The main barriers to finance of Sustainable Energy Assets (SEA) projects – namely energy efficiency, demand response, distributed renewable energy generation and electricity storage – are: 1) project valuation difficulties; 2) difficulties in project optimisation; 3) a communication gap between contractors and investors leading to a lack of trust. Today, protocols and tools exist for project valuation, but they are used separately, in different ways by different investors or contractors. Therefore, SEA projects are valuated on a one-off basis, without any standardisation. The SEAF project will significantly lower the entry barriers to finance for small to medium projects, through combining existing tools and protocols, namely Joule Assets’ market valuation tool, the risk assessment methodology from insurance company HSB and the Investor Confidence Project’s energy performance protocols. These three service tools will be integrated into an all-in-one, easy to use, single source valuation and risk assessment framework, which aims to: 1) Facilitate and support an intensive stakeholder engagement process; 2) Provide independent valuation and optimisation for SEA projects according to up-to-date energy market data; 3) Standardise energy efficiency valuation criteria for easy comparability with other similar projects; 4) Enable initial risk assessment at much lower cost and with less administrative effort; 5) Facilitate the matchmaking between investors and contractors; 6) Lay the foundation for robust exploitation. In addition to its demonstration with a large network of investors and contractors, SEAF seeks to enable investments of €10-15m and primary energy savings of 18-45 GWh/a over the course of its duration. Through its unique combination of services, SEAF will specifically target small projects, which would otherwise not get financed and it will have a disproportionately large impact on job creation, as reduced energy costs have a much stronger effect on SMEs.

The LAUNCH project will look to overcome barriers to aggregation and market scaling, accelerating the development of the SEA as tradable securities. Today the SEA market is splintered over many project and contract types, small portfolios and many methods for assessing project risk. This smothers market growth today and will continue to do so in the future. Contracts and risk assessment protocols must become standardised, in order to encourage market growth in a manner which will lay the groundwork for and accelerate the scaling of project finance in the future. Indeed, in order for the sustainable energy market to reach its full potential, we must lay the groundwork required to accelerate the development of Sustainable Energy Assets (SEA) as tradable securities. This is the aim of the LAUNCH project. This will be done through, setting up systems to prepare SEA developers for equity investment, standardising developer-end client contracts, and creating a commonly agreed set of risk assessment protocols. The consortium has wide market reach and access to best in class materials. LAUNCH will develop these deliverables further in direct cooperation with a representative group of the European Finance Industry and a substantial pool for SEA developers and pilot them in real market conditions in cooperation with SEA developers and funds. The combination of development with key players and immediate real-life uptake, will ensure the project results are market ready and fully exploitable. The project will provide a basis for accelerated and sustainable SEA market growth and aims to create a European standard for the SEA market going forward. The main resulting benefits will be accelerated growth of the SEA industry, including substantial job growth, energy and CO2 savings and further standardisation of SEA, laying the groundwork for their acceptance as tradable securities.

NOVICE will develop and demonstrate a new business model in building renovation to better monetize energy efficiency by consolidating services and subsequent revenue streams from both energy savings and demand response. In order to do so NOVICE introduces new actors (aggregators) in building energy upgrade projects and fosters their collaboration with ESCOs, financing institutions, facilities management companies, engineering consultants to facilitate the roll out of the dual (grid services and energy efficiency) energy services model. The main business bond to be forged between ESCOs and Aggregators through NOVICE will allow their seamless collaboration in exploiting economies of scope and scale along with risk sharing on implementing building energy renovations. That business relationship will take the form of a MoU and will result in the composition of a new enhanced EPC template that can deliver the successful deployment of the dual energy services scheme in building renovation. The enhanced EPC template and the overall dual energy services scheme will be scrutinized by a financing institution to assess its bankability and identify the appropriate financing mechanisms for initiating and rolling out investments under that scheme. NOVICE throughout its duration targets to trigger the initiation of more than 20.8 m EUR of investments in building renovation based on the dual energy services model that will result in primary energy savings of more than 25.2 GWh/year. To achieve that target NOVICE brings together a highly experienced consortium that consists of stakeholders from the entire value chain (research institutions, technology vendors, engineering consultants and facilitators, Aggregators, ESCOs, Financing institutions, Facilities Management companies) of building renovation. Strong participation of SMEs (6 out 9 partners) demonstrate the commercial exploitation potential of the NOVICE outputs and supports the successful rollout of the NOVICE business model.

EuroPACE will develop a scalable on-tax financing mechanism to unlock the huge potential for deployment of energy saving and generation technologies to European households. The scheme is inspired by the successful US PACE scheme, that was invented in California in 2008. The project will address several fundamental challenges to Energy Efficiency investment by (1) A Market-Based Approach: EuroPACE will deploy private capital as up-front financing to homeowners, i.e. reduce reliance on grants and subsidies, (2) De-Risking EE Investment: the long-term repayments obligation is tied to a property and not its owner. In turn, municipalities will be the conduit for the repayment via a special levy collected with the property tax bill, (3) Technical Assistance: decision-making processes for homeowners will be optimised by training energy service contractors. They will be held to account by a comprehensive consumer protection code, (4) Aggregation and Standardization: EuroPACE will design standard underwriting requirements and project performance guidelines to enable project aggregation and Green Bonds issuance. By 2025, the EuroPACE industry will generate measurable impact in the three key areas: (1) Economy: over 45.000 jobs and €5bn of capital in local economies across the EU27, (2) Society: over 300.000 homes retrofitted and improved, and (3) Environment: energy saving of 3.5MWh/year, equating to CO2 savings totalling 1.8m tons. EuroPACE will account for just 4.6% of the European renovation industry by 2015 giving way to huge growth potential. This will be achieved by a well-resourced and highly skilled consortium that will focus its efforts on three pillars of activity: (1) Conduct a market review to assess on-tax financing suitability in EU27, (2) Develop and execute a first EuroPACE pilot in the city of Olot (Spain) and (3) Develop generalised Guidelines and a Toolkit that will make EuroPACE fully scalable. Over 75 signed Letters of Support confirm a broad support platform for the project.

Four major Distribution System Operators (in Italy, France, Spain and Sweden) with smart metering infrastructure in place, associated with electricity retailers, aggregators, software providers, research organizations and one large consumer, propose five large-scale demonstrations to show that the deployment of novel services in the electricity retail markets (ranging from advanced monitoring to local energy control, and flexibility services) can be accelerated thanks to an open European Market Place for standardized interactions among all the electricity stakeholders, opening up the energy market also to new players at EU level. The proposed virtual environment will empower real customers with higher quality and quantity of information on their energy consumptions (and generation in case of prosumers), addressing more efficient energy behaviours and usage as through advanced energy monitoring and control services. Accessibility of metering data, close to real time, made available by DSOs in a standardized and non-discriminatory way to all the players of electricity retail markets (e.g. electricity retailers, aggregators, ESCOs and end consumers), will facilitate the emergence of new markets for energy services, enhancing competitiveness and encouraging the entry of new players, benefitting the customers. Economic models of these new services will be proposed and assessed. Based on the five demonstrations, while connecting with parallel projects funded at EU or national levels on novel services provision, the dissemination activities will support the preparation of the Market Place exploitation strategies, as well as the promotion of the use cases tested during the demonstration activities.