so what i wanted to i've got a few
questions for you today
because  i know you're you're a pretty
smart guy and
and i usually have a lot of trouble 
certainly my knowledge of the
projects arena is very limited  you know ask me
anything about
 the products  sales side and
i'm fine but
i really want to pick your brain and
recently i've been seeing a few
 clean energy council  announcements
come through
and so if you don't mind i just wanna
share with you a couple that have
come through in the last couple of weeks
and just get your opinion on or maybe
even just pick your brain about what
they're actually saying here
so  let me just bring up my my
screen
share cool here right so
the first one i saw give me this okay
can you see my screen yep excellent all
right so i don't know if you saw this
one but
it came through i think  last week
clean energy outlook confidence index
and so it says here the latest
results from the
the clean energy outlook confidence index
survey are in with investors
buoyed by state moves over the last six
months to include more renewables into
their energy mix particularly in new
south wales
anyway i won't read the whole thing but
it does go into some uh some pretty
interesting
 stats that they that they put
together i think they interviewed like a
hundred
or so CEOs from
within the Australian solar industry
have you seen this report yep yeah okay
cool
so you know just looking this is
quite interesting
it looks like investment
confidence
across states so does your investment
confidence vary
state to state looks like predominantly
that's a yes which
i would have imagined looks like the
strongest states
where with confidence scores would be
new south wales
and victoria and queensland as well
 to an extent i i guess a year or two
ago probably queensland would have been higher on this
on this list is that do you think is it
moving south
i would say even more than two years ago
like queensland was one of the first so
before i joined Clenergy like we've done
a lot in
in queensland so we had like three
projects up in queensland but there was
like 16
actually four projects 16 17 18
that was like the boom days
up in queensland um the gold rush of
course it sort of rebounds now
there's a lot of announcements and
they're certainly on track
but  yeah you see like that confidence
reflects also like largely it follows
what the market rates are doing
like you dollars per megawatt-hours which you then get from
say trading the electricity which is
partly merchant if you don't have
like a 100% PPA and as you see
here like NSW clearly is well
it is number one and then followed by
victoria so new south wales is still the
highest
market rates compared to queensland say
Western Australia is completely
different it's not part of the NEM
tazzy has low rates 
south australia has very low rates which
is credit to
because they put in so much wind which
is good for the consumers
but less so for the generators
so this
partly went in into that confidence
index like what's driving the underlying
basics
to really build more renewables and
much is driven just by higher rates
okay and so you're saying yeah so the higher the rates the more
investment you'll get into those
those states basically because it makes
more sense to build projects combination of
course like
like rates um market rates or prices
to drive your returns at the same time
you also need to have access to the
network
and that access needs to give be given
preferably 100 percent
and in victoria as most know like in the
north
um like murray region
we had a lot of issues with
curtailment
up to 50% so that's hurting then your
returns and that's why like victoria
had sort of like a bump like
it was impacted and there were not many
new projects coming online
certainly not in that region everything
was on hold but that's
that's largely resolved  through smart
inverters and fixes
 in inverters and also their network
upgrades so the victorian government is
very strong in
in pushing upgrades um and supporting
renewables
which is different to other governments
are doing and um and that's why
you see victoria certainly climbing back
to a
top position at the moment number two
but i guess like more to come
so access to the network is another big
one queensland still has
some curtailment which can happen like
when
the grid is just constrained, NSW
is top position because like the network
is still
in most regions pretty okay and
Transgrid and NSW government
doing a lot in upgrading networks
creating these renewable energy zones
which is just helping additional
renewable generation
actually heaps and that's why that
confidence index
is is top for new surface
okay and so when you say curtailments 
what you're talking about is they're
saying they're limiting what these
these farms can export is that right
yeah okay i mean would that have been
considered a possibility
when these projects were developed that
that would be contained to
at all or to the extent that they
were well you always try to forecast and
you get smart consultancies involved and
they even
give you reliance on it but who knows
like what's happening over five
ten fifteen twenty-five years for
example like the solar farm should run
at least 25 years that's how we
calculate it but
like most new so the Mildura
region
murray region will be
a hot zone for renewables in victoria
and  sort of like you saw it coming
that you will have
quick constraints um you will and the
result out of it you will have curtailed
generation and no one saw it coming that
you have up to 50 percent curl tail
curtailed generation
50 is like that's massive or like
cuts it by half of course and
and out of it was also then every year
aim of the market operator is
analyzing your marginal loss factors so
that's like a multiplier
and preferably it's like one or one plus
which very few locations are still
one plus so
up in victoria it's used to be like
0.9 / .88
and that dropped to 0.85 or even lower
and that again hurts your bottom line
your returns are just in a function of
like what you get from the market your
energy output and times the MLF and of
course like a few other factors but
the big ones are clearly like
curtailment and your MLF
and your market rate sorry what's mlf
marginal loss factor a little bit it's
just like
the losses which you have to pay
from your point of generation to the
node
like every state has one node which is
like your reference point which the
prices are calculated and your MLFs are calculated
