 Good afternoon. Welcome everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. EESI is a nonprofit organization that was established by bipartisan Congressional caucus about 35 years ago to make sure that we were all helping policymakers learn more about energy and environmental issues and to find solutions to those kinds of problems that have been loomed very very large across our great country. So this afternoon we are delighted to have this briefing on equitable solutions to rural energy burdens. We are very glad to be partnering with Congressman Clyburn as well as the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and of course the National Cooperative Business Association Calusa. And at this time I would like to turn the podium over to our partner Doug O'Brien who is the president and CEO of NCBA. Thank You Carol. Welcome everyone and welcome to those who are participating virtually and we're also we're recording this event today so more and more folks can have the benefit of the conversation today. It's going to be a great conversation about a really important topic. I just want to introduce myself. Carol mentioned I am Doug O'Brien from the National Cooperative Business Association. We're an association here in the U.S. been around for over a hundred years and our mission is to promote, defend and advocate for the Cooperative Business Model. We do advocacy thought leadership public awareness and development including significant work on international development. So we work with the cooperative community across the United States including rural electric cooperatives, major, major stakeholders in our association in the cooperative community here in the United States. I do want to thank Carol and I want to thank the Environmental and Energy Study Institute for their partnership in an initiative that we're working together on that we call the the partnership for advancing an inclusive rural energy economy. It's really at the core of what we're talking about today. The goal of this partnership is to put more money in the pockets of people in rural communities and to catalyze rural development by supporting rural electric cooperatives in developing member responsive programs for energy efficiency upgrades and clean energy projects. We work with Congress. We work the agency at USDA to help catalyze activity in rural places. At the end of the day what this work is really about is putting more money in the pockets of families in rural America and probably in particularly those households that are more limited in income. A lot of people, many people in this room certainly in this building, talk all the time about the need to make sure that rural people have that opportunity to improve their livelihood, to improve the stability and the opportunity for their family. At the end of the day some of the strategies that we're talking about today I believe are some of the most effective and really the most realistic strategies to really make a difference in the incomes and in the pocketbooks of these rural families and we're really going to dig into that which we look forward to. Of course I want to acknowledge a real leader in this space of taking care and looking towards helping rural families and that's Honorable James Clyburn who helped make this event, this room and hosting this event so we want to thank him. We're going to get to see Representative Clyburn as soon as he's able to join us after votes. I do just want to say so I don't take up the time in the room when he walks in that Congress and Clyburn is just one of the strongest advocates for rural elector cooperatives, for rural constituents of the 6th congressional district in South Carolina. And I'll add that the Congressman is a particularly admired champion for his constituents and all Americans who are living on low incomes. He again just recently partnered with the Senate Colleague to introduce the 10-20-30 legislation which is focused on making sure that federal resources are focused towards those persistent poverty counties. 85% of all persistent poverty counties in rural places so it's going to be great to see Congressman Clyburn. I do want to mention one of our members and one of the sponsors for this event, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. I want to thank them for their leadership in this space and for partnering on this event. So we do have a great lineup of speakers today beyond Congressman Clyburn that I mentioned before. We'll also get to see Congressman the Honorable G.K. Butterfield. He'll join us too as the schedule, the vote schedule allows. He represents the first congressional district of North Carolina which happens to be the place where one of our first speakers is from Curtis Wynn. So Congressman Butterfield will be with us and talk about that community, talk about some of the work that Curtis has led there and so important to his district. As far as run-of-show, I'm going to do a quick introduction of our panelists today and then I'm going to get out of the way and invite them to the podium. So just some short bios. Certainly the materials for those that are in the room here, we have more materials, more information on the table. For those who are experiencing this virtually, those materials are I'm sure within a click and please do take a look at these materials. So to no further ado, here's our speakers. The first is Curtis Wynn. He is the president and CEO of Roanoke Electric Cooperative in North Carolina. He has nearly 38 years experience in the electric utility industry and Curtis is also the president of the board for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. He serves on that board of, he also serves on the National Rural Utilities Cooperative Finance Corporation. And I'm proud to say both of these entities are part of NCBA Clusa, part of that strong cohesive cooperative community that we get to be part of. I'd also like to introduce Mary Shoemaker and she is a senior research analyst at the American Council for Energy Efficiency Economy, where she conducts a mix of research analysis and outreach on energy efficiency opportunities in the United States and leads ACEEE, ACEEE's Rural Energy Initiative. Good to have you here, Mary. And then back over to this side, Chris McClain, a former colleague of mine from USDA, is the assistant administrator of the Rural Utilities Service Electro-Program at USDA. He has served as the acting administrator for RUS and Chris started his federal career as a Senate staffer and has served in a number of positions at RUS and at USDA. Good to see you. Chris, glad you're here. Chad Lauder, back to my right and your left, is the CEO of the Tri-County Electric Cooperative. It's headquartered in St. Matthew's, South Carolina. Chad has been part of the cooperative for 19 years and has served in the role of CEO for the last six. Prior to becoming the CEO, Chad was the manager of marketing and government relations at the cooperative. And finally, Mark Case over to my left is the general manager and CEO of Watchtow Electric Cooperative headquartered in Camden, Arkansas, and has served in this capacity since January of 2002. In 2017, Watchtow was named the Cooperative of the Year by the Smart Electric Power Association, and in 2018, Mark was recognized by the Public Utilities Fortnightly as one of the top 40 innovators in the United States. So I'm going to hand this over to Curtis for some remarks. In just a moment, I will mention that as we are fortunate enough to see the congressman when they arrive, we'll manage our agenda to make sure that we're able to hear from them. And we do have time for question and answer when all the speakers go through, and just a few concluding remarks and with no further ado, Curtis. Thank you, Doug. Good afternoon to everyone. It's good to be here with you. I want to, in my few minutes before you this morning, I want to draw a few connections, three actually, one being what today's topic, equitable solutions to rural energy burdens. I want to draw that connection to my platform as NRECA's president, and also tie that to the role and the work that we're doing at my local cooperative in northeast of North Carolina, Congressman Butterfield's district, which is really one of the poorest districts in the country in terms of economic opportunity is concerned. So I'll draw those three connections and bring that back to what I believe is a business case for what we're talking about. So first of all, as it relates to my platform as NRECA's president, there's one key element that I've been talking about all over the country, and that has to do with the rapid pace of change that is happening in the rural utility industry. Technology is changing, the industry is changing at a very rapid pace, and as utility executives go through our daily jobs we're having to keep up, and that is really something that all of us face on a day-to-day basis. Secondly, as it relates to my platform, there are three key themes or charges that I think that we have to pay attention to. These are realities that we face every day. The first is that in a space that we call electric cooperatives and the electric utility industry at large, market forces are ruling the day. It's really actually something we have to pay close attention to. Whether it's member expectations, whether it is the way people look at us as utilities, the market is taking the place of what used to be a role for policy. So Doug, the congressman is here, so you want to go. So what used to take the place of policy, so market forces are very important to us. That's one of the themes that we've been talking about and a reality that we face. The second is that, and this ties directly to what we're talking about today, is that the importance of efficiency and sustainability. That is a reality that as cooperatives we've got to grapple with that and figure out how to run our utilities more efficiently and pay closer attention to sustainability. And last, of course, is the whole grid modernization and having grid flexibility. And what that means in terms of what we do from a day-to-day basis is that the flow of electricity, as it used to be, used to be coming from one central source going in one direction to serve the member-consumer. Energy is being produced in numerous places, whether it's rooftops, whether it's community solar, whatever the case may be, and we're having to manage that flow of electricity and give us a quick and easy, but yet complicated way to manage the flow from the source back to where it's being used and make sure that all of that is integrated. And there's also disruption that has to come into play. As we look at ourselves from a sustainability standpoint, we're very prone to being disrupted as a utility. What disruptors love to do is prey on businesses that are holding on to antiquated ways of doing business and they've brought efficiency into their processes and that creates opportunities, particularly on the consumer side of the meter. And we're having to make sure that we move to the consumer side of the meter and be a part of that, which is something we have never done in the past. And we have to acknowledge that these are realities. We have to act on these and we have to do it in a leadership capacity that we all have as leaders in this industry. So that is my platform and I want to transition now to talk about locally how that platform ties to what I do on a day-to-day basis. Every day at Roanoke Electric, we're not growing as a utility and we're trying to figure out how to survive as an organization. So the second reality that I talked to you about was efficiency and sustainability. And our whole business strategy has evolved to be about efficiency and sustainability. Let me just tell you a little bit about what I mean by that. We're doing a whole lot with energy efficiency. We're basically making investments in energy efficiency. And we're also putting smart energy devices out into the consumer's home. We're also getting into the smart grid and automated mirroring infrastructure. And finally, we're doing distributed energy resources all across our system. But none of that is possible if we don't have a robust communication system in place, which has gotten us into the broadband business. Now, what you saw in four of those items pop up in a part of our pie chart called power supply. That is the biggest expense that we have as a utility. And as a utility, we're figuring out that if we cut back on that biggest expense in our operating statement, we're becoming more efficient. But at the same time, we're showing our member consumers how to be more efficient on their side. That is the business case. And that is really something that we as a cooperative have decided to invest in. Now, there's also this term that we are using quite often called beneficial electrification. And that is the use of electricity to replace other sources of energy such as fuel, diesel, and those types of things. And co-operatives in general are looking at that as a good opportunity for us to grow our businesses. Now, I want to just talk some about our energy efficiency program and the type of investments. What you see in front of you really is just the types of investments we've made with regards to energy efficiency. The average investment we're making in the home to improve the envelope is about $7,000 per retrofit. And the reason we're doing that is because the more of these we do for every... And then the first thought that you may have is, well, why would you cut back on what you sell? If you're selling electricity, why would you encourage your members not to do it? But for every dollar that we save for our members, we're gaining in other efficiencies such as the cost for the demand for electricity. So as you can see, for $2,000 that we may... $2,700 we may lose in energy sales, we're gaining about $10,000 in demand cost savings. So that's the business case. Overall, for every retrofit that we do to support our members, there is a return on that investment. So over a 20-year period, as you can see, as we do these retrofits and we are doing quite a few of those, we're saving dollars off of our bottom line by making those types of investments. Now, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time on this. The next three, I'm going to make sure I have a save enough time for my colleagues. But I just want to mention that where we live in our district, we have... For every retrofit we do, we are probably turning one person down because there is some type of health and safety issue that they're experiencing that would not allow us to make that $7,000 investment. But the short story is that we've been creative enough to bring partners into the mix to allow us to do the upfront cost before they get to the energy efficiency level to make some investments such as repairing leaky roofs and other health and safety issues that may be a part of that residence. And we're working with partners through a community solar project to do that. I don't have enough time to get into the details on that, but just know that one thing about a cooperative when your board says figure something out as CEOs, basically we learn how to figure out, right Chad? We figure out how to figure it out. So that's something we were told to do and over time we brought partners in. So we're really combining a land loss retention project with an energy efficiency project with a retrofit project. And it took a lot of creativity to bring additional partners into the play to make that happen. But if you get the slides you can learn more about how that works. But finally just to get down to the very end of this and move to the next speaker, I just want to say more about the business case. If you take the energy efficiency piece and look at the savings there and you compound on top of that the investment of smart thermostats, smart energy devices and titles to what we call in the business a demand response program which on a day like today when it's almost 110 degree index, heat index outside rather than having window unit air conditioning running trying to keep people cool if you've got high efficiency heat pumps running with smart thermostats on those heat pumps where when we're getting ready to get into the most expensive power that we can purchase we partner with our members to say we're going to raise that temperature a few degrees so that we don't pay for that expensive electricity. Those are the kinds of things we're doing to make sure that we bring value and create opportunities for all of our members. And the business case I want to end with here is that when we do that instead of it being viewed as support for a low income citizen when we do that as a system we're lowering the cost for every person that is a part of the electric cooperative. And that to me is the business case that we have here is that it does not cost or you do not subsidize these programs by doing them when you're doing them you're actually providing benefit for the entire system. So I want to just end with that. I know we're going to have a chance for questions and answers so I'll move on to the next person. Thank you. Curtis, thank you. For so many reasons I couldn't think of a better person to be the first speaker. Curtis Wynn, a real absolute leader in his cooperative in Roanoke, North Carolina but certainly for the rural electric cooperative community for cooperatives, Ritt Lard. So really laying out that business case and the real results for the communities and the families of the cooperative. I'd like to introduce now is Congressman Butterfield that I got word that he's here. Very good, there he is. And he's someone who knows Curtis well. He represents Curtis and the other good folks from the first district of North Carolina and invite him to the podium right now. Thank you, Congressman. Thank you. Thank you. First let me apologize for the delay in getting here this afternoon as all of you should know we've been on the floor for the last hour or so doing the people's business. But thank you so very much for coming and thank you for your profound interest in rural energy. This is something that we really, really, really care about in eastern North Carolina. I represent 14 counties in eastern North Carolina, northeast of North Carolina and Roanoke is certainly an integral part of my congressional district. As such, I've gotten an opportunity over the last 10 or 15 years to get to know Curtis when and I can tell you that he is doing a great work there with Roanoke and so much so that the National Association has now elected him as the president of the National Association. So he knows the subject matter and when he speaks we listen. And so thank you Curtis for your leadership and thank you for all the great work that you're doing. Not only are they providing electric service to our rural communities but they're in the space of broadband and so many other areas that are critically important to low-income rural residents. So thank you for coming. Thank you for the incredible work that you do. Also want to thank the majority whip of the House of Representatives, my friend, Congressman Jim Clyburn. Jim has been on the front line of rural energy issues ever since I've been in Congress in many years before I got here. So thank you to Mr. Clyburn and his staff for putting together the format today and thank all of you for the incredible work that you do. Thank you. Congressman, thank you for those remarks and your leadership in North Carolina and in Congress and across the United States. I would like to ask the majority whip and our host, Jim Clyburn, to please join us at the podium and I want to repeat just a couple things I was able to say at the beginning. Thank you for making this event possible and much more thank you for your leadership here in Congress in your great congressional district and for rural folks across the United States. As I mentioned in my remarks at top, there's no greater advocate, tireless advocate for the people in rural America, certainly including the use of rural electric cooperatives and particularly for those folks in economically distressed households. So again, Congressman, thank you very much for hosting and please join us for some remarks. Thank you very much. Thanks to all of you for being here. Thank you. Thank you. I know he's not in the program but I'm asking him to come on down here so he can see his face. He's trying to learn a little something. You've heard from North Carolina, now South Carolina. Who came in the room with me is Sanford Bishop, who is from Georgia. He's got a little, a few rural communities. So Sanford Bishop, thank you so much for being here. Let me just thank all of you for what you're doing in order to make the greatness of this country affordable and accessible for all citizens. That's my mantra, that's what I'm living by. I mean, I live up here for one thing only and that is to make this nation's greatness accessible and affordable for all of its citizens. It can be education, housing, and today we're talking about energy. One of the most interesting things from there, those of you in the co-op business, you may have read this book. It's a tabletop that was done by the electric co-ops in celebration of their 50th anniversary. Back in 19, I guess it was 85. And the book was called The Next Greatest Thing. I keep a copy in my office and one in my home in South Carolina. And that book's title came from a testimony given in a rural church in Tennessee where a gentleman stood before the congregation and said, the greatest thing that could happen for anyone is to have the love of God in one's heart. But the next greatest thing is to have electricity in one's home. And I think that to me gives rise to the next, next greatest thing. And that is to have broadband accessible and affordable throughout rural America. Several years ago when I was having one of my listening sessions, you hear a lot about town hall meetings. Every now and then I will have one when I'm sort of trying to keep faith with my caucus. I'll have a town hall. But I have a lot of listening sessions. I go around my district and I sit down in rural churches and other rural gatherings and I listen. And one day, doing one of my listening sessions, it came up to me that a lot of rural people in my congressional districts were having real challenges trying to pay their utility bills. Simply because they were heating the bushes around their houses because of the lack of insulation. The clouds, because they needed roofs. A lot of escaping on the ground. They needed aprons under the ground. The HVAC system being there manufactured in South Carolina is the number one in the nation in manufactured housing. And so a lot of this manufactured housing came with the lack of the proper insulation. And so I noticed that Chad and company started something called Help My House. And what they were doing, they were rounding up. I should have known this because I'm a member of Tri-Conner Electric Co-op. And I noticed when I get my bill every month it was always a round number and that's always suspicions. Always a round number. But they had started this program that they called Round Up where if your bill were 1950, it would become $20. My last bill was like something old too. So I contributed 98 cents to Round Up. And so I asked, explain this to me, how does this work? And why are you doing this? And that's when I was told exactly what was going on. That money was being gathered, put in a pot and anybody as a member of that co-op could go into that little pot of money and do what was necessary to make their homes energy efficient and pay it back on their monthly bills. I said this ought to be a national program. It took us six years to get it done. But Congress finally wised up and did it. And this year, $100 million in the program to help energy efficient or to make homes and businesses energy efficient because we amended the bill later to add businesses as well. And so I'm very pleased that you're here now. I really want to thank Chad, I understand that around 35 or 40 of your members have now taken advantage of this program. I think we started off with 13 million in South Carolina. I'm glad that the people have had enough sense to honor us with their first little trunks of money. Now 100 million available and we're going to keep plusing this up because we believe that rural energy savings is going to be one of the things that's going to be a really national program broadly is going forward. And I want all of you to remember this and I'll close with this. I've been telling this story the last time I told the story was to a rule to the co-ops. He had the national program appeared several weeks ago. And I talked about the man who came up here who was a farmer from Chester, South Carolina. He was the national group of farmers because last year they borrowed money and when the crops came the floods came and they lost their crops. Now not credit worthy. So they came up to ask us which we finally did to be of assistance. But one gentleman was there from Chester, South Carolina. He says, now Congressman, I came up here to talk to you about my cotton farm and ask you for some disaster relief but that's not what's on my heart today. He says, what's on my heart or the families in my community who go off to work in the mornings, come home at five in the afternoon and they load their children up into automobiles and take them down to the parking lot of the local library and they sit out in their automobiles at home work because that's the only place that they can get onto the internet. That should not be. That should not be. When I told the story to the co-ops a lady came to me afterwards. She said, I just retired as a school administrator and I just had a teacher to fail a bunch of students and I went to him and asked him if he failed all those students and he told me, she said it's because they were all refusing to do my homework and she asked him, well how do you assign homework? And he said, I do it over the internet. She said, don't you know that these children do not have the internet in their homes? I didn't ask her what happened to those students. They had already failed. Something is wrong with that. So if our children are going to get properly educated you've got to give them the next greatest thing. If you're going to have telehealth in our rural communities where in South Carolina we just close five rural hospitals we need broadband. You've done it. Co-ops have done it. You know how to do it for electricity and I do believe God has given you what it takes to do it for broadband. Thank you. Thank you, Congressman. I do want to take the opportunity to invite Congressman Sanford Bishop from the 2nd District of Georgia a great leader here in Congress and a leader in the ag appropriations a real supporter of rural communities through co-ops, through co-op development and in particular through the breast program we're talking about today. So we're just so fortunate to have you with us today. Thank you for taking a few minutes. First of all, let me thank you all for being here and let me thank my colleague Jim Clyburn for organizing this. Jim Clyburn and GK Butterfield are very, very close friends of mine. We have bonded since before we came to Congress but I'm not going to take along. I chair the Agriculture Subcommittee it's called Agriculture Rural Development and FDA and Related Agencies. I took this subcommittee when we got the majority because I have a passion for rural communities. I represent the 2nd Congressional District of Georgia which is 29 counties. 26 of those counties are rural. One of them happens to be Sumter County which is the home of Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia. I celebrated the 75th anniversary of rural electric with President Carter and he talked about what rural electric meant to his life as a child when it came to rural Georgia. But I believe very strongly and I have a passion for rural America. I believe that no child or no family should fail to realize its potential because of the zip code that they happen to be living in. No business in rural America should be shortchanged because of where it's located and so not only does agriculture include the crops and conservation but rural development where rural utilities, rural housing or rural economic development is centered for rural America. That is where we need to put a lot of emphasis and that's my passion and that's why I took the chairmanship of that subcommittee and which is why I am so supportive of my colleague, Jim Clyburn with the Rural Energy Assistance Program and with all of the rural programs and so I want you to know that there are two kinds of committees in Congress. There are authorizing committees, they write the wish list but there are appropriations committees and subcommittees that write the checks and I just want you to know that as long as I am the chair of the subcommittee and I think we have bipartisan support for this we're going to do our dead level best to make sure that America's rural communities get the resources they need so that the people who live there can realize their full potential. We've got some of the best, some of the brightest, the most ingenious and creative people living in these communities. All they need is the opportunity and the resources and we want to do our best to make that happen. You are an important, a significant part of that and I'll close with one of my favorite poems which is called A Bag of Tools. It goes like this, this is strange how princes and kings and clowns that caper and sawed us rings and common folks like you and me are builders for eternity. Each is given a bag of tools a shapeless mass and a set of rules and each must make your life as flown a stumbling block or a stepping stone. I just want to thank you and I hope that you will continue what you are doing and join with all others of like man not to be stumbling blocks but to be stepping stones for a higher and a better life for all America but particularly those who live in rural America. Thank you for what you do. Keep doing it and we want to work with you. God bless you. Thank you for your leadership. Thank you for those remarks, Congressman Bishop. Now next we want to take just a very short video that really I think does an excellent job of kind of laying out some of the challenge but also some of the potential and opportunity here from AC Triply in the video is the rural energy burden so if we're ready to run that. It's been a long time since my heating system been broken. Been a long time. After my system went out I never could get it fixed because it was just too much. I couldn't afford it. So I had to let it go not to start getting me some heaters for the winter and for the summer I get fans and it wasn't doing anything but just running my light bill up, up, up, up. Well it ran my light bill up to four and five and six hundred dollars a month. So I'm going to fix income. This light bill got so out of hand I'm worried that they're going to soon put me in the dark. A lot of the people that live in the rural areas homes have a tendency I will say to not be well insulated. They're losing energy through leaky duck work or leaky windows and they're paying for that. When you can't pay your para bill with one whole paycheck you have a problem and that's not counting you've got four kids and groceries and gas to get back to work. When your para bill is five hundred and eighty nine dollars then that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for anything. I had to make some choices on whether to pay my high energy bill or cut back on my grocery bill or cut back on other necessities that I needed to have from day to day. I had to be very mindful about how much traveling I had to do because I had to be concerned about paying my electric bill. My husband had recently passed I was a widow and a single parent and I was the only sole source income I almost gave up and I actually almost walked away from the home and once I got introduced to this program I became hopeful. The program that we operate the on-bill financing program can be a quick turnaround to not only get the problems fixed but to get the member into a comfortable situation. When the co-op sends us a bid sheet out we come out and see what we've got to do to fix the house. We'll come out and air seal them and patch in holes if there's any if they need another unit we put a new unit in. We normally cut them down to light bills in half especially if you're in a manufactured home the light bills are high. When you analyze my bills there's at least a minimum of two hundred and fifty dollars a month in savings compared to what I was paying. I did not understand what being energy efficient was until they did this. I did not understand that I could save that much money if my house was energy efficient. I'm grateful for this program and I just hope that other people will be able to benefit from it because it really did change my life. Yes, it really did. Hi everyone, I'm Mary Shoemaker I'm with the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy AC Triple E Thanks so much for sharing that video. I think it just really drives home the tangible impact that energy efficiency can have on people's lives and improving the quality of their lives. My remarks today are going to be to talk to you about how energy efficiency is one tool on the toolkit for improving rural prosperity. It's not a silver bullet but as one of my friends in Kentucky said there are a lot of silver BBs and energy efficiency I think is one of them. So, next slide. Actually, I just realized I have this, thanks. As a little bit of context on AC Triple E we've been around for almost 40 years. We're a non-profit based here in DC and our bread and butter is really to do research and write reports on energy efficiency best practices looking at how utilities are delivering programs to their customers and members, how state governments are passing policies to help drive those programs and really writing about what we see as best practices but also convening people to talk about their experiences through conferences and other convenings. Here we go. So, I'm on AC Triple E state policy team but I also lead our rural energy initiative. We have had a historical focus on agricultural energy efficiency and over the past few years we have really built out our work looking at kind of equity in delivering energy efficiency programs asking ourselves if the people who need these programs most and can benefit from them most are actually able to access them. With kind of both of those focuses in mind we launched this initiative last year to look more squarely at energy efficiency in rural communities. So, we've done a couple reports on this topic. We had our first rural energy conference last year and we're doing our second one next February. Today I'm going to share with you some of our research. So, we've been talking about energy burden quite a bit but I thought it might be helpful just to kind of lay a foundation and make sure we're all kind of coming from the same level of understanding of this topic. So, an energy burden is the percent of an annual household income that goes towards utility costs. It's caused by a variety of factors. Some of them are physical, like the quality of a home or maybe the economic situation the tenants of that home find themselves in. And it has a variety of impacts as well. As you saw from the video it can really affect the indoor air quality and the comfort of the tenants of a home and it can also really keep hard-earned money in those household pockets. So, ACAAA last year did a report looking squarely at energy burdens in rural households. We broke down our data by regions but just to share kind of some top-level takeaways we found that the average rural household spends about 4.4% of their income on energy bills. That compares to about 3.1% in metropolitan households. So, those are averages but just from those averages we found that rural homes pay about 30% more on utility bills than metropolitan homes and that number will vary based on the region you're looking at but also vary based on which demographic subset you're looking at. For example, we found that on average rural low-income homes pay a lot more on their utility bills, about 9% and manufactured housing residents as we saw from the video as an example they also pay a lot of... they have high energy burdens. So, energy efficiency is one key tool as I mentioned for alleviating energy burdens. We found that it can alleviate up to 25% of an energy burden and save households on average $400 per year and it also... energy efficiency leads to additional benefits like local job creation and improved public health. One important point that I think folks often get tripped up on is the fact that low energy prices do not always equate to affordable bills. So, just because electricity is cheap in an area as it is in many of the southeastern states we've been talking about today just because it's cheap doesn't mean that it's affordable for the households who are still using more electricity than maybe they need to to lead comfortable lives. So, you might be wondering if energy efficiency is so great then why doesn't it just happen on its own? So, here is where programs come in that are led by co-ops like my fellow panelists or state energy offices or nonprofit program implementers. So, co-ops play a really important role in first helping their members identify energy savings opportunities maybe through doing a whole home like through measuring their energy use and identifying the specific improvement opportunities. Second, utilities and other program implementers can help their customers and members identify funding or financing to lower the upfront costs to actually pursue those improvements. And then last, or not last but as the third kind of category that I want to focus on is helping members access technical resources they need to actually make those efficiency upgrades. You know, I think a lot of us are comfortable changing out a light bulb or maybe buying a new appliance but we might not be so comfortable adding insulation into our walls or replacing windows. So, the second point I mentioned on the last slide increasing access to financial resources there are a few federal programs that play a really key role in doing this and Administrator McLean is going to dive into them a bit deeper. Today has a few great programs that are focused on rural community members. The U.S. Department of Energy also has a few great programs that are not explicitly rural focused but are certainly valuable resources to consider. So, the last plug I'll just make is for AC Triple E's 2020 rural conference. We're hoping to pull together co-op leaders, advocates, state government officials, federal policy makers, anyone who's really interested in driving our energy savings in rural communities and we'll send out that call for topics next week. So, I hope you'll consider joining me and I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Mary. Next, I want to welcome to the podium Administrator McLean to talk about one of the programs and really the strategies that Congress and particularly some of the congressmen who are here before have championed at USDA Rural Utility Service. So, Chris McLean, Chris. Great. Thank you very much. It's so great to be here as a former Senate staffer. It's like the most relaxed I've ever been coming into the House side of the Capitol. That is great. I really appreciate one being part of this very distinguished panel and I want to have a big, big thank you to Congressman Clyburn, Congressman Bishop, and Congressman Butterfield for all that they've done to support this program. It's extremely innovative and thrilled to be able to be able to minister the Rural Energy Savings Program. Let me give you a little bit of context about the Rural Utility Service and USDA Rural Utility Service is one of three Rural Development Agencies at the United States Department of Agriculture and we have the Rural Housing Service which can, as the name implies, invest in housing and community facilities, the Rural Business Service which creates jobs and has the Rural Energy for program for renewable energy and now for energy efficiency and then we have the Rural Utility Service which is the agency that I work in and I'm the head of the Rural Utility Service Electric Program and RUS is a one-stop utility shop. We invest in telecommunications, electric, water, and sewer infrastructure in rural areas and the thing to know about utilities in rural America is that everything is more expensive both in absolute terms and relative terms especially when you consider as the study just did, the relative incomes of consumers. So a core organizing principle of rural electrification movement has been to find savings. So I'm going to talk a little bit today about the Rural Energy Savings Program Act or RESP and I have with me in the audience, I have Luis Brinal, Bob Coates, Steve Picharillo, that's our energy efficiency team and they really help us move this program along and this was really a brilliant idea to create RESP here on Capitol Hill and then to be able to fund it through the Appropriations Committee because what it does is it seizes the value of energy savings to make investments in the quality of life of rural America. So the structure of the RESP program is very similar to another familiar economic development program that our sister agency the Rural Business Service Operates called the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant Program so it's very much like the loan aspect of that. RUS will make a 0% interest loan to an eligible borrower. That would be a utility or utility like entity. Then we will find our security with that borrower's assets. Then they will set up, the borrower will set up an energy program to make investments in the consumers of the utility so it could be the residences, could be businesses, could be educational institutions. The consumer then pays the utility back our borrower pays them back through an on-bill financing mechanism and that on-bill financing mechanism can be classic loan repayment or as Rowan Oak did a tariff model which does not have to rely on the credit worthiness of the individual consumers that are benefitting or in case of a municipal utility and called PACE financing where your property rates, your property taxes are adjusted to reclaim that benefit and then as the customers pay back to the utility the utility pays us back. RUS will make a 20-year loan to the borrower and then the borrower will then make relend that money in 10-year increments so you have a rolling set of energy efficiency improvements and so think about what Curtis told you. They make an average $7,000 investment per home. I mean think about how hard that would be even in your own life to come up with $7,000 even if you can save money over the next 10 years that's a big number to deal with an average consumer. So that's the power of capturing the economic value of those economic savings. So I'll go to the next slide. RUS has $100 million available at least $100 million. It's actually in excess of $100 million right now under ANOFA, Notice of Funds Availability which runs through the end of this fiscal year and when that runs out we will, depending on how the appropriations play out over the next couple of weeks here we'll likely reopen that for another round of funding in the next fiscal year. We're at right now very busy writing regulations. Luis and I every day I said, Luis how we doing on those regulations? And we're going through all the details because over the last three years we have run this program we called on a notice and I saw Brandon McBride in the audience here. Brandon was our administrator of RUS on our first Notice for this program and three of them under Individual Notices now the Office of General Counsel says, you know, you need to have a standing regulation especially now that Congress has made it clear that this is a lasting priority. So we're working on that regulation and that regulation will again give all the details 0% interest our customers can charge up to 5% to their customers. Alright so we're going to make a 0% loan to the utility to make a loan. They don't have to charge 5% but they can charge up to 5%. Congress raised that from 3% to 5% to make the program a little more attractive and allow the utilities to recapture some of their costs. And Congress has tweaked this I mean they really care about the statute because they've tweaked it along the way. One of the big changes happened in the last appropriation cycle where Congress said, you know, the full replacement of a manufactured home with an energy efficient manufactured home could be an eligible energy efficient measure. Now we've tried to learn at RUS as much as we can about manufactured housing and Bob actually has a lot of background in that area and it's been talking to people in the industry and we're working with some potential applicants that we're looking at that model so it's pretty exciting. Think again think about the transformation of an individual's life to move from a 1960's era manufactured home to a modern energy efficient home and be able to finance that with the savings they would achieve on their energy bill. It's pretty profound and exciting. And another tweak that Congress made in the Farm Bill was to kind of expand our scope from electricity to more utility so it's a recurring bill not just an electric bill that those loans can be repaid. And then I will show you next here this next slide there we go there we go. We've got about 14 loans where we have obligated funds and you can see it runs the gamut across the country in size represented here at the table as well and we have a number of more in-house that we're working with and then once we get that regulation published we have a few that will be benefiting from the Farm Bill changes that we'll be able to address. And 14 on one hand this is one of our youngest program it's a big decision big decision for utility to say we're going to fundamentally change our view of the business from selling things to not selling things and then take out a loan because even though it's a 0% interest loan it has to be paid back and we need adequate security to be able to secure that loan so it's a big decision so in such a short period of time to be able to commit over 50 million dollars of financing to these first early adopters it's pretty exciting and as these success stories roll out through the industry we're getting more and more interest. We just had a webinar with NRECA members 100 and plus participants and we're still getting feedback and questions so we're promoting this program further and further and it's very very exciting so I look forward to your questions and I thank you for everything that you do and again thank the members of congress and the staff for being so supportive of this great program and our great agency thank you. Thank you Chris I'd like to now bring up another leader of a rural electric cooperative that is in Representative Clyburn's district in South Carolina, Chad Lauder the CEO of the Tri-County Electric Cooperative Thank you and thank you for having me here on this distinguished panel after following up Curtis I really don't know if I need to say anything because he kind of wrapped it up what I am going to speak about is the co-op in general and why we look at these programs I started my career 19 years ago as a guy that crawled underneath these homes to find out why the power bills were so high as you learn in the co-op world you do whatever you're asked to do a lot of times it's all kind of stuff so I remember the first couple of years I was there seeing these homes the age of the homes the conditions that these homes are in and just how high these power bills were and what you learn quick as you look at the power usage your members that are at the lowest income levels usually had the highest power bills it's just a fact of life and the reason why is the manufacturer homes they live in are typically older even though some of the new manufacturer homes are very good homes they're well insulated your typical member that is on the lower income scale will be living in a 1970's model mobile home or if they're in a stick built home it was a home built possibly by their parents or grandparents it was built in the 70's 80's a lot of these homes have no insulation in them have no insulation in the floor and so when you go in these homes and they're typically upset with the utility why is my bill so high are you charging me more than your neighbor nor than their neighbor and you have to tell them no we're not you know your rates are the same everybody's paying the same amount for power the problem is they're using twice or three times the amount of energy that their neighbor is and it's due to the home they're living in one instance that sticks my brain even after so many years of doing this was a lady as a single mother in one of our service areas she had called crying because she couldn't pay her power bill well what does a co-op do you know we don't just say nothing we don't we we'll go out and try to find what the problem is that's what we're here for we're here to solve the problems of the members so went out there looked at the home couldn't really find what was going on and finally I said man where's your heating for the house well my heating unit broke 10 years ago and we just opened the stove up and heat the house with the stove if you've ever been in a house that we're heating the house with the stove and smell the smell that you smell in the house you cannot believe what you're seeing in front of you for one thing she has five-year-old kids running around the house with a stove wide open heating the house and it sticks in your brain when you see this and you wonder what can be done so after years of going through this process in 2010 the electric co-opters and Carolina Bennett got together and started to help my house project help my house was a very simple project essentially we do a home loan and tie the funds back to the bill or the repayment back through the power bill typical loan like Curtis was about seven thousand ten thousand dollars but what you saw was they were saving 32% on their power bill they were reducing that bill right off the bat it was almost immediate savings they were getting and from that savings they were able to pay back that loan with the money they were saving on the power bill and still have excess money that they were saving so it was a win-win for the member and the utility these programs are structured for the co-op model this is what we're here for we're here to work with the members on a grassroots level to solve the problems of the membership let your co-operatives took that talked to Congressman Clyburn recognized the significance of this program and brought it to Washington and now when you see the USDA program that we just talked about is there and Tri County actually this month in August we'll be rolling out a new program to our membership which we have 2.5 million dollars that we're going to roll out of the energy efficient loans to our members to save them money on that power bill now it does cut down to usage but it reduces our wholesale power bill so it is a win-win for not just a member that gets that energy efficient upgrade to the home but it's a win for all of our membership because when it reduces what essentially is 75% of your cost is wholesale power that big ticket item you see the savings across the board to every member on the environmental side what you see is you may not have to build that next generating station you've just reduced your peak if you have enough of these on your system you've reduced that peak and that generator you may not have to build so environmentally you're reducing how much generation you have to put out there to get the power to the members I can't really think of any better program that the co-ops can offer other than possibly broadband and I think that's coming down the road as co-ops look at this is take the leadership into their areas to see where they can help with broadband co-ops were formed in 1940 to bring a service to an area that was not being provided for people were in the dark in 1940 and the co-ops ran this power to the membership on the backs of the members the members bound together to do this now in the 21st century that we sit in today there are houses without internet or if they have internet it's slow and you cannot do school work on it you can't do business you can't do medical work on it that's where the co-ops have to step in and I think you'll see this the leadership of Curtis and those leaders in the co-op system that will continue to grow at the core of it all stands as the co-op and the co-op is the members the members request and they want these programs those programs will be there will be there for them a program like this through the USDA only helps the members all of them not just the ones that are receiving that benefit we're proud to offer this program we're proud to roll it out in August with our other co-ops in South Carolina as we move forward with these energy efficiency measures and I look forward to taking your questions thank you Chad thanks so much for really tying a lot of these important ideas laying out that business case one more time building on the policy case that the congressman talked about we get to hear from one more co-operative Mark Case please join us at the podium he's the general manager of the Watchtower Electric co-operative Mark it's good to see you again appreciate the opportunity to be here today she goes back several years we lost our largest industrial customer and at the time that customer was about 12 percent of our total load and I explained to our board at that time that equal just over 100 percent of our total margins and so our business model had to change and the way we decided to change was to invest more in our members and we've been facing a 20-year history of shrinking population companies closing jobs going away people disappearing from our community and we wanted to do something to make a difference and we started working just on basic efficiency and weatherization like we were working with a company E-Tility I think some of them are here today and they've been our partners since the beginning and we started making these basic loans and then I can thank Curtis Wynn about two years into that he brought us the concept of a tariff that could be used to help finance bigger investments when we were making loans many of our members were not eligible for loans anybody ever tried to go borrow money and get turned down that'd be about most of our members but when we went to a tariff based program credit was not an issue there's no credit checks if they were a member of the cooperative they were eligible to get the benefits of our program and our program now includes basic weatherization, duck sealing insulation, air sealing and new heating and air systems and similar to Roanoke we're averaging now about $7,500 per home the unique thing about the tariff is we were now able to go into properties that before were never eligible multifamily housing, rental property people that could never participate before in a population that's really hard to reach and in fact if you could go into multifamily homes and income was not an issue and to be able to put high efficient heating and air in those homes was life changing and so not only did they save money by lowering their power bill but we're averaging about 15% on top of the payback on the loans additional savings for them to put in their pocket and that's been an incredible change this year and because we had applied for a rest loan and got approved we're looking at what else we can do to make our program even better and we've added solar and just in the last couple of months we've completed our first three residential solar project using the help pays model and that's been an exciting opportunity now the people that are getting solar have to pay more down, they're not able to do it with zero down because we have to keep an 80% of the savings go back to repaying the loan and to keep that ratio for most doing solar they're having to come up with money up front but that's been another benefit of the program and I say we qualified for rest funding as you heard earlier that's at 0% interest and we wanted to pass that bonus back to our members and we are investing in our membership and we're doing it at 0.5% interest that we give to them that 0.5% cover some of our administrative cost but we wanted to pass as much of that savings back to the members as possible and when you can do new HVAC and you can recover it on the bill over 10 years at 0.5% interest it pays back in a hurry the other thing we're doing we wanted to raise the bar for efficiency and so when we change out heating and air we don't put the minimum that we can find we are requiring a minimum of 16 seer air conditioning systems we do heat pumps and something unique to our program if we go to a house and because we are regulated by our state utility commission if they have an existing gas furnace we replace that gas furnace with an efficient gas furnace as well and it's paid for on the electric bill and since 2015 we've completed just over 550 homes that we've been able to reach which in the scheme of things is a fairly small number but for us we only have 7,000 members and really we only have about 5,000 residential properties in fact that in a short period of time we have contacted or touched over 10% of our membership and we continue to expand that program we've added smart thermostats you know you hear a lot about everybody trying to lower their bills and someone comes to us you know if you want to know how to where electric usage comes from ask your electric company we have these wonderful things called meters that give us tremendous amount of data and we know more about where everybody's energy uses is than anybody and even the people that are using it but before all we could ever do was give advice and someone comes and talks to me because they can't pay their $300 electric bill and I tell them if they buy a new heating and air system and add insulation and air seal their house that they could save money and solve this problem and they of course immediately tell me I don't have the $300 to pay my bill this month how am I going to come up with $7,000 and so now we're able to offer solutions and not just advice. Advice is always great to get but solutions are a lot better and solutions actually help people so we continue to add the program we've also started a fiber to the home project because of the work we were doing and energy efficiency our local phone company came to us and said would you like to partner on a broadband project and to be honest we weren't even considering broadband but because they had seen the other work we were doing and energy efficiency they now we are now doing a broadband project and we have over 600 homes already served so anyway we've had great results and we're looking forward to doing more in the future thank you thank you Mark now we do have some time for some questions and that can be to any of the panelists I'm going to remind the panelists that for recording purposes this is the best mic so please if you want to feel the question please come on up here any questions yes sir hi my name is Seth Heald I'm with a campaign called Repower REC working to reform a co-op in Virginia and I'll address this to Mr. Winn we have tried to get our co-op encourage them to use a pay type program a tariff based program and found resistance one of the board members told me this would raise rates and there must be I think this is common among a lot of co-ops so I'd like to hear what your response is and what can we do to persuade more co-ops to do what we've heard from the three co-op CEOs here today great I appreciate the question and I think it goes right back to what I was saying during my presentation I think one of the challenges that came to our co-op when we were one of the first ones to participate in the E-Clip program was to go out and talk to more co-ops about it I think where we may have fallen short in that is providing the business case on the front end of that and explaining what you've heard all three of us talk about in terms of the overall impact that it has for our systems on the bright side of that I'm happy to say that we have been working with our private lending institution at CFC to help us put a more comprehensive program together that will hopefully move the needle and to get more participation in the program coming from a trusted organization like CFC that could possibly put the whole piece together all of the solutions together the way we look at it there are probably six major pieces to this one is getting that executive to understand the impact it's going to have on his or her financials and I think once we are clear with that it removes a lot of the hurdles downstream which is the program operation that we talked about the manpower that it takes to run the program I think pulling all of that together will help more co-ops get into this I think the other piece to that is that we've been hearing a lot about energy efficiency but you've heard little bits and pieces about demand response and smart thermostats there are a lot of other components to this vehicle electrification that closely tied to this that I think will also help the business case even more using the same type of model that we've used with energy efficiency so I hope that gives you a little bit of clarity on that thanks Curtis other questions, yes sir so obviously the co-ops and you guys have shown how these co-ops help people on a micro level and how the individual and individual families are greatly helped by co-ops but what exactly is your overall policy and mission towards the country on a more macro level and energy policy as a whole I'll invite maybe Curtis to answer that question okay I'll start a little bit I'll just start a little bit and talk about co-ops generally I won't talk about rural electric co-ops because I co-ops and I didn't say that top most people in this audience probably know co-ops are a special type of business they're a type of business that's owned controlled and benefit the people who use the business we're talking about one of the co-ops that have really gone to scale and transformed particularly the rural countryside here with rural electric co-operatives but because of that dynamic the way that they serve their members and they focus on all aspects of the business as well as policy I think is unique and just a really important thing to understand but with that kind of setup I'll ask Curtis who of course is the chair of the conference speaking from a policy perspective as relates to NRACA the National Trade Association one of our co-operative principles we talk about a lot of the seven is the independence and autonomy principle Chad's co-op is run by him and his local board marks the same way they have local decisions to make when it relates to the National Trade Association and a policy perspective we have a very diverse membership of over 900 co-ops ranging from distribution co-ops to generation transmission type co-operatives so the policy really is all inclusive of making sure we provide a all of the above type of a policy that when we come and talk about the energy burden as well as the energy policy for electric co-opters in general is really it covers a magnitude of areas that has to be inclusive of the multi millions and billions of dollars of investments that are already in place and the unintended consequences of what might happen if that is not handled properly as we transition to this whole new era of efficiency demand response distributed generation and it's moving but as I mentioned earlier the pace is rapid and this policy has really taken a back seat to market demand corporations businesses, individuals household owners are pushing co-ops and pushing the whole utility industry at a pace that's much faster than policy ever could I'll just add one more thought on scaling up so I think one important component is really making sure we're elevating the successful program models and putting them on the radars of other co-ops who are not currently offering energy efficiency programs but could be interested and the USDA's REST program is so invaluable and it's important to make sure co-ops are aware of this important financing stream but to your question about policy I don't have the perfect solution but I will just say that state energy offices and their association state governors as well as the National Governors Association are all thinking about how their members can most effectively serve rural communities and I don't always think that energy is at the forefront of their minds and so that's something I'm trying to do is making sure we collect examples of looking outside the co-op space, look at state energy offices and governors who are effectively prioritizing energy efficiency as a tool for helping their rural constituents Thank you Mary I think we have time for one more question and maybe we'll go over here sorry and I'm going to as you're heading well two more questions here and then we'll go over here we'll make them fairly quick and I'm going to guest and speak for the panelists that they'll be available for the people in the room here and they're also you'll be able to find their contact information for those virtually and they'd be happy to continue the conversation but please Great, Zach Valdes with Hispanics and Energy I have a question about what's the default rate on a lot of these loans, y'all are handing out does that happen pretty often and also how do you I think this is a really good opportunity for a regional perspective that is often overlooked and I think that I'm originally from Texas and I don't know that this is really the model for every state but maybe for some of these more rural ones I appreciate that question I mentioned earlier that we've completed almost 550 homes and we've had one house that defaulted and that's when it was a loan and not a tariff since we've used our tariff model there have been zero defaults and that's the strength of the tariff because even even if someone moves out of the house which happens a lot of time when there are uncollectible accounts we've invested in the property and not in the individuals someone else moves in because it's a tariff it's part of that location and utilities everywhere have tariffs for their rates the energy efficiency tariff is specific to each location and it depends on the amount of investment we've made we've included some local school districts we're working with our county now a new heating and air for the county courthouse it's a 100 year old courthouse and rural counties and schools are in the same situation as rural residents they have limited access to funding but if we can help those groups it helps all of our members and the default rate has been almost zero one out of five fifty and we're doing pretty well Thanks Mark Okay, last question Hi, Emily Rampone Senate Budget I'm assuming most of you saw the recent study that just came out of Chicago showing that wealthier communities are actually subsidized by poorer communities because they're more likely to be using electricity during peak hours and I was just wondering if anyone has any potential solutions to that dilemma Is it all you man? You gave this one to me The idea of peak and off-peak if you had the ability to control your usage and you reduce your usage off-peak and not use it or reduce your usage during the on-peak situation it reduces the wholesale power cost but right now rates are the same across the board it's not on a demand type basis or on a peak non-peak ratio there are some rate structures that are going to that extent to where you're putting in an hourly type demand on each resident and then the person pays for that right now that's not the case so whether the most co-ops across the country and most you too across the country use it whether it's 5 o'clock in the afternoon or whether it's 12 o'clock or midnight rates are changing and I'll be the first to tell you Tri-Canada is a small rule co-op in South Carolina we are about midstream 18,000 meters we're looking at changing that we're looking at changing how we build members rate structures are going to have to change most people need to understand your paying or your rates that you're paying now were designed in 1940 when cost of electricity was probably 2 cents a kilowatt hour now it ranges anywhere from 25 cents to 10 cents and everywhere in between you're going to see these rate structures change where members will be able to take advantage of when they use electricity I firmly believe that the future of electricity or future of charging members will go to more of a time of use where if you do not use energy during this period cost will be very low if you choose to use it cost will be high so the more co-ops can educate their members of when to use it and when not to use it and I think that's when you get into the demand response components of putting in smart thermostats putting in a water heater switches to where you're telling members don't use it now using an hour later and they will see that benefit directly on the bill right now is the benefits and the wholesale cost so members don't actually see it on a monthly basis they see it on the long term but in the future they will actually see that on a monthly basis so they say let's just say somebody is at the house and they can choose to wash clothes at 8 a.m. on a February morning in Tri-County system you don't want to do that that's the highest usage during February is between the hours of 6 a.m. and 9 a.m. if they shift that down to 11 11 a.m. they will see that direct benefit on the bill so your question of do they subsidize one or the other you try not to and I don't think you really see that directly right now but I think in the future you're going to see these rates change or the rate structure change where the members actually have physical control of when they use it and then they can actually control how much you're paying for electricity during the time of the day did that somewhat help out? Thanks Chad Chad thank you and thanks to all the panelists just a couple concluding thoughts a couple things that I heard that because of the power of this business model of the cooperative business model and this intervention this strategy the congress has brought that the agency has brought and that most importantly the cooperatives serve their members have brought to the ground and we've heard the policy case for those who care about putting more pockets or more pockets more money in the pockets of rural families and particularly economically distressed families this is a strategy that can make a difference and it's proven we've heard the business case for a long time from our RAC leaders that it certainly saves money for those families but very importantly it saves money for the cooperative as a whole thus saves money for the entire membership so we've heard that business case and finally we've heard strong congressional support both from the authorizing side and from that appropriating side this is a program that's here that will be here and that can grow but right now there are significant resources available at RUS to move out on RESP to move out with this strategy so for those in congressional offices for those who are leaders within your RAC please take a look at this program think about what it can do for your members and now you've seen and heard some great examples as I mentioned the panelists are going to be available right now but I'm sure they would be happy to answer questions virtually in the future with their contact information and also and I certainly can say that the sponsors and I want to thank EESI for sponsoring this I want to thank the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and then NCBA CLUSA we're here to answer questions and to help connect and to help improve the lives of your members as well and with that we'll conclude and just say thank you very much everyone for taking the time to be part of this conversation