Contracted MW Is Not Delivered MW
A signed offtake agreement is a promise with a date on it. The project that has to keep that promise usually lives in a different system — so when a permit moves, nobody can say what was already sold, to whom, and from when. The gap between contracted and delivered megawatts is a governance problem, and it is where the commercial cost of a development delay quietly accumulates.
Luis Cabello5 min readAsk a developer how much capacity is contracted and you get a number quickly. Ask when those megawatts will actually be delivered and the room goes quiet, because answering it means holding two things in your head at once: what was signed, and how the project behind it is really doing.
The agreement is a PDF on a shared drive, or a row in the commercial team's tracker. The project lives in the development system, with its permits, its land and its milestones. The link between the two is somebody's memory.
A promise with a date on it
An offtake agreement is not really a document. It is a set of commitments with dates: delivery starts here, the longstop falls there, this much capacity, at this price, under these conditions precedent. Every one of those dates depends on a project reaching commercial operation — which depends on a grid connection, which depends on a permit, which depends on a piece of land.
Development teams know that chain intimately. Commercial teams know the agreement intimately. The failure is not that either group is careless. It is that no system holds both, so the reconciliation only happens when someone thinks to do it — and the person most likely to think of it is the one who just noticed a problem.
Contracted MW is not delivered MW. What sits between the two is development execution, and it is usually the least instrumented part of the business.
Why the gap is expensive rather than merely untidy
A permit slipping by three months is a development event. The same slip measured against a delivery-start date is a commercial event, and it has options attached: renegotiate, resequence, substitute supply from another project, or accept the consequence. Those options are real and cheap a year out. Weeks before the date, most of them have closed.
So the cost of the gap is not the delay itself. It is the delay being visible as a schedule fact months before anyone frames it as a commercial one.
What governing the gap actually looks like
It is less dramatic than it sounds. The agreement stops being a document and becomes a record on the project that supplies it, with the terms that matter as structured fields rather than paragraphs: contracted capacity, delivery start, longstop, tenor, pricing structure, credit support, conditions precedent.
- The commercial commitment sits on the project, so opening the project shows what it has already been promised to.
- Dates are data. Delivery start and longstop can be filtered, sorted and exported rather than read out of a contract.
- Where several projects supply one agreement, each project carries its own piece of the contracted capacity.
- The agreement stage follows the dates recorded against it rather than a status somebody remembered to update.
None of that predicts anything. It removes the excuse that the information was somewhere else — which is, in practice, the reason most of these conversations happen late.
Where this stops
Worth being precise about the boundary, because this territory has good specialist tools in it. Governing offtake agreements against projects is not energy trading. Settlement, meter data, imbalance, dispatch optimisation and forward curves belong in an ETRM, and they should stay there.
The question worth owning is narrower and, for a developer, more urgent: can the development portfolio deliver what has already been sold? That is a question about land, permits, milestones and risk — with a commercial commitment attached to the answer.
Navorda Offtake — PPAs and offtake agreements, recorded against the project that delivers them
