As the global transition to clean energy accelerates, we believe the need for transparent and scalable market solutions has never been more pressing. Meeting growing energy demands while reducing emissions will require unprecedented amounts of low- and zero-carbon electricity. However, it’s our view that the growth of clean energy is currently limited by status quo purchasing and risk processes.
Currently, clean energy buyers, sellers, and investors face challenges related to price transparency, transaction liquidity, and operational efficiency. These issues can slow market activity, limit investor confidence, and, ultimately, delay the deployment of renewable energy projects. Due to a general lack of key data and software tools, we’ve seen that decisions are often made in relatively inefficient and illiquid markets.
In an effort to address this, we are excited to announce our investment in REsurety, a company that is empowering clean energy stakeholders by providing data-driven insights via its CleanSight products and innovative trading solutions through its new CleanTrade platform.
Untangling the Complexities of Clean Energy Markets with CleanSight
Despite the renewable energy industry’s current scale, many pieces of the ecosystem surrounding power procurement and trading are still nascent compared to the traditional energy industry. As a result, industry participants suffer from relative illiquidity and significant opacity in terms of power pricing. In order for renewable energy to be deployed efficiently, increased data resources were needed to enable workstreams such as site identification and contract settlement - which led REsurety to introduce its CleanSight offering.
Developed with input from industry stakeholders, CleanSight delivers an integrated suite of clean energy software solutions that provide the transparent insights needed to assess opportunity value and risks - helping enable confident, data-driven decisions. The platform empowers clean energy buyers, developers, and investors to identify opportunities, evaluate projects, and optimize the management of operational portfolios. By enabling more efficient procurement, management and tracking of clean energy transactions, CleanSight can facilitate smarter decision-making and enhance market activity.
Reimagining Clean Energy Transactions with CleanTrade
Recognizing the value that CleanSight brings to clean energy stakeholders, REsurety identified the need for a complementary platform to facilitate transactions using these insights. This realization led to the development and launch of CleanTrade, a first-of-its-kind platform designed to bring price transparency and transaction liquidity to clean energy markets, launched in October 2024. S2G believes CleanTrade fills a critical gap in the energy transition’s toolkit, providing the level of price transparency and transaction liquidity that traditional energy has long benefited from but which we believe clean energy markets have sorely lacked.
Pending approval by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”), CleanTrade will operate as the first CFTC-compliant Swap Execution Facility (“SEF”) for clean energy. A SEF is an electronic platform that enables regulated and transparent trading of swaps. Through CleanTrade, users can engage in structured negotiation, on-platform execution, and compliance reporting for virtual power purchase agreements (“vPPAs”). The platform also supports physical power purchase agreements (“PPAs”) and project-specific renewable energy certificates (“RECs”), offering a comprehensive marketplace solution.
By creating a marketplace for the procurement and trading of clean power, buyers can view projects on an apples-to-apples basis in terms of both price and environmental impact which has historically not been possible. We believe this represents a paradigm shift in clean energy procurement that could result in increased transparency, transaction speed, and higher confidence around market pricing.
REsurety’s Approach to Addressing Key Obstacles with Innovation
We believe REsurety is tackling some of the clean energy market’s most pressing challenges with innovative solutions that empower stakeholders to maximize environmental and financial impact. Here’s how:
CleanSight
Improving Accuracy in Virtual Power Purchase Agreements: vPPAs, also known as “contracts for differences,” are financial arrangements where a buyer agrees to pay a fixed price for a specified amount of renewable energy generation. Instead of receiving the physical power, the seller sells the energy into the wholesale market at the variable market price. If the market price exceeds the fixed price, the seller pays the buyer the difference; if it falls below, the buyer compensates the seller. Managing vPPAs is complex, requiring frequent settlement reconciliations - often quarterly or monthly - to ensure accuracy and transparency. Errors in these reconciliations can result in significant financial discrepancies. REsurety’s vPPA tracking and management tools help streamline this process, providing robust quality assurance and helping prevent costly mistakes.
Providing Key Nodal Level Market Intelligence Data: REsurety’s market analytics platform integrates weather and power market data to enable analysis on both historical and forecasted performance indicators - including price, capacity factors, generation, basis, capture rates, and locational marginal emission (LME) data - on a project and nodal level. This tool enables users to quickly visualize and download long-term, fundamentals-based power price and generation forecasts as well as simulate the impact of factors such as extreme weather, gas prices, or increased levels of renewable energy and storage build-out.
Equipping Investors with Critical Information for Better Decision Making: REsurety’s project and contract asset simulation tools create customized simulations of specific opportunities and enable in-depth comparisons used for project or portfolio-level underwriting and due diligence. Post-investment, REsurety’s portfolio-level analysis tools enable the monitoring of generation and financial performance.
CleanTrade
Enhancing Transparency and Efficiency in Renewable Transactions: Renewable energy transactions do not have access to a scalable, regulated transaction platform, which in our view limits market transparency, increases transaction costs, and limits access for smaller buyers. REsurety’s CleanTrade platform will introduce a compliant multi-party marketplace for renewable energy buyers, sellers and traders. This will help remove some of the largest barriers to adoption for smaller offtakers and expand the overall appetite for renewable energy procurement.
Helping Project Owners Manage Risks After Contracts End: Once PPAs expire, renewable energy project owners often face challenges in managing merchant market exposure and re-contracting assets. Today, many project owners who want to hedge merchant positions of operating projects and re-trade purchase agreements lack the ability to do so. REsurety’s CleanTrade platform offers a streamlined solution to re-trade renewable power purchase agreements, improve liquidity, and expand market confidence for project owners.
Helping Clean Energy Buyers Manage Financial Volatility: Many corporate clean energy buyers enter into vPPAs for sustainability reasons, and struggle to absorb the financial volatility that results from exposure to the weather and commodity market underlying their vPPA settlements. CleanTrade offers these buyers the tools to actively manage the risk of their existing contracts – freeing up risk capacity to sign additional agreements with new projects.
Advancing Expansion and Market Influence
REsurety recently secured $32 million in Series C funding, co-led by S2G and Citi. This investment has been leveraged to fuel the expansion of CleanTrade and REsurety’s broader mission to empower and accelerate the clean energy transition. With S2G’s support, we believe REsurety is positioned to scale CleanTrade, broaden its partnerships, and enhance its offerings, enabling a wider range of stakeholders to participate confidently in clean energy markets.
By creating an accessible marketplace for clean energy, our belief is that REsurety is setting new standards for both efficiency and sustainability in energy markets. We invite you to follow REsurety’s journey as it seeks to reshape the clean energy landscape and drive a more sustainable future.
