The Chamber’s Let’s Rebuild America initiative and the National Chamber Foundation today held the third in a five part series of forums examining the concept of a national infrastructure bank. Today’s event focused on a clean energy bank, and was cosponsored by the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy.

Among the panelists at the forum was Karen Harbert, the Energy Institute’s president and CEO.  In Congressional testimony as well as in articles and speeches, Harbert has long advocated for a clean energy bank that would bring capital to new energy technologies without increasing burdens on taxpayers. In fact, the Energy Institute included the development of such a bank in our 88 policy recommendations that were delivered to President Obama and Congress. 

A clean energy bank would be a federally-backed entity with the authority to issue loans, loan guarantees, lines of credit, insurance, and other financial products to help support the deployment of advanced clean energy technologies. Aside from start-up costs, the bank would be entirely self- financing through fees and interest collected, similar to the Export-Import bank.

Addressing clean energy technology without spending more taxpayer money is particularly attractive in today’s budget climate.  The Congressional Budget Office forecasts an increase in the public debt from $7.5 trillion at the end of 2009 to $20.3 trillion at the end of 2020 if the President’s FY2011 budget is adopted. 

In Congress, one clean energy bank proposal has taken hold in the form of new Clean Energy Deployment Administration (CEDA), which would be part of the executive branch but operate in a similar way.  That proposal was included in a bill that passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year, though no further action has been taken in Congress.

Regardless of the exact form it takes, Harbert said that it is clear that we must increase the rate of capital formation in the clean energy sector through new, innovative financing to support large-scale adaption of clean energy quickly.  While some energy and climate issues have the potential to divide, we believe that there should be broad, bipartisan support for the concept.  The Energy Institute will continue to work to see a clean energy bank adopted.