Regional Energy Services Company Vlaams Energiebedrijf - VEB

The “Vlaams Energiebedrijf NV” (VEB), a Flemish External Independent Agency under the form of a Publicly owned Limited Company, was incorporated by the Flemish Government in 2012.  VEB's existence and incorporation has been highly driven by the political situation in Belgium since 2009 (e.g. transfer of federal competences to the regions) and is the result of certain Flemish political parties' desire to create a Flemish alternative to the existing incumbent energy company in Belgium.

VEB’s purpose from the beginning was to facilitate, deliver and coordinate energy services to realise energy efficiencies in public buildings, to facilitate or be a player in the electricity (green and/or decentralised production) and gas market (cogenerating) or the electricity and gas delivery market and to facilitate or be a player in the market of Green Certificates and Cogeneration Certificates.

Since the incorporation the scope of its ambition and activities has been changing and today the VEB’s focus is on being a Central Purchasing body for energy, on facilitation of Energy Efficiency investments of the Flemish public institutions both central as local.

As a central purchasing body it targets 30% share of the Flemish public institutes and has the ambition to  generate, after 3 years, 40M€ yearly energy savings with these targeted Flemish authorities.

As to its energy efficiency programme the VEB is targeting 1200 Flemish public buildings with a current energy baseline of 100M €.  The VEB aims at achieving 25% energy savings from energy efficiency measures, or €25M of yearly savings.

VEB went really operational in the course of 2014 and today it counts about 60 customers for group purchasing of energy (about 8% of the market) and it reached for the 1st quarter of 2015 annualised savings of 12M € (9,8M € energy and 2,2M € admin/billing expenses), or 20% savings on the energy bill.

Recently VEB managed to successfully complete the tender of a building energy efficiency project (Energy and Maintenance Performance Contracting (EMPC model) and was in the process of tendering 2 other projects.