Making energy efficiency bankable: Lessons learned from a global market transformation effort

摘要

In May 2007, former U.S. President Bill Clinton and Mayor of London Ken Livingstone announced an ambitious energy efficiency best practices effort. The Energy Efficiency Building Retrofit Program of the Clinton Climate Initiative (CCI) explored ways to make efficiency retrofit projects more bankable for CCI client cities in the C40 Climate Leadership Group founded by Livingstone by using unsubsidized, commercial models applicable in a variety of countries and considerably more scalable globally than current regulated and legislated models tied to local jurisdictions. In this context, the authors provided pro bono advisory services to building owners in over twenty large cities worldwide, negotiating technical and financial performance terms on more than a hundred projects. Their experience suggests that, when deployed in combination with each other, these models can potentially transform the global market for energy efficiency retrofit projects, especially in the underserved private sector where financing is perhaps most difficult and that this has implications for a broad acceleration of energy efficiency investment. From these efforts emerged some promising models. Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) is an updated performancebased approach to contracting energy efficiency (EE) retrofit projects designed to be the sine qua non of 3rd-party EE project finance by turning energy savings guarantees into a true credit enhancement. Energy Performance Lending (EPL) is a credit underwriting process with elements of project finance for commercially mortgaged properties with limited refinancing options, which involves a new way of looking at security for lenders financing EE projects. Managed Utilities Service Contracts (MUSC) are special-purpose entities owned by 3rd parties and designed for multi-tenanted buildings, which remove a significant decision hurdle by aligning incentives between owners and leaseholders. Equipment Leasing is an existing, but underutilized, financing model for local governments, thinking about existing public finance mechanisms in new ways that eliminate capital budget competition and concerns over agency borrowing limits associated with traditional forms of public finance.