The EBRD’s FINTECC programme offers grants, policy dialogue and TC help
The EBRD’s Finance and Technology Transfer Centre for Climate Change (FINTECC) raises awareness of the innovative resource efficiency technologies available (it will soon do the same with environmental technologies), and helps spread their use through grants, policy dialogue and technical cooperation.
What obstacles does FINTECC need to overcome?
There are a number of obstacles that we have identified that prevent companies from implementing climate technologies, such as lack of awareness of the options that exist as well as a lack of developed local supply chains, which means there is actually an increased cost that the companies face to install such climate technologies.
How does FINTECC operate?
FINTECC comes along with finance (arranged by the EBRD) to any Bank project in the countries involved and essentially provides grants of between 5 and 25 per cent of the investment cost of the eligible climate technology to companies that choose to install efficient low-carbon technologies that are not common in the market.
We sustain companies through implementation, first by working with the companies, either through consultants or directly, to identify investment opportunities which lead to reduced impact on the environment, which might involve, say, water efficiency or energy efficiency.
Out of these investments there might be some which might have low market penetration level in the country, but at the same time might have a good replication potential, which means there might be other players in the country or region which might be encouraged to follow the example by seeing the results.
Once the technology is successfully installed, the companies can then apply for a reimbursement for the portion of the investment which is eligible. So if, say, the cost of the investment is €1 million, they might get up to €250,000 back from us. (Bigger projects would have a cap of US$ 500,000 or €400,000).
That is the project part of our work. We also carry out policy dialogue assignments, TC assignments, studies and resource efficiency audits.
To give you an example of the studies, one of the main ones we have done this year was to cooperate with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
With the FAO, the EBRD has developed a step-by-step methodology that can help countries assess market penetration for an array of climate technologies and boost the transfer of practices in the agricultural sector. The EBRD has also collaborated with the International Energy Agency (IEA) on a set of activities aiming to support the market penetration of renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies in the Caspian and Black Sea (ETC) as well as in the southern and eastern Mediterranean (SEMED) regions.
The result is helpful not only for us but also for the local government, and this is our aim now - because local policy should go in the same direction, whenever they come up with promoting sectors and technologies, it’s good to know where the highest potential lies and which are the areas that need to be developed the most. So this is a helpful exercise.
A general methodology has been piloted in three countries: Morocco, Belarus and Kazakhstan (the FAO cooperation is only in Morocco) and in the last quarter of this year all of those studies will be published and available to the public.
How is FINTECC’s work financed?
We apply for funds to implement the programme from different donors. The main one is the GEF (the UN Global Environmental Facility), which provided funds for ETC countries, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. For north Africa, the financing comes from the EBRD's own Shareholder Special Fund (SSF).
The money available for climate change mitigation projects in the ETC region is US$ 6.5 million, with a further US$ 1.3 million available for climate change adaptation projects.
For Ukraine, US$ 7 million is available and $6 million for Kazakhstan. In countries where funding comes from the SSF, the funds amount to €5 million.
And how do you measure its success in the past two years?
So far the EBRD has 21 signed transactions that include a FINTECC grant. Incentives committed so far are worth US$ 6.6 million, supporting US$ 44.6 million of related GET investments.