Innovating the Energy Transition: Generate Capital

Through our Catalytic Climate Finance (CCF) program, The Russell Family Foundation (TRFF) leverages its resources to uplift planet-positive solutions. CCF’s mission of leveraging philanthropy to create a healthier planet relies on strategic investments in creative solutions.

One of our investment partners, Generate Capital, embodies these goals through its use of innovative financing strategies to advance an equitable and economically sustainable energy transition. Generate is a leading infrastructure platform that builds, owns, operates, and finances sustainable resource infrastructure across sectors like solar energy, renewable natural gas, smart cities tech and fuel cells.

With over two thousand operating assets so far, Generate is creating a democratized, digitized, decarbonized, and decentralized energy transition. As both an investor and an operator, the company brings unique value to the clean energy space by deploying flexible capital across a wide range of technologies and markets.

Generate’s Unique Approach to Capital Investment

Generate aims to be the leading capital partner in a generational effort to rebuild the physical economy in a way that creates value rather than destroying it. As the most value-destructive force in modern history, climate change requires rebuilding essential systems like energy and manufacturing in ways that reduce emissions and enhance resilience.

Generate’s hands-on approach to both investing in and owning infrastructure projects allows the company unique, operational insights that improve investment decisions and foster a stronger understanding of the market. Because Generate is not constrained to any specific sector or technology, its portfolio can respond quickly and effectively to changing market and policy dynamics. This flexibility extends to its approach to capital: by providing capital through various mechanisms, Generate can tailor investments to the needs of their partners, creating long-term and adaptable financing solutions.

TRFF’s investment in Generate provides mission-aligned capital that supports Generate’s system-wide impact. More than that, though, Generate explains that TRFF’s support acts as a vote of confidence in its strategy for investing, helping to validate both its mission-alignment and its fiduciary success. TRFF’s support helps bridge the gap between values and market, demonstrating that climate-aligned infrastructure can be both impactful and profitable.

How Generate Projects Create Change: From Solar to Green Steel

Generate’s ability to invest at every level creates the potential for catalytic change. For example, the company owns community solar projects across the U.S., which are smaller-scale than utility-wide solar, but larger than residential. These mid-scale projects serve people who are often excluded from traditional rooftop solar, such as renters, residents of multifamily housing, and low-income communities, ensuring that they are included in the energy transition. This delivers solar power directly to communities.

Generate not only owns and operates community solar projects, but also invests in other developers with similar assets, which improves efficiency and scalability. As Generate explains, every American should be able to take a piece of the energy transition.

Generate is also investing in green steel. Recently, the firm invested in what will be the cleanest steel facility in the U.S., in partnership with Pacific Steel Group. The new plant will manufacture rebar from recycled materials using lower-carbon processes, reducing emissions and modernizing the supply chain. This will be a flagship for how to manufacture green rebar – a crucial component in construction used to reinforce concrete and masonry structures.

This project also rethinks the traditional business model for rebar: steel will be cut to project specifications on site, rather than cut to uniform amounts. This will minimize waste and emissions from unnecessary transportation and processing, supporting both climate goals and industrial revitalization.

While most investors would look for steel plants currently in the process of decarbonizing, Generate instead looked for investments that would push the steel market into cleaner practices–investments that would help green steel out-compete other steel. Generate’s investment in green steel acts as a microcosm of its unique focus on pushing the overall market towards cleaner energy and processes.

Philanthropy’s Opportunity to Catalyze Change

Though the current U.S. policy and political environment for sustainable energy infrastructure is uncertain, Generate’s flexibility in technology, capital, and operations gives it the wherewithal to continue to drive cleaner markets while maintaining profitability. Its understanding of the full complexity of developing these infrastructures helps the firm create profitable, scalable projects.

Generate explains that as annual electricity demand increases, the need for distributed, resilient, and economical energy solutions will only grow. Despite political pressures, market dynamics already favor renewables like solar, wind, and storage.

Philanthropic investors have a unique opportunity to foster genuine market adoption of alternative energy sources. Philanthropic capital can build the markets that lead to an economy-wide energy transition. As advocates, philanthropists can help produce durable market signals that mark a clean energy transition as the only viable path forward. These signals can then lead to policy changes that uplift these markets, which are highly reactive to policy. Strategic finance can help empower environmental solutions and drive social impact, catalyzing an economy-wide energy transition.