Western Wind: A Clean Energy Rodney Dangerfield?

Independent Valuation

Almost every company will tell you that their shares are undervalued, but what's a bit more unusual in this case is that their assets (wind farms with a little solar thrown in) are fairly easy to value with a rigorous discounted cash flow (DCF) model.  While wind and solar resources vary from hour to hour and even year to year, the expected energy production from wind and solar farms is fairly predictable over time, and all Western Wind's projects except for Mesa have Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with electric utilities that specify the prices those utilities will pay for as long as 20 years, leading to fairly predictable revenue streams over time, and fairly low uncertainty in asset valuation.  The company is currently selling electricity from Mesa at the spot price, but they are in the process of negotiating a longer term PPA.

Last year, company management decided to back up their words by hiring the independent DAI Management Consultants, Inc to value the company's equity stake in their renewable energy projects.  Western Wind has a 30-MW operating wind farm (Mesa), an operating combined wind (10 MW) and solar (500 kW) farm (Kingman I), a 120-MW wind a farm and that is nearing completion and expected to be fully operational by the December 2011, and a 30-MW solar farm in Puerto Rico (Yabucoa) that is expected to be completed by the end of 2012.  Windstar and Kingman have signed PPAs and debt financing in in place, and Mesa is fully financed and operating under a spot price sale agreement. Yabucoa has a signed PPA and the company expects to close financing for it by the end of 2011. 

Assumptions 

Western Wind has released the results of DAI's valuation in a series of press releases as the valuation of each project was completed.  The complete valuation is not public because it depends on the terms of the PPAs, which are confidential.  (Confidential PPAs are a practice which I believe is counterproductive as well as counter to free market principles.  Nevertheless, keeping PPAs confidential is standard utility industry practice, and could only be banned by utility regulators; it's not something I or Western Wind have the power to change.)  They did, however, release the assumptions on which DAI's valuation was based.  These assumptions are included in the table below. 

One assumption that I would have liked to see is the expected capacity factors for each of the wind farms, since that is key to knowing how much energy each project is likely to produce, but otherwise the disclosure seems comprehensive.   

Assuming the capacity factor estimates are accurate, an assumption which shows the fairly conservative nature of the valuation is the second-to-last row "Weighting of income approach vs cost approach."  This row indicates that for each of the incomplete wind farms, only 75% percent of the valuation given is based on a DCF model; the other 25 percent of the valuation is a replacement cost approach using comparable market transactions.  This is conservative because the DCF model should give a considerably higher value than cost when valuing a wind project because unfinished projects trade at a discount: Why invest money if the expected returns (DCF valuation) are below what you could get by selling the project?

Another row worth noting is the third to last, "Discount rate on equity returns."  This is extremely important because DCF valuations are highly sensitive to the discount rate assumption: a slightly lower discount rate can lead to a much higher project valuation.  Discount rates vary with the riskiness of the project, and with interest rates in the economy in general. (Risky projects should have higher discount rates, and we see this reflected in the fact that when power is to be sold on the spot market rather than under a PPA, DAI used a significantly higher discount rate.)   

As an investor, the simplest way to judge if an equity discount rate is appropriate is to ask yourself if you would be willing to earn that discount rate as an annual return for owning a slice of the project.  For myself, I would be happy to own a slice of a operating or nearly-completed wind farm for 10.5-11.5 percent per year.  I'm not quite sure why the Yabucoa solar farm is given a lower discount rate than the others even though it is over a year from completion, but I still consider the return to be sufficient.

Given these assumptions, DAI came up with the following project valuations: