 So I just wanted to introduce everybody to Michael Stoddard, who is the head of Efficiency Mane and has been since the inception of Efficiency Mane. Sierra Club has done a lot of work through our Green Sneakers program with Efficiency Mane over the course of many years. And so we're delighted that Michael can come and speak today and to an audience and a bigger audience than is in this room, because we will be hearing more about what Efficiency Mane is doing and so go on community access TV as well as YouTube. So I'm Becky Bartavix, and I am happy to be honored to have Michael come and speak today. Thank you. Well, thank you for inviting me. And Efficiency Mane is always looking for opportunities to talk to communities of people who are interested in promoting energy efficiency and things that we can do that are good for lowering energy costs and lowering the emissions that are associated with using energy. So we're grateful for this opportunity to talk to you and your members and the audience, the bigger audience out there about some of the work that we're doing now. And I'm going to focus today on residential programs that we run. We also happen to run programs for commercial and industrial consumers in Maine. And those are a very big part of what we do, but today I'm going to focus on the residential. And I think maybe that's an ideal fit for a group like CR Club, which is going around and talking to its membership and people in the communities where they live about things they can do to lower their energy costs and lower their carbon footprint by investing in energy efficiency. Could you go to the next slide? Thanks. So a quick introduction about Efficiency Mane, who we are, what we do. We run the programs across the state for every type of customer and every type of energy that can be saved in every part of the state. So there's no part of the state that is excluded. There's no customer group that is excluded. We have some kind of a program for every customer type and every place in the state and every fuel type that gets used. Mostly what people think of us as doing is providing financial rebates. So we help provide a little subsidy to address the typically higher cost that is associated with a high efficiency piece of equipment and I shouldn't say higher cost, I should say the higher price. So when you go to the store to buy it, usually cost a little bit more than the average efficiency equipment, but that's what these programs are there to do. They're there to help defray that incremental cost for the higher efficiency equipment and when we do that, we can get more people to buy the good stuff and install that and then for all the years that that piece of equipment is installed, whether it's a light bulb or an air conditioner or a refrigerator or something else, they will be lowering their costs over the life of the product. So that's what these programs are trying to do. We get funding from a variety of sources. The bulk of it comes from the utilities, the electric utilities and the gas utilities, but we are also the recipient of all of the funds that come through something called Reggie, which is the regional greenhouse gas initiative. And I'll talk about that more in a second. And then there are a few other revenue streams that we have. One comes from the ISO New England grid operator and then we get occasional grants and other contracts that help deliver some revenues to us. While we do the same thing with all those funds, we turn around and we turn them into financial incentives for customers to buy high efficiency equipment and we keep up a pretty nice website that's full of information. We provide trainings and education and things like that. So that's what we do with the funds. Our mission is to try and lower the costs and the environmental impacts of how we use energy in May. And I know that's of interest to everyone at every income level in the state and it's certainly a priority for most environmental folks is to try and think about ways that we can be reducing our carbon footprint and our other impacts on the environment and energy production has always been a pretty big source of impact, especially air pollution throughout the country and also in Maine. We're lucky that in Maine and in New England we have a pretty clean power generation supply. So what's relatively clean, but obviously everything we can do to avoid consuming a unit of energy means there's one less unit of energy that has to be produced and that can really cut down on our emissions as a region and as a state. Because this is the Sierra Club and I wanted to acknowledge what I imagine is on a lot of people's minds, I wanted to make sure people are reminded about, we have a number of directives that govern what we do that are codified in state law, in the state statute. But some people don't know that there are a couple of those pieces that relate specifically to greenhouse gas, goals for the state and spending funds related to the regional greenhouse gas initiative with an eye towards lowering our carbon emissions in the state and advancing some of those targets. So generally speaking, people may not know that the law requires us to do a strategic plan every three years, we call that the triennial plan and it lists a whole bunch of things we have to talk about in that plan, but one of them is designing, coordinating and integrating sustained energy efficiency and weatherization programs that are available to all energy consumers in the state for users of all fuel types. And it further clarifies that one of the goals of the plan has to be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the heating and cooling of buildings in the state in order to advance the state's official targets for greenhouse gas reductions or carbon reductions. And I listed those, I bulleted them out just for a friendly reminder. So the goals are by 2020 to reduce our emissions 10% below 1990 levels. I think we've gotten there for a variety of reasons, but longer term, and this is what's always useful to keep in mind and looking off onto the horizon, those goals of long-term reductions of 75 to 80% below 2003 levels, that's in the ballpark of what you see nationally and regionally as these long-term sustainable emissions levels for carbon. And so a part of the programs that we run are designed to help advance those goals. And I frankly, I'm not aware of any other entity in state government or program that is specifically designed to advance those goals. And so I'll tell you a little bit about what we do to do that. One thing is we are the recipient of the proceeds of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. And I won't bore you with the details of what that is. Suffice it to say that Maine is a participant in a regional carbon cap and trade system, basically, and the allowances for power plants to generate electricity in those nine participating states is capped at a certain level. And those power plants have to buy allowances at auctions that are held quarterly. And when they pay for those carbon allowances, Maine gets its pro-rata share of the auction proceeds. And under state law in Maine, those proceeds come to the efficiency Maine trust. So we are then directed to spend them on programs to help lower energy costs and lower greenhouse gas emissions. And those are the funds that we use to help weatherize homes, to help people upgrade their heating systems to a high efficiency and a lower carbon emitting heating system and a variety of other things. But those are the key objectives of how we use those funds on the residential site. We do also take some of those funds, usually about half of them, and apply them to the commercial and industrial sector. So we've done a lot of work with paper mills and hospitals and universities working to lower their carbon footprint and improve their energy efficiency. And these are the dollars we often use to do that, especially if it's something that involves reducing consumption of heating oil. We have other funds, obviously, that we use for saving electricity or for saving natural gas. But this is the pot of money we use to reduce heating oil consumption. Next slide, please. So let's talk a little bit about the programs and the rebates that we have for residential customers. And I'm hoping that people watching this or listening to this will be thinking about things they can do in their community to help push this along. If any of these programs seems like it would be a good tool for you to leverage when you go out and have your meetings or talk to your neighbors and your friends and other members of your organization, I hope you're thinking that you can always refer back to programs that EfficiencyMain is offering and thinking about how you can leverage that to get more people involved. We are providing tens of thousands of rebates every year. So this is not five, not 15, not 125. This is tens of thousands every year that we are offering just to residential customers alone. I don't know if folks can see this. This is a table on the list of specific rebates that we offer for weatherizing homes and upgrading heating systems in homes. I want to start by noting a couple of the bullets at the bottom and what those bullets are reminding me and reminding readers is that these programs change fairly regularly. We will occasionally change the eligibility requirements on insulation or a particular heating system, what would qualify for a rebate. And we occasionally are changing the amount of the rebate. So I'm showing here that the rebate for air sealing and getting an energy audit is $400 or $500. The rebate for insulation, you can get up right now $700 for upgrading your basement. You can get another $700 for upgrading the walls in your house and you can get another $700 for upgrading the insulation in your attic. So the combination of that would be $2,100. That's the rebate we offer today, but it may change. If we get more funds and we're a little more flush, we might increase that. When we start to run low, we might decrease it a little bit so always be reminded to check back on the web to call the 800 number at Efficiency Main because they will have the latest information about what's applicable at any time. But right now, these are the incentives that are available. For a heat pump, you can get $500 for a basic heat pump and $750 if you're getting two heads in the house. Boilers and furnaces are eligible for $500. Peloton wood stoves are eligible for $500. Biomass boilers and furnaces are eligible for $3,000 as are geothermal systems. I just want to say a word about that. That's not available for every single product in those categories. It's only available for qualifying products in those categories. So you've got to get the model that achieves the high efficiency standard. So a lot of people may be familiar with Energy Star. That's a third party certification. That tells you that that model is in the highest efficiency levels of that class in that class of products. And this is kind of the same. Sometimes we use Energy Star as a criteria for eligibility, not always. But in these cases, we have specific criteria and they're all spelled out on our website and the folks who answer the phones at the call center can also explain those to anybody who might have a question. I also want to mention that, and this is particularly relevant in Portland, those are the base incentives, but we have some situations where we can add to them. So anyone who's a natural gas utility customer can get an adder on top of what is listed here. So lots of people in the Portland area are customers of the local utility. And if they did a project with one of these qualifying products, they could get an additional incentive on top of that. The same thing is true for eligible low income customers. They are eligible for an enhanced rebate, recognizing the fact that they are available. Funds to invest in these kinds of upgrades is very limited. And so for people who qualify and we have different ways, which I'll talk about on another slide, of identifying eligibility for low income, those customers would be able to get a significantly higher incentive from us and meaning their customer contribution would be quite a bit lower. I will talk about this more in a minute, but if you're sitting there thinking about things you can do in your community that might take advantage of your quote unquote boots on the ground, the people who go door to door and the organizing you can do in your community. This I would submit is a really interesting opportunity and one we've been encouraging local community organizations to think about. How can they marry up the neediest folks in their community whose homes could use some improvements and the programs that we offer? Next slide, please. So this is a little bit more detail about one of the low income initiatives we have, the one that we offer to weatherize, to help weatherize homes. This is not the only program in the state to help low income customers weatherize their homes, but this is the one that we run and for customers who are either in lie heaped the program that offers federal funding for fuel assistance or maybe they've been involved in some other low income program where their income status has been a screening criteria use. So things like these federal loan support programs would be other indicators, but also we've opened it up for this weatherization program to anyone in a mobile home and also anyone in a home where if you go on the municipal property tax assessment roles, if the home's assessed value is less than $80,000, we're also treating that as an eligible low income home. So in any of those homes, all things that you could look up or they could show you on a piece of paper that they're qualified, we have these two really nice measures that we're promoting. One is $1,000 worth of air sealing and basic insulation. That's caulking and filling the cracks with foam and maybe some basic insulation in spots. On a really big house, that doesn't go super far, but it's enough to do a very significant amount of basic in-ceiling. On a mobile home, you can really cover a lot of ground with $1,000 worth of work. So that is something we've been promoting. We're looking for the customers to chip in $50 towards that, which we think is a very modest contribution towards the value that that will provide, but that should save them vastly more than that every single year in their reduced heating costs. Similarly, we are offering a cost share of we'll cover up to 80% of the cost of a new high-efficiency heat pump after they've done the bundling, what we call the energy assessment, insulation and air sealing that bundle. So if they've done that first part, they would then also be eligible for this other part. We're still looking for them to chip in 20% towards the cost of that project, but if you put those two things together, you could be dramatically changing the economic outlook for that person, that home. Okay, next slide. So general piece of information about how to pursue these kinds of projects in your home or in somebody else's home that you're trying to promote them taking these steps, you need to use something that we call a registered vendor and that's just a contractor who has agreed to participate in our programs and is familiar with our programs. And there's a whole big long list of them on our website. And all you need to do is, if you've never done this before, you can go to our website and type in a zip code and then it will search for all the vendors who are nearby that zip code. And if you wanna get more specific, you can select the kind of service you think you're looking for, whether it's an energy audit or somebody to install a heat pump or a heat pump water heater or any of the other services that are eligible for rebates from us. And it will give you a list with their contact information, a link to their websites, you can learn more about them and you can be on your way to choose somebody to help you with a project. Also, on our website, you will find a list of suggested questions that we have that we really recommend you bring up when you're talking to contractors who might be doing these projects. We have a bunch of other templates and tools and we do recommend that people try to get a contract with a vendor so that it's clear to everybody what the cost of the project's gonna be and what the services are you gonna get. And we have a sample contract there that has been provided by the Attorney General's Office so it's a nice handy-dandy, simple, blank contract that you can just fill in to sort of memorialize what the agreement is gonna be. Next slide, please. So I was talking about things that you can do at your home or at a client's home or a friend's home if you're trying to help people out to reduce your heating load, typically, which is either improving the shell of the building with insulation and air sealing or improving the heating system. But those aren't the only things you can do at home. The other thing you can do is when you go shopping to buy appliances and lights and anything that you hook up that uses energy in your house, you can make sure that you're trying to buy the most energy-efficient models. Obviously, there are tens of thousands of kinds of electronic products out there in the world. We do not offer rebates on every different type. We've focused on the kinds that we think save the most amount of energy and are purchased in large volumes in Maine. And so those are currently including this thing on the upper left corner, that image is of a water heater that goes in your basement, typically. And this particular type heats the water with a heat pump, and that's the red part that you see there, it's bolted right onto the tank. So that's just like if you have an electric water heater now of one of those big cylindrical tanks, these heat pump water heaters are about 50% more efficient than that. So you can really see a significant savings over the life of that piece of equipment. Thermostats, the new fancy programmable thermostats that have sort of a learning capability and they learn what your usage patterns are and on the house, we're now providing rebates for those. Also clothes washers and room air purifiers. And right now the rebates on those are up to $750 for the heat pump water heater and then going down to $50 for the high efficiency clothes washers and the room air purifiers. So this is not enough to drive you to go out and get one if your current one is working fine, but your current one won't last forever. It's gonna eventually reach the end of its life and when that happens, these incentives are there to try and nudge you in the direction of purchasing the high efficiency one instead of the average. Can I ask a quick question? Yes. Is there a limit to how many times you can request a rebate? For the products that you would go to the store and buy like light bulbs and any of those four items I just showed you, no, there is not a limit. For the things that we put into the home where the contractor comes to your home and the earlier slides I was talking about home weatherization, there are some limits to that. Some lifetime limits on how much we'll spend on any one house, but it's pretty significant. I believe it is almost up to $5,000 if I recall correctly. So we recognize that a lot of mainers do projects in phases whether it's because that's just a, we can't just make all those decisions at once and so we're gonna pick away at it or because maybe we haven't saved up enough money to do a great big project all at once so we're gonna pay it off in installments. So this year we'll do something and a few years from now we'll save up some more money, we'll do some more. So that's okay, there's no restriction or prohibition by us against people doing it that way other than a per household cap but we've tried to set that fairly high. So I can't fail to mention light bulbs. They're kind of maybe getting boring at this point but they've been a real workhorse of energy efficiency in Maine and across the country. Maine is in the very top performance of states across the country in the percentage of all of our light sockets that are filled with LED and high efficiency lights so we should be very proud of that. They are fantastic for a couple of reasons. They work great, they perform very nicely, they last a really long time, they are a very low price point piece of equipment and so I feel great knowing that we can make these available to everybody at every income level. This isn't just for somebody who's got lots of money. This will work everywhere for everybody, it's affordable and affordable for everybody and it will save a lot. So it's 80% less energy use and a corresponding 80% less greenhouse gas emissions associated with that. So we've been able to do a tremendous amount by promoting LED lights at Efficiency Maine over the last three or four years and there still are opportunities there but I emphasize it because again, if you're a community organization or you're affiliated with any other organization that's thinking about how you can marry your interests in environmental objectives and also improving the livelihood, improving the lives and the economics of less fortunate people in your community, whether you're working with a church group or a rotary club or some business association, wherever you find an incandescent light bulb, that is an opportunity for making an improvement that's gonna bring all these other benefits along with it and it's extremely affordable. So what we do is that at stores you normally won't even see it but we have already made an arrangement with the store owner to mark down the price of the LED bulbs. It would normally cost quite a bit more than an incandescent bulb but we've provided incentives. So when you go to the store and you check out you don't have to, there's no paperwork, there's no form to fill out, you just pay less because we've already bought down the price of that qualifying LED light bulb but some of your counterparts in other communities have done specific projects to try and go find homes where there are a lot of old light bulbs still in place and replace them and there are some things we could do to work with you if that was of interest in your community you should get in touch with us and we can help do bulk purchasing of LEDs if that's something you wanna work on or you can just go get them at the store but it's a very meaningful improvement that you can help make that works in almost every situation. We benefited from that with the Green Snickers program I think you gave us CFLs when we went to it. That's probably right, yeah, yeah. Okay, let's move on. So part of what I was asked to speak about today we refer to as collective purchase and all that means is trying to take advantage of better prices that you can get when you do bulk purchasing when you purchase something in a higher volume but it's a nice compliment to community initiatives that you might be undertaking where you're trying to do outreach and raise awareness among your fellow citizens and talking to them about your goals whether they're environmental or energy related and trying to drive people to make improvements in their home. So next slide please. So we recognized that some towns had gotten very organized and they were making plans to reach out to their residents and they wanted their residents to take advantage of the efficiency main programs but they also recognized that they might be able to leverage that getting a bunch of people signed up to get a better deal from contractors and non-equipment and this happened several times and then we ended up deciding that we would call it collective purchasing and we would have a dedicated place on our website where you could go get some tools to help you if you thought you might wanna do this in your community. So we have a little video that describes the basic idea. We have this toolkit that has some blank forms in it and some templates that you could use and customize to your own intended use. If you suppose you thought that you might be able to sign up 20 people in your community to get their homes weatherized and we're expecting to take advantage of the efficiency main rebates to do that but you thought if we could get one contractor who would agree to do this over the course of the summer that contractor might give us a better deal if he or she knew they wouldn't have to come back and do 20 different visits to all these different homes and haggle and bargain about what the price would be but instead we'll just offer one price and give them kind of a discount for getting a volume of customers wouldn't that be great and so several communities have done that and I think had really good experience and it takes a little bit of extra work on the front end but especially in rural Maine for example they can be super helpful because it's hard to get a contractor to come out to certain rural areas they have to drive a long distance that's time they're not gonna get paid necessarily unless they succeed in getting projects there and they don't know that when they drive out there so sometimes they're reluctant to do that but if you say well we got 20 customers already signed up here and they're very motivated to do this then you can get a bunch of contractors to come out and bid the project and maybe get a better price on it so this is just the contents of what's in that toolkit and I would encourage people to go to the website and read about it and again if you have any questions you can follow up with us and we can provide more information. Next slide please. And I mentioned that this has been done in a variety of ways in a variety of towns right here in the surrounding towns around Portland we have the Casco Bay heat pump challenge where some vendors of heat pumps and some contractors who install them are trying to reach out and get, collaborate with the local communities to meet some targets they've set for the number of heat pumps they'd like to see installed in this area. The Island Institute did a really effective series of projects out on various islands and they did what I just described a minute ago getting contractors to offer a price and set aside some time to get on the barge and haul their truck out to the islands which was quite an undertaking so that they could insulate a number of homes and that they wouldn't have, no individual home would have been able to afford that by themselves but once they knew there were gonna be a whole bunch of homes participating it finally made sense. And Rockland has been doing something all this past year whether I was Rockland all of those, by the way if you don't have connections to people in those initiatives we'd be happy to connect you you can contact us and we could put you together so you could pick their brains about how it worked. Yeah. Yeah. The Island Institute and Islands. On tiny islands, what constitutes collective? I'm a part of the main island coalition and used to live in French Barrow and French Barrow has probably we could have no more than about five or six homes so would efficiency main go out to French Barrow? So first of all, we do not employ the people who are doing the work. We are a facilitator and we provide financial incentives and we provide information but you're not contracting with us to do the work you're finding somebody out in the private sector who this is their day job they provide these services and this equipment. So in that case, there's nothing at all that is preventing you or the residents of that island from getting together and reaching out to somebody in that registered vendor list and seeing if you can entice them to come out there. They may or may not do it but I think they're much more likely to do it if they knew they had five customers on the other end than if they just had one and the customer, the customers are gonna get a better bargain if they group together and try to do it instead of doing it one at a time. I think there's one more slide left maybe? Yeah, so I just wanna mention that I talked about the residential programs that are available and that I think are easily accessible and maybe tools that you can leverage in the work that you do with your membership and in your communities but we're in Portland and in the Portland area and there are a couple other things I wanted to mention that we're excited about that I thought the Sierra Club audience might also be interested in. One is that we were recently named to be the administrator of the Electric Vehicle Charging Station Initiative. The Volkswagen Settlements, one of the settlements has resulted in a pretty sizable penalty being paid to Maine along with all the other states but Maine's share of it was very significant and the Maine Department of Transportation was responsible for developing a plan for what they would do with those settlement funds and they chose to take a portion of those settlement funds and use them to promote the installation of new electric vehicle charging stations on selected corridors, priority corridors in the state and it's gonna be a little over $3 million and we'll be running it over three years or until the money is gone, whichever comes first and so we're very excited to get that launched. We'll probably be putting out a competitive solicitation this late spring or early summer in which we hope to get at least an initial proposals from vendors to install what are called DC fast charging stations, level three charging stations along some of the major corridors in the state so that people who are traveling here from away or trying to get from point A to point B over a long distance would be able to charge up their vehicles pretty quickly in a half an hour or so and get on their way. So that would be at least one phase of the project. Other phases are sort of to be determined but we're very excited to be doing that and certainly there will be some focus on Portland as a spot along the path of a couple of these highways and then also if funds allow we may be looking at doing more infilling with smaller charging stations more spread around in places where they can get a lot of use. And then the second initiative I wanna mention is under the umbrella of what I'm calling non-wires alternatives and it's sort of in the vernacular of people who work in the electricity grid world. We refer to the grid as the wires, the poles and the wires and the substations that you see sprinkled around the community and Portland and the greater Portland area has been growing quite a bit as an economy in recent years and with that growth comes more consumption of electricity and with that increased consumption electricity comes more strain on the grid to the point where eventually you may need to upgrade the capacity of the grid to handle all the load. And that's very normal but it's also pretty expensive to invest in all of those upgrades and the local utility has just recently submitted its proposal for what it thinks the next round of upgrades will be and when they will be and one of the things that is required in Maine now by law is to look at whether there are alternatives to upgrading the wires that might be cheaper. Because if they are cheaper then that should be the steps that are those should be the steps that are pursued instead of a wires solution. So that process is just getting kicked off now in which the greater Portland area and by greater Portland this particular case means looking almost all the way up to Freeport and down sort of to Scarborough and over to Westbrook and Windham even and everything in between there. All that part of the grid is looking is under consideration for being upgraded. It's a fairly expensive project that will take place over several years but before they get permission to do that there's gonna have to be an analysis of the alternatives and those alternatives could include things like energy efficiency. It could include a load management and demand response and it could include things like distributed generation and solar for example. So anything that you could do that would reduce the need for more of those poles and wires and substations could count towards an alternative solution. Now it may be that we look at all those alternative solutions and determine that they won't work. They won't work for logistical reasons or they won't work financially. But if they do it could be really exciting and it will require participation of lots of people to try and figure out whether there are sufficient opportunities to save energy or to displace the grid by using local distributed generation in its place. And so I think it's really exciting because that is what you hear people refer to as the future of the grid. The next, the 21st century grid. It's made possible in part by the advances in electronics and the digitization of everything so you can have two-way communication. So you can maybe turn things on and off or you can adjust them up or down in real time. So on a super hot day when the grid is really loaded up and what we call peak demand is straining the grid and exceeding what the capacity of the grid is to deliver. Maybe these other alternatives would kick in at that moment and you could turn down the lights or reduce the air conditioning or shift the water heating to later in the day or run your dishwasher later. All those little things when you combine them together could be enough to avoid the need for additional transmission and distribution capacity. So it could be really interesting and we'll see where it goes. Yes? Is it a taxpayer thing? It's not a taxpayer thing. It is an electricity utility customer thing. So the customers of electric utilities are called rate payers. And they pick it all up. There are some formulas about the compensation or the cost sharing. So at the very highest voltage levels, sort of the backbone of the grid, the high voltage transmission lines, those costs are socialized across the six New England states. So main share of those costs is only 8% but main rate payers also pay 8% of all the other high voltage transmission lines in all the other five New England states. But our share of the local projects would be 8%. But it's our share of the distribution level projects which are all the wires that run up and down, all the streets serving all the homes and businesses that at the local level, we pay 100% of that cost. And in both cases it's the rate payers that pay for it. So follow up, who is being looked at? It's sort of a collaborative effort, I would say. And I would also say that the answer to that question is a little bit under construction. But generally my expectation is in prior years, the utilities would provide a preliminary analysis of the alternatives at the time that they would submit their proposal for the upgrade. And then all the other parties would have a chance to chime in and sort of cross-examine that as would the Public Utilities Commission. There was some dissatisfaction, the last time there was a really big transmission line case with having the utilities being in charge of that analysis. And so the law was changed a little bit and my understanding of how it's gonna work now is that the Public Utilities Commission, either themselves or they will hire out a third party to provide what's called an independent analysis. So the law does require that there be an independent analysis of those non-transmission alternatives. So what do you say? Well I'm using the word exploring sort of loosely because at Efficiency Main Trust we are one of the entities that is interested in figuring out if there are alternatives that are viable, financially viable and logistically and you know as an engineering question will they function and supply the kind of capacity that is needed to make the grid run appropriately and not have brownouts and blackouts and voltage sagging and things like that. And if so, how big is that opportunity? Is it tiny or is it really big? Is it big enough that we could displace some of the need for these proposed upgrades to the transmission distribution system? We're one of the entities that's interested and we're also one of the entities that's pretty well positioned to contribute to that analysis but it'll be a group effort to analyze that. I'm just curious along that same line the Booth Bay experiment, were you involved with that or am I, did I hear that you might be looking at that as an alternative? We were, Efficiency Main was one of the parties that was involved in that pilot project and we contributed about 200 kilowatts of energy efficiency based savings. So by installing LED lights in all those little stores and boutiques in Booth Bay Harbor area, we were able to help cut those businesses' demand on the grid during those hot summer days. Both because the lights used a lot less electricity and they also generate a lot less heat so those businesses didn't have to run their air conditioners as much. So for both reasons we were able to reduce demand on the grid. There were other parties that did some solar power. There were some other parties that did some nifty kind of an air conditioner setup where they cooled things at nighttime when there wasn't much demand on the grid and then they delivered that cooling during the daytime and there was also a local generator, a distributed generator that was put in place. Never had to get used but in a hypothetical emergency situation where there was a big strain on the grid, they could have flipped the switch and run that generator to provide the power locally instead of bringing it in across these lines that would have reached their max capacity. So that project was admittedly a sort of a informal pilot project but it did prove the point that you can supply a significant amount of energy capacity, viable capacity, not just energy but T and D capacity when you need it at a much lower cost. The estimated cost of what it would have been to build a transmission distribution line down to Booth Bay Harbor was $18 million. And we did all those projects I just described for $6 million. So the ratepayers saved $12 million in that case just in the upfront costs. It also happens that the utilities tend to pay those costs off over many, many years and there's interest on all that. So the compounding effect of that is even more than the $12 million that was saved just on face value. They were a partner in that, yes, yep. And it would be different in a different part of the state if we were up north, it would be in the Amara territory but the principle is the same. I'm just curious about the EV charging stations of I live on an island in Panopska Bay. So I think it would be really great to have some of the DOT parking lots offer some of those charging units and I'm certain that they probably would benefit some people on Casco Bay Islands and some of that money could go to supporting charging stations. So we're planning to put out a high level plan that in the next month or so that just gives a high level indication of what we're thinking of doing with this amount of money over this time and we would welcome any comments that people would wanna chime in just like what you're saying. A lot is gonna depend on how expensive it is to do the first priority that has been agreed to by the DOT and the governor's office and we agreed that we would do that too and that's to put these fast chargers along the highway. I don't think that's gonna suck up all the money. I'm hopeful there's gonna be a significant amount left over so that we can do more of the kinds of project you're describing but I can't tell until we get there. In the North-South part of the climate, like the turnpike. I do, that's exactly what I mean. So I'm fortunate not to support the people in the state of Maine who would be using those as well. We seems like there should be some where people live. Yep. For one, for instance, would be that lots of people aren't very much. Yeah, so I, yep, no, I totally understand that and would agree that that is where we're imagining going next after we do the core part of the highway from like Kittery to Waterville. And I've penciled it out a number of times and I'm reasonably confident that there will be sufficient funds to do a good chunk of Route One as well and then some of the things you're describing. I'm gonna be pretty disappointed if we can't stretch it that far but I have to acknowledge that we've never done this before and I just don't know what people are gonna charge us. Could you specifically mention what the Portland and South Portland part of that is? This, of the non-wire solution? Yeah. Well, this is how it is referred to by Central Maine Power and this is how it is referred to by the Public Utilities Commission and so when they look at their whole territory at Central Maine Power, they tend to have shorthand names that they use to refer to loops, very circuits. So this is the greater Portland area and when they did their big transmission upgrade that they proposed in 2007, eight and they've implemented over the last five years which they call the main power reliability program which is the big over a billion dollar transmission line upgrades. They held aside the Portland area. They had initially thought they would include that in their proposal but because the recession hit and things kind of slowed down they decided to wait. And so the time has come now to deal with the greater Portland area. Yeah. Is there a timeline for the upgrade, the grid upgrade that CFP is talking about? I should know the answer to that but I'm not. I say that distributed generation has been the target of what appears to be hostility from both the PUC and CFP. So they have a tendency to reduce the need for more grid expansion. So I'm wondering how that all works. Well, in answer to your first question I'm not sure what the date of need is for the upgrades. I should know that. I think it varies. They have, they look pretty carefully at all the substations that are on the map of where their facilities are located and they can see if the amount of growth that has happened on the system. And it's a helpful analogy I think to think about streets and roads. And you imagine you have a one lane street and then a two lane road and then a three lane highway. It's kind of like that. And if you put enough cars down a one lane road eventually it's gonna get jammed up and traffic will be backed up. And the same thing sort of happens on the grid. And if you get people drawing more and more electricity and trying to push more and more through at some point it will exceed the capacity of those wires to handle it and the substations. So I don't know exactly what the date of need is but I think it's between two and five years from now. I noticed I read some of the filing and I think they're looking at load growth out to 2025. But it takes quite a while to get these things permitted and approved and then it takes more time to build them. It takes a couple of years to get the stuff installed. So I think they're looking out sort of three to five to seven years. And your other point about their support for or hostility to distributed generation. I think I wouldn't get that tangled up with the policy debates that you've read about or heard about at the legislature because I think while those are very real I don't quite see how they're gonna directly impact the utilities or the public utilities commission's interest level in distributed generation. I think the bigger question is gonna be how would the utilities get compensated if there is a non-wires alternative? It's not exactly clear how that would happen. If there's no money in it for them I suspect they would continue to be, well they would argue that the law requires them to do whatever is the lowest cost solution that's going to provide the level of service that is expected from the grid. But I would also say there's... You can allow it to require them to get smaller. To come... Oh, to contract. Yeah, so the law would suggest that if there's a cheaper way to do it then that is what should be pursued. And that's what the public utilities commission should approve. Theoretically that is what would happen. But it can get more involved if they end up owning the asset, whatever the thing is, if it's a generator. Some question about who would own it. Would they own it themselves or would the customer whose land it is on own it? Or would it be located on utilities land maybe? So there are a whole lot of... Once you start getting away from poles and wires and you start getting into these other alternatives there are a whole bunch of questions. It does get pretty intriguing. It's also kind of exciting because I think there's a lot of creativity that we haven't taken advantage of yet and a lot of new technology and we haven't thought of all the ways that that could be deployed to achieve this outcome and save people money and also reduce the need for more use of the grid. But it's gonna be complicated and it's gonna take some time to figure it out I think. Yeah, question. Yeah, you may not be the right person to answer but my understanding is that Green Mountain Power which distributes power much like CMP does also leases solar panels to clients and that's the way poor people can have solar panels and that's one of the reasons why from what I understand as 10 times per capita more solar panels than we do here in Maine. Is there something in the law of Maine that prevents CMP from doing that sort of arrangement? Are they forced to be simply a distribution company or can they get involved in distributed generation? Well, I'm not familiar with the Green Mountain Power program that you're describing but I don't believe there's anything in the law that prohibits the utilities from lease programs. For example, I'm aware that the natural gas utilities have lease programs for water heaters for example. It gets a little tricky because there are, I think there are some places where the law is, there's a tension within the law. There are quite a lot of restrictions against the electric utilities from promoting their own product. So they're not allowed to advertise to use more electricity and I think there are also not, they're not generally allowed to own generation. That is quite explicit. In fact, they were forced to divest themselves by the law of all of their generation assets. There are exceptions to that. They're allowed to own generation assets in for sort of emergency purposes to make sure that the grid stays running. So it's a little bit of an untested question about how much, if you're talking about solar panels, could they own the solar panels because they would be owning generation at that point. But that's not the same as leasing them. If they're leasing, well, it may or may not be. Are they the owner of it until the customer has paid off the lease? I'm not really sure. I think that I'm not really sure how that works. But I do know these other utilities have leasing programs. So it seems at least plausible. Do you know about Massachusetts? It's not the line. They do leasing too. Yeah, no, I don't know. I'm just not familiar with those other programs. I'm gonna circle back. I'm sorry, I got the wrong time that this was gonna start. So on the project checklist for collective purchase initiatives, it says that there are community leads. I presume that's for each community. There is a community lead. So the first thing I'll say is that we're, that's recommended. I mean, we're trying to share with you the models that we've seen people use. We're just trying, we're not prescribing and saying there's a right way and a wrong way to do this. We've just seen this is how other groups have done it. And so having one or more individuals who are putting themselves out there as a point of contact, I think is what we're saying there as a community lead is helpful to have. Can I just interrupt for one second because our program is gonna have to end for an hour and then you can ask further questions afterwards. I just wanna thank Michael very much for coming and to this Brown Bag Lunch series and really appreciate everything. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.