We are currently seeing a deceleration of renewable energy growth in Europe. This is partly attributed to the challenges for financing renewable energy projects. Reduced access to conventional financing options over the past few years has triggered innovative financing schemes to emerge, with crowdfunding attracting a lot of attention. CrowdFundRES recognises the vast potential of crowdfunding for financing renewable energy projects. The project has been developed for and in cooperation with the three target groups: 1) Renewable energy project developers whose access to financing is getting more challenging 2) The part of the public that has an interest in investing even very small amounts of their savings in renewable energy projects 3) Crowdfunding platforms who act as intermediaries facilitating the financial transaction between the public and the project developers. The overall objective of the proposed project is to contribute to the acceleration of the renewable energy growth in Europe by unleashing the potential of crowdfunding for financing renewable energy projects. In order to achieve this, the work has been structured for achieving the following objectives: 1. Gain a deep understanding of the public’s perception of crowdfunding 2. Analyse the challenges faced by the application of crowdfunding for renewable energy projects in Europe 3. Develop guidelines that support easier, more effective and wider accepted practices in crowdfunding renewable energy projects 4. Apply the guidelines and review them based on practical experience 5. Improve the market and regulatory framework 6. Promote the crowdfunding concept and its advantages among those who could contribute or raise funds

The REALIZE project aims to present a carefully selected and pre-qualified portfolio of new renewable energy generation technologies to the EU Innovation Fund (IF) through proposals resulting from successfully completed Horizon projects in Renewable Energy Sources (RES). The project will support IF project promoters to win major Innovation Fund support or propose alternative funding opportunities at EU, national and local level. Intense support will be given to ten technology partners in the consortium building on their results from 15 pre-qualified Horizon projects. From these, we will prepare seven IF proposals spanning a variety of sectors: Concentrated Solar Power, wind, solar thermal and solar photovoltaics, ocean energy and biofuels as energy-producing installations and as manufacturing projects for small-, medium- and large-scale calls. Their technology will be profiled. REALIZE will also reach out to the broader renewable energy community, with conferences and written material addressing IF’s selection criteria; sharing “lessons learnt” (including with Innovation Fund’s designers) and explaining the complementarity of different public funding programmes. Deep collaboration with other projects funded under the same call topic is foreseen but not counted upon.

The overall objective of this proposal is to reduce the risk associated with investments in sustainable energy projects. The project results should increase trust from investors, financers and insurance companies. The project aims to establish a common practice for professional risk assessment based on technical and financial due diligence. The focus is on photovoltaic (PV) installations, with emphasis on projects on buildings or at the customer side of the electricity consumption meter and financed by professional investors. The project pursues the following specific objectives: - To develop, document and establish practices for evaluating and mitigating the technical risks associated with investments in photovoltaics - To develop, document and establish practices for valuing such risks when modeling the costs of a PV investment as investors do when evaluating the life cycle costs of such projects - To evaluate how these risks affect the electricity production and the expected return on investment in different business models - To enable the key actors, and particularly the financial market actors, to widely adopt the project results as best practices for the mitigation of risk of sustainable energy investments with current and new business models. The project will be based on large amount of empirical data available within the consortium and from other projects, allowing to formulate recommendations that are statistically significant and based on a large evidence base. The project will involve all relevant stakeholders being financial market actors, valuation and standardization entities, building and PV plant owners, industry, energy prosumers and policy makers. The impacts to be achieved are reduced uncertainty, increased investors’ confidence and trust, valuation methodologies agreed by the market, standardized descriptions of investments, labelling schemes or harmonized frameworks for investment, and support to national strategies for financing.

INCREASE aims to contribute to a wider uptake of IPV by delivering innovations at module and system level, as well as for the design & operation phase. New encapsulants and coatings will be developed contributing to improved aesthetics, reduced glare, lower environmental footprint, improved behavior during fire, and improved antifoiling and antisoiling behavior. At system level, innovations focus on integrated facade and roof concepts, as well as noise barriers. Practical guidelines will further be delivered for bespoke infrastructure integrated projects, validated with a variety of complementary infrastructure integrated PV projects. Elaborate testing is foreseen at module and system level in line with relevant construction related and electrical standards. Optimal case-specific selection of IPV size and characteristics will be supported by a multi-objective optimisation software that takes into account the shape and use of the building or infrastructure, its surroundings, and its energy flexibility potential and steer the asset operation as well as suggest specific user behaviour to maximise the self-consumption. To increase market acceptance, a strong layer of user feedback and co-creation underpins the overall R&D activities, and contributes to delivering 10 complementary building and infrastructure demonstrations on 9 locations in 6 European countries. Cross-sector interactions, policy exchanges, investor dialogues, and country-specific business case assessments will further direct the exploitation towards large scale market uptake.