Crossing the energy efficiency chasm: an assessment of the barriers to institutional investment at scale, a UK perspective

Martin Parker and Peter Guthrie

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, 2016, vol. 6, issue 1, 15-37

Abstract: Significant savings in CO 2 can be won from fabric upgrades, and improved forms of heating. An increase in the number of building retrofits and installations of energy efficient plant such as biomass boilers or combined cooling, heating and power plants must be the aim if the UK is serious in meeting its commitment to CO 2 reduction at both the domestic and EU level. A way of achieving this increase, which will need to be significant, would be to tap into the vast funds under management by institutional investors who are required to invest those funds to optimise its monetary return, taking into account the level of risk. The aim of the research is to identify the enabling conditions that would need to exist to attract institutional investment in energy efficiency at scale. The UK Green Investment Bank (GIB) has invested £50 million into three energy efficiency funds, requiring each fund manager to match the amount by attracting investment from institutional investors. It is these funds that have been analysed as a single GIB case study. Embedded units of analysis are on two levels with the individual funds being the first and the institutional investors investing in those funds as the second. The early findings of the research reported here indicate that the emerging key enabling conditions that would make energy efficiency an attractive proposition are (i) the way energy efficiency investments are classified, (ii) the contractual structure of the individual transactions made by the funds and (iii) the experience and familiarity of the fund manager.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/20430795.2016.1159650 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jsustf:v:6:y:2016:i:1:p:15-37

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/TSFI20

DOI: 10.1080/20430795.2016.1159650

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment is currently edited by Dr Matthew Haigh

More articles in Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().