Massachusetts closed their second green bond last night. They were nearly 3x oversubscribed!
And it seems they got a better price! This is new. Their press release says: "Strong overall demand for the Green Bonds led to lower yields on the bonds, with some bonds being sold at lower yields than the municipal market’s AAA yield curve. The general obligation bonds are rated AA+." No actual figures provided, and given interest rates on AAA are s-o-o-o low it's not likely to be much in the way of price difference, but it's worth noting because we don't have many examples of green bonds being sold at the same time as non-green that have the same rating.
Proceeds will be sued to fund clean water projects, energy efficiency, environmental remediation and river revitalization & preservation. Plus a large project to build a facility to support the construction of offshore wind projects.
BTW, they had nearly $260m of retail orders. That's big for them. Bravo Mass. Treasury!
In the meantime California's having an excellent roadshow. They've just emailed me: they're upsizing their first ever green bond on the strength of retail and institutional investor demand. The bond is part of a larger General Obligation bond sale, so it'll be interesting to see any price differentials.
State Teasurer Bill Lockyer is member of our Climate Bonds Standard Board - we are strongly supportive of their pool of projects, but we do not (yet!) have formal criteria published to allow the Standards Board to certify their bond; same with Massachusetts. Multi-stakeholder science committees take time - sigh. Not that it's holding back the market at this stage!
