The collaboration is designed to give municipal clean energy projects a repeatable path to institutional capital after the loss of federal funding.
NEW YORK, Sept. 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN), a network of local government sustainability practitioners across North America, and Plural, a financial services firm for the builders of energy and digital infrastructure, today announced the Climate Capital Collaborative, designed to build a repeatable financing channel for municipal clean energy projects, working alongside Arizona State University’s Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service and execution partner Ezra, an AI-native capital advisor for allocators and issuers. The pilot begins with six projects across multiple states, with the first project currently in active diligence, and is designed to scale across USDN’s membership over time.
The partnership pools renewable energy projects into standardized portfolios that institutional lenders can finance.
Across state and municipal grantees, roughly 212 awards in 48 states—representing about $16 billion in total project funding, with roughly $12 billion in federal money obligated but never disbursed—were stranded by the rescission of Inflation Reduction Act funding under OB3, according to public federal award data. That funding had been awarded to help local governments plan and build clean energy and climate resilience projects, from solar installations to grid upgrades.
“Cities didn’t lose their clean energy projects or need for sustainable infrastructure, they lost the funding. There is enormous demand still there,” said Dr. Michael Dorsey, the Director and Chair of the Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service at Arizona State University (ASU) and Professor of Practice.
“As the world approaches an electron supply constraint, private capital interest in infrastructure is growing,” said Adam Silver, CEO and Co-Founder of Plural. “The problem isn’t a shortage of capital, it’s that these projects have never been packaged in a way institutional lenders can underwrite. Our job, alongside USDN, is to discover patterns across the network and build pools of similar projects that are investable, available to institutions, and administered on Plural’s platform.”
How the Climate Capital Collaborative Works
USDN holds the member relationships at the center of the pilot, working jointly with ASU, which brings technical project assessment, to screen and ready projects for financing. Plural then structures the transaction and builds the institutional diligence package as the deal’s capital markets arm with services provided via Plural Brokerage LLC, a FINRA member broker-dealer. As an SEC-registered transfer agent, Plural also handles origination, issuance, cap table management, debt service, transactions, and ongoing servicing. Ezra, Plural’s execution partner, brings distribution, connecting the resulting pipeline to a broad network of lenders.
Each project is financed at the project level through a special-purpose vehicle; the municipality itself is not the borrower, and the structure does not use municipal debt capacity or constitute municipal debt.
Individually, many of these projects are too small to justify a bank’s diligence budget. Aggregated and standardized, they can fit the mandates of infrastructure credit investors, who gain access to public-sector-backed sponsors with stable credit profiles and projects suited to long-term holds rather than short-term development-to-flip strategies.
The Climate Capital Collaborative’s Project Types and Scope
USDN’s network spans more than 250 cities and counties and more than 330 communities across the United States and Canada, representing the long-term addressable scope of the collaboration. The pilot is evaluating a range of project types, each selected for having a clear, financeable revenue stream, including:
Solar, including landfill and brownfield sitesSolar-plus-storageCommunity and municipal solar programsGeothermal district energy and building retrofitsMicrogrids and resilience hubsEfficiency and grid-edge upgrades
“No single city has the scale to bring a project like this to institutional investors on its own. This gives our members a shared path to the capital they lost to federal funding clawbacks,” commented Deneine Christa Powell, CEO of USDN.
Why Plural and Ezra
Plural was built to enable large-scale capital programs for projects. Rather than asking each city or county to originate a deal on its own, Plural structures a pipeline once and runs it as software for the life of the assets, with issuance, compliance, and servicing handled automatically. Ezra’s deep experience in lending markets further expands the network of lenders who can participate in the program. The goal is to give municipalities access to the same institutional capital markets infrastructure that has, until now, largely been reserved for developers with in-house finance teams.
What’s Next for the Climate Capital Collaborative
The collaboration was soft-launched today at Climate Week NYC. In the fourth quarter of 2026, the goal is to complete diligence on the first cohort of projects and bring the lead project to market, with the aim of a signed term sheet with a senior lender. A first close is targeted for late 2026 into the first quarter of 2027, with the aim of featuring it at USDN’s January 2027 convening. Looking to 2027, the goal is to convert individual placements into a standing financing channel operating against an agreed credit framework. These are goals, not projections; no terms are signed with any lender at this time.
ABOUT PLURAL
Plural is the financial services firm for the builders of energy and compute infrastructure. Purpose-built so developers building energy, compute, transportation, and adjacent assets can create a financial program once and deploy it at any scale, Plural combines banking and advisory services with proprietary software to structure, execute, and permanently run the capital programs that fund next-generation infrastructure. Plural’s subsidiary, Plural Brokerage, LLC is a FINRA Member broker-dealer and cap table management is provided via Plural Transfer Services LLC. The Plural Group has secured over $600M in investor commitments for its clients while managing the full asset lifecycle, from investor onboarding and compliance to distribution processing, secondary trading, and ongoing administration. The company’s team brings experience from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Standard Chartered, EDF Renewables, and other leading institutions, having collectively raised or managed over $10B in infrastructure capital.
ABOUT USDN
The Urban Sustainability Directors Network (USDN) is a peer-to-peer network dedicated to advancing the field of local sustainability by supporting more than 3,000 local government professionals from 330 communities across the US and Canada that serve more than 111 million people.
ABOUT THE ROB AND MELANI WALTON SUSTAINABILITY SOLUTIONS SERVICE
The Walton Sustainability Solutions Service empowers businesses, governments and NGOs to create significant change through actionable knowledge and innovation. It connects members to a vast network of globally respected experts across the Arizona State University ecosystem to explore possibilities, develop strategies, pilot programs and scale systems that solve complex sustainability challenges.
MEDIA CONTACT
Tess Pawlisch
608-333-9788
plural@needlepr.com
IMPORTANT DISCLOSURES
Plural is a trade name for Plural Everything, Inc. and its subsidiaries. Securities-related products and services are offered through Plural Brokerage LLC, a broker-dealer registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and a member of FINRA and SIPC. Transfer agency services are provided by Plural Transfer Services LLC, a transfer agent registered with the SEC. Plural Everything, Inc. is not a registered broker-dealer or transfer agent. Plural is not a bank, and does not accept deposits or extend credit as a bank.
This announcement is for informational purposes only. It does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy any security, nor shall it constitute an offer, solicitation, or sale in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful. Any securities referenced were offered and sold in private placements exempt from registration under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, were not registered under that Act or under any state securities laws, and may not be offered or sold absent registration or an applicable exemption from registration. Prior transactions are not indicative of future results.
Statements in this release that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that reflect Plural’s current expectations. Such statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed. Plural undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
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SOURCE Plural
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