and providing a new way for people to get into solar and you know it the main thing that they're doing that's really exciting is making it cost effective and really easy for people to do it and one of the big differences is  providing a way to lease the system instead of having to buy the system and put a whole bunch of money upfront but i'll leave that to them to explain tonight we're really excited to hear all the details and everything but one of the things that we're doing in addition to that tonight is we're powering the projector and the microphone and everything that's up there in the room in the library up on the second floor is being powered by my solar bus so even though the sun is going down right now we have a whole bunch of solar  the solar panels on the roof of the bus or charging up the batteries and then that allows us to use energy tonight when after the sun goes down so we're really excited about that and you can see the power cord if you look in the front door there's it's very simple there's an extension cord coming out of there coming right behind me right here going up over this even then in through the window on the second floor right into the room where we're doing it and that way all the energy it's kind of like we're  to launch a campaign targeting richmond and it's certainly part of regional climate action committees goals is to is to create opportunities for people to adopt solar energy and to use renewable senior harry's hold myself as chris mentioned my name is dan conan so and i work at a brand new company called sun common which is based out of waterbury center we've actually got some other some commoners here  before working at sun com and i worked over at v purred which is the state's largest environmental nonprofit and while i was over there i'd helped get going this solar communities program which was just wildly successful and really really exciting  the whole principle behind that was that if we bring communities together bring towns together to go solar at the same time will not only get the renewable energy that you know vermonters wants and need but also will be able to bring the cost down for folks and finally make it affordable  ecause you know we we can talk about solar all we want but if people can't afford it it's never going to happen so so that was our mission at the perk and the program became so successful that we had to spin it off and some common is the is the spinoff so where that where the direct successor to that but i wanted to kind of first off introduce introduce myself have gary introduce himself just kind of our backgrounds and then i was hoping to go around the room and hear from you guys what  questions you had and what's kept you from going solar in the past it's i think that'll really help inform the discussion so i grew up in a small little town in west virginia population three hundred and nine and  the i'm sure a lot of you know here when you when you grow up in a small town you develop a really close relationship with the land and and the environments and you know i was always out hiking my house was right off the appalachian trail and  but at the same time i got a you know i got cabin fever and wanted to go out and see the world and get as far away from my parents and as far away from west virginia as i could so i went into college and started studying international studies and you know if we can solve these big environmental problems all at once and over the course of my studies there i you know got more and more excited and kind of story coming back to small town politics and small town initiatives so that's what i've been doing and doing ever since i start up a little solar hot water nonprofit in virginia where we're doing barn raising for solar hot water where a family would buy the parts in the system and come out and throw a big party and everyone would help and so that was kind of my first venture into solar and then started getting this program up and running so moved moved up here my wife went to uva and so we wanted to come back to vermont and get back on so so here i am and you know happy that as we go through the evening i want to walk you guys through the finances and the technology and you know answer any and all questions you have about going solar as so that's my role here tonight gary come up and introduce himself and then we can get going from there thanks hello i'm gary also known as the solar bus guy if you ever see my bus driving around town that's me and i have several roles here tonight several hats that i'm wearing as i do in my life quite a bit so one of them well first of all just a little bit of background about myself i've been working in the solar industry for over twenty years  long before they had grid intertie systems like they do now where you can run your meter backwards and stuff like that i was designing systems for people who wanted to live completely off the grid which is really the only way to go solar now it's really exciting because you don't have to get all of your power from your solar panels and you don't have to have batteries in the systems are cheaper and easier to install and there's so many exciting things happening like with suncom in the way that you can now get into a system and lease it and you don't have published by real goods which is still one of the biggest solar companies when i worked there and they actually just recently bought all terrorists one of the other companies around here but i don't work for them anymore a few years ago i just kind of got tired f working for a big company and i just started going on my own and i really enjoy education so i've been doing this bus thing where i just bought an old school bus and put solar panels on and i've been going around visiting schools and setting up educational displays at all kinds of public events so one of the hats that i have that i'm going to be wearing today is kind of i see myself i'm on the richmond climate action committee and as chris explained you know one of our goals is to get people to be more efficient use more clean energy sources and things like that so just because of my experience in the industry i see myself sort of like a consumer advocate and i see myself as like sitting in one of the these chairs and you know there are questions that i have for some common you know i've learned a bit about it read some of the articles you probably have to in the newspapers and you know but there are some questions that i and i'll try to make sure that the concerns and questions that i have or would have as a consumer get answered later on in the question and answer session and another thing that i'm doing today is supplying the power  if you notice that the bus is out there but we have an extension cord running from the bus up to here and all these projectors and this microphone everything is powered by the solar panels on the roof of the bus and hopefully someday soon you'll have solar panels on the roof of your house just like there on the bus and you'll be able to do things like this too and the third hat that i'm wearing i mentioned that you know i've been focusing primarily on education for the last ten years or so since i got the bus and just recently i decided with all the huge increase in interest in the the way it's so much easier and more less expensive for people to get into solar it was time for me to you know put out my little shingle to so i have a small solar company i've done a few solar in installations around here and my role with sun comet is kind of to fill in to work with them you know there's a lot of  companies around here but i really i want to make it really clear that i love what they're doing i'm really excited about it myself and i hope that a lot of people here in this room and using some common as a way to get to go solar but i think they'll they'll probably acknowledge that there are some needs that some people would have that might not fit into their particular way of delivering systems and so  services will be to fill in some of the gaps if you have particular need that doesn't fit in their model i i do all kinds of systems and we'll cover that probably in the question and answer session about you know what different types of systems there are what might be right for you and what might not so i think that's all i wanted to cover now and i just wanted to remind everybody there's a few places to sign up for things here and please be sure that you do right on the way and there's a place to sign up for the richmond climate action committee newsletter which is the way to be sure that you'll find out about events like this in the future and there's also sign ups here for sun com and also for me so other than that that's all i wanted to cover right now and i'll turn it over to what's the next thing on the agenda with  well that that gave a little bit of an overview and did everyone get one of these that was passing around i want to walk folks through now how this actually works and what this means for for the family as as the video mention as you probably have gathered by this point what we are doing it's on common what we're really excited about is that for the first time ever folks can go solar with no upfront cost through a solar lease but what i've done here is given you a little sample case which is actually my house in the system where we're designing for a place that i'm just just bought last week and and moving into next month  the way it works is there's no upfront cost and then with with the lease your monthly payments are locked up so that over the course of to twenty years which is the life of the lease your your payments will not increase the our goal here is to size the systems so that you're meeting all of your electricity bill and there's a couple of different ways that we're doing that we're combining federal tax credits we're combining state rebates and several different  options like that to bring the cost down but at the end of the day what it means is that you are paying this one flat monthly payments that doesn't change for the twenty years so that's that's going to be the most common option for folks the other two options that we've got are of course buying it outright as well as and prepaid lease where you pay upfront and you get all the other benefits of the lease the other benefits to the lease are number one having your maintenance take taken care of so there's a part of the system called an inverter which changes changes the electricity from d c the ac that usually goes out after about ten or fifteen years so if you if you buy system you would have to replace that in ten or fifteen years under the lease though you are that's completely paid for that's just a part of that's just a part of the lease that that replacement feel free to jump in here at any point with questions because i want to answer answer sun power they're out of silicon valley in california they came out of a computer chip industry and so they have panels that are they have factories in california as well as in mexico and the philippi so they're made around the world but actually i'll pass this around now the really cool thing about these panels is they are the most efficient we could find on the market which means you get more power out of your  each pan let's step back a little bit for the for the average family to produce your power that you need it's roughly two hundred square feet two hundred square feet of this  so that you know that twenty panels for for folks each one of those each one of the big size panels is forty pounds but it's fifteen square feet so it's it's really spread out it's not concentrated weight on one spot m or ford offering a lease on their car that's the basic concept when when someone signs up for with some common what we do is we'll take a look at your electricity bill we'll take a look at your house and we'll design a system that meets your electricity bill so that's why that's actually not all of your electricity because the the the utility company pays you extra for the solar that you're producing they kick in a little and so your monthly bill to them would be zero and you would just be paying paying the lease if anything they would be they would be writing you a check or giving you a credit so you say to use against your account and then the way it works over the course of the years you'll build up credit during the summer and pull it down in the winter because these are these systems are tied into the grid and during during the summer you'll produce a lot more power than you're actually using in the winter you will produce less but over the course of the year it all average yeah and just to be just me when i when i for odd numbers like that it's that's that's an average we design the systems specifically for the house and we we're making this we're making this guarantee that will be able to meet your electricity bill  for all folks it it's not dependent on the system size  electricity bill the monthly lease payment is the eighty five dollars but they're actually getting the eighty six ninety four back in credit so it it all averages out to eighty three dollars and that's tipper about and then from there you  we wouldn't be paying anything to bring on power yes so that's that's been a big hurdle for a lot of folks and that we've been sorry what happens when you sell a house that's been a big hurdle for a lot of folks that's why we've been talking about the pace program  and getting that up and running what happens in that case is you just sign that you just sign the lease over to the next person and then very soon so let's say you're selling a house in two thousand and twenty that person the person that's buying from you is still getting the power at and twelve rates so it's actually a big boost for them but you're not taking on the risk of hoping that the value of the house is going to equal what you just sign it over you're not taking on any risk like that  what you want there after twenty years it's about eighty five eighty five percent  yeah so if it goes it goes down a little bit every year and you know we can oversize if you want sorry sorry there the question is since the panels lose a little bit of juice every year and at the end of twenty at the end of the twenty year lease they have about eighty five percent they produce fifty five percent as much power as they do right now the question was are we taking that into account when we're building the systems so that you know you're not you're you're you're fifteen year still getting enough power we that that depends on the homeowners preference you know if if you want to build a bigger system we absolutely can do that but you know it just it just depends on what the what the homeowner actually wants on that front so so we do would be happy to work with you to build build that up one thing along those lines i should note is that you know any extra power any you know any increase in your usage is going to be at the new electricity rates so you know you will be getting charged by green on power v c s for the extra for the extra you're using beyond things that are known that are going to grow like if you know you're going to have a kid in the next year we can build that we can build up a system to meet that but just just to be aware of that going  you can only build it up in the future it's it's not ideal if it cost a cost more to be able to do that you know just really doubling up on certain parts and things like that but but you can absolutely can can if in that case you know they could they could take out a new lease an add in add in new panels to meet the extra need you also when you're buying when you're selling your house you could buy out the value of the system and sell that so on and they'd be able to take it from there and i would say in that in that case you would most likely just have then get a new lease and or just buy it just buy the extra panels to add into the system so i mean that there'll be lots of folks around to are happy to kind of add in the add in the extra parts that you would  your use then that's that's a credit that the homeowners getting that they can you know either get a check cut or apply towards towards so if it dips below that that's when sun power will start chipping in the chip and the difference so i mean honestly i don't see i don't see it happening where all of a sudden we have a cloudy  where we get and absolutely no sun you know that the systems are designed based around long term like you know fifty fifty sixty year average as a around climate so  isn't there so it's like ten fifteen bucks a month to be hooked up to the great that can be there's a little solar bonus that every utility is required to pay and that can go towards those those customer so let's say pay fourteen cents a kilowatt hour for for your electricity there is also a six cents a solar bonus on top of that so instead of getting paid fourteen cents a kilowatt hour for your solar that you're producing you're actually getting paid cents does that make sense so that that extra that that extra between the fourteen and twenty can cover your customer charges know the question is if we get another in and your houses and houses destroyed or panel the panels are destroyed what happen khoury covers the insurance on the panels and then beyond that you probably want to check with your homeowner's insurance company just to see what kind of coverage you currently have and if you would need to increase it all but actually extending the life of the roof underneath that he said if you need to re roofie in the next say five or seven years you probably wouldn't want to do it you know you would want to replace the roof before you but before you put the bells on don't get the full amount so do you you can still get some but it's not going to be as financially beneficial for you when you when you go beyond what you are  guaranteed for ten years and beyond ten years if they're likely going to take away so always for the first ten years you'll have that but even beyond that you'll still be able to get the value but the net metering value the answer is no that's then you don't pay anything for the twenty years and then can you hear my mother first question graham on systems where we're not doing those yet we're just focusing on the roof mounted systems that he said there are lots of folks you know we hope to get there and there are lots of folks who are doing them doing that right now as well yes at absolutely so what we're looking for in a good site is the couple limitations are we can't do slate roof because that would crack to crack the slate and that would be bad the other thing we can't do right now are flat roofs and the rubber man remember ends on the on the so those are the two rooftops we can't handle but besides that we're looking for just a generally south facing to to westerly roof and also a you know shade  the couple of complications though are that you know you would have to set up the decision making structure so you would have to figure out who the power company is going to contact and you would basically have to put together talk with your neighbors figure out who's going to be the point of contact and also through who's going to who's going to have their name on the lease because you have to have a person with their name on the lease so essentially the way that would work is the person with the big would be responsible for paying the full amount of the lease and then they would have and then you would have to pay down you know that your your share of the electricity so it gets a little more common convoluted it's not the easiest system but for  for folks who want to do it it's it's absolutely it is an option and we can we can show you how how to set it up when we just can't make those decisions  yeah it is it's awesome for people who just don't have the right roof like if you if your roof points exactly the wrong way or you're deep in the woods and would have to cut down an acre of trees to get a you know there or in the case of a condo association that'll be really the only option for folks so for folks who have just have a bad site all together a group net metering is the way to go it's just a little more complicated to get there in number number t know the question is what happens if sun power goes under they are a publicly traded company so they as as part of the financial regulations from the f c c they have to put aside enough money to take for being a publicly traded company mean it just doesn't work as well there at fair market value at that point but honestly the most likely option is going to be that some power is going to say keep it because they've been telling us over and over again i mean that they reserve the right to give you the system because because at that point twenty twenty years from now it's not going to make sense for them financially to send someone out to take the panels down and then ship them somewhere else to try to be resold it just doesn't make financial sense for them so the most likely  sure how that would work if the power outages really are important to you though that's where that's where the battery backup systems come in whereas as gary was talking about