Developer Fee/Costs

Hello,

One financial aspect to projects is what one must pay to the developer. If you are the owner yourself, and no developer intermediary, than there is no issue in the current SAM implementation. However, if you are not and you must take into account paying a developer for a certain project, than there is no explicit way to include such cost in SAM.

I have gotten around this by simply adding in the developer fee into one of the other fields. For example, I add it on to the Land Costs. This is not a perfect solution though, as normally one would not include the developer fee into certain totals; for example the insurance costs would normally be a percent of the vale of the system without the developer fee. I get around the insurance problem by simply adjusting the % insurance for the developer fee.

Also, sometimes these developer fees are paid out over time as well. I get around this by adding it on to the O&M Costs.

In the long-run, an additional field(s) related to developer fees would be useful.

The residential, commercial, utility single owner and utility IPP financing options in SAM are for projects that are developed, owned, and operated by a single entity. There are no explicit inputs for developer fees. Your approach to modeling developer fees seems like a good one, and should give you reasonable results.

The utility partnership flip and utility sale leaseback financing options are for projects with two partners, and do include an input on the Financing page for the development fee.

In general, we have tried to make SAM's financial models flexible enough model a wide range of projects, but not so complicated that they are impossible to use. Things like a developer fee, or inverter replacement for a PV project, could be more accurately modeled with more inputs, but we think can be adequately modeled with existing inputs.

We would like to hear more suggestions like this (and responses to this one) -- if there is enough interest in adding an input, and we think we can make it work in the user interface, we would be happy to do so.

Thanks,
Paul.