Resources for Sustainability: Renewable Energy Finance Guide for Policy-Makers

Growth in the sustainability industry is closely linked with developing and maintaining strong economic models, and a variety of options exist to support steps towards project realization.

Team Gemini and the company’s growing number of team members engineer in a joint effort the Team Gemini closed-loop project models that apply a variety of industry-proven technologies. So far, no single technology can meet all sustainability needs, therefore requiring different options to provide the best benefits based on different synergies (like Anaerobic Digestion and Combined Heat and Power units providing combined benefits of electricity and thermal energy, energy storage, and waste remediation and resource recovery of cellulosic and organic waste bio chemicals, industrial sugars, and lignins).

Financing any industry-scale, closed-loop project is a challenging task that relies on a range of financing models, policy initiatives, secured feedstock supply chains, product off-taker terms and conditions, market variability, and other factors in order to implement successfully.

Financing guides can provide useful perspective on how such financing tasks may be supported. As can be seen from various reports, renewable energy financing continues to be a growing industry. Bloomberg New Energy Finance provides one helpful guide to renewable energy financing.

Implementation of national clean energy or ‘green’ infrastructure plans will require unprecedented levels of private investment, not only for climate reasons, through NDCs, but also to deliver energy security and access to energy for those who lack them, as well as creating the conditions for sustainable development.

Now, more than ever, it is critically important for policy-makers and non-financiers to understand and interface with the financial community to establish effective conditions at national level, where the investment case will have to be made.

As a practical contribution, the Finance Guide provides a factual overview of the landscape of finance – sources of capital, what the capital markets do, how transactions work – and more broadly to set common finance terms in context.

The guide reflects recent changes in market conditions, financing structures and relevant policy debates.

Supporting and developing a 100% renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure is among Team Gemini’s primary endeavors. Many technologies ultimately contribute to this goal, including the appropriation of waste as a source for (electric and thermal) energy production, in addition to valuable commodities like biofuels, fertilizer, compost and more. Additionally, Team Gemini closely examines and implements methods of minimizing or even eliminating any pollution and environmental impacts, including protecting and treating valuable water resources (foremost the use of fresh or potable water, the split version of wastewater collection between sewage water and grey-water. This achieves the most efficient wastewater treatment based solely on organic polymer uses, and results in the most valuable water recycling re-uses and implementing sustainable agriculture).

Feel free to explore more topics on our Resources page, or contact us if you’d like to recommend others.

For a full listing of Team Gemini sustainability tools and resources, please visit our resources page at http://teamgemini.us/resources/.