Basis Climate is going full steam ahead into 2025 after recently facilitating a USD 10m investment tax credit (ITC) sale, emphasizing that US President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders haven’t impacted the transfer marketplace, said Derek Silverman, Basis Climate co-founder and chief product officer, in an interview with NPM.

Trump’s executive orders issued shortly after his inauguration last week included threats to halt Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) disbursements going forward, sending some fears through the renewable energy industry while also raising more questions about what that includes.

Silverman said his company is monitoring changes from the executive branch but not overreacting to the orders or Trumps rhetoric on renewables.

“Tax credits are not disbursements, and the tax credit program is in full effect,” Silverman said. “But it was easy for people to really read into that and get stressed out. But as of right now, there’s been no executive action that would impede a tax credit sale, and it would take an act of Congress to repeal or amend those statutes.”

So called “regulatory decay,” like rescinding guidance and rules regarding for renewables and the IRA or defunding certain program mechanisms like registration portals, could result in legislative issues or even lawsuits for the administration, Silverman said.

“It’s just disrupting business,” Silverman said. “They live in a contradiction – they issued an energy emergency, but the same time hate renewables.”

Basis Climate facilitates clean energy tax credit transfers by identifying buyers, helping negotiate pricing and deal terms and managing transactions from start to finish. The company helps manage transactions for projects of all sizes: Silverman said they have facilitated hundreds of millions of transactions to date, including a credit sale as small as USD 365,000.

“We’re really trying to make it easy for small projects to access tax insurance, and place their credits with buyers,” Silverman said.

Tax credit buyers that work with Basis Climate typically include a variety of corporations such as banks, insurance companies, tech firms and manufacturers. Insurance companies generate a lot of tax liability throughout a fiscal year, and banks have an understanding of these credits “in their DNA,” Silverman said, making them obvious customers for solar project tax credits.

“A lot of them are doing it purely for the tax savings,” Silverman said. “Some of them like the added benefit of participating in the energy transition and funding projects, but more or less it’s a financial product. It generates tax savings.”

Since the tax credits are federal, Silverman said Basis Climate doesn’t limit itself geographically and has seen a lot of project activity in California, Texas and Illinois. Power demands are also increasing in Viriginia with new data centers and promises of wind on the horizon, Silverman said.

Rooftop solar opportunities on commercial and industrial (C&I) properties are also something Basis Climate is excited about in 2025.

“There’s so much opportunity to put solar on commercial buildings, and we’ve still only scratched the surface,” Silverman said. “Tax transferability is a powerful mechanism to open up sales or encourage ITC-eligibale projects for REITs (real estate investment trusts) and other real estate companies that don’t have the tax liability.”

Recent Massachusetts deal

Basis Climate recently helped Lightshift Energy complete a sale of nearly USD 10m worth of ITCs from four utility-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) in Massachusetts to a qualified buyer, helping provide technical guidance and manage the transaction from start to finish.

The tax credits generated by the projects were subject to prevailing wage and apprenticeship (PWA) requirements, and Basis Climate partnered with Dili, an AI-powered general diligence solution, to verify technical wage compliance under the IRA.

“The prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements was kind of a piece of the puzzle that needed to get solved last, near the end of the deal,” Silverman said.

Another small hurdle of the deal was that the projects qualified for an Energy Community Tax Credit Bonus of 10% according to the program’s 2023 map but not the updated 2024 map.

“That was an easy fix – we were able to show that construction started prior to the map being released in mid-2024 and that’s in the rules. If you show that it was, in the beginning of instruction, prior to that, then they qualify for that 10% adder,” Silverman said.

*This story was originally published exclusively for NPM US subscribers.

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