kWh Analytics, a climate insurance provider, announced it has been awarded $500,000 from InnSure’s Insurance Innovation Prize supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The funding will support the development of a tax credit insurance product tailored specifically for small-scale distributed generation (DG) renewable energy projects, addressing what the company called a “critical market gap” in renewable energy financing.
The new insurance product is meant to enable projects under 20 MW to effectively monetize transferable tax credits introduced by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While the IRA made tax credits transferable, in part to promote distributed generation, traditional tax credit insurance solutions require “extensive and expensive due diligence from highly specialized and skilled professionals that smaller projects cannot support,” per kWh Analytics. The company argues this creates a barrier for smaller renewable energy projects seeking to participate in the tax credit market.
“The transition to clean energy requires innovative financial solutions that work for projects of all sizes,” said Jason Kaminsky, CEO of kWh Analytics. “This award will enable us to leverage our extensive data, insurance expertise, and technological advantage to open new financing pathways for smaller renewable energy projects, supporting the deployment of clean energy across the country.”
GO DEEPER: Jason Kaminsky, CEO of the clean energy project insurance provider kWh Analytics, joined Episode 51 of the Factor This! podcast to share the data behind solar’s biggest risks, along with pathways to avoid potholes down the road. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
kWh Analytics will apply its data-driven approach, powered by its AI-enabled underwriting assessments and proprietary database of over 300,000 renewable energy projects, in an effort to streamline and standardize the due diligence process for tax credit insurance. The new tax credit insurance product is expected to launch within 18 months, supporting distributed generation solar and battery storage projects in New York and nationwide.
In November 2024, DOE greenlit kWh Analytics to continue phase two work on a $2 million award under the Increasing Affordability, Reliability, and Manufacturability of PV Cells, Modules, and Systems award, an initiative under the Energy Department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) aimed at extending the lifespan of photovoltaic (PV) systems. The award allows kWh Analytics to continue research it started in 2022 on building a program that incentivizes solar asset owners to keep their stuff online by taking care of it.
Over the preceding 24 months, kWh Analytics used natural language processing of operations and maintenance (O&M) service logs to learn what makes solar assets reliable. These field insights inform upstream stakeholder decisions, such as O&M preventative maintenance and spare parts strategies. In phase two of the project, kWh Analytics will explore ways in which field data can inform insurers’ decisions to incent asset owners to put reliability measures into practice.
The company plans to publish the results of its research project in 2025.
kWh Analytics, which has insured more than $30 billion of assets to date, utilizes a proprietary database of more than 300,000 zero-carbon projects and $100B in loss data to fuel modeling and insights that support its underwriting decisions.
Each year, kWh Analytics releases its Solar Risk Assessment, a comprehensive report providing a data-driven evaluation of solar risk. Last year’s report suggests standard modeling assumptions can underestimate solar project losses from weather-related physical damage by more than 300%.
