Loan Purchase Agreement: Fill & Download for Free

Welcome to one of the most capital intensive industries there is. The power industry is also one that is heavily regulated and almost all projects will have long timescales relative to other technologies. Given that a private electric power company could have several meanings, I’ll address several different meanings.First is a transmission or distribution utility. Both are natural monopolies that are protect by the government and are very heavily regulated. Also the rate of return on investments is decided by the government. The short answer is that being a distribution utility isn’t possible short of buying an existing company. Now it is possible to form a transmission company. The company could build and operate merchant HVDC stations and transmission infrastructure like these folks do: Clean Line Energy Partners. Lucky for you, FERC order 1000 was a watershed moment as it allows any other qualified entities to bid on transmission projects than just the incumbent utility. The amount of capital needed for such a firm would be staggering, many billions of dollars.The other more feasible option is to become an independent power producer (IPP). I would recommend being a wind and solar developer as the conventional IPP model with fossil fuel plants is having a tough time in the current electric market conditions. To get funds, there are several sources:Your own money - unlikely as most folks don’t want to lay out this much capital (hundreds of millions).Loans - these can be secured for experienced developers with power purchase agreements or a buyer lined up.Industry incumbents - Companies like Siemens, Shell, AES, and many more are usually willing to invest in energy related companies or form partnerships.Private Equity - If you’re buying existing assets.One other option is to buy and install residential solar panels. They could then be leased to customers and through distributed controls, they can be aggregated into a virtual power plant. This would likely be the lowest cost option of all your choices. More revenue streams could also be created by installing batteries too, allowing you to provide ancillary services and peak shaving.

Cheaper Components + Cheaper Debt + Additional benefits = Cost Effective ProjectSuccess of developing solar project depends on a right mix of factors, primary costing and sales:Cheaper Components: Solar project in range of 5 MW and above can easily be set up with capital cost of Rs. 5 - 5.5 Crore/MW (around $ 0.7-0.8 million/MW) including cost of equipment, land as well as soft costs like IDC, Insurance, etc. Almost all suppliers provide panels with warranty to provide 80% generation after 25 years. Look for land banks with good solar irradiation and access to grid connectivity and infrastructure.Cheaper Debt: Secure power sales options, Selection of right power purchase agreements, access to funds at low rate of interest will ensure your returns increase. In this regard, Govt. of India has accorded priority sector lending status to Renewables and loans upto Rs. 15 Crore are easily available. For Rooftop projects, IREDA is providing loans to aggregators at discounted rates of 9.5-10.5%.Additional benefits: Accelerated depreciation under section 32 A of the Income tax act allows 80% depreciation in first year. 10 year tax holiday is already available to this sector under section 80 IA of the Income Tax Act. Besides, several incentives like Excise exemptions, Custom exemptions, concessional VAT, etc. are also available to solar sector in India. Also keep in mind that Capital subsidy of 30% is still available for rooftop projects (except commercial & Industrial consumers in Private sector) and if you are selling to a 3rd party or captive consumer, you can also avail tradeable Renewable Energy Certificates (REC).Other than this, you need to focus of Efficient project management and well designed contracts and agreements. Tariff of Rs. 6.5/KWh mentioned by you is very attractive now given the fact that In November 2015, SunEdison bid Rs. 4.63/KWh and a month later, SB Group also won project at Rs. 4.63/KWh.

I believe "Learning by Doing" is more of a transactional jargon that is just a simple extension of "Practice makes Perfect", "Ear on the Ground" (and other similar idioms).In building a power plant or any other kind of large scale infrastructure project, the risks profile is such that its high at the front and low at the end. Here are some of the stages you have to pass through to get a Wind Power Plant done.Technical FeasibilityA developer will hire a "Feasibility Study Consultant" to write a FS. The FS should contain almost every imaginable parameter that is critical to building the plant: Does any air move at all here? Is the soil very soft and my turbines sink in over a long time? Is it on an island where we have to build a bridge first before we can get the equipment over - or maybe on a mountain with no road access? What's the nearest substation that I can hook my transmission line to - is it 200km away? How big a turbine and how many turbines should I put?Wind Yield StudyAfter you have your own investment in the project, you need to come up with a bank loan (explained below under Financing). A bank will "approve" the project if it is a "good" project. This is called being "Bankable". One of that is the central question of "does any wind blow?". Of course anyone competent will also make sure that they themselves know for sure that the wind blows hard enough on the location.In a wind project, a project is "bankable" if you have 3 Years of wind yield data. This basically means you stick in the ground, a long pole with a sock at the top and record daily wind rates in m/s for 3 years. Hopefully nobody has vandalized your machine over this period - so you should make trips there every once in a while.The quality and quantity of data depends heavily on the experience of the bank, your personal experience and many other things - so the requirement could be less than 3 years of course. The bank should in principle, be more rigorous than you in assessing the technical condition since it will provide 60 to 80% of the total project cost.People typically "extrapolate" using power computer modelling - there are many service providers who go around measuring wind speeds at strategic locations and sell you that data extrapolated to a nearby site.You will have to take a view on the extrapolation of course.The development banks (e.g. World Bank, Asian Development Bank or NREL) also does on-the-ground work on this and give all this data away for free - they typically call it something like Indochina Regional Wind Study. The more developed a country or region, the more such public data is performed in advance and is available - e.g. wind speeds in the US are all free online.Even if you have 10 years of wind data, there are micro climate issues such as El Nino, La Nina and melting glaciers for hydropower, cloud cover for solar PV and other things. Don't forget a power plant is supposed to last minimum of 20 years, and climate and weather during those 2 decades are not predictable. Past performance does not indicate future performance.Issues of LandAs a hydro or wind or solar installation typically requires quite a bit of land, here are other questions: Can you even buy the land? If so, how much? Is the land the ancient burial grounds of an indigenous population? Is the land farm land, residential land or productive land? Is there a protected forest with a critically endangered leopard who just had a litter of babies?Power DemandYou will have to understand both the quantity of homes in the area as well as the quality of the power demand. For quality, it means - Is the substation I am connecting to distributing power to an industrial zone? Or to a residential zone? An industrial/commercial zones peak in the afternoon as everyone goes to work but residential zones peak in the evening as everyone comes home and switch on the air con and watch TV.RegulationThis is a big topic - it can typically take like 20 permits to build a power plant. Local government, central government, Ministry of Spatial Zoning, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Public Works etc, will all be involved as key stakeholders in evaluating, qualifying and approving your project. Sometimes you will find that regulations will not allow you go completely build or go beyond a certain size or encroach a certain boundary etc.Power Purchase AgreementThe "offtaker" will sign a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with you and promise to buy all the power you can produce OR buy only the power it needs (thus you need a local power demand study) OR a mixture of both.Usually the grid offtaker is the national state owned utility and will hold an Independent Power Producer (IPP) auction - so you will have to BID for the price per kWh (the tariff) of which you will be buying electricity. The tender and bidding process can cost you millions of dollars and you could just fail at winning the bid as someone else bid lower or was more qualified. For non-renewables, they have these large "IPP Auctions" held every 5 years or so. Look at some of the news articles at SparkSpread for example.For renewables in most countries, they work via a "Feed In Tariff" mechanism - which means its a rolling programme at a fixed rate - so no negotiations and no tender processes, you can apply anytime. Sometimes there's a region or national quota per annum or per rolling round.The PPA has a ton of rounds of qualifications involving various Ministries and departments before you can even get to the price point. It goes on for pages and pages and you need to wave it to everyone else you need to convince you actually have a project in your hands.Its also the biggest chicken and egg and you need the PPA for permit X and you need permit X for the PPA.FinancingWho will pay for your plant? A typical loan structure can be 60% to 80% of total invested capital. The term is "Project Finance" - which roughly means its non-recourse in this sector. This means that if things go really badly, the bank will take your plant but will not take YOU or YOUR company. If you give something called a "personal guarantee" or a "corporate guarantee" - then when things go bad, the bank can have a claim on you or your underlying company - but then the interest rate of the loan will be lower - or the "money will be cheaper". To get project financing, it takes a whole odyssey of its own.Engineering, Procurement and ConstructionYou have everything now - PPA, financing, permits. You get someone to design, engineer, procure the parts and construct it. They find out that there's a sinkhole in the middle of the project - which wasn't previously identified by the FS. There's a way around it - but you must pay them some more. The bank can't finance that portion as they gave you a fixed loan. You now have to come up with the rest of the cash.So in large construction projects, you can structure your EPC contract to be either extremes a) full wrap turnkey b) rate based. A full wrap means you tell the EPC company, take a look yourself, give me a price then get it done. Banks love full wraps as they know their project will get built. Therefore the wrapping will have a premium, although the project could cost more, it could cost less as well if there's a sink hole. For rate based, its obvious, you pay by the hour and any new problems there are you pay for it. A delay and cost over run not just cost you the over-run but also the loss in revenue from selling electricity.Commercial MattersUsually in any big project there are multiple parties in the chain who, rightfully, protect their own interests at all phases of development, evaluation, construction and operation. There's the developer (who did all the technical feasibility and permitting), the sponsor (who will come up with the money for the project), the equity provider (who comes up with the rest of the equity that the sponsor cannot or does not want to afford, typically a PE fund) and then the people of the country who rightfully own the natural resource you are trying to exploit represented by their government.How you craft, draft and trust each other to share risk, share downside and share upside, how you build that relationship amongst all stakeholders - is a big, and probably the most important topic.Understanding and pricing the difference between cost and value - value is a perception and related to the perception of risk and opportunity cost. Cost is simply what goes out of your pocket. For example a wind turbine might cost 2 dollars today but it could be valued at 20 dollars in 2 years, if the price of oil is 200 dollars a barrel. How does the multiple parties who went into the project share this 18 dollars of "profit"? Usually the most amount of profit should go to the party who took the most amount of risk (which might not necessarily be the most amount of money). But then risk is a perception perceived differently by everyone limited by the information they have.RiskThe risk, by definition, is the what it means when people say you need to "Learn by Doing" - as you do more, the risk goes away more (because when it happens, you know what the outcome is and there's no more uncertainty). The more you do, the more you can understand and perceive specific risk better in the future.The risks for a wind project are all the uncertainties of the process I have outlined above.All of the above applies to any power and infrastructure project. For example if its a toll road, the primary underlying "natural resource" is not the wind blowing but who will drive on the road. If its water, who drinks water and where's the water etc. All of these are risks.So Why Take This Risk?So why do people do it if its complicated? The different thing about infrastructure risk unlike retail is that once you have built it and done it, then your outcome is extremely predictable for the life of the asset. People need electricity and they need roads.An alternative to building a wind power plant is to sell cupcakes. Selling cupcakes is not predictable - people might not like the taste of your cupcake or the wrapping of your cupcake and everyone knows how to make cupcakes. But all you need to buy is an oven to make cupcakes - not a wind turbine the height of the Empire State building. In the end its a choice.