Foss & Company announces the launch of TaxEquity.com, a web platform designed to optimize the tax equity investment process for renewable energy developers.

Arranging financing for commercial and industrial solar projects is notoriously challenging, and getting to a term sheet with a qualified tax equity investor that can close is arguably the most difficult part of assembling the capital stack. There are only a handful of highly active tax equity investors, and the whole process can often seem cumbersome and confusing due to high variability in each project, intricacies of tax code, deal structure and interests of debt providers. Because of this, a considerable amount of due diligence must be conducted on each project, driving up costs and resulting in a slow evaluation process.  These factors set a relatively high barrier to entry for developers; most professional tax equity investors won’t work with developers with projects or portfolios less than 3 MW in size.

Foss Renewable Energy Partners Managing Director Alex Tiller said “The goal with TaxEquity.com is to allow more capital to flow to more renewable energy projects. We can achieve this by standardizing the way we interface with developers and evaluate their projects. Additionally, we will work with debt providers to generate standardized and preapproved documents that a developer can choose to use, which leads to a streamlined evaluation process. Combining the two previous steps with algorithm driven analyses, we hope to cut the time to terms sheet down to hours, rather than days.” Tiller added that in the near future, they would like to find a way to fund projects as small as 100 kW in size.

Renewable energy project developers can evaluate the system on the website (www.taxequity.com) and introduce themselves, execute a mutual nondisclosure agreement, and provide details about their projects. The more detailed the information that is provided, the faster the response time that can be expected.