 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We are very glad that you are all here this afternoon and we are looking at a topic that we have become increasingly excited about at EESI and the topic is, as you know, how on-bill financing can really help us open the doors to improved energy efficiency at the residential level. At EESI we have been working and watching a whole pilot program develop with South Carolina rural electric co-ops over the course of the last couple years and we're going to hear firsthand today about the results of that pilot, what the implications of that are for co-ops, for their members, and the implications of that for how much energy we use or better that we don't use in this country, and how it can really create win-win-win situations all the way around. One of the things that I think is so important with regard to this, and let me also say one of the reasons that EESI has been involved in this whole effort and why we are particularly excited about this, is that our organization, Environmental and Energy Study Institute, was formed back in the mid-80s by a bipartisan congressional caucus. We were a spin-off of that setup as a separate as an independent nonprofit organization. But the whole idea behind it was to provide for good sound credible policymaker information and to work for ways to create innovative policy solutions to be problem solvers. I think that what you are going to hear about today in terms of what has been happening in South Carolina co-ops is a great example of that, and is certainly a huge reason why we are so excited about the kind of leadership and commitment that we have seen in South Carolina's co-ops. We will first hear today from my co-occoic, who is the president and chief executive officer of the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina, ECSC. And while we are also expecting congressman James Clyburn to come and we will interrupt Mike in terms of his presentation when the congressman comes since he is on a tight voting schedule this afternoon. But congressman Clyburn has also been playing a very very important leadership role, which you will also hear about. But Mike has been such an important voice with regard to leadership with regard to this project. He is, as I said, he is the president and CEO of ECSC, which is the Statewide Service and Trade Association for Electric Cooperatives in South Carolina. The members are 20 member owned cooperatives, three wholesale power supply cooperatives, and one material supply cooperative, operating the largest distribution system in the state. So more than 1.4 million South Carolinians, excuse me, in 46 counties, use electricity from electric cooperatives. Prior to joining ECSC, Mike served as the attorney and director of research for the South Carolina Senate Judiciary Committee and in the state senate there and he was also chief counsel to a judicial merit selection commission and his experience goes on to having worked with Public Utility Review Committee as well. So he brings a wealth of experience and I also want to mention that he, to Mike's success in terms of generating leadership for this pilot, has been his incredible partnership with Ron Calcuttaire, who is, and you will hear more from a member of his staff later, but he is the president and CEO of the Central Electric Power Cooperative Inc. And it has been that incredibly important partnership that has made this whole pilot possible and its success. So Ron, why don't you just stand up because you've been just such an incredible force for all of us. Mike, take it away. Let me tell you a little bit more about Ron because he has been in this business a lot longer than I have. I will celebrate my eighth anniversary with co-ops and that may sound like a long time, but I'm still an infant in terms of that type of service for co-op leadership. Ron's been in this business at Utility for 43 years. He had the benefit of experience as a young man of working for a utility that went bankrupt and that may sound like something you may not want to brag about. He was a young man working with an investor-owned utility, which was trying to build a nuclear generation unit. When they originally had it permitted, the cost was to be $314 million. When they finally mothballed the plan and the utility went bankrupt, the cost had got up to $3.1 billion. I think Ron learned four important lessons that he shared with me just by watching him. It always costs extra economically to run water uphill. If you think about a matter of public policy, if you're trying to make something run uphill rather than with a business model or with the consumer's interest, it costs extra. Number two, think outside the box. Don't be confined by what people say that are within the utility community because you can be different. As part of number two, number three, always measure twice and cut once. And that's been part of this pilot. And really about this pilot is Ron's fourth. If you're going to fail, fail fast, fail cheap. And this pilot was, can you make it work? And it's more than just doing energy efficiency. It's designing a consumer product that they'll buy and that they'll understand. Also involved in the pilot was Lindsey Smith, who works for statewide Lindsey stand-up. Along with my fellow panelists, Mike Smith and with John Michael Cross and EESI, they worked and actually did the actual work of the pilot. Imagine this challenge on the part of Lindsey's. You're doing something that's one of a kind and you're also herding cats. Because South Carolina's 20 electric cooperatives and those that participated in the pilot are all autonomous. It's not a command and control culture. You have to sell it to them. They have to understand there's benefit to their members. Anybody grew up on a co-op line, raise your hand, electric cooperative line? About 12 and 15% of the United States population is served by a co-op. In South Carolina, 70% of the land mass is served by an electric cooperative. About 70% of the land mass in the United States is served by an electric cooperative. Just making sure that I'm clear about why I have this job is because I like working for a not-for-profit. But I like to work for one that has a bottom line both from a business standpoint but also from a satisfaction standpoint. If you're a customer of an electric cooperative, you're also a member. So you have the right once a year to show up at an annual meeting and they come to our annual meetings by the thousands. You'll have 30,000 people show up at one co-op's annual meeting. And you have the right to vote. And you have a right to vote about whether you're happy or not with your cooperative. And that vote is expressed in terms of electing trustees to your co-op board. If you're unhappy about the price of electricity or environmental, whatever, you've got the right to turn your board out. And in turn, if the board gets turned out, management gets turned out. And there have been turnover among electric cooperative trustees both in South Carolina across the country for various reasons. But I think just like your members are democratically elected, it makes them extremely responsive to what your constituents want. We serve the same base. That 1.4 million people in South Carolina are constituents of members of Congress and in the Senate. We often look at things the same way. Here I was talking about some of the work I've done. I've always thought that the electric cooperatives that they were asking for something, it better be good for all the state of South Carolina than just for the cooperative. Otherwise, you're going to get punished later by your public officials for being totally self-serving. Let me get to the PowerPoint a little bit. We serve very poor places in South Carolina, Lake City, South Carolina, which is like a third world country. We serve Kiewa and Hilton Head Island. And the reason we serve Kiewa and Hilton Head is they flipped a coin in the 1950s. And the loser had to take Hilton Head and Kiewa. There were six African-American farm families that lived on Hilton Head Island at that time. It wasn't profitable to serve them. Nobody lived on Kiewa. So a lot of the places we serve, we were the loser, so to speak, with an investor on utility who couldn't afford to run the line out there. Now look at Hilton Head. Now look at Kiewa. But it wasn't because we were trying to make a profit. Nobody could have envisioned what those two places would have been like now. So there's a purpose there. An overview of what I want to cover quickly to make sure we save plenty of time for the technology involved. Who we are, our own bill financing program. What we're talking about is our Help My House program, which is the actual retrofit. Then we're going to have some coverage by Mike Smith of the performance and other own bill financing programs. The business case, could you scale up Help My House? And I've got some participant survey results. Remember I said I wanted my members, I don't call them rate payers, consumers to be happy. It's important that when this is over with, they're at least as happy as they were before. I think I've got some incredible numbers to show you about the acceptance of this. It kind of blows me away the level of satisfaction. This is the coverage area for electric cooperatives, 20 cooperatives in South Carolina. Our members are affected by poverty. They're 20% below the national average. They're 50% more likely to live below the poverty line. I've got people that live in a single wide mobile home that take a bus to the beach to change sheets to make $9.15 an hour where they leave their kids as latchkey kids 6 in the morning and they get back at 8. Because there are no economic opportunities in their local community. In January 2000, was 11 or 10 run, but it was so cold, 10. January 2010, that single mom in a single wide mobile home probably paid $800 for electricity at 10 cents a kilowatt hour, because her heat was running all the time. In a month like January 2010, between gas and electricity, it ate up 80% of her disposable income. No food, no medicine, no clothes. To me, that is morally unacceptable that we would just stay there and tread water. You've got to have an alternative. We're affected by climate. Electricity is our primary form of heating. It's under light in the Northeast where it's heating oil in some other places. We rank the seventh and cooling degree days for summer. So you've got both seasons that's pushing you. Housing stock. We're number one in the country for manufactured housing. 24% of our people live there three times higher than the national average. A lot of these mobile homes, manufactured homes, are heated with strip resistance heat. And think about if you were cold in the morning and your way of heating was to go turn on a hairdryer and walk through the hairdryer. That's essentially what strip resistance heat is, is it blowing forced air over something like a hairdryer cools. Very often that single mom will let the kids turn on the stove, the oven, and actually get warm in front of that oven. Because it's more, it actually accomplishes more than the strip resistance heat. Effective by cold based generation. When this was originally done in 2008, 80% a little over of our generation was from cold. That's changed a lot with fracked natural gas. It's now much lower than that. But it was something that we react to. This is carbon friendly. This produces results. For every ton of coal you burn, there are three times of CO2. St. Cooper, our primary power supply, we don't own any generation. Burns 10 million metric tons of coal a year, producing 30 million metric tons of CO2. Think about what this accomplishes if you could avoid that. These are the two costs, that's our average system cost. This is if you build a new combined cycle natural gas unit, it's $3,000 per KW to construct. Energy efficiency, if you do it right, can be a replacement for building new generation, whether it be nuclear or natural gas or coal or whatever. That's how much nuclear is. That's often touted as a carbon free solution to CO2. But it's expensive. Think about that single mom in that mobile home and what it would do for her if it raised the cost of her electricity. This is our current generation mix and you see if it's changed from about 84% to 58% and that's because of frack natural gas. A lot of that's purchase power. We are St. Cooper's largest consumer by far, wholesale consumer. We're also Duke Energy's single largest wholesale consumer in the United States. So we're buying from both, again we don't own, we're just a super consumer. You'll see our other mix there. So we're, if you're looking for CO2 solutions and economic solutions, you look for something probably different than nuclear or even natural gas if you're going to replace coal. Again, these are some of the costs to build nuclear plants, costs to build natural gas plant. We found, and I agree with a series of presidential administrations on this, that the barriers to energy efficiency are inconvenience. It's just a matter, if you're thinking about raising a family, how often are you going to have time to stop and think about what am I going to do for energy efficiency? What am I going to do to lower my bill? There's a lack of information. Co-op members in South Carolina, this is not across the board, have the fourth highest level of functional illiteracy in the country. So when you tell them to do something and they're struggling with a fifth grade education and it's written on a college level. You need to do it for them. Not as a matter of paternalism, but they deserve our help. Lack of financing. Our program went credit tested. When we went out and found people to work with, we looked at what the home used. We didn't look at this credit score of the consumer. We did look at whether they paid their bill. But as long as they'd been paying their bill and their home scored and Michael taught more about that later, that was all we did. So you didn't have this barrier between those that could afford it and those that can't. If you tie it the way we'll talk about in a minute to the meter, you can recover your cost. In the incentive to do it, our pilot was how do you overcome these barriers? Own bill financing. The state of South Carolina a couple of years ago passed what I believe is the strongest own bill financing statute in the United States. And what it essentially says, and we were I guess probably the primary proponents of it, was if you do a quality approach to energy efficiency in a member's home, you'll have the right to collect that loan payment on their bill, including this sounds kind of draconian, the right to cut the meter off if they don't pay it. What we found is that is also tied with quality control. And Michael talked about this a little bit later. In the statute you got to do a front end BPI audit, a back end BPI audit. There's ways that the members protected. We're there in the home with them as co-op employees. We're their advocate. We make sure it gets done right by doing the back end audit. And so they're getting their money's worth. And what we geared this toward was the energy savings of the retrofit, I'd at least pay for the loan over a 10-year period. We've got some pretty remarkable numbers that we'll share with you that it was a lot better than that. So in their pocket the first month, by the way we structure it, they may have a third of the money they would have paid on their power bill. So all of a sudden it's not just about being more comfortable. It's a matter about money being available for that single mom to make some economic choices about shoes, clothing, food, drugs or whatever. If we're paid on the monthly utility bill, they don't have to have the cash. We make sure the work's done right. We write the check to the contractor. And our contractors are trained by us. They realize our quality control. If it doesn't test outright, they don't get paid. Lindsay, we had some people have to come back six times to get the work done right. And again, it was the member making sure that he got what he was promised. Again, this is kind of the nuts and bolts of it. It's in your PowerPoint. But it's what I just explained. It stays with the home. If I sell a home, or even we have tenants that can be covered with it. I sell my home that lean, which is not really a lean, it's a meter obligation. It stays with the home. There are consumer protections in the state law that require the utility to give notice to the new member in our case. If it's a landlord-tenant situation, we have to give notice to the new tenant. And the landlord has to give notice to the new tenant if he's going to be moving into a situation where he's going to inherit payback. But again, the benefit of this should transfer uniformly because everybody's saving money. It just travels with it. So that was a major improvement in South Carolina law, is that you didn't have to worry about people being transient. Because we do have a lot of population in some of our places that moves. So this was the ability to fix a home, particularly for landlord-tenant situations. Think of a landlord-tenant situation where what incentive does the landlord have to fix the property? It's not that he doesn't care, but if he has to put money in that, it's out of his return on investment in the property. What incentive does a tenant have to fix a home that he only may stay in for a year? So I think it's important that this goes both to owner-occupied, which we have one of the highest levels of owner-occupied housing in the country, but also to landlord-tenant. And again, no need for a credit check. If you credit check people, it's not that South Carolina people aren't credit worthy. It's just that if you're making $9.15 an hour, you're not going to have a $750 credit score. So it's eliminated. Why am I comfortable saying you can eliminate that? If you tie it to the electric bill, there's a default rate for cooperatives across the nation of non-payment of electric bills of less than two-tenths of 1%. So as a business case, and I want to stress that, people pay their electric bill. They also, if the loans tie to the electric bill, they pay it. So your ability to collect is more or less assured. I don't think you can find any other consumer loan transaction that's going to even have close to that low level of a default rate. These were the goals that Central established, and I will tell you that this idea is Ron Calcuttaire's idea. And folks, he's an electrical engineer. And he was the one that focused a lot on it, not just working technically, but also that it benefit all residential energy users, not just those that had their home done, but structured in a way where everybody won from it. And that was really through avoiding building new generation. Reduce wholesale power cost, purchase cost. Again, if you can avoid buying power in your consumer, and your consumer member with the retrofits helping you, it helps everybody. And the key one to me is maintain or improve member satisfaction. You don't want folks talking about your product and saying it doesn't work if you want it to have scale. So as we talked about how to get scale, we looked at what are successful businesses as it relates to quality control. Drive down the interstate with your family and think about where you're willing to stop to use the restroom. Some chain restaurants have better reputations generally than others for cleanliness. Now there may be a better restaurant individually in certain communities of a chain, but some just really require all their restaurants to adhere to a level of quality. That was our goal, is that you couldn't let one co-op, one home ruin the brand of Help My House for everybody. We partnered with them, ECSC. We worked with Congressman Clyburn, Senator Graham, a very bipartisan group of House and Senate. I want to stress bipartisan on legislation, the Real Energy Savings Plan. It has passed both the House and Senate, unfortunately in different sessions. It's containing legislation this year in the Senate Farm Bill, right Carol? The House has favorably looked at this in their treatment in the House Ag Committee. It's just that Bill's got held up for reasons you all are well aware of. So this has got bipartisan support. I had the pleasure and the privilege of presenting this to the White House Council on Environmental Quality in 2010 and 2011 as well. We've looked for ways to reach out across the aisle. This has been presented to DOE, EPA as an alternative to some things that are more costly. It's been my pleasure to present it to the Aspen Institute as a way that you can get cost-effective carbon reduction. Pilot program kicked off. We accessed USDA financing because we're not for profit and because we were asked to serve areas that would not be profitable. We are able to borrow money from the United States government, the rural utility service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, at a rate that still makes money for the federal government. In fact, last year it made $100 million for the United States government. So it's not a deficit matter of adding to it, it actually helps with the deficit. So we were the very first group in the country that USDA said, we'll make one of these type of loans to you or you can start this work. We were their pilot as well. We've been working with them. Again, that two-tenths of one percent default rate I think was very important to them that people pay their electric bill. These were our participating costs. We took eight of the 20. We wanted them to be motivated. They serve a diverse amount of areas. Palmetta serves Hilton Head. Sancti Electric serves Lake City. That's where the way to get some of the bus. These were other partners and I can't stress how important Carol and John Michael Cross's work has been with us to make this one where you measure twice and cut once. This is driven by data. There are 350 fields of data that we're watching over time, including the demographics of the home, the demographics of the homeowner, the type of retrofit done and consumer satisfaction, and doing that over a continuum of time. And does the home still perform? So again, you've got that consumer satisfaction. Carol, I am so proud of the Doris Duke affiliation. In the year that you competed for that grant, which did not go to pay for any of the retrofit. There were, I believe, 400 applications. They awarded nine. EESI and the co-ops are one of those. We also are a part of an award with the University of California at Davis for a commercial version of this or landlord-tenant situations. ECOVA was the partner that more or less managed it. It used to be called ECOS. Carton Down and Freel partners out of Baltimore. Again, the consumer part, we wanted to survey it. We wanted real data, not made up data. They also had an anthropologist that helped us design the consumer transaction, which is, believe me, every bit as important as getting the technology right. These were our goals. Determine the barriers. What do we have to overcome, both with the consumer and with the technology, and with contractors? For a contractor to be willing to do the work with no assurance he was going to get paid until he went back six times, takes a little bit of education. Establish a functional model for own bill financing. We were the first person to use that state statute in South Carolina. We had to work through lots of things to make sure we were doing it right, because if we don't do it right, we have no right to bill it with the electric bill. So get it right. Who participates? The source of loan funds. A centralized support function. We formed something called KW Savings, so that every one of these co-ops didn't have to invent the will themselves. We were there as a support function. It's a not-for-profit too. Every co-op did a little bit different, and I think that's part of the value of innovation, is that we didn't say there's a one-size-fits-all. And with energy policy, I think it's much the same way in the United States. You've got to have innovation and allow for innovation. We didn't encourage that. But we still required quality control. Audit in, audit out. Cost effectiveness to the participant, to the co-ops, long-term resource. And I can't ignore this. The man's savings, the load factor. The man's savings is at your peak, and you try to shave it. It's not total consumption. So if you're going to make one of these programs work, you've got to work not just total consumption, you've got to work shaving that peak if you're a super consumer. That's what lets you avoid building a new nuclear unit and your natural gas unit. That's what makes the dollars work. So any home that we go into now, when we do the retrofit, we also are putting a switch on the water heater that we can turn it off, cycle it off. We're likely doing the HVAC system, and we're looking at nanotechnology to control other appliances within the house. Again, having that certainty that you've reduced the peak, you're not having to rely on the consumer for a long time. You don't make it uncomfortable for them. You cycle it on just enough to reduce peak. You can shut down a large capacity water heater for a fairly long part of time. I want you to hear that, Suzanne. But if it's too small, you can't shut it down because it doesn't store heat. So water heaters are a very important part of what we do with load management. We want it as a long-term resource as an alternative to building a new generation or generators building a new generation. And again, we want to determine member satisfaction. I want to turn it over to Mike now, who again is with Central Electric Cooperative, another electrical engineer getting his doctorate now in that. And he's really the guy with Ron that made us be honest about the numbers that dealt with would it work or not. Thank you, Mike. So I want to cover some of the engineering aspects of this and the numbers that came out of this program. But Mike covered a lot of the people that were involved in this. Now we'll just say if it wasn't for all the people involved because it's had so many moving parts to honestly make this project work, it could have so easily fell that so many different levels. And the results would look about as honest as they do now. So it was a real effort on a lot of people to make this pilot program as successful as it was. And I'd like to thank EESI's involvement, both Carol and John Michael because they were willing to get into the weeds and help our report actually be more understandable and help the analysis to be deeper. So the next time we move forward, we'll have a better product and learn from our mistakes. I made a mistake. I was like, Carol, I didn't see that. That's all right. I'm just going to cover the structure real quick on some of the players involved. You know that the co-ops involved and their member, the people who actually get in the upgrades done in their home. They're basically the face of the co-op. And most of the co-ops were the face of the program. They were like the primary contact with the member and the help my house program. The BPI auditor, someone that gets involved with the program and can be someone that works at the co-op for most of the co-op. So it was someone that was hired a professional person who was trained and certified to go on homes and analyze the homes and figure out what work should be done in the homes and test the homes and how good the HVAC is using, how good the is working and how good the duck work is. EE Energy Efficiency Trained Contractor is a contractor that we brought on board to do the work in the home. And as we were learning in this program, every one of the contractors involved was doing something that they typically did not do. We did not have a large pool of contractors available in South Carolina to do a program at this level and that would get the results that we got in the program. So there was a lot of learning with everybody. Central Electric, as you know, is a generation and transmission cooperative. But we did create a 501 4C group to handle the loans and handle all the payments and kind of keep it separate from Central. So the process is pretty straightforward. Participant selection, we could also probably say house selection. Each of the eight co-ops kind of went about it in their own way to identify homes that they would reach out to to participate in this program. And we wanted homes that were problems that had fixes that we could expect returns from. So we could select participants from high bill complaints or we could look through the energy use over the year and look for people with extra high energy use in the summer and winter time. Those are homes that are great candidates for weatherization. Participant selection. And then once a person was contacted and asked if they wanted to be a part of it, we did a visual audit. This is not a comprehensive audit. It's basically we look closely at the energy use. We make a visit to the home. In most cases it was a co-op employee that visited the home just to make sure that the roof wasn't falling in. No need doing the work on the home if you got other problems and the home isn't going to make it 15, 20 years down the road. Once it passed the visual audit we brought the BPI trained contractor in. They would spend hours in the home and like I say this was very rich data intensive. So we were capturing a lot more information just so we could understand the results and you would normally on a large scale program. You'd go on and you'd do that. It isn't just like a lot of the homes that were in this program were manufactured homes. And it says right there inside near the power panel is the roof. One thing that we absolutely verified is if you don't look inside the roof to see how much insulation is in it doesn't matter what the data plate says. It is way off on overestimating how much insulation is actually keeping the heat from getting out of the home. So the comprehensive audit was really just poking and prodding around running a blower door on the home to see how much leakage comes in through the cracks and seals running a duct blaster to see how tight the duct work is. Getting it inside the home. Then we went through a loan approval and contractor selection. The loan approval was done with a quite frankly there was a lot of paperwork involved but one of the good things about our co-op and their members is there's a good bit of trust there so the lawyers were happy with all the paperwork but for the most part while it was annoying our members agreed that it wasn't that was for our member we did not select contractors to go in the home do the work. We had a list of approved contractors and it was up to the homeowner to call them up get a price to have done the work that we recommended to be done on the home and then decide which contractor they'd want to use or if they want to go forward with the program. Contractors selected and they go in the home and they do the work and three or four days later you've put new insulation in the attic you've sealed there's a broken window we don't typically go in and replace all the windows in a home but if there's a broken window or something that's obviously in the way that needs to be done we will replace a door or a part of a rotten floor. So the work is done in the home and then on the final inspection and project approval that BPI auditor that came in first and goes back in the home to see if the home was done to standard see if the contractor said you can go in there and go wow as a homeowner I'm sure glad I paid $5,000 for those countertops because it looks so good and I can show it off you don't see most of the work done in weatherization it's only you feel it and you see it in your energy use and energy savings over the years so you know without someone really looking hard to see that the work has done well it's easy to allow shoddy work to get through and as Mike mentioned some of the homes we went in their and say no you're not you miss this this and this do it a second time and a third time that only happens if the first couple of times with that contractor then they get it we're really looking to see that the work is being done well and I must admit our members were extremely tolerant of that we did not get complaints from our members because we kept the contractor going back in there to get it right and I think that's in the contractors of honesty and legitimacy to the work that they were doing basically the co-ops of the contractors okay or that the work was done our member felt that it was and once all the check boxes are checked then KW savings cuts the check to the contractor and we're done so I want to spend just a couple minutes to talk about manufactured homes some people are very familiar with some people we don't see a whole lot of them like Mike said about a quarter of their members live in manufactured homes and some co-ops over half of their members live in manufactured homes it is a large part of our membership and the load that we serve manufactured homes are not stick-built homes they're not built the same you should not treat them the same if you do you will not get the results that you want in a manufactured home well first off there's typically two kinds of manufactured homes we see a single wide which is a trailer complete going down the road that you see that's that's a put in on site or double wide which are two pieces that are put together you can imagine when you put two pieces together that there's they're not done well then there's there's the biggest crack that you have to deal with when you put the two pieces together there's a bigger crack that comes underneath the home they have what they call belly board underneath that pretty much holds the belly in and it holds the duck work in the home it holds all the insulation and duck work unlike stick-built homes manufactured homes the duck work is kind of in the condition space so if you talk to somebody who lives in manufactured home they'll tell you that the floor feels warm in the winter time when warm. But what we found with contractors and manufactured homes, even though at the beginning of our program they didn't really, they were trained on how to make these homes weather tight and sealed. Once they did a few homes, they're easy. And a manufactured home that's installed correctly will have some of the best weather sealing and best energy use that you can imagine. And it's, and really you can almost know what you need to do before you go in most of these homes because they're built so consistently. So while they were initially a problem for our system, I think moving forward to include them in our program, they can be some of the easier homes to do. So here are some of the measures that we did in the homes. You know, weatherization, one thing that we focused on this program is we didn't do load control, which is mean kind of clipping the peak and energy use. And we didn't do base load control. We did not recommend going there and install a low flow shower heads or CFLs. Those are all part of a good program. This is a weatherization program. It's a pilot program and we focused on heating and cooling, making the envelope tighter, make it make it leak less heat, make it hold in more, keep the heat out and use that more efficiently. So that is what we focused on and that is what we measured. 99% of the homes, when we went in a blower door and we tried sucking the air out of the home, there was areas for improvement in the home and went in there and we would put ceiling around windows or in the attic and we would basically tighten up the home so it would leak less air. Duck reduction. Most of the time when people have a problem with their HVAC, they call the HVAC contractor, he comes up and replaces a box, replaces a motor, he replaces a switch. The duct work that's installed in your home, which may be 30 years old, typically does not go touched or even tested for the lifetime of that home. 98% of the homes that we tested, we wanted to get the duct leakage under 5%, meaning that the air that went into the duct system, 95% of it got into the conditioned space. 98% of the homes needed some level of duct sealing and some of them leaked 20, 25%, meaning you're conditioning it, you go into the trouble to condition air and then you're leaking it into the attic or you're leaking it into your crawl space. And sometimes what's dangerous is on your returns, you're sucking in that nasty air from your crawl space and you're actually exposing yourself to bad environmental things. Attic insulation, we bumped up the attic insulation in our homes to R38 South Carolina, that's the code and that's a good number for us. 91% of the homes that attic insulation bumped up. Mike mentioned an electric furnace to a heat pump. Electric furnace is basically running a bunch of hairdryers. It's creating heat out of electricity. When you pump heat, you typically can use a half to a third or even less the energy to heat your home when you move it from outside the inside the home in the wintertime or you take it from inside your home and move it to the outside of the home in the summertime. So basically between replacing electric furnaces or replacing old heat pumps, nearly 90% of the homes had a new large piece of equipment installed in the home. Floor insulation in about a third of the homes and then miscellaneous is the broken door or window. And we did do a couple of tune ups. Here's the model predicted savings for each measure and basically you see that the majority of savings in our program were replacing the large piece of equipment. Well, the large piece of equipment that were replaced the heat pump or in the accessories that are attached to the heat pump is also the most expensive piece of the program. So while we did get the biggest savings, it had the highest cost. So our return on this kind of equipment was more like eight years and it was the other work we did with the sealing up the home or the ductwork that brought our, you'll see the results down to 6.6 years later on. And so here the bottom line, what people like to see, you know, what did our program predict and what did our program actually measure after a year of being in service? The homes that we selected for our program were higher than normal energy use customer homes by almost double. So here are homes that use over 30,000 kilowatt hours of energy a year, 30,000. And we had the audacity to predict that we wouldn't go in there and do work and clip over 11,000 kilowatt hours worth of energy from that home in the course of a year. After the year goes by and we measure what the actual energy use was in those homes after they were upgraded, we were at 10,800 kilowatt hours a year of real savings. Now both these now there are no two years that are identical with heating degree with the same days you need to heat and the same number of days you need to cool. So all these numbers are adjusted for what they call typical meteorological year, which is the average of the last 30 years. So these are all just the numbers that you can compare directly. The savings now the savings are a function of how much energy you're using your saving. And how much you're being charged as a member for those energy savings if you're being charged 10 cents a kilowatt hour. And basically this would be $1,159 of predicted energy savings a year. So it's different for each co-op. But for this program, these numbers here, they're adjusted for all the actual co-ops savings. The project costs for 125 homes, we used the average loan was $7,684. So we gave out almost a million dollars in loans for this program. And that seems like a big number. It seems like it's not a big number. But for some of the homes that we're putting in like double wide manufactured homes, people may question, you know, you're going to put $7,500 in this home. But if that home is going to use $20,000, $25,000 worth of energy in the next 10 or 15 years, it's worth putting this kind of money into it and actually getting reduced energy use and more comfort for our members. So we predicted the payback, basically dividing this number by that number to be six years. The actual payback that came out was about 6.6 years. Now, we put in all these homes, we predicted we modeled each home, we went to the trouble and we took all the homes characteristic and we put it into nationally available software called Remdesign. And that told us what the predicted energy savings was going to be and it's different for each home. And even though we predict lower than it, we predicted only six years of for the payback, most people always elect to take the 10 year loan. They want the lower monthly payment. And so that means we were talking about earlier is putting money in your pocket from day one by this program. So you know, these are the numbers broken down. Yet the actual savings is about $1,100 per year. On the average home, the average home had $870 worth of loan payments throughout that year. And then what they pocket is $288 for the first 10 years. And then after that, they're pocketing all of this. Okay, I apologize if this comes across technical, but it's it's easy to measure energy savings. You know, if I replace this if I put the CFL in, I'm going to use 25% of the energy than I use with my incandescent lamp. And most of the modeling programs that we use all were about energy, energy, energy. But as a utility company, it's not just the energy, it's when we have to make it available. If everybody uses all the energy they ever need in the same hour of the day, our generation, how we have to provide that energy is much more expensive. And if everybody use the exact same amount of energy each minute for every minute of the day, it's a different kind of generation is a different kind of system. So we call that demand, you know, how much energy is being used right now. And these are typical if you look at any utility load shapes and how they provide energy to the members or demand, provide service to the members, you will see these curves a lot. Basically, this is just a 24 hour day. People are sleeping. This is in the summertime in South Carolina, starting to warm up. And then basically have this long hot air conditioners are running hard to the afternoon. Lighting load comes in, people come home, then they go to sleep and you start the cycle all over again. This top graph right here are the 125 homes before we did the work in the home. This bottom graph are the same 125 homes. After the work is done in the home, which basically is saying at seven o'clock in the morning, the average home is using 1.5 kw. Whereas before they were using about 2. So it's a better load for our system. And I think what's important for us here with energy efficiency is this low curve does not change. In the wintertime, you see people sleep and they wake up and they use hot water with high hot water, electric water heating penetration, their HVAC and then they go to work. And then it's kind of quiet in the afternoon while they're gone and then they come home and then we have another peak in the afternoon. Any questions about these killers? Because this part of the analysis was as important to us as the energy savings. The energy savings are important to our members because that's money in their pocket. That's how we charge them for the energy they use, the kilowatt hour and that's what the benefit they get. For us, this is what we have to build our generation to. And we can use the same electrical system here to provide them power, but we have a lot less generation running or we have to build less generation for someone for an energy efficiency program. I mentioned a while ago that we do DSM in homes when you all go into on a stress and they'll go into you don't want to mask this data. Now, if you go into a home and do the man side management, you actually get a lot bigger results. Right. So this peak right here would be clipped. And then of course that means a lot more to the utility. The member isn't charged by their peak. But for a system peak for when we have to provide energy for a system, that's very important. And this is a little bit off script, but I do want to add this piece in if any for solar energy, if these same homes had not reduced energy use 34% through energy efficiency, but because they put enough solar panels on their home to reduce energy use over the course of a year, 34%. This peak would be identical seven o'clock in the morning in South Carolina. But right here where the trough is, it would go way deep down and actually probably go negative with a net generating and pushing it onto the grid. And that's okay on onesie twosies homes. But if that happens on large scale, our generation has to be different. And our costs are different. I might skip this little bit load factors just basically the ratio of your peak energy use for the system in your average energy use. So in South Carolina, it's typically 45%. And what this shows us for our system is the load factor actually got better in the winter time for our system in the shoulder months, it kind of got worse. And in the summertime, it was about the same. But over the course of the year, the load factor was about the same, which means we basically run our system the same as we have traditionally, we just run it less strong. And so the pilot program is done. And we've pretty much wrapped up the the results of that program. For co ops are moving ahead. Basically, we don't have a central South Carolina cooperative on bill financing program, but co ops have decided to move forward on their own to provide the service to their members to weatherize their homes. They can electric cooperative is borrowing USA money for that. Black River is using its own money, anti electric cooperative in your collector cooperative, which did not participate in our first program. But they saw what was going on and they wanted to participate in Lynch's River. So can we scale this up? We did not select these homes randomly. This is not a random selection of homes because we need to spend our money wisely and we need to go into homes where we think we're going to get results. We did target high energy use homes. And I'm going to show you the next graph that the homes that were selected in our programs and the homes that are typical in our system that it is the higher energy use homes. Actually, this one's next. So for the help my house program, the general populations in for the South Carolina coops is we required 100% of your heating came from electricity to begin with. We didn't want to go in homes that had gas use because we couldn't help that and we couldn't measure it. The whereas only 73% of the homes on our system in general use electric heating. 42% of our homes in general. Let's see 42% of the homes in the pilot program were site built. But if you look at our population is 68%. So we were very heavy on the manufacturer homes. But again, we're looking for opportunity. Okay. And then the average sizes are about the right. By the same. Okay, bear with me again on this real quick. This bottom line right here is how many kilowatt hours you use in a year and our average home uses about 15,000 kilowatt hours of energy in the year the average co up home. Here's a distribution and that's about 12% of the homes. And then everything below this on the half of it uses of the homes use less than 15,000 kilowatt hours of energy use. And here's the distribution of homes using more than 15,000 kilowatt hours of use. Our pilot program, the average home used 31,000 kilowatt hours a year. And this is the distribution curve for that. So basically, the homes we picked were high energy use homes. That's equal to about the average annual use for a host in the United States. We got that just a minute. Thanks, Mike. This is data driven. Some of the manufacturer housing's quality housing, Warren Buffett owns a company that produces housing is every bit as quality as site built homes. So when we say the manufacturer housing is a problem, that's not a generalization across all housing. It's just the housing that Warren Buffett finances can be a lot more expensive. And these same people are going to have that as a barrier. Just about survey response satisfaction. This is on the back end. 96% of the people were sets, but just as satisfied or more satisfied with their electric cooperative. Are you more comfortable? 89% said they were somewhat or a lot more comfortable in the home, which I want to stress. These were homes that people maybe lived in one bedroom, because the other bedrooms were cold. So their use of their home has changed. We had one home that actually went up an energy cost. And I want to stress it went up 7%. It has heating and air conditioning now before he heated with wood and he had no air conditioning. So 7% is not a bad cost to have that level of comfort. Satisfying with your post electric repair bill 89%. You've got very little 11% of American people are going to be dissatisfied about something. But that's extraordinary. And again, this is real survey data. This is not something made up. We wanted we wanted a hard look at it. Alright, what do I do to play Lindsay? Just click. Alright, this is a family and summer to 1979 site built home 2000 square feet, put in a new heat pump duct ceiling air sealing attic installation $6,540. This is those measures that Mike was describing earlier. Now our bill is way it's it's way down between $150 and $200. You save enough to pay more than pay for the for the work. It doesn't make sense to me that anybody wouldn't do it. And that's not just one family. We have one lady that was in a pre pilot that her KWH she used went from 30,000 to 10,000. She was a Head Start teacher. Now that's not typical for everybody. But with our results, we found there were tremendous savings. Electricity drop by about one third. Savings along with the total bill drop. And again, these are data driven. One year's worth of data. It's been weather normalizes what I call it T and one. So what's the peak drop again? If we can use demand side savings in the future, which we're doing, you get more of this drop love factor unchanged. But if you use demand side management in the home, all of a sudden, this gets much better. Pulse became more comfortable. We're extremely satisfied. And respond this ongoing thing and co ops again are innovative and they're early adopters and they're people that come in later. So the four people would immediately go for four cops immediately go from what was a pilot into offering the program is impressive. It showcased some of the advantage of the co ops working together. Congressman, we are delighted to be joined by Congressman Clyburn this afternoon. And I just I know he's been through a whole long series of votes. And we are so glad that he is here. And a couple things I just wanted to mention very quickly is that while he's been in the Congress about 20 years now, that he very quickly gained the respect people to notice very, very early on, that he had immeasurable leadership and consensus building skills, which have been so terribly important. And of course, as you know, he is the assistant Democratic leader of the House. And one of the things that I think is so important about what Congressman Clyburn has done is that while he has always really cared about rural development and and economic development overall, he has always looked at what is important in terms of yes, South Carolina constituents, but also what the implications of that are how that can be applied in terms of making things better for all Americans across the country, which is why his leadership with regard to the issues that we're talking about this afternoon is so important because back in the 111th Congress, Congressman Clyburn introduced the Rural Energy Savings Program Act and garnered widespread bipartisan support for it. It passed the House as part of the Farm Bill and almost made it through the Senate, but he has been a terrific leader and always working to make sure that there has been broad bipartisan support for this very, very important concept. Congressman Clyburn? I want to thank Mike Hacker, who's here with me, who I don't know, I guess it takes two mics to get this done, but he and Mike Howard have worked very, very closely together in spite of the diversity of their backgrounds, Hacker being from Michigan. He seems to have taken two southern waves pretty well. And he's been very, very successful with us. I want to tell you, I'm going to weigh off Script here, Craig, Link, who works on this issue for me now that Mike is going off the green, green up passions, pastures. Right. Got some little notes here for me to use. And don't tell them I'm not going to use them. I want to tell you a little story. When I was back in, I guess the sixties when I was running a rural program, the South Carolina Commission for Farm Workers. That was an eight county program that was based in Charleston. And we focused on service to migrants and seasonal farm workers. It was an introduction for me to a lot of things that I'm faced with up here today. I guess the one thing looming of all that we're doing up here is whether or not we'll have an immigration bill and the importance of that bill. And it's kind of interesting how many people seem to talk about this issue and seem not to know exactly how long it's been that so much of our economy relied upon noncitizens. The migrant stream that started way it out in Florida with their orange groves and came up through South Carolina doing vegetables and the same stream just go all the way up to Connecticut. And things we did to try to stabilize the people who had children following the stream and the fact that these children did not get educated that did not get health care. And we did a lot of things to try to get them to just put their buckets down somewhere. And make a good life for their children. And that is the backdrop of what we're doing today. But there's a county in my district, Williamsburg County that I worked in during that time doing a seasonal farm, working with seasonal farm workers. And we had a self-help housing project. And I remember we started a training program that I was asked to to expand the program. And to take in my home county of Sumter. I was not allowed to take in my home county of Sumter because they had made some decisions to fund an agency, the public labor had made some decisions. And they would not allow this particular program, because they they had decided where these slots would be. And of course, they were concentrating in New York and Detroit, Chicago, the big cities. And so what I saw happening was the fact that children in South Carolina, young college students, in the summer months, they would leave South Carolina, go up to New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and they got enrolled in the programs in those cities. Now just think about that. And if those of you who are my age, you may remember that George Romney, Mitt Romney's father ran for president for about 20 minutes. In his campaign, it was kind of interesting. He came to South Carolina and Strom Thurman took him to Williamsburg County. Now the reason he was taken to Williamsburg County is because when they had the riots in Detroit, George Romney left his office in Lansing and walked the street to Detroit, and he stopped and he talked to people we saw sitting out on the stups. And he talked to them about their backgrounds, about their experiences and why were they what it brought them to Detroit. And he he kept hearing Williamsburg County, King Street, Greenville all. And so he wanted to see where these people were from. And that's why he came to Williamsburg County. And I started studying these kinds of issues as a very young man. And I always maintain that one of the reasons we have had these so-called urban crises is because there's been such a failure of rural policies. And I'm into this day that if we get real good solid rural policies in place, it will go a long ways toward curing some of these urban problems. Because people are leaving rural areas, going, looking for jobs, looking to be educated, looking for some things that if we make these rural communities more conducive, then we could really go a long ways towards solving this problem. And that's what I saw in this rural energy savings program. If you can make the homes that these rural people live in energy efficient, make them affordable, they're more apt to remain there and get their educations and be productive citizens rather than going off looking for a way to have a better life. And so when Mike came to me and showed me what the co-ops in South Carolina was doing, how they were funding this program and the fact that it was just to me it was a no brainer. It's absolutely a no brainer. And I went with him on two occasions to visit a home in Calhoun County. In fact, I think both of them were in Calhoun County. Now that I think about it, one part of Calhoun County and the second part of Calhoun, one an African American woman and one was a white man. And they both had experienced such transformation in their lives because when you are paying for your energy bill and 50% of it is helping to keep the birds and the trees warm because so much is escaping from your homes. And when you can go in and you can put together a program such as this one and take that money and retrofit and put in a new HVAC system and see your energy bill cut in half and then realize the other half of savings and pay the note back. So when you are paying the loan that you get, repaying the loan, paying your energy bill and doing so for less than what you were paying in the beginning, but that's a no brainer. They'll not be hard to convince anybody of that. And they have it done within the co-op. You're paying the back in your monthly bill. And so that's what got me. And I was able to make it. We took on bipartisan support for it. And I think we're in a good place. We talked to a lot of people about this. And we know there's some cost. But it's easy to make that cost. The investment now. The interesting thing about the cost involved in all of this is just the way they do things up here. Because if you really look at where we see the application and the implementation of the program, it shouldn't be scored that way. Because the co-ops take on the liability, not the consumer. So to project what may be a default, some cost to the government, it's just not real. But that's the way the rules are. And so we're going to look about the rules. And so we're going to have to get this done that way. I believe that this is going to be a program that the whole country will get into. I had my 73rd birthday last Sunday. So I've been around long enough to remember when electricity came to my neighborhood. I'm an indoor plumbing came to my neighborhood. I remember now bathtub with the lividens out in the backyard. We were waiting for them to get the room fixed so we can sit that bathtub in and my brother's not playing in that bathtub. We just couldn't wait until they put water in it. We just got in that bathtub without water, waiting on it to get installed. So I remember all of that. I remember and I know what the co-ops and what rule electrification did. And I believe that this rule energy savings program fully implemented. They have just a significant impact on rural communities and rural families as electricity did in the first place. And so I want to thank you so much for your commitment to it. I want to thank Mike for his leadership in helping to put it together. And I don't need to get involved in how much money the loans are and how it appeared back. I know Mike has done that for you. If he hadn't done it, then y'all ask him to do it before he leaves. But if you're having the questions of me, I'm glad to try to respond to them. And if you, who knows, I might even answer one or two. Yes, sir. Oh, the people who I never forget the first. I guess with a video, the young lady from Red House out of St. Matthews, whose name I'm blocking them. Then there are Mrs. Butler. In fact, we went over when we were putting that together with the news media that went with us. And we interviewed her. And I remember watching one of her reports on evening news. And my wife grew up on a little farm in rural Berkeley County. And like me, she remembers she never talks about it. Because I think it's a little more realistic for her than what's for me. She never talks about this part of her life. I'll talk about it a whole lot, because it's my best way to get through some speeches. But I remember her reaction to, to Mrs. Butler, how emotional she was about the savings she had realized. Because my memory server, her deal got like $600. She was just, it's an incredible savings she had. I mean, she was able to pay back them on, on a monthly basis. And paying whatever else was being, and she had money left. After all this is over. And it was just so emotional. I remember she reacted. And I've not seen anybody that did not see this as a tremendous program. I don't know whose idea it was. I've given my credit for it. And he is not denying it. I'm not too sure if he is deserving of it. But I've given him credit for it. But nobody's ever said anything but positive things about this. All my friends here on both sides of the aisle think that this is a great concept. It's just that people just like to find ways. It's a change from what we've been doing. I've had a lot of things with the last people. Why not? They say, well, we just never done it that way before. That's the only reason it's never done it before. Well, thank you so much for having me. I hope I get back to the next series of votes. Okay, thank you. I want to share one quick thing and then turn it over to Carol recognized Julie Bartmar. South Carolina is a very Republican state. Our General Assembly is controlled in the House and the Senate by Republicans. Overwhelming. They passed the on bill financing statute. And I don't think we lost a single vote. I don't mean a single vote taken a single vote out of either body. They support it. They have been very supportive Republicans and Democrats of our program. They're proud of it. Not because the cops are doing it because it's the right thing. So it's not a partisan issue. It's one that they see value because for every African American you talk about there's an elderly person in Sun City outside of Hilton Head that's helped in the same way. And they vote very differently. Carol, I'm gonna go ahead. There's plenty of conclusions that we are skipping and recommendations. But I want to save time. And thank you so much, Congressman for being here. We really, really appreciate that. And for giving everyone a sense of why this program is really important in that the kinds of values that it can really bring across the country. Because as we've looked at today in terms of looking at what's happened in South Carolina, it's like, so why why are we here? Why are we looking at it? And it's because exactly about Congressman Clyburn was talking about in terms of what this could really mean to rural Americans to co up members and indeed to other consumers across the country. If we really are serious about helping in terms of reducing energy consumption, and making energy more affordable and making people's quality of life better. And so it takes people like Congressman Clyburn, who are really providing that leadership to help realize this on behalf of all Americans. And that's what we're really looking at what Julie's going to talk a little bit more about in terms of thinking about what this means for co ops across the country. Now, Julie Barkmeyer is the senior principle of legislative affairs with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. And Julie comes from a very rich hill background. She's worked on the hill for for nine years, working on both the house in the Senate side, having previously worked for Senator Blanch Lincoln of Arkansas, and then also for Congress for Congressman Joe Baca of California as well as Congressman but Kramer of Alabama. And so I think Julie's message in terms of as we look at what does this mean nationally for other co ops is is a very, very important piece of where do we go now what does this mean in terms of thinking about its application here on the hill, Julie. Thanks, Carol. And I'll go through this quickly. So you can get to some questions if you have them. Good afternoon. Again, I'm Julie Barkmeyer with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. And our ECA is a not for profit trade association that represents all rural electric utilities in the country. There are over 900 member owned utilities like the ones that Mike and Mike represent. And they serve 42 million people in 47 states and actually need to put my slide here. For years, rural electric cooperatives across the country have provided advice to their members on how to save money on their energy bills. And this includes programs and incentives to help them use electricity in a more efficient and cost effective way. Some of these some of this advice includes incentives, rebates for energy efficient appliances, and changing light bulbs, and time of day rates to encourage off peak usage. 96% of electric cooperatives across the country offer some sort of energy efficiency program. And 70% of co ops offer financial incentives to promote greater efficiency. Clearly one of our best examples is the impressive work that Central Electric Power and Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina have done with the help my house pilot program. We heard them talk about the great energy savings that this program has brought. There's also Midwest Energy in Hays Kansas that has saved 1.4 million kilowatt hours a year through their house smart program. It was considered a groundbreaking on bill financing program initiative to help members overcome the upfront costs hurdles standing in the way of energy efficiency improvements to consumers homes. And this became a model as well for the Rural Energy Savings Program Act that I'll talk about. Another example is the New Hampshire Electric Cooperative that has an on bill financing program for businesses. And there's Hoosier Energy in Indiana that use federal stimulus funding to weatherize more than 2000 homes as part of a consumer home improvement initiative. And because consumers benefit from these programs and our ACA supports the Rural Energy Savings Program Act which is a legislative proposal you've heard about that would help Rural Electric Co-Ops offer help co ops offer or expand the efficiency programs like the ones that South Carolina co ops offer. Respa as you know was originally introduced by Congressman Clyburn in 2010. And it's a voluntary program that promotes energy efficiency improvements to homes and businesses in rural communities. It helps co ops offer low interest loans to their consumer members for efficiency improvements. And allows the repayment of the loan three monthly electric bill savings and would also create jobs in rural areas. A few more specifics on how the bill would work and a lot of these are elements that Mike talks about in Congressman Clyburn talked about. Individual co ops or groups of co ops would apply to the rural utility service within the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund these local energy efficiency programs. Our U.S. would issue a zero percent interest loan to the co-op. The co-op would then issue a low interest loan to consumer members to cover administrative costs. There would be trained auditors and contractors to conduct an energy audit to see what energy efficiency improvements would be needed. And the bill also includes a startup loan of four percent of the amount of the loan to help the co ops begin the process for the first consumers. Typical consumer loans as we've heard today would cover ceiling insulation HVAC systems, boilers roofs or other improvements that are tied to the structure of the home. And that was an important point that was made earlier and that they would demonstrate to our U.S. that these improvements will actually provide efficiency savings. Consumers would then repay the loan through the extra charge on the utility bill and within a 10-year period. And the idea that the most important idea is that these loans will essentially pay for themselves with the amount of energy they save. And the couple in the video made that point very clear. To summarize the legislative background of RESPA, it was first introduced by Congressman Clyburn who really has been a champion on this effort. And the bill ultimately did pass the House in 2010 by 240 to 172. And last Congress it was introduced as a standalone bill by former Senator Luger and Senator Merkley. And the past two years some version of RESPA has been included in the Farm Bill. The full version of RESPA was included in the Senate Farm Bill. There's some language in the House Farm Bill that just clarifies the re-lending of co-ops to consumers. And we continue to be hopeful that a Farm Bill will be completed and RESPA will be part of that package. And in the meantime we continue to just look for ways to help co-ops help their members expand their energy efficiency efforts. And that basically sums it up. I'll turn back over to Carol. We have a few minutes for questions. We just we want to make sure that you can leave at four o'clock. We have the room until then. And we also want to thank Senator Graham's office because in the bipartisan nature of this whole thing, Senator Graham's office reserved the room for today's briefing. Any questions and if you could identify yourself please? Go ahead. This is an exciting program from my point of view. And it seems like we get these savings sort of balance themselves out pretty well. Has there been any input about going into deep energy retrofits? This is the low hanging group. And I had the pleasure speaking about this in Quebec in January. And they're at the point of getting the deeper penetration where they've got the low hanging they've covered. But again I want it to be cost effective. That was one of our goals. Cost effective. That we didn't make the loan amount a barrier. Again there's going to be a cost extra sometimes to do things deeper. But we offer the ability for the member to pay down additional improvements. If they wanted to combine a solar panel with this we do it. That's the model that they had in Great Britain with the Green Deal. Yes there's lots of thoughts about where you go next. This achieves a reduction again of low hanging fruit combined with demand side management. We're all about cost effective. But yes sir we're we've got Ron and Mike have got a list of things they want to do. This isn't the whole list. Ron was there anything you wanted to add? Oh okay. Okay just wanted to give you that opportunity. Okay other Suzanne? I had the pleasure in South Carolina working with a number of the investor own utilities. Trying to find solutions that are outside the box. And I think they're looking at this with the administration's recent announcement of where the EPA may go. I think it's going to get to be more and more relevant about what options you have rather than building new generation. And again the business case has to be made. I mean for anybody but particularly for shareholders. And so I don't I'm glad I work for a not-for-profit. But I'm glad there's still a bottom line. But I can tell you at least in South Carolina they were big supporters of the own bill finance and statute once we started getting it rolling. Okay over here. I'm a lot fan and I think this program is wonderful. I have a couple of just mechanical questions. For folks that run utilities having the power to turn off a customer's power is not something that a utility particularly would want to do. So I just kind of put that out there. Did you get resistance to that as a possible? That's a great point. In some co-ops choose not to turn it off. They're already faced with turning off people who can't afford to pay the bill. So it's the same group of people they may have to turn off because the bill's too high. What I found is that working with people if they trust you they will work with you to find a solution to pay the bill. Particularly if they believe you put skin in the game with something like this. We don't want to cut off people. Remember we're democracy. They got a right to vote and show up and vote and be mad. But no. And again our loan rate in the original program is two and a half percent. It may not stay there in a full scale program because of whatever the interest rate is from the RUS will drive that. We paid for the audit in paid for the audit out. That was not a consumer or member cost. Again it was a business case if you could avoid building new generation with that. What about utilities concerns about becoming a bill collector and having to step up when most of utilities they're engineers and they're writing the system. So I've got a literature degree and a law degree. So I mean it takes it takes a village. I would share with you there already having to be a bill collector and they're having to be in a way where they can't offer solution to the person that's paying a high bill. So this is a solution. If you get a high bill complaint as we said that's one of the places you go to do the visual inspection and I feel a lot better about offering somebody an option than saying well we can't help you. And again the bottom line is not just dollars it's that member being satisfied. I might just add that a couple things that really struck John Michael and me as we went to South Carolina and listened to people first of all the the unbelievable relationship that people have with their co-ops quite different than what you find with people's relationship with their IOUs. The other thing is that there was really you know there there was this whole thing too in terms of word spreading that there was this pilot project and word of mouth where not that much advertising to say the least but word of mouth in terms of well my neighbor is getting this can I be part of this too where it would just sort of go down the street. It was very very interesting and and and I think that the values that came out in terms of the much greater comfort as well as obviously the affordability were really really compelling and as Mike said regardless with everything there does have to be a business case and we have to be clear about that. Other questions? Okay go ahead. You do have the data that Mike shared with you and one of the slides that shows you what we predicted based upon each measure. I would also say there's there's the concept of Givens paradox that if people save enough with efficiency they may change their usage. Again with co-ops it's not a command and control situation if they choose to be more comfortable if they choose that they can afford to have a hot water heater and have hot water rather than just cold water. That's part of this. That's empowering a consumer member choice. So we did have homes that were not as low as others. We had a home that only went down by six percent I believe and what we found was two people were living there before in one room and they had the family move back in with them. So I'm less worried about what they do about their usage. I'm more worried that they get what they were promised by way of the retrofit. Mike sure absolutely go ahead. From the generation transmission from the utility perspective though if we want to have a program and we want to have to count on it to not build generation or to operate our system differently it really doesn't matter what people what happens individually but as a group if we can model that we want to save so much energy and we hit 93 percent of it we can hit that as a group that's what that's what's important to us. And that's the engineer speaking because that's what they have to deal with. Any other questions or comments? Carol I can't make one. Sure absolutely. Yes I could not have been a better partner throughout this process. They were there they bring a measure of integrity to something so it's not we didn't intend for it to be self-serving to start with but they brought this level of integrity you've got to again like Ron measure twice cut once your data's got to prove it we're not going to get down the road of just making up what happened so Carol pushed his heart and so did John Michael all along the way is you've got to measure all of these factors. And I want to also say that there is so much information coming out of the pilot that that is available and and again I can't say enough good about this whole management team that we have the pleasure of getting to know during the last couple years in terms of working with the folks in South Carolina on this because one of the things I think is really critical for us all to to take away to is that when we look at policy at the national level it's really important and should make us feel better to know that something has been tried and what do we know in terms of what works what doesn't work what kind of needs to be improved which was a whole thing that came out of this pilot and has come out of pilots in different places across the country so there is a lot of knowledge. I think that there is now great confidence in terms of what really can be done and in terms of its replication and scalability which is really important now as we look at what the potential could be as is is you know as part of the Farm Bill as has been reported in this in the Senate now and and of course as had been passed by the House a few years ago so at least we do have that whole base of knowledge now and you've got a team of folks here that can answer all sorts of questions if you have them and in terms of Lindsay Smith who has just been an incredible person that has answers his email and his calls all the time right and of course Mike Smith and then of course Ron and and Mike and so if you do have questions or whatever please let us know we want to make sure that they get answered because this is a really important we think it's a very valuable and important area of policy concerns and that there is information really solid information that is now available. So I want to thank all of our speakers the management team for this tremendous work because we're finding out what where policy really does make a difference. So thank you all for coming and thank you very much our wonderful speakers.