The hidden bottleneck in clean energy: due diligence

About This Event:

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.

Latitude Media Frontier Forums are live, interactive conversations and presentations that showcase frontier trends in clean energy and climate technology. These virtual events feature timely, in-depth conversations between leading voices in the industry and Latitude Media’s Stephen Lacey, as well as interactive Q&A sessions with attendees. Register here for free!

Event Details

Date

Time

1:00PM

-

2:00PM

LOCATION

Frontier Forum

Cost

Free

Featured Speakers

Rich Deming

CEO of CEART

Rich Deming is the Founder of CEART, the Climate Asset Risk Tool, a digital platform that brings transparency and speed to project development by transforming due diligence into a digitally-enabled process.

Stephen Lacey

Executive Editor + Co-Founder of Latitude Media

Stephen Lacey is the co-founder and executive editor of Latitude Media and the co-host of Open Circuit. He helps shape editorial coverage, live events, and creative partnerships. He’s a veteran journalist, editor, and producer who’s been running news teams and making audio programming about the clean energy transition for nearly two decades.

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