Research database

The main goal of QUEST is to promote investments in Sustainability and Energy Efficiency by identifying and empirically risk-grading factors that influence performance. QUEST will develop a simple toolkit to evaluate these investments. It may be easily applied to all types of Sustainability and Energy Efficiency investments and covers project design-construction-operation risks. Financial institutions applying the QUEST toolkit will be able to reduce risk while significantly increasing investment. QUEST will identify and statistically classify Project Risk Factors (ex. energy consumption) as well as Quality Management service features (ex. energy measurement) to reduce the gap between predicted and real performance in operation by exploiting existing databases (e.g. De-risking Energy Efficiency Platform). QUEST will then create and promote a data-driven decision-making process, certifiable to ISO EN 17065 standards. This will help financial institutions improve risk premium calculations reliability. The core element will be a “Quality Management Impact” factor that represents the added value of quality management. QUEST facilitates risk-securitization of investments by: - Reducing loan costs by identifying the risk profile of investments and also reducing transaction costs - Reducing insurance costs via improved risk identification - Transparently securing funding scheme requirements for Energy Efficiency QUEST’s proposal aims at reaching 880 financial institutions and other stakeholders. Working on 12 pilot projects, QUEST seeks to trigger 1.5 GWh per year (4.000 GWhPE/per year 5 years after project ends) primary energy savings and generate 1 M€ (80M€ per year 5 years after project end) in additional finance for Energy Efficiency investments.