Analyst: Has datacentre demand moved corporate PPA pricing in Europe, or is that a conference story?
Expert: It's moved it. Not evenly. But yes.
Analyst: Meaning?
Expert: Meaning the headline number barely moved. That's the bit people get wrong. Ask me in early 2024 where a ten-year Iberian solar pay-as-produced deal cleared and I'd have said twenty-eight, twenty-nine. Now, call it thirty-two. That's noise. What moved is everything wrapped around the number. Tenor, shape, who eats the curtailment, whether you're still getting paid when day-ahead goes below zero. Price per megawatt hour is close to the least interesting line in the contract now, which is a strange thing to say after fourteen years of arguing about it.
Analyst: Give me the tenor, then.
Expert: Sorry, back up, the sequence matters. 2019, 2020, a decent corporate signed ten years. Twelve if they were a heavy industrial with a treasurer who understood what he was buying. There were maybe four of those in Europe. Then '22 happened and every procurement head on the continent got shouted at for not hedging. Then prices fell and the same people got shouted at for hedging at the top. So by 2023 the fashion was five to seven years. We hated it. You can't finance a seven-year contract sitting in front of a twenty-five-year asset. Well, you can. You just get taken apart on the sizing.
Analyst: And now?
Expert: Datacentre counterparties will do twelve. Fifteen if you can get them a connection they couldn't get on their own. I signed one at fifteen and I'd have taken eighteen.
Analyst: Why will they go long when nobody else will?
Expert: Because power decides whether their building exists. For a manufacturer electricity is, what, four percent of cost base, so of course they want optionality. And the sign-off comes from whoever owns the site pipeline, not from procurement, and that person does not care about beating the curve by two euros.
Analyst: When did you notice the shift?
Expert: Second half of '24 the inbound changed shape. Before that it was an RFP, forty pages, price grid, twenty developers invited. Then we started getting phone calls instead, and they'd ask our queue position before they asked price, never happened to me before. Internally we called them the fridge deals, because a datacentre is an expensive fridge. Somebody said it in a Tuesday meeting and it stuck.
Analyst: Real pipeline, or tyre-kickers?
Expert: Both. Maybe a third were serious. Tell was whether they'd paid for a grid study.
Analyst: And what did that do to your clearing price?
Expert: For the right asset, in the right bidding zone, with a connection date they believed, I got 2025 numbers I wouldn't have believed in 2023. I'll give you the figure we signed at. But you need to know what's inside it, because the number our largest competitor put in their announcement and the number they actually received are not the same number, and I know that because