High income return and safe investments through financing of energy efficient measures in the industry sector

Energy-efficient technologies may induce large energy and monetary savings in various industries. Based on our study, investigating the German industry by covering over 250 publications, we show that investments of merely 5 billion euro may generate cash-positive savings of about 20 billion euro until 2020. Until 2030 the savings are increasing up to over 60 billion euro. However, plenty of commonly identified potential in industries remains unrealized due to comparatively short requested payback periods in order to minimize a company's investment risk. According to our last survey of industrial enterprises it can be seen that usual payback periods for energy efficient machines shall not exceed 3 years. Energy efficient measures with higher payback periods often remain unused, but regardless can generate a payback rate of over 20% over its entire lifetime. Against this background we compare different methods for industrial energy efficiency investment evaluation and come up with effective recommendations for operators to realize more energy savings and reduce energy costs. Recent studies show that enterprises are realizing more energy efficiency measures while using a total cost approach as a basis for an investment decision than enterprises which concentrate only on short-term profit maximization. Furthermore, new funding models for efficiency measures could be an alternative to take full advantage of specific monetary potentials. In times of low market rates investors gain less interest rate income as years before. 2009 fixed-period interest rates dropped to 0,5% and today they are partially still under the inflation rate. As a result the demand for classical asset management with mutual funds dropped steadily in recent years and investors are looking for alternative investments. Using private capital to invest in energy efficiency will solve two problems at once: Capital assets in energy efficiency may significantly improve portfolio compositions of investors while simultaneously provide required financial resources for efficient technologies. As a result investors gain high income returns and enterprises are able to reduce their overall CO2 emissions. Furthermore, through the use of different funding models the payback period for enterprises can be considerably shortened. In this paper we discuss several funding and business models and show the specific impacts on cost-effectiveness, payback-periods and common requirements.