From Risk to Resilience: How Financial Leaders Are Managing Volatility with Energy-as-a-Service

The reason CFOs are being pulled into areas like energy management and operating infrastructure is that the financial impact is too significant to ignore. “The market and macroeconomic environment in which energy companies operate is becoming more volatile, which makes planning, budgeting, and forecasting far more difficult . . . CFOs and their teams must bring a rigorous, long-term value perspective to the critical, strategic, and tactical decision-making that will drive performance,” says Boston Consulting Group. 

This reality has been thrust upon financial leaders due to several factors: 

• Persistent market uncertainty: Sticky inflation, global trade disruptions, and shifting regulatory landscapes have disrupted traditional planning and budgeting cycles. 
  
  
• Rising operational risks: Energy supply disruptions and price volatility directly impact business continuity and financial performance.
  
  
• Escalating retrofit and labor costs: Inflation, supply chain disruptions, rising wages, and high R&D costs have dramatically increased expenses associated with energy infrastructure upgrades.
  
  Increased uncertainty (as shown in the US Economic Policy Uncertainty Index) makes long-term planning feel almost impossible for financial leaders.

Recent operational shocks have only amplified these issues for CFOs. This was starkly illustrated in April 2025 when city-stopping blackouts swept through Spain and Portugal, costing businesses approximately €1.6 billion in just a few short hours. Manufacturing industries suffered the most severe impacts. Volkswagen’s Navarra plant alone lost production of approximately 1,400 vehicles, while the meat industry faced estimated losses of up to €190 million, primarily due to refrigeration failures.

North America isn’t immune to the devastating consequences of grid instability either. In 2021, Texas saw a series of extreme weather events that strained its power grid and left 4.5 million homes and businesses without power, resulting in at least $130 billion in losses and forcing Toyota’s San Antonio manufacturing plant to halt production for several days. This signals that when the power goes out and there is no backup plan, it’s not just operations that suffer; it’s also the CFO’s balance sheet, supply chain, and risk exposure that are affected. It also shows us that energy volatility is no longer a theoretical risk for businesses, and today’s forward-thinking CFOs are implementing backup and risk mitigation strategies to prepare for the unexpected.

Of course, a financial leader’s traditional strategy during times of uncertainty has been greater liquidity. But herein lies a CFO’s current dilemma: balancing the urgent need for energy reduction and resilience with the equally pressing imperative to preserve capital flexibility and growth trajectory. 

This tension is exacerbated by the traditional capital-intensive approach to energy infrastructure. As KPMG’s report on scaling renewables observes, cost and available financing remain the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of sustainable energy solutions: “investing in buildings to be more energy efficient, and electrifying transport can only happen when ample supplies of capital are available.” Many organizations recognize the benefits of going green but struggle to produce a strong business case for capital expenditure (CapEx) allocation, considering the competing business initiatives required for efficiency and renewable projects. 

CFOs now find themselves caught between competing pressures—the need to upgrade aging and inefficient energy systems and the essential business mandate to remain financially agile and meet future growth targets.

Cost and available financing remain the biggest barriers to widespread adoption of sustainable energy solutions.

—KPMG’s Turning the Tide in Scaling Renewables Report

This impasse has catalyzed an important shift in how the modern CFO approaches energy and infrastructure investments. Rather than viewing energy infrastructure as a capital-intensive cost center, progressive CFOs are turning it into a strategic hedge against volatility, one that supports enterprise-wide resilience. They’re actively hunting for solutions that de-risk upfront investments and deliver measurable outcomes. This includes exploring energy cost management strategies, grid-independent resilience such as solar and battery storage, smarter building systems that reduce exposure to market volatility, as well as creative capital solutions for these measures. 

What top financial leaders understand is that volatility demands adaptation, and the most successful CFOs are those who turn liabilities into assets. In this light, the choice facing CFOs today is clear: continue treating energy-intensive, aging infrastructure and systems as uncontrollable costs to be absorbed or transform them into strategic assets that build resilience against an increasingly volatile market.

Enter Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS), a model that converts capital-intensive energy and infrastructure modernization projects into long-term operational savings, effectively transferring performance risks to specialized service providers while achieving instant financial benefits.  

Historically, infrastructure and maintenance spending for facility upgrades has fallen under capital expenditure (CapEx) budgets, placing these critical projects in direct competition with other strategic business initiatives, such as growth investments, new product development, technology upgrades, or market expansion. As a result, sustainability and energy efficiency upgrades have often been delayed or deprioritized in favor of projects perceived as delivering more immediate returns. 

Redaptive’s specialized EaaS model addresses this challenge through sophisticated, structured financing solutions that are customized precisely to each customer’s financial and operational needs. Instead of merely “funding” projects, Redaptive creates tailored, off-balance-sheet arrangements that allow customers to pay via predictable monthly payments or through a share of realized savings. This strategic financial structuring preserves valuable CapEx budgets, mitigates competition with growth initiatives, accelerates timelines, reduces operational risks, and unlocks long-postponed infrastructure and maintenance upgrades.

By shifting infrastructure and energy spending from CapEx to operational expenses (OpEx), CFOs gain the following clear advantages:  

• Capital preservation: Maintaining liquidity and available capital for critical growth initiatives and core business investments. 

• Risk transfer: Moving performance and operational risk to specialized providers, reducing internal exposure. 

• Predictable costs: Converting historically volatile energy and maintenance costs into stable, fixed monthly expenses, significantly enhancing budgeting accuracy. 

• Accelerated implementation: Avoiding lengthy CapEx approval cycles, enabling rapid project deployment and faster realization of benefits. 

• Balance sheet optimization: Achieving off-balance-sheet financing that preserves debt capacity and strengthens financial ratios. 

• Scalability and flexibility: Allowing seamless and rapid scalability of infrastructure upgrades across multiple facilities or business units without significant incremental capital investment. 

• Enhanced operational efficiency: Freeing internal teams to focus more directly on core business functions rather than managing infrastructure complexities. 

• Increased data visibility: Examining real-time analytics, smart metering, and building performance insights to identify inefficiencies across multisite portfolios for more informed decision-making and continuous optimization of energy spend. 

Read how one Fortune 25 banking firm used data analytics and energy services to optimize HVAC assets, resulting in $52.5 million in gross energy and maintenance savings over 10 years—all while maintaining capital flexibility for core business investments.