Critical Capital

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.

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.

The future of energy isn’t shaped by technology alone. It’s shaped by markets, policy, capital flows, and the institutions that connect them. Trillions of dollars are moving into clean and critical infrastructure, across energy, advanced manufacturing, supply chains, AI, and digital infrastructure. But the forces driving those investments are complex, global, and often misunderstood. Alfred Johnson is the CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy. He has spent his career working at the intersection of finance, software, and public policy. On Critical Capital, Alfred talks with the people deploying capital, shaping policy, and laying the foundation for the modern economy. This is a show about how power moves across markets, institutions, and systems — and what that means for the future of energy. Episodes drop every other Tuesday, starting April 28. Subscribe to Critical Capital wherever you get your podcasts, or listen at cruxclimate.com.