Investment Strategy
Investment Strategy
The Connecticut Green Bank is a public policy innovation, a catalyst that helps mobilize greater local and global investment to address climate change.
As the nation’s first green bank, the Green Bank makes clean energy more accessible and affordable for all Connecticut citizens and businesses by creating a thriving marketplace to accelerate the growth of the green economy. We facilitate clean energy deployment by leveraging a public-private financing model that uses limited public dollars to attract private capital investments. By partnering with the private sector, we create solutions that result in long-term, affordable financing to increase the number of clean energy projects statewide.
In June 2021, with bipartisan support, Governor Lamont’s House Bill 6441, was passed and will extend the green bank model beyond clean energy to include environmental infrastructure.
Investment focus
The Green Bank’s investment focus is on “clean energy” and “environmental infrastructure” as defined by Section 16-245n of the General Statutes of Connecticut:
Clean Energy includes:
- Solar photovoltaic energy
- Energy efficiency projects
- Solar thermal, geothermal energy, wind, ocean thermal energy
- Fuel cells
- Low-impact hydropower
- Low emission advanced biomass conversion technologies
- Combined heat and power systems
- Projects that seek to deploy electric, electric hybrid, natural gas or alternative fuel vehicles and associated infrastructure
- Other energy resources and emerging technologies which have significant potential for commercialization and which do not involve the combustion of coal, petroleum or petroleum products
- Any related storage, distribution, manufacturing technologies or facilities and any Class I renewable energy source
Environmental Infrastructure means structures, facilities, systems, services, and improvement projects related to:
- Water
- Waste and recycling
- Climate adaptation and resilience
- Agriculture
- Land conservation
- Parks and recreation
- Environmental markets, including, but not limited to carbon offsets* and ecosystem services**
* Carbon offsets means an activity that compensates for the emission of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gasses by providing for an emission reduction elsewhere.
** Ecosystem services means benefits obtained from ecosystems, including, but not limited to, (A) provisioning services such as food and water, (B) regulating services such as floods, drought, land degradation and disease, and (C) supporting services such as soil formation and nutrient cycling.