Triple-A

Triple-A is introduced, for identifying “Triple-A” energy efficiency investments, aiming to reduce the respective time and effort required at the crucial phase of the investments’ conceptualization, as well as to increase transparency and efficiency of respective decision making. By introducing this new scheme, we seek to make energy efficiency investments more transparent, predictable and attractive for investors / financiers and project developers.

Triple-A has a very practical result-oriented approach, seeking to answer three questions:

• How to assess the financing instruments and risks an early stage?
• How to agree on the Triple-A investments, based on selected key performance indicators?
• How to assign the identified investment ideas with possible financing schemes?

The Triple-A scheme compromises three critical steps (answering each question), with the following main outputs:

• Step 1 - Assess: Member States () risk profiles and mitigation polices, including a Web based database, enabling national and sectoral comparability, market maturity identification, good practices experiences exchange, reducing thus uncertainty for investors.
• Step 2 - Agree: Standardised Triple-A tools, efficient benchmarks, and guidelines, translated in consortium partners’ languages, accelerating and scaling up investments.
• Step 3 - Assign: In-country demonstrations, replicability and overall exploitation, including MS recommendations on realistic and feasible investments in the national and sectoral context, as well as on short and medium term financing.

The Triple-A case study countries were selected to promote diversity across a number of factors, including: a leading European economy (Germany), an innovation front-runner in energy (The Netherlands), a weak economy, went through one of the longest and most severe recessions (Greece), an economy with slow economic recovery (Italy), a diversified economy with a strategic geographical location having some of the largest European firms (Spain), a country that has experienced one of the fastest economic recoveries in Europe (Lithuania), a progressing country with a once skeptical stance towards low-carbon development (Czech Republic), and a country, recovering from a slow transition to a market economy, with growing regional strategic role and significant ambition towards EU processes (Republic of Bulgaria).

Emphasis will be placed on fostering local integrated energy, transport mobility and land-use planning, as well as multi-level governance, linking up national and sub-national levels for delivering integrated sustainable energy planning and projects to achieve synergies and economies of scale.