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Critical Capital

The future of energy is shaped by markets, policy, and capital flows — not just technology. Hosted by Crux CEO Alfred Johnson, Critical Capital explores the interlocking forces powering clean and critical infrastructure. The show features in-depth conversations at the intersection of energy, government, and global markets.

Latest Episodes:

Senator Martin Heinrich unpacks his new permitting reform bill Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

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.

Data centers gave nuclear its moment. Can it deliver? Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

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.

What it costs to make power cheap Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

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.

What it takes to build in America again Sep 01, 2026

Show notes

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 disrupting services. What does that mean for power demand? Aug 18, 2026

Show notes

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.

Senator Thom Tillis on energy, China, and leaving Congress Aug 04, 2026

Show notes

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.

The unprecedented opportunity for infrastructure investors Jul 21, 2026

Show notes

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.

Navigating the new world disorder Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

Conflict and disaster displace millions of people around the world every year, and millions more live with food insecurity, unreliable access to electricity or no electricity at all. These same populations are also the most adversely impacted by climate change, geopolitical competition for resources, and global instability. David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and former UK Foreign Secretary, says the world is at a "hinge moment."

In this episode, Alfred Johnson sits down with Miliband to discuss the breakdown of the post-WWII international order and what it means for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Miliband explains how "energy poverty" severely cripples humanitarian recovery and highlights the infuriating paradox of our time: the world has never been richer or more technologically advanced, yet distributed clean energy remains out of reach for those who need it most. They discuss concrete, scalable solutions the International Rescue Committee is pioneering, like solarizing health clinics and water pumps, and fueling breakthrough market solutions through Airbel Ventures.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

The trillion-dollar collision between AI and the grid Jun 23, 2026

Show notes

The rapid rise of AI has sparked a multi-trillion-dollar collision between our aging power grid and massive, energy-hungry AI "factories."

Unlike traditional cloud data centers, AI training workloads are incredibly dense and volatile, capable of spiking or dropping power demand in milliseconds and threatening grid stability. Dr. Varun Sivaram, CEO of Emerald AI, says the solution lies in load flexibility.

By using software to dynamically shift AI workloads across time (temporal flexibility) or across the country (spatial flexibility), data centers can adapt to the grid rather than overloading it. It’s an approach that avoids the need for expensive, off-grid microgrids that drive up equipment costs and starve public utilities of revenue. Instead, implementing modest flexibility can immediately unlock over 100 gigawatts of stranded grid capacity, ensuring American geopolitical competitiveness, lowering consumer energy rates, and creating a dynamic demand buffer to integrate more clean wind and solar energy.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

The US-China rivalry runs through energy and minerals Jun 09, 2026

Show notes

On today’s stage, China is the rising global power, and U.S. dominance is under threat. Geopolitical tensions like wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, combined with supply chain disruptions and a growing demand for rare earth minerals, continue to strain the relationship. But that relationship is key to the future of energy in the United States.

In this episode, Alfred Johnson talks with Harvard professor and geopolitical strategist Graham Allison. Together, they unpack the growing rivalry between the United States and China through the lens of the “Thucydides Trap,” a concept Graham popularized in his book “Destined for War.” The "Thucydides Trap" is the idea that when a rising power threatens an established one, conflict often follows.

Drawing on history and decades of foreign policy experience, Graham explains how today’s U.S.-China relationship resembles past global power struggles. He also explains how economic interdependence complicates the rivalry, and why energy, rare earth minerals, Taiwan, and global supply chains have become central geopolitical battlegrounds.

Critical Capital is a co-production of Crux and Latitude Studios. Learn more about how Crux is financing the future of energy.

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