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 that 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 those of 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.