Procuring renewable energy quickly and affordably has become imperative for organizations of all kinds, from corporations aiming to reduce their emissions, to electricity suppliers looking to meet standards or reduce costs, to financial institutions wanting to invest in the burgeoning renewables market. And ultimately, it's imperative for us all, if we're ever going to slow the rate of global warming.
To accelerate development, the industry needs a more liquid, centralized marketplace, where buyers and sellers can meet, with tools and standards required to get deals done faster. With this mission in mind, today LevelTen announced the launch of the LevelTen Marketplace 4.0, a completely redesigned experience that includes new tools designed to make planning, executing, and monitoring a PPA faster and easier for every market participant.
The launch includes three enhanced software tools: Search, RFP Automation and Performance Monitoring.
Search: Find the PPAs You Need to Reach Your Global Goals
A few weeks ago, we announced that the LevelTen Marketplace now includes European PPA offers, which was a major part of the 4.0 update. With this launch, we're delivering the world's most complete collection of transaction-ready PPA offers, with more than 3,800 offers from over 1,100 projects under development, spanning 21 countries across North America and Europe.
Now you can browse and compare a solar project in Spain to a wind project in Sweden (or Texas), and even design a global portfolio of PPAs matched to your regional consumption profile and tailored to maximize diversification benefits.
To enable this, we had to collect data on regional electricity markets, weather, and more, and then ingest it in a standard way so that we could apply our CFO-Ready Analytics™ to every offer. That was no easy task, considering how many different data sources there are across North America and Europe. This gives you a consistent way to compare offers and select one based on what you value the most, which could include:
- NPV: Easily compare the projected outcomes of all PPAs offered in the selected market to find one with the most overall value and least risk. View the projected net present value and cash flow by year, and see how it changes based on which forward curve is used in the analysis.
- Risk: View the optimistic, pessimistic, and base (mean) scenarios for how a PPA will perform in terms of net present value and yearly cash flow for any specific year or over the life of the contract. To deliver this analysis, we run more than 20,000 independent Monte Carlo simulations on nearly every offer, daily.
- Impact: Instantly see the projected number of GOs/RECs per year and the estimated metric tons of emissions that will be avoided annually.
- Load-matching: View the seasonal production characteristics of a particular project and the project's expected generation over a 24-hour period to see how a project's output corresponds to the power consumption at your facilities, in order to make a hedge efficacy determination.
With access to the largest collection of PPA offers and the data and analytics to compare each one, it's never been easier to find a PPA that meets your needs and priorities.
RFP Automation: Instantly Compare the Value of Custom PPA Offers
All of the offers in the LevelTen Marketplace are based on a standard set of terms that make it easy to make an apples-to-apples comparison. But if your organization needs a PPA with special terms or requirements, you or your advisor can conduct a request for proposal (RFP) through the LevelTen platform.
LevelTen dramatically accelerated the RFP process when it launched its RFP Automation Tool in 2018. The tool instantly connects renewable energy buyers with the largest network of renewable energy developers in the world. The intuitive online system enables those developers to reply to RFPs in just a few clicks, and ensures responses and data are standardized, shortening the entire submission process to just a couple of weeks.
Today, we're making it even easier to compare custom offers generated as a result of an RFP, so you (or your advisor) can quickly select the best one. The new design creates a scatter plot of all the options, with the highest-value in the top right corner. If you'd like to dig deeper, you can view and filter proposals by developer, project, plan, or submitted documents.
Skip the spreadsheets: This is the modern way to PPA.
Performance Monitoring: Track Progress and Know How to Improve Your Portfolio
Before LevelTen, there was no easy way to connect existing renewable energy purchases to future procurement. To understand your overall renewable share in any given region, you had to collect REC/GO data from multiple sources and try to synthesize it using various tools and spreadsheets. Our cloud-based software is bringing this laborious process into the 21st Century.
With the latest Marketplace update, you can upload information about your existing renewable energy contracts, whether they were certificate-only contracts (unbundled RECs/GOs) or power purchase agreements, and whether or not they were procured through LevelTen. Then, you can automatically see how those previous investments are helping you reach your renewable energy usage goals. With a subscription to LevelTen's Performance Monitoring Software, you can do even more...
LevelTen launched its Performance Monitoring Software in September 2019, revolutionizing the way organizations monitor the performance of a PPA once the project is operational. Using direct data feeds from the project, the software instantly displays how many RECs/GOs have been generated, the historical settlement payments/cash flow, the number of megawatt hours sold by the project, and more, all with downloadable charts that make reporting easy. Critically, the Performance Monitoring Software also displays how each of those metrics are expected to perform in the future, given the most recent market data. This allows you to take action (if needed) to reach your goals and manage your budget.
If you have more than one PPA on the books, Performance Monitoring becomes even more critical. LevelTen compiles data from all PPAs into a single dashboard, so you can see how the PPAs are performing together, as a portfolio. For example, if wind prices fell in one market, but solar prices rose in another, the impact on your overall portfolio could be small. With this data, you can also determine which PPA to add to your portfolio next to further diversify and improve your portfolio.
This is the Path to Achieve Our One Goal: To Save the Planet
To accelerate renewable energy development at the rate needed to slow global warming, the industry needs to come together. Buyers, sellers, brokers, and investors need a single place to share information. When everyone unites, something magical happens: Faster, easier, cheaper transactions suddenly become possible. We've seen entire industries transformed by this: It's time for the renewable energy industry to do the same.
We'll bring the supply, you bring the demand. If you represent a corporation, utility, retail electricity supplier, financial institution, CCA or anyone else who needs renewable energy, let's talk.
