White Paper: Bridging the Gap in Energy Efficiency Finance, connecting opportunity to capital
Based on two years of fieldwork with over 150 ESCOs and investors in Europe, this paper explains the concrete reasons the finance gap exists and presents eQuad – a holistic approach to overcoming market barriers and helping ESCOs and investors thrive.
The analysis presented here has therefore been written primarily for ESCOs, but also for investors in energy efficiency projects. This white paper provides ESCOs with a guideline of investor expectations, available financing structures, and key criteria to successfully reach a deal with a financial institution. For financiers who are looking to identify viable projects to invest in, this paper describes how opportunities are pre-selected by eQuad to meet a given investor’s appetite. Finally, this paper will be of interest to other stakeholders working in policy or academia, who are looking to understand, at a granular level, the complexity of Europe’s Energiewende (transition to a zero-carbon energy system); why transition takes time – what are the barriers, and what is being done to overcome them.