For more than a decade, the federal government's biggest tool for accelerating clean energy hasn't been a grant or a loan. It's been the tax code.
Tax credits have driven the buildout of wind, solar, and now a much wider range of technologies, like storage, nuclear, and advanced manufacturing.
But there's a catch: most of the companies earning those credits don't have enough tax liability to actually use them themselves. A clean energy developer can be sitting on tens of millions of dollars in value that's slowly losing worth simply because they can't cash it in.
In 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act tried to fix that by making these credits transferable for the first time ever — sellable directly, for cash, to a company that can use them. It created a brand-new, multi-billion-dollar market overnight, with no playbook and no established way for buyers and sellers to even find each other.
Our guest today set out to build the infrastructure this new market needed.
Alfred Johnson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Crux, an AI-native capital platform for clean energy and manufacturing infrastructure. Crux got its start in transferable tax credits, and has since expanded into tax equity investment and debt origination, leveraging software, data, and AI to cover the full capital stack for energy and manufacturing infrastructure.
Alfred grew up around politics in Washington, DC, and spent nearly two decades moving between government, finance, and technology before his wife, Emily, pushed him to build something in clean energy.
In our conversation, Alfred walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build the capital markets infrastructure this country needs to power its clean energy future.
Today, Crux has raised more than $77 million, grown to more than 120 employees, and facilitated nearly $10 billion in transactions across the clean energy economy.
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