A Practical Framework to Explain PPA Performance to Leadership

In Verse’s recent webinar, Director of Client Enablement Sam Cotterall and Operations Business Manager Amber Lin broke down a challenge most teams run into once a deal goes live: how to clearly and confidently explain PPA performance to leadership. You negotiate a strong contract, and then the real questions start. Is the asset performing the way it should? Why is the budget drifting this month? And when developers point to curtailment, basis risk, or “market conditions,” how do you know what’s real? 

The throughline was simple: most teams don’t need more data. They need a practical framework for translating asset behavior into executive-ready answers, especially in volatile markets. 

Why Explaining PPA Performance Is Harder Than It Looks

Renewables create a specific kind of confusion: performance is rarely about one thing. 

A single month’s outcome can be driven by a mix of: 

• how much the asset produced, 
• when it produced relative to prices, 
• and how contract terms translate those outcomes into settlement dollars. 

That’s why two assets in the same region can “feel” like they experienced the same month and still land in very different places financially. 

Extreme events make this painfully obvious. During winter storms, heat waves, or grid stress events, leadership questions get more urgent. Everyone wants to know, quickly, whether you captured value or missed it. The catch is that many teams don’t have a confident answer until invoices arrive weeks later. That’s what makes PPA performance so difficult to summarize in a single number.

The framework: Four pillars that map to executive questions 

When you’re explaining a result, the fastest way to build confidence is to use a repeatable structure. What we usually see work is breaking PPA performance into four pillars. Each one answers a distinct leadership question, and together they explain most monthly variance without getting lost in edge cases. 

Verse Business Operations Manager, Amber Lin, explains how to breakdown PPA performance into four pillars. Watch the full webinar replay here.

1) Resource and expected generation (PPA performance starts with output) 

Was the “fuel” there, and did we perform relative to expectation? 

Start by separating resource-driven variance from performance issues. If wind speeds were down or irradiance was weak, that’s not a surprise in renewables. It still impacts budget, but it’s a different story than “the asset didn’t show up.” 

What tends to help is comparing the month to: 

• a long-term average (context for “was this abnormal?”), and 
• your expected profile (context for “did we underperform?”). 

This establishes the baseline before you talk about dollars. 

2) Market context and pricing drivers for PPA performance 

What did prices do, and why did they do it? 

Leadership doesn’t need a market lecture. They need the short causal chain. 

Prices typically move because of a small number of drivers: 

• demand (often weather-driven), 
• fuel economics and marginal generation, 
• congestion and local constraints, 
• and broader structural dynamics (load growth, renewable penetration). 

Your job is to translate “prices were up/down” into “here’s what changed and whether it’s transient or structural.” 

3) Timing, capture rate, and PPA performance 

Did we generate during the hours that mattered? 

This is the most common disconnect: people assume more generation equals better performance. In practice, value depends on when you generated. 

Capture is the bridge between asset behavior and financial outcome. It helps answer: 

• Did we produce during high-price intervals? 
• Did we miss peaks due to outages, icing, curtailment, or derates? 
• Did the market crash during our production hours? 

If you need one “executive-friendly” concept that still has analytical rigor, capture rate is usually it. 

4) Contract mechanics and claim validation that shape PPA performance 

How did the PPA translate reality into settlement, and are the explanations valid? 

Even strong internal teams get tripped up here, mostly because the contract logic lives in the background until something breaks. 

This is where developers often point to: 

• curtailment, 
• basis, 
• negative pricing, 
• availability clauses, 
• floors/ceilings and other settlement terms. 

The goal isn’t to assume bad intent. It’s to be able to say, confidently, “yes, that claim matches the data and the contract,” or “no, there’s a gap we need to resolve.” 

How to turn PPA performance into an exec-ready narrative 

Once you have the four pillars, the output should be simple. 

What tends to land best with leadership is a one-page (or one-slide) summary that follows this order: 

1. The answer: on track or off track, and by how much. 
2. The drivers: the top 2 to 3 reasons, mapped to the pillars. 
3. What it means: transient vs repeatable, and what you’re watching next month. 
4. Any open items: invoice questions, developer follow-ups, or contract interpretation issues. 

This structure does two things. It reduces the urge to overshare analysis, and it makes your explanation defensible without making it complicated. 

Key takeaways on PPA performance 

• You don’t need more data. You need a consistent explanation framework.
• Most variance is explainable through generation, market context, timing/capture, and contract mechanics. 
• Capture is often the cleanest way to translate “asset behavior” into “financial outcome.” 
• Developer explanations are useful, but they’re not the final word. Validation is where confidence comes from. 
• In volatile markets, speed matters. Leadership asks in hours, not weeks. 

Watch the webinar replay here and see the practical framework Sam and Amber use to translate PPA performance into executive-ready answers.