Annual contracts are gone. Hourly matching, shaped PPAs and scope 2 compliance arrived instead – and the tooling never caught up.
Juan Pablo Cerda, CEO at Renewabl, opened his keynote on renewable procurement with a statistic he clearly enjoys delivering.
Three problems with the spreadsheet
Cerda broke the issue into three specific failures rather than a general complaint.
First, Excel does not link to compliance. There is simply no connection between a procurement spreadsheet and the frameworks a company reports against.
Second, it handles some data well, yet it is poorly suited to large volumes of complex data.
Third, and perhaps most consequentially, it is not traceable.
Meanwhile, the regulatory pressure on large corporates keeps increasing. Cerda listed the Greenhouse Gas Protocol scope 2 update alongside several major voluntary and disclosure frameworks, and noted that the list keeps growing. Taken together with those requirements, he argued, spreadsheets stop being viable altogether.
Juan Pablo Cerda, CEO of Renewabl, explaining the technology behind their team’s work.
Why annual procurement is finished
The deeper change, however, is in how procurement itself works. Corporates previously used annual demand and fixed contracts, planning everything on an annual basis. That world, in Cerda’s words, is absolutely gone, and there is no way back to it.
Temporal complexity is the first reason. Corporates are now required to move from annual procurement to hourly procurement, which changes the nature of the problem rather than merely its resolution.
Portfolio complexity follows. A single buyer might hold a solar PPA with a particular generation shape, a wind PPA with a different shape, battery storage, guarantees of origin, and spot market exposure alongside all of it.
Consequently, none of this can be done in a spreadsheet. The industry is evolving quickly, and the tooling has to evolve with it.
What managing that complexity is worth
The commercial argument arrived through a worked example. Cerda cited an analysis showing what happens when a corporate manages this complexity properly rather than approximately.
In that case, the corporate saved around 40 million on its portfolio. The saving comes from optimization that simply is not visible at annual resolution.
What the platform does
Renewabl’s core function follows directly from those requirements. The platform helps large corporates manage their consumption alongside the production of the renewable assets they have contracted.
It also examines portfolio emissions in considerable detail. Specifically, it analyses every hour of consumption and every hour of production, then matches them hourly to keep the buyer compliant with initiatives such as the scope 2 update.
Reporting illustrates the efficiency gain most directly. A report that typically takes a corporate weeks to produce comes out of the platform in a single click.
Beyond analysis sits a second stage, which handles execution. Through it, corporates go to market and transact on an hourly, quarterly, monthly or annual basis with a large network of utilities, generators, asset owners and independent power producers.
Takeaway
Cerda’s argument is less about software than about a mismatch nobody planned. Renewable procurement rules changed underneath corporate buyers: annual reporting became hourly matching, single contracts became shaped portfolios, and a compliance question became a data problem with thousands of rows per site per year. The tooling never moved. That is why a spreadsheet failing at traceability matters more than a spreadsheet failing at scale – because the requirement now is proving, hour by hour, that the electricity you bought was the electricity you used.
The keynote stage returns at Energy Tech Summit 2027 in Bilbao, April 7–8.
