US DoE's new FIPP programme

30 November 2009

The United States Department of Energy (DoE) has released a set of guidelines for a new commercial bank-centred loan guarantee programme. The new solicitation, dubbed the Financial Institution Partnership Program (FIPP), is the eighth that the department has issued under its loan guarantee programme, but the first to ask for applications from lenders rather than borrowers.

The department has struggled to make the loan guarantee relevant to energy development in the US, despite seven rounds of solicitations. The FIPP takes a lot of the hard credit work out of the hands of the department, but at the same time forces developers to reconcile the very different demands of the US government and commercial lenders.

The DoE has already issued seven rounds of solicitations, under authority it gained from the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The Obama administration, with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act pushed this Bush administration initiative still further. While the solicitations ...

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