 Hi everybody, welcome to Maine Audubon's climate spotlight series. I'm Nick Lund. I'm Maine Audubon's network and outreach manager and I want to welcome you to the third in our climate spotlight series, is rooftop solar right for you? Today we'll be joined by some experts in the field of rooftop solar to share their knowledge and experience with you and to answer any questions you might have. Say hello in the chat, continue to do so please as you're joining. It makes a fun atmosphere. So I have to say first, thank you for coming to this Maine Audubon event. We've been working hard since 1843 to protect wildlife and wildlife habitat across the state. If you're not a member, we'd love to have you and I'll put a link in the chat to our membership but it's just mainaudubon.org and at that website you can also check out our native plant sale which is happening right now. Planting native plants is the best way to support baby birds and pollinators in your area. So check out what's growing at our farm with greenhouses and see if you can put some in your garden. Great. So without further ado, we know that making the transition to renewable energy is critical to meeting our emissions reductions goals and combating climate change and that rooftop solar energy is one of the most effective and user-friendly technologies on the market. Today we have three panelists to talk about the nuts and bolts and the benefits of rooftop solar. I'm going to start your video, Phil, just so we can see you here while I introduce you. There he is. So the first on our panel is a co-founder of one of the most exciting and important solar energy companies in Maine, Revision Energy. He's helped install all kinds of solar capacity all over the state and it is a great friend of Maine Audubon, Phil Koop. Hi, Phil. Thank you for joining. Graciously filling in for Chris Wazoleski from Highland Green is Mr. Christian Haynes. He is the construction manager at Seacoast Management Company which has helped install solar panels for residents at Oceanview and Falmouth and Highland Green and Topsam, among other places. Hello, Christian. Thank you for joining. Right. Last but not least is my colleague, Maine Audubon's Director of Advocacy and Staff Attorney, Eliza Donahue. She advocates in support of solar energy in Augusta and also knows what it's like to be a solar consumer from her home in Brunswick. Hello, Eliza. Good morning, everybody. So we're going to get started in a second. Just a quick tech thing here. All the attendees are on mute. We can't see you or hear you. If you have, want to type things in the chat, that's great. It's great to hear folks' reactions live. If you do have questions, we're going to save the questions for the end. So we have three panelists today. We only have an hour and I'm chewing it up right now with my talking. So we're going to get through the panelists first and then save questions for the end. So please, the best way to do that is to type them into the little Q&A box down along the bottom thing there and we'll answer them at the end. This is being recorded and so if you miss any portion of it, we'll have it on our website a little bit later on. So without further ado, let's get started. I'm going to turn it over to Phil Koop and he's going to go. So thank you, Phil. Thanks so much, Nick. Yeah, let me dive right in. I'm going to share my screen and try to get through a few images here to kick things off and also to respect my 20-minute time limit. There we go. I'll assume everybody can see that. So since it's such a blazing hot day today, I thought we would start with some cooler images. Here's our new mascot, Sun Squatch, skiing in front of the little kid ski shelter at Shawnee Peak up in Bridgesfield, Bridgestone, Maine. I want to start with the aperture pretty wide and talk about why we so badly need rooftop solar in Maine. We live up in this beautiful little corner of the world where it's not always top of mind that today there are 8 billion people on the planet who are burning fossil fuels for the energy that we need. This is Mexico City to illustrate kind of the sheer volume of humanity today that's burning fossil fuels in a closed atmosphere and one of the big problems that we face in regard to the overall level of carbon emissions and methane emissions is that we're fighting this invisible enemy. If this is interstate 295 going north, the worst problem we might see here is that folks aren't getting the Starbucks as fast as they want to go, but in reality, every car in this image is actually doing this. The catalytic converter technology today has rendered carbon emissions basically tasteless, odorless, and colorless. So as a society, we kind of sleepwalk through the truth that the 500 billion cars on the road today are all doing this to the biosphere that we depend on for life and in Maine in particular, we also have 400,000 homes that are heated with number two heating oil each burning about 800 gallons per year and causing about 18,000 pounds of carbon pollution. Again, none of us really see this pollution in the world. So we've got these big invisible problems in front of us. And I just want to touch on the transportation one more time to note that 50% of the carbon pollution in Maine comes from tailpipe emissions. And at this point, Maine has the highest per capita carbon pollution in New England. So that's just a quick tee up for why we really need rooftop solar in Maine. Now let's talk about what is the opportunity for a homeowner to derive a strong economic and environmental return on investment? Well, the first thing that we need is a powerful resource. And this slide is showing us the relative abundance of energy sources known to humankind. The little blue marble down in the lower left hand corner that represents all human energy demand for an entire year. And then you can see in this context, we have plenty of finite fossil fuels to meet our energy needs. We have a lot of solar and a lot of wind power to meet our energy needs. The takeaway from this slide is that in one hour, the sun delivers enough energy to the surface of the earth to power all human energy demand for an entire year. So the solar resource is just a staggering amount of power for humankind. And if we get efficient about harnessing it, we can replace those fossil fuels over time. So now let's look at the local solar resource and how it is, how abundant it is for manors. You can see here from this image that our latitude in Maine is roughly identical to Monaco on the French Riviera. Over in Monaco, they enjoy a year-round balmy climate and a lot of sunshine because they don't have the same Gulfstream weather patterns that bring the Arctic kind of winter weather down through our region. But the bottom line is that this is a very sunny latitude. It's basically the north of France and the north of Spain and the south of France. And you've noticed that you see that I've got Germany circled in the upper right hand corner. Germany is a very relevant case for us. It's a relatively cool climate, but they've been investing in rooftop solar and renewable energy for about 30 years. And so they really illustrate a pathway to 100% renewables for places like Northern New England over the next 20 to 30 years. And here was an announcement back in 2016 where Germany, a modern industrialized nation with a heavy manufacturing economy is achieving nearly 100% renewable energy. And the takeaway from this slide is that at a much further northern latitude, Germany's solar resource is much weaker than ours. In our neck of the woods, we get 30% more sunshine per year than a place like Germany. And you can see the kind of progress that Germany is making. Another way for us to quantify the local solar resource is to look at this nationwide map of solar potential. So what this map is showing us is how much solar electricity we can expect to generate from an array in a given geographic location in the United States. So I've circled kind of New England and then the big star is representing Houston, Texas. It might surprise people to know that a solar array installed in our region is going to yield about the same annual electricity output as a solar array in Houston, Texas. And that's because we have a good latitude. It's also because solar panels, modern solar electric panels or photovoltaic panels, they perform much better in cooler, drier climates like we have up in Maine relative to the hot and steamy type of climate that you have in Houston, Texas. So in a nutshell, Maine has a surprisingly powerful solar resource, which actually makes it cost effective to invest in solar technology to harvest that resource. And the other thing I wanted to touch on from the kind of the macro perspective is the cost of the technology. Over the past 10 years, the cost of solar electric panels has dropped by more than 80%. And today we're at the point where solar electricity generated from a rooftop array is actually more cost effective than buying electricity generated from a distant fossil fuel plant in our region. And you can see from this image as the cost of solar technology has plummeted over the last 40 to 50 years, the resulting adoption of the technology has really skyrocketed. So that's just been incredible. We have witnessed that in ourselves here at Revision Energy. We started out in 2003 with basically a couple of people in a garage trying to figure out how to do solar. You roll forward to 2020, we've now installed now more than 10,000 solar energy systems in Northern New England. We have about 270 people on our staff. So we're seeing good things happen. Let's talk about the nuts and bolts of whether your particular rooftop is good for solar. So you can see from this image where we got to think about the sun on an annual basis, not just what it's like today in the middle of summer, but also what's it like in the dead of winter. And you can see in summer the solar arc is extremely high. And so what I want to talk about with this slide is the angle of installation that you want to aspire to. And the rule of thumb in solar is you install the panels at the same angle as your latitude. So we're at about 44 degrees north latitude here in Northern New England. And so that classic like 12-12 pitch on our Northern New England roof is actually ideal for our region. It's about a 45-degree pitch. But it's also important to note that, you know, it's kind of like the viable range. You can actually install panels on a flat roof with a slight pitch of the 10 or 15 degrees all the way up to the 45 to 50 degrees. And you don't lose much production from one extreme to the other. But anyway, the ideal in Maine is somewhere between 40 and 45 degrees as a slope. If you happen to have a 30-degree pitch roof or a 20-degree pitch roof, the only thing that happens is that you optimize your roof for solar harvest in the summer with a low-pitch roof. And you lose some of your solar harvest in the winter when the sun is at a much lower angle. The other thing, besides thinking about the angle or the slope of your roof, is what is the orientation of my roof? A lot of people get hung up on the idea that your roof has to face exactly south to have good solar exposure. And that's actually not true. The aperture for a viable solar orientation is somewhere between 150 degrees on the compass, and that's to the southeast, to 240 degrees to the southwest. And you can see from this image that if you happen to have an east-facing roof, and that's the only place to put your panels, well, you're only losing about 23% of your annual yield, so it's not a death blow to the solar array. And I've got a good image here. Thank you, Ocean View and Falmouth. Christian, I'm sure you recognize this image. This is a housing development up in Falmouth where the founder and developer, John Wassoleski, has decided that he's going to have the most sustainable community he can possibly build, and you can see it. Almost every home in this development has rooftop solar, and then I've overlaid a compass rose to kind of show us what we can expect. So if you point the solar array due east, you're going to get about a 77% solar fraction as you would if you were to point the solar array facing directly true solar south. And just a quick aside, in our region, solar south is actually 196 degrees magnetic on the compass. And to arrive at solar south in a given latitude or region of the world, you have to factor in your declination. And now getting into the weeds, but our declination here is 16 degrees west. So you take 180 degrees magnetic and you add your declination to arrive at 196 on the compass as absolutely perfect in Maine. Anyway, you can see from Ocean View and Falmouth that most of these arrays are facing in pretty much the ideal direction. You've got one in the lower left that's going to be a little bit off, but the loss per year is pretty minimal as long as you're in the window from 150 to 240 degrees on the compass. Let's say you live in the most heavily forested state in the nation that happens to be Maine. We're still about 90% forested after 150 years of heavy timber industry in the Maine, which is pretty remarkable for how we protect our forest resources. But you also might have tall trees in front of your roof. And what you're looking at here is an image that's generated by the sole metric sun eye. This is a really cool device that we bring out when we come and do a solar evaluation at your home. And we can look at the trees on the horizon from your rooftop and calculate with a high level of precision, how much solar electricity you will sacrifice by leaving the tree where it is, or maybe you want to prune them back. We can also use this sun eye for a new building lot that's somewhere out in the woods. If we know where your roof is approximately going to be, we'll hop up on a ladder and use an extension pole to lift the sun eye up to where about the roof plane will be. And then we can do a solar shading analysis from that perspective as well. The bottom line is if you have trees in Maine, oftentimes they're not going to be too thick or tall to prevent a solar installation. And in the case that they are, we have other options that we can solve that problem with. But don't worry if you have trees in front, that's something we can deal with. So we're talking about whether rooftop solar is right for your home. I just want to point out on a scorching hot day like today, rooftop solar can be incredibly potent as a greenhouse gas repellent. You can use the solar array on your rooftop to power air source heat pumps for heating and cooling. Right now as I'm sitting here talking to you, my solar powered heat pump is keeping the home at about 70 or 68 degrees and it's extremely comfortable. You can also use the rooftop solar array to charge your electric car in the driveway. You can use it to heat your water with a heat pump water heater and you can store it in a battery for use in the future. And what is really thrilling to tell everybody who's on this Zoom with us today is that this 100% solar household idea is really catching hold up here in Northern New England. We used to do one or two of these projects per year in our region and now we're doing one or two projects per week and basically helping people almost completely eliminate fossil fuels with a combination of rooftop solar. The little heart there is representing the ductwork for the air source heat pump. You see the electric car in the driveway and then down here in the basement of this home there's your Tesla battery to store the sunshine on sunny days when you're making more than you can use. You can put the extra into the battery. You also put extra back out onto the grid which is being shown in this slide, the electric poles to the right and the wires are showing how you can export to the grid and get credits for that exported power. In this basement image, I just want to draw attention to the white box on the wall on the upper right hand side. That's the solar inverter and so the rooftop solar electric panels that you see here on the right side, those are solar electric panels on the left are two solar hot water collectors but the rooftop solar electric array is generating direct current electricity and then that direct current flows down into the white box here on the upper right next to the gray box and that inverter it converts the direct current into alternating current and then that gets fed into the main electric panels that you see on the left next to the Tesla battery and that's just a quick primer on how solar electricity gets harvested on the roof and then it comes down it will first feed the loads in your main electric panel. Excess can then be directed into the storage battery and additional excess can then be exported to the grid for credit on your bill and this is how people are deriving a really powerful return on their solar investment. You know you generate your rooftop electricity, you remove the need to have expensive electricity coming from the grid and you can save it for yourself for use at a later time. This next image here is just an illustration of the different ways that heat pumps can be installed. The above the Amazing Grace poster there that's a indoor unit that blows cold air on a day like today in the summer it'll blow out nice hot air in the winter when you need it for heating and the lower right is a kind of a floor register that does the same thing, blows cold in the summer hot in the winter. This technology I can't say enough about air source heat pumps powered by solar it's a zero carbon approach to home heating and cooling. It was not available 10 years ago. Today it is one of the fastest growing technologies in the energy sector and one of the reasons is that it's about half the cost of oil to heat your home it's about half the cost of a window air conditioning unit for cooling. Getting back to the nuts involved about rooftop solar here's another snowy image to kind of cool us off today but I wanted to throw this image up this is a roof that I actually climbed on about 12 years ago when I was a younger guy and not so nervous about being up high. You can see that I've got some dimensions around the array the latest fire codes require that you have a 36 inch walkway on each vertical side of the array and you need an 18 inch clearance between the peak of your roof and the top of your solar array so those are just some numbers to keep in mind we handle those for our clients but if you have a really tight roof space it can restrict how much solar you can harvest from the roof. I also just want to draw people's attention to the shadow from the chimney on the array so that's an example of where we would use that solar metric sun eye tool to track the shadow it doesn't matter which day of the year that we're on your roof when we do the sun eye analysis it will forecast the sweep of the shadow across the array throughout 365 days of the year and then it will spit out exactly how much solar production you will lose by having that shadow on your array. The good news is modern solar technology has built in electronics that can factor in for a shadow coming across like you see here and it reduces the negative impact of the shadow on your array. Ten years ago we would not have installed in a situation like this. The good news is that with modern panels and modern solar inverter technology we're able to solve for a problem like this and still make the investment cost effective. As I get ready to wrap up my 20 minutes I just wanted to let everybody know that Revision Energy is proud to be a certified B Corp and as a B Corp we've committed to running our business to create maximum positive change in the world rather than just maximizing shareholder returns. We are also a 100% employee-owned company because we believe that the people who are making this company succeed deserve to share fully in that success. This is one of our early rooftop solar projects that we did back when Glenn Cummings was president at Goodwill Hinkley School and we were all very proud of how the savings for that array were going to be used to help for scholarships for kids who who really need a lot of help in this world. And so that's pretty much my 20 minutes. I can't wait to answer any questions that you folks have. Here is my contact info if anybody would like to reach out via email or cell phone whatever you wish and I will stop sharing my screen if I can. There we go. Thank you Phil and now as we saw that last slide but that looks like that was Phil in the Sun Squatch costume. So I'm sure you have a bunch of questions about that how to paddle costume but maybe we can save those for later. So thank you so much Phil that's fantastic. You guys are doing awesome work all around the state and and Phil knows all there is to know. So if you guys have questions please type them into the Q&A box down below. We'll get to them later. I do see one from Sarah right now about what solar panels can do when your your power otherwise goes down when the grid goes down. A lot of people lost power in the recent storms. So Phil do you want to speak to that quickly Yeah let me jump right in. Sarah that's a great question. You saw that I lingered for a little while on that image that had the Tesla battery in the basement and so it's only been within the last three or four years that battery storage technology has reached the point where it's becoming more accessible to homeowners. You can finance the installation of a battery to store solar electricity when you know when the sun is shining and you're making hay you can store that solar electricity in your on-site battery and then when the grid goes down or the sun isn't shining that night you can fall back to the battery as kind of like your backup power supply and as time goes by the cost of batteries continues to decrease and we will also eventually be able to use our electric car in the driveway as a backup battery for the home when the grid goes out. So keep your eye on battery storage that is the solution to the problem you brought you do our attention to. Fantastic thanks Phil. I see some other questions coming in but we are going to save them and move on to Mr. Christian Haynes. You saw an image there of Oceanview and Falmouth. He was involved with that I believe so Christian take it away. Thanks Nick. Good morning everybody or afternoon I guess where we're right on the border there on the cusp of that so I'm just joining in to I guess maybe talk about our experiences as community developers and our initiative as a corporation or as a developer and it all comes from the top and Phil mentioned John Wazoleski our owner who oversees and owns several retirement and age adult community communities throughout the state. So John started probably I would say oh good 10 plus years ago with revision energy with some of our existing buildings here in Falmouth and work with revision to put together some plans to start to install I think originally on some of our earlier projects were actually solar hot water projects and then those morphed into more of a PV electric style systems on on some of our existing buildings both here in Falmouth and in Toxham and Highland Green over the last several years and then recently with we've we've kind of involved solar right from the get go on all of our new projects and so that really started primarily in Falmouth here with our Blue Break Commons project and that was built right into the build the project right from the get go and then if that morphed and flowed right into our project the schoolhouse cottages here in Falmouth which Phil showed you a picture of and we did we built 48 independent buildings and cottages for residents and all 48 cottages have its own grid tied solar system which the the residents love because obviously it helps with their electric bills significantly plus it's the owner's initiative to do what he can to to reduce his footprint so we have also done some other larger projects where we it's just part of the right out of the get go how are we going to involve solar and revision to to help this project work and so in our one professional building here in Falmouth we installed solar when we added on to that with our memory loss care building and so we also incorporated a electric car charger out in the parking lot for folks who are visiting relatives or doing business in our alum professional building so we we're we're trying to do a little bit of everything we've started a new community over in Cumberland Cumberland Crossing and we again on every cottage we are installing a solar system and Phil touched upon the the cost for for solar and we've actually benefited greatly from that going from Falmouth to Cumberland in just those I'd say the last three or four years for a generally about the same cost of the systems that we were putting on in Falmouth now we're we're carrying the same expense but we're actually able to put a little bit larger array on the roof obviously so that's generating more solar power per building and but the expense the expenditure has not risen exponentially it's been it's almost been the same cost which has been fantastic and and obviously revision you know crunches the numbers for us and tells us the best avenue to go to to maximize the the benefit to the dollar and so they're they're very helpful with that so in our community up at Highland Green we've seen a great increase in participation in solar early on when the when the Highland Green started several years ago it was probably I would say it was right around the 15 to 16 percent of folks who are building new homes up there were considering solar and and and actually you know followed through with some type of solar system on their homes in Highland Green and now in the last oh three to five years we have seen an increase of probably more around the 60 percent followed through with people who have inquired about solar and have followed through with solar on their homes which is which is great to see several people in Highland Green actually have done kind of what what Phil was alluding to is they have gone to heat pumps with solar PV and hot water and they are they are very much self-sufficient however they are still grid tied but their homes are extremely efficient and they love their homes they they rave about them they love to have people come in and see what they've done and so that's exciting to see as well and we continue to to talk to people about solar and the positive benefits not only for their day-to-day and month-to-month billing but also the the great things that it's doing for the environment so we we are launching a new cottage product in Highland Green as well called the Quarry Cottages these will be homes that people can select a site and build a a nice 1600 square foot cottage on there we will have as part of the build package an option to add a solar package it will be up to the new resident whether they choose to move forward with that but these folks these days are very much in tune to what solar is all about they've learned a lot about it through through neighbors through webinars like this and so a lot of people like to know more about it and ask about it and realize that it's a great benefit in our in our projects in Falmouth and Cumberland the developer has it is part of the build cost it that's it's not an option there we just include it as as the right thing to do I believe and Phil might be able to to help me on this but in Falmouth I believe we are generating up over a megawatt of energy and we hope to continue to increase that ability throughout all of our campuses to to generate a good quantity of electricity to be able to be shared throughout the community we also are approved and working on trying to come up with some enticed some investors for a solar farm in at Highland Green so that's an ongoing project as well and we hope to maybe someday the community center up at Highland Green if we were to do an expansion or renovation on that building we would certainly probably entertain adding solar as well to to that project as again the owner likes to you know anytime we do a project or we do a renovation we we try to include the solar into the base cost of the project just as kind of the right thing to do also want to mention that we just recently installed a Tesla power wall in one of our cottages in Cumberland and we are very excited to learn more about that how that works and see the effects of having that tied with the solar system in the home there and see what hopefully the the new residents who move into that unit eventually that's our model unit right now will will really take advantage of that and enjoy that as well it is I can talk quickly about about kind of the the construction end of things and and Phil kind of touched upon some of that but I will say that new construction if you're if you're planning or thinking about building a new home installing the solar is extremely simple it's it's they're in and out they'll rough things in and usually not even a day the panels go on the roof you know half a day and it's a they're they're very efficient they're very good at what they do and as well as probably other solar companies for retrofit for an existing building again a little trickier but you know everybody kind of puts their heads together and figures out the best way simplest way to get from point A to point B which would be you know the the panels on the roof to a mechanical or a basement area to set up the the basically the infrastructure the inverters and the tie ins to the panels and and all of that those good things that go along with it with the solar but we have been extremely satisfied with with everything that we've been doing and feel it's it's a it's a great thing to do for our communities throughout the state and we hope to continue to try to lead the charge on on on incorporating solar with with all projects that we that we are considering and working on so I think that's about that's about all I have Christian thank you so much and thank you for all the work you're all doing across the state and all your facilities it's really exciting and I know that a lot of your residents appreciate it and are happy to be on the cutting edge and cutting down their footprint I should also note Christian mentioned a solar farm there quickly if you'd like more information on community solar please check out the video on mainonabond.org of our previous climate spotlight presentation all about community solar I'll link to that in the in the chat thank you Christian again if you have questions please put them in the q&a box down below I see Phil is hard at work answering them already he knows what he's doing down there but we'll get some for the end as well and I want to turn it over to my colleague Eliza Donahue main Audubon's director of advocacy and staff attorney to talk about her work with solar and her personal experience at her home with solar panels Eliza great thanks Nick good morning everybody so again Eliza Donahue I'm director of advocacy at Audubon and I'm here to share my experience as a homeowner with solar on their roof my plans to share the basics you know how my family and I made the choice to invest in solar and how it shows up in our day-to-day lives from our electricity bill to what's in our basement and you know what happens when it snows though uh though others have already gotten there I suppose uh so my husband and I built our home in Brunswick in the summer and fall of 2016 we opted for new construction because energy efficiency and heating and powering our home with renewable energy was our number one priority we knew that we wanted to heat and cool our home with heat pumps and that we wanted to feed those pumps with solar energy homes with that combination of heat pumps and solar were not widely available and retrofitting an existing home more on the heat pump end of things didn't really appear to be within our budget so when we met with solar installers we really only had cost in mind working in environmental advocacy I didn't need to be convinced that avoiding fossil fuels was a good thing to do and I also knew a handful of folks in Maine who had had a positive experience installing solar on their homes but we were on a budget it needed to make economic sense and the funny math that we worked off was this you know how this is the way that we kind of figured out whether this made sense for our wallets we rolled the cost of installing the heat pumps into our mortgage and we so we set that aside and the cost of financing the solar panels because we didn't have the cash to pay for them outright and what we paid or what we anticipated we would pay if anything to our electric utility needed in our brains to be comparable or less than what we had paid in the past annually for heating with oil and and paying an electric bill that was about or had been about $3,500 annually so again that's kind of funny math because we did not incorporate the cost of the heat pump system which was considerable again our entire home was heated with heat pumps nor did we account for the return on investment on the heat pumps or solar panels which was substantial substantial in a really positive way the installers that we talked to really took the time to lay out the costs we really belabored it and they were right there with us down to the nitpicky details we ended up installing and here I'm going to attempt to share my screen see how this goes all right I think I'm good we ended up installing 21 panels on the roof of our new home the installer even helped us identify what solar south was so we made sure that our home was oriented to maximize our solar gain you guys already got some great information from Phil that sure if you can have your home face solar south that's great but just because it doesn't doesn't mean that solar isn't a good fit for you the total cost of the project was about $20,000 that was before the federal tax credit so that remember this is back in 2016 the federal tax credit was 30% then today that federal tax credit is 26% our panels generate the equivalent of about 90% of the electricity we consume we generate excess electricity in the spring and summer months and because our panels are grid tied and due to mains net metering law we draw on that excess in the fall and winter so come February or March our consumption exceeds a combination of the energy we're generating in our baked banked credits we end up paying in February or March about $150 a month to CMP to cover those electricity costs then back in the spring or when we get back to spring our energy needs go down again and our solar gain goes up so factoring that in again about $350 annually that we pay to CMP and then about $2,200 annually that we pay to that we use to pay for the panels themselves that was well below what we had been paying or what we would have paid had we installed you know traditional oil heating in our home so the cost was was well within our budget now today four years later and even you know immediately after we installed the the solar panels we really don't interact with them at all on a day to day basis there is an inverter in our basement that literally only has an on and off switch and it's always on I'm going to share a copy that hopefully is appropriately redacted on my most recent CMP bill yep here it is you'll see that this is literally my most recent bill that all we're paying for this $13 are delivery charges move over to let's see this one here is also a picture from my most recent bill it is and you'll see that there is a chart of my generation and usage over the course of the year again generation far exceeds usage about half of the year is very similar a couple of other months in the year and then I draw on banked credits during the winter months and what's notable about those winter months is that I'm still generating power then snow sticks to the panels but generally by mid-morning it falls off on its own I've never had to nor is it probably a good idea giving the design of my house to knock snow off the panels heat up enough that the snow slides off very easily so I think given the time I'm going to leave it there but I'll I'll say that I'm really stoked about my solar panels and have no regrets you know obviously everyone's situation is different but based on my experience I have a lot of confidence that installers can help walk anyone through designing and paying for a system that meets your needs actually just last week I went through the process again we're looking to build an addition a garage and we want to make sure that when we're designing that garage that it is designed to anticipate our electricity needs including getting electric vehicles in the future you know what is it going to need how many panels are we going to need to install should we you know a couple years a handful of years down the road purchase electric vehicles the installer helped me make really educated guesses at future consumption and associated costs and even what it would mean if we designed a garage with an east facing roof and if you remember back to to Phil's presentation you know sure solar south is great but there is a lot that can be done with roofs that might not be you know perfect so that's me and I'll pass it back to you Nick to do some Q&A hi everybody Eliza thank you so much that is great on the ground experience and I'm going to go ahead and hope that all the panelists want to start their video again and we have a few questions please folks put your questions in the Q&A I actually want to start with a question of my own and I'm the host so I can do whatever I want which is you know very basically if I want to start the process of putting or considering putting panels on my house what's the first step and maybe the second and third steps and I don't know if Phil or Eliza or folks who have experienced it so under under COVID Nick we've really had to change our procedures for you know for more than three months we were excluded from visiting people's homes and so we were doing virtual solar evaluations which is a service that we still offer and we do this via a similar kind of zoom meeting where we get on line with the client we can look at your roof with the excellent google map imagery that's available today and with a very high level of accuracy we can calculate the orientation of your roof we can figure out the pitch of your roof and we can give you a pretty good preliminary snapshot of a solar return on investment remotely online and if you like having visitors come to the house we also do the in-person solar evaluation at your home I mean we'll come out and do all of the hands-on measurements and use that sun eye tool to calculate any potential shading issues but anybody on this zoom today can simply go online and go to google maps and look up their address and use the satellite view and the compass rose that's on google maps to get a good sense of what your orientation looks like. Great. So I'm diving into some questions from the Q&A. Alison Saunders asks we have a metal roof does that create any issues? A standing seam metal roof is actually the very best surface on which to attach an array because we can clamp to the standing seams and avoid having to do any roof penetrations whatsoever that being said the vast majority of our projects are installed on asphalt roofs and so we're very good at both but if you've got a metal roof you're actually in in ideal shape for a solar array. Great. Arnold asks where the panels are manufactured? So modern solar electric panels or photovoltaic panels are a global commodity they're manufactured in the US and pretty much on every other continent around the globe. We intentionally try to source as much as we can locally although the US made product today is one of the more expensive panels that's on the market. We also offer people panels sourced from Western Europe. Germany is one area where we get our panels and then the balance comes from Asia excluding China. We've consciously tried to not source from China because we think it's not the best place to buy our products from but also now we have some pretty stiff tariffs on solar panels coming out of China and so we do source from places like Taiwan and the Philippines and we like to give consumers a choice in where ultimately they get their solar panels. Great. So Phil was busy answering some questions in the Q&A I'm not sure if everyone was able to see those answers or not so apologies if I cover some of the same ground but Ernie asks a couple questions one of which Eliza touched on a bit which is what is the expected lifetime of solar panels and what happens when snow and ice builds up or covers them? Sure. So modern solar technology is incredibly robust and reliable. All of the tier one products which is the only type of equipment that we install those solar panels come with a 25 year warranty and a 40 year expected useful lifespan and we can say that with a straight face when you think about the fact that solar panels today are what human life is depending on for survival at the space station in outer space and outer space is one of the harshest environments known to humankind and so if solar panels can do a great job in outer space you can start to have a little bit of confidence in a 25 year terrestrial warranty like you get here on on planet earth. We've got hundreds of thousands of panels installed throughout northern New England today and the failure rate of those panels is is below like 0.2 percent it's a astronomically low number and one of the reasons these systems are so reliable is that you have zero moving parts in a solar electric system so there's virtually no failure points and with regard to snow and ice you know yeah the reality is we we live in northern New England and we get some pretty harsh winter weather and you can get a mix of you know heavy wet snow followed by a really hard freeze and under those circumstances your solar panels will become covered in a bulletproof shell of ice and snow and during those stretches which typically number a few days or maybe a week you're probably going to have zero production from the solar array. When we do a preliminary estimate for a customer like yourself Nick you were wondering how it might work for you when we tell you about your solar array and what you expect to receive in terms of annual generation we include a couple weeks of zero production in the dead of winter because we know it's likely that you're going to be you're going to be covered by a nor'easter for a few days if not a full week and that gets factured into the factored into the production estimate and it's also worth noting that with more than 10,000 arrays installed thus far over the last 16 years we have this great body of data about what a solar array will yield will yield because each array has this monitoring system and it shows you day by day production and so we have a historical look back on the output of all the arrays we've installed thus far and that enables us to highly be highly accurate when we forecast what an array will generate when we install it for you at your home. Great thank you Julia Johnson asks can solar be used for radiant floor heating? Yes a really good question so that depends almost 100 percent on the quality of the structure and so if you want to have solar powered radiant floor heating you have to build a high performance envelope for your building whether it's a you know a passive house kind of home build where you've got minimum r40 insulation in the walls, r60 in the ceilings you really need a super insulated envelope to enable solar powered radiant floor heating to succeed because you're going to remember the time when you most want the heat say in january and february it coincides when the solar resource is at its absolute lowest in main and so to be able to use that that minimal solar resource to provide heat in the home it's got to be super insulated. Great a question from c.m. Pyle could you speak to the differences between summer and year-round homes? Yeah great question so you know solar electricity produces typically 12 months of the year with minimal output in january and february if you're putting a solar array on your summer home but won't be living there in the winter you may be able to harvest solar energy credits for the time of year when you're not using the property and I think you know it really depends on the situation I think this type of question would actually be better answered offline because it varies from state to state depending on what the policy is and it also depends on you know are you there six months a year you there three months of the year and so it's very it's highly specific to the usage and where the home is located. Great question from me Eliza mentioned that the tax credits are inflectuating or changing a little bit is there an outlook in that realm or do we know what the future looks like for solar credits? Yeah so right now a homeowner stands to receive a 26% federal tax credit on a solar installation that's completed in 2020 and I'll just say that right now a lot of the solar companies in Maine are getting fully booked for the installation queue for the rest of the year and so at revision one of the things we're doing is we're guaranteeing people the 4% difference in the tax credit change that will happen on December 31st so in 2020 the tax credit is 26% in 2021 the tax credit steps down to 22% so this year is better than next year in terms of the solar return on investment and for folks who don't make the cut in our installation queue we're guaranteeing that 4% benefit into 2021 if you install in the first quarter. Yeah and then it's really important to note that in 2022 the tax credit goes down to 10% for commercial projects and goes to zero for residential. Wow so we are crossing our fingers that we get a change in the federal leadership in November which will hopefully lead to some type of restoration of the tax credit in the years ahead and this folks is why they call it the solar coaster. And folks please join Maine Audubon's advocacy alerts if you want to help encourage beneficial solar policies from state and feds in the future. Question from Sandy, can solar be used on a mobile home? It can be I guess it depends on how mobile the home is right? I mean a lot of mobile homes sit in one place 12 months of the year and that makes it pretty simple to do a solar array because that that mobile home is probably connected to the grid and you can do a grid tied PV system. If the mobile home is truly mobile and you're trying to drive it all over the place that's an entirely different animal in that case you're using a you know a solar array that's connected to a an inverter in a battery system exclusively that's called an off grid system. We can help people with both options but the bulk of our work is done for homes that stay in one place here around and for folks who want something smaller that's off grid I've put into the Q&A a reference to a place called the alt e-store it's www.altestore.com and that business sells people small solar plus battery packages to like to power your camp in the summer or maybe to power your mobile home if you're moving all over the place throughout the year. Great and with that we are at the one hour mark and I think we're going to stop it here. If you have additional questions please email me if you'd like which is nlund at mainautobahn.org and Phil's email as well was could you say that one more time Phil? Phil at revisionenergy.com there you go. I'd like to thank our panelists Phil Koop, Christian Haynes, Eliza Donahue, I'd like to thank all of you for coming and joining us today I hope you're staying cool out there hopefully from a cooling heat pump. If you want to watch that's right Eliza's nice and cool right now. I will put this up on mainautobahn's website as soon as I can so if you missed anything feel free to check that out and thank you so much for joining mainautobahn. Have a great week everybody. Bye.