The sweet taste of a LEMON

Two social housing assocations of the Emilia Romagna Region, ACER Reggio Emilia and ACER Parma are aiming to accumulate a total of 15,29 million Euro energy investments in 622 private and public social dwellings. The LEMON project will develop an innovative, bankable and aggregated sustainable energy investment scheme based on the following aspects:

• It will be a pilot project for the Emilia Romagna Region Social Housing Programme, creating a new financing model for energy
• It will retrofit interventions through the development of an EPC model for contracts that will mobilize large investments in energy retrofitting, in order to reduce the buildings energy demand.
• LEMON will support the investments combining different financing instruments available at National and Regional level (ERDF, National financing, National incentive “Conto termico” and loans)... 
• ... and in particular, it will roll part of the investment on the rents according to the reduced energy costs for the tenants. LEMON will develop the Energy Performance Tenancy Agreement (EPTA). The contract between the tenants and the ACERs will ensure that a portion of the investments covered by ACER Reggio Emilia and ACER Parma with a loan is charged on the rents for as long as the loan is repaid, leveraging on the savings produced by the retrofit interventions. 

The replication of the project will be based on a wide dissemination and capacity building strategy among the social housing companies at regional and national level, and also among other stakeholders (City councils, Provinces, Regional, public authorities, Groups that represent e.g. Local Government Associations, National public authorities, Organisations working in the field of energy efficiency, ESCos, Businesses).

The project results will be disseminated across Europe towards the EU network Climate-Kic and the European Federation for Public, Cooperative and Social Housing, Housing Europe.