Initiative Area

Financing the Energy Transition

Launched in 2024, Financing the Energy Transition (FETI) provides international policymakers with the technical assistance, modeling, and financial structuring needed for a just green transition.

The speed of global decarbonization will directly determine how extensive the effects of climate change are; this, in turn, will affect the lives of most of the human population. Curbing global warming ultimately means averting suffering; the more quickly it is done, the more harm we avoid. In our view, success hinges on solving the coordination problem: how to get nation-states with competing national interests, and corporations with profit mandates, to build and deploy green replacements to our fossil fuel infrastructure. We don’t yet know how to make the kind of rapid green transition climate scientists tell us the world needs financially viable. 

Like all coordination problems, this challenge requires structures that align incentives and create enforceable mutual obligations. Governments are now directly participating in markets and interacting with industry on levels not seen for generations. Yet our contacts within US governmental entities and globally, in finance ministries of climate-vulnerable nations, tell us they lack the tools to incentivize and encourage investment. They need new forms of technical and financial expertise, and sophisticated modeling capacities, in order to design the taxes, tariffs, concessions, and new public financing required for meaningful global decarbonization. These are the capacities FETI has been designed to provide.

WORK WITH US

Our partners include policymakers at the national and subnational levels domestically and abroad, private investors, and NGOs. If you’d like to hear more about partnering with us, please email us; we welcome questions and comments. FETI provides a combination of policy design, modeling, and direct assistance in its four primary areas of work:

Sovereign Fund Architecture

  • We gather and compound the proceeds from natural resource extraction throughout the world to benefit the public in the form of social wealth funds. 
  • We use financial modeling and governance expertise to transform these revenues into portfolios of public assets, and then facilitate productive investment that is both socially and environmentally beneficial.

Critical Minerals

  • We build tools for policymakers to map value chains that are central to the green transition, such as batteries and copper wiring, from extraction to final product assembly.
  • We address key questions around siting and financing, as well as tax, duty, licensing, and royalty schemes, considering strategies that can permit producer countries to retain long-term value from resource extraction and trade.

Green Technology Market Design

  • We build Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) models to advise governments and investors on integrated financial strategy for green investment.
  • Among our key topics are the cost and construction of green infrastructure, the design and coordination of relevant supply chains, and the relative cost-intensity and durability of different technologies.

Catalyzing Private Green Investment

  • Our proprietary agent-based model, IMPULSE, addresses the question of how investment can be mobilized in support of the green transition using the policy tools available to the US government and like actors. In particular, IMPULSE aims to capture the systematic response among investors to influxes of catalytic capital into different generation technologies. 

Financing the Energy Transition Contributors

Higher Education Finance

Eduard Nilaj

Data Science Research Associate

Special Projects

Francis Tseng

Lead Independent Researcher

Guaranteed Income

Jack Landry

Research Associate

Chief Research Officer

Jerome Hodges

Financing the Energy Transition

Jonah Allen

Research Associate

Social Wealth and Financing the Energy Transition

Jonathan Calenzani

Fellow

Higher Education Finance

Laura Beamer

Lead Researcher

Center for Active Stewardship

Mikhael Gaster

Fellow

Climate

Natalie Leonard

Fellow

Center for Active Stewardship

Nolan Lindquist

Executive Director

Social Wealth

Paul Katz

VP and Lead Researcher

Social Wealth and Financing the Energy Transition

Sina Sinai

Research Associate

Related Publication Series

Financing the Energy Transition

This series presents at investors and policymakers with a high-level picture of the factors influencing the financing and bankability of green technologies in the United States. For each technology -- including nuclear, solar, wind, hydrogen, long duration energy storage, carbon capture, and industrial decarbonization -- our team of data analysts and market experts conducts in-depth interviews with investors and scholars to ground sector-specific levelized cost models. These models, in turn, allow us to capture the key sensitivities governing each technology's cost profile and identify the most important levers for optimizing their financial viability. With these reports, we aim to equip decisionmakers, on both the investment and the policy sides, with the insights they need in order to make informed decisions that will accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.

Labor Market Policy and the Energy Transition

Over the next year, JFI will be working on policy related to the twin opportunity of the climate labor gap and the skilled labor institutional gap. The current landscape of the climate transition reveals a paradoxical juxtaposition: paired forward-thinking policies around capital deployment stand in contrast to retrograde skilled labor policy. This combination will only serve to undermine and delay the energy transition while also wasting an opportunity to construct truly ambitious, sorely-needed new institutions. In the coming series, we’ll investigate what it would take to build these new institutions.

Mineral Wealth and Electrification

The energy transition represents a significant opportunity for countries producing the materials critical to electrification. In this series, we look at eight such materials: aluminum, cobalt, copper, natural graphite, iron, lithium, manganese, and nickel. As demand for so-called “critical minerals” grows, producer countries must develop robust strategies for effective value capture to transform a temporary windfall into an opportunity to grow shared wealth and climb the value chain. Doing so demands both institutional capacity and political will.

Recent Updates

JFI at Climate Week

JFI and our affiliate initiative, the Center for Active Stewardship, are hosting a series of events during NYC Climate Week.