ACER Assessment PPA Contract Templates (2024)

ACER’s formal assessment, mandated by Art. 19b(2) of the Electricity Market Design Reform Regulation (EU 2024/1747), of whether the EU needs voluntary ACER-issued Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) contract templates. Conclusion: no.

Title: Assessment on the need of ACER’s voluntary Power Purchase Agreement contract template(s). Legal basis: Art. 19b(2), Regulation (EU) 2024/1747 (Electricity Market Design reform). Art. 19b(2) set a deadline of three months from the Regulation’s entry into force (published in the Official Journal 26 June 2024, in force on the twentieth day after publication).

Key findings

Mandate: Art. 19b(2) required ACER to assess, in coordination with relevant institutions and stakeholders, whether it should develop and issue voluntary PPA contract templates adapted to different counterparty categories. Only if the assessment found a need would ACER (with NEMOs, after stakeholder consultation) actually develop templates.

Method: combined qualitative and quantitative approaches — a dedicated PPA expert group plus an open public consultation with both closed- and open-ended questions, statistically analyzed for trends.

Conclusion — no new templates needed: “ACER concludes that it does not need to develop new voluntary PPA contract templates.” A significant majority of stakeholders judged additional templates unnecessary (in the public consultation, 74% found an additional ACER template unnecessary, 22% useful, 4% no strong position). Key reasons:

• Existing templates (from industry associations and national bodies) already suffice; stakeholders generally prefer in-house templates and/or internal legal resources anyway
• Standardization risks unwanted rigidity — bespoke PPAs better fit parties’ specific needs and risk profiles
• Stakeholders and ACER prioritised addressing collaterals, demand pooling, and project-development bottlenecks over new templates
• Templates aren’t the binding constraint — ACER itself judges these barriers more significant than the lack of new templates (a minority of respondents saw the lack of suitable templates as a major barrier)
• Practical concerns with an ACER template specifically: a one-off document with no mandated regular-update mechanism, single-language limitation, and ACER’s inability to tailor to each Member State’s national law

Recommendations instead of templates (Section 4.1, three recommendations):

1. Regular updates to existing templates — addressed to market participants, industry organisations and service providers; ACER to collect and publish a public list of existing templates indicating when they were last updated; annual revisions, initial update within a year
2. National-level policy action — Member States to remove regulatory/administrative PPA barriers, ensure access to financial instruments mitigating buyer-default risk (guarantee schemes where necessary), support smaller enterprises, and incorporate demand aggregation and public tenders encouraging PPA participation in national energy and climate plans (assessment and initial implementation within 12 months)
3. Addressing structural barriers, with a knowledge-sharing webinar — ACER and the European Commission, with public and private actors, to tackle scarcity of new renewable projects, project-development bottlenecks and legal/land-permission issues; a joint webinar could include templates on its agenda

Separately, ACER “acknowledges” stakeholder suggestions for periodic workshops and voluntary “plug-in” legal clauses for existing templates (e.g. REMIT/EMIR reporting) rather than a full new template, and says it will evaluate their need and feasibility over the coming months and years (Section 4.4) — not a firm commitment.

Ongoing monitoring, not one-off: ACER says it will continue to monitor market needs and provide guidance where necessary, including through its separate statutory annual PPA market assessment (Art. 19b(1); first report planned for Q4 2025). The Expert Group on PPAs continues, shifting to support that annual assessment.

Relevance to existing wiki topics

• Power Purchase Agreement — resolves the Art. 19b section’s open “must assess… and develop if appropriate” framing with the actual outcome
• Electricity Market Design Reform 2024 — resolves the “ACER voluntary PPA templates — outcome unknown” data gap; the obligations table’s “Develop voluntary PPA templates” row is corrected to reflect the assessment’s negative conclusion