PPA Helper

Background

The question behind this one: how do US power purchase agreements actually work — and how do you learn to originate, negotiate, and settle one without sitting on a finance desk?

PPAs are how a lot of new power gets financed and how big buyers — increasingly data centers — lock in a price for years. But the mechanics are genuinely confusing: a virtual PPA is really a contract-for-differences that settles against a floating wholesale price, and most explanations are either pure jargon or behind a consulting invoice. I wanted something you could actually poke at — change the market, watch who pays whom, and read the real clauses with a definition one tap away.

How It Works

It's a static site — plain HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS, no build step, no dependencies, no backend — that deploys to GitHub Pages as-is. The interesting parts are the simulator, the generator, and the sourcing:

• Settlement simulator: a pure settlement-math core drives a virtual-PPA contract-for-differences sim. Pick the buyer or the generator's side, choose a market scenario (calm, rising, falling, a summer spike), and edit the price table to see who settles up each period. A basis-risk slider adds a node-to-hub spread so you can watch a congestion event erode the developer's realized price — or wipe it entirely. The same math runs in the browser and in dependency-free Node tests, so the numbers are checked rather than vibes.
• Draft PPA generator: fill in parties, project details, and commercial terms and the tool generates a full VPPA practice template in seconds — every negotiable position marked [IN BRACKETS] so you know exactly what to fill in. Not a legal document, but a serious starting point for understanding what a bankable PPA looks like clause by clause.
• Cited content, one source of truth: a 48-term glossary is the single source that also powers the inline tooltips, so a definition is always one tap away. The Drafting tab walks through annotated term sheets, a risk matrix, a physical-vs-VPPA comparison, the full deal lifecycle, and who's who in the market. A Data centers tab tracks hyperscaler and neocloud deal structures; Perspectives collects expert viewpoints.
• Meets you where you are: an experience-level filter (Newcomer / Practitioner / All) reshapes the same content, so it works for someone seeing "basis risk" for the first time and someone who negotiates these for a living.
• Honest about its homework: a "Coverage & sources" view scores what's actually backed by a primary source. The content came out of four research passes — a deep-research run, a government and national-lab pass (FERC, IRS, EPA, NREL, Berkeley Lab), a data-center deals pass, and an expert-perspectives pass.
• The eight tabs: Learn, Drafting, Draft PPA, Settlement simulator, Data centers, Perspectives, Glossary, and Coverage & sources.

One honest caveat, stated in the tool too: the simulator and term sheets illustrate contract mechanics — they're not market data, legal advice, or financial advice, and the deal data is point-in-time.

[View the Live Tool] | [View the Code]