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Lee: Financial standardization fails without dedicated coordinators and aligned commercial incentives

Amanda Lee · Frontier Forum: Fixing distributed energy's finance gap · Jun 12, 2025 · at 6:26

Amanda Lee of Banyan Infrastructure explains why historical efforts to standardize distributed energy project financing repeatedly stalled.

0:00 / 0:46exact quote · 46.7s
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“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 in, trying to bring everyone to the same place to get to critical mass to say we're all moving in a direction, right? And the second one is sort of the goal that the coordinator is that critical mass of people who are all saying, yes, we're going to go do it now, right? And it becomes a negative chicken and egg sometimes for the prior experiences where this happened, where, hey, if you don't have a coordinator, you get sort of people coming together in like a conference or industry group, everyone agrees it's a great idea conceptually, and then you sort of like leave and you're like, great, I've got like a business to run. I need to make some money.”

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