Project Finance Copying and distributing are prohibited without permission of the publisher

Merchant Power: Financing strategies

01 January 2000

By James Bartlett and Reiner Boehning from the Global Energy and Project Finance Group at CSFB.

Read more: [project finance] [project finance] [BOT] [power projects] [project financing]

The US electric generation market is rapidly evolving towards a merchant environment, where electric energy and capacity is sold into open wholesale electricity markets under short-term power sales contracts or spot arrangements. As a consequence, non-recourse financings with varying degrees of merchant exposure are not the exception to the rule, they are becoming the rule. The traditional PPA-based project financing in its pure form is a vanishing breed.

This article outlines how the various US financing markets have adopted to this paradigm shift and highlights a number of representative deals that were recently executed.

Overview

1999 has seen a significant supply of financing transactions with either fully merchant or semi-merchant characteristics. This supply was fueled by two parallel developments: (i) the continued stream of utility asset divestitures with more than 30,000MW changing hands this year, and (ii) the significant growth in greenfield merchant plant financings. The latter has...


Upcoming Events

Change font size: Switch to default font size Switch to medium font size Switch to large font size