Each stage is the next one’s precondition.

Seven stages run on every mandate in this practice, whatever the technology. They are in that order because a lender will not begin one of them until the one before it exists, which means the only real choice available is which stages you start before somebody tells you to. A renewable project that is late is almost never late in construction. It is late at a document stage, and by the time that is visible the commissioning date has already moved.

The first conversation is about dates

In renewables there are usually three, and only one of them binds. The commissioning deadline in the offtake document — nine months from signing under a PM KUSUM RESCO PPA, longer elsewhere and rarely as long as it sounds. The connectivity or evacuation milestone the transmission licensee is holding the project to, which is a different date with a different penalty behind it. And any scheme or policy window that made the project worth doing in the first place, including the vintage of open access charges a C&I project has been granted.

Which of those three binds decides the whole sequence, and the answer is not always the one the promoter has been working to. It also decides whether we are useful to you: a window with three months already spent is not the same engagement as the same window on the day of signing. The work is identical, the sequence is not, and in one of the two cases the honest answer is that there is no longer room for a debt process. Hearing that in the first conversation is worth more than a mandate letter.

Appraisal time is mostly queue

A credit team that finds a document missing does not slow down. It puts the file down and picks it up again when the paper arrives, which costs the queue a second time. So the elapsed weeks between submission and sanction are largely a count of how many times the file went back down, and that number is set before it is ever sent.

Which is why the file goes out reconciled rather than complete. The MCA record, the GST registration and the KYC folders have to agree on who the directors are, and by the time a file is ready they are three separate lists that disagree more often than anyone expects. The land area has to agree across the revenue record, the registered lease deed and the DPR, and a khasra number that differs by one digit between two of them is a fortnight. The capacity has to agree between the offtake document and the DPR, which it frequently does not, because one contracts in AC and the other quotes DC. Each of those is a day of our time and a fortnight of the project’s.

Queries come back to us, not to you. Most of them are not credit questions at all — a schedule that does not tie to the return filed, a director’s address that differs across two documents, an area that does not match. Held by someone with the whole file open, those are answered the same day; relayed through three parties, each costs a week the commissioning date does not have.

What changes by technology

The stages do not change. What changes is which one is hardest, and it is a different one in each market. In solar under a DISCOM PPA the credit question is the utility’s payment record and the binding constraint is the scheme’s clock. In commercial and industrial solar the credit question is the offtaker’s own and the constraint is a set of state charges that can move after financial close. In wind, debt is sized off the yield assessment, which makes the resource study a financing document before it is a technical one. In green hydrogen and compressed biogas the binding stage is offtake itself, because the Indian lender set for both is thin and neither is financed on generation alone.

What you are holding at the end

A mandate closes on drawdown, not on sanction. Sanction is the point at which the work is nearly done, and the gap between nearly and actually is where commissioning dates usually go.

The document set, current

In a state the next facility or the next tranche can be run from rather than rebuilt: the entity papers, the director set, the land file, the DPR and the reports commissioned against it.

The conditions precedent, closed out

Each line with the evidence that satisfied it sitting against it, rather than a list somebody has to reconstruct at the first drawdown request after ours.

The obligations that outlive us

PPA compliance dates, the performance guarantee and its renewal, covenant tests, the filings that follow a change in shareholding — as a register with an owner and a date on every line, handed to whoever inside your organisation is going to keep it.

Decisions that stay yours

Price, security and structure. We hold the file, the query log and the CP schedule; we do not hold the decisions.

Where to start

The date in your offtake document, the technology, and where the project is. That is enough for us to say which of the three dates binds, whether the timeline still has room in it, and which lenders are worth approaching.