Financing: A cost-effective complement to – or replacement for – incentive programs?

This year Dunsky sent its largest contingent ever to the ACEEE Energy Efficiency Financing Forum in Tarrytown, NY, a reflection of our expanding work assisting utilities and governments with the design and evaluation of financing strategies and programs.

Two Dunsky team members presented our recent work. Matt Poirier presented our approach to helping utilities identify and leverage on-bill financing opportunities. Matt walked through the value of clarifying goals at the outset – are we looking to increase program participation or, alternatively, to achieve the same savings with reduced program costs? – and then choosing among proven program design options to best meet that objective.

In another session, Alex Hill presented Dunsky’s framework for assessing the cost-effectiveness of financing programs, including examples from our groundbreaking work for the California Public Utilities Commission. For the CPUC, Dunsky demonstrated how financing can work in conjunction with incentives to raise the combined cost-effectiveness of the two initiatives. In short, the addition of a loan loss reserve allowed homeowners to access low cost capital to support their projects, which increased the net savings while offering significant interest rate reduction benefits.

This work expands on a previous Dunsky White Paper, led by our founder Philippe Dunsky, that addressed the challenges in properly assessing the cost-effectiveness of financing in a way that allows apples-to-apples comparison with incentive program options. Faced with a unique set of cost and benefit characteristics, we developed an adapted methodology that applies to an array of financing strategies, including those with loan loss reserves, interest buydowns and other components.

If you’d like to learn more, please drop us a line and Alex, Matt or Philippe would be happy to fill you in on the details.

Related projects: Dunsky is currently designing multiple financing programs – including residential PACE, commercial PACE, loan guarantees and others. Stay tuned for more!