REsurety announced the regulatory approval of its clean energy transaction platform, CleanTrade, from the US federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). CleanTrade now provides a compliant marketplace for financially settled contracts for clean energy, often referred to as virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs).
Global food and agriculture company Cargill and independent energy and commodity group Mercuria, early adopters on Clean Trade, were matched to execute the first transaction on the platform.
Regulated transaction platforms, such as the Intercontinental Exchange, have been key drivers of transparency and liquidity in traditional energy markets for years, allowing market participants to procure, sell and trade energy products such as natural gas, oil and baseload power with speed and confidence. Now, with formal approval from the CFTC, CleanTrade unlocks these significant benefits for clean energy markets.
“Last year, more than 90% of new US generation capacity came from clean energy sources, but despite that explosive growth, clean energy markets have been deprived of the sophisticated toolkit that traditional thermal energy has long benefited from,” said REsurety CEO Lee Taylor. “With this CFTC approval, CleanTrade now fills that huge void in the energy markets.”
Historically, clean energy transactions have been supported by brokers and information service providers. But that process was opaque and illiquid, and transacting was cumbersome. As the industry has scaled and matured, its needs have outgrown those services. As an approved Swap Execution Facility (SEF), CleanTrade is a marketplace and platform where organizations can fully transact. It provides full market transparency into transactable bids and offers for clean energy and enables end-to-end workflow support, from automated generation of compliant form transaction documents to Dodd-Frank reporting.
In addition to providing a marketplace for the SEF-enabled VPPA products, CleanTrade also provides transparency and liquidity for physical power purchase agreements and project-specific renewable energy certificates. CleanTrade users also benefit from financial and environmental analytics provided by REsurety’s CleanSight platform, providing insight into project-specific capture rate and congestion risk exposures as well as the granular and rigorous environmental metrics increasingly demanded by leading clean energy buyers such as 24/7 carbon-free electricity advocates and the Emissions First Partnership.
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