For decades, electric utilities, suppliers and grid operators have faced a fundamental dilemma when evaluating energy-intensive customers: how do you serve Bitcoin miners, AI, HPC and other energy-intensive operations without exposing your organization to catastrophic financial risk? The traditional answer has been simple but limiting—demand massive upfront collateral or walk away from the business entirely.
But what if there was a better way? OBM’s Real-Time Settlements (RTS) is fundamentally changing how forward-thinking power suppliers approach large-load customer risk management by automating daily payment cycles and eliminating traditional collateral requirements.
The collateral trap: Why traditional risk management limits market growth
Traditional risk management operates on a simple premise: require enough collateral to cover potential non-payment losses, typically 45-60 days of estimated usage. For a 15-megawatt Bitcoin mining operation consuming roughly $550,000 monthly in electricity, this translates to collateral requirements between $825,000 - $1,100,000 — amounts that eliminate most potential customers from consideration entirely.
This approach artificially constrains your addressable market, forcing you to reject high-revenue customers who could significantly improve your load factor and profitability.
Traditional collateral requirements also assume that payment risk is binary—either a customer pays their full monthly bill or they default entirely. This ignores the reality that most payment issues emerge gradually and can be addressed through early intervention rather than massive collateral draws.
Real-Time Settlements: A financial innovation game-changer
Real-Time Settlements fundamentally redefines payment risk by automating daily settlement cycles and providing instant response capabilities when payment issues emerge. Instead of hoping customers will pay monthly bills totaling millions of dollars, RTS automatically processes smaller daily payments directly from customer bank accounts, dramatically reducing exposure while improving cash flow predictability.
The mathematics are compelling. Under traditional monthly billing, power suppliers face 45-day payment cycles with maximum exposure of millions per customer. RTS reduces this cycle to 3 days or less, with daily invoices calculated from real-time actual energy usage and market prices.
Most importantly, RTS provides what no other settlement solution offers: a cure in the event of non-payment. When daily settlements fail, integrated load control systems can instantly curtail power consumption behind the meter, preventing additional exposure accumulation while providing time to resolve payment problems. This transforms payment risk from an uncontrollable external factor into a manageable operational variable.
The competitive advantage: Serve growth markets with confidence
For risk managers, RTS creates opportunities to confidently serve customer segments that competitors consider too risky to touch. Bitcoin miners and other energy-intensive operations represent some of the fastest-growing electricity demand in the market, but they've historically been excluded due to perceived payment risk.
While competitors demand millions in collateral and reject promising customers, power suppliers using RTS can offer competitive rates with minimal risk exposure and faster customer onboarding.
The path forward: From risk avoidance to risk innovation
The energy suppliers thriving in tomorrow's energy landscape won't be those that avoid risk most effectively—they'll be those that manage risk most intelligently. Real-Time Settlements represents exactly this type of innovation: technology that transforms risk into manageable, profitable business opportunities.
For risk managers evaluating high-power industrial customers, the question isn't whether these customers represent risk—they do. The question is whether you'll manage that risk through outdated collateral requirements that limit market opportunities, or through proven settlement technology that de-risks energy payments while enabling confident growth into the most dynamic segments of the electricity market.
With RTS, power suppliers stop hoping customers will pay and start knowing they will pay—daily, automatically and with built-in protection if they don't. The choice and the competitive advantage, is yours.
About OBM
OBM is a leader in flexible load management solutions, providing energy agility, operational simplicity and risk mitigation through innovative compute management platforms, comprehensive energy optimization technology and broad energy partnerships. With a proven track record of managing loads up to 500 MW and integrating them into leading demand response programs nationwide, OBM empowers power suppliers to transform risk into revenue by confidently serving high-energy customers with confidence while gaining competitive market advantage.
For more information about OBM's Real-Time Settlements solutions for power suppliers, visit https://obm.io/power-suppliers/.
