Before taking over the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) in March 2021, Jigar Shah was a well known and widely respected cleantech entrepreneur and investor, with a bent for highly quotable, provocative statements. Being in government hasn’t slowed him down much.

In the last 18 months, Shah has taken the LPO from a largely dormant part of DOE with a core of about 80 employees, to an office of 175 now processing applications for 84 loans totaling $86.5 billion, as well as “another 200 or so advanced pre-consultations,” some of which will turn into applications, he said.

Shah was one of a string of Biden administration officials at the conservative-leaning National Clean Energy Week (NCEW) Policy Symposium, a three-day online conference, sponsored by Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions (CRES) Forum. Amid recorded statements from a small army of Republican lawmakers, the officials avoided politics, instead using bottom-line, market-based arguments to talk up government’s role in supporting clean energy technologies as they go from development to startups to competitors in U.S. and global markets. (See related story, GOP Prescribes Natural Gas, Nuclear, Deregulation for Clean Energy Transition.)

The billions in clean energy funding in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act have transformed DOE from an agency that does basic research and demonstration projects to a major player in clean technology commercialization, Shah said during a Wednesday “fireside chat.”

Besides staffing up the LPO, he said, “We were able to … really define what our risk box is with Congress, [the Office of Management and Budget] and the Treasury Department, so we now have a fundamental agreement across all of those groups around how much risk we’re supposed to take and which risks we’re supposed to take. We can communicate that clearly to applicants so that we’re not wasting people’s time.”

Shah credited President Biden and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm for giving the office the high-level “cover” it needed to revive the loan program. He recruited former executives from cleantech companies to “come in to really mentor a lot of the potential applicants into the program, and that’s been hugely important. Getting through the Loan Programs Office is not a core skill that many CEOs and CFOs have,” he said.

“For a long time, the words that we used [were] a lot around ‘demonstration’; we need to demonstrate the technology at scale, and once that demonstration happens, the private sector will take over. I think that is patently false. I think everyone agrees it’s patently false, and people are now starting to use the vernacular that we’ve put in place around this ‘bridge to bankability,’” he said.

Shah laid out four “major milestones” on that bridge: going from demonstration, to scaling projects so engineering, procurement and construction contractors are comfortable building multiple plants, which in turn results in a learning curve that ultimately reduces costs and, finally, allows access to commercial markets and cheaper capital.

The LPO is working closely with commercial markets, he said. “They’re looking over our shoulder all the time and saying, ‘Hey, entrepreneur, we’d love to do deal No. 2; we’d love to do deal No. 4 … depending on where they are. We’re … making sure that people can actually look over our shoulder because we want to shorten the amount of time it takes to full market acceptance.”

Shah said his office is not picking winners or losers, but he added that not all applicants have the patience and persistence to go through the tough LPO application and due diligence process. In July, for example, the office announced it had closed a $102.1 million loan to Syrah Technologies for the expansion of a Louisiana plant producing graphite-based active anode material, a critical material used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles and other clean energy technologies.

“We’re certainly helping everyone who comes into the office, from people who use natural gas as a feedstock, to people who are doing nuclear, to people who are doing geothermal and hydro or critical minerals,” Shah said. “We do pick winners in the sense that we want people who can get through our [application process]. … We believe this transition is going to come from people who are persistent, who can get through all the necessary documentation we need to get through the process.

“When you do a $3 billion project, and many of our projects are $3 [billion] to $5 billion projects, by definition it disrupts somebody. It’s really hard to blend that right into the landscape,” Shah said. “So, what does it look like to do good community engagement? What does it look like to find the labor necessary to be able to build these projects? What does it look like to just source the materials that you need from friendlier countries and from our own country and to build up that manufacturing supply chain?

“I think applicants into the Loan Programs Office today understand that asking those tough questions really results in a better project, a project that has better support from the community and, from our perspective, has a greater likeliness of being repaid over the 30-year period of time,” he said.

Ex-Im

The Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) has been supporting the export of U.S. renewable energy technology since 2002, said Judith Pryor, first vice president and board vice chair of the independent federal agency that, according to her, “punches above its weight.”

In 2019, Congress expanded the bank’s mandate “to include energy storage and energy-efficiency technologies and instructed Ex-Im to make available 5% of its financing authority to support it,” Pryor said during a Wednesday presentation at NCEW.

The bank provides financing to U.S. firms to export their products, as well as loans and guarantees to help foreign buyers purchase those goods. Pryor listed several renewable energy projects the bank had funded, for example, providing an $8.7 million loan guarantee that allowed thin-film solar manufacturer First Solar to beat out competition from China for a 9-MW project in Guatemala.

“It’s a critical time” for the bank to provide support for clean energy, she said. “U.S. industry has some top-notch offerings in this space and … we are hearing firsthand the need for these products and the desire to buy American,” Pryor said. “We’re seeing more and more applications each day here at Ex-Im, especially related to storage.”

The bank can offer extended terms of up to 18 years to foreign buyers, she said.

Another key initiative at the bank is a domestic finance initiative called “Make More in America,” Pryor said. Authorized in a February 2021 executive order on supply chains, “what it allows Ex-Im to do for the very first time is provide support across the entire lifecycle of an export, from capital investment, to enabling production capacity here at home, to exporting credit insurance and buyer financing to win specific sales. …

“If we set aside the urgent need to transition to a cleaner, greener future for just a moment and look at this through a business lens, there’s simply no reason U.S. companies shouldn’t take advantage of an industry experiencing double- and triple-digit growth,” she said.

SelectUSA

A complement to Ex-Im, the Commerce Department’s SelectUSA is “the governmentwide initiative dedicated to advancing foreign direct investment to the United States,” Executive Director Jasjit Singh said.

The office sees renewable energy as a big draw for foreign direct investment (FDI), Singh said at NCEW on Thursday, noting that the U.S. is now the “premier destination to invest in new clean energy technologies.”

Between 2010 and 2019, annual investment in renewables grew from $29.4 billion to more than $55.4 billion, he said. Greenfield FDI — in which a foreign country creates a new U.S. subsidiary with new plants — has  also been strong, outpacing investments in fossil fuels every year since 2013, except for 2019, Singh said.

“The pace and scale of the transformation that’s underway in the U.S. renewable market offers a valuable opportunity for investors,” he said.

SelectUSA provides market research and counseling to U.S. companies and economic development organizations to help them develop FDI strategies, while also providing reports to foreign investors on local resources, “such as workforce statistics, access to ports, general electricity rates, state and federal tax rates, and more,” he said.