 No. January 17th. It's been a year. January 17 energy and climate action committee meeting. I will be your host this evening with Lori traveling and we, I believe we'll start with review of the minutes, public comment. And then I'd like to, after those two, maybe we had. Adjust the agenda a little and meet Michael, who I think I don't know is maybe a new member of the group, which is super exciting. But if we get through those two items and then we can give that a little bit of space. That's my proposal. Would you like me to share the minutes share my screen that you're welcome to. Yeah. That sounds great. I'm happy to as well. No, I'm just, I was closing something else out. Sorry. So, I will share. So you should be seeing that now. Actually, these, you know what? That's right. I think the date is wrong at the top. So, I'll adjust that. Sorry about that. So, I'll adjust the date, but I think the minutes themselves are correct. It appears that the next person in line is Lori to do the minutes. And then after that, they looping back around to join. I'm good. Yeah, it's going to take me a second and get booted up here. But yes, I will take care of that. No rush. Thank you. You know what? I'm sorry. I apologize. I just realized this is the wrong set of minutes. Can you just give me 1 second? This was the draft, but I usually edit them. So I'm going to stop sharing a second. I apologize. Just give me 1 minute. No, no, in the interim. I think everyone's had these. You sent out the minutes. I did. And I'm hoping I sent you the right 1. I may not have. Hold on. Just give me 1 second and I will just let me know if this is the set you have. It should be. These were corrected. So this is what you should have received. And if it isn't, then just review these as I scroll. Okay. It looks different because what we received was labeled December 3rd at the very top. Okay, so I accidentally sent you the uncorrected draft. So this is the draft you should have received. So I will repost this and send this, but this is the one you should approve or not. Do you recollect if there are any significant edits? No, it was more just sort of formatting and primarily. Anyone feeling courageous to move to accept the minutes? Yes, I will move to accept the minutes as they are. Do I have a second? I'll second it. Fantastic. Who is that? Sorry. It's me, Don. Don. Don it is. Okay. Okay, so I will need a voice vote. So if you can have yourself unmuted and I think everyone has their cameras on in no particular order to the motion was to approve the minutes. Roof. Aye. Allison. Yes. Selman. Yes. Yes. Michael, is it icing or a saying or I just want to say it properly. It's a thing. Ising. Okay. Ising. I. Breger. Yes. D. Yes. Drucker. Obscene. Okay. And the minutes are approved. Fantastic. I see Lydia and Martha are here. If anyone has a comment. There we go. Stephanie will let you in. Go ahead and unmute. Hello, everyone. Happy New Year. Just wanted to say that I was glad to see the letter to the editor about not eiling your vehicle that was published. And I wondered if that also was sent out as a parent's letter from the schools. I don't think yet, but we're, we're, we're scheming all kinds of ways to send that letter out. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Hi, I'm Lydia Vernon Jones. I'm an Amherst resident. And I just realized that you were having the meeting today. So I didn't get a chance to send you a letter. Issue, but I'll just kind of put my personal. Voice to it. In meeting with the Amherst climate justice alliance and some other local climate groups. We would like, we would love it if your committee would take it upon themselves to review. What will happen if the Jones library bids come in way over. What, what, what the library trustees can afford. And we want to be sure that what is cut out of the library plan is not the green features for the building, which was what the trustees sold the whole plan on was this was the only way. To go with their plan. And we want to be sure that someone calls. Makes it transparent about what's getting cut out of the plan when, when probably the town council will have to figure out how to come up with even more money. We'll just let it be whatever it happens to be whatever they cut out of that. And we see that as a way of falling under your mandate in terms of monitoring the sustainability of town buildings, even though this is kind of a town gown building. And I will send you more about some more specifics about maybe how to find that information from the past and, and how to get get the future plans. And, you know, I know some of you have championed that building and would like to see it be as green as possible. So thank you for the time today. We're bringing that to our attention. Yeah, I think that'd be super helpful to get your letter so we can see when that information becomes available and discuss how we could potentially address that as a group that's very helpful and happy new year to you and Martha. Well, by the way, nice to see you. All right. We have a new person here. Is there any formal thing that happens. If not, Stephanie, I maybe suggest we take some time to introduce ourselves knowing that we've got a 530. We have 2, 3 more topics to hit before 530, but I think it's, you know, for me, this is a human people centered. Group and would be, I'd be remiss to not give Michael some good time here. I was going to suggest actually Jesse that perhaps because this isn't on the agenda, I wasn't sure Michael was going to be attending this meeting. So perhaps you want to just give Michael an opportunity, welcome him, give him an opportunity to introduce himself, but maybe save this either for the end or do a more formal thing at the next meeting, because we do have another new member as well. Who will be joining us as well. I don't, I'm assuming Tony will be at the next meeting also. Yeah, that makes good sense. So, Michael would introduce himself and, but that we would do a fuller kind of meeting with new members when, when both are present. Correct. That makes sense. All right. Hi, Michael. Hi. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, one thanks for the opportunity to join this committee I'm very excited about, you know, spending time with you all and helping kind of town of Amherst in this capacity. I moved to Amherst about three years ago from Phoenix, Arizona. And so I work in the energy efficiency field and energy consulting field for commercial real estate industrial facilities of the likes so heavily involved in the energy sector and renewable energy sector and kind of the private industry. We also do also have experience in government work and stuff like that as well. But my background is in mechanical engineering. I have a graduate degree in energy engineering, and I've spent kind of my whole kind of career college and things like that in in this, in this arena of energy energy efficiency, climate resiliency, and in the in those topics. As I said, I'm originally from Louisville, Kentucky, moved out to Arizona to start for work for the first five years and then moved to Amherst, Massachusetts. My partner is a UMass professor in the energy and sorry in the civil and environmental engineering department. So we moved here for her for her job. And I was lucky enough to continue to have my current position with my company back in Phoenix, Arizona. That's a little bit about me. I could go on but I think that is fantastic. You're frozen, I think, for a second so we're going to ask you to do scores of spreadsheets for us and all the calculations, you have it all figured all out that sounds like a great resource to have in the group. Welcome. Very to Amherst and to the committee and look forward to sort of integrating you and Tony in further at the next meeting. All right. Onward with our agenda updates on pace and transportation that's done and then Stella. You are muted. I would say you couldn't hear my printer go when I had to print something, but that's okay. Stephanie I talked she will be attending the. Massachusetts municipal association. Conference later on this week on Friday and Saturday. Where this is where she actually met up with the previous person she talked to in the department that deals with the new regulations in pace. She has graciously and kindly agreed to scout out another person or the same person in that department and get back to me with. Just some kind of where do we go from here with the department and putting together something hopefully reviving something with the Chamber of Commerce. And, and, and bid. So that's where we are. We should hear more. Next meeting or the meeting after after Stephanie goes to her conference this weekend. And just for the record, it's mass development is who. Yeah. Mass development. Yeah. Just for the record, so it's an MMA conference, but you'll be meeting with mass development. Well, they, there's a trade show and mass development has a booth space and that's how I connected with them last year in the 1st place. In fact, they flagged me down. I was just walking by and they yelled out to me and started talking. So they were kind of way off to the side. I don't think they had a lot of traffic that that morning. So, but I will be seeking them out this time and we'll follow up. Thanks, Don and Stephanie Stella torch passing. Announcement. No, not yet. I don't think I still haven't gotten a chance to talk to Stephanie and I still have. I just did my parental leave paperwork for my like work today. And I said. March 4th through April 29th on that. So obviously dates subject to change and a little unpredictable, but I should be here in February. Likely, and all like that. Anyways. No, so that's great that the letter that's great that the letter went out. So the next things on my list were to call the driving schools and see if they teach about idling and if they don't see if we can talk them into it. And then draft something that contains the letter like we talked about last time. That can go out in parent mailings from the schools. I, I, as I've said before, I don't yet receive parent mailings from the schools. So if anybody wants to save me some Googling and if you if any of you know of like what the newsletters are that go out and who perhaps like compiles those newsletters. It would be useful to have email addresses. I assume it's more than 1 person. I assume there's different people. Sending out kind of. Those fyi emails for different schools. Yeah, Stephanie still, it's typically the. The PTO. Groups that send them out and so. I can, I can help you with that as well. I think we probably just have a standard list of who to send things to. So I can assist you unless Laura has some ideas to. Yeah, I mean, maybe I looked at Steve or Jesse from the. Upper school. I mean, are you guys using this new. The new this year parent square thing. I get I see a yes from Steve. Okay. Um, so Debbie. Debbie Westmoreland skins out a lot of the kind of like general announcements on that. So she would be someone to connect with there. Well, so I think by by next meeting, I'll try to have a. Like a little blurb intro to the letter with the letter, like a little package publicity package. I don't know that we can send. That to the schools and then also try to figure out exactly who. Who will be sending it to whether that's it sounds like maybe Debbie Westmoreland or. Or PTO PTO group emails. From Stephanie. It's PGO and I think and I would also and add the. Victoria and the athletic departments. Right. I think that's a really, really good one that she, she manages the middle score. Just know the up just the high school. I think maybe, yeah. Oh, Jesse, you had talked about Amherst like recreation too. Right. Oh, yes. recipient of this. Yeah, the rec department would be a great one. And that's going to be. I'll just send it to you because I can't remember his name right now. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it was recommended. Sorry. Was recommended before would be the. And rise. Amherst sunrise group. And sort of like a peer to peer. Way with the high school students. That do drive their own vehicles. That's a really good idea. Thanks, Laura. Awesome. So everyone, I think. I'm just thinking of contacts and categories and groups be nice. This went out. Everyone all at once. And. Let's see how we do. And we've got about 36 minutes for. Cop 28. And the solar. Planning education. Series. So I'm going to move it to Laura. Yeah. That, but maybe. 15 minutes. I'm doing my math right. We'll split it down the middle. Yeah. I probably won't need that much time. So, but. Yeah. Happy to be back. Sorry. I've been gone for quite a while. Traveling for a cop. And then traveling for personal reasons as well. So I'm good to see everybody. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to move it to Laura. That was fun to read in the minutes. Yeah. So. I mean, I think what. I, so I did attend to cop. I was at the actual cop. Then you for two days out of the two weeks. So I have a very narrow personal. Takeaways based on the. The things that I was participating in. And then I had an offsite, some offsite meetings. So. I think what I'll do is probably share with the group a couple. I mean, you could Google like key takeaways from cop 28. And you'll find 25 different articles with different flavors from different organizations. I can certainly share a couple that I think are. Most useful. You know, I think what the. The general takeaways were is, of course, folks were happy to see some talk of fossil fuel phase out in. Other official language. It's the first time that's happened. You know, some groups felt that that wasn't strong enough. Other groups. And feel like it's, we have to be careful when we talk about fossil fuels phase out because of the developing world who have not had the ability to grow their economies on fossil fuels like the rest of us have. And so. And then of course the beginning of cop was overshadowed with a lot of concern about the oversized impact that oil and gas industry was going to have on the cop in general. So I think all those things considered the fact that there was. That that was included in the final text is important. It's a big step forward. I think people were pleasantly surprised with that outcome. There was a lot of talk about nature, which I think was one of and water, which I think that's the first time that a lot of that has been. At kind of elevated at a higher level. It was the first time they had a day on gender. At cop happened to be the day that I was there. So that was interesting to hear. You know, I think most of us are aware that. You know, women. Are are at the front lines of many of these. Climate impacts in general were the ones who have to. Kind of one woman I heard speak made this really good point that like, even in a disaster, women are the ones putting still have to put food on the table. We still have to do all of these tasks. And, and so, you know, there's. We're the ones who are getting impacted. And we're also the crisis managers in many situations. So that was that was an interesting conversation, whether it has any real impact is unknown, of course. But there was. Let me think. What else to say? Maybe I'll pause there and see if there's any questions. Or if anybody else has heard things that they want to reflect on. Yeah, Jesse. I'm just curious. What the atmosphere like the energy was means Dubai. I've never been to Dubai. It sounds. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, specifically like, was there optimism? Was there anger? Like what was, and maybe there was both, but I don't know if you can speak it all to this sort of like. The energy of the group or groups. And in a little about the place. Yeah. That's a great, a great point. Dubai is an interesting place. I had never been there either. Has anybody been there? Just to the airport. Yeah. The positives I would say is that the public transit was quite good. It was. All the elevators and escalators worked. Which is not something you can say about most public transportation in the US. It's the event was at the expo 2020 center, which was kind of, it's kind of, I would describe it as Disney world without anything fun in it. Like there was no rides. I think, but it was this very expansive. Area that they built for the world, the expo 2020, which they ended up having, I think in 2021. And so they had built. The train line out to, to that space, but around that space was pretty barren. Like there wasn't a lot of things right around the expo center. I think there was a ton of people there. So it was a great, a good place to have it. And the, and the fact that they had this big center was helpful. They have a blue zone and a green zone. So the blue zone is where like all the official negotiations happen. And the green zone is kind of open to anybody. So that created kind of a weird, weird dynamic. Like one day I had a blue zone pass. And the other day I didn't. And there's like a, there's a literal wall and like, in some places you can see the people on the other side of the wall, but you can't go to that side of the wall. If you don't have the right pass. So that was kind of a strange dynamic. I've never been to a cop before. I heard from other people in attendance that like, there were definitely was less protests and less things at this one. Probably. I mean, I know because of kind of crackdowns on that kind of stuff. So I think there was less expression of, you know, less expression in that way, I would say, then probably at previous cops. The atmosphere, I was there kind of earlier in the week and the atmosphere was a little bit, you know, I think that was when a lot of the news was breaking about like there was this other situation where the president of the cop kind of dismissed the science of climate and dismissed Mary Robinson, who's a very well known and beloved by many. Leader. And so that was kind of what was the atmosphere when I was there, just sort of like, I believe who's the one, one below the department of energy head, head person, who's kind of like the science is clear, you know. So that was kind of the message that was going to counter that, that narrative. I do think people thought it was going to be a complete bust. And so I think, again, I think people were feeling like, okay, it wasn't a complete bust. It did move the conversation forward on fossil fuels. I think the general sense is that we're moving in the slowly in the right direction, not at the scale or speed that we need to be at any level local all the way up to national and global. And there's a lot of headwinds in terms of misinformation campaigns in terms of, you know, anti ESG in the US, you know, there's a lot of things happening that are trying to slow, slow progress, continue to just keep the progress slow. They do have Tim Horton in Dubai, which I thought was the weirdest thing. That was my weirdest takeaway. I'll leave it out of the minutes, but interesting fact. I just, I just your, you raise the issue about women and their role and their important role. Just, I read recently that the next, you know, they're already obviously planning the next cop meeting. And at least from what I heard, there is not one woman on that planning committee. And I think it's in another country. I forget what country it's in, but that don't have strong women rights. Yeah, very disappointing. I mean, it's not just the role they play, but their, their, their, um, importance in decision making and, and, uh, the diversity of decision making processes. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. As, as a budget on. Don't know too much about it. I had to look it up on the map when they announced it. I was like, where is it? Typical American. Yeah, exactly. Um, any other questions, comments, additions? Sounds like an amazing, like a, I mean, just the eye opening. Can't imagine. I mean, looking at the pictures of the expo 2020. That's where you're talking about climate. All right. I have a question. Yeah. Laura, I just wondered personally if it left you feeling more hopeful or more discouraged. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, it's always good to connect with people that are doing, doing the work in different ways. And so in that sense, it, it made me feel hopeful. Like I was able to have conversations with folks. Um, that made me on some, like on some specific topics related to my work on corporate climate action, where I was feeling a little bit like, wait a minute. Am I in a Twilight zone? Like what's happening? And like to be able to talk to people in real life and be like, no, I think the same thing you think like that part was helpful for me personally. Um, I think having so many people. Yeah. So I think that I think. Um, I definitely left more hopeful than I thought I was going to leave. Whether I was like fully hopeful, I don't, I can't, I don't know. But if that makes sense, like, I thought I was going to go there and leave really depressed. And I didn't leave really depressed. So. That's great to know. I just wondered, um, if you had a chance to see that article I shared with everyone. At the beginning of the month. Um, it was like, I think the first thing I wanted to know was, you know, I was like, yeah, I'm not going to leave it to you. I'm not going to leave it to you. I'm not going to leave it to you. I'm not going to leave it to you. She was sort of talking about how. She sort of went into the year, sort of feeling like everyone's going to die from climate change and then. Felt like. That's not going to happen. And, and she wasn't saying that it's not an urgent need to address it, but just encouraging us that. What we are doing is having an impact. not having it's not doing anything but these efforts are cumulatively working to have some impact and especially here in the US I was encouraged to hear about the 20% reduction which I I would have answered negatively I think that was her question to folks and people all answered negatively as I would have as well so it was encouraging to hear what she had to say so I just wondered if it was sort of if you felt that that was probably an accurate assessment or and if you didn't have a chance to read it that's fine I just wondered if you thought that was an accurate assessment given where you just came off the COP28 I just wondered is does that jive with what you experienced there? Yeah no I didn't have I didn't I wasn't checking my email when I was on vacation and therefore I just have a lot of unread emails but I will look up that one and read it because that sounds really interesting thanks for sharing um yeah I mean I think that's I think where we are now my personal opinion is where we are now versus where we were a few a few years ago the headwinds are that we mostly know where we need to go we have the pathways and we're and we're and we're moving down those pathways we're just not quite moving fast enough or at the scale we need so it's a different than maybe five or ten years ago where the pathway still felt very unclear um so in that sense yeah like we know where we're going we just need to move a lot faster and a lot quicker um and that feels good like that feels like a problem that's solvable versus a problem that seems kind of more difficult I think where on the flip side I think there's more and more pressure to slow down that is coming from areas that we're not even quite aware of like the whole anti-ESG movement for example like that kind of came out of left field and it is slowing stuff down when we don't need to be slowing down um right now there's a lot of chatter in the news about EVs and how americas aren't ready for EVs and EVs aren't making enough money and it's like hard to know how much of that is coming from real sources of information right um and that's the part that I start to feel like that's what's bothering me right now is just like um the attempts to just slow things to continue to slow things down and some of the or maybe some truth in that and there's probably some non-truth in some of that stuff and that's happening across the whole space right you realize yes lies or just like misrepresentation or like how does that compare to america's purchasing of all cars like is it you know like there's it's pulling data out to you you can do a lot I love data and you can also use data to tell whatever story you want to tell right so um anyway well it's always about considering the source exactly and the sources are getting sneakier and sneakier to find that's actually a question I I had you you mentioned misinformation and misinformation campaigns and something I've been trying to keep an eye on a little bit you know seen a lot of things come my way that are just like seem to be sort of climate denying very active climate denying um literature do you have a resource that you go to you're like all right if if I need to make a point I go to you know something like that or is or it's just it's anything emerge from this that was like kind of like a a fact check if you will like a certain fact or if if you did come across it I think that would be a great thing to share with this group and our listeners Martha yeah yeah no I think that's a good point as something and others probably have thoughts as well on this um you know I think it's it's more about what I'm where I'm seeing it come from is is more like there's a news article about EV sales or there's a news article about the offshore wind and how the New Jersey project you know got failed or whatever you want to call it right and like always taking that into context of like well how many offshore winds projects have have not failed what's the percentage oh actually this one is not or these two that failed you were not talking about the eight that passed and that's a you know or went through so like trying to put it all in context is something that I think um is something I'm working on because I think that that's where it's it's it's like reputable media sources it's not that the media source is not reputable it's the it's that it's a headline that's got click bait potential that is telling a story that seems benign but then I see those stories be used by investors be used by companies by used by people that actually have to move as a reason not to move as quickly so that's what I guess that's what I mean by maybe it's not misinformation as much as it's just that you know every story we tell like these stories that we tell that seem benign or actually having a real impact on slowing progress yeah that's the steady this this the way things are spun yeah yeah that that makes a lot of sense okay it's helpful I guess it just along those lines just my own experience outside a cop obviously but is um it's just always frustrating when you know they talk about okay heat pumps are very expensive EVs are very expensive offshore winds has all sorts of problems getting going and and the story about climate is not like how are these projects and these technologies working today it's how do we use how do we accelerate and get to get through this initial stage of market build up so that we can get to the price points and the maturity of the industry that we need in 10 years it's always going to be hard getting started a new industry and new technologies but you got to invest in that to get over the hump and into where these electric vehicles and heat pumps are the status quo and you know you know disinformation that EVs are are expensive so why bother is missing the point of of of what we need to do as a society to move forward yeah exactly doing I think that's exactly right and we're in the like status quo bias that we have like yeah it's not going to start and be a perfect industry like that's not how things work there was an last point I'll make because you reminded me of it and then we can move on to the next type topic there was a really interest I went to us a Lanark council forum and there's a really good session on kind of like how to how to make financing a big a big focus was finance flow and how to get financing flowing from developed countries and private private sector into developing countries and there was a guy up there from JP Morgan he was asked what's the role of banking and closing the financing gap and he gave a lot of talking points blah blah you know blah blah um it's a it's not a financing problem it's a project development gap we need um you know we need good projects kind of like focusing on the need for good projects and the woman on the stage from the Atlantic council actually she gave her response I thought was quite provocative um you know she was basically like you're saying all these are all the words you're saying but you're holding if you want a regulatory environment to be perfect before investing in it we would have never invested in the expansion of the US West for example or any other you know like we're holding these projects to a level of scrutiny that we would have never when we're talking about just expanding and growing and trying to make money our our level of comfort is much different than these projects that still for some reason to some people feel like a nice to have or an extra or like a bird that kind of just like not a place where we need to be focused if we're focused on making money right so um you know that was I think that applies to all of this like we are we're applying this level of certainty and ROI on things that maybe don't have an ROI because we can't put all of this into financial terms and I know that's not what the bankers want to hear but that's the reality of the situation I love that point I think it's a perfect segue into our next topic which maybe is also your topic Laura though you may not be as prepared for it but yeah that idea what you know why do we hold certain things to this very high standard of what's the payback no one ever asked like what's the payback on their pants or a vacation or cabinets it's only energy for some reason has has to has to pay for itself that your house is comfortable or secure better indoor air quality does not matter um so we have our net Greg is slated to start at 530 and we have we have a discussion right before that that's called solar continued discussion and planning of educational series development regarding solar on the built environment and I I think in fairness to people who may be joining us from the public to see Greg I want to make you wait until 530 um however if you I think it would be fair for you to weigh in on this conversation we are trying to figure out who's next we've got you are going to speak in oh Stephanie sorry I have an update on that actually so you can continue speaking to Greg but I do have a quick update yeah no that's great I mean I think it's I'm not sure what this represents in the agenda so we have 10 minutes basically for this topic Stephanie this definitely will not take 10 minutes so we can definitely then defer to Greg um but we were just talking about um securing some speakers actually for a few series and different topics and so I connected with sunbug solar and they were going to um they agreed to come and speak at a future meeting and they were going to discuss um electric vehicle charging and also parking lot canopies as well we had sort of talked about again the built environment so I think those two topics are things that they are going to address and they can come in February either the second or or the first or second meeting in February that's great that's great and I think the overall just to remind ourselves this really stem I think from a comment you made Laura which was let's shift the conversation to the type of PV projects we all can agree are good projects that aren't going to be met with a lot of controversy in the clips let's prioritize the positive on that um so I will open it if people have comments about anything anyone's been up to on that topic or not Steve this is not a big lead but there is a um governor's commission the commission to accelerate siting and permitting of clean energy infrastructure and that was established back in September I believe and it's supposed to be having some kind of results or report out a little bit later this spring um February or March I'm not sure I've poked around and I haven't found much information on the mass.gov website and I could not find a source of agendas or minutes I haven't explored exclusively but I guess my question is one if anybody else in the committee here knows of that commission and their work and possibly if that's something we could get somebody involved with that to speak I think it would be wonderful to hear what's happening and whether there's opportunity for input to that process Dwayne is that anything that you are aware of the commission to accelerate siting and permitting of clean energy infrastructure yep sorry I was looking for the mute box yes I have heard of it um I think um I'm pretty I I know of at least one person who was assigned or um what is it called uh asked to be part of it um uh so I know it's it's kind of it's a thing I don't know if the full commission has been um seated yet uh were appointed and I I don't know anything about whether they have a an agenda or time frame yet so I don't I don't really have too much info okay yeah I think it was seated back in September and there is a list online of the people who are members of it um but yeah okay all right well I'll dig around some more and see if um if I can find anything that might be useful for us the the other thing that people might be of interest it was mentioned at our last meeting and that's the forum that Mass Audubon is sponsoring this coming Monday evening in the banks community center um it was in our minutes I forget the exact title of it but that's I think they'll be promoting their proposal for policy changes to support more solar unroof tops and canopies um going forward so that should be an interesting event Monday just to follow up on that um so um yeah so that that event is happening Monday the 22nd from six to seven thirty at the bangs community center and I am actually now going to be part of that panel representing the town so um that just transpired last week so um but yes I was going to send you all the information but I encourage you to attend because it will be a very interesting discussion and I think Joe Comerford is going to be there I think Rep Mindy Dom I think is going to facilitate and there's going to be others that I think will be you'll be interested in hearing from do we know who organized that event Mass Audubon right and I think this is in connection with their study that they released yes that study I just found that here that study is called growing solar protecting nature and I believe you can find that online that's a pretty detailed study that was released this fall October 2023 pretty detailed study with quite a bit of analysis in it um I haven't looked at it recently it may have been updated and I expressed some of my concerns that our previous meetings about just some way some of the things were framed in that report but I'm looking forward to their policy proposals yes and um they are holding these forums I guess um around the state so they are actually they've they're taking it on the road as they told me and actually Michelle Manion I think who's the rep from Mass Audubon who's going to be leading this I believe her name is on the list of people on that commission for accelerate siding and permitting of clean energy infrastructure so perhaps we can ask her during that presentation what's happening on that commission so Jesse if you want I can um I don't have a lot of updates so I could very quickly um we have five minutes and I can give a very quick staff update unless you want to have more conversation about this topic that sounds like a great idea hit us okay you're five minutes okay again it probably won't take me that long so I already gave you the update about the solar form that's coming up on the 22nd um also just a reminder that the um DPU is here having their hearing public hearing about the community choice aggregation uh also on Monday the 22nd busy day um that's going to be at 2 p.m uh that will not it's only a few people from the aggregation the proposed aggregation are going to actually be speaking uh one from each community I'll be speaking on behalf of Amherst um but the hearings are not very long I was told that they're usually about all of 15 minutes they have a full docket uh the the DPU has a full docket that day and so it's really just a kind of you know opportunity for for the communities to sort of express their support for moving this project forward but it doesn't have a lot of weight it won't really have a whole lot of weight in terms of the decision making by the DPU so um so again that that's happening on on Monday as well um Valley Bike Share there was recently an article in the Gazette which I was surprised to see myself quoted so um that was kind of shocking but um because I hadn't been interviewed so um but we are trying to move that effort forward again that's going to be um we're going to be having more discussion we have an RFP that's released the deadline is the 31st we'll be reviewing proposals and um hopefully being able to at least get this season moving forward um so feeling more optimistic it's not um I wouldn't say that we have everything locked in and secured for the long-term longevity of the program but at least for now we're hoping to at least get this season moving forward so that was um I'm kind of hopeful and optimistic about that otherwise um it's budget season working on on that piece um uh we had to get sort of preliminary preliminary information in but I haven't heard anything there's been no hearings or anything yet so um I have asked for an increase in funding for sustainability um but you know I that's just I can ask for the sky but it doesn't mean we're getting it so it's just you know the beginnings um beginning of those discussions so that's um primarily and I don't have a whole lot more to to update you on today other than I did mention that we do have um you know we're welcoming Michael today and we do have Tony McElrath who'll be joining us hopefully at the next meeting as our next new member fantastic Sammy is there is there a new Sean yet no so no we have we do not have a new finance director yet um I believe the search is ongoing but I haven't heard anything that we're close yet so um but yes very missed yeah yeah I know I know all right we're we've got um some folks are starting to appear in the um in the attendee booth that's great um I think we'll hold for one more minute um anyone have anyone have a uh a quick ECAC member update that takes one minute Dwayne seems to have gotten much younger do you have any comments Alden no comments okay sorry hi Alden you're famous all right well I think we can start the process of introducing this next um piece this is part of our ongoing um education series which is really I think you know Vasu was a great pioneer of this and then Laurie who's who excuse me away so just you know all of us but I think the two of them really have consistently sort of pushed for this education series to happen I think it's wonderful um for all of us sort of use use this space use this forum to bring bring this to ourselves and to people Stephanie do you have an introduction at all prepared because I could I could muster one if not uh you I'm going to let you take the lead I have plenty I could say about Greg and our partnership for the solarized program um but I I'll let you I can also introduce myself yes I'm fine introducing myself so all right go first of all thank you for the invitation Dwayne it's great to see you been a long time I hope you and your family are well uh Stephanie thank you thanks Greg and good to see you Greg yeah uh I'm Greg Garrison uh I'm the president and owner of northeast solar um we're a solar installation company primarily based for residential agricultural and and some commercial work uh we're based in Hathill, Massachusetts we've been around for about 13 years I came to the solar industry through uh GCC who had a renewable energy program that started in around 2008 it was funded by the Commonwealth Corporation when that emission in the state was really focused on pushing real energy and I took their associates program there after telling my past business which was mainly focused on burning gas to make money um and transitioned into this environment I have an enormous carbon debt to repay and I'm working on it every day so um I come to this uh in a long way I've met Stephanie through the Solarized Amherst program uh which was a lot of fun and we did a lot of work there and uh been primarily focused on the residential market and they asked me to come here today to talk a little bit about you know solar finance and how do people get solar on their homes and you know what are the different options etc um but I'll start the conversation with saying that you know in in our instance in my instance particularly because in the days that DeWayne was a part of the MAFCC and other organizations and we were primarily focused on where does the energy dollars go it's not just about the green energy but also about where does the energy dollars go so we spend the state spends an enormous amount of money on energy every year powering and fueling their homes for heating cooling electrical etc and if we can retain more of that money into the state the state does better economically so when we look at the financing options for the solar we look at them in a sense about where does the money go and how does it benefit the homeowner and how does it benefit the local community so there are primarily I would say five ways to finance solar there's the direct purchase which is just writing the check for amount of the solar there's financing where you come up with some type of financing package and we'll talk a little bit more in depth about that there's PACE financing which really hasn't gotten any legs yet and we can talk a little bit more about that there's leasing and there's power purchase rates and I'll start back at the top which is there's it was said earlier in the conversation that you guys are having about people think about energy as a payback and what DeWayne was saying about how people look at the wind projects and everything that's going on now and they're saying where's the payback where's the payback all the synergy dollars are going up I can tell you that when I started installing solar in Massachusetts we were selling solar at around $10 a lot which would mean if you put a 10 kilowatt system on your house it would cost a hundred thousand dollars but the state subsidized that through rebates different incentives and of course they had the federal tax credit which would reduce that cost down substantially but what it did is it accelerated the marketplace substantially you had a lot of big players coming in primarily with PPAs and leases but they came in on a big way and what it's done is we're currently selling solar at about $290 a watt in just a little over 10 years and that's what drives the energy dollar down so now the solar market is a very you know it's a very competitive market but it's a more cost effective market for the homeowner so when you're talking about payback which is still the primary driver of solar it's a little bit easier to look at so what we look at when we look at financing if you're looking at a direct purchase somebody's going to say here's a $20,000 system and they're going to write a check so what does that payback look like for the customer is that you've got your federal tax credit up 30% and then you have net metering and another thing we call RECs which are renewable energy credits there was an SREC market which is solar renewable energy credits but that has expired it probably will never come back and there was a program called SPART through the state but that is pretty much expired for residential because there's no value in it so most homeowners on a direct purchase can look to pay back their system currently at the current prices in 7 to 10 years depending on how much solar radiation they get on a daily basis what the benefit that is is that there is that upfront cost there's that big expenditure that comes out but for the next 10 to 15, 20 years because most of these systems now most of the systems we sell well actually all the systems we sell now components have a 25 warranty so for the next 15 years if everything maintains itself that is all revenue that comes back to the home that's no more electric bills or significantly reduced electric bills depending on how much they consume and that money comes back to the home on and what we think that is the absolute plus because those dollars that they're not spending on their electric bill will typically get spent somewhere else maybe it's a dinner out maybe it's some movies maybe some time with the kids and family but that money gets spent somewhere else in the community and that's how we look at it we look at that expenditure and where it goes the next option typically is financing and there's different financing options and this is where I would caution anybody that you know was listening to this webinar or thinking about it is that what happened in the solar industry about two years ago was people who deal in financing think about these used cars financing options which have really high interest rates or really high dealer fees moved into the solar market in a way where they actually started solar companies so they could push their financing so they came into the solar industry to install solar but really to push their financing so what we do and what some of the companies do in the area is that we lose use only local financing options you can either take a home equity loan which is probably a good benefit now considering the interest rates because it's only deductibility but we use like us five credit union which has a solar loan project and we use that because we know that because when you're paying those dollars back in that money still accelerates in the local community so we prefer that type of financing and then we use local community banks so as much as we keep those energy dollars local that's what we prefer to do and that option is probably more available to most people than they realize the current interest rates are not favorable but there is still a payback you're you're done paying your system off in 10 years and you still have that 15 years to go through with no strings attached the next option is that pace financing I talked about which hasn't been developed which we all would hope that would come around at some point and pace financing essentially assigns the value of the solar rate to your property taxes and then you pay an in addition on your property taxes to pay back that solar installation this is a very clean way of doing it it's a very cost effective way of doing it it keeps all the moneys back in the community obviously but pace hasn't gotten past the point where local banks and mortgage companies are comfortable with being secondary to a pace loan in case that any types of bankrupts here or anything went out so paces had a hard time getting started there are some commercial pace options available out there but nothing for the residential market and I would hope that at some point and maybe this current administration will be able to push it through pace would be a real option because that really for local communities would be the best option the next two options are not direct ownership options they are ownership options by the financing companies so what is a lease where you lease the system from the company you still get all the benefits of the net metering depending on the contract and we'll talk about that in a minute in some of the renewable energy credit benefits but you pay a flat rate every month to the owner of the solar array that's attached to your house and like the lease arrangement PPAs are the similar thing it's a third-party ownership where somebody else owns the array on your house and you pay them for the electricity that it generates and what they do is they typically give you a certain percentage or a few dollar or a few cents off your electric usage so if you're 20 cents a kilowatt hour to use rounds numbers they may sell you the power at 16 cents so you save four cents a kilowatt hour but they still own the system and they still own the benefits of the system that model those two last models export all the energy dollars that come from solar outside of the state into the financing companies and they have an income generating property that's attached to your home with that and it depends on every company's got a different not every company's got a pretty much a different arrangement so there's rules against the transfer of ownership so if you want to sell your house and you have this property attached to your house the new owners either have to assume the lease or assume the PPA agreement or you have to buy it out before you can transfer the home so they control the transfer of the home before until they're made whole essentially on their agreement with you now for some people these arrangements seems pretty good because there's no upfront cost there's no maintenance and the maintenance means if something breaks obviously they're going to fix it because it's an investment property people want their investments to be returned so they want to make sure it's operating on a percent so they'll take care of the maintenance but there can be provisions on the production of the system which means if when you had your system installed you had a small little maple in your front yard and five years later it's a large maple tree and shading more to the property they may require you to remove the tree or trim it to get the production up to where it needs to be and and then there may be some requirements to make sure that that production stays consistent so in those ways it's it's beneficial for the homeowner to have a system that they don't have to pay for but there isn't a lot of economic benefit to them or to the local community so one of the things in our company is we don't offer any PPA or leases because we don't feel that they're we know that they're not good for the consumer and also they're not good for the local community the energy dollars are still leaving the state there's no financial benefit to besides the green attributes to that solar ray being installed on residential home it's it becomes a financial model in the financing picture it gets a little bit more it can get a little bit more complicated for the homeowner so as I mentioned we use just local banks it's pretty straightforward you finance it there's a payment there's an interest rate and you just do that sometimes because of the payment currently with the interest rates your payments can be more than your current electric bill so you're actually paying more money on a regular basis than you would be if you just paid your electric bill and for a lot of people that's like well when they look at tabletop type of budgeting they look at well I'm spending 150 bucks a month now on my electric but you're asking me to spend 250 bucks on a solar I need that hundred dollars a month for my budget so I can't go with solar so that is definitely a headwind against that and because of that a lot of people don't look at the long-term benefits if they and depending on what they want to do and what they think their permanency is in the neighborhood if they're going to be there for five years 10 years 15 years or this is your final home that makes a lot of decision-making process so when they look at it long term after that seven to ten years depending on the length of term they pick then that money flows back into them and there is definitely a payback on that and there's definitely a benefit to them long term the return on the investment is typically about even with the current interest rates about five percent the same thing you get for a very high cd so it's still there they just have to look at it objectively in that way some of the financing options that are out there also with financing companies and this is where solar's kind of gotten this wild west kind of the old school I think they called them the the aluminum siding guys where they'd come up and sell you anything quickly on a quick finance model these financial products are designed to match or beat your current electrical rate so they'll come in with a financing package and say oh your current bill is you know 150 bucks a month light can get you in solar on this financing package for 110 dollars a month or less or equal to but what they don't realize is that these these loans are typically 20 years almost the lifetime of the system and they have substantial dealer fees so currently the dealer fees on these financing models are 30 which means if you're buying a $20,000 system you're going to add 30% to that and you're financing that also so essentially you're paying a lot more for that financing than you would originally so if you decide to pay it off early you're still paid off they still made their money on so these are substantially different and for the consumer it's important to say for a consumer to look at and say what is the cost of my system I don't want to know what my monthly payment is tell me how much my system costs how much you're going to how much you're cost by paid cash and how much am I financing because that can be substantially different so it's important for the consumer to be able to look at these financing options and look at it and say okay so here's my monthly payment but I want to break it down into what is my actual purchase cost versus my finance cost to disclose some of that because in the way that they the solar industry is currently not our company but some of the other companies that are out there is currently structured is to have a very fast sales cycle you click on a web link you reach out to the the company and there the current models are designed to have somebody contact you very quickly we can now do designs we can pull up your address very quickly and there's a couple of different softwares and the SAI is involved in this also now um that can detail your roof lay out the solar array estimate the production create a financing package and everything within minutes send it to you in a web link where you can scroll through in the presentation and just by clicking a few boxes get all the way to purchasing so it's kind of I think about it as a hallway with a series of lights and as you walk down the hallway they keep turning on lights so you keep following it down until you get to the end or a series of yeses to where you can actually say yes enough time so you finally say yes at the end and that's the way the market is kind of gone so when consumers are looking at what solar can do for them or why they would want to go solar they have to think about what their priorities are so they want to save on the electric bill what is it they want long term for their home they have to look at as a long term energy improvement I myself obviously I have solar on my home I also have storage and I also have air source heat pumps so you know I've you know I've kind of got the whole package and I could tell you that in my example when you actually go through it even though it was at an expense for me also like it would be for anybody else that benefit to me is much greater it's a it's a much greater package and I would encourage the the consumer who's out there looking at solar to consider one why they're doing it if they're just looking to eliminate its electric bill it's looking at an investment is looking at the long term as I did I looked at it as a long term kind of security for my home I don't have to worry about energy bills that much I don't worry about fuel bills that much I don't want to worry about energy scarcity that much there's a lot of different conversations that can have around that and to make sure that whenever they are presented with a package that they review it and look through it carefully and the leasing documents or the PPA documents even the financing documents can be multiple pages we're talking in excess of 25 to 30 pages of agreements because there's a lot of stuff in there for their investors to make sure they're made whole on this so we always encourage people to look at this in a very open-minded and very questioning state and to make sure that when they move forward they understand fully what the benefits will be to them overall the adoption of solar in our communities we believe is a net benefit the more energy dollars we capture the better it is for our communities better for the households it's better for the overall community what the utility has to come up to speed with is the fact that we may be generating more power than they need especially during the summer times then they can actually physically use because you get this surge of power that comes out of all these solar rays into the grid that they you know just really can't be used effectively in California had this issue and in California they dealt with it by establishing the new net metering policy which is called 3.0 and essentially what they did is they significantly reduced the amount of benefit they get from net metering which essentially crashed the solar industry because california was a leader solar sales in california are down 80 percent some of the largest companies that provide solar equipment like n-phase, solar edge, r-e-c panels, q-cell panels, all the major brands have had significant financial difficulty because that markets just collapsed but that was the result of a utility or an administration that decided that they needed to curtail the economic benefit where that economic benefit went did it go to the homeowner to grow utility so currently in our state we have a very pro solar group there are some discussions about siding and those are very valid discussions and i've sat on a lot of those seminars and webinars about that but essentially for residential solar there's really a mandate out there currently and what we're trying to do is find the best way to make to to drive people to that benefit which is putting solar on your roof and hopefully air source heat pumps also we install our source heat pumps also it's kind of a package deal because we can do both the solar and the air source heat pumps so when you install the air source heat pumps the solar will offset the electrical expensive additional expense on that and essentially you're you're coming out pretty neutral but it's a kind of a mandate that the state has set up and we feel very fortunate to be in a state like this but it really matters to the consumer how they purchase it whether they go with a direct purchase or whether they go with a third party purchase so and i've read a lot of quite a bit so i'll stop for a minute and see if anybody else is getting questions i have a question i'm not sure if you can answer it i'm maybe steve or dwayne can answer it of these options of these ways to finance and a solar project is there a carbon difference and and i can imagine to to use rex or not to use rex is probably i'm guessing is the big one but is there a is there an emissions difference um associated with any of these models as far as um so with the wreck difference would you do a third party if you do third party purchasing ppa or lease the wrecks are automatically going to flow to them so there is no carbon benefit that we do have customers who don't elect to take the wrecks because they want the green attributes to stay with them and they don't want to benefit the power plant's ability to purchase their green attributes um and so only in the direct purchase option is that available and maybe in the future maybe pace but from a green attribute standpoint only direct purchase has the best carbon benefit because it's the decision of the homeowner and right now rex are not a big deal i mean a year's worth of rex are maybe $300 to a homeowner so it's not a big financing option or a benefit the net metering is still the number one benefit so if a customer elects to and we inform our customers that if they elect to keep their wrecks personally then they capture all the green benefit and i also say the embodied cost of most of this most of the manufacturing because most of the manufacturers have done very good with zero waste like inface has a plant in mexico where a lot of the microvirtues are done and it's has a zero waste stream which is really great so the embodied energy and a lot of this stuff is is captured in about five to seven years oh wow that's great um it looks like steve and then stephanie can you grab martha after after steve that'd be great yes i'm i'm curious we we've heard some concern about the newer fire code regulations restricting the amount of solar that can fit on a roof have you experienced that and do you have an estimate about how much that's restricting solar capacity on residential rooftops it depends on the residential rooftop but typically it's about 10 the nfpa weighed in on this they want direct access to the roof to lay a ladder down to climb their up to be able to ventilate the roof etc there's a lot of things they haven't considered in it like people have metal roofs they don't ventilate metal roofs so there's a lot of things they haven't flushed out in it but yes every town including amherst has a very aggressive nfpa requirement that we have to meet so all of our systems have to be put through first to the fire chief or their fire safety officer to be approved and then we do that but yeah it reduces our capacity by about 10 and that doesn't affect existing systems i'm not going to have to take my roof no no it's just that all new systems starting in 2023 well at a certain point 2023 but definitely for 2024 we have to have at least three foot on one side and 18 inches at the ridge of it so that three feet on a smaller roof for some homeowners you know if you can put six panels across and then three up that's great but now if you can only put five across and three up it's a significant difference and sometimes that's the difference between meeting the electrical expense or not meeting the electrical expense but i will also say we get this a lot you know when people come to us and say oh this is only going to offset you know 60 percent of my electrical use and i go well solar can only do what it can do but you know what who controls the electrical use you do so you know you want to get to zero work on that part of it martha you can go ahead and unmute thank you can you hear me again yes yeah well thank you for your presentation i have two things first of all i feel a little pessimistic in terms of the costs i mean every public survey that i have seen shows that the main obstacle to getting solar on one's rooftop is the upfront cost that a lot of people simply cannot afford $20,000 even $10,000 never mind whether it's going to benefit them in the long term and so it means a lot of lower income homeowners just are stuck it seems to me in the present market i don't know whether you would agree or not i would agree yeah yeah and so that's a problem maybe for amherst to consider whether there's any other options the other question i would have and this particularly would relate to california but overall the problem of the daytime surge in the you know when you're doing net metering is what about battery storage are you doing more now with installing battery storage for people when you do solar we do and and i actually have storage in my home but storage is also an additional cost so you've spent $20,000 for your electrical system and then you'll spend $15,000 on storage so there's an additional cost and there are some incentives in storage but i wasn't asked to talk about those in this proposal so the way that i use my storage is that during the day when the sun's up my battery gets whatever energy it does whatever energy it creates more than what i'm consuming if stores are my battery and then at night like right now my house yep my house is still being run by my batteries so right now everything you're seeing is being run off energy i created during the day during this daytime and it'll during the winter time i run out of energy about two o'clock in the morning and i start pulling back from the grid but that is the benefit that we like a lot of people do but again to your point about people on morphics budgets or low income it's a very difficult upfront expense to do and i think this is where my personal soapbox is where paced financing could be a huge benefit to both the community and to solar financing in my case we put solar panels on a decade ago when they were first coming in and we did it by leasing with with sun and um past two months of the first time in the ten years that i have had to pay an electric bill to my utility company at all and it's because i've recently gotten a heat pump so for for me it was very cost effective because it's i pay 12 cents a kilowatt hour and so instead of the 40 cents that the ever source charges but yep everybody has a different model ours is just focused on where the energy dollars go yeah thank you thank you martha dwayne and laura yeah great hi greg and thanks for um all the information uh this evening it's been great um just a question i've always trying to have been trying to figure and i think it's come up in this committee before as well and that is on the on the net metering policies and i used to know more detail than i do today but um is it if you're um you know the question arises if you have a home where you could put up more solar and would like to put up more solar than what you actually use over the course of the year at the residential level are you able to then make an agreement with a neighbor or a friend or somebody in the in the utility territory uh to virtually net meter uh sort of just person to person if if um you have excess space on your house you can those are personal agreements um so you can what's called a schedule z in the utility language you can say i want to transfer 30 of my production to this meter which may be your neighbor and then you would have an individual agreement with them saying i'm going to send you this amount of energy and i'm going to send you a bill every month for whatever your kilowatt hour charge is going to be and you can do that we have a few customers more than a few probably a few dozen that either sell it to their their mother or their sister or their local church or you know they they net meter it that way without agreement there are some people who have come up with personal agreements and say you know i'm going to send you this much power and you just pay me this on a monthly basis okay yep perfect so it um i know that works sort of as a community shared solar sort of arrangement it can also work resident to resident or home or sure that's between the residents themselves there's no you know that's your own agreements yeah gotcha thanks yeah thanks this has been really interesting um um two yes two questions comments um to martha's martha's point yeah i mean i think that the pace program sounds like a good one i also know that umass five and others do purve early say that umass five provides low solar loans low for specifically for lower income folks and and um they have different interest rates in different systems associated with them of course all of this means that you own a home and you have credit so like that's still a barrier for many people um so one question is just how do we how do we deal with particularly in amherst rate we have a lot of homes that are owned and then occupied by renters what's an opportunity to um get those houses put so is it just the will of the landlord or is there some other way we can we can motivate there um my other comment is just on the so we got solar on our home in 2018 and i think we covered 80 percent of our average load um and i didn't think at the time that in 2022 i would have gotten heat pumps and an electric car right so now we're not there um and because of the fire code we can't add to our our solar so i'm wondering if your advice has and maybe it has given that you also provide heat pumps but has your advice changed at all for people getting solar to think about you know these other electrification potentials that are coming down the pipe um yeah of course it has and i'll address a couple of things um um u-mass five has different loans but they only have one solar loan and it isn't income-based the only real income-based loan that was out there was the most successful one was the actually the the mass solar loan it was run by the state that was subsidized and that was a highly successful program that had really good benefits for low-income households and we were able to really move that forward um they haven't looked at that since um to address whenever we have a customer that comes in and wants to look at solar um depending on how their house is situated and how it is if you have a house with a very large roof that's facing direct south with no obstructions you've won the lottery when it comes to electrifying your home but i mean load it up load it up as much as you can that's you know the the first purchase is the best purchase on that and what we do with most customers now is we have those conversations up front because we believe um and i think that we all should is that the path forward is through clean energy electrification of households um electric cars mini splits solar storage that's the way it's going to be now where storage was or where solar was 10 years ago very expensive storage is also going to be coming down so right now when you're looking at storage it's an expensive proposition in the future it's not going to be so what we counsel all of our clients is start with your power plant put that personal power plant on your roof learn to live with it learn how it works learn how much energy it provides learn how to adapt your lifestyle around it and then start looking at introducing these other products into your lifestyle whether it be the eb first we install car chargers also or whether it's air source heat pumps uh and then build those into it with the idea that what you want to do with your household if you can given the size of your roof and the current production available you can transition to a pretty fossil fuel lifestyle your transportation your heating your electrical is done so we always tell people up front to think about the future and that what's right now great thanks for the correction on the loan yeah and Craig i want to add to that one one uh thing that you alluded to before but i i'm going to pitch that you put this into your homeowner pitch as well which is the load reduction as far as coupling the solar the heat pumps but also coupling it with weatherization potentially energy retrofits deep energy retrofits even which still um i think have a place um that and because once you're heating and cooling go onto the grid you really need to reduce uh your heat loss through envelope upgrades as part of that package i think that's the kind of the that's the renewables the mechanicals and the envelope those things really need to to go together so i'm gonna just i i know you were i've mentioned that before but i wanted to yeah no it's it's really important to reinforce the concept yeah mass save has incredible rebates for air source heat pumps so if you're doing a whole home retrofit depending on your income basis it starts at 10 000 and can go up to 16 000 for a rebate a cash rebate they send you a check so if you're spending 20 000 on air source heat pumps you're going to get 50 back in a check but to do that you have to have a home energy audit and you have to do any upgrades in excess of a thousand dollars to tighten the envelope and improve your insulation quality so whenever we're doing the air source heat pumps and we're doing the rebates for the clients they all have to add their home energy order first before they can apply for the rebates so we're ensuring that that happens before we go in with the air source heat pumps so i think it's a very smart move on the state's part to require that prior to the introduction of those of course you can just have the air source heat pumps and salt and not apply for the rebates but we haven't had maybe one customer out of 100 that has actually done that where they just wanted their bedroom to be cool in this in the summertime just throw an air conditioner up there i don't want to worry about it but for the most part you know and we've done a lot of whole home retrofits this year i would say in excess of a hundred and all those had prior mass the the mass energy autosun and the insulation improvements if required i had a question that might come up for people who'll be watching this in the future that's slate roofs are you able to mount solar panels on roofs that are covered in slate shingles we don't there are companies that do we have tried but typically it's incredibly expensive because you really can't walk on slate roofs because you just depending on the age you can just crack them all up in there it's tricky because future leaks you know the mounting hardware all that it's just you know that's kind of complicated but no we don't there are some companies to do them you can find them Stephanie then Stella Greg you said that you all are doing um heat pump installations now too so if a home already has solar installed will you all come in and just do the heat pump portion absolutely yeah with our primary advertising and focus is on our current customers we have close to 2,800 customers in the valley um so we're marketing to them directly you know because this is the natural transit i mean our company is actually pretty focused on the electrification of homes um and when we were actually approached by the mass save group about three years ago when they were coming out with this program to say we want a solar company to start installing air source heat pumps because it's the natural thing to do you know you can also to electrical expense with solar so could you please consider this so we did and we became part of what they call the heat pump and solars network which is something you have to take courses on and qualify for so we're part of the heat pump and solars network now is a part of the mass that chooses climate goals thanks it's my turn i just had a question i had a question it's um maybe a little bit off topic of affording solar but it's related to i think laura's cop experience and also stuff we've talked about in this committee in the past which is how do you think the solar industry is doing right now at incorporating women into blue collar electrification jobs that they've historically kind of been excluded from i think it's honestly the trades is suffering there isn't a lot of people going into trades men or women electricians are very hard to find and we've homegrown all of ours we've started out with two electricians they spent five years training their apprentices we had four electricians then they had four electrician four apprentices and now we've got you know that number of electricians so we've homegrown all of our own electricians and there honestly isn't a lot of women in the trades we do have women in our staff they don't work in the field so much but it is something that's more at a academic level than it is our level we're totally open to we're totally open to having women in the trades but it's just very difficult to find right now yes steve so another question is i think to the um uh massachusetts sort of statewide with goals for putting solar on rooftops they're pretty ambitious at least in the amount of technical potential that has been identified um what what's your sense like around amherst what percentage of residential homes are have rooftops that are suitable for solar oh i think we did this before we did solarize and i was thinking it was it wasn't a lot i would say it's around 35 to 38 percent if i remember correctly i mean it's a there's a lot of it's got to be facing kind of southeast or west or in the general direction and it can't be covered with trees um and so that's historically what you see just about anywhere um so i would say that but saying that also of that 38 percent or whatever the number may be you probably have an adoption rate of less than 10 percent maybe 15 percent um yeah that's there was the economic factors and other things into account yeah i don't i don't know if if for a lot of people solar isn't like the first thing they think of i mean we get a lot of people who look at it and say i don't want that thing attached to my house i don't know what that thing is i don't know what it's supposed to do but all i do know is i don't want it attached to my house um so you get that so there isn't everybody who understands completely yet even you know a decade later the benefits of it going yeah just expanding on that a little bit greg um and i i think you mentioned or i think northeast solar does do some small commercial um installations as well i'm just wondering your experience um and sort of what you see a sort of the difference and the barriers associated with um installing solar on larger rooftops commercial rooftops um we have some enamors lots and hadly um and and just your experience in terms of what some of those barriers technically technically or or business uh are uh in terms of approaching uh and looking at that sector as well yeah what we find the biggest barrier um we do a lot with agricultural because they have big barns and so they they're ideal for installing solar on what you'll find in small commercial especially is that there is a smaller footprint of a lot happening in it and a lot of times uh either manufacturers or businesses um have a lot of roof penetrations duck work air conditioning units everything else it kind of breaks up the rooftop and it makes it very difficult to install solar north ampton had a real big push to try to do as much as they could downtown but if you actually look at google maps and google earth and look at those rooftops it's just all cut up i mean it's you can fit very small panels on there on the larger roofs um there are a lot of benefit um but it's a very aggressive market um and it's also it gets a little bit more complicated because the larger you get the more utility um cooperation you need to have about how to install because you get very large power plants on people's roofs uh it can do a lot uh there's a lot of consideration to be made with the utility on it so we focus on the smaller stuff um and with the smaller stuff we find that those businesses that aren't traditional older type of buildings are much better and whenever we get a new commercial client we always encourage them to build south in large um you know to do what they can all right i'm going to ask a question trees uh stella is our local tree expert um one of the thing one of the topics that she's brought to the group and that i've witnessed myself as well is the sort of the advice to cut down a tree or to not cut down a tree and i'm just curious how any advice for for people i'll give myself as an example i have solar it does not produce as well as it used to i've got this row of red pines uh they manage to go up fast and yeah they do i've lost a lot of production but the cost to take them down it wouldn't pay for itself in electricity so how do you think about trees and how do you advise your clients so i've got an akw solar array on my house that produces about 5 000 kilowatts a year because i had this big oak right next to my house that shades my house during the summertime and i couldn't cut it down um trees do a better job sequestering carbon than we do offsetting it so it's for every client it's a conversation uh we do more trimming than we do cutting but for some customers who want to transition their home and i put a series of blog posts up on our website about my transition where you can hear about the tree and my air source heat pumps and the solar and everything else so you get an idea what it looks like but that's a real conversation because a lot of people don't don't want to remove the trees and other people do want to remove the trees so it's a cost consideration in that um and that just adds to it but overall i think the people that elect to do trees are doing it because they're looking for that transition they're looking to transition to renewable energy they're looking to transition the heat pumps looking transition to electric cars and they get it so that expense or that removal of those trees is that important to them um and how they utilize that waste wood is another decision-making process for them i appreciate the the uh the 5 000 kilowatt hours on the eight kilowatt system that's your that was a very vulnerable moment for you to share that i that's great yep couldn't get rid of the oak that's kind of a couple of nice little squirrels that live there every year we got this one knot and every year i can plan on this squirrel that currently lives in there we got half a year now having a fight in that hole to protect her nest so he's been there for about four years now and what's the payback on the squirrel i don't know you mentioned that with some lease agreements there's a stipulation that if a tree in your yard grows up and starts to shade the system that they could ask you to trim it or cut it down what happens if a neighbor's tree grows up in that sort of a situation i assume nothing i i don't think they can do anything um they i don't know if there's any penalties in there but i know that i had two neighbors in my development here uh that had to remove trees because they had lease systems on their property um also understand that the companies that sell these financing agreements these ppas there's for the the companies there's the tax credit and there's also the depreciation from a business expense and after that six-year window of look back on depreciation benefit they bundle all these leases together into financial tranches and they sell these tranches to third party investors so they're completely out at this point the original investors in the solar are completely out they've gotten this investor money so now your solar array is owned by somebody else or another investment group and their return is based solely upon the projections that the original financing company gave them so they're the ones that typically step in and go wait a minute this system was supposed to produce you know 5000 kilowatt hours a year and it's going to produce in 35 and they have a tech come out and they look at it and go oh it's got a big shade tree and they go okay cut it down because we want five not 35 sorry and is that cutting it down is that at the at the homeowner's expense homeowner's expense okay gotcha it's in it's an easy for them to say yeah okay that's in the 20 pages that you signed i yeah yeah so it's 625 this has been super informative and enjoyable i really appreciate you taking the time i want to i wonder if we should button up any last questions and then do our closing items for our our meeting so we all we can end at six at our scheduled 630 time oh don here we go last question no what happened you're muted you're muted don you guys did the solar installation in our home about eight years ago um on on bay road but it's it's a it's a tracker um and not um not on a rooftop um and i realized that that requires open space which which we actually have do you install many trackers by the way we love it it's wonderful so yeah trackers are moving part so i have a love kind of question on those but you know we're there to take care of it if you need it but yes we still install trackers um it's still something for people like you that have a nice open space it's ideal you can get almost one and a half times the production out of the same footprint and it's amazing yeah well i just want to give the public a last opportunity to to ask a question um i know marthurs but we have another member of the public if you're interested in asking a question please feel free to raise your hand electronically while we still have greg with us all right okay thank you so much for the invitation thank you so much for giving me time i hope it was productive for you i've always liked doing news because i feel it's still important and i can thank dwayne a lot for his early stewardship in this he got it started in a lot of this and it's definitely for getting us enamors so always appreciative great thank you greg thanks greg all right take care everyone have a good night thanks you too the mini-drugger oh look at that amazing uh member updates next agenda public comment adjourn in three minutes i think we don't have any member updates does anyone have any updates good job um next agenda lori and stephanie and i can make that right anything anyone's got on their mind that they want to make sure it's it it'll be heat pump solar i think don mentioned something about the pace follow-up from me going to mma and then i think maybe a follow-up on the transportation great yeah i hope to have intel from the driving schools and um yeah public comment well thank you both and the third who's left for coming i hope you enjoyed greg's presentation um i'm gonna move to adjourn this meeting at the wonderful time of 6 28 p.m i don't think we steve seconds that it probably means to be verbal does it need to be verbal i will second that even though i don't think we normally go through those motions to adjourn a meeting i it's just fun i love the red tape i was just giving you that encouragement jesse is your great job you're doing tonight i was just just milking the last two minutes to get to 6 30 yeah look the power you all know the power goes to my head when i run this meeting so i appreciate oh speaking of power just uh steve steve needs to move steve needs to do a dance i think we've got a previous advice to heart here there we go well we'll have a in his office not in his house i have a warm and and wonderful night everybody thanks everybody