Frontier Forum: The hidden bottleneck in clean energy

Summary

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Open Circuit — Frontier Forum: The Hidden Bottleneck in Clean Energy

Host: Stephen Lacy (Latitude Media)
Guest: Rich Deming (CEO, East Energy Renewables & Founder, Cert Score)
Date: April 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode centers on the “hidden bottleneck” in the clean energy transition: the fractured, risky, and slow process of evaluating and closing clean energy project deals. Host Stephen Lacy and veteran project builder Rich Deming dissect why transactions themselves—not just grid capacity, permitting, or supply chain issues—are a major drag on deployment. The discussion covers Rich’s decades of experience, the complexity of clean energy deals, and the potential for AI and new platforms (like Cert Score) to radically accelerate project diligence and reduce costly failures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Clean Energy Projects: Complexity in Transactions

• Early renewables deals were chaotic—each was unique, with no standardization in contracts or financing, making every closing unpredictable.

  “There was tons and tons of talking and it could go on for months... and suddenly, you know, four hours before you’re supposed to close, there’s this brand new thing and it’s everyone’s got to run around with their hair on fire...”
  — Rich Deming (00:26)

• Today’s projects can involve hundreds of documents, reviewed by numerous parties at different times and with different priorities—often leading to repeated work and late-stage surprises.
• Multiple, conflicting deal timelines (tax credits, exclusivity, financing deadlines) push teams to rush parts of the process, especially the term sheet—often with incomplete knowledge.
• The risk: Misunderstandings, missed risks, and expensive diligence that sometimes gets wasted if fatal problems emerge late.

2. AI and Cert Score: Unifying the Fragmented Picture

• Rich identifies a “fog of war” in diligence—no single party has the full picture soon enough.

  “No one had a clear, unified view early on... and suddenly AI made it possible to bring that fragmented picture together.”
  — Stephen Lacy (02:20)

• Cert Score (CERT): An AI-powered platform designed to structure project data, surface risks early, and speed up decisions—from term sheet to closing.
  • Developers upload their data room (“literally drag and drop”), then the platform analyzes the files, counterparty backgrounds, and even community sentiment (social/local media scraping).
  • Outputs a “search score” (1–100) summarizing project risk, pinpointing specific problems, and helping users prioritize which deals to pursue.
  • Notable for uncovering “landmines”—sometimes legal, sometimes reputational—before diligence budgets get spent.

3. The Human-AI Approach: Lessons in Building Trustworthy Automation

• Rich stresses the platform isn’t just a “cool toy” for AI, but is built on deep, structured human expertise—starting with the 300 questions real diligence teams ask.

  “If you just have the large language model, but you don’t have any structured or curated data... you just have a cool toy... If you just started taking a data room and throwing it into a knowledge language model, you’re going to get nonsense... you’re going to get hallucinations.”
  — Rich Deming (03:01)

4. Shifting Market and Regulatory Risks

• The margin for error is shrinking (especially after IRA legislation):

  “Flight to quality... There’s no margin for error now... It’s kind of the same problems, but they can cause more damage with less margin for error.”
  — Rich Deming (09:37)

• Insurers have become critical gatekeepers: the tax credit is “worthless if it’s not insured,” and there’s a “circular fog” as funds defer to insurers, who in turn defer to lawyers.
• Community sentiment (local pushback against projects) and counterparty risk (bankruptcies, lawsuits) are increasingly visible and need to be surfaced early.

5. Platform Development and Tech Evolution

• Built over three years, Cert Score leverages advances in AI and coding productivity (“vibe coding” allows rapid feature iteration by a small team).
• Rich took AI courses at Duke to keep up—highlighting the technical demands of designing platforms in a fast-evolving space.

  “We basically had to build this thing on shifting sands, which is interesting because now we’re built for shifting sands.”
  — Rich Deming (12:39)

6. Who Benefits: Use Cases and User Types

• Primary enthusiasm from private equity funds and acquirers—they can very quickly prioritize or disqualify projects from massive pipelines.
  • “In a meeting, each project, 10 minutes, we would just thumbs up or thumbs down...” — Rich Deming (15:35)
• Insurers benefit from not tying up capital with uninsurable projects.
• Developers gain a hard look at deal readiness before spending on exclusivity or further development ("better to know up front what’s not fundable").

7. Sector Adaptability & Expansion

• Domain knowledge for bioenergy, solar, and batteries is built in; platform is ready to add new sectors (hydrogen, hydro, wind, even small modular nuclear) with modern automated learning from diverse data sources (e.g., podcasts, newsletters, conference transcripts).

8. Philosophy on Acceleration and Failures

• To accelerate the transition, the industry must filter out bad deals early—"the dreamers and the schemers"—and clear the way for the best projects and capital to connect efficiently.

  “If a project’s not ready for a due diligence period, it should sit and be further developed or possibly be abandoned... that is to everyone’s advantage.”
  — Rich Deming (20:27)

• The hardest risks live in EPC (engineering, procurement, construction) and utility agreements—often where deals die due to responsibility gaps or lack of enforceability.

  “EPC is the hardest... somebody’s got to stand up and say, if this thing doesn’t work, we’re going to take it on the chin for the whole cost of the project. And nobody really wants to do that.”
  — Rich Deming (23:08)

• Final assessment of a deal sometimes feels like “magic”—with dozens of lawyers and engineers finally coming to agreement, even if the process shouldn’t be so mystifying.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On term sheet risks:
  “[The term sheet] should be the most important thing that you're spending the most time on... but the problem is... at that point, nobody really knows what's in the project. That's when the pain starts.”
  — Rich Deming (01:47)

• On AI’s role:
  “If you just have the large language model, but you don't have any structured or curated data or decision-grade data, you just have a cool toy... If you just started taking a data room and throwing it into a knowledge language model, you're going to get nonsense.”
  — Rich Deming (03:01)

• On evolving with technology:
  “We basically had to build this thing on shifting sands... now we’re built for shifting sands.”
  — Rich Deming (12:39)

• Why platform matters:
  “If a project's not ready for a due diligence period, it should sit and be further developed or possibly be abandoned if it just has binary risk that can't be taken care of. And that is to everyone's advantage.”
  — Rich Deming (20:27)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:10–02:20] – Why clean energy dealmaking is so slow and risky: the messy, fragmented process
• [03:01–05:12] – Building AI-powered diligence: The Cert Score story, combining human and machine judgment
• [09:25–11:11] – The new diligence environment: tight margins, insurer dominance, and “flight to quality”
• [12:39–15:28] – Technical evolution: “building on shifting sands” with AI and rapid code development
• [15:35–18:00] – Who uses Cert Score and how: funders, insurers, developers
• [20:27–23:08] – Why accelerating diligence accelerates the entire industry; tough lessons in project failure
• [23:08–24:40] – Where projects fail: EPC/utility agreements as the biggest stumbling block

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Tone and Language

Rich Deming brings pragmatic optimism and the hard-won realism of a clean energy builder. He avoids romanticizing the sector, displaying a pragmatic, “no nonsense” approach. The conversation carries a conversational, insider’s tone—always aware of what’s at stake but dryly humorous about industry frustrations (“the dreamers and the schemers”).

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Transaction efficiency is now the core bottleneck in clean energy. Even as tech, capital, and supply chains mature, deals still stumble at the finish line due to opaque, fragmented diligence.
• AI tools like Cert Score won’t fix everything—but they can unify data, surface risks early, and help everyone involved avoid wasted time and resources.
• The industry is ready for a shake-up in how underwriting, risk, and project quality are assessed—potentially making clean energy capital flow as fast as the climate emergency requires.

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For more information, or to try Cert Score, Latitude listeners can submit a project for free at CERT IO.

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Transcript

[Rich Deming]

This is a frontier forum brought to you by Latitude Studios.

[Stephen Lacy]

Rich Deming has been building bioenergy and solar projects since the early 2000s, back when the industry wasn't much of an industry yet. There were no standardized contracts, no coherent playbook for financing, and every deal was a one off. It made closing those deals unpredictable.

[Rich Deming]

It was just sort of a mystery every time where everybody circled around everybody and there was tons and tons of talking and it could go on for months and months and suddenly, you know, four hours before you're supposed to close, there's this brand new thing and it's everyone's got to run around with their hair on fire, et cetera.

[Stephen Lacy]

A single project can take years to assemble. It requires land agreements, permits, interconnection studies, power contracts. By the time it reaches financing, there can be hundreds of documents in play. Each set of documents is reviewed by a different party at a different time with different assumptions. That review is often replicated by the private equity diligence team, the debt diligence team, independent engineers and consultants working for various parties, and of course the law firms. It's a pretty inefficient dynamic that often ends badly when no one has the full picture early on. It can cause big problems at the last minute.

[Rich Deming]

You're now 30 days before you're supposed to close and all of a sudden, oh, we need this document re executed with this clause. I only have to go to a public utility to get that, so I'm sure that's going to happen in 30 days. So there's this sort of constant surprises.

[Stephen Lacy]

Every deal has multiple timelines. There are tax credit deadlines, exclusivity agreements, or financing terms that can shift the longer a deal drags on. So teams push forward where they can, spending a great deal of time and effort even when they don't have full clarity.

[Rich Deming]

If you're almost anyone involved, you want to get that term sheet signed. And so I think that a lot of times people rush through the term sheet, which should be the most important thing that you're spending the most time on and that you're most informed about to get to the point where they can unlock the diligence budget, unlock the period of exclusivity when everyone really starts working on it. But the problem is that everybody involved at that point doesn't really know what's in the project. The developer certainly wants it to get funded and the funders certainly wants to deploy some capital. But that's when the pain starts.

[Stephen Lacy]

Having gone through this process dozens of times, Rich watched deals stretch past deadlines and lawyers, surfaced new issues days before closing. He could see that no one had a clear, unified view early enough. And suddenly AI made it possible to bring that fragmented picture together.

[Sam]

So you're sitting there wondering like if we're in the era of software, getting into the era of AI, if these problems are so common, like why hasn't a better emerged? So that brings us to the foundation of Search Score. As you were asking yourself that question, why did you think that there needed to be a new platform?

[Rich Deming]

If you just have the large language model, but you don't have any structured or curated data or decision grade data, you just have a cool toy. It's been amazing what's happened in the last couple, two or three years in AI, but you still have to be really careful. I mean, these are career ending decisions. Potentially. If you just started taking a data room and throwing it into a knowledge language model, you're going to get nonsense. I mean, you're not going to be able to put half the type of documents up, you're going to get hallucinations, you're going to get whatever. So I think we're in a space where it's time for this, but you still have to be very careful. This thing, we've been building it for about four years and it's really the first thing we did was sit down with a diligence lawyer and say, what, what is every question you ask of a project when you, when you start a diligence process? And we went through that with multiple lawyers, multiple engineers, multiple other folks. And we really, you know, These are the 300 questions that this discipline asks and has to have an answer for. And these are the binary ones and these are the ones that are not binary. So we started with that human skill and human knowledge and experience and intelligence. And then we definitely use agentic AI to sort of speed up and triangulate some of that expertise.

[Stephen Lacy]

I'm Stephen Lacy. In this episode, I sit down with Rich Deming to talk about the hidden bottleneck in clean energy. It's not the grid, not permitting, not supply chains, but the transaction itself. Rich is the CEO of East Energy Renewables and founder of Cert Score. CERT is a platform designed to bring more structure and clarity to how clean energy projects are evaluated and financed. And in this conversation, recorded live as part of a frontier forum, Rich and I talk about why deals still fall apart late in the process and what it would take to surface risk earlier, move capital faster and get more projects built.

[Rich Deming]

The clock is ticking. I Mean your agreements are getting stale, your PPAs have deadlines, everything has a deadline. And so everything that delays you puts the project at risk.

[Stephen Lacy]

So tell me how it works.

[Sam]

What is the platform?

[Rich Deming]

It's really focused on this space leading up to a term sheet and then from term sheet to close. What we really solved for was just speed and ease of this problem process. And so what happens is a developer can upload their data room in probably 20 minutes. I mean, it is literally depending on what shape their files are in. If it's in one folder, they can literally drag it and drop it and then they'll just watch it upload. It'll identify file types or corrupted files that it's not going to be able to do anything with. But mostly it's just pulling them up. And then it takes about three hours. And it runs through a series of different processes and sub processes. And it really uses a domain intelligence and applies it to this project to look at every single different piece and part of the project where risk lies. It can be legal documents, it can be the pro forma, it can be permits. It has a pretty intense internal analysis. And that internal analysis is informed by a lot of research and a lot of collecting of data of like sort of best in class PPAs, best in class interconnection agreements, et cetera. And then the other part is it has actually several sort of web crawler features that it'll go out. It takes the counterparty out of any single document, any single permit, any single agreement, and it runs analysis of the counterparty. So it discovers if there's a counterparty who's got a background that is filled with bankruptcies and lawsuits. You need to know that. Not on the one yard, you need to know that at term sheet time. It also does the same. Community sentiment has just gotten enormous. Any project has a potential community sentiment problem. So we also send out web crawlers and it looks at social media in the area, local media, national media. It looks at multiple different ways. Is there any sensitivity around the neighbors don't like this project or the state just typically hates these kind of projects, those kind of landmines. And so it runs through this large gamut of analysis of every facet of the project and then it creates this summary report. The summary report gives you the search score of which the platform is named, is a risk score from 1 to 100. And it really enables you relatively quickly to see where this project falls. And you can look at it through a lens of development. You can look at it through a lens of ready for construction. You can look at it through a lens of operating if you're acquiring projects. And it kind of very quickly gives you an ability to, if you have a pipeline of projects to understand which ones are funding ready, which ones need some more work. If you're thinking of acquiring 10 projects, it'll let you know which ones really are more ready for primetime, which ones might have some problems, but sometimes problems are opportunities too. You can drill in very quickly to what problems are causing the score to be a little lower. And it just gives you decision grade data and decision capable information very fast.

[Sam]

I mean any worthy product comes from someone who has been through the pain. And so how might projects have been saved in the past for you if you had had something like this?

[Rich Deming]

That first bioenergy project, I went through the chute nine times. Let's see, let me count the ways of how those due diligence processes failed. Another issue that bit us pretty hard was a requirement that your utility contract has to say this. And you go back to the utility and they go no. And so I mean you're really in this stuck spot. You need to understand what that spot is before you start the diligence process, not at the end of it. It's also great though for funders. Typically at term sheet, a fund will open up a diligence budget of maybe 400, 500, $600,000, maybe more. And if they don't find out, there's a risk they can't accept until the end that money's gone, it's just wasted. And not to mention the time of their analyst and everybody else. So it's just helpful for everybody can just find those landmines on day one, or better yet, before day one.

[Sam]

So you talked about the landmines. How are those landmines shifting today? Are you seeing what kinds of risks and issues are surfacing today in this market?

[Rich Deming]

It really is that we are now 20 years into this place. Back in 2003, that first project, I sometimes say that back then it was like performance art. There wasn't really a renewable energy industry. But some of us were team tinkering around and putting up some solar panels and acting like it. You would think 20, 25 years later, we are now a mature enough industry, you wouldn't see a lot of the same things. But you do see if not exactly the same thing, same patterns. I would say what's happening today is clearly we're in a little bit tougher regulatory environment. And I was at a conference not too long ago and they kept talking about flight to quality, which is the capital is still going to be deployed, the need is pressing, the opportunity is there, but everyone's just going to have to be a hell of a lot more care. There's no margin for error now. If you take some of the tax credit wind out of the sails. If you take. You just make things tougher. You can't make mistakes. And so I wouldn't say it's a whole new class of mistakes. There's a constantly shifting environment around interconnection and grid connectivity. I think that's a function of data centers, a function of a lot of different things. But really there has always been nuances and challenges around the grid. And so I wouldn't say that's so much new. The margin of error got a little tighter or a lot tighter about two years ago. And it's going to be tight like that for a while. But it's kind of the same problems. They can cause more damage with less margin for error. Yeah.

[Sam]

Are you seeing that in the projects you're developing, that this sort of volatile political and economic cycle is creating a moment where investors are asking harder questions?

[Stephen Lacy]

What does that typically mean for the

[Sam]

diligence process when they are being more selective?

[Rich Deming]

Well, it's not. It's not really new questions. The tax credit regime under the IRA got pretty intense. I mean, we did those projects in 2024 with having approved domestic content after EPC agreements had been signed, which was murder. And. And the intricacies of the tax credits are still there. Those questions get a lot harder now. It's interesting, I didn't realize when the insurers became the gatekeepers of all projects, but really in the aftermath of the IRA law and then up to today, tax credits still drive a lot and the tax credit is worthless if it's not insured. And so when you ask the lawyers, when you ask the funds, when you ask everybody what do you need in this space? They usually go, go ask the insurers. Whatever those guys will insure, we'll take. Which is becomes kind of a circle sometimes, because you ask the insurers and they go, whatever's in the legal opin, you know. And so there's this kind of circular thing that's happens which just causes a little bit of fog of war, I think, during diligence.

[Sam]

What's the technical rollout of cert been like? How have you started to build the platform and where are you going to as you continue to evolve it?

[Rich Deming]

You know, that's super interesting. Because really, this started about three or four years ago, and I was getting on toward my late 50s and thinking about my next chapter, et cetera. I love Running east energy dearly, but kind of wanted to think through what's the very last phase. And this was the problem that has bedeviled me the most kind of my whole career. And so I really wanted to focus and drill down on, okay, what are the technical solutions to this thing? That just doesn't. It gets better, but it doesn't get good, you know? And so I started messing around with that, and I found this PhD student, student and Columbia guy, and we basically just started having conversations about, how can you solve this with different technical fastballs with the computer and this new AI thing and all this. And I realized pretty quickly I was not even able to really discuss this with him to a state I wanted to discuss. And so I took a whole bunch of online courses at Duke University actually for AI just to be able to kind of have the technical conversations. And so during that first year, there was a lot of pontificating and using some early models to say, like, how could you pull the variables out of a spreadsheet? How can you do whatever? But why I say it's so compelling is that's only three years ago. And the way things have changed in the last two years are just shocking. One way I think of it is like, we basically had to build this thing on shifting sands, which is interesting because now we're built for shifting sands. I mean, we really can use any large language model. We really can pivot to wherever that the industry goes. The vibe coding thing is shocking. You know, we've got this office in Fidi in New York, and we've got this great team of about seven folks. And the way those guys are leveraged up with the ability to vibe code is just shocking and amazing to watch. You've got to have really good coders because you've got to debug that. But if you have a feature idea, somebody will come with a feature idea. In the old days, it would have taken months and months and prototypes and debate and use case and focus groups. And you can say, well, I bring it in tomorrow. Let's see how it look. You know what I mean? And they can bring a fully fledged feature in because they can vibe code it. It's a shockingly fast evolution of how these things happen. And to have had that occur while we're building it these last three years has just been really fun. I mean, really gratifying and really Sort of this we went from my CEO, you start talking about minimum viable products and now he always goes like, go ahead and kick off a minimally delightful product for us to look yet.

[Sam]

Who's the intended user? So is it mostly for developers? Is it for investors, for insurers? Like who, who is the ideal user?

[Rich Deming]

It's interesting because there's multiple different use cases. I think we've definitely seen the most really eager enthusiasm on the fund side because you know, the, the, if you're, if you're a private equity fund, I mean you need to build that pipeline, you need to deploy that capital or you're not going to stay in business or you're not going to succeed. And it's so insanely complicated. You can have your analyst out shaking the trees and locating projects, but it is so hard when somebody opens up their data room to you and there's 300 documents in it. Just wrapping your head around that is a real pain. And so deciding which projects you even want to look at again, you might see that first sort score. This happened to us. We're in acquisition mode at East Energy. This happened to us not long ago. We pulled up the search score and in a 10 minute, in a meeting, each project, 10 minutes, we would just thumbs up or thumbs down because it was like, okay, there's a couple that lives next door that keeps filing frivolous lawsuits. Let's just not even go there, you know what I mean? And so to know that instantly instead of after a lot of research, so funders or acquirers is a really simple and compelling use case. Insurance is a really interesting use case because if you're in the insurance business and you give a formal quote, you're closing off part of your capacity to insure and you start to hit the top of that. Well, if you've got a bunch of quotes out for projects that were never going to get funded, they have fundamental problems that you don't see immediately. And insurance diligence is different. You probably wouldn't see them. You're tying up capacity and handcuffing yourself from the way you need to do business because you don't have the right data. So we've had to. Great response from insurers and then developers. I can tell you at East Energy we're using it, I can name three or four other developers. Like I said, if you're a developer who's put your heart and soul into a project, it's a little tough to see a score to say you're not quite ready for Primetime yet. But in the end it's incredibly helpful. You're kidding yourself if you don't think finance is going to find that. You know what I mean? It's just that they're going to find it after they've had you under exclusivity for 60 days.

[Sam]

You've been involved in a wide variety of kinds of projects. You talked about your bioenergy experience. Solar. What are the other kinds of projects you imagine living on this platform?

[Rich Deming]

Yeah, absolutely. So what we do have expertise and deep domain knowledge in is bioenergy, both biomass and biodigestation, in solar and in batteries. But what's really interesting, this really speaks to that three year process I was talking about is, you know, there's the infrastructure and there's the don't, there's the domain, there's the curated data sets, there's the knowledge. The way the platform works at this point I find just fascinating because for the first year for a new domain, we would really have to get in there and do a whole bunch of knowledge based sort of programming coding to really hit those at this point. The agentic AI piece of this does an incredible job of generating domain knowledge about each sector. So as an example, we recently had somebody who wanted to do pilots with batteries. It was fantastic because we can upload those projects. If it's a sector we're not super familiar with, we do it for free and we're happy to, to go through the pilot very quickly. We can take at the top of a funnel domain knowledge from anywhere. We can take transcripts from one of your podcasts. We can take, I should ask the lawyers if I can say that, but we can take newsletters, we can take conference transcripts, we can take document sets from anywhere and really run it through and relatively quickly find the domain knowledge that we need for that sector. So that is to say right now we're primarily focusing on battery, solar and all range of bioenergy. But we also have zero trepidation about adding more sectors. Hydrogen has not been one of them. Hydro has not been one of them. Wind has not been one of them yet. But I fully expect we'll be there. I'm talking to somebody right now about small modular nuclear and he was saying, are you sure? I think there's only going to be 15 of these projects in the next 20 years. And I was like, yeah, but it's pretty cool. So, so it's, it's adaptable.

[Sam]

How do you think or hope that this will change the pace of development in this country? I mean, you care a lot about accelerating renewable energy. You've been working in the industry for a long time. So how can this platform potentially accelerate the industry?

[Rich Deming]

I said to somebody in a breakfast meeting yesterday, the dirty little secret of those of us who've been building clean energy for 20 years is our eyes really glaze over if you get too, too tree huggy on us. I mean we're pretty much hard, hard realist, especially if you've been through, through the war. But at the same time this climate thing's an existential situation for us, you know, as a species. Or maybe it's not existential as a species anymore. Maybe it's just whether your grandkids are going to have a decent life or a miserable dog eat dog like resource deprived place. We need to get this right and especially if you've been working in it for a long time. I mean the, compared to what we were trying to get bankable in 2008, I mean the technology is there, the understanding of what has to be there for performance guarantees, the understanding and the ability to get a performance guarantee are there, the capital is there. There are trillions of dollars that are able to come into this space. And so to me it's just you have to clear the pathway a little bit. And so it's not, not get rid of the bad projects, but if a project's not ready for a due diligence period, it should sit and be further developed or possibly be abandoned if it just has binary risk that can't be taken care of. And that is to everyone's advantage. If you're a developer. An associate of mine used to talk about the development war. The dreamers and the schemers, like some folks are just never going to make it. We couldn't figure out if they just were dreaming or they actually had something up their sleeve. If you're a developer, it's in your benefit to know quickly like oh, these are the three things. And when I have a conversation with somebody at a fund I need to know those three things and if they can't get over it, I shouldn't spend my time on this. And if you are a fund and you've got, we just raised $1.2 billion, I hear this sort of thing a lot and we got to get it out the door. Like that money is interesting because it has a clock ticking on it. You're paying somebody interest for that money or once the tranches come in, etceter, you need to get that money deployed. And so capitalism is a really cool thing. I mean, all the pieces are there to solve this problem, and so it's just time to clear out some of the unnecessary information. I'll say again because it feels that way. Fog of war that goes on.

[Sam]

So you've spent your career getting clean energy projects built. What is the hardest lesson that you've learned on why projects fail? And then is there anything that surprises you about how deals eventually come together?

[Rich Deming]

I mean, how they fail, I've mentioned a couple of times. I mean, I think I've seen every different which way. I mean, on a biomass project, you have this really solid offtake agreement with the hauler who comes from the farm, but the hauler doesn't have a firm offtake agreement with the farm. So there's no chain of custody, like all the way through. I've seen biomass projects die for that. I've seen projects. Once again, EPC and utility agreements are just. Projects die all the time because it's deemed that the utility can end it too quickly. It's deemed that the EPC will be able to wiggle out of responsibility if it doesn't work. It's deemed as like those two agreements are the hardest. And I don't know if you're not in the space, if you would know this, but I think EPC is the hardest. I mean, that is the very hardest thing to get over the finish line because somebody's got to stand up and say, if this thing doesn't work, we're going to take it on the chin for the whole cost of the project. And nobody really wants to do that. And so there's a lot of mud wrestling. So those kind of risks lie in these documents. And as far as what comes together the whole way, to me it just seems like magic every time. I mean, by the time the 14 lawyers and the 16 engineers and the 20 analysts and all the counterparties, by the time it's done, I'm always like, wow, it's amazing. I mean, it's, it's an amazing process, but it probably shouldn't be amazing. It shouldn't seem like magic.

[Sam]

Yeah. Hopefully this can be mystified a little bit. Well, Rich Deming is the CEO of East Energy Renewables. He's the founder of Cert Score. I enjoyed this very much. A lot of great questions, too. Thanks, Rich.

[Rich Deming]

Hey, thanks a lot, Steven. If anybody's watching and reaches out to us and Latitude, we're like, we're fully prepared to let them go for free for a project and really get a look at it.

[Stephen Lacy]

If you want to explore the platform yourself. CERT Score has agreed to give any Latitude listener one free project that's a $2,500 value. It takes 10 minutes to set up an account and onboard a data room, and then the team at CERT will walk you through the analysis of your project while showing you the capabilities of the platform. If you want to submit a project and try CERT Score for free, send an email to the team. Support CERT IO CERT is spelled C E A R T. That's actually a Gaelic word for trust or honesty, but the team uses the acronym Climate Asset Risk Tool so you can learn more at CERT IO. And thanks so much for listening.

[Rich Deming]

Sam.