The Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency (FREE) has 5.5 million dollars in funds available this year to finance energy efficiency projects, an amount from which it has already used 1.5 million dollars, said Adrian Ghiță, Executive Director of Fund, during the conference “Energy efficiency for the energy transition – Oradea”, organized in Oradea by Energynomics together with the Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy.
“We started the year with an investment target of 5.5 million dollars and we have signed contracts this year of 1.5 million dollars. We have studies for another 4 million dollars on the table,” said Ghiță.
He added that the investment budget for 2024 will be similar to this year’s. FREE generally provides financing between $100,000 and $1 million, but in certain situations can provide larger loans of up to $2 million.
FREE has so far granted 51 loan contracts whose total value is of 86.5 million euros, of which FREE’s contribution was almost 30 million euros. As a result of these projects, FREE’s 45 clients achieved annual energy savings of 76,442 tons of oil equivalent per year and avoided the emission of 206,582 tons of carbon into the atmosphere per year.
At the same time, in certain situations, FREE also grants a technical assistance component for “structured” projects. One of the impediments to investments in energy efficiency projects is represented by the poor quality of technical projects. In many situations companies seeking funding have incomplete technical projects, which causes them to waste time and even funding.
“We have zero non-performing contracts because we have a dual mechanism for checking the projects we finance. One of the lessons of the last 20 years is that people lend themselves hard to energy efficiency. It’s a nice topic to discuss, but when decisions have to be made, people and companies in general hesitate to make drastic decisions. It is an element of education that comes from our structure. We have to change this somehow,” added Ghiță.
The conference in Oradea was the 2nd of a series of 5 scheduled by the Energynomics communication platform, the Romanian Fund for Energy Efficiency – FREE and the Directorate for Energy Efficiency within the Ministry of Energy. The project is financed by Norway Grants 2014-2021.