LIFE EUCF - Financing energy efficiency in European municipalities and local authorities

The European City Facility aims to remove obstacles of municipalities and local authorities to fully unfold their potentials in building comprehensive sustainable energy investment programmes and fostering the European energy transition.

Moving energy consumption and production towards a more sustainable approach, and in particular increasing energy efficiency, is a step stone for driving forward the implementation of the European Green Deal and achieving the European Union’s target of climate neutrality by 2050. In this context, municipalities and local authorities play a key role in building comprehensive sustainable energy investment programmes by aggregating smaller projects into larger investment portfolios and individually leveraging the financial resources needed for the energy transition. Yet despite this critically important potential, the lack of financial and technical capacity of municipalities and local authorities often pose obstacles to developing credible investment concepts that are attractive to the financial sector. In this context, the LIFE European City Facility (EUCF) builds on the success of the previous initiative developed under the framework of the EU Horizon 2020 Programme for Research and Innovation, to support municipalities and local authorities in Europe with hands-on, locally-based expertise for the development of credible and robust investment concepts for their sustainable energy projects. The LIFE EUCF provides tailor-made, rapid and simplified financial support in the form of EUR 60,000 grants to finance the activities necessary for the development of the investment concept as well as technical support and capacity building activities.  

The EUCF is implemented by a European consortium led by Energy Cities. adelphi thereby takes responsibility for the organisation and implementation of the LIFE EUCF application, evaluation and investment concept development processes. Moreover, adelphi is responsible for the validation of the investment concepts prepared by EUCF beneficiaries and for the development and implementation of a comprehensive framework for monitoring the results and impacts achieved with the LIFE EUCF.