Traditional regional banks tend to be skeptical about clean energy projects, which are framed as risky investments that may not yield solid returns. As a result, many banks have little experience with loans for clean energy or efficiency measures. Larger banks with more resources also resist homeowner and small business clean energy projects, focusing their clean energy resources instead on financing large scale solar and wind projects.
Such communities have historically been redlined — that’s the discriminatory practice of refusing to lend to residents of non-white communities. This $20 billion in national clean financing is a form of greenlining — reversing that discrimination by offering loans with more forgiving terms in historically excluded communities.
While in Charlotte, the Vice President and Regan will meet with homeowners in a historically Black community where a local nonprofit, Self-Help, worked with community partners to finance, renovate, and construct energy-efficient, affordable homes for low- and moderate-income families.is to create and protect ownership and economic opportunity for all, especially people of color, immigrants, women, rural residents, and low-wealth families and communities.