A power purchase agreement is a long-term financial contract between a corporate buyer and a renewable energy developer. Once signed, managing that PPA effectively (before the first invoice even arrives) is where most teams fall short.
You signed the deal—but, between then and COD, the rules of the game have changed. From volatile markets to shifting policies, today’s clean energy leaders must rethink how they manage risk and expectations before the cash starts flowing.
Join us to learn how leading teams are avoiding surprises, aligning with finance, and turning a signed power purchase agreement into a strategic asset—not a headache.
Key Takeaways:
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.
Amber Artrip: Welcome to today’s webinar on managing power purchase agreement volatility and performance tracking pre-COD. This session is being recorded and will be sent to all registrants within 24 hours. It will also be available on our website at verse.inc. Please use the Q&A button in Zoom to submit questions — we’ll address as many as we can at the end of the session.
Sam Cotterall: Thanks, Amber. Today we’re focused on a part of the power purchase agreement journey that doesn’t get nearly enough attention: the period between signing a power purchase agreement and reaching commercial operation date, or COD — when the electrons are actually flowing and settlements begin.
Sam Cotterall: We’ll start by acknowledging the current market context. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed this month, and as an industry we’re still understanding what this new reality means. That’s the backdrop. The focus of today’s session, though, is what you can do given that backdrop — specifically, how to work with existing power purchase agreement commitments that are signed but not yet online, and how to shift from a reactive to a proactive mindset when managing your power purchase agreement before your first invoice arrives. We’ll cover the market context, walk through the risks specific to the pre-COD period, and then I’ll demo how the Verse platform supports this process.
Sam Cotterall: The rules of the game have changed. The energy market has moved from what I’d describe as a chess environment — controlled, rules-based, relatively predictable — to something closer to dodgeball: faster, less predictable, and requiring constant adaptation. Many of us signed a power purchase agreement under the old rules. The question now is how to manage your power purchase agreement well under the new rules.
Sam Cotterall: There are three broad dynamics driving this shift. First, demand growth. After nearly two decades of flat electricity demand in the developed world, we are now in a period of meaningful load growth driven by AI and data centers, as well as industrial electrification. Efficiency gains are slowing while power prices are rising, and this will dynamically reshape price curves in both near-term and long-term markets.
Sam Cotterall: Second, a supply-demand imbalance is emerging. The Inflation Reduction Act created strong incentives to build new clean capacity — but the One Big Beautiful Bill and related executive orders are likely to slow those additions. An August executive order now requires Secretary-level approval for any infrastructure on federal land, which is particularly significant west of the Mississippi where nearly half of all land is federally owned. That’s not just a tax credit issue — it affects permitting timelines and interconnection. Clean capacity additions are likely to lag behind load growth, putting upward pressure on prices and adding volatility.
Sam Cotterall: Third, what this means for existing commitments. Large corporate and hyperscaler buyers view electrons as a business imperative and are largely continuing to operate as normal despite higher prices. Some global organizations are looking at other markets — Canada, the EU — where procurement may be more cost-effective. And some energy managers are revisiting complementary strategies: site-level battery energy storage, efficiency, cogeneration. What hasn’t changed is that a signed power purchase agreement is a 12-to-15-year financial commitment. Those settlements are still coming.
Sam Cotterall: Here’s the core problem we’re addressing today: the first-invoice surprise. Getting a power purchase agreement signed is a hard-won milestone. There’s internal education, external RFPs, months of negotiation. When you finally sign, it’s natural to take a breath, enjoy the recognition, and shift focus to the next initiative. The project still needs to be financed and built before electrons flow — and that gap, from signature to COD, is typically one to two years, sometimes longer.
Sam Cotterall: The problem is that the market doesn’t pause during that time. In a traditional consulting-supported model, teams often disengage from the project during this window and re-engage once settlements start. By then, it’s too late to adjust your budget, set up accrual systems, or re-align internal expectations. You’re explaining what happened instead of managing what’s coming.
Sam Cotterall: Building a feedback loop pre-COD prevents that downstream disruption. The goal is to be proactive — to understand what your asset is likely to do before it does it, so you’re never caught holding the bag.
Sam Cotterall: One specific and underappreciated risk in this pre-COD window is COD timing itself. Supply chain constraints, permitting delays, and interconnection timelines are all less predictable than they used to be, and COD shifts happen. This is a real-world example showing how a seemingly minor shift in commercial operation date can have major cash flow implications.
Sam Cotterall: In this case, a client’s target COD was May. It slipped to October — still within the outside COD window in the contract, meaning no liquidated damages were owed. But missing the high-priced summer months entirely had a significant impact on revenue in those first six months. The financial difference was well over a million dollars, and the sustainability team found itself having to explain a settlement profile to finance and leadership that looked very different from original expectations — not because anything went wrong contractually, but because of timing.
Sam Cotterall: The takeaway is that the time of year a project comes online materially affects your settlement curve. That is forecastable. As you receive milestone updates from your counterparty during the construction period, you can and should be modeling what a COD shift means for your first year of performance.
The Buildout Effect: Lessons from Spain
Sam Cotterall: We often use California and ERCOT as examples of high renewable penetration markets where solar buildout has compressed intraday pricing. This time, we want to look at Spain, which is relevant for organizations evaluating European power purchase agreement procurement as an alternative or complement to U.S. contracts.
Sam Cotterall: Spain has seen a massive solar buildout over the past decade. Total demand in Spain is around 40 gigawatts, and at peak solar hours, up to 80% of that can now be met by solar generation alone. The result is significant intraday price depression during the hours when solar assets are generating — which is exactly when power purchase agreement revenues are earned. Looking at the 24-hour average price from 2020 through 2025, the trend is clear: average prices have been falling year over year as solar capacity has grown.
Sam Cotterall: We modeled a 100-megawatt Spanish asset at both a €40 and €50 strike price. Power purchase agreement holders are seeing lower-than-expected values in the hours that matter most to their settlements. This revenue compression is real, and it’s often predictable — the continued buildout of solar is not a surprise. What’s required is an hourly approach to forecasting that accounts for the intraday price impact of additional renewable penetration, not just an annual average. Dummy power purchase agreement settlements can help surface this risk before it appears on the books.
Sam Cotterall: The core idea is straightforward: don’t wait for actual invoices to understand your asset’s financial profile. Simulate cash flows before COD using real data and market conditions.
Sam Cotterall: Here’s how we do it. We start with your asset specifics — equipment specs, contract terms, settlement point — and overlay actual historical weather data for that location. We then apply real-time market pricing and Verse’s proprietary forecast. This trains a machine learning model on what your asset would have done had it been operating in that market. The result is a monthly view of what generation, gross revenue, market revenue, and net spend would have looked like — giving you a historical baseline to compare against your original approval case assumptions.
Sam Cotterall: From there, we run dummy settlements. Before a single real invoice arrives, you have a model-based view of what that first invoice is likely to say. Two to three weeks before an actual invoice is due, the platform can provide an estimate based on real-time generation tracking and market pricing. And we use the pre-COD period to set up telemetry data integrations — so that when the asset is live, actual generation data flows directly into the platform via API, giving you real-time performance visibility from day one.
Sam Cotterall: The accuracy improvement is significant. In a representative month we analyzed, the traditional developer 8,760 profile paired with a fundamental forecast predicted a negative net settlement of roughly $240,000. The Verse model generation approach predicted a positive settlement of approximately $1.5 million. The actual settlement came in at $1.7 million. That’s the difference between a finance team that’s blindsided and one that’s prepared.
Sam Cotterall: The pre-COD modeling approach gives your organization three things. First, financial clarity — confidence in a budget figure before COD, and a system for tracking how that forecast evolves over time. Second, internal risk literacy — stakeholders across finance, accounting, treasury, and sustainability can understand what drives the asset’s performance and what market changes mean for the P&L. Third, day-one readiness — when the first real invoice arrives, you’re not starting from scratch. Your accrual process is set up, your finance partners have context, and deviations from expectations can be explained proactively rather than discovered reactively.
Sam Cotterall: Verse supports this through a combination of software and high-touch advisory. The platform handles ongoing analytics, performance tracking, invoice validation, and data management. The advisory layer adds market context, industry relationships, and interpretation. The goal is a co-pilot for your clean energy program — not a tool that replaces expertise, but one that amplifies it.
Sam Cotterall: The Verse platform is called Arya. I’ll walk through the key capabilities relevant to pre-COD management.
Sam Cotterall: The foundation is your load and supply data. You enter the specifics of each asset — power purchase agreement terms, REC agreements, financial hedges, load — and the platform uses that as the backbone for all downstream analysis. This feeds into everything from wholesale market exposure analysis to renewable glide path planning to portfolio insights.
Sam Cotterall: Within portfolio insights, you can view your full asset portfolio rolled up or drill into individual projects. For each asset, you can see historical performance using what we call a best available estimate — the platform’s ML model using actual weather and market data to simulate how the asset would have performed even without invoice data. Looking forward, you get a regularly updated forecast. Forecasts are versioned and named, so you can compare a budget forecast from December against the current view and understand exactly where and why expectations have changed. You can toggle between net spend, market revenue, and generation to understand the drivers.
Sam Cotterall: Invoice validation is a core feature. When a developer submits an invoice, Verse automatically ingests it and checks for data errors — pricing mismatches, interval-level calculation errors, timestamp issues. In the demo, I showed an example where the power purchase agreement price was misprinted for the last two days of a month, affecting every interval in that period. That kind of error would go undetected in a manual review process. The platform flags it automatically. Beyond data errors, the platform compares invoice generation against modeled expected generation, helping identify whether deviations are due to reporting issues or actual underperformance — which may warrant a conversation with your counterparty.
Audience Question: How early in the project lifecycle do you recommend starting this kind of modeling? Is it only helpful post-close, or can we use it earlier?
Sam Cotterall: Great question. I wouldn’t start this before you have a signed power purchase agreement — during the RFP and short-list phase, the right tool is our valuation app, which focuses on power purchase agreement contract-term NPV and annual cash flows to support the investment decision. But once commercial terms are agreed and you have executive or board approval to move forward, that’s when I’d start building the pre-COD model. At that point, you know your strike price, your settlement point, your equipment specs. You can start running dummy invoices, creating a phantom asset, and training the model on historical performance at that location. The sweet spot is post-signature, pre-COD.
Audience Question: Any advice on bringing sustainability and finance teams together in this process?
Sam Cotterall: This is one of the clearest benefits of a single platform. Verse is not a per-license tool — we work with your whole organization. Whether it’s accounting, finance, treasury, sustainability, or procurement, everyone can have access to the same data and view it through the lens that matters to their role. Some of our clients have a small group managing the platform and disseminating information; others open it broadly to anyone who touches the asset. Either way, the key is replacing siloed spreadsheets with a shared data environment where the sustainability team’s assumptions and the finance team’s accruals are grounded in the same numbers.
Audience Question: Is there a way to trial the platform?
Sam Cotterall: Absolutely. We’d love to set that up. The proof is in the pudding — we want you to see the type of information you’d have access to and evaluate it against your specific portfolio. Reach out through the website or reply to our follow-up email and we’ll get you connected.
Sam Cotterall: To summarize: the new standard operating procedure for power purchase agreement management is to forecast like your asset is already online — before it is. That means building your power purchase agreement budget before COD, living the volatility before you’re living the volatility, and using software as a co-pilot so that when the first invoice arrives, your team is ready. The goal is to shift from reactive to proactive, and the time to start is now.
Amber Artrip: Thank you, Sam, and thank you to everyone who joined us today. The recording and additional case studies will be sent via email within 24 hours — just reply to that email to get connected with the team. We’ll see you at the next webinar.
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