The state of Washington has created a funding source for them, a green bank, so to speak, and Eli Lieberman is helping to create it.

The Washington State Green Bank is an independent 501c3 nonprofit financial institution that was stood up by the Washington State Department of Commerce in late 2023 and And the idea comes from a long line of green banks across the United States.

It's a movement that started in the ARA days, so 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, mostly in the Northeast.

And this was a time during the financial crisis when there wasn't a lot of lending going on and markets had sort of stalled.

And the Department of Energy was sort of trying to think, How can we increase more investment in renewable energy and clean energy, but using public sector dollars in a very efficient way? So how can we get those private markets moving again, you know, that had stalled up in the financial crisis? So out of that came the initial green banks, like the New York Green Bank, the Connecticut Green Bank, and Michigan Saves, where I used to work.

And really the idea is how do you take public sector dollars and use them to leverage private sector investment? So you're really looking to make the public sector dollars work harder.

So the Connecticut Green Bank, for example, has a 7 to 1 leverage ratio.

So the fact that you're out there, do you anticipate that might turn out to be kind of an incentive for the private sector to come in and loan money?