LAUSR

This paper analyses the financial implications, from the point of view of an investor in renewable energy, which sells the energy for an uncertain price of electricity and decides to take advantage of the Colombian tax policy over the renewable energy. The policy, known as Investment Tax Allowance (ITA), encourages installation of renewable projects in a country traditionally dominated by hydro power. Price is modeled as a non-stationary autoregressive stochastic process with normally distributed error terms. Costs, and uncertain revenue and taxes are considered to assess the financial impact on a solar project when the policy is implemented. Since impact varies according to project ownership, two cases are evaluated: a generation company (GENCO-1) that only owns the solar project; and, an existent generation company (GENCO-2) that owns a portfolio of projects. Results indicate that if ITA is applied, it is likely that the GENCO-1 cannot take the full advantage of the incentive, as opposed to the GENCO-2. Although this policy might not satisfy planner objectives since it does not guarantee the construction of significantly high capacity of new renewable energy projects, it definitely represents an attractive mechanism to decrease tax obligations at the GENCO-2 level. Finally, a theoretical analysis shows that investment cost affects the mean of the present value; whereas tax rates impacts both its mean and standard deviation.