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Green bonds – a powerful way to develope green energy?

Green bonds, a fast-growing money game with the clout to develop clean energy, await an umpire, EE News,  Benjamin Hulac, E&E reporter ClimateWire: Thursday, May 14, 2015

When he chaired the Federal Communications Commission from 1993 to 1997, Reed Hundt studied the swift expansion of the nation’s telecommunications system that made the United States among the most advanced nations in the field and sparked investment overseas.

Between 1996 and 2013, broadband companies invested more than $1.3 trillion in telecom infrastructure domestically, according to the broadband industry’s trade group.

About 32 percent of the world’s population — 84 percent and 21 percent of residents in developed and developing nations, respectively — now has mobile broadband connections, according to the United Nations.

Hundt believes the same experience could be repeated in developing clean energy to cope with global climate change.

Borrowed money paid for the communications boom, Hundt explained, speaking yesterday at an energy efficiency conference in Washington, D.C. He added that world leaders should apply the same method to fund the renewable energy market.

“Everything in communications has been purchased with debt,” he said, holding up an iPhone and describing how rapidly mobile phones have spread internationally.

The portion of the business world devoted to renewable energy resembles the telecom industry in the 1980s, said Hundt, now the CEO of the Coalition for Green Capital, a nonprofit working to drive renewable investment by creating so-called green banks.

“I think that we’re in the really early days,” he said during a panel talk on green bonds, adding that a “total, radical, disrupting overhaul” of the energy sector must be accomplished with a massive lending market and robust debt securitization…………..http://www.eenews.net/stories/1060018552

May 18, 2015 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, renewable