International Marine Contractors Association (IMCA) has published Renewables Contracting Principles, along with a variety of guides, templates and discussion documents aimed at raising awareness on contracting issues and providing tools that may be useful for its contractor members, their clients and sub-contractors.
The new document from IMCA focuses on the differing issues concerned renewables. Based on the IMCA’s risk allocation goals (FAIR), the documents has been published as a discussion document and an aide for clients and contractors alongside their in-house standard contracts and industry published standard contracts.
A relatively new sector in the Industry is the Renewables sector, consisting mainly of wind farm construction and cable laying. Whilst the General Contracting Principles could be applied to this new sector, a number of issues in this sector are differing from the general offshore activities and it is felt that these need to be addressed in the contracts made. Similar initiatives by others are already well advanced, such as for a standard CAR insurance policy and a standard vessel hire contract to be used in offshore wind farm construction projects.
In this document, IMCA presents the Renewables Contracting Principles, which are to a large extent similar to the other contracting principles published and are also based on FAIR acronym – FAIR, IMCA’s risk allocation goals, are as follows:
– Fair (not equal) and realistic distribution of risk in proportion to relative rewards
– Allocation of risk – to the party best placed to assume
– Insure – sufficient scope of cover
– Reasonable – avoid ‘duplicate’ assumptions of risk and minimise potential for dispute.
The Principles are not intended to represent a complete analysis of all risks which are covered by contracts in the offshore renewables industry. In general, they reflect well established industry custom and practice of addressing certain risks such as the knock for knock indemnity regime.
Image: IMCA