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good morning everyone this is ed kranich with the connecticut green bank thanks again for joining us uh for the residential solar investment program update uh we're just waiting for our attendees to file in and everyone to get settled so we'll be getting started in just a few minutes here all right looks like everyone is just about settled so we will get started all right so um now that most of the attendees are on the line i'll go over the agenda the staff with us today and a few other items before we get started again my name is ed kranich i'm the manager of incentive programs with the connecticut green bank uh managing the residential solar investment program so first today in the room and uh in virtually we have brian garcia our president and ceo uh the new director of incentive programs sergio carrillo who will introduce himself or bg will introduce him on the next slide we have celia price associate director of incentive programs sarah pine manager of incentive programs matt massounis our legislative liaison joe bonanata manager of the smart elon program so we are also joined today by the rest of the incentive programs team i'm sure you're familiar with all of us um and some other staff so i'm sure we have the capacity to answer any questions that you may have so for our agenda today we'll start with a couple of bits on staffing changes uh we'll go a little bit more into the impacts of coven 19 talk about survey results from some surveys that we've put out over the last couple of months we also have a few survey poll questions for you so we'll we'll be interactive in the middle of this webinar and most importantly we're going to talk about the rcip status with respect to the 350 megawatt target in our closeout process assuming uh that we do not get any type of an extension uh after that we have some smarty updates with um an overview of the new special offer for battery storage um and a little bit more about battery storage and senate program uh that we're proposing uh and a couple other rsip reminders uh so with that um brian garcia make sure that you are uh unmuted and i'll pass it over to you uh let me just unmute you okay excellent all right thank you ed uh good morning everyone uh this is brian garcia um ed why don't we go to the the next uh slide uh let's go to the slide with sergio's picture on it slide four excellent all right so i just wanted to catch everybody up on uh where we are on staffing here at the green bank uh i'm very excited to introduce our new director of incentive programs we'll get there in a second and i'm going to ask sergio to say a little bit about himself if he's on the line but let me just kind of work through where we are everyone here on the line knows our incredible rcip team and incentive programs team uh we're undergoing a lot of changes as we make various transitions but i i do want to say a little bit about about celia who you all know has been incredible uh working with you all over you know more than the last decade celia is in a transitionary process um you know sometime within the next three to six months she's in the process of moving to michigan um uh celia can can weigh in there uh if she like uh but uh she's um gonna be helping us transition uh the programs and specifically get sergio onboarded and uh ready to go to help support uh our incentive programs and lead our incentive programs um but we're we're excited uh for sergio to be joining us he went through a really extensive search process uh he comes to us from delaware having worked for a utility in the gas and electric businesses helping support commercial customers address their energy needs we are really excited to welcome aboard actually today is the first time he's uh in the office so we actually have a lot of people here in rocky hill uh today which is really unusual given covid19 um but uh let me let me turn it to you sergi if you wanted to say a few things and sell you feel free if you wanted to say a few things as well but but sergio i don't know if you're on the line you there all right so we he we probably don't have him signed on as a panelist here actually just a moment brian um we can unmute sergio so just bear with me a moment cool we can also unmute celia if she wants to say a few things yes and sergio i believe you should be able to unmute yourself now sorry for the confusion there yes can you hear me yes all right i'm here thank you brian hello everyone um it's a pleasure to be here um as brian said my name is sergio carrillo i'm the new director of incentive programs and i wanted to tell you a little bit about myself for the past seven years i worked for chesapeake utilities corporation it's a natural gas and electric utility and i was leading their strategy development and execution efforts part of that strategy was clean energy technologies including solar combined heat and power chp compressed natural gas cng renewable natural gas rng and others and prior to chesapeake i had helped different financial roles in energy marketing companies leading retail electricity pricing for residential commercial industrial customers and also leading wholesale electricity procurement processes in pjm so that's a little bit about my background i'm i'm very excited to be working with this exceptional team and uh i'm looking forward to to working with with you guys in the very near future excellent thank you sergio celia do you want to say anything uh sure um thanks brian and i just wanted to say we're really excited to have sergio here joining the team so welcome sergio um it'll be great to have your experience um to contribute to all the work of the incentive programs and i just wanted to thank everyone in the industry for all the support and the collaborative work that you've been providing and we hope to continue that and look forward to continuing to provide support during the transition along with dale hedman who is still also providing support to the team who was our prior managing director as well as all the great staff on our team so thank you all right excellent thank you so so we wanted to give you all a sense of where we are on staffing given a number of transitions uh but we are ready to continue moving forward uh ed let's go to the next section which is the covid19 impacts uh perfect yeah let's go to the next slide all right great so uh so thank you to many of you uh who've been involved in taking the surveys that we've done over the course of the last three to six months working with the governor's office advanced ct decd deep the utilities we've assembled a number of different surveys to get a sense for how all of you are managing through covid19 based on a number of different data points it's very clear and in conversations with you all that this is a very very difficult time the first survey that we had in april uh this is this is these are two data sets you're seeing on the left is our earlier one and on the right is the one from july and this is data specifically pulled from the residential uh uh solar pv market respondents so the first survey that we did in april uh you can see on a detrimental impact scale you know how detrimental has covet 19 been to your business on a scale of one to ten the residential solar market was at eight roughly on average of ten uh sad faces um we also asked the question of how long is it going to take when covid19 is under control for your businesses to be able to get back to normal and you can see there six to 12 months so early days really really difficult still still difficult today but i can tell you that the solar residential solar pv industry was bad but there were worse uh industries the energy efficiency residential industry was devastated um so they had worse data in the april then we redid uh the survey again in july to kind of see how you all were doing obviously following the paycheck protection program um literally nearly 100 of the respondents were able to access the ppp there was one uh company on the efficiency side that was unable to access it but it seems like you all were able to buy yourself some time and and receive some of that federal support through the ppp we saw that in the responses but you can also see the detrimental impact again not good but it's less than what you were experiencing in april um with regards to you know how long is it going to take for you to get back to normal once we get covet 19 under control you can see that you all are in a better place although there is um a really concerning data point to us uh that we didn't see in the first survey is that some of you uh will never recover from that and and that is uh uh we want to get a better sense of that ed indicated earlier that we're going to be doing some surveying so just want to get you all thinking about responses here because we'll get to that in a second but we want to further understand what this means uh in the context of the sustainability of your businesses in connecticut let's go to the next slide um so one of the other questions we asked in survey 2 was you know since june 1st of 2020 how would you rate customer demand we wanted to see the see and understand the demand side of the market for your business um and you can see half of the uh the pie there uh customer demand is lower than this time last year and not increasing um we'll share with you a little bit of the data that kind of substantiates that opinion um the other thing is uh the small greener wedge in the upper left-hand corner for some of you customer demand is higher than this time last year so it may be that maybe you're seeing people wanting to be more sustainable themselves and taking it upon themselves to be more independent i think if we did this uh survey today we might see that even more given the rate increases in the storms but uh your some of you are experiencing that uh customer demand is equivalent to this time last year the blue wedge so some of you are feeling that is it is the same and then lastly the purple wedge in the bottom there customer demand is lower than this time last year but increasing um so this was the survey response from uh the july survey let's go to the next slide um so we wanted to share with you kind of some actual data i'll get into this data in a second uh but at a macro level um all of you know you know what the goals of the residential solar investment program are from a policy perspective there are really three things that the policy speaks to the first is achieving 350 megawatts of new residential solar pv uh before december 31st of 2022 uh celia is going to give us an update on where we are on that in a minute the second is for the green bank to administer a declining incentive block structure to support this market and you all have been doing a great job we've gone from uh step one of having you know a hundred and thirty dollar z-rec equivalent price to where we are currently now in the program which is about a twenty 20 equivalent z-rec price so we've managed to reduce uh incentives by 85 over that period of time while you all are managing through the investment tax credit reduction while you are are managing installed costs and and everything that's happening in the market but um there are some concerns that we see as a result of cobit 19. um and the third policy goal is the one we're really focused on um and that is that within the rcip policy is an economic development objective which is fostering the sustained orderly development of the local solar industry so this specifically to the green bank means we want a vibrant stable industry to continue providing residential end-use customers with access to new solar pv installations to to you all helping them maintain maintain their existing uh energy installations this is the one that worries us because of what covid19 has done to the industry so let me turn from that goals to what you're seeing now here in this graph so we have a number of different metrics as an organization to help us understand the stability and viability of the local industry in connecticut for example one of them is you know your diversity so you know 75 percent of you your customers are taking a lease or a ppa product uh 25 are owning uh we had 50 contractors last fiscal year from july 1st of 2019 through june 30th of 2020. um installing at least one project with 16 of those contractors installing over 50 projects or doing at least 2 million dollars in revenue so that's an important one for us is the companies that are here delivering revenue and building businesses around supporting this market there are seven third-party owners in the market all of you know them sunova is nearly 100 million dollar market last year sunrun and posigen at 20 million uh so there are a number of third party options and if you haven't partnered with those options yet uh take a look and we're happy to facilitate uh but what you're looking at here is a data point that is directly uh impactful to you all as an industry this is our sip applications that we receive from you what you're seeing on the x-axis is monthly uh data going all the way back to january of 2017 not only 2018 the red line there represents 2017 data as well on the y uh one axis is the megawatt hours of application submissions in those months and then on the y2 axis is the megawatt difference from the same month in the prior year so this to us is a metric of how are you doing this year to what you did the same month last year and you always want to be above zero right for us sustained orderly development is continued growth we want to see investment in connecticut and deployment in connecticut so being above the green line is important and what you clearly see here is that immediately when covet 19 hit we dropped below the line it looked like we tried to get to the line back in june and july but then we we dropped in august we'd be interested in hearing uh from you all what you what you think happened in august we all know it's typically a vacation month in new england but there may be something more feel free to to text that in or chat that in um but this is this data to us is you guys aren't stable it doesn't feel like things are you know are ready especially as we get closer to the 350 megawatt target on the rsa so what we've been doing actually let's go to the next slide and then i'll talk briefly about what we've been doing before we get to the poll great so this is the second piece of data that again comes from you all which is when you submit in your completion paperwork for the final piece of the incentive again these are materials that come from you so again we see um this to me where the prior graph is more customer acquisition on the demand side this is the construction work on the jobs so this is the important part because this is where economic development comes into effect where your businesses are generating revenues you're hiring people work is happening and we see the drop again in august we saw something good happen in july you know you were doing more installations than july of last year but then it dropped again in august and you all might say this is just vacation time in new england and we all you know that's what happens but we'd be interested to hear you know what else you think happened in august but with this data as we started to track it early on with the surveys and this data you know the green bank took the position and we had a conversation with our board of reaching out to the legislature and expressing the need to extend the rcip because you'll see shortly from celia we're getting close to the 350 megawatt target and once we hit the target it's going to be more difficult if not impossible for us to continue supporting the industry so we worked all summer to propose legislation and i'm sure all of you are out there advocating so we're trying to get the legislation extended uh in some sort of special session and undertaking other things including trying to address it through a regulatory process um all right let's go to the next slide where we want to start diving into some of your opinions so since we have have you all here we wanted to get your insights on three different questions there all these questions are going to come at you in a poll here shortly really quickly so if you can al just work through them that will be great that will tell us kind of how things are going um the first part here is this question on you know on a scale of one to five with one being the least uh uh the least and five being the most important how important are the following to the residential solar pv industry in connecticut and you're gonna get seven questions go ahead and keep it on the other thing sorry um the slides um you're going to get seven questions you're going to respond to them on the one to five level and then go to the next slide you're going to get a follow-on question slide number two that's going to say given the impacts of covid19 on the residential solar pv industry in connecticut on a scale of one to five how important is the continuation of the rcip to the stability of your company's operations in connecticut this is a really important question for us because we want to know how important we are to helping your companies navigate through cobit 19. and then the last third question ed go to the next slide how would you rate the following barriers to greater customer adoption of residential solar in connecticut please rate one to five you know labor shortages supply chain issues economic uncertainty these things are going to come at you uh when i tell ed uh right now to to start them i'm gonna give you guys you know three to five minutes to respond if you can work through them quickly that will be great and then we'll come back to to the presentation and webinar here today all right ed let's go ahead and fire it out okay we're just over three quarters of you have voted great so it sounds like yeah they're moving through them pretty quickly let's say let's let's let them keep going keep going gang um we realize this is a lot clicking through but this is this will be important data for us okay so i'm going to close the first question and go to the next all one just about 90 okay now the next question is on the importance of federal trade policy so we'll give you try to do this one in 45 seconds we didn't miss that second question did we no the we're still on the first seven questions of the first question oh gotcha so it's a total of about 16 questions 16 polls that will come up so we're going to try to move quickly yeah so folks can just quickly respond to these we're just going to start moving pretty quickly okay next one connecticut net metering excellent thank you all keep going and what might help is uh just give them a sense of the percentage as they're racking it up so we can keep them moving okay this one is on the connecticut tariff policy 30 50 you're all going a lot faster with each question so we appreciate that excellent next question the importance of the residential solar investment program and we appreciate those of you who say that it's very important don't buy us don't buy stay responsive okay 85 of you next question electricity rates great there's one more after this and then we'll move to the second question which is just one response okay good and availability of financing great after this question we'll be on question number two which just requires one response then we'll go to question three which has a series of six responses move the slide back one ed if you could perfect so this is the second question you're going to be asking answering now all right how's the response rate at goodwill right 85 that seems to be the max for these so okay so question three so how would you rate the following barriers to jump ahead to greater customer adoption so this first one is for labor shortage one being the least important five being the most important sixty percent seventy percent excellent and okay next question supply chain issues or delays 50 great keep going gang we're almost done thank you eighty percent next question economic uncertainty thirty percent fifty percent eighty percent okay next question uncertainty and availability of the rcip incentive great and after this one there's two more so if you all keep with us we're almost there about eighty percent of you next question uncertainty in the availability of the federal itc at 50 70 80. good and the last part of this question challenges with virtual sales 65 80 perfect excellent all right everyone thank you for for bearing with us on that that's that's going to be really important it's going to be another data set to help us further understand where all of your respective companies are in managing through covid and what uh policymakers and others can do to help support uh you through that um so we're gonna try and we'll share the results of these polls uh probably in the follow-up email that we usually do after these webinars we'll share these results in that write-up um let's go ahead and go to the next section and i'm going to ask celia if she can start us off on just providing the overview of the rcip statutes and so yeah i'll trail you on the next couple of slides and just add in my thoughts as you kind of work through them you might want to unmute cellular and forgive me thank you uh so we just wanted to on on this slide um just make a couple of points about the r sub statute so as as most of you are aware our sip was put into statute in 2011 by public act 1180 section 106 with an original target of 30 megawatts which we met early and then extended to 300 megawatts in 2015 and most recently the legislature extended rcip to 350 megawatts last year through public act 19-35 we just wanted to point out that if you look at the language on this slide the statute actually specifies deployment of 350 megawatts not just approval of 350 megawatts so we'll provide an update on the status of the program on the next slide um that will um reflect uh what we need to do to take into consideration approvals versus deployment an additional reminder that we wanted to to mention here is we realized some contractors didn't know what the status of net metering was and we just wanted to let you know that net metering does not end until december 31 2021. so it was updated by public act 19-35 last year decoupling the timing of net metering um ending and transitioning to the tariff decoupling that from the end of our sip so you may recall that um the prior statute pa 18-50 was going to have net metering end at the same time as and thanks to the industry um being very vocal about how that wouldn't that would be damaging to the industry and also with the understanding that the tariff was going to take longer to be implemented net metering was extended through the end of next calendar year and is not tied to the end of our sip so just wanted to make sure you're all aware of that next slide so this is our status and the note here at the bottom shows that this was the status as of september 1 2020 however i'm going to explain how we're at about the same number as of today so we're at about 342 megawatts of approved projects or about 98 of the target in terms of approvals as of today the approved capacity is still about the same given that we've had some cancellations as well as some new submissions since september 1st so um you can see we're less than 10 megawatts away from the target now um in terms of reaching the statutory target of deployed projects we're at about 303 megawatts or ninety percent of the target so technically arsene doesn't end until we reach 350 megawatts of deployed projects we just wanted to to mention here a couple of the statistics for the program program-wide about 25 of systems are homeowner-owned and about 75 percent are third-party owned through a lease or ppa and then um everyone should be proud of the fact that we have enabled investment of total investment of 1.3 billion in residential solar about 150 million provided by way of the rcip incentives and the rest borne by um customers or the private sector so that's nearly a nine to one leverage ratio of private to public dollars it's an extremely efficient program so in summary we're less than 10 megawatts away from reaching the 350 megawatt target we're estimating reaching 350 megawatts of approved projects as early as october given that we're averaging about five to six megawatts of approvals per month so what we have at the top there two to three months it's uh we probably should have updated that to closer to two months in terms of 350 megawatts of approved projects however because we all know that projects drop out due to expirations or cancellations for various reasons we will ultimately need to approve additional projects to reach 350 megawatts deployed and that's a little bit of a tricky process and so that's what we want to go over with you today is how we're going to handle that closeout process to try to reach ultimately reach 350 megawatts of deployed um projects um without um you know over promising incentives where we may not be able to do that great and so let me pick up from here just in terms of because i'm sure a number of the contractors are wondering if there's a possibility of extending the rcip um so you know just so you know as we've been watching and tracking the impacts of covid19 we've been feeling more and more like the policy goal of sustained orderly development isn't going to be met because we're kind of limping you all are kind of limping into the 350 megawatt goal and it feels unstable to us so we've made a number of cases to the legislative leaders and administrative leaders on extending the rcip we don't know what the status of all that is but we do know that it's important to stabilize your industry that we get more runway and especially given some of the recent focus right on the rate increases in the storm response we all know that solar pv is good in terms of reducing electric rates to those participating uh and improving the reliability of the grid by deploying more solar so in addition to that kind of those legislative efforts and you guys should you know working directly with your local legislative leaders through your local associations however you feel appropriate work to communicate that to your respective legislative leaders we will do it through our channels as we have been doing uh but beyond that you know we're we're also exploring other regulatory solutions at pura in new britain the public utilities regulatory authority uh we put in a number of considerations we don't know what the status will be for those considerations but we're simply trying to get other options on the table for uh some way of extending uh the rsip and we'll know more you know hopefully in the coming months about whether or not those options can be acted on um so i i think that's it so unless you wanted to add anything else on the status of the rcip we could move to the closeout that sounds good let's uh let's go to the closeout process thank you okay thanks celia um so we're just gonna go over a couple of slides here on how we're planning to uh close out the rcip over the next couple of months as celia just indicated so really the first and most important thing here kind of the overarching subject is that it's very important to communicate with your customers as of right now that they're not necessarily guaranteed an incentive so um as we get closer that likelihood of not getting an incentive will possibly increase um so we will follow up with a communication with some more detailed information about how this whole closeout process will work um but for now we're just going to kind of go over some of the the high level and and the things that are most relevant for the next couple of weeks um so as we approach the 300 megawatt last year which was our previous target we implemented a way to track the order of the incentive application submissions in power clerk um so you may have noticed that the arsa ticket number rtn field is showing up in new applications since last year so we're actually you know well into the 10 000 or so of that our sub ticket number um but at that time we were expecting ourselves to end at 300 so we're just going to pick up kind of where we left off with the 350 and start using it the way that it was originally intended now the rtn field as you know is blank when you're first editing your application it only fills in a number upon entering the submitted via internet status the rtn number is your place in line so it's it it changes or it can change um unlike the rpv number the rpv number never changes once you submit an app if you change statuses if you get rejected resubmit it'll always stay the same the rpv number but the rtn number can change depending on how many times you have to submit so as we come a little closer to the 350 megawatt target plus a few megawatts uh we will soon only review projects in order of rtn so it'll make things a little bit more complicated for us to have to review kind of different types of applications in the order that they're received instead of batching them like we do now but it's really the best way to ensure that it's fair for everyone that your place in line is is where you get to be reviewed um we will have a policy of similar to when we're ending a an incentive step um that if you get rejected for a small reason um not anything major but just something like a minor correction that needs to be made we will give you three business days so we'll put it in a special status called application rejected three day and you'll have three business days which includes uh it's you know just monday through friday minus weekends and holidays to correct errors and resubmit without losing your ticket number so if you're fifth in line and we review you today we reject it you'll have three days to resubmit it and then assuming that you know we've gone through the list you will be next in line when you resubmit ticket numbers cannot and will not be manually edited so you certainly won't have access to do that as applicants we won't have access to do that as admins or program designers so to just kind of recap this the rpv number will never change once it's assigned and the rtn number will be lost if the application is not submitted within three business days um if you wait more than three business days then a new rta number will be generated and you will be at the end of the line so we will the process of assigning the rtn is completely automated we won't edit them and correct submissions as you know will save you time and potentially save your customers incentive one additional thing is that we will regularly post the submitted queue customer details so we'll just have the rpv number the rtn number and probably the system size posted in a list likely an excel document on the power clerk home page so at any time if you know that your rtn number is you know 2010 or 2025 whatever the number is you can go and you can download that list on power clerk and you can see where you sit in line so you can kind of get a better idea of to know yourself and to tell your customers uh you know of of the likelihood of being approved so you can kind of do the math between how many megawatts are ahead of you how many megawatts are left in rsip and then just kind of determine your probability um so for those of you who may want to see this visually we just made a couple of quick um uh infographics here so as an example here's a quick approval something that's right the first time so we have the contractor on the left green bank on the right so you would submit a project we will have a new process where an automated email will go out after your submission and that will tell you here's your rtn number here's your rpv number and you know here's where you can find the information on on the rtn list and at that point you know we'll review it in the order of rtn and then move to approved status if it's approved so the additional step of the automated email is really just to kind of set expectations for you and the customer that you know you may have to wait make sure you don't install it first and just know that there may be a little bit longer wait time because of the way that we're reviewing apps now um incomplete submissions as i said before so we have the ability uh and we reserve the right to determine in our sole discretion what constitutes a complete or incomplete application um so if we see an application come in that's you know basically just kind of junk it's you kn w wrong customer info the contract isn't signed um info isn't really put in there it's essentially just thrown in there to reserve a place in line that will be rejected first pass and you will have to get a new rtn number when you resubmit so we won't give any three-day rejections for anyone who isn't clearly making an effort to submit a complete application minor corrections for things like a couple numbers being off or something being unclear that's normal that would get the three day uh so here's what it would look like if you had the three day so i eliminated the first couple steps of it being submitted and reviewed um but as you can see here we would reject it put it in the three day status and send the letter as long as those those corrections were made as requested and submitted within three business days you'll get another submission number when you or i'm sorry another submission email when you resubmit it it will have the same rtn number that you had before and we would review it in order when we receive it and it would be at the top of the list and then at that point we would approve it and then the most complicated would be if a project was rejected put in the three-day status and then it was not corrected in three business days or they didn't make the corrections as requested we would then put it into application rejected status which is an automated process and then at that point it would erase your current rtn number and then you would get a new one when you resubmit and you would be at the bottom of the list which as we approach the 350 the likelihood of actually getting an incentive would go down so again really just trying to drive home here um so after we um after we reached the 350 megawatt target or the target that you know we set with any bit of overage so maybe 355 megawatts we will have a contingent approval process where we have already reached our capacity but we will continue to review projects in the process that i just described in the previous slides so going through by rtn number in order and assuming that everything's okay and okay to approve we would issue a contingent approval so similar to your contingent approval from the utility uh you would not be able to install or really proceed until you've received a full approval but the contingent just says you're in line we would approve this if we could and pending any other project being cancelled or expiring you will be in line to receive a full approval if something opens up um and then just hears that visually about how we will issue the contingent approval and verify whether we have enough cancelled capacity in rsip to go ahead and approve the next project so with that i'll pass it over to sarah now who can go over a little bit more about the our sip close-out process all right i'm gonna cover um maybe everyone's least favorite topics um expirations and cancellations um so on 91 we did resume automatic cancellations for projects um that have reached 270 days or more and are technically expired um those uh cancellations the auto cancels will continue uh through the end of our sip from here on out um we are going to we realize maybe um that we should send out some some additional uh information um so we're going to send out communications at 60 days 30 days seven days and one day before the cancellation um i believe it was only 30 so so that will start 9 15. um if you know a project is going to be cancelled um or is not going to going to be installed at all um we do have a process guide on the power clear homepage on how to cancel that project yourself in power clerk and this is very important um because it will help to free up capacity in the program um and help us figure out you know what's left in in our sap next slide please the good news is um we are going to consider extension requests um for projects that are already installed and only waiting on completion paperwork this is at the green bank soul discretion and we are going to implement a new status and form um to request these extensions in power clerk um so more information will be available on that um soon but just a reminder that extension approvals are are not guaranteed next slide hey sarah i just wanted to jump in i i just got a note from someone that um she could not hear the audio um if anyone on the line or any attendee um if if you can't hear or if you have an issue send it in through the questions or the chat uh just just so we can know um so if anyone else has any issues let us know otherwise i think it might have just been that one person okay okay um so we are going to have to uh sort of whittle down um the expiration time frame um from 270 days uh to 180 days um this is going to go into effect for um any project approved after september 15th um and um that will be reflected in the rcip um reservation and reservation incentive letter um that goes out as well next slide please and back to celia and brian all right all right thank you sarah and ed for uh that comprehensive closeout um again all we'll provide these slides we'll provide the webinar and if you have questions put them in the chat we're gonna go a little longer than 11 30 for those who want to hang out on the webinar um so just transitioning a little bit here to future market opportunities uh celia and i wanted to talk about the equitable modern grid docket which is docket number 171203 that's at pura there are 11 different reopeners from things like energy affordability to zero emission vehicles to battery storage which is reopener number three we have always felt as i'm sure all of you do that the future of the solar pv market is combining solar pv with battery storage so that we can ensure that participating households not only have backup power in the event that you see what we've been seeing uh storm uh outages on the electric grid but also that the benefits of those solar pv systems can help uh rate payers and the grid improve its reliability so um the green bank and a number of partners which we'll talk about in a second uh brought forward a what we just tentatively called solarize storage uh we wanted to give some pizzazz to our our proposal title uh but this is essentially a proposal that would seek to deploy 50 megawatts of battery storage in combination with uh existing or new a residential solar pv by the end of 2025 so i think we estimated 10 000 uh homes here and we're going to go into some more detail in terms of uh our structure in a second let's go to the next slide um so in terms of the design of the program we used a number of different sources to to really create a best practice design and and i feel having reviewed all the proposals in the docket that this proposal is by far the most comprehensive the most effective and most efficient look at how to do this in the residential solar market and i want to thank you know all the tpos out there who put in their proposals and support so you know we looked at industry research there's a number of of things out there from things like the energy storage association their research reports on looking at at various state designs we had a number of conversations with many of you either directly or indirectly through solar connecticut in terms of what you all were seeing in the field and what you believe is needed in the market we actually conducted and some of you may have seen this some willingness to pay surveys so we actually went out to 20 000 uh rcip customers and smarty loan customers we got 1900 responses um and it was a survey that took about 15 minutes we gave 10 certificates to the first 300 respondents to dunkin donuts so we got really good data and if you all haven't seen it ed why don't we flag it as including in our response so that they can see uh the research results it's great it's really extensive so we want to share that with you all we also took a look at regional best practice programs we wanted to understand uh the upfront and performance based incentives that are being offered in northeastern states on battery storage in combination with uh behind the meter storage and we also developed a benefit cost calculator working with guide house our consultant we developed a really comprehensive tool that allows us to look at what those incentives do in terms of things like performance cost tests a participant cost test total resource cost test rate payer impact tests societal cost tests you know and the like these are all what are called cost effectiveness tests uh assuming the benefits exceed the cost or benefits are greater than one what you see here then is is those programs should be supported and we saw with our program design extensive uh benefits to all ratepayers and society from doing the program uh next slide uh celia why don't i turn it to you to to kind of talk about our collaborative partners uh on the proposal great thanks brian so shown on this slide are some of the many collaborative partners that we worked with on the proposal to pura and also partners that provided a support letter for the proposal including contractors third-party owners and battery storage technology providers we also appreciate other contractors that we've had many conversations with that provided your time and knowledge to help us improve the program design for the industry and we'll likely reach out for further input as we get an opportunity to flush the program design out further thank you for that uh next slide hey celia before before we move on can i can we hang out on that so i just wanted to make one more point on this if i could which was that we made a strong effort to ensure that the program design we put forward also included our utility partners through the conservation and load management fund they administer those funds so uh we included both avon grid and eversource as administering a performance-based incentive uh we believe that the green bank you all are doing an exceptional job on the upfront incentives so we designed that as a way to get customer acquisition and be a catalyst to getting customers to want to do battery storage we added in the utilities on the performance-based side so that we can keep those customers as cellu will will talk through specifically to dispatching their their their battery systems when the grid needs it the most so i just wanted to make that point that we we made a very active effort to involve the utilities in our proposal thank you brian that's a really important point because as many of you know there are some programs out there already for example eversource has a connected solutions program in massachusetts and just started one in connecticut so we did have conversations with the utilities to make sure we were factoring in what they were going to be proposing so that our program design would be supplementary and provide the best possible combined economic benefits for helping encourage adoption of storage so next slide so this uh this is um a diagram of the what's called operational control design for the proposal essentially um we are proposing a program design that incorporates both an upfront incentive from the green bank as well as an ongoing performance-based incentive from the utilities and in exchange for providing the upfront incentive the green bank would would require that customers allow their battery to participate in you could call it a passive dispatch or we also sometimes call it set it and forget it so that battery would be set to dispatch on a regular basis for example during iso new england summer peak hours and that would provide a baseline of benefit to the grid in addition those same batteries if they would like to also benefit from the additional performance-based incentive from the utilities would be agreeing to participate in active dispatch which means that the utilities could send a signal usually a day ahead that that battery would be needed during the scheduled time to dispatch usually the next day and in that case that would override the default setting forget it dispatch and so that day where there's a scheduled event from the utilities the battery would just dispatch to satisfy that event and be able to to get benefits from the utility demand response program next slide unless brian you have anything to add there might be a motion on this slide go ahead and click one set showing the technical you can walk through that cell great okay thank you so um this is a interesting diagram showing um how the battery charges and then dispatches um and of course it's charging from the solar earlier in the day and then the battery has enough capacity to dispatch to meet on-site load for the green banks set it and forget it or passive demand response requirement and then as we mentioned they're going to be some days where the utilities will send a signal and that that's um the bar here where it says event day is called where that battery will be asked to provide active dispatch in response to that scheduled event now notice that what this graph is trying to illustrate is that there are benefits to the grid from the passive dispatch that's going to be happening by default but the active dispatch event is going to allow for even additional incremental benefits over and above that default dispatch because when the utility calls an event not only can the battery dispatch to meet on-site load but can it can also export to the grid so the analysis that was done by our partner guide house showed that additional benefit could be provided to the grid and that's important because we need to show a certain benefit cost ratio as brian alluded to earlier in order to argue for the fact that these programs can provide benefits and therefore we can justify the cost to the state and to rate payers for providing these incentives perfect uh next slide so this is just kind of the last slide that that puts forward you know we we all have learned a lot about the importance of a declining incentive block structure in terms of uh supporting your companies and helping onboard customers uh so we laid out a 50 megawatt uh incentive structure uh by step uh again as i had noted before we we think that this would reach at least ten thousand or somewhere around ten thousand households uh as celia was stating there uh for the set it and forget it the upfront incentive that the green bank would provide and we've got two of them one for non low to moderate income incentive customers and others for low to moderate income customers we want to make sure that we're making vulnerable communities more resilient so we've offered provided an additional incentive there so for getting that upfront incentive you would follow the set it and forget it protocol that cellulate out and then if you wanted to participate in the ongoing performance based incentive allowing the utilities to access that system in dispatch actively dispatch that system there's an ongoing performance based incentive and we modeled massachusetts incentive over a 10-year period so celia i don't know if you want to give more context in terms of what that might look like for a project or anything else but this is all to say that this structure that you're seeing here would pass all the cost effectiveness tests that we were alluding to earlier and deliver more value to ratepayers in society than we're currently getting from just deploying behind the meter residential solar thank you brian i think just the overarching goal is we wanted to provide an upfront incentive in addition to the performance-based incentive to help buy down that upfront cost for the battery storage and help that customer meet the cost of that battery as much as possible over say a 10 year lifetime for the battery excellent all right so i think we're on to now the smarty loan and i think we're going to transition here to joe b i'm not mistaken next slide hi good morning everyone um it's good to speak with you all um so brian and celia thank you for for the great overview of the proposed um battery storage um incentive um i'm happy to report that we actually have a battery storage special offer through the smarty loan that um i'll introduce uh in just a bit and that's available right now so um a good tool to hopefully for your company to take advantage of and to offer to your customers before i talk about that though ust a quick refresher on what the smarty loan is it's the residential financing program that's administered by the connecticut green bank in partnership with nine local lenders so banks and credit unions all across the state really the key points about smartie are the flexibility of what can be financed solar battery storage ev chargers heat pumps windows insulation it really runs the gamut of anything that can save uh your customer on their fuel or electric bills um there's no money down required with smarty there are fixed monthly payments and no prepayment panel so this is a great program to take advantage of it's an unsecured personal loan so no lien is put on the property and no collateral is needed with flexible underwriting criteria so borrowers with as low as a 580 credit score and a 50 debt to income maximum could potentially qualify for the loan um so if you have any questions um if your company needs a refresher on smarty or wants to join smarty as an eligible contractor uh please reach out to me uh you'll have my contact information on the on the final slide um and if you can go on to the next slide please um the next slide is talking specifically about the battery storage special offer and as mentioned it's available right now um it launched on july 1st of this year along with a special offer for both heat pump technologies air source ground source and heat pump water heaters along with electric vehicle charging stations and what the special offer is is it's a 2.99 interest rate for five seven or ten year loan terms um and it's specific to battery storage um and it's capped at twenty five thousand dollars whereas the smarty loan in general is kept at forty thousand dollars so the way that that works to allow for homeowners who either want to finance a battery um in a battery that might exceed 25 000 or a battery and solar um we we do allow for a blended rate um and now and just a note from that first bullet point is that this offer is available um for battery storage installations paired with solar pv or a retrofit adding a battery to an existing system so where the blended rate comes in is um in in the idea of either a battery that might exceed the 25 000 2.99 cap or a battery paired with solar or another measure um and so the way that that blended rate would work um is that the battery would qualify at the 2.99 rate um the additional um uh battery cost or the solar or whatever the other measure is above 25 000 would qualify at the standard smarty rate um so using an example of a 10-year term the standard rate is uh 5.99 so with that loan the 2.99 for the battery the 5.99 for um for the the other measure the loan would close at a 5.13 uh interest rate for the 35 000 loan at 10 years so it would close below uh below the standard rate of 599. we have a handy calculator that we can share with you um just to help you run the numbers of what those costs um might be but a great opportunity for um for your customers to either add a battery to their existing system or to install new solar and storage systems at below market rates for an unsecured loan for more details on how to get started with the battery storage special offer i'd refer you all to the power clerk login page we have a comprehensive rfq and program guidelines form uh for you to review as well as a customer terms and conditions uh document there um and then just for final reference with the value of the of the interest rate buy down or irb for for that ten thousand dollar battery loan at ten years is um about a thirteen hundred dollar cost and that's the cost that um we would cover to help buy down that that incentive um we anticipate the 2.99 offer to be in the market likely through the fall but we would announce um within at least 30 days before the offer ends so any questions please reach out to us with that i'll turn it back over to the team thanks thanks joe so with that we're going to go into a few important rsip reminders but uh after that we're going to go over questions so um i think we'll just kind of run through the reminders quickly um and if you have questions please start submitting them now in the questions panel and then we will filter and go through them after the next slide so with that i'm going to pass over to sarah just for a couple of quick rsip reminders thanks ed um and these slides will be available after the webinar so um we can just go through them pretty quickly um just a gentle reminder um to please double check applications um before submitting you know either up front or on on the back end this is really important as we reach the 350 to avoid losing place in line and then don't fret if you receive a three-day rejection notification on a friday it is business days so we'll go through a couple common errors on the up front um generally it's paperwork that's uploaded doesn't match power clerk is um it could be you know missing information cut off blurry and correct um shade report um is not accounting for all of the shade obstructions uh it might be outdated or inaccurate next slide please on the back end on the um completion submissions um some of the common errors are are pretty similar um maybe the document uploaded um has the wrong information perhaps it's for the wrong homeowner i'm just double checking things like that sometimes the equipment fields if there was a change order might need to be updated so just double checking that um self-inspection photos um it's hard for us to sort of verify um array modules and things like that if the photos are very far away or blurry or missing so having all of those clear close-up and verifiable photos will will help everyone save some time next slide please all right some biggies um the approval to energize letter um that common issues would be the utility inverter rating on the letter not matching up in power clerk or maybe the actual approval to energize date doesn't match up um if the project is in addition there's a few additional steps that that need to be taken there so we'll have some information there and the same with battery storage um projects that are not reporting in locus some of the common issues are the mac id might be incorrect or if you're using a solar edge uh solar log or end phase perhaps the permissions haven't been provided to green bank next slide please and i'm gonna tap in celia for the payment slide thank you sarah so this is just a reminder that for payments um the data monitoring must be up and running in the locus platform not just in the original platform like end phase solar edge or solar log so we need to be able to see the data in locus in order to issue the payment and then just a reminder that if you want to get the project um if you want to get the site built in locus before you have all the completion paperwork you can use the pdp submitted status and there's a guide on the power clerk login page for that and then lastly if you have any questions regarding inspections please contact bill colonist and his email address is provided there all right and so with that we will get into the questions uh so we're gonna spend probably five maybe ten minutes uh to wrap up the questions here um just a moment while i filter through these um so first question if someone auto cancels and the customer still wants to move forward can we resubmit a quick answer is yes however depending on when you catch it you may actually have to submit a new application and get a new rtn number and you would go to the back of the line um so make sure that you pay attention to those auto emails that will go out that will remind you of a project's impending expiration of the deadline for the 270 or soon to be 180 deadline 180 day deadline uh thanks ed and and this is sally i just wanted to add um and as sarah mentioned we're going to have an extension requested status and you'll be able to to submit that into power clerk if you want to request an extension before our project gets auto cancelled thanks and we're hoping to have all these changes to power clerk so like celia said the extension requested a couple other things about the auto generated emails to go out uh starting uh september 15th which is this coming tuesday so a couple days from now um next question is what about the proposed 100 megawatt extension um is that something that you think is likely or where is the green bank on uh making efforts for that i think it's a question for brian great so thank you for that question yeah if you all were listening into the energy and technology committee hearing earlier this week on lco 3920 you clearly heard from the energy and technology committee chairs that both the rcip and virtual net metering extensions are priorities for them but right now they are dealing with the rates and storm response to isaias um as the priority um so they know where we are on the 350 it's a a priority you know there's no telling what they're going to do in a special session uh you all need to be out there advocating for the extension we're doing what we can to advocate for that extension as well so they're just trying to manage bigger priorities uh given the ratepayer impacts uh and you know from both the rates and the tropical storm so um we need your help too uh this next question i believe is um it's either for celia or for joe depending on the nature of the question but it was can you clarify that the only battery equipment from the collaborative partners will be accepted so is i think that means is there a list of eligible equipment um for i think for the smarty battery and then also for a proposed rcip battery program um i can take that thanks ed so um for the smarty i just wanted to remind everyone the details for that are in a program guidelines document on the power clerk login page and it does specify that if a contractor wants to participate in that special offer for battery storage we're asking you to submit to us what equipment you're planning to use for those projects and we will do that and approve it if it's reasonable if it's a battery technology that's not yet commercial that's an example of a type of equipment that we would not approve so we will be um creating a list as those come in and are requested but a lot of the standard battery technologies that are out there now that are commonly being used and are commercially available will be acceptable for smarty and it will be similar for the battery storage incentive program we're certainly going to have a lot of the common commercially available technologies that are acceptable for use in that program but you'll also be able to propose additional technologies that aren't on that list so we're trying to be technology agnostic and keep that open for participation we want to encourage as many technology providers to participate um and so we will but we will review those um as they come in just to make sure that they meet the minimal criteria of the program and also just so you know the the program design for the proposal that we submitted to pura um we have that proposal available on the connecticut green bank website if you'd like to look at that in detail just go to the connecticut green bank page and under strategy and impact if you go to planning it's under there and it's called pure docket solarize storage proposal or or reach out to us and ask us if you need the link thank you thanks ellia um a couple of questions about auto cancellations um so can it be switched back to approved status in order to request an extension um the short answer for right now is yes we are doing that for some projects or well for anyone who asks right now um for projects that get auto canceled due to expiration just because this is kind of a new thing people aren't used to it but we will fine fine-tune this policy a little bit over the next couple of weeks so we'll have some more official guidance as to what we will and will not accept as it gets to be more uh significant related to you know customers ability to actually get the rsip so just sit tight on that one um next question i think this is for celia in your talks with avon grid are they expecting to join in on the connected solutions program like eversource um actually i think brian might be um better able to answer that question um so i i think this gets back to the broader point of that these are proposals that have been brought forth to pira underneath reopener number three so pura is going to um open i suspect hearings and comments on the different proposals which is i guess uh what we would call out to you all as if you all can express support for that and help us through that process that would be great i suspect pura will take up the conversation on this performance-based incentive you know is replicating massachusetts performance performance-based incentive the right way to go if so then should avon grid follow that protocol if not then what should we be looking at and i think what they're going to look at is the cost benefit calculation uh you know the participant cost test the program administrator cost test some of those things i was talking about there's a calculator behind that so i suspect they're going to want to look at what would happen if you offered this type of incentive versus that type of incentive to make sure that rate payers are maximizing their benefits from the program so i guess that's a way of saying to be determined but our point was that we wanted to see the utilities included in our proposal so that they can offer an ongoing performance-based incentive thanks brian um so i'm just gonna grab one last one because it's quick uh does the three day business or the three business day um deadline start on 9 15 yes it does so uh tuesday the 15th is when we'll be rolling out or hoping to roll out all the changes that we discussed so reviewing an rdn number order um having the three day auto cancellation or um three-day automatic loss of the rtn number if you get um rejected um so again as these things roll out we'll have a little bit more guidance email notifications and um sort of a process guide for for all these new changes um so just kind of being mindful of everyone's time here because we are about 25 minutes over we will go through any additional questions through the email when we send it out with the recording and the presentation uh sometime next week so in the meantime if anybody else has any additional questions you can feel free to email them to us we have our emails on the screen here uh the smallsolar ctggreenbank.com is probably the best way to reach all of us so um with that if any of the panelists don't have anything else to add just wanted to thank everyone for joining us today and we will be in touch next week with some more details uh about the webinar and questions and a copy of the presentation so thanks everyone you