Future Returns: How to Bridge the Gap for Financing Climate Infrastructure

By Abby Schultz

Entrepreneurs with ideas for addressing climate change often run into financing hurdles. This can happen at the start, when they are trying to take an idea from the lab to a prototype, or it happens several stages on, when it comes time to build a facility at commercial scale. 

This latter stage is often a “second valley of death” for climate projects. That’s because the amount of financing needed at this point is more than a venture or growth-equity fund would provide, while bigger traditional project-finance or infrastructure funds often find the potential returns of financing these structures  don’t warrant the investment risk.

Research conducted since early last year by the nonprofit Prime Coalition, and backed by Schmidt Futures—a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt —and Blue Haven Initiative—a family office founded by Liesel Pritzker and Ian Simmons —was recently published in a report, “Barriers to the Timely Deployment of Climate Infrastructure.” It details four areas where major gaps in financing can stymie entrepreneurs and what to do about it.  

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