A new 'green bank' will help bridge gaps in clean energy in New Mexico, officials say

It’s not easy being green.

But a new investment center, officials say, will help bridge gaps in New Mexicans’ access to clean energy.

Colloquially known as a “green bank,” officials say the nonprofit New Mexico Climate Investment Center is a mechanism for channeling federal, private and other public dollars into clean energy projects that may not otherwise be fully funded.

“This gives you the accountability, while also giving you that nimble, flexible, strategic, quick turnaround that New Mexicans really are hungry for,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said during a Friday news conference. “This is the only vehicle that’s really going to, frankly, put that on lightning speed.”

Among the federal dollars the center is aiming to bring in is between $50 and $70 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding.

Officials say the center will focus on bridging energy projects financing gaps in several areas, including in rural, tribal and low-income communities.

Generally, many people in the latter spend a significant part of their income on energy, said Beth Beloff, founder and executive director of the Coalition of Sustainable Communities New Mexico, which established the investment center.

“The Climate Investment Center aims to alleviate these burdens through programs that increase access to energy efficiency, rooftop solar ownership, solar lease programs, financing for community solar, to further drive down those subscription costs for low-income households,” she said.

The investment center was established over the summer and recently was provisionally made a federal 5013. Both moves come after the failure of Senate Bill 169 during this year’s session, legislation that would have established the center and set aside $20 million in state funding for it.

But Beloff said the Coalition of Sustainable Communities New Mexico “couldn’t wait for another legislative session to try to push through a bill,” citing federal funding opportunities that would have been lost by the time the center was established by going that route.

Beloff noted the $20 million that SB 169 would have provided is still needed for the center’s operation, and Senate Majority Leader Peter Wirth (D-Santa Fe) said Friday that lawmakers are “all in on our side” to make that appropriation happens during the upcoming session.

Roughly half a dozen people turned out to Friday’s news conference to criticize New Mexico’s recent efforts at investing in hydrogen as a source of energy, holding long, yellow banners reading such things as “Invest In Renewables.”

Alejandría Lyons, coalition coordinator for New Mexico No False Solutions, which is a coalition of environmental justice groups, said her group aimed to “make sure that no investments for this investment center go into hydrogen.”

But Beloff said the objective of the investment center is to closely follow the language of SB 169, specifically referencing a line that the center would invest in projects that include “other renewable sources of energy that replenish within a human lifetime” — language she said was shorthand to exclude fossil fuel-related funding, to include hydrogen from methane.