Many state policymakers and utility regulators have established aggressive energy efficiency (EE) savings targets which will necessitate investing billions of dollars in existing buildings - and tax payer and utility bill payer funding is a small fraction of the total investment needed. Given this challenge, some EE program administrators are exploring ways to increase their reliance on financing with the aim of amplifying the impact of limited program monies. While financing is potentially an attractive tool for increasing program leverage and mitigating the rate impacts of utility customer-funded efficiency programs, administrators can face difficult choices between allocating funds to financing or to other approaches designed to overcome a broader set of barriers to consumer investment in EE. Robust assessments of financing's role in reducing energy use in buildings are necessary to help policymakers and program administrators make better choices about how to allocate limited resources to achieve cost effective energy savings at scale. In order to better understand what EE financing can be reasonably expected to achieve, and for whom, this book is organized around three levels of inquiry (Figure 1), from the most fundamental (level 1) to the most detailed (level 3).

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781351127264, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Meeting the goals enshrined in the Paris Agreement and limiting global temperature increases to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels demands rapid reductions in global carbon dioxide emissions. Reducing energy demand has a central role in achieving this goal, but existing policy initiatives have been largely incremental in terms of the technological and behavioural changes they encourage. Against this background, this book develops a sociotechnical approach to the challenge of reducing energy demand and illustrates this with a number of empirical case studies from the United Kingdom. In doing so, it explores the emergence, diffusion and impact of low-energy innovations, including electric vehicles and smart meters. The book has the dual aim of improving the academic understanding of sociotechnical transitions and energy demand and providing practical recommendations for public policy. Combining an impressive range of contributions from key thinkers in the field, this book will be of great interest to energy students, scholars and decision-makers.

This book is devoted to investigating the policy design and effectiveness of financial and market-based instruments to promote energy efficiency financing. The concept of this monograph is to present the latest results related to energy efficiency funding schemes, energy efficiency obligations, voluntary agreements, auction mechanisms, and Super Energy Services Companies (Super ESCOs) in major jurisdictions across the world. The book focuses on financial and market-based instruments as they deliver a price signal, which provides an incentive for firms to invest in innovation or implement more energy-efficient technologies and deliver energy savings while minimizing costs. Such instruments can have significant advantages for the government, supporting the fiscal sustainability of the government’s energy efficiency efforts, requiring less enforcement than regulation and according the market flexibility to select the most cost-efficient technologies. This book is highly recommended to researchers, policy experts, and business specialists who seek an in-depth and up-to-date integrated overview of energy efficiency financing.

Utility customer-supported financing programs are receiving increased attention as a strategy for achieving energy saving goals. Rationales for using utility customer funds to support financing initiatives.

This report draws lessons to date from recent international experience in applying public financing instruments to unlock commercial financing to scale-up clean energy in East Asia. It addresses the following issues: when to use public financing instruments; which instrument to select; and how to design and implement them most effectively.

While energy efficiency projects could partly meet new energy demand more cheaply than new supplies, weak economic institutions in developing and transitional economies impede developing and financing energy efficiency retrofits. This book analyzes these difficulties, suggests a 3-part model for projectizing and financing energy efficiency retrofits, and presents thirteen case studies to illustrate the issues and principles involved.