Corporate energy procurement has scaled rapidly, but the infrastructure to support PPA management after signing has not kept pace. As portfolios grow more complex, spanning multiple markets, technologies, and stakeholders, organizations are increasingly exposed to financial risk, performance blind spots, and fragmented data.
In this webinar, Ryan Skinner, Research Director at Verdantix, joins Sam Cotterall, Director of Client Enablement at Verse, to unpack new research on how leading organizations are closing the PPA management gap and bringing greater visibility, control, and financial rigor to their renewable energy portfolios.
Drawing on Verdantix survey data and real-world enterprise examples, the session examines why traditional approaches — spreadsheets, consultants, and add-on platform modules — are no longer sufficient for modern PPA management. It also highlights how organizations are evolving toward purpose-built solutions that enable continuous performance tracking, financial validation, and forward-looking decision-making.
This session is designed for corporate energy, sustainability, and finance leaders responsible for managing large energy portfolios and ensuring they deliver on both financial and carbon goals.
Sam Cotterall
Director of Client Enablement | Verse
As Director of Client Enablement at Verse, Sam Cotterall acts as a cross-functional leader, blending deep product expertise with market knowledge to bridge product, sales, and customer success functions.
Sam joined Verse from Schneider Electric, where he was a manager on the Renewable Energy and Carbon Advisory consulting team. In that capacity, Sam partnered with Fortune 500 companies to design, implement, and optimize global renewable energy strategies. He led clients through complex decision-making processes with a specialization in renewable energy and tax credit procurement in North America.
Prior to Schneider, Sam worked at BloombergNEF to help investors, businesses, and policy makers navigate the energy transition through data and insights.
Ryan Skinner
Research Director | Verdantix
Ryan Skinner is Research Director at Verdantix, where he leads analyst teams covering sustainability software, climate risk, energy transition, and AI’s role across all three. With nearly a decade at Forrester before joining Verdantix, Ryan brings deep expertise advising technology and business leaders on software selection, market strategy, and innovation. He chairs panels, delivers keynotes, and hosts a dozen-plus podcasts and webinars annually — and oversees the firm’s Green Quadrant methodology, one of the most recognized benchmarking products in the sustainability research space.
Jessica Hunt (E&E Leader, Co-Owner): Hello and welcome. We are so thankful that you are joining us today for this webinar with Verse and Verdantix. Today’s topic is “An Industry Analyst Perspective: Closing the PPA Management Gap.”
A few housekeeping items before I turn things over to Ryan and Sam. This event is being recorded — please don’t feel like you have to take notes. Be fully engaged in the conversation and ask as many questions as you’d like during the next 45 minutes.
We will have time at the end for attendee questions. If we don’t get to your specific question, the speakers will follow up with you as soon as possible. And yes — Verse will be following up with all attendees and registrants after today’s event with a copy of the slide deck.
We’re going to start with a quick opening poll: please share what you hope to get out of today’s event, and feel free to share any questions in the chat as well. I’ll be on the back end — let us know in the comments where you’re joining from. Thank you, Sam and Ryan, for being here.
Sam Cotterall (Verse, Director of Client Enablement): Thanks so much for having us, Jessica. It’s great to be back on an E&E Leader webinar. Jessica challenged us not to just read our LinkedIn resumes, so here’s my fun fact: I live in Colorado, and this is the third year in a row that I’ve managed to ski 50 or more days in a season — which is hard to do with a full-time job. This year was also the worst snowfall year on record in Colorado. And while it’s not directly related to renewable energy, one of the reasons I get up every day and want to work toward renewables and a cleaner future is so that I — and my children and their children — can keep skiing. With that, I’ll hand it over to Ryan.
Ryan Skinner (Verdantix, Research Director): Thank you, Sam. Thank you to Verse, Jessica, and E&E Leader. My name is Ryan Skinner. I’m a research director at Verdantix, a global research and advisory firm focused on sustainability, industrial optimization, EHS, and decarbonization. My team works specifically on energy transition topics — renewable energy, renewable energy procurement, EV charging, and more.
My fun fact: I speak Norwegian fluently, despite not being Norwegian. I’m an American who lives in the UK. If you speak Norwegian, I’d be happy to chat.
Sam Cotterall: I got to watch a World Cup match in Oslo once — I didn’t speak any Norwegian, but it was awesome to see how fluent in English everyone in Scandinavia is.
Ryan Skinner: It’s not easy to learn Norwegian there because everyone wants to speak English to you. And you probably paid a lot for your beers — that’s another fact about Norway.
Ryan Skinner: Let me dive into the content. This talk is really for those of you in corporate procurement, energy, sustainability, or operations roles who are thinking through your energy strategy. I want to start by positing a situation you’re probably all familiar with — where things are steadily getting worse and you’re noticing it.
A classic example: your car starting to show signs of age, a favorite sweater starting to fray. Or a road slowly breaking up through the seasons. You know it’s going to get worse, and you know you should probably do something about it.
There are very specific situations within the energy space where this metaphor applies — problems that are starting to feel a little painful and will only get worse. Today we’re focusing on renewable energy procurement in particular.
I’ll walk through four key areas:
Our Research Base
Our perspective comes from extensive research on the buy side — the corporate, demand side of energy. We survey over 300 energy leaders every year. We also do research into the corporate energy transition solution space, digital grid tech, and specifically last year, a deep dive into renewable energy procurement vendors.
Key Trends in the Energy Landscape
When we asked energy leaders whether their CEOs and C-suites were speeding up or slowing down their energy transition: 66% said speeding up, only 5% said slowing down.
When we asked sustainability leaders how important increasing procurement of renewable energy would be in the coming 12 months: 55% said very important, and more than 80% said important.
Market Growth in Corporate PPAs
Looking at Bloomberg NEF’s year-on-year data on contracted gigawatt capacity for corporate PPAs over nearly 10 years, you see dramatic, steady growth — with incremental additions roughly equivalent to half the UK’s annual electricity consumption being added in corporate PPA volumes per year.
From our own research, the average firm expects to increase their spend on off-site renewables by around 34% from 2026 to 2030. We’re seeing this in examples across industries — Google and TotalEnergies powering Ohio data centers, Rio Tinto signing a 15-year deal for U.S. mining operations, and Network Rail here in the UK signing a PPA for about 300 gigawatt-hours of offshore wind.
The summary: renewable energy deals are only growing. There’s more spend, more deals, and a lot of momentum.
Ryan Skinner: With all of this activity comes more problems. And the more aware you are of these problems, the more you can get ahead of them — giving you competitive advantage and leaving you better prepared.
What’s changing? Businesses are now signing multiple PPAs and managing entire portfolios at once. Each PPA involves a distinct counterparty, distinct performance profiles, and distinct data streams. There are simply more complex deals with more discrete conditions to track across more geographies.
When we asked 350 energy leaders this year how likely they were to redevelop their approach to procuring renewable energy in the next two years: 40% said highly likely, 40% said somewhat likely.
Scope 2 changes are also underway. The working group for Scope 2 has floated changes that will require more specific geographic reporting, hourly accounting (something akin to a 24/7 mandate), and the use of residual mix factors — all of which further complicate procurement, ongoing management, and EAC recognition.
The #1 Challenge Limiting Renewable Energy Procurement
When we asked corporate energy leaders which challenges most limit their ability to procure renewable energy, the top responses were:
This is leading to big questions within businesses. One CEO of a company working with PPAs asked: “Why didn’t we make money on our PPA?” — a question that should never have to be asked with proper management in place.
The Bridge Analogy
Think of it this way: you’re standing at the start of a bridge. At the far end is “PPA bliss.” To get there, you cross seven key steps:
The problem: the steps up to and including signing are very well supported in the market. The steps after signing are not.
During the pre-commercial operation date waiting period, you could face delays, supply chain issues, interconnection permitting problems — and there are very few tools designed to help corporate energy leaders manage this, especially across multiple PPAs. The same goes for contract performance adherence. You essentially have support up to the point of signing, and then you’re on your own. The potential losses across multiple PPAs can be in the millions.
Ryan Skinner: When we surveyed corporate energy leaders, roughly half said a dedicated energy or procurement group leads major energy procurement decisions. About one in five said operations, and a little over a quarter said sustainability.
The challenge is that each group has somewhat conflicting priorities:
Current Solutions — and Their Gaps
Each of these has strengths, but all fall short when it comes to live performance, EAC management, and continuous data.
Ryan Skinner: When we were talking to Verse and looking at their technology as part of our research, we saw it was designed to address many of these post-purchase, ongoing PPA management challenges. Some specific examples:
Sam Cotterall: Thanks, Ryan. I also want to point out that Ryan’s presentation is based on a much longer-form Verdantix report that goes into much greater detail — I’d encourage everyone to check that out.
A quick note on Verse: we’re an SF-based energy platform startup. Our co-founders Matt and Sayad worked on the sell side of energy for a long time and realized that while developers, IPPs, and utilities have purpose-built tools for managing their core business, corporate buyers didn’t have access to the same tools. So they built a technology stack specifically for large energy buyers.
Thinking Beyond the PPA Silo
Before diving into the product, I want to address a question from the chat. We talk about PPA portfolios specifically, but you can’t view energy from a renewable energy procurement silo. You need to understand your costs, your load, your consumption from the site level up to the global portfolio level. By understanding supply and demand together, you can then manage risk — whether that’s market exposure, constructing a hedge portfolio, or controlling behind-the-meter assets like battery energy storage systems.
Sam Cotterall: Verse Portfolio Insights covers your VPPA, PPA, and green tariff portfolios — the full supply side of renewable energy, all in a single pane of glass. Forecasting, accruals, and invoice validation are critical features. But today I want to focus specifically on two areas: pre-COD management and contract adherence.
Pre-COD Framework
We’ve found that the pre-COD period is often a blind spot for energy buyers. You spend significant time with a developer doing an 8,760-hour fundamental forecast to build a 12- or 15-year NPV model — thinking through implied REC value, EACs, and so on. But then there’s a construction period that can take quite some time, and the world looks very different when that asset comes online versus when you signed the contract.
What Verse does is create a digital twin of your asset. When you sign the contract, you know the location, the capacity, the makes and models of the equipment — and we use all of that in the Verse platform to model generation using locational weather data. We don’t just model assumed production; we create dummy settlements by matching that with generation-weighted revenues from real market prices.
We also continuously update the forecast on a weekly basis. The world changes — geopolitical dynamics, market shifts — and having an up-to-date view of how that impacts your PPA portfolio, including assets not yet online, is really important.
What can you do with the digital twin?
Case Study — COD Delay
We had a client whose commercial operation date was pushed back. Rather than capturing high-value summer months, the asset came online later than expected — and it completely blew up their first-year budget. Without an updated view of when the asset was coming online and how that impacted revenues, that budget was caught off guard.
Contract Adherence
Teams spend an enormous amount of effort negotiating contracts — sometimes six months, sometimes multiple years. But what we’ve seen is that companies often forget about the nuance of specific contract terms and their ongoing financial impact.
What we’re really excited about at Verse is the ability to connect directly to SCADA and telemetry platforms to pull real-time generation meter data, market prices, set points, and weather data from the actual sensors on site. This gives offtakers the ability to be proactive — not waiting for an annual availability report or a monthly settlement to find out where you stand.
Case Study — Snow on Solar Panels
A great example of this: a solar array in Alberta, Canada had a contract clause requiring snow removal from panels within a certain time window following a snowfall. By connecting to real-time data, we could see a period of abundant solar resource availability but very low generation — meaning the operator hadn’t cleared the panels as required. This happened during a very high-priced environment and resulted in significant liquidated damages owed to the offtaker.
Beyond specific contract terms, understanding generation shortfalls across a portfolio matters because in North America, fewer RECs received means fewer credits toward your sustainability commitments — and working through contractual provisions to ensure replacement RECs are due, or that performance-based guarantees are in place rather than mechanical availability guarantees, is a meaningful financial protection.
EAC Tracking
Sustainability platforms are purpose-built for downstream reporting, but we think having everything in a single tech stack is really important. Verse tracks:
Jessica Hunt: We have some great questions in the chat. Here’s the first one: long-term contracts are frequently impacted by evolving electricity markets. Can you give examples of how contracts can be adapted based on current market conditions and the data clients are seeing?
Sam Cotterall: I’ll take a first stab at that. There are a couple of ways to think about it. First is learning from performance data. If you’re going back to the RFP process for additional procurement, understanding what worked and what didn’t from your existing portfolio is incredibly important. For example: “We spent a lot of time negotiating a mechanical availability floor — did it pay off? Did we actually see liquidated damages from that?” Being able to quantify — “that $0 price floor saved us Y dollars this year” or “those basis differential caps limited our exposure by X hours” — that’s valuable intelligence for the next contract you sign. Using the performance data from your existing contracts to understand what is buyer-friendly and feeding that back into origination is really important.
Ryan Skinner: Nothing to add there from a research standpoint — Sam’s response covers it well.
Jessica Hunt: Following up on the contract adherence case study: what are some of the most significant financial or operational wins your clients have realized by tightening up contract adherence during the settlement phase?
Sam Cotterall: One of the biggest things I’ve seen is a fundamental rethinking of production-based versus mechanical availability guarantees. The question shouldn’t be “is an inverter online, therefore my project is good?” It should be “is my project generating energy as expected?” Production-based guarantees are beginning to become the new normal because they align incentives for both the developer and the offtaker.
Quantifying the difference — what does a production-based guarantee do for my portfolio compared to a mechanical availability guarantee? — is something we’re actively working through with clients who have those terms in existing agreements, and certainly with those putting them into new ones. That, to me, is one of the most meaningful outcomes of this kind of contract adherence and portfolio performance monitoring.
Jessica Hunt: Ryan, one more for you: what does your research show about PPA procurement timelines, outdated grid infrastructure, and supply chain constraints — and how do they play into each other?
Ryan Skinner: We survey energy leaders all over the world, so we see this vary significantly market to market. Where regulators are moving fastest, the market opens up much more quickly — developers can move faster, financing gets arranged faster. We’ve seen a lot of variability in just the last few years.
When we ask what the most significant challenges are, differences in global regulatory policy come out at the top. When companies see a particular market move very fast or very slow on that front, it reverberates through the business and creates real challenges.
Sam Cotterall: I was going to add — reading some of the questions I didn’t get to while I was presenting — one of the more interesting things I’m seeing from clients is standalone capacity or tolling agreements for utility-scale front-of-meter batteries. If you have offtake exposure to solar, you know that solar is driving midday pricing down and that generation-weighted revenues look very different now than they did in 2022 or 2023. The introduction of large-scale energy storage isn’t just interesting for grid operators — it can be really valuable for corporate offtakers as part of a comprehensive portfolio approach.
Jessica Hunt: Well, we went a little over our planned 45 minutes, but Ryan and Sam — thank you so much for the work you put into today’s event. Sam, it’s always great to work with you and the Verse team. Ryan, it was great to get to know you this week, and thank you for giving us your evening from England.
If you have any additional questions, please feel free to submit them as we close out. And don’t forget you’ll be receiving a copy of the slide deck from the Verse team. Thank you all for joining us.
Sam Cotterall: Thank you.
Ryan Skinner: Thank you.
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