Watt It Takes

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.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures 

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Electricity demand in the U.S. is climbing faster than the grid can comfortably absorb, driven largely by AI data centers that need power 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The U.S. power system needs all the reliable clean energy it can get, and once-forgotten geothermal energy is one such resource.

In the 1960s, the United States was a world leader in building large-scale geothermal power plants, but during the fracking boom of the mid-2000s, drillers turned their attention to oil and gas. As wind, solar and batteries got cheaper, bankers and developers put their money into those resources.

Geothermal development around the world had flatlined, until a new generation of geothermal developers and entrepreneurs borrowed the horizontal drilling techniques that powered the fracking boom and used them to make geothermal viable in far more geographies

One of those entrepreneurs is Tim Latimer, Co-Founder and CEO of Fervo Energy.

Fervo Energy is a geothermal developer using advanced drilling techniques from fracking in the oil and gas industry to make it easier to find and harness heat underground.

In our conversation, recorded in December 2021, Tim told me about how he combined his expertise in oil and gas drilling with a dedication to solving the climate crisis, and used his experience to break open an overlooked renewable resource. Tim predicted the 2020s would be "the geothermal decade," noting that we can't transition to a zero-carbon grid without round-the-clock clean energy resources to supplement intermittent renewables. Geothermal offers that always-on feature needed now more than ever.

We're revisiting this conversation now in celebration of what Fervo has accomplished: signing hundreds of megawatts of power purchase agreements with hyperscalers and utilities alike, and recently completing the largest IPO of any clean energy company.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Every morning, 26 million children in the US get on a school bus. It is the largest mass transit system in America, and it has barely changed in 80 years. There is no real-time tracking, no route optimization, and no visibility for parents. Bus drivers still rely on walkie-talkies and dispatchers still use fax machines.

Nearly half a million diesel buses are moving those 26 million children, producing more than eight million tons of carbon annually. It is one of the most overlooked, high-impact decarbonization opportunities in the country.

The question isn't whether this system will change. It's who is going to change it. Our guest has spent the last decade building the solution.

Ritu Narayan is the Founder and CEO of Zūm, a full-service school transportation platform that is modernizing and electrifying the yellow school bus.

Ritu grew up in India and was raised to value education and dream big. After graduating from the Delhi Institute of Technology (now NSUT), she moved to California where she became a product leader at Oracle, Yahoo, and eBay.

She left a career at eBay to take the leap into entrepreneurship and started Zūm to solve a deeply personal problem: modernizing and electrifying student transportation.

In our conversation, Ritu walks me through her journey, and what it takes to reimagine a system the whole country depends on and nobody talks about.

Today, Zum serves more than 5,000 schools across 18 states and completed over 60 million student rides last year. Zum has raised $430 million from investors including Sequoia, SoftBank, GIC, and TPG, and launched the nation's first all-electric, vehicle-to-grid school bus fleet at Oakland Unified School District, returning energy to the electric grid while children are at school.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time on this show talking about the grid, why it needs to expand, where it’s falling short, and what it will take to meet growing demand.

We’ve talked about improving how the grid gets planned and built, and the bottlenecks that slow projects down. But even if those bottlenecks are resolved, the system itself is becoming harder to manage. Demand is rising fast, driven by electrification and data centers powering AI. At the same time, the grid is getting more complex. Distributed resources, extreme weather, and aging infrastructure are making it harder to plan, predict, and operate. And the tools utilities rely on weren’t built for this kind of system.

Our guest today has spent his career inside that problem, from working at a utility to building one of the early software platforms for managing distributed energy. Josh Wong is the founder and CEO of ThinkLabs AI, a Powerhouse Ventures portfolio company. We co-led ThinkLabs’ $5 million seed round in 2024. ThinkLabs is building an AI copilot for the electric grid, helping operators understand and manage the system in real time. Using physics-informed models, the platform can compress analyses that once took weeks or months into minutes.

Josh was born in Hong Kong and raised in Toronto. He began his career at Toronto Hydro, where he saw firsthand how difficult it is to operate the grid in practice. That experience led him to found Opus One, a company focused on helping utilities manage increasingly complex power systems, which was later acquired by GE. Josh kept coming back to the same underlying problem: utilities need to move faster, but the tools they rely on make that nearly impossible. ThinkLabs is his answer.

In our conversation, Josh walks me through his journey, and what it takes to build in one of the most complex and risk-averse industries in the world. Today, ThinkLabs has raised more than $30 million from investors including NVIDIA and Energy Impact Partners, and is working with partners and customers including Southern California Edison, and other major ISOs.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage founders building the future power system across energy, infrastructure, and AI. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.

At a moment when the energy conversation is increasingly focused on markets, infrastructure, and scale, it can be easy to lose sight of something more fundamental: access.

Roughly 750 million people around the world still live without electricity. And while the industry debates timelines, technologies, and capital flows, that reality remains unchanged for a huge portion of the global population.

This month’s guest, Alex Honnold, is best known for something completely different, but has spent the past decade working directly on that problem.

Most people know Alex as the first person to free solo El Capitan, climbing 3,000 feet of sheer granite without ropes. It’s one of the most extraordinary feats in modern sport. But over the past decade, he’s been channeling that same focus and discipline into a different kind of work: expanding access to clean energy through the Honnold Foundation.

This conversation was recorded live during San Francisco Climate Week, in a room full of founders, investors, and operators working to build the energy system of the future. And what stood out most to me was Alex’s clarity.

He doesn’t speak in industry jargon. He doesn’t overcomplicate the problem. He keeps coming back to something simple. If people don’t have their basic needs met, nothing else works.

In our conversation, we go back to Alex’s childhood in Sacramento, growing up as a shy kid climbing anything he could find, to the experiences that shaped him early on: loss, independence, and the years he spent living out of a van. We talk about what led him to free solo El Capitan, and the mindset behind it, and how those same values eventually showed up in his decision to start the Honnold Foundation. And we get into how he thinks about risk, failure, and impact today, both on the wall and in his work.

Alex is funny, candid, and at times unexpectedly vulnerable. And he brings a perspective that I think is easy to overlook, but hard to ignore once you hear it.

About Powerhouse Innovation and Powerhouse Ventures

Powerhouse Ventures backs seed stage startups developing innovative software to advance clean energy, mobility, and industry. If you are thinking about building something in this space, get in touch with our team.

Powerhouse Innovation is a best in class consulting firm, powered by the strongest energy innovation network, data and team in our industry. We partner with world's leading corporations, investors, and utilities to source and evaluate disruptive startups shaping the future of energy and industry.

To hear more stories of founders building our energy abundant future, hit the “subscribe” button and leave us a review.