Frequently Asked Questions

Global Environment Facility (GEF) is a designated funding mechanism of the multilateral environmental conventions, providing incremental finance to developing country parties for incorporating global environmental benefits into their national developmental efforts. Since its establishment in 1992, the GEF has provided over $17.9 billion in grants and mobilized an additional $93.2 billion in co-financing for more than 4500 projects in 170 countries.

GEF plays an important role by generating ‘incremental’ environmental benefits on top of baseline investments. GEF also catalyses innovation through risk reduction. This will help leverage future investments in environmental infrastructure.

Recognizing India’s efforts towards a low emission-economy and focusing on energy efficiency programmes, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has partnered with Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL), under Ministry of Power, for the project ‘Creating and Sustaining Markets for Energy Efficiency’, under its GEF - 6 cycle.

The project aims to mitigate 60 million tons of CO2 eq, that will enable a total direct energy savings of 38.3 million GJ by 2022, and 137.5 million GJ by 2032.

Under this project, Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the donor agency. Further, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) & Asian Development Bank (ADB) are the implementing agencies and EESL is the executing agency. ADB will bring together the GEF grant and their own loan to EESL for investment and apply their due diligence process. They will also support EESL in generating a new pipeline of investments under EESL’s new business plan. UNEP will be the lead agency of the project, and will support with technical assistance. UNEP will bring its regional and global experience and lessons in testing new business models and new technologies to the project. KfW will be a co-financing partner and will contribute to the increase in overall business operations of EESL.

The project aims to achieve its targets, spread across three main components:

a). Expanding and Sustaining investments in existing market sectors: Support certain portion of EESL’s existing targets for installation of energy efficient Street Lights, Domestic Lights, 5-star Ceiling Fans & Agricultural pumps

Technology	Target
LED bulbs	39.8 million
LED based Street Lights	1.5 million
Energy efficient agricultural Pumps	0.23 million
BEE 5-star rated ceiling fans	2.13 million

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b).Building Market Diversification: Development & implementation of new business models through installation of new technologies of super-efficient ACs, public charging Infrastructure for EVs, tri-generation technologies, energy efficient motors etc.

Technology	Target
Super-Efficient ACs	50,000
High energy efficient motors	40,000
Fast charging infrastructure for EVs	200
Trigeneration	12.5 MW

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c).Replication & Scaling Up: Developing a long-term growth strategy based on collected lessons, experiences etc. from the above-mentioned components and achieving a target of USD 300 million investments across all technology areas through innovative ways of financing like an Energy Efficiency Revolving Fund (EERF)

This is a five-year project from 2018 till 2022 which involves a total funding of USD 453 million comprising of a GEF grant of USD 18.85 million and Co-financing of USD 434.2 million from ADB, UNEP, KfW and EESL.

Depending upon the changing market dynamics, new technologies piloted under the GEF-6 project may undergo change.

Energy Efficiency Revolving Fund (EERF) is an innovative and sustainable funding mechanism to support energy efficiency projects. Out of the USD 18.85 million grant available under the project, USD 13 million has been earmarked for EERF. The main objective of the proposed EERF mechanism will be to support ‘proof of concept’ investments and scale up energy efficiency financing of identified EE projects/programs in the country.

GEF Grant and technical assistance resources will help to address some of the upfront risk in such investments. Returns generated from EERF will be re-invested to finance additional projects, which would then allow capital to revolve as a sustainable funding mechanism.

With the support of the GEF-6 project, EESL aims at establishing 200 nos. of fast charging infrastructure - C122 (2X50 kW DC + 22 kW AC) chargers across Delhi – NCR area.

The partnership with GEF will enable EESL to play a leading role in India’s transformational shift towards embracing energy efficiency. EESL will benefit from improved operational effectiveness and capacity to finance energy efficiency projects.