 Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Dan Versette, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thanks for making time to join us today for the first of a three-part online briefing mini-series about rural communities, climate, and COVID-19 recovery. Our panelists today will provide an update on on-bill financing programs for home energy efficiency improvement. Tomorrow and Thursday, panels will look at the impacts of the pandemic on the biofuels industry and the communities that help support and then the dual threat of natural disasters during the time of a major public health crisis. Be sure to visit www.esi.org to register for the entire mini-series, but if you miss one live, you'll be able to find an archived webcast and presentation materials on the website, and written summaries will also be available. Over our decades-long history, ESI has long put a special emphasis on understanding the impacts of climate change on rural areas as well as the solutions that we see taking root in making a positive difference. According to the census, about 97% of the land mass of the United States is rural, but only about one in five Americans live there. Rural areas are defined literally by distance, distance from urban centers, distance between neighbors, and long expanses with little to zero human habitation. Rural areas also have certain characteristics that have drawn our attention. A lot of our agriculture production comes from areas with relatively sparse population density. Urbanization has decreased the percentage of the US population that lives in rural areas. Rural families pay on average about 40% more for energy compared to their urban counterparts. And while there are differences by region in general, rural households have a lower medium income, although that does not necessarily equate to more families in poverty. These characteristics mean that climate change affects rural areas differently than cities, whether that involves the type or frequency of natural disasters, or the sensitivity of families to more expensive energy. All of that is compounded and not really in any good ways by a present situation. The big stories of coronavirus COVID-19 so far have mainly featured urban areas, Seattle, New York City, metropolitan Washington, D.C. But as the pandemic spreads, the hot spots are increasingly in rural areas. Just this morning, if you check current data from state and local health officials, you see rising, actually accelerating caseloads in Iowa, South Carolina, West Texas, Arkansas, and other rural parts of the country. I make no claim to be a public health expert or epidemiologist, but I'm still very concerned for our friends and neighbors who live in these areas. On top of that, we're about to hit our summer stride, which brings with it extreme heat and humidity, hurricanes, and other forms of severe weather. To us at EESI, all this means we need to take some time to raise awareness of how these issues, mainly climate change and COVID-19, are currently affecting rural areas. And importantly, what rural communities are doing in response to mitigate and adapt to these increased risks. Tomorrow afternoon, we will look at the bioeconomy, which supports many rural communities and produces products like biofuels that are better for the environment and people than fossil fuels. And on Thursday, we will convene a panel to look at severe flooding. Again, please visit www.esa.org to register for the complete online briefing series. But today, we welcome, we start by welcoming our friends from the world of cooperative businesses to share an update on what their members are doing to help rural families lower their utility bills, make their homes more energy efficient, healthy, and comfortable, and resilient. A cooperative business, or co-op for short, is a company owned and operated by the people who use its products and services. A great number of rural households rely on co-op utilities for electricity, as well as clean energy program offerings. That's mainly the focus today, on-bill financing programs to help make affordable capital more accessible to rural customers for cost-effective energy efficiency projects. For almost a decade, EESI supported co-ops in development and implementation of on-bill financing, which very briefly involves a low-cost loan made available by the utility and repaid as a line item on the customer utility bill. One final bit of logistics before we get started. Because we're online today, I cannot call on you if you have a question. So please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. If you prefer, you can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org. We will draw from your questions submissions after we hear from our panelists. And now without further ado, our first two panelists are Rob Artis and Jay Kirby. Rob is the President and Chief Executive Officer for Santee Electric Cooperative Inc. Headquartered in King Street, South Carolina. As a proud native of his area, he oversees planning, organizing, and directing the day-to-day operations of the cooperatives. Santee Electric provides power to nearly 45,000 accounts in Clarendon, Florence, Georgetown, and Williamsburg counties. James W. Kirby Jr. is Vice President of Public Affairs for Santee Electric Cooperatives. Jay has more than 30 years of experience with residential energy efficiency and commercial energy management. Jay holds certifications through the Building Performance Institute as a building analyst professional, envelope professional, and manufactured home professional. And all of that means he knows a lot about energy efficiency in people's homes. Jay, Rob, or actually I should say Rob Jay, thank you so much for joining us today. I really look forward to your presentations. Well thank you, Dan, and good afternoon everybody. We're delighted to have an opportunity to talk to everybody about what the program that we have here at Santee Electric. We've got, in addition to the 45,000 accounts that we have, we have about 36,000 members at Santee Electric. That's because we have a lot of farm accounts, a lot of folks have multiple accounts. One interesting thing since we're going to be talking about people's power bills, one interesting thing to note is that we are in the part of the United States where most folks try to heat their homes with electric heat. Because of that, that makes Santee Electric a winter peaking cooperative. A lot of utilities have a summer peak. We do have a summer peak, but our predominant peak is the winter peak because we have so many people heating with heat pumps and electric resistive heating. And Jay will explain a little bit about how that that causes a problem and what we do to try to help those folks. I've been at Santee Electric for nearly five years, but I've been in the co-op business for about 20 years. And when I first came to Santee Electric, I came here from a co-op that did not have a help my house program. It was another South Carolina co-op. So one of the first things I wanted to do when I got here was sit down and talk to Jay. And I said, Jay, obviously the co-ops all had this choice in South Carolina about back around 2010 whether or not to get involved in to help my house program. And I wanted to know how it was that Santee Electric got involved in this. And Jay said, Rob, I've been talking to people for a long time about what we could do to help them with their power bills. And I would go to them and tell them about the things that they needed to fix in their homes. And it just got to the point where I really got tired of telling people that I don't have another way to help you. And so when this help my house pilot program came along, Jay and Santee Electric really embraced this as an opportunity to help folks that may not have the money to make these major fixes to their homes, but to help them to be able to finance those projects and do things that were absolutely necessary. And so they've been able to do a tremendous amount of great work here at Santee Electric. So but I knew that I could do this presentation without an expert like Jay. And so my my real honor is for an opportunity to toss things over to Jay. So Jay, why don't you tell these folks about the wonderful program that you started here at Santee Electric. Thank you, Rob. Let me put a powerful here. There we go. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'd just like to share with you a little about our program called Help My House. This way allows us a way to help improve energy efficiency in existing home using own bill financing. Some quick basics on Help My House. It's a very convenient program. And it allows own bill repayment. In 2010, the South Carolina Legislator passed a law that allowed utilities in South Carolina to provide own bill financing. And it also improves comfort and energy savings for our members. And the program also provides consistent quality. We use trained, qualified, BPI contractors, and BPI's Building Performance Institute, and the co-ops, anti-electric managers, to quality assurance and quality control. And we do this by providing a book-in audit. So we do a comprehensive audit on the front end of the program to find out how much air infiltration the house has and how leaky the ductwork is. And then if the house decides to go through the program, the contractor does the work. And once he finishes, we send in a third-party auditor to do an audit on the back end. And on the back end, they do a blower door test to see how much infiltration has been reduced in the building envelope and also duct leakage reduction. And we require duct leakage to be less than 5%. So we thrive on that quality assurance. Our members love that we have somebody on the back end checking behind them and looking out for it. We do affordable financing. We have a 4% low-interest loan that's tied to the meter. It's not tied to the actual member itself. And if the home sells, the loan transfers to the new homeowner. So they kind of have two options there. Either they can settle the loan at closing or it can transfer to the new homeowner. We've seen that work both ways. And the great part about it is, like Rob mentioned earlier, when we did audits on homes, people typically didn't have the money to make these improvements. So the help my house allows them to do with no money down, no credit checks required. The only credit checks we do is with the cooperative. And we have a very liberal policy there. They can only have one disconnect in a 12-month period. So they can be late every month. And what you find with a lot of homes that have high energy use, they're just not able to pay those bills. And so this kind of helps them get back on track. But with help my house, we're looking at fast payback improvements. So we're trying to pick the low-hanging fruit. We want to make sure we seal and insulate the home and the ductwork, replace electric furnaces with heat pumps. And like we mentioned earlier, a lot of our housing stock is manufactured housing. So probably roughly 30% of our housing stock is in manufactured homes. And as we know, most manufactured homes come with electric furnaces with electric resistant heat, which can cause drive-up bills for our members in the wintertime. So this gives us the opportunity to change those out to high efficiency heat pumps and help our members save there. And it also helps the cooperative with its heat demand savings. And we also want to repair and replace older heat pumps. So how do we get started and help my house? Like Rob mentioned earlier, back with the economic downturn in 2009, 2010, we noticed a lot of our members suffering, having trouble to pay bills. When the economy went down, I think it was another virus back at that time. So we reached out to our G&T, which is Central Electric Co-op, and our statewide Electric Co-op is in South Carolina. So we wanted to try to develop a program that would be able to help our members save money and give them the opportunity to borrow money with no money down to make these improvements to their home. So we started a pilot in 2011 to kind of test this program model of help my house. And we had eight of the 20 cooperatives in the state, including us, that participated and we weatherized 125 homes. And for the next year, I think it was 2012, we monitored the energy use of those 125 homes and we were excited to find that we reduced the energy use by more than 30% in those homes. Some fared better, higher than 30%, some maybe a little bit less, but 30% was around the average then. So we saved participants more than $200 a year after the loan payments. And we found in some cases, we've saved members more than $200 a month. So homes that were in extremely poor condition during the peak winter months and peak summer months, we saved them upwards of $200. The homeowners were, members were immediately more comfortable in their home. And all these participants were surveyed at the end of the program. And we also had a lot of happy homeowners and happy members, which makes us happy. But 96% of them were satisfied or more satisfied with their co-op and 90% as comfort has improved in their home and 90% was satisfied with the post retrofit electric bill. So we were excited about that. So SanctiElectric decided to participate in that program. And to date, this is a little bit about our numbers. We weatherized 289 homes to date. We mainly started off using our own funds and red leg funding. So we've loaned out so far about $2.8 million. And our average loan amount runs around $9900. And the part we're most excited about is our loan default rate, which right now is still at 0%. So we've had some of these homes that's been into bankruptcy. Our members had trouble or either the homeowners passed away and, you know, the home sat dormant for a while. But then when the home was purchased or taken over by a new member, they were able to pick back up on those loan payments. So we're excited about that default rate. We hope it continues. To help my house in 2020, we had kind of ran out of our funding. We exhausted our red leg loan and the funds we had. We were signed up to participate in the Rule Energy Savings Program by RUS. It took us a little bit longer to get in there than we thought. So we kind of went a little dormant through 2018 to kind of the summer of 2019. But happy to say we're up and going now. We've got $13 million for the state of South Carolina with Santee Electric. It's got $2.5 million that's available for its members. And our KW savings is selling the carbon offsets to Duke University. So how has helped my house fare during COVID-19? We had to shut our program down on March the 18th for the safety of our members. But I'm happy to state that we restarted things yesterday. On Monday, June the 15th, we started with limited services right now. We're going to try to limit our interaction with our members. We're mainly going to just focus on HVAC and Duckworth, whether starting to get hot here in South Carolina, hot and muggy. And so we've already had a lot of members calling their units out. So we're going to try to get them satisfied and taken care of. We're going to delay the testing, the bookend audits that I talked about until we think it's safe for everybody. We don't want to be in there with blower doors, moving air and things like that. So we're going to delay that. We'll test at a later date whenever it's safe. So currently we have about 47 homes, members that are on our waiting list, ready to go. And so we started calling them and trying to get an appointment set up. We're still going to go in and do a walk-through type audit. And we've got some COVID-19 release forms where we try to ask our members to make sure that nobody's been sick enough of the household because we don't want to bring harm to our anti-electric employees or any contractors that are going in there. But our contractors are really excited and they're ready to go. They kind of made it through this three-month drought off the PPP plan where they were able and they were still able to do some work on their own. But that's all I have for you today and I'll turn it back over to Dan. Great. Thanks, Jay. And thanks, Rob, for your presentation. And thanks for joining us. And congratulations on a successful program. And it sounds like you have, or you just said that you have a great waiting list ready to go. It's a really impressive program. And I noticed, Jay, one of your slides, you had a photo of a couple folks expecting some energy efficiency measures. And one of them, the one wearing a suit, was Representative Jim Clyburn from South Carolina, who was one of the, I guess you might say, founding members of the House when it comes to the rural energy savings program. And so I just wanted to make sure that he got a shout out. He's been a big supporter of these kinds of programs. If you missed any of what Rob or Jay had to say, just as a reminder, everything will be available and posted online after today. May take a couple days for some of the written summaries to appear, but everything will be there. So visit EESI.org if you missed anything. And now we're going to move to our third panelist. Our third panelist is Kate Latour. Kate is the Director of Government Relations for the National Cooperative Business Association, CLUSA International, and has been with the organization since February of last year. Before joining NCBA CLUSA, she worked for United States Senator Tammy Baldwin working on economic policy issues. She received her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. And I didn't know this, is currently pursuing a master's degree in government at Johns Hopkins. And Kate, thank you for taking some time away from your work at NCBA CLUSA and your summer studies. Yes. Hopefully enjoying a little bit of a break from from school for the summer. But thanks so much. I really look forward to your presentation. Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. Let me go ahead and share my screen. There we go. So I thought it might be helpful first, just to give a little bit of background on NCBA CLUSA for those who may not be familiar, but we are the Apex Trade Association for cooperative businesses across all sectors of the economy. And some of our, you know, association members and different sectors are listed here. We have been around for over 100 years. And in addition to our domestic membership, we are also an international development organization. And so we helped to found the USAID program called Cooperative Development Program. And so not only are we working really hard on making sure the co-op model is being used here in the United States, but also helping to empower people across the world as well. So today, there are about 2 million jobs provided by cooperative businesses. About 12% of people across the world are a member of at least one cooperative business in the US. That number is about one in three people. So just some data here on the contribution that co-ops make to the economy. Really, I think the compelling 75 billion in annual wages and just the higher degrees of reinvestment that co-ops contribute to their local economy. And then I always think the electric cooperatives, statistics and data are so compelling and impressive that they're powering 20 million homes, schools and businesses. So really doing some great work. And I think really to just touch on how we got there for a very short history lesson, agriculture co-ops started in the mid to late 19th century from Northern European farmers who were familiar with this model before they came to the United States and wanted to remain competitive in the marketplace as things were changing. So they organized, raised public awareness and were successful in advocating for policy change that led to greater technical assistance and access to finance and other support primarily through the US Department of Agriculture. And in the mid 1930s, policymakers again looked to that co-op model to solve the latest challenges when only 10% of rural households at the time had access to reliable electricity. Farmers advocated and policymakers agreed that using the co-op model would be a way to solve this challenge. So through executive action and later codified through legislation, the rural electrification administration was established and within about 20 years, more than 90% of households had electricity. So I think really the electric co-ops have been so integral, especially in rural America where private investor owned companies are providing utilities that they have stepped up in a really big way. So co-ops, like I said, they exist to meet needs in communities that private markets and government services aren't meeting. So as a result of being owned and controlled by the people who use the service, co-ops have a longer lifespan than non-cooperative businesses. And with the security of knowing that they're so deeply rooted in the community, they're more likely to spur further economic development. And then I think the really fine point on co-operative ownership is as a co-op owner, any money that is not reinvested into the co-op for future use, research and development and advancement, is returned to the folks who own and control the business. So I think there are so many examples of co-ops investing in their members of in community, but I wanted to talk a little bit about USDA's rural energy savings program. And in doing so, I also really want to commend EESI on their terrific support and that they provide to electric co-ops and municipalities looking to participate in this program and helping them to apply for those funds. So to set up the need for a program like REST just to really reiterate the point that Dan made earlier, rural Americans face significantly and disproportionately higher energy costs. The rural households spend about 40% more of their income on energy bills than their non-rural counterparts. So I think these, it's important to note as well that the disproportionate effects are really significant on elderly and low income households, even more so in rural communities. So a program like REST which covers the upfront costs of energy efficiency improvements is a critical lifeline. You know, I think Jay mentioned that the average loan amount was about $9,900 and that is an expense that most people would have a really hard time coming up with at the front end on their own. So this innovative financing mechanism is really important. Also I think a really important detail is that the co-op manages the project from start to finish and again no out-of-pocket investments at the front end and then the being tied to the home and where the investment is rather than the individual are all really important points of this program. And I won't repeat Jay and Jay's presentation on how much it can improve people's energy bills and as well as for the co-op. I think a really demonstrating the success of the program is how satisfied people are with their co-op and as a result are more likely to stay in their homes and be a part of the local workforce. So in other words, a dissatisfaction in their home or inability to afford the utilities is not driving people to look elsewhere for work or their general livelihoods. It sounds obvious but I think it's worth pointing out that when people spend less on their energy bills they have more money in their pockets and they can either invest in themselves for their retirement or circulate that money back into their local economy. With more discretionary income to spend elsewhere, other small businesses are also supported and able to maintain or even grow their workforce. So REST has really shown that these investments covered especially on the front end who for people who otherwise may not be able to afford it are good for the households for the co-op for the economy and of course as energy efficient improvements they are also good for the environment. Given kind of the moment that we're in I do just want to touch on how co-ops can and should be used in kind of a post COVID economy. I think we have seen very clearly that there are disproportionate impacts both in health and economic aspects that really as a nation we need to look closely at at those disparities and how co-ops can really help to build a more equitable inclusive and sustainable economy. They like I mentioned co-ops reinvest their local dollars at higher rates because they're locally driven and because of that fact they're also more resilient in economic downturns and I think again most importantly the profits are driven by serving their members rather than being the main goal. So one example of co-ops kind of in this post COVID economy is looking at succession plans for otherwise healthy businesses and the in a lot of communities especially rural where there are not a lot of buyers rather than risking that business either closing their doors or being sold to kind of a big box company the employees the consumers and the producers who have helped generate that business's success over the years are really viable buyers they pay fair market value for the business so the current owner can retire knowing that she or he made the money that they deserve on that business and then also it's just again really deeply rooted in the community so it will continue to serve those provide those goods and services that communities depend upon and I think you know the the close relation to electric co-ops here is is making sure that there are jobs that are continuing to thrive in rural communities and the electric co-ops can continue to provide utility to those businesses and the homes of the workers who are employed there. I think there's really a lot of opportunity in various sectors and some of the sectors that we're focusing most specifically on are kind of the construction the heating and air conditioning sectors as well as child care and home care providers and then also food and grocery stores where we've seen a few examples already where kind of mom and pop are ready to close the business or no longer be running the business and rather than closing the doors entirely sell it to either the consumers in the community or to the workers who are employed there. I think housing is a really important sector as well. Jay mentioned the the manufactured housing community and housing is of course one of the main ways in our country that people generate wealth and asset building and in manufactured homes which are traditionally low-income residents they're actually paying rent for the land on which their their home exists and so instead actually there's been a growing presence through organizations like Rock USA to help those residents purchase the land and become a resident-owned community just like in your utility bills and other sectors that often results in lower monthly payments and also to I think the ownership stake really instigates a point of pride and just getting to that quality of life again can really make vast improvements and then last but not least you know I think the bridging the rural and the rural divide has never been more important especially as we are working from home and for really an unclear amount of time making sure that broadband investments can continue to help rural Americans to bridge that gap in telehealth services distance learning and generally just capturing economic potential whatever their entrepreneurial endeavors are we've seen in the past three months that having access to internet is really critical and there are I think about 100 electric co-ops that have already innovated and expanded their services to their members to include broadband which again you know that's I think a direct result of the electric co-ops being driven by the needs of their members not by the interests of shareholders and not seeking profit just to seek profit but rather to really make sure that the co-op is serving the community and can really maintain that high quality of life so I know I'm running out of time but I just want to end kind of where I started to say that co-ops have been a really integral part of solving rural challenges and now I think is no different there are you know like I said without access to reliable internet where we risk really increasing that that growing gap in health outcomes capturing economic opportunity and educational achievement so there are a few examples that co-ops can really help to reshape our society and especially to create a more stable and sustainable economy but I want to be sure to stay on topic here so like that I will turn it back over to Dan thank you Kate I turn my video on and off double tap so fix that thank you so much for your great presentation and just so you know we would have let you go on a couple extra minutes if you wanted to but now we have extra time for questions so just as a reminder if you would like to ask our panelists the questions there are two ways you can do that the first is by following us on twitter at EESI online the second is to send us an email at or excuse me EESI at EESI.org and we already are getting questions in so if you have one you would like to ask our panelists I suggest that you do that and we'll do our best to get to them but we're going to start the Q&A and while I miss not being able to do these briefings in person one of the things that we've been experimenting with since we've been online is this co-moderating format and so it's always fun to invite one of my EESI colleagues into the briefing to help with the Q&A portion and when it comes to on-bill financing there aren't that many people who are better equipped to lead a Q&A session than my colleague John Michael Cross he is actually based in St. Paul Minnesota not here in Washington so we have our world headquarters in Washington but then we have our satellite office in Minnesota and John Michael leads that for us and has been working with EESI on bill financing programs and dozens of cooperatives and municipal utilities around the country so John Michael I'll turn it over to you to get started with Q&A thanks. Thanks Ann hi everybody glad to be here Jay, Rob, Kate thanks for great presentations and for especially for touching on how COVID-19 is impacting things on everybody's mind so and Jay you spoke about how to help my house program is adapting to the virus and I was wondering Rob could you talk a little bit about how the situation is impacting the co-op more broadly and how you all are responding to this incredible challenge? Sure John Michael I'd be glad to this has obviously been a big a big deal for all of us you know we know that there are some folks out there who have either lost their jobs or have had you know at least a reduction in the income that they see and so it makes it a little bit tougher for them to pay their power bills. One of the things that the governor of South Carolina did very early on was made a request to all of the providers the investor on utilities and the co-ops in general you know if we could suspend disconnects for non-payment for this period of time while we're asking a lot of folks to shelter in place at home we need you to do that. That's made things kind of interesting for CNT Electric for the past three months whenever folks don't pay their power bill we have not you know we haven't turned anybody's power off. We've got a very successful prepay electricity program here we we've worked really hard to take a lot of the emotion out of being disconnected for non-payment at CNT Electric because our prepay program allows folks to buy ten dollars worth of electricity at a time twenty dollars worth fifty dollars worth sometimes five dollars worth so that you know when you when you get cut off for non-payment it's no longer oh gosh where am I gonna come up with five hundred dollars to get my lights turned back on for them having your power turned off is about like someone else running out of milk well I ran out of milk I need to go buy a little bit more milk you know that that's that's kind of the way they looked at electricity ran out of electricity let me go buy ten dollars worth of electricity that works fine as long as we can keep sending them that signal that hey you've used up the the amount that you paid the problem that you run into is with these past three months where we haven't disconnected for non-payment you have folks that are used to dealing with ten dollars worth of electricity at a time or twenty now having hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars of past due balances because we've taken that stimulus away that says you've used up your money so we're working pretty hard with those folks we've definitely had to make a lot of arrangements with people but it's it's definitely been a very difficult time because we've got three thousand accounts that are used to dealing with very small amounts of money and now those folks have gotten some pretty big uh some pretty big past due balances of course we've had to separate our employees we have six construction crews we keep those folks separated from each other so if you do have an infection on one crew it's not going to contaminate the entire company we've asked we've had to shut our lobbies down that's one thing that co-ops pride themselves on is an additional level of member service and right now we're not letting anyone come into our building we're doing all of our business through the drive-thru or through our mobile apps and things like that so we've had to adapt quite a bit and of course we've had a whole lot of meetings and staff meetings and board meetings and everything else on all of these uh wonderful uh bits of technology like zoom and uh webex so uh but we've been adapting and i've been very proud of our team excellent great yeah uh always hard to keep the zoom gloom at bay a little bit but uh i don't think this uh webinar is contributing that in the slightest thank you uh jay the help my house program design particularly around eligibility requirements that seem to make energy upgrades possible for more of santee's membership why was that important for you and how has that broader accessibility played out in practice and then for kate what are some of the other steps that co-ops are taking to build a more inclusive economy thank you john michael um you know as a utility we've had programs in the past typically they're tight rebate type programs um then we've had loan programs where you know you had higher interest on loans and you had to do credit checks so we felt like we were missing a large part of our membership um you know when we have we have a large part of our membership that is kind of at at poverty level or below so we wanted to come up with a program that we could reach out and really help those people in and help my house and the rest program is going to help us meet those goals so out of those 289 homes we've been able to reach a large portion of that population of membership and really help the ones with the high usage but you know it's there and it's available for everybody so we're really happy with the program and the way it's going i can happen just on kind of the co-op question more broadly um i think we have seen that's that's the nature of co-ops to increase participation and bring people into the fold and um you know especially on kind of the worker and housing side thinking of people who may not be able to afford those big expenses of let's say starting a business on your own whereas if you are in a co-op um it's it's that a little bit more accessible buy-in where you still have that ownership stake in the business um i think looking at electric co-ops um and and energy energy issues increasing participation is i think critical um to building an inclusive economy looking at some of the kind of other programs um beyond on-bill financing and beyond the rest which are incredibly important um but also looking at electric vehicle charging stations um and that is um you know a new opportunity and if rural um rural electric co-ops are supporting that investment um it's just a new way for rural communities to participate in the in the energy economy um i also love the example um from bark electric they launched a community solar project um in which you know was supports housing uh or homes rather um as well as businesses but um importantly also the schools um and really worked on some innovative financing to make sure that worked for the school districts but um not only did that help uh they implemented broadband but the in the solar capacity um not only is it helping the energy efficiency of the school buildings they also use it as a STEM program and an opportunity for kids to learn about solar solar energy so um i think just the different way that that co-ops um they're really nimble and able to innovate and make sure that they're they're increasing participation for folks excellent great uh dan i think you had a question i do actually it's not just my question we're getting questions from our audience so i'm going to ask a question from someone who just emailed us um and as a reminder if you have a question and you'd like to email us the email address to use it is esi at esi.org you can also follow us on twitter at esi online this question has to do with resp and that's come up a couple times kate just mentioned that jay included in his presentation uh rural energy savings program pro administered by the u.s department of agriculture's rural utility service the question is what is the current funding available for resp uh and uh there's a sort of a corollary question to that which is uh the program called eclipse which is the energy efficiency clean loan program i think correct john michael that i think that's right eclipse we'll go with that um someone can google it uh and hit me up in the chat but um whenever i want to sort of talk a little bit about i'd like to hear the answer about resp and sort of what's available because that's an ongoing program it helps capitalize help my house way back but it's still a thing and it's still helping cooperatives and then jay and rob um i would really be interested in hearing your opinion about sort of the importance of resp to help my house at santi electric and sort of where you would be without it and it seems like it's a really critical program uh in the program's history or your program's history and i was wondering if after um we sort of get the number out there you'd be willing to comment on that so i can touch just on the number side of it a little bit the most recent um fiscal year appropriated 12 million dollars um for resp to leverage that money for resp loans um to date my latest records have over 80 million have been invested um in in program in resp programs um and i believe that covers just over 20 different rural utilities and just over uh actually i believe 14 states by my last count and that may not seem like a lot of money but we're talking about pretty significant leverage so 12 million dollars goes pretty far tens of millions of dollars um jay um what does resp mean to your program how important has it been i think resp is just gonna allow us to reach a lot more of our members like i mentioned earlier my presentation you know we had to use our own funds which are limited um and i'll say we had to reach out and do a red leg loan i think for the second one so now having access to 2.5 million that we can plan better and it gives our contract contractors more security and a better feeling knowing that you're not always trouble with running out of fun so we think we'll be able to reach out and touch and change the quality of life for a lot more of our members with that back to you john michael uh great uh kate how can uh electric co-ops potentially work with other types of co-ops ncba represents all kinds of maybe finance and agriculture in particular to help pursue energy efficiency savings or even renewable energy yeah and this is um already happening happening quite a bit co-ops operate on seven principles six of which is co-ops supporting co-ops um so it's kind of ingrained in in the nature of all cooperative businesses um there has been i think a lot of support from electric co-ops and um farm credit financing to you know continue to support co-op development um and make opportunities more accessible um and one of those things especially in rural communities is making sure you can afford utilities um so i think you know resp and and just the ways in which even outside of the program that electric co-ops are willing to kind of again meet the needs of their members whatever those needs are um i think um sorry the you know in the renewable energy space it really is holistic i think the electric co-ops right now we're seeing our farmers and farmer co-ops really experiencing a hard time and again making sure that um the electric co-ops are adapting to make sure that businesses can stay open um and i think beyond the immediate supply chain it again affects kind of the holistic community and um you know if you don't have the money to pay your bills then you're not likely to go out to eat at a restaurant or shop at the you know your local store um and so really i think it is um just the way in which electric co-ops um are they're ingrained um and making these communities thrive and actually there is one other i was just thinking of the the state associations and jay mentioned that um i think the state associations are also incredibly important um in their work many of them are economic developers and co-op developers in addition to kind of the member services um that associations kind of stick to tried and true um there is in north dakota they are working um to solve food insecurity issues and using the co-op model as a way to solve that and um uh you know there is from from helping with food distribution challenges and again that kind of hyper local focus where rather than where big box stores it's sometimes a little unclear where their food comes from um the food co-ops and food local food distribution make sure that you're supporting local farmers and um really kind of double down on the local economy um we have another question um that came in from um by email and this one probably is for you jay um the question has that you mentioned that you're sort of the average loan amount um that that santi electric cooperative provides um how long do customers have to repay that loan what is the repayment period for um a loan of that size is there a maximum is there a minimum is there an average right um yeah we can loan anywhere from you know a thousand to fifteen thousand dollars um and it's four percent interest again and we can go to term up to ten years so that is um a good time to spread that loan over yeah and jay when i introduced you i listed your certifications and said that you know a lot about energy efficiency i have just a follow-up when you're talking about loan amounts of that range and you're talking about a repayment period of that amount of time what is it about energy efficiency when you bundle those kinds of improvements when you do duck sealing air sealing uh heat pump replacement what how does it work in terms of the the the savings they compound but when you talk to customers about energy efficiency what do you tell them about adding those kinds of individual measures together to get more savings yeah you know we again we do the audit on the front end so we we look at their past energy usage we don't want to do anything to jeopardize our members and put them in any kind of financial hardship so we take a long hard look at that um you know we know that try to pick the measures that are going to give them the best payback so you know typically you know around a ten thousand dollar loan the payment's going to be about a hundred dollars a month extra and so in your your peak winter months and your peak summer months you can you can tend to save that amount you know of course in the shoulder months when you're not using a lot of power you know we let them know that their payment can be higher or their bill can be higher by the amount of that paper so we just want to make sure they know what they're getting into and and again we don't want to cause them any kind of hardship we only want to try to help thanks Jay John Michael back to you great um so a uh uh one of the point people at USDA on the rural energy savings program turned out his joint is watching us today and he sent me an email let me know that it's he clip is the energy efficiency and conservation loan program and so Bob thank you for always keeping me straight and then also want to mention that the rest funds available for this current fiscal year are 178 million of zero interest loan to rural utilities my understanding is that there's still a good good deal of that available ready to to move out the door my next question for Robin Jay is I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your community solar program and how the goals of that program pair with help my house Jay I'll I'll start off with that one and then you correct me when I get something wrong um I think the co-ops in South Carolina in general decided to work together to establish a community solar program through our generation and transmission cooperative so uh each each co-op decided that they would aim for around 250kw of uh of community solar somewhere in their system santi-electrics is spread out over two sites one near our headquarters that is already constructed it's 130kw and then another one near one of our district offices that'll be 120kw the the idea behind community solar we've got lots of homeowners who have put up solar on the roof or in their yards or whatever the case may be some of them on adjacent pieces of property and we've got rates and riders for uh for folks who uh who have installed their own solar but the truth is a lot of times there's a lot of upfront expense with that and so this kind of dovetails into the same help my house issues what do you do for the folks who can't come up with that large amount of money up front or who don't necessarily have the tax liability to appreciate the tax credits that you get because of installing uh solar so for those folks the ones who just can't lay out a huge amount of money to start with or who don't need a huge tax write-off we've got this community solar program where basically rather than you putting something on your roof or putting something in your yard we've got a small-scale solar farm here at you know somewhere that's tied directly into santi-electrics territory and uh by you buying into it and i i mean jay will get the dollar figures right i won't but uh you know you're talking about 50 bucks once up front and then maybe 10 a month after that and then you get whatever energy that your panel generates and so you can look in a inside the fence and you know there's 130 panels and one of those panels is mine and whatever it's generating is is what i'm getting another great thing about doing it that way is we can make sure that we put it near the middle of the system grid you know a lot of times folks will build a big community solar farm and they'll build it where they have lots of wide open spaces but if that doesn't happen to be near our existing bulk power system it might cost them more to get their energy generated from you know from their location back to the grid then they spent just building the solar farm so by us doing it we can put it in a place where it's efficient to get it back to the grid but uh jay why don't you uh correct those numbers that I tried to guess at and tell them exactly how much it is to participate in a block of our community solar yeah we we sell it in one kw blocks like Rob mentioned it's $50 upfront fee that's kind of to keep people from jumping in and jumping out of the program it's uh $14 a month per block and they get 10 set per kilowatt hour back for every kw uh that block generates you're pretty much right on there uh that's cool the community solar projects are so they're so great um that's such a great innovation and so congratulations on your work on that um we are getting close but i think we have time for two more so i've got one for kate and then i think john michael has one to wrap us up with uh kate my question for you is um we've talked a lot about sort of the impacts of coronavirus of COVID-19 um in your base in washington with the esi in washington up till now there's been a lot of discussion about sort of how we what kind of fiscal measures what kind of policy measures we sort of put in place to um help with the recovery effort but there are increasing conversations about what an economic stimulus sort of a post COVID-19 stimulus might look like do you have any did ncba clusa have any stimulus priorities that would encourage this kind of these kinds of programs yeah i think i'm going to take that question back up just one step in first um thank you sda for their support throughout this um i think that given their extensive history with co-ops they have been critical um in making sure that other agencies like the small business administration who are less familiar with the cooperative model um and how to finance and how to loan uh how to lend money um to that structure um it has been a lifeline to the entire business model um in that vein i think we are really supporting a lot of the asks of our members um in things like a simplified forgiveness for the paycheck protection program and we're also making sure that you know in any of these future programs that co-ops are eligible um we saw kind of in the immediate right after cares um a great deal of uncertainty of which types of co-ops are eligible we're still fighting that housing co-ops um while they are um actively owned and operated by the owners who live there um there's uncertainty in their eligibility for things like the paycheck protection program um and then i think really looking at preserving those businesses through employee and consumer buyouts um helping similar types of businesses form purchasing cooperatives to reduce the overhead think about like your favorite line of restaurants along one of the corridors in dc um if they would come together to form a co-op reduce those overhead expenses um in a sector that already runs really tight bottom lines that could help just even a little bit um and i think really using this as an opportunity to kind of reshape um how we view ownership and the value of ownership from things like your homes your businesses the stores you shop at um and actually even your data um i know it's something familiar in farming sector the farming sector probably more broadly than others but thinking about the data that you produce as a consumer or the data that you produce as a patient um i use the example of of 23 and me getting um significant profits when creating a drug off of the dna that was submitted through their customers well what if the customers who submitted that dna that resulted in the drug received that product so really just kind of um looking to increase ownership um and the average person's ownership in in society um and really kind of strengthen that foundation through greater economic security great thanks and john michael i think you get the last question great uh and i just want to mention that i'm doing my best to support the the brewing cooperative here in the twin city shout out to fair state um so uh just want to wrap up uh and thanks again for everything today and for the questions that we didn't get to uh we'll we'll pass those along to our speakers by email so we can get uh people some written responses back quickly but for my last question to wrap us up is prime for jay and rob what advice would you give to another co-op retailer you're looking to start out on the the on-bill financing path you want me to tag down rub i do because you did it at santi electric and all i got to do is watch you uh after you'd already set it up okay yeah i would highly um recommend that they look at the risk program you know we've seen co-ops a lot of times offer just loan programs for heat pump replacements and they go in and change just the unit out sometimes they don't focus in on dot work and other issues at the house and it really doesn't solve the members problem you know it helps um i call it waste and electricity efficiently then you know they may have a higher seer unit but if you don't look at the house as a whole system i think you're missing that so i would urge them to reach out the rest and look at the loans and you know whether it's the tariff model like pays or help my house or something i think they're all valuable models and things to look at and consider great well we are just about up to our limit and um let me just thank rob j kate for your participation today excellent presentations lots of insight and um thanks for sharing your experience and thanks for doing it at a at a stressful time um and taking j and rob in your case taking time away from serving your members and kate um serving all of the members of ncba closer so thanks a lot thank you john michael for joining me today um just a couple last things before we wrap up the first is um everything that you just heard and saw will be available at esi.org some of it very soon some of it a little bit i'll take a couple days for us to get our written summaries up there but please make sure to visit us online um while you're there uh it would be great if you uh signed up for our newsletter climate change solutions it comes out every other Tuesday and it's a great way to keep track of esi but also keep track of climate policy developments mainly in washington but we also try to feature things like success stories and case studies of on-bill financing programs that john michael and his colleague megal yannis uh work on around the country um and it would mean a lot if you would take a few moments to uh complete our survey um you see that on our screen here um we do read the responses and we do try to improve and we try to come up with um with briefings that uh not just inform policymakers but also um our timely and our um of interest to the general public as well so if you have a moment please fill out the survey and um thanks in advance for doing that um we are one minute past one o'clock it's time to wrap up thank you to armory and sydney and daniel bryan and amber and anna and ellen and bridget and anna excuse me and abby um and of course john michael and megal on the on-bill financing team for all the hard work that went into today we will be back tomorrow i think at two o'clock um to learn about biofuels and the bioeconomy and rural areas and then we'll be back on thursday back at noon eastern time um to learn about rural areas and how they're going to be coping with the threats of flooding while also continuing to deal with the threat of the pandemic so thank you very much i hope everyone has a great rest of your day and um thanks so much for joining us hope to see you back here tomorrow