Proposals should clearly focus on tailored, market-oriented solutions to crowd in private finance at scale for sustainable energy investments, understood as investments in energy efficiency and/or small-scale renewable energy sources and storage.

Proposals are expected to focus on one of the two scopes below. The scope addressed should be specified in the introduction of the proposal.

Scope A: Innovative financing schemes – Proposals should set-up innovative financing schemes leveraging private finance for sustainable energy investments, with a dedicated and clear focus on energy efficiency, in at least 1 eligible country with a clear ambition and effort towards expansion in additional eligible countries. The financing scheme should be operational by the end of the project, whereas the related investments may be implemented after project completion.

The financing schemes can involve, for example but not limited to:

• Equity, debt, mezzanine financing, potentially combined with non-reimbursable grants (“blending”).
• Guarantees, risk-sharing, insurances or other de-risking instruments.
• Energy services such as energy performance contracting and variants thereof, if used to finance the investments.
• On-bill, on-tax and building-based financing, where the debt is attached to the energy meter or the building rather than the household or company.
• Schemes complementing, with a dedicated financing component, already existing local and regional technical assistance facilities, in particular integrated home renovation services.
• Schemes targeting the secondary market, including refinancing mechanisms, specialised securitisation vehicles and green bond schemes.
• Local investment structures, including citizen financing (e.g. crowdfunding) for energy efficiency.
• Market-based instruments relevant for sustainable energy (e.g. carbon finance instruments, energy efficiency obligations, etc.).
• Brokering, aggregation or clearing houses, which facilitate matching of demand and supply of sustainable energy finance.

Scope B: Mainstreaming sustainable energy finance

Proposals should address one or several of the following areas of work:

• Development, evolution, labelling and certification of financial products, including insurance, as well as provision of information and potential advice to the borrower or investor in order to ensure uptake of green products, with a focus on the retail side and/or capital markets.
• Evolution of risk and sustainability assessment of private investors by integrating the specificities of energy efficiency and integrated small-scale renewables, including multiple benefits of energy efficiency. The focus can be at project level (e.g. creditworthiness analysis, quality standards, benchmarking data) or at portfolio level (e.g. internal ratings-based approaches, climate stress-testing, analysis of investment strategies, etc.).
• Benchmarking, tagging, monitoring and disclosure of data on energy efficiency investments and financial performance thereof, including standards to report on the energy performance of investment portfolios (in particular mortgages, consumer loans, corporate loans).
• Targeted support to policy makers, regulatory bodies and supervisory authorities on sustainable energy related activities, for example on risk ratings and stress testing related to energy performance of assets.
• Accelerating implementation of EU sustainable finance principles by private investors and/or companies for sustainable energy investments, including for investments not yet covered by the EU taxonomy.
• Capacity building at all levels of the private finance value chain, in the form of exchanges of best practices, development of training programmes and/or evolution and/or rollout of existing training programmes.

The proposed actions should have a strong component of engagement with the relevant stakeholders in the private finance value chain, including institutional investors, but also retail banking branches, brokers, fund managers, investment advisers, insurers, etc., in order to ensure adoption of the results by market players. Proposals should demonstrate support of the targeted stakeholder groups and how they will be involved throughout the project.