TEMPO Project - Crowdfunding As A Novel Financial Tool For District Heating Projects

The district heating and cooling sector is in full evolution towards decarbonisation alongside an increasing share of renewable sources. This scenario entails new challenges above all from the point of view of the market. From a publicly-owned DHC sector, to new private-public partnerships and cooperative models, the future of district heating and cooling gives room to innovative financing schemes and business models able to deal with the need for an increasing leverage of private or alternative funding.

Infrastructure projects financing is harder in an even more limited public spending framework. Moreover, competition from gas and increasing energy efficiency measures which reduce heat demand, require finding the right investors. For all these reasons, it is time to look for new opportunities of stakeholders’ participation and cooperation.
The right answer to all this could be crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a form of alternative finance, which allows to fund a project or venture by raising small amounts of money from a large number of people, via web-based platforms.

Developed as Deliverable D6.4, this study was conducted by Dr Chiara Candelise, a PhD qualified energy economist and policy specialist. She is a researcher at Bocconi University (Italy) and Imperial College London (UK) as well as founder and CEO of Ecomill s.r.l., an Italian equity crowdfunding platform dedicated to the energy sector.

You can download the full study here

If you want to know more about this and other deliverables, click here to access the TEMPO Project website.