OVERVIEW

Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) has existed for a number of years, but in many European Countries it is still not commonly used. What kind of business model innovations will drive uptake of service and performance based contracts? How can the EPC business model be made more attractive to all the parties involved?

The European Union has developed the Clean Energy for all Europeans package, which aims to facilitate the transition away from fossil fuels towards cleaner energy and to deliver on the EU’s Paris agreement commitments for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Among other goals, it sets a target to improve energy efficiency by 32.5% and a target of 32% share for renewable energy by 2030, for European Union countries. These are highly ambitious targets and achieving them will require significant upgrades to be made to buildings to ensure that they are capable of responding to the comfort needs of the occupants, whilst providing flexibility to the grid when required.

This webinar will explain how two Horizon 2020 funded projects are testing innovative business models that will combine building level flexibility with Energy Performance Contracting to accelerate the transition to a low carbon future. Hosted by NOVICE and AmBIENCe, the webinar will demonstrate how to extract the most value from a building’s energy assets, which building segments would be most suitable for deploying these innovative business models and which countries have the right legal framework to support them. The impact of combining Energy Performance Contracting and Demand Response on occupant comfort and project bankability will also be explored.

Please see below a brief description of the two H2020 projects.

The AmBIENCe project aims at accelerating the decarbonisation of buildings and districts by stimulating emission-free consumption next to reduced consumption. For this, the flexibility – of electrified heating or cooling – of active buildings is leveraged through well-designed Demand Response programs to actively steer consumption to coincide as much as possible with – local – emission free generation. To maximize the benefits at district level, an optimal coordination among buildings is added. To accelerate such active control of buildings and districts, the Energy Performance Contracting concept will be extended to include the benefits of active control of building level flexibility.

NOVICE delivers a new business model for ESCOs that takes advantage of revenues from both energy efficiency and demand response flexibility in a single, integrated service. Many assets that are commonly installed or upgraded during energy efficiency retrofit projects (such as HVAC systems, CHP and RES installations, BEMS and heat pumps) can also be used to provide flexibility services to the electricity grid. This increases the value that upgraded energy assets can deliver to the building owner and improves the return on investment (ROI) of energy efficiency renovation projects. The enhanced Energy Performance Contract (Energy Performance Contracting) developed by the NOVICE project team will guarantee building owners a minimum level of energy savings and occupant comfort whilst ensuring that the maximum value can be extracted from the flexibility potential of on-site energy assets. To sit alongside this enhanced Energy Performance Contracting, the NOVICE project has also developed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) that governs the relationship between ESCO and Aggregator and allows the two parties to work together seamlessly to provide a holistic package of energy services to building owners, thus enhancing the business case for renovation projects and driving up renovation rates across Europe.