While interconnection queues and permitting challenges dominate the conversation about clean energy bottlenecks, there’s a more foundational problem that gets far less attention: the transaction process itself remains broken. Decades into the modern clean energy era, deals still take too long to close, burn through excessive capital in due diligence, and often collapse at the finish line over issues that should have been identified months earlier.
Projects face rigorous review by finance teams, lawyers, and engineers — all looking for deal-breaking risks. The process is costly, slow, and demanding. And when deals stall, hard-earned permits and contracts can expire, killing projects.
In this Frontier Forum, Rich Deming, founder of CEART (the Climate Asset Risk Tool), joins Stephen Lacey of Latitude Media to examine why due diligence bottlenecks persist despite decades of market maturation — and why solving them matters more now than ever. Drawing from his experience developing projects across biomass, solar, and biofuels — and the painful lessons learned when deals collapsed — Deming breaks down where the transaction process fails investors, developers, and insurers.
The conversation explores what happens when the market shifts to a proactive, transparent, digitally enabled approach to due diligence: faster deal flow, better capital allocation, and reduced wasted effort. In a landscape defined by speed to power, understanding project risk clearly and quickly becomes a competitive advantage. In an era of unprecedented demand for energy, overcoming the due diligence bottleneck and eliminating transactional inefficiencies enables the entire industry to get more clean energy on the grid faster.
Who should watch:
- Investors
- Project financiers
- Infrastructure funds
- Project developers
- Project engineers
- Insurers
- Lawyers
- CPAs
