“BASE was founded on a conviction that remains more urgent than ever: that addressing climate change requires the right financing strategies and business models, not just the right policies and technologies, to make clean solutions genuinely competitive, affordable and scalable.
Over twenty-five years, each project, each financing strategy, each business model we have designed and tested has brought together governments, financiers, businesses and communities around the shared belief that market-based solutions can drive the systemic change our climate demands.
We are deeply grateful to every partner, collaborator and ally who has been part of this journey. Together, we have been laying the foundations for a more sustainable and equitable world. The next chapter is the most important one yet.”
– Daniel Magallon, Managing Director, BASE Foundation
Building the Financial Architecture for Global Climate Solutions
For 25 years, BASE’s work has revolved around one main question: how can financing and business model innovation make climate-friendly solutions the norm rather than the exception?
BASE, the Basel Agency for Sustainable Energy, was founded in 2001 as a Swiss not-for-profit foundation and a Specialised Partner of the United Nations Environment Programme. Across the quarter-century, BASE has developed financial strategies and market-driven approaches that unlock investment into climate change mitigation and adaptation, with deliberate attention to markets and segments often regarded as challenging or underserved. The vision behind that work has remained constant: a low-carbon and resilient world in which sustainability is an inherent part of how businesses and markets operate.
The scope of the mission has widened over time. What began in 2001 as a focus on sustainable energy finance broadened in 2021 to encompass a fuller range of climate change solutions, including adaptation, the circular economy transition, as well as nature conservation and restoration, which is progressively being explored. Each new project has been built on top of earlier work rather than alongside it. Many of the financial mechanisms BASE deploys today in renewables or efficiency, agriculture, resilient infrastructures, and Virtual Power Plants stem from innovations developed in different sectors or as part of various initiatives rolled out over the course of the past decades. The story of BASE is, in that sense, a story of compounding building blocks. Holding those blocks together is a set of operating principles BASE has stuck to throughout: integrity and a commitment to long-lasting impact, a people-centric and diverse working culture, and the practice of co-creating solutions alongside partners across sectors.
Tracing back to the origins: establishing the foundation
When BASE was founded in 2001, climate finance as a field was only burgeoning. Capital flows for renewable energy and energy efficiency were fragmented, mistrusted by mainstream investors, and disconnected from the projects that needed them most. Klaus Töpfer, then Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, had identified the gap explicitly at SUN 21’s Internationale Woche für eine nachhaltige Energiezukunft, the first international week for a sustainable energy future, which took place from July 27 to August 1, 1998, at the Messe Basel convention centre. The diagnosis was simple: there was an institutional deficit where investors, NGOs, project developers, and policymakers should have been working together. Three years later, with the Canton of Basel-Stadt and the chambers of commerce of Alsace (France) and Südlicher Oberrhein (Baden-Württemberg, Germany), BASE was established as a tri-national project to fill that deficit.
The early decade of BASE’s work was very much focused on building the connective tissue that would let capital flow. Each of the projects between 2002 and 2009 addressed a different missing piece, such as trust signals or meeting places for innovators and investors.
In 2002, BASE published the Financing Sustainable Energy Directory, one of the earliest tools to create an inventory and connect lenders and investors with renewable energy entrepreneurs. The directory was established at the time because these actors would heavily rely on encounters at conferences and events to establish such connections. In 2003, BASE co-founded the Gold Standard alongside other international NGOs to bring trusted, results-based certification to a voluntary carbon market that was at risk of losing credibility before it had built any. The Gold Standard generated nearly USD 70 billion in shared value (environmental and social benefits) being deployed across 114 countries and is widely regarded as the benchmark for environmental integrity in carbon offsetting.
In 2004, BASE worked with UNEP to launch the Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative (SEFI), which set out to change the high-risk perceptions of sustainable energy that kept mainstream financiers away. SEFI provided investors and project developers with credible tools that incorporated environmental and social factors into risk assessment and economic performance, and reports with on-the-ground insights they had been lacking. Additionally, it convened a coalition of public and publicly backed institutions, including the California Energy Commission, the Carbon Trust, and Sustainable Energy Ireland, to share knowledge and pool experience. SEFI’s work concluded in 2013, and the operational question in many markets shifted from whether to how to finance sustainable energy.
The 2007 Renewable Energy Insurance Training Kit took a different angle on the same underlying problem. It targeted insurers, financiers, and project sponsors directly, equipping them with self-paced learning modules on policy frameworks, insurance practices, and risk management tools. The kit was a small project in scale but a substantial one in retrospect, as it allowed an early reflection on the role of insurance products for sustainable energy projects, a train of thought that would later translate into a practical model, the Energy Savings Insurance.
In 2009, BASE moved into a different kind of channel. The RemitEnergy project in Haiti, developed with the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank and the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, demonstrated that diaspora remittances could be redirected toward clean energy for families back home. The project enabled Haitian migrant workers living in Miami to buy solar lanterns and home systems that would reach their families through a network of remittance agents and local distributors. By 2016, the model had reached 82,000 clean energy products sold and around 410,000 beneficiaries. The Haiti pilot was later replicated in Bolivia with workers in Spain, and the underlying idea, that everyday financial flows can be reshaped into climate finance channels, remains active in BASE’s portfolio today.
The building blocks of climate finance: an evolutionary journey
By 2010, BASE moved beyond convening and informing. The years of advisory and research work had surfaced a clearer view of what was missing from the market. Key issues that had to be addressed were the high financial risk that kept promising projects from finding capital, and significant upfront costs that kept innovative technology from reaching the people who needed it most. The next stretch of BASE’s work translated those learnings into instruments.
Structuring funds and reducing risks
In 2010, BASE launched greenTEK Ventures, a finance platform, to develop private equity funds specialised in green technology in emerging markets. The aim was to build local funds, capitalised in part by development finance, that could absorb the risks presented by early-stage clean technology and prove that environmental and economic performance could move together. A USD 100 million green private equity fund was structured in Mexico, with parallel work undertaken in South Africa and Turkey across geothermal, energy efficiency, solar photovoltaic, and waste management.
The de-risking lens sharpened further in 2013, but this time, with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in mind, when BASE worked with the Inter-American Development Bank to conceptualise and implement the Energy Savings Insurance in Latin America. SMEs were reluctant to invest in energy-efficient equipment because the savings promised by suppliers often felt uncertain and hardly verifiable. ESI brought three elements together to dissolve the mistrust and help to mobilise financing: a standardised contract, an independent technical validation of the proposed savings, and, as the core component, an insurance product covering the difference if the savings did not materialise. The Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance recognised the model in 2015 as one of the most promising instruments for mobilising private sector finance into energy efficiency. ESI has since been initiated across North Africa, Europe, and Asia.
Addressing higher upfront costs: On-bill/On-wage and the shift to servitisation
In the second half of the decade, BASE’s work pursued its exploration of how to better support access to financing for people and businesses typically unable to obtain significant loans.
The first move in that direction was on the consumer side. Across much of West Africa, the cooling and refrigeration market remains largely dominated by old, inefficient, ozone-harming appliances. On the other hand, costs remained prohibitive to a significant part of the population. Modern, energy-efficient equipment costs even more upfront, making it unaffordable to households and small businesses that lacked capital or proper access to financing, even when the lifetime savings would have more than covered it. From 2016, BASE worked with UNEP’s United for Efficiency programme and partners in Ghana and Senegal to design ECOFRIDGES, a financing mechanism that lets salaried workers and utility customers pay for efficient cooling appliances through small deductions on their wages or utility bills, while partnering with local banks to ensure low interest rates. As these monthly payments were usually compensated by the energy savings yielded by the new efficient appliances, the model removed the upfront cost obstacle while improving energy access, thereby opening the market to a tier of consumers conventional finance had treated as out of reach.
The cooling problem itself, though, sat at a much larger scale. Cooling consumes around 10 percent of the world’s electricity, and global demand is projected to triple by 2050 as temperatures rise. Tackling this challenge without locking the world into another generation of inefficient, climate-damaging equipment was, and remains, one of the most consequential opportunities in climate mitigation.
And over the course of such projects focused on mitigating high upfront cost and on reducing the financial risk of owning equipment, a key question arose: Is ownership needed at all?In 2019, drawing on a model the solar industry had already proven through power purchase agreements, BASE launched the Cooling-as-a-Service (CaaS) initiative with funding from the Clean Cooling Collaborative. The concept was new yet straightforward: customers would no longer purchase cooling equipment. They would instead purchase cooling itself, paying a per-unit fee for what they consumed while the technology provider retained ownership, performed maintenance, and bore the operational risk. The model aligned incentives in a way that conventional sales did not. Providers were now financially motivated to install the most efficient equipment available, to keep it running well, and to upgrade or refurbish components rather than discard them. Cooling-as-a-Service was endorsed by the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance in 2019 and has since been deployed in commercial, industrial, and agricultural settings across more than a dozen countries.
Expanding the mandate and systemic integration
In 2021, BASE took a step it had been moving toward for years. The mandate formally broadened beyond sustainable energy to include a wider spectrum of climate change solutions. The change reflected the recognition that the financing innovations BASE had developed for the energy transition, including servitisation, risk mitigation, and blended finance, could be potentially applied to new areas: climate resilience and adaptation, nature-based solutions, sustainable agriculture and the circular economy.
New use cases for the as-a-service model
Cooling-as-a-Service became the platform for Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant (Your VCCA), a programme deploying solar-powered cold rooms for smallholder farmers that originated in India and Nigeria before being replicated in Guinea-Bissau and Iraq. In 2022, the Coldtivate app, a digital tool managing inventory and predicting the remaining shelf life of stored produce, was developed to complete the solution. Pilot results from Odisha showed spoilage falling from 17 percent to 4 percent and farmer incomes rising by nearly 30 percent.
The servitisation logic also moved into the European built environment through the Efficiency-as-a-Service initiative, implemented with Agoria, ANESE and InnoEnergy in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, and later into Switzerland through Servetia, which supported hospitals, industrial facilities, and other building owners towards adopting Energy-as-a-Service contracts for retrofits. For a more global impact, BASE consolidated this growing body of work in 2022 by launching the Servitisation for Energy Transition (SET) Alliance, building on the earlier CaaS Alliance that created an initial community of pioneers, including solution providers, users and financiers, as part of the original Cooling-as-a-Service initiative. SET now brings more than 80 companies and organisations together as the standing platform for servitisation across sustainable energy technologies, from lighting to heating and storage.
From mobility to fully integrated systems
In electric mobility, BASE’s work spans more than a decade. In 2013, working with the Inter-American Development Bank and Bancoldex, BASE structured a USD 20 million financial product for the adoption of 270 hybrid buses in Bogotá, embedding a Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) approach that significantly reduced capital costs. Six years later, BASE and TransMilenio, Bogotá’s bus rapid transit system, designed the financial framework for its shift to fully electric buses, work that contributed to the deployment of nearly 1,500 electric buses. By 2024, the same business-model thinking had moved to West Africa, with BASE supporting the Ghanaian Ministry of Transport with a technical and financial analysis for electric bus adoption and structuring an e-Mobility Policy Working Group. Around 100 electric buses have since been deployed in Accra.
Building on this work, and recognising the untapped potential of considering energy systems as a network rather than isolated solutions, BASE has extended its work into Virtual Power Plants (VPPs). The spread of distributed resources like rooftop solar, batteries, electric vehicles, and flexible loads is changing how distribution networks operate, while business models, remuneration mechanisms, and bankable pathways for coordinating those resources at scale are still being built. VPPs are among BASE’s newest areas of work and a direct response to that gap. By digitally orchestrating distributed energy assets and adjusting consumption in real time through demand flexibility, VPPs can compensate for the intermittency inherent in renewable generation, delivering meaningful efficiency gains and financial benefits to both grid operators and their clients. With Integrate to Zero as a partner, BASE has been running active pilots in Brazil (with Auren, FloripaBit, and GreenAnt) and Colombia (with Celsia and enerBit), combining platform development, customer engagement, and financial modelling to turn VPP concepts into investment-ready business models. A 2025 residential pilot in Brazil reached 130 active participants and tested hybrid remuneration structures combining availability payments with performance incentives, while the Colombian work built the digital and operational foundations for future flexibility services.
Creating unified languages for financial institutions
In sustainable finance, BASE has translated its market-standardisation expertise into Green Taxonomies and Circular Economy Categorisation Systems for private banking sectors across Latin America. Working in parallel with the Inter-American Development Bank, the European Commission, ASOBANCA, and a growing roster of regional banks, BASE has helped financial institutions build the internal frameworks they need to identify, evaluate, and report on sustainable lending, which is a precondition for turning sustainable lending from a niche product into a mainstream category.
Conclusion and outlook: the 2025–2030 strategic horizon
The first 25 years of BASE were about building a financial architecture: the mechanisms, models, partnerships, and standards that make sustainable solutions financeable in markets where they otherwise would not be. The next years will be about turning that architecture into the default. The goal is to make climate-smart technologies and sustainable services the best option in agriculture, housing, transport, industry, and finance.
Geopolitical shifts have made the broader landscape for climate finance more uncertain and competitive, making BASE’s expertise in de-risking and market transformation more relevant than ever. In that environment, BASE is advancing emerging fields of work such as virtual power plants toward the point where evidence of viability and replicability is in hand, while proven models extend into new markets across Southeast Asia, West Africa, and Central Europe. Throughout, BASE is expanding its communications and knowledge sharing alongside the technical work, recognising that innovative models and strategies can only become the default if shared as open-source knowledge.
To celebrate this anniversary, BASE has launched a refreshed homepage, the first step in a phased modernisation of a site that has served the organisation for many years. The redesign reorganises BASE’s public face around the strategic priorities and gives partners, funders, and prospective collaborators clearer entry points into our work. Landmark solutions and services we provide come into sharper view, alongside a dedicated section surfacing the initiatives where BASE is actively seeking partnership or funding. More of the site will follow in the months ahead.
Explore the new homepage at energy-base.org.
