Attorney Spotlight: Jacklyn Branby

Associate | New York

Jacklyn M. Branby is an Associate at Mintz who focuses her practice on bankruptcy, financial restructuring, and commercial litigation matters. She has experience with Chapter 11 and other litigation and advising clients on out-of-court restructurings, including providing guidance on divisive mergers, loan workouts, and forbearance agreements.

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How has the financing landscape for renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure projects evolved in recent years?

Renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure finance has moved well beyond the traditional tax-equity and contracted-renewables market. The drivers are converging: energy security concerns, electrification, IRA incentives, and surging electricity demand — projected to grow 35–50% by 2040 as data centers and reshored manufacturing come online — have expanded the opportunity set into battery storage, sustainable fuels, hydrogen, CCUS, and dedicated power infrastructure.

Renewable energy and sustainable infrastructure finance has moved well beyond the traditional tax-equity and contracted-renewables market.

Deal sizes have roughly doubled, and capital structures have diversified through transferable tax credits, green bonds, and corporate PPAs. At the same time, higher interest rates, tighter credit standards, and evolving policy dynamics have made execution more complex than ever, putting a premium on experienced deal teams and creative structuring.

What makes energy and infrastructure project finance different from traditional financings?

The fundamental difference is structural. Project finance is non-recourse. Lenders look solely to the project's cash flows and assets for repayment, not to the sponsor's balance sheet.

The credit story is built not on a borrower's consolidated financials but on a web of interlocking contracts.

Revenue flows through a contractual waterfall that prioritizes operating costs, then senior debt service, then reserves, before anything reaches equity. There is typically no terminal value; all debt must be repaid from operating cash flows within a finite project life.

The credit story is built not on a borrower's consolidated financials but on a web of interlocking contracts, including EPC, O&M, offtake, and concession agreements, that allocate construction, technology, regulatory, and market risk across project participants. For lenders, it is an entirely different analytical framework: granular, project-specific, and contract-driven.

What's a fun fact about you outside the office?

I have a six-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi named Archibald Francis Montgomery Branby.

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