TrustEE – innovative market based Trust for Energy Efficiency investments in industry

Many promising industrial energy efficiency and renewable projects lack viable financing due to insufficient performance or credit guarantees, a lack of ability/capacity among lenders to assess project risks, or related financing challenges.

Even when technological or non-technological barriers are removed, investment conditions still hold as a key barrier to a further market penetration and to a due exploitation of their market potential.

Acknowledging this fact TrustEE aims to reduce these barriers and push market based financing models for PHES (Process Heat Efficiency and Sustainablity) applications.

By this the initial start for gathering financial resources among a wide base of investors and assuring the availability of investment capital to economically viable projects is envisaged.

In a first step, a web-based platform will be developed. Within the platform projects will be submitted structured, partly automatically evaluated and presented. The focus will be on the methodological assessment of energy efficiency measures and the integration of renewable energies on process and system level of the manufacturing industry. The technical and economic evaluation is designed to overcome existing obstacles of conventional financing schemes.

Specific examples of concepts aim at reducing the use of fossil fuels (e.g. natural gas) to supply the thermal energy requirements of industrial processes and include, inter alia the use of waste heat (heat recovery), the integration of solar process heat (solar thermal energy), biogas, biomass and heat pumps.

In addition, new financing options are identified and evaluated focusing on extended guarantees, marketing support and attractive financing options.