Critical Capital

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For decades, clean energy technology was framed as a moral imperative; a necessary strategy for saving the planet. Today, it’s just good business.

Thanks to rapid breakthroughs in generation and storage, the unit economics of cleantech have reached price parity with — and in some cases even undercut — fossil alternatives. But despite the incentives, this shift away from fossil fuels continues to hit roadblocks. Broken project finance stacks, risk-averse underwriters, and political gridlock have all slowed down innovation and deployment.

In this episode of Critical Capital, host Alfred Johnson sits down with two champions of the capital-centric, apolitical approach to climate investing: Lowercarbon Capital’s Chris Sacca (co-founder and managing partner) and Caie Kelley (general partner). Built on the heels of Sacca’s Lowercase Capital, a powerhouse tech fund in the 2010s, Lowercarbon has quickly emerged as one of the most dominant forces in cleantech. Today they manage over $2 billion in assets across the sector.

During this in-studio conversation recorded at New York Climate Week, Alfred, Chris, and Caie unpack why the industry is ditching the word "climate," how technical-minded founders can bridge the gap from lab-scale science and prototypes to deployment, and how to rebuild the capital stack needed to help this new era of cleantech reach its full potential.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

If there’s one thing stakeholders in the energy sector can agree on, it’s that new infrastructure needs to get built faster and more reliably. A recent Crux study, for instance, found that federal permitting delays hamper clean energy projects for an average of six months; cancellations due to endless litigation are common.

For years, federal lawmakers have sought to expedite this process through permitting reform: a legislative package that would streamline new energy generation and transmission projects. Yet despite consensus that reform is needed, getting lawmakers to agree on the particulars has proved elusive.

This week, however, the U.S. Senate took an enormous step towards instituting permitting reform with the introduction of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA), a wide-reaching bill that has the potential to revolutionize the entire energy sector.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich, a chief architect of the bill. Conducted just minutes after the press conference where Senator Heinrich and his colleagues announced BAAJA, their conversation digs into some of the bill’s largest potential impacts on building and financing projects, as well as the next steps it will take on its journey to becoming law.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

The rush to build data centers has sparked an energy debate: will gas meet the growing demand or will clean firm power like nuclear step in? Nuclear has bipartisan support, new contracts from tech companies, and the capital to build. What it needs, according to Lara Pierpoint, is to be built on time and on budget with government support that lasts.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Lara Pierpoint, managing director of Trellis Climate at Prime Coalition and a nuclear engineer by training, to talk about what it will take to build clean power for the data center era.

Together, they dig into whether nuclear can get out of its own way on costs, why data centers now draw the local opposition that nuclear once did, and what AI means for the security of the grid. They also cover what hyperscalers will pay for and how to make government funding promises last from one administration to the next.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

Home energy has spent most of a decade being sold as a premium product, priced at a margin homeowners would pay for something they wanted. Zach Dell says there’s a better way. He argues that electricity is a commodity, that the cheapest version is the best one, and that getting there means owning the supply chain that produces it.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with Zach, co-founder and CEO of Base Power, about what it costs to make power cheap. Zach argues the number that matters is the fully landed cost, the parts, manufacturing, logistics, financing, and tax credits added together — and that solving for any one alone gives the wrong answer.

Together, they dig into why residential batteries are the fastest capacity to add to the grid, why a supplier that works at one unit a day breaks at a hundred, and what last summer’s sourcing rules did to whether a Chinese part still makes sense. They also cover Texas and Illinois market structure, and growth from 60 people to a reported 650.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

American industry is building factories, mines, and grid hardware at a scale not attempted in decades, and the capital is there. But Erin Price-Wright says the cost of money no longer sets the return on an industrial project. It’s the time spent waiting on a regulator.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with Erin who joined Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice in 2024 to invest in energy, mining, and industry. She argues the grid's real constraint is transmission and equipment, not generation, which has made smaller, faster hardware competitive with scale.

Together, they dig into where venture equity stops and project finance begins, why credit investors distrust the timelines founders quote them, and what she wants written into law so builders can plan past one administration. They also cover Mariana Minerals winning permits to expand a southeast Utah copper mine in a reported six months, and why a first factory stays near its engineers while the second follows the fastest-building states.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.