The market that lets you buy December's electricity in June.

A screen, an order book, and a question nobody could answer: what will power cost?

Somewhere on the Luzon grid, a factory manager is staring at a number. It is the price of electricity, and it has just doubled. Not because anything broke - because that is simply what the spot market did this hour. For most of the world's emerging power markets, that is the whole story: take whatever today's price is, and hope.

Green Tiger Markets exists to end that particular kind of suspense. It is a B2B trading platform - an exchange-style marketplace with a central limit order book - where generators, solar developers, retailers and investors trade forward contracts on Philippine electricity. Instead of being a hostage to the spot price, a buyer can agree today on the price they will pay in a month, a quarter, or a season. The company is small (around sixteen people) and scattered across Austin, Boston, Singapore, Manila, Seattle and Poitiers. The ambition is not small at all.

Electricity is the one commodity that never learned to trade forward.

Coffee has a forward price. So does copper, wheat, oil, even orange juice. Walk into any of those markets and you can find out, with reasonable confidence, what the thing will cost six months from now. That single number - the forward price - is what lets a coffee roaster sign a contract, a bank underwrite a loan, a farmer plant with a plan.

Philippine electricity had no such number. The Wholesale Electricity Spot Market (WESM) tells you what power costs right now, settled against the Luzon Weighted Average Price. It is excellent at the present tense and silent about the future. So a merchant solar developer trying to raise money faced an awkward conversation with lenders: we will sell electricity, at a price we genuinely cannot tell you. Volatility did the rest.

The numbers are not subtle. Luzon baseload power traded near PHP 8.7 per kWh in May 2023 and fell to under PHP 2.6 per kWh by September 2025. That is not a market with a mild case of nerves. That is the exact problem a forward market is built to tame.

Why a forward curve is not a luxury here.

Two commodities traders looked at a power grid and saw an order book.

Green Tiger Markets was founded in 2021 by people who had spent careers pricing risk in markets that already worked. John Knorring, the CEO, put in eighteen-plus years in finance - Goldman Sachs, DRW Commodities, and a stint running Abaxx Exchange and Clearing in Singapore - after a Princeton degree in Operations Research and Financial Engineering. His co-founder and president, Carlos Korten, rounds out a team that wears its Wall Street pedigree lightly and its startup ethos openly.

Their bet was almost contrarian in its simplicity: the machinery that makes mature commodity markets liquid - standardized contracts, a central limit order book, financial settlement, a transparent forward curve - is not exotic. It just had not been pointed at electricity in a market like the Philippines. So they built a company that was digital from day one, with no headquarters worth the name and a team spread across six cities, and aimed it squarely at that gap.

A marketplace where future electricity has a price - and a buyer.

What Green Tiger actually sells is certainty, packaged as a contract. The platform offers financially settled Contracts for Difference (CFDs) referenced to the Luzon Weighted Average Price. No truckloads of electrons change hands; the contract settles in cash against where the spot market lands. If you locked in a price and the spot ran higher, the contract makes you whole. If it ran lower, you paid for the certainty - which is the entire point of insurance.

Who shows up to a market that did not exist last year?

The honest answer for any new exchange is: at first, almost no one - until the first trade prints, and the thing becomes real. Green Tiger crossed that line in 2023. The customers are the people for whom electricity is a balance-sheet item: generators wanting to fix revenue, renewable and merchant solar developers who need a price to put in front of lenders, retail suppliers and large consumers managing cost, and the banks and underwriters standing behind all of them.

The partnership that matters most is structural rather than commercial: every contract is tethered to the Wholesale Electricity Spot Market, settling against its published Luzon Weighted Average Price. Green Tiger does not replace the spot market - it gives it the future tense it was missing.

Energizing economic growth, one forward contract at a time.

Green Tiger frames its mission plainly: energizing economic growth via a B2B platform that facilitates the forward hedging of electricity prices on a financial basis. Strip out the finance vocabulary and it reads like a development thesis. Cheap, reliable power needs investment. Investment needs predictable returns. Predictable returns need a forward price. The forward price is the small, unglamorous gear that the rest of the machine turns on.

There is a reason this matters beyond one archipelago. Most of the fast-growing world runs on spot-priced, volatile electricity and is trying to finance a renewables build-out at the same time. Solar that cannot promise a price is solar that struggles to get funded. A working forward market is the quiet infrastructure that lets the clean build-out pencil out - which is why interest in Green Tiger's model has already drifted toward Latin America and Africa.