For many buyers, the toughest negotiations around a corporate renewable power purchase agreement (PPA) happen inside their own organisation. The chief financial officer, the operations director and sometimes several competing sustainability teams all need to be won over before a deal can be signed. On the second day of RE-Source 2026 in Amsterdam, a panel moderated by Mikkel Kring of Our New Energy traced how successful deals can win internal support and make it through the boardroom to signature.
Go slow inside, then fast outside
For Cyril Perez, head of origination at Lightsource bp, which has closed 64 PPAs in six years, much depends on getting the order right. “Front-load the strategy discussion,” he said. In the companies where Lightsource bp has signed smoothly, “the executive approving the PPA has seen a scope 1, 2 and 3 abatement cost curve. They have seen for themselves that renewable power is the cheapest form of decarbonisation for much of their business. They have put their head around additionality, whether they want it or need it. The PPA discussion is then about negotiation, risks and strategy fit, not about forcing a strategy conversation that should have happened earlier.”
In Amsterdam, RE-Source 2026 catches the PPA market mid-rethink
Jacob Wædeled Smedegaard, who recently signed the first corporate PPA for the Lars Larsen Group, owner of the Jysk retail chain, backed this up with figures from his own deal. His team spent 18 months preparing internally, and the external negotiations for the Danish deal then took just four months. “We had identified the opportunities before we started looking at PPAs. We had done the alternatives work. So when we went to market, we could focus on the core of the PPA and not have to debate whether this was the right thing to do at all,” he said.
Not everyone at the table wants the same thing
Smedegaard also described the challenge of selling the same deal to several chief financial officers within a group. “The first CFOs said: great, PPA, fixed price, easy for the budget,” he said. “The others said: but what if the market price drops? For them, the fixed price was a risk, not an opportunity. We had to quantify both sides and put it on paper.”
Martin Jacobsen, global category lead for renewable energy at Novonesis, warned against letting the project become too closely identified with sustainability alone. “Do not make it only a sustainability process,” he said. “The moment the share price changes or the company’s fortunes alter, suddenly it is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have. Sell it as a business case first: the long-term securing of energy OPEX. The sustainability benefit is the cherry on top.”
In his experience, the toughest internal audiences are finance and operations, which both ask variations of the same question: where will the spot price be in five years? Jacobsen’s answer is that nobody can know. “Did anyone know Ukraine was going to happen? Did anyone know Iran was going to happen?”
The role of the trusted intermediary
Several panellists pointed out that most corporate buyers, particularly first-time or smaller ones, do not have the internal capacity to run a PPA process alone, and the sellers on the panel see filling that gap as part of their job. “You become a trusted advisor,” said David Kipling, chief executive of On-Site Energy. “You give the client the arsenal to answer the questions they do not yet realise they need to ask. Sometimes the question arrives as ‘I need to reduce scope 2 by 50 percent, but I have no idea how to do it.’”
As a developer, Perez has had the same experience. The least experienced buyers tend to engage law firms or specialist advisers to manage their request-for-proposals process, and Perez argued this works in both parties’ favour. “When you have a top-tier adviser on the other side managing the process, it is smoother,” he said. “Both parties understand the allocation of risks, we get to it faster, and we move on.”
Kring, the moderator, put it more bluntly. In his view, the deal lead inside the buyer cannot be a junior hire with little PPA experience, because they will lack the network and the standing to keep doors open across the organisation. Where that internal seniority is missing, he added, an external adviser can carry part of the weight, provided the mandate is clear.
Behind the meter needs a different conversation
The questions change again when the asset is on site. Kipling described a 15-year commercial relationship in which the provider finances, builds, owns and operates the asset, and in which the CFO’s first question is rarely about sustainability. “It is: what does the return look like? What happens to the asset at the end of the term? What does the bottom line look like?” he said. The chief executive, Kipling added, wants to know whether the site where the asset is installed will still be viable in 10 or 15 years.
Rising gas prices push PPA buyers towards operational assets
Rachel Swiatek of Climate Group, which runs the RE100 initiative and the 24/7 Carbon-Free Coalition, said the Greenhouse Gas Protocol’s ongoing revision, due to conclude by 2028, is now a live C-suite concern. Her advice was to start with the basics. “Start looking at the data you have access to,” she said. “What does your consumption look like? Do you have smart data? Ask your suppliers what they can give you on location and time matching. You can start in just one site or market.” In her view, uncertainty over standards is a reason for companies to be thorough while carrying on with procurement.
Jacobsen made a similar point from the buyer side. In Europe’s liberalised markets, he said, consumption data is available in 15-minute intervals, but in parts of the United States served by vertically integrated utilities, such as Duke Energy in North Carolina, where Novonesis has two of its largest factories, getting hold of that data and acting on it is much harder.
Mandate, sponsor, team
Perez set out what the buyer’s deal team should look like. It needs a deal lead empowered to negotiate externally and to speak to the ultimate decision-makers internally, and a senior sponsor, often the CFO, a chief sustainability officer or a chief procurement officer. Around them, there should be enough people to involve accounting, regulatory, finance and procurement at the same time. “Managing the internal process is often 50 percent of the work,” he said.
Buyers chasing value, not price, in Europe's PPA market
The panel closed with three takeaways. Buyers should agree on the purpose of the deal internally before approaching the market, prepare thoroughly inside the organisation so that external negotiations can move quickly, and give the deal team enough room to handle small changes in price or technology without going back to the boardroom. As Kring put it, “once you are in the market, having to go back and forth creates noise, and it makes the process difficult for the seller on the other side to manage.” (hcn)
