Practice Areas & Industries: Holland & Hart LLP

Practice/Industry Group Overview

Holland & Hart's Project Development and Finance Group has experience in a wide variety of infrastructure projects from conception and organization, through feasibility and permitting and financing and construction, to operation, maintenance and transfer of ownership.  We have completed numerous and varied project financing transactions in energy and many other industries over the past two decades.  We have represented borrowers (and in limited circumstances, subject to reserved rights to be adverse, lenders) in non-recourse project financings for major IPPs involving the world's leading project finance banks.  Holland & Hart acted as counsel to the developer in the financing of a portfolio of wind projects that was selected as Project Finance magazine's "2004 Renewables Deal of the Year".

Services Available

Since 2001, in the energy industry alone, Holland & Hart's Project Development and Finance Group has represented clients, principally developers or sponsors of large-scale electric generation facilities involving virtually every conceivable technology and fuel, in the successful closing of approximately $3 billion of financings.  We represent developers in virtually all aspects of contractual, regulatory and developmental requirements associated with a project.  The group's services include:

• Assisting with the acquisition and development of wind generation facilities, including the power purchase and interconnection agreements with a utility.
• Formation of complex joint ventures utilized to carry out the purposes of project development and finance.
• Assisting in the negotiation and drafting of project development documents and the development and implementation of project strategies.
• Formation of project entities with complex management, operations, and ownership provisions including exit strategies, ownership changes, deadlock or dispute resolution and tax matters of a highly sophisticated nature.
• Negotiating, forming and drafting partnership agreements between IPPs for the development, ownership, operation and financing of power generation facilities.
• Structuring, from a business and tax standpoint, strategic joint ventures between companies, each contributing numerous projects located throughout the United States to a "mixing bowl" partnership in furtherance of each company's goals.
• Drafting and negotiation of warranty and operations and maintenance agreements.
• Designing extensive and complex exit strategies, management, and deadlock resolution provisions.
• Assisting with virtually all aspects of acquisitions for purchasers, including contract and permit due diligence, financing, and purchase agreement negotiation and drafting.
• Negotiating project documents, including acquisition from the initial developer, to power sale, interconnection, construction and financing work.
• Representing host facilities in connection with analysis of alternatives for cogeneration including proposals, inside-the-fence options and public utility developed options.
• Representing developers of energy-generation projects by analyzing legal and especially tax implications of sale and leaseback or conventional financing options in connection with the acquisition and construction of a facility.
• Representing pipeline companies in connection with virtually all access, condemnation, surface access rights, surface lease issues, environmental review, permitting and regulatory approval relevant to a pipeline construction project.
• Negotiating complex EPC contracts, merchant power sales agreements and transmission agreements.