In normal times, for bigger deals, what would happen is that a small number of banks would underwrite the transaction (ie take a bigger chunk of risk) and then syndicate it to other banks to reduce their exposure. But the syndications markets have been dead or 2 years now, so you have to either do smaller deals, or find all the banks in the club from the start (which means involving more banks in the negotiations, which is not simple). In our case, the EIB's participation allowed to avoid the problem.
Debt:equity is more like 70:30. I can't really comment on the investors here, but offshore is now a big utility play, and not only do they usually have 50-100% of projects, but they don't even use project debt, funding it all on their balance sheets (which means multi-hundred million euro investments on their side). In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
but offshore is now a big utility play, and not only do they usually have 50-100% of projects, but they don't even use project debt, funding it all on their balance sheets (which means multi-hundred million euro investments on their side).
Who is "they" ... that is, in the "big utility play", who's playing? The utilities themselves? Or the amorphous "thems that does utility plays"?
And "funding it all on their balance sheets" ... is that all equity funding? I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.
Are the savings big when you build 100 turbines at a site compared to 10 or 1? Or are the savings marginal, and the reason that the big utilities build big wind farms just because they are used to working with big projects and that's where their competencies lay (like when big oil leaves small fields to be developed by independens)? Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
