The energy transition is reshaping the economics of energy retail, writes Ruben Van den Bossche, CEO of Gorilla.
Electrification, renewables, flexible demand and more volatile markets are creating new opportunities for retailers to grow, differentiate and play a meaningful role in the shift to a low-carbon economy. But realising those opportunities requires navigating new layers of commercial complexity.
B2B energy retailers operate at a complex intersection. They buy and sell a commodity whose price can change suddenly and operate inside tight regulatory frameworks that differ by region.
The challenge most retailers face today is that the tools they rely on haven’t kept pace with this new reality, and many still run pricing, forecasting and risk decisions on siloed systems or spreadsheets held together by institutional knowledge. Without the right infrastructure, it is near impossible for teams to understand where profitability is truly created or lost.
What’s next for energy retailers
Volatility triggers unpredictable price swings that can erase a deal’s profit overnight. EVs, heat pumps and AI data centres are reshaping demand curves faster than most forecasts were ever built to handle, and relentless regulatory change keeps adding cost and complexity. Each of these is also a feature of the energy transition, and retailers that learn to navigate them well will find themselves better placed to compete as the market changes.
While risk cuts across the supply chain, no single party wants to own it. It’s the retailers who are left locked in long-term contracts, shouldering charges no one else takes accountability for. They know they can’t keep accepting loss as the cost of doing business, but they don’t have the visibility needed to put a stop to it. What looks manageable on the surface often isn’t, and the bigger problems sit deeper in the gaps between systems and data, which are quietly draining value.
Across the market, big events like wholesale spikes or regulatory shifts usually draw retailers’ attention away from the less obvious changes. But as a result, margins are left to bleed out under the radar and contribute to invisible erosion.
For many retailers, margin erosion comes from an accumulation of hundreds of small, hidden leaks like settlement adjustments, imbalance drift, hedging timing, incorrect metadata and shifting non-commodity charges. This is often driven by data discrepancies and siloes, which leads to inaccurate or inconsistent forecasts.
What the energy transition demands next
The energy transition is creating a new commercial landscape, with growing opportunities coming from surging data centre demand, the continued roll out of renewables and the growing role of dynamic pricing. But there’s also an extra layer of added complexity to consider. New products like green tariffs, flexibility services and EV charging contracts carry cost structures that existing tools were never built to model. Upcoming shifts will only widen the gap between retailers who can price and manage these products accurately, and those still relying on static models or spreadsheets.
So rather than wrestling with siloed systems, retailers need to see the full margin picture in one place. There are a set of fundamental principles that retailers should follow, and it starts with visibility, gaining a real-time understanding of margin at contract level, not just portfolio level. Building a single, trusted data foundation is essential to forecast accurately as it allows margin to be analysed continuously, so underperforming contracts are exposed before losses spiral.
From there, retailers can empower their commercial teams to price with confidence, including the new generation of transition products like green tariffs, flexibility agreements and EV charging bundles. By aligning pricing logic and billing execution, complex products can be invoiced accurately, and AI can be used to anticipate the right product mix needed to retain and grow accounts.
AI also helps eliminate the manual processing, reconciliation steps and last-minute struggle with spreadsheets energy retailers know all too well. Without those distractions, experts can focus on where they bring the most value.
This new approach turns margin into the foundation from which retailers can support decarbonisation without sacrificing profitability, responding effectively to the energy transition while doing right by their business.
Learn more: https://www.gorilla.co/
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