Main Ratios - Interest Cover Ratio
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Main Ratios - Interest Cover Ratio in renewable energy project finance.
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Glossary
Project finance Renewable EnergyTranscript
Interest cover ratio, same idea, but it's interest only. So cashflow available for debt service divided by the interest payable. Now the interest payable is what is needed to be paid in cash. It doesn't include any non-cash interest, so if we're adding interest onto the value of the loan like we would during interest during construction, IDC, then we wouldn't include that interest. It's only what we're going to pay in cash. Again, it gives an indication of how much cover the lender has, how comfortable are they. If we have an interest cover ratio of say 5, it means we've got five times as much cash as we need to make the minimum amount of interest payments. If on the other hand we have an interest cover ratio of 1.5, it means we've only got 50% more than the minimum that we need to be able to make our interest payments. That means there's not a lot of space for things to go wrong before the interest payments are threatened, and that of course is interest only. We then need to layer on top of that when we do the debt service cover ratio or the principle payments, we calculate this period by period in the model. It should get bigger as the project matures because the cashflow will be going up and the interest will be going down. And again, just like the DSCR, it will have a minimum covenant amount or minimum level or value that is required to be met by the project every time they report back to their lenders.