James F. Guidera

Focus areas: Energy finance, wholesale power markets

James Guidera has over thirty-five years of experience in energy finance.  Mr. Guidera managed the project finance activities of Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank in the Americas for nearly twenty years until his retirement in 2019.  Credit Agricole CIB is part of the tenth largest banking group in the world, and has been a global leader in the project finance specialty for decades.  The project finance team Mr. Guidera led has been regularly ranked among the top five banks in the regional project finance league tables owing in to its particular expertise in the recent US-market build-out among wind and solar deployment, gas-fired merchant power generation, and gas-liquefaction facilities.   

Prior to taking over management of the bank’s regional project finance group in 1999, Mr. Guidera was a Managing Director leading significant transactions in the North and South American project finance markets.  Over a long career with a succession of US and European banks Mr. Guidera acquired extensive experience in a wide range of sectors and project-types: power generation projects involving fossil-fuels, wind, solar, biomass, LNG export and import facilities, pipelines, petrochemicals, oilfield development, metals-mining along with social and transportation infrastructure projects involving public-private-partnerships.   His transaction experience has involved the full range of project capital providers: senior commercial lenders, export credit agencies, development banks, broader capital markets participants, private equity and other investment funds.

Mr. Guidera continues to provide financial advice to market participants as the principal of Ghent Associates, LLC. , a consulting practice based in New York.   He has been an adjunct professor of international energy project finance at SIPA since 2014.

Prior to his banking career, Mr. Guidera practiced law in Philadelphia. He received his BA and JD from Villanova University.

Education

• JD, Villanova University
• BA, Villanova University