Project description
New financing mechanism for greener buildings
The uptake of deep energy renovations (ERs) in the European building stock is a top priority and in line with the European Green Deal. Enhancing energy efficiency financing mechanisms is essential to achieve this target and ensure widespread use of ERs in Europe. The EU-funded Ren-on-Bill project aims to scale up investments towards deep ERs of residential buildings, while promoting the development and implementation of on-bill schemes based on cooperation with the financial institutions accepting repayment by drawing on utility bills. This method, successfully adopted in Canada and the United States, is expected to significantly lower default rates and bring several benefits to the European building energy renovation market and its society.
Objective
Ren-on-Bill’s overall objective is to scale up investments towards deep energy renovations (ER) of residential buildings by promoting the development and implementation of On-Bill Financing schemes, based on the cooperation between energy utilities and financial institutions.
On-Bill Financing (OBF) is a method of financing ER investments that draws on utility bills as repayment vehicle. OBF has been in use for more than 30 years, and it is especially widespread in the USA and Canada, where it significantly drives the building renovation market, with over 1 billion $ investments reached by 2013. Compared to traditional loans, default rates have been found to be lower, thus making OBF a lower risk instrument for investors. In Europe, although a few attempts have been made, OBF has not yet had a significant impact on the residential energy efficiency building renovation market.
In detail, the project will:
- Analyse and define the residential building ER and OBF market context to enable replication of suitable OBF schemes across Europe;
- Engage key stakeholders (in particular energy utilities, financial institutions, representatives of the final user and ER market side) through national stakeholder platforms;
- Develop tools to structure the residential sector’s ER financing demand allowing allows utilities and financial institutions to assess ER investments based on a transparent methodology and to bundle investments accordingly;
- Develop suitable utility business models for the deployment of deep energy renovation OBF schemes for residential buildings in Europe;
- Implement selected OBF business models at the 3 Ren-on-Bill partner utilities through a collaboration for strategic development of pilot on-bill financing schemes;
- Exploit the insights gained over the project horizon to support European-wide dissemination of knowledge on OBF schemes towards utilities, financial institutions and policy-makers.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
28028 Madrid
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.