 Okay, so we are now recording. All right, good evening, everybody. First off, thanks, Lori, for leading the meeting last week when I was off, so appreciate it. So let's start with our overall vision and our chart. So let me share my screen here. So again, the ECAC is meant to guide the town, guide the goals for the town manager and the town and also work with the community to raise awareness. And we do wanna try to prioritize exponential change and exponential improvements and try to work with more speed. So the people in the community, your help is very important and necessary to drive this forward. In terms of what our top pillars are and what were our focuses, we have the heat pump, Andhra looking at the region and state and what new policies or what other towns are doing, Dwayne on solar, Stella with transportation and Don on SeaPace. In terms of ECAC metrics for myself and I would also like to see some metrics for the five pillars at some point. The first one around the ECAC meeting, I looked at the video, we had 12 people, 11 people at the last meeting. I think we have opportunity to do more. I think this is great from what we've seen but we do need more community participation. So people in the community, if you can share, continue to share this information. We have the education series. We do wanna create more awareness. So really appreciate if you can continue to be involved and bring more people to this meeting. Education series is something that we have for today as well. There'll be our second one for the year. And then I added the third one here on annual report. This was a recommendation from Anna that in the past that we've submitted annual reports in December. And our recommendation was to submit this in September only because it would align with the town manager evaluation and town manager goals for the following year. So it just took this as an action item for me to remember on what we need to do next year. And then open actions, I don't know if this was discussed at the meeting last time. I don't think it was from the video that I saw yesterday. And Stephanie, you had some of these action items here and I added the last one. I don't know if you have an update on these, Stephanie. Sorry, no, not today. I have other updates, but not that one. Okay, okay. And then I added the fourth one. I saw the video and there was conversation about aligning the carp, Stephanie, with the documentation that you have to help prioritize how we prioritize and then help prioritize town manager goals as well. So we need to have a conversation separately about that. All right, the next item on the agenda is to... Let's make sure we have somebody taking minutes. Steve, your turn. I think so. I was just looking at the minutes and I'm after Dwayne on the list. Okay. So I think it's my turn. So I just started. Thank you. And did everyone get a chance to look at the minutes from the last meeting? Okay. I had one change before I forget that I think I was listed as the note taker, but I'm pretty sure it was Dwayne. Yeah. I guess I didn't update that. Thank you, Lori. And I did update it in my copy. So when I save it with the final version to post, it says Dwayne now. Also, I wanted to note that Stella will be here. She just had to, she's running a bit late. Okay. All right. Can someone make a motion to move? Accept the minutes. I move we accept the minutes. I second. Okay. The voice vote in no particular order. Allison. Yes. Drucker. Yes. Rose. Yes. Raghavan. Abstain. Roof. Yes. Regger. Yes. Selman. Yes. Goldner. Yes. Okay. And it's approved with one abstention. Thank you, everybody. Let's open up to the public for comments, Stephanie. Okay. So if anyone in the public has any comments, questions, please feel free to digitally raise your hand and I will allow you to speak. Okay. No one is raising their hand. All right. Let's go move on to the next part of the agenda and talk about C-PACE. Wait. I thought I did that last week. I did. But I can give a very brief update. I did meet with the director of the chamber earlier today. She seems excited to kind of help us move forward with that. I think she, like the questions that you saw, that I saw earlier on your little slide, Vasu involves some sort of database or how to collect a database for properties in town that might be likely candidates for some sort of rehab using the PACE program and PACE funding. So she and I are going to talk again, but Claudia is really excited about being able to help us out and having a dialogue with this, with me and with the committee about moving forward with the development community. That's the only thing I have to report since last week. Thanks, Don. Yeah, I noticed that you, we talked about C-PACE and transportation. Well, we didn't talk about transportation last week, last meeting. Don, do you need any help with on PACE? I mean, I'd always welcome help. I'm trying to get some time to get together with Stephanie since I think that one of the things we talked about doing was putting together some sort of summary information sheet that can be available in town hall for people who are going in, asking questions about how to move forward, how to make applications to move forward for approval of projects in town. And I've meant to do that, but I've been pretty busy and haven't been able to reach out to her. So I'll try within the next week or so, Stephanie. Don, if you just wanna send me a few dates and we can just try to get something on the calendar, you can do that tomorrow. Yeah, actually tomorrow I'll be in New York City. Okay, never mind. But I'll send them out Friday, even if you don't look at them until Monday because I know Friday's a holiday. I'll see them Friday. Okay. Yeah, Don and the other thing I would say is without violating open meeting law, there are other people in the committee who are interested in PACE, right? And so just keep that in mind as well. You can collaborate. I can reach out. Don't announce anybody during this meeting. You can reach out. But you can also work with any other person who's not on the committee. And I'm sure that there's people who would be interested and we just need to identify them. But that might be a good way to really have a team. You know, Don, I could also reach out to Carol and see if she would just meet with the two of us because she may have some ideas. Yeah, that would be great. So I can, I want to see you tomorrow. So I'll bring it up. Yeah. Thanks, Don. So I know the agenda isn't correct then. I apologize. I didn't, Stephanie, I didn't catch that. So I don't know, Lori, if you have updates on heat pump. Well, you're about to hear them at 5.30. Yeah. Other than that. Other than that, I don't think so. I think, I mean, I've been working personally to learn as much as I can. I've been reaching out to my own community in Echo Hill. We have a little Echo Hill energy transition list now. So I don't know that there's anything else to report. I did speak with a bunch of different people. Oh my gosh. Mike Simons today at Abode Energy, nominally for a home energy consultation. But I also took the opportunity to talk to him about just general stuff. So I'm trying to figure out the best way to get the information to everybody. I think this series of, we already have a series of at least two things lined up. We're trying to get somebody for the, oh, I should announce that, right? For the 7th of December, I'm trying to find somebody to talk about envelope issues from CET, is that right? I forget where they were coming from Stephanie. Yeah, and I, yeah, we can follow up Lori because I've actually made contact with them about the heat pump program. So I think this is the point now which you and I can connect and I can share information that I've gathered from them. And I think we can start creating something. That would be formal. Yeah, I'm hoping we'll have a community wide heat pump advocacy training and a bunch of other stuff like that. But Stephanie, I know has been working on that. So I'm really looking forward to that. But I think, you know, I think 530 will review this video. I did try to get the folks, I should say that the folks who are in the video we're gonna watch are giving another live webinar, same thing. They do this about once a month. So the next one is November 17th, 16th. So if anybody wants to have an opportunity to ask Mike Simon and Lowy Hayes questions directly, go again next week, you know, it'll be the same dog and pony show, but they'll be live and they'll be answering questions afterwards. So it's the best one I've seen. I've been to a lot of these heat pump things and those guys are really good. So we should find a way, Stephanie, to advertise that as well to our community just so people know if they missed this one, that one, you know, is live. They can go to that one. Dwayne and then Andra. Yeah, just something I learned about heat pumps in the marketplace over the last couple of weeks. And this is not advocating for any particular company, but we did, I did have a meeting with a company called Energy Sage, which some of you may be familiar with in the solar space, where they provide a low pressure opportunity for home, particularly for the homeowner market to put in their information and get no pressure sort of quotes from a range of solar installers, residential solar installers that are comparable to each other and there's no phone contacts just all by email until the customer engages with one of the solar developers. So it's a mechanism, market mechanism that has gotten some attraction and some funding to try to make it easier for residents to navigate the solar market. What I did, and they've been in that business for quite a while, what I did learn a couple when I spoke to the company a week ago or so is that they are about to launch a similar venue for heat pumps, which I think we all, and I don't, you know, again, I'm not advocating for the company, but just as a resource that this issue of, you know, just the barrier market, the consumer barrier of getting quotes, getting comparable quotes and it is obviously a barrier. And this company recognizes that and is trying to do something similar to what they've done in the solar market for the heat pump market. So Dwayne, do they do any vetting of these quotes? Yeah, yeah, well, they do vetting of the companies and substantial vetting of the companies. Again, I'm not advocating for them and I don't know their complete secret sauce, but they do need to, and so, and the quotes are, and I don't know how it's gonna come out with heat pumps, which has some maybe some additional complications associated with it in terms of, you know, how it interacts with the house where solar is a little bit more straightforward in that way. But what they do do, at least in the solar field, which I presume will be similar in the heat pump, is to work with vendors and vendors agree to provide quotes in ways that are consistent, transparent and consistent so they can be compared one to another. Whereas if you go out and do it yourself, you can get different quotes and don't know how to compare them. Right, so this is interesting because there are now other companies bringing up too that I've ran into Zero Energy, which is also now offering, they claim that the average homeowner takes between get this 50 and 100 hours to figure out how to convert their home, which I can tell you is probably an underestimate from my own experience, but they're trying to make it simpler and they charge quite a bit more even than a boat does and I found a boat to be, boat charges now 150 bucks for a consult and I found that to be the best use of my money so far. This company, Energy Sage, the customer doesn't pay anything. They're their business models, they get that money from the... Right, so the problem with that is that I now here's where the real problem is. I have quotes from seven different companies from my own house, all of whom are on the mass save list of approved providers. There are no approved providers through a boat, boat also vets companies, but they have none out in Western mass because we're just not a big market. So they have no providers here. So all we have to rely on the ones that mass save tells us are okay. Those providers have given me now over a dozen quotes, maybe 15 quotes that are all over the map. Most of them are, they would work, but they wouldn't really be anywhere near the best solution. I only have two that are actually a good solution and only one is a really good solution and it isn't the one that Abode advised me to get. So I'm now working on getting the final, what I think will be the final quote from the one company that got it almost right. So that's the problem, right? It's that these companies are all good, but they're all used to dealing with furnaces and they wanna sell you another furnace with a little bit of heat pump backup. So it's a, and only one or two of them knows how to do even just a simple ductless conversion, just without over the one, I got one ductless quote that was for like eight tons of heat, which would have made my house clammy and wet in the summer, it would have been ridiculous. So I don't know what they're thinking, but yeah, so they don't all know what they're doing, I think, yet, not the ones out here, they haven't done it enough. So what we really need is something like that with the quotes that are with some, we need Mike Simons to look at everything basic. Yeah, so. Andra? Just one thing on that, there's, did you all hear about the Wellesley? Well, some people are using the word blackmail to bribe, bribe, sorry, by the gas company, I think they have Oh, yes. National grid to let them put into their like, you know, zero energy, super plans to go clean in their buildings, to put in that they will gas. Sorry, and Andra, can you start? I'm not clear what you were talking about. I'll send out the thing, but it was sort of an outrageous thing where the gas company asked, the offered made an offer that most municipalities wouldn't refuse that kind of completely undermined their climate action plan. They offered millions of dollars of support for climate energy transit. I think it was a million, was it a million? For energy transition? Yeah, yeah, but the condition that they had, they would put in gas lines. Okay. All new residences, something like that. Because those are still allowed, as of now by the state. It angered legislators and activists to the degree that there's very serious discussion going on now about taking MassSafe away from the utilities. It was an offer that they made through the MassSafe program. Yeah. State perspective on MassSafe. I wanted to mention that local energy advocates meeting next Tuesday, the 15th will have a speaker from renew communities, which is a company that I believe manages and develops low income housing and has committed to doing clean energy retrofits. For their buildings, their communities, and they're going to be on talking about all the bumps in the road that they ran into doing their first one in the Boston area. And it was bumpy, but they learned a lot. And they're pursuing it in their other properties. Hunter, can you tell us the date and time for that? It's the 15th. It's at seven o'clock. And I can share this. I'll ask Stephanie to send out the link, but you can also go on to the local energy advocates. Or website. We'll have the link there. Thanks, Andrew. Stephanie, you had your hand raised. I just lowered it. I'm okay. Okay. And Lori, can we have, I think you're doing a lot of work. Can we have that in the, in the slide that you can share next time? And I also want to have, we were talking, I know you were talking about the, we were talking about the time manager goals last week, or let the last meeting. And I wonder if we should start thinking about what should be our goals for the heat pump program. And then that should. Possibly help drive what the town manager's goal should be. For this heat pump program. If there's anything that we can try. Yeah. So I mean, I think, I think my goals are my own goals are to continue this education series. And then what I can to help Stephanie get this heat pump advocacy program in place, you know, whatever, whatever helps me, Stephanie, if I can, you know, if we can encourage a town manager to do what you're trying to do there. That's where our goal ought to be. Well, I think it's, you know, we have the funding. So it's just a matter of putting it together. And that's as I reached out to this committee. You know, when we first got that ARPA funding that. You know, I'm sort of starting just having the conversations and trying to put something together, which is why I now want to bring Lori in because I'm at a point where we can discuss this more. And then bring it to the committee to sort of, let's make this. You know, a viable program. I do want your input and I want your guidance on this. As well. So I'm. Not trying to create something on my own. Or by myself. And I don't think it's a matter of trying to get the town manager on board. I think the town manager is on board. We have funding. And I think what we're, the one thing that I've heard from the town is that we want to get. As much money for heat pumps themselves. So at one point we had talked about. Hiring staff. To sort of manage this program. But now the approach is try to, to try to work with CET and work with existing programming. And just sort of have an additional stream of funding to support the purchase of the heat pumps. And we especially want to target rental units and low income housing. So that's kind of the focus and the drive for that. So it's just a matter of, you know, having conversations and communicating. And as I go along, I will certainly be. Bringing you more information. Yeah, I guess my comment was just not around. Not only just the heat pump program, but we have five pillars identified. And I'm out of those pillars. What are we trying to drive? And is the town aligned. With those goals. Can we add those goals. As part of town manager's goals for the next fiscal year. And that will ensure alignment between what the town wants to do. What are we doing? And then how are we creating awareness within the community? We don't have that today. And that's. It's just for everybody who owns these pillars is to just think about. What do we want to drive out of. You know, the heat pump program, the pace. And then what should the town manager's goals be? And you want to try to push an aggressive agenda to the town manager. And then they, the town can then decide whether. That goal makes sense or not. Yeah. So I just keep going. Back to the 2025 roadmap. I mean, those are the. You know, those are the things that that's where, you know, the projects that we funded for ARPA came from. So in my mind, those are the things that are in your pillars and the things that we're trying to address and move forward. The. The fleet transition we have. I had a conversation. I don't, I feel like I could start. Getting into a whole other like. Staff update. So I don't, I'm kind of, I can hold this off. I could keep talking, but I don't know that I should. So I can hold off and wait until the staff update to say more of what we're doing. Yeah. If you, if you want to hold off, it's fine, Stephanie. I was just thinking through this after I. Heard the last meeting and. We were talking about goals and the town manager's goals and the carp is there. We can use the carp goals. But we should all align. And this is a perfect time that we can push the town. On what. The town can do. So. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think you're getting ahead of yourself on the agenda. And I'd really like to hear from you. And the home rule petition from Rose. So. All right. Thanks, Lori. All right. Any other questions or comments on the heat come program? If not, I'll turn it over to Dwayne for solar update. Yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't. I thought I was on the agenda, but then I didn't see it. So. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think you're getting ahead of yourself on the agenda. And I'd really like to hear from Stella. I didn't see it. So I'm not. And truth that I didn't quite finish my homework either. So I can just given up a status update. You know, my, what I have embarked on since the last time was. This. User friendly tool that we as a committee and constituents can use. To make their own. Or, or do some assessment and evaluation of. How much solar it might make sense for Amherst to try to host within its town. And. This goes somewhat in concert with the. Consultants work on GZA who we met. I think at our last meeting. On the solar mapping. For this tool could be useful for. Anybody that would like to use it. But for us, I would like to use it to. Work together. To reach a consensus of some, some. Say low, medium and high values to offer to GZA. As they're mapping out doing their mapping to. Provide a. A sense of. Of what it might look like in the town. To host this sort of low, middle and high amount of solar capacity within the town. And so I do have. That tool, if you will. Kind of. In working order. And. What I, what I don't have yet is. Confidence in. Sort of the base case assumptions that I want to put in there. As a, as a form that we want to make available. And, and then, and then just the simple user friendly formatting is not really there yet. And so. That stuff's not that. Rigorous or hard. So I will work on that. And. I know I can't collaborate. But I can get. A little bit of a review, I believe. From some. Members of the, of the, of the group. So I will probably do that over the, over the interim course between now and the next meeting. And. And I think we're in good shape time wise because GZA is not going to be ready for this. To receive this for a while yet. But. But I like to sort of get that. Up and going. And so. I think we're going to be ready for the next agenda. Next agenda. The one after that. I think we'll be in good shape. Thanks. Any questions or comments? Okay. All right. Let's move on to the next part of the agenda. Home rule petition. Andra. Okay. I wanted to. Have a bunch of slides and be really. Fancy about this and. I didn't manage it. But I. Wanted to be clear that. Home rule petition. Is one of several ways that. Municipalities are trying to push. The state to. Allow for. New buildings to be. And. Fossil feel free. Another way is. By adopting. The soon to be. Inactive program. Or a specialized stretch code. Which. Doesn't get you all the way to net zero, but you can make it too expensive to actually. Put in. Fossil fuels. And. So I can tell you about each of these. And. A third option for us. Would be to at least make it clear that Amherst. No longer. No more gas from Berkshire gas. Which is the current policy from. Five years. A go when it was last. A question. And. Lobby for. And. Doing the moratorium that we're under. And. That's something. That would just be a statement. There's nothing legal we could do. Because. I don't know. I don't think so. I think it's just like a resolution. So it. We could do all three of these. So let me go into the home rule petition idea. I would probably know that several of. The very progressive and frankly, richer. Towns have. Like Brookline and Arlington. Have. Pushed. To be allowed. To establish their own. Code for new buildings. And. Have. Rules that not necessarily outright ban of gas lines. But. Pretty. Specific about how that would be done. And. Those. Did not pass. In the legislature last year. I think. Yeah, we're up to 10 communities that had requested this. By. By the end of. The session. And. Instead. The legislature. Made this pilot program. Which. Any community that has voted. That they would like to. Have a. No new fossil fuels in new buildings. Standard. And. Let the. DPU. Decide. How that. Could go forward as an. Experiment. So 10 towns will be allowed to do that. 10 municipalities. Those slots are going to already be filled. But we can still apply for it. We can pass a resolution. We can. We can do that. We can do that. We can do both a home rule petition. Saying we want to do this. Legislature. Let us. Out of the state. Code. And do it exactly the way we want. And we could also. Say to the DPU. We want to have. We want to be in line. We have the ability to do that. All of all of these require us to. State in clear legal terms, which other communities have already figured out how to say. We wouldn't have to rewrite. It very much. Can you still hear me? Yes. My screen is. Gone. And then. We could do any, any of these things, but the home rule. The stretch code opt in. And there's no reason we can't do them all. And we should really look at them carefully side by side. And decide what, what actions we recommend. And so. Recommendation for stretch code. Or home rule petition would. Be going to the. Under we keep losing you. Yeah, I know. I'm going to have to. Get back in on my phone. Let me, let me do that. And then. I can continue. It's a short update. We could do that. Meanwhile, I thought the 10 pilot towns. Communities were already selected. And really Stephanie. No, okay. Thought it was. No, in fact, some of them are even going to be eligible. So they're encouraging more people to apply and just make the case that. This is important. We all want this to do it already and stop with the. Stop with the pilot for one. The other one, the other Andrew will drop out in a minute. Yeah, the program doesn't exist yet. So no one can apply yet. But we could be ready to apply when it's. The DPU has set up the procedures for applying. And. There's no reason that we shouldn't do it because what it signals to the state. To our new governor. To the legislature is that there is wide interest across a lot of municipalities. It's a lot of other. Towns and cities that are also. Preparing to do this. So. I have a question. You brought up. No, there are some affluent communities that are interested in this. I, is there an impact. To low income communities as a result, if we. You know, if we're interested. What are some of the cons. Yeah. So after the Boston has passed their. Resolution, whatever it is resolution. Yeah. That they would like to have this. Their own particular way of going fossil fuel free in new buildings. So they will be. Applying as well. And. We can do the resolution. We can do the resolution. We can do the resolution. We can do the resolution. We can do the whole back. To allow Springfield or, you know, Worcester, some other. Community. That would. So it would benefit. More low income. And BIPOC communities. Yeah, we could. Play that. In, in real time. Things will continue to shift. So. So. Governor's new DPU. To. Increase it. Then. You know, then, then there's more room. There's more. It's not a zero sum game. Like it is right now. So. So is that what you're recommending? Then. For us. I think it's a little confusing. And that we should have it really clear in our mind so that we can bring it to the town council. In a way that will make sense to them. And. You know, I would love to go ahead with. All three avenues. Stretch code. The homeral petition. And. Proposition. Saying we no longer. Require. More gas from Berkshire gas. But. We need to strategize about. So. And I apologize. I didn't think that. Given the. Agenda that we were going to actually have. Time to. Delve in. Or I would have tried to prepare some. Visuals so that you could look at them side by side. Should we talk about that at the next meeting then? Yeah, that would be good. Okay. If people have particular questions that. You would want to see side by side. That would be useful for me. To know. Is there any reading we could do in the meantime? Yes. A lot. Of course. I. I can try to pull from. Several different sources. The benefits of each. I think it would end up. Being best looked at as a table and then. Have some sources that you could dig into. Okay. Senator. Sorry. Just wanted to say I'd love to see us do all three. We do have a comment. I think I would like to. Thank you. I'd say the homeworld petition and the. And the Berkshire gas. Should we look on it the next time we discuss. Or. What we think. I think it would be great if we can. The discussion might lead us to more questions. Yeah. You don't need to have a local building code in place to put a home rule petition in. You can figure that out after you have home rule, you can build your own building code. Yeah, and the thing about the stretch code is we could say when you put it together, you know that that's also waiting for you to set up the whole process for how do you actually do the opt up. And we could say we want to do it, you know, just letting you know as soon as you've got it, we're going there and again, it's just all of these are signals to the market to the politicians that the rest two sits wants to go all clean in their buildings. Okay, thanks. Let's talk about it next, next meeting. Thank you. And if there's any information that you want us to pre do a pre read, just send it over please. Thank you. We have 15 minutes so let's move on to the next part of the agenda is around setting priorities for the council and the manager. I don't know Stephanie or Anna. You want to jump in and discuss this. I've just allowed you to speak so you can unmute. Thanks Stephanie hang on one second I'm just walking outside really quickly. Hi everybody. Sorry about that. I'm at the spin studio to teach my class. Anyway, so yeah I had sent a list after our last conversation. I had sent some information to Vasu and Stephanie that that. I'm going to start over. You all had referenced the annual report as a as a better starting place for goals. Looking forward because they you had prioritized specific things from the car plan versus just looking at the plan and kind of picking at random. I looked at that list and sort of tried to narrow down things that I thought might be doable in a year and that really fell clearly under the purview of the town manager as directed by the council so there are some things that you know the town manager might do well might do but it may not. I'm not sure that it makes sense for the council to ask for it it may be something the town manager doesn't is on so who looked at that list and pulled out a few things. I'm on my phone so I don't have them in front of me but I'm happy to if you want to share them out with folks. And I'm hoping that there can be some discourse around this and some discussion on whether those make sense, whether there's things going on and keeping in mind that these are not this is not a guarantee that I can get all of these into the goals. And then I wanted to also just mention that that for sure the town manager would be working with Stephanie and with you all were appropriate on the actual implementation of these, and that there were some things in the annual report that are much more clearly council directives that I will take and try to run forward with so that's that's the. And I'm happy to answer any questions I do have to warn you though I have a stop in about seven minutes, five minutes sorry. So if there's any questions happy to answer them. Yeah, I know let me share my screen. I just copied the email. Thank you, thank you. Okay. So, the ones and Yeah, so it's around buildings and you had renewable energy. And then there's some comments that Stephanie made as you could see, and the steel color. And then I'm just starting looking at your email you had something in yellow. So questions in yellow. Yeah, so I had added a couple of my own comments and questions in as well as some things that weren't necessarily in the goals document but that I thought might might be worth carrying forward based on discussions that we've been having since the last time that report was written. So that's, those are the two things that are in there. So I just tasted what the yellow and orange. Okay. All right. So I'll read the first one since you're on your phone so the first one is around the affordable housing. I can't see anybody on the screen so please stop if you have any comments. I also just really quickly add these areas were defined in the annual report and some of these are already underway but putting them in the goals ensures that they maintain priorities for the next year. So I do know that some of these are already happening and that was a conscious decision to still include them. I'm thinking about the right way to approach this is that do people want to read this information. I'm trying to see all your screens. You want to join me to scroll through this and all the members you can read through some of the comments here. That work. Stephanie. I just wanted to suggest maybe it would be helpful if this actually got included forwarded to the committee and included in the packet and I don't know if there's a timeline where you have to have their response by but maybe at the next meeting they could give you a response with having had more time to actually look at everything. I don't, you know, it's up to you. I'm proposing that idea. Yeah, I mean I think that's fine. I what I can do. I need to ask Michelle when I know that GOL was just starting to talk about the goals and the way that the process works is that the governance committee sort of develops an initial round and then brings it to the council so I think that that should work but if I hear otherwise what I may ask for is just individual feedback on them, obviously not deliberation which deliberation would be ideal so hopefully we can get to that next meeting. But if if for some reason this is moving faster than anything else has ever moved in town council ever then I will, I'll reach out and let you know. Okay, I'll send this over to actually I'll send it to Stephanie and Stephanie if you can forward this to everybody. And then one thing I do want to comment here is take a look at the pillars that you have. Anna's added and see if it makes sense to add or remove some goals here to align. And question on goals Stephanie. Is the GHG inventory assessment going to be completed next fiscal year. Yes, so the proposal so we have an application in for a fellow and they would be conducting the inventory over the summer of 23. So it would be done by the end of the summer, it would be done by August. So I have to jump off that if folks would have any questions on this, anything I can clarify. Feel free to shoot me an email and and we can, we can talk through it one on one. So I apologize I have to leave early but thank you for talking about it and discussing it and hopefully we'll get some good goals. Yeah, we'll have an action item for next for the next meeting to discuss this. Well, Vasu, is it possible to put it earlier in the meeting I do usually have to jump off early and then go back and watch the meeting. If it's possible, that would be great. Thank you. Yeah. Okay, bye everybody. Bye. It's 523 you have seven minutes. I don't know if you want to go ahead. Let's make a suggestion. I think we didn't hear from Stella last week because she missed the meeting but if there's an update on transportation I'd sure love to hear it. If we do it in a few minutes before the before we start the presentation. Yeah, we can because there's definitely no update this semester I'm taking math for the first time in 15 years, and also engineering which I've never taken. So basically everything is just in like triage mode till December, but I registered for next semester and I'll have a lot more time. Yeah, I will say I don't know if I made this offer explicitly. But I have meant if we're leaning if we're really leaning into the educational series thing which I think is great. I can totally talk to my friend who's the transportation manager for the city of Durham. I don't know if that would be helpful for people like a helpful voice for people to hear from because Durham is like differently sized and kind of far away but she's really smart she knows a lot about buses a lot about bikes. And she's my friend so she would be willing to come come talk to us. So just let me know if that that would be of interest and that's that's something I can also do this semester, even in the midst of everything, because she's my friend. And still I also wonder if we should bring in tap into the conversation if we're if we decide to have that this conversation. Yeah, so tack. I'm also happy to reach out to tack. I just need a contact information for tack, because that wasn't clear from the website really to me so if Stephanie you could send me just the name of somebody. And I'm allowed to am I allowed to talk to them like that. Or do we need to invite them to the meeting because I'm also happy to do that. You're happy to you're more than welcome to reach out to the members of tack. And you can invite them to a meeting. I mean, it sounds to me like you've already just set up a potential education series presentation if you have a friend. If you have this information and then you want to bring tack on sounds like a good educational opportunity for folks. Yeah, I mean what would maybe be interesting. What actually could be potentially cool is if we're trying for an hour for these educational things is a half hour update from tack and a half hour like voice from another city. People think that would be interesting. Yeah, I think that'll be good Stella, but also wonder if it makes sense to have if we decide to do an education series on transportation let let it be a sequential set of series if we decide to have that, like the keep on program we have the what and how and then next month we're talking, and then the, you know, following month we're getting some additional potentially we're getting people to have a conversation about. So maybe it's, you can think through what the sequence of series should be and then we can have the next set of months just focused on transportation for example. That sounds great. I can, I can figure that out. Thank you. Yeah, I can also connect with Stella about the things that we are working on now with this company utility mark on the greenhouse gas emissions inventory for the fleet from the municipal fleet. And it's the idea of setting up a, you know, a log logistical steps, you know, and this is just the municipal fleet it's obviously not the entire community but just sort of one piece of what's happening and so I'd be happy to sort of connect with you about that. Yeah, I'd love to connect about that. As I've mentioned before I'm like very interested in the commercial side like the heavy vehicle side of that, especially. Yeah, that's the big challenge, actually. Yeah. Any other comments. We have three minutes. Laurie I'm assuming we want to wait for three minutes for people to join right. Yeah. So is there anything else on the agenda we can. If you want to do a, a tech check, see if we can hear it and see it. Let's not because I have it all set up and if I run it I have to. And I sort of did that earlier so let's do that live and it doesn't work now we're sort of dead anyway so. I could give you some quick updates. Because I'm after the presentation so just do it now. Exactly. Solar landfill ribbon cutting I sent you all the invitation. It's happening on Monday from 1230 to 130. Yay. It was only seven years in the making. So really excited. And you know, if you all can make it that's great. When was that again. So Monday, the 14th. 1230 to 130 we're having the ribbon cutting event at the solar landfill. The North landfill 740 Belcher town road, but an invitation went out to pretty much everyone in their departments. So, yes, there you go. Thanks. So scissors, Stephanie. Yeah, we're looking for the big scissors. We don't actually own them we borrow them. So we're trying to locate them. I hope they give them to you to do the cutting. Yeah, I'm a little nervous because they're very sharp. So, and they're very big. So, but that's really exciting and glad to be moving that forward. Then something that just recently happened which was just kind of an off the cuff thing. The facilities manager, as I've said, several times is located in the cubicle sort of next to me, and he reached out to me recently and said hey I wanted to include this sustainability statement in my RFPs and RFQs because I keep getting these proposals that include fossil fuels. So he sent me something and then I tweaked it. And so I just want to very quickly it's not very long and I just want to read it to you and the reason why we want to do this and we're going to include it and we are going to include it moving forward. And all of our procurement requests for for building projects is because a it then will reduce his getting proposals that include fossil fuels, and to it aligns with the goals that you all have put adopted. So the sustainability statement that will go in all future procurement docs for our municipal buildings is the Amherstown Council has committed the town to a goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. The Energy and Climate Action Committee's 2021 Climate Action Adaptation and Resilience Plan offers guidance on meeting this goal in the sectors of buildings, renewable energy, land use and natural systems, and infrastructure. Projects that replace end of life equipment must adhere to meeting the stated goal of carbon neutrality by replacing fossil fuel systems and technology with applicable and available renewable alternative technologies. That's a great segue to the presentation. So there you go. So that's for, you know, the municipal side. And yes, go for it. Stella had a question. Yeah, I think it sounds great. I also just want to float this it's probably we can't follow up on it probably right now but I wonder if there should be could be anything similar to that language about implementing like a maximum working temperature. Have I mentioned that before is that outside the scope, but I think maximum working temperature for any kind of like outdoor work commissioned by the town. Might be pretty important going forward as far as like equity and justice and climate adaptation, because right now like as I maybe people here are aware there's no like federal maximum working temperature. So I think like the town that might be an opportunity for municipalities to show some leadership. It could be something we could entertain. And I'd be happy to talk about it offline. It's not something I think that we, we don't have anything so we can't include it now. Yeah, totally. That's the short answer. Doing quick comment and then just real quickly. Just, I think I caught something at the end in terms of that it has to be sort of not fossil fuel but renewable energy. I'm not sure legally or whatever but it might be a little bit broader than that in terms of I mean I'm thinking of electric strategic electrification, which is not technically or doesn't necessarily technically does not always end up in the definition of renewable so might be renewable energy and and clean electrification or something along those lines. Okay. And we should. Yeah, let's get started with our second education series and well first one now on heat pumps and I see some new attendees have joined that's great and again the intent here is to create more awareness so you know attendees if you know other people who are interested. We would like to hear from all of you on education series, sort of, you know, things that you want to learn, but also, you know, bring bring your family friends and we can do this without you so thank you for attending. You are seeing the heat pumps what where and how much screen correct. Yes, I can. All right, good. So, All right, so the presentation that we're about to watch was recorded, it was posted and recorded from a webinar, a live webinar by loy Hayes at the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, and Mike Simons from the boat energy management. I saw it recently and was really very impressed I think a bunch of us few of us at least a few of us saw it live and then I think the rest of us have watched it since then. So, the idea today is to watch this thing together and then have a discussion afterwards, we're not experts but we've all been thinking a lot about this stuff so we may or may not be able to answer your questions, but we will certainly be able to tell folks where to go if they have questions. So first of all just a little bit of background so a heat pump is a device that through the clever application of thermodynamics takes heat out of the air, for example, in the winter and puts it into your house. It moves heat from one place to another hence the idea of a pump moving water uphill right moving heat uphill or from the warmer from the colder place to the warmer place. In the summer, it does exactly the opposite functions backwards like an air conditioner, pulling heat out of your house and dumping it to the outdoors. And like an AC requires some sort of a coolant or working fluid to do this or refrigerant to do this. Unlike an air conditioner the same fluid is used in the winter to do the heating. So it just reverses the process of the air conditioner in the winter. So this heat around this is what I wanted to get at because there were questions about this when I saw this seminar, and I didn't think it was quite adequately addressed in the seminar because it moves heat around. It can actually be more than 100% efficient by quite a lot. So you put a kilowatt of energy in, you get four kilowatts of heat out, it looks like it's making energy, but it's not it's just moving energy from one place to another, like that pump. So it can be 400% efficient, which means that it costs 400 times four times less than an electric radiator to run. It runs on electricity, but it heats far more efficiently than electric radiator. So this is why they're inexpensive to run. So why do we care, right? Why do we care about this? We care about this because residential energy use, which is mostly for heat, is responsible for a very large amount of the greenhouse gas emissions in the country in the world. I've been trying to get numbers for this and every time I look it up I get something different in this presentation you'll see Lowy Hayes I think calls it 50% of energy goes into residential heat. I don't think that's quite right. I think in Amherst residential energy is something like 30% and nationwide there are numbers that say it's 20%, but I think it depends what community you're in and how you're eating and where you are on the, in latitude right how cold it is. So, but it's a lot. It's a big chunk of greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention methane that leaks out of all of our furnaces, which is much worse than carbon dioxide, you know, pound per pound. The idea is that we all have to be at the same time electricity is becoming greener and greener, right, as we move to solar as we move to more hydroelectric as we move to wind power. So the idea is to move homes, what's critically important to meet, you know, both the needs of the world and the Massachusetts climate goals. What's critically important is to move homes away from fossil fuel heating and to electric heating, which means heat pumps. The good news is that in doing this, they're not only environmental benefits to your home, it's more comfortable. There's also possible substantial savings, financial savings, depending on how you currently heat. Ultimately, it'll probably be necessary as the fossil fuel prices go up. It'll probably be a win to use electric. And they're also really good financial incentives for installation right now, you can get, you know, to $10,000 to transition your home. You can get $15,000 in 0% financing loans. There's fantastic incentives out there. So without going on any more now. I'm going to go to the presentation I just want to say that we'll give out these slides, which have a list of resources the presentation you have a YouTube link to, but you don't have the links that they talk about. There's a list of them here for all of these incentives and rebates they're going to talk about and for all of the things you want to do you always want to start by calling mass save and getting a home energy assessment. A lot of the rebates the $10,000 home rebate for transitioning your home is dependent on you having a mass energy massive energy assessment in your home. So you got to start there. So is the financing. There's also a page specifically for renters renters of course can't, you know, it's hard to put in a heat pump but you can put in an air conditioner and get a rebate put in a high efficiency air conditioner and get a rebate so there's, there are different things that you're eligible for and there's a page specifically for renters on mass save green energy alliances where this video comes from and and abode energy management, and they have fantastic websites with enormous amount of resources for you if you're interested in heat pumps. Abode also offers a quote comparison and consultations. I took advantage of one of those today and can test that they are fantastic. Rewiring America has a web page that tells you about federal incentives that are currently available for the same transition Massachusetts has its own incentives but now as a result of the inflation reduction act, there are federal incentives as well. So, let me go ahead and do the webinar and then afterwards we'll have a discussion I think. Okay, so I just need a moment to find it. It is here. And I'm going to start right here, let me just, oh, you know what I have to reshare this screen because I forgot something really critical. So I'm going to stop sharing and then I'm going to reshare because I just remembered. I didn't do what I needed to do so that you all can hear this. So share, share sound, share. Oops, did I share the wrong thing. Are you seeing heat pump basics again. Okay, so let me go ahead and start it and tell me if there's any problem here. So on to heat pump basics Mike, can you tell us what is a heat pump and how did they work. Yeah, certainly. So with a heat pump, I think that a lot of just to kind of begin to understand how they work it's actually found in the name. So heat pump works by pumping energy from one location to another. So an example of this that's commonly used isn't is talking about your refrigerator or your freezer, how that contraption works or how that appliance works. It takes the heat from inside of the box when it pumps that heat to the outside of the box which would be into your kitchen. So let's just say for example that you have your kitchen 70 degrees, you want your freezer to be 28 degrees. How a heat pump works in your freezer is you'll have really, really, really cold refrigerant. Let's say negative 15 degree refrigerant inside of there. It takes hot goes to cold. So say the 30 degree air inside of your refrigerator goes into that very cold refrigerant and then it pumps that heat to the outside and along the way it pressurizes it and makes it hot. And that's how the hot air, that's how the heat from inside of the box goes to the outside of the box. The same exact technology works with a window AC. How that works is it just takes the heat inside of your home as well as some of the humidity inside of the home and it pumps that energy and it dumps it to the outside. So if you're standing on the outside of a window AC, it will feel hot on the other end. So with a heat pump, it's the same exact technology but it's able to do heating as well as cooling. So in the wintertime it may not seem like there's a lot of energy in the outside air if it's zero degrees outside. But it is important to realize that zero degrees outside is a lot warmer than negative 50 degrees outside. There's still a lot of energy that could be pulled out of that outside air and brought into the home. So unlike with fossil fuel based systems where you're setting things on fire and just trying to capture that energy with a heat pump, you're just using electricity to move energy from one location to another. And instead of a heating system being like 60% efficient, it ends up being over the course of the year around 250 to 300% efficient. So it's really cool, exciting stuff and it's helping people migrate away from fossil fuels. Great. And just like your refrigerator doesn't have a place where it actually is bringing your air into the fridge and then pushing out again, there's no air exchange between the inside and the outside with the heat pump. It's just the refrigerator that comes inside and goes outside, right? Yep, you got it. So it's all just happening through like thin copper tubes is kind of what's moving the energy from one location to another. And the type of refrigerant that they're using is called R410A. Great. So just to recap, heat pumps don't generate the heat. They're just moving it just like these water pumps are not making water. They're just moving it from one place to the next. And I'll go on to the next slide if you're ready, Mike. Yeah. Tell us about how efficient heat pumps are. Yeah. So one of the, so heat pumps change efficiency depending on what the outside temperature is. So let's say there's 47 degrees outside, there's a lot more energy in the outside air than if that was say zero degrees outside. So one of the things to note is that say as the temperature drops, the efficiency of the heat pump drops. But for most models, most like single zone and multi-zone, they kind of are typically kind of on the scale of anywhere from like say 400% efficient or having a coefficient of performance of four in kind of the more moderate temperatures. But then down to say the single digits even into sub zero temperatures, they still end up being pretty much over 175% efficient. So there is, so compared to traditional systems, much more efficient. Other things to note in terms of heat pumps is there's a variety of different types. We saw a photo before of a ductilish unit. And that's typically the most common in our region where you can just be putting them on a wall or on a floor. And it's really easy to retrofit most homes with one or two ductilish units. And then you could even possibly be displacing a large amount of your kind of fossil fuel use on the shoulder season. So sometimes when people are adopting heat pumps, they're kind of trying to do completely migrate away from fossil fuels. Other times when people are adopting heat pumps, they end up kind of getting a delightful cooling solution and then kind of don't need to turn on their actual heating system until January because you can just use the heat pumps as a partial home solution when it's kind of more moderate out. Great. And there are ground source heat pumps. That's also called geothermal. But we're focusing tonight on the ductilist models because those are the more common. So let's look at some of the variations of what the ductilist heads might look like. Go ahead, Mike. Yeah, so on the left-hand side, what we have is probably the most common type or just a standard wall-mounted unit. So how that unit works is it's just going to be kind of pulling in the air from the top of the unit, conditioning it, and then blowing it down. One of the things that I'll be addressing in the comments is it sounds like marketing, but these units are inverter-driven. They're modulating. So they never stop kind of blowing and mixing the air inside of the room when they're running. So whenever you're calling for heating, it's just kind of constantly taking the air into the room, and it's constantly blowing it over the coil, and it's constantly dumping the heat into the room or removing heat and dumping it to the outside. So for a lot of homes, it can end up becoming a lot more comfortable than what people are used to with their central heating system where you have one thermostat or two thermostats, and you're dealing with day and night and north and south, and there's always going to be kind of temperature imbalances. In the middle, what we see is a floor-mounted unit. And what's nice about floor-mounted units is, one, you can kind of have all the lines that's just dropping down through the basement and out of the house. Another thing that's really nice about floor-mounted units is you don't have to get up on a chair or a step ladder to change the filter. And floor-mounted units can also be tucked behind a little desk so that you can kind of mask them a lot more. And then they also have ceiling-mounted units where it's exactly as it looks. It's just kind of mounted, recessed into the ceiling. A handful of manufacturers are making that type as well now. Great. And you mentioned changing the filters. This is something that, because it's blowing air, the heat pump head is constantly cleaning the dust, et cetera, out of your air. So you do need to just rinse those in water and let it dry and then put it back in maybe monthly during the winter. But I have one and I've certainly left it for a whole quarter from time to time. And the ceiling cassettes, they do need to, some of them need to be accessed from an attic above, but some of them can be installed just from below as well. What about the outdoor unit, the compressor? Mike, what's the space needs on that and other considerations? Yeah, so with the outdoor unit, there's a few different things to know. So over on the left-hand side, let me just say that that unit looks big. And that unit looks big because that home has a pretty big heating load. On the right-hand side, we see photos of, say, a small, like a medium-sized unit and a smaller-sized unit. So do know that with the outdoor units as far as spacing, it really does depend a lot about what the heating load as well as the cooling load is for the property. Another thing to be keeping in mind is that we're in Massachusetts, we're not in Bermuda. So we do need to deal with snow. So that's why on both of the photos, we do see the equipment up on stands. Sometimes people are also mounting it on the side of the house. As far as the outdoor equipment, in my opinion, most installers have cut the install of it more or less figured out. There's not too many considerations that you don't want to install the equipment right next to a dryer fan. You don't want to install the equipment where you can see it outside of your window. So the only big considerations is if you do have ice dams, do not install the equipment directly where you have ice dams forming on your roof because you don't want 100 pounds of ice slamming on the equipment. We seem to have a problem. Let me stop it and start it. Well, maybe we should take questions this far while this thing is reloading. What do you think? Let me put my camera open again. But yeah, with the outdoor equipment, I think that's mostly the installer base in Massachusetts really has it pretty well figured out. And it can even be protected. It can be hidden underneath the porch. So a lot of flexibility there. And the refer journal lines from the compressor to the inside heads can travel quite a distance, right? Yeah. So depending if it's a single zone or a multi zone, sometimes there's minimum. So typically the minimum is like 12 feet. But with the photo on the left-hand side, that person's property, he would have 250 linear feet of like line set length to be working with, to be connecting the outdoor unit to the indoor unit. And on the photo on the right-hand side, it's a really nice install. They matched the line hide cover with the color of the exterior of the home. But do know that there is also, if you don't want like tons of line hide running around the house, on the outside of the house, they also do make contraptions called branch boxes, where you can be running from the outdoor unit to a contraption on the inside. And then from the contraption on the inside called the branch box, then you can be running all the ductless equipment off of there. So if you do need, say, eight indoor units off of one outdoor unit, you don't have like eight line hides, which more or less looks like gutters running along the outside of your house. So some installers can do a really elegant job with getting the equipment installed and commissioned properly. Great. Thanks. So let me talk a little bit about why the heat pumps are so important at this moment in time when we're, you know, we have a state law that the, that greenhouse gas emissions have to be reduced to virtually zero by 2050. And in New England, half of our greenhouse emissions, or almost half of our greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels used in our homes. And heating is by and large, the largest source in our homes of greenhouse gases. So we need to find ways to get rid of those fossil fuels. And electric heating is at this point just about the only thing that's considered greenhouse gas free. Sort of heating. Some wood heating is considered greenhouse gas free, but not really because there's a lot of emissions from that. So this is a graph from the Mass Clean Energy Center showing the relative greenhouse gas emissions from each of these different types of heating. And you see electric baseboard oil, propane and natural gas are all much higher than the air source heat pump, the ground source heat pump, and what they're calling automated wood heating. And note on this natural gas graph, they're not including the fugitive emissions from the well heads, et cetera, et cetera. So when we green the grid, that is when all of the electricity is produced by renewable sources, we will see that the electric forms of heat are going to be zero emissions. So that's what we're going toward. And that's why electric heat is so important. And you can green these electricity sources already if you subscribe to a municipal or a non-profit program that connects you to 100% clean electricity, which of course our group, Green Energy Consumers, does provide. So that's why heat pumps are really essential at this time. And virtually everyone will have to be moving from these fossil fuel heat systems to electric heat systems over the next 30 years. So let's move on to costs, installation costs. So costs, there are two major costs. One is the cost of purchasing and installing the system. And the second is operational costs. So first looking at the installation costs, very rough ballpark, a single head ductless system could be $6,000. Again, take all these numbers with a grain of salt. I don't know your house and what technology would be appropriate, et cetera. But this gives you an idea. And a centrally ducted system. So if you have ductwork already in your house for heating, possibly the ductwork for your cooling, you can use that for a heat pump. And that would be roughly $15,000 to $25,000 or more. Note that the electric service very well might need to be upgraded if you don't already have 200 amp service. There is the 0% heat loan. And in the research that we've seen, this works out to be roughly comparable to the cost of installing a fossil fuel heating plus central air. So if you already have central air and a fossil fuel system, you could replace both of those with a heat pump system that provides both heating and cooling. So now on to the operating costs. This graph is a little busy, but it makes some important points. First, look at the kind of gray screen behind the colored lines. That shows you the distribution of hours in the year at certain temperatures. So you see most of the year that big kind of block of gray on the right side of the graph is occurs between about 32 and 60 degrees. And that happens to be a great temperature for heat pumps to operate in. We do have to, of course, take care of providing heat for the temperatures between freezing and zero or minus, but they're not a lot of hours of the year. Then the colored lines show different types of heating. If you start with the yellow line on top, that's your electric resistance. The purple line is propane. The black line is heating oil. The green line is air source heat pump. The blue line is gas and the orange line is ground source heat pump. Now this year, the black line and the green line may be much closer together because of the geopolitics that are wreaking havoc with all of the energy costs. And electric prices are definitely rising in addition to heating oil costs, but that gives you a sense of the cost breakdown. And if you do have gas heat, you're now wondering, well, why would I get a heat pump? And that really just has to do with the price of gas and the price of electricity. So watch how those prices change over time and you'll see that a heat pump becomes more and more affordable. And even in this set of data, the space between the green lines and the blue lines is virtually nil when you get up to 45 degrees or so. So in that shoulder season, your heat pump would be just as efficient as your gas system. Moving on, so now we're talking about incentives for paying for the thing. And these include significant incentives both in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. If you're integrating a heat pump with a fossil fuel system that you're going to continue to use for those very cold days, say 32 or 45 degrees and colder, then that's what's called a hybrid system or an integrated system. And the incentive for that is $1,250 per ton. A ton is 12,000 BTUs of heat. A typical home might need three to five tons of heat. Larger homes obviously would need more. So it's up to $10,000 for a partial system. These do require a thermostat that connects both the systems. So it's set at a certain temperature to automatically switch from the heat pumps to the fossil fuel. And the technician sets that switch over point. And it's a seamless transition. Now in Massachusetts, there's now a whole home incentive. So if you're going to get rid of your fossil fuel system, or you can still have it, but it has to be, your heat pump system has to be sized to provide 100% of your heating needs. And that incentive is a flat $10,000 per home. And you can get more information about that on the MassSafe website. Gas heat is now included in the whole home incentive. It didn't used to be. So that was a big change in 2022. More on incentives. You could get incentives for the ground source heat pump. That's 15,000 per home for a whole home system. This is more expensive due to the site work that needs to be done on your property, but it is more efficient than air source as we saw on the graph. So if you do have space and, you know, the capital to get into a more expensive installation, that is certainly a good option to explore as well. And some of the ground source companies are now supplying financing, you know, through their own company so you can get one for zero down with a, you know, obviously with a payment plan. There are also air to water heat pumps. Now this would take heat out of the air and it would put it into a water tank that would then distribute that hot water through your home. But this isn't a drop in replacement for your boiler, fortunately. It's most applicable for radiant flooring because the temperature that the heat pump can get that hot water to is not hot enough. It's not comparable to the hot water that comes out of your boiler. It's not boiling. So, and also there are very few experienced installers doing this hydronic replacement work. So there is an incentive for it and there are people who are doing it, particularly with radiant flooring, but it just takes a lot more planning and a lot more work to find a contractor who can work with you. And also on water heaters, there are heat pump water heaters. Again, these are two to three times more efficient than electric resistance tanks. So if you have an electric resistance tank and you're replacing it, it would be very good to very wise to explore getting up a hybrid or a 100% heat pump water heater. They do need adequate space for air exchange. You can't put this in a closet. It has to be in a fairly large space. It does need electrical wiring. So if you don't currently have a circuit going to your water heater, that would be an additional cost. It does need a condensate drain and it does make the space colder and drier. So if you had a semi-finished basement, you would want to insulate the wall between the finished part of the basement and the heat pump water heater. And there are incentives for those as well. Now the big news that we got in August is the Inflation Reduction Act included significant funding for heat pumps. So for instance, the federal tax credit was and is this year $300 for a heat pump install. In 2023, it will be up to $2,000. So that's great. Plus, there's additional credits for electrical wiring upgrades. And there's now no lifetime cap on how many tax credits you can take for energy efficiency. So you can plan out 10 years worth of energy efficiency work on your home and take that tax credit every year. The federally funded rebates, there are two types of those. And I say federally funded because the funding is going to come down to the states and the states are actually going to administer it. And we don't yet have from the states how they're going to administer that. But just to give you the overview, some of the incentives are for all income levels and some are for less than 150% of area median income. Now, just to give you a sense of what that is in the Boston area, that's $200,000 for your household income, gross household income is 150% of area median income. Again, states may decide to tweak their existing rebates. But Mike just learned today that Massachusetts is not going to do that. So at least as far as the tax credit goes, they're not going to reduce that. So, and there's a great calculator on the rewiring America site that lets you figure out which IRA measures would be applicable to your home and your household. But just to give you a little more detail very quickly, and then you'll be able to see the details of this when we send out the recording of this webinar. The income qualified rebates are for homes, as I said, up to 150% of area median income. And there's even a greater incentive for households that are below 80% of area median income. There is all sorts of different things that are incentivized, electrical wiring, insulation, electric stove, electric dryer, panel upgrades, etc. Note this can't be combined with other programs. So if you got $10,000 from the state of Massachusetts, you can't also get $8,000 of this federal rebate. Again, the details haven't yet been spelled out, but that's my understanding at this time. The homes program is the program that has no income restrictions. So you can be a millionaire and still get these incentives. It is based on your projected energy savings of a total retrofit. So to apply for this, you need to have a professional come to your home, make a proposal. I'm going to do X, Y, and Z for your home. Here's your current energy usage. And after I do X, Y, Z to your home, this is what I project your energy usage would be. So the more energy savings are projected, the higher the level of income, the higher level of incentive that you would qualify for. And this does apply to multifamily buildings and specifically low at moderate income properties qualify for even greater incentives. So this is a great opportunity. Let's move on to system design options. I know we're moving quickly, but we want to have time for questions. Mike, what if a home has ductwork already? Tell us. Yeah. So I will say with monitoring the questions, there's a lot of questions about ductwork. And we did just really highlight ductless mini splits. Do you know that ducted heat pumps are 100% an option. So if you already have, say, central AC or if you already have a hot air furnace, whether it's propane, oil, or natural gas, there's likely a heat pump solution for you. The heat pump solution could either be a one from kind of the same type of manufacturer that made, say, a central AC, which could be like from carrier or Linux or train, where it just be a coil that would be sitting right on top of your fossil fuel based system. And that can work and that can kind of get you down to well below freezing, really migrate, mitigate a lot of fossil fuel use and provide, in many cases, a much more comfortable central AC. There's also, if you do have an existing furnace and you do want to kind of get rid of that oil tank in the basement or get rid of the gas meter outside of your home. They do make centrally ducted air source heat pumps that are completely cold climate that have enough heating capacity for most average size. OK Lee insulated homes to get rid of the fossil fuel and switch over to a heat pump. So if you already have duct work in a lot of ways, it's a much more straightforward install. Then if then if your home does not have duct work, which we'll get to in a second. Some other things that they do just make a note about in that slide is do know that say let's say that your home is 100 years old in your home originally had a coal fired furnace. There's a good chance that say the duct work that was appropriate for a coal fired furnace is not going to be super appropriate for a inverter driven modulating cold climate air source heat pump. So sometimes duct work doesn't need to be modified to make it to make it work as good as the manufacturer would like it or to get it properly commissioned. So do know that if you do have duct work, it's likely going to make the project a bit easier. But there there still certainly could be things that the contractors telling you you should do as part of the project as well to make the heat pump more applicable for your home. Great. Thanks. And what about a home that lacks duct work? Yeah, so if a home doesn't have duct work, then it's then there's kind of two different options. So option number one would be doing what I did where I just kind of took a couple a handful of ductless units and I more or less scattered them around the house. And I size the equipment to meet my buildings heat load. So say, for example, my home is 100 years old, there is no duct work. So what I ended up doing is I put a ductless union more or less every other room. And that was my approach for kind of migrating completely off of natural gas. That is kind of the more affordable option. Other people their approach may be just putting in one big ductless unit and running the equipment like a wood stove or a pellet stove. Other people may decide if they really like, say, the idea of having a emitter or heat source or cooling source in each and every room. It may become a matter of let me actually go and invest in my home. I'll put in a brand new duct distribution system. And then the even if you do start off with the boiler, you kind of end up with the same thing that you would have if you did start off with the furnace with having a ducted system. So in New England installers are happy to kind of work with you, figure out what your kind of goals are for the project and come up with an appropriate solution. Great. Let's move on to some really great examples. Can you walk us through these, Mike? Yeah, so on this example over here, this would be this would be what I would say would be appropriate for kind of the rugged New Englander. It's not probably the perfect solution for a lot of people where you're just putting in say one large ductless unit. This install could cost $6,000 and this could be enough heating horsepower for the entire home. So let's just say that the load is 15,000 BTUs. They put in 18,000 BTU ductless unit. You just set that thing on to say 70 degrees. The family room, the kitchen, the living room area is going to be delightful. And as you migrate further back into the bedrooms in the summertime, depending on how well your home is insulated, depending on the windows, they may feel a little bit warmer, a little bit hot. I'm not going to say that that's going to be uncomfortable for everyone. Or say in the wintertime, you migrate back into the bedrooms and on a very cold day, maybe those rooms are feeling cold and maybe that's not a horrible idea because you like to sleep when it's a bit cooler in the bedrooms. So do know that this is a potential option, but for a lot of homeowners, this is kind of not what an installer is first going to be proposing for the home. But do know that it is a potential option that could be explored if you do really want to kind of keep the budget in check and have a really nice cooling solution and migrate away from fossil fuels. And this could also be done in conjunction with an existing heating system that is set so that it comes on if it gets too cold in the bedrooms, etc. Yeah, it's never been a better year for thermostats than 2022 because now like all of the major manufacturers with Honeywell Nest, Ecobee Lux, they all have a centrally located Wi-Fi thermostat that kind of remote sensors. So let's just say that the bedrooms do fall below 65 degrees and 65 degrees is kind of your comfort threshold. Those remote sensors could talk to the main thermostat that's in the same room as the ductless unit. And even though that room is already at 70 degrees, it could cause the central heating system to fire, do a cycle, warm up the bedrooms. The mini splits still happily running. The heating system just ran for one or two cycles overnight. So yeah, there's a lot of kind of good ways that could get configured. Great. And for another example. Yeah, this is where I think I come in the most helpful if you are kind of thinking that you're going to have a potentially ductless project or that's what you're most interested in. There's a real consequence to say the efficiency of the system with oversizing. So on the previous one I said imagine that the heat load was 15,000 BTUs. Let's say that you do want four indoor units. The smallest indoor unit, the smallest multi-zone that supports say like four indoor units is 36,000 BTUs. So just by the sake of like wanting a ductless unit in each and every room, now you've kind of doubled the size of the outdoor equipment. And when the heat load is so oversized or when the equipment is so oversized versus the space that it's supposed to be going in, it does have a real impact on how efficient the equipment runs. And what I mean by that is say that you were thinking that your heating expenditures was going to be $2,000 over the course of the winter. If you oversize it by say 50% or 100%, you very well could end up with energy expenditures that be closer to like $2,500 or $3,000 depending on the manufacturer. So sometimes there's a real penalty for kind of going with this approach. The other thing that I will say about this approach as well is the previous install probably costs about $6,000. This install is going to be costing like $22,000 or $20,000. It's going to quickly, and this is just like a small studio that we're looking at. So just picture this as two stories. You know, now we're up to eight indoor units. Now it's $40,000 for the equipment. So I do just try to steer people away from this. One, it affects efficiency. Two, it kind of creates these proposals that some people can afford. Lots of people can't afford even with all the great incentives and tax credits. And yeah, so I do just think that like if you are designing with ductless, it's really important to be asking for an accurate heat load calculation from the contractor. Because once you have that, then these types of installs don't happen with kind of oversized equipment. Great. And that is definitely one of the things that's included when ABODE does a quote comparison. They'll rate it in terms of the sizing of the equipment. And now the perfect porridge for GoliLux. Tell us about this one. Yeah, so this is kind of what we're always trying to kind of guide people towards. So let's just say hypothetically that the heat load is say 15,000 BTUs per hour still. You could have a 9,000 BTU ductless unit in the living room servicing the living room kitchen dining room. And then you could have a 6,000 BTU ductless ducted unit up in the attic or down in the basement and having registers in the floor coming up servicing the two bedrooms in the bathroom. And I can say that this is the type of install that ends up with having a coefficient of performance of close to three or being nearly 300% efficient. It would enable you to have like the common area to be on its own zone as well as the two bedrooms to be on their own zone. So if you did like to say sleep and say 65 degree weather and you like the common area to be 70 degrees, this would be what would enable you to do it. And as far as pricing goes, I do think that most of the time I'm seeing like a small slim duct unit. I'm seeing that at like $10,000, the ductless unit $6,000. So it does come in, you know, $15,000, $16,000 for this type of setup. But I can say that the equipment is going to be running really, really well in terms of efficiency. In cooling mode, everything's going to be dry. It's going to be comfortable. Nothing's going to feel cold or clammy or humid. Yeah, so, and you can even be adding, you know, adding features to especially the ducted system that could be used to really be improving the indoor quality of the home as well. So that's really what we're trying to promote. But with any consultation that we're ever conducting, it really does kind of start off with just trying to think about long term goals for the home potential budget, what you're hoping to accomplish. And depending on that, you know, the perfect system could look wildly different than this as well. All right, each home is unique. Yeah. So just to recap. I'm going to stop it there because these abode discounts are actually expired. They expired last week. This is a, this is only a three week old video, but they've already expired. I do recommend that folks go to the abode website, the green energy consumers website or the abode energy management website and look, you know, if you are interested in getting a quote comparison, I can vouch that they're good here. It was worth my while, trying to sort between 15 different quotes so from seven different manufacturers seven different installers in my case. I'm a little crazy about that. At this point, I think I'm going to stop sharing the screen and let's open up to the public for any questions. Yep. Let me find the screen share thing. So if anyone in the public has a question, please electronically raise your hand and I will allow you to speak. Janet McGowan. Please unmute yourself. Yes, thank you so much. I that was the most informative explanation of heat pumps that have always sort of mystified me about like how do they work. One thing that just filled me with anxiety over and over was the idea of having contractors come in and give different options. I live in a 200 year old house. And, you know, it's actually got like a 14 inch brick wall in the middle because it was built in two sections. And all I could think of was, you know, complicated equipment a complicated situation different options, but what really made me most anxious was getting a good contractor who's experienced. And is there any help on that front. This, this is a real problem, especially in Western Massachusetts abode actually has contractors that they vetted, and that they work with for everywhere except western in the eastern part of the state. I've been pushing a little to try to get, you know, to I've been encouraging the folks that the guys but to go through their mic Simon actually did, you know, we should get some here too. It doesn't mean they're not qualified it does mean they're not as experienced and nobody has really looked at them yet. My advice would be if you can afford to get a consultant in abode charges 150 bucks for a consult and they'll set you on the right path. I wish I'd done that first. Because I wasted a lot of time getting quotes for things that weren't going to work. And so if you can afford that abode does it. There are other companies now. Zero. What is it zero energy. The other one I just spoke with was. I can't think of the name right now but abode has the best deal right now I think we mentioned one earlier. Sage energy was energy sage right. That is now trying to be. I don't know that they're vetting the quotes but it's worth trying their, their, their a like a clearing house for they've been doing solar quotes you apply to them you say you want solar on your house and they'll get you a bunch of quotes right. They're now trying to do the same thing for heat pumps but I don't think that solves the problem of which one of these is the right thing for my house. You got to schedule a consult with abode or get somebody in. Who knows. Otherwise, I can tell you that there are on the massive website you won't go too wrong. Let me put it this way. The quotes that I've gotten, only one of them was a miss. And I literally have on my own house like 15 different quotes only one of them was just a miss that wouldn't have worked. The rest of them were partial home transitions they all kept my furnace in place which I wasn't crazy about doing, but they would have worked. So any of the mass on the mass save website there is a list of contractors that mass save works with and approves of, and any of those guys will do a reasonable job they just might not do the best possible thing. That's, that's what I discovered. Okay, we have another question. Paul Kaplan. Please unmute yourself. Yeah, hi. Thanks for doing this. This is really great. I have a whole lot of questions. I don't want to take everyone's time with some but maybe two questions. I'm kind of interested in geothermal you said if you have space enough space for it. And all the other questions I have what's available as far as rebates and tax right off. Is abode qualified to give you a completely objective view of all of this, or do they have an axe to grind in any particular heat pump, you know, any axe to grind at all. Abode is their goal is to do the energy transition so if anything they'll push you toward moving away from fossil fuels faster than the contractors will, but they don't sell you anything. You're just paying their information so I would trust them in that sense regarding. Yeah, I guess, yes, yes. Perfectly regarding geothermal. I can only I think there might be somebody else in this group who might be able to answer this better than me but I can tell you that you're in the same neighborhood I'm in fall so I know a little I looked into it myself and the problem is they need to get a ginormous drilling yard and because the rocks around here are really hard and they need these bigger rigs they don't have tiny ones like they had when I was in Maryland for digging wealth. They use big rigs and unless you have a way for them to get that into your yard and preferably your backyard so you're not running presumably your furnaces at the back of the house your duct if you have a ducted system. It's probably at the back of the house so ideally they would dig at the back of the house. So that's the problem is going to get a rigging but you should call a few companies and see what they say. Okay, anyone else have a comment about you. It is the best way to go if you can afford it and get a rig on your property but. Are there any other questions. Laura can you address the next education series and heat pumps. Well, we don't have a schedule for sure yet but we're hoping on one of the things that you absolutely have to do if you're going to get a heat pump is make sure that your house is nice and tight I'm guilty of not having done as much as I could there yet myself. It's ongoing trust, you know if you're a homeowner or a renter for that matter it's an ongoing struggle to keep your windows and doors and walls and everything else tight. So, you know the next the next in the education series will hopefully be on envelope envelope issues right getting the envelope of your house, batten down. You know, so that this is a little heat leak as possible. So we'll be talking about that hopefully on December 7 at 530. Thanks. And thank you for the questions. Yeah. Okay, let's move on to the next part of the agenda. You'll have a lot of time and Stephanie, you know if you want to address any updates that you have. The only one that I have really relevant to the education series is that I spoke to the communications director and we're going to create on your web page, kind of a folder that will have all of the education events in one folder. So they'll be titled and numbered in, in an order so seeing that we only have two so far we're going to try to get on that tomorrow. That's great. Thanks, Stephanie. Sure. Any number of weeks. All right, the items for our next meeting. We're going to our conversation about the home rule petition under if you can send us any information on that. And then we do want to take a vote on that based on the conversation we have. And then the same agenda is today and I'm setting priorities for the town council and town manager. I'll send information over to Stephanie and what Anna had sent. And then Stephanie's response and mine as well as I'll send it over to Stephanie and she can share with all of you. Keep in mind they're on the pillars that you have the items in the car and see what do we need to push the town to address this part of their goals for a point. Anything else that we need to talk about the next meeting. The next meeting is scheduled for the 23rd bus Sue and that's the day before Thanksgiving. So I'm not sure if you all are planning to meet or your next meeting will be December 7th. So you should decide. Yeah, I'm glad you brought it up because I'm out. Do we want to have a meeting the week after the way we're not missing this meeting. Okay with me. So the 30th instead of the 23rd. That work for everybody. Would that be then the 30th and the seventh or shifting our entire two week. No just be back for. Okay. Because Laura is working on the December 7 education series so I want to keep that December 7. I'm looking forward to Dwayne's presentation on the solar hosting tool so I'd be in favor of those two meetings moving to the next meeting to 30th. Yeah, I can plan to do that on the 30th. Yeah, I wouldn't be able to do it today before Thanksgiving. Sounds like the 30th. Okay. Okay. So we're going to have a meeting on the 30th. I don't think we need any additional public comments and less. Unless the public has additional comments that they want to talk about outside of the heap of conversation that we had. If anyone has any comments, please digitally raise your hand and I'll meet you. And Stephanie, can you note how many attendees there has been 12 total. All right, we can adjourn then. Thank you all for your time. Lori, thank you for setting this up. Hi folks. Hi. Great job, Lori. Thanks. Seriously, love it.