Deep renovation – the idea of capturing the full economic energy efficiency potential of existing buildings with focus on building envelopes – leads to remarkable energy savings. As nearly all of Latvia’s stock of multifamily residential buildings continues to rapidly deteriorate due to harsh weather conditions and lack of proper maintenance, the idea is attractive. Realizing this potential requires designing, financing and implementing complex energy efficiency investments, but today nearly all apartments in Latvia are privately owned. Practice shows that individual owners are inadequately organized to manage their collective property. Combined with a lack of awareness and technical knowledge, limited availability of funding, high risk perception and reluctance for debt financing, the barriers overwhelm most people. A concept that addresses these constraints is Energy Performance Contracting (EPC). A key feature of EPC is that the provider, an energy service company (ESCO), guarantees energy savings. SUNShINE supports public and private ESCO's and leads to an innovative investment scheme with a pipeline of projects worth €30m, guaranteed savings over 26GWh/year, and 202020m2 of deeply renovated buildings. A major objective is to demonstrate the financial viability of deep renovation via suitable financial engineering of public funds and private capitals. The proposed approach is simple, yet very innovative: most ESCOs have limited balance sheet capacity and are not able to support much long term debt. So re-financing is usually achieved by selling future cash flows (receivables) by a forfaiting transaction. After this transaction the ESCO continues to guarantee energy savings for the entire EPC term (15-20 years). Unfortunately, in emerging EPC markets like Latvia, there are not enough track records, so banks are not yet ready to offer these services to ESCOs. The project delivers the same service by establishing a special purpose fund for EPC.

In the Covenant of Mayors signatories commit to a Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan. However, often municipalities lack capacity to turn their plans into actions; and the residential sector is often left behind and deep renovations not implemented. Realizing this potential requires designing, financing and implementing complex energy efficiency investments. Practice shows that small and medium municipalities are inadequately organized to manage and finance this process. At the same time individual owners in the residential sector are inadequately organized to manage their collective property. Accelerate SUNShINE supports Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), with a pipeline of projects worth €27m and guaranteed savings over 27GWh/year. A major objective is to demonstrate the financial viability of deep renovation via suitable project bundling, municipal partnerships and financial engineering. In the proposed approach four municipalities works together in a shared project management unit, composed by experts covering technical, socio-economic, legal and financial advisory. This unit deals with project development and process standardization. In each municipality public buildings are bundled for Energy Performance contracting based procurement. At the same time each municipality establish a support scheme for the deep renovation of multifamily residential buildings always based on Energy Performance contracting and continuing the effort made by SUNShINE. As most ESCOs have limited balance sheet capacity, re-financing is usually achieved by selling future receivables by a forfaiting transaction. Accelerate SUNShINE supports this solution, further rolling out the Latvian Baltic Energy Efficiency Facility, which is an investment fund with a single purpose: forfaiting receivables from EPC. Here process standardization is very important for attracting private and institutional investors.

save@work focusses on overcoming the barriers to energy saving practices in public office buildings and changing the behaviour of public sector employees at work place. A minimum of 9000 employees in at least 180 public office buildings (administrative buildings - municipal/regional or federal state operated) from nine countries will compete in a year-long energy saving contest to achieve the highest energy savings possible compared to the previous year. Throughout the competition participants will benefit from expert knowledge provided by the partners; a web-based Energy Saving Online Tool (feedback system) which helps to visualise actual energy consumption and savings made by each building; tailor made information and campaign materials and the exchange of experience with other participants. The energy saving competition between public office buildings is embedded in an energy quality management system: Analysis – Development of Measures – Implementation – Monitoring and Continuation, which ensures an individual, professional goal-oriented and sustainable approach for realising energy savings. It is projected that the project will lead to 13 GWh primary energy saved and 3,100 t of CO2 avoided in public buildings across Europe. Support from behavioural change experts and an accompanying evaluation of the implemented measures and results will help provide important insights useful for both project implementation as well as future initiatives in this field. Factors of success, barriers and the impact of the project in respect to mid- and long-term changes will be analysed. Project activities and results will be disseminated through a wide communication campaign to the public, as well as other stakeholders in public administrations and academic institutions. By providing a complete set of strategies and materials needed to replicate this project, our goal is to inspire others to follow our lead and develop energy efficient offices of the future.

All over Europe, a good level of knowledge about Sustainable Energy Action Plan (SEAP) development has been reached. There are different good quality methodologies and guidelines available. However, currently municipalities struggle to implement these action plans. There are different reasons for that; one of the most important is the fact that often municipal employees do not feel engaged and are not motivated to take any sort of actions and initiatives, unless someone has actually “obliged” them. In many cases, this lack of engagement and commitment ends up with investments in energy efficiency that do not deliver expected technical and economic outcomes. Hence, the energy efficiency potential is not fully exploited and worse suboptimal investments do not provide expected yields. Moreover, local authorities (LAs) more often are facing also challenges regarding climate resilient infrastructure and climate adaptation. The level of knowledge and understanding is even scarcer as regarding climate mitigation. COMPETE4SECAP is designed to deliver a systematic approach to energy savings in local authorities using energy management systems (EnMS) according to ISO 50001 or European Energy Award with dedicated online monitoring tool and energy saving competitions. EnMS and competitions when combined can trigger significant benefits by providing innovative and efficient way to involve municipalities that have already their SEAPs but do not act in order to foster their integrated development at local level. Trained and engaged municipal employees will be able to better implement energy efficiency projects, which then require higher investments. An EnMS will help the LA to have reliable data for informed decision and further help in monitoring and evaluation of implemented projects. The use of renewable energy and integration of climate adaptation will also be facilitated through EnMS with the set of procedures from an environmental management system (e.g. IS0 140001).

The QualDeEPC project is aiming to both improve quality and cross-EU convergence of Ener-gy Performance Certificate (EPC) schemes, and the link between EPCs and deep renovation: High-quality Energy Performance Assessment and Certification in Europe Accelerating Deep Energy Renovation (QualDeEPC). The objective of the project is to improve the practical implementation of the assessment, is-suance, design, and use of EPCs as well as their renovation recommendations, in the partici-pating countries and beyond. Recommendations for renovation shall be made coherent with deep energy renovation towards a nearly-zero energy building stock by 2050. In order to reach these objectives, the project will organise its activities in four stages: 1 | Analysis of existing EPC schemes, good practice, shortcomings, and priorities for improvement 2 | Development and testing of concrete proposals and tools for enhanced EPC assessment, certifi-cation, and verification, as well as Deep Renovation Network Platforms 3 | Adaptation to country needs and implementation of consensus elements, and developing a roadmap for further dialogue and 4 | Sustainability Strategy and Conclusive policy recommendations, dialogue, and transfer. Project partners will work to achieve consensus and implementation during the project for as many improvements as possible, seeking the cooperation of certification bodies, energy agen-cies and other organisations. Some of these are project partners, many others agreed to sup-port the project as associated partners. However, many of the potential improvements to EPC assessment, certification, and independent monitoring and verification will need adaptation of standards, regulations, or even legislation. The QualDeEPC project will stimulate such changes by (1) intensive dialogue involving the important stakeholders at all levels from the very beginning in the above four project stages and (2) disseminating its findings among the relevant target audiences in Europe.