BRE: A $380M Project-Finance Package for a 932 MW Solar Project

Situation

BRE set out to finance one of the largest engagements in CMA’s book: a 932 MW utility-scale solar project in Brazil, seeking roughly USD 380 million of senior secured project financing. This is the deep end of infrastructure finance. A deal of this size isn’t underwritten on optimism about clean energy — it’s underwritten on structure, contracts, and coverage. Senior lenders lend against a ring-fenced set of cash flows, and they will interrogate every layer: who is the borrower, what secures the revenue, how the proceeds move through the group, and whether the project services its debt under stress.

The project itself was strong — fully licensed, permitted, and ready-to-build, with land rights secured and two long-term power-purchase agreements in hand. But a great asset inside a complex multi-entity sponsor group is not automatically financeable. Lenders needed a clean view: a non-recourse structure, a borrower that is the sole obligor, cash flows that can’t leak to non-project uses, and a model that proves debt service holds through the tenor. BRE needed the business plan and the project-finance model that would carry a $380M ask into a data room and survive it.

The engagement

CMA built the business plan and the project-finance model — the two documents a senior lender actually decides on — to institutional project-finance standard, through multiple revision cycles.

The transaction and holding structure

The first job was to make a complicated group legible to a lender. The engagement structured a clean three-tier ownership architecture: BRE as the top-level holding and acquisition entity that raises the financing; an operating holding company that owns 100% of the project; and a ring-fenced project company (SPV) that is the borrower of record and sole obligor to lenders. Loan proceeds were mapped transparently — deployed primarily at the project-company level and, where defined, upstream within the sponsor group and to a fixed-price EPC-and-development counterparty — strictly for project purposes. The structure preserves a genuinely non-recourse framework: all project revenues are contractually ring-fenced to service project debt, with no cross-collateralization and no structural recourse to other assets in the group. That is the difference between “we’ll pay you back” and “here is the ring-fenced cash flow that pays you back.”

The PPA-anchored revenue and bankability case

Revenue was built the only way a project-finance revenue line should be — from the contracts. Two long-term PPAs provide 100% offtake of net generation at a fixed price near $42/MWh with 3% annual escalation, from creditworthy off-takers — insulating the project from merchant power-price risk. On roughly 2.0 million MWh of annual generation (modeled net of losses, degradation, and availability, not peak output), the framework produces $87.6 million of first-year revenue and EBITDA margins above 90%. Most importantly for a lender, it produces a debt-service coverage ratio that climbs from 1.46x to 1.89x across the tenor and never falls below 1.46x — a substantial cushion over the typical 1.20–1.30x minimum for utility-scale renewables.

The financing package and the model

The financing itself was structured and modeled end to end: a ~$380 million fully-amortizing senior facility at a fixed 7% rate, with a one-year construction period during which interest is capitalized and debt service begins only in the first full operating year — aligning repayment with stabilized revenue and avoiding cash-flow strain during construction. The facility was sized against a $371.2 million total investment ($333.0M EPC/plant construction + $38.2M acquisition and development), delivered under a fixed-price EPC contract that pushes cost, schedule, and performance risk to a single counterparty. The model handled the details lenders probe hardest — Brazilian tax incentives (REIDI and the SUDENE rate benefit) modeled with the full-rate reversion as the downside case, a curtailment sensitivity to demonstrate DSCR resilience, and a full cash-flow waterfall — and the returns hold: a 25-year unlevered IRR of 24.3% and over $283 million of accumulated cash by final maturity.

Why the structure mattered

The framing decision was to build for the security package, not the sizzle. At $380M, the deal is won or lost on whether a lender can see a clean, ring-fenced borrower, contracted cash flows, and coverage that survives the downside — not on how attractive solar is in the abstract. Getting the three-tier structure, the non-recourse ring-fencing, the PPA revenue, and the tax-and-curtailment sensitivities right in one coherent plan-and-model is exactly what turns a large, complex sponsor group into a financeable one.

Impact

BRE came away with a lender-grade, non-recourse project-finance package for a $371M, 932 MW solar project — a clean three-tier structure, PPA-anchored revenue, a 1.46–1.89x DSCR, a 24.3% unlevered IRR, and the risk allocation and sensitivities a senior lender demands before financial close. On a deal this size, the asset only becomes real when the structure and the model make it financeable — and that is what CMA built.