John Knorring

Somewhere in Manila, a power retailer just locked in the price of electricity it will deliver in 2027. No plant changed hands. No electron moved. Just a contract, settled financially against the spot market - and the nervous energy of price volatility drained out of someone's balance sheet. The marketplace that made it possible was built by John Knorring, who runs Green Tiger Markets from a laptop and a team scattered across five cities on three continents.

Green Tiger is the first and only forward marketplace for Philippines electricity. Its philosophy, in Knorring's framing, is "pricing the future without delivering it." That is a strange thing to sell. Most people think of energy companies as the ones with turbines and transmission towers. Green Tiger has neither. What it has is a standardized contract - a way for a generator, a utility, or a retail supplier to agree today on a price for power that arrives months or years from now, and to settle the difference in cash against the wholesale spot market.

"We don't build generation," Knorring says. "We make it possible for firms to manage risk - and that's what unlocks RE investment." It is a quieter claim than most energy founders make, and a more structural one. Solar panels are cheap now. Capital is not. And capital will not flow into renewable projects whose revenue swings wildly with an unhedged spot price. Fix the price risk, and the financing follows.

Knorring spent two decades inside the machinery of commodity futures. He traded and managed risk at Goldman Sachs. He traded proprietarily at DRW Commodities, one of the most respected private trading firms in the world, across most listed futures markets you could name. Then he went to Singapore as the founding CEO of Abaxx Exchange and Clearing, standing up a brand-new commodity futures exchange and clearinghouse from scratch, initially built around liquefied natural gas derivatives.

That last job is the tell. Building an exchange is not the same as trading on one. It means assembling the plumbing - the contracts, the clearing, the rulebook, the regulators - so that other people can transact with confidence. Abaxx taught him how to build the venue. Green Tiger is where he does it again, this time aimed not at the deepest, most liquid markets, but at the ones that need the infrastructure most and have it least.

The academic roots run deep. Knorring studied Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton - a discipline that is essentially the mathematics of decision-making under uncertainty. Forward markets are uncertainty, packaged and priced. You could draw a straight line from the lecture hall to the order book.

The thesis Knorring keeps returning to is unfashionably patient. Everyone wants to talk about adding generation - more panels, more turbines, more megawatts. He argues that "more solar isn't enough." Without a forward market, a developer in an emerging economy faces a wall of price uncertainty that makes long-term financing expensive or impossible. Build the market first, and the megawatts have somewhere safe to land.

Green Tiger's expansion map points past the Philippines toward Southern Africa and other markets with the same gap: real demand for clean power, real volatility, and no standardized way to hedge it. The mission is infrastructure - boring, structural, foundational - and Knorring seems entirely comfortable being the person who builds the boring thing that makes the exciting thing possible.

It is a fitting role for someone who spent a career learning that the most valuable thing in any market is not the asset. It is the price you can trust.