Authored by Owen Glubiak, Vice President of Business Development, REsurety
Financial trading is all about speed and accuracy. That used to look like the chaos of physical pits – think equities and futures trading a la Wolf of Wall Street – and has since moved to the silent efficiency of screens decades ago.
However, the clean energy market, one of the most critical sectors of the modern economy, remains stuck in a workflow that feels decades old. While artificial intelligence evangelists are talking about the end of the email era, clean energy is still stuck in an era marked by “scrolling down to read from the bottom” of the email chain, spreadsheets, and lengthy Request for Proposal (RFP) processes.
For a clean energy project developer or a company looking to purchase clean energy from a developer, getting a deal done is notoriously slow. A typical Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) can take nine months or more to close. Even hedging an operational project—a task that should be routine—can drag on for months. From experience, we know most of that time is spent waiting for a reply to an email or a phone call.
In the “Email Era”, trading was a relationship game. In the emerging “Screen Era”, trading is an information game. The transition from manual RFPs to screen-based digital execution isn’t just about saving time; it is about bringing financial efficiency and data-driven intelligence to a market that desperately needs it. REsurety saw this firsthand after years working as a trade advisor to the world’s top clean energy companies. And given the $16B in notional value ready to transact on CleanTrade in just two months, others felt this pain too.
The best deal might not be within your network.
The current state of clean energy trading is defined by limitation. When a project needs to secure a hedge, the “market” is often just the handful of contacts in the treasurer’s phone: the bank that holds the project loan, a retailer they worked with on a previous deal, or a commodity trader met at a conference last year.
This insulation creates two major problems:
- Price Opacity: Without a centralized marketplace, there is no way to know if the price in your inbox is actually a “good” price. You are negotiating in a vacuum, limited to the three or four data points you could manually gather.
- Liquidity fragmentation: You might be willing to buy, and a counterparty you’ve never met might be willing to sell at a better price, but because you aren’t in each other’s “Rolodex,” the deal never happens.
CleanTrade expands your access to ensure the best deal flow.
Moving this workflow to a digital, screen-based platform (like CleanTrade) changes the fundamental physics of the transaction. It transforms a process that takes months of sequential emails into a parallel, digital workflow.
While the reduction in time—collapsing months of negotiation into weeks or days—is the most obvious benefit, the “deep value” lies in the strategic advantages that come with seeing the whole board.
The Future of Clean Energy Trading
As the US clean energy market scales, it cannot afford to rely on the manual, opaque workflows of the past. And investors can’t afford to waste dollars on clean energy deals that don’t meet their goals.
The sector requires the ease, transparency, and efficiency that only digital trading can provide. By moving from the inbox to a screen-based marketplace, we aren’t just saving time; we are building a more efficient, competitive, and robust market for clean energy.
At REsurety, we are driving this evolution.
To learn more about how we are modernizing the way clean energy is traded, explore CleanTrade here.