Why make green investing hard work?

I’d like to invest some of my money into producing more green energy while also having the possibility of earning some interest for retired me.

I haven’t yet looked into sustainble financial instruments and they may well be a good option, but this is more an observation about the smaller scale, green project, crowd-funding like platforms that exist.

The model they all follow is much like KickStarter. There is a list projects on their platforms with info on what the project is, how much energy it will produce/save, expected returns etc. What I find strange is that there are no invest and forget offers on their platforms. I can’t evaluate the quality of a project based on 5 bullet points and even with a more thorough prospectus I’m limited in how well I can evaluate the probability of the projects hitting their targets. Especially as the platforms don’t focus much on the returns of past projects but focus on selling new ones.

I would rather invest with a company who themselves are heavily invested in their own fund, let them choose the projects and provide me with a return (or a description of why the markets were impossible to navigate this year). I would be suprised if I was the only person who would pay for this so I wonder why no one is doing it? Of course there is a chance that people were and they all failed for reasons obvious to all the people choosing not to follow this model.

Examples:

• Sun Exchange
• Citizenergy
• Abundance Investments
• One Plant Crowd
• Tridos Bank
• GoParity

Update:

I asked Sun Exchange about past performance of all projects and whether they plan to offer a invest and forget product. They were helpful and sent me the annual report of a user who owned cells in every project. But for me the report information still left me with many questions about the performance of the projects.

As a tech company it should be fairly easy to share how you make the financial forcasts and then the have the performance data for the projects easily accessible.

My general impression of the space is that the desire of people to invest in sustainability means the companies can optimise/rely on feel good factor instead of a strong financial product.

For the invest and forget they reasoned that the direct ownership of the solar cells is why they do not have a fund. That seems fair. They also plan to add an auto-buy function which would make it much lazier for people like me. However, if they aren’t invested in the fund and the forcasts and performances aren’t easy to access then the auto-buy feature still isn’t enough to swing it for me.