Project dates: 01. Apr 2017 - 31. Mar 2021
Objective
In the Covenant of Mayors signatories commit to a Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan. However, often municipalities lack capacity to turn their plans into actions; and the residential sector is often left behind and deep renovations not implemented.
Realizing this potential requires designing, financing and implementing complex energy efficiency investments. Practice shows that small and medium municipalities are inadequately organized to manage and finance this process. At the same time individual owners in the residential sector are inadequately organized to manage their collective property.
Accelerate SUNShINE supports Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), with a pipeline of projects worth €27m and guaranteed savings over 27GWh/year. A major objective is to demonstrate the financial viability of deep renovation via suitable project bundling, municipal partnerships and financial engineering.
In the proposed approach four municipalities works together in a shared project management unit, composed by experts covering technical, socio-economic, legal and financial advisory. This unit deals with project development and process standardization. In each municipality public buildings are bundled for Energy Performance contracting based procurement. At the same time each municipality establish a support scheme for the deep renovation of multifamily residential buildings always based on Energy Performance contracting and continuing the effort made by SUNShINE.
As most ESCOs have limited balance sheet capacity, re-financing is usually achieved by selling future receivables by a forfaiting transaction. Accelerate SUNShINE supports this solution, further rolling out the Latvian Baltic Energy Efficiency Facility, which is an investment fund with a single purpose: forfaiting receivables from EPC. Here process standardization is very important for attracting private and institutional investors.