How conventional supply works
You buy from a supplier. The supplier buys from the wholesale market, which is a pool. Your power came from whatever was running, and your renewable claim rests on certificates retired against your annual consumption. Nothing traces your units to any particular turbine, because nothing needs to.
That model works. It is also opaque by design, and the opacity is where the supplier’s margin lives.
How a private market works
A private marketplace matches specific generators to specific consumers within a closed group. Your consumption is matched, settlement period by settlement period, against the output of assets you can name. What cannot be matched is topped up conventionally.
Two things change. The generator sees who took their power and gets a price negotiated within the group, not dictated by the wholesale curve. The consumer sees where their power came from and may pay less than a supplier equivalent, because fewer intermediaries sit between the two parties. That is not guaranteed.
What it is good for
- Traceability. An auditable record of source, asset by asset and settlement period by settlement period, rather than an annual certificate position.
- Price stability. Matched volumes priced within the group are insulated from some of the wholesale volatility, though not all of it.
- Value for awkward assets. Generation at unfashionable hours is worth more in a matched market than in an annual certificate market, because it fills hours that are hard to cover.
What it is not
It is not a way to avoid the grid. The power still flows through the same network, incurs the same network charges and is settled through the same central systems. What changes is the commercial matching, not the physics.
It is also not automatically cheaper. It is a different structure with a different risk allocation, and it should be compared against a well negotiated conventional contract on the same basis as anything else.
Who it suits
Consumers with steady load who care about provenance as much as price, and generators whose output does not fit neatly into a standard offtake. Matching itself can be done from about 2 GWh a year upward. A private market arrangement with generation contracted specifically against your load, which is where additionality comes from, is usually a serious option from around 20 GWh. For a worked example, see how Regatta’s 43 sites were matched to two wind farms.