EU funded Project SEFIPA presents new Financing Instruments for Sustainable Energy

Nearly half-time of the Horizon 2020 project SEFIPA, the project team is proud of the first (interim) results of the five working groups, promoting investments in energy efficiency and renewables. The working groups consist of stakeholders such as project developers, investors, public authorities and interest groups.

For example SEFIPA facilitated a legislative harmonization process, which made the combination of federal investment grants and bank guarantees provided by the Austrian Bank for Tourism (ÖHT) for energy efficiency measures in the Austrian hotel and tourism sector possible for the first time ever.

“So far, we often have experienced challenges to implement projects with our clients where for example the energy efficiency investment is economically reasonable because of the investment grant but where we see difficulties to finance the remaining investment. The fact that the combination of an investment grant and a bank guarantee from the tourism bank is now possible because guidelines between the two relevant executing agencies have been harmonized will definitely incentivize additional energy efficiency projects in the hotel and tourism sector,”says Werner Kerschbaumer from Siemens AG Austria Building Technologies, part of one of the leading energy service companies in Austria.

“Another notable success of the SEFIPA project is a recent amendment to the Austrian Electricity Act (ElWOG), which for the first time allows residents of apartment buildings with a rooftop PV system to consume the generated solar power themselves. This amendment is likely to mobilise additional investments of several hundred million Euro within the next years in rooftop PV systems”, emphasizes Gerhard Bayer, scientific project manager at OEGUT.

SEFIPA stakeholders will continue working on developing innovative financing instruments and their implementation until February 2019. More detailed information is available on the project’s website: www.sefipa.at

Another highlight of this project is the establishment of a crowdinvesting platform for sustainable energy projects: www.crowd4energy.com

ÖGUT – Austrian Society for Environment and Technology

As an independent non-profit organization, ÖGUT has for 30 years promulgated sustainability as the basis for the economy and society. As a platform for sustainable development ÖGUT links together more than 100 organizations and institutions in the business world (companies involved in waste disposal, financial services, energy services etc., plus lobby organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and the Confederation of Industry), the administration (Federal ministries, the Province of Lower Austria, the City of Vienna) and environmental advocacy (the largest Austrian environmental NGO´s). ÖGUT is a competence centre with a wide range of topics and services on offer. Our aim is to develop innovative responses to today's challenges and to get them implemented, in collaboration with our network.

ÖGUT's seven focuses:

Energy Changes

Energy Changes´ business activities solely focus on renewable energy, energy efficiency and GHG mitigation activities. It identifies, evaluates and develops renewable energy/ energy efficiency and GHG reduction projects and provides policy consulting as well. It´s staff includes engineers, scientists, economists and business experts with many years of experience in sustainable energy, resource management and the Kyoto mechanisms. EC (Austria) was founded in 2006 and has currently 10 employees and an annual turnover of 1.2 Mio EUR. Energy Changes is based in Vienna, Austria with 2 additional operational offices in Austria and one subsidiary in Bratislava, Slovakia.