Joe Romm’s Climate Progress has a lengthy post on the benefits of creating a public green bank that could work with the private sector to ease the transition toward a clean energy economy. The post is actually reproduced from the Center for American Progress, which praises proposed amendments to the U.S. Waxman-Markey bill that would create a clean energy bank within the Department of Energy. According to the amendments, the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, or CEDA, would direct loans, letters of credit, loan guarantees, insurance products and other financing options to support clean energy production, transmission, storage and other projects that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions or save energy. The administration would take a “portfolio investment approach” and “ensure no particular technology receives more than 30 per cent of the total funding available.” And all of this would be on top of existing loan guarantees and incentives offered by the feds.

Sounds like something Ontario could use, because even though our new Green Energy and Green Economy Act is an ambitious and progressive piece of legislation, and even though a newly proposed feed-in tariff program offers a huge incentive for developers, I’m still not convinced there won’t be a capital constraint that will ultimately slow down development. This is particularly true if, as the Ontario government has said, it wants to encourage community co-op and First Nations projects. I would even argue the federal government should consider creating such an institution, but that is not likely to happen under our current Conservative government, so no point in asking. (more…)