SunCast 894: Why Clean Energy Should Be Easy to Finance - But Isn’t | with Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux
Clean energy should be easy to finance.
The money exists.
The technology works.
The demand is real.
And yet, projects stall. Deals drag. Capital gets stuck.
And with the IRA crumbling under our feet, everyone is right to ask “how will these projects actually get funded?!”
So what’s actually broken?
In this episode of SunCast, I sit down with Alfred Johnson, CEO and co-founder of Crux, to unpack how clean-energy finance actually works once a project leaves the slide deck — how pricing gets discovered, how risk is evaluated, how trust is established between parties who’ve never worked together, and why so much of the process still depends on manual workflows and bespoke negotiation.
Alfred left a senior role at the U.S. Treasury after reading the Inflation Reduction Act and realizing it didn’t just expand incentives - it forced the creation of a brand-new market. One where buyers and sellers had to find each other without reference prices, standardized terms, or a shared operating system to move capital at scale. Crux exists to solve that coordination problem.
We talk about:
🔹The difference between money being available and money being usable
🔹Why trust — not tax credits — becomes the real bottleneck in new markets
🔹What breaks first when financing workflows don’t scale with market growth
🔹Why standardization matters more than speed in early market formation
🔹How Crux decided which parts of the capital stack to tackle first — and why order mattered
This is an episode about much more than tax credits.
It’s about why markets fail even when money is available — and how they get rebuilt.
If you care about how capital actually moves, why deals slow down, or what it really takes to scale the energy transition, this one’s worth your time.
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