Development capital now writes checks on blank term sheets

Finnfund and Proparco announced a $33 million commitment to Erco, a Colombian solar platform, with no stake, no pipeline, no offtake and no price in the public record. CIB's $14.4 million loan to a Canadian gold mine named the lender and two technologies but omitted the project size, owner and power price a co-investor would need to size the asset. The unpriced energy deal—built from capacity figures, delivery dates and permitting wins that never attach an owner or a tariff—has now arrived at the lender's own desk.

Development capital has historically been the discipline layer: a lender underwriting a solar platform or a mining power project has to price the stake, the pipeline, the offtake and the default path, because the credit committee sees all of them. Development capital is now writing checks on the same blank term sheet as the projects it finances. When an institution makes public only the dollar amount, $33 million and $14.4 million are public numbers with no denominators.

The most plausible explanation for the missing columns is that the terms themselves have become the asset. A connection point, a steelmaker's identity, a tariff determine whether a project gets financed and at what cost, and developers have learned that publishing them invites competition before the agreement is locked. That is rational for the developer, less rational for the lender, whose capital at risk should be advertised with enough detail to establish that it is actually at risk; the lender has adopted the developer's habit and the blank term sheet has become a convention rather than an exception.

Queensland's Bungaban wind-solar-battery approval shows how far the project side has already gone: the sign-off clears one gate and leaves the two that price the asset—connection and offtake—unanswered, with no capacity figure, owner or buyer attached to the public record. Oyster named a steelmaker as the industrial offtaker for a 48-MWp park, which makes the missing tariff a private term and turns the connection point into the number that actually prices the plant. Nexgen dropped 160 MW of Philippine wind with no counterparty, no price and no stated reason, and Pacifico's 1.3-GW Vietnam survey licence names no offtaker, connection right or sponsor. Each announcement is a milestone with the valuation columns erased.

The pattern extends to projects that have cleared more than a permit. Qair announced a 15-year offtaker for Polish renewables while price and capacity stayed blank, making the tenor the underwriting fact and the economics invisible; Hep took a 35.7-MWp German solar project into construction without an owner, an offtake or a price attached to the milestone; and Woodway is selling a 2028 delivery date for gas to data centers with the offtaker unnamed and no term disclosed. From Queensland to the Philippines to Germany, the project side now publishes dates, capacities and counterparties as if the terms that set value were proprietary.

A lender's announcement is more than public relations: in project finance, the press release is often the first document an investor sees, and in some jurisdictions it is the only disclosure required before a deal closes. When the check size is the whole story, the information asymmetry developers have long maintained becomes a market standard for capital providers, and a $33 million platform commitment and a $14.4 million mine loan are small enough to hide but exactly the kind of transactions that set precedents for the larger ones.

The blank term sheet would be a curiosity if it stayed on the project side, but the Erco and CIB announcements mean it has crossed into the capital that is supposed to price it. A lender's public disclosure is the first screen a co-investor, a rating agency or a secondary buyer uses to decide whether the asset exists in tradeable form; when the disclosure contains only the check size, there is nothing to screen. The $33 million Erco commitment may be a smart underwrite and the $14.4 million mine loan may be well collateralized, but nothing in the public record permits anyone to test either proposition.

The consequence lands on secondary-market pricing: development debt and equity change hands only if a buyer can reconstruct the cash flows—contracted price, connection schedule, offtake tenor, residual stake. Strip those out, and the only verifiable number left is the one the announcement chose to publish, leaving a market for disclosed check sizes rather than energy assets. For every Qair or Hep announcement that leaves price and capacity blank, the lender's blank term sheet gives the developer cover to keep the next one blank too.

Due diligence under this convention becomes a private, bilateral exercise. A bilateral lender may be perfectly well informed; nothing about a blank press release suggests the credit committee lacked the terms. The problem is what happens when the public disclosure is the only market-facing record: a fund holding one of these commitments marks it against the last known number, which is the check size; a rating agency asked to assess a portfolio of such assets has no publicly verifiable inputs; a secondary buyer has to negotiate access to documents before it can even name the asset. That is a cost imposed on everyone outside the two counterparties.

The unpriced energy deal has become the format, and every project developer that withholds a tariff or a connection point now has a lender's example to point to. The next checkpoint is whether secondary buyers accept the blank term sheet as a disclosure standard or start discounting the paper to reflect the missing information. That discount, if it appears, will be the market's own correction, and the next time a fund wants to sell a participation in one of these commitments the buyer will be asked to underwrite not a power plant but a press release. The only line in it that can be checked is the dollar amount. A lender that restores the denominator—stake, pipeline, price—will have a public underwriting record when no one else does.