Shedding light on the main legal, technical and financial issues disrupting the EPC legislative framework.
With this objective, on 5th of June a national workshop about “The EPC contract in the current legislation” was held at Liguria Region premises. During the morning, the first session of the meeting took place in order to understand and frame the subject, and to share the experiences of the main national stakeholders: institutions, public administrations’ representatives involved in European projects, facilitators and professional associations from construction/ESCOs industry.
The roundtable in the afternoon has been dedicated to conflicts of law and to the technical and financial barriers undermining the application of the EPC in Italy: on the basis of the considerations expressed by the participants, all the main issues faced by the public administrations in the last years and related to the EPC have emerged, generally in reference to the PPP (Private-Public-Partnership). The debate has shed light a relevant variety of solutions adopted by the Public Bodies that have been engaged in issuing tenders for the energy refurbishment of public building through the ESCOs.
The most relevant debase was about the legislative qualification of the contract (procurement or concession?), in reference to its specific object and to the necessary terms to ensure a real allocation of the risk to the ESCOs, in accordance with the national and European legislation about the technical design and the financial accounting of the EE initiatives.
This debate has involved the different institutions and stakeholders in an hard interpretation process of the Italian Code of Public Contract, considering the existing conflicts between the Code itself and the technical laws in the sector. In the end, the attention of the participants has been focused on the issue of financial and economic sustainability of the EPC contracts, thus highlighting the present criticality for bankability of the projects, and the accessibility to the public subsidies for the energy efficiency, with the aim of identifying and proposing possible solutions to the recurring issues.
Useful documents
