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cast is now starting all attendees are in listen only mode hello everyone welcome to the webinar we're going to get started shortly we're just going to give another two or three minutes for folks to join us all right it's 1203 so we'll get started welcome everyone thank you for joining this webinar about the connecticut green banks cpace program which provides financing for energy related improvements on your property my name is emily basham and i'm the manager of partnership development at the connecticut green bank just a couple quick housekeeping notes all attendees are muted and you can enter questions into the chat feature of the webinar platform at any time during the webinar the webinar will be recorded and emailed to you afterwards we're scheduled for about 45 minutes today we'll present for about 20 of those minutes and use the remaining time for any questions but at any time as questions pop up just feel free to put them into the chat box on the webinar platform at least can you go to the next slide please thanks so before i turn it over to my colleague elise to explain the cpace program i'd like to mention the municipal partners who helped organize this event and have them quickly introduce themselves because cpace financing is administered through municipal assessors offices we could not provide this resource without their participation and all of the towns that you see on the screen here are participating in sustainable ct which is a statewide voluntary certification program that recognizes towns for being sustainable so we've got windsor locks enfield the city of hartford bloomfield and east windsor that have collaborated to participate in this webinar they are all towns that offer cpas financing and participate in the program and they all are participating in the sustainable ct certification program so we commend all of these towns for their sustainability goals and encouraging local businesses to do clean energy projects through cpas so with that i'm gonna intro unmute the representatives from our municipalities and have them introduce ourselves themselves starting with jose hey good afternoon everyone uh my name is jose geiner i'm director of planning and economic development for the town of bloomfield i just want to welcome you here i want to thank first of all uh we have our environmental planner stephanie baramian who helped set this up along with the chair of our conservation energy and environment committee charlie horn so i believed it both on on today so uh welcome and we look forward to refreshing our our knowledge about this great program thanks jose dela do you want to introduce yourself jeremy yep hi it's della froman from the town of enfield i'm the assessor i'm also the supervisor of revenue collection for enfield we currently have had three green pace program facilities we still have one we're still working with it's been actually very easy process to make sure that they get the financing through the state through this program and i think the more work gets out the more reaction we will have from our property owners looking forward to having more of our property owners get involved with this project for the good of the entire town great thanks stella and schuberth hi everyone i'm shubita complete director of mayor luke bronen's office of sustainability here in hartford connecticut our office implements projects that are related to our city's climate action plan and more recently our city plan we've prioritized energy efforts in both city operations and also residential outreach to of course help save money and improve our resilience as a community we've been really fortunate to partner with the incredible teams at the green bank and also sustainable ct on a variety of projects including cpas so i'm really glad to be here today thank you thanks jubina and mandy hi my name is naomi moore i'm the finance director at the talmud rocks and i'm on our sustainable cte team here at the town along with some other great team members just looking to expand the program that we have in town we have some participants but we'd like to see more thanks mandy thanks everyone for your leadership and your collaboration and these programs and i'll turn it over to elise and i just want to remind everyone feel free to use the chat feature to ask your questions at least we'll be pausing midpoint of our presentation to answer questions and we can also answer them at the end so without any further ado i'll turn it over to elise bouzelli from the connecticut green bank who manages our cpas program to dive into the details great thank you emily and uh just to echo echo emily's sentiments on on all of our municipal partners um it's really great to see five different different municipalities participating in this and and collaborating to get the word out to as many building owners as we can about these these programs that we have available um so again thank you to our municipal partners at windsor locks and fields hartford bloomfield and east windsor for for joining us and collaborating with us on this webinar so as emily said my name is elise bizelli i work on our financing programs team here at the green bank and just to to do a quick introduction to the connecticut green bank the connecticut green bank is a quasi-state organization and we were founded really with the main goal of deploying as much clean energy in the state of connecticut as possible and we do that by trying to attract private capital leveraging our public public dollars to try to attract private capital investors into the market so the green bank administers programs through all of the different sectors the residential side commercial side industrial and we try to attract those investors into the market to actually finance these these projects for us and uh so you know as building owners i think most of you that are on the call um i'm sure these these points here are no surprise to you we have a lot of a lot of challenges in the state of connecticut as building owners um especially in the in with energy right so the first one here um we have unpredictable energy costs i i think we're all aware that connecticut is is one of the most expensive states in terms of our energy costs um and it's sometimes hard to to deal with some of the equipment that you might have in your building maybe it's you know it's older it's on its way out it's inefficient um it might be uncomfortable for for you as the as the tenant or for you as the building owner you know to keep control of of of all of the the different mechanical systems and and everything in your building so having having these challenges um really we we wanted to create a solution for uh for commercial building owners to to be able to kind of take control of those energy costs and and deal with those uncomfortable buildings and and make them more efficient so the the main financing program that we have available at the at the connecticut green bank for commercial properties is called c-pace c-pace stands for commercial property assessed clean energy and it's it's a financing program that is available to commercial properties to basically make any of those energy improvements that that make your building inefficient and uncomfortable so we have the the ability to offer financing to commercial properties to do clean energy upgrades and really what what that means is um commercial properties include anything that that isn't a residential property or a town municipal building or a state building so pretty much if it's if it's anything other than a residential home or residential property with one to four units and as long as it's not a municipal property your your property would be able to use it so that includes things like like office buildings industrial facilities multi-family properties of five units or greater are considered commercial so they can take advantage of of cpace as well as retail facilities and non-profits uh non-profit properties are also considered commercial and clean energy solutions are really anything that helps to save money on your utility bills so think of really anything that would help to save money on your electric bills or your fuel bills a couple of examples would be things like upgrading your lighting to leds or maybe replacing your you know 30 or 40 or 50 year old boiler with a more efficient boiler or maybe looking at in increasing the insulation in your building or replacing your windows all of those things would would help to reduce your energy costs also things like solar pv producing your own energy through a renewable energy source solar or geothermal those types of improvements are are also um also definitely qualifying for for cpace and the way that the the repayment is um is structured is it's a it's 100 financing and it's it's repaid over a long period of time our financing is available from anywhere from five to 25 years depending on the equipment that you're installing and really what that gives you the ability to do is is pay for those improvements over a long period of time so you're paying a smaller amount over a long period but you're also realizing the savings the the dollar savings through your energy improvements so you're not only helping to save energy but you're saving money on top of that so that's really the the idea beyond behind those long behind that long term repayment structure and you're repaying your uh your assessment or your financing through an assessment excuse me so think of uh think of like any other benefit assessment that you might be getting from your town so like a municipal assessment such as a water or a sewer assessment those are considered benefit assessments and your c-pace financing would would actually work in the same way it's a it's an assessment that gets placed on your property and you're repaying it in the same manner that you would your other assessments or your real estate taxes in the town it's considered a benefit to your property if you if you add solar pv to your building or if you um you know upgrade your hvac system and you add in some you know lighting controls that's considered a benefit to your property so it would act in in the same way and the the other piece of that assessment is that just like a water assessment would the benefit assessment will actually remain with the property regardless of ownership so if you decided you know maybe in five or seven years that you wanted to move to to a new building um your assessment your cpas assessment would actually remain with the building right because if you moved from from one building to another you wouldn't take your boiler with you and you wouldn't take your solar panels with you those would all stay with the property so the so the repayment of that um or the repayment obligation actually remains with with the property just like any other municipal assessment would so it's a different type of financing it's really meant for as the name implies c-pace is really meant for clean energy projects and it's it's structured in that very way it's to to look at projects that you know may not pay themselves back in in a quick period of time um and we really try to to focus on on safe and on the energy savings that are uh realized and making sure that that not only works for you as as the building owner but that it it works for your your bottom line as well and so this kind of shows you it's a quick graphic to kind of show you how the the c-pace financing process would work so on the left here in the green box you've got your typical energy bill right it's just you pay your energy bill you pay your electric bill you pay your gas bill your oil bill whatever it may be and that's how that's how it works right now on the right if you decided you wanted to uh to work with with cpace to finance a project you would still have a portion of your energy bill to pay but it would be a lot smaller right because you'd be installing energy upgrades you'd be installing equipment that would help to save you money so you still have your the gray bar there would still be you know a smaller energy bill then you've got your additional um cpace payment your energy upgrade repayment would be your cpace payment and then the pink bar at the top would be your additional savings so one of the key key points of the cpace program is when we do our underwriting for these projects in order to qualify we want to make sure that the actual dollar savings that you're seeing from the improvements that you're installing are going to be more than what you're actually spending on the repayment we call it the technical term for it is called the savings to investment ratio and we want to see that be above one so basically we want to make sure that over the life of that equipment you're going to be saving more money than you're actually spending on your repayment so again you know it it makes a makes a lot of sense if you need to make some of these upgrades or you're thinking about making these upgrades cpas might be a great tool to help you do that not only to be able to give you the funds but to be able to kind of help you spread those payments out over a long period of time realize some of those those savings and potentially even be cash flow positive and i will give you some a couple of examples of projects that we've done and i've got a couple case studies that we'll look at towards the end of the presentation but i'll give you a good example of what some of those positive cash flow projects look like and then this just kind of gives you a general idea of the projects we've done uh over the last couple of years here and this is actually as of the end of march and we don't have our our most recent numbers as of the end of june yet but um this is showing you we've we've got over 300 projects that we've closed uh at this point we're probably i think we're around the 320 320 project mark in terms of closed projects and that equates to we're probably closer to about a 166 million dollars in in total closed project financing which is great we've we've been able to help a lot of building owners make the improvements that they need to make their buildings more comfortable and more efficient um but i can tell you that even though we've we've had this great success over the last you know seven and a half years or so we're really only scratching the surface here we've we've got a lot a lot more buildings out there that we can certainly help help get become more efficient and become more comfortable so certainly certainly hoping to be able to help more building owners take advantage of this and then this gives you a quick breakdown on the types of projects that we're seeing the pie chart over on the left here gives you a breakdown of the types of projects so the big piece of the pie here the dark blue renewable energy renewable energy is anything that that produces energy from a renewable source such as solar pv or geothermal or wind and you can see that's by far the biggest chunk of the pie here most of the renewable energy projects that we've done in in the last couple of years have been solar projects solar is a really great fit with c-pace there are a lot of a lot of good incentives available through the utility companies there's a rec program that you can take advantage of and there are also uh tax benefits um federal tax benefits that you can take advantage of as well if you're looking to install solar so pairing those benefits with the the long-term payback of cpas financing um the the projects that we see with solar are usually cash flow positive almost immediately so definitely tends to be a good a good fit and then the the lighter blue the energy efficiency that is the energy efficiency will be projects that are helping to save energy so things like lighting upgrades or hvac improvements or um lighting controls or building management systems those would all be considered energy efficiency and then the green piece the combined those are almost always a solar project that has an energy efficiency component so a solar plus lighting project or a solar plus hvac project so that's generally the breakdown um we we like to see any and all projects come through so while we have had a lot of success with solar certainly had you know the the efficiency pr jects work just as well and we are we are open to seeing any any any clean energy projects come through and then uh in the bottom right hand corner this kind of gives you an idea of what the what the spread is in terms of the projects we've financed um so the the one thing i want to point out here is that we do have a minimum amount that we can finance um thirty thousand dollars is the the minimum amount the floor that we can finance and that would be after any incentives or anything grants or anything else that's available so the 30 000 would be the minimum amount we can actually actually finance and the average project here that's actually probably a little high i i think we're we're closer to the you know two to three hundred thousand dollars is usually what we're seeing for for projects um but really we don't have a maximum um it's all going to be based on when we do our underwriting we look at the financial health of the property itself um so it's it's a little bit of a different type of underwrite it's not going to be your traditional construction loan so we're looking at the financial health of the property the value of the property when we do this because it's it is a benefit assessment so really if if the property can handle it and we're not going to be putting a building on our underwater um you know we can really really go up as high as the as the the property really allows we did have this is the the largest project we did was an 8.3 million dollar project in hartford and it was the largest commercial project um sea pace project in the country for a while but it has since been been eclipsed a couple times over there's some really successful programs out in the midwest that have done some really large projects um so anyway just to say that you know there's we can there's a very big range here of the types of projects that we can we can do and the size of projects that we can finance and then this gives a quick breakdown of the different property types so you can see it's actually a pretty good spread across all the different property types the the two that i want to point out here all the way to the left the industrial sector um industrial properties tend to be a great fit for c-pace um especially manufacturing facilities tend to be really energy-intensive and so reducing their energy costs through efficiency or through renewable energy tends to tends to really be welcome by the the folks that run industrial buildings so that tends to be a great fit um and then also non-profits non-profit facilities um you know a lot of times there's a uh some pent-up demand there for for equipment that needs to be swapped out or replaced and it it might take some time to to raise the funds to do that or to find the funds to do that so being able to offer cpas to help replace those systems um or you know kind of relieve that pent up demand and and still have your project be be cash flow positive uh tends to be a really a really good fit so we we've had a lot of success with nonprofits as well but again you can see we've got a good spread here across all the different sectors in terms of what types of properties can use cpas and then here we've got this is just a quick snapshot of some of the types of upgrades that that you can you can look at again not an exhaustive list by any means but pretty much anything again that will help to save money on your utility bills would be would be eligible the one thing to keep in mind is that we want those upgrades to be permanently affixed to the property as i mentioned earlier the the assessment if you were to move if you as a building owner were to to move to a different building the assessment is going to remain with that property so we want to make sure that the improvements also stay there and the energy savings stay there so that the new owner can continue to make those payments so we want the the equipment to not only save money but it has to also be permanently affixed and these are just a few examples but like i said not in not an exhaustive list um okay so i'm going to quickly pause there and take a quick sip of water and emily if we have any questions if you'd like to read them out sure thanks elise we've got one question so far about whether town buildings are included or not so if you get when you're done sipping your water let us know about municipal properties sure thank you yeah so municipal properties are not included in the cpase program we do have some other programs that are available to municipal properties we have a solar solar program that actually emily is involved in and emily if you want to quickly quickly mention solar map but we do have the ability to do solar projects with municipalities it wouldn't be through the sea pace program but we can generally do solar with municipal properties sure thanks lisa i'll just follow it up quickly the solar municipal assistance program is a kind of full suite of technical and project development services that the green bank provides to municipalities to investigate which of their properties if any would be suitable for an on-site solar installation using the green banks solar ppa program which at least you might be touching on a little bit later which is also available through the c-pace program for commercial properties be happy to discuss further with anyone who knows any towns that aren't already involved with um with us today and while we were chatting we had one more question come in if you don't mind answering it now elise about is it more cumbersome to use the see pace program for mixed-use residential versus some of the other property types or would you you know encourage mixed-use properties to pursue see pace financing as well yeah that's a that's a great question so generally speaking mixed-use properties are eligible for c-pace um when you have a situation a like a tenant landlord situation um it can be a little bit more complicated just because there's there's a few more steps that are involved and a little bit more information that that needs to be gathered but one thing i will say is that the the way that the cpase financing works is that we are always going to sign our financing agreement our cpas financing agreement with the owner of the property which in in a landlord-tenant situation would be the landlord um so as long as the landlord is on board with the projects then i i think it's it's a pretty easy process um what can sometimes hold some projects up is if we have a tenant come to us that's interested um and maybe they haven't approached their landlord about it or if they're still kind of in negotiations with their landlord about doing a project um that can sometimes take a little bit of time so i guess that's just something to keep in mind um but i wouldn't say it's really any more cumbersome the process generally is still going to be the same some of the paperwork that we collect just naturally will be a little bit different between a you know owner-occupied facility versus a versus a you know landlord tenant or mixed use type property um but but i think generally to answer the question um i don't think it's necessarily more cumbersome um it could just you know maybe we might have a couple more steps we need to we need to follow thanks elise and we'll let you keep going in the presentation and we can answer any remaining questions at the end okay great thank you guys for the questions um so just to keep going here um so one thing before i i kind of dive into the the case studies um i did want to mention we just launched some new repayment options obviously we we know we're all going through the the throws of of the covid pandemic and understanding that a lot of small businesses especially have struggled because they were closed for you know a couple of months or people just weren't coming in as much and and there might be some you know some cash flow issues there so we we came up with a couple of of different options um typically the way that your your your repayment would work is once you close on your financing with us um then construction of your project would begin where we would disperse our funds and then once you complete your project you would begin your repayment um but given the situation that we're in um and understanding that there may be some cash flow issues that have have come up that cash flow issues that have come up separately from the fact that you may still have this you know need to make these energy improvements we're basically giving you the ability to still make those improvements still close on financing with us and begin to realize those energy savings but not have to pay us right away so the the two options that we have here the one on the left is showing you deferring your first two payments so basically we're not forgiving your your first payments um but we're able to just defer those so you would be paying those at a later at a later date um so you would still be accruing interest during that time but you just wouldn't need to pay us you could use those those energy savings that you're getting that you might need right now to to pay for other things you know if you're saving money and now you've got some extra money in your pocket to you know make payroll or to to you know buy a piece of equipment that you needed to to buy you can do that and and you know pay us pay us pay us later and then the other option on the right here is if you've you know if you've got some money some money coming in and you know you think you can make partial payments essentially we also are offering an interest only option for up to three years so you can decide how long you want to take that interest only but again it it will give you kind of that ability to to make some of those payments or a portion of the payments for the first couple of years if you know if you've got some some money on on hand so i'm happy to talk through these a little bit more at the end when we take some questions but generally the idea here like i said is to to give you some flexible repayment options understanding that the need for reducing our energy costs has not gone away um but the you know the the cash our cash flow situations may have changed a little bit so we we wanted to be be aware of that and be flexible with with folks to try to help as much as we can okay so to to quickly go through a couple of case studies here so this first one is um this is an industrial facility located in hartford crest mechanical and they did a a roof mounted solar system and just want to note here that they've got uh for over four hundred thousand dollars of savings um and so just to to show you there's a quick quick image of the of the solar pv um i believe you can actually see this from 84 um in hartford when you dr when you're driving on 84. i believe this building is visible um so uh just some high level high level metrics on the on the project here the the one thing i want to point out here is the um the total cost of the project so it costs 145 000 to to do this project but you see those lifetime savings are over four hundred thousand dollars so very casual positive um this project also included they were able to take advantage of tax tax credits that were available um the federal there's a federal tax credit it's called the investment tax credit itc um that's available it's a 26 tax credit at the moment and that's going to step down at the end of 2020 to 22 percent i believe but uh so that that's available um there's also depreciation accelerated depreciation that's available if you can take advantage of that and i mentioned earlier there are wrecks that are available in connecticut as well so the utility companies run a program called the z-rec l-rec program and z-rec stands for zero emission renewable energy credit um and basically it's a 15-year contract that you as the the property owner will enter into with the utility company and they they pretty much pay you to produce energy from a renewable source for them they install a a net meter on your property which basically allows you to to both pull energy from the grid as you normally would but also to send energy back into the grid when you're not using it when your panels are producing energy and and you're using as much as you can in your building but there's excess that access is going to go into the back into the grid and that's really what the utility companies are paying you for um and like i said it's a 15-year contract and it's it's very lucrative in the state of connecticut right now and that program is going to be available for another year and then we'll be switching over to a different type of program so there'll still be some incentives available but they may not be as good as what we're looking at right now so certainly certainly something to consider but again obviously a very cash flow positive project here by paying paying that you know 145 thousand dollars over 20 years you can see those savings are significant and then another type of project so this is calvary temple this is a house of worship in bridgeport connecticut and they installed a new high-efficiency gas boiler and they also converted from oil to to gas um and uh you can see here the the amount that they financed was um was about just over 50 000 they financed that over 10 years and you can see again their lifetime savings is over 250 thousand dollars so they spent a little over fifty thousand dollars to install this and they were able to they're looking at lifetime savings of close to three hundred thousand dollars so um i i love we have a an actual video of um of uh pastor thompson up on our up on our website and um and his wife denise and they talk about how you know they couldn't they couldn't hold they couldn't hold their their their masses on the weekends because sometimes it was too cold their boiler just wasn't working pastor would have to run down and and turn on the boiler you know on a saturday morning early just to try to get the the boiler to to work in time for service so this really really did allow them to continue to actually offer their offer services to to their um their congregants so this was a really big win for them okay so um so i'm just quickly going to talk through uh now we've got the a few other options that are available so i've talked about solar already and i've talked a lot about the the tax credits and things that are available um for for folks that can't take advantage of the of the tax benefits or non-profit facilities we also have but they would like to go solar we also have a solar ppa option and a ppa stands for power purchase agreement and basically what happens is you're you're entering into a contract with the green bank as the seller to to pretty much purchase the power that the panels are producing at a lower cost than what you're currently paying the utility company so the green bank owns your solar system or owns the solar system and basically you're paying the green bank a lower amount than you would you would pay the utility company and this just gives you kind of a visual of what that looks like so your cost your ppa costs would be lower than your utility costs it offers um you know immediate positive cash flow and with the ppa since you don't own the system you you wouldn't have to worry about any any of the operations or maintenance costs that are that are associated with that so certainly uh happy to to chat with anybody that's interested in our ppa program emily mentioned that it it is available the ppa program is available for municipalities and state properties um and like i said also available for non-profits or or any um any facility that just may not have the tax appetite to to utilize the financing program and then the last thing i'll mention here um is we also have a new construction pilot program with with cpace we launched this about two years ago now we're actually working through uh we're getting ready to to close on one of our first projects um but it's it's really a different way to to finance a project so traditionally cpace is meant for retrofits it's meant to look at you know a piece of equipment and changing that piece of equipment out for for a new efficient piece of equipment with the new construction program it's a whole building energy saving approach an we can finance a portion of the overall construction costs [Music] in that in this program so a whole building energy model would be done we work with the utility companies to to get that done they have a a program already in place for new construction so we do a whole building energy model and we want to make sure that that building is going to be at least 10 percent more efficient than what code requires so as long as we meet that that minimum threshold we can match that percentage so whatever the percentage above code is we can match that percentage in our financing um up to 20 so again happy to to chat with anybody that's interested in this um but but really it's it's meant to really meant to try to um to kind of take over some of that more expensive debt in a capital stack or potentially even increase the total available capital for a new construction project so again happy to chat with anybody about that if you're interested but but it is an available program and so with that i will um turn it back over to emily to see if we have any more questions but feel free to chat those in happy to happy to answer anything thanks elise um thanks for running through all the information we're ready for your questions if you can use the chat feature of the webinar platform to type them in we've got a couple here stephanie wanted to know if converting to natural gas is really a green improvement in terms of including natural gas as an eligible measure for the program um and its environmental benefits at least could you be more specific of the conversion um and how that's an improvement environmentally yeah so um it's a good question uh so really if if you're converting from oil to natural gas um there are there's a significant amount of ener of savings that you're gonna get of dollar savings that you're going to get and in terms of the environmental impact i think there's some debate on that it's stephanie raises a very good point but generally speaking you're going to be saving a lot of money by doing that so that's why it's it's right now it is included as an eligible measure but i can certainly see your point stephanie and it might be you know might be worth looking into electrification instead of switching over to natural gas but but generally speaking the dollar savings there are what makes it makes it eligible yeah and i would just note just trying to move a lot of the properties in connecticut that currently heat through oil to another heating source i think is the primary goal thanks elise and we've got another question just a follow-up about using the solar ppa for municipalities which would be separate from the c-pace program and this question comes from david david i believe you're you're joining us from bloomfield today um so the the solar ppa assessment done by the green bank through the solar map program we've actually completed that for the town of bloomfield and the next step after that is to kind of review those findings and understand the town's priorities for actually developing a project and i believe we've got a meeting scheduled in the next week or two to do that but generally our process is to evaluate the potential and then help the town go through both project development securing a contractor the utility incentives and and starting construction so that's that describes the solar map project specific to municipal properties not necessarily the c face program just to be clear all right and i'll give it another minute or two to see if we have any additional questions i know we're a minute over um our scheduled 45 minutes so we appreciate anyone who has to drop off and appreciate their time joining us today and we'll hang on a couple more minutes if there's some remaining questions yeah and i guess while we're waiting um you know for some more questions to trickle and i'll just mention to any of the participants that are that are joining us today if you have some questions about your particular property or if you're you're joining representing another property or you may have some some ideas for properties in your town that could potentially benefit from this my contact info is here i'm certainly happy to to talk with you about the potential project or or how to get started with the project really our main goal is to to get you get you guys to contact us and and talk talk through what the options are um we're we're always happy to help so if you have any any specific questions certainly feel free to contact me directly here and as emily mentioned we re-recorded this and i believe we'll be sending it out to everyone or at least making it available especially to the town so you know if there's another another piece of this or you'd like to share this with with other members of uh of your town or another building owner potentially feel free but absolutely feel free to just contact me directly as well yep it doesn't look like we have any more questions um so we'll end the webinar today and as elise mentioned we'll send out this recording and and the slides using our registration list so thank you all for joining us we appreciate your time and we look forward to having you contact us about a potential project thanks all you