The first-ever exchange-executed VPPA, completed by Akamai on our CleanTrade platform, marks a turning point for our industry

If you want to buy, sell or trade natural gas or traditional thermal power, you can do it in minutes. You log in to CME or ICE, see live bids and offers, and transact with pre-qualified counterparties on standard paper and with confidence in the regulatory compliance and legal durability of your contract. This has been true for decades, since ICE revolutionized traditional energy transactions more than 25 years ago.

But, if you want to buy, sell or trade power from a wind or solar project, which represents the majority of new capacity additions in the U.S. and in many markets remains the cheapest, fastest-to-build source of energy, the process has looked very different. You run an RFP. You wait weeks to months for offers. You compare proposals priced at different moments in different formats and with different assumptions. Then you spend most of a year negotiating a custom contract over email.

Clean energy has outgrown its RFP phase. That’s why we built CleanTrade.

What happened on August 31

On August 31, Akamai Technologies executed a virtual power purchase agreement for an almost 200 MW greenfield solar project in Indiana on CleanTrade. It was the first clean energy transaction ever executed on a CFTC-registered exchange. A second trade, for an operating wind project in ERCOT, followed suit a week later.

Over our history, Resurety has supported more than 7,000 MW of clean energy transactions, so the roughly 200 MW aren't what's new here. What makes this transaction so different is how it happened: on a regulated marketplace, with every vetted bid and offer in live view. 

Mike Mattera, Akamai's Global Head of Corporate Sustainability and ESG Officer, called it "the fastest VPPA Akamai has ever completed." Because buyers and sellers meet in a live market, deals are closing in a few months instead of the year a typical RFP takes.

Markets can be an incredible force for good

Resurety was founded on the premise that improving the liquidity, transparency and impact of clean energy markets can be an extraordinary force multiplier for the speed and cost of the energy transition. As Commodity Trading Advisors, Resurety and our peers have spent years chipping away at providing the liquidity that clean energy needs. With CleanTrade, we’ve delivered for clean energy what every other mature commodity market already has.

Liquidity, connecting buyers and sellers. A project gets built when it finds an offtaker. An RFP, however well run, shows a buyer whoever answered, from one network, at one moment. That's a snapshot, not a market. And while there have been platforms that collect offers for years, collecting offers is not the same as running a market. On CleanTrade, participants see both sides of the market live, across regions and products. That's how Akamai found a project it hadn't seen anywhere else.

Transparency, so capital gets cheaper. Markets charge a premium for what they can't see. Bilateral deals disappear into private contracts, so the market never learns what clean energy actually trades for. If you ask five people what an operational wind PPA is worth in PJM - you’ll likely get five (very different!) answers. That information opacity has long - and unnecessarily - cost clean energy.

A regulated exchange changes the status quo in two ways. First, every participant can see all live bids and offers across all products and markets - with the confidence that the bids and offers are posted by pre-qualified counterparties subject to a rigorous rulebook. Second, all activity on the market produces a price record. Participants can see anonymized bids and offers through our Offtake Activity Monitor product. And S&P Global's Platts now draws on CleanTrade bids, offers and trades in its PPA price assessments and monthly reports, including new daily benchmarks in active markets.  

Impact, so the market can see what it's buying. In most markets, fossil generation doesn't pay for the costs its emissions cause. Until it does, the best correction is to make carbon impact visible at the moment of the deal. Akamai used Resurety’s carbon analytics built into CleanTrade to compare projects on emissions impact. It chose Indiana because each megawatt-hour there displaces roughly 540 kg of CO2, compared with about 350 kg in ERCOT. 

Credit where it's due

Being first takes nerve, and Akamai has a great track record of going first. While the standard-setters continue to debate how Scope 2 accounting should work, Mike Mattera's team didn't wait. Earlier this year they published CLIMATE-2026, a consequential accounting framework that was independently verified and made public for anyone to use. Its premise is simple: take credit only for decisions that actually change emissions on the grid.

This transaction is that ambition in action. In Mike's words, it's about "moving past promises and taking the kind of urgent, consequential action our planet needs right now."

Join the market

A market is only as good as the people in it. Every bid and offer that moves onto an exchange makes the price more trustworthy for everyone else.

If you buy, sell or hedge clean energy, whether you're a corporate buyer, a municipality, a utility, a developer, an IPP or a trader, become a CleanTrade participant. 

Not ready to transact yet? See where the market is actually pricing, through Reports on CleanSight or the Platts PPA assessments built on CleanTrade data.

Clean energy has earned the right to be bought, sold, and traded like the serious commodity it is. Now, it can be.