SolarCentury

Mazars has been assisting Solarcentury since 2016 to develop its transaction and operational project and portfolio models across multiple jurisdictions in Europe and Latin America.

Client background

Solarcentury is a UK-based solar company having developed over 1.6 gigawatt of renewable energy assets across four continents, with a strategy to “grow globally and “downstream”, by becoming an investor, asset owner, and operator in the utility scale PV solar projects. To do so it embarked on a strategic process to form joint venture partnerships with one or more institutional investors who would become the majority owner of projects acquired from Solarcentury, with Solarcentury acting as minority owner, operator and asset manager.

Our role

Working closely with the Solarcentury, Mazars developed a suite of models in relation to Solarcentury’s strategic expansion. The models were:

• a project finance model (“PFM”) with optionality to allow country-specific parameters such as renewable supports, PPA structures, and tax and accounting to be input for eight or more countries (and for single countries if impractical to cover them in a single model);
• a consolidation model (“CM”) which allowed portfolio level analysis of the projects under consideration; and
• further, as the projects developed towards financial close, Solarcentury required additional support to develop PFMs and the CM(s) into detailed transaction model(s) for use in closing the deal(s).

Later, Mazars also developed a corporate strategy model to forecast the expansion of the group, choose the development strategy and plan dividends and cash movements between group entities to maintain liquidity. The model provided a high-level, five year forecast of seven portfolio companies and the potential pipeline of known and hypothetical developments.

Project outcomes

• the PFM helped in initial valuation, construction and ongoing operational management, and shareholders reporting purposes of projects under up to eight different tax and accounting regimes;
• the CM was used for asset management and shareholders reporting purposes; including calculating portfolios investors global IRR;
• The models were able to provide accurate, clear evaluation of project returns to support Solarcentury negotiators and decision makers;
• Used by and relied upon by project finance banks, insurance companies, and other prospective equity and debt investment and counterparties in their review and consideration of the project, including in the modelling of the multiple scenario and sensitivity cases which such third parties need in their investment and credit appraisal.