Credit Enhancements and Capital Markets to Fund Solar Deployment: Leveraging Public Funds to Open Private Sector Investment

Credit enhancements represent a variety of financial support structures that are designed to reduce risk to those holding the debt, including debt raised via a securitization process, and thus lower the required yield associated with the security. The purpose of all forms of credit enhancement is to increase the collateral against which notes are secured (Lin,1999). The following section evaluates is not guaranteed. Perceived risks of the solar asset class--including those related to technology, offtaker creditworthiness, and regulatory policy--can increase the required yield, increase probability of investor loss of interest and/or principal, or both. In many cases, this is a cyclical phenomenon: risk perception is fed by lack of historical knowledge, which is in turn fed by risk perception. Therefore, successful access to capital market investment in order to spur low-cost solar deployment depends on the success of this initial fledgling period.