 of the two of us that organized this series. So we're here every fourth Wednesday of the month for Portland Sustainability Series. And unfortunately, I'm just Bernersie, Executive Director of the Union Conservation Collaborative, could not be here tonight. But that was a great organization and they have been an incredible partner for this series. And I believe this is our 14th. So I'm pretty excited that we're continuing to move on. Tonight we have the two gentlemen speaking about the solar panel array that is on the roof of the library. And if it were a better evening, I would invite you to take a look at it. But if you're ever in the library during the day, if you take the elevator to the third floor, you have a great view of our solar array on the roof. So I encourage you to do that sometime. Rocky Apoid is the founder and owner of GreenSun LLC, a company that installs solar energy systems and is committed to promoting renewable energy technology through community outreach. Rocky collaborated with PPL to install an 8,000 watt solar array to demonstrate the feasibility of solar low voltage systems. In addition, he developed the solar outreach to schools, which is a mobile solar trailer, which is very cool, and should check out on his website, designed to teach math and science to high school students and communities already into solar energy. And Peter Cheminel is the co-director of the Spillway Fund, an organization that seeks to help preserve and protect the natural environment of southern and mid-coast Maine by promoting clean energy, supporting sustainable agriculture, and encouraging a passion for the areas of unique natural heritage through arts, residencies, and education. So I have some involvement in this project, mostly for the educational components of the library. But I'm going to introduce Randy Creswell. He's the chair of Perkins-Thompson's Bankruptcy Creditor and Dettoroids Practice Group, shoo, with a title. And he served on Perkins-Thompson Library's Board of Directors since 2009, and he's now the board's president, so. Thank you, Randy. He's going to give us some information about PPL's vision. So thank you for coming. I know it's a smaller crowd, so it will be a little more and probably more formal, and hopefully, you know, I have some back and forth with dialogue, and I think that's really the general data presentation for your questions, sir. I guess from the library's perspective, and I wouldn't say that we were actively going down this road to be really part of the spillway folks, and they kind of raised our consciousness about sustainability and introduced the idea of the solar panels on the roof. And we're right now in line with the transition here, because I believe in 2009 or 2010, exactly, it's when we just did the renovation for the main building, and we are quite removed from that now. And the board is really thinking about what's the next step, what are we going to do as a library, and whether it's more infrastructure for the physical plans and the like, but also how can we really follow along the concept of sustainability? I mean, a lot of the ideas are designed for the first iteration of the library. We're going to have, perhaps, a green roof and have outdoor space on the roof here so that folks can go out and enjoy sort of those views and use that more as a community place. And we're still really exploring that, and just thinking that spillway involvement has really been an accelerant for those kinds of ideas. And so that's where the library's moving, is trying to get a good headline. And the project that we did with spillway that involved Rocky Acroy, putting the solar panels out here, we're going to have educational stuff that ties in with the panels. You've got an array of it that will be probably consistent for a single-family residence, so you get a sense of what kind of power we generate with that. Obviously, it doesn't do much for a giant facility like this, but the idea is to put a, perhaps, kiosk somewhere accessible downstairs where folks can go see, measure how much power it's generating, it will translate into what it would be like if you had had their house and what kind of savings and environmental benefits you'd get over that first year at a time. So the educational moment is very important to the library, and so we're grateful for the introduction of that to us. And so that's all I really want to say in terms of the boards down here. There's a consciousness now about where the library's going and how we can fit into this sort of conversation. Peter, I don't know if you were going to go first, and this is Peter Scherber, all of us who are one and one of the more visionary folks I've met in quite some time, so I appreciate it. I think there's a lot of show. That's great. Hello, thanks for coming and joining us tonight. We're excited that this has finally come to fruition. We're still working on the educational piece, but the solar panels are up there, and we're climbing in. We're generating power right now. And you'd be surprised how long it took us to get to this point for what's a relatively simple project, but there were a lot of ins and outs along the way. But first I want to thank Randy and the Board of Trustees and Sarah Campbell, the library's director, and her team for being really inspiring partners in all of this. We've got a couple more projects that are going to work together, so hopefully this is just the beginning of a lot of great stuff to come. I don't want to thank you guys as well, not only for putting this lecture series together, but for developing the educational piece we're going to talk about a little bit in just a moment. So I'm here as co-director of the Spilway Fund. It's an organization that started three years ago with a friend of mine, John Scali, who grew up in the cable Elizabeth. But I have to see the world, and we kind of came back a few years ago. I wanted to do something to give back for our own area. So we started this organization to do things in the areas where we're most interested in the environment and the arts. As fate would have it, the environment guy is on a plane to be able to get right now. So you've got the arts guy here to talk about science stuff, which I'm going to not do when I pass that down to Rocky, because he's more than capable of it. In just a moment, boy, we'll talk about this stuff. I do know something about it, just how we got here. And that's something that might be of interest to you. It's kind of the essence behind the Stilway Fund, the way you look at the environmental piece, which is our simple idea is this, that the environment should be something we can all get out of it. So whatever side of the political aisle we're on, we all like clean air. I think we all agree on the value of energy independence from the floor to the ground. And I think we all want a clean environment for our kids and for our kids to grow up in. So it should be something we can all get behind. That said, and the future isn't going to come about if we wait for the stars to align and adjust up, or if we wait for the market forces to make it suddenly desirable for this to happen. If it's gonna happen, it's gonna have to happen because of all of us who benefit from it, which is pretty much everybody. So that's our idea that we are a very small organization, we have very modest resources. So we thought we would start small by filling every roof with boards with solar panels. Small resources, big dreams. So we're kind of like the proverbial hand trying to move a proverbial boulder. It's only gonna work if the boulder happens to be at the edge of the precipice anyways. You can all the other ends of the bush. You get the wind in your back and then you get a bolt of lightning to get the boulder and just push it right off the edge. So we started by going to City Hall with the mayor. We thought maybe Mayor Strindland could be our bolt of lightning. Turns out that's not in his portfolio. But what he did do, he did this one better, he said, why don't you guys start with one of them? And why don't you start with one of them? And we did the rest of his history in the making. And as we all were working on this project and we went through the different possibilities and to see what we could make happen, we came across one notion about what is the, the factors, the biggest factor in someone's decision to go solar for their home. So we don't have a guess of what that is. What is the tipping point to make someone say, hey, I wanna do something else? Cost. The cost, the guess. The answer I'm looking for is your neighbor, is it? That's the number one thing that you've seen all people go solar, that's a big common threat. And what that means, it's not just you're doing it because you're keeping up with the Joneses, it's because you can ask the questions that we're gonna be able to ask for, I can tell you that. What is the cost? How long does it take for itself? How much energy will it produce? What do you do on a cloudy day? What is the end of the year? Call these things from your neighbor's area. You can go back and forth. We decide, hey, that's for me. So we also realize we're sitting in this building here, which by cousin's location in the center of town, and the fact that 600,000 people walk through the doors every year in a way the library is everybody's neighbor. So we had an opportunity to be realized if we created a size, solar array, about the size we have on a household on the roof here and we're able to get the information to people. We could be everyone's neighbor, everyone's solar neighbor. So our goals are twofold. One is to provide that information to people. So homeowners and business owners who come to the library can get the information to decide if the solar is right for them. But also to get it in front of the homeowners and business owners of tomorrow. A ton of students walk through this library. And between the solar project and hopefully we'll have more renewables in the future projects baked into the library and become part of their DNA, the way the millennials grew up with recycling was part of everything they think about. The way Gen X was like, me grew up with no seat belts. Now the way we grew up with there was our issue. So we had some of you already had the Indian chief of the tier and all the literature. So we were getting our parents' grandparents to throw things away in the library. Millennials won't print anything, they'll be sad we might be cycling. We were hoping that tomorrow's, today's are the people, tomorrow's the earth to grow, knowing the stuff that we're about to hear about tonight just because they've been around all the time. And with the help from people like Rocky, I think we're gonna get there. With that I'm going to turn the mic over to Rocky. We're probably gonna have plenty of time for the Q&A. So any questions you have about that? Any questions you have or actually thoughts, any other thoughts for me in terms of helping us move that boulder? Any way to find a public involvement in making these things happen? Love to hear about that. Thank you. Good evening and thank you for everybody for coming. Small crowds, so I really wanna just say that anybody has any questions along this whole thing, just raise your hand, stop me and ask questions. Very, very informal. Thank you for our Portland Public Library and all the people involved for giving me the opportunity to be here today. I loved working with Portland, as a collaborator with the Portland Public Library to do this project. Part of my DNA is to really kind of push renewable energy and from ways that go back into my high school days to a certain extent with littering and recycling, even before it was vogue from my perspective. I think your point that generational sort of changes that are accepted as commonplace, things like recycling was something that really didn't happen when I was a kid and again, it's something that's expected and it's part of the daily life. Solar and other sorts of renewables coming forward are gonna be part of this next generation and again, forums like this are great ways of getting this going. This is the sun. This is like a one day, a time lapse from like 14 days from 1914, excuse me, 2014, where it's just kind of recording the sun and it's one complete rotation. The amount of energy in the sun is incredible. We're only just getting a teeny, teeny tiny fraction that's hitting the earth as it's coming from the sun. It's going in three to six hundred sixty degrees in all of the directions and it's been here for millions of years and it's gonna be here for millions more so this is an incredible resource that we can do much better at tapping. Sure. I'm not gonna answer that other than say it's really far. That's probably something. Yeah, it's incredible. The amount of power that the sun has, especially at its distance. This is the solar ray that we put here on the library. Again, the goal was to have a solar ray which is pretty similar to something a household would be. This array is 8,235 watts. I'm gonna jump quickly to the day that we did a lot of the construction. There you go. So my crew of about four or five people came with a crew of about four or five people from the library and in pretty much on a kind of a cloudy, a little chilly day, we were able to get this whole system up and running or not up and running, but at least installed onto the roof. And we all took part in it, both volunteers and some of my crew. It was a lot faster when you're doing as the time lapse. This is the actual dashboard for the solar system here at the library. And what it does, it records on a daily basis all the energy that's produced on a daily basis and kind of keeps track of it for one month to the next. This was actually installed and started collecting data at the beginning of September. So this is what we've seen in terms of production on a day-to-day basis. About 45 kilowatt hours on that particular day. In the summer, it might get up to 50 or 60 or 70, really, again, you're gonna have a much greater production during the summer than you will during the winter. It's actually pretty dramatic in some of the changes. I'll even show you on another site. So this is the recordings for the first two months, but another site that I have solar on, it's the Comfort Inn in Portland. This is gonna show you kind of the typical year-to-year curves. It's been up and running for two years. You'll see, in January and February, it's really not gonna be producing as much as it... Produce is almost three times as much in the summer, which is why net metering is so important because you design a system in the course of a year to cover your annual needs, but you're gonna be producing most of that annual energy in the summer months. So in the summer, you're gonna be producing access credits that go to the net or to CMP and you get those credits and start using them in the winter. And if you size the system correctly, you should be just about zero by the end of the year. So this is kind of a typical sort of solar curve. Yes. Why does it produce more in the summer? It's got nothing to do with heat, unless maybe it does. The length of the day. In the winter, basically when you're designing a solar system in Maine, you base it on an average of 4.5 sun hours per day over the course of the year. You might get 10 hours of sun in the winter, in the summer, and only two or three in the winter of useful sun hours. So it kind of just evens it out. Plus you also maximize the angle that the sun is with the roof if possible. You can't do that in all cases, but you can in many. So enough of the preliminaries. So what my talk is really gonna be focusing on mostly is some of the technical, how do we get power from the sun? So here's our sun, how do we get it to come out of that outlet? And there's lots of parts that go in between. The first piece is solar modules. And what solar modules have are solar cells within them. Each one of these little squares is one of these little solar cells which produces about maybe about one volt of energy. And solar panels usually come in either 60 or 72 cells. And depending upon the quality of the cells and the size of the panels, you're going to have different panels that will be able to give you different amounts of energy. Things have gotten better technologically. 20 years ago or 10 years ago, an average size panel might be 150 or 180 watts. Right now, there are modules out there of the same size, producing 300 to 350. So the next piece of the basic part, and I don't want to get all the physics on you guys, but basically when sun hits or light hits a particular type of metal, it will release electrons which will go from a cathode to anode. And in silicon, which is these are silicon solar cells, that's exactly what's happening. You're pushing some electrons from this side to that side and what those electrons wanted to do is go from, you know, there's too much on the P side, which is a lot of extra electrons. They want to get back to the other side. So if you put a light bulb in between here, you can take advantage of the energy that the electrons have when they want to get back to the other side. So you're giving them a path to get back to the initial spot. That's all I'm going to get into into the physics of it. But when we have solar panels, what we basically have is a power that's coming out is DC. I'm not sure if everybody started with DC power versus AC power, but solar panels are just like a battery. They've got a plus side and a minus side. In order to get power to come out of an outlet, it has to be AC and that's where the inverter comes in. Solar panels again, DC alternating current for panels. So once you've got the solar module that's producing the DC power, it goes to the inverter. The inverter is changing it to AC. Well, how do you get to your outlets? Well, that's where the installation comes in and you need to be able to connect to your service panel, your circuit breaker box in your home. So I talked about it gets high in the summer and low in the winter. If you have all that extra electricity, if you don't have a place to store it and right now with net metering, the grid is that storage system. It's literally a battery. I'd say it's almost a free battery. It costs you like $12 a month to be hooked up to the grid. So you're able to, any energy that's not being used at the home is being put onto the grid as a credit for later on in the winter when you might need it or even at night time because you're not having any solar power during the day, during the evenings. I have that question. Sure. Does the all power generated by the inflation go into the grid or does it go into your own system and then just spill over into the grid if there's extra? It's pretty much that way. It spills over. Again, you're, if- Especially power in your own appliances or in your own power. I mean, there's extra that goes into the grid. For the most part, that's how it works. There's, if you're looking at the meters as electricity is being produced, you'll see that like first thing in the morning, you're gonna be, your meter's gonna be turning because of CMP and you're just getting power off the grid. As your sun starts hitting the modules, you're gonna start seeing that your power starting to, or the CMP power starting to diminish and your power is gonna start to go up. Some of the solar monitoring systems like the one I showed you actually can show some active changes. This particular software didn't, the one that's here at the library, but there are different ways of doing that, but that is in essence correct. So it goes back onto the electric meter, then it gets back onto the grid and then that's your, basically your free, a battery that costs you like $12 a month to just be hooked up. Okay, so the basics of PV photovoltaics is the main components are gonna be solar panels for making the DC power the inverters for converting DC to AC. The racking system, you gotta put the system on something, you can't just throw it on the roof, it's gonna be secured. And then there's a whole series of electrical supplies, wire conduit, hardware, sealants to make sure your roof does and make a whole slew of different things. So that's really what goes on to a typical PV installation. So you get your solar panels up on, solar panels up on the roof, they come down to the inverter, which could be in your basement, could be outside, whatever's the most convenient or aesthetic depending upon the customers or the homeowner's choice. Then it goes to the power, AC power goes DC power to here, AC power goes to the circuit breaker box and then it gets distributed to all y'all that's in the house. But anything excess goes off to the meter and then off to the grid. So this is the question everybody wants to know, how much does it cost? Well, it really kind of depends upon your variables, how much electricity do you have? Can you actually put a system on your roof? Do you have Southern exposure? Do you have trees? Do you have enough space on your property for a ground mount installation? And really depending upon all those different characteristics, you're gonna have a system which is gonna either be bigger or little and that's really gonna affect the cost. So when we talk about cost for systems, we usually talk about the cost per watt installed. So if you put down like a 10,000 watt system at $2.20 a watt, it's gonna be $22,000. If you're using a ground mount system which might cost a little bit more, it'll be like $29,000. So I'll get into some of those details actually right here is a great example. Here's a typical flat roof mount. There's two or three different ways of doing it but this is a racking system that holds the panels with cement blocks onto the roof and this is more expensive than some of the others or a typical rooftop at around $2.70 a watt which is what the cost for this particular installation was. For the homeowner paying taxes, so $21,000 would be the cost of that system but with the current tax incentives from the federal government, you get 30% back of that. So you realize cost is only about 14.7 and if you calculate the amount of energy that it will produce in the course of a year, your simple payback is around 10, almost 11 years. You go to something like a ground mount system, a ground mount system because you don't have any structure at all to start off with. You really need to kind of build things from scratch and there are several different ways of doing it, pole mount, cement, there are different variables and it depends, do you have ledge? If you have ledge, you really can't drive posts so those sorts of things are gonna influence the cost. So on a high end, you might say that a ground mount might be $2.90 a watt so an 8,000 watt system with a ground mount would be $23,000. After a tax credit, it'd be $16,000 and payback around 12 years. So the best way of going is if you already have a structure which is your home and that structure, the roof of your home actually faces south, you can get that price down because all you need to do is have a racking system as opposed to a whole structure at the same time. So $2.30 a watt is probably in a ballpark of what something like that should cost these days. If I was to install this system, I actually installed this system in 2013 and it was around $18,000 then which was $3 a watt and that's because the price of modules have come down significantly in the last three or four years. That may be changing with the tariffs that may go into effect with the under the current administration. We can talk about that if you're interested later on. But in any case, solar systems, this is gonna pay itself back about nine to 10 years but solar systems should be expected to last 25 to 30 years. So you're gonna have, you're basically paying for all your electricity in one year for the next 25 to 30 years. And the return on investment, if you look at those numbers overall, an 18 or basically a $12,000 investment probably have a return on an investment in 30 years of like maybe $20,000. So you're actually making money. There's, to spend in essence $12,000 on a solar system is something that pays you back. You buy cars for 20, 30, 40, $50,000 and they never pay you back and they only keep costing you. So again, it's a good justification from even a financial economic perspective. You just need to have the capital up front in order to get it installed. There's one other type of racking system which is solar trackers and these are very cool and they will basically stay perpendicular to sun all day long and they usually produce about 40% more electricity from the same amount of panels. However, the racking systems cost about at least the same amount as a solar system. So you're better off spending the extra money on more panels and you'll have something that's not gonna have mechanical failures, breakdowns, things like that. So even though the place that I would recommend a solar tracker is if you have a very small piece of property and you wanna maximize whatever you can, that's really, and you have maybe some extra money to spend for it because it is much more cost effective. It'll cost you more for the racking than it will for everything else. In terms of production, there's a program called PVWATS. With this PVWATS calculator, this is right online. I can even go here right now. We can just go through the motions. I'd put in, I'm on for 106 for the Portland area. And so we're putting up an 8,000 watt system on a typical home. Most panels are gonna be standard. I wouldn't put anything premium. And then is it a roof mount like that home or is it open rack like on top of that library? Well, let's just go for the perspective of home. Let's say it's a roof mount versus the others of the tracking. Are they tracking in both directions? Are they tracking in two different directions, both following the sun this way and also following the sun up and down? But again, a typical home is gonna have that. System loss is a default in 14%. I usually put in a 20% because I'd rather under promise and over deliver than make it so if there was a bad cloudy summer and it didn't produce as well as I said it should, I'd rather you be happy that it's producing more. And then the degree, basically the best angle for solar panels in the state of Maine is right around 35 degrees. You're gonna be maximizing those sun hours in the summer and producing as much electricity as you can then. So I usually put 35, well, again, if you're building a new home, make your roof around 35 degrees. If you already have an existing home, you really can't control that. And how close to the south are you? Are you 180 degrees south or are you a little bit off? So long as you're within like 20 degrees, it's gonna affect the production maybe around 3, 4, 5%. Once you get starting to get close to the east and west, you might start losing 10 or 11%. So again, a southern exposure is the best. New construction, it makes so much sense to be making these decisions right up front. And we'll say residential and the cost for residential is about 13 cents a kilowatt hour right now. And you just press the button and it gives you the basic consumption or the production. So I'll take, when I'm trying to figure out what the payback period is, I'm gonna say this is gonna, it's gonna produce around 10,000 kilowatt hours a year and it's gonna save me about $1,300 a year. So I'll take that $1,300 and I'll take that $1,300 and divide it into the 12,000 that cost me to figure out, well, it's gonna be about 9.6 years to payback. And then I'll say, if it's gonna be a 30 year old system, then I can say, well, we've got $1,300 times another 20.4 years. 1,300 times 20.4 years. So you'd have a return on investment of $26,000 after so many years. And again, that's gonna increase even further as the price of electricity goes up. As the price of electricity goes up, your payback goes down and your return on investment goes down. Rocky, since it's such a long term thing and there is some dollars involved in the payback and you're talking about 30 years, what do you see with people who sell at home? Do you know maybe, does that get worked into? That's still talking to some real estate people I ask that question and it doesn't seem to be helpful or a deterrent one way or the other. One place that is a deterrent though is Solar City, which is Elon Musk company that are, they're basically putting solar panels all over the country and they own the system. It doesn't cost the homeowner anything to put them up. But then they end up paying Solar City for the cost of electricity. So they're getting solar panels, they're paying for electricity, but they're doing it in a green way. Problem with that is when somebody's selling the house, there are some problems with, well, I don't want these solar panels on my house and I don't wanna have a relationship with Solar City or Elon Musk or Tesla. So there are some issues that come up when the homeowner doesn't actually own the panels. But in general, I think it's about even right now, I think as the millennials and the younger people start becoming, this is part of their life and part of the ways we should be moving forward, it's gonna be more of a benefit. Okay, so if you wanna figure out how much it's gonna cost for you to put up a solar system, basically what you wanna do is go to your CMP bill, multiply your annual use by 1.25 by 365 by four, divide by 4.5 hours a day. So here's your central main power bill and this is what you wanna look at. Down at the bottom here, you'll see that these are actually 13 months, so just take 12 of the months, cut off even the 417 and the 416, add up all those numbers down below and that's how much electricity you use in the course of a year, at least one particular year. Then you take that number, multiply it by 1.25 and you get 9,028. Because what you're doing is you're taking care of losses because there's gonna be some losses whenever you put the system up. It's just a good number to be able to get you to the right size system for an annual use. So you take that kilowatt hours from the losses over the entire year divided by 365, so 24.7 kilowatt hours is the average electricity you use in the course of a day. Well, as I said, solar systems are based on, at least in the state of Maine, 4.5 average sun hours per day. So you divide 24.7 by 4.5 and you get, what do I have? That should be 5.4, sorry. 5.4 kW as opposed to 5,000 watts, it's the same thing. Or multiply that by 10, you get 24,000. So in any case, you would need a 5.4 kW system. The library here is 8.0 or 8.23 kW system. So if you need a system that's 5.5 kW, let's just multiply it by about $2.50 a watt. Your system for that house is gonna be around $13,000 after you take away the tax credit, it's gonna be about $9,600. Again, these are ballparks. Things can change depending upon your home. Things can change if you're facing them more west than south. If you've got trees that are causing shading, this is kind of the perfect situation. And also if you've got an electrical system that's old and has to be modified, other costs can come through, but in a typical situation, that's what it costs for probably a small ranch. And this is just showing that if you put those exact same numbers through PVWATS with all the losses, you come up just about where you wanna be. And you just wanna be a little bit under what you actually produce. Because anything that you produce that doesn't get used in 12 months, CMP doesn't, they keep it for free. You don't get the, you lose the credits. So in terms of PV making a decision, are you saving money versus saving energy? What's your reason for doing it? I know this high upfront costs, efficiency main, how it has, they used to have a paste loan, but they have a power main loan. They change their programs on a regular basis, but they're about 4.99% for 15 years. So even if you go through or get an equity loan on your home, if you finance it over a period of so many years, the amount that you're spending on your loan is gonna be about the same that you're gonna be spending on electricity anyway. So it's not gonna change your bottom line of your monthly budget too much. Depending upon the situation, it might be instead of $80 a month for electricity, your loan payment might be $100. But it's not gonna change your bottom line for very, very much. One of the things that's huge right now is the federal tax incentives. Right now it's 30% until 2019, and it will be reducing to 10% in 2021. For residential, this typical payback is nine to 12 years. That can get better as panels and modular solar pricing comes down. I can say that I did a small solar array, one of my first ones about seven years ago, and a 2000 watt system ended up being like $9,000, which was like almost $5 a watt installed. So again, pricing has come down quite a bit in the last three or four years, significantly. Sure. Can you consider the check? I mean, you know, we're gonna have to be replaced in the next five years, right? That is correct. If you can, and the modules can be taken off and put back on, it's just an additional labor cost at that time. Most of the cost of a solar system is not the labor, it's the cost of the materials. Labor is probably maybe 10, 15, 20% of the whole cost. So you have to take them off to fix the roof that's not back during the needle? Yeah, you would wanna add on at least a few thousand dollars to your roofing project, just to be sure. So, but the best thing to do is if you know you're gonna need to replace your roof in a few years, you might as well do it now. And then it'll help protect the roof, but if you've got a leaky roof to start off with, don't think solar panels are gonna fix your leaky roof because it'll still drip between the panels, it's not a tight, solid connection. The other thing that people don't think about is, you know, if I've got 10,000 dollars, let me put in the stock market and I'll make, you know, some money on that. Let's just say it doubles in value in 10 years. A doubled value, you're gonna be paying taxes on that $10,000 income. Any savings over the course of years will never be taxed because you don't tax money you don't really spend, if that makes sense. So, if you're trying to say, well, I'll make more money in the stock market, just realize that that money would be tax-free if you save the equivalent amount of money in electricity. So it's one thing to consider. And again, projected lifetimes of modules is 25 to 35 years. Modules themselves are guaranteed for production of 80% their rated value for 25 years. So if you've got a module that says it's gonna produce 100 watts in 25 years, it's guaranteed to be at least 80 watts at that point. And inverters, for the most part, they'll probably have to be replaced once or twice in the course of 25 to 35 years. And again, the price of those, price of inverters are probably these days, a couple thousand dollars. So, and technology 10 years from now when you're replacing it it's probably gonna be cheaper than that. Yes? Can you say that the solar is a sure thing to the investment? Is there anything that could go wrong between now and 20 years from now that could affect your return on your investment? Aside from, if you take a loan and you're paying interest on the loan, that's gonna reduce your return on investment. So interest on the loan. If a tree falls, the panels are designed to withstand like golf ball size hailstones. They're really pretty resilient. I could stand on them, and they're not gonna break. I sometimes have to crawl around panels to do things on occasion. What about that dearing, I think there's a nabot or something where they just did away with it, I think. So something you're not getting that is surprised when they show energy and suddenly you're paying for electricity at night. Yes, that is another thing that, depending upon politics and philosophies of our elected officials on whether they support it or don't support solar or any other sort of renewables. Net metering is something which is very, very important, at least from my perspective in this stage of the development and blossoming of the solar industry. Right now, the state of Maine probably has about 1% of all the electricity is coming from solar. And the Public Utilities Commission basically said when we get to 1%, net metering is gonna go away. So we're kind of at that point and there's lots of discussion. As soon as net metering goes away, it changes significantly the payback period because if you're not allowed to get the credit that you send to CMP, then that means you are not gonna be able to get that payback as much. So right now in the state of Maine, it is grandfathered forever if you get installed by the end of the year, this year. After net, it goes down 10% for the next 15 years. So next year it'll only be 90% the year after that, it'll be 80, something percent until after 15 years, it's down to nothing. So the question is, I don't necessarily disagree with the philosophy that net metering is really not sustainable. You can't have, you're using the grid as essentially a free battery. It costs you $12 a month versus buying a battery bank which is gonna cost you $10,000, okay? So the feeling is if you can, well, you can't have, let's just say 50% of the homes in the state of Maine had solar. That means the other 50% of the homes are actually maintaining the grid and that's really not fair. I don't disagree with our current administration about that my point is what is the appropriate percentage where net metering should go away. It shouldn't be, from my perspective and talking to other people, it should be someplace between five and 15% because you still have to maintain the lines when the power goes out. Even when at nighttime you're still dependent upon the grid on snow storms and weeks without if your panels are covered for a significant amount of time. So there was one month in three years ago at one of my sites, the roof was completely covered with snow for almost a month. Produced almost nothing and it was because it was so cold. Usually it'll warm up and the snow will just slide right off the modules. But in this particular month it was like, I think the winter of 2015 and February, it was like a cold spell. Usually a snow storm and then it warms up to like 30, 45 degrees and everything slides off and you're good to go and you're cleaned off again. But those things can happen and you're still dependent upon the grid. So the grid still has to be there. Even for those who have solar when there's no power available. So it's a legitimate concern. It's just a matter of at this point, again my opinion at this point for the solar industry needs that boost and so prices can come down even further to make it more affordable where sooner or later batteries will be cheap enough to be able to install those. And again, hydrogen is another way of storing energy. We can talk about that a little bit later if you're interested. So net metering is something we could talk about for hours and there's lots of conversations going on in the state. State has had a couple bills to kind of preserve it. Both of them were approved by our state legislatures both vetoed by the governor and then they missed the override by like two votes both times in 2016. But getting back to the federal tax credits this is the schedule for the federal tax credit going down from in 2020 to 26%, 2020 to 22% and then in 2022 it goes away completely except for 10% for commercial. So if you're gonna be putting in a solar system you should be really thinking about doing it at least before 2021. We're just talking about net metering. Well, what's the alternative net metering while putting in a battery bank system being completely off grid? There are other components that are required in an off grid system. One of them being batteries which is probably the most expensive piece. So we've got the solar panels, we've got the inverters and other components but we also have combiner boxes to bring strings together because voltage is a lot smaller. I don't need to get in the technical piece of that but here's a typical grid tide system where you have your panels, you've got your inverter, you've got your service panel and then you get the grid. In a battery based system that's purely off grid you've got the panels that goes to a combiner, it goes to a switch, it goes to a charge control which basically maintains, it's like a voltage regulator if most cars have those to make sure your battery stays charged. Pumps that electricity in the battery and then from the battery you have the inverter which transfers it to the AC. So there's just a couple extra components but the expense really comes in enough batteries to take care of all your needs. This is actually, and this is a situation where it makes more sense to be off grid. This is up in Cornish where a couple purchased 100 acres in Cornish on top of a mountain and to run CMP almost a, probably three quarters of a mile to the top was gonna be like $40,000. Well, spend the money on the batteries but at the same time be frugal in what you need and this is just the house for the battery bank and as they're getting to set up to build their house, they built a small cottage and for the most part these panels which is only around 2,000 watches taking care of all their lighting, refrigeration and some basic, basic needs. And there was one time I got a phone call in the middle of December saying the batteries are dead. I said, well, we haven't had any, it was that cold, cold summer winter. We haven't had enough sun for those batteries to recharge. So in that situation, you either have a spare generator to charge up the batteries, you're good for another couple of days. This battery bank was good for probably about two to three days of their use with zero sun at all or complete, recovered by snow. But even if the snow is gone, it's still not producing that much. You saw in the figures from the library, I think today it was only like, we had up to 50 kilowatt hours in a day on a sunny day last week. This morning I think it was only like two kilowatt hours. So even on a cloudy day it's not producing what it could be from that perspective. And here's the inverter, here's the charge controller, here's the battery bank in that particular system. So things you wanna start thinking about if you're talking about putting in a solar system for your home is your site evaluation. Do you have a good solar exposure? Do you have a lot of trees? If you're not willing to cut trees, I'm not an advocate, I was a botany major, so I don't like to cut trees. You don't want to, shading could be an issue. The roof angle, if you have a good roof angle, you can still produce power, like the library is, the modules are only at 10 degrees. Those will still produce power, but probably maybe 1,000 kilowatt hours less power in a course of a year just because they don't have optimum orientation to the sun. Your roof dimensions, how many panels can you get up on that roof? So basically you wanna look at your CMP bill to figure out how much you need and then kinda make those, all the calculations to figure out what's happening. I talked about fixed versus tracking systems. Tracking systems I really wouldn't spend money on. I would just take the extra money and you'd save money by just putting in more panels than putting in a tracking system. So this is a great example of the couple in 2013 built this 1,700 square foot salt box. Again, and I wanna go beyond the solar stuff because we're talking about sustainability. When you're building a brand new house, there are so many smart things that could be done these days. And I kinda pointed them in different directions. Before you even start thinking about solar panels, number one is insulation. Do a good job in insulation. Number two, pick a heating system. And the most efficient heating systems in this state is gonna be geothermal. The next most efficient is going to be air source heat pumps. There's a huge difference in cost. And we can talk about that later if you'd like. But so number one, installations really spend the money on weatherization number two, geothermal. Then number three, I said, live in the house for a year and then figure out how much power you need. And then we designed the system. As it turns out, they didn't have enough roof space for 100%. This system was doing about 80% of their value. And their annual energy cost for their entire house for heat, how water, air conditioning, electricity, $850. And again, the things that I had recommended is basement foundation, ICF. So as long as your basement is insulated, ICF are basically two inches of foam on the inside, two inches of foam on the outside, and they fill and cement in between. They're like Lego box that go together. But they're really, really good in efficiency. Meticulous weatherization. Make sure all the gaps are closed. Make sure you don't have a good insulation and contractor that's really knowledgeable about making sure things are sealed up tight. Dense pack cellulose insulation. I do not ever recommend using fiberglass insulation these days. There are so much more superior products out there, especially if you're building new. Little bit more expensive than fiberglass, but you're not gonna get the performance you would out of dense pack cellulose or rock-sol. Foam is another really good insulating product. I'm not a big fan of foam just because you can't do anything in the walls ever again. And during fires it can have really bad smoke inhalation sort of toxic chemicals when the foam starts to burn. But it's a great insulator. I'm not gonna say that. Geothermal heating and air conditioning. And as you look here, just the electricity cost was all the heat, air conditioning and electricity needs $363 for 2015. They spent more money heating their hot water than they did heating their house and using all the electricity, okay? If they could have put more modules up here, they would have been up to 100%. They've since changed to a heat pump water heater so the electricity's gonna be higher. They also bought an electric car. So if they could put more solar panels up, they would definitely do so to kind of make themselves completely net zero. Which brings me to the next topic which is community solar. I've talked to the owner saying, hey, if I ever do any community solar projects, they want a piece of it. And has anybody heard of community solar before? That is really a fantastic way of moving forward. Not everybody can install solar. If you live in an apartment in Portland, you can't really install solar in your apartment. You don't know the building. If you're a condo owner, same sort of thing. Or if you're in a neighborhood that just is just too cramped and too many trees or whatever, roof obstructions, buildings, whatever first. So there are situations where some people can just never put up solar. So community solar is something where up to nine different people or CMP meters. So let's just say there's 10 people in the room here. I can be one of them and nine people out there. We can all put in together for one solar system. And if I've got like 10 acres of land and I can easily put up 100 modules, you can buy 10% of it, you can buy 30% of it, you can buy 15% of it, whatever you share the cost in terms of building this whole system. And from the net metering perspective, and this is my understanding is over the community solar, since you're building a solar array, the only way of getting it to your home is through the grid. And to my understanding, net metering is not affecting community solar at this point. So from that perspective, the couple rules is one of the owner has to have the solar array on their property. And the other is everybody in the organization has to be on the same utility, whether it's all CMP, Bangor Hydro or whatever happens to be. They're gonna be more expensive because you're actually leasing some people's land. That's gonna be part of it. So you might see a little bit greater expense. So community solar is an answer for lots of different places. And there's actually more, I've talked to my legislator, representative of my town, who is, he wants to see if any sort of net metering stuff is gonna happen, he wants it to be the most efficient as possible. And these community solar systems are ones that can do so. I'm just gonna shift over to just a couple other things that I do. I started this program called Solar Outreach for Schools, which is basically a mobile solar trailer that's designed to bring a solar trailer to a school, work with the math and science teachers to teach students. Again, we're talking about the generational sort of gap. And part of it is to really let students understand that in order to design a solar system, you need to know math and science and physics. So you're working with the physics teachers and math teachers and really teaching them all the things about the different components. Once the classroom work is done, you take them outside, they assemble the whole trailer. You leave the trailer there, power up a battery bank, which it's again a grid-free system, and then use the power for a school event. Once it's done, pack it all up and bring it to another school. My goal is to have students at one school who've learned it to be the teachers of the next school. Again, this is still early in its infancy. This was the solar trailer at the Portland Green Fest about a month ago. This is actually its debut. Been working on this for quite a few years. I started with a pilot project at Casca Bay High School probably about seven or eight years ago. And here's where we have the students actually putting this thing together. This is, we left it in the parking lot for a couple days at the end of the week. They had a school assembly and they used the power from the school assembly for powering their projectors, powering their music, powering everything else. But it could be used for a lot of other things. This is the construction in the earlier days, getting painted up, cleaned up a little bit more. And here are all the components I talked about before, the charge controllers, the switch boxes, the combiners, and the inverters. So the last couple slides is, as citizens we have choices. But we don't have all the choices that we might like to have. But our choices that we make, and sometimes we have to spend a little bit more money to do so, can start influencing changes to the way things work. And this is where the generational gap will change as kids of today just think of solar. Well, why wouldn't you be doing solar and other renewables? We don't always have a choice where our electricity comes from. Again, we used to have man Yankee. So we had no choice about getting power that came from a nuclear power plant. Although you might think nuclear powers might be better than global warming. You're not getting the same global, you have different sort of environmental risk, one versus the other. Oil, natural gas, coal, these are all different types of fossil fuels. We're virtually dependent upon fossil fuels for transportation except in subway systems that could perhaps be set up to an electrical grid that's being powered by renewables. Consumer demand is a force for change. Being an active citizen who's promoting some of the things that can help our renewable energy efforts to make things cleaner and better as we move forward. Just as a list for the fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, propane, coal, nuclear, renewables, these are still combustible. Pellets, wood, corn, ethanol, those are all combustible products, but they're still renewable. So there's a carbon neutral effect to using that. Then the solar-based renewables, which is solar electricity, solar heat, either passive or through different sorts of thermal tubing. Wind, those are all based on solar and the sun. And then hydroelectric, whether it's a dam, tidal or wave. Typical windmill, this is a different type of windmill called vertical wind, which has a big magnet underneath here which supports the weight of that. So you can do it in places where it's less obtrusive, but they're not as productive. Again, hydroelectric power or hydro power from the earlier days with water wheels to big dams. Again, this is just a means of storing energy by utilizing water in a higher potential energy. Radiant heat through these evacuated solar tubes that can heat hot water to as hot as you need it to be. You just need to have enough tubes for your amount of consumption. In the Midwest or in the desert states, they've got these parabolic structures which are concentrating the heat on this tube in the middle, which gets up to, it's not water, it's some sort of brine solution, it gets up to 600, 700 degrees that can spin turbines. Tracks the sun, very, very effective for, again, large-scale electricity production. This is one of my biggest jobs at Daysen in South Portland. This hotel has 417 modules on it, and it's 123 KW, so 123,000 watts. And this hotel, there's actually another 153 on the other side of the building. It's only actually, this whole system is only doing about a third of their energy consumption. But it's significant. And when you start putting solar up with commercial entities, not only do they get the tax credits, they also get to depreciate. So paybacks for a commercial situation like this is usually anywhere between five and seven years. And we start having large solar farms like this, those will start making some big differences as we move forward. Some of my other projects, this is a 1971 Volkswagen Bug that I'm converting to an electric. Here you can see where the gas tank was, there are three batteries. This is actually a transformer, which is you plug in, you actually plug in a cord there and it turns on this charger, which charges three batteries there. There are actually also nine more batteries in the back seat. The motor's been taken out and been replaced with electric motor with some of the different controllers that take the battery power and transition it into electric power. This went fully charged. I'm embarrassed to say I've been working on this for several years, it's not quite done yet. But probably would be able on a full charge to be able to go about 80 miles. And to convert something, to convert a car right now, the equipment was around $8,000. So a lot cheaper than a Tesla or even the Chevy Volt, if you've got the wherewithal to figure it out. That's it for me. I could go on forever about lots of different things, but. Can I ask you guys a question? Is there anyone in the room who's considering the solar, and that's why you're here? Would you like to mention was this helpful? Did you learn anything, or would that be in the house that maybe could influence your decision? I was definitely helpful for me. I didn't know, did you have any idea how much the system might cost? So that was helpful. And I think lots of issues about that area and versus an off-grid system. But I'm also curious if you design the system for, you mentioned the house where the people who are now having a car, but have you designed a system for people who are electric car owners that you wish to take advantage of, to try to power their car with solar, and would you have to have a battery to store some of that energy to power your car? A whole battery? Well, yeah, if you're charging it during the day, it's easy, but your car is likely not gonna be at the house during that day. So if you're connected to the CMP anyway, if you're gonna be on grid, there's not a problem in charging your car at night. In order to be net zero, you just need to build a bigger system. Like I said, this family was 80% with 6,000 watts on their roof. And they've started adding the heat pump body heater, which is, again, they went from natural propane to that, and they're plugging in their car now. So there, I don't know what their consumption is now, but it's probably at least another 25 to 30, 40% more than it was when they first moved into the house. So we just have to upsize their system. If they had more space on the roof, it's just a matter of putting up enough modules in order to make up that difference. And if they can't, which they do not have, enough space on the roof, I haven't done a community solar yet. I've got a potential site right now that I'm speaking with the owners. They definitely want to have a piece of it, because they want to be able to be net zero. And then another nice thing about community solar is if you move from one place to another, you just change your credits to a different meter. So it's not something you're tied to. So you could live in the apartment in Portland this week and move to another apartment next week and still be able to swap that power to a different meter. How would a consumer go about finding a community solar opportunity? I would say I'm not doing it yet. It's the niche market that I'd like to be able to get into. I just need to get my feet wet, but you could reach out to other solar installers out there. That's the way. If you didn't have enough room on your own roof, could you put some in-head land, no trees around it? Could you just put some extra panels on some kind of, something that would hold it right in the ground? Yeah, a ground mount system. I actually was just up at Rangely about three weeks ago, huge house, but it had doors everywhere. And it wasn't quite well situated towards the south and where it was south, there were trees. So I said, you know, it doesn't make a lot of sense to be putting like two or three panels here around dormers, but behind the driveway, there's a nice area that's unobstructed facing south that you could put in a ground mount system there. It would probably be much more, you'd get twice as much energy out of it because it's gonna have better exposure. So yes, ground mounts are, well, a very appropriate, they just cost a little bit of it. The information you gave, it's a pretty, so very, pretty good model for, I like to just go home and look at my bills and plug in the numbers, so thank you for that. Yeah, and anybody, again, regardless if you get solar and you work with me or anybody else, I'm not here to pump my business, I'm here to answer questions. So anybody who has any questions, if you wanna reach out to me one way or the other, whether you decide to do so or not, I'm happy to, again, part of my existence is to encourage people to move forward in a positive, concrete direction. Can you speak of a geothermal and how homeowner would go about upgrading and adding to their energy portfolio? Does anybody know what geothermal is? Okay, basically, do you know what heat pumps are? You know the heat pumps that are appearing in people's homes all the time? There's like a $500 incentive from EfficiencyMain right now. I hope you're rather explaining if you can't read what they do. Yeah, basically, what a heat pump does is it takes air, which is outside, or a better way of explaining it, the best example of a heat pump is your refrigerator, because you have a compressor on the back of the refrigerator, which is, as it's compressing, it's taking heat out of the inside of the refrigerator and it's dissipating. You know how your refrigerator is warm in the back? That's exactly what a heat pump is that's on the side of somebody's house. But instead of taking cold air out of the refrigerator, it's taking warm air out of the outside air. And then your heat pump is the thing on the back of the refrigerator that you're capturing and filling into your house. That's kind of, it's basically HVAC, compression technology, which has been around for a long, long time. So there's a difference between, the difference between heat pumps that are on the outside of the house versus geothermal. It's the same principle. What you have on the outside of the house is, let's just say it's 50 degrees outside. So it's gonna suck 50 degree air outside, take like 10 degrees of heat out of it and put that extra 10 degrees in your house. And when it spits out the air, it's gonna be like maybe, instead of 50 degrees, 40 degrees. So it's extracting heat from the air. Well, you can imagine at 50 degrees, it's gonna be pretty efficient. But as it gets closer and closer to zero degrees, it gets less and less efficient because it has less heat to work with. And there's a concept called coefficient of performance. It's called COP. It means for every unit of energy you put in, how many units of energy do you get out? And the COP for using electric heat is one to one. You put electricity into a heating element and you get 100% of it back. The coefficient of performance for oil, even with the best oil boilers is 0.85 or 0.9 to one. Because some of the heat is always going up the chimney. Some of the more efficient ones are in the 90s right now for some natural gas units. So when you're dealing with the heat pumps on the outside of people's homes that's using the outside air, your COP is around three to one, 3.5 to one at 50 degrees. But as it gets closer and closer and closer to zero degrees, it goes down to like one to one. And then at some point, if it gets so cold, you need to have a backup system for that. The geothermal systems, what you're using instead of that outside air, you're using water coming out of the ground, which is 50 degrees you're out. So even if, and geothermal systems, usually have a COP of four to one. So even on a zero degree day, you're still taking water up out of the ground at 50 degrees, extracting the temperature out. And when it goes back out of the machine, it's down to 42 degrees. So you've extracted like six degrees of temperature out. It is much more efficient moving heat than creating it with electricity, gas, oil, or other sort of fuels. Does that make sense? Geothermal systems get expensive, much more expensive. Mostly because you need to have a well, because that's where the water is coming from. So if you have, I'm trying to make this quick and simple. Basically, if you've got a heat pump that does, it's called BTUs. And if it's like a four ton or 4,000 BTUs, for honest, it's putting out so much heat based on that. For every ton, you need three gallons of water per minute. Gallons per minute. So if you have a four ton unit, you need to have a well that can put out 12 gallons a minute, okay? So if you've got a well that puts out 50 gallons a minute, like the house that I showed you that's very, very efficient, their well was putting out 50 gallons a minute. So they had no problem at all. And it doesn't even have to be that deep. I have geothermal in my house. I had existing wells that were doing 18 gallons a minute. And all I needed for my five ton unit was actually, it was two gallons a minute because, well, let's just say it's three gallons a minute. I still have an extra three gallons a minute for my domestic water use. If I put in a two ton unit, which is a small house, probably that's all I need. They need four gallons a minute, or eight gallons over the six. Does that help? Again, it's, go ahead. So it's not too expensive if you have a well already or if you're going to install a well because you're not on public water. Not if you're on public water, but it becomes less attractive as you can install a well. Correct. I put it in the system in my house. I had 18 gallons a minute. My well was only 100 feet deep. And it cost me $14,000 for the installation of geothermal pump. And I had another $3,000 to put in a better pump, a more efficient pump. And that was put in about eight years ago. And my heating costs would have been about $3,000 a month and it's gone down to like maybe $1,000 a month, $1,200 a month. So my payback plus it was, at the time it was getting the 30% tax credit. So my, let's just say $18,000. I get $6,000 back in a tax credit the first year. So I have payback of $12,000 over the course of six years. The $2,000 here is paid for itself. What I need to do is have enough tax credits just right now for geothermal this year. A common theme today is that the juicy things running out. I know I believe Efficiency Main some of those benefits are potentially running out in the nearest future. That's correct. Efficiency Main just in 2016 had a $5,000 rebate for geothermal. So my $15,000 or $18,000 system would have only cost me $5,000 after tax credit and rebate. So it makes it much more even playing field. But now they're down to $3,000 and the federal isn't doing it anymore. Do you think in your crystal ball and other factors will balance out from the loss of those incentives in terms of price dropping for solar panels or something like that? As technology gets cheaper, as solar panels get cheaper, there's probably, that's when at least the tax credit should run out. Again, I think the incentives are there to get people and the industry up and running from a federal government perspective. And once it's up and running, and if you can get, if it costs $20,000 10 years ago to do a solar system and it brings it down to 12,000 after tax credit, well, if you can buy 10 years later in the same system for $12,000, you're getting it kind of for the same price anyway. And that's one of the good things about incentives that makes it, so it's volume driven as opposed to specialty driven. I live in big apartment building, 96 units, I think. And I was thinking of maybe persuading the landlord to switch from natural gas to solar. Because we have a clear view on the roof of any direction. So is there a site that I can point them to to maybe do some persuading? Because they're very economically persuaded. One thing about solar, it's not usually the best source for creating heat unless you're attached to geothermal or something like that. How, again, natural gas is the heating system I assume. So they'd have to change their heating systems to something that electricity could power. So it's not just changing the, putting solar power up for the natural, or for the heating perspective. All right, the heat is hot water based for it. Yeah, so at this point for solar thermal would be a way of maximizing the sun to create heat. But at this point the costs of solar thermal are so, you'd need such a huge system. It's pretty much cost prohibitive at this point. So I would recommend to be able to offset a lot of electricity by utilizing solar if you've got a big wide open roof. But from a perspective of, there's so much more infrastructure that have to change in the apartment complex from heating systems and geothermal, if you were to go in that direction, would also, it works best with forced hot air not baseboard of hot water. So it's not necessarily the best fit for a change. The thing that could be done is to change over to maybe the heat pumps, the air source heat pumps on the outside of the buildings for each unit. But then again in the apartment complex that's complicated too. But I will say that at the hotels I've been working at, the hotel owner is very, very energy conscious and he's changing, you know, like the air conditioning units you often see in and heating units in hotels. Well those are now becoming much more efficient like heat pump sorts of heating and air conditioning. So they're much more efficient than they were maybe five or 10 years ago. And he's swapping them all up to be able to emphasize that. So in a situation where you started, if you could change all your apartments to like these kind of wall units to just stick outside, that's a way of utilizing electricity where you get there better coefficient of performance than a three to one for outside source heat pumps. And then you keep your regular natural gas for backup on those really cold days. Does that make sense? Yeah. In terms of the sustainability aspect for all this, I mean if you can't afford to do the solar system now, the energy life for your home, is that a good way to get all the ways that something can be cost-effective in terms of the back of the box until you get to the solar system? Absolutely. Before you do anything with solar, you should be tightening up your house. I was a certified energy auditor. My certification ran out. I've got the equipment to do it, but I'm not certified at least to get to do that. I can still do them, but my name doesn't mean anything to efficiency main where you can get rebates. You need to have a certified energy auditor to get some of the rebates from efficiency main. So if you put in, you want to spend as much money on insulating your house before you do anything with solar. Absolutely. And efficiency main, at least last I knew, if you spend $2,100 on energy improvements, they will reimburse you around, I think, $12 or $1,300. It starts off, and their programs change all the time. I've kind of lost track, but minimum, if you put in $200, you get $400. And they're different tiers of what you can do. I just did this in my house and the insulation company went with paying the cost for the energy that was part of the package. I also found a huge difference to it. I had about four or five different people look at the house, and they all said something different, and they had very different price ranges. So the last time I remember that, not only the best price review was the only one who noticed everything, but all the others had seen his take on what the house needed, incorporated all their ideas. So it was really a wide range. One guy said, it's all about this, it's all about that, it's all about the other thing. And had I gotten either one of those, I would have had a third of the puzzle. So the final guy who got the job, hadn't been, I'm telling you, incorporated all those and all of those things. But so I shop around, but Rocky's right, I think it makes a huge difference in terms of insulation, changing variables, stuff like that. Efficiency main website has great videos about how they go through a few case studies. People see, you might find a home like yours with some of the problems. They show what they found and what the solution was and what the savings were. But in a lot of cases, the savings from just taking insulation are dramatic. And definitely every place that's gone before worrying about productivity, if you're actually crossed through variables, might be saved. Yeah, I agree with that on the percent there. The places where, and if you have an official, an energy audit, depending upon who's doing it, it's gonna anywhere between probably $300 and $500. But it's well, money wealth, if you get a good auditor, it's money well spent because you know where exactly to concentrate your dollars. And for the most part, the places to concentrate your dollars is weatherization. And there's something called the stack effect. You know how a chimney just draws heat up the chimney? Well, your house is like a big chimney. If you got leaky basement crack windows and things like that in the basement, not insulated rim joist around the basement, you've got your stink pipe that goes from the basement all the way the roof or a chimney that's got a spacer on it. You're just sucking air all the way up to the roof and it's not even touching the house. So the first place is you spend money in terms of insulation. If your insulation budget is tight, is number one attic, close any sort of gaps from stink pipes around chimneys and there are proper ways of doing it. You can't just put foam around a chimney. You have to put a little metal. There's supposed to be two inches of non-combustible next to your chimney. So you put metal around it and then you use fire-rated caulking to seal that. And that prevents air from going right up middle of the house. I had one audit I did in Wyndham where they had a bathroom fan that was, it was just exiting into the attic. So basically heat from the house was when I did the blower door test, heat was just going right up through the bathroom fan into the attic and outside. And that's actually even a bigger problem because you have moisture from a bathroom fan going into an attic which is cold and it starts to condense and you can start having mold and mildew problems. There are a lot of things. But spend money in the attic first, basement second. Windows are probably the last thing to do. It's like 30 paybacks from most windows. And you know, you got a good window. You got a bad window and it's like an R1. You got a really good window. It's like an R3, you know. You might as well put an R39 up in the attic and seal all those gaps before you do anything else. But windows are the last thing to do. And even the walls on the side of the buildings are, probably I'd do those before the windows and I thought if the windows are really, really bad you can do that as well. But I live in a house built in the 1700s so I got plaster walls. I'm not, you know, I'm gonna do my insulation when I re-side the house. I'll take the boards off and I'll do it from the outside.