Frontier Forum: Why clean energy capital boomed in a volatile year [partner content]

April 6, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In 2025, total capital expenditure across renewable energy, battery storage, manufacturing, minerals, and clean fuels reached about $120 billion, a six percent increase from 2024. When you layer in all the financing activity—construction debt, tax equity, and credit transfers—the total topped $200 billion. That is roughly a third of the cost of the entire interstate highway system, adjusted for inflation. The market was not supposed to do that well. Tariffs, shifting tax policy, and foreign entity of concern (FEOC) compliance rules created a stormy year. But the capital kept flowing.

Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and Katie Bays, the company's head of research, describe the market using two metaphors. The first is a ship in a storm: cross-cutting forces like tariffs, policy uncertainty, and supply chain shifts were real, but the ship still moved forward. The second is a duck on the water: from above, the market looked calm or even stalled, but beneath the surface, project finance professionals were paddling furiously. The durable economics—falling battery costs, rising electricity demand, lower interest rates—were as good or better than in prior years. The motion just was not always visible from the outside.

How financing structures adapted

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What you'll learn

1 (00:02) **Episode Introduction & Core Metaphors** - Stephen Lacey introduces the episode and the two central metaphors for the 2025 clean energy capital market: a ship in a storm and a duck treading water.
2 (02:11) **Top-Line Market Results: $120B Capex, $200B+ Financing** - Despite a stormy year, total capital expenditure in the clean economy increased 6% to $120 billion, with total financing activity exceeding $200 billion.
3 (05:08) **Deconstructing the $200B+ Financing Volume** - Alfred explains how a single project raises 5-10 different kinds of capital, leading to a total financing number much larger than the capex figure.
4 (07:47) **Signals of Resilience: Structural Adaptation** - Katie Bays explains that market resilience came from the flexibility and creativity of financing structures, not just raw volume.
5 (10:28) **Divergence in Capital Access: Winners and Bifurcation** - The market saw a split between large, bankable projects and smaller developers accessing more expensive capital.
6 (11:43) **Maturity of the Transferability Market** - The three-year-old tax credit transfer market has rapidly matured, growing to a $42B market with expanding participation.
7 (17:43) **Impact of the "Storms": Tariffs, FEOC, and Policy Uncertainty** - The storms above the surface (tariffs, FEOC rules, tax policy shifts) caused investment to be front-loaded into the first half of 2025.

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Show Notes

In 2025, the clean energy market navigated a mix of shifting tariffs, evolving FEOC compliance rules, and uncertainty around tax policy. On the surface, it looked like a year defined by instability.

And yet, capital continued to move.

Total capital expenditures across the clean economy reached roughly $120 billion, with total financing activity exceeding $200 billion across the full stack of project capital. The transferable tax credit market scaled to about $42 billion, growing rapidly in just a few years.

So why are the underlying dynamics so strong?

In this episode, recorded live as part of a Frontier Forum, Stephen Lacey speaks with Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and Katie Bays, Managing Director and Head of Research at Crux, about what actually happened beneath the surface of the market.

They discuss how developers and investors navigated uncertainty, how financing structures evolved to provide more flexibility, and why underlying demand continued to pull capital into the sector.

Read the full Crux market intelligence report. And watch the full video of the Frontier Forum here, which features even more depth on tax credit pricing, safe harbor strategies, evolving deal structures.