How Innovative Citizen Financing Schemes Enable Large-Scale Energy Efficiency Measures in the Building Sector

38th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition; 1681-1682
Buildings play an important role in everyone's life: they serve as homes, workplaces, schools, shopping centres, hospitals or other public buildings. Nevertheless, about 75% of the EU building stock is not energy efficient, leading to a large amount of the energy produced being wasted. To minimize energy loss, existing buildings need to undergo energy efficient renovations. However, there is a particular deficit in finding suitable financing schemes for the implementation of energy efficiency measures. Innovative financing solutions are needed to enable energy-efficient retrofits on a large scale and to strengthen collaboration between all stakeholders (project promoters, public/private financial institutions, end-users) and especially with citizens. Based on the ongoing research activities in the frame of the H2020 European project CitizEE, this paper presents the latest advancements of the innovative Citizen Financing Scheme of the Pilot VIPA based in Lithuania. The VIPA scheme enables citizens to become prosumers (people who both consume and produce electricity) through the combination and leveraging of different funding sources.