Renewable delivery modelsInnovation, certainty and attracting partners

It's very much a more collaborative type arrangement. They might be fixed fee, fixed price contracts but nonetheless it's a collaborative approach. There's lots of interfaces to manage. I think it's built on that collaborative relationship with the owner-operator is really important so that does bring a different mindset and a maturity that you manage risk together and yes you respect your contract, your boundaries and of course you do but you work together to de-risk and manage risk together.

We have a recent project where we've really taken the overall project program and schedule and it was a split contracting project and there's a lot of focus and a lot of pressure on having real certainty around the overall project delivery schedule.

We brought some innovations there in terms of really unpacking that program and schedule and working with contractors and really understanding what their critical paths were and really testing and challenging that and coming up with a really robust risk-based schedule, which then the client could have greater confidence in and ultimately their funders, their equity and debt providers having greater certainty that the duration of the project was robust and risk-adjusted.

These projects are complex, and multiple parties contribute to them. And so, that financial close is a very important milestone, but I think that's the beginning of the journey.

I think it's really about that longer-term view, particularly with an asset owner type mindset from the beginning, that it is an asset that you might operate for 20, 30, 40 years.

There's lots of steps and gates to work your way through before you can get to a deliverable project. You make decisions progressively through that. But I think you make those decisions with the end in mind. It's really important. Rather than a short-term fix to get through the milestone and then move on.

Again, these large split contracting type projects have lots of interfaces between contracts, so we can provide really good insights about how you manage those insights, those interfaces well in advance of them potentially having significant consequences. And I think we've worked with multiple levels, tier one, two, three type contractors to match them at the level of their competency, depending on the size and complexity of the project.

That mix of tier one, tier two, tier threes is important. Will you always attract the big tier ones? Maybe not, particularly with the buoyancy in the Queensland market particularly.

If I think about Queensland at the moment, there's a lot of activity in the market. There's a buoyant market across the state with the Olympics, with the Bruce Highway upgrade, which is all associated with that. And then you've got renewable energy projects.

There's a lot of competition out there for good contractors and suppliers and vendors. So, I think it's really important that developer clients really understand that and make their project and their contracting model and their approach very attractive to the market.