A Sigh of Interest Rate Relief for Renewables

Are clean energy developers finally free from high interest rates? Not yet, but this might be the beginning of the end. At the Federal Reserve’s annual conference in Jackson Hole, Fed chair Jerome Powell told attendees, “The time has come for policy to adjust.”

Analysts and market participants immediately appeared to interpret this as locking in a series of interest rate cuts starting at the next Federal Open Market Committee meeting next month. Stocks immediately rose and yields on U.S. government debt fell. Market prognosticators expect the federal funds rate to fall a quarter of a percentage point at the September meeting, but there’s a reasonable chance the cut would be larger.

The renewable energy industry — or at least its share prices — got in on the party. Shares of NextEra, which has a massive renewables business, rose following the speech. The stock price of Iberdrola, the Spanish utility with a large wind business, rose after text of the speech was released. The iShares Global Clean Energy ETF, which tracks a range of clean energy companies, is up more than 2.5% today. (No such luck for GE Vernova, which manufactures wind turbines — its shares fell today after another turbine blade failure at the Dogger Bank wind farm off the coast of England, coming barely a month after a blade manufacturing defect led to the Vineyard Wind disaster.)

Renewables investors are particularly giddy at the moment because for years now, the industry has disproportionately suffered the effects of high interest rates compared to fossil fuels. Unlike a natural gas- or coal-fired power plant, a wind turbine or a solar panel does not have to pay for its fuel. In the long term that’s a win, because there is no such thing as a wind pipeline rupture or the discovery of new reserves of sun, and therefore nothing that can send prices reeling. But in the short term, that means the lifetime cost of a solar or wind farm is heavily weighted towards building it.

And to build, you need to borrow money.

“Wind and solar have taken a beating from high interest rates because they’re very capital intensive projects,” Lori Bird, director of the World Resources Institute’s U.S. Energy Program, told me. “Because they’re capital intensive, a 2 percentage point increase in interest rates yields a 20% increase in the cost of electricity, compared to 11% from fossil,” Bird said, citing estimates from Wood Mackenzie.

Developers take out construction loans to build their projects and then pay those back with a term loan that covers the life of the project, explained Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise (and also a Heatmap contributor).

“If you’re a developer who’s going through the construction process right now, your construction loan is probably floating-rate, so the amount of of interest you’re paying on your construction loan will fall,” Arun said. After you're done building, you get another loan to pay off the construction loan, and that loan can be smaller if your construction loan gets cheaper thanks to lower rates.

These longer-term loans are paid back from the project’s revenues over the life span of the project, which means that the developer or investor will not have to earn as much from selling the electricity to cover the cost of their debt.

Alongside the supply chain issues and inflation that developers — especially offshore wind developers — had to deal with over the last few years, high interest rates have led to higher costs for the power that renewables developers sell. The price of power purchase agreements for wind and solar rose in 2023, thanks, in part, to high rates, and only stabilized early this year as investors became convinced that cuts were finally close.

But whether these lower financing costs turn into higher profits or lower prices for electricity consumers is, unfortunately, not a sure thing — which is one reason why the industry's shareholders may have responded positively to Powell's speech.

“I think profit expectations will rise,” Arun said. “If there’s less money you need to pay in debt service, it doesn’t mean developers will pass on price savings.”