GREEN LOANS EXPERIENCES AS INVESTMENT MULTIPLIER SCHEMES

In recent years Italian national and regional governments have been active in promoting energy efficiency and renewable energies. The most effective measures are focused on the residential sector: feed-in tariffs for photovoltaic systems (higher tariffs for building integrated small plants), 55% tax credits for energy efficiency investments (windows or boilers substitutions, walls and roof insulations or even complete building refurbishments). Recent surveys show that in some cases the customers are informed but cannot afford to pay for the needed investments and they prefer not to ask for loans, paying interests. In this situation the final customer may decide to opt for low quality refurbishments, not necessarily affecting the building energy consumption. For these reasons there can still be some room left for some local supporting initiatives. In the Province of Milan the Mutuo A-profitto provided green loans with no interest to the consumers to all those who want to perform an energy efficient refurbishment of their house: local banks provided the third party financing interest were paid half by the bank itself and half by the province administration the project designer or the installer had to declare the expected energy savings In this way the customer obtained an interest-free loan up to 7 years: since the amount of the instalment could not exceed the amount of the expected economic savings, even the annual cash flow will be positive. Eligible measures include: glaze substitutions, walls and roof insulation, heating systems, solar water heater, heat pumps. Since 2007, the Milanese Province administration has provided 1,35 million Euro funding, which mobilized 16 million Euro of total investments. The Piedmont Region has recently introduced a similar scheme addressed to households and companies. The paper provides an in depth description of the schemes adopted in Milan, an evaluation of the results and a comparison with the Piedmonts’ experience and the "éco-prêt à taux zéro" (zero interest green loans) recently introduced in France by the Ministère du Développement Durable.