Plural Energy 对中型可再生能源项目进行代币化以扩大投资池

这家成立两年的代币化公司使中型可再生能源项目能够从链上投资者那里筹集资金，其双重目标是大幅增加可投资可再生能源资产的人数，同时开发新型金融产品能源领域的产品。

The U.S. renewable energy industry is in an odd position. Large-scale projects are funded with relative ease thanks to long-established relationships with financial giants. Meanwhile, small-scale installations are becoming cheaper to implement by the day.

美国可再生能源行业的处境很奇怪。由于与金融巨头建立了长期的关系，大型项目的融资相对容易。与此同时，小规模安装的实施成本日益降低。

But the consolidation of the energy sector is making it increasingly difficult for mid-sized projects to get the financing they need. These ventures, which are typically worth less than $100 million, are too pricey for regular people to pay for, yet too modest for financial heavyweights to take an interest in them.

但能源行业的整合使得中型项目越来越难以获得所需的融资。这些企业的价值通常不到 1 亿美元，对于普通人来说太贵了，无法支付，但对于金融巨头来说却太温和，无法对其产生兴趣。

That’s where Plural Energy steps in. The two-year-old tokenization firm enables mid-sized renewable energy projects to raise funds from investors on-chain, with the double-aim of dramatically expanding the number of people who can invest in renewable energy assets while also developing new kinds of financial products for the energy sector.

这就是 Plural Energy 介入的地方。这家成立两年的代币化公司使中型可再生能源项目能够从链上投资者那里筹集资金，其双重目标是大幅增加可以投资可再生能源资产的人数同时还为能源行业开发新型金融产品。

“Right now, the process of raising capital for solar is just unacceptable. We’re never going to hit our climate goals,” Adam Silver, co-founder and CEO of Plural Energy, told CoinDesk in an interview. “[We want] to make an easy button for capital raising for good climate assets.”

“目前，为太阳能筹集资金的过程是不可接受的。我们永远无法实现我们的气候目标，”Plural Energy 联合创始人兼首席执行官 Adam Silver 在接受 CoinDesk 采访时表示。 “[我们希望]为良好的气候资产筹集资金制作一个简单的按钮。”

“By taking advantage of tokenization, we can essentially unlock all of the magic that happens in DeFi ecosystems, and bring it to an industry that's desperately in need of financial innovation,” Silver added.

Silver 补充道：“通过利用代币化，我们基本上可以释放 DeFi 生态系统中发生的所有魔力，并将其带入一个迫切需要金融创新的行业。”

Investors can access four types of products through Plural Energy. The first is small-scale asset-backed instruments, like a project bundling 1,000 rooftop solar installations into a single security, which is then tokenized. The second category is development-stage renewables, and the third is operating renewables (for example pre-existing solar plants that seek to raise additional funds to expand).

投资者可以通过 Plural Energy 获得四种类型的产品。第一个是小型资产支持工具，例如将 1,000 个屋顶太阳能装置捆绑成单一证券的项目，然后将其标记化。第二类是开发阶段的可再生能源，第三类是运营可再生能源（例如寻求筹集额外资金进行扩建的现有太阳能发电厂）。

The fourth category, Silver said, is the “weird stuff,” like a battery that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to trade, or the bitcoin (BTC) mine being built by Sangha Renewables on a West Texas solar plant operated by an energy company. “Things that are a little bit out of the ordinary for traditional infrastructure investors, but are really cool to everyone else,” Silver said.

西尔弗说，第四类是“奇怪的东西”，比如使用人工智能（AI）进行交易的电池，或者由 Sangha Renewables 在一家能源公司运营的西德克萨斯州太阳能发电厂建造的比特币（BTC）矿场。 “对于传统基础设施投资者来说，这有点不寻常，但对其其他人来说却很酷，”西尔弗说。

So far, the majority of these projects have involved solar power in one form or another, but Plural has also looked into wind-based initiatives and even a hydropower deal.

到目前为止，这些项目大多数都涉及某种形式的太阳能，但 Plural 也研究了基于风能的举措，甚至水电交易。

Yet these projects didn’t make it past Plural’s due diligence. To date, a total of five deals, representing $40 million, have been given the green light to raise funds through the platform. Only 5% of the deals considered by Plural make it to the finish line, but that hasn’t discouraged demand for the platform, which currently has around $150 million, across a dozen assets, to bring on board in the coming months.

然而这些项目并没有通过 Plural 的尽职调查。迄今为止，共有五笔交易，价值 4000 万美元，已获准通过该平台筹集资金。 Plural 考虑的交易中只有 5% 能够完成，但这并没有抑制对该平台的需求，该平台目前拥有约 1.5 亿美元的资产，涵盖十多项资产，将在未来几个月内上线。

“When a renewable energy company comes to us, we put it through our broker-dealer due diligence process, and then we also do asset due diligence,” Silver said. “We make sure that it's like an asset that really any one of us would feel comfortable investing in personally.”

“当一家可再生能源公司找到我们时，我们会对其进行经纪交易商尽职调查流程，然后我们还会进行资产尽职调查，”西尔弗说。 “我们确保它就像我们中任何人都愿意亲自投资的一项资产。”

While broker-dealers must ensure that investors aren’t getting scammed, they aren’t necessarily responsible for making sure that something is a good investment. Nevertheless, the Plural team insists on only presenting deals that it’s confident in, Silver said.

虽然经纪交易商必须确保投资者不会被骗，但他们不一定负责确保某件事是一项良好的投资。尽管如此，Plural 团队坚持只提供其有信心的交易，Silver 表示。

The first ever project greenlit by Plural took six months to complete the process from start to finish, from agreeing to tokenize with Plural to a live tokenized security offering. That timeline has now been brought down to six weeks.

Plural 批准的第一个项目从开始到结束，从同意 Plural 代币化到实时代币化证券发行，花了六个月的时间完成。该时间表现已缩短至六周。

Plural’s business model and technologies “open up capital markets to the most sensible pool of investors, streamline the fundraising process, and provide transparency to all parties,” Spencer Marr, president of Sangha Renewables, told CoinDesk.

Sangha Renewables 总裁 Spencer Marr 告诉 CoinDesk，Plural 的商业模式和技术“向最明智的投资者开放资本市场，简化融资流程，并向各方提供透明度”。

Once they’ve been given the nod, issuers on Plural get to choose what types of securities they want to offer — like common equity, convertible notes with interest, or unsecured convertible notes. Each of these security instruments receives a unique token in the back-end. Investors then get to choose what kind of security they want, and receive the appropriate tokens for it.

一旦获得批准，Plural 上的发行人就可以选择他们想要发行的证券类型，例如普通股、带利息的可转换票据或无担保可转换票据。这些安全工具中的每一个都会在后端接收一个唯一的令牌。然后，投资者可以选择他们想要的证券类型，并获得适当的代币。

But each deal comes with its own unique requirements. For example, one project gave retail investors the opportunity to invest as little as $500 in a portfolio of solar projects. In the case of Sangha’s bitcoin mine, however, the deal is only open for accredited investors, with a minimum investment of $50,000.

但每笔交易都有其独特的要求。例如，一个项目为散户投资者提供了投资低至 500 美元的太阳能项目组合的机会。然而，就 Sangha 的比特币矿而言，该交易仅对合格投资者开放，最低投资额为 50,000 美元。

Plural is a registered transfer agent, meaning that it maintains the ownership documents, known as cap tables, of the projects financed through its platform. Under Plural’s system, each tokenized security gets its own on-chain cap table, the data from which is then cross-referenced with a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) database to generate an SEC-compliant cap table.

Plural 是一家注册转让代理，这意味着它维护通过其平台融资的项目的所有权文件（称为上限表）。在 Plural 的系统下，每个代币化证券都有自己的链上上限表，然后将其中的数据与“了解你的客户”(KYC) 数据库交叉引用，以生成符合 SEC 要求的上限表。

“The only way you can change who owns what [in the project] is by changing

“改变谁拥有[项目中的]东西的唯一方法是改变