Financial Instruments for Energy Renovation Policies
PROBLEM:
Up-scaling investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy for buildings is a major challenge to meet European Union targets for 2030. Most of ERDF incentives used non-returnable grant systems for promoting energy investment, but due to deficit restriction in EC Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) the investment has been decelerated. Grant method is showing important weakness in relation to other methods such as Financial Instruments (FIs), so regional authorities have a key role to play in creating new policies in this field.
The use of Cohesion Funds, especially ERDF, in the generation of new Financial Instruments (FIs) is a main challenge for the coming period 2014-2020, especially when combined with EC funding initiatives.

OBJECTIVE:
The overall objective is to promote new policies, or improvement of existing policies, aimed to the creation of funding instruments, especially Financial Instruments (FIs) supported by ERDF funds and integrated with EC funding initiatives, such as EFSI (Juncker Plan 06/2015), tools from the European Investment Bank EIB (ELENA, Margarite Funds) or even from public-private partnerships.

OUTPUTS:
The outputs will be the improvement of specific regional policies and ERDF OP in 7 EU regions, involving 5 Managing Authorities with competences in ERDF for EE and RES projects. 
The improvement will allow the implementation of FIs and energy investment in the phase 2, thanks to changes of strategic focus in 6 ERDF policies and 2 existing FIs.

Other important outputs are:
>3,8M€ of ERDF and >2,65M€ of FIs funds influenced. 
120 people increasing professional capacity attending interregional events. 

 - 28 stakeholder events, including: 
14 interregional events with more than 330 stakeholders attendants. 
14 local stakeholder meetings with more than 200 attendants. 

- 140 best practices produced and displayed in a geo-referenced map (FIener-map tool) and an online database both placed in the website.