Critical Capital

For decades, geothermal energy was limited by geography. Developers could only drill where hot water or steam was trapped beneath the earth’s surface.  Enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), however, revolutionized the industry by harnessing the oil and gas fracking playbook. EGS operators blast specialized fluid into hot, dry rock, fracturing it to produce huge amounts of heat. It’s a technology that has opened the door to utility-scale geothermal generation in a wide range of locations. No company has found more success in EGS than Fervo Energy. Since launching its pilot, Project Red, in 2023, Fervo has made enormous strides. Drilling times and costs have already plummeted, and their first utility-scale project, Cape Station, began producing power in Utah this September. Fervo has signed power purchase agreements with customers including Google, Shell, and Southern California Edison, and they’ve announced two additional projects.  This spring they went public at a valuation of $7.4 billion. In this episode of Critical Capital, Alfred Johnson sits down with Sarah Jewett, the COO of Fervo. They unpack EGS’ remarkable, modular technology, as well as the company’s strategy for diversifying its customer base beyond hyperscalers. They also dig into permitting reform’s potential to supercharge the sector.   Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

When the behind-the-meter power generation company Intersect launched a decade ago, the playbook for setting up renewable generation was pretty straightforward: secure power purchase agreements with your customers, then build your generation. But Intersect took a different -- and far riskier – path. They built generation infrastructure before anyone signed up to buy it.  Without buyers, the company would have sunk. But a spike in U.S. energy demands fueled by massive data centers put Intersect in the perfect spot. It had a product nobody else had: immediately deployable power. Intersect built 14 generation projects, and this spring, Alphabet bought the company for nearly $5 billion. (The deal did not include operable projects, only those in development).  In this episode, Alfred sits down with Sheldon Kimber, founder and CEO of Intersect, to unpack the financial frameworks and market insights that drove both Intersect’s growth and their remarkable acquisition by Alphabet. They explore why Intersect’s merchant approach proved so effective, how "bring your own power" is becoming the gold standard for data center development, and why the future grid will rely on a "flywheel" of renewables, batteries, and gas. Have feedback on Critical Capital? Fill out our listener survey to let us know what topics and guests you’d like to hear next! Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

Have feedback on Critical Capital? Fill out our listener survey to let us know what topics and guests you’d like to hear next! 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.

AI is still in the foothills of enterprise adoption, but the infrastructure buildout required to support it is already reshaping energy markets, capital allocation, and industrial policy. Data centers are driving demand for new generation and transmission, while billions of dollars flow into the hardware and software needed to train and run increasingly powerful models.  That makes energy infrastructure a big constraint in the AI buildout race. Data centers require more power generation, transmission, grid capacity, and additional physical infrastructure; all major investments. And those energy systems will have impacts on the cost of running potentially more power-hungry frontier AI models. That’s a lot of uncertainty even before considering the economic transformation still to come. If AI moves beyond software and begins to fundamentally change how services like law, accounting, insurance, and finance are delivered, it could reshape a far larger part of the economy and create a new wave of demand for both digital and physical infrastructure. In this episode of Critical Capital, Alfred Johnson sits down with Jake Saper, a partner at Emergence Capital and an early investor in enterprise software and AI infrastructure. Saper argues that the biggest transformation from AI may not happen inside software companies at all. Instead, it could reshape the much larger services economy, creating a new category he calls AI-native services (AINS). Saper explains why he believes companies built from scratch around AI may have an advantage over traditional service-business roll-ups, and why the biggest challenge for these companies is delivering their services with AI rather than simply adding more human labor. The conversation also explores the increasingly blurry line between software and physical infrastructure.  Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

Energy policy has become increasingly polarized just as the U.S. faces record electricity demand, a rapidly expanding AI economy, and growing competition from China.  In this episode, Alfred Johnson speaks with North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis about why the country's biggest energy challenge is the inability to build durable, bipartisan policy that survives changes in political leadership.  Drawing on more than a decade in the Senate, Tillis argues for an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy that embraces renewables, natural gas, nuclear, and other generation sources rather than treating them as competing ideologies. He discusses the economic consequences of abruptly cancelling energy projects, the need for stable investment signals, and why rising electricity demand requires policymakers to focus on practical solutions instead of partisan rhetoric. Tillis also discusses domestic manufacturing, critical minerals, AI governance, and the importance of strengthening America's energy supply chains while remaining globally competitive.  Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

We are entering a period of infrastructure development unlike anything we’ve seen in the last century. The infrastructure economy is witnessing a generational redesign and a fundamental reshaping of the physical fabric on which society is built. In this episode, Alfred Johnson is joined by Jessica Bailey, Global Head of Infrastructure at Nuveen, an institutional giant with over $1.4 trillion in assets under management. Jessica directs $40 billion in infrastructure investments and discusses how the collision of the energy transition, digitalization, and aging grid systems is creating an unprecedented investment landscape. Jessica shares her unique journey from climate philanthropy at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to pioneering C-PACE financing. She also explains the financing structures needed to scale domestic manufacturing, why economic realities are beginning to override political gridlock, and why the biggest check on AI growth won't be capital, but could be energy and community pushback. Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.