Imagine you're managing renewable assets across Europe. Each project is held in its own Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), and each SPV is entitled to receive Guarantees of Origin (GOs). Naturally, these GOs need managing and selling, but efficient corporate structures such as SPVs, holding companies and shelf companies often do not translate into simple operational processes, particularly in compliance-heavy areas like renewable energy certification. Before we take a look at the tools available for optimizing GO management and sales for SPV owners, let’s first understand why SPVs are such a popular choice in this industry.
Why are SPVs so popular in renewable energy financing?
Many large renewable producers opt for SPV structures for good reason: they’re quick to create, they enable financing on a project-by-project basis, they isolate risk and liability to the specific legal entity. This isolation makes it easier to approach investors, as SPVs are independent legal entities that ring fence the assets and liabilities of a single project, limiting exposure for whichever backer is approached - think private investors, sponsors and governments. This structure also allows for non recourse financing, where lenders rely on the project’s cash flows instead of the parent company’s broader balance sheet. Put simply, "ability to repay is assessed against the cash flows generated by the project”. By isolating projects in this way, SPVs make it easier to attract capital, since the structure sets clear repayment expectations and massively simplifies due diligence.
Why do SPVs complicate certificate handling?
Put simply: separation of assets creates more uncertainty when dealing with different GO registry platforms in different regions that allow authorization of individual users to various companies with different levels of difficulty. Most producers handle multi-SPV GO management by doing the following, all problematic:
- In-house means going solo, forcing you to remember levels of user access and numerous credentials for all of your SPVs; this quickly becomes a juggling act when repeatedly trying to login to handle large scale operations.
- Outsourcing means you delegate everything to local production device managers, who usually don’t have expertise in GO, or naturally treat GOs as a lesser priority than energy sales due to the % of revenue makeup.
Without consolidated, team-level oversight, dropping the ball is inevitable somewhere down the line - especially as manual complexity increases to unsustainable levels as SPV numbers, headcount, and portfolio size grows.
Why Information Vacuums Cost Money
Managing GOs independently is hard, but avoiding errors when team level management occurs is especially important: internal fragmentation creates knowledge silos that cause administrative burden to compound.
When different team members (e.g, those tasked to sell GOs) must handle different SPVs or countries, inconsistent processes and coordination headaches occur. For instance, a trader could miss cross-portfolio hedging opportunities when GOs of a particular region or quality label command a premium, but you can't act reactively across SPVs without a streamlined device or inventory overview.
Compliance gaps also emerge when regulatory changes affect different SPVs (or the PDs they contain) at different times, creating particular challenges for cross-border GO management. Reporting complexity becomes a monthly nightmare when investors want portfolio-level GO performance data but you're fumbling with logins to aggregate reports from multiple SPVs and registries.
The Consolidated Management Solution
The answer isn't eliminating SPV structures - their benefits are clear, and that's often impossible given financing requirements. Instead, you need GO management that operates above the SPV level with total accuracy while respecting underlying structures.
Soldera does exactly that. Think of it like this: your SPVs remain separate legal entities, but their GO operations connect to a single management brain. Each SPV maintains its identity for legal and financial purposes, but GO issuance, trading, and compliance flow through our one coordinated system - a single source of truth.
- Single Dashboard View means every SPV appears on one platform. For devices, you’d see your Win Park A in Germany, Solar Project B in Spain, Hydro Asset C in Norway, all visible simultaneously with real-time inventory levels. For inventory, all GOs are visible with the same level of precision.
- Unified Strategy allows you to set portfolio-wide trading rules that automatically apply to relevant SPVs, such as forward hedging 60% of next year's production across all assets with country-specific minimum prices.
- Automated Compliance handles each country's registry requirements automatically, simplifying transaction history, automatic invoicing, and consolidated reporting for all SPVs, all under one roof.
Real-World Benefits
Existing Soldera members, such as one industry leader managing GO operations across Europe through multiple SPVs, report: “because of the amount of assets and the certificates we need to deal with every month" (per SPV), consolidated management is essential. Companies using our consolidated SPV management report dramatic improvements:
- Time Savings drops portfolio management from hours per week to a mere 30 minutes per month, enabling one person (or multi-user access) to oversee hundreds of assets across multiple SPVs.
- Revenue Optimization through professional sales processes with structured tenders consistently achieves 10-25% premiums above benchmark prices, implementing proven strategies for maximizing profit from GO sales across your entire portfolio.
- Administrative Relief eliminates sloppy Excel files, standardizes compliance with manual registry interactions (registration, transfers), transaction history, consolidated reporting, and coordination calls between different asset managers.
- Strategic Clarity enables informed decision-making about forward sales, pricing strategies, and market timing through portfolio-level insights.
Next Steps
We don’t mean to sound arrogant, but if you're managing GOs across multiple SPVs, your current approach likely costs too much in time and money and delivers less than necessary. We advise to get a hold of it early - as the administrative burden will only increase as your business grows and expands internationally, your PDs under management become more complex, and regulatory requirements evolve.
At Soldera, we've built the platform specifically designed for multi-SPV GO portfolio management, currently managing over 3,000 production sites across Europe for firms like Nuveen, Svea Solar, Sunly, Solör Bioenergi, Utilitas, and BaltCap.
We’re honest when we say that no corporate structure is too difficult for us to consolidate for you. Let's discuss how consolidated GO management can work for your renewable portfolio structure and growth plans.
