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.

The current universal concerns about global energy security, competitiveness, and environmental protection make energy efficiency more important than ever. However, realizing large-scale savings has proven a significant challenge due to many barriers. 'Public Procurement of Energy Efficiency Services' looks at a largely untapped energy efficiency market the public sector. While the efficiency potential in this sector is substantial, the implementation of energy savings programs has been complicated by a number of factors, such as insufficient incentives to lower energy costs, rigid budgeting and procurement procedures, and limited access to financing. The book looks at energy savings performance contracts (ESPCs) as a means of overcoming some of these barriers. Because public facilities can outsource the full project cycle to a commercial service provider, ESPCs can enable public agencies to solicit technical solutions, mobilize commercial financing, and assign performance risk to third parties, allowing the agency to pay from a project s actual energy savings. The recommendations in this book stem from case studies that identified approaches, models, and specific solutions to ESPC procurement, including budgeting, energy audits, and bid evaluation. Such an approach also offers enormous potential to bundle, finance, and implement energy efficiency projects on a larger scale in the public sector, which can yield further economies of scale. ESPCs can also serve as an attractive element for fiscal stimulus packages and efforts by governments to 'green' their infrastructure, which can create local jobs, reduce future operating costs, and mitigate their carbon footprint. Lower energy bills, in turn, help to create fiscal space in future years to meet other critical investment priorities. Bundled public sector energy efficiency projects can help stimulate local markets for energy efficiency goods and services and 'lead by example', demonstrating good practices and providing models to the private sector.

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).

"High upfront costs continue to be a significant barrier to achieving potential monetary and energy savings from energy efficiency investments across the building sector. Over the past several decades, a number of innovative energy efficiency financing program designs have emerged with the intent of reducing the upfront costs for energy efficiency improvements and assisting owners in the residential and commercial building sectors in achieving greater energy savings. ... The purpose of this report is to take a closer look at experience with on-bill financing programs and to analyze key elements for successful programs as well as factors that may impede the achievement of optimal results. It also addresses current barriers to adoption of on-bill financing from utility, consumer, and financial industry perspectives, as well as ways to address these barriers, and identifies emerging trends in program implementation."--Publisher's description.