and coal way or but it's the what i think my role is is to help advise the town on energy issues and i'm kind of an energy geek so i actually like that you know so the program is on pace which is property assessed clean energy and the purpose of the show tonight really is to advise the town on the energy issue that's coming up for town meeting at a vote would you want to just talk about the history  is from the floor so we voted on it actually passed two to one but we weren't able to implement it because it was voted properly and what we decided to do is to wait until this town meeting and do it the correct way as it turns out we really didn't lose any opportunity because of that because the the state's been trying to set up the program throughout the course of this year and it won't be really ready for prime time until later on the spring anyway so it was good timing for us to be doing this yeah so i did want to say that we are alive collin and if you have a question for jeff we're going to do a presentation about pace and what it is but please do call if you have questions the phone number is four three four to five five zero so to start off really what is pace ok if we could have the slides up the second slide would probably be good what i thought that i would do is talk a bit about what pace is what are the eligible improvements and eligibility requirements and discuss a little bit about whether pace financing might be appropriate for  any individual within the town so just would that be a pro sounds good ok so let me see it could have the next slide please so what pace stands for it's an acronym it stands for property assessed clean energy district  and it's essentially an overlay district over the entire the entire town and anyone any homeowner within that district would be eligible to to do pace financing which paces is used for energy efficiency or renewable energy projects projects for an eligible homeowner any homeowner within the district and they can finance those projects through their property tax bill so it's a different form a different way to finance energy efficiency improvements so what are the benefits why would you well you know as i say i'm an energy geek and to me saving energy is a good thing  for a number of reasons saving energy saves money it saves energy itself and you know kind of a side benefit is it might just save the planet you know that's that would be useful to do that  and so pace is really another tool to use to help people do stuff that they wouldn't necessarily done another way what kinds of improvements are eligible for the program i like some sometimes people think well replace my windows or i might put in some insulation or put solar panels up all of those things really you know as far as the efficiency improvements go  the first step would be to get an energy audit which is really an assessment of how efficient your home is what there's been a lot of studies done in vermont and what they have found is that the average home could could not so difficult lee reduce their energy use by as much as twenty five percent but in order to do that they have to make some investment the average cost of the improvement for something on that that twenty five percent savings is about ten thousand dollars so it takes a lot you know so the first step would be to do an audit to find out what you know what's the best things to do and in what order and what priority what the cost might be in the savings might be as you say weather is ation is a good one you know that probably the most cost effective and least costly thing to do is to seal up your leaks and cracks and air leakage and that's not as simple as it seems where air leaks into a home is really an expert can help determine what that where best to do that we actually have someone come in to do a sort of later on of one way you can tell but but for the most part it's hard to tell except on your energy bills you know if your house is drafty you know that your house should not be drafty and the reason why your house is drafty is outside air is getting in and it should so things like insulation an area ceiling might be eligible as you say replacing windows is often an expensive thing a new furnace you know or boiler high efficiency furnace measure for pace and maybe some health and safety measures if they're related to the efficiency improvement sometimes you know you might need to do some extra wiring if you're doing insulating and that could be eligible for for a baseline as well so that's something that occurs to me and i've had this experience myself and know that others do about you know prioritization like if i think oh i have to spend five thousand dollars for an assessment an improvement so i don't have that and although i might know that it would benefit and there might be some return on investment it's really hard to think about you know coming up with that kind of money so part of this whole project really is to be able to finance it in a way that works for people who do talk about that sure as you say what one of the challenges is is trying to figure out how to do some things that you might not have done otherwise you know if you can come up with a cash that's always the cheapest thing to do but a lot of people don't have you know five ten fifteen thousand dollars lying around to invest if you did energy wouldn't be a bad that would be a bad way to to  invest it you know if you could save eight hundred dollars on a ten thousand dollar investment try getting that out of the bank you know those those c d s in the savings accounts with the best you can get one percent so if you know energy efficiency actually does o it's one more way to do that you know home equity loan might be a good a good way to do it pace has you know a certain advantage just because it goes with the property rather than with the homeowner so if you're going to move it can stick with the property rather than having to be paid off at the time of sale which is what could be a real advantage so that kind of financing or funding for example if you had  what how does that financing work then like the logistics of it would be you take and it would somehow be tied to your property tax payment you know what's different about pace party state to set up efficiency vermont it will be the organization a little help coordinate the loan process and they'll help oversee the project and make sure that it's done correctly and and then set up the paperwork for the repayment schedule on the same schedule as as your property tax payments so it should be simpler to do than than than going pace financing the you must own and live in your home so it's this at this point pace is only for residential projects only for for homeowners you have to be current on  there is you don't want to get over extended if you don't want to borrow more than the property is worth and for in order to go through the kind of the hassle of pace you need to be a large enough loan you know so no less than thirty five hundred dollars and no more than thirty thousand dollars or fifteen percent of the assessed value of the property so it's for these in between projects the you know the five ten fifteen thousand dollar range which you know a boiler could fit that frankly a renewable energy project might fit that as well you know pace financing could be used for solar p v project or solar hot water or pellet boiler potentially so you could use it for something like that as well house and sometimes there doesn't have to be icicles on the house that's correct you know this is this is an extreme example but you know people should think about icicles you know we  had earlier in january we had enough snow on the roofs that you might have seen some icicles on your roof and what icicles represent as they represent heat leaking through to the roof melting the snow and then the snow drips down and it forms icicles and what that means is that you're leaking energy your your your waste you're literally heating the outdoors and if that's not good for the building it's not good for the occupants because it means that there's  inside that can create mold and mildew and it's certainly not good for your fuel bill that the rule of thumb to think about as far as i sickles go is is that it's a dollar an inch you know think of it as you know wasting money you know so this is an extreme example but if you you know if you drove up you know any street in richmond and at the beginning of january you would have seen some houses where there was snow piled high on the roof and a house right next door where there was icicles dangling down and that represents air leakage for the most part so that's a good indicator a better indication is really getting an energy audit by an energy professional to tell what's going on with your houses of ours air leakage and whether or not you have enough insulation in your walls or if there's a good opportunity to insulate the sills like you like you found in your house so what is  energy audit and they come how long does it take and what do they do i just got one done this past month myself and it took about a couple of hours different companies will do it in different ways but they  one really good thing that they do is they put a device called a blower door on one of do an outside door to your to your house and it it the blower door has a fan in it that they can control and with that fan they can either blow air in or blow air out of the house and they can do that in a controlled way and then they can tell how much the house is leaking and if it if it's exceed certain parameters they can tell well you've got a lot of leaks and then they go around looking for them you know and they can find them because if you if you are if you depressurize a house if you're blowing air out it sucks in cold air through the leaks and you can find them you know with like an infrared camera for example that's what they did in my house they walked through the house with an infrared camera and they could see where the cold air was coming in it was really quite interesting and and they could find places where there might have been a void in the insulation like in your so that probably would probably is how they found the void and the insulation on your cell and you can feel it you can go against the wall and you can you can feel the cold air coming in actually i had some students who were  practicing trying to learn how to do energy audits come to my house so they didn't have the blower door but they did have their checklist of things that they were that they were looking for and they were in training kind of to learn how to be auditors her energy audits but do they do those know you close your house up all really tight you close all your windows and yeah and you lock them and you latch all of your doors and you seal any outside penetrations i had to leave my wood stove off for a day you know so that at that wasn't part of the you know because you don't want to suck air you know you want to back draft your wood stove and fill your house up with smoke and so they they they take those precautions and then they then they can do that that fan thing and they can really tell where the leaks are and that the leaks sometimes they come from surprising places if your attic when when when you build a house oftentimes you run like electrical wires up through the a and the electrician will drill holes through the interior partitions into the attic and if those holes aren't sealed up then they can be a place where war merican leak out because fiberglass doesn't actually stop air it air you know warm air can go right through fiberglass and that's what causes those icicles in an attic so finding those you know it's a certain detective work really for you know what what auditors need to do is a have to to think about and understand how the the building works to find where the leaks might be so whether it's aisha's one thing and some of those things really don't cost very much money they don't like you can sometimes tighten up without spending thousands of dollars on if you if you can do that that's fantastic you know and they're actually really good resources for that efficiency vermont has videos on and how to do it do it yourself weather ization yeah last time meeting we had a trailer with a crate trailer on the center for mont c v a ca ca i forget what that stands for community action i think it is council they have they have a trailer that that showed all of the potential mistakes you might have in your house and then and how you fix them we might do that again the richmond climate action committee is a town energy committee and we did a couple of years ago we did what we called a button up workshop that showed you know common areas where are there's leaking and voids an insulation and how to fix those things you know what about other financing methods if you mean pace really is going to offer an opportunity for people to take a loan and have it be set up so that they can pay it back over time along with their mortgage or their property tax but how else  what other things can people do about financing well you know as i mentioned probably the cheapest thing you could do is keep using cash if you have if you have money to invest in energy efficiency that it's a good investment and you know it when you when you fix your roof or you know fix your driveway it's just a cost you know but when you insulate your house and or put in a higher efficiency you're taking some of the money that you would have given to the fuel oil dealer frankly and using it for home improvement and that's that's not a bad thing to do that's a that's a not a bad use of money but a lot of people don't have you know thousands of dollars of cash that they attic the air sealing part is really probably the most cost effective thing you can do and either you can do it yourself or you can hire people to do it and it need to cost tens of thousands of dollars to do air sealing but it can be very c cost effective to do it you know with a professional and there are many now around the do that that kind of work so weather ization is one thing but i want to also switch to this whole idea so our or you know again something i've been thinking about on my house is would it be smart and how would i even know if putting some solar panels up on my south facing roof would be worth the investment i know what one point i looked at it was like it would cost so much money it would take ten years before it would be paid for and that seemed like a long yeah well i've like to think of if you think about payback a lot of people try to analyze energy investments in terms of you know how long would it payback if you're borrowing money to to do something then the payback doesn't really matter what matters is is whether or not you're spending more money than you were before so you know i like to think of it in terms of return on investment so a ten year payback which sounds like a long time is really the same as a as ten percent return on investment because you're getting ten percent back every year you know you're on some improvement on  your house the same equation is just a different way to think about it so you know one of the purposes of pace and one of the advantages of pace is that you can oftentimes stretch the loan term out longer than you might for a home improvement loan so a home improvement alone might only be of like five years with pace you can you can stretch it out to ten or fifteen years and the payment could be less than what you're paying now for on your so that that's the reason that's one of the reasons that that this program's been set up is to to allow people to have a longer period of time to make that a positive cash flow so wouldn't really be a ten year payback one of the reasons i became the town energy coordinator is we i was a champion for the woodchip boiler up at the candles on up at the middle school we were one of the you know first dozen schools in the state to put year because we financed it over twenty years actually coming too soon we financed it over twenty years and the loan payment was less than what we were paying in electricity at that time he you know so you know you could say it was a you know a ten or twenty year payback didn't really matter it's actually cost us less you know from day one month to month for the bill to cover th what other projects do you have in the wings for the from the richmond climate committee and anything exciting on the rise and one thing i would like to point folks to is that we have a natural gas in richmond now that's that's a big deal it just came to town this past year and vermont gas actually has really good programs for folks who have natural gas they'll provide a free energy audit for their customers you know so if you live in the village and you have some of those imagine you know you could call for my gas and get a free energy audit they could give you some recommendations on things you might do if you're low income if you have you know you meet certain i think it's sixty percent of median the state medium income you can not only get a free audit you can get free weather is asian through the champlain valley office of economic opportunity c d o you know it's a really good point because in the state budget law heap which is low income heating assistance and many people in richmond do get the life benefit because they qualify their income eligible and it oil however if those like dollars are going into houses that are you know spending a lot of money on fuel well we talked about that and in montpelier that if you have a household that spending three or four thousand or five or six thousand dollars a winter on fuel oil providing that heating assistance certainly keeps people warm and keeps them from freezing but it's not a good use of resources really and if you can you know if you can if we can spend a portion of that money and make the houses tighter and more energy efficient everybody wins yeah you know the thing about an energy efficient home is it's not just that it saves saves energy and saves money it's much more comfortable  you know i mean i live in a two hundred year old house when when i first moved in i burned something on the order of nine or ten cords of wood a year and still had to thaw the pipes it was freezing you know you wouldn't take your coat off you know and  making it energy efficient i made it a whole lot more comfortable i'm burning to cords of wood now you know so that it's it's saves me money and i'm a lot more comfortable in the morning when i get up yeah yeah so we did wan put up some other kinds of resources for people from our gas you mentioned vermont gas providing so if someone is on vermont guys who are contemplating that they should just contact them to absolutely recommend that they do that you know why not you know i mean natural gas is a good fuel it's a relatively inexpensive fuel it's a relatively clean fuel and we should use all fuels no matter what wisely you know so using less of it would be good and the programs set up to help do that efficiency vermont has programs that that teach people how to do stuff they also have rebates they have they have money to help people you know invest in efficiency improvements either electricity or  insulation and air sealing what will probably be doing what the what the town energy committee will will likely be doing over the course of this year is this pace program is kind of a big deal really and it'll take some effort on the town's part to put together the program and make sure that it runs smoothly what we've offered to the select board is to help them come up with the guidelines for how to do that they'll vet them you know  if it will be the town's program but we'll try to help set it up so that it works properly and probably try to help educate people listed the opportunity you know there's a you know it's a worthwhile worthwhile thing to to try to use of again but one other thing i don't know that we talked about but i did want to make sure that people understood that if they do pays the loan and do some improvements on their home and then three or five years later that home how does that work so so it can work a number of ways you know you can at the time a sale paid the loan off you can pay the paste loan off or not and that's an interesting feature you know so well for  other types of loans a home improvement loan or a home equity loan you do have to pay it off at the time you know at the time of sale with a pace long you don't so if you have a loan that is stretched out over fifteen years to get a positive cash flow out of it so that you know your your interest payments are less than than what your fuel oil payment was that's the intent of it you can pass it on to the next homeowner that's that's a possibility which is i don't i don't know of any other type of finance mechanism where you can do that so if you put solar panels up and you don't move them with you but they stay on right house then the cost for those just goes on to the next home yes you know so it would be and it's a it's called an assessment so it's like an assessment on your property tax bill so it would runs with the property tax bill and with the property good well i appreciate that you took the time to come and explain this and people will be hearing more about it town meeting if you have any questions certainly free to call here at four three four to five five zero we have another minute or two is there anything in the  or other energy issues i'll do my best to answer them if if i don't know the answer i probably know where to look probably do you know i haven't talked to a select board yet about how tell meeting is going to work but you know i'll probably try to do a similar presentation a town meeting in answer questions relative to that and i'm not sure what else we got on the docket for the town energy committee this coming year but i know there's a statewide goal of eighty thousand homes yes by twenty twenty so maybe richmond can take the challenge and become part of that no actually we have done that sort of that process the time energy committee has taken what's called the home energy challenge  where we will be going to the members of our committee will be going door to door doing kind of walk through out it's not as not official audits but looking for efficiency opportunities and encouraging folks to take steps to save energy so we'll be doing that in march i believe right you know so i'm looking forward to that thanks again sure thank you all for tuning in the program tonight has been about pace and we look forward to your questions and conversation more time meeting on this topic that will be voting on goodnight