lessons from the early years of offshore wind in Europe (1) | 24 comments (24 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Death and Taxes (4.00 / 5)

The industry is a normal one is every respect with regards to tax, except in countries where the support regime takes the form of tax credits:

in the US, you used to get PTCs (production tax credits) ie a tax credit a 2c/kWh linked to your actual production, which increases the value of the generation if you have tax bills you can deduct these credits from (thus the practice of bringing in tax investors which lent their tax capacity to projects - Lehman Brothers was the most active). This has been replaced now by ITCs - Investment Tax credits (same mechanism, but upfront and linked to the investment made) or by direct cash grants, ie a non tax pechanism
in several countries, renewable energy projects can do accelerated depreciation, ie write off the value of their investment faster than normal, leading to accounting losses which create tax losses which can be deducted from later profits;

Otherwise, the main tax item is going to be the yearly licensing fees that projects need to pay to get the right to harvest the resource.

Wind power

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sun Oct 17th, 2010 at 09:24:48 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Death and Taxes (none / 0)

Jerome a Paris:

Otherwise, the main tax item is going to be the yearly licensing fees that projects need to pay to get the right to harvest the resource.

Are these taxes production-related?

eg Enercon PartnerKonzept interests me, of course.

Yield-oriented cost structure
The costs for the ENERCON PartnerKonzept contract are based on the annual wind turbine output. The customer pays a minimum fee depending on the respective wind turbine type and a yield-oriented surcharge. This means that the customer pays more in good wind years with good yield and less in bad wind years with less output thus stabilising annual wind turbine profit.

"The future is already here -- it's just not very evenly distributed" William Gibson

by ChrisCook (cojockathotmaildotcom) on Sun Oct 17th, 2010 at 09:43:18 AM EST
[ Parent ]

it depends (none / 1)

licenses are usually fixed amounts, but there can be taxes/levies which are proportional to production. As Enercon notes, the main difference is linked to wind levels (or, in case of poor performance, to operational failure).

O&M (operations and maintenance) agreements can be structured as flat fees (effectively linked to nominal capacity) or proportional fees (linked to actual production) or a combination of both. Payments can also be linked to "availability" (ie the percentage of time the wind turbines are actually able to produce power, irrespective of what the wind is). The main differences are linked to whether the operator (which is typically the turbine manufacturer) takes wind risk, and to what extent it takes performance risk on its own turbines.

Nothing that hasn't been done for decades in this and other industries.

Wind power

by Jerome a Paris (etg@eurotrib.com) on Sun Oct 17th, 2010 at 09:51:09 AM EST
[ Parent ]

lessons from the early years of offshore wind in Europe (1) | 24 comments (24 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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