Investments in the energy transition are increasing globally, with countries pouring billions of dollars into infrastructure, critical mineral supply chains, and power generation capacity.

Most of the approach has been focused on upfront capital intensive investments and long, illiquid, lock-in periods, which some argue, present significant downside risks to these investments in case things go south.

To facilitate the shift away from CAPEX intensive investments, a new, alternative model is being tested and implemented at scale.

We are talking about servitization.

The world has seen concepts like Cooling as a Service, Batteries as a Service, Chemicals as a Service, Irrigation as a Service, etc take off in different parts of the world.

Today, we will be sharing our insights on Energy Efficiency as Service and how a Swiss firm has managed to deploy capital at scale to revolutionize the traditionally capital intensive industry.

While the concept of energy efficiency has existed for a long period of time, servitizing it has just started to take off, predominantly in large scale commercial projects in North America and Europe.

A significant contributing factor to this success has been driven by blended finance mechanisms developed by innovative minds in the industry.

One such company that has revolutionized access to institutional capital in the energy efficiency as a service space is Solas Capital, based in Switzerland.

Established in 2018, the firm was co-founded by Sebastian Carneiro and Paul Kearney to address a vital, overlooked gap within the traditional project finance landscape.

During a presentation at a webinar by the SET Alliance in late 2025, Slawomir Huss, a partner at Solas spoke about trends in the servitization of energy efficiency – “We are seeing the birth of a new asset class. Energy efficiency is moving from a maintenance headache to a investable product. The model is maturing rapidly. We are seeing “blended finance” where donor funds from groups like the Global Environment Facility take the first loss position to make projects bankable.”

Huss mentions the use of Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) as an investment structure to raise debt financing for Energy Efficiency . We invite you to watch the video below where he explains how this works in greater detail.

Alternatively, our team has prepared an interactive component for you to engage with to understand how EaaS financing works.

Though funding for EaaS is not as significant as one would think, progress is being made slowly. In 2020, the European Investment Bank (EIB) partnered with Solas to form the Solas Sustainable Energy Fund committing EUR 160 million to provide debt financing for ESCOs building energy efficiency projects in the EU.

As more an more players enter the market to make EaaS competitive and accessible, we see a change taking place on how risk is perceived in sustainable finance, which would ultimately mean thinner credit spreads, and larger scale deployment of decarbonization projects around the world.

Written by Jake Milton, Climate and Environment author at Insurance Dimes.