More and more companies are signing or considering PPAs with renewable-energy producers. The motivations are concrete: cost predictability over years, ESG goals, protection against spot-price volatility. Yet a PPA alone does not solve one fundamental problem — a wind farm produces when the wind blows, not when the plant hits its consumption peak.
This problem is solved by an energy management and optimization system. Percee EMOS automatically shifts a facility's flexible loads — HVAC, refrigeration, vehicle charging, batch processes — into the hours when the farm is actually producing. The effect: the company consumes the maximum of its contracted energy during its generation hours, limits more expensive spot purchases at the peak, and automates ESG/CSRD reporting from the same data.
Below we explain what a corporate PPA is, how it works in practice, and why such a system is an essential complement to any Power Purchase Agreement.
A PPA is a long-term contract to buy electricity directly from a renewable producer — most often the operator of a wind or solar farm. Instead of buying energy from a supplier at a variable price, the company generally agrees a fixed price (or a pricing formula) with the developer for a period of 10 to 15 years.
Two main types of PPA exist on the market:
A typical corporate PPA buyer is an entity with annual consumption above 1 GWh — retail chains, production plants, logistics centers, data centers. For smaller organizations a PPA is rarely worthwhile, given transaction costs and developers' volume requirements.
Three main reasons to choose a PPA: price hedging (protection against price rises), delivery of ESG commitments and initiatives such as RE100, and long-term budget-planning certainty.
Legal frameworks for corporate PPAs now exist across most European markets, enabling direct contracts between renewable generators and end buyers. The market is growing, though it remains younger than the more mature PPA markets in Scandinavia or on the Iberian Peninsula.
A typical contract today runs for around 10 years, with annual volumes from tens to a couple of hundred GWh. The source is most often a wind farm or a large PV installation. On the supply side stand renewable developers, aggregators and specialist brokers. On the buyer side, retail and logistics companies — sectors with large, repeatable consumption — are entering PPAs more and more often.
The PPA price is usually lower than the forecast average spot price over the long term. That is the main advantage from a CFO's point of view. There is, however, an important caveat: a renewable farm's generation profile never matches the company's consumption profile. And that is the point at which the contract alone stops being enough.
A wind farm produces when the wind blows. A PV installation — when the sun shines. Meanwhile a production plant has consumption peaks tied to its business schedule. Air conditioning in a supermarket runs hard in the late afternoon, when the building has been heated by the sun and customers are arriving. Logistics centers charge their electric fleet at night. These profiles rarely coincide.
The consequences are tangible. During hours of renewable over-production the company does not consume "its own" PPA energy — often the surplus goes to the market at a low price, or the company is charged an extra fee. During consumption peaks, when the farm is not producing, the company buys energy on the spot market, often more expensively than the PPA rate. The result: a double burden. Once under the PPA, again on the balancing market.
The solution requires neither changing the contract nor building energy storage (though that is also an option, in reality a very expensive one). The first, most cost-effective step is shifting flexible loads on the demand side into the hours of actual renewable generation. This is the job of an energy management and optimization system (EMOS), which correlates the generation forecast with the operating schedule of the buyer's equipment.
Percee neither sells nor brokers PPAs. The platform's role begins where the signature on the contract ends — in the daily management of consumption in the context of the renewable generation profile.
The platform integrates with the farm's generation data (via the aggregator's API or based on weather forecasts) and sets it against the facility's real consumption profile. On that basis, EMOS automatically shifts flexible loads — HVAC, hot water, refrigeration, charging, batch processes — into the hours of highest renewable generation.
The second dimension is reporting. A PPA generates data needed in ESG reports and CSRD reports: the share of renewable energy in total consumption, volume purchased vs consumed, carbon footprint. Percee aggregates this data automatically, at 15-minute resolution. This eliminates the manual collation of spreadsheets with data from the aggregator, the grid operator and internal measurements.
A PPA and an energy management and optimization system answer two different questions. PPA: "what is the maximum we will pay for energy, and where does it come from?" Percee EMOS: "how do we use that energy so as not to pay extra?"
Without a system like Percee, a company with a PPA has a secured price but does not control how much of that energy it actually consumes optimally. The difference between a well- and a poorly-managed corporate PPA is not a matter of the rate. It is a matter of the remaining costs: balancing charges, spot purchases at the peak, unused surpluses.
The full strategy looks like this: the PPA fixes the price and provides a path to ESG goals. Percee maximizes the physical use of the contracted energy and minimizes the costs the PPA does not cover. Adding a virtual-power-plant model goes further still — offering demand flexibility as a service on the balancing market. Percee EMOS supports such scenarios too.
Together: the company knows what it pays, pays as little as possible, and has the data to prove it to auditors, the board and the regulator.
Have a PPA, or just analyzing one? No commitment — we can walk through together how Percee would fit your strategy, from integrating with the renewable-farm profile to automating ESG reporting. Let's talk →
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