Case Study Operations - EBITDA
- 05:01
This video builds up the operations of the windfarm.
Glossary
modeling modelling Project finance RenewablesTranscript
We're moving on to costs now, and you can see the variable costs are as a percentage of electricity revenue.
That does make sense because it wouldn't make any sense to attach costs to the offtaker revenue because that's money coming from the offtaker as part of the PPA, and that's not something that we are going to have to spend money on that there's no expenses attached to that really.
So it makes more sense to attach the variable costs just to the electricity revenue, and that's what we're going to do.
So if we take the 15% and then we attach it to the electricity revenue, having locked that 15%, now I'm a big fan of negative presentation, and so that means that whenever I have a kind of expense that would go into the P&L or a cashflow that would go into the cashflow, if it's negative, I like to show it as negative.
That can cause problems down the line.
But I do think on the whole, it's clearer.
And you can see we haven't got any costs in years one and two, and that's because we haven't got any revenue and that's because we don't have a wind farm yet.
Fixed costs is going to be a little more challenging.
First off, the fixed costs appear to be fixed, but that's a real cost.
And so the fixed costs will be moving around despite their name.
We need to build those fixed costs up, and so we need to build them up using the inflation rate that we've got over here.
Now you can already see what's going to happen if we stop now, we will have fixed costs in year 50 despite there being no project.
So we've got to use the flag that we have over here to say, okay, only fixed cost please, if the project's operational.
We can now copy to the right, we can find that we've got fixed costs, but you can see I just need to flip the sign there to make it compatible with a negative presentation elsewhere.
We've got total costs then, and then we're ready to do EBITDA.
We can take the total revenue and with negative presentation, you would be adding the total costs.
You can see at the moment we've got a loss, but that's because we haven't modeled all of our revenues yet.
A lot of this model will look quite strange to start with.
There will be a major doubling back and filling in of lots of information down the line.
And what we can do now is double back and fill in the fixed costs.
We are going to charge our offtaker for our fixed costs and that will be income, so we'll need to flip that sign.
What we'll also need to do is take into account that we're not going to be able to charge them the whole lot.
We've negotiated a 60% charge.
You can see that massively de-risks the project already, and it prevents us from making the loss that we predicted earlier, and that's because we've pushed a lot of our fixed costs the way of the offtaker, and we're going to push some more fixed costs their way in the form of the debt service element of the capacity charge.
You can see down here we've got some outputs, and these are really just metrics to analyze what's going on.
This is the first time that we're going to run into errors.
So you can see we've got an average revenue per megawatt hour.
You could interpret this two ways of course, and we're going to interpret it as electricity revenue and electricity revenue per megawatt hour.
And you can see over here we've got the achieved megawatt hours.
If I press enter there, you'll see an error and you might be okay with those errors appearing later on.
When we do tests on metrics such as breaches and DSCR covenants, it's important that we actually get rid of errors because Excel won't be able to deal with them very well.
And so it's a good habit to get into even this early to say, okay, if we've got something like this, let's wrap it in if error, and then if there is an error, just put in an n/a and what will happen is Excel will throw out an n/a.
And that's helpful to us because a lot of things Excel does, such as IFs, will tend to ignore N/As as opposed to errors, which it will interpret in strange ways.
We're going to do the same with EBITDA margin, so we're gonna wrap it in an IF error and we're going to say EBITDA over and we'll do total revenue now and we'll say N/A, pull that to the right.
And what you can see is that really the way it's worked out is this is a weighted average of all of the inflated sales prices.
And then this is a little more complex because there's an interplay between the sales price, the fixed costs, the variable cost, the scale of the project.
And so they're quite useful for analysis.