The project aims at facilitating the dialogue between Italian public and private key actors on financing issues related to energy efficiency in the existing and new buildings sector and fostering collaboration, innovation and action through the establishment of a permanent national roundtable and connected events at local level. The project will set up a national roundtable with selected high level stakeholders in order to allow an in-depth discussion about current barriers and market failures, as well as share best practice and innovative financing solutions, with the goal to improve stakeholders’ awareness and knowledge and to identify the necessary political and regulatory framework. In parallel, local events and initiatives will be organized to engage as many stakeholders as possible, enabling capacity building, dissemination, replication activities and scale up of “success stories”: local actors are one of the main drivers of the energy transition and they bring forward tremendous opportunities for investment and innovation in a number of fields. National roundtables and local events will be organised in order to trigger a continuous and mutually reinforcing virtuous circle. The combination of a top-down and bottom-up approach will create the conditions for the development of tailor made support tools and instruments for the different stakeholders involved. The outcomes of the national roundtables and the local events will be analysed, and a roadmap for PAs and industry sector including strategic and operative recommendations for the implementation of financial instruments will be elaborated. Connections with past and current similar initiatives at EU level will be pursued throughout the project, in order to keep the national outputs in line with EU requirements and the provisions put in place to face the ongoing global situation. Finally, different strategies to maintain the roundtables as a permanent forum after the end of the project will be proposed.

Feed-in tariffs (FITs) have been the fuel for successful solar PV growth stories in basically every one of today’s large solar markets. First in Europe, now in China and Japan. The US is the only exception – backed by tax credits and net-metering, leasing has become a key means of financing residential solar systems there. With many European countries phasing out FITs, the simplicity of selling solar power will be gone; and without safe and fair returns, real estate and homeowners will not invest in PV anymore. In post-FIT times, solar companies and/or electric utilities in partnership with financial institutions will have to come up with new business models and financing schemes for PV investors in order to continue the success story of the FIT era. The German Solar Industry Association as project coordinator is driven by the mission to successfully evolve those business and financing models, to disseminate them among stakeholders and to shape the necessary policy framework and to remove barriers that prevent those models from realization. Consequently, the goal of PV Financing is to help stakeholders from specific application segments with the implementation of PV projects based on new PV business models while applying innovative equity and debt financing schemes. The availability of financing for PV projects based on the new business models shall be increased and the transaction costs shall be decreased by educating investors, commercial banks and insurance companies on the PV business models and their risks.

Europe’s cities are some of the world’s greatest tourism destinations. The socio-economic impact of tourism is extraordinary and urban tourism, but it brings at the same time a range of negative externalities, including high levels of unsustainable resource consumption and waste production. In comparison with other cities, tourist cities have to face additional challenges related to waste prevention and management due to their geographical and climatic conditions, the seasonality of tourism flow and the specificity of tourism industry and of tourists as waste producers. UrBAN-WASTE will support policy makers in answering these challenges and in developing strategies that aim at reducing the amount of municipal waste production and at further support the re-use, recycle, collection and disposal of waste in tourist cities. In doing so UrBAN-WASTE will adopt and apply the urban metabolism approach to support the switch to a circular model where waste is considered as resource and reintegrated in the urban flow. UrBAN-WASTE will perform a metabolic analysis of the state of art of urban metabolism in 11 pilot cities. In parallel a participatory process involving all the relevant stakeholders will be set up through a mobilization and mutual learning action plan. These inputs will be integrated in the strategies along with a review of the most innovative existing technologies and practices in the field of waste management and prevention. The strategies will then be implemented in the 11 cities and the results will be monitored and disseminated facilitating the transfer and adaptation of the project outcomes in other cases.