 Hello everyone. Welcome to Maine Audubon's climate spotlight. This is our second presentation called Getting Involved in Community Solar. I thank you all for joining and again, I encourage you all to stay cool and hydrate today. Thanks for joining us. I hope you're out of place with a fan on you. Maine Audubon is working hard to protect our state's wildlife and wildlife habitat from the impacts of climate change. We know that aggressively cutting our carbon emissions from all sectors is key to meeting the strong climate goals set by the Mills Administration and that getting electricity from renewable sources is a major part of that. Today we have five experts or four experts, rather, who are going to talk you through one avenue for personal renewable energy, solar power via a community solar farm. But before I introduce our panelists today, I have a few housekeeping items. First, I'm obligated to let you know that our Maine Audubon's native plant sale is happening now at our Gilson Farm headquarters in Falmouth. Planting native plants is the best way to help native pollinators and native birds. And in stock, we have everything from butterfly weed to balsam fir to blueberries to milkweed ready to plant in your garden. You can order online at mainnativeplants.org and I'm going to stick that link in the chat in a minute. Second, some tech stuff. I'm going to be moderating today. All the attendees, all the folks watching at home are going to be muted for the duration. So if you have questions, please type them down below. You see a little Q&A box down there. That is for questions that will come to the panelists. If you have other hellos or welcomes, I see some folks are doing that now. Feel free to put those in the chat. I've found that the best practice here is to save all the questions for the very end. Staying on track and staying on time is the hardest part of these presentations, especially where there's so much good info to share. And so I'm going to make sure we get through all the presentations and then have time for questions. I'm happy to go over time, but I want to make sure that we get everything in for the folks who need to jump off at noon. So let's get to our presenters. Tom Sweeney is the CEO of Clean Energy Co, the nation's largest developer of community-based renewable energy facilities, and a leader in community power generation. They are Colorado-based, but recently opened an office in Maine. David Cookta is a member of Flag Pond Community Solar Farm, which was installed by Maine-based Revision Energy and went into operation in 2019. Welcome, David. And Alyssa and Alan Armstrong are members of the Sierra Club's Portland Climate Action Team and the main idle community farm in Freeport, community solar farm in Freeport. Before retirement, Alyssa owned a small business, and Alan was a mechanical engineer. They have two grandchildren. Thank you very much. And so without further ado, let's get started. Tom, I'm going to get your screen up and going. And can everybody see that? Tom, take it away. Great, Nick. Thanks. Well, I'm glad we could do this presentation today. Hopefully this will give everybody a little bit of additional information in terms of how you can take advantage of a community solar project, whether you intend to develop it yourself or participate in a different way. Hopefully this will help all of you. So, Nick, if you want to go to the next slide, we'll kind of kick things off here. So just as a little bit of background for everybody, you know, the first community solar project was actually built in 2010 in El Jabel, Colorado, and that was built with Holy Cross Energy, which is a cooperative utility. So they were pretty forward thinking and allowing a program like that to be developed, which had no legislative or regulatory framework for it. And of course, since that time, you know, we've got almost two gigawatts of community solar projects now across the country. And 20 states have enacted an ongoing legislation or regulation to make that happen. So the market itself has developed in a number of really interesting ways. Now, I think everybody recalls that community solar really started because of the majority of residential customers of utilities cannot put solar on their residents. They're either renters or the rooftops are not not going to support a solar implementation. And likewise for commercial businesses, the numbers closer to 95% of commercial entities cannot put solar on site. So there's a really large, unserved community of utility customers that cannot access solar if you don't have some type of community solar enabling regulation or legislation. So in this particular presentation, and then you'll see the following presenters will give you some more specifics as well. We'll just run through a few of the details around project development. Some of the questions that you need to answer about project ownership and operation. We'll talk about the types of project subscribers, sources of financing. We'll talk about the available programs in Maine because there's more than one program a project could be developed under. And we'll take the time to talk about the types of subscription contracts that are out there in the marketplace and the one that's probably used most commonly today. And if there's additional issues that people want to talk about or have questions answered, we can cover them. I'll talk about three specific industry issues that people should just be aware of. So Nick, if you want to go to the next slide. All right, so in terms of developing a community solar project, there's kind of three, I'd say overarching issues that you do want to make sure to answer. So whoever the manager is going to be overseeing development, you want to make sure that they're qualified to do that. And as a reminder to everybody, when you're doing solar project development in particular projects like this for community solar, you are going to end up in a situation where your development is going to happen in parallel. There's reasons why we do that. The most important one is that it doesn't do a lot of good to get to the end of the permitting process and then find out you don't have a viable interconnection and the flip side is true. It doesn't do much good to get a viable interconnection and then find out permitting is not going to be possible. So typically development is done in parallel. I think the other thing to point out is that development is expensive. I'm giving you a range here of 125,000 to $300,000 to develop a project. It sounds like a lot, but you'll be surprised how quickly the money gets eaten up in terms of the engineering fees, civil development fees, planning and permitting fees, interconnection system impact studies. I think our average right now for system impact studies in Maine for Amera is coming in around $50,000 per project. So it'll add up really quickly. And this set of numbers excludes the actual interconnection deposits that you have to pay after you get an interconnection services agreement. One thing to point out to everybody is that if you're thinking of doing a community solar project, you just have to keep in mind that subscribers to the project cannot have their money put at risk from a development standpoint. That's actually a no-no from a legal perspective. So just keep that in mind. And then finally, it's worth mentioning that project development is a risky business. I think most of you on the call probably recognize that already, but it is true. You can have a perfect site that you cannot get permitted or that you'll find susceptible to wetlands or vernal pool issues. There could be other core habitat issues associated with it. And likewise, you can have a site that you can get permitted and you cannot get a viable interconnection. We certainly know that in Maine, because of the volume of projects that are in the interconnection queue today, the need for transmission level studies and upgrades to substations and distribution circuits is going to take place. The question is which projects will avoid those versus which ones will be susceptible. So it's important to know that project development is a risky business and we do have projects that we develop that ultimately fail. And so that is a lost investment. There we go. So a couple of other things you can do that are helpful. Make sure you know who's going to own and operate the project as you go forward. There are many cases where democracy is an effective method to manage people's interest and rights. It is less ideal when you're managing a single project. And there are reasons why you typically have an individual or an entity that's identified as the asset manager. Because sometimes you get adverse responses or reactions to how you manage the assets once they're running. So it's important to keep that in mind. And you really have to have two types of oversight. You're going to need the oversight from a financial perspective as well as from an operations and maintenance standpoint. So asset management is typically running the financial tax subscription and reporting requirements for the projects. Operations and maintenance is really covering the physical operation, the inspection and the repair of any of the assets if they fail. So you've got two broad categories to manage there. All right. Okay. So as you're thinking about the project you're going to want to answer the question who are the subscribers going to be. Obviously any rate payer of the utility has the ability to participate in a community solar project. The issue that comes up is that if you're going to mix residential and commercial subscribers in the same project you'll have certain constraints then that will come up that you'll need to address. Both in terms of what program the project can participate in, the form of bill credits that will actually come out of that and whether or not you're going to have tax equity investment. And lastly if you're going to have consumers or residential subscribers in a project you will need to pay attention to consumer protection and disclosure rules. And those are pretty well-defined. They're not necessarily complicated but you have to make sure you're aware of them in terms of what you're doing. Okay. All right. As it relates to the source of financing you know a few years ago it was actually pretty difficult to get people to finance community solar projects. One they were relatively new in terms of the concept. Today it's very different. You have a very broad spectrum of both commercial and local banks that are willing to participate in financing of projects like this. You know here's a couple things I can mention if you're going to use a commercial lender to help finance the project. They're typically going to require equity contributions depending on the project structure. They may require personal guarantees or a takeout guarantee for construction financing. Some lenders will provide construction lending to permanent lending. I know we did that with a number of local banks here in Colorado as well as on the east coast. So those are available. And then finally if you're using tax equity in the project you know just keep in mind that the tax equity participation needs to be contracted and they have to invest into the project prior to the commercial operation starting. And this is really the issue where the tax equity investor has to demonstrate they have some amount of money at risk during the construction cycle. You'll also typically need that for your takeout financing so you don't qualify as well from a long-term lender perspective. The operations financing you've got five broad categories that can provide financing for the project to operate from. Obviously it could be equity that's been provided in the project company itself. Tax equity is one of the forms of operations investment that can occur. Most projects will take on long-term debt from some type of commercial lender. That long-term debt could be from a commercial bank. It could be from a group of individuals or entities. And the two more common components that you see for financing operations long-term. So the sale of power to the utility is a very common method for that long-term source of revenue as are the sale of renewable energy credits. And I think that's going to get talked about in a couple of minutes as to how you take advantage of the production of REX and whether you're going to monetize them through the market. And then finally I'll mention that we've built a number of projects probably a little over 30 projects that we built back in the early days where we actually used operations and maintenance trust accounts to safeguard funds for the operations of the project long-term. People may not be as familiar with those but that is a way to sequester funds off to the side to protect the subscribers of the long-term operations of the project. So that's an option that that you can explore as well. All right. So in Maine, you know the great part is you have three different programs that you could consider having a project operate under. Net Energy Billing is a program that's been around the longest. It was recently expanded in terms of the size of the projects. You also had the commercial and industrial program under chapter 312. And then you have the large shared solar program under chapter 312 as well which was passed in bill 1711 last summer and of course was implemented through the PUC rules. Now the Net Energy Billing program provides the most certainty with respect to the ability to qualify a project. However, it does not support consolidated billing like the CNI and the large shared solar programs do. So under the Net Energy Billing program subscribers can receive either a kilowatt hour credit or a tariff bill credit. There's an option that you would choose as the project owner which direction you want to go. There are limitations in either case though if you choose one or the other. And as an example the tariff bill credit program is restricted to commercial only. Okay. Either option is going to limit the types of subscribers or the mix of subscribers so you just want to be familiar with with net if you're going to use that. If you're instead going to take advantage of one of the DG procurement programs, you know there's a couple things to be aware of. So the CNI program can only support commercial and industrial customers. It's limited to 125 megawatts so it's unclear how long that program will be available in its current form and or whether additional capacity will be expanded into it. The large shared solar program has a higher volume of capacity that's available, the 250 megawatts, but it comes with some pretty significant subscriber mix requirements including low income and or municipal participation. So you want to be aware of that as you think about what type of program you want to operate under. The good news though is that both the programs on the DG site for procurement, they both support net consolidated billing and that eliminates one of the more significant risks and cost of operating a community solar project which is you're eliminating billing and collections activities and that's a really significant benefit both to underwriting the financing of the project and to the operating costs of the project from an asset management standpoint. So those are worth being aware of. Next slide. Okay so what type of subscription contract is going to be used? I'm going to just point out a few contracts that have been used in the past and the reason why. We'll talk about the most common contract that you're going to see at the bottom. So you know generally there's been three types of contracts that have been used over the past eight to ten years. There has been a contract that's been used that requires an upfront payment that's securing an interest in a capacity subscription and the output of that capacity for the project. That's a program that allows you to develop a project without long-term debt or other financing from commercial banks. It's not as common today but it has some benefits to why you would use it. You typically still need tax equity though. If you're going to do that so it's got some constraints how it's put together. Second option is to consider an upfront payment program where the subscriber is actually purchasing the panels at or before commercial operations. Now if you take advantage of this type of subscription contract the project is eligible to have those subscribers take a 25D tax treatment which means they will be taking a personal tax credit for their purchase of the panels in the project. This is one of the only ways to get around the use of tax equity on a solar project. We did it on probably a dozen or so projects. It was it was very effective and it eliminated any long-term financing for the project so it worked well that way. A note to everybody though that is a residential only project then if you're going to try and take advantage of the 25D program it's not available to commercial customers. Finally the most common contract that you see today is what's referred to as a pay-go subscription where subscribers are receiving bill credits each month and the project company bills the subscriber the requisite amount at the end of each month. So if you received a hundred dollar bill credit from the utility for production that month typically you're going to be billed 90% of that amount through a second invoice. Now that's a pretty common contract structure today. It typically has some kind of guaranteed savings or a specified discount to the bill credits received. It does require the project company to perform billing and accounts receivable work and finally you got to have your consumer protections and disclosures addressed as they will apply and in particular in Maine those are pretty well defined what you need to do there. Okay Nick. All right so just a couple of last things and then the other presenters can give you a little more detail and experience in terms of what they've done. So there's really three big issues you got to deal with. You got to make sure you've got binding site control in a form that is going to meet your development needs. Typically we're using what's referred to as a binding option lease agreement or a binding purchase option agreement that is usually a year and a half to two years long in its first term and has multiple renewable renewal periods associated with it and typically that binding site control encompasses everything that's required for the project whether that's solar easements, access for the utility, access roadway, etc. You're going to need an interconnection service agreement with the utility I think everybody knows that. It's it may be a little more difficult to get than you might think but there are defined rules for how you go through the interconnection application and the process the utility follows. And then finally you're going to need to obtain all your non-ministerial permits and other related government approvals. These three items that are listed here at the top those are all the things that are required for you to apply to one of the programs in May and receive approval for your project to actually move forward. So those are the three big categories and then finally you've got to decide what you're going to do with the renewable energy credits. Some commercial customers are interested in retaining or owning the renewable energy credits for lease program qualifications. Other customers are not interested. Typically we don't see Rex transferred to residential customers. It's more common that they're sold into the market to support the project but those are things to be aware of. Anyways Nick that's it for me. Thanks for having me. Hey thank you Tom. I'm stopping sharing now. That was fantastic and folks out there you can tell that a lot goes into putting one of these projects up and getting it running. But I think we'll transition now from the you know head of a company experience to the consumer experience which hopefully is a little easier and I know from talking with these folks that it's more exciting and fun to be involved. We're going to start now with David Cookda. So David I'm going to unmute you and you can take over sharing your presentation. All right thank you Nick for inviting me. Let me share my screen with you. Can you now see my slideshow and only that okay. Well again thanks Nick and Eliza I don't know if you're on but thanks for inviting me. I'm a member of the flag pond solar farm whose panels you see there and we've been installed by revision energy in SACO they're on marginal farmland by a person who farms in SACO but had some land that really he couldn't use. So I'm one of nine members of a 501 3C a community solar association which we pooled our resources together to buy those panels. So I'm an investor rather than a renter of the panels. I want to give you a prosumer's perspective on what it's like to be in a solar farm. That's a word I recently learned it's someone who both produces and consumes energy so I'm not just a consumer I'm a producer. I want to talk briefly about my experience of being in a solar farm the steps I recommend taking to join one based on my experience and then how being a prosumer has changed my relationship to my utility. So most importantly here's the environmental impact I had last year according to the EPA. According to the EPA that's not working. There we go. According to the EPA the average passenger vehicle in America emits 10,361 pounds of CO2 each year. My share of the solar farm last year prevented 10,588 pounds of CO2 from being emitted into the atmosphere so it's as if I took a car off the road last year. That's the kind of difference you can make every year. So this is if I didn't drive or just took somebody else's car off the road. But what surprised me are the economic benefits. When I looked into investing in a solar farm I discovered that I was not only reducing my carbon emissions but I was reducing my electric bills as well in the long run. I like to think of investing in a solar farm as like buying a house. I used a loan to pay a bunch of money up front and once my loan was paid off in 12 years at fixed rate interest my electricity is essentially free except for a small monthly delivery fee. David can I see to speak up just a little bit please? Sure. Thanks. At that point once my loan's paid off I own an asset that's not tied to my house so I can sell it. I can pass it on to my daughter whatever I want to do with it give it to a charity. But really what's owning what owning my own power is done is the same that owning a house is done just as I have to clear my own sidewalk now that I own a house. I now pay more attention to the energy I generate. There's my deed on Saturday from what power I'm generating from our solar panels. But I also pay more attention to the energy that I use. I turn off my lights more often I take shorter showers because producing my own energy means I'm a better energy consumer as well since I'm responsible for both ends. And that's why my wife and I bought an electric car from Paris Auto Barn this January. That's our key SOEV parked in front of our solar panels. We're driving on sunshine. So we've actually taken two cars off the road this past year. So here's my advice on the steps to take based on my experience. The first thing that a solar installer is going to ask you is how much electricity do you use on an annual basis? Because that's going to determine the size of your solar array. You want to produce as much as you consume. So even before we invested in the solar farm, my wife and I did two things. One, we focused on investing in efficiency. And I know Maynard Auto Barn is going to have a panel on efficiency later this summer, so I won't go into that. But the second thing we did is just electrify everything we could. So my solar panels are guaranteed for 25 years. And after that, they don't explode. They just become less efficient. So it's important to think about your long-term energy needs. What are you going to be doing 25 years from now? So my wife and I installed heat pumps and a heat pump water heater a few years before we invested in the solar farm, which reduced our overall heating bills by about 75 bucks a month. Then once we joined the solar farm, our savings increased even further. We pay about half of what we used it when we were using oil. Owning and operating an EV is far cheaper than a gas-powered car, but driving it out in sunshine is even cheaper. I pay about 2.2 cents per mile, which is about a third of the cost of an efficient gas-powered car. Unfortunately, and here's my advice, I failed to anticipate charging an EV when I calculated our energy needs when we bought our solar farm share. So now we're consuming a little more than we produced. So I didn't think 25 years in advance that we would own an electric vehicle. So I should have purchased a much somewhat larger array. So again, think about your long-term needs. So again, electrify everything you can. We have an electric range, electric leaf blower, electric snow blower. My family runs on food, but everything else runs on electrons. So here's what my calculations look like. I simply tallied all my CMP bills to get my monthly and annual usage. Your mileage may vary, but I did on the left some estimates to what an average main electricity household needs and electricity based on the really great sources you see below from the efficiency main and the state of main central main power. So again, the goal is to produce as much energy as you consume. I'm going to post those sources in the chat when I finish my little talk. So here's my monthly electricity bill from CMP from May 2020. You'll see in my April meeting, meter reading was 79,653 kilowatt hours while my May reading was 80,372 kilowatt hours, which according to CMP's advanced math means I use zero kilowatt hours in the month of May, even though the real number was 719 kilowatt hours. But because I banked credits throughout the year by producing more energy than I consumed throughout the rest of the year, I was only charged the delivery fee of $12.76. That's about my average CMP bill per month. And then again, once I pay off my solar loan, I'll step back, my solar loan is slightly larger than what my CMP bills used to be. But again, like a mortgage, once I pay off that loan, my only bill would be that $12.76 until my panels. Explode or whatever they're going to do. But beside my bill, here's the other thing that CMP sends me every month. It's a statement of my generation, my usage, any credits I've accrued, which is handy data. But you'll see that as a white sheet of paper folded twice upon which somebody at CMP printed out what's probably just a little spreadsheet they use to track solar farm customers. There's no CMP letterhead. There's a little explanation for what this is. Fortunately, it came in a CMP envelope, so I knew who sent it. But I point this out because my experience is that to be a producer as well as a consumer of electricity, CMP is not ready for us. It's not built to handle us. They don't have the software to generate official documents. And frankly, they drag their feet in getting our solar farm online. Like many utilities, CMP is a natural monopoly that serves customers by delivering energy long distances from big power plants by cutting down mains for us. There's a CMP corridor. And that's relatively passive. Consumers have little to do except for rely on state regulators to not get gouged. So a pesky little consumer like me trying to produce my own energy is a bit of annoyance to them. It took them two months after our array was installed and connected to the grid for them to activate our accounts. Also, I have news rich on, you know, click on a few clicks in the computer somewhere. We actually had to contact Shelley Pingree's office to complain. And lo and behold, the very next day, our accounts were activated. So CMP is also met metering where you get 100% credit for your debt and energy you produce. Fortunately, they lost because we have a new governor and Eliza Donahue and others lobbied on our behalf. So since the solar farm is still tied to the grid, we're good and bad. We're still dependent on our utility company and the state PUC to act in our best interests, which means from time to time it's up to us to pay attention to what they do. But what being a producer of our own my own power means is I'm one of a variety of energy suppliers distributed around the grid, solar, wind, batteries. And I took on the capital cost. I took on the financial risk to improve and balance the grid. I'm reducing CMP's reliance on gas power and peaker plants and willing to learn that CMP is transitioning into becoming something more like Uber. Those folks in the middle is the computers which are software driven managers of producers and consumers who are tied to the grid in a lot of different more efficient ways. So being a pro-sumer means I'm pushing my utility company to make the transition into this new energy form, which means I hope I'm making it easier for other small-scale renewable energy sources to come online like you folks because my utility will now have the software one of these days and that nimble management so that hopefully they won't drag repeat as much because they'll be able to handle all these different distributed energy sources. So in the end, I'm not only reducing my carbon footprint and my energy costs, I think I'm opening the door to other folks to do just the same. I'll put up this last slide with a list of sources that I used. Again, I'll post them in the chat and then a list of main companies in the community solar farm business. So that's the final good thing you do when you join a solar farm is you're supporting main jobs and why do we need it rather than buying imported oil or supporting fracking companies in the Midwest or sending your money that utility investors overseas. And in the lower left-hand corner there is my email address if you want me to send you this list if you have any questions I can't answer here today. That's all I got, Nick. Great. Thank you, David, very much for that. That was outstanding. Now we will turn it over. I believe Alyssa Armstrong is going first. Let me go ahead and share your presentation so you have it. Okay, everybody see that? Alyssa, I will unmute you and Alan as well. It's not unmuting for some reason. There you go. Yeah, good, great. Thank you, Nick. My name is Alyssa Armstrong. My husband and I, Alan, my husband and Alan and I are members of main idle solar farm. You can see it on the right as you drive north on 295. It's just past the third pre-port exit. And I want to thank May and Audubon, Nick and Alyssa for hosting this discussion series. Sharing information is critical for moving toward a carbon-free future that ensures a livable climate for all creatures. Five years ago, Alan and I joined Sierra Club's Portland Climate Action Team. Our first project promoted solar power, specifically community solar farms or CSF. In fact, one of our members even made land available for the second solar farm in Maine. That one is the Sky Ranch Solar Farm in Wayne. At that time, solar farms were limited to nine members, making it difficult to achieve economy of scale. We were told that was because the utility would be doing the math by hand and couldn't handle more. Kind of makes you roll your eyes, but that was the way it was before the new legislation, new and improved solar legislation that went into effect last summer. Membership in a community solar farm was attractive to us as a way to reduce carbon emissions. We had put a few panels on our roof, but we live in Portland's historic district and were prevented from installing enough to meet our needs. So in 2016, we joined the Maine Idol CSF and Freeport. We did that by contacting revision energy. They had a list of people who were interested in joining CSFs. Our name came to the top of the list, so we joined Maine Idol. There are eight other households. Alan will probably talk more about how that works. Our 12-panel share supplied the rest of the power we needed for our home after the panels that are on our roof, including for a heat pump. The next year, we bought an electric car and were able to buy more panels to meet its needs. Our total investment has been $24,000. It might take more than a dozen years for us to recover that investment in dollars and cents, depending on electric rates in future years. But our electric bill is only that $13 distribution charge every month, and our natural gas bill has been reduced by at least a third with the electric heat pump. Our gasoline bill, of course, for the electric car is zero. So by reducing or eliminating those fossil fuels, not only are we saving money, but also reducing carbon emissions. And now, because of the new solar legislation, things are much better financially for new community solar farm investors. So do not be discouraged by those numbers that I just said. It's a whole different ballgame now. But saving money wasn't our objective. For us, the payoff will be a better world for our grandchildren, for the loons on Mainz lakes and streams, and the farms that need consistent rainfall. We must reduce carbon emissions to protect the future of our beautiful planet. Joining a community solar farm now is a way of helping to preserve our planet and our future. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Alyssa, for that. And I plan to just talk about what it's like to be involved in the active management of a community solar farm. Our main idle farm is a little bigger than many, but not near as large as the ones that will be possible now. The limit on solar farm size when we build ours was 660 kilowatts. Ours is 100 kilowatts because that's all the needs that nine people had at that time. But now we can have 200 members in a community solar farm. And the maximum allowable size is 5,000 kilowatts or 5 megawatts. So things are much better for economies of scale now than when we did ours. Also, when we did ours, the only way to have a community solar farm was to assume the responsibilities of management for all aspects of the farm. And as Tom said, those are asset management and operations and maintenance management. So I want to talk a little bit about how we do that, how we manage that. I am the asset manager. I'm the treasurer. We have three officers among our nine members, the president, the secretary, and the treasurer. So I put up a budget each year and assess the numbers for what we have to pay for our expenses, which include rent to the landowner, insurance, and physical maintenance, which includes mowing the grass and sort of thing. And there are some legal fees that occasionally happen. But those expenses are handled by two different ways. One is to sell our renewable energy credits, which is something that I personally did not want to do. And I'll talk a little bit about that later. But this year that generated about $2,400 for our farm. And so with a small additional assessment for people, we were able to pay the rent insurance and that maintenance. So that's not been a burdensome job on me. I just give it a little attention every once in a while. The other part of it is the operation and maintenance. Our farm is very fortunate to have Fred Farber. I want to give Fred a shout out if he should be watching, who pays attention to the production of our farm. And if we have a problem like an inverter shorting out, Fred is on it and can call revision and they'll fix it under warranty. And on we go with good production. But that is an essential function of managing your own farm, is to pay attention to what's happening to it. So after four years of being involved in this, we have saved by a very conservative calculation method, 6.3 metric tons of carbon dioxide that were not emitted into the atmosphere. We've avoided $3,025 of electric bills that we otherwise would have paid. And it's worth noting that the costs that we paid when we made our investment, all nine of us, were an average of about almost $4 per watt of install capacity. That figure now is around $2.80. So there's much less investment involved for the same output power. So I just want to say a little something about the relative advantages of a community solar farm as opposed to putting solar panels on your roof. The primary one is the scale that the installation costs are much lower for ground-mounted large farms than they are for custom-mounted rough mountings. The orientation can be optimal as the site is chosen for perfect unshaded solar gain. But then there are some places where rough mounted solar panels can make more sense. You don't have to pay rent and insurance when you put it on your own property. You don't, of course, have to worry about the management issues that we have to worry about and got something else here that I can't remember what I was saying. But the question of renewable energy credits, yeah, these are something that is extremely difficult for a very large number of people to grasp. In my solar farm, seven out of the nine of us are perfectly happy with selling their renewable energy credits. But if you sell the renewable energy credits, your electric power has no solar quality to it because you sold that to somebody else. So here's how it works. States that have renewable portfolio standards require their electric utilities to produce a certain amount of their power from various kinds of renewable sources. If they can't do that, they need to buy credits that says somebody else did that. And in our case, when we sell our renewable energy credits, we're saying we produced this power, but we don't care what its character is. So we'll sell that character to you. And I didn't want to sell my credits. I wanted to know that when I'm driving my car, I'm driving on solar energy straight. Well, in the first few years of doing this, we're happy to retain some of our credits and sell the rest of them. So I just paid for my own credits into my solar farm instead of the money that would have come in from somewhere else. Then revision decided that now that's too much trouble and I can't do that anymore, we're going to sell all of them or none of them. And so the majority of our farm wanted to sell all of them. So now I have to buy them from somewhere else. And I've chosen to go with second slide, please. Oh, wait, third slide, please. Give me the third slide. Yeah. So here is what I get from TerraPass for buying my renewable energy credits back from them. And they are a lot cheaper than the ones that we sold. And why is that? Well, these are voluntary credits and the ones we sold are compliance credits. So I guess very messy, but a compliance credit is one that is responsive to the renewable portfolio standard. And the voluntaries are just anybody who wants to buy them for any purpose. So I have to buy a lot more of them. I otherwise would buy in order to make the same money happen. If we go back to the second slide just briefly, this is a page from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which explains all of this arcana. And so I have put the web address of this into the chat and so if you care about the solar quality of your power, it's well to understand this issue. And I'll stop and run over, way over, I'm afraid. All set? All right. All right. Hey, thank you so much. Let me stop my share. That was fantastic. Thank you to all the presenters for going through that in great detail. It sounds like you guys are, you know, having a great time with this. And it's really fun to hear from people who are really taking charge of their carbon footprint and are not waiting for someone else to do something but are doing something about it themselves. So that's great. So I want to make sure we have time for questions. So I'm going to unmute everybody. We have a few questions. I'm going to go ahead and lead off with one question. I think probably for Tom first, is that if I was a consumer wanting to buy into a solar farm, get involved with a solar farm, what do I do first? Where do I go to sort of find a farm or what's my first step? Well, there's a few different steps you could take. And I'm assuming the question is coming from a main resident. So, you know, the first thing you can do is obviously go onto the web and search for community solar farm. You'll see a lot of available entries from commercial developers, companies like ours or other businesses that are that are associated with this. And I think once you've started that process, you'll have enough options there to determine is there a provider in a community solar farm that you're interested in. And of course, you could also have conversations with other like-minded people. And you may find that there's a reason why you'd like to consider developing a project. I think everybody who's developed one would tell you it takes a little longer than you think. And it can be complicated, but it's rewarding in other ways too. Can I add a little to that? Yes. According to the Rocky Mountain Institute out there in Colorado, energy sage, which is an aggregator of bids, if you get two or more bids, you're going to save a lot of money. I think they average about $1,000 per project. So it's worth going to energy sage and you can submit a bid to go that way. Or you can also look at all the links that I put there for the main-based solar farm people. Right. And please check out the chat for some great links that David put in there. Okay. Trying to move quickly here. Question from Sarah. Does a community solar member get to consider the location of the project before signing on? I know this is a really important issue for main Audubon and our members. We love solar energy, but we want to make sure it's developed in an environmentally responsible way. So does the consumer get a say in that or have an understanding of that before they get involved? The way revision works, at least they contact landowners to try to lease lands and then they pool subscribers to that particular project. They're doing it on a basis where they just find the land and then they find the people first. So in essence, no. But I know part of the main climate council, Eliza Donoghue, is on the natural lands and forest, whatever the working group is. And part of their... Natural working lands, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Part of the emphasis of that group is that we need to do sustainable farming, preserve our farmland and our forests as we develop solar. And so they have a best... It's on the main Audubon site. The best practice is siding guidelines so that solar developers are not taking advantage of our ample forests and acting more like CMP than good solar farmers. And I just put that link in the chat. Thanks, David. Sure. Great. Thanks. So from an anonymous attendee, I'm considering joining a solar farm that will be managed through an LLC. Any feedbacks on issues to consider when joining a solar farm LLC? We're a 5013C, so that's about all of the acronyms I can help you with. Absolutely. The Liability Company. Yeah. So I don't know the difference between the two. Again, ours is non-profit. So like Alan said, we have legal fees and such, but Alan, I don't know if you can answer that. LLC? I don't know the difference either. I know that we are a corporation, but I don't even know what class of corporation. Yeah, maybe I can help a little bit here. So typically projects that are being developed by commercial developers, those projects are all individual LLCs that are referred to as special purpose entities, and they're set up that way that those projects are standalone entities from a reporting and management perspective. So that's a pretty common structure inside the solar industry. Great. Thank you. Question here from Jeff, a couple of questions actually. I'm going to sort of take them one at a time. How much space does an array that produces enough power for the average household take up? Anybody know that? Jeff is concerned. He says he was led to believe at some point that the footprint of solar production would be maybe greater than the energy created. That may have changed now. And so I don't know if there are insights there. David said that his panels were meant to last at least 25 years. And is that the standard these days, or what are people seeing there? Well, let me answer the question about the panels active life. So what you're seeing now from manufacturers is warranties that extend for the 25-year period. Typically the panels are degrading at about a half a percent per year. So that means by the time you get to the 25th year, you're producing somewhere around 87 and a half percent of the nameplate capacity of the panel from when it was originally manufactured. So almost 90 percent after 25 years is pretty amazing. So projects, you know, projects useful lives are in that 35 to 40 year range. It's a very long production cycle for these types of projects. Now the footprint is changing pretty dramatically. Eight years ago, you were hard pressed to find panels that would support 235 watts of production. Those same panels today are now over 400 watts of production. So they've almost doubled in an eight year period. So we're taking up a lot less space each year as the panels become more efficient. And generally, for most people, you're really trying to put solar projects onto land that it doesn't have another useful purpose if you can. It may be compromised in some fashion. So it could be ground field. You may have it be adjacent to an active farm, but it's an area that's not really suitable for active farming now. So where you place the projects is as important as anything in this process. Alyssa, were you trying to say something? I thought you were raising your hand in there. Great. Yeah. And I know that Maynotabong, you know, strongly supports panels on brown fields or capped landfills or gravel pits or around airports, other areas that aren't being used in an inappropriate way. So there's lots of land to go there. Gina has a question about the future of wrecks. Do you all have insight on how renewable energy credits, what the future, their future looks like, or speculation? I don't have any special insight, but I will say that Maine has recently doubled its renewable portfolio standard, which will make wreck purchases even more costly or remunerative, depending on your point of view, as we go forward to the foreseeable future. And as we all know, the catastrophe of climate change is going to get worse before it gets better. And so I see no reason why wrecks will go away. Their value does fluctuate a lot. The value that we got this year in our farm was more than twice as much as it was last year. And a few years previous to that, it had been higher even than it is now. So it bounces around a lot, but I don't see it going away. Great. Thank you. Are there any other questions? I see we're at time here. I see that Sue has asked a question. What is the area needed for a farm? And I will say that the main idle farm is actually visible from 295. If you're going up on 295 between Portland and Augusta, it's right there on the right just after the Freeport exit, right? So you can see the area firsthand for yourself. And you can also see what type of land it is on. It is not farmable. It is, you know, it's something that, I mean, the land is owned by one of our members and it was out of use before we put the solar panel on. Great. Well, we did have one final question about David's Kia, but I think maybe we should leave that. We have an upcoming presentation on September 8th about transportation and issues with how to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector, where we'll have some experts on electric vehicles from Mitsubishi and from Revision. So I encourage you to join that discussion where we'll talk about cars. And for all the future presentations coming up, these are every two weeks through September. Please go to mainautobahn.org slash energy to register. We've got a great slate coming up. So I want to really thank everybody for joining today. Tom, thank you very much. Alan and Alyssa, thank you. And David, thank you very much. For folks who joined in late or whatever, this was recorded and we'll be putting it online very soon. And again, thanks for joining Mainautobahn's Climate Spotlight. Stay cool, everybody, and have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Thank you, Nick.