Residential Building Energy Renovations with On-Bill Financing

ended

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.