plafarge

Great question! Spark is the first of it's kind in terms of enabling individual investors to invest directly in energy efficiency projects.

However, we're following in the inspiring footsteps of some incredible companies in the cleantech crowd investment sector, particularly Solar Mosaic (joinmosaic.com) and SunFunder (sunfunder.com)

There are also some great teams working on impact focused energy efficiency investments offered to accredited impact investors, including one of our favorite companies, Bloc Power (blocpower.org)

Thanks! We're incredibly excited to be in full launch mode, and can't wait to have our beta platform and pilot projects available over the coming months.

We are a for-profit, and believe that building a strong, scalable financial model is what it takes to transform a sector and fix what we see as a market that is structurally underserved by credit markets (small and medium scale energy efficiency projects).

We will be disclosing Spark's take through the investor disclosure documents. Each project will include a detail prospectus for each project that will lay out credit risk decisions, upfront schedule of lease repayments and investor yield (the delta of which is Spark's revenue).

We're building our project pipeline to be able to offer efficiency note with 2 to 5 year tenors (durations) and interest rates between 5% and 10%, depending on the credit risk and payback period of the project.

Spark's upcoming beta platform will focus on energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, primarily building retrofits like LED upgrades, HVAC, boilers, water efficiency, building automation systems, heat pumps, etc. We're targeting projects in small businesses, community organizations like churches, charter schools and non-profits, and mid-scale commercial and industrial facilities.

Luckily, efficiency projects with three to five year paybacks are generating significant current year cashflow through avoided energy or resource costs, meaning Spark can offer solid returns and short tenor notes, lowering temporal risk to our investors. Specifically, we generate returns for our investors based on the revenue we receive from lease payments made by the project recipient.