The bill regarding the “Improvement of Energy Efficiency and Energy Services”, for which the public consultation ended on the 17th of March, refers to the reduction of the environmental footprint of large facilities and plants and incorporates the European Directive 2006/35 for “Energy Efficiency at end-use and Energy Services”. The bill introduces the term ESCOs (Energy Service Companies) in the Greek energy market.
The operation of ESCOs is based on providing complete energy services, basically to corporations, from the stage of planning to that of financing. Their fees are depending on the amount of the energy saved. Despite its positive character, the bill introduces the corporate structure of ESCOs in a general framework without specifying their legal status and know-how criteria and does not predict for efficient control mechanisms. The lack of such mechanisms would possibly lead to an arbitrary calculation of the percentage of energy saved and return on investment. A disadvantage of this bill may be the fact that it does not include provisions regarding the methodology of the energy saved measurement, which the Directive 2006/35 includes, so the result could be an irrational determination of the investment cost and inefficiency of the control mechanism. A possible solution could be to provide specific indicative methods giving interested parties the capability to choose the most appropriate one.
According to the bill, the projects undertaken by ESCOs are financed by third parties. Financing may come either from the ESCOs existing funds or financial institutions or both. Therefore some of the benefits for service users are the low investment cost because of abovementioned funding and the assumption of the major risk by the ESCOs as well as the procurement of the necessary equipment at better prices.