Introduction
Motivation
The Climate Capital Gap
Despite rising awareness of the climate crisis, global investment in clean energy falls drastically short of what’s required. While developing countries require over $1.7 trillion USD in annual investments for climate-related initiatives such as clean energy infrastructure, currently less than $0.7 trillion is currently invested annually. That means less than 33% of required capital is actually flowing.
But this isn’t just an economic inefficiency - it’s a systemic failure.
The Uneven Geography of Climate Finance
What’s more, the limited capital that is available is heavily skewed toward developed economies. Emerging markets — home to nearly two-thirds of the global population — receive only 15% of climate financing, despite having some of the greatest potential for solar and renewable energy deployment. This imbalance slows down global progress and locks out high-impact opportunities.
Why Distributed Solar Is the Answer - and Why It’s Not Being Funded
Governments across Latin America are now promoting distributed solar mini-farms as a resilient, decentralized alternative to centralized energy infrastructure.
These systems — often $500k - $2M in size — are ideal for local grids, supported by net metering, subsidies, and local incentives.
But here’s the problem: they’re not receiving financing.
Why? Because the dominant financing model — traditional project finance — is structurally misaligned with their size and needs:
High transaction and advisory costs make small projects uneconomical to fund.
Complex, time-consuming structuring processes delay deployment and raise risk.
Lenders prioritize scale and demand bundled portfolios, which local developers often can’t assemble.
Global Capital Wants In
At the same time, there’s growing demand for sustainable, yield-bearing investment products:
88% of retail investors want to invest sustainably (Morgan Stanley, 2025)
ESG assets are projected to reach 21.5% of global AUM by 2026 (PwC)
Over 75% of institutional investors plan to exit non-ESG assets within two years (PwC)
There’s a surplus of capital seeking sustainable yield, and a shortage of efficient mechanisms to connect that capital to real-world impact — especially in underserved markets.
Suno's Vision
At Suno, we believe that a financial ecosystem built around clean energy is one of the most scalable ways to address climate change. Our solution uses blockchain infrastructure and a two-token system to channel global capital efficiently into renewable infrastructure — while offering yield, liquidity, and accessibility for users.
The Suno Protocol: A Two-Token Design
Tokenized Project Ownership – pWatt
Each clean energy project onboarded to the protocol is tokenized using its own unique pWatt token.
Fixed supply per project, proportional to installed capacity
Price per pWatt reflects the cost to originate 1 watt of clean energy generation capacity
Holders receive revenue in stablecoins based on the project’s energy output
pWatts are not interchangeable between projects, ensuring traceability and risk segregation. Initially, pWatts serve as investment vehicles to fund new project development, therefore investors in pWatts support new clean energy development and receive project-specific yields over the project’s lifetime — typically up to 30 years.
The Reserve and the uWatt
Once a project becomes operational, pWatt holders can choose to swap their tokens for uWatts, which represent a fractional share of the Reserve — a growing pool of operational, revenue-generating clean energy projects.
Key features of the uWatt:
Liquid and tradable
Diversified yield from multiple projects (~13% APR)
Backed by the Net Present Value (NPV) of the Reserve
Designed to serve as a DeFi yield layer and stable value store
New uWatts are issued only when pWatts are contributed to the Reserve via the above described issuance mechanism. The NPV of a project shortly after it begins operations is typically 15-25% higher than its original CAPEX — the price initially paid for pWatts — rewarding pWatt holders for de-risking the asset and incentivizing them to lock their pWatts in the Reserve.
Pathways for Participation
The Suno Protocol offers two main user paths:
pWatt holders take on higher project-specific risk but have access to higher potential project-specific yields
uWatt holders gain diversified exposure to the entire Reserve and earn passive income
Once a project becomes operational, pWatt holders can swap for uWatts at any time — transitioning from active investor to passive yield earner.
Ensuring Long-Term Value
Although individual clean energy projects depreciate over time, the protocol accounts for this by:
Allocating a portion of Reserve revenue to offset asset depreciation
Reinvesting in new pWatts to replenish and grow the Reserve
This mechanism helps ensure the long-term stability of the Reserve value - and as a result - stable value of the uWatt over time.
The mechanism for offsetting asset depreciation does not extend to pWatt tokens, whose value declines as their associated projects age. Therefore only holders of the uWatt token can protect their holdings against asset depreciation.
A New Financial Layer for Climate Action
By combining real-world energy infrastructure with blockchain-native liquidity, Suno removes traditional investment barriers such as:
High minimums
Illiquidity
Cross-border friction
Limited exit options
This creates a dynamic, transparent, and accessible climate-aligned financial ecosystem — one that unlocks capital for underserved regions and enables participants to earn sustainable yield from real impact.
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