Buildings for healthy communities by ESEB

We build a sustainable energy ecosystem to stimulate building renovation for healthy and happy communities by working with all stakeholders, connecting them transparently, and generating the financial mechanism to ensure value. We are comitted to changing how communities are built by providing deep building renovations through the globe, starting in Eastern Europe. Our financial mechanism structure, technology and approach would lead to healthier communities and lower CO2 emissions.

The building and construction sector plays a key role in the achievement of the EU goals set up by 2020 climate & energy package. Realization of such goals can only be done using simultaneous smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. Few structures are in place to foster low-energy construction. The innovative ESCO financial scheme established by Funding for Future, LABEEF, and ESEB in Latvia sets up a fund that structures demand and executes the creation of an ecosystem environment consisting of financial mechanism, buildings, energy companies, construction companies and stakeholders. The basis for such a strategy draws from the fact large scale investment of building renovation is possible through 1) aligning the interests of each stakeholder through the unit of the building; 2) measuring risks and best allocation of risks; 3) standardizing processes and documentation, and 4) reducing transaction costs. The core technological tool is the SHAREX online platform. This tool creates transparency and accessibility as it is designed to follow each transaction from initial concept to final implementation while ensuring the highest levels of legal and financial security, transparency and respecting the needs of each stakeholder.

A successful financial instrument must focus not only on the financial instrument itself, but rather on linking all stakeholders. This approach is at once a top-down approach/ bottoms - up. This requires providing tools for communication and accessibility to each stakeholder on all levels of engagement. This includes apartment and building owners, cooperatives, energy company, building company, financial and banking institutions, and local and national government. Each set of stakeholders has a very different set of needs and at times, these needs can even appear contradictory. Attention is paid to both a top-down approach and bottoms-up approach. This ensures that financial instruments are created, including contract eligibility criteria for projects, buildings, owners, and companies. Further, this involves regional, national as well as public/private sphere stakeholders. To address the needs of local level stakeholders, we also work with building level. This includes identifying community “champions” that will serve a fundamental part in ensuring the sustainability of the project. Such a simultaneous process is key to ensure that financial instruments (top-down) can take hold in an accepting environment (bottoms-up). Therefore, within the actual project implementation and strategy, we need to guarantee an innovative methodology that will ensure social innovation. 

With increased connectivity, technological engagement and citizen ownership, there are growing opportunities for individuals and communities to engage and be active participants in meeting the SDGs set forth by the United Nations. Creating such solutions remain dependent on building the ecosystem to enable local innovations to flourish and providing resources to permit global cooperation and replication.

Through focus on stakeholder engagement built through design thinking, we will create the proper ecosystem needed to decrease the consumption of polluting energy sources, renovate buildings to provide quality indoor climate thanks to better ventilation, and increase stakeholder accessibility and communication on local and regional levels. By building stakeholder commitment capacity building plan directly into the core of the FinEERGo-Dom project, the methodology ensures project success and sustainability. We ensure benefits engaged communities, renovated buildings, lower CO2 emissions, healthy communities. We develop upon the SHAREX platform, a multi-stakeholder platform, the ensures appropriate levels of visibility, transparency and accessibility for all involved stakeholders. As we have already developed the needed stakeholder engagement through the preliminary phase of project implementation, we build more advanced modules in the SHAREX multi-stakeholder platform to allow for replicability across partners. Within the project goal of creating collective governance of energy use and monitoring, the SHAREX platform enables scalability, multi-stakeholder communication and transparency in the procurement of works, their execution and implementation of financial instruments that enable building renovation.

The core “lesson learned” from the Latvia experience and past efforts at creating sustainable financial instruments for building renovation that stimulates overall energy efficiency is that the instrument can only be long term if all if all stakeholders are aligned and understand fully the role of the building, financing mechanism, and energy. It may seem obvious that all those involved must be informed, however delivering this result has proven challenging. What has lacked in other implementations are standardized mechanisms and processes and targets for stakeholder engagement as well as digital tools that provide transparency and transaction ease. To drive our project´s success, we implement human-centered design thinking within the stakeholder engagement, methodology, product development through the entirety of project process from financial scheme to building renovation. Design thinking is defined as a systematic process that empower individuals to develop new innovative solutions. In our case, we develop upon the SHAREX platform, a multi-stakeholder platform, the ensures appropriate levels of visibility, transparency and accessibility for all involved stakeholders. As we have already developed the needed stakeholder engagement through the preliminary phase of project implementation, we build more advanced modules in the SHAREX multi-stakeholder platform to allow for replicability across partners. Within the project goal of creating collective governance of energy use and monitoring, the SHAREX platform enables scalability, multi-stakeholder communication and transparency in the procurement of works, their execution and implementation of financial instruments that enable building renovation.

We build a transparent and secure platform, SHAREX, to connect all stakeholders within the ESCO ecosystem. Our platform allows all types of users and data managment. We offer users a secure way to enter, manage, approve and print energy contracts. We collect energy data to track the succesfulness of our implementation. We analyze how stakeholders are connected or influential in a project implementation. We aim to involve all stakeholders, so we can track all projects. 

By creating an ecosystem of procedure standardization, expert verification, archived savings and available building stock, the financial sector will support energy efficiency and environmental protection projects. This will increase the investment of banks as there will be increased standardization and scaling up energy efficiency investments on the market. Public investment will also be repaid and reinvested, leading to more projects and building renovation. Stimulating the ESCO market will also lead to investment in the SME sector. The solution will work as a guarantee for energy savings and environmental effect which will be furtherly verified with the unified procedures implemented in the mechanism. Buildings and infrastructure that will be a part of the project will differ by country, however, these include: multifamily private and municipal buildings, - public buildings, - individual residential buildings, housing communities, cooperatives. The project begins in June 2019. We use this opportunity to present our methodology to bring together stakeholders within such a unique ecosystem – that ultimately, leads to healthy communities, healthier environments and more transparency.

270 people (who live in 6 renovated multi-family houses);

400 people more (9 deep multi-family renovated houses more);

2200 people more (50 deep multi-family house renovation projects). 

Pilot projects will occur in partner organizations in Austria, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. The funding ensures that ESCO can take on more projects without needing to wait for completed projects, making investments faster. This will mean that over 340 million euros can be invested, 160.8 GWh/year will be saved. 1.5 mLn m2 of heated area as well as hundreds and thousands of stakeholders.

Legal and legislative barriers can prevent financing. Furthermore, mindsets can be closed. This prevents any steps from proceeding keeping the actual implementation of the financial mechanism something abstract. 

All barriers involve a new approach to stakeholder engagement. We implement a double helix methodology of top down merging with bottom up. This means including everyone- from building owners, to banks, muncipalities and energy companies. We ensure that all needs are met through our platform SHAREX. 

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6 full time staff members 

We are a multidisciplinary, Pan-European team with over 100 years of combined technical knowhow, legal expertise and insight into financial engineering. We combine our experience using an approach based on the highest standards of transparency to offer both residents and investors safe, long term homes for families and capital.

1. Krajowa Agencja Poszanowania Energii S.A. (KAPE), Poland

2. Narodowy Fundusz Ochrony Środowiska i Gospodarki Wodnej

(NFOSiGW), Poland

3. FUNDING FOR FUTURE (F3) The Netherlands

4. Econoler SA (Econoler) Bulgaria

5. Austrian Energy Agency (AEA) Austria

6. MMP SK Slovakia

7. MMP RO Romania

8. STAGE AI

9. Riga Technical University’s Institute of Energy Systems and Environment (IESE)

10. Engineering consulting company EKODOMA Ltd.

Unique alternative investment management fund that invests in long-term renovations of multi-family dwellings in the Baltics. The fund opts for sound, healthy, and socially responsible investments ensuring a robust long term return aimed at 15-30 years.

We work within an ecosystem of partners, making us the Market Linkage Model. We have considered a small transaction fee, or an annual fee. However, we believe that the value will only come when there are several thousands of contracts online as this would demonstrate the savings in administration over managing and reporting on the data themselves.

We want to participate in the SOLVE program to test our solution of clean energy for all and creating better workflow and transparency in the energy sector by partnering with the broad network offered by EDP.  As we have worked mainly in Eastern Europe, we believe that working with the network of SOLVE will create a global ecosystem of stakeholders. We will have the opportunity to grow in the energy sector and lead to further investments. We also would want to see our approach adopted as the more of us use the same protocols, the same taxonomies the easier it will be to grow a Sustainable Energy Sector.

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We would like to partner with other financial institutions as well as investment companies. This would open different opportuntities for market growth. Furthermore, we would like to partner with urban architecture studios and urban development consultancy groups to identify stakeholders and possible building renovations. 

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