Modern office buildings are routinely using up to 3.5 times more energy than expected. This incredible performance gap is mainly due to badly adjusted control settings. Beyond the energy bill, these buildings offer bad thermal comfort and generate a lot of work for management of complaints and manual tweaking of the controls. 3E has developed an Artificial Intelligence based tool to improve comfort & decrease energy, operational costs and CO2 emissions of buildings & building portfolios. Technically speaking, SQ Building is a machine learning technology which predicts the behaviour of a building in function of its characteristics (glazing, orientation, building materials), occupation of the building (people & equipment), and the meteo forecasting. Based on this, SQ Building continuously optimizes the building management. Our clients are the asset, property and facility managers. SQ Building will empower them to finally trade off the trilemma of comfort, energy and operational costs. SQ Building achieves a drastic improvement in thermal comfort, between 15 and 40% reduction of energy costs and a significant reduction of operational effort (less interventions), validated and demonstrated in different real-world pilots since 2015. In 2016, we concluded a strategic collaboration agreement with Sodexo Belgium for whom we run a commercial pilot since February 2017. We have currently contracted 67,000 m² of buildings and have issued offers for more than 1,000,000 m². Commercially, we envision €16 million of revenues over the next five years and accelerated scaling after Year 4. These will generate €50-100 million of savings for our clients through better comfort, energy savings and reduced operational efforts. 3E is an independent technology and consultancy company with €10.3 million of revenues in 2017. Over the past eight years, we successfully commercialized four data-driven software services and created three successful spin-offs with different private investors.

The overall objective of this proposal is to reduce the risk associated with investments in sustainable energy projects. The project results should increase trust from investors, financers and insurance companies. The project aims to establish a common practice for professional risk assessment based on technical and financial due diligence. The focus is on photovoltaic (PV) installations, with emphasis on projects on buildings or at the customer side of the electricity consumption meter and financed by professional investors. The project pursues the following specific objectives: - To develop, document and establish practices for evaluating and mitigating the technical risks associated with investments in photovoltaics - To develop, document and establish practices for valuing such risks when modeling the costs of a PV investment as investors do when evaluating the life cycle costs of such projects - To evaluate how these risks affect the electricity production and the expected return on investment in different business models - To enable the key actors, and particularly the financial market actors, to widely adopt the project results as best practices for the mitigation of risk of sustainable energy investments with current and new business models. The project will be based on large amount of empirical data available within the consortium and from other projects, allowing to formulate recommendations that are statistically significant and based on a large evidence base. The project will involve all relevant stakeholders being financial market actors, valuation and standardization entities, building and PV plant owners, industry, energy prosumers and policy makers. The impacts to be achieved are reduced uncertainty, increased investors’ confidence and trust, valuation methodologies agreed by the market, standardized descriptions of investments, labelling schemes or harmonized frameworks for investment, and support to national strategies for financing.

The European Union is undertaking consistent action to enforce and promote energy efficiency in building sector. The new energy efficient constructions, expression of the European efforts to decrease CO2 emissions, represent a growing share of the building stock. Now there is an unavoidable need to learn from what we are doing, or have recently done, to improve the quality and the performances of the future building sector. This proposal plans the creation of European Energy Efficient building & district Database (ExcEED). ExcEED will be a solid and well-structured database with measured and qualitative information from beyond the state of the art buildings. The key aspects of the database will be: • A set of tools that allows geo-clustered, statistical, and knowledge analysis of the data; • A collection of tailored Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will “transform data into information”; • The ability to analyse building-district interaction; • The existence of the database and associated analyses will be guaranteed beyond the project conclusion thanks to a model of financial self-support; • The ability to continuously gather new data thanks to specific features (e.g. occupant surveys) that increase project visibility among designers with interest in the major rating schemes (e.g. LEED); • The connection with the major EU financed databases on buildings (i.e. Building Observatory). The advanced tools and KPIs associated to the database will allow the analysis of energy performance and environmental quality at the level of single building/district, geo-cluster of buildings, and European new or renovated building stock. The analysis will result in knowledge to inform single building managers, designers, and European policy makers.