Historically, April 1st is the start of the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) renewal season as it coincides the financial year. For your new PPA contract, it’s worth making sure that you are getting all the benefits as an exporter.

Here are a couple of important things to check, before you sign on that dotted line:

• TRIADs - Be sure that you maximise your benefit as not all PPAs grant you 100% TRIAD income. As TRIADs can be substantial – often worth tens of thousands of pounds (on top of export income for the same period), you will want to receive all of this and not just a proportion thereof.  
• Embedded benefits - These are the added extras for exporting onto the grid, rather than importing. They are paid by the Distribution Network Operator (DNO) to the supplier, who then passes this on to the exporter. Again, the supplier may not pass on 100% of this benefit. These add up; as the value of export electricity is in steady decline, you need to make the most of embedded benefits.

The critical details in the contract fine print are easily missed, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. For example, with ‘line losses’ of +/- 3-4%, and an associated value of £5 per MWh, you might be winning or losing 0.5p per kWh. On a 500 kW AD, this could be around £18,000 per annum.  That’s the difference embedded benefits might make on a good vs bad PPA.

Please give us a call if you would like some help or advice on this.