Finance & EconomicsFinance & Economics
Empowering Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) in the Energy Transition: The DEESME Project
The DEESME project, under the EU's Horizon 2020 program, aims to assist European SMEs in enhancing-energy efficiency and contributing to the EU's carbon reduction goals. Despite existing national schemes, SMEs face hurdles such as limited resources and energy audit perceptions. With a consortium across several countries, DEESME's multifaceted strategy addresses enabling SME energy transition management, policy development, and national authority adoption of its approach. The project uncovered 11 challenges through stakeholder consultations—six general and four SME-specific—such as resource limitations and compliance issues. To address these, stakeholders suggested establishing information hubs, promoting non-energy benefits, creating compliance guidelines, encouraging carbon footprint calculations, and using benchmarking. These solutions aim to help national authorities implement Article 11 of the European Energy Efficiency Directive effectively. Article 11 introduces additional SME challenges, focusing on the identification of obligated companies, compliance assurance, audit quality maintenance, and reporting balance. DEESME's initiative is crucial for integrating SMEs into the EU's sustainability trajectory.
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Stimulating Consumer Demand for Energy Efficiency Investments
The Energy Efficiency Financial Institutions Group (EEFIG) will soon publish its final report from an expert working group on accelerating consumer demand.
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What are green loans and how are they linked to the EU Taxonomy Regulation?
The EU Taxonomy Regulation aims to provide clear and consistent criteria for identifying environmentally sustainable activities. In addition, the EU Taxonomy Regulation also requires financial market participants to report on the environmental sustainability of their investments, one of the reasons why green loans are becoming more popular.
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Energy efficient industrial pump systems: market potential, success factors and financing options
The market for energy efficient pump systems in industry is expected to reach $16.3 billion by 2025. The market is highly competitive, with a number of companies offering a wide range of products and services.
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Transforming Europe’s Social Housing: Survey on Energy Efficient Refurbishment Strategies
SUPER-i survey is an online survey aimed at collecting insights on the current state of the energy-efficient refurbishment of social housing stocks in Europe. Results will identify areas for improvement, enable benchmarking of energy efficiency performance, and inform decision-making processes at various levels.
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Riding the Green Wave: The Meteoric Rise of Sustainability-Linked Bonds
The market for sustainability-linked bonds hit the $100 billion mark in 2021. This growth rate is significantly faster than that of green bonds, which took almost six years to reach the same market size.
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Make or break for EU Industry
The Energy Efficiency Financial Institutions Group (EEFIG) has just published its final report from its working group on industry. It is a wake-up call that action needs to be taken urgently. Europes industry must decarbonise to unprecedented levels at a high pace.
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How to generate long-term value creation through operationalisation of sustainability data
A lack of effective and automated tools is holding firms back from properly collecting and sharing data. Sustainability data should be of high quality, auditable, transparent, comparable, screened for errors and data gaps. Firms should strongly consider optimizing their data to generate actionable insights.
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Energy transition investment in Emerging Markets and Developing Countries
Emerging markets and developing economies (EM&DEs) account for nearly half of the total global greenhouse gas emissions. The volume of capital currently being deployed to transition these countries to lower-carbon sources of energy is insufficient given the size of the climate challenge.
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How to finance industrial decarbonization
It will be essential to decarbonize industry. Debt financers, particularly banks, do not consider energy-efficient industrial equipment as an attractive lending proposition. Public-funded unsecured subordinated debt financing could be used to help.
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