At New York Climate Week 2026, senior leaders from across the capital stack converged to answer hard questions about why institutional money hasn’t reached community-scale infrastructure (sub-$50M or often sub-$5M sustainable infrastructure deals) and what would change that.
The climate finance ecosystem has proven that community-scale infrastructure works. Community solar, building retrofits, storage, and EV charging get built, perform, and pay back. The open question is how to scale the asset class and bring in the liquidity needed to meet the enormous demand.
During New York Climate Week, Banyan Infrastructure co-hosted an event alongside Invest in Our Future, the Milken Institute, RMI, and CGC to bring together institutional capital alongside the green banks, CDFIs, and developers who source the smallest deals.
The panel included Angela Adduci from BMO’s Climate Institute, Chris Creed from Galvanize, Matthew Sweeny at Macquarie Asset Management, and Genevieve Rose Sherman, Co-founder and CEO of Concrete Transition Capital.
The audience included a collective pipeline of hundreds of billions of dollars, spanning teams investing at the $50M+ check size, and dozens of the investors, lenders, and developers building and investing in community-scale infrastructure.
This article captures the key discussion themes under the Chatham House Rule.
Key Takeaways
Small deals stall because the cost to underwrite and manage a $5M deal is not 100x smaller than that of a $500M deal. That proportional cost burden continues after origination when irregular and disparate data increases the overhead to service the investment.
The homogeneity required to make the asset class bankable can be manufactured at first. Deals can converge through alignment on a small set of unifying principles rather than actually being identical. More importantly, key systems and processes must enforce the selected areas of conformity, flag key discrepancies, and track large pools of aggregated deals easily.
Capital can be complementary rather than competitive. Money can be layered by ticket size, with each layer having a defined job and a defined exit, rather than competing for the same asset.
The panelists engaged in earnest and detailed discussion during the event.
Community infrastructure’s institutional lending challenges
The time spent to evaluate a $10 million deal, a $100 million deal, or a $500 million deal doesn't materially change. Meaning, at the end of the origination process, the overhead costs to evaluate large and small deals are roughly the same. While larger deals have the margin to shoulder that burden, it unfortunately just doesn’t pencil at the smaller scale.
The cost of servicing these bespoke deals does not stop at closing. Inconsistent and disparate project data balloons the time to collect, analyze, and report on assets, driving up overhead and servicing costs for banks and institutional lenders.
Manufactured sameness and technology innovation
If the problem is a fixed cost, the fix is spreading it across many deals. The capital markets already know how to do this. You pool receivables, warehouse them, and mutualize the risk.
While this level of standardization, or “sameness”, may seem impossible at first, the panel challenged attendees to remember how past asset classes have scaled, particularly C-PACE. What made C-PACE poolable early on was a story, not identical paper.
Certain elements of deal structure can be controlled and aligned to make transactions replicable. This means we can standardize the wrapper, facility terms, documents, and data, while letting the underlying cash flows of these diverse projects stay as different as they are.
As for reporting after origination, while this used to be a challenge, a variety of technology and software tools now streamline the process. The days of email threads and file versions are over, replaced with clean digital dashboards, live integrations, and project records that can be easily shared across stakeholders. The trick for developers and originators is to standardize the reporting criteria across their assets so it's repeatable and scalable.
Layer the capital, don't make it compete
Different sources of capital can complement one another rather than simply compete. This means one participant can underwrite a small portfolio of 5 projects for a $10 million facility, with institutional capital sitting behind that across multiple assets within the same portfolio.
Simple in spirit, this model still presents tactical challenges the community infrastructure market must solve to evolve. Private credit is a bridge, never a destination, so it asks every borrower one question before it commits: "Who is going to lend you money next?" A muni-bond take-out, mortgage financing, an institutional debt facility. Community-scale originators should have the second lender planned before the first will move.
This also helped elevate the key discussion around the role of catalytic capital. There is a real desire to innovate in the market, but the reality of shouldering the costs of pioneering a new product stalls forward momentum. To capitalize on first-mover advantage, the panel discussed how concessionary capital from green banks, CDFIs, and philanthropy can help absorb pioneer costs, take first-loss and pre-development risk, and then step back once the swim lanes are developed for other originators to follow.
Attendees gathered after the session to network and discuss insights.
What success looks like for community infrastructure
The panelists advised that the milestone community infrastructure is working towards is community-scale and green-lending specialty absorbing into the mainstream. Meaning, no more “green” or “community” labels on the asset class, and that catalytic capital (which is so essential now) moves on to help jump-start the next opportunity.
Overall, the takeaway was clear - markets get made by participants coming together. The demand exists; the money and projects already share the room. The work now is building the standards, data, and layered structures that let money find projects on its own
Join an ongoing initiative
Our event concluded with the latest readout on an ongoing initiative led by the Milken Institute, Banyan, CGC, IOF, and RMI to tackle these challenges and create liquid markets for community-scale infrastructure. With participation from many folks in the room, this initiative is designing the standard products the panelists are looking for and mobilizing key players to finance aggregated transactions within the next year.
Markets are best built with maximum participation to optimize the products and find the best leaders for these initial pools, so we made a general call for additional participation then and extended it to all attendees.
Thank you to our co-hosts and event panelists!
Join us in our mission to unlock institutional capital for community-scale projects by meeting us in a city near you, signing up for our newsletter or getting directly in touch via info@banyaninfrastructure.com.
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