It seems to me these giant grants to a small number of organizations (Climate United Fund, Coalition for Green Capital, Power Forward Communities) seems like it could be delivering pork to well-connected people. Is this actually going to produce “clean” energy and help disadvantaged people? These seem like very large awards to a small number of organizations.
I see your confusion. They could have worded this better, but it’s two grants being split between eight nonprofit financial institutions. My understanding is these entities will lend that money to communities to do ongoing infrastructure projects. The goal is “turning $20 billion of public funds into $150 billion of public and private investment to maximize the impact of public funds.” I don’t know how that part works exactly, but to me that doesn’t sound like a handout. Of course I would hope they would be held responsible for any mismanagement.
As for why they need to create a financial nework to do this: These kinds of projects can take many years and sometimes need ongoing financing. Apparently, when Obama tried to fund something like this, there was a lending bottleneck where I guess banks didn’t want to finance community infrastructure projects or something, so a lot of the funding just sat there until the grants expired. This is supposed to prevent that from happening.