Inside Crux's 1Q2026 Market Update: Q&A with Josh Price

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Crux recently shared our “1Q2026 Market Update” reports with clients, offering sector-specific insights into how the transferable tax credit market evolved through the first quarter of 2026.

Josh Price, Director of Intelligence & Research on Crux’s Market Intelligence team, recently sat down with Crux’s marketing team to discuss the reports’ key findings, what the data is saying about pricing and demand, and what the Market Intelligence team is watching for the rest of the year. Their conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Crux: Before we dig into the data, can you tell us what this quarterly report is designed to do and what went into putting it together?

Josh Price: I think about this report as supplementing our biannual, industry-leading Market Intelligence Report to provide additional granularity and transparency into how the clean energy finance market as a whole — and specific sectors within it — are evolving.

For the first time, we've created four specific sector reports for our quarterly market updates:

Utility-scale renewables, which include solar, storage, and wind;
Distributed generation, which covers residential solar and commercial and industrial (C&I) solar;
Manufacturing tax credits (§45X);
Clean fuel credits (§45Z).

We have clients on all sides, so we're diving deeper into each of these sectors to show people what we're seeing in the market.

Crux: This update notes that the market entered 2026 on firmer footing. What notably changed between Q4 of 2025 and Q1 of 2026?

JP: There are a few things, but I'll start with the buyer side of the market. The One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB), which passed in the third quarter of last year, created a lot of uncertainty — not just for developers trying to figure out what the rules of the road are for generating their tax credits, but also for buyers figuring out what their tax liability was going to be for 2025.

Toward the end of last year, there was still uncertainty over what buyers would owe in 2025, and if you don't know your tax liability, it's hard to transact in the market — you don't know what or how much to buy. One of the things we found in our annual report was that by the end of Q1 2026, 85% of the buyers we surveyed expected to know their 2025 tax liability. This increased certainty helped pull demand forward and get more folks in the market in Q1 relative to what we saw at the end of last year.

The other big item was increased clarity on the foreign entity of concern (FEOC) rules. The OBBB changed how both tax credit generators (or sellers) and buyers have to look through their ownership structures and supply chains to decouple from China and other foreign entities of concern in order to qualify for certain tax credits. There was a lot of uncertainty in 2025 over how the FEOC restrictions, material assistance rules, foreign ownership rules, etc., would impact both sides of the market. In February 2026, we did get some initial intel — Treasury issued interim rules that provided some clarity, particularly on material assistance cost ratio calculation, which helped both sides of the market get more comfortable with supply chains. There's still some uncertainty related to ownership rules and additional contracting, but we viewed the interim rules as a big positive to help provide initial clarity in the market.

Crux: Can you describe what you've observed in average pricing across the market over the course of Q1?

JP: I'd say pricing variation was more a story of credit quality, seller quality, and credit type. On net, pricing was largely flat from Q4 2025 to Q1 2026.

For 2025 ITCs, pricing averaged $0.909, and the pricing signals across the sectors were a bit mixed. Utility-scale ITCs — which typically have stronger developers and backers — rose from $0.914 to $0.926, while we saw residential ITCs decline from $0.920 to $0.900. The residential ITC market had some struggles in Q1 and parties were skittish on both sides of the market. We also saw a slight decline in C&I pricing. I think the delta between utility-scale and distributed generation ITCs pricing reflects some of the differences in seller quality.

For 2025 PTCs, pricing was also pretty flat and varied by sector. We didn't really see any uniform market direction; some were pushed upwards a bit, like clean fuel PTCs and manufacturing PTCs. The supply of 2025 credits was increasingly constrained, and for high-quality credits there are definitely buyers.

With 2026 vintages, the dynamics look a bit different. ITC pricing dropped slightly, by 0.6% to $0.895, though we have seen demand pick up pretty significantly. This pricing is pretty typical with some of the seasonal patterns we've observed in prior years.

2026 PTCs picked up around 2%, jumping from $0.900 to almost $0.917. Utility-scale spot PTCs were pretty limited on the power side, but we did see increased activity for §45Z given some positive regulatory developments, and demand and pricing for manufacturing PTCs held pretty steady.

As we talked about in our annual report, the 2025 market was a tale of two halves. The first half was a very strong continuation of the trends we saw in 2024 until those trends were interrupted by OBBB. And our report analyzed the impact that had on both sellers and buyers as the market digested those changes. Some of the analysis we've run on PTCs shows on average there's a 2% price increase from January to December, so we'll be watching very closely to see if the market returns to normal or grows after the disruptive year we saw last year. It seems to be growing, and it grew last year despite that disruption. So we're pretty optimistic, and we're going to be watching for clues to see how the situation unfolds.

From a policy perspective, we are paying close attention to the tax credit “cliff” for solar and wind projects on July 4, 2026. As a reminder, projects need to begin construction before that date to guarantee a 4-year eligibility period for a tax credit. Projects starting construction after that date probably need to pencil out without a tax credit, and we will be looking at how those projects fare when raising capital. We’re also closely monitoring Treasury for additional clarity on the FEOC rules to see how the market matures in response.

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