Allen and Joel speak with Jatin Sharma from NARDAC, an insurance broker specializing in complex renewable projects. As a boutique firm, NARDAC aims to bridge knowledge gaps between insurance capital providers and renewable companies to facilitate optimal coverage terms amidst the market's rapid evolution and emerging risks. Visit https://nardac.com/ for more!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with my co host, Joel Saxum. Our guest today is Jatin Sharma, a managing partner at NARDAC. NARDAC is an independent wholesale broker, which navigates the relationship between insurance carriers and retail brokers.

And as the turbulent as the insurance market is at the moment, NARDAC may be your key to getting there. Success weathering the insurance storm. NARNAC is a specialist for large, complex projects that includes a focus on renewable energy. Whether you're an original equipment manufacturer, a developer building a wind farm, or an asset owner, NARNAC helps the industry understand the risks.

Jatin, welcome to the program.

Jatin Sharma: Thanks for having me.

Joel Saxum: So Allen and I of course in the lightning world and wind and with the podcast and the networks that we have, we talk to people about failures and fires and gearboxes and all these different things. Do you see the like macro changes, right? So I say this because I've talked with people in the insurance world or in the, on the risk world on the IPP side that say, yeah, our premium is going up on this site.

Or our deductibles are starting to increase here for this reason. And to me, it seems like that's more of a, like a micro okay, that's specific to this project, this technology, this site, mostly it's this site but with better communication strategies in a more I would say a more integrated insurance market.

Do you see the premiums or the deductibles starting to change? And let's just, it's for ease of use. Let's focus on like the U S onshore market.

Jatin Sharma: If we did like a. a three to five year time horizon with today versus, three to five years ago. I'd say that we've probably seen an increase of about 40 percent on the price paid per megawatt for wind operators in the US.

And that, that would be my kind of average number, across a portfolio and that's on a risk adjusted basis. And you might say, wow, 40%, that's a lot. That's pretty material. What does that do to your OPEX? What does that do to valuations? I think it's important to put it in context that insurance is directly linked to the cost of capital.

So in the same way that, five years ago, if you told me you had a million dollars and you're going to put it in the bank account, you probably got to get a quarter percent interest, maybe half a percent, on lowest risk opportunity. Now you go and put it in, maybe you can get 5. 5%. In the same way, insurance will have turned around and said if five years ago, for every 100 you were giving me, and I was giving you back 55 to 65 in claims, payments, let's say loose numbers here, that is no longer an acceptable return, I want to be giving you, I want to be getting 150 and I want to, not give back more than 50 to 75.

Fives. In that sort of ratio and it's the law of large numbers. So there are many sites that have zero claims and every now and again,