| Project Detail |
A boost to energy efficiency and smartness solutions for residential buildings
The EU is committed to curbing increasing energy demand and controlling CO2 emissions. Energy service companies (ESCOs) can play a key role by promoting energy efficiency, renewable energy sources and smartness in buildings. Despite the large economic energy saving potential, very few ESCOs operate in the residential market that requires further development to overcome current limitations. The EU-funded frESCO project will deploy innovative business models by engaging with ESCOs and aggregators. The goal is to integrate energy service bundles that properly combine and remunerate local flexibility for optimising local energy performance, both in the form of energy efficiency and in demand-side management. The project’s new business models will be tested in Spain, France, Croatia and Greece.
Despite the large economic energy saving potential in the EU, the energy service companies (ESCOs) market for residential buildings is much less developed than in other demand sectors (e.g. the industry or public/service sectors). Besides sector cross-cutting barriers (e.g. low energy prices, lack of information and awareness, lack of appropriate forms of finance) there are specific barriers which make a large-scale application of the ESCO model for residential buildings particularly difficult (e.g. lack scale or lack the necessary energy intensity to justify investment within the structure of present-day EPC model). In this context, frESCO aims to engage with ESCOs and aggregators and enable the deployment of innovative business models on the basis of novel integrated energy service bundles that properly combine and remunerate local flexibility for optimizing local energy performance both in the form of energy efficiency and demand side management. Such new service and business models will bring under common Pay for Performance Contracts (extended form of current EPCs) two currently differentiated service offerings to enable the realization of next-generation smart energy service packages. The strong presence of the industry in the consortium (2 ESCOs, 2 aggregators, 3 ICT and technology providers and 2 engineering companies) and the end-users (1 Cooperative and 1 Hotel), supported by 3 knowledgable RTOs, will ensure the market uptake of frESCOs new business models. frESCOs new business models will be demonstrated in 4 different pilots (Spain, France, Croatian and Greece) with complementary characteristics in terms of building typology (single-/multi-family), climate, regulation, energy consumption, energy assets, consumer groups, etc., thus facilitating the replicability of frESCOs solutions across Europe. Overall, frESCO aims to directly achieve a primary savings of 464 MWh/yr and a reduction of 108 tCO2/yr and trigger 28.3M€ investment during the replication |
