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good afternoon folks my name is David DeMaio and president of the Pat Munger construction company over in Branford Connecticut and I welcome you this afternoon to this presentation on commercial solar in Connecticut I'm joined by Dan Schwartz a principal in the company independent solar uh he'll have a chance to introduce himself momentarily Pat monger construction company is a commercial industrial contracting firm been in business since 1968 I have been with the company for 38 years and nearly 30 years as the as the president of the company again were commercial industrial general contractors and back in 2008 I saw an opportunity to add a complementary service to our business and that was that was a solar entity and the relationship with the independent solar came about of about by wanting to partner with a company that was word in the solar field and marry that with a company that had good sound construction background because at the end of the day a solar project is really a construction project great thanks Dave and pleasure to be with you all today my name is James Ward's I'm a co-owner of impending solar we've been around since 2007 we focus exclusively on commercial customers we've completed over 60 commercial installations which is about 50 megawatts worth of capacity in addition to developing and building projects we also maintain our projects that we built for our customers and almost 100% of the problems that we've built we still work with our customers and maintain them for them our focus is really on doing a quality installation for our customers and having that long-term customer relationship and that's why it's been great working with Dave and the modern construction company together we've done a number of projects together and that's been a very successful partnership so from the perspective of a longer construction we were looking for a solar partner that married our core values which you folks can find on our website and that was really important to us quality was job one there's a lot of installations out there that you could tell after a couple years the wire management the PVC piping that's used rather than the metallic piping that we use is starting to degrade from the Sun and things of that nature there's small items but they start to show their their uh their head you know a couple years into the project and we're building projects that have a life expectancy of 25 to 30 years up in a harsh environment on your roof so quality and detail is really important and we found that partnering with independent solar they met our core values they're quality oriented and they are very much experts on the engineering and procurement side of the equation and we bring the construction that's expertise in because as I mentioned before at the end of the day it's a construction project we're working on people's roofs we're working in people's facilities tying into electrical infrastructure so having the construction background as part of the equation is really important and one of the things that bowler products are are fairly complex and what we try to do in working with monger is make it simple for the customer so we're looking at tying it all together whether it be the the engineering and the permitting of it to the financing and obviously the construction in the operation we kind of make it turnkey to the customer so take a complex project and and make it something that the customer doesn't need to focus on other than understanding the the financial benefits for for their company so real quick this the slide that's up now folks is a building located on interstate 95 as you head into New Haven from East Haven this is the old post office distribution facility that laid bacon for a number of years and several years ago it was purchased by a customer of ours and we renovated in rehab the entire building into a new car dealership a complete change of use and the owner was very much tuned in to sustainable construction took a kick took advantage of every opportunity that was there to to reduce energy cost to upgrade materials and at the end of the nearly the end of the project he was so interested in solar that we brought James on board and all that James you know talk about the commercial solar advantages and what this particular customer and all our customers take advantage of yeah in the end of the day a solar project is a financial investment and so what kind of over review what are the weather key factors that make it a good investment first off the energy that you produce is going to reduce your utility bill so we have customers with systems that save them anywhere between twenty to over a hundred thousand dollars a year on their energy costs so substantial savings on on you know the utility cost for the business also because it's a 25-year system to be sent that utility rates go up over time you've hedged against that so if you're supplying fifty percent or 60 percent of your energy from the solar system to the extent that UI or eversource or wholesale energy rates go up you're insulated from that not to make a big difference over time especially if you get into a period where energy costs are rising rapidly another advantage of solar is that there's significant tax benefits you can actually about fifty percent of the cost of the system you get refunded in the first year through tax savings through tax credits and and depreciation so if you have a hundred thousand dollar solar system you actually get $50,000 back on your on your taxes and in the first year the systems installed so that's that's substantial and then something we'll get into a little bit more is that in Connecticut which is unique to Connecticut that you actually have the opportunity to get a 15 year contract with utility so that they pay you additional to your energy savings they'll pay you for 15 years for producing clean electricity with your solar system you to the next slide you great thanks so the the the two primary Connecticut specific benefits are one is net metering what that allows you to do is that you get the full retail value for all the solar electricity you produce so for example some of our customers don't operate during the weekends and you might have a sunny weekend day where you're not consuming a lot of the energy on-site you basically get to spin your meter backwards during those times where you're not using it and then you can use it up when you start your workweek back up or at night or even some of our customers generate more energy than they need for the whole summer period and then they use up those excess credits during the winter and they get the full retail value of it so if your retail value is 12 cents a kilowatt hour you basically get that full value doesn't matter when you produce the solar it can be applied to whenever you're actually using it net metering has been around since the start of commercial solar thank you netiquette but the state has actually said that it's going to end to new customers starting in 2021 if you get into the program before 2021 you're grandfathered for 20 years but after 2021 new systems will not be able to take advantage of that the other component in Connecticut which I mentioned on a previous slide was the Xerox which stands for zero emission renewable energy credit so this is that 15-year contract that you get with whatever utility territory you're in it's for a fixed price over that 15 years so there's no variability and it the key thing in understanding the Z rec is that it's in addition to your energy savings so going back to our example before if you saved let's say $20,000 G on electricity for your solar project you might I get $15,000 a year and zerack payments and so your total revenue from the system is $35,000 so we kind of double dip in terms of being able to save on your energy costs and also get these payments for the renewable energy credits from the sole in order to get into the to get those 15 year contracts you actually have to put a bid in and that happens once a year and that opportunity is coming up in July and that was the reason for the timing of this webinar is that if folks are interested this is a good time to talk about it because we have the opportunity to go out and secure a zerack contract and similar to net metering this program is scheduled to sunset in 2021 to new customers so if you get into it now you'll still have your 15 years but after 2021 they won't be giving out new zerack contracts look if you only got next slide great so to talk a little bit about the kind of what are the minimum requirements to do a commercial solar project so you do need some scale to the project so you need about 15,000 square feet of available roof space so that means 15,000 square feet not including any space that's taking up by HVAC units or mechanical units or pipes or you know setbacks from the edge those kinds of things are not included in there in terms of roof condition that the best is if your roof is less than 10 years old so if it's been replaced or if you have a new building and and and it's not yet 10 years old you typically have you know 20 or in 10 to 20 years left on on that roof and so it's a good fit for for solar or if you're in need of a roof replacement it's a great time to do solar because there's some benefits of combining in terms of cost savings of doing the solar and a new roof at the next time so if you're looking at okay in the next few years we're gonna have to replace our roof that's a really good time to totally get solar and there's also ways of wrapping the financing for the two together it can be beneficial for the property owner and in terms of your annual or your monthly electric bill going to be paying at least $1,500 a month in order to be able to kind of accommodate the the solar system going on next time right so we'll just do kind of a high-level sample project financials so kind of talking about the what we had talked the financial benefits of the system this kind of puts numbers on it so if you have a system awesome six hundred twenty five thousand dollars which is a large system your tax credit which is twenty six percent in the in the first year would be one hundred sixty two thousand dollars you also get depreciation savings and that tends to equal about another 25 percent of the project cost of between the tax credit and the depreciation it's about three hundred thousand dollars of taxes savings in the first year on an annual basis your energy savings from a system this size would be about fifty five thousand dollars it used Iraq payments which is that addition to your energy savings would be about thirty five thousand dollars and you know you have some operating expenses in terms of insurance maintenance of the system so you're looking at you know eighty to eighty five thousand dollars year in you know positive operating profit from the system so typically we see the system pays itself back even without financing in about five six years you're looking at returns of you know ten to fifteen percent and then it's even before you finance it and there's a there's a number of financing options available if that's of interest and you know it's the system will last for 25 years so you have a very strong cash flows for a long period of time after the initial upfront investment your next slide yeah all right so this project here is this is a company called creed monarch and located in that in New Britain they have a 150,000 square foot manufacturing operation and you can see they have a big open roof and it was and because they're manufacturing they energy is a huge cost for them in terms of their operations so it made a lot of sense to to look at solar so this roof installed about 3,000 solar panels longer did the did all the installation work for this system and I think one of the things that will kind of go through a video here that will give you a Andover give kind of the scale of the system this would certainly be on larger end of projects but trying to gives you a feel for the scope of the project and apologize if that if the video is a little - you can see here that we leave plenty of access paths and access to the to the roof scenes and mechanical units but still having you know a lot of room to to install the the solar system in this case this building is a is a standing seam metal roof which is an ideal attachment surface first solar systems but we also do a lot of projects that are like flat a membrane style roofs as well and that that's a that's a great surface for attachment law and each one of these panels has an individual controller on it I called an optimizer so the advantages of that is that it produces the most amount given for any individual panel if there's any kind of shading or obstructions on it you get the most out of the system and as Dave mentioned it's tough to see from this video but all the piping that we use is all steel threaded piping which is you know really high quality stuff and we'll give you an installation that actually will last for 25 years and you know working with Munger that's one of the things that we really share is that every system should last for you know for 25 years and that takes a lot of thought to do to make sure that you're using the right materials and construction methods to to get that kind of outcome focused on this side side that's up now as a bishops orchards located in Guilford Connecticut this is a customer mongers nearly 30 years of business with these folks great people great company a lot of forward-thinking from an agricultural perspective and this is the second solar array that independent solar Munger did for the Bishop's family the first one is over right on the roof of their farm market that you could see directly from route 1 and this solar array as you can tell is a ground mount and they took a piece of land that really wasn't for mobile and and turned it into a productive [Music] part of their farm in their their vision for sustainable farming so just another example of how we continue to serve our clients not only in the construction side but on the solar side and what James talked about the system James you still with us all right so I'll pick up here I'm not sure what happened to James maybe lost his link obviously we're in different locations because of covin 19 this again is located in Guilford Connecticut the ground mount system and this is a 360 KW system as I mentioned the second major project for our customer in terms of solar and between this ground mount and the system that we have across the street on their farm market we satisfy about 80% of their annual energy consumption they have big you know compressors and coolers and things of that nature you may imagine of keeping their farm mark and their produce fresh so this was a big expense for them and certainly builds up it helps with their sustainable of plan for the farm a next slide is a is a quick video of the solar array you know we we do a lot of layout we do ground-penetrating radar we do Geo tech studies to make sure that this you know that these systems aren't necessarily heavy but there's a lot of wind up left under these systems and that same goes for when we look at roof analysis so there's a lot of a lot of behind-the-scenes activity that goes into the construction of this array you can see we've got fencing around the whole project to keep it safe and of course the bishops keeps it keep it well moto they had to do some clearing of some trees that were valuable assets to them so that we reduce shading on it so another good opportunity of how we can facilitate a customer's needs with a ground mount solar system you're back on James yeah I'm gonna read in on this this is another Guildford customer of monitors biomed devices they were recently in the news quite a bit because of their ability to switch manufacturing medical manufacturing processes from what they were normally doing into actually manufacturing ventilators for koban nineteen so governor Lamont was down and they they really stepped up their game but they've been a customer of mongers for several years and they came to us with a particular roofing problem which you'll see in a slide or two and it refers to what James was talking about the age of your roof a
d the condition of your roof and at the time their roof was in really poor shape and this was a great opportunity to introduce in the solar and they really loved the idea and I'll let James talk about this solar right now yes so this system actually provides the entire usage for the building so we offset 100% of their electrical usage for the year with this with the solar system it's about 550 panels on the standing seam roof which table will go into more but this is kind of an example of where you have a great match between a big open roof and in this case you know new roof ideal for solar and the customer was able to you know get significant savings off their electric bill and then also combine that with the zerack program have a really attractive investment for them so folks on this slide you can see on the before picture how poor condition their metal roof was it was nearly a 40-year old building 40 year old roof it was definitely on life-support in some cases it was very difficult even to walk on safely and you know we did our best to keep him dry inside for a long time and then finally we we you know told them that that you know at the end of the day you guys need a new roof and so we probably cost out a new fantasy metal roof system available system that go right over this roof so we never exposed them to the environment did a complete engineering analysis of adding the roof over the existing as well as the ability to handle PV solar and the after picture shows you a you know really good example of the new fantasy metal roof the racking system that we use that clips to the high rib of the standing seam roof and the horizontal racks and the PV panels you could see the metallic conduit threaded conduits that we use iMeet it is to each one of those panels there's a TV wire and it's well-maintained the wire management is a is well thought out you don't see wires hanging down that would rub on the roof and then wind maybe shape wiring that would cause it a major short of the system so this is a good example of the kind of quality that we produce as a team this what kind of talk just a little about the process for anyone that's interested in in thinking about solar for their for their property the first thing we do is we look at the utility bills we typically only need like one recent utility bill because on those bills it'll have basically your your history over the last 12 months so we'll take a look at that what are you paying for your electricity and how much are you using we'll take a look at the electrical gear that you have right now what kind of service you have voltage is what the ampacity is we're kind of transforming you have on site and then we'll combine that with a layout of your roof to get a clearer idea of what size solar system you could accommodate you know given those three factors how much roof space you have what your electoral infrastructure is and how much you're paying for for electricity and then we put together a financial model that gives you an idea and okay if we move forward with the solar project here's what here's what it would look like at that point if it's interesting saying hey this is a good investment this is something that we might want to do we will work with you on the process of submitting a zerack application and depending on what either goes to UI or eversource depending on which utility or and those applications need to be in by July 13 and it takes you know two to three weeks to get all the information together that we need and have the forms ready and the analysis done so that we can submit by that that deadline so this is kind of ideal timing if anyone's interested to start doing that feasibility work seeing if it's interesting and then still having enough time to put an application the nice thing is that you can get the Z Rock award before you actually decide that you want to do the project so you'd have that in hand and you'd say ok I've got my z rock contract my 15 years where the payments are locked in before you actually have to commit and you know to actually moving forward with the investment this solicitation that's coming up that is due by July the utilities will let people know whether they've been awarded a contract by August or September and if so you have you know a couple years to complete a project and so depending on whether you want to try to get it in this year and take advantage of the tax rents in 2020 or whether it's more of a longer-term project you have a lot of flexibility on how quickly you actually move forward with it once the Xerox in hand just just to add during during this process we also would have completed a roof analysis for you just to help understand the age and the condition of the roof and if any repairs or maybe replacement should be considered and we also would have performed a structural analysis to determine that the structure of the building can handle the weight which isn't substantial but there's a tremendous amount of wind up lift as you may imagine when getting up under these panels so that's all analyzed and in the case of a membrane style roof we would be using a ballast at racking systems so we wouldn't be penetrating the roof membrane so that's adding ballast in a lot of cases is a concrete block laid out in specially designed pans that the racking system is attached to so that adds a substantial amount of weight so we would have done all these analysis upfront so that you knew exactly that your building could handle it and you knew if there's any costs associated with any of those items you know exactly what those would be so you'd have a good clear picture of your of your costs and your paid you you folks this is are going to be probably the last slide we talked about so this is would be a great time if you wanted to start sending in your questions so we had we had some in front of us as I completed this slide trying to take a minute or two and kind of talk you through the construction process because that's really at the end of the day but this is once once your folks are committed and we're ready to roll james is completed or his you know complete all his engineering documents we file for the appropriate permits with the local municipality and have our building permit in hand to proceed we then set this up as our standard construction project we will assign a construction manager and project superintendent to the project will have a pre-construction a meeting James's team will be there mongers team the owner will look at things where is our storage area is going to be for the panels so when they come in our material and tools to storage trailer setting up that kind of ground infrastructure we'll look at a safest location to place our crane or other boom lift equipment so that we can access the roof safely my munger safety coordinator would be part of that meeting as well we would play in our our edge protection railings and things of that nature so that we have a complete secure and safe environment to work in for not only our workers but also your employees we would then go through the process of actually laying out on the roof we do a free roof inspection done prior already but to give you a little more information we actually walk the entire roof we note any deficiencies that there are any we identify them in a document and at the at the end of the project we refer to that document if there's any you know and any damage that we may have caused you know you're when you're handling metal especially on a on a membrane roof it's it's going to happen somebody going to drop a tool somebody's going to drop something there's going to be a penetration that we go back and we we fix and repair so that we leave the roof in the same or in better condition than what it was when we started our work on it there's a lot of layout that's done to make sure that the panels are square and and the grid is well laid out that the work paths are laid out we install the if the metal roof or installing a device called an S five clip which is specifically designed to fasten racking systems to the high standing seam of the metal roof racking is all installed every every every bolt and fastener that's part of the solar installation has a specific torque setting that we have to achieve we have torque wrenches and testing that goes on to make sure that everything is it's a torqued properly installed properly and then we work in conjunction with independent Soler's electrical crew as we lay panels they're doing the wire connections and the wire management behind us they're upgrading the electrical system and making the appropriate breaker installations into the electrical system setting up for the Z rec meter that's going to be installed by the utility companies this process is going hand-in-hand at a very safe and clean and neat environment and at the end it was because we get get to the end there's testing and commissioning that James's team does very thorough testing and commissioning to the system and then then they do the closeout and invite the utility company in in the local municipality in to inspect and approve the system to bring it online we do with James's team does a full closeout post construction meeting with the owner so you understand the the means and methods of the system it's it's it's really very much much of an EIN system there's nothing for you to do in terms of turning it on or off or moving parts James author's data collection systems and we can install a monitor in your Lobby or someplace in your facility where you can show the public real time actual production in pass production of your system it's kind of a neat a neat talking point when people walk into your Lobby to see a lot of these systems you won't even know are on buildings because of their flat roof buildings when you walk in the lobby and you get to see a monitor set up and you see that the real-time production of the solar system it's pretty cool pretty neat to see and then if you're so inclined and it's certainly advisable you enter into a maintenance contract with James's team they'll come out once a year they'll do a complete walk of the route for the system so make sure the wire management's a good place there aren't any damaged panels and they have offered full time modern they monitor your system all the time so don't know you know immediately if a panel goes offline for some reason and they'll dispatch a technician to your facility and they'll know exactly what panel is not producing so it's not a kind of a wild goose chase that's what's nice about the optimizer systems that James talked about earlier is that the technology today we can pinpoint a problem right down to the panel so it's real quick and easy to discover if there's any kind of an issue so that's that's really the process it's very very detailed very organized very safe and we love the opportunity to to a part of your team if you were to choose to do solar we're going to look for questions now okay first question is up and I'm going to let James handle this is there financing available and who is your financing partner James yeah there's yeah there's a lot of different financing options so it depends on how you want to structure it often times there's a lot of local banks in Connecticut that this is now the ninth year of the zerack system of the Z rec program so they're very familiar with Xerox and the security of the 15-year payments so a lot of the banks that we work with in Connecticut are actively looking for potential customers who want to finance their their solar projects ones that have gotten zerack some of you might be familiar with the C pace program which is run by the Connecticut Green Bank there you can actually get financing terms of up to 25 years for your solar system so you can spread out the payments over a much longer period of time and have more cash flow and there's even more options beyond that so many financing options to choose from the real question is you know how does that fit with what you're looking to do how does that fit with your company there's just one thing I wanted to add not to the financing ended it but James touched on this early on about if your roof is ready for replacement at the time you're thinking about solar there are there are ways to roll part of the roofing cost into the solar project to help with financing and also take advantage of some tax credits so again just to kind of reinforce that if your roof is tender in need of some kind of major repair replacement that shouldn't don't don't automatically assume that it takes you out of the solar market another question you have in it actually Dave just building on your point there that it actually makes it a great candidate if you if you actively you know need a new roof or within the next couple years it's actually the ideal time I think to look for for adding solar James you may want to handle this next question in it related to what percentage of a roof repair or reroute cost with solar can be included in the tax credit yeah that that's how I couldn't give you a number on in terms of every cases every case is different it just depends on the nature of what the repairs are or the prep work that needs to be done alright folks I don't see any other questions up those that either means that James and I did a really great job or we bored you to death and you're not there anymore we're gonna think the first I'm gonna let Luke close off with another another repeat of his email so if you'd like to reach out to us and on behalf of Munger construction I really thank you folks for your time this afternoon I sincerely hope that you're all healthy and well and your businesses that they have been impacted are starting to come back online and wish you all the best
