Welcome to SRS's Blog

SRS uses this blog to share information and generate discussion on current opportunities and solutions impacting commercial and public building stakeholders related to the assessment, benchmarking and optimization of energy and sustainability performance.

We welcome your comments and contributions.

  • Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans – New Whitepaper Sponsored by SRS!

    Posted on April 23rd, 2012

    http://www.srmnetwork.com/wp-content/uploads/Whitepaper_Underwriting_EE_Loans_FINAL_04-20-12.pdf

     SRS Sponsors New Whitepaper:

    “Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive  Energy Efficiency Loans”

     New underwriting “best practice” enables building energy efficiency investments to become a mainstream financial asset class

      TRUMBULL, CT – APRIL 20, 2012 – Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS), the industry leader in on-demand building energy assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, today announced it is sponsoring a new whitepaper: Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans.  Published by Building Energy Performance Assessment News (BEPAnews), this new report is the eighth in its Critical Issues Series and is available at no cost.

     The paper discusses how commercially-attractive financing mechanisms supported by best practice underwriting processes accelerate the deep energy efficiency investment market. It also describes how these solutions enable energy retrofit lending to become a mainstream financial asset class with a high degree of standardization, predictability and scale.  (download paper)

     “SRS is proud to sponsor this research paper that provides commercial building stakeholders with the insight needed to accelerate energy efficiency retrofit investments that unlock significant energy savings opportunities,” noted Brian McCarter, SRS CEO.  He added, “The key to providing such financing is the ability to underwrite loans in a standardized, technically sound and fully transparent manner. It is precisely these new underwriting “best practice” protocols that provide stakeholders with the confidence in the pre-retrofit energy savings projections and confidence that the energy savings can reliably be measured and verified after the retrofit.”

     About Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)

    SRS, an industry leader in on-demand building energy assessment and proprietary benchmarking software, delivers Sustainable Real Estate Manager® an Internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) workflow platform enabling building stakeholders to assess, benchmark and optimize the energy and sustainability performance of their properties.  Its Peer Building Benchmarking™ database contains over 120,000 buildings nationwide encompassing 15 property types comprising 3.3 billion square feet, over $7.8 billion in annual energy costs and $635 million in annual water/sewer costs and has reinvented commercial real estate’s energy efficiency benchmarking best practice.  For more information, visit www.SRMnetwork.com.


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  • Energy Efficiency at Zero Upfront Cost

    Posted on April 11th, 2012

    http://www.environmentalleader.com/2012/04/09/energy-efficiency-at-zero-upfront-cost/

    Energy Efficiency at Zero Upfront Cost

    Eric Woodroof
    Founder
    Profitable Green Solutions

    Financing Options that Allow for Immediate Simple Payback 

    It is no secret in today’s stormy economy… cash flow is tight in businesses and organizations. For many, it has been a downward spiral of spending more on operations and being further unable to upgrade systems. However, there are ways to “turn the ship around” and head out of the storm. Although cash flow constraints delay about a third of good energy management projects from getting implemented, this article describes financing mechanisms that can allow your projects to get implemented…now. Plus, at the end of the article is a link to a free webinar that will show you much more. This free webinar was part of a paid webinar series in 2010 and has over an hour of useful financing information.

    Why?

    If your company doesn’t have the upfront capital to fund an energy project, you could finance the project (just like your home mortgage) so that the implementation costs are spread out over time and this cost per year is less than your savings cash flow. Financing does not have to be complicated. In fact, financing energy efficiency/green projects can be very similar to your mortgage or car payment with fixed payments for a length of time. The bigdifference is that your car will not “save” you money like an energy project, which might have a 25 percent return on investment. Even if you pay 15 percent interest, you are still saving more money than the finance payments, which means the project becomes “cash flow positive” and does not impact the capital budget. This can allow your CFO to move forward without sacrificing any other budget line item. Unfortunately, when presented with financing options, a common reaction is to hesitate as people don’t like to enter into long-term contracts or pay an additional financing cost to a lender. However, with many energy management projects, the cost of financing is usually less than the cost of delay. Plus, if you do finance the project, the simple payback is effectively zero.

    Table 1 below shows the cash flow for a non-financed project. Assume the project costs $100,000 and saves $28,000 per year for 15 years. This project could get approved IF the client has $100,000 in cash to fund it. The project has a Net Present Value of $ 102,700 and an Internal Rate of Return of 27 percent.

    Part: 1 2

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  • New Webinar: “Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans”

    Posted on April 2nd, 2012

       Register Here:  https://www.bepanews.com/webinarregistration.aspx?w=15

    “Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-
    Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans”

    Sponsored by Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)
    Presented by Anthony J. Buonicore, P.E.
    Chairman of the ASTM Building Energy Performance Task Group

    Join our Webinar
    Presented On: April 13, 2012, 1:00 PM
    Presentation: 1 Hour
    Q & A: 30 Minutes
    Emerging Best Practice for Underwriting Commercially-Attractive Energy Efficiency Loans

    The commercial real estate market, consisting of almost five million office, retail, service, lodging, multifamily, warehouse and storage buildings in the U.S., represents a significant opportunity for stakeholders to monetize energy savings. The availability of commercially-attractive financing for building energy efficiency projects has been a major obstacle to market growth. However, financing programs, including PACE and others, are now able to overcome these obstacles and provide multiple commercially-attractive financing structures. This webinar will explore these commercially-attractive financing structures and the emerging best practice to underwrite these loans. Two case studies will be presented.

    The webinar will cover:

    • The significant pent-up demand for deep energy retrofits
    • The keys to energy efficiency investment
    • The criteria for commercially-attractive financing
    • Commercially-attractive financing options
    • The advantage of PACE programs
    • The emerging best practice for underwriting energy efficiency loans
    • Credit enhancements that can make lending even more attractive
    • Case studies

     

    The webinar will be of special interest to:

    • Commercial building owners and managers
    • Energy consultants and energy auditors
    • ESCOs
    • Energy service providers
    • Building engineers and architects
    • Bankers and financers
    • PACE program participants
    • Attorneys

     

    Presented by:
    Anthony J. Buonicore, P.E., BCEE, QEP
    Managing Director, Buonicore Partners, LLC
    Chairman, ASTM Building Energy Performance Assessment Task Group

    Moderator:
    Brian J. McCarter
    Chairman & CEO, Sustainable Real Estate Solutions, Inc. (SRS)


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