 Hello everyone, this is Miguel Yanez from ESI and I would like to welcome everyone to the webinar. It's already over a few minutes past 1 p.m. in central time, 2 p.m. Eastern, and it's a good time to start the webinar. And so I would like to thank everyone for attending this webinar. Today we're going to be talking about on-bill financing and how members only do this in the mid-west can take advantage and make use of on-bill financing. And so before I start the webinar, I would like just to do a couple of housekeeping reminders. And so I will ask everyone to, if you're using your phones, to please mute them. And so it starts 6 if you want to mute your telephones and then later you can unmute them when you want to ask a question. And we will talk about that at the end of the webinar before the questions. And so as I said, my name is Miguel Yanez, I'm with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, which is a nonprofit here based in Washington, D.C. So I'm very happy to be with everyone on this webinar and doing it together with Associated Electric Co-op who have so kindly helped us in promoting this webinar. And I wanted to offer a thank you to them. And so with that I would like to give the word over to Dave Renzi, who is the Manager for Member Energy Services at Associated. So Dave, please take it away. Thank you, Miguel. Well, I just wanted to also welcome everybody to the webinar today. With Miguel and Mark Walters with Renu, Missouri back in April along with Chris Rolffing and we discussed this program. I know it's been around a little while and we have shared that with our member owners in the past. But I think there's some interesting changes possibly to the program that we wanted to hear about and thought this was an opportunity to put the word out there and get our member owners up to speed on it to see it. It was something that they wanted to add to their energy efficiency portfolio. So again, welcome everybody and I'll turn it back over to Miguel. And Lindsay, look forward to hearing what Lindsay has to tell us about the cooperatives of South Carolina. Great. Thank you very much, Dave, for the introduction. He said we started talking about on-bill financing when I was in Missouri back in April and trying to start talking about all the work that ESI, the Environmental Energy Institute is doing in regards to on-bill financing. So let me start with what we do as a non-profit. We're a non-partisan non-profit that mostly works on federal policy, location and clean energy issues. But for the past six years we have been working on a more local level, working with rural electric cars in South Carolina. We're developing an on-bill financing pilot program which will be provided in more detail by the next speaker, Lindsay Smith, who is with the Electric Cooperatives of South Carolina. So working with this association and with eight co-ops in South Carolina and with Central Power Electric Co-op, which is the power provider for these co-ops in South Carolina, the same way that Associated is also a GNT or power provider for co-ops across Missouri, North East Oklahoma and Southern Iowa. These co-ops developed about 125 homes and retrofitted them over a 12-month period. So Lindsay Smith will go over these details shortly after my presentation. And so I want to start talking about what is on-bill financing. That's the main topic of this webinar and I just want to lay out the basics of what on-bill is. So in this webinar on-bill financing is mostly alone. It's typically made by utility to one of its customers or members and it's repaid on the monthly bill, the monthly bill of the customer that chooses to do the energy efficiency retrofit. Probably the most common application for on-bill for electric utilities is to finance energy efficiency improvement to their customer home. And so in this webinar, when I refer to on-bill financing, also Lindsay Smith will refer to on-bill financing will be about building efficiency upgrade. But you can also use on-bill financing to finance other things. It could be distributed generation, such as solar, wind and all sorts of other projects. One of the great aspects of on-bill financing is it provides a viable alternative for homeowners that cannot afford the upfront cost of energy efficiency upgrades and therefore cannot use and cannot get all the advantages of the rebates and the tax incentives that are normally used by utilities to get customers to do energy efficiency retrofits. And so as utilities think about developing an on-bill financing program, they can do it in different ways. And so as they design the program, it can be made to be at least bill neutral or even to generate a cash flow positive for the customer. As a bill neutral program, it means that the monthly average energy savings are equal to or greater than the monthly loan payment. And as I said, it can also be designed so that it can provide a positive cash flow for the participants of the program. And so this also allows for alternative loan underwriting methods, such as using good payment bill history of participants to determine eligibility for the program instead of credit checks. So using these alternative underwriting methods can open the door for lower income households that might not have good credit score. And so this goes into the point that on-bill financing really benefits everyone. It benefits customers of all low income and middle class as it opens the door to those that cannot afford upfront payments and to those families that cannot have a good credit check score history. And so it can also benefit renters. And it benefits participants in lowering their energy bills, saving energy, and increasing comfort levels in the house. We have heard of people saying that the house is being retrofitted. They're not just more comfortable, but they feel that their houses are much bigger. That they're feeling because they can be closer to the window than before when it was so cold, it couldn't, or so hot, it couldn't stand close to the window. On-bill, at a larger scale, on-bill financing programs can drive local economic activity and create new contractor and energy auditor jobs. As houses are being retrofitted, it creates a large network of contractors that are certified for developing energy efficiency retrofits, usually BPI or resnet. And so it also benefits the utility as sensually on-bill financing helps customers and members of the co-op and it increases their satisfaction. They're feeling more connected to the co-op and it provides a consumer service program for the utility. And additionally, as on-bill financing reduces energy, it can also curb the need to build new expensive power plants. So on-bill financing is not a new concept. It has been around for decades. Throughout research here at ESI, we have found more than 50 co-ops in 22 states that are either running or have run on-bill financing programs. And they have come in many different shapes and sizes. These programs, especially some of the older ones, are not necessarily designed to achieve energy savings. Some may be simply a heat pump replacement program for an emergency when a customer needs a heat pump at a moment's notice. But other on-bill financing programs have different elements and many of them are about reducing energy for their customers. And so on-bill financing has evolved over time. Some on-bill financing programs date back to the early 80s. A few programs have started in the last few years to tweak the model to offer bigger energy savings to a wider set of their communities, including underserved populations. And so for example, Midwest Energy Co-op in Western Kansas has since 2008 provided more than 1,000 retrofits to their members and has leveraged more than $8 million in energy efficiency investment. Also, five co-ops in Eastern Kentucky are doing a very successful on-bill financing program since 2012. After my speaker time, Lynse Smith will be talking about the South Carolina Cooperative and their Helma House program in which ESI was part of the development. The pilot did include eight co-ops, but right now five co-ops are developing similar Helma House programs all about on-bill financing and they're all about energy efficiency. And so Lynse Smith will go into detail about those programs. And so why on-bill financing and what is the business case for on-bill financing? So on-bill financing at the end of the day is energy efficiency more broadly and it can be a good business case for rural electric co-ops and for public utilities alike. And it's not just about the concept of on-bill financing will sell less power, it's also about member satisfaction. On-bill financing reduces energy so customers feel better in their homes. And so it's a lot of good things that it can do for the customer and for the consumer. And also once the utility is inside of the house of a consumer customer, it can do a lot of other things. It can put a thermostat, it can inform the consumer of all the great elements that the gob can provide and all the services it can offer. And in the long term it provides a lot of good things in reference to the clean power plant and to the local businesses and to the local community. It really keeps all the dollars and the money locally into the community and it helps all around. So we come to the point of talking about on-bill financing and all the great elements that it has. There's a lot more, there's a lot of finer points about design program. But one of the points I want to make is how to finance an on-bill program. That's something that everyone will have on their minds. And so I will go a little bit upon the sources of origination to catalyze an on-bill financing program. And so essentially there's three categories. There's public funds, there's private funds and internal funds. In terms of public funds you can find from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program, also known as EECLIP, which I will talk about later. And the Rural Economic Development Loan Grant, also known as Red Leg. And so it is the Rural Economic Development Department and the Department of Agriculture that offers these Red Legs at 0%. But they are competitive and they are offered two or three times a year. There's only a two million maximum for application and a 100 million annual cap per year for these loans. UDGDs can also use loans from their cooperative banks such as CFC and Coven. For example, Midwest Energy used $8 million in loans from CFC to catalyze their on-bill financing program and has been able to, as I said, more than 1,000 homes. This is also a viable option for UDGDs. Alternatively, UDGDs may also choose to use their own internal funds to catalyze on-bill financing and this is the most common matter that we have found as we did research on on-bill financing. Coven and UDGDs may choose to create a loan-revolving fund that recycles payments and interest from existing loans that can be used to fund future loans and therefore fund future Red Legs. So, as I said, let me say a few things about ECLIP, about the Energy Efficiency Conservation Loan Program, which is run by the USDA Royal UDGD Service, or IUS. The program went into effect in February of last year and so it is one of the first programs by IUS to systemally offer energy efficiency support for rural UDGDs. Rural UDGDs can use these loans to start up or expand any number of energy efficiency or related activities, if unlike Red Legs as a rolling, not combative application process. And RUS, the Royal UDGD Service, has the capacity and the authority to make ECLIP loans. They have the authority to do up to $6 billion in loans. There's a lot of opportunity for these loans. It is not just for on-bill financing, but on-bill financing programs can use these loans to capitalize them. And so the UDGDs have this great opportunity with ECLIP. The interest rate on ECLIP is the government rate on the day the loan is awarded. So right now it's about 3% and there is a one-eighth that needs to be added to that interest rate. And so who is eligible for the ECLIP loan? Loan recipients for ECLIP can be any electric UDGD. It could be a rural electric cooperative, a public UDGD, or even an investor-owned UDGD, provided that they serve a rural area. And so rural areas is defined as a town or either dedicated, separate place of less than 20,000 people. For UDGDs with service areas that cover both rural areas and larger population centers, the ECLIP loans must be shown to directly benefit the rural portion of the service area. Non-current rural UDGD service buyers would need to be approved or re-approved as RUS buyers in order to be able to apply for ECLIP loans, which could be an involved process. USDA is pretty open to what types of projects these loans can support. So there's a wide range of eligible investments and activities that include energy efficiency projects such as building weatherization, HVAC upgrades, round source heat pumps, efficient lighting, and a lot more. Like insulation, heat pumps, you name it, a lot of them. Other eligible activities include distributed generation for on or off grid renewable energy services, also demand side management investments, and energy audits, as well as consumer education and other soft costs. The loan prohibitions for the ECLIP loans state that these loans are reimbursable and are essentially like a line of credit. So the co-op or rural UDGD that decides to apply for a loan and so what a loan does not actually have to borrow and does not have to pay the interest on all the borrowed money on all the loan. It only pays the interest on the portion of the loan that is withdrawn to be spent on the program. USDA also allows for ECLIP borrowers to use up to 5% of the total loan amount to be received upfront to handle startup costs of the program. And so that is an exception to what I said before. And so because loans can be of any size, there's no maximum to a loan, the larger loan, the more things that can be done with it, provided that they're all detailed in a business plan within the application. And so with the application process, the RUS wants to know what will be included and what will be funded with the loan. So there is no loan maximum, but RUS wants to know what will be done with that amount of money borrowed by the UTD. And so there is two required elements for loan programs, a business plan and a quality assurance plan for the loan funded projects. RUS has given minimal guidance on these plans with the hope that co-ops and other utilities will develop something that works for them and isn't too conformed to a work template. This of course may have led to confusion about what should or should not be included. And so there is in the works a more, let's say, development of a toolkit to provide more specific details on what should go on a business plan and quality assurance plan. But, and so UTD should contact their RUS general field representative to get started on these loans applications. But equally, while it has started about a year ago, it has already provided two loans to two co-ops across the country, totally in $10.5 million. These two co-ops, Roanoke Electric Cooperative in North Carolina and North Arkansas Electric Cooperative are doing on-bill financing programs. They have used these loans to then re-loan it to their customers in order to do energy efficiency programs. Roanoke Electric Cooperative shows to do a more, an on-bill financing program that is tariff based. And so that's one of the possibilities within a design program of an on-bill financing in which it's not alone, it is a debt that the customer has with UTD and that it is put on the meter of the customer. And then that debt, let's say, is repaid over a period of time agreed with the UTD to pay for the cost of the energy efficiency retrofits. And so these repayments are included on the participants' monthly UTD bill. And then so because it's an agreement, it's a debt on the customer, there's no loan, there's no papers. That is a lot easier for the UTD because there's no loan papers. In South Carolina, there was a hybrid and Lindsey Smith will go over that. In North Arkansas Electric Cooperative, it's not a new program. It's a new way to develop their existing on-bill financing program which has been running since the early 80s, is one of the oldest programs run by ACOB. And so they have used Eclipse to get $4.5 million and being able to continue with their successful program, which is mostly for heat pumps and for the station project. And so here is a slide for everyone to look at the USDA resources. And again, we're not trying to promote USDA, we're a non-profit, and we're just trying to tell what are the options for utilities in terms of financing because there are many ways to finance an on-bill program. And as I said before, there's a multitude of them and these ones that I have gone over are one of them. And so finally, I would like to let you know about all the work that ESI has been doing with on-bill financing. ESI has been for the last year being grant funded to do work with utilities as in regards to on-bill financing, assist them to help them think about their design programs and assist them through their capabilities and how to provide capital to their program. And so we are ready to help utilities with financing, including applications to the Eclipse program. And for that, we have a team of experts that are ready to engage with COBS and public entities as well as stakeholders interested in UDD-run efficiency programs. As a non-profit, we are not a turnkey program. But instead, we seek to help utilities set up a program that works for them just as we did when we helped in South Carolina the eight COBS and the on-bill financing pilot. I want to stress that while we function like consultants, our work is grant funded and therefore our assistance is completely free. We don't provide any charts for utilities that won't work with us. Right now, we are working with two municipal data in Michigan and in Iowa to implement on-bill financing. We are also working with one co-op in Michigan to do the same thing and we hope to take this program on a larger scale on these two states. And so let me just turn it over to Lindsey Smith right now who is the vice president of education programs for the Electric Cooperative of South Carolina and he will go over the health house program and how that program developed and what has been done after that by the COBS. So, Lindsey, whenever you want. Miguel, thank you. I appreciate that information and this opportunity to talk to the group about our program in South Carolina Health My House which is an on-bill financing program that we started back in 2011 and continue to work on today. What I will talk about in this presentation is who we are as South Carolina co-ops a little bit of our background, why we got into on-bill financing, how our program works, the results and lessons we've learned and then what we're doing now and what we'll be doing next with this program model. South Carolina Electric Co-ops, there are 20 of them, 20 distribution systems around the state. We serve in all 46 counties across the state and the co-ops come together through their G&T Central Electric Power Cooperative to buy power and also through the statewide which is the organization I work for here. I'll talk a little bit more about the demographics of this group when we get to the next few slides. One thing important to stay here, unlike some co-ops, maybe yours included, we do not own power plants, we buy all of our power, mostly from a state-owned power authority called Santee Cooper, some of it from investor-owned utilities and Southeastern Power Co-op or Power Company. So it's kind of a hodgepodge, but mostly from Santee Cooper. That of course puts us in a fairly unique position as really consumer advocates, which is the role we take most often in most of our stakeholder meetings here. Also important to state for you, we are not state-regulated here in South Carolina. We always talk about we're the most directly regulated group of co-ops or kind of co-ops in that we're regulated by our members. When they get together for annual meetings and vote in and out, trustees of course, that's about as accountable as you get. Here's a little bit more specifically about our members, the demographics. About a quarter of them live in manufactured housing, mobile homes to a lot of folks. That's three times the national average, so that poses a lot of unique housing challenges for us here in the state. Half of them are more likely to live below the national poverty line, so we are poorer as a rule, our members are. In some months, they're spending almost, well, the great majority of their disposable income on their electric bills. That's worth knowing and important and something we've got to work on with them. We write really high and cooling degree days per year. It's a hot place to live and when it's cold, our folks are using primarily electricity to heat their homes, whether it's electric space heaters, resistance heating, or heat pumps, which is most of what they're doing. To address all of those issues, in 2011, the co-ops came together through that G&T I mentioned, Central Electric, and launched a pilot version of on-bill financing called Help My House. You see on the left side of your screen there, the pilot version lasted a couple of years, involved eight co-ops, as Miguel mentioned. They retrofitted in a little less than a year's time, 125 homes. The goal was 100, but they had so many folks interested in participating, they upped the ante a little bit. The main purpose of this pilot or test, it was research. It was the co-ops researching whether energy efficiency could be tapped into instead of asking Santy Cooper and others to keep building more power plants. You all know how that works. When they do that, they pass the cost to you and you pass it to your members and eventually, when you squeeze hard enough, people squirm and people get angry and is there a way to offset some of those expenses and by tapping into energy efficiency, pass along the lower cost to your members and not have to build so many power plants through your power providers. We did this. Central did this with RUS and G&T funding. You heard Miguel mention a moment ago, red leg loans. That's what Central Electric used, and we'll talk some more about that in a minute. Then we'll talk later on in this presentation about the ongoing programs that are currently working at individual co-ops. They have launched individual help from my house. Programs are owned, funding them in different kinds of ways. Five co-ops. The main purpose there is just member service. What are you going to do when those members call you every winter and say, I can't afford this power bill? What can you do for them? That is one thing you can do for them. They've used a mix of co-op and RUS funding dollars to do that. Let's talk about the pilot again. I mentioned Central Electric as the G&T. Their board in 2010 had these efficiency goals. Let's reduce residential energy use in 10 years by 10%. Let's reduce the wholesale residential power purchase costs and let's make sure as we test what we're going to test that we maintain or improve member satisfaction and also, oh, by the way, will consumers buy into this? Will they be interested in this? They partnered with us, the statewide, to design the pilot program. We worked together with folks in Washington at USDA and RUS to actually advance federal legislation that enables more financing of efficiency. Back in that time, red leg would not have been available for energy efficiency loans. We worked with the folks at RUS and USDA and obviously with the folks in Congress as well, and they reworked the rules so that red leg could be used for that. Central was the first co-op group or concern that got one of these newly revamped red leg loans and then kicked off the pilot program using that funding. We structured it in such a way that it is very much like the tariff that is used by those Kentucky co-ops that Miguel mentioned a moment ago. A lot of folks have gone to the tariff model where you're not really making a loan to folks, but instead you're basically putting a surcharge that's transferable to the next person who moves into that home. Well, our loans are set up pretty much the same way. We did ours though through legislation at the state level, a 2010 state law that ties our loans to the meter on the property and also allows us as co-ops or any utility to disconnect the member if they do not pay the loan payment. Again, that loan stays with the home if it's sold, and this helps eliminate the need for a credit check. Why is that important? Because some of the very people who need these retrofits, these improvements to their home, some of the very people who can't afford to pay your electric bills are people who cannot pass a credit check in many cases. So it was important to us to have risk management that got us around to that. More on this, it allows members to finance the energy efficiency loans with our measures with low interest loans, ours are less than or are 4% or less. They're repaid on the monthly utility bills like Miguel described, and of course it gets over a huge barrier, and that is folks who don't have the money in the pocket to go buy a new heat pump. A lot of the rebate programs are terrific. They work great for a subset of your members and consumers, but they have to be folks who can write that check and then get paid back later. A lot of the folks we're talking about here today don't have that money to pay out at the beginning to get a rebate. So more about phase one, this pilot I talked about, eight co-ops, there they are, central electorate, the statewide association, and then key partners. One of them is the host today. Environmental Energy Study Institute could not have done this program without them. They were the folks, they and ECOVA at the bottom of their screen who brought experience to the table with EESIs work funded by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Here's the structure of the pilot and how we worked. Basically you want to follow central electric as the source of this whole thing as I mentioned. What the heck is KW Savings? In order to do a red leg loan, you must have a third party that takes the money from the outfit or the co-op that borrowed it from USDA and then makes the microloans ultimately to, in this case, the co-op and then to the consumer member to pay the contractor. So basically central gives over the money to KW Savings. KW Savings for us is the administrative arm for our help my house program. They own the brand. They work with the co-op. The co-op has an account representative who deals with the consumer member. Come out, take a look at your house, make sure that it pre-qualifies for the program if it does. That representative calls a BPI Building Performance Institute Certified Energy Order who comes out with a blower door, goes to the member's home, conducts the tests, crunches the numbers, projects with computer software. Can we save this person enough money to more than cover that monthly loan payment? If reduced their monthly electric bill by 50 bucks and then their loan payments $40, we just made them more comfortable. We've lowered their overall output for cost of electricity and their loan payment, put a little bit of money in the pocket and everybody's happy so they can make their loan payment and everything. We have a list of certified contractors that we've trained who have a contract with us. They understand our process. The member gets to choose which contractor they want to work with. We give them a list. These are folks who are authorized to be part of our program. These contractors also understand that if this auditor comes in at the end of the job and the work is not done to our standards and satisfaction, the contractor must come back and complete the repairs in the home before he or she gets paid. That's the way it works. Only after that work is done satisfactorily to our standards does the payment of the contractor happen and does the consumer member begin paying on the electric bill. Our available services at KW Savings, you'll see all of them there. We can do it soup to nuts. We can do the whole thing, but Co-op doesn't have the resources and people to do it. Or we can do these different individual items that you see listed here. Everything from energy audits to contractor management, loan review, everything listed there, including work and resolution problem solving after the work is completed. Another important function of KW Savings, that third party I mentioned, we're the brand managers. We're the franchisors. If we're the Chick-fil-A, then everybody else who has a help by house program is a Chick-fil-A store, a franchise. We're making sure that they're all frying the chicken sandwiches the same way. They're all keeping things spotlessly clean. All the employees are nice and doing their jobs well. But importantly, all the quality controls that you see listed here, oversight of loan processing, that has to be something we're plugged into. The data collection is happening as it should. We want to keep up with how the houses are performing after we finish improving them. And then, of course, we have to see the business plan up front. How are you going to operate your help by house program at the local level? Some of the things have to be common from program to program. There is some variability allowed, however. Here, again, is a layout of the process. I kind of went over it when I went through the flow chart earlier, but you see it there. Selection, which is sometimes self-selecting. I have a high power bill. I call my co-op. I need help. You send out your visual order. You look at my house. You pre-qualify. Then comes the BPI energy audit. You approve my loan. I get to pick the contractor. Contractor installs on schedule with me. And then that final inspection and approval that I mentioned earlier. When we did the pilot, here's how things broke out. Most everybody got air sealing. That won't surprise many of you who deal with this sort of thing on a regular basis. Duck leakage, something that's most often overlooked by the HVAC, the heat pump installation folks. They just drop the unit and drive off and never take a look at ducks very often. And that's something that needs to be fixed. Attic installation, and then lots of new heat pumps, replacement, and also replacing electric furnaces. Don't know about how things work where you guys live, but here in South Carolina, still, a lot of the mobile homes, single-wide and double-wide mobile homes, are still sold with electric furnaces. Incredibly expensive way to heat a home. And that's some of our double-wide mobile home owners here are paying $500, $600 electric bills in the winter, crazy, but true. Measured results were close to predicted in our pilot. We predicted they'd be about $12,000 KWH a year on average. We came very close to that. That's on the right-hand column. Annual savings also very close. Project costs were dead on. And the simple payback, these red leg loans are 10-year loans. We wanted to come in under that, and we did around six years, six and a half years. Annual savings average per, there you see almost $1,200, average annual savings. Net savings of almost $300 after loan payments are made. So that's significant. Not only making people more comfortable covering their loan payment with the savings they're getting on their electric bill, but also putting money in their pockets. And that was important to us. Demand savings, tracking fairly closely what you saw in energy savings, although we did not install demand control switches in the homes because we wanted to see them perform strictly with the energy efficiency measures. And then we surveyed folks afterwards because we needed to ask them some questions that weren't going to show up on meters and electric bills. Are you satisfied with their co-op? Almost all of them said I am. Even at least as much or higher. Are you more comfortable? Almost 90% somewhat or a lot more comfortable, and that's an important indication for us. We wanted to see that happen. Are you satisfied with your post repair electric bills? Again, 90% said yes, somewhat or vary. Here's an example of some folks who were very satisfied. The Norseworthies who live in Summerton, South Carolina, they're served by Santee Electric Cooperative. You can see they've got kind of a typical size ranch style home about 2,000 square feet. They are both retired, so they're now on fixed incomes, social security and retirement. Any amount they can save on their electric bill is great. We installed the energy efficiency measures. You see they're on your screen to the tune of about $6,500. And this is what they saw on average on their monthly electric bills in terms of savings. Savings approximately $150 to $200 a month. So you can imagine what a huge difference. And that's just one family, one example. There were others that were even higher than that. So what are the lessons and conclusions we learned from the pilot? 34% less electricity on average in each home. And again, almost $300 in savings per year after the payments are made. Coincident peak savings of about a third. Again, tracking about the same as what I showed earlier in electricity use. No load factor, which as I said would have improved with installed control switches. That comfort factor. Very important. And the owner said they got that. And of course they were extremely satisfied. Miguel already showed that slide. So I'm going to skip on and talk to you about this phase two because when this program ended, this research and development program by Central Electric, the G&T, several of the co-ops, some of them involved in the pilot, others not involved in the pilot said, you know, we liked that model. We liked that members liked it, that they were really satisfied with their co-op, that they became more comfortable. And we'd like to explore it as nothing more right now for us than a member service. Something we can finally tell the person who calls us every winter every summer in the heat of summer and says, I can't afford this bill. And so these are the co-ops that have decided to run the program. With ACAN Electric and Santee Electric being two of the first and most active as you can see from their numbers. ACAN Electric, in fact, has applied for and is about to be awarded its third $1 million red leg loan. That's how they're funding their program. Santee Electric just received its first $1 million. Its funding, its lending pool, or it has to this point with its own dollars. And that's true of Black River Electric and the others you see on the grid there as well, with the exception of Lynch's River. The reason you're seeing NA on Little River and Lynch's River, those are brand new programs to the family. Both of them starting their programs, Little River with its own Lynch's River with a million dollar red leg loan that they just received. So approaching 350 homes since the pilot, if you have added the 125 pilot homes, you're getting close to 500 homes program-wide that we've completed with Help My House, which I know relative to some of the programs out there nationally is probably a drop in the bucket. For us, that's significant. And what it does for us is important in that with EPA 111D's final rule coming out, they've said to the states, you guys can get double credit for any energy efficiency you do for low-income residents, for low-income consumers. The fact that we have run a program like this and oh, by the way, partnered with Duke University to sell them some of the carbon offsets that we're gaining by weatherizing these homes, we are having to prove to Duke University and they, in turn, to what we call the carbon offset police, how they're gaining those carbon offsets, how they're getting those improvements. By getting those measures in place and by establishing a way to do that, we're accomplishing something EPA is requiring states to do and that is to be able to prove that you're getting the energy efficiency gains. So we've got a leg up even at this very small scale on something that could go bigger scale depending on what direction the co-ops in the state of South Carolina choose to go. I know we're short on time. I'm going to stop there and hand it back over to Dave, Amory and Miguel and let you guys take it from here. I believe hopefully have a few minutes for questions. Thank you very much, Lindsay. This is Miguel again and thank you very much for your question. Now we will open it up for questions if anyone has any questions or comments about webinar. You can raise your hand. If you want to ask a question, you can raise your hand. If you're using a computer on the upper level of your computer screen, you can also type questions on the chat box and if you want, you can also unmute your phones but please do it in an orderly manner. If you want to ask a question, you can unmute your phone through the pound six. Miguel, this is Dave. One question, I guess I have a Lindsay about defaults. I know that it's tied to the meters but if I pull that meter and nobody else moves in there, I've got an empty house and no repayment of that loan. What was your default rate? Dave, it's less than 1%. We have not had a whole lot of experience with defaults at this stage. What has happened in a couple of cases where folks have just gone bankrupt and moved out, essentially the loan goes dormant during that period so you're not collecting payments, obviously, on the loan at that stage. But when the new homeowner moves in, that state law I spoke of earlier in the presentation has a provision where there's a document in the closing packet for the new owner that says there's this loan on your meter and you will be paying on that loan when you move into the home on your electric bill. So there's disclosure there at closing. The new homeowner knows that's on there. Certainly that new homeowner or the buyer has the option to negotiate that with the bank or whomever selling the home and might negotiate it so that the bank pays it off. But it's there. So the next person coming in pays the loan, begins paying on the loan. The only thing you've lost at that point, of course, is the interest you would have gained otherwise and you're not going to ding the new buyer for that. But you do get the loan paid off also. Thank you. This is Dave. I don't want to dominate the questions, but I guess one of the questions I do have, if nobody else is going to ask something, is on the follow-up on the certification of the energy efficiency savings. Are you requiring a second or follow-up blower door test to guarantee that or are you just a visual inspection? Neither. What we're doing is using billing, history, so usage history for the consumers. We reconnect with the co-op and we pull the usage history for the home since the retrofit was done, which is how that was initially done and studied for the first 12 months after the improvements were completed. In fact, EESI hosted a presentation on Capitol Hill for all the energy legislative liaisons, congressional liaisons to present those findings. That's how we came up with the 34% and so forth. But we're in the process right now of updating that study. So a couple of years since we've checked in on those homes, we want to see how they're doing. As you may be fully aware, some data out there from previous programs that indicate people get less energy efficient once you make their homes more energy efficient, meaning now I'm saving all this money on my electric bill. I like being really cool in this. I'll just turn that thermostat down a little bit lower and they start actually chipping away at some of the savings that you helped them gain. We'll be interested in seeing how that's going to play out and whether or not that's a factor for us in this case. Dave. Thank you. And follow up on that then, Miguel. Is that allowed under the ECLIP program? Or is an audit required on that? It's not required. We did EESI and an evaluation of the program after one year. So we got an external consulting company that looked at all the data from the pilot program after one year and it was weather normalized. And so after looking at all that data, the number at the end of it was 34% energy savings. And so that was really varied because it included single family housing, it included single and double wide manufactured homes. So 50% energy savings, especially double wide and some 25%. So 34 is the average on one year weather normalized data. And it is not required by ECLIP. It was just something that we did after the pilot in 2013 and we have a report for anyone who is interested. And if you want, you can email us. My email address is on the screen. If you want the report and more information, I will be happy to provide to you. Thank you. Well, this is Dave again and I know, Miguel, we talked about the possibility of these slides being available to participants. And are you with that information? Yes, Dave. These slides are available on the site's website and I think we can send an email to everyone that has participated on this webinar and also people who are interested. They can also provide and send email to me. My email address is on the screen and I will be happy to just send them the recording and the website. Alternatively, these slides are on our website, ESI.org. That's where you can find information about this webinar and we will post the slides and the recording on a dedicated website within our website. This is Amri just jumping in. The slides are not quite up yet but they will be very shortly. This is Dave again. It doesn't appear there's any more questions and I do want to thank both Miguel and Lindsay for your presentations and Amri for hosting us today and all the participants for any time out of their schedules to learn more about this on-bill financing opportunity. Yes, I would like to thank everyone for attending this webinar and as I said, if you have any further questions you can email us and as Amri said, the slides will be up soon in our website and you can also send us an email for any questions, comments, or if you want any further information. Thank you very much for everyone and hope to see you soon in another webinar. Thank you very much.