The energy transition causes significant challenges in the building sector, which demand profound changes not only on the economic perspective, such as implementing innovative financial models to overcome financial barriers, but also fostering cooperation between all actors involved, paying particular attention to citizens and communities. It is essential to advance the business cases for energy efficiency measures and to increase support for respective projects, by standardising citizen financing in investment programs. There is therefore a need to consider the role of different actors (public authorities, financial institutions, project developers) and the interactions with innovative citizen models, particularly at the regional/national scale. The main objective of CitizEE is to support European public authorities to scale up investments for energy efficiency in the building sector through attracting citizen private investments. By integrating tailored and widely adopted crowdfunding and cooperative financing schemes with adequate available or to be developed Public Financing Instruments (PFIs), CitizEE will enable to set up large-scale community energy efficiency programs while strengthening know-how of regional/national key stakeholders. The ambition is to put in place a sound enabling legal, financial and operational environment to attract citizen private investments coupled with Public Financing Instruments (PFIs) aimed at: (i)mitigating performance & credit risks, (ii) closing financing gaps, (iii)enlarging citizen access financing, (iv) reducing transaction costs (v) enhancing capacity of local crowdfunding operators and cooperatives and (vi) stimulating the required investment towards higher renovation rates and thus a more efficient building stock.

Triple-A has a very practical result-oriented approach, seeking to answer three questions: - How to assess the financing instruments and risks an early stage? - How to agree on the Triple-A investments, based on selected key performance indicators? - How to assign the identified investment ideas with possible financing schemes? The Triple-A scheme is introduced, compromising three critical steps (answering each question), with the following main outputs: - Step 1 - Assess: Member States (MS) risk profiles and mitigation polices, including a Web based database, enabling national and sectoral comparability, market maturity identification, good practices experiences exchange, reducing thus uncertainty for investors. - Step 2 - Agree: Standardised Triple-A tools, efficient benchmarks, and guidelines, translated in consortium partners’ languages, accelerating and scaling up investments. - Step 3 - Assign: In-country demonstrations, replicability and overall exploitation, including recommendations on realistic and feasible investments in the national and sectoral context, as well as on short and medium term financing. The Triple-A case study countries were selected to promote diversity across a number of factors, including: a leading European economy (Germany), an innovation front-runner in energy (The Netherlands), a weak economy, went through one of the longest and most severe recessions (Greece), an economy with slow economic recovery (Italy), a diversified economy with a strategic geographical location having some of the largest European firms (Spain), a country that has experienced one of the fastest economic recoveries in Europe (Lithuania), a progressing country with a once sceptical stance towards low-carbon development (Czech Republic), and a country, recovering from a slow transition to a market economy, with growing regional strategic role and significant ambition towards EU processes (Republic of Bulgaria).

Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) is a proven model for modernizing mostly public buildings by ESCOs with guaranteed energy and cost savings. Nevertheless, a broad roll-out of EPC is being prevented mainly because of two unresolved issues: the split incentives dilemma and the lack of adequately flexible contract models. The guarantEE project will address prevailing barriers to EPC in a team of 14 experienced partners, covering large parts of Europe in a mix of advanced and emerging ESCO markets. Based on a concise market analysis, guarantEE will develop innovative business and financing models addressing and overcoming the split incentives dilemma in performance based ESCO projects. This will be done by adequately sharing costs and benefits between user, building owner and ESCO (triple-win approach), thus opening up new project opportunities. Furthermore, EPC contract variants will be elaborated and tested, addressing the need for enhanced flexibility (e.g. exit clauses, simplified M&V, future energy market needs, storage). The target groups are public and – especially in advanced EPC markets – private sector clients. The developed models will be applied in 33 pilot projects involving private and public building owners. The project will achieve 78 GWh PE and 18000 tCO2 savings per year and will trigger investments of >11 M€. Particularly in emerging EPC markets, guarantEE will support market development by providing standards, an online EPC pre-check, good practice examples, EPC information and project facilitation for mainly municipal clients. Broad dissemination activities, including the European Energy Service Award, will maximise the project visibility. The project will address or consult at least 1000 building owners and EPC facilitators and will inform at least 2000 energy sector stakeholders on EPC. The guarantEE project will unlock additional EPC project opportunities, contribute to standardisation, and provide political advice and steps towards a common energy service market in Europe.