The Municipal Investment Fund (MIF) provided $11.25 million in grants and technical assistance to 49 communities across 46 states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and four Tribal nations to build pipelines of finance-ready clean energy projects. Drawing on grantee surveys, interviews, and reports covering 985 projects worth nearly $11 billion, the report finds that the biggest obstacle to local clean energy deployment is not identifying promising projects but moving them from concept to implementation. It documents the barriers grantees faced, the creative and replicable solutions they tested, and recommendations for building the conditions that let private capital participate. Many of these recommendations don’t require local governments to finance projects directly.

Who it’s for: Sustainability, Finance/Budget, Economic Development, Planning and Permitting, Procurement, and Public Works staff, along with elected officials, green banks, nonprofit partners, and funders working with local governments.

What’s inside:

  1. Emerging Barriers — six themes: Municipal Governance & Internal Capacity; Financing Structure & Capital Access; Regulatory, Policy & Utility Barriers; Federal Compliance Requirements; Workforce & Contractor Constraints; and Community Trust & Equitable Deployment.

  2. Promising Solutions — seven themes: Strategic Aggregation & Portfolios; Innovative Financing Mechanisms & De-Risking; Creative Capital Stacking & Leveraging Existing Funds; Partnership Structures; Procurement Structures; Regulatory Reform; and Community Engagement & Benefits.

  3. Key Findings — cross-cutting lessons on the roles local governments can play, what finance-ready projects have in common, why predevelopment funding is a critical bottleneck, and why regulatory and administrative barriers can matter as much as financing.

  4. Recommendations — nine actions organized into three themes: Project Development & Investment Readiness; Financing & Market Development; and Enabling Conditions & Local Capacity.

  5. Case Studies — breakthrough approaches in Douglas County, KS (project aggregation and underused state programs), Richmond, VA (cooperative procurement), Spartanburg, SC (private-sector risk transfer and code rewrite), Tompkins County, NY (revolving predevelopment funds), and Salt Lake City, UT (collective procurement).

  6. MIF Background —  introduction to program objectives, funding and support structure, participating communities, and key outputs. MIF portfolio analysis by project phase and by sector (building decarbonization, solar and storage, geothermal, transportation, resilience, and the water-energy nexus).