Main Ratios - Loan Life Coverage Ratio
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Main Ratios - Loan Life Coverage Ratio in renewable energy project finance.
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Glossary
Project finance Renewable EnergyTranscript
The loan life coverage ratio, LLCR. This is like the debt service coverage ratio only. It's over multiple periods. So for each year we say what is the future cashflow from now until the end of the loan life? When we make our final repayments. How much cash are we expecting to make during that period? And then we divide that by the total amount of debt service from now to the end of the loan. So if you like, it's a multiple period debt service cover ratio and it tells us the same sort of thing. It tells us how much cover the lender has on average across a number of years to meet the minimum repayments that are due. The advantage of using the LLCR is it will iron out peaks and troughs in the cashflow. So if we have some periods of high cashflow and other periods of low, it averages and smooths them out. Because we calculate these ratios for every period in the model, we may encounter a problem of a divide by zero error when we have no debt service, such as during the construction period or beyond the end of the loan after we've made our final repayment. If we carry on calculating this ratio, it will have a divide by zero error in it. We just need to correct for that. Use some sort of if error adjustment to show that we no longer wish to calculate it. If the debt service is a zero, the usual default is if error cash flow, divide by debt service and then not zero, but a piece of text, like a dash or a blank. The reason we want to set the ratio to be something alphabetic, not numeric is because we will do a minimum across all of the years what is the minimum loan life coverage ratio across the whole of the project. We don't want to pick up a minimum of zero that reflects the post loan conditions. So if we set it to be a piece of text instead the minimum will ignore pieces of text and it will just look at the numbers year by year and then it will pick up the minimum loan life cover ratio when it's being calculated as a number. Two issues here, firstly, should we discount the cash flows? For the first time we're looking at multiple periods. We know time value of money. We shouldn't just add year one plus year two plus year three. They're happening in different time periods. It's logical that we should discount them if we do that at what rate? It might be logical to use the cost of debt, for example. But again, there's no fixed rule on how this works. If it is a requirement that the loan life coverage ratio needs to be a discounted ratio, then the discount rate should be set in the loan agreement. The other consideration is what happens beyond the end of the loan life. There are likely to still be cash flows from the time that the loan is finally repaid until the end of the project life. If we include those in the top line, so we're talking about all future cash flows and then we divide them by debt service, which only is going to happen during the loan life, we are converting the ratio to what we call a project life cover ratio. That includes the tail end of cash flows that happen after the end of the loan. You could argue there's an even stronger reason then to discount those cash flows because they're happening even further out in the future.