Lee: $1M clean energy deals are not 1,000x simpler than $1B deals
Amanda Lee · The urgent need to simplify clean energy finance [partner content] · Mar 12, 2024 · at 2:26
Amanda Lee, COO of Banyan Infrastructure, discusses why distributed clean energy projects carry disproportionate administrative friction compared to utility-scale deals.
0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.4s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“A one million-dollar deal is more simple than a Billion dollar deal, but not a thousand times less. It still has its own contracts, counterparties, models to deal with all of that.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Amanda Lee
Lee: Distributed energy faces crushing operational overhead compared to utility-scale projects
“And now if you're doing distributed, it's a million dollars rather than a billion. So you might have a thousand times the amount of data at every single one of those stages, a thousand models, a thousand PDF documents or contracts, a thousand counterparties. S…”
Lee: Financial standardization fails without dedicated coordinators and aligned commercial incentives
“And so the two things really missing, right is first and foremost the build of the coordinators, right? Sometimes it's the government, sometimes it's an industry group, other times it's a financial institution or organizations like ours that are really leaning…”
Lee: Vague terms like 'bankable off-taker' are meaningless without quantitative criteria
“Like, I need a bankable, you know, off-taker, and I need an experienced EPC, right? Like, those are meaningless words in many ways, right?”
Lee: Sufficient deal volume exists to securitize commercial solar and energy efficiency
“And there's more than enough, like, in certain asset classes, right? Community, solar, commercial solar assets, multifamily energy efficiency, the volume of deals has been done, but can we bundle them together, find somebody who's willing to warehouse and be i…”
Lee: Traditional Financiers Historically Found Small Community Energy Projects Unbankable
“This is capital allocated towards the smallest of deals, often to counterparties and projects that prior financiers found unbankable or developers thought were not worth the time because it's a complicated deal and very tiny.”
Lee: SMBC found infrastructure projects under $100M unfeasible due to process costs
“We've worked with SMBC, for example, and they were like, you know, and from their perspective, look, anything under a hundred million dollars would be really difficult to invest in because of such a taxing process they have up front and ongoing.”