Indirect Credit Support.
For any particular (ultimate) obligor of the project's debt and any given degree of leverage in the capital structure, the cost of debt is typically higher in a project financing than in a comparable conventional financing because of the indirect nature of the credit support.
The credit support for a project financing is provided through contractual commitments rather than through a direct promise to pay. Lenders to a project will naturally be concerned that the contractual commitments might somehow fail to provide an uninterrupted flow of debt service in some unforeseen contingency. As a result, they typically require a yield premium to compensate for this risk. This premium is generally between 50 and 100 basis points, depending on the type of purchase contract negotiated. The hell-or-high-water contract, described in Chapter 4, provides the greatest degree of credit support and therefore requires a yield premium that is at the low end of this range.