 Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for sticking around and coming to hear about the Solar Project. My name's Eric Sundquist. I am a member of the Sustainability Ministry team. Several of us are here. Our leader, Pat Egan, is here. Jay Martin, who's been working on the Solar Project, and Mark Schultz, who has been working on some companion projects around efficiency in our building that are really paying off too, which we'll come to in a minute. He deserves a lot of credit for that. Anybody else from the ministry team here? No. Oh, yes. I'm sorry. Danielle, I'm sorry. So as many of you know, there's been a desire for years and years to do better around our carbon footprint to do solar, in particular, on our buildings. There was discussion back when I first joined here, and this building was being planned. There was discussion that didn't go anywhere, but now we are at a point where we're about to have solar on FUS. And so this is a Q&A about the project and then about how you can get involved in it. It's a fundraising campaign. It's not an extension of the capital campaign or anything like that, but this project will require some financing, and so I'll explain how that works and how you might want to get involved. You can also be involved in the ministry team on other endeavors, because we're not going to get to net carbon zero with just this, so we have a lot more to do. So this is also being recorded, so if my drowning puts you to sleep, you could go home and, you know, drink some coffee and watch the rest of it, you know, invite your friends, whatever. If somebody says, I wish I'd been able to see it, they can online. And that means when we do the Q&A, Jay is going to do Oprah Winfrey with a mic and walk around so that people who are watching online will be able to hear you. So with that, I'm going to have to stand here because I don't have a monitor. Sorry about that. So the ministry team does have these goals. These aren't exactly, haven't been, you know, blessed by the board or, you know, written in stone anywhere, but these are sort of our guiding principles and probably not terribly controversial. We do want our building and eventually all our operations. We want to talk about transportation. We want to talk about the stuff we buy, anything that we touch to be carbon neutral or better. And or better is, you know, it would be good if we could get better because we put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere over the years that FUS has been around. So to the extent that we can make up for those past years, that would be good. We don't want to blow the budget. I mean, we want this to be hopefully a win-win, things that actually reduce our costs but don't drive them up. And we realize that we're a relatively small drop in the bucket in Madison or in the world. So whatever we can do that ripples out and affects the community at large and has some multiplier effect that we're interested in that, not just our own stuff. So to the specifics of the solar project, last year we had four installers come and give us bids and some of them we went back to twice. So we did a fair amount of due diligence on this and we now have a installer that we've selected, but just to get you up to speed on why we decided what we did. If you sort of were in a, I see Kurt up there from our co-op, he's okay, he'll find us. If you were sort of thinking about this in terms of the economics as they were five years ago, you would tend to be kind of conservative on the size of it because solar panels cost a lot more than. So we got some bids that were in the range of 50 kilowatts. We got one that was much bigger in the 80 kilowatt, it was more aggressive and we talked to them and they're the ones we eventually picked. It's like the marginal cost of extra panels when you're thinking about all the wiring and labor and inverters and all the other things that are happening is not that much anymore. So you can deal with a little bit of shade or something like that, which five, ten years ago you would never do. So we're at a bigger system and good news is, I mean it's kind of good and bad, it's taken a while for this to happen so the bad news is that we don't have it up there yet. Good news is the improvement in the solar panels has continued so we're actually going to get more powerful panels than it would originally expect. So this will be above 80 kilowatts, somewhat maybe 82, 83, not that much. So then the location, we scoured the entire campus for every place that we could put it. There was a parish vote that said, Frank's building is off limits. You're going to agree or disagree but that was our boundary, we weren't going to put it on the landmark. But everything else we looked at, we looked at the roofs, we looked at the parking lot and then the grassy grounds. The parking lot has some issues in that people drive in and out of it. It would require a structure. We have snow plowing, additional costs. So there's some issues there. The roof actually has some issues too in that it's not just the optimum sort of south facing sloped roof that you would really love. We have all these sort of weird additions that face different ways. And then the grounds, the grounds, we have a lot of trees. There might have been some marginal places where we could stick something like on the grounds on the other side of the landmark. But it's a long way from the panels. So running wires over to the panel was not very optimum. So we ended up with just the roof. So that's what we're talking about. I'll show you what that looks like in just a second. Visibility is an interesting thing. We have a lot of concern about aesthetics here. And so that's why the original landmark is off limits for this. But we also don't want it to be totally hidden. At least that's how we came down. Because we do want people to know about it. We want people who come in, do tours here. People who may be here for whatever reason to know about solar and to actually think about it in their own house or wherever. So we thought that at least some visibility would be useful. But we want to be mindful of the aesthetics. So we're not thinking about putting it on the right building or taking over the green roof or anything like that. So we opted for partially exposed, which you'll see in a second. So the specs, it's 232 panels. It's going to be greater than now. He hasn't fully respect it since we got this upgrade in the panels. And it's going to offset about a quarter of our energy use. And I say a quarter. And this is where Mark walks up, but I want to give him props here. The energy efficiency stuff is ongoing now, too. And so we don't know exactly what our energy use is going to be. So we're sort of estimating. But so it's about a quarter of what we were using before the energy efficiency stuff kicked in. And you should really give him a pat on the back because he's organized a way to run our geothermal pumps more efficiently and take out about another quarter of our usage here. So between these two projects the ministry teams involved in is going to take about half of our electricity use out. So that's a really fantastic outcome. And the pumps are kind of not shiny like solar panels. Nobody sees them and it's kind of boring. But I mean if energy that you don't have to use is even better than energy you have to generate even if it's sustainable. So maybe we'll cheer him when he walks in. We're going to capture all this stuff in a data logger. We're part of our commitment to a grantor that is helping us with this is to again demonstrate the savings and put it on the web so that people will ripple out and think about doing solar in their own lives. It's not just here. And all of that is a sticker price of around 170K for the solar. So when we get to the, and this is what it looks like, you can see that there's a little bit here on the 2008 building around the green roof. But most of it's on the 60s and 70s era additions that are just over here, the flat roofs that nobody really sees and some people are just surprised that they even exist over there. They go in those buildings but they don't really, it's not visible from the parking lot at all. So all that stuff is going to be pretty invisible to anyone unless you go through that passageway that connects, that was part of this addition and look through that little window you'll be able to see it there. We will have some right here by the entrance and that's where the partial visibility comes in. You really won't be able to see these at the top of the green roof unless you really look for it. But right by the entrance right over here, if you kind of peek over it you'll be able to see it. But it's, so really I guess in my opinion it would be better to have it even more visible but at least when there's a tour or something people could point it out and somebody will be able to see it. I'll go through all of this and then so that we can run around with the, but if somebody has a burning question we could probably do this but let me know if you have a clarifying question or something but we can do like, we'll get into the weeds a little bit on the financing, that's the hardest thing to deal with so. But we do want to record it. All right, so if we just bought the system outright, this is just showing what we would save. If we just owned it today, we would save about a quarter of our electric bill, that's about 10,000 a year right now but MG&E is likely to keep ratcheting up costs over time so if we assume a reasonable increase in MG&E costs we would be paying something like 2.1 million over the next 30 years to MG&E for electricity and this project would bring that down to about 1.65, several hundred thousand dollars less than that. So on the face of it it makes sense, if we had the money it would be a good thing, we would make a rate of return, it would be cheaper, we'd lower our cost, our footprint and so forth so, but we don't have 170,000 dollars so we have to think about that. Again, that's the sticker price. We did go out and get a grant from Renew Wisconsin called Solar for Good that's available to congregations. So that's good, it's going to lower our price by 20,000. Focus on Energy has a couple of programs for renewable installations, we tried for the big one, actually we tried twice and we asked for something like 20,000 to 30,000 and we did not get that but there is a prescriptive grant of around 4,000 that we should be able to get when we install this so that brings it down to the 150 range. The capital campaign that concluded last year set aside some money for this 35,000 but that money is still coming in from pledges so they don't have that in the bank yet but there is a commitment of 35,000 so now if we waited for that 35,000 and we used these others we were down to like 120,000 or something like that, still a big gap. So our options would be to delay the project and if we relied on the 35,000 we'd have to delay it. That would then be a problem for this grant, it has a deadline. Make it smaller, get a loan or go back out and do some more fundraising but we just did that so none of those were particularly appealing. So instead we're working with Legacy Solar Co-op and Kurt Reinhold who is the genius behind that is here today to help us with some of the nitty gritty questions should they come up. I've been involved with the Co-op now for about four years on another project so I can speak to the legitimacy and how it all works. It is a little convoluted though so buckle up and it's not convoluted because Kurt made it intentionally complicated, it's convoluted because we have to deal with public service commission and statutes in Wisconsin about what constitutes a utility and what doesn't so we have to make sure we aren't a utility and we have to work as you'll see in a second we have to deal with federal rules on getting tax credits. So the whole point of working with the Legacy Solar Co-op is to one, come up with this upfront cash to build the system but two, to engage a profit-making entity that will be able to get tax benefits lowering the overall cost. So that 150,000 that we're not covering with our grants is going to be covered through working with the Co-op and again this gets a little complicated so bear with me and there'll be questions. So with Kurt and the Co-op's help an individual with some tax liability will set up an LLC. This will be a profit-making entity only for the purpose of developing the project here. They'll get revenues as we pay for our energy services over the years so it is a legitimate profit-making entity. It's not something that somebody's gonna make billions on but they will get a return on it. So that we're in the process of setting that up now. What it requires is somebody that we're calling a tax sponsor. They will set up the LLC, it'll be called FUS Solar LLC or something like that and if anybody's interested in doing that we already have a couple of people who've put up their hands to do it but nobody's signed on the bottom line yet. It requires that you have a certain amount of tax liability, maybe 15,000 a year because you have to be able to take the tax credit off of that to make this all work and be able to put in maybe 30, 40% of the upfront capital of the project upfront. So if that sounds like you, if you're flush enough to do those things, it would be interesting talking to you and even if you didn't do it for FUS, the co-op has a bunch of other projects with nonprofits and churches going on and it might be, you might wanna do that. So the LLC then, where's the LLC gets money? It gets an upfront tax credit of 30% of the, is it the cost of the system or the cost of the LLC, what the LLC puts in to the LLC? Okay, so it wouldn't be 30% of the entire system cost because we have this grant to make it, to cover part of it but it'll be 30% of the 150K or so. And then you're able as an LLC to then write off the depreciation on the capital asset over a period of years. That is a very significant amount too. So it ends up being about half of the cost of whatever the LLC puts in between depreciation and the tax credit. So if it's 150, we're getting 75 back from a Cossam basically to reduce the cost of this is the way that works. So then the LLC, the owner of the LLC will put in some money to capitalize it. The way other people can get involved is through buying bonds. The co-op, most of its, I don't know, I think most of its day-to-day activity is around these bonds. It raises money through bonds and then makes loans to all the LLCs that have been created. So you won't be buying a bond in the FUS project per se. You'll be buying a bond in the co-op which will make a loan to the LLC. So I told you this gets complicated but if you, once you get your head around it, it's like it kinda, it all works, it's just complicated. The bonds are 12 year bonds. They pay four to six percent depending on how much you buy. The more you buy, the more interest you earn just because the transaction costs are less at the co-op level. You have to be a co-op member. You can be a co-op member for as little as 25 bucks if you wanna just do it as a one-time deal. If you wanna be a lifetime member, I think it's 100 and then you could buy bonds for the rest of your life in different projects, in help capitalize these projects on and on. An advantage to having our members buy the bonds is that five years from now, six, seven years from now, maybe you're made whole, you've gotten back all your principal and you're feeling generous. You could donate the remaining equity in the bond and even though it's not a bond in the first Unitarian project, it could be, it could end up as equity in our system. So help us own the system sooner. But it doesn't have to be members of our congregation to buy these bonds and they all get mixed together. So there will be funds that bond owners from here and there, they have to be Wisconsin residents, but it'll all get mixed together and be in this loan to the LLC. So then, FUS, we turn this on say in July, which is about what we're looking at. The LLC will invoice FUS for the energy services and we, which will offset what would have been paid to MGE and it's set at a rate so that we actually have a little benefit to FUS upfront. FUS will pay a little bit less for this energy than it would be to MGE, not a lot, but a little bit. So it's a little cash benefit upfront. When the system is owned by FUS, of course, then that chart that we showed before kicks in and it's all gravy. So this goes on for a period of years. It has to go on at least about six years in order to satisfy the IRS and to get all the depreciation benefits and so forth. Between year six and 12, we can talk about buying out the rest of the bonds, the rest of the equity that we don't have and taking it over and that could happen in year seven, it could happen in 10, 12. So as long as we don't do that, we'll be paying these invoices. The sooner we do it, the better, but we'd still have to come up with some money to do that. So this is kind of what it looks like if we assume that we didn't, we let it go the full 12 years. You can see about $1,000 or a little less of benefit per year in the years that we're paying the LLC. And then once we take ownership, we're up around 12,000, assuming this increase in MG&E rates by then, and we're in good shape. So the total over 25 years would be a $200,000 savings if it works out this way. If we take it over sooner, it'll be a little bit better. If MG&E doesn't raise its rates as much, then it'll be a little less, but this is an estimate. So there's a little issue that came up as we were thinking about this last fall. It turns out that the flat roofs over here are leaking, and it's probably not a good idea to put a new solar array on roofs that are at the end of their life and have to be replaced. So we could have probably limped along and patched them for a few more years, but eventually they were gonna have to, I mean, pretty soon they were gonna have to be replaced anyway. So that project is gonna start on this week, weather permitting. It's not a cheap project. It involves getting a crane and lifting stuff over, and so it's over $100,000. It's, there was a well-timed bequest. I don't know whose it was, but there was a bequest that's gonna cover a fair amount of this. The FUS Foundation has been approached to cover some of it, and then the remaining roughly $50,000 is going to be bundled into the LLC. So the LLC will also take that on. What that'll do is allow us to pay back that portion of the roof in these quarterly billings for energy. It'll eat into, if not offset, that little gain that I was showing over the first 12 years. So we might actually be at a deficit, but that's because we're paying for a roof. The energy will be at a profit, quote unquote, for FUS from day one, but with this roof added in, gotta pay for that. So a benefit of having it in the LLC is not only that it'll provide this upfront capital, but some of that can also be put into the tax credit and depreciation as well. So it reduces the cost of our roof a little bit and lets us pay it off in a way that is more amenable than just coughing up 110,000. Oops, wrong way. So here's the summary of what's gonna, the outcomes here, and I'm almost done droning on. We're gonna reduce our carbon footprint substantially, but not entirely, so the ministry team is gonna keep working on the rest of it. Utility costs, again, absent the roof. So these are not with the roof. $900 a year or so to begin with, and then $200,000 as you saw over 25 years. We'll have this out in the community. Hopefully it'll generate more interest in renewables and more activity generally. The roof is coming at significant savings and people can invest, normally to invest in some new enterprise, you have to be like a billionaire or something. You have to do an IPO or something that's generating new activity in the world. It's really hard to do that. Usually you go to the stock market and buy some stock that's been traded 85 times since that was initially offered or something. These bonds will directly influence what more development of solar in our area. So it's really pretty exciting that somebody with 250 bucks can be catalyzing something like that, at least I think so. So here's the timeline. The roofing project is starting this week. If it doesn't rain too much, it's supposed to take about two weeks. The LLC, as I said, we're looking for a tax sponsor to go ahead and pull the trigger on that. The bonds are available now and Kurt can speak to that about how you could purchase them. You can do them online for up to 1,000, so that's easy. If you want to do more than 1,000, then it involves a conversation right, that's the reason. Okay, but could you take bond orders today or not? Okay, okay. So either that or online and fill out the form and do, you can buy four $250 bonds online but more than that it's a check and not a credit card I guess, huh? Okay, so mid-summer after the roof is done, our installer, and by the way, the installer is full spectrum. They're on East Washington. They're the ones who had the most creative proposal and when we, you know, it was the one that was most aggressive and best thought out. When we pushed the other installers on, can you match this or what do you think about it? A couple of them said, oh, well that's a good idea, we'll just do that. And others were non-responsive, so we were really impressed with the amount of upfront time that full spectrum put into this and the creativity so we're, and they have a long track record here so a lot of people are familiar with them so that's who we're going with. So solar production begins as soon as that's done. The other part besides the array will be an inverter which will just hang off the back of where the utility room is over here. If you're walking back to the classrooms as a door and it'll be hanging off the back of that and wired into the panel, nobody will ever see it but it'll be back there. So then six to 12 years we'll be paying the LLC for our utility services rendered and at some point we'll take it over and own it and we'll just be generating our own power. By then maybe we will have added something in the parking lot or some other thing but at least this system will then be ours. And again our ministry team will be thinking about ways to get to net carbon zero or better through offsets or other opportunities too so if you're interested in the ministry team you can always look us up for that. And so that's all I had. Mark you walked out just as I was like praising you to the heavens here about your EE work cell. Again just a fantastic under the radar project that's gonna really help us. Okay so that's what I had. We could take questions if people have them or Kurt did you wanna come up and say anything more first? Why don't you come up here and use the mic cause we're on the web. And Jay's gonna open Winfrey it in case so we can capture that. Did you wanna say anything first? Sure hi thanks for letting me speak Eric and all of you. First of all I'm honored to be part of a project that is kind of a long time in the making and we'll see how quickly and efficiently we move forward from here but there's always a lot of questions because with this funding program it's fairly complex but it's elegant I'll say in its complexity because it does multiple things to make number one the value of this proposition much better for FUS but also you get to have some participants make a little bit of a return on their investment in the meantime and it just reduces some of the barriers and increases access to investing in this kind of clean energy kind of putting your money where your mouth is sort of thing. So I've been at this quite a few years in fact Eric was on an advisory committee I had back in I think 08 or 09 when I was working on a grant to do work in this area basically which is to investigate remedies for some of the barriers that exist in this community solar model and in Wisconsin we have some unique barriers but there are some that are federal like rules surrounding tax credits as well as rules surrounding the offering of an investment in a public manner that could be classified as a security. So there are lots of reasons why we had to make it a complex funding instrument but after having done all of the hard work and planning we've been successful with over 20 solar projects in Wisconsin they're all nonprofits of one kind or another in fact some of them are not nonprofits some of them are farms or cooperatives which some people think are the same thing as nonprofits but they're not. It's just how you handle the accounting and the surplus revenue. So we've worked with a number of houses of faith and so I could answer some of your questions perhaps through discussing how we've addressed that issue with some of these solar projects. So maybe I'll just leave it there. Actually one other thing I wanted to say is that our program has evolved over the years and one of the ways that it's evolved is in the form of the co-op bonds. I don't know if any of you have ever thought about or actually did invest in co-op bonds with for instance the Willy Street co-op when they were doing their fund drive to raise capital for the west store and then also for the north store. So I've been involved with not only the Willy Street co-op but the Regent Market co-op bond drives for some of the capital improvements and so we basically modeled our bond fundraising model after those but we made some improvements I think at least considering what the application of that co-op tool is being used for. So here Eric mentioned bond members can earn between four and six percent. We've actually changed it a little bit and now you can decide if you want to, you don't have to necessarily receive four percent or five percent or six percent. You could say you know what, I just wanna do a cash neutral transaction or I just want two percent return. So you can write in there what your expectation is and what you would like to see and any difference between our cost of doing business and whatever your interest rate is that just helps empower and provide more margin for allowing us to extend this opportunity to other parishes, other solar projects. But the other thing I would say is that even if you are considering the small amount of the fullest bond allocation of $250, you can actually earn six percent. So you can earn the highest if you are planning to donate at least half of that to the FUS at the end of the six year term or anywhere between years one and 12. They're 12 year bonds but in year six, FUS has the option to buy you out in order to get a bigger lion share of the energy savings going forward after year six. But if you have to wait all the way to year 12 and then now you're paid back. But in year six, you still have about two thirds or three quarters of your principal is still out there and at $250 that would end up being about $150. If you were to agree to donate that $150 to FUS for those first six years, we'll pay you six percent. So it's just kind of an incentive that we're adding in there to provide kind of a goodwill gesture if you're thinking in those terms of helping FUS with this project. Excellent. Thanks, Kurt. Question. My name is Mr. Kordis. I have two things I'm confused about. The first is, have you found a tax sponsor for this project? And the second thing is, how many bonds do we have to buy? I know it's a community in total but what are you looking for in terms of the amount of bonds? Okay, so I'll restate the question just in case it wasn't picked up, I heard it. I think, thank you for asking that. It's somewhere between zero bonds. Well, not really. I mean, I'm gonna give you the extreme. A tax sponsor can fund the entire project, him or herself if they wanted to, but it allows having a loan from the co-op or having a second source of funding besides just the tax sponsor, allows the FUS and or the co-op and other participants in the co-op to be the off-taker of this project in after six years. And so it could be 50-50. So if we had a $150,000 project and let's say the tax sponsor put in 50,000 of his or her own funding and that person leveraged another $75,000. Well, that means that for $75,000, that would be the same as divided by 250 is 300 bonds or 3,000 bonds. Oh, yeah, 75K worth of bonds. Right, right, right, right. So that's the answer to your second question, the answer to your first question, do we have a tax sponsor yet for this project? We don't have a fully vetted and accepted tax sponsor relationship yet, but we will hopefully soon. So I'm sorry, I can't be definite with that answer. But if people are interested, you have other projects, right? Absolutely, yeah. So there's other opportunities if this sounds good and FUS is taken, because there are at least one or two people who are already interested, then how many do you have in the pipeline? Half a dozen? Yeah. Yeah, so there'll be folks looking for this year. And this individual was a tax sponsor just a few years back and so we have a model that he can speak to and then I can provide additional references from other parishes or other houses of faith where we've done the similar model variations on it, but it's proved pretty successful. We had a library that had a number of trustees buy bonds themselves and then the foundation purchased about half of the other bonds. So it was a nice mix between, we had about a dozen people who bought small amounts, maybe $250 or $1,000 or $2,000. We had one couple buy $6,000 worth of bonds. We had a corporate sponsor that brought in $15,000 and then the library foundation purchased about $20,000 worth of bonds. So it was really a very colorful mix of folks who came together for that library. And so that's probably the average is maybe, we have maybe a dozen participants with one tax sponsor and it just helps to level the playing field financially with those other potential solar hosts who happen to pay taxes and can actually use a tax credit to help fund it. So we have to jump through hoops and legitimately so. It's kind of like the low income housing tax credit where you have some private equity that you bring in to do a public good and you have a lot of strings attached with that tax credit, but it allows some good to take place and to reduce the long-term cost of that project. So thank you. Any other questions? I was wondering if your projections over the next 30 years include any, how the maintenance of that system is included in that or if there's any kind of warranty on the panels themselves? The panels are warrantied for 25 years. They'll be insured, so they're usually as good as a roof is for hail. If there was a really bad hail storm that would destroy your roof, it might damage these as well, but they're not fragile. After 25 years, and those warranties do get called on, the project that Kurt alluded to that I did on housing initiatives, we had a warranty issue and full spectrum went out and replaced it and it was like, it was no. That's one reason we want to have the data logger so we can see, is there anything weird? Is it the production low this month for some reason? Then we get it fixed right away. Maintenance, the most likely item of maintenance is the inverter, because those kind of go bad after, I don't know, 12 years or, I don't know, something like that. The warranty period on inverters varies, but usually it's a 10 to 12 year warranty. You can buy an extension up to 20 years, but then maybe it costs the same if you buy one or two extra inverters and keep them in the closet until you need them, but we do factor in this discount rate over 20 years of what it would cost each year and then you kind of levelize that cost, so we kind of build that into the pro forma. So not much maintenance, especially since we're doing the roof now, so we're gonna have to mess with the roof again. Anybody got anything else? Well, great. Well, thanks again for coming. I saw Joe came in as we were starting to talk. I want to give him props also because both the board and the executive director, Monica Nolan, have worked through this. There've been ups and downs. We thought when we realized the roof would have to be replaced as part of this, not only was Kurt creative in thinking about how the LLC and the bonds and everything would help on that, but so was your executive director and board and they worked through it, including making an ask of the foundation to fill a little gap, so my ask to you is give them all credit and thank them for working hard on this and their volunteer and paid positions. If you want to do a tax sponsorship on this or something else, talk to Kurt or email him. LegacySolarCoop.org is the website, easy to find in Google. And if you want to do bonds, you can also do up to 1,000 online there. I didn't realize about the 6% bonus for donations and all that kind of stuff, but you can find the bond disclosure and everything you need to buy bonds online too or I guess talk to Kurt today before we leave. And then look for some activity on the roofs up here in the next few months. Yeah, on the things I can hand out. Good.