WACC

Maisie Cu!

Welcome to Maisie’s universe

Welcome, everyone. You have tumbled into the Queen’s rose garden, where three playing-card gardeners are painting the white roses before she arrives. Maisie is somewhere ahead, chasing a white rabbit and a lower cost of capital.

“Would you tell me,” said Alice, a little timidly, “why you are painting those roses?”Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, ch. 8

🔎 The thesis, in this world

  1. 🌹 Three gardens grow roses in the same sunshine. So why does one garden borrow its money much more cheaply than the other two?
  2. 🎨 The price of money: Weesow in Germany pays 3.55%, Claresholm in Alberta 5.66%, Travers in Alberta 6.23%.
  3. 🃏 In Germany the whole palace looks after the garden: steady rules, planned grid, patient banks. In Alberta each gardener must protect their own roses with a contract.
  4. 👑 The moral: don’t paint every garden the same colour. One price of money for every country gets it wrong.
💬 Meanwhile, in this universe…Tap the bubbles to keep the conversation going.

Three little doors

🍰 Eat me · Play with the modelOpen to everyone. Take a bite and everything changes size: move one input and watch every chart grow or shrink.Start here ↓ 🐛 The Caterpillar’s question · Walk through the thesis with MaisieThe Caterpillar lets no one pass without an answer. Solve one small sum from the model, and Maisie walks you through her thesis in eight small steps.Solve the sum → 👑 The Queen’s court · The defense roomFor Maisie’s professors only: the briefing room, the slides and the maps, behind a real password. No heads will roll.Take a look →
🐇 The back storySix tiny chapters · tap to open

Before the rabbit hole, there was a long chase. The white rabbit led Maisie across three continents, through a few countries and various field placements, some of them undercover (just kidding… or not). In every industry she asked the same question: what does money cost here, and why? And like Alice, she met a new cast of characters at every turn, each with a different answer. Three continents, a few countries and various field placements later, voilà: a thesis.

It was never a straight road. She learnt, she failed, and she tried again. There were wrong turns, doors far too small to fit through, and more than a few challenges that felt like the Queen shouting “Off with her head!” Each one taught her something about how money, risk and people fit together.

Live financial model

Move one thing, and watch everything else answer.

Move any input; every chart on this page follows. The thesis base case reproduces Table 6.4a and all eight rows of Table 6.8. βL = βU[1 + (1−T)D/E] · Re = Rf + βL·ERP + RPc · WACC = D/V·Rd(1−T) + E/V·Re

WACC post-tax
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light = debt contributiondark = equity contributionclick a bar to edit that project
One-variable swaps (Table 6.8)

Equations & concepts

The maths behind the model, and the words behind the maths.

Never studied finance? Start here. Six small ideas, explained with a house and a mortgage, are enough to read everything on this page.

    Try it: same farm, more debt

    Slide the borrowing up. The farm itself doesn’t change, so its unlevered bumpiness stays put. But the owners are paid last, so every wobble hits them harder: their levered bumpiness climbs.

    Three projects, side by side

    Twelve small windows onto the same three fields.

    Every chart here is interactive. Nine of them recalculate from the live model above; the two marked thesis values show reported figures. The coloured project buttons above each chart show or hide a project on every chart at once. Where you see ✥ drag, grab a dot or bar edge to change that input directly; the model's sliders follow. Hover over anything for exact figures.

    Full build-up, input to WACC

    Every rate begins as a small decision.

    All inputs and outputs for the three projects. Input cells are editable: type a new value and press Enter. Click a project name to open it in the model. Changed values are underlined in amber; the last two columns give the gap from Weesow.

    Cost of capital components

    Six measures, three places, one question.

    Risk-free rate, cost of equity, cost of debt (before and after the tax shield) and WACC. Turn measures on or off with the measure buttons; click a bar to open that project in the model.

    Capital structure and where WACC comes from ✥ drag

    How much is borrowed, and how much is believed.

    Top bar: financing mix (debt D/V against equity E/V). Drag the white handle to change gearing and watch the WACC bar underneath respond. Bottom bar: WACC points contributed by debt (light) and equity (dark).

    WACC against gearing ✥ drag

    Lean on debt, and equity leans back.

    D/V swept from 0 to 85%, everything else fixed. Drag a dot along its line to set that project's gearing. A hollow ring marks the thesis value once you move away from it. At the thesis inputs the lines rise only gently, because re-levering β pushes the cost of equity up almost as fast as cheaper debt brings WACC down.

    WACC against contracted share ✥ drag

    A promised price is a quieter kind of sunlight.

    Revenue under contract (PPA or feed-in) lowers WACC at each project's thesis slope, about 3 bps per percentage point. Drag a dot to change that project's contracted share.

    WACC against the risk-free rate ✥ drag

    The tide that lifts every cost.

    The rate channel, swept from −1% to 5%. Dashed rules mark the 9 Sept 2026 ten-year yields (Bund 3.37%, Canada 3.79%). Drag a dot onto a rule to reprice that project at today's yield.

    WACC against the cost of debt ✥ drag

    What the lender asks, the project remembers.

    Pre-tax cost of debt swept from 0% to 7%. Travers is steepest because it has the highest gearing. Drag a dot to set that project's debt cost; drag Weesow to 4.20% to reproduce the thesis's 4.75% swap.

    Sensitivity tornado

    Which winds move the number most.

    How far WACC moves when one input goes down (left) or up (right), everything else at current values; all panels share one scale. Try it: switch between split bars and total swing, load the thesis’s Table 6.4d ranges, hide drivers, drag a bar sideways to widen or narrow that driver’s step, click a bar to apply that change to the model, or click a driver’s name to jump to its slider.

    Drivers:
    WACC fallsWACC rises

    Bridge from Weesow to each Alberta project

    The long walk from Brandenburg to the prairie.

    Start at Weesow's live WACC and swap in the Alberta project's inputs one at a time. The steps always add up to the gap, but their sizes depend on the order; pick an order to see how. Click a step to move it to the front. The thesis's one-at-a-time swaps (Table 6.8) are the buttons in the model.

    adds to WACClowers WACCclick a step to move it first

    Debt service coverage thesis values

    Can this year’s sunshine pay this year’s debts?

    Minimum and 20-year average DSCR (Appendix A). Move the covenant slider to see which projects would breach a lender's minimum; at 1.0× cash flow only just covers debt service.

    Current-market rates thesis values

    Same order, different weather.

    Table B.2: reported base case against current-market repricing (ERP and country premium fixed). The ordering Weesow < Claresholm < Travers holds in both. Switch views, or show your live model value as a diamond to compare your scenario.

    Cash-flow waterfall thesis values

    Where each year’s light finally lands.

    How each year's revenue turns into cash for equity: revenue, less operating costs and tax, gives cash flow available for debt service (CFADS); less debt service leaves cash to equity. Pick a project, drag the year slider or press ▶ to play through the 20-year horizon, or switch to the 20-year total. Click any year in the strip below to jump to it. CFADS and debt service come from thesis Figures A.3–A.5; revenue comes from the thesis engine. Claresholm's debt is repaid by year 8, so from year 9 all of its CFADS goes to equity.

    operating costs & taxdebt servicecash to equityshortfall (DSCR below 1.0×)

    Net present value and discounted cash flow

    What the future is worth today.

    Each year’s unlevered free cash flow (the cash flow available for debt service, less the interest tax shield actually used) is discounted at the project’s WACC and added up, then the build cost is subtracted. Capital cost at year 0; 20-year horizon, no terminal value. Derived from thesis Figures A.3–A.5; it reproduces the reported project IRRs of Table 6.4b (−2.3%, 5.7%, 5.5%). The NPV itself is a derived figure, not one the thesis reports. Drag the discount-rate slider or click the profile chart.

    Discounted cash flow, year by year
    NPV profile: NPV against the discount rate
    cash flow (undiscounted)present valuecumulative NPV

    Findings

    What the three fields finally told us.

    The thesis's conclusions in one place: the three key findings (Table 7.1), the quieter second-order results that sit underneath them, the causal chain that links institutions to WACC (§7.4), and what each audience should do differently (Table 7.2). Click any see it ↗ to jump to the chart that shows it.

    Key findings

    The three things the thesis claims.

    Second-order findings

    What you notice on the second look.

    Results that qualify, sharpen or complicate the headline. Tap a card to open the evidence.

    ○ WACC-minimising gearing● actual gearing (drag it; the model follows)dashed = excess leverage

    Corrected specification from Appendix B: debt carries systematic risk, βD = s × spread ÷ ERP, with spread ≈ 41 + 315 × gearing bps fitted to the three deals. At s = 0.4 it reproduces Table B.3 (optima 17.8%, 36.7%, 53.9%). Lower s toward 0.27 and Travers becomes the most over-levered, as the thesis notes. Its WACC levels differ slightly from the main model, which charges each project its observed debt cost.

    Down the rabbit hole

    Chase the mechanism: from a law to a discount rate, one level deeper at a time.

    Every level is observable in the cases (§7.4, Table 6.6). Press 🐇 to follow the rabbit all the way down, or click any level to see it in the model.

      Revenue certainty is itself an institutional product: contract structure is an institutional artefact, not an alternative to institutions.

      What to do differently

      Three audiences, three changes of habit.

      Assumptions & inputs

      Every number here has a source, a reason, or an honest label.

      The complete set of inputs behind the model and charts, taken from the thesis (Tables 3.2, 5.4, 6.4d, A.1 and A.2 and the Appendix A case pages). Each engine input is tagged C confirmed from a public source, P proxied from a benchmark, or M modelled. Filter, search, or click ↗ slider to jump to that input in the live model.

      WACC & CAPM inputs

      The recipe, ingredient by ingredient.

      These are the eight inputs the live model uses, plus the tax-shield switch. The model's starting values are these thesis values; Weesow is shown on the standalone (Lens 2) basis used for the three-way comparison.

      Common-engine assumptions register

      Nothing enters the model that is not listed here.

      The full register from Table A.2, one row per input. Use the buttons to filter by project or by how the value was obtained, or type to search.

      Why this number?

      Every assumption, and the reason it holds up.

      For each input in the financial model: the value for each project, where it comes from, why that number was chosen, and what happens to the result if it is wrong. Pick a group, or open everything at once.

      C confirmed from a disclosureP proxied from a benchmarkM modelled or a convention
      Stress-tests for the most contestable numbers (computed from the same engine)
      What if…ResultOrdering W < C < T
      Weesow borrows the sculpted 57.7% instead of 43%3.66%holds
      Weesow realises the full 30% tax shield3.37%holds
      Weesow is fully merchant (0% contracted)4.46%holds
      Claresholm gets Travers’s +50 bps country premium5.87%holds
      Travers gets no country premium6.09%holds
      All rates repriced to current market (Bund 3.37%, GoC 3.79%)6.55 / 7.69 / 8.19%holds

      Engine conventions

      The rules every project plays by.

      • Horizon 20-year evaluation window for every project; figures in local-currency millions (EUR for Weesow, CAD for Alberta).
      • Rate vintage Weesow priced at 2020 conditions, Travers and Claresholm at 2021 conditions.
      • Generation E(t) = AC capacity × capacity factor × 8,760 × (1 − 0.5%)t−1.
      • Revenue contracted slice at the PPA strike plus a merchant slice at the pool or spot price path; Claresholm's contracted share steps from ~56% to zero after year 8.
      • Operating cost escalated each year with assumed inflation.
      • Debt sized to the lower of target gearing and a target minimum DSCR; interest on the opening balance at the all-in cost of debt; DSCR reported on a straight-line schedule.
      • Tax at the combined corporate rate, after interest and a straight-line capital allowance.
      • Beta one unlevered sector beta of 0.70 for all three projects, re-levered on each project's gearing and tax rate (Hamada).
      • Contracted share moves WACC along each project's modelled slope, about 3 bps per percentage point (Table A.6).

      Headline outputs

      What the engine hands back.

      Ranges tested

      How hard each assumption was pushed.

      Table 6.4d: WACC swing over the range tested. The equity risk premium and beta dominate; operating assumptions move WACC far less.

      Limits of the model

      What the numbers can and cannot say.

      Build your own project

      Same engine, your sunshine.

      The thesis’s common engine, opened up for any utility-scale solar project. Punch in capacity, prices, contracts and financing; the page builds the WACC, a year-by-year cash flow, DSCR, NPV, IRR and LCOE, and sets your project beside Weesow, Claresholm and Travers. Start from a thesis project or the generic template, then change anything. 📊 Download my Excel model turns your inputs into a working spreadsheet: every number on its CashFlow, WACC and Summary sheets is a live formula.

      Start from
      debt servicecash to equityshortfallDSCR (right axis)
      Year-by-year table

      A simplified replica of the common engine (Appendix A, equations 1–13): straight-line debt amortisation, tax floored at zero with no loss carry-forward, a flat PPA price with optional escalation, and LCOE as capex plus discounted operating cost over discounted output. WACC uses the same CAPM, Hamada and tax-shield formulas as the live model, without the contracted-share slope. The thesis presets reproduce each project’s WACC exactly and its LCOE closely (about €63, C$68 and C$69 per MWh); their PPA and merchant prices are proxies, so IRR and NPV will not match the thesis. Treat results as directional, as the thesis does.

      Maisie’s corner

      Little takeaways, and a place to tell me what you think.

      One-line takeaways from the thesis. Tap one to see what it means and where it comes from.

      From the thesis
      Just for fun, still true

      Walk through the thesis with Maisie

      Ten minutes, eight small steps, for anyone who solves one sum. This door takes a number, not a word.

      “Who are you?” asks the Caterpillar. Here, a number will do: solve this sum from the live model, and Maisie will walk you through the rest.

      Weesow, the German solar park in the live model, borrows 43% of its money at 1.40% interest. The other 57% comes from its owners, who want 5.17% a year. Weesow gets no tax saving on its interest.

      What is Weesow’s WACC, in percent, to two decimals?

      WACC = D/V × Rd × (1 − T) + E/V × Re

        Defense room

        Behind this door: the slides, the model and the maps, for the day it counts.

        The briefing room for Maisie’s defense: the thesis explained, the full thesis, and the process maps. The presentation room waits inside behind its own door, like a set of nesting dolls.

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