Finance for Resilience (FiRe), a platform designed to crowdsource and champion new ideas to accelerate finance for clean energy, low-carbon infrastructure, and sustainable cities, recently hosted over 1000 energy-sector and finance leaders at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) Future of Energy Summit. At this summit, eight vetted finalists were featured in a competitive pitch process that resulted in the selection of four 2016 FiRe winners including EDF's Investor Confidence Project. 

Andy Darrell, Chief of Strategy for the EDF Climate and Energy Program, representing the Investor Confidence Project and gave this clear, concise, and winning explanation of why ICP is transformative to cities and energy efficiency:

Environmental Defense Fund’s Investor Confidence Project Europe (ICP Europe), supported by the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, today released a robust set of project guidelines to facilitate investment in the building energy renovation market. Building owners, project developers, finance and energy service providers, insurers, local authorities, and utilities all stand to gain from the ICP system, which offers transparency and accountability to the energy efficiency market by standardising how projects are developed, maintained, and measured.

Only half of the estimated €60 – 100 billion investment needed annually to achieve Europe’s 2020 building energy efficiency targets is being met, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. ICP Europe’s new protocols aim at narrowing this gap significantly by enabling investment for building energy renovation.
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In collaboration with industry stakeholders and with support from philanthropic donors, the Investor Confidence Project developed its ICP Europe Protocols to define European best practices for predicting energy savings, optimising performance, and monitoring the results of energy efficiency investments. These protocols enable the acceleration of energy efficiency investments and the emergence of a robust and thriving commercial renovation sector by increasing confidence in the engineering fundamentals and financial returns of projects. 

“We are happy to fund Investor Confidence Project through the Horizon 2020 programme. It has the potential to transform the market by making building energy retrofits a standardised product for the finance industry,” said Vincent Berrutto, Head of the Energy Unit at the European Commission’s Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises. “This will contribute to reducing transaction costs and make finance more affordable.”

“We are involved in the Investor Confidence Project Europe for purely business reasons: we believe it is a necessary step to unlock the capital our sector requires to meet Europe’s energy goals,” said  Stephen Barker, Head of Energy Efficiency and Environmental Care at Siemens in the United Kingdom.

“The ICP Europe project is key to put in place the right framework in order to unlock the financial stream needed to achieve the cost-effective potential of energy savings which exists in the buildings sector, therefore unleashing the multiple benefits linked to building renovation,” added Adrian Joyce, Secretary General of EuroACE.

“For all stakeholders, a clear positioning of the values and benefits of Energy Performance Contracting, together with project financing represent the most crucial issues. The ICP Europe Protocols structure the necessary data, which in turn enables the underwriting and facilitates the management of energy performance risks. This is a welcome support for the development of the European Energy Performance Contracting market with the longer term goal of reaching maturity”, said Volker Dragon, Chairman of eu.esco.

“We are honored to partner with public and private sector leaders in Europe to help accelerate a global asset class for energy efficiency,” said Andy Darrell, Chief of Strategy Global Energy and Finance, Environmental Defense Fund. “Wasting less energy is an essential step to prosperity with less pollution: the Investor Confidence Project can help bring that future within reach for families, businesses, communities and cities across Europe.” 

ICP Europe has forged strategic alliances with the financial, real estate, and efficiency sectors to develop project origination and underwriting standardisation through its protocols, which help to reduce transaction costs and accelerate deal flow for building renovation projects. ICP has attracted interest from the Energy Efficiency Financial Institutions Group, (including Siemens Financial Services, Deutsche Bank, ING, Allianz, and BNP Paribas) which cited investor confidence as the top priority for transforming the energy efficiency market.

“Governments and NGOs have for years been talking about how energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit that can bring a healthy return on investment. But, despite the actions of a few market leaders, investing in it is not as easy as it’s made out to be – or everybody would be doing it,” said Dr. Steven Fawkes, Senior Advisor for ICP Europe and a member of the Investment Committee of the London Energy Efficiency Fund with 30 years of experience in the energy efficiency sector. “With the release of the first six renovation protocols, ICP Europe is helping energy efficiency become a standardised product and, thus, an indispensable part of every institutional investor’s portfolio.”

Interested parties are invited to contribute to ICP Europe’s efforts through the Technical Forum and help make energy efficiency a global asset class by joining the ICP Europe Ally Network.

New Jersey’s Clean Energy Program (NJCEP) is launched and will incorporate the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF)’s Investor Confidence Project (ICP) energy efficiency protocols into the state’s Pay for Performance (P4P) program as an alternative compliance path.

The Pilot is designed to assess the benefits of adopting ICP protocols for NJCEP’s commercial and industrial projects with a goal of:

• Successfully incorporate ICP protocols into the NJCEP P4P Existing Buildings Program with minimal disruption to the current Program and its stakeholders, while facilitating access to private financing and projects through a more robust marketplace for energy efficiency services.
• Through the EDF-ICP Investor Ready Energy Efficiency (IREE™) protocols, provide to building owners and potential investors increased confidence in energy and energy cost savings. A secondary benefit is to test the market for the value of achieving the ICP IREE certification as a means to streamline financial underwriting.

The program is currently accepting projects into the P4P/ICP Pilot.

Program Offerings and Incentives
The ICP Pilot will offer up to $35,000 of additional incentives to qualifying  Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ certified projects and conducting measurement and verification.

​Get Involved
If you are a credentialed project developer or part of the ICP Investor Network, we would love to help you get involved in this exciting new opportunity. Please contact us and we would be happy to discuss next steps, and facilitate introductions.

The California Commissioning Collaborative will be hosting a webinar on the the Investor Confidence Project on Wednesday, February 17 at the CCC's next lunch and learn webinar.

We need to talk about... The link between investor confidence and commissioning 
 
Commissioning doesn't usually arouse the interest of investors, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't. The Investor Confidence Project (ICP) provides a suite of protocols, existing industry certifications, and third party verification to support "investor-ready" energy efficiency projects. ICP is intended to attract much-needed private capital that can help grow the energy efficiency industry. And it could be great news for the commissioning industry!

ICP could help drive more demand for commissioning projects and offer new business opportunities to commissioning providers. This webinar will provide insight on how to become a credentialed provider, how to certify a project, and how ICP can be used to support commissioning projects.

Presenters:
Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, EDF
Tracy Phillips, Technical Lead, Investor Confidence Project
   
Wednesday, Feb. 17th 2015
12:00 noon - 1:00 pm Pacific 

This webinar is open to the public and free of charge. 

Register for the webinar 
 
CCC meetings cover the hot industry topics, and include technical presentations, case studies, program discussions, and networking opportunities. You can view agendas and presentations from of our past meetings here. 

Let’s examine the requirements of the ICP Targeted Protocol, which is geared toward “smaller” projects typically involving just one measure or a handful of measures with limited interactivity.

While digging into the ICP protocols can sometimes seem daunting, we have found that in general most project developers are already doing most, if not all, of the required steps to develop a project that is ready for certification.

Once a project has been completed for underwriting, the final step for Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ Certification is to have an  ICP Quality Assurance Providers review documentation, make sure all of the components have been developed properly, and to check them for technical rigor. 

And that’s all it takes to produce an IREE™ certified project. 

Do the requirements above sound like how you already develop projects? If so, then you’re ready to start using ICP to develop an IREE project. If you are interested in starting to use ICP IREE™ certification for your projects, please contact us and we can help you get going.

Doing Energy efficiency right just aint simple. Yet a key goal of the Investor Confidence Project (ICP) is to reduce transaction costs and streamline the origination of energy efficiency projects.  While it is tempting to cut corners during development, projects that deliver reliable results require a detailed approach to engineering and independent review to provide confidence to building owners and investors. 

A question we consistently hear is “what is the cost of quality assurance?”  There is not a clear answer to this question, as outside of ICP’s efforts there is not much standardization surrounding what a QA process consists of.  What is clear is that the lack of standardization affects both the cost and quality of these efforts and clear requirements for both project developers and quality assurance providers reduce the time and costs of the process.

With this in mind, the ICP Technical Forum met on October 15, 2015 to discuss and come to agreement on preliminary estimated levels of effort associated with the QA tasks associated with the development of ICP Certified Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ (IREE™) projects.  The result of this meeting represents the first published attempt to determine average industry review time and cost estimates.

The ICP project development process is divided into two periods. The Underwriting Period is comprised of all activities leading up to securing project financing, and includes all baseline development tasks and information gathering, savings calculation tasks, and the development of the Operational Performance Verification (OPV or targeted-commissioning) plan, the Operations, Maintenance and Monitoring (OM&M) plan, and the Measurement and Verification (M&V) plan. After successfully meeting the underwriting period requirements, a project is then eligible to be certified as IREE.

The Performance Period is comprised of tasks that occur during construction and continue into the performance period of the building, and include actual performance of the OPV activities, OM&M activities, M&V activities, updating of various manual(s), and training of the facility personnel.  There are QA activities associated with both periods.

The term “Quality Assurance” can mean a number of things.  Although there is no standardized definition, our stakeholder group agrees that in general there are basic “documentation reviews” and much more in-depth “technical reviews” that can involve some or all tasks associated with the project.  ICP related compliance reviews are documentation reviews focused on ensuring that all ICP specified documentation is available and completed in accordance with the requirements of ICP and the standards we reference.

The Technical Forum examined the entire scope of possible QA activities associated with all stages and types of reviews.  For each task, stakeholders discussed and came to agreement on the potential minimum and maximum number of labor hours associated with the QA effort.  These hours were then aggregated according to the type and stage of the review resulting in the following estimates:​

ICP Project Development Templates are first of a kind ready-to-use templates that take the time and cost out of developing the key performance period plans required for Certified Investor Ready Energy Efficiency™ projects. Developed in collaboration with stakeholders, these templates have been designed for users to customize the contents and language to fit owner or project specific requirements, and generally based on information already developed for the project.
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ICP requires that at the time of IREE™ Certification these actionable plans are in place, so that building owners and investors can ensure that projects are implemented, maintained, and measured through the performance period of thier projects to make sure they achieve thier energy savings potential. The ICP system provides the plan as part of the underwriting pacakge, but we rely on those taking risk on the savings to ensure that the plans are executed on.

We are pleased to release templates for Operational Performance Verification (targeted commissioning), Operations Maintenance and Monitoring, and Measurement and Verification. 

Operational Performance Verification (OPV) Plan Template: 
The OPV plan can be used directly to describe the targeted commissioning process to support Investor Confidence Project (ICP) compliant projects that use either in-house or third-party commissioning providers. 

​Buildings use nearly 40 percent of all energy in the U.S., so improving their efficiency is key to a clean energy future. Because increasing deal flow in the energy efficiency market has been a challenge, Environmental Defense Funds’ (EDF) Investor Confidence Project (ICP) announced today the launch of its Investor Network to help connect investors in search of quality energy efficiency projects with project developers of buildings in need of capital. Offering investors a common language to compare project risks and savings makes projects simpler, decisions easier, and project performance more reliable.
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“The Investor Confidence Project helps create a pipeline of investor-ready projects to meet growing demand within the building sector” said Andy Darrell, EDF’s Chief of Strategy, Global Energy & Finance. “We are thrilled to see these investors looking for ways to deploy capital into energy efficiency and look forward to helping close the gap between opportunity and a robust marketplace of smart investments.”