Energy Exchange

Don’t Miss Three Important, Upcoming Webinars from EDF’s Investor Confidence Project

By EDF Blogs / Published: November 6, 2013

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, Environmental Defense Fund

 

Nearly 40% of U.S. energy is consumed by both residential and commercial buildings, which emit more than a third of our country’s greenhouse gases. Realizing all of the available cost-effective energy efficiency savings would require roughly $279 billion of investment, resulting in more than $1 trillion in energy savings over ten years.

Environmental Defense Fund’s Investor Confidence Project (ICP) opens up energy efficiency to investment markets by laying the foundation necessary to enable organizations to tap into this vast potential. This means turning energy efficiency upgrades in the commercial building sector into an asset that can be bought and traded, much like stocks and bonds.  By developing a straightforward set of protocols that define a clear road-map for upgrades, ICP creates an investment-quality asset class whose risks and returns are transparent. Ultimately, large-scale adoption of the ICP framework will reduce transaction costs and engineering overhead, while increasing the reliability and consistency of savings.

ICP will be hosting a series of webinars targeted at specific stakeholders in the energy efficiency sector, and strongly encourage individuals and organizations interested in the future of the energy efficiency industry to attend.  With the assistance and feedback of industry leaders, investors and programs, ICP has developed a range of Energy Performance Protocols tailored to market needs and project types that will reduce transaction costs, manage performance risk and increase deal flow.  Our webinar schedule this fall will focus on how these protocols can create value for individual projects, organizations and the energy efficiency industry as a whole.

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ICP Protocol For Standard Commercial Projects

By EDF Blogs / Published: September 18, 2013

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, Environmental Defense Fund

The Investor Confidence Project (ICP) is pleased to announce the release of our newest Energy Performance Protocol for Standard Commercial projects – defined as multiple-measure energy efficiency projects typically costing less than $1MM.

This protocol strikes a balance between engineering and measurement and verification best practices and the need for a streamlined, cost-effective approach to developing a standardized investment quality energy efficiency project.  This latest addition complements our existing Large Commercial Protocol in an effort to develop a family of protocols addressing the range of projects types common in the growing energy efficiency retrofit marketplace.

The goal of the Energy Performance Protocols, as a whole, is to reduce transaction costs associated with investing in energy efficiency projects by standardizing how projects are baselined, engineered, installed, operated and measured.  This allows investors and building owners to gain confidence in the long-term return on their energy efficiency investments.  The goal is to bring together project originators, building owners and investors in a more transparent, and thus more robust, marketplace.

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How Smarter, More Flexible Energy Can Help Communities Weather Future Storms

By Andy Darrell / Published: August 27, 2013

Last week, the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force released a Rebuilding Strategy, which aims to rebuild communities affected by Hurricane Sandy in ways that are “better able to withstand future storms and other risks posed by climate change.”  From an energy perspective, the main goal of these recommendations is to make the electrical grid smarter and more flexible.  This effort would minimize power outages and fuel shortages in the event of similar emergency situations in the future.

The Task Force is led by President Obama and chaired by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan.  The recommendations put forth in the report were developed with Governor Cuomo, Governor Christie, and a number of federal agencies and officials from across New York and New Jersey, representing an unusual opportunity to make changes that will help communities weather future crises.

This key idea – smarter, flexible energy – is central to resilience, safety and quick recovery in a storm, as well as reducing the harmful pollution linked to climate change in the first place.  This has been a key theme of EDF’s efforts to help the Northeast region respond to Sandy.

When the power grid went down on most of New York City following Hurricane Sandy, a number of buildings were able to keep their lights on thanks to existing microgrids and on-site, renewable energy sources.  The Task Force report lays out a path forward for taking these isolated success stories to scale and making these clean technologies available to everyone.

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New DOE Effort To Standardize The Energy Efficiency Data Dictionary

By EDF Blogs / Published: August 8, 2013

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, Environmental Defense Fund

This week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) released a new report that will serve as a data analysis tool for the energy performance of commercial and residential buildings. By providing a standardized approach for the evaluation of energy data, the Building Energy Data Exchange Specification (BEDES) will help optimize energy efficiency efforts.

BEDES provides a common language for key data elements to help a range of stakeholders communicate more effectively. The use of established formats, terms and definitions will allow for smoother interaction between contractors, software vendors, finance companies, utilities, and Public Utility Commissions. As a result, information can be shared and aggregated without laborious scrubbing and translation, which will help more rapidly answer the key questions related to energy savings and financial performance that remain barriers to energy efficiency adoption at scale.

We are pleased that the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) was highlighted as one of five key projects aligned with BEDES goals, and prioritized for collaboration as the project moves forward.  The Executive Summary (page 4) of the report clearly expresses some of the key data issues and potential solutions that this ambitious project will attempt to solve.

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Pushing Energy Efficiency Finance Beyond Theory To Practice

By EDF Blogs / Published: July 30, 2013

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, Environmental Defense Fund

New Energy and Loan Performance Data Project Uses Latest in Data Science to Help Capital Markets Engage in Efficiency Lending

Environmental Defense Fund’s Investor Confidence Project (ICP) and the Clean Energy Finance Center (CEFC), in partnership with state and local lending programs, financial organizations and a range of additional stakeholders, are collecting, aggregating and analyzing loan performance and energy savings data from energy efficiency upgrades in residential and commercial buildings.

The Energy and Loan Performance Data Project represents the first concerted effort to combine data from some of the largest US energy efficiency programs in an attempt to develop an actuarially significant dataset to help engage the capital markets.

Nearly 40% of US energy is consumed by both residential and commercial buildings.  Realizing all of the available cost-effective energy efficiency savings would require roughly $279 billion of investment, resulting in more than $1 trillion in energy savings over ten years.  However, currently, only 1% of all US investments are made in energy efficiency projects.  Our goal for this project is to help lay the foundation that will enable organizations to tap into this vast potential market.

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Investor Confidence Project Aims To Develop Multi-Billion Dollar Energy Efficiency Finance Market

By EDF Blogs / Published: July 17, 2013

This commentary, authored by James Lester, originally appeared on Cleantech Finance. 

Last month, we discussed an influential new report by Ceres and the Investor Network on Climate Risk (INCR), Power Factor: Institutional Investors’ Policy Priorities Can Bring Energy Efficiency to Scale. The report detailed several policies that if put in place, could unlock broad-based financing from institutional investors for energy efficiency, a potential several hundred billion dollar investment opportunity.

Among the issues that prevent large scale energy efficiency financing, Ceres and others have found that there is no systematic method to measure the accuracy of the initial predicted energy and financial savings of each project. There is not a robust fundamental way to make sure the upgrades are performing after they have been completed. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and a collection of expert partners are working to change that.

EDF has worked with a variety of industry experts to design a straightforward set of protocols that define a clear road-map from efficiency opportunity to an investment quality project with reliable returns and access to markets. The project, known as the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) hopes to enable a market for investment quality energy efficiency projects, by reducing transaction costs and engineering overhead, while increasing the reliability and consistency of savings. Read More »

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