EENVEST
Risk reduction for Building Energy Efficiency Investments
Project Summary
EENVEST was a Horizon 2020 funded collaborative project, aiming to promote building energy efficiency investments. EENVEST bridged the gap between building owners, interested in upgrading their buildings to consume less energy, and investors, that are willing to provide capital investment and generate profit through energy bill savings following the retrofit.
In theory, this sounds like a promising investment opportunity and a win-win situation. However, there is a lack of trust to invest in such projects, since the level of complexity and uncertainty in building retrofits is usually high, and profitability predictions are usually based on rule-of-thumb calculations.
EENVEST provided a practical, reliable and secure solution to connect building owners with investors in a cloud software environment. The technical information of a potential building energy retrofit, provided by building owners, was validated through blockchain, and translated into economic indicators based on a comprehensive risk evaluation methodology. This allowed investors to easily locate promising investment opportunities and evaluate the associated financial risks without the need for technical construction knowledge.
IES' Role
IES led the development of the online software platform that acted as a marketplace, where owners seeking to renovate their building could register the details, enabling potential investors to easily assess potential investment risks.
IES created an easy, user-friendly method for building owners, or their representatives, to collect and upload all the information required for the evaluation of potential retrofit opportunities. The information was stored on the cloud and used by the EENVEST risk evaluation model as input. This risk evaluation model, manually developed by IES’ project partners, was converted to a fully automated algorithm, and be integrated to operate on the cloud upon request.
To ensure distributed consensus and trust in data exchange and validation, blockchain technology was used to provide decentralized validation of information shared on the platform. This meant that central validation of incoming data by a single entity was replaced by a network of technical valuators, so that information will be deemed 100% reliable. The platform allowed the recording of a reliable and fully traceable history of the data and parameters, solving one of the main problems of the energy efficiency investment market: the unreliability and fragility of technical and financial data as evidence of the risks and potential savings. Investors were in turn able to access, filter and evaluate all the available investment opportunities and associated risks, calculated by the evaluation model, through a cloud-based tool to make informed decisions on retrofit investments
