March 29th, 2022 — As corporations, utilities, and financial institutions commit to increasingly ambitious decarbonization targets, demand for renewable energy has skyrocketed: corporate buyers alone purchased a record 24 GW of renewables in 2020, representing a near doubling from 2018.
In recent years, organizations procuring renewable energy through power purchase agreements (PPAs) have catalyzed gigawatts of new solar and wind assets. But as net-zero and renewable sourcing commitments shift from hallmarks of early movers to near-requirements for modern companies, today’s consultant-heavy renewable energy buying process is proving insufficient.
RenewaFi is the two-sided digital marketplace for renewable energy, enabling buyers and sellers to source and evaluate deals in minutes instead of months. By replacing inefficient and expensive contracting processes, RenewaFi’s scalable technology mitigates risk, increases transparency, and allows renewable energy projects to come online faster.
The existing renewable energy procurement process is incompatible with rapid decarbonization.
PPAs are the mechanism of choice for buyers and developers alike, allowing corporations and utilities to authentically decarbonize their operations and access future cash flows without upfront capital investment requirements.
At the same time, PPAs are prerequisites for developers to finance and construct renewable energy power plants.
PPAs are notoriously difficult to source and negotiate. Sellers often struggle to find buyers and vice versa, and each deal needs to be customized based on a range of complex considerations.
The negotiation and assessment process remains stubbornly manual and lacks transparency.
This cumbersome process leads to evaluation and negotiation timelines that often stretch 12 months or more, tenuous completion rates, and hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars in consultant fees to achieve a single PPA.
We need procurement tools that are built for a net-zero world.
Whereas many of today’s largest renewable energy buyers, such as Amazon and Total, have had over a decade to build procurement expertise, a parade of newer entrants with net-zero commitments are looking to procure renewable energy without delay.
As both experienced and new buyers become increasingly self-sufficient and demand automated processes, there are few viable alternatives to the current process.
The speed, cost, and overall friction involved in PPA negotiations are now a critical bottleneck in the proliferation of renewable energy projects.
RenewaFi’s digital marketplace empowers large renewable energy buyers and sellers to source and evaluate renewable energy PPAs in a matter of minutes.
RenewaFi’s patent-pending digital auction technology is the first to empower both buyers and sellers to rapidly initiate renewable energy deals, including PPAs as well as secondary market transactions.
As responses to these auctions come in, each is analyzed, filtered, and ranked based on the given buyer’s or seller’s criteria. The platform also provides powerful data visualization and contract automation tools to help identify the optimal deal.
RenewaFi allows all market participants to reduce execution risk, expedite contracting timelines, and reduce transaction expenses. Additionally, experienced market participants now have the option to circumvent unnecessary intermediaries should they choose to do so.
Nearly 50 market participants, representing a 200 GW pipeline of proposed renewable projects, are already active on the platform, including Fortune 500 companies, utilities, financial institutions, and developers.
Powerhouse Ventures is proud to join RenewaFi’s $3 million seed round, alongside First Round Capital, Floating Point, BoxGroup, and more. We look forward to working with Founder & CEO Noam Yaffe and the entire RenewaFi team to build the PPA marketplace for a zero-carbon world.
Special thanks to Ry Storey-Fisher, Sam Wohlforth, and Marie Thompson.
To read more about Powerhouse Ventures’ other publicly-announced investments, visit our Insights page.