Joule Assets, providing microcapital solutions for the energy efficiency and demand response industries, recently won the European Union Flexiciency Grant to advance energy efficiency investment opportunities in Europe. On the heels of establishing Joule Europe in Brussels, the company, along with its European partners, will offer energy efficiency upgrades to the industry’s leading Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of small European project developers. The win signals Europe’s commitment to modernising its electricity grid.
The EU Flexiciency Grant awarded Joule Assets and its 16 European partners, including Siemens, ERDF Vattenfall and others roughly €17m for the Energy Services demonstrations of Demand Response, flexibility and energy efficiency based on metering data Project. The Flexiciency Project aims to augment consumers’ relationship with the grid by providing the ability to monitor and modify local energy consumption in real time. Joule Europe and its partners will identify and expand additional cash flows for energy-saving project installations and technologies on the Energy Reduction Asset (ERA) platform. Increasing consumers’ access to grid data will promote smarter energy usage and enable residential and small commercial energy customers to play an integral role in the decarbonisation of the power sector.
Joule Europe recently convened in Rome with Flexiciency partners to review the platform structure and pilot structures. Jessica Stromback, Chairman of Joule Assets Europe noted, “This cross- collaboration is a meaningful initial step in achieving the European Commission’s 2020 decarbonisation targets and ensuring that energy efficiency continues to be an instrumental part of the process. This enables us to expand our ERA platform’s capabilities in Europe and provide small project developers with new financing opportunities to leverage additional cash flows for their own customer base.”
Just as the new financing vehicles are heralding in a new FinTech era, energy efficiency markets have emerged as one of the most lucrative sectors in the United States and Europe. Joule Assets’ ERA Fund in concert with the ERA platform will drive new energy efficiency and demand response investment opportunities and address this enormous, untapped market for small-to-midsized project upgrades.
Joule’s financing and data solutions enable small-to-mid-sized contractors access to capital, significantly shortening their sales cycles and extending project pipelines and ERA Fund investors are projected to earn low-risk base returns of 6-10% with additional mezzanine returns of 5-15%.
