Understanding Power Project Financing 2nd Edition

This September 23-27, 2024, we went to Morocco with 16 authors for a Book Sprint organized with the Commercial Law Development Program (CLDP) to write the 2nd Edition of their book ‘Understanding Power Project Financing’ from their Understanding series. They were joined by Book Sprints facilitator Alysa Khouri to update the book with new, emerging themes in the field of power project financing in Africa. 

In the Introduction of the book, the authors share its main purpose: 

“This Handbook builds upon the first edition to provide an updated overview of the key considerations relevant to the financing of power projects in Africa. It also highlights the evolving financing landscape and offers insights into emerging structures and their specific characteristics. In doing so, this Handbook aims to provide practical guidance to stakeholders as they develop strategies to increase the volume of capital deployed to bridge the growing energy deficit.”

The authors pose for a group photo in the warm, gorgeous Moroccan light after a successful Book Sprint.

The Sprint Update

CLDP is a long-time partner, having written the six-book Understanding Series all through Book Sprints. The first edition of this book was written almost a decade ago, also in Morocco. We are grateful for the partnership and trust that keeps CLDP coming back to work with us!

For this second edition, the authors wanted to focus on what has changed in the intervening years since the book was written. Drawing from their collective expert experiences working in law and finance projects in Africa, they were able to identify new, current issues that have been coming up more and more in power project financing in Africa. 

The authors hard at work to hammer out the second edition of Understanding Power Project Financing.

In particular, they felt it was necessary to explore more of a climate financing perspective in this second edition. Several of the invited experts were actually working in the field of climate and renewable energy. They observed that over the past decade, renewable energy has begun to receive more funding. The authors recognized that the first edition was used a lot as a reference by practitioners in Africa or practitioners working with Africa. As such, it was deemed valuable to include discussions of concepts such as carbon offset schemes and credits in this second edition to provide avenues for the known and intended audience to move from theory into practice with climate financing. 

Overcoming challenges

The challenge of this Book Sprint, quite interestingly, was that the first edition provided a really good baseline of material to work with already. However, due to recent developments in the field, the authors felt that much needed to be changed, rewritten, or updated still. Thus, atypical of update sprints, a lot of new writing was actually done during this Sprint! Our facilitator, Alysa, shared that she was constantly running back and forth between smaller writing groups over days 2 to 5 of the Sprint because of the amount of work the authors had set out to accomplish. 

The experts were a good mix of majority returning Book Sprint authors and new Book Sprint authors, providing a mix of expertise in the method and fresh perspective towards the process. Alysa described the group as incredibly polite and respectful, with several of them drawing on their legal background to stand their ground during negotiation processes of the content and how it should be written. Thus, while there were some challenges with regards to aligning perspectives on the content, these were eventually ironed out for the final version with Alysa’s facilitation. The group was even able to enjoy dinner not just once, but twice at a lovely, traditional Moroccan space! They were able to enjoy a gorgeous sunset view while working on the terrace area – truly the inspiring atmosphere they needed to successfully complete this second edition of the book. 

The authors hope to launch the book soon, so make sure you’re following Book Sprints to find out when it drops! 

Keep an eye out for more Sprint updates in the future! Never miss an update with us by following us at the links below. 

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