Launch: sustainable energy assets as tradable securities
The LAUNCH project will look to overcome barriers to aggregation and market scaling, accelerating the development of the SEA as tradable securities. Today the SEA market is splintered over many project and contract types, small portfolios and many methods for assessing project risk. This smothers market growth today and will continue to do so in the future. Contracts and risk assessment protocols must become standardised, in order to encourage market growth in a manner which will lay the groundwork for and accelerate the scaling of project finance in the future. Indeed, in order for the sustainable energy market to reach its full potential, we must lay the groundwork required to accelerate the development of Sustainable Energy Assets (SEA) as tradable securities. This is the aim of the LAUNCH project. This will be done through, setting up systems to prepare SEA developers for equity investment, standardising developer-end client contracts, and creating a commonly agreed set of risk assessment protocols. The consortium has wide market reach and access to best in class materials. LAUNCH will develop these deliverables further in direct cooperation with a representative group of the European Finance Industry and a substantial pool for SEA developers and pilot them in real market conditions in cooperation with SEA developers and funds. The combination of development with key players and immediate real-life uptake, will ensure the project results are market ready and fully exploitable. The project will provide a basis for accelerated and sustainable SEA market growth and aims to create a European standard for the SEA market going forward. The main resulting benefits will be accelerated growth of the SEA industry, including substantial job growth, energy and CO2 savings and further standardisation of SEA, laying the groundwork for their acceptance as tradable securities.