REsurety Raises $32 Million to Launch New Clean Energy Marketplace
REsurety, which provides software and services to clients seeking to reduce their carbon footprint, announced the launch of CleanTrade, a new marketplace aimed at enabling the purchase and sale of clean energy contracts, virtual power plant agreements, and other products, services and assets, via a single trading platform.
The new marketplace will be funded by the company’s recent $32 million Series C raise, led by sustainable food, energy, agriculture and oceans-focused investor S2G Ventures and Citi.
Based in Boston, REsurety was founded in 2012 by Lee Taylor, with a goal to improve the transparency, liquidity, and impact of clean energy markets. The company provides software and services to support the financial and sustainability goals of clean energy buyers, sellers, and investors.
REsurety said the CleanTrade marketplace is an innovative step in that it provides a single marketplace or platform specifically dedicated to clean energy assets. It offers an alternative to transaction platforms that are not equipped to deal with clean energy assets, and can thus be “opaque, slow and inefficient – both financially and environmentally,” the company said, with buyers and sellers able to get clear information on the assets they are trading on CleanTrade. The marketplace also features tools to facilitate these transactions.
REsurety founder and CEO Lee Taylor said:
“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 clean energy markets have sorely lacked.”
In addition to enhancing the sale and purchase of assets, the marketplace – with the approval of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) – will offer traders a Swap Execution Facility (SEF), which will enable participants to trade swaps (derivative contracts). In addition to this newly created SEF, CleanTrade supports physical power purchase agreements (PPAs) and project-specific renewable energy certificates (RECs). CleanTrade also allows users to rank trades in terms of what is most and least attractive by the implied cost of the carbon abated.
CleanTrade’s digital platform initially grew from Citi’s Commodities division in Markets, according to the companies.
Siris Singh, Global Head of Markets Strategic Investments at Citi, said:
“With REsurety and Citi’s long-standing partnership, it was a natural fit for REsurety to take this on, further develop the platform, and provide the clean-energy economy with a robust diverse product offering.”
Francis O’Sullivan, Managing Director at S2G, added:
“At S2G, we are committed to supporting innovations that can help accelerate the clean energy transition, and we believe REsurety and its CleanTrade marketplace represent a game-changing platform in this regard. Our view is that by providing enhanced price transparency and liquidity, CleanTrade can help reduce the barriers to customer adoption of clean electricity and in turn, this will help support further deployments of clean electricity production capacity.”
Source: esgtoday.com
