Environmental Defense Fund’s Investor Confidence Project has announced a partnership with the Los Angeles Better Buildings Challenge that aims to develop a more robust marketplace for energy efficiency retrofits in the city.
Los Angeles has set a goal of achieving 20 percent energy savings across 30 million square feet of existing buildings by 2020 as part of the Better Buildings Challenge, a national leadership initiative sponsored by the US Department of Energy and launched in 2011.
The LA Better Buildings Challenge will be promoting the Investor Confidence Project protocols through its network of building owners and industry stakeholders as it aims to bring greater transparency and accountability to the energy efficiency market by introducing a system of standardization in the way commercial building retrofits are developed, funded, and managed.
The ICP framework assembles best practices and existing technical standards into a set of protocols for developing projects, determining savings estimates, and documenting and verifying results, EDF says.
The ICP protocols are designed to increase confidence in energy and financial savings among building owners, project developers, and investors, making it easier to overcome the many barriers that make it hard for projects to move from a good idea to construction. The ICP team is working with LA Better Buildings Challenge to connect local companies, building owners, and projects to local investors and our national network of project allies. This service will provide them with a range of relevant options, from energy service agreements and debt and equity financing, to insurance products and a diversity of software tools.
Adopting the ICP framework should save LA Better Building Challenge partners from the expensive and time-consuming process of creating and maintaining unique technical project requirements that could otherwise result in a patchwork of program requirements across California and the county, increasing transaction costs for project developers, building owners, and investors alike, EDF says.