Insight certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Halfacre: Distributed infrastructure suffers transaction friction from fragmented, non-traditional counterparties

Rachel Halfacre · Frontier Forum: Fixing distributed energy's finance gap · Jun 12, 2025 · at 2:24

Rachel Halfacre, lead for the community infrastructure program at the Milken Institute, explains the structural barriers hindering community-scale clean energy development.

0:00 / 0:39exact quote · 39.5s
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“But I think the other challenge around this asset class is that it's not one utility, right? It's a hundred business owners. It's a hundred nonprofits. It's a hundred YMCAs or churches. And so they're not the typical player in this space that's accustomed to thinking about term sheets, thinking about risk profiles, thinking about offtake agreements. This is all Quite a novel kind of experience for those folks that are leading the charge of development, and so I think at the core of why Death by a Thousand Cuts is so apt is because you have to get buy-in for so many different parcels of land that are really managed by smaller scale owners.”

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