Trump tried to defund them, but green banks keep financing clean energy projects

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A community solar project built for New Orleans’ oldest historically Black Catholic order of nuns. An all-electric affordable housing complex in Salt Lake City. A program offering low-income Maryland households inexpensive loans for rooftop solar and energy efficiency.

These are just some of the recent projects financed in the US by green banks, entities that use public funds to boost lending for clean energy and climate-adaptation efforts in tough-to-finance sectors. And they’ve done it even as the Trump administration’s clawbacks of federal climate funding force them to scale down their Biden-era plans.

“We’ve continued to move capital in very challenging times,” said Dan Adler, executive director of the U.S. Green Bank 50, a coalition of 56 green banks and other organizations. To fill in the gaps, they’ve sought out financing partners ranging from commercial banks and credit unions to corporate and philanthropic funders. ​“We’re making a virtue out of a necessity,” he said.

The Green Bank 50 laid out what its members have been able to accomplish over the last two years in its inaugural impact report, released in September, which collected data from 48 green banks nationwide. Over the course of 2024 and 2025, those organizations put about $1.4 billion of their own capital, along with $11 billion in additional private capital, into more than 40,000 projects.

The report includes summaries from about 70 case studies of the work that’s been helped along by financing from green banks. Some are large-scale projects, like the $10 million community solar array being built on land owned by the Sisters of the Holy Family in New Orleans, which has committed to providing up to 350 low-income households with reduced utility bills using the solar power it will generate. Loans for that project came from the nonprofit Inclusive Prosperity Capital, the United Church of Christ Cornerstone Fund, and Pelican Community Capital, which is a Louisiana community development lender affiliated with the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.

Inclusive Prosperity Capital is among the many green banks that has had to make do without promised grants from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. It won $249 million from the program, which was created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and provided $20 billion in green bank grants and another $7 billion in Solar for All grants. The Trump administration terminated both programs last year.

“We had projects with financial commitments, training courses for developers and lenders, a predevelopment mentorship program, staff hired and trained, and more,” Inclusive Prosperity Capital CEO Kerry O’Neill said. ​“We hope recent court decisions will result in our return to this important work.”

In August, a federal judge ruled the administration’s freeze of the $20 billion to be unlawful, and this month, two separate federal judges have ruled the Solar for All termination illegal. But the administration has yet to release the funds, and is expected to appeal to the US Supreme Court.

The loss of federal funds has severely curtailed the scale of work planned by the Green Bank 50 partners. Climate United Fund, a partnership that was awarded $7 billion but had its funds frozen, has been unable to follow through on plans to finance U.S.-built electric trucks, energy-efficiency and clean energy upgrades, and loans to Native American–led clean energy projects.

The 48 green banks surveyed in the impact report have about $6.8 billion in their funding pipelines. But Adler conceded that the loss of federal funds has put some worthy projects out of reach. ​“When money is coming down from the sky at basically 0 percent [interest], you can do very interesting projects—and we’re prepared to do that again,” he said.

“But now we have to focus on tight discipline with private capital as our key partner,” he said. ​“You can’t do the higher-risk projects, so you work on what’s addressable.” The goal, he said, is to find projects that are still considered too risky or unproven for private-sector lenders, ​“but if you do it with green banks a few times, then private capital can take over.”

That’s in fact the founding principle of the green bank movement, he noted. Some of the first green banks formed in Connecticut and New York state in the 2010s have become significant drivers of private-sector lending for building energy efficiency and electrification, solar for schools and municipalities, and other categories of investment important to meeting state and local climate policies.

The technologies behind the projects that green banks finance aren’t risky in and of themselves, Adler said. But the classes of customers that green banks work with—such as affordable housing providers and solar developers working in low-income communities—can be. ​“Whether they’ve been redlined out of the traditional capital markets, or the deals are not as big as traditional lenders are motivated to engage in, we’re taking on the credit risks and the deal structure and size risks,” he explained.

Green banks have continued to find ways to reduce those risks. One method is bundling funds from multiple lenders, which reduces an individual lender’s risk. That’s how Inclusive Prosperity Capital and its partners financed the community solar project for the Sisters of the Holy Family.

It’s also how the New York City Energy Efficiency Corp., a 16-year-old green bank, supported a 396-unit, all-electric affordable housing project in Salt Lake City. The green bank worked with Utah nonprofit SustainEnergyFinance to set up a $4.5 predevelopment loan—a form of financing that can be hard to underwrite for first-time projects—so that the project’s developer could move into the next phases of construction.

Green banks are also sharing technical resources to help each other lower financing costs, Adler said. He cited the Solar and Energy Loan Fund, a Florida-based green bank that has financed nearly $80 million in home energy-efficiency, solar, and storm-hardening projects. That organization has developed a platform, now being used by 13 other green banks and similar lenders across the country, that standardizes much of the underwriting and loan-processing expertise it’s built up over the past decade, said David Graber, the green bank’s chief of staff.

“We provide the back office and the capital. Partners bring the local trust and the projects,” Graber explained. The Solar and Energy Loan Fund estimates that each lending partner on the platform avoids hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in costs it would otherwise incur running a full lending operation on its own.

Montgomery County Green Bank in Maryland has blended financial technology support and layered financing to make home renewable-energy and energy-efficiency improvements more affordable. In March 2026, the organization launched a $4 million initiative that offers households low-interest loans for rooftop solar, heat pumps, and other projects.

Qualifying homeowners can access solar loans with a subsidized interest rate of 2.99 percent for the first 15 years, with a higher rate applying afterward, said Rokas Beresniovas, the green bank’s head of partnerships and business development.

As utility bills rise, mobilizing investment for these kinds of efforts is more important than ever, Adler said. But as the Green Bank 50 report highlights, many green banks operate on budgets of less than $2 million per year.

“We could do a lot more,” he said. ​“But we’re looking at what we’re able to finance.”