The corporate PPA pitch is seductive: bypass the faceless market, buy clean power straight from the source, lock in costs, lock in savings.

Remove the gloss, though, and you find an arrangement built around compromise. Market risk for businesses that just want predictable energy, rigid pricing and heavy commitments for generators.

Yes, we’re raining on the PPA parade, but with good reason. We also have a better alternative. One that genuinely delivers the promises of a PPA for the 99% of businesses and generators for whom energy costs and fair returns are the difference between survival and failure.

Never designed for business

PPAs are really only good for two things: brand-new, big-money generation projects that need to know there’s someone there to buy the power before pouring concrete, or brand-new, high-demand energy buyers (think a data centre) looking for long-term power certainty at any cost.

The buyer commits to a fixed price for a decade or more, absorbing the risk that market rates crash below their agreed rate. In return, the generator hitches their financing to the buyer’s balance sheet.

Today, platforms and intermediaries are trying to bring that exact mechanism to the mainstream. They’ve shortened the contract lengths, built digital tender portals and tried to pitch PPAs to smaller businesses and independent generators.

Yet while the interfaces have modernised, the machinery hasn’t changed.

The market has taken a debt-underwriting vehicle built for mega-projects and tried to turn it into an everyday trading tool. In doing so, it has inherited all the original flaws: rigid pricing, layered intermediary fees and the same underlying exposure to a volatile wholesale market.

Corporate PPAs were simply never designed for normal businesses buying power, nor for mid-sized renewable generators looking for a fair route to market.

Where the model breaks down

Forcing this model onto regular businesses and independent generators creates two immediate problems.

1. Mismatch, balancing and exposure

Renewable generation (wind, solar) rarely respects office hours. Power isn’t guaranteed when you need it and it can’t be shut off when you don’t. That creates a continuous mismatch: contracts match on paper, but the grid settles in real time, half-hour by half-hour.

Who pays when balancing costs fluctuate? If it’s not clear, it’s likely it lands with the buyer.

When a generator overproduces, you are obliged to pay for all that power whether you need it or not and the surplus gets automatically sold onto the wholesale market. The problem is, renewables tend to overproduce at the exact same time (imagine a windy Sunday night when power demand is virtually nonexistent), creating regional price crashes that can even turn negative. That leaves you paying the generator your full agreed rate, while selling the excess off for pennies. Or worse, literally paying the grid to take it off your hands during these negative price events.

The reverse is just as punishing. When generation drops off during a calm, cloudy weekday, your business still needs electricity. You have to buy power straight off the grid to plug the shortfall, typically during peak hours when wholesale prices spike.

A business enters a PPA expecting an insulated, predictable rate. Instead, every time generation and consumption fall out of sync, the monthly bill takes on the risks and trading costs you thought you were escaping.

2. The devil in the detail

A PPA is not a plug-and-play contract; it’s a bespoke legal undertaking. Six-month negotiations involving specialist energy lawyers, risk consultants and credit underwriters are routine.

Crucially, a PPA cannot physically deliver power across the grid on its own. A licensed utility supplier must still step in to "sleeve" the volume and route it through the national settlement ledger. Every link in that chain takes a cut.

What’s more, many buyers don't realise that a PPA price only covers the power itself. Non-commodity costs (NCCs) – including network distribution charges, transmission fees and policy levies – make up well over half of an electricity bill. They sit outside the contract and get added on top, leaving you with far less budget certainty than advertised.

It’s just as raw a deal for independent generators. To make a long-term PPA palatable to a corporate off-taker, generators are routinely forced to accept steep discounts and onerous balancing terms, while tying their asset’s future to a single customer's credit score.

Large corporations and utility-scale developers may be able to absorb these legal costs, discounts and risks. For the other 99% of businesses and generators, the fees and friction break the business case entirely.

The transaction is the problem

PPAs are often packaged as an alternative to the wholesale market. In reality, they remain exposed to it. Rosso, tem’s transaction infrastructure, was built as a true replacement.

Where a PPA creates mismatch and locks parties into rigid bilateral constraints, Rosso is engineered to create balance.

Instead of tethering one business to one wind farm and hoping the weather plays ball, Rosso balances a live network of thousands of generators and buyers in real time, bypassing the volatility of the wholesale market and the web of intermediaries within it.

The result is stable prices and bills that are up to 30% lower for businesses, alongside significantly better, more reliable pay for the generators powering the system.

You get a straightforward, fixed contract of between 1 and 4 years that fits normal business planning, bills that don’t take a degree to decipher and zero protracted negotiations. In a word: simplicity.

Three questions before you sign a PPA

Before committing to a PPA, ask yourself:

1. Who pays for the balancing risk?

2. What line items in this price can fluctuate after signing?

3. How many intermediaries are taking a cut between the turbine and the meter?

If the answers are blurry, you’re buying risk, not clean energy certainty.