One of the principal challenges to increasing energy efficiency investments (EEI) is the lack of statistical data on the actual energy and costs savings achieved with them. Data is still hard to access because it is decentralized and in different formats. Consequently, only a small part of this can be used to produce reliable empirical evidence on the performance of the EEI. EN-TRACK will meet this challenge by enabling an interoperable ecosystem of data and tools supporting building refurbishment decision making, putting it into practice with the financial sector. EN-TRACK builds on an existing infrastructure enabling massive data gathering, making the data comparable and interoperable with other existing databases, analysing this data and offering relevant results to key stakeholders. This will support better (more informed, more transparent and faster) decision-making, contribute to the de-risking of investments in energy efficiency in buildings and facilitate process of closing investment deals. Enabling interoperability with most currently active databases and tools (DEEP, eQuad, EnerInvest, etc.) will lead to an unambiguous data exchange based services ecosystem with low transactional costs. This is a big step towards making energy efficiency investments a mainstream activity of the financial sector. EN-TRACK is a three-year project that will directly involve over 35 financial institutions and 100 key stakeholders with a buildings stock investment capacity of over 442M€, trigger over 23M€ in investments and expects to be achieving annual savings of over 38GWh/yr and 17ktCO2eq/yr by the end of the project. EN-TRACK will become self-sustainable and x10 expansion 5 years post-project is anticipated. The EN-TRACK consortium is a team of 7 from 5 EU countries that includes data and analytical skills, buildings access, leading figures in the energy efficiency financing field, links to the key initiatives (DEEP, EEFIG, etc.), and professional communications skills.

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.

The potential for mainstreaming energy efficiency financing will be addressed by the PROPEL consortium by creating a single, holistic resource centre in Europe, which will be maintained and has ALL the critical collateral and resources required to develop, sell, contract and finance sustainable energy projects at the required scale. The PROPEL project will build on the consortium’s significant ownership of, and access to, the full range of necessary standardised financing collateral, to deploy this collateral in the market while at the same time, firmly establish an industry association, the Sustainable Energy Finance Association (SEFA), which will act as THE knowledge and resource centre for the mainstreaming of finance into sustainable energy assets, not only during the project’s lifetime but long after its completion. The PROPEL project will develop an integrated ecosystem of financing collateral and relevant actors, which together will drive the market for sustainable energy assets forward. PROPEL will focus on building and testing this ecosystem in four countries (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Netherlands), reaching out to a minimum of 400 EE projects developers (supply side), 50 end-client representatives (demand side), and 30 financiers (banks and financial funds). PROPEL is expected to trigger €20M of investments into EE Projects within the project duration, leading to 40,46 GWh of annual primary energy savings and 10’890 tCO2 savings. These impacts are estimated to grow 25 fold within the 5 years after the project, due to PROPEL’s aim at creating a long-lasting eco-system, which will be hosted by SEFA. The PROPEL consortium has a wealth of expertise in developing standardised collateral and putting together the building blocks for development of a single ecosystem of collateral and actors that will enable and facilitate the scaling up and acceleration of financing to the sustainable energy market.