Energy Risk Awards 2024: The winners

Winning firms shore up businesses ahead of next shock and advance energy transition plans

The generally calmer market conditions of 2023 compared with 2022 gave risk managers some respite from dealing with extreme volatilty. While falling prices across the complex brought challenges for producers – many of which were helped by this year’s winning banks, research and data providers, and advisory firms – generally market conditions returned to something closer to normality. 

This provided an opportunity for firms to reflect on lessons learned and shore up businesses for the future. Our winners have all used the relative calm of the past few months not to relax or retreat and lick their wounds, but to put in place innovative and creative plans to prepare for the future, whether that’s more short-term supply disruptions or longer-term climate risk.

The volatility of 2022 showed that many firms weren’t able to identify all their exposures quickly enough. Much work has been done over the past 18 months to tackle this so that firms are better able to understand their real-time risks and exposures and to identify any protection gaps across their businesses.

As firms continue to struggle with high interest rates and rising costs, the provision of working capital was a major theme across the awards. Many of this year’s winners helped firms identify and address funding and liquidity gaps in their clients’ portfolios, with some then extending credit for projects such as storage provision so that firms can buttress their businesses against future supply shocks. Winners providing innovative working capital solutions include Societe Generale, Macquarie Group and Bank of America, while winners such as OpenGamma and Aegis Hedging addressed cashflow predictability, enabling huge potential cost-savings.

Working capital is also being constrained as more firms find themselves having to operate in environmental markets. Buying green certificates such as emissions allowances, renewable energy credits and guarantees of origin ties up substantial amounts of capital. This year’s Climate risk manager of the year, STX Group, addressed just this issue.

A large proportion of our award winners are focused on enabling the energy transition and our winners’ entries showcased the determination and pioneering spirit required to get some of these challenging projects past the post. For example, Axpo, winner of our inaugural Renewables firm of the year award, signed a raft of first-of-a-kind power purchase agreements that are enabling much-needed renewables projects across Europe. Parameter Climate also carried out game-changing work in the climate risk transfer segment.

Our inaugural Voluntary carbon market (VCM) house of the year award went to Tramontana Asset Management for its groundbreaking clean cooking and agroforestry projects across India and Sri Lanka. These are setting new standards for quality and integrity in the VCM, which is essential if that market is to overcome its recent credibility issues and grow to its full potential. It offers a key mechanism for firms to decarbonise cost-effectively and has the potential to outgrow all other emissions markets. Climate Impact X and Anew Climate also won awards for their pioneering work helping to raise standards and inject transparency and liquidity into the hugely important VCM.

The period from January 2023 to April 2024 – the time under consideration for the 2024 Energy Risk Awards – may have seen some ‘normalcy’ return to commodity markets, with prices and volatility falling, but it was also a time when many ground-breaking projects came to fruition that were anything but ‘normal’. The projects recognised in this year’s awards address the major challenges in the commodities complex today through creativity and innovation. Drive, determination and a pioneering spirit feature throughout, as these firms take the commodity markets in new and exciting directions.

See the winners below:

Derivatives house of the year:

Bank of America

Oil and products house of the year:

Macquarie

Natural gas/LNG house of the year:

Macquarie

Base metals house of the year:

Bank of America

Electricity house of the year:

ENGIE

Emissions house of the year:

Vertis Environmental Finance

Voluntary carbon market house of the year:

Tramontana Asset Management

Environmental products house of the year:

SCB Group

Weather house of the year:

Parameter Climate

Renewables firm of the year:

Axpo

Liquidity provider of the year:

Grey Epoch

Climate risk manager of the year:

STX Group

Commodity and energy finance house of the year:

Societe Generale

Deal of the year:

ENGIE

Sustainable finance house of the year:

BNP Paribas

Commodity trade finance house of the year:

Societe Generale

Commodity exchange of the year:

Nodal Exchange

OTC platform of the year:

Aegis Markets

Commodity broker of the year:

Tullett Prebon

Commodities research house of the year:

Macquarie

Climate risk research house of the year:

Veyt

Data and analytics firm of the year:

Mobius Risk Group

CTRM software house of the year:

Orchestrade

Technology firm of the year:

GridBeyond

Hedging advisory firm of the year:

Aegis Hedging

Technology advisory firm of the year:

KWA Analytics

Climate risk advisory firm of the year:

Quant AI Lab

Innovation of the year:

OpenGamma

Newcomer of the year:

Braemar Securities

One to watch:

Anew Climate’s Epoch Evaluation platform

One to watch:

Climate Impact X

One to watch:

Topaz Technology’s Topaz Quantitative Developer module