European sustainable energy finance association to launch

The Sustainable Energy Finance Association (SEFA) is launching as a European trade association for the sustainable energy industry.

The SEFA, which launches officially in Brussels on May 30, has been established in the Horizon 2020 supported PROPEL project to provide representation and the collateral for members to implement pathways towards a successful clean energy transition.

PROPEL, which in turn draws on the LAUNCH project, was aimed to scale up the building energy efficiency market by creating an end-to-end service package to develop, sell, contract and finance energy efficiency initiatives at scale.

The SEFA is accelerating the transition to a zero carbon economy by advancing the development and financing of sustainable energy in the built environment across Europe, the association states on its website.

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“Our vision is a thriving, zero net carbon built environment, with buildings, communities, towns and cities powered by sustainable energy. We believe that our buildings and infrastructure can be transformed into intelligent, efficient, clean power hubs; providing substantial economic, social and environmental benefits.”

The ongoing challenge out of which these projects and the SEFA has emerged has been the financing of smaller scale energy efficiency projects for commercial and industrial customers by ESCOs – generally up to about €1 million (US$1.1 million) – which are too small for the traditional investment houses.

The broad goals of the SEFA encompass capacity building, communication, finance and policy, with the provision of resources and tools and the support of a team of experts.

Among these are a service’ contract, a hybrid business model and risk and ESG assessment packages.

The founding partners of the SEFA, the members of the PROPEL consortium, are Jessica Stromback, CEO of Joule Assets and very much the driving force going back about a decade for developing the smaller scale energy efficiency funding market, John O’Rourke, director of New Energy Group, who is the chairman, Matthew Halstead, senior project leader at TNO, and Alexandra Hedesiu, MD, and Csaba de Csiky, chairman, at EnerSave Capital.