Green Transition Finance business loans
Loans of €500,000–€5 million for businesses operating in Ireland, supporting qualifying clean technologies, energy improvements and climate-resilience investments.
Esta oportunidade está atualmente disponível em inglês.
SBCI Green Transition Finance provides business loans through BVP as the “BVP SME Debt Facility”. The loans have majority funding from the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland and support through the European Investment Fund’s InvestEU guarantee programme.
You can borrow €500,000–€5 million. BVP’s brochure quotes interest at the six-month Euribor benchmark rate plus a margin of 5–9 percentage points. The total interest rate therefore depends on both the benchmark and the margin agreed for the loan.
Repayment can be spread over the loan term, include periods when only interest is paid, or use a final lump-sum repayment of the borrowed amount. This is debt that must be repaid; it does not give the lender an ownership share. Loans are normally senior debt, meaning they rank ahead of subordinated lenders for repayment. BVP can also consider lending on terms that place its repayment behind more senior lenders.
The climate-related part of the offer includes clean-energy and climate-technology businesses, renewable energy and storage, industrial energy efficiency, building energy improvements, low-emission transport and climate adaptation. The broader programme also covers other environmental purposes; an environmental label alone does not make every investment a climate project.
Eligibility
Your business must be established in an EU member state and operate in the Republic of Ireland. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) must have fewer than 250 employees and annual turnover no higher than €50 million and/or a balance-sheet total no higher than €43 million. Small mid-caps must have fewer than 500 employees and fall outside the SME category.
There are two routes: the business itself qualifies as sustainable, or the specific project or assets being financed qualify. In both cases, the loan purpose must satisfy the InvestEU Sustainability Guarantee criteria applied by BVP.
For example, the green-business route requires at least 90% of turnover to come from specified qualifying activities. BVP or the business’s external accountant verifies the relevant revenue evidence. A climate-related intellectual-property route requires a qualifying technology right registered within the previous three years and a loan purpose that enables its use; merely owning a patent is insufficient. A qualifying green prize or public-support route also uses a three-year lookback, an approved award list and a loan purpose that maintains or develops the relevant activity.
Other enterprise routes include recognised eco-labels and environmental-management certification. Examples include a valid EU Ecolabel, EMAS environmental-management registration or ISO 50001 energy-management certification. One performance-improvement route uses independently certified reductions of at least 20% in greenhouse-gas emissions, energy use, water use or specified air emissions per unit of output or revenue over the previous five years; another concerns replacing at least 20% of primary materials with recycled or secondary materials over that period. These are alternative assessment routes, not conditions that every borrower must meet.
Project-based eligibility depends on the particular measure and its technical conditions. For example, under the industrial equipment-replacement route, energy use or greenhouse-gas emissions must fall by at least 30%; where the investment increases production, the reduction can be measured per unit of output. This threshold does not apply to every other project category. Renewable-energy projects, building measures and adaptation investments have their own criteria.
How to apply
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Contact BVP through its borrower page or contact page to discuss the business, funding requirement and sustainability eligibility. BVP also directs applicants to the EIF Sustainability Guarantee checker. Its assessment uses the rules applicable to its guarantee agreement.
Prepare evidence for the route you use: this can include company accounts, the relevant award or technology-right record, certificates and the project’s technical information. For funded project measures, documentation must also show the use of the money, for example invoices, purchase contracts or technical offers. The applicable technical and spending evidence must be in place before loan funds are released.