🌐 Clean Energy Meets Its Match: Crux Accelerates Deal Flow

Archetype: 🧩 Friction Removal — Make it easier
 (Secondary: 💳 Financing as the Unlock)

In 2021, I co-founded Plantd with a simple goal: turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into durable building materials and lock it away in the walls and roofs of homes across America. The idea carried ambition and optimism. The path to capital carried something else entirely.

We pitched for months. No clear signals. No obvious market. Just a rush of meetings interspersed with long stretches of silence.

Then one day, a LinkedIn video of a sledgehammer contest contrasting our biomass prototype versus engineered wood caught the eye of someone I’d once interviewed on my SiriusXM show, The Lazy Environmentalist. She passed it to her boss, who happened to be Biz Stone, a renowned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor.

Overnight, the deal moved. Not because the fundamentals changed, but because credibility entered the room. That’s how capital works when a market is fragmented or yet to be built: randomness fills the gaps, and randomness is slow.

A year later, our Series A round surfaced a different kind of grind. I built our data room from scratch — employee files, legal agreements, patent filings, agriculture supply chain documents, production specs  — hundreds of items organized and uploaded. 

Then came weeks of diligence. Follow-up asks. Clarifications. More uploading. More hunting. Hours and hours to satisfy one investor group for one round.

Clean energy developers repeat that cycle 7 to 10 times per project.
Every loan. Every investor. Every layer of capital.
The same documents reviewed again and again.
No standardization. A bespoke process each time.

This slow, manual machinery adds 5–10% in cost to every clean energy asset before it ever comes online.

In a decade when we need to speed up deployment, these frictions slow it down.

The Biggest Markets of the Next Decade

Today’s market conversation is obsessed with AI. Last week, JPMorgan projected $5 trillion in AI infrastructure investment between 2026 and 2030 — a staggering figure.

But it’s still dwarfed by clean energy.

The International Energy Agency’s most conservative “muddle-through” trajectory projects $10 trillion in clean energy investment over the next five years. The transition is already scaling at a historic pace; to stay on track toward the net-zero future by 2050, it must go even faster.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was designed to accelerate that deployment by strengthening domestic manufacturing, securing supply chains, and giving developers the confidence to build.

And while wide swaths of the IRA have been curtailed, its most transformative incentive remains intact:

Transferable Tax Credits.

Today, the biggest bottleneck to maximizing their potential is not politics or pricing. It’s friction.

The funding slog I lived through at Plantd but multiplied across thousands of assets, each requiring its own capital stack.

The IRA created the leverage. What didn’t exist were the financial rails to speed it along.

The IRA Opening: Why Transferable Tax Credits Matter

Tax credits aren’t new. We’ve used them to shape America’s energy industry since before World War I. But until 2022, they shared the same flaw:

Developers rarely had enough tax liability to claim them.

You could build a $300M solar farm or a $3B battery plant and end up sitting on a credit you couldn’t use.

The IRA changed that. For the first time ever, a developer could sell their federal credit to a company that could use it.

A dormant asset became liquid. Billions in value became tradable. A massive new private market emerged, approaching $40 billion a year in volume.

And because these credits are earned when a project is placed into service, they anchor the entire capital stack. A battery storage developer building a $30 million project with a 30% investment tax credit generates a $10 million credit the moment the asset turns on.

That credit can be:

• Bridged against (via short-term loans)
  

• Sold for immediate liquidity
  

• Used to de-risk long-term financing and improve economics

It’s often the first domino that determines whether the rest of the capital follows.

But a market of that size — spanning manufacturers, utilities, corporates, investors, and advisors — requires structure, transparency, and repeatability.

In 2023, none of that existed.

The Operator in All the Right Rooms

Alfred Johnson’s career has followed the fault lines of financial systems — moments where markets either function or fail.

He entered the U.S. Treasury in March 2009, as the financial crisis was unfolding in real time. At 22, he found himself drafting memos and statements for a department trying to keep the global system from breaking.

Later, at BlackRock during the European debt crisis, Alfred worked on restructuring debt and banking systems under strain. Then came two startups — one scaled and sold — followed by a return to Treasury as Janet Yellen’s deputy chief of staff, focused on financial markets and financial technology as the IRA took shape.

When tax credit transferability became law, he recognized exactly what it would take for the credits to fulfill their promise:

• Liquidity — a real marketplace
  

• Pricing clarity — a shared baseline
  

• Workflow efficiency — the ability to process extraordinary volume

Crux was built to deliver on all three.

Where the Friction Is

Clean energy finance still operates on repeated review of the same sprawling documents:

• Engineering reports
  

• Interconnection studies
  

• Environmental assessments
  

• Contract packages
  

• Financial models

Each investor asks their own version of the same questions. Each review mixes PDFs, spreadsheets, folders, email chains, and legacy servers.

“These are huge deals with huge consequences,” Alfred told me. “And the information is scattered across systems that don’t talk to each other.”

The result: slower deals, higher costs, delayed buildout, and billions trapped inside a manual, bespoke process.

Crux relieves that pressure.

The Platform Built for Clean Energy Capital Markets

“We have trillions of dollars of potential projects that need to be funded. And we have all of this capital that would fund it. And it’s too hard,” says Alfred.

Crux operates on three pillars to accelerate clean energy finance.

1. Liquidity

A centralized place where developers, manufacturers, tax credit buyers, lenders, and tax equity investors can find each other and transact. Not a replacement for relationships — a force multiplier.

2. Market Intelligence

Crux aggregates real transaction data from across the market and feeds it directly into the platform. If a credit trades around, say, 92.4 cents, everyone sees it. Negotiation begins from a shared baseline. Pricing uncertainty evaporates.

3. Transaction Efficiency

This is the core workflow that turns a document-heavy process into fast, repeatable transactions. Developers upload their company and project documents — sometimes thousands of pages. Crux’s system then:

• Auto-organizes everything using Large Language Models (LLMs)
  

• Places each file into expert-developed credit-by-credit diligence checklists
  

• Surfaces the exact questions investors ask every time
  

• Generates summaries of key terms
  

• Lets investors query the data directly (“chat with the data room,” launching soon)

Investors no longer chase documents. Developers no longer rebuild data rooms. Expert advisors spend their time evaluating — not searching.

It’s the difference between administration and judgment.

The Results Are Already Visible

Crux launched in 2023. In just two years, it’s grown to:

• 120+ transactions closed
  

• Billions deployed
  

• 1,000+ developers, manufacturers, and investors now on the platform

And the platform’s scope is expanding fast.

One example:
A developer who sold credits on Crux last year returned seeking tax equity for a large portfolio. Crux deployed $240 million in tax equity into the deal and then began supporting equipment financing for its upcoming projects.

Once a developer’s documentation is structured inside Crux, every new transaction builds on the last. Information compounds, confidence deepens, and the pace accelerates.

Supercool Takeaway

Crux exemplifies how an AI-enabled software layer can unlock the hardware and physical layer that deep decarbonization demands.

Operator Takeaways:

• Organize once, transact everywhere.
A structured workflow turns one set of project files into the foundation for every deal.

• Let real pricing guide your strategy.
Market intelligence gives developers a clear baseline for stacking credits, tax equity, and debt.

• Use AI-structured workflows to reduce complexity.
AI, coupled with expert review, absorbs the document load so teams focus on evaluation, not document chasing.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

Clean Energy Meets Its Match: Crux Accelerates Deal Flow

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other platforms.

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Stat of the Week: $40 Billion

The size of the private market created by IRA tax credit transferability. That’s more annual liquidity than the entire U.S. voluntary carbon market by more than an order of magnitude.

Quote of the Week:

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🌐 The Climate Adoption Playbook - Module 4

Turning Low-Carbon Features into Lifestyle Upgrades

Florida’s Gulf Coast has always offered sunshine, water, and nature. But the region’s climate-linked risks have escalated. Insurers are withdrawing from the state. Premiums are rising fast. And after major storms, many neighborhoods lose power for days.

Hunters Point was built to give coastal living a future — powered by solar-plus-storage and design solutions that keep the lifestyle resilient. Developer Marshall Gobuty created an 86-home waterfront community built to withstand Category 5 hurricanes.

At Hunters Point, affordable home insurance is still accessible, and no homeowner has ever received an energy bill.

Rooftop solar paired with a Sonnen battery provides continuous power. Homes use high-efficiency insulation, elevated foundations, and reinforced construction that meets the toughest coastal standards.

Hunters Point is the world’s first residential community to earn LEED Zero Energy certification.

As Marshall Gobuty told me: “Mahesh [then-CEO of USGBC] made me crazy because he said you can do net zero. And I said, ‘Mahesh, what’s net zero? Literally, what is it?’”

That question pushed Marshall to treat zero-carbon performance and lifestyle desirability as the same objective — and to build homes that prove it.

Operator takeaway: Adoption accelerates when zero-carbon living becomes the strongest, safest, and most desirable way to live.

From Module 4 of the Climate Adoption Playbook — learn how climate solutions gain market adoption by turning low-carbon features into lifestyle upgrades.

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Related

The New Architecture of Clean Energy Finance
A new set of companies is redesigning how clean energy gets financed. They’re building the financial tools developers need to start projects faster, reduce risk, and bring more capital into the market.

kWh Analytics provides insurance for solar projects. Their flagship product protects developers and lenders if a project produces less energy than expected. That insurance gives banks confidence, lowers financing costs, and helps projects reach construction sooner. Their inaugural Resilient Power Report shows how performance guarantees are becoming one of the most valuable tools in solar finance.

Energetic Capital offers credit insurance that keeps commercial solar projects from stalling. When a school, small business, or community organization wants solar but doesn’t have strong credit, lenders often pull back. Energetic steps in with an insurance product that takes that risk off the table, allowing financing to move forward. Their recent support of a 400-megawatt solar project in Texas shows how credit insurance can unlock projects at real scale.

Evergrow builds simple financing for clean energy hardware — from solar to EV charging to battery storage. They combine tax credits and long-term project value into financial products investors can trust. That makes it easier for developers to raise capital earlier in the process. They were recently recognized by the World Economic Forum for creating a tax-credit and project-finance platform designed for fast deployment.

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Where Supercool Traveled This Week

We’re just back from an eventful couple of days at Schneider Electric’s Innovation Summit in Las Vegas. I had the opportunity to speak with several executives, including Jim Simonelli (above), CTO of Data Centers, about how the company is building the software, hardware, and Intelligent systems to power the AI-enabled, low-carbon future.

Schneider Electric has operated in the U.S. for over 135 years, accelerating energy innovation. Now, as electrification gathers steam, the company’s technologies are cutting right to the heart of the Supercool future.

We’ll release these interviews in a series of upcoming podcasts.

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Interested in Advertising with Supercool?

Connect with future-forward decision-makers seeking next-gen climate innovations. Reach out to discuss how Supercool’s platform can help. Just hit reply to this email.

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