LPO's new Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment (EIR) Program provides a powerful U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) financing mechanism to help meet national emissions reduction goals by transforming old or dirty energy infrastructure into new or modernized clean assets and revitalizing communities where old energy infrastructure sits.
"'The entire energy infrastructure ecosystem qualifies to come into the 1706 program to be repurposed,' [said] Jigar Shah, head of DOE’s Loan Programs Office." [The EIR program] "can help replace coal plants with clean energy, switch gas pipelines to hydrogen, upgrade transmission, and more."
EIR—also known as the 1706 Program—empowers DOE to guarantee loans to projects aimed at retooling, repowering, repurposing, or replacing energy infrastructure that has ceased operations, or those that enable operating energy infrastructure to avoid, reduce, utilize, or sequester air pollutants or anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides $5 billion to implement EIR through September 30, 2026, with a total cap on loans of up to $250 billion.
By providing financing to reinvest in energy infrastructure that has "ceased operations" (e.g. power plants that have been retired but can be refinanced and replaced with established or emerging clean energy sources like renewables and nuclear), EIR is meant to revitalize American energy infrastructure at the pace needed to address the climate crisis.
LEARN MORE:
• Read more about LPO's new loan program, EIR, in the second of our three-part IRA blog series entitled #DeployDeployDeploy: https://lnkd.in/gDRZWT38
• To stay up to date on how LPO is administering the EIR program, see: Energy.gov/LPO/EIR
• For a full overview of the impact of the IRA on LPO financing opportunities, see: Energy.gov/LPO/IRA
