Category: Legal
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What is wind turbine certification?
Wind turbine type certification is the accreditation, done by a reputable third party (“Certification Body”), that a manufacturer is selling a wind turbine that meet relevant standards and codes. TUV, DNV-GL, Bureau Veritas (among others) are examples of Certification Body. The scope of certification, according to the industry standard IEC 61400-22, can be: Prototype certification:…
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Land lease and site access: 5 usual mistakes
You would be surprised to discover the amount of problems that are generated by missing, uncomplete or wrongly defined land lease and site access agreement. Land lease contracts must be negotiated by the project company (that is, the developer of the wind farm) with the landowners. It’s extremely rare to have the whole wind farm…
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Split EPC contracts
As you probably will be aware of if you are reading this blog, an EPC is a typology of contract where a company agree to develop the engineering, procurement and construction of a facility (in this blog, a wind farm) for a fixed, “lump sum” amount. The key advantage of this type of contract is…
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Technical due diligence of a wind farm
It is a hard task to compress in a blog post the reasons behind the technical due diligence of a wind farm and the several points that must be evaluated. In a nutshell, in the clear majority of the wind farms developments are built using borrowed money. The equity (cash at risk) is put by…
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Disclaimers you shouldn’t accept in a BOP/EPC turnkey contract
Having the pleasure of studying dozens of subcontractors offers each month I’ve already seen a huge number of disclaimers. Some of them are reasonable, some of them can be removed (basically, giving a price tag to the subcontractor risk excluded by the disclaimer) but some are “deal breakers”. Which are the disclaimers that I warmly…
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FIDIC contracts in EPC Wind Farms
I’ve recently had the pleasure to be exposed recently to the FIDIC contracts structure. Therefore I want to share with you my impression regarding the possibility of using this type of contract in wind farm EPC tenders. The first FIDIC contract was released in the fifties. After half a century, the FIDIC contract family is…
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Wind Farms construction contracts
Wind farms can generally be broken down into 2 separate areas of construction: Turbines: supply, installation and commissioning of wind turbines and towers Balance of Plant (BoP) works: everything else needed except the turbines (foundations, substations, cabling, etc.) Several option are available to the developers: The first option is that the wind farm Special Purpose…