Scaling Clean Energy Solutions: My Summer at the Nevada Clean Energy Fund
Parul Gupta, MSx ‘24, Sloan Fellow
Clean Energy Investments Fellow, Nevada Clean Energy Fund (NCEF)
This summer, I had the opportunity to serve as a Shultz Fellow at the Nevada Clean Energy Fund (NCEF), a nonprofit green bank focused on accelerating clean energy solutions across Nevada. While I contributed in small ways to multiple workstreams, like researching health impact metrics, responding to city climate action plan, and working on the investment plan for community solar projects, my primary contribution was on evaluating software platforms for managing the lending lifecycle at scale, which would enable NCEF to deploy capital more efficiently and effectively.
The project was particularly significant as NCEF recently received $156 million in federal funding through the Solar for All initiative, aimed at bringing solar energy to disadvantaged and low-income communities. As a small organization, it became essential for NCEF to implement processes and systems that would scale its capacity and streamline operations across loan origination, underwriting, servicing, and compliance reporting. Since software platforms are especially well suited for automating and managing workflows, my role was to assess potential platforms and provide recommendations on how they could be leveraged to meet NCEF’s long-term goals.
My contributions included researching existing best practices and learnings from peer green banks, interviewing stakeholders across NCEF’s leadership to gather requirements, and facilitating prioritization across almost 120+ requirements. I helped map out NCEF’s current and desired processes and evaluated over a dozen vendors for their ability to meet those. From these, I shortlisted the solutions which were the best fit and evaluated them more deeply through product demos and obtained quotes. Finally, I ended with a set of recommendations depending on the budget constraints and the relative importance of Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) specific compliance vs. standard lending features.
The nascent and evolving nature of the green lending software market made this endeavor uniquely challenging as there was no perfect solution and no well-established best practices. Guidance from the EPA and workplans were yet to be finalized, with banks as well as software developers waiting to finalize their processes and roadmaps. Since GGRF grants were fairly recent, most vendors did not have supporting compliance functionality and there was little to none post-implementation feedback from existing customers.
The experience was deeply rewarding for me because it helped me understand how green banks work and the role federal grants play in accelerating the clean energy transition. It also helped me develop an appreciation for the immense complexity that these mission-driven, and often resource constrained, organizations face in winning, deploying, and meeting the compliance requirements of government grants.
For various personal reasons, I chose to not pursue a career in this field, yet this learning experience made me a more well rounded professional and will serve me well, regardless of the exact roles I might take up. I am deeply grateful to Stanford, the Shultz program leadership and donors, and NCEF for this invaluable opportunity.
