Alliance to Save Energy’s CarbonCount® Scoring Tool Brings Transparency to the Green Bond Market
The Alliance to Save Energy News
Alliance to Save Energy’s CarbonCount® Scoring Tool Brings Transparency to the Green Bond Market
Washington, D.C., June 21, 2016 – The Alliance to Save Energy (“the Alliance”) announced today the first application of its unique CarbonCount® scoring system to a green bond issued by a global bank and financial services firm. The Alliance has certified that Deutsche Bank’s HA Rooftop I, LLC green loan – a pool of residential solar loans – is reducing 0.18 tons of CO2 for each $1,000 of the asset’s value.
The Deutsche Bank certification marks a new, promising phase for investors seeking reliable, transparent and user-friendly investment information regarding carbon emissions. Use of this CarbonCount scoring tool gives investors credible information about the impact of their investments on carbon and demonstrates a commitment to investment strategies and portfolios that reap both strong financial and environmental returns.
Alliance to Save Energy President, Kateri Callahan said, “In just this last year, the CarbonCount scoring tool has been recognized with the Bloomberg Finance for Resilience (FiRe) award, HBSC has cited the model’s promise in its evaluation of the corporate green bond market, the Connecticut Green Bank has committed publicly to use the CarbonCount certification system and now Deutsche Bank has scored its investment using this methodology. We are very encouraged by this uptake, and look forward to working with additional private industry partners to expand the CarbonCount certification tool to the burgeoning green bond market.”
CarbonCount certification is well positioned to play a significant role in providing much needed transparency for investors and the public alike. Currently, there is no widely used standard in place for determining the environmental performance of green bonds. With Moody’s estimating that the prospective market for carbon finance is expected to reach $70 billion in 2016, and the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Collaboration (IPEEC) projecting a G20 financing demand of $430 billion annually, a standard evaluation method is sorely needed.
Callahan continued, “The beauty of the CarbonCount scoring tool is that it provides a single, key metric for determining the ‘shade of green’ of an investment. CarbonCount certification holds the promise of providing markets with an analytically robust but readily understood standard to compare the environmental performance of varying investments made through green loans and bonds.”
“The assets in Deutsche Bank’s HA Rooftop I, LLC highlight the flexibility of our CarbonCount methodology,” said Kevin Lucas, Director of Research at the Alliance to Save Energy. “The underlying projects were located in ten different states and contained a mix of PV modules and hardware. Our process was able to separately calculate the impact of avoided electricity generation, and thus avoided carbon emissions, in each region to produce an aggregate score. CarbonCount certification enables an apples-to-apples comparison between projects, technologies and locations, not only for renewable generation installations, but also for energy efficiency and even other energy-related projects.”
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