Community choice aggregators (CCAs) and public power companies are scaling faster than ever—expanding their renewable portfolios, navigating dynamic wholesale markets, and managing diverse counterparties. Each new deal adds layers of data streams, pricing structures, and settlement terms that they must track, verify, and reconcile.
Much of this complexity stems from power purchase agreements (PPAs)—the cornerstone of renewable procurement. Spanning dozens of pages, these long-term contracts use detailed conditional logic to govern electricity pricing, delivery, and settlement.
Managing structured energy contracts at scale has become a significant operational challenge. What companies could once handle in spreadsheets or legacy systems now demands real-time integration, validation, and automation. Errors in a single formula or data feed can cascade into missed revenue, compliance issues, and strained relationships with counterparties.
That’s why leading organizations are moving toward integrated, automated systems purpose-built for structured energy contract management—software that can centralize data, model contract logic, and streamline settlement validation from end to end.
The shift isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about safeguarding accuracy, transparency, and trust in an increasingly complex energy marketplace.
PPAs illustrate just how complex structured energy contracts have become—and why manual management is no longer a sustainable approach. They combine multiple data sources, time-dependent pricing models, and performance guarantees, creating layers of complexity that spreadsheets and legacy systems struggle to handle.
Structured energy contracts have evolved in many ways, each introducing its own challenges. The following factors make settlements, validation, and invoicing increasingly difficult:
Even with skilled teams, the practical challenges of managing complex contracts are significant. Manual methods and disconnected systems create bottlenecks and increase the risk of mistakes:
Even small gaps in managing structured energy contracts can have major consequences. Missed settlement charges or under-billing can quietly erode revenue, while errors or omissions may create compliance exposure, potentially leading to fines, litigation, or reputational harm.
Inaccurate or incomplete data also limits your ability to optimize performance or implement risk-based pricing strategies. Without precise settlement records, negotiating or enforcing contract terms becomes significantly more challenging.
The bottom line is this: How well you manage structured energy contracts directly impacts your risk, cash flow, and market competitiveness.
Automation enables companies to manage growing contract complexity with greater accuracy, speed, and scalability – capabilities that manual processes and spreadsheets simply can’t match. In today’s fast-moving energy markets, automation has become essential to maintaining both precision and agility.
Yes Energy’s ContractCoreTM delivers these capabilities in a platform purpose-built for the energy sector. It centralizes operational, contractual, and settlement data, applies configurable logic for diverse contract types, and integrates seamlessly with energy trade risk management (ETRM) and financial systems. With unified workflows and automated validation, ContractCore enables teams to manage every agreement, milestone, and settlement with accuracy.
Key capabilities include:
Organizations using ContractCore have seen dramatic improvements in both efficiency and accuracy.
Marin Clean Energy (CA) reduced invoice validation times from four to five hours to under 10 minutes per invoice by automating data integration and settlement workflows through ContractCore.
Similarly, Arizona Public Service (AZ) leveraged ContractCore to shorten its quarterly contract management and invoicing cycle from five to eight business days to less than one – a 90% time improvement.
ContractCore is one module within the broader Yes Energy PowerCore platform, an end-to-end, cloud-based solution designed to help energy organizations operate with greater efficiency, visibility, and confidence. PowerCore supports a wide range of supply and trading operations, providing advanced tools for bidding, scheduling, settlements, and analytics, all while adapting to evolving market rules and workflows.
Source: Yes Energy
The platform is organized into flexible, modular components to meet the needs of different market participants:
Additional modules – AnalyticsCore, ScheduleCore, and SettleCore—are available in select ISOs, primarily in western markets such as WEIM, CAISO, SPP IM, and parts of MISO.
By integrating these modules into a single ecosystem, PowerCore enables utilities, CCAs, and power traders to navigate market complexity with precision, respond quickly to operational and regulatory challenges, and maintain visibility across every aspect of their portfolios. In an era of expanding renewable energy adoption and increasingly complex contracts, this ecosystem provides a foundation for efficient, accurate, and scalable operations.
Contact us to discover how ContractCore can modernize your settlement operations and help your team manage complexity with confidence.
About the author: Joyce Jenq is the lead product manager of the front office line (the “bid” part) of the Yes Energy bid-to-bill solution. Joyce worked at Shell Energy as a real-time trader for western US markets where she learned about power, gas, renewables, and carbon trading products. She earned her MBA from UCSD. When she’s not working with customers and the development team to solve customer problems, she’s spending time swimming with her family, hiking, and giving belly rubs to her doodle.