Home   /   Research   /  Retrofit   /  EENVEST

EENVEST

Risk reduction for Building Energy Efficiency Investments

Project Summary

EENVEST is a Horizon 2020 funded collaborative project, aiming to promote building energy efficiency investments. EENVEST will bridge the gap between building owners, interested in upgrading their buildings to consume less energy, and investors, that are willing to provide the capital investment and generate profit through energy bill savings following the retrofit.

In theory, this sounds like a promising investment opportunity and a win-win situation. However, there is a lack of trust to invest in such projects, since the level of complexity and uncertainty in building retrofits is usually high, and profitability predictions are usually based on rule-of-thumb calculations.

EENVEST will provide a practical, reliable and secure solution to connect building owners with investors on a cloud software environment. The technical information of a potential building energy retrofit, provided by building owners, will be validated through blockchain, and translated into economic indicators based on a comprehensive risk evaluation methodology. This will allow investors to easily locate promising investment opportunities, and evaluate the associated financial risks without the need for technical construction knowledge.

IES' Role

IES will lead the development of the online software platform that will act as a marketplace, where owners seeking to renovate their building can register the details, enabling potential investors to easily assess potential investment risks. 

IES will create an easy, user-friendly method for building owners, or their representatives, to collect and upload all the information required for the evaluation of potential retrofit opportunities. The information will be stored on the cloud and used by the EENVEST risk evaluation model as input. This risk evaluation model, manually developed by IES’ project partners, will be converted to a fully automated algorithm, and will be integrated to operate on the cloud upon request.

To ensure distributed consensus and trust in data exchange and validation, blockchain technology will be used to provide decentralised validation of information shared on the platform. This means that central validation of incoming data by a single entity will be replaced by a network of technical valuators, so that information will be deemed 100% reliable. The platform will allow the recording of a reliable and fully traceable history of the data and parameters, solving one of the main problems of the energy efficiency investment market: the unreliability and fragility of technical and financial data as evidence of the risks and potential savings. Investors will in turn be able to access, filter and evaluate all the available investment opportunities and associated risks, calculated by the evaluation model, through a cloud-based tool to make informed decisions on retrofit investments.
 

Project Status

In-progress