SBRI - competition to scale up business energy efficiency projects

Tender description

The Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy are creating a new £7m innovation competition that will fund the development of new business models that aggregate and scale up the delivery of small scale energy efficiency building retrofit/refurbishment projects in the non-domestic sector. The department is holding a workshop in late November/ early December to provide further early details on the competition. As it is still in its development stages, the workshop will allow interested parties to provide feedback and help steer elements of its design. The competition The competition ultimately aims to pilot the most promising business model to show:  How aggregation can generate a sustainable supply chain of projects and thus reduce individual project costs;  How larger, aggregated, projects can attract more lenders into the market;  How standardising parts of the process, i.e. contracts, assessments, or monitoring, can remove resource constraints from the market actors assessing potential savings or finance opportunities, encouraging more businesses into the SME energy efficiency market. Competition Structure The competition will be in two phases: • Phase 1 will fund feasibility studies/business cases that scale up energy efficiency projects, addressing the barriers that currently inhibit the energy services market in providing smaller energy efficiency projects funding. • Phase 2 will fund successful applicants to pilot their approach, demonstrating the potential for their proposed business model to support the aggregation of energy efficiency projects and achieve energy savings. Outputs might include a prototype of product (where applicable) and an evaluation of the solution's impact.