Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Project N° EIE/04/006/S07.39512
FINAL REPORT
September 2007
Coordinator
Reinhard SIX
RHONALPENERGIE-ENVIRONNEMENT
France
Project website : www.pubenefs.org
Supported by
PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
Dr Crispin D Webber, Alexander Bruce, Thames Energy Limited (TEL) (has substituted
North East London Energy Efficiency Advice Centre (NELEEAC)), Great Britain
Project web page : www.lessenergy.co.uk\NELEEAC_energy_services_PU_BENEFS.htm
Asko Ojaniemi, Jyväskylä Innovation Oy (JIO) (has changed name from Jyväskylä
Science Park (JSP)), Finland
Project web page : http://kesto.finbioenergy.fi/pu-benefs
Legal disclaimer
The sole responsibility for the content of this report lies with the authors. It does not
necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Communities. The European Commission is
not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
CONTENTS
12. ANNEXES 3
PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
This project intended to develop a suitable management framework for assisting public
bodies and especially local authorities to implement energy services including energy
efficiency, and thus to enhance the market of energy efficiency and energy services, by
providing efficient tools to meet the needs of public bodies and facilitating the work of
ESCOs. The major outcome of this action is an increased number of public bodies using
energy services in the eight participating regions.
The project ran by local and regional energy agencies started with studies on the specificity
of public bodies, their legal framework and capacity for third party financing and energy
performance contracting in 8 countries (Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain,
Italy, Spain, Sweden). The results of these studies can be found as an English summary on
the project dedicated web gateway www.pubenefs.org, which links up to the web pages in
the partner countries and regions giving detailed information about the project in the country
languages.
In order to prepare the ground and to study the real context feasibility studies were carried
out (two per partner). They have identified on the ground the specific problems and solutions
for implementing energy services. Energy performance contracting for example is not
possible in all the involved countries, so the design needs to be adapted to the specific
framework conditions. In a second step the elaboration of adapted specifications have
assisted the local authorities for their tenders to implement energy services, allowing having
the best offer by ESCOs. The results of these feasibility studies are available on the web
portal in an English summary version.
As the quality of contractual relationships is crucial a guideline for designing contracts has
been elaborated in a way that public bodies can adapt them rapidly, taking into account the
already acquired know-how in Europe. Every partner has designed or adapted the contracts
already existing to include energy savings and performance guarantees. The structure and
the content of these model contracts can be found on the partner’s web pages.
A special feature in this project was the cooperation with the different target groups and key
players necessary for developing the market for energy efficiency services. They have been
associated through specific advisory committees, which gave valuable input for the project
work during several meetings.
The dissemination of the results was given high priority in view of ensuring an efficient
replication of the work carried out. Several tools were produced in the partner languages
directed to the target groups like a booklet presenting energy efficiency services and EPC
with concrete examples and CD-ROM’s compiling the different project deliverables like the
model contract. Organisation of training and dissemination seminars at different levels
completed the promotion. In this way this project will be able to increase the number of public
bodies and local authorities deciding to study and further implement energy services
schemes.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
1.1 Summary
Opening of energy markets and use of energy services represents a good opportunity for
local authorities to include energy efficiency measures in their management, but several
problems can occur, such as lack of knowledge of existing mechanisms, as third party
financing, specificities inducing difficulties to implement energy services (legislation,
accounting schemes etc), risk of losing the knowledge on the energy consumptions.
This project intended to develop a suitable management framework for assisting public
bodies and especially local authorities to implement energy services including energy
efficiency, and thus to enhance the market of energy efficiency and energy services, by
providing efficient tools to meet the needs of public bodies and facilitating the work of
ESCOs.
The major outcome of this action is an increased number of public bodies using energy
services in the eight participating regions.
The studies of the public bodies knowledge and experiences of energy services and
performance contracting, shows substantial differences between the partners and their
countries. There are several factors influencing the development such as legislation and
liberalisation together with the level of autonomy for public bodies and political decision-
making.
However, the partners input and findings in the case studies, indicates that the actual
structural and legislative hindrances seems to be somewhat overestimated, and that
countries and regions with an active business sector and a tradition of public private
partnership seems to find ways of implementing energy services, even with insufficient legal
and administrative structures.
In the more developed markets are the type of contracts used based on client preferences,
while the contracts in the least developed markets seems to be based on what type of
companies are operating in the market.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
The graph below is not intended to be too determinative, but to give an overview of the
maturity and knowledge of public bodies in the partner’s countries (in 2005).
AUT ES FI FR GE IT SE UK
1) Absence of national efficiency regulations, and the separate structures of public budgets
2) Different and more attractive schemes for running public tenders
3) Article 10 Separation of investment/functional costs, limitation of "cross-contribution"
4) Different interpretation/usage of budget split allocations
5) More progressive interpretation of the public procurement act and financing guidelines
There is a need for more skilled and proactive public bodies in order to balance business
negotiations and to tailor the energy services offered to the specific needs and prerequisites
of the public bodies in each country.
The graph below is not intended to be too determinative, but to give an overview of what
types of activities and structural changes that public bodies prioritize in order to improve
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
AUT ES FI FR GE IT SE UK
Energy Performance
Contracting X * X * X x X x
Profit Sharing and
Shared saving contracts * x x x x * x x
X = Commonly used
X = Less commonly used
* = Non or very limited usage
1) Increase is foreseen due to new legislation
Feasibility studies
In order to prepare the ground and to study the real context feasibility studies were carried
out (two per partner). They have identified on the ground the specific problems and solutions
for implementing energy services. Energy performance contracting for example is not
possible in all the involved countries, so the design needs to be adapted to the specific
framework conditions. In a second step the elaboration of adapted specifications have
assisted the local authorities for their tenders to implement energy services, allowing having
the best offer by ESCOs.
The identification and the set up of a co-operation for a feasibility study with local authorities
and public bodies has shown a certain delay due to several reasons: lack of interest,
changing political context, change of responsible persons or changing priority in the building
management services. The approach for carrying out these feasibility studies has been
different according to the specific country and regional context and the competencies of the
project partners.
In preparation of the feasibility studies the partner KEA has, with the input of the partner’s,
produced a feasibility study guideline, which is available on the PU-BENEFS gateway. Short
presentation in English presenting the feasibility studies have been produced by the partners.
These are available either on the partner web page (synthesis of feasibility studies) and on
the PU-BENEFS gateway (summary of feasibility studies in English and the synthesis of
these studies).
• mainly involved are local authorities, three hospitals and one university
• the sectors concerned are in three cases school buildings, public lighting in two
cases, leisure centres and swimming pools in four cases and hospitals in three cases
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
• the main focus of the needs looked at are: heating, control, street lighting, CHP and in
three cases also biomass boilers
• the proposed tools of energy services are in the majority EPC and in three cases with
TPF. An exception is France where for one case a combination of O&M guarantee
contract and leasing is proposed and the second case implements a new public-
private-partnership contract tool.
• Public lighting systems seem to have interesting saving potentials. There are
remarkable differences in the specific average electricity consumption per light spot
and year (560 in Spain, 775 in Italy).
• Acceptance of complex contractual structures, technical measures may be better
when a neutral partner such as an energy agency is involved to check the proposed
measures of the feasibility study.
• Control systems for heating plants and rooms, the replacement of inefficient boilers,
pumps and hot water storage as well as public lighting bodies and bulbs have often
been proposed.
• Depending on the prices for primary energy, additional proposals were cogeneration
and wood chip boilers. The wood chip boilers still have pay back periods > 12 years.
Contracts design
The objectives of this task were to elaborate in the partner countries where necessary model
contracts for the purchase of high quality level of energy services, based on the already
existing contract models in Europe and the recommendations made by the experienced
partners. The coordinating partner TEL developed a guideline for drafting a model contract.
The exchange with the partners improved this guideline. The challenge within this task was
to produce a flexible document which although having a central format and theme, each
partner would have the ability to modify and as such have the opportunity to adapt it to the
context of their own country. The contract documentation was developed with the intention
mainly to support the reduction programme of CO2 in the environment as well as to reduce
the energy costs of the client.
For a successful implementation of projects, it is necessary that the respective contract lays
down rules for all relations between the client and the ESCO which are resulting from the
project and including for example:
• explicit statement of the contract duration
• What is to be done in the event of damage or loss (maintenance)?
• What is to be done in the case of bankruptcy of a contracting party?
• What is to be done if the designated use of the building changes?
• Are there provisions for changes of energy prices foreseen?
• Guaranteed energy savings and provisions for the allocation of guaranteed cost
savings as well as consequences if the guaranteed savings are not met
• Passing the risk and the property
• What is to be done if the building is sold?
Based on the exchange during the project meeting and the guideline for a model contract the
partners have adapted or developed model contracts taking into account the crucial points
listed above and their country specific conditions. These adaptations are available in the
country language on the partner web pages and the produced CD ROM.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
order to facilitate the replication of the project and assist the local authorities to really
implement energy efficiency services two tools were produced by each partner:
• A brochure with the results, explaining the specificity of public procurement in the field
of energy services and including some of the best practices studied
• A CD-ROM with general information about energy efficiency, with the guidelines for
feasibility studies and the contract model(s) designed.
• Training seminars for technicians of local authorities
These tools are also available on the partner’s web pages. An English version of the booklet
with a general presentation of energy efficiency services and some best practices can be
downloaded on the project gateway.
The role of this committee was to accompany the different work phases of the project and
give in input in order to improve the studies and tools produced. In addition vary valuable
exchange took place between the participants concerning the problems and pitfalls of EPC
but also the opportunities and the strength’s of this tool.
All of the partners have seized this occasion to create a larger basis for EPC and reach a
better of pertinence of the studies and tools produced.
One very effective dissemination means is the organisation of work shop targeted to an
audience of professionals including elected officials, civil servants, technical consultants,
ESCOs, banks etc.
So in all the partner regions and countries dissemination workshops on “Energy efficiency
services in public buildings” have been organised touching some 700 decision makers and
technicians. In addition a European seminar was organised in cooperation with the
FEDARENE, the European Federation for Regional Energy and Environment Agencies and
the Committee of the Region in Brussels attracting more than 150 people. The content of
these seminars can be found on the web gateway and the partner web pages.
Main lessons learnt and measures needed to improve the situation for EPC
During the 30 months of the project duration all the partners were very much involved to
promote energy efficiency services for the public bodies and local authorities within the
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
territory covered. This presence in the field is very valuable and gives a good opportunity to
draw lessons. A synthesis is presented in the following:
Training demand
• Training as well the technicians as the decisions makers is in most cases
necessary; a good way is to cooperate with the federations or associations of
the local authorities or the technicians
Government support
• Develop a “Definite Public Procurement Guide” for giving guidance and security to the
local authorities
• Tackling the VAT issue for EPC by for example reversing the VAT payed for the
specific EPC services to the local authorities (in total or partially)
• More and clear support by the different government levels encouraging the use of
EPC
• Indicating clearly the interest and usefulness of EPC in the different energy efficiency
strategies and plans
• Financial support mechanisms for the starting and market development phase would
be of great help: securing the choice of local authorities for EPC, increasing the
demand, reducing the transaction costs
10
PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
This project intended to develop a suitable management framework for assisting public
bodies and especially local authorities to implement energy services including energy
efficiency, and thus to enhance the market of energy efficiency and energy services, by
providing efficient tools to meet the needs of public bodies and facilitating the work of
ESCOs. The major outcome of this action is an increased number of public bodies using
energy services in the eight participating regions.
The project partners are in the majority regional energy agencies working at the regional
level:
The content of the final report is described in the following for each chapter.
In chapter 3 the country specific framework conditions for public bodies to carry out energy
efficiency services are studied. According to a common template all partners analysed the
framework conditions in their respective region and country. A synthesis is giving an
overview of the different situations.
A high importance was given to study best practices concerning energy efficiency services
for public bodies in the eight involved European countries (see chapter 4). The objective was
to study and find out the conditions of success for such innovative schemes. Each partner
has produced 2 case studies, including at least one third party financing scheme. They are
highlighting the obstacles that restrict the use of financial instruments and contracts for
energy savings in regard to public bodies.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
In order to prepare the ground and to study the real context feasibility studies were carried
out (two per partner). They have identified in the field the specific problems and solutions for
implementing energy services (see chapter 5).
The contractual nature of energy services is a key determinant of its success. It is therefore
important to consider and propose models of contracts well adapted to the specificities of
public bodies in each region and country (see chapter 6).
Having in mind the huge information lack within public bodies and particularly local
authorities several tools were designed for the promotion of energy efficiency services. In
order to facilitate the replication of the project and assist the local authorities to really
implement energy efficiency services two tools were produced: booklet and CD-ROM, which
are presented in a concise way in chapter 7.
As it was stated already in the beginning the need for training is very high within the technical
services of the public bodies. Therefore each partner organised at least on dedicated training
seminar for technicians of the local authorities and other interested persons and
organisations, which are illustrated in chapter 8.
A special feature in this project was the cooperation with the different target groups and key
players necessary for developing the market for energy efficiency services. They have been
associated through a specific advisory committee by all of the partners. The enriching
cooperation and accompaniment is highlighted in chapter 9.
The main purpose of this project is to increase the number of public bodies using energy
efficiency services. The obtained results in the different tasks have been made available and
disseminated with a view to encourage the target groups to follow the shown examples and
implement energy efficiency services. One very effective dissemination means is the
organisation of work shop targeted to an audience of professionals. The design of these work
shops and their outcomes are described in chapter 10.
During the 30 months of the project duration all the partners were very much involved to
promote energy efficiency services for the public bodies and local authorities within the
territory covered. This presence in the field is very valuable and gives a good opportunity to
draw lessons. The project partners were solicited to present the lessons learnt in chapter 11.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
However, the partners input and findings in the case studies, indicates that the actual
structural and legislative hindrances seems to be somewhat overestimated, and that
countries and regions with an active business sector and a tradition of public private
partnership seems to find ways of implementing energy services, even with insufficient legal
and administrative structures.
The graph below is not intended to be too determinative, but to give an overview of the
maturity and knowledge of public bodies in the partner’s countries in the year of 2005.
In the more developed markets are the type of contracts used based on client preferences,
while the contracts in the least developed markets seems to be based on what type of
companies are operating in the market.
The graph below is not intended to be too determinative, but to give an overview of the
maturity and knowledge of public bodies in the partner’s countries.
AUT ES FI FR GE IT SE UK
Energy Performance
Contracting X * X * X x X x
Profit Sharing and
Shared saving contracts * x x x x * x x
X = Commonly used
X = Less commonly used
* = Non or very limited usage
1) Increase is foreseen due to new legislation
13
PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
There is a need for more skilled and proactive public bodies in order to balance business
negotiations and to tailor the energy services offered to the specific needs and prerequisites
of the public bodies in each country.
The graph below is not intended to be too determinative, but to give an overview of what
types of activities and structural changes that public bodies prioritize in order to improve
AUT ES FI FR GE IT SE UK
1) Absence of national efficiency regulations, and the separate structures of public budgets
2) Different and more attractive schemes for running public tenders
3) Article 10 Separation of investment/functional costs, limitation of "cross-contribution"
4) Different interpretation/usage of budget split allocations
5) More progressive interpretation of the public procurement act and financing guidelines
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
The legal and administrative framework for public authorities has been identified in several
partner countries as quite important obstacles. These need to be overcome at state level
thus involving the national states responsibility.
In this issue is Austria, and especially Upper Austria, a promising exception. Also UK and
parts of Germany are showing promising tendencies, but the real Member State focus is
somewhat limited.
The first one is the introduction of a market driven implementation of EU directives. The
ESCO’s are keen on getting in and analysing different building stocks in search for projects,
and will therefore start moving the real estate market forward.
The other one is the possibility to ensure that the energy savings potentials stated in the
analysis and certificates, now also can be implemented on a favourable and cost neutral
basis for the real estate owners.
Another interesting approach for municipalities and public real estate owners is the Swedish
EPC-projects being successfully implemented without outsourcing the operation and
maintenance staff. This solution could be of EU interest, since it prevents a lot of internal and
trade union opposition, that currently limiting the usage and applicability of the energy
services among public bodies.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
Since it’s lightly that the public sector will carry a wider responsibility and higher savings
targets in the directive, it’s now essential for larger public real estate owners to be able to
submit evidence, clearly stating the savings achieved within their premises.
Though Energy Performance Contracting projects are implemented with savings guarantees
is the actual energy consumption and achieved savings therefore followed up and analysed
thoroughly. Real estate owners carrying out EPC projects, are therefore simultaneously also
paving the way for their own smooth compliance with the future saving targets.
However, an important prerequisite for Energy Performance Contracting ability to support the
proposed directive, and pave the way for real savings, is need for high quality and credibility
of the services delivered.
Even though European standards for Energy Performance Contracting, probably will take
time to establish, due to the Member States different legal and administrative framework,
there’s a pressing need for competition neutral guidelines and administrative capacity
building among the public bodies.
The need for frameworks and funds supporting a high quality introduction of Energy
Services, as stated in FEDARENE’s second position paper on the directive of end user
efficiency and energy services, is partially being achieved through the PU-Benefs and other
European and national projects, but there must be a higher and broader focus in the Member
States.
The supporting frameworks are essential to prevent the risk of backlashes and diminished
faith in Energy Services and Energy Performance Contracting, that at times happened in the
US market.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
Upper Austria has recently also passed an energy efficiency strategy ("Energie Star 2010")
with the aim to increase energy efficiency by 1%, by 1.5% in the public sector respectively.
The buildings sector has a major role to play in achieving these goals. As the building sector
is a complex one which is quite resistant to change, there are a number of measures,
comprising legal, financial and information measures being implemented in order to tackle
sustainable energy use in buildings and to bring about a real change in investment and
behaviour.
At the very core of all the building activities is the calculation of an energy performance
indicator, an energy performance indicator for 50,000 building has been calculated in the last
12 years. This energy performance indicator is the basis for an energy certificate, of which
again over 50,000 have been issued in the last decade. Additionally there are a number of
subsidy programmes to motivate home owners to invest in higher energy standards.
The previous 2-3 years have also seen significant sustainable energy activities for public
buildings as well. The public building sector is of specific importance but also one of the most
difficult ones - often the structure of the institutions (different responsibilities), procurement
rules and other bureaucratic barriers prevent things from happening. It also took some time
in Upper Austria to get things moving, but now there is a whole package of activities.
There are minimum energy performance requirements for the construction of new buildings
and for retrofitting (as for the housing sector) and there is a legal obligation that renewable
energy sources have to be given priority for heating and hot water supply in public buildings
("priority for renewables for heating").
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
To ensure that these rules are followed, public funding was linked to it: municipalities in our
region get the money for their public buildings mostly from the region. And this funding now is
only given if the energy standards are met and if renewables are used (or if not, they have to
have a very good explanation why not).
More and more energy performance requirements are also put into the tender documents for
public buildings and in many cases O.Ö. Energiesparverband supports municipalities in the
preparation of these tender documents.
There is a legal obligation for energy accounting for municipalities and there is already since
1994 an annual benchmarking and monitoring carried out for all public buildings of the
regional government.
One of the important activities in the building sector to trigger energy efficiency in public
buildings is energy performance contracting.
Although it took some time to make energy performance contracting well known among
public bodies, with the help of the Upper Austrian support programme, the instrument is now
quite well established in the region. Most municipalities are familiar with the scheme energy
performance contracting and about 50 municipalities have already implemented a contracting
project. The implemented projects mainly concern retrofitting of public street lighting and of
public buildings (modernisation of heating systems, insulation of buildings, more efficient
lighting etc.).
A balanced approach was carried out to help both sides - the ESCO and the clients.
Especially the energy advice given in the frame of the programme by an independent agency
(O.Ö. Energiesparverband) helped very much to establish confidence in the contracting
instrument. At the beginning of the market development, it was also very helpful for the
ESCO to get support and advice when implementing their first contracting project, for
example, the contracts were reviewed and critical questions discussed with both contract
partners.
At the beginning of the market development, very often several advice sessions for every
project were given by O.Ö. Energiesparverband. People applying for the support are guided
by O.Ö. Energiesparverband and are therefore able to benefit from the experience of earlier
projects.
The combination of financial incentive with an information element (advice from experts) is
one of the key factors for achieving successful implemented projects and for establishing a
broad contracting market in the region.
Aim of the support programme was not only to financially support contracting projects, but
also to improve the quality of the services offered by the ESCO. This quality approach turned
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
The quality approach was also very beneficial for the ESCOs and helped to make them more
professional and to ensure high quality of their services. Presently a number of ESCOs offer
their services in Upper Austria. O.Ö. Energiesparverband offers on its website a service
which presents the most active ESCOs. In order to be named on the website, the ESCO has
to deliver quotations of references and the contract is checked by O.Ö. Energiesparverband.
Presently 15 ESCOS are listed and in total more than 30 ESCOs are established which offer
services in Upper Austria.
Main obstacles which prevent energy efficiency projects to be implemented are above all:
high investment costs and lack of public money, administrative barriers, lack of trust in
Contracting.
Although energy performance contracting could therefore play an important role, it took quite
a time to successfully implement the first contracting projects in municipalities.
With the help of best practice examples and a growing number of successfully implemented
projects, the situation has improved in the field of energy performance contracting. However,
in the field of financing renewable energy plants by TPF the market development is still,
despite large potential, very slow. Above all awareness raising and information is needed to
overcome this situation.
• first, ESCOs are invited to deliver their references in terms of the planned contracting
project
• second p, some of them (~ 3 ) are invited to deliver a detailed offer and the best one
is then selected for contract negotiations.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
Public organisation:
The main obstacles preventing successful contracting market development are:
• it takes time: despite increased efforts to trigger the market development it took about
4 years in Upper Austria to get the first successful projects started
• confidence needed: it is very difficult to establish confidence in the contracting
scheme (people are often sceptical about the win-win situation for both contract
parties or don' t understand that the ESCO has also to benefit financially)
• complexity: due to the complexity of the contracting scheme it is not so easy for
municipality officials to explain and understand how contracting works
• unrealistic expectations: very often contracting is communicated as a "miracle tool"
that can solve all energy efficiency problems of municipalities. It is crucial to
communicate the benefits of contracting on a serious basis not neglecting the
disadvantages and the limited field of application
• loss of influence: the fear to loose influence and control over energy related questions
prevents from entering projects
• loss of jobs: people responsible for operation and management of installations and
buildings within the municipality are very often against contracting because they fear
to loose the job or at least influence and control. For a successful implementation of
projects it is therefore crucial to involve them right from the beginning and include
them in the monitoring or energy management during/after the project
• local added value: very often one argument against contracting is less local added
value (if the ESCO concludes the contract for retrofitting buildings).
In addition to these obstacles there are other means of financing energy efficiency projects
and renewable energy installations in municipalities established. The most important
financing tools are:
• founding a new "association" ("KEG" i.e. a special association under the Austrian law
similar to a limited liability company): the benefits for the municipality are that the
investment is officially done by this association and does not appear in the
municipality's accounting
• leasing: the leasing scheme is already well introduced and known by most people,
especially for new public buildings it is a common financing tool
Grouped procurement for energy and/or EPC contracts:
One requirement of the contract of the EPC-scheme is that there are 2 partners: the ESCO
(supplier) and (for example) a municipality (consumer). The difficulty of the complex EPC
contract is to foresee more than 2 contract partners. Although it would in some cases be
helpful to achieve the minimum investment (required by the Upper Austrian EPC programme
is 40,000 €), to group investment projects in different municipalities, this is hardly ever done.
The reason is that implementing projects beyond municipality borders is difficult as every
municipality has its own administration. Implementing contracting projects with more than
one municipality would therefore require comprehensive contractual provision.
A different situation is given for certain public schools in Austria which are owned by one
national association. Here the EPC-scheme is carried out by pooling schools located in
different municipalities. As the owner is always one association, this causes no contractual
problems.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
Public organisation:
Additional obstacles (complementing the ones already mentioned in 2.1) for TPF are:
• no tradition, no best practice examples: the process in Upper Austria started with
EPC-projects and therefore so far hardly any TPF projects in municipalities are
implemented
• biomass district heating well established: very often there is no necessity to finance
biomass heating systems in municipalities because many municipality buildings are
connected to biomass district heating installations. In many rural municipalities such
networks are established and operated by a local farmers'cooperative.
Leasing
Often new public buildings are financed by leasing which means that only the financing and
planning is carried out by the contractor. He also carries the risk of functionality. Generally
by entering the contract a certain residual value is fixed, after termination of the contract the
object can than by purchased.
Public accountancy:
The leasing rate is calculated on the basis of the actual investment and (similar to renting
objects) the annual rate is shown in the accountancy (expenditure).
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
This programme does not only support energy efficiency projects but also investment in
renewable energy technologies and the initial focus on the public sector has been extended
to businesses. The programme offers financial support (maximum 100,000 €), depending on
the type of project, minimum investment costs of 40,000 € are required.
Besides the financial incentive, the programme offers also a number of advice and
information activities. The combination of financial incentive with an information element
(advice from experts) is one of the key factors for achieving successful implemented projects
and for establishing a broad ECP market in the region.
The ECP/TPF programme was developed and is implemented in co-operation with the
regional administration.
Private initiatives:
The Upper Austrian ECP/TPF programme started in 1998 with targeting at municipalities –
the public sector – only and was only in 2002 extended to companies – the private sector.
The main market development therefore so far took place in the public sector. In addition
companies are very often don' t want to enter a for example 10 years contract with an ESCO.
However, some good best practice examples have been completed recently and the
prospects for further projects (energy performance contracting projects and especially
biomass projects financed by TPF) in the private sector are very good.
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PU-BENEFS Energy efficiency services for public bodies
OVERVIEW
The historical situation in Germany
An inventory of obligations developed during the 1992 United Nations Conference on the
Environment and Development aimed at preventing disturbance of the world' s climatic
system. The convention obliges the industrial nations (among others) to reduce their
emissions of greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by the year 2000.
Germany was able to reduce its CO2 emissions by 11% between 1990 and 1994. In order to
reach the goal Germany has set herself, a 25% reduction in CO2 emissions (relative to 1990)
by the year 2005, further energy conservation measures will be necessary.
In the last 5 years, energy consumption was made more expensive, through the introduction
of a CO2 or energy tax in order to promote less energy-intensive patterns of production and
consumption.
The general situation for public bodies
In Germany’s public buildings over 2 billion € energy costs are spent each year. 70% of
these costs are occurring in municipalities. Fiscal crisis has led to increasing problems with
inefficient, old technical facilities in the municipalities. Increasing energy prices are making
the situation even worse.
Still enough hurdles exist especially in public buildings: the lack of own experience and the
still existing awareness from outsourcing projects especially in municipal administrations still
requires strong efforts. May be the most important item is the dissemination of “good-practise
examples”, which encourage still observant public authorities to do their “pilot-project”.
Another specific hindrance of public bodies is the budgetary legal conditions. The division of
the budget into two parts, one administrative and a wealth part, which are separately
managed, is especially a hurdle for energy supply contracting.
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• The budgetary legal conditions. The division of the budget into two parts, one
administrative and a wealth part, which are separately managed, is especially a hurdle for
energy supply contracting. Another main problem is the financial crisis, which is
influencing the opportunities of public bodies. This problem is tightened by rising energy
costs.
• Public administration has no direct incentive for optimisation of their equipment. Due to
the budgetary legal conditions, savings earned on the administrative part of the budget
can not automatically be transformed on the wealth part. A handful of administrations
already have realized the problem and generated “in-house- contracting”- projects, were
this hurdle was taken away for a limited of projects.
• The budget crisis has led to a reduction of the personal capacity of public administrations
in the last years. Own staffs were replaced by external services, especially in engineering
and design services. In many cases, smaller and medium municipalities don’t have own
engineering competence at all, which would at least be needed for management of
technical proceedings.
• Larger municipalities have often reduced their own technical staff. A problem is the
fragmented organisation regarding ownership, O&M responsibility and the one paying the
energy bills. A good organized “facility and energy management” is hard to find,
especially in medium and small municipalities. The fragmentation of the organisation is
responsible for friction losses at each interface.
The two-divided budget, as it is in mainly practiced, does not foresee any write- offs. That
leads to the situation, that energy services, which normally include write- offs in their
calculation are economically not comparable with a cost calculation not based on “full-cost”.
VAT has to be paid by the end-consumer, which is the public body. This is does not lead to
disadvantages for energy service project.
Public procurement:
The Public procurement of energy services, EPC and O&M services is clearly stated: the
VOL (Verdingungsordnung für Leistungen/purchasing regulations for services). This
regulation states the definition of services, the purchasing proceeding in relationship to the
amount of the purchased services in the contract period.
If the amount exceeds 200 T€/contract period, EU- wide tendering is obligate Less than 200
T€, the regulations foresee Germany- wide tendering. Experience shows, that most of the
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energy services (supply and EPC) obviously have contract periods with 10- 20 years, so that
in most cases, EU-wide tendering is compulsory.
VOL specifies the proceeding for EU-wide tendering in several steps and also specifies a
timetable with time periods between each step (§18a VOL/A):
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municipalities. This statement has no legislative character, but has already been brought on
the way in larger municipal administrations. Outsourcing projects mostly are concerned with
engineering services in public buildings. Other functions, such as budget management have
not been touched yet. The hurdle that seems to be the highest for dissemination of energy
service projects is the scepticism of the municipalities:
• External companies might operate the facilities better than it was done before (by the
municipalities). This often turns out to be true, it is one of the reasons to implement
energy services.
• This implicates the fear of loosing competence or the job, because third party does
better. KEAs own experience with energy service projects show, that the engineering
staff is still needed for project- controlling functions, and that a remarkable reduction of
personal in this function is not possible. Operational functions may be outsourced, which
means, that in very large heating units, the contractor is engaging the existing staff. In
smaller units, the facilities are often run by the housekeeper. The outsourcing of an
important part of this category of facilities, e.g. the heating unit, would not implicate, that
the housekeeper will be outsourced too, or lose his job.
• The fear that the energy service company earns money with their services, which could
have been spared in own performed projects. The first part of the argument is definitely
true, the second part definitely wrong. Energy service projects are based on calculations
which implicate e.g. fixed investment amount and a minimum of energy efficiency ratio. In
comparison to the municipal staff, the contractor has to earn money and does this by
keeping up the efficiency ratio and investment amount stated in his calculation.
After the liberalisation of the electricity market in Germany after 1999, the municipalities were
obligate to tender electricity service for their buildings. Except those, which have subsidiary
utilities. In the last years, municipal associations started with group procurement for
electricity. The transaction costs of this procurement could be remarkable (30%) decreased
in comparison to single procurement proceedings.
In the energy service market, the grouped procurement does not play an appreciable role;
the amount of municipalities using this tool is very few. Referring to KEA’s information, in the
moment only one EPC is brought on the way in grouped procurement. In discussions can be
heard, that the municipalities are afraid of loosing control over the proceeding, and fear
involuntary cross subsidies with the other part taking municipalities.
This fear normally is not founded on facts: grouped procurement means, that each part
taking municipality is managing one tender of the procurement. The evaluation is done for
each tender separately, and the best offer for each tender will be awarded.
Third Party Financing (Often partially included in EPC contracts) and Leasing
Third party financing and leasing has not gained an important role in energy service related
functions in municipalities in Germany. This is due to the circumstance, that public bodies
are, though their budget crises, good rated debtors, with low interest rates. For energy
service providers it is very difficult to underbid these interest rates.
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In Catalonia, in 1991, once powers to promote energy efficiency had been transferred from
the State to the autonomous communities, ICAEN, the Institut Català d’Energia (Catalan
Energy Institute), was established. ICAEN’s mission includes, principally, promoting energy
efficiency and the introduction of renewable energy sources and investing in projects to
develop more efficient technologies.
Both ICAEN in Catalonia and IDAE at State level, then, are responsible for launching energy
awareness and energy saving campaigns, ranging from free audits for industrial companies
and service buildings, advertising campaigns, the establishment of subsidies and financial
participation in projects involving energy saving or the promotion of renewable energy.
To date, ICAEN has carried out more than 1,500 energy audits and thermographic
inspections at Catalan industrial enterprises, and has a share in more than 60 cogeneration
and wind park enterprises, in which it invests 10% of installation costs through public
corporations in order to promote the introduction of CHP and wind power in Catalonia. To
manage this investment in projects both private and public, ICAEN established three
companies, EFIENSA, SAENSA and EISSA, in which other public bodies also hold shares.
EISSA is currently engaged in installing HVAC plants in medical centres and hospitals,
managing this plant and selling comfort to buildings. EISSA is also responsible for acquiring
the most efficient plant in terms of saving energy and reducing costs.
This year, as regards public buildings particularly, IDAE has increased its investment in
projects involving public administration buildings: energy efficiency and saving in Spanish
prisons and energy efficiency and cost reduction at La Moncloa complex.
Apart from these public sphere activities, energy service companies (ESCOs), providing
services for private enterprise, mainly industrial, are just beginning to appear in Spain.
The general situation for public bodies
In Spain, energy efficiency and rational use of energy measures are implemented in
piecemeal fashion, as no regulations exist at State level to govern these, and the lines
followed in the communities to which powers have been devolved depend on the political will
at the time.
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• At State level, the E4 Strategy for Energy Efficiency in Buildings has been presented,
and the Technical Building Code will be approved in 2005.
• Only a few autonomous communities, such as the Basque Country and Catalonia,
have established regulations governing energy efficiency certificates, whilst work has
been going on for some time in Catalonia on an eco-building decree. Moreover, as
regards lines of action involving buildings and the rational use of energy, the
Autonomous Government of the Balearic Islands has approved a programme which
will apply for public buildings.
• Some local authorities, such as Saragossa City Council, have established energy
efficiency ordinances focussing, in the main, on the introduction of renewable energy
sources.
Moreover, on the question of public buildings and public administration services, it is
important to take into consideration the different types of building according to the body in
charge, as this is the body that will play an active role in making the investment, monitoring it
and ensuring its possible replicability. The administrative levels and the buildings and
services they are responsible for are as follows:
• Local administration: public lighting, traffic lights, infant and primary schools, water
pumping, administration office buildings such as town halls, departments, sports
centres, markets, libraries, etc.
• Autonomous community administration: secondary schools and universities, clinics
and hospitals, public housing, prisons, ports and, in the future, airports and railway
stations.
• State administration: ministerial buildings, infrastructure and, until devolved to the
autonomous community administration: airports and railway stations.
Although more and more interesting and replicable projects are being implemented, the fact
is that little has been done to promote monitoring of building behaviour, which would enable
a more standard regulatory framework to be provided.
Moreover, a series of barriers or inherent problems have been detected, and work should
focus particularly on turning these into opportunities
Regarding the ESCOs, currently public administration does not have any experience in
contracting energy services. Till very recently this possibility was completely unknown. Only
few companies such as EISSA offered to Public Administration energy services similar to
those carried out by ESCO, although not always corresponding to the highest efficiency
standards.
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problems and barriers delaying the establishment of such a market. These can be
summarised as:
However, certain experiences have been identified in Catalonia and Spain that may be seen
as projects aimed at developing the concept of energy services. These are isolated cases
that cover only part of the potential service, but which enable a certain basic understanding
to be acquired (i.e., HVAC in the public hospital sector in Catalonia through EISSA, district
heating and/or cooling systems through public and private development, etc.
As a result, we can conclude that, though energy services are a powerful mechanism for
energy efficiency, organising and standardising, and which may produce interesting results:
• The Spanish and Catalan administrative authorities still have much to do,
• Energy saving and management is important (both public and private),
• A market exists in business and industry
• Technical and economic barriers can be overcome.
Nonetheless, it must be said that an energy service company does not necessarily have to
provide all the services it offers: some services can be provided through subcontracting
or strategic alliances. In any case, however, the service company itself will be responsible
to the client for ensuring guarantees and quality of service.
Here, there are, in principle, three profiles of companies that will take different
directions according to core business activity to offer energy services as an integral service:
The Spanish government strategy is to encourage all possible supply companies to take part
in establish a diversified, standard market, promoting alliances and UTEs in order to provide
a quality, professional integral service.
The general needs for an improved energy services market
The principal obstacles that exist in Spain and in Catalonia to the development of energy
services are cultural, political and technical in type, as well as concerning aspects of
operation and functioning.
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Socio-cultural barriers
Novelty and culture. Energy services are a new instrument, both in terms of concept and
procedure. Moreover, our culture is not sufficiently mature in terms of energy and energy
efficiency awareness.
Lack of political will at the different administrative levels, linked to the lack of energy
bodies forming part of local administrations to promote initiatives.
Rigidity of local authority budget provisions, as budgets are structured into items that
must be kept separate, making it difficult for investment in efficiency to help decrease
maintenance costs as items are differentiated (running costs).
Technical barriers
The situation of the building pool and its functioning. Departments of the public
administration are generally distributed throughout the territory and not in one single building,
and this makes investment or actions to improve energy efficiency more difficult to make.
The conditions under which a building is used, whether rented or owned, may serve to
block certain initiatives. If a building is rented, especially, the engagement of those
responsible for deciding whether or not to carry out a particular action may be very limited.
Nonetheless, an Energy Performance Contracting (EPC) agreement may give equally
positive results.
Market barriers
Lack of players on the market: matching supply and demand methodically and in the most
suitable conditions.
No energy service companies exist that respond to the definition of the ESCO.
However, professionals and companies with similar capacities do exist. For example, the
European database on energy service companies identifies five ESCOs in Spain. However,
these are not really ESCOs according to the above definition. These companies possess the
technology and know-how but have not adopted the procedures or ways of operating.
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The public authority and a private organisation form a private/mixed company. Both
participate in that company. The new company carries out the public services.
The public authority signs a contract with a private organisation for a planned duration,
who carries out the public tasks (such as, for example, construction and maintenance)
with his own investments, but the responsibility for providing a public service to citizens
still lies in the hands of the public authority. This is Performance Contracting (PC).
On the other hand, there are other aspects that have to do with the state regulation,
organisation, etc that have to be explored. There is no experience at all in Spain but there
are some initiatives that run under this objective.
Public accountancy:
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In Spain, the public administrations are governed at present by the revised text of the Law on
Public Administration Contracts (Legislative Royal Decree 2/2000 of June 16) and by
subsequent revisions of it, such as: SECTION IV Article 34 of Royal Decree Law 5/2005 of
March 11, on Urgent Reforms to Promote Productivity and Improve Public Procurement. This
framework establishes the criteria for purchasing any goods or services by the
administration.
As regards legislation regulating energy markets since the start of the liberalisation process
in 1997, promoted by the European Community, Spain has adopted a series of laws,
regulations and standards that have greatly altered the situation as regards managing buying
and selling energy. The starting point in Spain was laid down by Law 6/2000 of June 23, on
Urgent Measures to Intensify Competition in Goods and Services Markets.
Since 1 January 2003, processes of liberalisation in both the electricity and natural gas
market and as regards vehicle fuel have entered fully into effect, to the extent where
consumers can now purchase energy from the marketing company of their choice.
This opens up the possibility of marketing companies complementing the work of buying and
selling energy by offering their customers value added in the form of advisory services. In
this way, they would begin to fulfil the role that ESCOs are called on to play.
In any case, up to day so far there has not been published any decree or law which would
establish a method or rules of contracting energy services between ESCO and users. In the
framework of the project SENA of the European Commission, ICAEN is working on the
design of a juridical framework which regulates the contract settings of ESCO.
Until there is no established regulation framework, the only experience which can serve as a
base for the legal relationship between ESCO and users is the particular legal framework
which has been established between the consumer companies and energy suppliers or
companies responsible for maintenance, which could offer in a desultory way some energy
service (as the case of EISSA).
Public procurement:
Given the way the administration operates, the decisions taken by such organisations tend to
be very conservative. For this reason, when contracts are made, there is a tendency to gain
less whilst reducing the risk of losing a lot to the minimum. In consequence, the main
regulations seek to ensure high security provisions for budgets.
For this reason, for example, when a call for tenders is announced for the purchase of
electricity on the free market where the price varies from hour to hour (meaning that there
are, over a twelve-month period, 8,760 different electricity prices corresponding to each hour
in the year) marketing companies are asked to offer a single price for all electricity
consumed, and that the marketing company should manage price variations, even though in
this way the Administration runs the risk of ending up paying more for this power than if other
methods of purchasing energy were adopted.
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This system enables the Administration to establish a budget that is relatively firm,
conditioned only by the fact that it is difficult to predict consumption in one year’s time but, in
any case always subject to a fixed price.
This philosophy also holds with the few contracts signed to date with ESCOs.
Public organisation:
At present, the public administration is perhaps the biggest subcontracting party. Whilst
industry always has its facility maintenance and management personnel, only very rarely
does the public administration have its own building or facility manager.
To put it another way, there are very few public workers in charge of managing and
maintaining public administration buildings.
Paradoxically, however, this maintenance service outsourcing does not involve hiring an
ESCO, either because they are not so well known, or because there are none or because,
simply, it has just never been done before. It is a well known fact that it is difficult to change
the way the public administration works, that, incomprehensibly, this requires enormous
efforts.
For this reason, services, when not hired, belong to the public administration but, in no case,
to the company that manages them.
It is most probable that knowledge of these different options for contracting services that are
beginning, very slowly, to be used by private enterprise, will reach the world of public
management. At the moment though, it does not seem likely that this will happen overnight.
Grouped procurement for energy and/or EPC contracts:
Actually, there is not a procurement for energy services, Spain is in a previous phase,
developing the rules and regulations that have to be implemented for different types of
buildings and uses.
Profit sharing (Project and/or O&M incentives)
As regards financing energy projects, particularly energy services, there are two forms, each
entailing different risks and liabilities:
Guaranteed savings: the energy service company assumes both financial and technical
risks.
Shared savings: the customer is responsible for investment and financial risk, whilst the
company assumes the technical risk.
Although both forms exist side by side, we feel that for energy services, in the case of the
public administration, it is more advisable to adopt the guaranteed savings system rather
than one based on profit sharing. This is because, if the company assumes both technical
and economic risks, it becomes possible to win the user’s trust over more quickly. In the case
of guaranteed savings, the contract period is longer, but the public administration delegates
problems.
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We feel that, in the case of a service so new to our country, such as those provided by
ESCOs, the formula based on guarantees is particularly attractive in enabling both parties to
achieve trust in the market.
There are aspects of ownership questions regarding this form of financing that are not quite
to the liking of public bodies.
The main problem of the third party financing (TPF) projects is that till recently companies
offering this kind of service did not exist.
Other problem for applying TPF in public installations is that in case of forming a company
which would manage, finance and execute the energy efficiency politics, this usually has very
high life duration period, superior to legislation period which, in fact, would make difficult for
the municipal authorities to approve this kind of projects.
From another side, besides all the official difficulties in order to establish this kind of project,
responsible public authorities are used to own their installations so that they often resign to
finance them through the third party.
Leasing
Fundamentally speaking, this form affects ownership of the plant in which the ESCO has
invested in order to provide the service. Leasing is a habitually used practice, particularly for
large, industrial projects.
Private initiatives:
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Few private initiatives are launched without aid, support or promotion by a public
organisation. In Catalonia, investment in most projects is partially or wholly public.
Companies have recently started to emerge that are engaged in CHP or HVAC plant
installation, but their activities are more centred on financing projects than on providing
construction and operating services (or, therefore, with seeking energy saving measures).
The engineering companies that design plants are often those, also, that offer customers this
financing service.
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Several documents clarify the implementation of this policy: the guidelines of energy group
services, the national energy efficiency improvement plan, the implementation of which is
ensured by ADEME (the Environment and Energy Control Agency), and the national plan to
combat climate change drawn up by MIES (the Greenhouse Effect Inter-ministry Mission).
An important debate centred on energy was held from January until May 2003, which is to
result in a framework law in 2005. This law will include the implementation of energy
efficiency certificates (mainly due by energy providers).
The transposition of the European directive on the energy performance of buildings will be
done in 2006. The energy performance certificates for buildings should be mandatory in 2006
(for sold ones) or 2007 (for rented ones).
In the 70’s, the main point was financial savings after the oil crisis. Some important energy
efficiency works had been done, and the first energy departments have been set in the local
authorities, but did not always last, because of the decreasing prices of energy in the mid
80’s.
Now the interest for energy is seen by the environmental impacts, especially the greenhouse
gases, and is to be included in sustainable development projects, such as Local agendas 21.
Anyway, there are still numerous local authorities that do no want or do not know how to
implement a real energy policy. The use of energy services is not widely spread among
public bodies, except for the use of operating and maintenance contracts.
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It has recently developed a quality approach to offer the best service to the customers, called
Valiance. It includes the search for progress when operating and maintaining installations,
the preservation of the installations and a transparent information for the customer, with a
personalised approach to take into account its needs.
Some of the energy services companies are members of groups that also provide other
services for local authorities (waste, water…), and so they have a long experience in working
for them.
• juridical : the code for public tender has obliged to separate the investment
and functioning costs for an equipment, and forbids the operating costs to
contribute to the payment of the investment. This point has been included in
the code in 2004, after some abuses that allowed only bigger companies to
tender. A new frame for public-private partnership has been implemented in
2004 that should allow global contracts
• - procedures: local authorities are now reluctant to engage in long term
procedures, that excludes longer return on investment times for energy
contracts. They are also not willing to include financing schemes in other
contracts, but prefer to get them separate.
• - financing of investment: local authorities are now less willing to borrow
money for their investments, and prefer self-financing. Moreover, there is
always a lack of means for the general investments, and energy investments
are not seen as a priority.
• - market organisation: until the last years, there was a strong separation
between energy providers (public and national ones) and energy services
companies. The energy providers, because of their monopoly, where
forbidden to provide energy services. This is changing with the opening of the
markets, but local authorities hesitate strongly to go on the open markets.
• - political: energy efficiency is not seen by politicians as attractive (this may be
changing with the rise of environmental interest), as it is not visible (and not at
all on the short term)
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• some specific expenses are not included in the field of VAT, mainly for public
services where there is no concurrence (i.e. administrative tasks, waste
management, libraries, swimming pools, …), that means that it is not possible
to recuperate VAT and that VAT is not due by the user.
• local authorities can choose to be in the field of VAT for commercial services
(i.e. that requires a payment by the user, such as waste management, water
distribution …), that will allow them to recuperate VAT on costs.
• VAT on investments can be refunded via a special state fund.
• all the expenses linked to energy consumption are submitted to VAT, that is
not refundable if the service is not included in the field of VAT (general case)
Public procurement:
The main principles for public procurement are the following:
• - free access to public tender
• - equal treatment of candidates
• - control of the use of public expenses, through formalised procedures for
tender
The main rules are included in a code for public procurement that has been rewritten in 2001
and 2004.
A decree on public-private partnership has been issued in 2004. Mainly dedicated to state
investments in buildings, it can be used also by local authorities.
The general rules for the public procurement for contracts concerning services and goods
are the following:
Of course, it is always possible to implement a stricter procedure. For the State, the level of
230 000 € is changed 150 000 €
Public organisation:
The local authorities have technical and administrative services, some of them obligatory (for
example for official acts). The local authorities are free to choose either to subcontract or not
the facultative services.
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Within the technical services, the energy management is not frequently dedicated to a
specific service, but generally included in a service for buildings (building, maintenance and
running). This leads to difficulties to implement an efficient energy policy.
Grouped procurement
Grouped procurement is allowed to the condition to respect the general principles of public
procurement. It is mainly used to buy goods, when it would be too complicated to organise a
specific tender (either smaller goods or for price advantages), but less for services, that
require a specific definition of the needs.
There had been grouped procurement for oil several years ago, but with the conversion of
boilers to natural gas, they were not working any more. With the opening of markets there is
one experience for grouped procurement of electricity, but since tender is still not mandatory
for local authorities, this procedure will not be implemented in the next years (moreover, the
costs of electricity and gas on the regulated market are low and do not encourage local
authorities to go on the liberalised market).
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There is a contract model published by the ministry of finances, indicating precisely what can
be included, how are done the payments and the calculation of profit sharing and the
duration (CCTG 2008), but it is not mandatory.
This model considers 5 kind of contracts, where it is possible to include or not P3, and to
include or not profit sharing.
Prices can always be revised according to economic variations: - Fixed price (MF): the price
is depends not of the real consumption, and includes P1
• Climatic revision (MT): the price is revised according to climatic variations and
includes P1
• Heating metering (MC): the price is revised according the quantity of heat
provided, and includes P1
• Fuel metering (CP): the price is revised according the quantity of fuel used,
and includes P1
• Only P2 (PF)
Public organisation:
The O&M contracts are very frequently used by local authorities that do not want to manage
directly this service. But profit sharing in these contracts are less common, because they
request a specific survey to check the results, and also because there is a lack of metering
systems.
Grouped procurement for energy and/or EPC contracts:
Grouped procurement is quite never used for this kind of contracts. In some rare cases, it is
a union of local authorities that tenders for the contracts.
Third Party Financing (Often partially included in EPC contracts)
Public accountancy:
There is a possibility of recuperate VAT through the special fund, if it is considered that it is
the local authority that makes the investment. That means than the installations are
considered to be the property of the local authority since the beginning, even if it is paid later.
Public procurement:
The rules for public procurement of borrowing contracts was not submitted to the general
rules for tender until a recent decision of the high court for administrative law (the Conseil
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d’Etat) in February claimed it was not conform to European directives. It is still to be decided
whether a new writing will be implemented or not, but until any new change, financing is
submitted to the general rules for tender.
It is possible to tender for the financing of an EPC contract after the results are known. The
financing contract could be implemented considering the results of the EPC contract (or
otherwise if it is preferred by the public body).
Private bodies can of course implement EPC contracts including the financing part directly.
Public organisation:
The implementation of third part financing requires at the same time a specific technical
energy department within the technical services and a link with financial and procurement
department to implement correctly the financing scheme.
Grouped procurement for energy and/or EPC contracts:
It seems very difficult to get several public bodies to group for third party financing contracts,
because financing is considered as an important prerogative of local authorities.
Leasing
Public accountancy:
Leasing is authorised, but it leads to a different VAT approach: the local authority can
recuperate the VAT only on the buying option amount (that is usually very low), not on all the
costs. If the local authority invests directly, it can recuperate the VAT on the total amount.
The interest of leasing lies in the possibility to determine the level of payments freely (either
constant terms, or progressive, or regressive,
Public procurement:
Leasing is submitted to the general rules for tender.
Public organisation:
Leasing is generally used for:
- investments in technological devices, especially those having a short life time
- real estate investments, if there is a need to isolate the costs of an operation, if it is
industrial or commercial
- investments for services where a payment is due by the user (public transport …). In
this case the service can be submitted to VAT that would allow to recoverate it.
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In the field of the Picolight project, it also organises an information day on financing schemes
for energy efficiency for local authorities.
AMORCE, the association of local authorities for waste and district heating also organises a
seminar for financing energy efficiency, but it is more dedicated to subsidies than to energy
efficiency services.
Private initiatives:
Energy services companies, through their union (FG3E), promote the development of energy
services, and have developed a specific offer to link their services to efficiency and quality of
results.
This offer is more linked to operating and maintenance contracts, but does not take into
account the specificities of local authorities.
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Six energy service organisations have made contracts, YIT, ARE, Enespa, Foster Wheeler
and Inesco. Public body is partner for 17 contracts and in 18 cases investment has been
made for private organisation, mainly in industry. YIT has made many contracts with public
bodies, the target has been often modernisation of ventilation system, heat recovery units
and building automation modernisations.
Enespa has made also mainly public cases where dominating client group has been
modernisation of icehockey halls, specially ice management and heat recovery from chillers.
Inesco has made 12 contracts, all with industry. Contracts vary from large heat recovery
investments in process industry to turbine modernisation in a power plant. The other ESCO
companies have made only few cases.
The general situation for public bodies
The governmental buildings are mainly owned by Senaatti Kiinteistöt. The total number of
buildings is about 11 000. By volume the largest category is university buildings 38 %,
second largest is office buildings 32 % and third category is special buildings 30 %. The
special buildings include hospitals, defence forces buildings etc.
The Senaatti Kiinteistöt buildings are managed by professionals and their energy
consumption is continuously recorded and benchmarking is carried out within similar
buildings categories. Energy audit has been carried out in virtually all buildings. Senaatti
Kiinteistöt is partner in national energy saving contract. The energy audits revealed energy
savings potential in the buildings, all actions showing payback time of less than 3 years has
been done. The other actions will be taken when other improvements in the buildings are
made.
The specific energy consumption in the Central Finlad region for Senaatti Kiinteistöt buildings
is 39 kWh/a/m3 for heat and 20 kWh/a/m3 for electricity. The target is to reduce the energy
consumption by 10 % before 2006 and 15 % by 2010. The target seems to be challenging
and even unachievable.
There are several reasons why the savings targets are so challenging. The usage of
buildings is increasing, there are more activities in evenings and weekends which will
increase the energy usage. There are also a lot of buildings built during 70’s and 80’s. When
these buildings are renovated, indoor air quality is improved and cooling added, the total
energy consumption may even increase despite of addition of heat recovery units for air
conditioning and other energy savings actions.
In municipal sector the situation is very much similar. Most facility management organisations
and housing companies are partners in voluntary national energy savings contract. They
have promised in the contract to carry out the energy audits in their facilities and to report the
energy consumption annually and to decrease the specific energy consumption.
This has increased the energy awareness and major part of such notified actions where
payback time is 2 – 3 years has been done. There are still possibilities in the category of 2 –
6 years payback projects.
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Knowledge level must be increased among customers that they start to demand such
services. Suppliers are not pushing guaranteed savings concept as long as they can manage
with mechanical performance guarantee of supplied equipment. The financing institutions are
actively offering their services as cheap sources for funds and this will lower the interest in
the financing component of EPC.
CURRENT PREREQUISITES FOR PUBLIC BODIES USE OF DIFFERENT TYPES
OF ENERGY SERVICES
Specificity of public bodies
The governmental buildings are mainly owned and managed by Senaatti Kiinteistöt. The total
number of buildings is about 11 000. By volume the largest category is university buildings
38 %, second largest is office buildings 32 % and third category is special buildings 30 %.
The special buildings include hospitals, defence forces buildings etc. The Senaatti Kiinteistöt
buildings are managed by professionals and their energy consumption is continuously
recorded and bechmarking is carried out within similar buildings categories. Energy audit has
been carried out in virtually all buildings. Senaatti Kiinteistöt is partner in national energy
saving contract
In municipal sector major part of buildings are organised into municipal facility management
organisations (offices, schools, hospitals etc.) and municipal housing companies. In small
municipalities the facility management may be under officials with many other duties as well
and may not be in as good control as in midsize and bigger municipalities.
Municipalities are generally partners in national energy savings contract and thus report the
energy consumption regularly. Kuntaliitto, association of municipalities; collects the energy
consumption data of municipal buildings and publishes the data. The municipalities can
easily do benchmarking among building groups and notice if they should pay attention to
energy issues in some building categories or individual buildings. The municipalities state
that they will get funds for all reasonable investments.
Of course it takes 1 – 2 years to go through the budgetary process if the need is not
allocated in advance.
The municipalities are risk free customers to banks and thus the margin for borrowed money
is very shallow. The municipalities have also jointly owned special finance institution,
Kuntarahoitus, financing municipalities and companies in close relation with municipality,
loans to be guaranteed by municipality. These funds are for large investments or loans not
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allocated specifically to any projects. Kuntarahoitus is not willing to make very small loans for
individual energy savings investments. Funds from Kuntarahoitus are market interest funds
with very shallow margin.
Government is supporting EPC by granting slightly higher grants for investments where EPC
concept is used but this has not been enough to trigger any wider demand for contracts.
Ownership of public buildings is centralised rather than fragmented. Different actors rent their
premises from the property management organisations. The occupants will state their needs
regarding temperature, ventilation, air conditioning etc. but the building management and
investments are carried out by the property management body.
The common case has been that the EPC contractor has financed the investment in total or
partly. The smaller operators have included the investment into their balance sheet. The
bigger operators like YIT are publicly listed companies. They watch their performance
indicators closely and one important indicator is the earnings per invested capital. This is the
main reason YIT has made the ESCO investment off balance sheet.
The present financial reporting system, IFRS will force the EPC investments to be shown on
the service provider balance sheet and YIT is not willing to do so. In future projects Third
Party Financing will be used. There will be separate contract for financing the project
between municipality and finance company corporation and performance guarantee contract
between ESCO and client.
The financing contract may be lease contract, when the investment will be recorded on the
finance company balance sheet. At the end of lease contract the client may by the
investment from the lease company at the agreed price, typically 10 % of the investment. If
the client is not willing to by the lease contract will be extended for one more year and the
lease company will get is money and the client will get the ownership to the investment free
of charge. If it is agreed in the beginning that at the end of the contract the price is zero, it will
not be classified as lease contract but partial payment and the investment should be on the
client’s balance sheet. In such case the investment will not be a collateral for finance
company.
All technical and performance risks are at ESCO. This will be applied to contracts under
negotiation and all future contracts by YIT. Smaller companies may continue the EPC
investments on balance sheet.
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Public procurement:
The first contracts have been made without competition based on negotiations. This will not
be able in future. In Finland the law does not state any minimum level where competition is
necessary. EU wide regulation states when competition must be published in the official
media and other terms to be followed, but in practise the towns are interpreting the law very
tightly and competitive bidding is applied at all service or goods purchases above 1000 –
3000 euros.
This means that all EPC contracts will fall within competition, small contracts may be by
inviting 3 – 5 bidders to compete the target and large contracts will be according to public
bidding process. The routine to arrange public bidding for EPC-contracts is not developed
yet. Only few cases have been performed so far. Motiva is partner in project where the
competition issues are addressed and in near future new information will be available. This is
one hindering fact, if you invite 5 contractors and they may not be willing to do their own
review of the target when the probability of winning a contract is low and proper competition
is difficult to arrange.
An arrangement where the audit of the target is made by independent consultant and bidders
are requested to commit themselves to this audit, is used. Winner of the competition will pay
the costs. New routines and experiences of the arrangement of public bidding are welcome.
Public organisation:
The public property owners/managers do not see many benefits in EPC contracting. They
are mainly large or mid size companies well capable of taking care of project management
and financing. Especially they feel that it will be economically viable to do the investment
themselves instead of using ESCO financing.
The reasons affecting this attitude may be that there have been only few cases so far and
some of the EPC service providers have tried to get contracts with very high margin.
Property managers have also let the service providers to study the potential cases but often
the service provider has decided not to offer due to too long payback time. This has created
the feeling that EPC is for desperate cases only who are not able to carry out investments
themselves.
The attitude towards Energy Performance Contracting without financing component is very
positive. EPC will bring the positive elements like risk free, well thought investment. Supplier
can not promise too much because the performance is followed for long period and the total
reward for the work is tied to the performance.
The Energy Performance Contracting without financing element may have brighter future.
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Profit sharing is used as part of EPC arrangement. Parallel to EPC investment contract an O
& M contract is made. Typically the EPC contract is agreed on relative safe savings
assumption and the savings exceeding the contracted amount is shared 50/50 (or 60/40)
basis. In other cases profit sharing is not widely used.
Public procurement
Profit sharing contracts will be awarded only by public bidding. Only few cases of profit
sharing have been performed and there is uncertainty how the competition should be
arranged. Good examples for simple but working procedures are needed. Profit sharing has
interest among public property management organisations.
Public organisation
Profit sharing provides the public organisation a low risk option for an investment. The
supplier will be tied on the investment by O&M contract for few years and will have common
interest to make sure that energy savings are achieved in practise.
Public accountancy
Third party financing is not widely used for energy savings investments. Energy savings has
been financed from own funds or by loans and in the few ESCO cases the service provider
has financed the project. If the financing organisation will retain the ownership of the
investment as collateral the project will be in the books of financing organisation, otherwise it
will be in the books of the building owner.
Public organisations like municipalities are considered as risk free customers and they get
loans without collateral. Other public bodies like municipal housing companies utilise
municipal guarantee and then they get funds on same terms as municipals. This
arrangement reduces the interest to other forms of financing.
Public procurement
Public procurement procedures will apply also for financing.
Public organisation
Public organisations will get funds from finance institutions. Energy savings contracts can
simplify the decision making process.
All municipal guarantee and loan decisions will be handled in municipal council. Third party
financing may be by technical committee because budget provisions are not needed. There
is some scepticism towards new forms of financing, municipalities tends to trust that direct
loans will be the most cost effective way to finance the investments.
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In few cases leasing is used to finance a complete building. If the components are heavily
integrated into other systems, leasing is not valid alternative because it is difficult to use the
leased equipment as collateral. The first leasing contracts are under negotiation in relation to
EPC contracts.
Public accountancy
Leasing is acceptable way of financing and used typically for financing vehicles and
equipment.
Public procurement
Public procurement applies for leasing as well. Lease contracts will be awarded after
competitive bidding.
Public organisation
Public organisations are used to get financing on attractive terms on loan basis. Sometimes it
is feasible for accounting reasons to use lease financing if special financing arrangements
are used. The costs of lease contract may be included in the project costs but the direct
investment costs may not be eligible. Not common so far with EPC contracting.
Grouped procurement for Lease Financing
Not widely used.
CURRENT NATIONAL EPC OR THIRD PARTY FINANCING INITIATIVES FOR
PUBLIC BODIES
Public initiatives:
The government owned energy savings promotion organisation MOTIVA has been spreading
information regarding ESCO and related energy services. They have organised at least one
seminar annually and give speeches in different seminars, prepare brochures and press
releases time to time. They also keep official record of EPC contracts, ESCO companies and
advice parties interested in EPC services.
Government typically grant slightly higher investment grants for energy savings investments
if EPC contracting is used in order to promote such activities.
Private initiatives:
One service provider, YIT has been active in public sector. Others have shown interest
recently but no new contracts have been reported. Associations of municipalities or potential
service providers have not shown any major interest.
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On the one hand, there is the international influence in the form of the objectives set by the
European Union; on the other, the process of decentralisation in Italy has led to the
participation of regional and local governments in energy policy. The conviction is growing
that energy, as a strategic factor for the economic and social development of the country,
requires recourse to market dynamics and free initiative, superseding the older concept of
the need to regulate the topic exclusively through a command and control regulatory system.
More recently, in 1998, the Pact on Energy and Environment was signed by representatives
of government institutions, of economic and social forces and of environmental and
consumer organisations, confirming the new mode of selection and implementation of the
country’s principal energy/environment objectives. That Pact, combined with other
instruments of negotiated planning, constitutes both corollary and instrument of a policy of
concertation, which by its very nature, prevents disputes arising between the various parties
involved, and thus limits the costs of environmental conflict.
The most important Italian laws on energy efficiency are the Act 10/1991 and connected
Decrees (412/93 and 551/91).
Local Authorities are responsible for the local energy policy and therefore enabled to
implement the Energy Services and TPF schemes through the Act 142/90. The general goals
of the national energy policy coming from the Italian legislative framework are:
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The Environment Minister in accordance with the Industry Minister recently approved a
document fixing specific goals Local Authorities must reach in the next years:
10% reduction of CO2 and greenhouses emissions compared to the 1990 year level
within 2010; doubling the usage of Renewables within 2010 (by the current 6% to
12% of the National Energy Accounting); over 15% electricity saving within 2010 (45
TWh), compared to the current electricity consumption in the country.
This means that ESCOs now still refer to the general discipline concerning contracts and
companies (Civil Code).
The first legislative reference to ESCOs is within 2 decrees (24th April 2001, substituted by a
new edition of 20 July 2004) that forced electricity and gas utilities to realise increasing levels
of energy saving.
First amongst Italian Regions, Tuscany has set up the first and only definition, in the public
administrations context, concerning ESCOs (Sector Voluntary Agreement for energy
efficiency through ESCOs). The agreement foresees the creation of an official list of ESCOs
and it is established in order to foster the TPF schemes at local level
(www.rete.toscana.it/sett/pta/energia/mercato/menu.htm).
This way the Region aims to decrease the energy demand for more than 270 millions KWh,
with investments for more than 103 millions Euro in 10 years. In spite of these initiatives and
of the legislative framework, up to now it was not actually possible to develop an effective
energy saving policy.
The delay in trying out new actions allowing Italy to be within the Kyoto Protocol framework,
represented a good reason as well for fostering and promoting energy saving initiatives since
the beginning of 2005.
Currently the 2 last Government Decrees (20th July 2004) allow to start up a new energy
saving policy. The 2 decrees foresee two interesting incentives (investments’ partial recover
for utilities, based on “white certificates”) and one disincentive (if utilities do not produce
enough white certificates, they can be economically punished).
Real estate companies are interested in energy services, but they tend to subcontract global
services regarding the whole O&M of their buildings, so that improvement of energy
performance is not a priority.
They are nevertheless very interested in the opportunity of a fiscal reduction (VAT at 10%
instead of 20%) allowed by a national regulation for energy services based on the provision
of the comfort level in rooms, including all the required operations (see below for details).
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Several measures should have been taken for increasing the efficiency energy level of the
public sector. Municipality Energy Plans should have been established, the new public
buildings should have used the Renewables, the Premises Regulatory Plans could have
used energy efficiency criteria but the majority of the Municipalities didn’t afford to implement
such policies.
Recently, through the energy market liberalisation, even the Public Authorities are allowed to
directly sign gas and electricity supply contracts, in the attempt to significantly reduce the
overall expenditure for energy consumption.
Concerning the overall energy saving potential, every year roughly 5000 kWh only for public
lighting is consumed.
The saving potential is at least 30-35%, as most of the lighting plants are obsolete.
From the available experiences the energy saving potential for energy efficiency
interventions in existing public buildings is in the range 15-25%.
A survey carried out for the Province of Modena testifies that among the 893,5 GWh
consumed in 2003 in the Tertiary Sector of the Modena District, 98,7 GWh were related to
Public Authorities (public lighting excluding). Therefore more than 11% of the overall energy
consumption in the Tertiary sector is covered by the Public Authorities activities.
The whole tertiary sector in Italy consumes yearly 12.441.000 tep (Source: 2001 Enea
Report on Energy and Environment), but unfortunately there are no national statistics
available for the only public sector.
The main constraints in the public sector for making measures to decrease the use of energy
are:
The knowledge about energy services by Public Authorities is still quite scarce even if
increasing.
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• the contracts’ complexity (mainly for local authorities busy with tenders and technical
specifications);
• poor environmental issues awareness/motivation;
• lack of technical expertise/skills;
• lack of interest by politics;
• lack of information on ESCOs and new financial schemes (e.g. since 2002 the
Lombardia Region created a 100.000 Euro fund for Local Authorities in order to
facilitate the diffusion of TPF. So far no Municipality or Province has asked for those
resources).
From the ESCO' s viewpoint, some barriers, which discourage ESCO operations, follow from:
• insufficient knowledge of the specific problem and of suitable contractual procedures,
• too low expected profits compared with the envisaged risks,
• legal barriers connected with bureaucratic difficulties in coping with public
• Administrations'tenders.
Energy services and related innovative tools/schemes are not diffused among public bodies
because of:
• the contracts’ complexity (mainly for local authorities busy with tenders and technical
specifications);
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An arising interest is growing in the lighting sector for many Italian companies available to
operate through TPF mechanisms. This is due to several reasons. First of all, the fact that
the lighting of large service production and industrial buildings is a sector that still shows
considerable margins for energy and cost savings by either the improvement or a more
rational use of the lighting systems.
The ten rules for Energy Service contracts stated by the Tax Department.
Energy Services contracts refer to the Act DPR 412/93, allowing Public Authorities to get a
reduction by 10% of VAT. Specifically, the Tax Department established 10 rules that must be
applied in order to get the reduction:
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The following points represent the fundamental requisites in the preparation of a contract for
a successful application of Third Party Financing schemes:
• energy diagnosis and feasibility studies that realistically evaluate the savings
• obtainable through the action proposed;
• technologies that adapt to the customer’s current needs;
• high return on the investment and a short pay-back period;
• availability of financing at highly competitive rates;
• customer’s management truly interested in reducing the energy cost of output;
• agreement with an energy services company of proven solidity and experience;
• contracts that show clearly the division between customer and supplier of risks and
benefits associated with a Third Party Financing operation.
A previous survey on TPF schemes in Italy carried out in 2002 concluded that:
The demand of PC services in the public sector looks at the moment very promising.
Stability at the time of public administration structures and of their energy needs may be
considered proper elements to encourage ESCOs in taking business risks.
The efforts of Piedmont Region to achieve a standard contract specification for PC bids
turned out into a definition of fair contractual relations between ESCO and client, at least
within the public sector.
Issuing decrees on primary energy saving, relevant to mandatory EE actions and involving
trading of energy saving certifications, features as a mechanism to promote ESCO and TPF.
The available experiences of energy performance contracting in Italy are not very
widespread. Most energy performance contracts have been implemented up to now in public
real estates. They have been based on detailed energy audits, with diagnoses and
suggestions of possible solutions.
The following public call for tender was aimed at the combined supply of fuel, O & M and
energy investment.
Public accountancy:
When a PC is implemented, the Public Administrations shift the cost to the section of
accounting related to yearly costs. The consequence is that the item related to energy
investments is cancelled or strongly reduced. Usually the attitude is to calculate a contract
duration sufficient to reduce the annual costs to the same level of the historical expenditure,
where the energy investment depreciation is covered by the energy saving. Some further
reduction can come from the discount operated by the winning tender, and from possible
sharing saving mechanisms introduced in the service specifications.
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In many cases this regards the energy systems only, while the envelope investments remain
in the investment part of the accounting, and is planned on a three-year basis (for example
the substitution of single glazing with double-glazing, including substitution of window
frames.
The Municipalities are starting to afford new accounting solutions to write off the retrofitting,
O & M costs of buildings. Some of them are trying to create, for example, fully public real
estates. In this case the administration has only an annual fixed cost (like a rental) while all
the management responsibility and costs are committed to the external real estate.
It is still too early to derive general indications from these attempts.
Public procurement:
The Financial Law of the year 2000 tried to force Public Authorities to purchase products and
services at centralised level, in order to reduce expenditure and optimise services and
procedures.
CONSIP, the company created by the Economy and Finance Ministry, was committed to set
up in the last years different tenders concerning energy:
• Electricity supply:
• Natural gas supply;
• Heating and transport fuels supply;
• Energy service;
The Financial Law of the year 2003 (articles 166-172) completely revised the 2000 scheme:
contracts signed with CONSIP will be related to products and services having a national
relevance only; Local Authorities are no longer forced but have just the opportunity to join the
contracts. Furthermore Local Authorities have not the obligation for their contracts to refer to
CONSIP price levels. Local Authorities are also free to make the decision of going on with
the CONSIP contract already signed or interrupt it. For more details see the web site
www.acquistinretepa.it.
The “Community law 2004” (n. 62/2005), transposing several EC Directives, has stated the
prohibition for public administrations to commit services directly to companies partially owned
by them, even if the private partner (not selected through tender) is a minor shareholder. This
imposes to many administrations the need of organising call for tenders.
In the last month of April, Italy specifically adopted the UE Directive on the criteria to sign
contracts for Public Authorities. Now onwards, contracts could not be renewed automatically,
but must be committed to totally public companies or to mixed companies having a private
partner selected via call for tenders.
The most recent calls prepared in Modena have a peculiar characteristic: a list of possible
energy investments is proposed in the call technical specifications: the tenderer can select
one or more of these investments, acquiring proportionally marks for its choices. Additional
marks can be added, if the offering company suggests other valuable energy projects. This
mechanism promotes green investments in buildings, and has been appreciated as a "Green
procurement" procedure.
Moreover, the two most recent calls included also a sharing saving mechanism if the gas
consumption was reduced below a specified threshold (to motivate the final users and create
a fund for promotional initiatives in schools).
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Other calls (see for example the Good Practice of Cremona Province) are based on a fixed
amount per year and on an obligatory list of energy investments.
Another problem arises from the maximum allowed duration of energy service contracts.
Many public authorities interpret that the maximum duration cannot exceed 9 years, as this is
the limit for the concession of energy, water or gas distribution in their territory. The subject is
still debated.
Public organisation:
The need of involving labour unions has been evidenced in some cases, particularly when
large organisations are involved (Hospitals) and internal maintenance personnel is operating.
The public or mixed utilities have participated in the calls for tender, but did not emerge as
winners. The best performing offers came from private companies and energy service co-
operatives.
Public accountancy
The Municipality of Modena launched in 2001 the Voluntary Agreement with schools called
"More energy to schools, more energy to the city". The agreement foresaw 50% contribution
to schools of the monetary equivalent of the yearly energy saving in electricity and gas
reached by the participating schools.
The Energy Department calculated the base line of energy consumption for each school,
averaging the last five years. The baseline is updated every year shifting one year ahead. If
major modifications are produced in the buildings (for example renovation of windows or
boilers) the calculation can be corrected.
The main problem was to obtain a transfer in the public accountancy scheme from the
money saved by the Accounting Department (paying the bills) to the Energy Department
(delivering the incentive to schools).
Public procurement
The Modena Health Authority, managing most of hospital and health facilities in town,
introduced some years ago a saving sharing mechanism in the O & M contract with local
companies. Unfortunately this clause did not produce any effect, as the O & M people did
found any interest in investing in energy. This experience confirms that short contracts and
simple O & M companies are not suitable for acting as ESCOs.
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Public organisation
After the Voluntary Agreement on energy signed by Modena Municipality with 7 primary
schools, now being furthermore extended, the local energy agency, which signed the
Agreement too, was expecting some contacts from schools for launching small energy
saving projects based on zero or very low investment cost. On the contrary no requests have
been advanced. This does not mean that the schools were not interested in energy saving.
During visits to classes, histograms of room temperature were found hanging from the wall
(LCD thermometers had been offered to each class by the energy agency), and child energy
managers are still appointed each month, to check the switching off of electric lights. This on
the contrary means that the schools personnel (teachers and manager) do not see their task
in proposing energy saving projects, but limit themselves to educational activities.
Grouped procurement for energy
There is no information of grouped procurement actions for energy saving initiatives within O
& M activities.
Third Party Financing (Often partially included in EPC contracts)
Third party financing includes supply contracting and performance contracting.
Supply contracting is quite widespread in Italy in some industrial sector (for example ceramic
tiles, paper industry, food industry) for CHP supply. Even if there are not Italian
manufacturers of key components (turbines and internal combustion engines) there are
several companies active in supplying full systems. They operate as ESCOs, even directly or
through other organisations (for example ENEL SI – belonging to the ENEL Group).
Supply contracts are also used in the domestic sector for CHP-supplied district heating,
usually managed by energy utilities.
An intermediate solution between supply and performance contract is the “Servizio Energia”
defined by the national regulation mentioned above, as the payment is based on the metered
value of heated water at the outlet of the boiler. In common practice the contract includes
also some price cap or some sharing saving mechanism to encourage reduction of fuel
consumption.
Public accountancy
The mentioned system based on a bill proportional to the supplied energy downstream the
boiler house, has a very negative impact on the public accountancy system. The yearly
expenditure in fact is not fixed, nor easily foreseen, as it depends on several variables:
• Seasonal changes of climate
• Changes in user behaviour
• Lack of control in regulations
• Even voluntary excess consumption produced by the service provider, who has a
direct interest in increasing the billed amount of energy.
This is why, after an initial enthusiasm, now most public administrations have become
reluctant in face of this type of contract. The most recent calls in Modena have introduced
some correcting mechanism: a maximum primary energy consumption limit, after energy
investments, has been introduced (corresponding to the foreseen amount in the tender). A
sharing saving mechanism has been added, to motivate the service provider in reducing
primary energy consumption, and to also give explicit incentive to the final users. In public
administrations in fact the final user is not directly paying the energy bills, therefore money
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has to be returned to him by transferring the amount from the saving of the accounting sector
to the energy department in charge of the contract.
Public procurement
The main problem for public procurements of this type is to respect the requirements fixed by
the tax authorities to allow for the VAT rate reduction from 20 to 10% on "domestic" type
buildings (includes schools).
Public organisation
The public administrations have reacted very positively to these TPF calls. The main problem
is the continuous control of the respect of the contractual obligations. This is why the public
administrations have often requested the assistance of the local energy agency.
The Public Administrations can access to TPF under the rules introduced by the national
Decree transposing in Italy the EC Directive on services. This Decree is Decreto Legislativo
17 March 1995 n. 157, further modified by Decreto Legislativo 25 February 2000, n. 65.
This law, substantially confirming the EC Directive, states that the procurement is considered
as a service procurement when the part related to works is of minor relevance respect to the
part related to services. This relevance was initially interpreted in terms of money amounts,
but recently (EC Directive Transposition Law 2004, issued 23 April 2005) stated that the
relevance can be assessed in terms of priority of the service (where the works are ancillary).
The public works are now ruled by the national Law 11 February 1994 n. 109 (Merloni -
articles 19-21), further modified by the national Law 18 November 1998 n. 415 (Merloni ter -
article 11).
Leasing
Not implemented in the Italian context.
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In the context of the Greenlight Programme promoted by the European Commission, Italy is
the Member State with the largest Local Authorities participation.
The core of the programme is a registration form, signed by the Partner and the Commission,
in which the Partner commits to:
• For existing spaces: either upgrade at least 50% of all the eligible spaces owned or
on long term leases or reduce the total aggregate lighting electricity consumption by
at least 30%. Eligible spaces are those spaces where the lighting upgrades are
profitable.
• For new spaces: choose new installations so that no alternative installation exists that
would: maintain or improve the lighting quality provided by the chosen installation and
consume less electricity and represent a supplementary investment which would be
profitable.
In addition, the Partner shall complete the upgrades within 5 years of joining the programme,
send a progress report every year and appoint a Corporate Manager responsible for assuring
the programme execution.
The programme is totally voluntary, which means that companies are free to decide whether
they want to join or not. If a Partner cannot meet minimal space requirements or reductions
in total lighting energy, they may drop out of the programme without any prejudice to rejoin
when their situation changes.
In 2002 the Italian Network of Energy Agencies in cooperation with the Environment Minister,
published a booklet on ESCOs to be distributed among Local Authorities.
The booklet is very useful as it presents at the very beginning ESCOs, advantages and
obstacles of connected financial schemes (TPF). It displays many best practices on TPF
schemes at national level and all over the Europe as well.
An innovative and more recent initiative in Italy on the “promotion of the rational use of
energy in the procurement of tools and services for the Public Administration” was carried out
by the Emilia-Romagna Region in October 2003. The Region decided to start up a deep
discussion among the main stakeholders of the Region.
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• the need of further studying the feasibility of Energy Procurement Groups. A more
detailed framework is needed.
Finally, Cremona Province and the Hospitals of ASL n. 14 of Piedmont Region experienced
two of the most successful initiatives in the field of TPF and Energy Efficiency Services (for
more details see the Best Practice Reports).
Private initiatives:
In Italy many private companies, differing one from the other for size, activities, kind of
enterprise, act as ESCO.
Even if currently there are 50 ESCO on the Italian market and the first ESCO were born in
the 80’s, they have still a long way to go.
The oldest ESCOs started operations in the field of industrial CHP, designing, installing,
operating and maintaining the unit, realised at the user-enterprise site. The user-enterprise
signs a contract where it engages itself in the purchase of minimum yearly amounts of
electricity and heat, at a contractually agreed price. The contract is a typical "energy-supply
contract".
More recently, a list of ESCOs was created in the frame of the "Greenlight" EC programme,
which has been particularly successful in Italy. Even if defined as ESCOs, several companies
simply proposed leasing contracts for lighting efficient equipment or simply delayed
payments.
In the last year a large number of enterprises have registered in the list of ESCOs organised
by the Electric and Gas Authority, in order to be admitted in the "White Certificates"
programme launched in Italy by the two Decrees of July 20, 2004. This definition of ESCO is
not very accurate: actually the so-called ESCOs have to organise programmes for the
installation of equipment for a minimum quantity equivalent to 100 toes, to obtain the white
certificate and trade it.
They do not have to invest themselves, nor to assume technical or financial risk. It is
sufficient that they demonstrate to be the unique promoter of the purchase.
For more complex interventions, the ESCOs have to present a monitoring programme
(comparing energy consumption before and after intervention, have it preliminarily approved
by the Authority, and finally present results. In this latter sector operate some recently
privatised utilities, as they are the subject of the obligation to fulfil fixed amounts of energy
saving, according to the two mentioned Decrees (a few skilled ESCOs have also received
similar approvals).
The Authority started to approve the first 10-20 monitoring projects in mid 2005. One of these
projects concerned the buildings of Modena Municipality (installation of condensing boilers).
A last category of ESCOs operates in the heating field, applying contracts of the "Servizio
Energia" type. They have financial capabilities, technical skills, and create joint ventures
among O & M companies, engineering companies and installers. They very often operate
with public administrations, due to their security in financing the investment cash flow, their
usual shortage of resources for investments, their often-obsolete systems in buildings. Other
typical sectors are the condominiums, large residential estates and in minor part hospitals.
Street lighting is still quite an unexplored sector for private ESCOs (a single example was
found in a small Municipality in Lombardia Region).
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Bibliography/Data Sources
- AltrEconomia magazine
- ENEA – Rapporto Energia Ambiente 2003
- Energo Club Dossier on ESCOs
- IEA DSM Task X – Performance Contracting, Country Report, Italy - Antonio Capozza,
CESI, Italy
- RENAEL – Dossier on ESCOs in Italy
- Report on the Emilia Romagna Region working group for energy efficiency in public
sector
- Web site FIRE – Italian Federation for the Rational Use of Energy (www.fire-italia.it)
- Web site of the National Net Distribution Manager (www.grtn.it)
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In an international comparison Sweden has a very well functioning framework for technical
installations in buildings. But when it comes to frameworks for alternative financial and
contractual solutions such as Energy Services, Swedish real estate companies are still
relatively undeveloped in relation to USA and other more progressive countries in Europe.
In the early 1980th efforts where made to establish so-called Performance Contracting and
Third Party Financing in Sweden. Most of the projects carried out were technically
successful, but the lack of experience regarding contractual and financial models, often
resulted in doubtful deal structures and dissatisfaction among both customers and providers,
and many companies left the business.
In this case could the Energy Services contribute substantial in meeting the energy and
environmental goals. But many public bodies haven’t discovered these possibilities yet, and
others are still inexperienced and therefore often reluctant to use the services. This situation
represents a “double” problem for the public bodies. First they don’t require the services from
the market, the only market development will be from the providers, but also since they often
opt out of talks and negotiations since they feel insecure, even though the savings potential
is substantial.
The legal framework and the law regarding public procurement etc. aren’t any major problem
if you use them right. But unfortunately there is a widespread precipitation that Energy
Services are very difficult to combine with public procurement.
The general situation for the energy service providers
In the early 1980th a first attempt to establish Energy Services in Sweden was made, but it
wasn’t very successful due to immature business and contractual development. However,
since year 2000 a new introduction of Energy Services and Performance Contracting has
been made. The introduction has partly been made through minor specialised Swedish
companies, but the main work has been done through larger companies with international
owners and long experience from Energy Services in other countries. In this process has
also the Swedish Energy Agency started to get involved to support a high quality
implementation.
The general needs for an improved energy services market
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In order to promote a high quality introduction of Energy Services in Sweden, and at the
same time increase the knowledge and support the capacity building among public bodies
and real estate owners, four main issues needs to be addressed:
1. Information and education efforts targeted to the real estate owners and the
establishment of national and regional information centres.
2. Capacity building among real estate owners and public bodies through the elaboration of
client specific references, and the development process guidelines and verified structures
for contractual matters.
3. Practical and competition neutral support and assistance to public bodies and real estate
companies that are in the process of establishing Energy Service contracts.
4. To leverage the usage of Energy Services from mainly being used for energy
conservation, to also being integrated with refurbishment and modernisation projects.
The invoicing includes VAT since the services is subjected to VAT, but since there aren’t any
definite accounting rules and the interpretation of the Eurostat-PPP documentations
regarding Public Private Partnership aren’t finished yet. It’s basically up to the public
customer to chose if the payments to the Energy Service Company would be treated as
running expenses (out of balance sheet) or as an investment (on the balance sheet).
The Eurostat PPP document will be ratified by the Statistiska Centralbyrån - Statistics
Sweden, and lies one of the single most important interpretations, namely the classification
of a public-private partnership. The problem is where to draw the fine line between pure
commercial business and a public-private partnership.
This is an issue, not only for Sweden, but for all countries involved since the classification
needs to be equivalent for every country.
Public procurement:
The Act on Public Procurement contains general provisions concerning public procurement.
It has been modified over the years to accommodate the GPA as well as the commitments
entailed by Sweden's membership of the European Union.
The Act itself does not present any restraints to Energy Services. It is rather the customer’s
lack of knowledge and experience in working with the Act that present an obstacle. The
purchase of an Energy Service contract differs in several ways from the purchases made on
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a more frequent basis. It’s a more complex nature and the qualifications on which decisions
are made, are rather conceptual and not always quantifiable.
The complex nature of the services normally call for a “Negotiated Purchasing Structure”,
that’s fully allowed and also well in line with the new European Purchasing rules including
“Competitive dialogue”. Since many public actors are inexperienced and insecure regarding
the issue of negotiated purchasing the process of adapting is slow among the public bodies.
Public organisation:
One of the greatest obstacles in terms of public organizations'appreciation and acceptance
of energy services, is the extensive decision-making process and the large number of people
and decision levels involved in making a decision within a public unit.
The Municipal Council makes wide-ranging decisions. Among these are goals and visions
for the municipality, what departments should be established within the organization, and
greater local fees. The Council decides on the municipal tax and is also the unit granting
each department their annual budget. Larger contracts normally need approval from the
council, so it’s essential to be able to present the project in a way that it support the
Municipal councils overall objectives.
The Municipal Audit is part of the Council with the purpose of evaluating, controlling and
also making the organization more efficient whenever possible. The Audit performs an
annual review of all Board' s activities as well as the activities of each department. Before
entering into larger contracts or taking on substantial expenses, approval is normally needed
from the Municipal Audit, therefore it’s essential to understand and adapt negotiated Energy
Service contract in according to the requirements by the Municipal Audit.
The Municipal Executive Board is the political body with daily and direct responsibility and
management of all the different departments. The Board is responsible for the
implementation of the decisions made by the Council and also managing and coordinating
common goals, and the development of strategic issues such as environment, economics,
IT, international relations and human resources. Lower levels in a municipality or public body
normally don’t start any negotiations of Energy Services without acceptance from the
executive board, so it’s essential to be able to present the project in a way that it directly
support and facilitates the daily work of the executive board.
The O&M, Operational and Maintenance department of the municipality or public body, is
normally also responsible for energy management, even though most of the organizations
are understaffed and lacking the resourced to carry out more substantial energy
management tasks. Within these organizations there are often also reluctance towards
Energy Services etc., due to the fear of losing jobs and for being considered not doing there
job properly. Therefore it’s essential that any marketing effort and contractual negotiation
take in account and address these fears and opinions in a constructive way, otherwise you
face implementation problems.
GROUPED PROCUREMENT FOR ENERGY AND/OR EPC CONTRACTS:
There are no tendencies on the Swedish market of any grouped procurements within the
public sector, except for electricity supply. The main reason for not doing so is the difficulties
in determination who, and how, such a purchase would be taken up on a balance sheet.
However, some collaboration in developing joint qualifications for the evaluation of proposals
concerning Energy Services has been noticed among county councils and municipalities.
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The closest thing to a real grouped procurement on the Swedish market today is when a
county council, which incorporates multiple hospitals, made a procurement involving all
hospitals in the county. The county council is the sole administrator and customer, but the
project will be implemented and specific, for each hospital involved.
Grouped procurement could also be interested in the perspective of the Energy Service
Company, since there are Contractors who will only work with a certain quantity, either in
square meters or in number of facilities, in order gain economy of scale.
The contract are normal service contracts including VAT, that normally is considered as
running expenses and therefore not affecting the balance sheet unless there is a component
of financing involved.
Public procurement:
In Sweden, profit sharing contracts are regulated by the AFF. The AFF includes definitions of
approximately 80 phrases that are of significance when using public procurement as a
means to come by a facilities management entrepreneur and thereby related services. The
definitions in AFF have been developed by the AFF Committee and Svensk Byggtjänst.
The procurement process works in according to the Act on Public Procurement as previously
described for EPC, but for this kind of contracts the process is quicker and smoother due to a
more mature market.
Public organisation:
Profit Sharing in terms of O&M contracts present an opportunity for a public body or real
estate company to have the technical management and maintenance taken care of by a
contractor, with possibilities to share profits with the customer if he succeed in cutting energy
or operational costs.
The challenges facing the contractor in pursuing a profit sharing project is first of all, the
general suspicion within the customer' s organization towards the private organization (profit
driven) that now is willing to share profits. Further, when a contractor takes over daily
management there is a certain amount of uncertainty involved, concerning internal hierarchy;
unofficial leaders, positions, job specification etc.
Another issue to consider when taking over daily technical maintenance in facilities is the
daily contact with the customer'
s tenants that often needs to be handled with care.
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There are no tendencies on the Swedish market of any grouped procurements within the
public sector and profit sharing contracts. The main reason being the difficulties regarding
who, and how, such a purchase would be taken up on a balance sheet. Also, in the specific
case of profit sharing contracts, there is the issue of how to decide who is to be awarded for
what. Grouped procurement could also be interested in the perspective of the Energy
Service Company, since there are Contractors who will only work with a certain quantity,
either in square meters or in number of facilities, in order gain economy of scale.
A project with third party financing does normally consists of three parties and two types of
contracts. The first type of contract is between the customer and the contractor and compiles
the condition for the practical implementation of the project including the contractor’s saving
guarantees, and it doesn’t affect the accounting. The second contract is between the
customer and the financier, it’s separated from the implementation contract, and consists of
the contractual payment schedule for the project.
The accounting rules depends on how the customer chooses to classify the project, running
expenses or investments, and in Sweden there are examples of both. In the first case the
third party financing can, in accordance with Eurostat's guidelines, be considered as off-
balance. However these issues are up to each organization to decide upon.
Public procurement:
On an overall level public procurement of third party financing are handled in same fashion
as described in section 2.1, "Public Procurement".
But Third party financing is, thus far, a relatively unfamiliar way to finance energy efficiency
and refurbishment projects and confusion around the specifics are still common. The most
curtail issue to address regarding public procurement is the understanding of the two-
contract structure, and that third party financing shouldn’t be procured or treated as a
financial service alone, but as an integrated part of an overall project implementation
Public organisation:
From the customer' s perspective, the largest benefit of third party financing is that neither
own capital nor a loan is needed to finance the project. All costs, including the cost of capital,
are accounted for throughout the contract period by the agreed, and also often guaranteed,
savings. This gives the customer an opportunity to use and reallocate existing investment
funds within the organization to other needs, or co-invest the funds into an even larger
project.
However, there also exists general skepticism for this kind of alternative financing methods,
that’s unfamiliar for public organizations. In order to increase the acceptance and
appreciation of the services, it’s important that the contractor provide the customer with
extensive information concerning this matter, and especially provide examples of how other
public customers have dealt with this kind of issues in the past.
Another important issue to communicate is the real cost of capital. In many cases are the
cost of a third party financing structure over 10 years, being compared with short-term
floating interest rates, which is an incorrect comparison.
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Before approaching a public body or municipality with a third party financing solution, it’s
important to coordinate it and anchor the structures with the customers financial officers,
otherwise reluctance from their part can stop further project development.
Grouped procurement for Third Party Financing:
Grouped procurement has not yet been used in Sweden for Third Party Financing, and it’s
not likely to develop either, due to the very customer specific solutions.
However, as mentioned under 2.1 and 2.2, there is a tendency of increased early
coordination and knowledge transfer among main administrative institutions regarding
procurement and financial issues.
Leasing
Leasing gives the leasee the right to make use of an asset for a certain period of time,
regulated thorough a contract, by paying a monthly/yearly fee - rent. There are two main
forms of leasing available for the public sector; operational leasing and financial leasing.
Public accountancy:
The accountancy of a leasing structure mainly depends on what type of Leasing that’s
applicable and how the public bodies choose to look upon the contracts. Leasing contracts
for Energy Performance Contracting is often designed with a positive or cost neutral cash-
flow for the customer over the contractual period, and could therefore be looked at and
accounted for as a running cost and not an investment.
Regarding VAT-rules etc. the Energy Performance Contracts carried out under a leasing
agreement apply to the customer’s normal VAT rules, since no specific conditions apply.
Regarding accountancy it’s important to understand that Financial leasing has many
resemblances with a purchase by installments, where the leasee enjoys the financial benefits
as well as takes the financial risks of owning the leased item. Financial leasing involves three
parties; supplier, financier and leasee.
Public procurement:
On an overall level public procurement of Leasing Financing is handled in same fashion as
described in section 2.1, "Public Procurement".
But since Leasing Financing still is a relatively unfamiliar way to finance energy efficiency
and refurbishment projects, confusion regarding the different types of leasing, (operational
and financial) are still common.
The most curtail issue to address regarding public procurement is the understanding of the
two leasing types, Financial and Operational leasing. When using Financial leasing (similar
to third party financing), its important to explain the two-contract and three partner structure.
As with third party financing, Leasing financing shouldn’t be procured or treated as a financial
service alone, but as an integrated part of an overall project implementation.
Before approaching a public body or municipality with a leasing solution, it’s important to
coordinate it and anchor the structures with the customers’ financial officers, otherwise
reluctance from their part can stop further project development.
Public organisation:
From the customer' s perspective, the largest benefit of leasing financing is that neither his
own capital nor a loan is needed to finance the project. All costs, including the cost of capital,
are accounted for throughout the contract period by the agreed, and also often guaranteed,
savings. This gives the customer an opportunity to use and reallocate existing investment
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funds within the organization to other needs, or co-invest the funds into an even larger
project.
However it’s also some skepticism regarding leasing solutions due to a history of misuse and
misunderstandings regarding the applications of Operational Lease (Service, Maintenance;
Insurances etc including some extent of financing risk is in the hand of the Leasing company)
and Financial Lease where in practice all responsibilities and risks stay with the customer. In
the latter case, several of the responsibilities of the customer are covered by an Energy
Service Company, as in the two contract structure in Third Party Financing.
In order to increase the acceptance and appreciation of the services, it’s important that the
contractor provide the customer with extensive information concerning this matter, and
especially the allocation of responsibilities and examples of how other public customers have
dealt with this kind of issues in the past.
Grouped procurement for Leasing Financing:
Grouped procurement has not yet been used in Sweden for Leasing Financing, and it’s not
likely to develop either, due to the very customer specific solutions. However, as mentioned
under 2.1 and 2.2, there is a tendency of increased early coordination and knowledge
transfer among main administrative institutions regarding procurement and financial issues.
Task 10: An international project under IEA, International Energy Agency aiming to
investigate and compare the development of Energy Performance Contracting in different
countries, followed up by feasibility analysis and the development of a Swedish action plan to
promote Energy Service Contracting. The result is available in English at:
http://dsm.iea.org/NewDSM/Prog/Library/Upload/132/TX_CR_Sweden_Final_Feb03.pdf
PU-Benefs: Is a EU-project aiming to inform and strengthen public bodies and real estate
companies in the process of tendering and acquiring Energy Service contracts. The capacity
building will be made through contractual and accounting support leading to at least two
Energy Service contracts in each country.
The web-page is under development, for more information please contact:
manuel.sward@energikontor-so.com
Eurocontract: Is a EU-project aiming to elaborate, try and evaluate different types of Energy
Services and contracts, based on key success factors mainly from Germany and Austria.
Complementary information in English can be obtained from: http://www.eurocontract.net
Forum for Energy Services: Is a National project jointly run by the Swedish Energy Agency
and Energy Agency of Southeast Sweden. The aim is to bring key actors regarding Energy
Services and Performance Contracting to the table. By putting together customers,
contractors, banks and technical consultants etc. can the process of overcoming mistrust and
expectation gaps be accelerated Complementary Swedish information can be obtained at:
www.energitjanster.se
EPEC: Is a National project jointly run by the Swedish Energy Agency and the technical
consultat firm WPS. The project aiming to develop the relatively well-known
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The UK Government also accepted the view of the Royal Commission on Environmental
Pollution, that it should adopt a strategy which puts the UK on a path to reducing CO2
emissions by some 60% on 1997 levels, by 2050. The strategy pursued by successive UK
Governments had been to encourage energy conservation, in particular through the adoption
of an Energy Services strategy and the use of efficient technologies such as CHP.
Of note is that a key issue deterring the use of energy efficient technologies in the Public
Sector is the current low unit energy costs, notably for electricity and gas. This cost reduction
became significant after the liberalisation of the energy markets in 1989, and became more
marked within the electricity markets in 2001, after the adoption of the New Electricity
Trading Arrangements. Government policies, designed to encourage the use of CHP, have
inadvertently resulted in contracting the market by the combined effects of regulatory and
fiscal measures.
CHP policy analysts have subsequently called for a decision support framework for Energy
Services businesses and have expressed “the need to develop a decision-making
mechanism to be used as an internal tool for middle managers in Local Authorities.
They can then be in a position to carry out an initial appraisal before a consultant is
appointed to carry out a detailed study or design. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) - A
Government Energy Agency - tasked to promote Energy Efficiency is of the view that a key
solution to this anomaly is the development of a positive investment framework for Energy
Services Companies (ESCO’s). The underlying principle of an ESCO as defined by the EST
is an organisation that has the ability to carry out all aspects of Energy Services.
Local Mayors and Councillors are concerned with short term solutions and are frequently
unwilling to seek tenders for selecting ESCOs to carry out traditional local Authority tasks,
risking local jobs and diverting resources to third parties.
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The UK model is therefore moving in a direction of long term partnering agreements between
Local Authorities and utility companies or specially set Local Authority companies such as
Thames Energy (formerly Waltham Forest Energy Services). Contacts with local financial
institutions have shown the potential support of local banks in investing in energy saving
projects, if guarantees about good design, quality execution of works, transparency in all
process are provided.
The EST recently invited bids from Local Authorities & private sector partners for funding
towards the preparation of a feasibility study and a business plan for setting up ESCOs in
their respective regions.
The general situation for the energy service providers
ESCOs are not a new concept in the U.K. ESCOs offer Independent consultancies on all
aspects of energy supply and conservation offering research, consultancy and management
of projects relating to energy use and energy efficiency in buildings, providing total energy
asset management service, including CEM schemes.
Other key actors such as local trade associations and local financial institutions are generally
invited to participate in the consortia in order to foster partnerships dedicated to the
implementation of performance contracts, according to specified guidelines and tender
documents developed by the ESCO and approved by the Local Authorities.
There are currently 12 registered ESCO’S, operating within varying aspects of the energy
industry. The EST was keen to stimulate niche energy services approaches, where local
authorities, housing associations and not-for-profit organisations work in partnership with the
private sector to provide energy services. The EST provided information, advice and initial
support as well as financial grants for setting up and developing approved projects on the
following approaches:
(1) Affinity based approaches, through partnerships agreements for energy supply and
other energy efficiency services such as advice, loan finance and grant support. The
customer will be offered energy supply along with other energy efficiency services.
(2) Community- based Energy Services approaches, through partnerships with the private
sector to supply packages of locally generated supply – usually through CHP – and demand
side measures.
The EST fostered the view that a successful energy services agreement will be a partnership
between the private sector contractor and the public sector client. The contract should be
open and co-operative, but with a clearly defined, approach to risk sharing, cost, staff issues.
The public sector client must assign someone to be the project sponsor to ensure that the
right contract is established from the outset. Although the contractor will relieve the client of
much of the management burden associated with the contracted-out services, the contract
must still be carefully managed throughout its duration and it is important that the client has a
contract manager, to secure a partnership that works.
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It is however becoming increasingly accepted in the UK that the energy services approach
can help public sector bodies to realise energy, environmental and financial savings that are
otherwise unattainable. It offers access to the investment resources and specialist technical
skills which are needed to provide energy services on a cost competitive basis.
The client organisation is therefore able to focus better on its core activities and transfer
much of the risk associated with providing the services to the contractor. Energy services
companies are also able to take a long term and strategic approach to energy since this is
their core business. The results of a properly formulated and well managed energy services
agreement will be more cost effective and efficient services provision, with reduced
environmental impact of the Local Authority’s activities. Many obstacles however still exist
and prevent the diffusion of energy efficiency services especially at local level amongst
smaller municipalities.
Traditionally in small and medium local authority areas the fuel for heating is purchased
directly from municipal supply offices and the operation and maintenance is provided by local
maintenance men in force to local call for tenders. Even all material for minor refurbishment
is provided by local dealers. On the other side, the municipalities do not have enough
financial resources for large investments in energy rehabilitation.
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A successful energy services agreement would be a partnership between the private sector
contractor and the public sector client. An open and co-operative, but clearly defined,
approach to risk sharing, cost, staff issues and management will be at the heart of any well
formulated agreement. The public sector client must assign someone to be the project
sponsor to ensure that the right contract is established from the outset.
Although the contractor will relieve the client of much of the management burden associated
with the contracted-out services, the contract must still be carefully managed throughout its
duration and it is important that the client has a contract manager, to secure a partnership
that works. Both project sponsor and contract manager must have sufficient time and
resources at their disposal, otherwise it is likely that the contract and its working will be
deficient. Before embarking on the process of energy services contracting, public sector
organisations are required to consider all aspects and deficiencies of the current provision
and establish how changes may be of benefit to the organisation’s long-term strategic
objectives.
Public procurement:
The public sector accounts directly for only 5% of UK carbon dioxide emissions and from
that, three quarters is for space heating and lighting. But this sector – in particular the
Government itself – has a vital role to play in leading by example. Government, along with
other public sector organisations, is taking action to improve energy efficiency. The central
Government estate has an interim target to reduce CO2 emissions by 1% a year from 1999-
2000, with new targets set in 2003 including on CHP.
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The review of government procurement has identified a number of areas where government
purchasing could more strongly support sustainable development goals. The review has
been considering how to build energy efficiency into government procurement and contract
strategies, and identified some specific categories where products are already available
which meet high energy efficiency standards. As a result, central arrangements were made,
for departments to purchase goods with high energy efficiency standards and which provide
value for money in areas such as IT equipment, boilers, lights and lighting systems,
refrigeration equipment, televisions and washing machines.
National Health Service (NHS) Trusts are already targeted to reduce the level of primary
energy consumption by 15% or by 0.15 MtC equivalent, from March 2000 to March 2010.
Since 2003 local authorities have been specifically required to benchmark their energy use in
operational property and street lighting and set local improvement target in 2003/2004. Along
with registered social landlords they are also required to bring their own housing stock up to
decent standards by 2010. Detailed procurement targets have been developed alongside
and complementary to the 2005 revision of UK Buildings Regulations and the methodologies
for the implementation of the EU Buildings Directive, including building energy certification
and labelling.
Public organisation:
Much research has been undertaken to examine the barriers to greater energy efficiency.
These barriers are extensive and numerous. They include: the shortage, and high cost of
finance; ignorance of cost effective opportunities and lack of information; a fragmented
energy efficiency industry; managers’ unwillingness for risk taking; the small proportion of
energy costs in total costs and other more urgent priorities; exclusion of external
environmental costs in final energy prices; and falling real energy prices (so that big savings
are made in bills but by price rather than quantity factors). Lower prices also lengthen
payback periods for energy investment.
There are a number of trade associations such as ESTA - Energy services trade association
- that provide a benchmark technical services to potential EPC clients. During the past 12
years of its existence, ESTA has however made little in roads into the public sector market
as they only provide information on their paid up members which does not meet public sector
competition rules.
With the opening up of the government estates to EPC there is a suggestion that other trade
associations such as the CHPA (Combined Heat & Power Association), IFBM (Institute of
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Facilities and Building Management) would become more actively involved with the
regulation of the supply of Energy services to the public sector.
The main applications are project improvement and/or incentive based O&M and energy
management.
• In terms of project perspectives, the contract could cover a performance based
delivery of energy services, where the supplier could benefit from developing “own”
alternative designs and concepts that fulfilling the clients’ performance criteria at a
lower cost.
• In terms of O&M, complete energy management services is the most common
structure based on a contract where the contractor (ESCO or other) is responsible for
the entire operational and maintenance of the clients’ premises, and within this
contract can benefit financially if he manages to cut energy and operational costs etc.
These include ‘active’ energy services for larger buildings, such as surveys, audit and
best practice bench marking; installing, commissioning and operating CHP or other
energy-intensive facilities; ‘build and operate’ contracts; competitive energy
purchasing (for individual customers or via purchasing consortia); and provision of
finance.
Public procurement:
CEM – Heat with Rent
A recent novel innovation for providing central heating to council tenants where Council are
unable to fund such installations is the “Heat with Rent” concept. Basically capital funds are
made available by the Gas (or Electricity) Authority to install individual gas (or electric)
central heating. Capital repayments, on an individual basis, are made by the tenant over a
fixed period (normally ten years) at a fixed, but slightly preferential, rate of interest. The Local
Authority could assist with small capital contributions to reduce the cost and encourage
tenants to participate.
The Local Authority would underwrite the scheme although they would not be liable for
individual tenant’s debt. Such a scheme would not have an affect on their Capital Controls.
Tenants would al have options on the system they wanted. This could be a very basic
system incorporating two or three radiators and a control and a simple programmer, or an
advanced system with electronic controls, thermostatic radiator valves etc.
The Contractor plays a direct role in the operation and maintenance of the new equipment
either using his own staff or sub-contractors or training and overseeing the customer’s staff.
The contractor may also purchase and supply fuel and energy on behalf of the customer. At
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the end of his contract the new equipment may be transferred into the ownership of the
customer for a consideration defined in the contract or without consideration or the contract
may be re negotiated or the customer may enter into a hire agreement at nominal charge to
cover the remaining life of the equipment. The customer may have the right under the
contract to purchase the equipment before the full term of the contract.
Public organisation:
See Public Accountancy.
THIRD PARTY FINANCING (OFTEN PARTIALLY INCLUDED IN EPC CONTRACTS)
Public accountancy:
There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved, including:
Under an energy service contractor customer pays directly for the continued provision at
agreed standards of agreed energy consuming services such as space heating, domestic
water heating, lighting, air-conditioning etc. The price is set as some figure lower than the
cost of providing these services prior to the installation of the energy saving improvements
e.g.: 3% lower initially rising to 13% lower over a period of 10 years. The contract defines
methods of adjusting the price in an equitable manner to allow for changes in weather, the
price of fuel, building occupancy etc.
Public procurement:
TPF is a procurement route that normally involves long-term contractual arrangements for
the provision of a capital-intensive service to the public sector by a private sector
organisation. In effective TPF procurement the public sector specifies the outputs it requires,
and private sector consortia then compete to meet those output specifications in the most
cost effective manner. The risks involved in the project are shared between the parties, with
each party managing those risks they are best able.
This approach to risk-sharing provides powerful incentives for the private sector to perform.
Furthermore the integration of capital and life cycle costs provides an incentive to invest in
more efficient technology up front to provide for lower life-cycle costs including lower carbon
performance.
In order for these positive incentives in TPF to realise better energy efficiency and other
sustainable development criteria, public sector clients need to be equipped to recognise and
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Leasing
Public accountancy:
Public sector procurement rules in the UK are currently designed to minimise the use of
leasing for equipment that has a life exceeding 15 years. In the1980’s, leasing had been a
common tool used by Local Authorities for portable heating equipment such a storage
heaters, photocopiers and other forms of office equipment. There were however a number of
high profile cases involving some Local Authorities that were using leasing to circumvent the
stringent public sector financial controls imposed by the then Conservative Government. A
number of public sector organisations extended the leasing concept to a wide range of
materials and services notably those with left wing Labour administrations. The Government
consequently introduced very stringent regulations that effectively included lease value within
the public sector borrowing requirements, thereby identifying the value of leases within the
financial allocation of public sector authorities and reducing their Government allocations
commensurately. Leasing does however form a significant part of procuring energy efficiency
equipment.
Public procurement:
Types of leasing arrangements used in the UK:
Financial leases are generally instalment purchases of energy efficiency equipment. The
lessee makes no capital outlay to purchase the equipment and receives all the savings from
the project.
Operating leases are an arrangement in which the lessor owns the equipment, which is
leased or rented to the lessee for a monthly fee.
Municipal leases are available only to tax-exempt entities like cities, counties, public school
districts and special districts.
Master lease agreements are ‘umbrella’ contracts with general terms and conditions. This
type of lease allows public bodies to fund many projects over a time frame.
Certificates of Participation (COPs) are lease purchase agreements that are divided and
sold to multiple investors, similar to stocks.
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Public organisation:
Where some public sector authorities do wish to enter into leasing arrangements such as for
energy efficiency equipment, this can be through a lease-purchase agreement between the
public body, as the lessee, and the company providing the leased equipment and/or
financing, the lessor.
In a typical lease-purchase agreement, the public body agrees to pay a certain amount
(lease payment) over a specified period at a particular interest rate. At the end of the term,
the public body has the option to purchase the equipment at “peppercorn” price. The basic
questions that need to be considered before entering into a lease are:
• How much experience does the lessor have in providing tax-exempt lease purchasing
and financing for energy projects/
• How flexible is the lessor in structuring the financing needs?
• Is the lessor known in the municipal finance industry?
• Will the lessor be in business during the financing term?
• Will the term of lease be within the useful life of the project?
• The cost /benefit of the project.
In a typical lease arrangement, the lessor would require that the interest amount be
‘capitalised’. This amount is borrowed through the lease and set-aside to make the interest
payment during the construction period.
The adoption of a Supplementary Planning Guidance document for energy efficiency and
renewable energy use in new developments by Leicester City Council is also noted as some
evidence of a changing role for Local Authorities in the area of sustainability planning. Whilst
the Government is ostensibly not letting go of the central planning and control remit, it is
perhaps unwittingly doing so through its devolvement of the sustainable development targets
and the renewable obligations for regions.
The main reason for the decline in energy services potential in the UK has generally been
attributed to the introduction of New Electricity Trading Arrangements (NETA) in March 2001.
By 2002 wholesale electricity purchase prices had been reduced by about 40% of 1990
levels.
The introduction of NETA as part of the Climate Change package of measures was heralded
by the Government as an encouragement for the use of energy services. The policy
instruments relating to climate change were the Climate Change Levy (CCL), the Enhanced
Capital Allowance and the Business Rates Reduction. Consequent concerns about a
potential shortfall in meeting the Kyoto objectives, prompted the Government to set up a
series of additional policy instruments, such a relaxation of the criteria for claiming CCL for
CHP schemes to encourage the installation of CHP. The Community Energy Programme and
the Energy Demonstration Programme in the UK, continue to offer financial incentives for
energy services in the domestic sector.
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There is however no grant programmes specifically promoting the use of energy services by
Public Sector Organisations (PSOs). The Finance Act, (2002), which allows the use of
Enhanced Capital Allowances for third party contract investment, goes some way towards
encouraging the use of third party financiers.
Results
• Advice line has received 380 recorded enquiries, of which 280 were from householders.
Supported 38 feasibility studies. These range from a morning consultancy to involvement in £
45,000 feasibility study;
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AYM also envisages its longer term development opportunities in the following:
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A high importance was given to study best practices concerning energy efficiency services
for public bodies in the eight involved European countries. The objective was to study and
find out the conditions of success for such innovative schemes.
Each partner has produced 2 case studies, including at least one third party financing
scheme.
They are highlighting the obstacles that restrict the use of financial instruments and contracts
for energy savings in regard to public bodies.
These best practices are a useful source of information at a European level and were
included in the produced booklets and are available on the web pages.
To assemble the different case studies from the partners regions and countries, into an
interesting overview of different approaches and experiences of public bodies, have a
regrouping from country specific to sector specific been made.
The intention is to give readers from countries with less developed energy service markets
an idea of how things are being done in other countries.
But the intent is also to show that different approaches and implementation structures are
possible, and thereby encourage public bodies to formulate own ambitions and increase their
involvement in energy service and performance contracting projects.
The catalogue is divided into five groups, together giving an overview of best practices and a
variety of approaches used by public bodies in different sectors.
• Hospitals
• Municipalities and Public Authorities
• Public real estate and housing companies
• Public schools and leisure premises
• Industries
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The table below describes the main characteristics of the best practice studies:
Best Practice Country Sector Main focus Contract type Size (m2) Amount (€)
1. Hospitals
ASL 14 Regione
Piemonte (Verbano- Italy Hospitals Heating TPF 440 000 m3 22 000 000
Cusio-Ossola)
Primary medical care
Spain
centre "Anoia" Hospitals Cooling O&M 2 500 1 678 320
Hospital "Arnau de
Spain
Vilanova" Hospitals Cooling O&M 56 000 1 152 000
Regionfastigheter i SkåneSweden Hospitals Heating EPC 450 000 10 000 000
2. Municipalities and
Public Authorities
Municipality of Street
Austria
Gunskirchen lighting Lighting TPF 36 200 139 000
Municipality of Freiburg Public
Germany
Pool 2 buildings Heating EPC 160 000 1 600 000
Municipality of Ettlingen Public
Germany
Pool 1 buildings Heating EPC 170 000 2 124 000
Provincia di Cremona Italy Schools Heating TPF 750 000 m3 7 500 000
Public
Sweden
Municipality of Nyköping buildings Controls EPC 280 000 5 400 000
United
Basildon District Council Kingdom Residential CHP TPF 700 000 3 500 000
London Borough of United Public
Waltham Forest Kingdom buildings CHP EPC 40 000 200 000
3. Public real estate and
housing companies
8 000
France
OPAC 38 Residential Heating O&M dwellings 4 330 000
4. Public schools ans
leisure premises
Impavaara swimming hall Finland Sport/leisure Heating EPC 51 000 m3 210 000
Varissuo icehockey
Finland
stadium Sport/leisure Heating EPC 115 000 m3 200 000
High schools of Rhone-
France
Alpes Schools Heating TPF 3 500 000 18 900 000
5. Industries
Rosenbauer International Austria Commercial Controls TPF 28 800 365 000
In order to facilitate reading, will country references be included in the text description under
each headline.
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The initiative involved 3 hospitals provided with 450 available bed places for an overall
volume of 440.365 m3.
It was an energy service delivered accordingly to the Act n. 157/95 (restricted procedure call,
assigned on the basis of the most economically advantageous tender).
In the 2001 Autumn the DALKIA ESCO won the call, making a proposal to reduce by 9%
roughly the total operative costs (compared to the historical expenditure regarding the 1999
year).
Actually it is supposed the saving is even more significant, since a remarkable difference in
fuel price occurred between the year 1999 and 2001 (+20%). This way the ESCO could not
propose a higher reduction on the financial tender.
In case of future possible fuel price variations, the contract foresees a clause on price yearly
update.
2 million Euros have been invested for energy efficiency measures. 1 million is set up to the
implementation of 2 methane CHP plants while 1 other million funded measures related to
remote sensed control systems on the existing energy production and distribution plants.
Customer contact:
Filippo Baretti, Dario Bottiroli
DirezioneTutela e risanamento ambientale, Ufficio Tecnico ASL n. 14 Piemonte
Regione Piemonte, ASL n. 14 Piemonte
via Principe Amedeo, 17 – TORINO
+39 011 4323476
Filippo.Baretti@regione.piemonte.it
ufficiotecnico@asl14piemonte.it
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For the existing installations as for new equipment, a criteria catalog has been established
following this plan. These criteria include:
Action was also undertaken on the financial sector and in this case, as it is a “Centre
d’Assistència Primària” (C.A.P.: public medical care centre), an energy purchasing system
tied to the services provided by the installations’ manufacturers has been established.
The selection of energy provider was made by EISSA through public tenders. The chosen
company was the one that fulfills the economical specifications and technical requirements of
the Project.
The level of savings was considered implicit within the improvement of the new equipment’s
performance features, and as far as the chosen provider covers the expenses of the
installation maintenance, this expense and its management are not considered direct costs
of the sanitary Centre.
Customer contact:
Health Department - Institut Català de la Salut (ICS)
Direcció d'
infrastructures
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 587 bis Planta 3
08007 BARCELONA
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For the existing installations as for new equipment, a criteria catalog has been established
following this plan. These criteria include:
• Typology of the production equipment and of the air-conditioning terminal units
• Typology of the installations’ auxiliary materials
• Regulation and control
• Insulation
• Rational design of the installations
• Measure of thermal and electrical power supply
• Fuels and energy sources
We point out as energy improving factor the water condensation systems and the utilization
of new refrigerants. The improvement plan would be completed with the substitution of the
pumping and fluids system, and also with a redesign of pipe network, with the purpose of
reducing distances and therefore the volume of circulating water. The Hospital “Arnau de
Vilanova”, in Lleida, could be placed among the Health Department (ICS) buildings that could
evidently be improved by performing an Improvement Plan of the installations, at least those
corresponding to the main cold water production plant used for the Hospital air conditioning,
which is showing big deficiencies in the operation and energy costs.
We have also acted on the finance ambit so in certain instances an energy purchasing
system has been established tied to the services given by the installation constructors.
The objective of the energy services contract is to ensure a global service, from the
installation itself until its maintenance and financing, in such a way that the contractor
invoices a fixed monthly amount where all concepts are included. The obligation to establish
a minimum of coefficient of performance (COP) for equipment (in particular in public
installations), should led to a more competitive market between manufacturers, and therefore
to a cost reduction of this equipment.
Customer contact:
Health Department - Institut Català de la Salut (ICS)
Direcció d'
infrastructures
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, 587 Planta 3
08007 BARCELONA
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C. SWEDISH HOSPITALS
The background of the project is that Regionfastigheter Skåne that manages in total 1.5
million m2 of public premises, experienced a period of increased need of refurbishment and
upgrading of their premises, and they identified substantial saving potential in energy and
operational costs. But their investment potential was limited due to budget and public
spending restrains, but also due to the lack of internal resources and experiences regarding
large-scale energy saving projects.
The aims and ambitions was to establish an Energy Service Contract with a service provider
that could take on the responsibility for detailed energy analysis, full project implementation,
development of financial solutions and provide firm savings guarantees.
The internal preparation was crucial in order to avoid internal opposition and maximise the
value of the future project. Therefore was almost the entire organisation involved in the early
preparation work before tendering, and it was clearly communicated that this project didn’t
aim to outsource or reduce staff.
The purchasing and contractual process was conducted in line with the public procurement
act, and started with a pre-qualification followed by feasibility audits and a negotiated
procedure purchasing process comprising of three potential suppliers.
The content of the project is energy efficiency, retrofits and refurbishment projects within
three hospital areas in the region. In the projects total turnover of approx 11 million Euro, are
also included substantial training and capacity building of the operational and maintenance
staff.
The Results of the project that started 2004/2005 are so far positive, and the initial training
and optimisation efforts delivers saving beyond expectations. The gained experiences is that
the planning and purchasing process of a project at this size is time consuming, and that you
needs to be a team with complementary competences to carry out the tendering and
contractual work.
In an EU perspective it’s notable that the strong EU focus on PPP and Energy Services
doesn’t seems to have effected the public authorities in Sweden, and that it’s essential for
EU to emphasise its efforts to make the Member Stated ratify the Eurostat Guidelines and
dismantle legal and administrative hurdles for Energy Service Contracting.
Customer contact:
Robert Johansen
Director of Development
Regionfastigheter Skåne
Phone: +46 70 585 34 52
Mail: Robert.Johansen@skane.se
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As saving energy was always a main topic for the municipality, Gunskirchen started in the
year 2003 an ECP/TPF project, with the aim to renovate the street lighting installations in the
whole community area and to save costs and energy with this action.
With the exchange and renovation of pillars, the implementation of new lighting control
devices and the enlargement of the street lighting energy savings of 24,615 kWh per year
and a reduction of the energy costs of 3,200 Euros per year are guaranteed. Also a reduction
of 7.4 tons per year carbon dioxide is guaranteed. The total investment amounts 138,930.58
Euros. A financial support of 3,603.70 Euros from the regional government is given to the
customer with the condition to use this money for refunding.
The municipality wanted to reduce failures in the street lighting and in combination with that
to reduce the grievances of the citizens. This should also be reached with the implementation
of the best available technology. In the contract was also fixed that the maintenance of the
street lighting has to be done by the energy service company which causes less work in
administration, maintenance and operation for the municipality.
All in all, the municipality of Gunskirchen is satisfied with the results of the project because
all the project targets for saving energy are reached so far.
Customer contact:
Franz Mallinger
Gemeindeamt Gunskirchen
Marktplatz 1, A-4623 Gunskirchen, +43 (0)7246/6255-800,
franz.mallinger@gunskirchen.gv.at
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B. GERMAN MUNICIPALITIES
ETTLINGEN
The background of the project is the increasing effort of the local agenda group to implement
an action plan for CO2- reduction targets. The municipality of Ettlingen has 38.000
inhabitants, manages about 60 public buildings, with total energy costs of 2 Mio. €. The
budget for the energy saving measures and refurbishments in the public buildings has been
decreasing in the last years. The action plan was to introduce third- party financed projects.
The aims and ambitions was to generate a project, were risks for the savings and the
investments could be delegated to an energy service company.
The internal preparation was consisting of intensive communication process which helped to
push aside hurdles within the municipality.
The purchasing and contractual process was conducted according to the public procurement
act. The municipality decided to involve the subsidiary municipal utility to implement the ESC
project.
The content of the project was oriented to the refurbishment of all heating stations with
implementation of CHP and computerized control systems. In most of the schools, lighting
systems were refurbished.
The project started in 2004; the results so far show an exceeding of the guaranteed savings,
which were 130.000 €/a.
Customer contact:
Mr. Hendrik Bubel
Environmental officer
Municipality of Ettlingen
Marktplatz 1, D 76275 Ettlingen, email: umwelt@ettlingen.de
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FREIBURG:
The background of the project was the action plan of the greenhouse gas abatement plan
stated in 1993, which foresee third party financed projects. Some projects have been already
carried out as heating supply contracting together with the local utility. To start the next step,
the town council decided to start an EPC in 2001.
The aims and ambitions was to generate a project, were risks for the savings and the
investments could be delegated to an energy service company.
The internal preparation was consisting of intensive communication process which helped to
push aside hurdles within the municipality. In further steps the missing data was collected
together with external experts.
The purchasing and contractual process was conducted according to the public procurement
act. It started with a pre- qualification followed by feasibility audits based on a standardized
ESC- contract and baseline information on the buildings. The purchasing process was
negotiated with three ESCOs.
The content of the project was oriented to the refurbishment of all heating stations with
implementation of CHP and computerized control systems. In most of the schools, lighting
systems were refurbished.
The project started in 2004; the results so far show an exceeding of the guaranteed savings,
which were 97.800 €/a.
Customer contact:
Name: Mr. Meik Möllers
Title: Department officer
Organisation: Municipality of Freiburg
Contact information such as address, telephone and e-mail: Fehrenbachallee 12, 79109
Freiburg, email: meik.moellers@stadt-freiburg.de
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C. ITALIAN PROVINCES
The Province of Cremona in the past used to sign contracts (for fuel supplying, O&M)
running for 1-2 years. Since 1992, the Province decided to focus its policies on a more
effective planning of energy efficiency measures. The Province, in fact, oawned many old
and obsolete buildings needing a refurbishment-restoration, even in terms of heating plants.
Especially 37 school premises had to be renovated and the overall amount of volume
involved was roughly 750.000 m3.
Nevertheless, while making this decision, the Province was not financially able to cope with
the necessary investment.
This way the Province chose to try out a TPF scheme. The renovation measures have in fact
been implemented and funded by the winning company.
A remarkable and encouraging energy saving was reached through simple measures related
to remote sensed management and control systems.
Customer contact:
Name: Ing. Rossano Ghizzoni
Title: Public works Department
Organisation: Province of Cremona
Contact information such as address, telephone and e-mail:
Tel: +39 0372 406403
e-mail: gestione.calore@provincia.cremona.it
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D. SWEDISH MUNICIPALITIES
The background of the project is that board of executives in the municipality of Nyköping, that
manages in total 250.000 m2 of public premises, decided to cut the municipalities energy -
and operational costs with 10 percent, motivated by financial and environmental reasons.
The energy and real estate energy manager were assigned to develop and propose an
action plan, but when presenting costs, the plan was rejected the manager then scanned the
market for other solutions.
The aims and ambitions was as much operational and managerial as technical, and
Nyköping therefore strived to find an Energy Service Company focused on both energy
savings, operational efficiency and the control systems needed to efficiently run the premises
and the operation organisation, but also had the financial capabilities that Nyköping lacked.
The internal preparation and anchoring process was relatively simple since a sense of
urgency was present, and since the proposed project was presented in a solution oriented
way, and therefore almost seen as a pain relief. The strong interest in organisational and
human development characterised the preparation.
The purchasing and contractual process was conducted in line with the public procurement
act, and started with a pre-qualification followed by feasibility audits based up on proposed
deal structures and clear demands regarding controls and operational systems. The
purchasing process was negotiated and comprised four potential suppliers.
The content of the project is strongly oriented towards the implementation of a computerised
control, operational and maintenance system implemented together with optimisations and
retrofits of the HVAC systems. The projects turnover is approx 5.5 million Euros and also
includes targeted training and capacity building for the operational and maintenance staff.
The results of the project started in 2002 is positive, and the guaranteed savings of 17 % and
10.000 MWh/year are already being exceeded, and the motivation of the maintenance staff
has increased after training and the system upgrading. The gained experiences is that the
planning and purchasing process of a project like this is time consuming and that the
immaturity among public bodies and the lack of support from public branch organisations
made it difficult to elaborate some of the structures for financing, accounting and contractual
conditions.
Customer contact:
Bo Flinkberg
Technical real estate manager
The municipality of Nyköping
Phone: +46 155 24 80 00
Mail:
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E. UK DISTRICT COUNCILS
BASILDON:
Langdon hills estate comprises of 556 dwellings, in Basildon District Council, Essex, UK. In
August 1999 the Council sought to address a growing problem of inadequate heating
provision on the estate by setting up a CEM contract with Waltham Forest Energy Services
Ltd (now named Thames Energy Ltd).
These constraints led the Council to initiate a tendering procedure which after a two year
development process led to a private sector investment of about £2 million private sector
funds as part of a £4m project for the installation of new energy efficient heating systems on
the estate.
The project was carried out in a social housing estate, which comprised 556 dwellings of 2
Bed, 3 Bed, 4 Bed & 6 Bed Houses, 1 primary School provides space heating, hot water and
electricity.
The scheme includes the use of 2 No. 210KWe Nedalo Gas CHP units integrated with boiler
systems in the energy centre. The units are currently connected to the local electrical
distribution system and the scheme supplies the electrical distribution infrastructure for
electrical supply to all dwellings and public buildings via a private wired network.
Waltham Forest Energy Services Ltd (now Thames Energy Ltd were selected as the private
sector partner and an energy supply and management agreement was signed with the
Council in August 1999 for a 10 year period.
Works on site commenced in Jan 2001 and has been completed in 4 phases to minimise
disruption to the residents.
The business plan projected a 4.75 year payback period. Estimated annual environmental
benefits were 1011 Tonnes of Carbon Dioxide displaced and 3099717MJ reduction in
primary energy sources
Contact person:
Mr Denis Thomas
Thames Energy Ltd
18 Hemmells
Basildon, Essex, U K
SS 15 6ED
Tel: 01268 411122 Fax: 01268 4111350
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WOKING:
Woking Borough Council already holds claim to being the most energy efficient council in the
UK and is also the only Local Authority to supply customers with electricity on private wire
combined heat and power (CHP) networks.
In 1999, The Council set up an Energy Service Company to capitalise on its intellectual
property in small scale community CHP to enable large scale district energy/CHP schemes
to be implemented, primarily with private finance.
Thameswey Limited - the Energy Services Company - is wholly owned by Woking Borough
Council’s Energy and Environmental Services. The company was established in February
1999
Thameswey Limited has entered into an agreement with Woking Borough Council to act as
its contractor to invest in combined heat and power plant (energy stations) to sell heat and
power in an environmentally friendly way with a view to improving the environment within the
Council’s area.
In May 2000, Thameswey Limited invested in its joint venture company, Thameswey Energy
Limited, to finance the first energy station in Woking Town Centre. Thameswey Limited will
make additional investments in Thameswey Energy Limited to finance further energy
stations, the next station is planned for Woking Park.
Contact person:
The Energy Services Manager
Woking Borough Council, Civic Offices
Gloucester Square
Woking, Surrey GU21 1YL
Tel: 00 44 1483 755855
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The general idea of the energy policy of OPAC 38 is to improve the quality of service for the
customers (the renters), without increasing the costs (that is the sum of the rent and of the
service and maintenance charges).
There is a specific department within OPAC 38 for energy, with two engineers. The existence
of this department is consistent with the political will to implement a sustainable development
policy, which started with the energy policy (at the beginning, with one engineer).
These operating and maintenance contracts are implemented for all the collective central
heating systems. If sanitary hot water is heated with the collective boiler, it is also included in
the contract. They include:
• Energy procurement
• Operating and maintenance
• Bigger maintenance and renewing: it is an annually fixed amount that allow to
replace heating systems parts when they are out of order, and works as an
insurance (the ESCO must implement all the necessary repairs).
Instalments occur in March, May, July, September, November for 15 % of the total amount,
and the final invoice includes the results of operating and review of prices. If the annual
(based on civil year) consumption, after climatic correction is over the target, OPAC 38 pays
only 1/3 of the over cost. If it is under the target, OPAC 38 gets 2/3 of the difference.
For year 2004, considering the climatic conditions, the target value was an energy
consumption of 101.8 GWh for 8905 dwellings. The actual value has been 97.8 GWh. This
represents 3.77 M€ for energy procurement, and 0,56 M€ for operating and maintenance.
The financial savings have reached an amount of 58 k€.
Customer contact:
OPAC 38
Laurent BOGIRAUD
Responsible of energy department
47, avenue Marie Reynoard - BP 2549
38 035 GRENOBLE Cedex 2
Tel: 04 76 20 51 45
Fax: 04 76 20 51 47
laurent.bogiraud@opac38.fr - www.opac38.fr
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Impivaara swimming hall was built in 1975. The building volume is 50900 m3. The contract
between town and service provider started under SPARTRIM contract. This contract has
same features as EPC contract, but is service provider trade name for such services. The
five year contract started in 1.9.1999 and ended 1.9.2004. The initial contract was followed
by three year EPC contract, where no new investments were made but the responsibility of
the energy management continued.
This contract was one of the first contracts for both parties. No competition was arranged but
the contact was awarded after negotiations. The supplier activity was key to the contract.
The contract included savings target both for district heat and electricity. The savings target
for heat was 1000 MWh/a and for electricity 400 MWh/a. The reference consumption was the
average consumption of heat and electricity from the previous five years (1993-1998). The
reference for district heat was 5241,5 MWh/a and for electricity 2156,3 MWh/a.
The main investments were rebuilt of building automation, frequency converters for fans and
pumps and replacement of heat recovery units.
The contract value was € 209 000 and the investment was financed by the service provider.
Customer contact:
Juhani Korte
Planning engineer
Turku Talotoim
Linnankatu 39, 20100 Turkui
tel +35822624390
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The hall has volume of 114900 m3. The building area is 17400 m2. The facility was
completed during 1983. The ice hockey hall temperature is +10 C and other rooms according
to normal building standards.
In the hall heat is needed for space heating, hot tab water and for keeping the ice
subdrainage working and for melting ice (snow) which comes from ice maintenance.
Benchmarking with other halls showed high relative energy consumption.
Turku municipality had already gained experience from EPC contracting and was willing to
continue on that line. Turku negotiated with some candidates and selected YIT as EPC
partner for this case. The contract was signed during 2003 and the investment was
completed on the same year. The total investment was € 198000, € 39600 grant was
admitted and the contract value was € 158400. Associated O&M contract was also signed.
The agreed target was to recover 1134 MWh heat from chiller condensers and from
ventilation exhaust air. The saved heat is used for keeping the subdrainage free of ice,
melting the snow collected from the ice surface and for tab water preheating.
During the first contract year the savings were 410 MWh when the hall was in use for 3
months after the modification. Year 2004 the hall was in use year round, which is more than
typical year. 2004 savings were 2958 MWh.
The target building automation is connected to YIT control room where they monitor
continuously the operations and energy consumption of the facility. Reports are available at
any time and further improvements can be planned based on accurate measured data.
Customer contact:
Juhani Korte
Planning engineer
Turku Talotoimi
Linnankatu 39, 20100 Turkui
tel +35822624390
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B. FRENCH SCHOOLS
In the framework of the devolution laws, the 22 French Regions became in charge of
investment spending for the construction of new high schools, as well as spending relating to
the major maintenance of existing high schools. In addition, the Region’s were now
responsible for the operating expenditure necessary to cover the material operating costs of
the high schools (energy, water, major and minor maintenance, etc.). In the case of Rhône-
Alpes Region, this transfer involved 275 high schools. Rhône-Alpes Region decided to
pursue a vigorous policy of investment in energy saving.
The objective of the policy of investment in energy saving was to set up sufficient material
conditions necessary for the high schools to fulfil their education service, but also minimise
the costs of this service.
The internal preparation was about one year. Since politicians and policy makers were
already aware of the necessity of an energy saving program, no special information process
was needed. The high school head and bursar who are responsible for operation and
maintenance of the installation were involved from the very beginning. To begin with,
systematic diagnostic studies of the entire property holding made it possible to select the
investment programmes.
After the various existing financing solutions were studied, the third-party financing format
was selected. This third-party investment format was far from widespread in France. It was
proposed only by SINERG, a subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations,
specialised in financing programmes linked with energy saving created in 1983. The principal
difficulty lay in meeting the Public Procurement Code.
Customer contact:
Rhônalpénergie Environnement (for the Rhône-Alpes Region),
10 rue des Archers - 69002 Lyon
+ 33 (0)4 78 37 29 14
raee@raee.org
Eric CORNIER
Operation manager
EOC France SINERG
74 Rue Maurice Flandin - 69003 LYON
+33 (0)4 72 13 03 23
ecornier@eoc-france.fr
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4.2.5 Industries
AUSTRIAN INDUSTRIES
Rosenbauer International AG is one of the worlds'largest producers of fire engines and fire
protection equipment. The customers of the company are fire departments in the whole
world. The branch office in Leonding, Upper Austria is the head quarter and sales division of
Rosenbauer Österreich which is a 100 % subsidiary of Rosenbauer International AG.
As saving energy was always a main topic for the company, Rosenbauer started in the year
2003 an ECP/TPF project with the aim to optimise the energy costs of the branch office in
Leonding. In Leonding the company has 21,300 m² production and stock areas and 7,500 m²
office and sales areas. The gas and electricity consumption was split up in 70 % for heating
and 30 % for warm water and the paint shop.
With the implementation of heat recovery installations, remediation of the hydraulic systems,
optimal integration of the CHP, sealing of the windows and training of the employees a
carbon dioxide reduction of about 309 tons per year and energy savings of 1,463,000 kWh
per year are reached. That is a reduction of about 53,500 Euros energy costs per year. The
duration of the contract is 6.5 years.
One of the general ambitions for the project was that with the ECP/TPF project the company
gets professional support service from the energy service company. Rosenbauer wanted to
address with the energy service cooperation all the areas of the company where it was
possible to save costs for energy. It was no problem to anchor the project in the company
and get the accordance of all the persons who are entitled to make the decisions in this case
or work in the company. Rosenbauer involved right from the beginning the whole personnel
into the project and therefore it was insured that the staff identified itself with the project.
As the expected targets are reached so far, like the professional implementation of the
project by the energy service company and the first results are positive, Rosenbauer is very
satisfied with the actual situation. And it is one of the first companies of this size and kind
that made such a project.
Customer contact:
Karl Widmann
Rosenbauer International AG
Paschinger Straße 90, A-4060 Leonding, +43 (0)732/6794-354,
karl.widmann@rosenbauer.com
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In preparation of the feasibility studies the partner KEA has, with the input of the partner’s,
produced a feasibility study guideline (see next chapter). Short summaries in English
presenting the feasibility studies have been produced by the partners (see annexe). A
synthesis can be found in chapter 5.2.
In addition the results of these feasibility studies and the guideline are available on the PU-
BENEFS web portal in an English summary version. More detailed results of the feasibility
studies can be found on the partner web pages.
Introduction
The successful implementation of energy service projects is often hindered by some items
arising from the project development:
Most of public authorities have no detailed information about the energy costs in their
building stock. Few public authorities run a professional buildings management, and have
only little information about the technical, organisational and low-investment weak points in
their buildings
Experience shows that running a successful project requires useful knowledge about poor
energy performance and costs. In earlier projects, the public authority allocated the initial
analysis/feasibility study completely to the ESCOs. This has undermined the position of the
authorities during the purchasing and negotiation process.
As long as only the ESCO has the data on the needs for action, the ESCO controls the
process. The result has often been the cause of problems; e.g. in many projects severe
interface problems occurred. Measures often only concentrated on areas where the energy
consumption could be optimised or improved by replacing parts of the installation. These
have however encouraged public authorities to replace non- energy saving part of the
installations.
Projects developed in the last two or three years have learned from that and encouraged
public authorities to prepare energy saving projects with their own feasibility study, analyzing
the most typical weak points in public buildings´ installations.
This guideline for feasibility studies should therefore be a manual for the preparation of the
project in that way. It gives some essential project information which has to be tailored to fit
the national context and provides a checklist with some typical items to be cleared at the very
start of the project. The feasibility study is only an initial analysis with a small cost budget. So
it is up to the expert doing the study, which working sheets is used for the work, and which
data is finally collected.
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1 2 3 4 5
Project Feasibility Purchasing Implemen- Contract
Development Study Process tation period
Decision Point
3
The procedure for carrying out energy service and energy performance contracting projects
normally follows at least five steps and three decision points, in which the public authority
may influence the progress and the scope of the project.
This step normally takes place within the organisation or the public authority and is mainly
opinion forming. Prompted by lack of finance, technical expertise, staff capacity and by the
elected representatives, the public authorities leave their “normal” way of investing in their
buildings and energy equipments and start to analyze alternative ways. Energy performance
contracting (EPC) and energy services (ES) have become more and more common in some
European countries and information based on practical experience, such as guidelines,
project reports are already available. In regard to the more or less complicated proceedings,
from the initial idea to the implementation of such a project, a market for consultancies has
been developed, in which some design companies and energy agencies offer specific
advice.
On the other side of the market, a number of local and global players offer their products
such as EPC and ES. The EU guidelines for public procurement normally envisages a
competitive contracting process with at least three competitors. This discourages public
authorities in nearly all cases to go into direct negotiations with service companies. The few
cases in which the direct placement of an order is legal are very specific and do not play any
important role in this kind of project. Some authorities, when attempting to avoid the
tendering procedure, have found that this can be a painful experience with penalties (mostly
financial restrictions) resulting from their mistake.
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Target of step 1
Decision Point 1
Kick- off for step 2
Target of step 2
• Initial analysis of typical weak points of the main energy consumers in the building
stock
• Generation of the base-line data (energy consumption, energy prices, energy costs,
maintenance costs etc.)
• Generation of a “to-do-list” with measures and interface definitions for each weak
point
• first evaluation of the estimated costs and savings for each measure
• Arranging the measures into categories: “technical” “very important”, “highly
economical”, “nice to have”.
• Prepare decision of which energy service is the most suitable (ES, EPC, others) for
the portfolio of measures
• Identification of the next steps for the procurement of the service chosen and the
related costs for these steps
• Indication as to whether the public authority is interested in proceeding further with
the purchasing process (step 3)
• Decision in the public council to initiate the purchasing process
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Decision Point 2
• Determination of the form of energy service and the buildings in which it should be
carried out
• Initiation of the purchasing process
• Decision prepared by the public authority and their consultancy, decision normally
made within the authority (minor projects) or within the public council
Target of step 3
Step 3 normally consists of several parts which have to be carried out by the authority,
assisted by an experienced consultant:
• Preparation of all necessary papers for the prequalification and the tender process,
such as the contract, baseline data, form sheets
• Running the prequalification before sending out formal request for tenders. The
process is necessary in order to ensure that the public body in the later stages is
entitled to use the more flexible Selective or Negotiated procedures. When 3-5
potential ESCOs are pre-qualified they receive the request for tender containing
basically four evaluation criteria.
• the level and quality of references, experiences and the proposed co-operation
structures
• the type and conditions of conceptual, financial and contractual structures
• The calculated level of energy to cost savings, it’s calculation basis, and the saving
guarantee structures
• the quality and quantity of measures to be carried out by the ESCO
and a more or less detailed and standardized contract and other form sheets
• Running the evaluation and negotiation and fine tuning of the ESCO’s offer. However,
even after appointing one ESCO for the analysis and development contract, a 2-stage
process is in use, meaning that it’s the results from the detailed analysis and
development that determinate if the customer finally says yes.
• Preparation of the decision to appoint based on decision making matrix taking into
consideration the evaluation criteria
• Preparation of the next step which is often the fine (detailed) analysis to be done by
the ESCO
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Decision Point 3
Appointment of the ESCO which has had the best offer with two feasible consequences:
• the mandate to start the planning, building and operations proceedings for the
negotiated measures (1 step process). Since the tendering process seldom gives the
opportunity for detailed studies or technical coordination a joint implementation
strategy between tenderer and the customer, a more detailed analysis and project
development is required to give the customer comprehensive decision making
material. To avoid unnecessary risks for the tenderer and to keep the decision
making material as detailed as possible, the “two- step- process” is practised,
particularly in technical complex projects.
• the “two- step- proceeding” foresees that the most suitable tenderer is awarded the
mandate to start a detailed analysis and planning process in close adjustment with
the public authorities, to calculate the measures again and to confirm or improve the
economic criteria of the step before (2 step process). Solution b) normally ensures
that the final decision about signing the implementation contract is not before the
presentation of the results of the detailed analysis.
Prequalification Prequalification
- selection at least - selection at least
3 ESCOs 3 ESCOs
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STEP 4 : IMPLEMENTATION
This step is quite comparable to the normal self-financing measures. To optimize the results,
the ESCO’s planning and implementation process should be linked very closely with the
public authority. Depending on the contract model chosen, often the ownership of the
installation is transferred to the public authority.
With regard to possible risks resulting from bankruptcy of the ESCO, this may be a viable
way to avoid conflicts with the ESCO´s creditors. Before finishing the implementation stage,
the ESCO and the customer must agree on the technical and administrative equipment and
routines necessary for the follow up and guarantee phase.
Targets of Step 4
• Installation of the energy efficiency measures fixed in step 1 or step 2
• Successful functional control by the public authority
• Final definition of interface between ESCO and buildings installations
• Start of the contract period
In addition, the duties of both parties resulting from the contract should now be in operation.
This includes the periodic maintenance, the quick response on failures, the guarantee repair
works etc.
Performance data can be gained from a frequently updated “weak” point list. This can be
generated within a facility management or an energy management project. The monthly
energy consumption report often provides a lot of helpful information about the weak points
and problems occurring in the operation of the existing installations. This can be used in the
preparation and implementation of energy service and EPC projects.
It should be noted that well operated energy management projects often generate significant
energy saving benefits with very little investment.
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Own Energy-
Performance
Contracting Contracting
•
Investment
Energy-
Energy-Audit
Auditfor
forBuildings
Buildingswith
withhigh
highSaving-Potential
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-Investment
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small-budget-investment
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At the start of the project with very little information and possibly no first hand knowledge a
first estimate can help to analyze the buildings stock very quickly whether EPC or other
energy service could be employed.
The basic criteria are the energy consumption and costs for each building. Often only costs
for heating and electricity are available. The consumption can be calculated with average
energy prices. If available, without extensive survey, the heated area (m²) should be
estimated and an initial benchmark for the electricity and heating consumption calculated.
To implement an EPC project, the required investment, and the total present value of annual
costs as well as the transaction- costs which occur in the purchasing process, have to be
recovered by the energy and maintenance cost savings.
The first item taken into account is the energy costs. In Germany EPC projects have been
realized in objects with energy costs of at least 50.000 €/a. But it should be noted that this is
certainly close to the minimal cost baseline, where EPC projects still may make sense.
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Example
• The individual purchasing regulations (see WP 2) may vary in regard to the type of
public body. There is a difference between the regulations for e.g. a municipal utility
and the municipal authority.
• Also the decision making process may be different for different public bodies e.g.
state authorities and municipal authorities
To get a better understanding on the clients’ decision making process, the description of the
process and the personnel involved may be helpful.
• Decision making process for the feasibility study
• Which persons are involved in which part of the process?
• Opinion of the staff involved in the process
• Which commissions were needed for final decision
• What were the criteria for choosing the nominated buildings?
• Who was involved?
• Criteria: benchmarks, short on-site audit
• What was learned from the data sampling process?
• Who was involved and what data was most difficult to gain? What were the problems
encountered.
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Identification of measures
The feasibility study provides information for the building owner as well as for the contractor.
Evaluation of technical weak points and possible improvements in the technical installation of
the building
Evaluation of the management and operation of the facilities including maintenance services
Way of implementation
The feasibility study also gives information about the method of implementing the measures
identified, which could be performed by the owner, by contracting or operational services.
The feasibility study may be help to decide if a performance contracting or energy service
contracting organisation would be capable.
Purchasing instrument
In some countries, e.g. in Germany, specifications are required for the purchasing procedure.
In owner controlled investment projects a very detailed specification, which gives clear
information about the quantity and quality of each purchased item should be produced, which
will enable the contractor to submit prices. This may often be the standard for purchasing
operating and maintenance services.
The procurement of energy service contracts often requires some basic data about the
quantity and quality of the energy needed and about further services which are required, e.g.
maintenance service.
What seems to be simple often turns out to be the opposite, when evaluating bids, especially
when the anticipated work is next on the agenda. Often, the owner of the public building has
insufficient basic information about the facilities, especially the possible energy saving
measures. As good practice projects show, the first step for the building owner should be an
energy audit, such as the feasibility study.
There are apparent advantages: the contractor benefit is that he has an indication of the
measures the public authority is aiming for. At least, the feasibility study could be used as an
agenda for the purchasing procedure, which leads to a remarkable simplification of the
bidding process. The feasibility study is also the data platform for the interface between the
data collated by the contractor and the outcome expected by the building owner, which often
has turned out to be very difficult without reliable data basis.
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Last but not least, public authorities require an estimate of the competitiveness of the bids in
comparison to their own performance. The results of the feasibility study, especially the
economic evaluation of the measures can provide that information.
To fulfil the function of a purchasing instrument, the feasibility study should give information
about:
• weak points and measures to be studied by the contractor in his bid
• examination of the economic efficiency of the proposed measures
• clear interface definition for the technical facilities to be replaced
The following main tasks should be managed in this step. To organize the data collection and
the evaluation of the technical equipment, the questionnaire- worksheets in the annex may
be useful (see brackets).
Examination of the sufficiency of the available data: are they based on own data
collections, bills, planning schemes or other data?
Organisational data: the data needed to stay in contact with the operating personnel,
including the design and the executive level (A4)
Collection of the consumption and other costs data: the consumption data, the
maintenance costs should be based on the energy consumption bills,
Collection of the technical data of the building and its energy infrastructure: the data of
the technical equipment normally should be collected during a site visit (B – D)
Baseline data: energy consumption, energy price and annual cost inventory: the baseline
data has to be prepared (B 3):
all consumption and cost data normally represent one year
normally the average of the last two or three years or the last year is used for the
consumption baseline
the heating consumption (correctly without the hot water generation, if measurable) should
be adjusted to the average annual heating days (degree days)
special circumstances affecting the energy consumption should be allowed for.
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Basic information on the buildings utilization (B2 ff): The consumption baseline normally
corresponds to the buildings´ utilization in the same year. The utilization can be specified in
functions (hospital with laundry), areas (floor, office…) and measured in lecture hours/a
(schools, universities etc.), in visitors (swimming pools) and in occupation days (e.g.: per bed
in hospitals). In some building types, the utilization time or occupation rate has a stronger
impact (e.g. swimming pools) on the consumption than in others.
Auditing the energy infrastructure: as generation, conversion, distribution and storage (D1
to D5) The evaluation is based on the results of the site visit (overall condition, year of
construction, technical standard installed), on current data (e.g. typical energy efficiency for
hot water boilers built in 1980-1990 and for a present day one)
Auditing the main energy consumers: in the building as lighting system, engines, fans,
chilling systems, boilers, pumps and hot-water storage (all in D 5-12) , thermal insulation of
roof, window, walls (C). The evaluation is based on the results of the site visit (overall
condition, year of construction, technical standard installed), on current data (W/m² lighting
power installed in energy efficient lighting systems in offices)
Highlighting weak points and flaws: In most chapters some typical weak points are listed
and may be completed by particular experience
Simplified Energy balance sheet for heating and electricity (D13)
Definition of the possible improvements and the scale of the next step
Spread sheets also can be used for documentation during the site visit. Each chapter is
concluded with a sheet, in which the results of the economic evaluation of the each energy
saving measure should be put in writing. At the end of the questionnaire, the economically
most viable measures are brought together. The questionnaire gives no guideline for the
calculation of saving measures but requires that the energy consultant gives details of his
calculations.
The data in Chapters A and B may be essential for the baseline energy consumption, costs
and prices which will be used by the contractor in the bidding procedure. In the following
Chapters, especially in D, data for the evaluation of the technical equipment is required.
Beside essential basic information, some of the spread sheets require very detailed data,
e.g. D4, where the relationship between outside and heating media temperature should be
examined. This is because it has been found that most control systems are not properly
optimized or working reliably.
It would be the energy consultants’ decision, which of the spread sheets are used for data
sampling and the evaluation of the facilities.
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If it is foreseeable, that the weak points found in step 1 do not implicate high technical
complexity this second step should not be done by the customer.
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Energy consumption
The energy supply concept should be calculated with simulation software, based on daily
load curves for electricity, heating and chilling consumption. For the first estimation in the
feasibility study, such a simulation tool is not required. The following scheme simplifies the
calculation procedure but also limits the accuracy of the results (within an acceptable range).
Duration curve
For the design of the duration curve the load curve of the hourly load figures is essential. If
not available, the load curve has to be constructed based on specific calculations. The
calculations normally show the correlation between the heating load and the ambient
temperature as well as the process heating load, which is in little correlation to ambient
temperatures. The graphic representation of the load curve shows how long the load occurs
during the year. The area beneath the function corresponds to the quantity of energy
consumed.
Design
The design of the applications (CHP, wood boilers, heat pumps) is normally based on a set
of parameters:
• the annual utilisation time should be high enough (e.g.: CHP > 5000 h/a full load
hours) to spread the higher investment and higher annual costs for interest and pay
back on a competitive level,
• wood chip boilers can normally be operated within a range of 30-100% efficiency
whereas CHP and heat pumps need to be split to avoid inefficient part load
operations
• annual costs from the refurbishment of a conventional boiler would be considerably
less
• the price for the alternative fuel should be taken into account, this would include
natural gas, oil, wood chips and electricity, including taxes and permits.
The size of the application can be estimated by the duration curve and the minimum
operation time per year expected.
Economic evaluation
The investment and annual cost savings of energy efficiency measures should be compatible
within a static payback method.
• To prepare information about the EPC feasibility, the calculation should be kept quite
similar to ESCO. Investment costs should include the total amount of annual costs
for interest rates. O&M refurbishment will occur in this contract period. The total
costs/total savings is initially now known.
• Using higher efficiency fuels would result in cost savings.
• The maintenance and repair costs for old appliances will be high
• CHP analysis should consider saved fuel costs for heating and the value of the
generated electric power.
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When comparing several solutions in energy service contracting projects, annual costs
should be drawn up, consisting of:
• Investments including engineering costs should be amortised over the life time period
of 15 to 20 years
• Annual maintenance and refurbishment costs can be estimated to be 2-3% of
investment costs for heating units. CHP’s are operated with fixed maintenance costs.
• Variable tax rates apply in each country for CHPs so an average energy efficiency
ratio is needed
• O&M costs i.e. based on weekly operating hours
• CHP: calculation of electricity
• Other costs i.e. monthly rates for boiler room
• Consideration should be given to the CO2 emissions/kWh and energy efficiency
factor
Development and evaluation should be priority rated whilst carrying out performance
contracting bids.
The criteria used to measure or rate the performance contracting feasibility should be the pay
back time.
Sum 100%
It should also be explained how the criteria for the importance of a measure was set:
importance can be very high if a measure is economically very attractive and/or the measure
is based on technical reasons e.g. to avoid contemporary break-downs or safety risks.
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The reasons for the rating of low priority could be due to a long pay back time which only
saves a small amount of energy.
SUM 100%
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The energy consumption benchmark helps to focus mainly on energy consumption fields
which are above average levels compared to other buildings using the same basic pattern.
The condition of the installed technical equipment must be examined. From this, information
about the technical requirements for reinvestment may be gained.
After having a closer look at the technical and energy efficiency deficiencies of the existing
consumption structure, the next step will be to find technical solutions to improve the
situation. This leads to a decision making matrix as shown in F giving information about the
different technical measures and their economic effects. Another criteria to complete the
decision making process is the technical need, resulting from obsolete installations, possibly
resulting from a lack of maintenance or routine servicing.
As experience in the last years in Europe has shown, some of the energy services are more
or less restricted on specific measures.
• Third party financing may provide the capital required for energy efficient measures
throughout all energy consuming installations. The utilisation of third party financing
is mostly in conjunction with energy supply or energy performance contracts.
• Energy Management Projects (EMP) targets the energy and energy cost efficiency
in public buildings. One of the main hurdles to developing the energy efficiency
potential in public buildings is the lack of efficient organisational structures to monitor
efficient consumption and cost control.
The initial stage of resolution are the “soft measures” such as an organisational structure
providing key figures e.g. the house keeper, the buildings manager and the users with clear
responsibilities and duties. Another hurdle is the insufficient data about the utilisation of the
building, the users’ behaviour, the technical equipment and the technical problems. To
resolve this problem data should be collected, problems analysed and design studies
produced of energy efficient measures.
Energy Management Projects target the use of low capital cost measures. Experience has
shown that EMP can produce energy savings of 10-15% with minimal investment. EMP
should, therefore, be the first step to consider before implementing more expensive energy
efficiency measures.
• Annual check of the energy purchasing conditions and contracts for electricity, gas,
oil, water. The first indicators for the evaluation of the purchasing conditions may be
the average price, which brings the total energy costs, (including load and
consumptions costs) into relationship with the total consumption. Buildings with
equivalent consumption figures should have comparable average prices.
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• Regular control of the energy consumption including both general metering and sub-
metering systems. Recent development in EMP shows a rapidly growing number of
sub-metering systems for electricity consumption and emerging markets for distance
control systems. These systems consist of optical or electronic adapters which are
installed within new or as retro fit on the existing gas and electricity meters, data
loggers, modems or mobile phone applications allow efficient management of the
energy consumption data of building pools.
Also studies on the daily measured load curve (gas, electricity and water) give helpful
information about the consumption characteristics of the building in total or of large
consumers. Decreasing prices for this equipment, starting now with about 500 € for
three meters, and the experience, that good EMP provides 10 to 15% savings, and
improved EMP (with DSM systems in operation) provide at least another 5-10%,
enable Energy Managers to implement these systems even in buildings with energy
costs < 10.000 €/a and give a potential payback of less than 1 year.
• Collection of the consumption data, and the area to prepare a practical benchmarking
system, based on specific electricity, heating and water consumption per m². These
figures allow comparison to buildings with similar utilisation and allow early warning of
excess specific consumption.
• Ongoing training and motivation of the technical operational staff, the housekeepers
and the building users to keep them aware of the energy efficiency targets. This may
be structured within individual training sessions for the key operating personnel and
monthly or quarterly information campaigns and sessions for the building users.
• Establishing a frequent controlling and reporting system, generating key data for
decision makers and users about the consumption, costs, eliminated inefficiencies
and further steps in the building pool of the public authority. The report also includes
the results and recommendations resulting from some economic studies about
intensive energy efficiency may be in the pipeline.
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Energy supply services are usually based on a contract in which the end user (or
beneficiary) pays for the energy supplied. Most energy supply services do not supply heating
or chilling as such because of the difficulty of measuring the quantity of energy supplied.
There are rare examples of energy supply services supplying lighting and chilling services.
The contracts are usually for the provision of energy saving installations, for the benefit of the
consumer.
The investment should meet both the planning and equipment requirements of the buildings
owner and the experience of the ESCO to plan and operate energy efficient installations.
One of the main motivations for the design of an energy supply project is to implement the
specific ESCO experience of energy efficient operation. The expectation of the client is that
the ESCO would be able to implement more efficient energy and cost saving measures than
the customer would be able to without expert assistance.
To make sure that the ESCO experience leads to valuable benefit one of the measures may
be to keep the technical specifications backing the project to a basic level such as a series of
technical bullet points instead of detailed descriptions and planning. The working package of
the ESCO may include the following options:
• the planning and design process starting on the basic requirements given in the
technical specifications is completed by the ESCO,
• the financing of the investments and the services,
• the purchasing and the installation of the material, the energy efficiency equipment,
which would consist mainly in the heating boiler systems, burners, the necessary
control and monitoring installation. With improving standards of room temperatures
an increasing number of energy supply projects target the chilling machinery.
Depending on the needs and specifics of every single project, the installations are not
restricted to the generation units of heating and chilling energy, but also on the
distribution system, pumps, controlled system for distribution circuits. In new or totally
refurbished buildings the complete distribution pipework and control systems
including the radiators have been already part of the ESCO business.
The ESCO in most cases is completely responsible for the maintenance and refurbishment
of the contracted installations.
To ensure that energy efficiency is constantly high throughout the contract period, the ESCO
controls the efficiency parameters and initiates maintenance and refurbishment measures for
the generation and the main parts of the distribution system on his own, when efficiency ratio
is decreasing.
Besides that, the buildings owner wants to continue operation of the installations after the
end of the contract period and sets up contractual requirements for the maintenance and
refurbishment, including a functional description of the condition of the main parts of the
installations at the end of the contract period.
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In some countries standards have been adopted for the maintenance and refurbishment of
technical buildings installation systems which can be taken as a guideline to define duties
and conditions.
• energy management, which supplies the customer with help to control his
consumption figures and the compatibility of the energy prices
• overtaking the complete risk for the calculation figures, for the energy efficiency rate
throughout the contract period
• the client is paying the energy he had consumed on a monthly or annual basis,
depending on the consumption amounts and the calculation and billing strategy of the
ESCO. The installed end energy is maintained and measured by the ESCO.
The contractual structure of the energy performance projects foresee the ESCO providing
the energy efficiency investment, and recouped through the energy consumption in kWh or
m³, actualized with a fixed or floating price per unit.
Example: the installation of two regularly controlled motor-fans in a swimming pool air
conditioning unit will have a pay-back period of 3 years. Facing the fact, that the unit is in bad
shape, the ESCO will have to include the refurbishment of the whole unit, which will not lead
to energy savings, and perhaps extend the pay- back (contract) period to possibly be 8
years. If this is acceptable to the client, the whole air conditioning unit will be refurbished.
Besides the outsourcing of the non-energy saving part of the investment, the total
refurbishment will be supporting a clear interface between the measures of the ESCO and
the installations remaining with the client.
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Experience shows that running a successful project requires useful knowledge about poor
energy performance and costs. In earlier projects, the public authority allocated the initial
analysis/feasibility study completely to the ESCOs. This has undermined the position of the
authorities during the purchasing and negotiation process.
As long as only the ESCO has the data on the needs for action, the ESCO controls the
process. The result has often been the cause of problems; e.g. in many projects severe
interface problems occurred. Measures often only concentrated on areas where the energy
consumption could be optimised or improved by replacing parts of the installation. These
have however encouraged public authorities to replace non- energy saving part of the
installations.
Projects developed in the last two or three years have learned from that and encouraged
public authorities to prepare energy saving projects with their own feasibility study, analyzing
the most typical weak points in public buildings´ installations.
In preparation of this step, a guideline for feasibility studies was designed by the participating
partners. It should be a manual for the preparation of the project in that way. It gives some
essential project information which has to be tailored to fit the national context and provides a
checklist with some typical items to be cleared at the very start of the project.
The feasibility study is only an initial analysis with a small cost budget. So it is up to the
expert doing the study, which working sheets will be used for the work, and which data is
finally collected.
The reasons for that are the different market situations in the different countries as presented
in the report: “Country specific conditions for Energy Performance Contracting”, which is
available also on the web site www.pubenefs.org.
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To help them in their decision making process, the feasibility study has to provide information
which allow the partners and the administration
In most of the feasibility studies, the possibilities for the implementation of an ESC projects
were evaluated. The measures and the estimated energy and maintenance cost savings
found in the different studies made proposals for ESC projects quite easy.
Most of the measures had static pay back periods on the investments in hard ware < 10
years. With some percentage foreseen for the “overhead” of ESC projects (financing,
maintenance, operation costs) this still leads to attractive ESC contract periods.
The PU- BENEFS partners were commissioned by the public administration to do the
feasibility studies or to control and evaluate the outcomes of ESCO or other consultancies. It
shows that “neutral” partners such as the PU- BENEFS partners seem to be very important
to help to overcome the suspiciousness and awareness against EPC and other energy
services in public administrations.
This may be a very important key fact to be considered for the development of the ESC
market in all partner countries.
Also it seems to be very important to develop a very simple tool to carry out pre- studies in
the partner countries which help to collect and evaluate some key figures (such as
consumption performance benchmarks, total costs etc.) needed to estimate the possibility to
carry out a feasibility study and to continue successfully with an ESC project.
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EPC 2 10 d 15 d 2d 3 months 2
Contract months
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ICAEN: The main point was to audit technical weak points in one building and the public
street lighting system in the f.s. and stops in the moment at ”Definition of Project Aims” which
should lead directly to the tendering process. The duration for the decision making process
was 7 months and needed 18 working days of ICAEN to go these steps together with the
public authorities. The total process until the establishment of the contract is considered to
take 20 months and 41 ICAEN working days.
JSP: The step- by- step structure is shortened in this project, a tendering process is not
foreseen. Main argument to choose not an own F.S. is that a ESCO concept may be directly
started and that in some cases the ESCO concept is free. After the decision making process
a letter of intend or pre- contract is stated. In the next step, the ESCO will start up detailed
measurements and the design and construction process.
RAEE: The decision making process is structured even more detailed in the preparation of
the F.S. First RAEE has to convince municipal politicians to think about energy concepts and
to kick off the internal decision making process with the realisation of the F.S. standing at the
end of this first step. RAEE supports the public authority to define targets and to make sure
that the external consultant will fullfill them. Remarkable is, that the public private partnership
and the call for tender seem to be two seperated proceedings: the decision towards a public-
private- partnership does not implement a call for tender.
AESS: Public lighting: From the beginning the subject of the audit was defined: public street
lighting system in the city of San Giovanni. In the first two steps the collection of consumption
and technical equipment data was finished. This intense data gathering in the fist steps is an
excellent baseline which allows to define the target of the f.s. very detailed in the beginning
of the project. For cost reasons this needs a letter of intent of the public authority to finalize
the complete f.s. and pay for it too. In the F.S. the main item is the development and the
comparison of technical measures. The last steps up to the contract rewarding are done in
quite a short time. Hospital: the total working amount was smaller than in the public lighting
project, which is due to the good cooperation, the profund data collection and the technical
measures input both done by the hospitals technical staff.
ESS: Videum: The cooperation between a professional public real estate company and their
main tenant (University) was the kick off of the proceeding. ESS joined to ensure both parties
a balanced outcome. The ambition to do the FS were te analyse the buildings stock and the
saving potentials with ESS to catalyse the outcomes and ideas of both partners. A six step
procedure was used. The first two steps were discussions led by the real estate company
and the University about a cooperation and the structure of it.
ESS joined in the 3. step for a first evaluation of the situation. Representative buildings were
auditet by ESS to find out the magnitude of the savings and a priority list for the measures.
With the help of ESS some difficulties in the framework conditions were solved (technical and
contractual measures to define basic climate conditions, definition of the buildings load
profile incl. Operation hours etc., and flexible baseline parameters f.e. changing educational
plans, studends etc.). In the Vöfab company, ESS was also called as an external and neutral
expert to bring on and enhance the already ongoing discussions. The town hall was audited
by ESS and the technical staff of Vöfab. To avoid discussions based on the fear, that jobs
could be lost by outsourcing proceedings, the audit was considering cooperative measures
for internal capacity building. Other main items were saving measures with a strong impact
on refurbishments and the contractual structures.
NELEEAC: Brent Town Hall: The client has not yet an existing energy management
structure and requested specific support: to indentify and prioritise 5 energy saving measures
and ongoing revenue savings.
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• Some partners report, that the decision making process in ESCO- projects is
shortened because it has (normally) no or small influence on the expenses in
the municipal budget. Instead of the municipal council the technical committe,
as a subcommitte of the council, is making decisions on the item. Experience
shows, that this sometimes leads to a shorter process.
ICAEN: The acquisition was started within a project information on energy service projects
by Institut Cerda and ICAEN in Barcelona. Main point was to audit technical weak points in
one building and the public street lighting system in the f.s. and stops in the moment at
”Definition of Project Aims” which should lead directly to the tendering process. The duration
for the decision making process was 7 months and needed 18 working days of ICAEN to go
these steps together with the public authorities. The total process until the establishment of
the contract is considered to take 20 months and 41 ICAEN working days.
JSP: The acquisition was done within information in the advisory board (WP 1). Buildings
were choosen in which general reconstruction measures were foreseen. One main item was
the specific heating energy consumption which was higher than the average similar building.
RAEE: Main aspect to kick off the F.S. seems to be the over average energy expenses of
the swimming pool. The municipality knows that thermal insulation and technical equipment
is poor. Also important were ongoing examinations about a district heating system based on
a wood chip boiler.
AESS: Public lighting: The first contact is reported to be done by market partners: ESCOs
and technology- providers pointing out saving potentials in preeliminary studies with specific
energy saving projects like ”public lighting” etc. An important information to be collected in
the beginning of each project are plans for the privatization of public services like in this case
the office for public lighting which is planned to be closed down. Hospital: Similar to JSP
AESS invited the hospital management to the first advisory committee session. The hospital
management wishes to reduce energy costs and was looking for an external help to
accompany them.
ESS: Videum: ESS was invited to join and catalyse the technical and contractual discussion
between a real estate company and their main tenant and to control the FS done by external
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consultants. This is a typical role for the neutral energy agency. The main argument to
convince both parties were the savings and the contract forseeing a fair sharing of the
savings and risks. Vöfab: The aquisition process was driven by the politicians and Vöfab
owners and ESS.
NELEEAC: The Council does not have an existing energy management structure for its own
properties. The Environment and Culture department has taken responsibility to initiate
energy efficiency improvements for its corporate buildings and is seeking to develop a
strategy that would engender a more proactive role in the energy management of its
corporate buildings. The energy efficiency drive on the sites are individually motivated rather
than devolved from a wider corporate level. Brent council commissioned NELEEAC to carry
out a comprehensive feasibility study for the Bridge Park Community Leisure Centre.
NELEEAC is then expected to use the recommendations of the report to develop a
comprehensive improvement plan to Energy Performance Contracting project on behalf of
the Council. The Bridge Park Community Leisure Centre building covers an area of 5,387m2
and spends approximately £72,928 per annum on primary energy (£13.54/m2).
The partnering of the Council with Brent Energy Solutions is a useful mechanism for
implementing staff awareness and training on energy efficiency matters. Council also
indicated a willingness to consider the scope for contract energy management particularly
with regards to the installation of the Building Energy Management System.
KEA: Based on long- term contacts starting from the support to introduce reliable energy
management structures in both the administrations KEA is assisting the design of the annual
energy reports for the public buildings. Since two years some buildings with over average
consumption benchmarks and energy costs > 50.000 €/a have been prioritised for the
implementation of energy saving measures.
The high complexity, the not existing technical staff capacity and lack of founding
opportunities in the municipal budget were the main door openers in this project.
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It seems a problem in almost all countries for the public administrations to present
consumption data and an overview on the technical equipment in the public buildings.
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Partner Tools used in Baseline data Remarks on the data Decision making
the F.S. mining process in the f.s.
ICAEN Actually drawn up Technical No further information on Interest rate > 6% on
forms to audit the information: lighting the data mining process. the investment and
initial situation and equipment, supply Data was completely technical feasibility
an excel evaluation qualitiy, maintance collected by ICAEN and
tool for the works, operational Institute Cerda. The
evaluation of the data and the ”state of sources: public authority,
measures the art” in public maintanance company
calculated. lighting components for costs
such as bulb types (staff+equipment),
and control/ general information on
regulation systems ESCOs etc.
JSP No specific tools Technical and No reports on difficulties
consumption data
were collected by
JSP.
RAEE No specific tools Collected by the Consumption data Energy consumption
consultant.consumpti collected in invoices had and cost savings and
on data collected no informations about pay back time
from the invoices of existing submetering
the energy supply systems and the energy
comp. consumption of
connected buildings
AESS No specific tools Budget data for Good cooperation with Saving potentials
Lighting energy + the public technical office shown in the
system / maintenance cost preliminary study
hospital
ESS Done by real estate Consumption data - Pay back period /
owner successfull contract
design for specific
problems
NELEEAC Questiionnaire by Energy consupmtion No current records Investment costs and
NELEEAC and costs available pay back period
KEA Done by Energy consumption, Was taken from the latest Clear definition of
municipalities latest energy prizes, energy report saving measures to
maintenance costs be realized in the
project, pay back
period and
percentage of
renewables
ICAEN: The datamining process was mainly organized on behalf of actually drawn up forms
for public lighting systems. Interesting is the fact, that not only energy consumption but also
maintenance works and costs are part of the feasibility study. The forms did included the
data mining and also for the calculation of saving measures. All data seems to be collected
by ICAEN and IC. No reports on problems to obtain specific data from the client. The
decision making criteria is mainly based on the technical solution and the interest rate (IRR)
which is considered > 6% on the investment made.
JSP: No specific forms were needed. The needed technical and consumption data were
collected by the F.S. provider.
RAEE: The data collection was done by a specialized consultant. Submetering of energy
consumption was taken into consideration.
AESS: The data collection was done by AESS in close cooperation with public authorities.
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ESS: Metering and submetering systems and the energy utility owned by the real estate
company made data collection quite simple. The tenants data was limited to average load
profiles and to the climate operation conditions. Maintenance costs were not part of the
collection for the roles and responsibilities would not change. In the Vöfab project a number
of meters and submeters made data collection quite easy.
NELEEAC: Own questionnaires were used. Electricity and Gas consumption are not
currently recorded on the site and there is infrequent access to utility data. Additionally the
inconsistency of any site monitoring complicates proper site energy consumption analysis for
the sublet areas of the building, especially with respect to the electricity used in communal
areas, gas used in the Kitchen and for water consumption. At present, this information is not
collated and is not fed into a management reporting structure.
KEA: the PU-BENEFS questionnaire was used. For the data collection, the energy reports,
the frequent energy management reports with information gathered from the frequent visits
on-site of the building and some first weak point auditions could be taken as reliable source.
The strategies and detailed measures were discussed together with the technical staff.
Results:
• Public lighting systems seems to have interesting saving potentials. There are
remarkable differences in the specific average electricity consumption per lightspot
and year (560 in Spain, 775 in Italy).
• Acceptance of complexe contractual structures, technical measures may be better
when a neutral partner such as an energy agency is involved to check the proposed
measures of the FS.
• Control systems for heating plants and rooms, the replacement of inefficient boilers,
pumps and hot water storage as well as public lighting bodies and bulbs have often
been proposed.
• Depending on the prices for primary energy, additional proposals were cogeneration
and wood chip boilers. The wood chip boilers still have pay back periods > 12 years.
ICAEN: The results of the F.S. show an increasing number of lighting sources, total costs for
electricity and maintenance of almost 1 Mio. €. Several measures (lamp replacement, tariff
optimisation, flow regulation, energy management system and service adjustments) are
calculated and packed together in 8 scenarios. Decision making criteria is mainly the
potential cost savings, the total investments, the IRR and the pay back period in years. At
least three scenarios still are in discussion.
JSP: The F.S. highlightens frequency control systems in the ventilation system of a public
swimming pool. No informations about savings and pay- back period are given.
RAEE: The F.S. highlightens the complete range of energy saving measures in public
swimming pools. Major savings by replacement of the boiler system, heat recovery in
ventilation system, removable covert on the swimming pool and a new control system. The
investment costs for some components seem to be calculated low (boiler with 400 kW 9.500
€) which leads to very attractive pay back periods.
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AESS: The weakpoints in the public lighting system had been technologically obsolete
lamps, light bodies with too high light pollution as well as exeeding electricity consumption
and maintenance cost. The measures included the replacement of the bulbs (new ones:
Sodium vapour), the light bodies and step- down transformers and timing devices, which
allow to manage the utilisation hours by an astronomic clock. This in total led to 36% of
consumption savings and a pay back period of 6 years. The specific national average
consumption per light spot is about 180 kWh / a higher than in Barcelona. Hospital: The
measures foreseen were 3 new chp plants and an absorber conditioning system.
ESS: Videum: The main weak point was the inflexible control system, which did not meet the
functionality required to meet the flexible operation of the building. The saving measures
should be carried out in a first step by the real estate company and been paid back by the
tenant in several years. 25% of the savings remained with the tenant.
NELEEAC: A comparison of the Town Hall with the benchmark energy performance
indicators published in the Carbon Trust Publication ECG 019 “Energy use in offices” was
used. The introduction of a 90 kWe CHP system, producing its own electricity would also
minimise the electricity purchased.
Whilst a CHP system would increase the overall gas consumption level, specific gas use for
heating/cooling would be reduced as the plant room would be configured for the CHP to act
as the lead boiler, producing heating and hot water. The implementation of zone controls,
flushing and balancing of radiators and a building energy management system would
significantly enhance the energy performance of the building.
If all the prioritised measures are implemented, the aggregated savings from the measures
identified represent a 63.95% reduction in energy consumption and a 47.17% reduction in
cost or £35,933, which translates into direct cost savings. A reduction of 329.56 tonnes of
CO2 emissions is also estimated per annum.
The benchmark energy performance indicators published in Carbon Trust Publication ECG
078, “Energy use in sports and recreation buildings” shows that the energy performance of
the Bridge Park leisure Centre is within the level of typical practice.
The centre does have scope for improving its Electrical energy use performance by
implementing good management practice and the recommendations outlined in following
pages of this report.
The introduction of a CHP system, producing its own electricity would also minimise the
electricity purchased. Whilst a CHP system would increase the overall gas consumption
level, specific gas used for heating would be reduces as the plant room would be configured
for the CHP to act as the lead boiler producing heating and hot water.
The implementation of zone controls, flushing and balancing of blocked pipes/radiators and a
building energy management system would enhance the energy performance of the building.
If all the prioritised measures are implemented, the aggregated savings from the measures
identified represent a 47% reduction in energy consumption and a 36% reduction in cost or £
27.549, which translates into direct cost savings. A reduction of 289 tonnes of CO2 emissions
is also estimated per annum.
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Table – Part 1 of 2
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Table – Part 2 of 2
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Results:
• The uncertainities resulting from the opening of national energy markets may be another
obstacle. A way to a solution may be, that the baseline is based on a fixes energy
consumption and the energy prizes stay variable. This needs an annual calculation of the
savings and the total contract period needed to pay back the total invest. If gas or
electricity prizes fall, the contract period will be stretched, increasing prizes lead to
shorten the contract period.
• For good baseline data, helpful informations for the FS the good cooperation with the
management and the technical department is an evident point.
ICAEN: The experience is not including a tendering proceeding so far. Still a contract model
has to be designed reflecting the needs of the authorities to handle well known contract
material and give away the risk. It is not sure that ESCOs will take part in a tendering
process.
RAEE: The swimming pool project seems to be too small for an ESCO- project. The main
obstacle seems to be that the proceeding foresees an authorisation of the French ministry of
finance to realise an ESCO project. Also the opening of the French energy market leaves
uncertinties on the development of the energy prizes and the pay back periods.
This effect has also been the case in other countries, where f.e. discreasing electricity prices
led to a break down of chp- measures in ESP.
AESS: The tendering documents for a EPC contract with fixed annual amounts per light
point are prepared in the next step. Good preparation and good framework conditions helped
to bring the project on the way: that the municipality has the need to use ESC or other ways
of Third Party Financing to avoid trouble with the national restrictions on maximum debt. Also
the general policy of personnel reduction is very helpful for the decision to continue the
project. Hospital: the cooperation with the technical staff of the hospital and the acceptance
of the project within the management were crucial points.
ESS: The proceeding choosen in the Videum was a step by step project evaluation and
negotiation guided by ESS. It helped to overcome the both parnters to finalize their
contractual and technical discussions with both parties finding in a balance of their
divergating items.
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NELEEAC: The clients did not have the required data such as the O&M, specification
drawings for the existing system or plants. NELEEAC visited the respective sites and
obtained information for preparing the feasibility study report. Monthly energy consumption
data were not available due to not having separating metering to the relevant sections also
the meter readings available are either quarterly or estimated.
KEA: The energy management system installed by the public buildings administration and
KEA proved to be a reliable base line for the FS and the tendering process.
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The adaptations made by the partners to fit to the specific needs of the local authorities in
their countries are presented in chapter 6.2. The design of these model contracts in the
partner languages can be found on the partners web pages.
This section is used to clearly state what this contract is for and how it will work. It is an
overview of the agreement and also gives the official names of the company and municipality
and the names of the people who are the main contacts.
It is through this formal contract document that both parties wish to work together in co-
operation to achieve the goals of
• Increased energy efficiency resulting in a reduction of CO2 release to the
environment.
• Reduced energy costs for the Client
• Reward of profit on activities carried out for the ESCO
The intention of this contract is mainly to support the reduction programme of CO2 in the
environment as well as to reduce the energy costs of the client. (Change as required)
Based on the baseline survey of the facilities with respect to the energy usage, energy costs,
state of repair of machinery/plant, the resulting measures are considered to be necessary by
both parties to this contract. The baseline survey results are listed in Section 2 (Baseline
facilities and Costs). These measures to be implemented are listed in Section 3 (Scope of
project).
The Parties have the understanding that the Client/ESCO shall pay for the investment with
savings accrued during the contract period/investment to be recouped from savings.
(Change as required)
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DETAILS OF PARTIES
CLIENT
Authorised Project Representative of the ESCO for all matters concerning this
contract. Contact:
Tel:
Fax:
Mobile:
e-mail:
INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR
Nothing in this agreement shall be construed as creating a partnership, a contract of
employment or a relationship of principal and agent between the Client and the ESCO. (see
2 and 9.3)
In order to determine the annual energy reduction, it shall be necessary to fix the
consumption of the base year and in what context the fuel was used. The following sections
record all baseline information. It is suggested that a full description is put in Appendix 1.
A. BUILDING FABRIC
The existing building/facilities/realty consists of:
Insert here a description (3.1) of the building, its uses, its address, etc
B. EQUIPMENT SCHEDULE
Insert here a description of the existing energy systems such as heating by electric, by gas,
by oil. Detailed information of types and model names etc of plant, including boilers,
instrumentation and controls, lighting type, age status etc., (or All as detailed in Appendix 1)
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Important. Gather as much detail about the initial state of the building as possible. This is
the only time you can and this will be the definitive record.
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G. AIR CHANGES
(Enter here any details of air volume changes)
The parties have jointly agreed the targets as stated below. Savings targets are set on the
following basis:
System run times, capacity levels and comfort levels are to be maintained at Baseline year
levels.
Energy consumption in the last X years- ????
Measurement and studies carried out- ??.
Savings Target.
The target is to achieve, with actions agreed in this contract, the following savings:
According to this agreement, the ESCO guarantees, that after system commissioning and all
actions, the consumption of primary energy will not exceed yy MWh/a (normal/identical year)
Estimated saved energy is xx-yyMWh/a and during the contract period of aaa years and
therefore the total saved energy amount will be zzzz MWh.
Baseline energy price is ee €/MWh and thus present energy cost is qqq (excl VAT)
ESCO and client shall work in close cooperation in order to make sure that all actions,
installations and maintenance is according to the contract and follow up on all savings
received.
To adjust the annual heating demand, the local heat index shall be used.
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OR The energy costs baseline has been determined on the basis of the calculation
instructions set out in Annex x.
The parties determine an overall energy cost value (energy costs baseline) based on the
calculation regulations and the reference period as follows:
Example Reference costs net / reference period 01/04/2005 to 31/03/2006
Gas: € 0.00 per unit
Oil: € 0.00 per litre
LPG: € 0.00 per litre
Solid Fuel: € 0.00 per tonne.
Wood Chips: € 0.00 per tonne
Heat: € 0.00 per unit
Electricity: € 0.00 per unit
Water: € 0.00 per m³
Energy costs baseline: €0.00
TARGET COSTS
The energy costs baseline in the reference period is based on the energy supply prices (net)
of the respective energy suppliers per consumption unit and part of the contractual object
applicable to the relevant period in accordance with Annex ?. The Client shall be under an
obligation to let the ESCO examine the calculation documents which form the basis of
Annex x and make copies of the documents at the ESCO’s expense at any time upon first
request.
SAVING GUARANTEE
As its main performance the ESCO represents and warrants that the energy saving
measures from the beginning of the main obligation to perform until the end of the Contract
will reduce the above mentioned energy costs per settlement period by an amount of € net
excluding turnover tax, in accordance with the calculation principles agreed. (This obviously
is dependent on energy tariffs. Beware.)
(Short description of intended actions) e.g. installing CHP, ground source heating, insulating
roofs, double glazing, ventilation, cooling system ,cold and hot water etc., followed by their
operation for a period of ß years.
The Client will order and the ESCO will supply the following System.
The scope of the ESCO’s work will cover design, fabrication, erection, commissioning,
operation, fuel supply, dismantling and…
The client/or/Supplier is responsible for the maintenance of the equipment included in the
system during the contract period.
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The ESCO has the right to connect the system to its own remote monitoring system.
The control of the system and the building indoor environment will be controlled and
monitored by ESCO supplied equipment. The Client has the/no right to alter these controls
without consent from the ESCO.
The ESCO has the right to make check visits and change system settings; however the
agreed indoor environmental conditions must be met.
6.1.4 Liabilities
This section sets out the liabilities of each party. i.e. the things that they are expected to carry
out as part of the contract. It comprises more than is required, and any items not required
should be deleted.
ESCO’S LIABILITIES
During the period of the contract the ESCO shall be (Delete if not) liable for:
a) Designing and engineering such energy saving measures as are required for the
achievement of the set targets. Such measures may include, but are not limited to those
dealing with heating the building, cooling the building, provision of hot water, provision of
cold water, lighting, water supply and /or treatment, waste disposal, fuel purchase and
fuel sales
b) Specifying, tendering and awarding works under this contract. Contractors chosen to be
awarded works shall be regarded as under contract with the ESCO/Client (delete as
applicable).
c) Financing and/or purchasing all capital equipment.
d) Remunerating all contractors’ costs for installing the equipment.
e) Remaining qualified as in Appendix 3.
f) Providing information, instruction and training for the Client personnel in the operation
and maintenance of the system (if Client ops & Maintenance). Details, quality and
quantity shall be agreed before signing.
g) Checking periodically that instructions (f. above) are being followed.
h) Reporting to Client of all deviations noticed during such checks.
i) Investigating if components or system not operating to specification.
j) Reporting to Client if improper operation is resulting in targets being missed.
k) Maintaining the equipment. However if the ESCO fails promptly to carry out any work
including maintenance which it is required to carry out then the Client may give notice to
the ESCO requiring such work to be carried out and if, within seven days of any such
notice, the ESCO has failed to take reasonable steps to have such work carried out or if
at ant later date the ESCO fails to proceed diligently with such work, then the Client or its
representatives may thereafter carry out such work and deduct the cost of those works
out of any annual service charge.
l) Ensuring that it’s staff follows good workmanship standards.
m) Providing to the Client, at least once per year, details of the water treatment and a
chemical analysis of the hot water generated by the system. Standard of such report to
be agreed before signing.
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n) Maintain in good condition and repair the Existing Plant until the works are carried out.
o) Providing and ensuring the suitability of the New Plant and Equipment and ensure that it
complies with statutory requirements and is sufficient capacity to carry out its obligations
under this agreement.
p) Keeping the energy system in a good state of repair and condition, as may reasonably be
necessary to enable it to carry out its obligations. If any alteration is required to be made
to the energy system in order to provide the service, then the ESCO shall carry out the
works at no cost to the Client.
q) Preparing a dossier of drawings, manuals (both operating and maintenance), test
certificates and databases relating to the installed equipment.
r) Preparing a maintenance regime for the equipment. Such regime shall consist of tasks,
periodicities, lubrication schedules, testing schedules and the like.
s) Keeping all drawings, manuals and databases up to date.
t) Preparing and submitting to the Client for approval all necessary applications for planning
permission and other applications for consent and approvals for the installation of new
plant and equipment and operation of the system.
u) At all times during the period of contract, making available continuous supplies of heating
and hot water to the Client and Occupiers.
v) Indemnifying the Client against any loss or damage to the New Plant and Equipment due
to any vandalism, negligence, neglect. Tampering, error or any other act or omission on
the part of the ESCO, his representatives, agents or contractors.
w) The ESCO is not liable for any indirect or consequential damage if not caused by
conscious action or gross negligence of its staff.
CLIENT’S LIABILITIES
During the period of the contract the Client shall be (Delete if not) liable to:
a) Use the equipment and systems included in the project according to the instructions
given by the ESCO.
b) Report immediately all failures and/or breakdowns of equipment to the ESCO.
c) Report information the ESCO may need in order to successfully perform its contract
obligations including:
• any disruption in energy consumption.
• any results of inspections and tests.
d) Let the ESCO representatives perform maintenance, checking or adjustment at agreed
times.
e) Send a report to ESCO within xxxx days of end of reporting period, where savings are
shown based on continuous measurement. The report may consist of copies of relevant
energy bills, meter readings (where ESCO does not have remote indication), other
agreed and relevant reports.
f) Inform without delay all activities or circumstances which may affect the project’s services
or liabilities.
g) Keep the structure of the facilities in a good state of repair and condition.
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h) Co-operate with the ESCO in order to ensure smooth cooperation with Client personnel
in all phases of the project.
i) Bring its contribution for the successful implementation of the project.
j) Ensure that it’s staff carry out their duties in a professional and safe manner.
k) Provide the ESCO with copies of all known drawings and operating manuals in the
Client’s possession relevant to the ESCO’s performance of this agreement.
l) Provide all Baseline Data
m) Carry out routine maintenance in line with the recommended program. (If maintenance is
carried out by Client, yet not in strict accordance with regime supplied by ESCO, then any
downtime, and resultant loss of savings, will not reflect on ESCO’s income.)
n) Agree to provide the ESCO with a monthly payment to cover the ESCO’s outgoings, in
the event that the ESCO is prevented from performing its duties by factors beyond its
control.
o) Effect an insurance after the completion for the whole duration of the contract. This
insurance is against all risks like fire, explosion, theft and pilferage, vandalism and floods.
The ESCO has the right to be shown the documents to make sure that the insurance is
effective.
6.1.5 Schedules
This section is included to clearly state the start and end dates of of the contract and or its
various sections. .
This project shall consist of 2 phases: the Construction Phase and the Operational Phase.
The system and its associated services shall be started up no later than __/__/2___. This
date marks the finish of the Construction Phase and the start of the Operational Phase.
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a) The ESCO shall be responsible for the compliance of each of its Contractor Parties with all
applicable health and safety legislation, rules, regulations and requirements of statutory or
regulatory authorities.
b) Where the CDM Regulations apply to the Works, the ESCO shall assume the obligations
on behalf of the Client as the client for the purposes of the CDM Regulations, and in
complying with its obligations in respect of the CDM Regulations, the ESCO shall:
• Make a declaration to the Health and Safety Executive in accordance with paragraph
4(4) of the CDM Regulations that it is the only client in respect of the Works;
• Appoint a Planning Supervisor and a principal contractor in respect of the Works and
to take such steps as are in the circumstances reasonable to ensure that each is
provided with the relevant information to enable him to perform his duties under the
CDM Regulations;
• Allow sufficient time and resources to enable the Planning Supervisor and principal
contractor to comply with their obligations relating to health and safety matters arising
from the CDM Regulations and to co-operate with them to that end;
• Notify the Planning Supervisor and principal contractor of any change in the
circumstances relating to the Works of which it is or ought reasonably to be aware
which may affect the health and safety of persons involved, or likely to become
involved, in the Works;
• Include in the design all information relating to the design and materials which might
reasonably affect the health and safety of persons working on the Works and its
maintenance and repair;
• Procure and deliver to the Client upon the Service Commencement Date the health
and safety file prepared, maintained and completed as required by the CDM
Regulations.
c) The Client shall be responsible for the compliance of each Client Party with the applicable
health and safety legislation, rules, regulations and requirements of statutory or regulatory
authorities and shall provide to the ESCO with information which it has in its possession and
which it reasonably considers would assist the ESCO in the performance of the ESCO’s
Obligations.
d) Design Development. Notwithstanding the fact that the ESCO must design and engineer
the facilities, the fact that the facilities are in fact a modification to the Client’s building
requires that all designs are shown to the client before construction commences.
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e) The ESCO shall not commence construction of any part of the Works in respect of which
the Reviewed Design Documents relating thereto have not come into being.
f) The ESCO shall at its own expense prepare and/or procure the preparation of and submit
to the Client’s Representative three copies (including copy negatives and CAD disks) of the
Outstanding Design Documents which clearly demonstrate and fully describe the ESCO’s
proposed design for the Plant and Equipment.
g) Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Notwithstanding the fact that the overall aim
of the project is environmentally positive, the ESCO shall conduct an EIA on the complete
project with a view to minimising all impacts, such as noise, waste, vents and other
damages.
6.1.7 Payments
NORMAL PAYMENTS MECHANISM
It is understood by both parties to this contract that all/percentage of the calculated monthly
savings are to be paid to the ESCO. Such calculations are to be made by the ESCO,
presented to the Client and, if approved, paid within 30 days.
OR
It is understood by both parties to this contract that one twelfth part of the annual targeted
savings will be to the ESCO each month. At the end of each twelve month period, a
reconciliation of savings and payments will be completed. The total 12 month difference
(either positive or negative) is to be carried forward to be added to the target savings for the
next twelve month period.
ADVANCE PAYMENTS
The price of the system is _____________ Euro. During the supply period the Client shall
pay to the ESCO advance payments as follows:
(This is included in the case of third party financing where payments may be due before
supply period completion)
In the case that the agreed saving is exceeded, the Client shall pay the ESCO 50% of the
achieved additional savings.
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In the case that the agreed saving is not achieved or cannot be verified as not achieved due
to common nuisance, temporary closing of facility, break in production, operation of
equipment differently from instructions, strike or other reason beyond control of ESCO, the
ESCO is not responsible for possible deviation from set target.
If any supply made or referred to in this Agreement is or becomes chargeable to VAT then
the person receiving the supply (the “Recipient”) shall in addition pay the person making the
supply (the “Supplier”) the amount of that VAT against receipt by the Recipient from the
Supplier of a proper VAT invoice in respect of that supply.
Where under this Agreement any amount is calculated by reference to any sum which has or
may be incurred by any person, the amount shall include any VAT in respect of that amount
only to the extent that such VAT is not recoverable as input tax by that person (or a member
of the same VAT group), whether by set-off or repayment).
The ESCO shall provide the Client with any information reasonably requested by the Client in
relation to the amount of VAT chargeable in accordance with this Agreement and payable by
the Authority to the ESCO.
The ESCO shall endeavour to arrange all such work by prior agreement with the Client and
Occupier with minimal disruption and loss of service.
C. INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR
Nothing in this Agreement shall be construed as creating a partnership, a contract of
employment or a relationship of principal and agent between the Authority and the ESCO.
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D. WAIVER
No term or provision of this Agreement shall be considered as waived by any Party unless a
waiver is given in writing by that Party.
No waiver under this clause shall be a waiver of a past or future default or breach, nor shall it
amend, delete or add to the terms, conditions or provisions of this Agreement unless (and
then only to the extent) expressly stated in that waiver.
E. FORMAL AGREEMENT
Unless otherwise stated in this Agreement, this Agreement together with relevant documents
referred to herein constitute the entire agreement between the Parties in connection with its
subject matter and supersede all prior representations, communications, negotiations and
understandings concerning the subject matter of this Agreement.
No Party has relied on any representation except as expressly set out in this Agreement.
F. SEVERABILITY
If any term, condition or provision contained in this Agreement shall be held to be invalid,
unlawful or unenforceable to any extent, such term, condition or provision shall not affect the
validity, legality or enforceability of the remaining parts of this Agreement.
G. COUNTERPARTS
This Agreement may be executed in any number of counterparts, all of which when taken
together shall constitute one and the same instrument.
H. LAW OF THE CONTRACT AND JURISDICTION
This Agreement shall be governed by the laws of [country] and subject to the Dispute
Resolution Procedure, the Parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the Courts of
[country].
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I. NOTICES
Any notice to be given under this Agreement shall be delivered personally or sent by post or
by facsimile transmission or by electronic mail to the address or facsimile number of the
other party set out below: -
Client: [ ]
FAO: [ ]
Address: [ ]
Facsimile Number: [ ]
E-Mail [ ]
ESCO: [ ]
FAO: [ ]
Address: [ ]
Facsimile Number: [ ]
E-Mail [ ]
Any such notice shall be deemed to be served, if delivered personally, at the time of delivery
or, if sent by post, 48 (forty eight) hours after posting or, if sent by facsimile transmission, 24
(twenty four) hours after proper transmission evidenced by a confirmatory transmission sheet
not indicating any transmission error and provided always that a copy of the notice is posted
by recorded delivery post to the receiving party on the day of transmission.
J. CONFIDENTIALITY
The parties of the contract are obliged to keep all information received with regard to this
contract secret towards third parties who are not involved.
However, the ESCO may inform co-workers, subcontractors and other third parties if
necessary and as long as they keep the received information secret themselves.
K. CANCELLATION OF THE CONTRACT
The client can withdraw from this contract
• if bankruptcy proceedings are instituted against the ESCO;
• if the ESCO violates clauses of the contract even after repeated warnings;
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In the case of the cancellation of the contract on the part of the ESCO, the ESCO has the
immediate right of remuneration amounting to the open amount of money. The guaranteed
energy cost savings are considered as obtained for the whole duration of the contract.
L. SETTLEMENT OF DISPUTES
(1) In the case of disputes concerning the energy savings, the energy agency of the country
where the building is, shall be engaged as an arbitrator for the settlement. If the client, the
ESCO and the energy agency cannot find an agreement within two months or if the energy
agency refuses an involvement, each party can ask at the chair of the national chamber of
commerce for the provision of a certified expert. Such an expert will prepare a report. The
costs shall be divided between the client and the ESCO. The report is not obligatory for the
parties but a basis for the further settlement out of court.
(2) In the case that a settlement of the dispute is not possible, it is agreed that court action
will be used.
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In France, the Procurement Contract Code makes it compulsory to separate investments and
operating costs for any equipment, and prohibits the use of operating costs as part payment
for investments. It is therefore not easy to set up energy efficiency services including the
investment. Since 2004, a decree has authorised public-private partnership contracts which
must allow the creation of contracts incorporating the investment. However, application
conditions are limited (urgency or complexity and proven economic benefit) and the
procedure is complex. For the time being, the only energy efficiency contracts that exist
concern public external lighting.
Within this context, the main energy efficiency services that can be implemented by
authorities are operating agreements with profit sharing and guaranteed results. The
authority can then, based on guaranteed savings, use leasing to finance its investments.
This contract model was drawn up based on examples of contracts and specifications
guidelines for operating agreements published in June 2007 by the Ministry of the Economy.
We have attached to it the general and technical terms and conditions allowing calls for
tender to be launched.
We have also asked a legal adviser (Cabinet Merlin) to provide technical and legal
comments on the model in order to attract users’ attention to key points in the contract and
limitations imposed by the Procurement Contract Code.
All of the documents proposed can be downloaded with the CDROM on the web site:
http://www.raee.org/pubenefs_cdr/services.swf
allowing any authority who so wishes to launch a call for tender with profit sharing and full
guarantee, to be in compliance with the Procurement Contract Code. They must of course
be completed on a case by case basis with
- data specific to authority equipment and buildings (list of equipment, consumption
objectives…)
- specific requirements: equipment renewal, price revision indexes…
Adaptation to each specific case is very technical and it is advised to use a specialist
consulting office to assist them the first time that they carry out the process.
This example was used in summer 2007 for the Grand Roanne Agglomération call for tender,
as part of the Pubenefs project, with the support of specialised consulting office (GIRUS,
Lyon, France). This example has been added to the French Pu-benefs web site.
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The contract model designed for the context of the Emilia-Romagna region is a blended one.
The model is split up in 2 main parts: 1 concerning the ordinary energy service (O&M), 1
relating to specific energy saving measures: the Italian Local Authority is interested to join
the different functions (O&M, retrofitting and energy supply) into one only “Global Energy
Service” contract ---> mixed Supply+EPC contract defined in the New Directive 2006/32/CE
“Combined Energy Saving and Delivery Contract”
In the bids evaluation, a share will concern costs and quality of the service, while one other
will regard the percentage of guaranteed saving (for the same duration and saving %, over
the minimum, admitted by the Local Authority), beside the quantity and quality of the
foreseen investments regarding the technical evaluation.
Among the several contract versions, there could be the one concerning the sharing of the
guaranteed saving between customer and ESCO.
Over the last 10 years, the Energy Service has been implemented mainly in the public sector
and, though less, in the blocks of flats.
In the initial phase the contract has been implemented in a very utilitarian way, limiting the
service to the energy supply and to O&M activities, with a little attention to the technological
renovation and to energy saving aspects. The Finances Ministry controls nevertheless were
addressed to formal aspects.
In the last years, following the boiler’s technological evolution (with high efficiency compared
to the existing boilers, usually obsolete and in bad conditions) the proposals by the market
actors focussed on the replacement of old plants, with retrofitting and in compliance with the
law measures on the overall central heating system.
This way of implementation of the Energy Service could be compared to the contract
typology called in the Directive 2006/32/CE, Energy Supply Contract or “Facility Contract” or
“Delivery Contract”, in other words Delivery of useful energy.
By this contract, the service supplier becomes responsible for the financing, design,
implementation and management (fuel procurement, ordinary and extraordinary O&M,
selling) of an energy production plant (both thermal and electrical or even CHP) used for a
specific building, new or existing.
The service profit is due to the payment of the useful energy actually delivered and in some
cases, to the contribution achieved for the value of the implemented plant.
The technical skills of the service supplier allow better performance and efficiency, thus
making possible a reduction of the consumption of primary energy and a competitive price of
the produced energy.
The main objection toward the Energy Service normally implemented is that the interest of
the user (to reduce his own final consumption) is opposite to the plant manager, paid
proportionally to the consumption computed by the heating meters.
The control of the heating power station and of the plant is usually in the manager’s hands,
who can be tempted to increase instead of decrease the consumption.
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During the 1st meeting of the Pu-Benefs Advisory Committee the issue was debated and
some proposals were put forward.
The first concerns the replacement of the “mono-tariff” (directly proportional to the computed
heat, generally 15-20% of the overall amount) with a two-tariff (one amount – including the
labour costs – is fixed, while another amount is variable – covering the fuel costs). This way
the interest of the plants manager in increasing unjustly the consumption is limited, since on
this amount he has no relevant profit margin.
The second solution is to limit the consumption control to the plants manager, i.e. through the
use of thermostatic valves on the radiators or the computing for each flat or sector.
A third possibility is to combine a Energy Supply Contract with the basic elements of the
Energy Performance Contract (the energy saving objective is reached through either
technical or behaviour measures).
This type of contract allow to work either on measures concerning the generator or on
downstream measures (i.e. regarding the temperature control, the automatic system of
building energy management, the attention to avoid wastage). This type of contract could be
defined “Combined Energy Saving and Delivery Contract”
These models are already applied in several of the Municipalities we are working with,
showing to be quite successful, both in terms of energy and money saving for the public body
implementing them.
The contract model normally adopted can be downloaded from the AESS website, section
“Cosa Facciamo – Pu-Benefs”
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Due to the demand of the public authorities, energy supply contracting is more or less drawn
from the agenda by EPC projects. Other services discussed such as leasing or financial
services do not play an important role in our region. The type of contract which we have
given priority was the EPC model contract.
The DENA EPC model contract with some specific adjustments meeting the needs of our
EPC project design, mainly the long contract periods and features related to the
consequences of such contract periods. Adjustments were made in the ESCO duties on
maintenance and refurbishment of the energy saving investments (sharing of the risk
between ESCO and administration or a complete risk overtaking by the ESCO).
The adjustments of the measured energy savings also were highlighted. According to
recommendations and experiences of other project partners we started to simplify the
methods for the calculation of the adjustments.
Other shortfalls of the DENA model contract were taken out. The market implementation
strategy for PC projects which is preferred by KEA in Baden Württemberg is based on
energy saving measures which are supporting refurbishment measures which have more or
less only indirect impact on the energy consumption of the building.
This strategy meets very successful the requirements of PPP projects in Baden-
Württembergs communities. The results of this strategy are long term contract periods which
have been reached in some projects 18 years.
The effects on the content of the contracts are additional regulations for changing using
conditions, changing ownership, and the duties of the contractor for the maintenance and
reinvestment in his energy saving investments in such long contract periods.
The draft version of the model contract has been discussed with experienced municipalities
and performance contractors in May 2007. These discussions created a general acceptance
of the model contract and keepg it close to the latest market developments.
The content table of the proposed model contract is available on the KEA web site
www.keabw.de/index.php?id=90.
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The contracts used were derived from Government contract formats already established by:
The Carbon Trust, The Energy Saving Trust for developing ESCO services in the UK
The contract models and case study details are note on the relevant section on the London
Energy Supplies and services (LESS) and Thames Energy’s website.
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1 2 3 4 5 6
-Prequalification
-Tendering
-Contract negotiation
The three contract structure for EPC and real estate development
1. DEA, Detailed Energy The result of contract 1 determines if, with what content and on
Analysis and Project what terms the project will move forward to contract 2. At this
Development (ABK contract) point is normally also contract 3 signed.
Since Sweden currently don’t have any “standardised all inclusive” EPC contracts, a relatively
progressive approach, of combining modified versions of other standard contracts are being
applied. ABK covers the consultancy part of the DEA, while ABT covers an “all inclusive” building
contract and ABFF covers the more structured O&M efforts (all these contracts can be incentive based)
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1 Frame
Agreement
2 DEA
Agreement
PU-Benefs has significantly
3 Building supported and influenced the
Agreement Swedish models, especially in
terms of:
4 Guarantee - Emphasis on Baseline calculation
Agreement - Tendering and evaluation structure
- The two-stage procurement model
- Clearing roles & responsibilities
- Guarantee & follow up structures
- Financial models & understanding
No formal evaluation of the contract models has been conducted yet, but experiences and
feedback gathered from the networking with Forum for Energy Services indicate an overall
positive feedback. However the feedback also highlighted the risk that this contracting
structure, and especially its usage together with some very demanding and costly
procurement structures, could increase the market barriers for new ESCO’s and thereby
contributing to an unwanted market concentration with limited competition.
The issue of balancing necessary demands for quality and structure, with the over all
objective of developing a broad and diverse ESCO market, will be an ongoing challenge for
the future Swedish ESCO work.
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The tendering phase contract model developed in the Eurocontract project features:
• The customer announces for the supplier commercial and juridical conditions, under
which the contract is done
• It corresponds the contract program in a building contract
• It is suitable for contracts in which also construction engineering is done in addition
with heating, plumbing and air conditioning work
- if only some simple heating, plumbing and air conditioning work is done, the
contract model can and should be lightened
• It guides what should be announced to the supplier and how it should be done
The general ESCO contract features all the necessary information for ESCO contracting,
including
• The parties and general issues
• Description of the energy saving measures and target savings
• Schedule
• Price, payments and savings deviating from the targets
• Conditions of payment
• Responsibilities of the parties
• List of contract documents
• Duration of the contract
• Changes in the contract, transferring the contract
• Disagreements and the legislation applied
• Signatures
The tendering phase contract model is developed (mainly for municipalities) by the national
energy agency Motiva as a part of the Eurocontract project. The general ESCO contract
model is developed and used by a large builder, developer and company, and it is validated
with their lawyers.
The general ESCO contract model has been applied successfully several times. There are
currently no experiences of applying the tendering phase model.
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Type of contract:
Contracting form:
o Contract:
Guaranteed savings: recommended, because it is the company that is
liable for both financial and technical risks
Shared savings: not recommended, because, though the company is
liable for technical risks, the administration is responsible for financial
risk
o Mixed enterprise:
Financial and technical risks are shared between the company and the
administration, which also takes a share in the project.
This form is often used in the case of a new work requiring operation,
which is not the case with Sant Jaume d’Enveja Town Hall.
o Concession:
Company liable for risks.
Generally used for long contract periods, this is not the case within this
study.
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The contract model for energy services proposed would have to follow the following
structure:
The model was discussed and approved by the members of the advisory committee, on
which both companies providing partial energy services and local authorities were
represented. Suggestions made by participants at the various meetings were included in the
project after study of their impact and assessment of the effect of their inclusion.
Moreover, legal expert advice was obtained in order to precisely define the possibilities
offered by the energy service contract.
Regarding application, it is too early to assess this as present, as the Catalan local
authorities that have begun to contract energy services for their buildings did not only over
recent months, and there has as yet been no feedback.
In order to promote and support local authorities beginning to consider contracting energy
services in this way, a copy of the model contract has been posted on the ICAEN website,
www.icaen.net, and we also plan to provide detailed, permanently-updated about this
mechanism for increasing energy efficiency.
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The model contract translated was selected because it is a typical example of a well
established ESCO and a municipality in the region. In the frame of the Upper Austrian
support programme for EPC projects, this contract model was already checked and
approved by ESV, who manages the programme. Moreover, this Upper Austrian support
programme requires certain crucial points that have to be taken into account within a
TPF/EPC contract. For a successful implementation of projects, it is necessary that the
respective contract lays down rules for all relations between the client and the ESCO which
are resulting from the project and including for example:
• explicit statement of the contract duration
• What is to be done in the event of damage or loss (maintenance)?
• What is to be done in the case of bankruptcy of a contracting party?
• What is to be done if the designated use of the building changes?
• Are there provisions for changes of energy prices foreseen?
• Guaranteed energy savings and provisions for the allocation of guaranteed cost
savings as well as consequences if the guaranteed savings are not met
• Passing the risk and the property
• What is to be done if the building is sold?
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• A brochure with the results, explaining the specificity of public procurement in the field
of energy services and including some of the best practices studied
• A CD-ROM with general information about energy efficiency, with the guidelines for
feasibility studies and the contract model(s) designed.
In the following the detailed content of these tools are presented by each partner. There are
also available on the partner’s web pages. An English version of the booklet with a general
presentation of energy efficiency services and some best practices is available on the project
gateway.
The different solutions: operating agreements with profit sharing, global contracts with
investment and operation, public-private partnerships
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A simplified diagram allows each party to identify where they are in relation to EESs and
what they can or must do. It also provides direct access to study additional material, contract
models, specification guides…).
• Examples of operating agreements with profit sharing and full guarantee
• Examples of best practice (7 examples in France and Europe)
• The Pubenefs programme
• Booklet
• Additional documents
- Reference guides,
- Legislative texts
- Training actions
- Internet links
Available on http://www.raee.org/pubenefs_cdr/services.swf
After a general introduction, describing the Pu-Benefs aims and content, a deepened section
on Energy Services in Italy and Europe, especially in relation to the Directive 2006/32/EC,
follows.
In order to show that many Public Bodies already concretely experienced, all over Europe
and Italy, Energy Efficiency Services and contracts, 4 best practice cases (from Italy, Spain,
Germany and Austria) are reported.
The produced cd-rom deals with topics partly reported in the booklet and partly not.
Specifically the content, all in Italian, as follows:
• presentation of the Pu-Benefs project;
• Guidelines for the Feasibility Studies related to Energy Efficiency Services;
• Abstract of the carried out Feasibility Studies within the EIE project;
• EU Best Practices catalogue produced by the Pu-Benefs Consortium
• Contract model and technical specifications.
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CD ROM
It presents contract models.
Contents List
1 / Why use energy efficiently
2 / European and national energy efficiency policy
2.1 / European policy
2.2 / UK policy
3 / Implementation of energy efficiency services
3.1 / Specificity of public bodies
3.2 / Tools available
3.3/ Ways to implement energy efficiency services
4/ Case studies
4.1/ Langdon Hills Housing Estate- Basildon
4.2/ Waltham Forest Town Hall
4.3/ Woking Borough Council
4.4/ Street lighting in Austria
4.5/ Hospital in Barcelona
4.6/ School in Germany
About Thames Energy Limited
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Booklet
The Swedish booklet produced starts with an introduction to the PU-Benefs project and its
overall objective to support the public sector in their striving towards increased energy
efficiency and decreased environmental impact. The content is then divided in six chapters
successively giving the reader more information about EPC and other Energy Efficiency
Services as well as the practical, legal and financial aspects of their realisation:
CD ROM
The CD ROM produced is intended to serve as a complement to the brochure for those
needing more information and templates for starting developing their own projects. Another
objective is to put the concept of EPC and Energy Services in the context of the new Energy
Service Directive by highlighting the expectations on the public sector to move ahead and
serve as good examples.
The content of the CD ROM is therefore composed of 5 chapters giving the reader both
background, process guidelines and contract templates:
The Swedish booklet and the content of the CD ROM can be downloaded from the webpage
of the Swedish PU-Benefs partner Energy Agency for Southeast Sweden at
www.energikontor-so.com.
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We have carried out several types of spreading mechanisms as: internal communication with
technicians of other Departments of Catalan government, information exchange with other
communities, participation in national conferences, training seminars and specific
conferences, as well as information to all municipalities who are interested in making an
energy audit to implement energy saving measures. The main contributions have been:
Publications
Web page
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The booklet contains general information on EPC and TPF, e.g. contract design, FAQ'
s, how
to get subsidies in Upper Austria for EPC & TPF projects, etc. and also 8 best practice
examples of Upper Austrian municipalities and companies which have already implemented
such projects in public and company buildings.
The booklet was disseminated in the frame of the dissemination workshop on 28 September
2006 and it was also sent to all 444 municipalities in Upper Austria and other important target
groups like ESCOs, potential clients of such projects, etc. There is also the possibility to
download the booklet from the project-website of O.Ö. Energiesparverband.
The booklet is available for download and the CD-ROM can be ordered for free at ESV.
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As it was stated already in the beginning the need for training is very high within the technical
services of the public bodies.
Therefore each partner organised at least on dedicated training seminar for technicians of
the local authorities (e.g. departments of building management, public works, procurement
etc.) and other interested persons and organisations.
With a view to optimise future seminars and also to receive feed back concerning the general
appreciation of energy efficiency services and the implementation obstacles by the trainees
questionnaires were distributed and the returned one analysed.
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The speakers were chosen on account of their expertise, their experience and their
complementary skills in the EES sector:
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In term of outcome, the initiative was rewarding since the two training sessions have resulted
in a new feasibility study (District Council of Montmélian) and several requests for assistance
have been obtained to better understand the needs. (Community of District Councils of
Portes de l’Isère, District Council of Vif, District Council of Echirolles) and have already
resulted in two studies and many interesting contracts.
The advisory committee has decided to renew these training sessions next semester.
In addition, several additional demand points have been identified, particularly regarding the
formulas for energy price indexation and these will be addressed at special sessions in
autumn.
The fact that no study has been launched following the proposals shows that even where
some interest is shown, authorities are not ready to implement energy efficiency services.
It seems that energy efficiency services are considered complex to implement (it is clear that
it requires a significant change compared with current practices) and that authorities are
anxious about subcontracting energy to private partners.
An energy efficiency services study has been initiated by a participant as part of an energy
audit.
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Your opinion on good and necessary conditions to develop energy efficiency services
• The need to raise awareness amongst local authorities is a priority in order to create
demand (Information / training of local authorities / public bodies to create the
demand).
• Participants also emphasize the need for more favourable general conditions (such
as a higher energy price).
Finally, it appears that removing obstacles from the Procurement Contract Code is a
desirable prerequisite for initiating development.
(clear political support by having removed the obstacles in the public procurement
procedures) .
Setting up a quality management procedure for energy efficiency services, elaborating a
guideline to follow from feasibility study till negotiation phase, setting up a clearing house for
independent information and assistance to local authorities and facilitating, through
subsidies, first energy efficiency services seem less important.
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Short description:
The seminar was targeted to civil servants-technicians of the Public Bodies located within
Modena and Bologna provinces.
The main goal was to introduce or deepen elements related to innovative financial schemes
for improving the energy efficiency of public buildings.
framework on the conditions for the adoption of Energy Efficiency Services in the
public sector in Italy;
the Feasibility Study as preliminary analysis tool for energy contracts
basic elements of EPC and Energy Services in the public sector
opportunities and obstacles
the choice of the sound Energy Service contract
solutions for contract models
project development and budgets for contract projects
best practices at national level
market projections
Two trainers developed the several issues: Mr Marcello Antinucci (AESS Modena) and Mr
Stefano Rugginenti (Local Authorities Energy consultant).
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Interesting especially the sections concerning the impact the training had on the daily work of
the participant technicians.
Among the 9 people, 5 had the opportunity to propose to their public body the
implementation of energy efficiency services, while 4 did not still have any interesting
opportunity.
The same balance is respected with the following questions: only 1 Local Authority was
interested and took action, 4 claimed to be interested but didn’t act and 4 did not gave any
answer.
The main reasons why the Public Bodies didn’t accept to resort to Energy Efficiency Services
were the following:
• too complicated to put into practice (ex. baseline determination, several departments
to get involved)
• cooperation/outsourcing with private partners (service provider) not accepted
• risk of conflicts with private service provider too high
Another necessary condition to develop energy efficiency service is the “Information / training
of local authorities / public bodies to create the demand”, while the third useful tool indicated
by the participants is a “guideline to follow from feasibility study till the negotiation phase”.
These data confirms the regional context is still pretty immature in the field of Energy
Efficiency Services but, at the same time, the technical level of the public bodies showed to
be quite aware on the conditions and tools needed in order to foster the dissemination all
over the region of such contracts/financial schemes (not last one, the creation of a clearer
support by the local politicians).
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Short description:
After the surprising success of our first contracting congress in Stuttgart held in February
2006 in cooperation with the German Energy Agency DENA, KEA, the association of Baden
Württembergs small and large scale municipal administrations (Gemeinde – and Städtetag)
the planning for the next meeting started in December 2006. The work shop session should
take place on the afternoon of the same day as the congress to avoid the costs and time for
the participants from the municipal administrations. The work shop should give room for the
spreading of very detailed information on the experience made in running EPC and Energy
supply projects.
After lunch the work shop session took place from 13h – 17h30. To keep all the participants
active in the work shop 3 representative projects (Weil from the PU Benefs project together
with Siemens, Mannheim together with MVV, and Nagold together with the energy supply
contractor Gauß) were presented by the ESCO and the municipal representatives.
Results, follow-up
This kind of presentation gave both participants room to explain from their point of view the
specific items, the positive and the problems which have been occurring in the project. This
invited the other municipal representatives to start intense discussions which lead to a delay
of the agenda of one hour but to an intensity of information transfer which never could have
been taken place in a classic front desk presentation. At the end of the workshop at about
18h20, still over 80 municipal representatives were present, which is, in our perspective one
of the best indicators for a successful event. We will repeat the congress and workshop in
winter 2007/2008.
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• Enhanced value for the daily work of the technician: 12 of 14 do see enhanced
values when starting up a EPC or ESC project especially in the collection of basic
data and information about the installations and weak points in their building stock.
The experiences made with global benchmarks as a simple prequalification
instrument were very much appreciated by the technical staff. Also the intention of
KEA to enhance EPC or ESC projects not only focussing energy saving measures
but also the refurbishment of the technical installations was understood and
appreciated.
• Additional needs for information: All the feed back which we have received made
clear, that additional information is required. KEA has prepared a small
questionnaire and sent it to the administrations. After having sent the required
information back, KEA will make a proposal for on- site visits in some of their
buildings. Some of the participants want model contracts that are provided in the
booklet and on the CD-ROM.
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Short description:
The aim of the seminar was to identify the application of Energy Services to the installation
and use of RES technologies. The seminar was attended by Local Authorities, Biomass
boiler manufacturers, Consultants, Finance house, regional governments, bio-diesel
producers, farmers and University Engineering student’s seminar. The idea was to create a
forum for renewable energy technology suppliers; consultants and financiers to meet and
discuss the application of their technologies to public sector buildings.
The PU-BENEFS project was presented as part of the European projects run by Thames
Energy Ltd. The emphasis was on the applicability of ESCOS as providers of finance,
technical know how and risk takers on the application of new technologies. The follow up
discussions were centred around the country specific report, the importance of accurate
feasibility studies and benchmarking techniques.
Opinion concerning additional needs for information: The participants welcomed the
training and discussions and suggested that the scope of the project should be widened to
consider ESCO activities in transport and other forms of public and private sector housing
improvements. They felt that there was dire need for additional information both in terms of
technical information and also in terms of information relating to pit falls with ESCO
performances
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Training seminar
A successful training seminar was conducted on the 15th of May in Skövde Kulturhus in
cooperation with SALAR, Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions.
This seminar is a type of regional follow up of the national workshop held in Stockholm on
the third of May. However, this seminar is more of a hands-on training and trouble shooting
seminar aimed for operational decision makers, procurement responsible and other equal
staff of local authorities and public real estate owners.
The seminar had the same strategic framing during the morning session, even though the
approach and examples was more training oriented and based on how to utilise the
knowledge and the PU-Benefs material in the every day work for the targeted group of
authorities and real estate companies.
This means that also this seminar focused on the multiple challenges that local authorities
and public real estate owners facing. Also the Energy Service Directive, The Directive on
Energy Performance in Building and the new Swedish Building regulations was addressed.
But they where all addressed out of practical training perspectives, on one hand dealing with
the grate opportunities and the other hand the additional workload and recourse constrains
that this development will add up on the actual organisations.
Thereafter Energy Services, their conceptual logics as well as their procurement and project
development aspect was dealt with during the entire afternoon.
A key aim was to present the ESCO tool and the step by step procurement and development
guide and Brochure/CD developed within PU-Benefs and the national Forum for Energy
Services. In order to handle the reluctance from the procurement responsible an extensive
discussion/explanation of the legal base for ESCO projects in the Public Procurement Act
was included. Also the issue of third party financing and the somewhat non-nuanced fear for
outsourcing was dealt with during the afternoon session.
The seminar was finished off with some appreciated ESCO and EPC reference projects.
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The step by step “talk through” of the entire Energy Service process from idea through
feasibility studies and procurement to contracts, implementation and follow up, was very
appreciated and the general guiding booklet as well as the attached power point presentation
of the project development was well received.
General
The feedback from the participants of the training session was relatively scanty, partly due to
things being relatively new to them and their limited ESCO experienced. However the
general attitude was positive, especially when focusing on how this ESCO tools actually can
assist them in their daily work, meeting different national objectives for energy efficiency. But
also some mistrust based on fear for outsourcing and lost of public sector jobs was
expressed.
Only seven sparely edited questionnaires was left after the session and three more was filled
in by ESS after “telephone interviews”
Several of those being a bit more experienced explained that when they earlier tried to
propose this type of innovative structures to their procurement management, they were
always turned down by the motivation that “It’s not applicable within the Public Procurement
Act”. Therefore it was a grate enhanced value to actually having brochures and templates
helping them in their internal work.
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Short description:
During the project set-up phase a number of meetings were arranged with different
stakeholders. During the project, there was constant stakeholder communication and
information dissemination. To facilitate these actions and to further disseminate information,
major seminar where energy services were introduced was held on October 11th 2006 in
Jyväskylä, with 70 participants.
Results, follow-up
The program consisted of a general presentation of energy performance services by
Jyväskylä Innovation, contractor YIT Building Services presentation regarding the available
services, and presentation by a “happy customer”, Seinäjoki General Hospital, where energy
performance contract was signed some ten years ago and performance throughout the
contract period could be discussed.
During the seminar local radio station had an interview of Asko Ojaniemi regarding energy
savings measures.
Generally, the comments on the training session were very positive. The presentations,
examples and the training in total were found good and useful. The quality of the speakers
was also deemed good. The exchange with other participants and speakers was generally
found useful.
Training’s value for the daily work varied more. Many of the respondents had made some
kind of proposals to local authorities and customers, with varying outcomes. Many of the
customers were at least interested. The arguments mostly heard when energy efficiency
services were not adopted were, that they are not adapted to the situation and needs, and
that they are too complicated to put into practice. In the case of implementation, an energy
audit was the most common way to proceed.
Additional needs for information varied a lot. Most of them concerned concrete examples and
success stories as marketing and information distribution material for energy efficiency
services.
Opinions on necessary conditions to develop energy efficiency services varied quite a lot.
Mostly, political will and support, general conditions such as the energy price, and
information/training for local authorities were seen as the most important issues.
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Organised by:
• Institut Català d’Energia (ICAEN)
• Consell Comarcal del Gironès (County Council of Girona)
• Ajuntament de Salt (Municipality of Salt)
Short description:
The training session organised on April 24 was aimed at informing local authorities in
northern areas of Catalonia about energy services as a mechanism for energy and economic
savings.
The aim of the seminar was to explain both the energy service concept and its potential for
saving energy and other resources, and structure of the model contract we are working with.
• Carles Basté, ICAEN: explanation of the energy service concept and the action taken
by the Autonomous Government of Catalonia to promote the mechanism.
• Margarida Plana, Institut Cerdà: introduction of the model contract being developed in
the context of the Pu-Benefs project
• David Vila, Salt Local Authority: presentation of the local authority’s case study: from
the feasibility studies carried out in 2006 under the Pu-Benefs project to the call for
tender published and adjudicated in May this year for a further six local schools.
• Marc Carreras, Gassó: energy management service (EMS) as a crucial instrument for
energy service companies entering the local public sector.
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In general the assistants were very satisfied with the technical session. According to the
answers to the given questionnaire we can conclude:
• most of them were not informed yet about energy services
• most of them will inform the local authorities in order to begin actions focused on
saving energy through energy service contract
• they have the interest to assist to further workshops and seminars on this sector
• they consider local authorities and government should continue promoting energy
services through training strategies (information is a key point)
• another key point is the framework conditions and the energy prices
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One tool is a specific training seminar. O.Ö. Energiesparverband divided this training
seminar into two events.
On 27 September 2005, a training seminar for municipalities with the title "retrofitting public
buildings" was held in Traun. During this workshop, the possibility of financing projects with
EPC was presented in detail and questions concerning this subject were discussed. More
than 50 persons attended the seminar, many of them mayors or heads of the municipal
administration.
Due to the already well developed EPC/TPF market in the public sector in Upper Austria,
O.Ö. Energiesparverband focused on a new target group: organisations providing relief
services. Similar to public bodies such welfare organisations as public, clerical and other
social organisations have large building facilities to operate and face high energy costs, and
also have a solid, long-term organisational structure (e.g. churches).
A second training seminar was therefore organised on 4 October 2005 in Linz. The seminar
"Energiekosten senken in Sozialeinrichtungen" ("reduction of energy costs in relief
organisations") was attended by 47 persons.
In order to prepare the training seminar and to develop the programme according to the
needs of relief organisations, 16 representatives of non-profit organisations, who are
responsible for building issues, were interviewed in detail.
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The results of the interviews were included in the programme design. It turned out that most
organisations had already some experiences with renewable energy sources and EPC/TPF,
but there was great need for more precise information and especially best practice examples
might be helpful in the dissemination of the EPC/TPF scheme.
As a follow-up of the seminar, the participants were contacted again and offered advice and
information on EPC/TPF. It turned out that many of the participants raised the wish to visit
best practice examples.
At each site, the ESCO and the respective client gave a short overview of the project.
Afterwards, there was enough time to raise questions and to discuss the experiences gained
by the projects.
In addition, a short seminar was organised after the tour, where the participants were
informed about details on EPC/TPF and the Upper Austrian support programme for such
projects. The main ESCOs in Upper Austria were present at the seminar and answered
many questions.
The feed-back of the participants was very good. As most of them are already planning or
considering an EPC/TPF project, they valued the opportunity to discuss their specific
questions and concerns with different stakeholders. The study tour was attended by 15
participants.
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The role of this committee was to accompany the different work phases of the project and
give in input in order to improve the studies and tools produced. In addition vary valuable
exchange took place between the participants concerning the problems and pitfalls of EPC
but also the opportunities and the strength’s of this tool. All of the partners have seized this
occasion to create a larger basis for EPC and reach a better of pertinence of the studies and
tools produced.
The first meeting of the advisory committee took place on October 11th, 2005.
The European and national context for energy efficiency services and the project were
presented, and an interesting discussion occurred about organisational and regulation
problems, including the need to use new tools, such as the private-public partnership, to be
able to implement energy efficiency services for public bodies. The local authorities pointed
out the main problems, such as the difficulty in using these new tools, for internal and
external reasons, and the lack of interest for these procedures.
The second advisory committee meeting took place on March 30th, 2006. Several
presentations have been made, including:
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The third meeting took place on 6 March 2007. It was an opportunity to discuss and validate
the content of the communication tools (brochure and CD ROM) of the final seminar and
training sessions. Exchanges concerning contract models led to appointing a specialised
consultancy to provide a legal overview of the contracts proposed.
The presentation of a project underway for a partnership contract has allowed the stages of
this new procedure to be fully understood. It has highlighted the constraints, advantages and
limitations of its application. It seems that it can be applied for public external lighting from a
critical size of approximately 10 000 lights.
The last advisory committee, which was held on 27 June 2007, allowed the project to be
assessed. Evidence from the two services implemented as part of the programme (Roanne
hospital partnership contract and operating agreements with profit sharing and full guarantee
of Grand Roanne Agglomération) has allowed the models proposed to be validated and
opinions to be exchanged about their reproducibility and implementation conditions.
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As foreseen different stakeholder representatives were invited and among them as a whole
did take part:
• 2 banks
• 1 hospital
• 2 public health service
• 15 Municipalities
• 1 Region
• 3 Provinces
• 2 ESCOs
• 1 private consultant on energy issues
• 1 social housing company
• 1 consumers association
• 1 national association of flats administrators
The minutes of the indicated advisory committee meetings are available on the AESS web
site:
• 9th June 2005
• 13th December 2005
• 6th September 2006
• 7th March 2007
The 1st Advisory Committee meeting dealt with some Energy Service issues and on some
specific content of the Country Report.
The control of the heating power stations is usually in the manager’s hands, who can be
tempted to increase instead of decrease the consumption.
During the 1st meeting of the Pu-Benefs Advisory Committee the issue was debated and
some proposals were put forward.
During the 2nd meeting, the discussion mainly focussed on the Italian Technical
Specifications to be provided to the other project’s partners (sharing saving scheme, formula
adopted for the periodic invoicing to be reported, amount of CO2 reduction reached through
the measures proposed to be indicated by the company within the call in order to promote a
diffused shareholding system, etc).
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Working and debating barriers in our country with the Advisory Committee members was
interesting as all the main stakeholders could share their view, especially on the main
obstacles to the effective implementation of Energy Efficiency Services.
The discussion between these main key players was pretty useful as, through these
meetings, we came to the conclusion of trying to combine, in our regional context, an Energy
Supply /Facility Contract (meter-based payment) with the basic elements of an Energy
Performance Contract, aiming to identify an energy saving potential, achievable through
measures both of technical content and related to user behaviour.
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The market conditions in Baden-Württemberg region are already developed. With regard to
this context the main items to be discussed within the advisory committee were contract
matters and specific financial instruments (flat rate).
Depending on the topics chosen, mainly the members of the public administrations Weil,
Lörrach as well as the ESCOs were active. Representative from the banks did not join, but
were informed about the results of the meetings.
Additional items which were discussed are the possibilities to diminish the ESCO costs
during the tendering proceeding by simplifying the tendering papers and the tendering
procedure. Together with members from the advisory committee KEA successfully prepared
an EPC conference with a workshop on May 8th 2007 targeted to public bodies.
All the members of the steering committee were committed to the project although towards
the end the bank became a little less interested. This was because the emphasis of the
project changed from project financing to technical barriers for project implementation. In
addition issues such as feasibility studies, benchmarking etc were of little interest to the
bank.
The four meetings held were led by a local authority representative and in a sense it was
their meetings. The meetings were occasionally dominated by Brent and Waltham Forest
Councils who had feasibility studies carried out in their public buildings.
The format of the meetings followed the progress of the project and discussions therefore
related to the feasibility studies, country reports, types of contracts and financing options etc.
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However, in order to get access to the right type of stakeholders we developed a constructive
and
recourse efficient way forward by integrate the mainly regional PU-Benefs project, into the
broader national Energy Service initiative Forum for Energy services, promoted by the
Swedish Energy Agency, and thereby we got access to and input from a variety of national
key stakeholders.
This structure has provided a progressive solution to interact with relevant stakeholders for
the Advisory Committee. This slightly modified approach has resulted in a work structure
composed of series of minor separate meetings and group meetings. Stakeholders involved
are senior representatives from the ESCO-Industry, The National Association of Local
Authorities and Regions, Regional Public Bodies, Public Real Estate companies and
Regional Energy Agencies. In addition have also representatives from the Swedish Energy
Agency and the Eurocontract project participating in what could be considered as a
continuous “Advisory Committee Dialogue”.
Within this work another challenge has been to attract direct involvement from the financial
sector, especially since EPC- and third party financing etc. still has a limited usage in
Sweden. However by including two of Sweden’s leading ESCO contractors in the group, we
have also been able interact indirectly with the financing sector through the ESCO’s they
provide financing for.
• How ESCO services would increase in value and take up activities if linked to the
EPBD
• Key criteria’s for encouraging public bodies to carry out feasibility studies and EPC
projects
• Best practice transfer from public bodies and ESCO’s in terms of procurement and
contracts
• Public branch organisation and their members feedback on processes and contract
design
• What financial (VAT) and accounting issues that needs to be tackled on a national
level
• How the work and material should be focused in order to attract political interest and
support
• How the work carried out could be used as input for State Public Inquiries regarding
ESD
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There were four meetings arranged together with different other events.
During the meetings, following issues were discussed: general issues about energy services
and their situation in Finland; information about the PU-Benefs project, how the project can
support in implementing energy services, possible targets for energy services and feasibility
studies and possible new areas for energy savings; applying the contracts.
Productive input included experiences both from customers and suppliers in using energy
services; feedback and information, best practice and other examples, contract models,
description of the business situation in Finland.
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Main objectives:
The objectives of the meeting were to present and put in common the energy services as a
mechanism of savings at a municipality level and to stimulate the implementation of the
energy services in Catalonia of real experiences.
Participants: limited invitations, > 30 people assisting (local and regional administrations,
ESCOs, financial entities).
Companies:
Gas Natural, Endesa, Iberdrola, Unió Fenosa, Cepsa
Elyo, Dalkia, Moseca
Energia i Serveis, Icogen
Institut Cerdà
Banks: La Caixa, BBVA
Administrations: ICAEN, Efiensa, Municipalities
Presentations:
Presentation: Objectives and Planning: Mrs Cristina Castells Guiu, Head of the Energy
Efficiency Area at ICAEN
The energy services in the Catalan policy and, specifically, framing its development as key
line of the Catalonia Energy Plan 2006-2015. Strong and weak points of the concept of
energy service.
Main outcomes:
• The scope of the Energy Service: not always data available, applicability to the
rehabilitation
• Economical & administrative procedure: payment of the audit
• Aspects to be considered in the contract: indexation of the energy price, normative
modifications, buys of emissions rights…
• The role for the Catalan energy administrations: promotion, coordination, information
• The role for the local administrations: implication, guaranteeing of payment…
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Main objectives:
• Present and discuss the structure and the main contents that a contract for energy
services should include.
• Promote the contractual procedure for energy services in Catalonia based on
contracting models
Participants: limited invitations, > 30 people assisting.
Companies:
Gas Natural, Endesa, Iberdrola, Unió Fenosa, Cepsa, Elyo, Dalkia, Moseca, Energia i
Serveis, Icogen, Institut Cerdà
Banks: La Caixa, BBVA
Administrations: Efiensa, ICAEN, The municipalities of Salt and St. Boi Llobregat
Presentations:
Energy services: areas of work that are being developed by ICAEN. Interest from the Catalan
government to help the municipalities and industries that are willing to implement these types
of mechanisms.
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Main outcomes:
• Lack of basic data regarding a necessary base for a proposal of energy services.
Who should carry out the audit? Who should pay for it?
• Proposal for the creation of the energy auditor figure
• Updating the price of energy during the contracting period.
• Debate over the objective of energy services: results or facts? Contractual
obligations in relation with each of the interpretations. The contractual nature of the
investment and maintenance plan wasn’t defined due to a difference in opinions as to
whether the contract is based on results or process.
• The concept of total guarantee is clearly stated in the contract. It contains the
concept that includes investments and maintenance of the installations during the
contracting period. Total guarantee can represent 10% of the contract’s cost of the
contract.
• The technical conditions of the contract have to be very detailed in order to avoid big
differences between the offers.
• The role of the banks is important at this stage during the implementation phase of
the energy services.
Main objectives:
Summarize the main themes of the project
Presentations:
Presentation of the main conclusions of the project
Mrs Margarida Plana i Turró
Project manager of the Energy Area at the Institut Cerdà
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In addition, detailed discussions were held with energy service provider companies (ESCOs).
Individual meetings were organised with each of the four most important ESCOs where
current market opportunities and barriers, as well as collective and individual promotion
activities were discussed.
The second meeting of the advisory committee was held in the frame of the seminar
"Energiekosten senken in Sozialeinrichtungen" ("reduction of energy costs in relief
organisations"), which was organised on 4 October 2005. 7 persons attended the meeting,
comprising 3 ESCOS, 2 clients of EPC projects, a pellets boiler producer and representatives
of the regional administration. The discussion mainly focused on how the market for EPC
projects and especially social organisations could be supported to trigger EPC/TPF projects.
The third meeting of the advisory committee was held in the frame of the information event
"Solar & Pellets-Trends: Informationsveranstaltung für Installateure" ("solar & pellets trends:
information event for installers"), which was organised on 18 November 2005. The advisory
committee focused on the possibilities to interest the target group of installers in EPC.
The fourth meeting of the advisory committee was held in the frame of the event "Energie-
Contracting für Sozialeinrichtungen" ("EPC/TPF for social organisations"), which was
organised on 1 June 2006 in combination with a site-visit. 15 persons attended the meeting,
including ESCOS, potential clients of EPC projects, representatives of the regional
administration and of different social organisations. The discussion mainly focused on how
the market for EPC projects and especially social organisations could be supported to trigger
EPC/TPF projects.
The fifth meeting of the advisory committee was held in the frame of the regional workshop
on 28 September 2006 in Linz. It was attended by 17 participants, including ESCOs, energy
consultants, representatives of regional administration with experience in TPF-project
implementation. The discussion mainly focused on how the market for ECP/TPF projects
could be supported to trigger actual project implementation. As a specialised lawyer attended
the meeting, the "typical" contract design, practical problems and solutions were discussed.
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One very effective dissemination means is the organisation of work shop targeted to an
audience of professionals including elected officials, civil servants, technical consultants,
ESCOs, banks etc. So in all the partner regions and countries dissemination workshops on
“Energy efficiency services in public buildings” have been organised. The content and the
outcome of these work shops are presented in the following.
In addition a European seminar was organised in cooperation with the FEDARENE, the
European Federation for Regional Energy and Environment Agencies and the Committee of
the Region in Brussels.
Speakers were chosen for their exemplary nature and in order to be able to show the entire
range of application of energy efficiency services in a concrete way. The day was first and
foremost directed at those elected officials who wish to initiate or improve an energy
efficiency policy but also concerned service managers who must be involved. The seminar
brought together almost 60 participants. The variety of presentations allowed everyone to
find some elements to take action.
The seminar complemented the training programme very well and raised awareness
amongst elected officials in addition to engineering and design departments. This model shall
be able to be reproduced in a decentralised way in interested provinces (departments) in
order to approach elected officials.
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Short description:
The workshop - addressed to ESCOs, technicians and politicians from Public Bodies, banks
– aimed at presenting good practice examples and effective tools available for Public Bodies.
Furthermore its objective was to point it out the obstacles making difficult nowadays the
implementation of innovative financial models and schemes in order to promote and foster
the energy efficiency in buildings, meeting the Public Bodies needs and making easier the
ESCOs work.
Results
Roughly 50 people participate in the workshop session. The interest from the people
participating was high even if, in the next future, many discussed topics deserve to be
deepened.
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The results of the last meeting in 2006 were taken as a reference to organize a contracting
conference and a workshop session in Stuttgart on 8th May 2007. The work started in the last
meeting of the advisory committee in December 2006 where the participants from both sides
of the market started to sample ideas on the main topics of the congress and the workshop
session.
Very soon the agenda was generated and KEA started to organize this main event. The main
targets are public bodies, and the intention of the congress was to give an overview on the
state of the art in our regional energy market. The work shop session should take place on
the afternoon of the same day as the congress to avoid the costs and time for the
participants from the municipal administrations.
The work shop should give room for the spreading of very detailed information on the
experience made in running EPC and Energy supply projects. The invitations send by KEA to
all municipal administrations had an over average feed back: over 130 participants (from
1.100 municipalities in Baden Württemberg).
The main impact was to show the proceedings of an internal or external supported Energy
Management in public buildings. The frequent controlling of the energy consumption, the
optimization of the control gear and the frequent support of the operating personal has been
proving the main key success points. The average energy saving, climate corrections already
applied, showed savings up to 20% heating energy, 30% water consumption and up to 5%
electricity consumption without any notable investments.
From Energy Management to EPC: the presentation done by head of energy management
section Rüdiger Lohse, pointed out that EM is a very helpful source for data and information
to prepare EPC projects. The basic information collected in the EM project is consumption
and information data on the existing energy consuming installations in all public buildings of a
municipality. The annual evaluation of the weak points and technical solutions to retrofit
these weak points are very helpful to evaluate the potential for EPC in the public buildings of
a municipality which normally do not exist.
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The presentation also pointed out, that unfortunately the approach of average municipalities
does not provide any qualified information on the public buildings. Municipalities only react, if
any fundamental problems are already undeniably on the door step and make it difficult to
develop a strategy for the energy saving investments in total.
The “project development by panic attack” could be avoided when EM is in work. Also
important is the perspective (which reflects one of the basic fears of municipalities) that when
an EPC is started on an existing EM project, the contracting company does not only earn the
easy fruit from the optimization of existing equipment but has to do well planned investments
to be successful.
The lunch break gave the participants opportunity to visit the ESCO companies on their
stands and get some personal contacts. After lunch the work shop session took place from
13h till 17h30. To keep all the participants active in the work shop 3 representative projects
(Weil from the PU Benefs project together with Siemens, Mannheim together with MVV, and
Nagold together with the energy supply contractor Gauß) were presented by the ESCO and
the municipal representatives.
This kind of presentation gave both participants room to explain from their point of view the
specific items, the positive and the problems which have been occurring in the project. This
invited the other municipal representatives to start intense discussions which lead to a delay
of the agenda of one hour but to an intensity of information transfer which never could have
been taken place in a classic front desk presentation.
At the end of the workshop at about 18h20, still over 80 municipal representatives were
present, which is, in our perspective one of the best indicators for a successful event.
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Short description
Workshop was titled: Realising the Potential for Energy Savings in Public Sector
Organisations.
The objective of the workshop was to disseminate the outcomes of PU-BENEFS project and
to communicate to public sector managers the potential of using ESCOs’ to improve the
delivery of energy efficiency services.
The aim of the work shop was to increase the level of awareness of the benefits of ESCO in
tackling the wider issues of climate change and global warming.
Results, follow-up
This workshop, attended by 52 people, was very well received. In general, local authorities’
representatives and other public sector staff have learnt a lot about the ESCO approach,
what kind of contracts formats are feasible, and what the financing options are.
After the workshop, contacts for future energy efficiency work with Brent Council and COI
have been made.
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The cooperation between SALAR and EES derives from EES early ambitions to interlink the
PU-Benefs project to the broader national energy service promotion efforts. Through this
cooperation strategy has the PU-Benefs project been able to work with the National Energy
Agency as well as SALAR and their regional members.
The background and the aim for this conference/workshop was to highlight the strategic,
environmental and not the least the economical benefits of using ESCO services as a cost
efficient implementation tool in public buildings. The workshop based its work on the multiple
challenges that’s laying ahead for the public real estate owners.
The so called Energy Service Directive, The Directive on Energy Performance in Building
and also new Swedish Building regulations will all together put considerable demands of
energy efficiency investments in the public sector.
Since all these investments can’t be handled and financed by the public real estate owners
themselves, the concept of Energy Services and particularly EPC, Energy Performance
Contracting was presented together with national examples from the PU-Benefs project and
other initiatives.
A very important aim was to present strategies for how to deal with large energy efficiency
projects from a political, an internal management and an operational and maintenance
perspective. The key point was to explain that the ESCO services and EPC doesn’t impose a
threat to the public organisations.
Results, follow-up
The interaction during the meeting was good and the majority of the audience was even
more positive to ESCO services than expected. The two most valuable key success factors
seem to have been;
• To link ESCO services to the national and European development as well as the
broad challenges of the Public real estate sector, and not only present is as an
energy efficiency tool, had a very positive effect on managers as well as other
decision makers.
• To be able to present a variety of reference cases of different size and focus
dramatically increased the credibility of the ESCO model.
But even if the general feedback was positive, we also realised that we must do more in
explaining and finding good and optimised interfaces between the ESCO projects and the
public real estate companies own/other operations. There is a genuine reluctance among
some of the operation and maintenance organisations, based on a combination of their fear
for outsourcing and a somewhat protectionist approach.
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To facilitate these actions and to further disseminate information, major seminar where
energy services were introduced was held on October 11th 2006 in Jyväskylä, with 70
participants.
Results, follow-up
The program consisted of a general presentation of energy performance services by
Jyväskylä Innovation, contractor YIT Building Services presentation regarding the available
services, and presentation by a “happy customer”, Seinäjoki General Hospital, where energy
performance contract was signed some ten years ago and performance throughout the
contract period could be discussed.
During the seminar local radio station had an interview of Asko Ojaniemi, the Finnish project
manager, regarding energy savings measures.
Workshop agenda
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Round table 1: District heating. Moderator: Margarida Plana, Director of Projects, Energy
Area, Institut Cerdà
• Josep Massanella, Energy consultant to Cornellà de Terri Local Authority
• Carme Puig, Molins de Rei Local Authority; Xavier Gil, Biomass energy manager
Round table 1: Energy management in public lighting. Moderator: Carles Basté, ICAEN
technician
• Carme Ruiz, Head of City Services, Sant Boi de Llobregat
• Blanca Atienza, Manager, municipal services and public way maintenance,
l’Hospitalet Local Authority
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200 participants, among them ESCOs, municipalities, SMEs, etc. took part in the workshop.
The focus was on the successful implementation of EPC/TPF-projects, the discussion of
success factors and barriers as well as on the main requirements of a model contract. Also
best practice examples where presented.
Also a round-table discussion including the main ESCOs active in Upper Austria and
representatives of best practice projects implemented in the last years in our region was held
during the workshop.
In the afternoon, a site-visit to two best practice examples in Upper Austria was organised for
the participants of the dissemination workshop. A biomass heating plant for a monastery in
Kremsmünster financed by EPC/TPF and the municipality of Marchtrenk which financed the
renovation of the street lighting and also of several public buildings by EPC/TPF were visited.
During the dissemination workshop a "market place" was organised where the ESCOs active
in Upper Austria presented their services.
During the event, the participants were asked to fill in a questionnaire answering the
following questions:
• TPF projects are considered / not considered in the future (if yes, which kind)
• services and products in the range of energy efficiency and renewable energy
sources are offered (if yes, which kind)
• interest in and need for energy advice
Around the seminar, media and PR activities were made, resulting in several newspaper
articles. A review of the event is available on the project website of O.Ö.
Energiesparverband.
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It was dedicated to insist again on the role of local authorities, the energy saving potential
within this sector, the necessity of establishing a good energy management and presenting
the implementation oriented results and outputs by the partners of the PU-BENEFS action.
The seminar was a great success with more than 150 persons registered.
Following the seminar dedicated web page on the site of FEDARENE was set up. It gathers
the updated interventions and the conclusions of the Pu-Benefs Seminar.
The proceedings and the recording of the conference are available on the website:
(http://www.fedarene.org/events/Fedarene_events/2007-06-20/CoR-Seminar_20-6-
2007.htm).
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During the 30 months of the project duration all the partners were very much involved to
promote energy efficiency services for the public bodies and local authorities within the
territory covered. This presence in the field is very valuable and gives a good opportunity to
draw lessons.
The project partners were solicited to organise the lessons learnt according to the following
plan. The major barriers and shortfalls will be identified, but also the measures to be taken to
overcome these barriers.
• Barriers, shortfalls
- Legal framework (public procurement procedure etc.)
- Information deficit
- Internal competence of public bodies
- Sufficient ESCO, technical consultants
- Financial restrictions
- Missing normalisation and standardisation
- Political support
- Missing facilitators for local authorities
In the following every partner has drawn up his lessons learnt. At the end a synthesis is
presented limited by the diversity of the players and frame conditions in the partner countries
and regions.
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In this context, the main energy efficiency services that can be implemented by authorities
are O&M contracts with profit sharing and guaranteed results. The authority can then, based
on guaranteed savings, use leasing to finance its investments.
Many authorities also think that using an EES results in a loss of control on the part of the
public corporation in favour of the private partner and are worried about this. Only
customised information will allow this preconception to be changed.
Communication
French authorities are not sufficiently aware of the stakes, potentials and possibilities of
energy management in their building stock and awareness raising/training must be made a
priority. Participation at meetings on energy management organised by other organisations in
district councils is an interesting vehicle for communication. It allows EESs to be presented
as a tool, amongst others, for developing an energy management policy. The limitation of
these actions is the limited number of participants. It will be necessary, in future, to scale
down this action by ensuring that other information and advisory bodies also promote EESs.
We must also, in future, develop articles in papers aimed at authorities in order to present
supported successful examples implemented as part of the programme to guarantee that the
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maximum number of concrete presentations reach authorities. Several contacts have been
made in this direction in June.
Support
On the other hand, the Local Authorities starting conditions are on average not very good,
as:
• Running costs for energy are increasing,
• Little financial availability for refurbishment investments and for RES use;
• Short of staff able to design and manage energy measures on estate, beyond the
ordinary maintenance. Need of outsourcing the whole energy management.
As confirmed by the trainees participating to the Pu-Benefs training seminar, the main
constraints in the public sector for improving energy efficiency services/contracts are:
The knowledge about energy services by Public Authorities is still quite scarce even if
increasing.
This troubled situation can be solved through new contract features, including these steps:
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This way the interest of the service company to let the consumption increase is
reduced, as on this increase there are not relevant profit margins.
• Remove, whenever possible, the final consumption controls from the service
company and commit it to the users.
• Use of thermostatic valves on radiators;
• Launching of communication and education initiatives (schools and training for
public/private technicians );
• Make the service provider aware and interested on saving.
Legal framework
The public procurement procedure is still very complex and certainly prevents some of the
administrations to initialize a EPC or ESC project. KEA is offering support for the
administrations. At least the competition generated in a tendering procedure is helpful for the
administrations to optimize the results. The tendering procedure may be very cost intensive
for the ESCO. The total man power for an ESCO to provide a qualified bid in a tendering
proceeding is at least 5 to 10 working days. To avoid exceeding tendering cost for the ESCO,
the number of ESCOs participating in the tendering proceeding should be fixed on 3- 4.
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As long only the ESCO has the know- how on the needs for action, the ESCO controls the
process. The result has often been problematic: eg. In many projects severe interface
problems occurred. Measures did often only optimize or replace the energy saving parts of
the installations, which urged the public authorities to replace the non- energy saving part of
the installations.
In many discussions with public authorities we had the impression that the experiences
which some administrations made with such a bad prepared contracting project has left
behind the opinion, that ESCO try only to pick the best out of the bunch of attractive
measures, leaving the authorities with the unattractive measures. Resuming our experiences
this is not the case. Projects being raised in the last two or three years have learned from
that and recommend public authorities to prepare energy saving projects with their own
feasibility study, analyzing the most typical weak points in public buildings´ installations
Financial restrictions:
The financial restrictions are one of the main reasons to prevent public bodies to realize
energy saving measures on their own and start up contracting projects. The implementation
of new financing models (flat rate system) enables ESCO to offer very attractive financing
terms.
Political support:
Regional government as well as federal government is in general supporting and promoting
PPP activities, i.e. the DENA contracting campaign etc. But still some small obstacles exist:
the regional ministry of environment provides a beneficiary programme targeting energy
saving measures and rewarding CO2 savings. The programme supports energy saving
measures done by public bodies with subsidiaries, but does exclude measures realized
within a contracting project from that subsidiary programme, although the ESCO will normally
deliver a better performance.
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Still public bodies need further training seminars to discuss their items and overcome some
of the hurdles still existing. We are in good hope, that the good experiences made in the
IKEC project and in other projects will facilitate the disseminated in the next months.
However the principal reason for so many different approaches is that in the United Kingdom
there is not yet a well developed market for the provision of energy services to public and
other authorities. The model of energy performance contracting, which is well developed in
other jurisdictions, has not yet achieved a standardised form in the United Kingdom. It is
likely, as more projects are considered, that this will change in the future.
There are good reasons for this in that of all of the various technologies that are available,
CHP comes the closest to being financially and economically viable. There is, however, still
an issue with the use of CHP. This is that, while the private sector is certainly interested in
the opportunity to build and operate plant to deliver heat and power through networks, it is
not as interested in the requirement in many cases that the suitable heat network be
constructed.
Of course the private sector will do this, but it adds very considerably to the costs of projects
as instead of simply contracting with the private sector to deliver a service, it is necessary to
contract with them to build and finance infrastructure. That part of the project clearly has to
be paid for and it is this that has given rise to difficulties in a number of CHP projects in that
there is frequently a funding gap around the cost of construction of the network. These
issues can be addressed and indeed have been in the case studies which we have
considered.
There is an argument that the cost of funding the necessary infrastructure should not
necessarily lie with the private sector. If heat networks are to be set up and if this is thought
to be a public good, then perhaps public funding should be directed towards assistance with
these capital costs.
The issues here are not dissimilar to those which applied to the construction of the electricity
transmission and distribution network in the 1960s and 1970s, which was financed by the
public purse. It is clear that the Government’s Community Energy Programme is not to be
continued, as has recently been announced by DEFRA.
A number of projects which were to be financed through that mechanism have not come to
market and the view of DEFRA therefore is that available funding should be allocated to
other better carbon saving programmes. It is not yet clear what those will be or whether, at
some stage in the future, the Government might introduce some form of commitment to
renewable heat.
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For the moment, therefore, the result is that ESCO schemes do take different forms which
depend to a large extent on how the scheme is to be financed. The financing is likely to be a
combination of available grant assistance, financial commitment by the local authority, and
financial commitment by a private sector organisation engaged in the delivery of the project.
In turn, the private sector may seek to borrow funds to finance its commitment and those
borrowings may be secured on the project documents, e.g. on the principal contract with the
public authority to make payment for the services provided in terms of the scheme, often
referred to as the anchor contract.
Timescales must also be considered as an issue for projects. Taking any project forward will
require the preparation and approval of a business case.
One important decision in any project, once it has been approved, will be the form of any
ESCO to be set up. Once that decision has been made, the timescale for setting up an
ESCO with an appropriate memorandum and articles of association could in fact be quite
short. Much more time is likely to have been spent before in structuring the project and in
considering who should participate in the ESCO and what form it should take. One
advantage of setting up an ESCO, however, is that the use of a separate vehicle for taking
the project forward gives the project added impetus as those who are involved tend to feel
more committed and energised if there is a special purpose vehicle in place.
The time taken to develop an ESCO procurement contract is also and issue particularly with
the EU tendering requirements. Many projects will be designed to fit around redevelopment
or new development and sufficient time should be allowed for the procurement process so
that it does not lag behind the agreed timetable for any development construction work.
The main challenge today is to focus on take up activities, moving public bodies from the
situation of knowing energy services being feasible, to a situation where they actually them
selves start being active and send out RFQ’s etc. Because one lesson learnt is that it’s very
easy for EU-projects and different Swedish initiatives to unintentionally dominate the project
development, leaving the customers somewhat left behind.
EPC and Energy Efficiency project themselves seldom get sufficient attention from politicians
and real decision makers as long as they are promoted as energy or efficiency project,
even though they are proved to be profitable. They way to get the appropriate attention is to
promote the projects as “tools” for addressing the decision makers and their organisations
challenges, such as environmental improvement, demands for cost cuts or increased
profitability as well as compliance with new national regulation and European policies and
directives.
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The tendering, procurement and contractual processes must be better anchored within a
larger part of the customer’s organisation in order to avoid misunderstandings, expectation
gaps and internal opposition. The traditional top-down approach where management and
procurement staff close contracts and just roll them out into their organisation doesn’t work
for EPC projects.
Without the involvement, acceptance and anchoring among the O&M staff and other service
personnel the projects are doomed to either being halted or stopped during the development
phase, or if being implemented, under perform due to the lack of constructive cooperation.
1. Legal framework
There are today no legal or practical hindrances for ESCO projects out of a public
procurement perspective. However public procurement is still being “interpreted” differently
and some minor backslashes has occurred mainly due to customers being “too” creative
when modifying templates and sometimes use inexperienced consultants.
To improve this situation the State Public Inquiry for the ESD implementation are proposed to
develop one “Definite Public Procurement Guideline” focusing on Energy Services within
their work to pave the way for the implementation of the energy service directive.
To improve this situation must the currently relatively small group of persons, companies and
organisations be increased, and one way of doing it is to appoint and training key persons
within strategic branch organisations and larger public real estate companies and regional
bodies such as Energy Agencies and County Councils. By this approach is the “collegial
dissemination and capacity building” expected to increase in a positive way.
Also on the ESCO side there is a shortage of actors leading to a less diverse market. In
terms of the ESCO’s several companies are interested, but at the same time there is a
severe shortage of experienced energy analysts with the dual technological and economical
perspective needed.
The upcoming Swedish implementation of the ESD, Energy Service Directive is expected to
improve the situation by rising the awareness and legitimise the so far a bit “novel” energy
service market and thereby attract more consultants and ESCO’s.
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4. Financial restrictions
In terms of financial restrictions there are a few obstacles and uncertainties hindering an
even more active ESCO development in Sweden. The first is the VAT problem linked to the
EPC projects, since the ESCO services are “VAT-classed” while many public bodies do not
pay VAT and therefore get stuck with an additional cost of 25%. Another problem hindering a
more active use of third party financing is the accounting insecurities regarding if the
ESCO/TPF investment should be on or of the balance sheet of the customer.
These issues seem to be difficult to handle even though parts of the VAT problems might be
solved with a proposed new regulation for “reversed VAT”. In terms of clarifying the
accounting issues linked to ESCO/TPF financing, the situation could be significantly
improved if the State Public Inquiry for the ESD implementation included this task in their
work.
6. Political support
Political support is important for the ESCO development, but so far has the political support
been limited to the local level, and even though national politicians and their parities are
being informed, they haven’t yet given the ESCO market much attention.
To improve this situation and make the politicians more interested the ESCO services needs
to be presented and marketed differently. Instead of focusing on energy efficiency as the
goal, the concept should be presented as a very cost efficient, some times even free, tool for
meeting the politicians goals and objectives in terms of environment and limited public
spending etc.
1. Legal framework
The public procurement procedure in Finland demands to tender any larger procurements
and this creates problems; in tendering there is a problem that all suppliers may not be
willing to make their own review of the target, if the probability of getting the contract is low,
and suppliers don’t always trust on reviews made by some other party. On the other hand
there are no clear instructions how to tender ESCO contracts, and not much experience in
this. Especially if the investment is small, tendering cost can be too large.
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2. Information deficit
Especially in smaller municipalities and bodies there is a need for more information and
support; larger municipalities and governmental facility management have joined energy
saving contract and have better awareness.
5. Financial restrictions
Municipalities and governmental organisations have access to relatively cheap funding to
finance actions with reasonable payback time. The financing component of energy services
is thus not so widely used, although it would accelerate the decision making process.
7. Political support
Political support and thus the customer activity of the municipalities is getting better, but
more information dissemination, marketing, and support must be done to activate the
customer base and convince the decision makers
One cure for the problem of too small investment opportunities is bundling smaller ESCO
investments into a one large investment. This way, service provider’s risk is reduced but
monitoring realized savings is harder.
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Public accounting problems can be mitigated by designing suitable contract models. Contract
models that adapt to different needs for municipal and other public customers, as well as for
renewable energy ESCO contracts, should be developed.
More information and marketing is needed for the employees and decision makers. Energy
savings are in most cases not seen as an important independent aspect, but rather as an
investment which can be implemented together with a larger renovation. ESCO contractors
have proposed that at least bigger municipalities should have specialised energy director, so
that the level of knowledge would be sufficient to make ESCO contracts.
The Association of Finnish Local and Regional Authorities could be used as a marketing
channel. New marketing material is needed, such as an “ESCO-handbook” introducing
tendering, financing and contract models, and concrete success stories as a marketing
material.
2. Information deficit
The lack of data on the starting situation in buildings is considered one of the most important
barriers to the large-scale adoption of the mechanism.
Moreover, uncertainty about how energy prices will evolve and the loss of the reference
provided by fixed energy tariffs with the introduction of the free market make it difficult to find
a reference point to take into account rising costs.
5. Financial restrictions
In the case of Catalonia, more than financial restrictions, we should speak of long payback
periods that imply longer than normal contractual periods, as well as variations in (basically
energy) costs over the period.
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7. Political support
The Catalan Government has made the introduction of energy services a priority line of
action in its Energy Plan. The mechanism therefore enjoys political support from the
Autonomous Government. Nonetheless, it is important to continue disseminating the initiative
and providing technical support for local authorities during the contracting process.
Although the ECP/TPF market in Upper Austria is already well developed (especially in the
public sector), there is still a need for information: interviews carried out in the framework of
the project showed that public authorities were really interested in the EPC/TPF scheme and
64% said that they found the financing scheme attractive. However only 20% had already
implemented a EPC/TPF project.
Inquiries have shown that best practice examples and study tours are a very helpful
instrument to trigger new projects.
As the general awareness and information level concerning EPC/TPF in public administration
is already very high, it is necessary to address new target groups to keep the market
development progressing. This was for example done within the project by targeting at social
organisations.
However, especially targeted information and awareness raising instruments are necessary
and requested by the municipalities; it has to be acknowledged that there is limited scope for
EPC/TPF projects in the public sector. Very often public authorities are interested in the ECP
concept but by dealing with it, they find out that they would better implement the respective
retrofitting measures themselves (without the services of an ESCO).
Very often there are public administration officers in the municipality, who are very active and
have already gained experience in energy matters. These people are very often the drivers
to implement the proposed measures without the help of an ESCO.
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In addition to the activities carried out for the public sector, a focus was put on the
transferability of the experiences gained so far to SMEs in order to increase the number of
EPC/TPF projects there. The main differences between the public and the business sector
can be summarised as follows:
Contrary to the public sector – where there are a limited number of municipalities in Upper
Austria and it is possible to select those which EPC/TPF might be interesting – the number of
companies is much higher and there are no simple selection criteria available, which makes
it very difficult to identify those companies who could be interested in EPC/TPF.
"Chicken-egg problem":
Another major problem with SME' s is the so-called "chicken-egg" problem, which means that
potential clients in the business sector do not know the EPC/TPF scheme and are therefore
not interested in requesting this service and vice-versa ESCOs are not motivated to provide
their services for which there is no active market demand.
Project duration:
The average contract duration of an EPC/TPF contract in Upper Austria is between 8 and 10
years. However, in the public building sector the contract duration can be up to 15 years. In
the business sector such a long contract duration is seen differently and many companies do
not want to enter a contract which runs for more than 5 years.
Project implementation:
Another advantage of SMEs is that the project implementation is in many cases easier
because of fewer restrictions given by the client. For example, public bodies often fear that
the project would not support local economy and they therefore request to include local
craftsmen in the project implementation. This is often not the case for SMEs.
The experiences gained in the implementation of EPC/TPF projects in public buildings are
very helpful to start building up a TPF market in companies. However, several structural
differences have to be taken into account and adaptions of the EPC/TPF contract might be
necessary. In addition, the particularities of the business sector have to be taken into
account when promoting the EPC/TPF scheme.
In general it can be summarised the market development for EPC/TPF projects takes time
and requires continuous activities.
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Information deficit
• Very high in all partner countries, perhaps with an exception in Upper Austria
• Concerns as well the management dimension of energy, the technologies available
and the contractual systems available
Financial restrictions
• Not all investments can be financed by EPC, especially investment with infrastructural
dimension (like construction of a district heating network)
• In most of the countries EPC services are classed with VAT, adding additional costs
for the local authority (up to 25%), which have to pay the VAT; thus creating a
disadvantage for the EPC solution
• EU tendering requirements might increase the transaction costs
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Political support
• Poor environmental issues awareness/motivation among politicians;
• Reserved view of engaging with private partners (certain degree of mistrust)
• If the private company can do it, why not we on our own as local authority?”
• Challenge to take politicians from knowing, how EPC works to do EPC in his own
local authority area
• EPC is considered very much as only an energy subject and one between others also
very important (how are the priorities set?)
Training demand
• Training as well the technicians as the decisions makers is in most cases necessary;
a good way is to cooperate with the federations or associations of the local authorities
or the technicians
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Government support
• Develop a “Definite Public Procurement Guide” for giving guidance and security to the
local authorities
• Tackling the VAT issue for EPC by for example reversing the VAT payed for the
specific EPC services to the local authorities (in total or partially)
• More and clear support by the different government levels encouraging the use of
EPC
• Indicating clearly the interest and usefulness of EPC in the different energy efficiency
strategies and plans
• Financial support mechanisms for the starting and market development phase would
be of great help: securing the choice of local authorities for EPC, increasing the
demand, reducing the transaction costs
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12. Annexes
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APPENDIX 1
General Data and status of Buildings
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ABBREVIATIONS
KW Kilowatt
KWh Kilowatt hour
MWh Megawatt hour
TRV Thermostatic Radiator Valves
ESCO Energy Services Company
VAT Value Added Tax
DEFINITIONS
Contract period: means the period from and including the Effective Date until the earlier of
the Termination Date and the Expiry Date.
Default Rate: means [ ] % above the base rate from time to time of [ ] Bank.
Energy: energy in the form of electricity, natural gas (including liquefied natural gas and
liquefied petroleum gas), district heating and cooling, heating fuel, coal and lignite, transport
fuels (excluding aviation and foreign bunker fuels), and forestry and agricultural energy
products and waste.
Energy Audits: a systematic procedure that obtains adequate knowledge of the existing
energy profile of the building site, industrial operation, etc.; identifies and quantifies cost
effective energy savings opportunities; and reports the findings.
Energy Costs baseline: Annual energy consumptions and energy costs determined for the
time prior to contracting which form the basis for calculating the energy consumption and
energy cost savings achieved in connection with the saving contract of (reference) year
Energy Distributor: the natural or legal person responsible for transporting energy, either
through grids and pipelines (“grid-bound”), such as electricity (medium and low voltage),
natural gas and district heating and cooling, or through other transportation and distribution
and distribution networks designed to deliver such energy as heating fuel, coal, lignite and
transportation fuels to final customers.
Energy Efficiency: a reduction in primary energy consumption, taking place in the energy
transformation, transmission, distribution or end-use stage, due to technological, behavioural
and/or economic changes, providing the same or a higher standard of comfort or amenities.
End-use energy efficiency improvements reduce final as well as primary energy
consumption.
Energy Efficiency Measures: all actions, such as energy services, energy efficiency
programmes and mechanisms or similar activities, initiated by any market player, including
governments and authorities, that lead to verifiable and measurable improvements in end
use energy efficiency, and thus to energy end-use savings, during the period of
measurement.
Energy Efficiency Mechanisms: horizontal and general measures, such a regulated tariffs,
energy taxes, subsidy schemes, funds, certification schemes etc., undertaken by
governments or government bodies to create a broad supportive framework or incentives for
energy companies, energy service companies, installers or other market players to provide
energy services and energy efficiency measures, not addressing end users directly.
Energy Efficiency Programmes: activities such as energy audits, financial rebates for
energy-efficient equipment, information, campaigns etc., normally paid for collectively and
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offered by national agencies, energy retail suppliers, distributors, energy service companies
and other market players.
Energy Service: the physical amenity for energy end users derived from a combination of
energy and energy using technology and/or the operation, maintenance and control
necessary to deliver the service (examples are indoor thermal comfort, lighting comfort,
domestic hot water, refrigeration, product manufacturing, etc). Energy services meet quality
performance requirements and improve energy efficiency, are contracted for a fixed period of
time and paid for directly by the customer or agent who benefits from them.
Energy Service Company (ESCO): a company that delivers energy efficiency measures in
a user’s facility, and accepts some degree of technical and sometimes financial risk in doing
so. The payment for the services delivered is based (either wholly or in part) on meeting
quality performance standards and/or the achievement of energy efficiency improvements.
Effective Date: means the date of this agreement and is the date on which the ESCO starts
supplying the service to the Client.
New Plant and Equipment: means the plant and equipment to be provided by the ESCO
and which is identified in Schedule X
Reference Year: the 12 month period (usually a calendar year) established for the energy
consumption and costs baseline. The reference year should (if possible) be the year prior to
the start of the contracting project. Alignment with the energy supplies during the last three
years prior to the start of the performance contracting ensures the best possible
representation of the energy consumption.
Utilisation: Change in utilisation in particular means changes in the floor space used, the
period of utilisation or the kind of use of the buildings within the contract period. This is the
Client’s responsibility. Also, if the utilisation of the building changes materially within the
contract period, the guaranteed savings may be adjusted or the contract may be terminated.
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Appendix 2
QUALIFICATION OF COMPANIES
Prequalification of tenderers. Listed here are some criteria. Others might be included if
needed, e.g. companies employing ethnic minority staff.
Companies must show the in-force certification on the Company Quality System, according
to EN ISO 9001: 2000,, for the implementation of the O&M service related to boiler houses
and heating plants.
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Appendix 3
Proposals Evaluation
This proposals methodology is that used in Italy. It is an excellent system, if somewhat
complicated, and should be thoroughly understood before being included in the contract.
The Local Authority will proceed to identify the awarded Company on the basis of the best
value for money.
In order to do this, the appointed engineer will assess the proposals on the basis of the
following criteria:
C = C1 + C2F + C2V
where:
C1 = fixed yearly amount related to the depreciation of the proposed investments,
multiplied by the contract’s duration years. The total amount proposed on investments
and the interest rate shall be explicitly mentioned.
C2F = fixed quota representing the yearly operation, boiler legal responsibility,
ordinary and extraordinary maintenance, multiplied by the contract’s duration years.
This quota shall not exceed 20% of the average energy consumption level (in euro)
mentioned in Annex B.
C2V = variable quota representing the product of the tariff T expressed in euro/kWh
and the energy yearly provided to the plant Et, computed or measured (if heat meters
are available) downstream of heating generators. The estimated value Et, related to
standard conditions of degree/days and working hours, for each plant, is reported in
the Annex B. On this value it will be possible to apply a reduction if energy saving
measures are foreseen by the tenderer on the final uses (energy saving value and
measures shall be mentioned in the proposal). Also the variable yearly quota (T x Et)
must be multiplied by the contract’s duration years.
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G = G1 + G2F + G2V
where
G1 = fixed yearly amount related to the depreciation of the proposed investments,
multiplied by the contract’s duration years. The total amount proposed on investments
and the interest rate shall be explicitly mentioned.
G2F = fixed quota representing the yearly operation, ordinary and extraordinary
maintenance, multiplied by the contract’s duration years. This quota shall not exceed
10% of the average energy consumption level (in euro) mentioned in Annex B.
G2V = variable quota representing the product of the tariff E expressed in euro/kWh
and the estimated value of overall electric energy yearly provided Ee reported in the
The overall amount for the Global Energy Service is the result of the former amounts:
CT = C + G
The average CT of all the overall amounts CTi of proposals admitted to the economical
evaluations, is computed (expressed in millions Euro).
The overall amount will have to be considered net of the safety costs, not to be negotiated.
A normal distribution graph is defined, centred on the value CT, having on the x axis the
economical value related to the amount CT and in the y axis the value F(CT) resulting by the
following
− ( CTi − CT ) 2
1 2σ 2
F(CT) = e
σ 2π
where:
σ means the standard deviation, equal to (0,1 x base tender value in art.1, net of the safety
costs, expressed in million euro).
If the overall amount offered by the competitor is located on the left side of the above
mentioned normal graph, a coefficient COAi for the economical offer related to the i
participant is computed as F(CTi)/F(CT).
If the overall amount offered by the competitor is located on the right side of the above
mentioned normal graph, a coefficient COAi for the economical offer related to the i
participant is computed as F(CTi)/F(CT)]2
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B) The 45 scores related to the technical evaluation are assigned in this way.
For the works implementation as described in the Annex C, 35 scores max will be assigned.
Scores will be assigned as Table 2 reports (single score for each measure to be
implemented).
Further scores (10 scores max) will be assigned for possible other proposed measures, in
connection with the measures mentioned in Table 3. The following documents must be
annexed: technical report, workable schemes, metrical calculation, assessment on the
primary energy yearly saved.
TOTAL 35,00
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Solar Thermal m2
PV kWp
Lighting control (presence kW
detectors, daylighting sensors)
Energy efficient lamps and kW
luminaires
Air conditioning (gas kW
absorption units)
Recovering-recycling system kW
on the air expulsion ducts
Geothermal heat pumps kW
Biomass boiler kW
Within the proposal, the expected overall energy saving % must be indicated (in terms of
primary energy, assessing also separately the percentage thermal and electric energy
savings).
B) The 15 scores related to the maintenance quality evaluation will be assigned on the basis
of the periodicities presented in the maintenance plan.
Companies proposing different periodicity for each measure (scheme of Annex E), will get 1
score minus for every change on the right side (lower frequency) and 1 score more for every
change on the left side (higher frequency), regarding the periodicity from 1S to A. The
maximum score 15 will not be exceeded.
The Local Authority has the possibility to proceed by law (art. 25 Act 157/95) concerning the
checking out of “abnormally low” proposals.
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