Transcript'Shrink Your Energy Bills' Presentation

um this this presentation and thanks for coming in late U look forward to meeting you later if we get the chance um uh the show is about electrifying your home making it more energy efficient and about the possibility of going solar at some point and possibly making your next vehicle an electric one and uh so you're looking at a house a pretty typical average house it's not uh a fancy house uh and it's there intentionally because many of the rebates and tax credits are really set up to benefit most of all uh lower income middle inome people and not the wealthy so that's one thing I really like about the bill um the the uh map on

the right side of the slide is showing you where uh there is a floating wind turbine uh Wind Farm of floating turbines to be de developed off the coast of Maine about 45 miles off of Portland so far away that you won't be able to see it on the horizon and U located very carefully to avoid of the impacts on migrating birds and and and that kind of thing so by 50 um

2050 um Richard stman who's a PhD uh Economist and an energy expert uh from main um thinks that we will be using about three times the electricity that we are using now and it's a big question where's all that electricity going to come from and um as things are being planned uh the hope is that about half of our energy at at at the year 2050 will be coming from these offshore wind turbines um let's go to the next slide here's a uh home with solar on the roof and uh a list of some of the things that you can save big time uh in your home uh and in your transportation energy efficient electric appliances like heat pumps will call them appliances tonight Energy Efficiency upgrades for your building envelope the the uh the

uh walls the roof even the basement walls in the floor ways to make to reduce the intrusion of cold air and the loss of warm air solar systems and not just solar systems on your roof but possibly uh an ownership share in a in a solar farm um or the more modest way of getting a discount on your electricity bills of 10 or 15% and then there are tax credits for new and used vehicles um vehicles are

uh a topic of some controversy these days in Maine and we'll talk about some of that later in the show and there's more next so um there are two buckets of savings to help you out from the inflation reduction act on the left there uh the first bucket is the tax credits that can be harvested from the Internal Revenue Service not state taxes and of course uh if you take a tax credit you can't take it until the year after you make the modifications um or the you know take advantage of them you can't take them advantage of them immediately um and that can be sometimes a stumbling block uh for people who don't have The Upfront cash uh and would like to use the think of the tax credit as lowering the cost it does eventually but not right off and on the right side uh are the inflation reduction act rebates um and these are all administered in Maine through efficiency in through Efficiency Maine um the money

comes uh much of it from the um the inflation reduction act but efficieny M as you know probably has been operating for many years providing rebates to maners uh with their own money which comes in large part from Reggie the regional greenhouse gas initiative that main belongs to sort of a c and trade way of helping Northeastern states reduce their emissions so keep these two buckets in mind as we go along next

print on this slide I just wanted to make the point that all these tax credits and rebates can get pretty confusing because there are so many of them and this is only the tip of the iceberg this is a uh from the efficiency main website there small print that relates to a lot of these and and so um my intent in this slideshow is to make things a little bit simpler next

time we'll break it down into four topics Home Improvements weatherization solar and uh my my slide formatting has gotten screwed up here a little bit but no worries and uh electric vehicles will be the last so let's start with Home Improvements next

slide so we're talking here about uh on this slide all the things that you can get a tax credit for and you can get a tax credit and a rebate both it's not like one eliminates the possibility of the other heat pumps heat pumps pump water heaters energy audits exterior doors windows air ceiling which is cocking and and finding other ways of reducing the holes in the building envelope through which cold air gets in and warm air gets out even uh there there there's a tax credit for a larger a larger 200 amp breaker panels uh if your current panel can't handle the electrification uh in your home that we're hoping you're going to do and the main climate Council hopes too and electric vehicle Chargers

so we'll get to the solar and electric vehicles later in the show we won't be talking about them in this section next credits these efficiency ban rebates and here's something important to note you qualify for the largest stre rebates if your household income is less than 80% of your area's median income

and if your area if your income's a little higher than that between 80 and 150% of the area median income the rebates get a little bit smaller and then there's the rest of us we qualify for rebates too so as I was saying earlier this uh program really benefits lower income folks the most and that's in my opinion the way it should be um so there's much more information on the efficiency main website about the rebates I'll be talking about some of them um but I can't there isn't time to talk about all of them in the 45 or 50 minutes I'm gonna be chatting with you to tonight next

slide so this person is taking a look at a website called rewiring America and that is along with the official efficiency main website which is very easy to find just type efficiency main into your search bar and rewiring America the same deal just type in rewiring America and it will take you to their website it's a nonprofit uh that is working across the country trying to get people to Electrify their homes and make them more energy efficient and when you go there on the homepage you'll see a link to a calculator and if you click on that calculator uh and put in five pieces of information a magical thing happens first you put in your ZIP code that's going to help the computer find what your average median income is because that varies on where you live and then you indicate your homeowner status are you renting or or do you own your home or condominium that kind of thing then you put in your

household income all the house old income you have and then you indicate whether you file singly or jointly and then you indicate the number of people in your home because that also has an effect on what you qualify for in terms of money saving uh incentives and then you click calculator and over on the right just like you're seeing under the purple box on this slide up Pops all the stuff that you can take a tax credit for or a rebate 4 now

I say that word rebate with a little bit of uncertainty because I know that efficiency main um designs the rebates for Maine and I don't think that a website that's designed for National use uh necessarily is accurate on the rebates so when it comes to rebates my recommendation would be that you go to the efficiency main website and that we're going to take a look at that shortly next

with stoves or ranges if you want to call them that a lot of people have gas stoves love gas stoves because they're quick responsive there's something about seeing that flame down there that people like but when gas is burned it releases carbon dioxide which is the main driver of climate change and many gas burning appliances like stoves leak uh natural gas as it's called is

primarily methane and methane is a another uh warmer of the climate it works much faster and more disastrously than than carbon dioxide but it doesn't last as long in the atmosphere still it's a serious problem and there's been news about it recently because the the government is trying to get the fossil fuel industry to Cap all their methane leaks around the country us methane pollution from gas stoves is roughly equ equal to the impact of 500,000 nonelectric cars on the climate

so this is not small change this is pretty big stuff and that's why um when an appliance that uses fossil fuels like a stove uh is on its last legs or you've just decided that it's not but I want to do something different anyway it's important to consider of the the options

that are more kind to Mother Earth next gas so they don't release carbon dioxide or methane and you might be saying right now oh yeah but but they get electricity from the grid and and how is that electricity made well I can tell you that in Maine we have a pretty clean supply of energy of of electricity um about 64 65% comes from

renewable sources um the largest is wind um I think it's about 25% and then the second largest is hydro uh electricity made by generating uh electricity at dams and then comes solar and biomass now I may have forgotten something but those are those those uh sources um constitute about 65% of um the standard offer electricity that we use in our home so it's pretty clean and and with the work the main climate council is doing it's going to get cleaner over the next couple of decades so uh I mentioned um induction ranges here we we bought one um During the covid period and and have been very pleased with out Works costs a little bit more uh than a regular range sometimes it costs a lot more but those are very expensive high-end uh uh stoves

and ranges that you don't really need unless you're a millionaire I guess um all right so and just to mention that it's the top that's induction powered it's not the the oven the oven is a conventional oven next appliances that's the time to go electric and my whole showing this slideshow around U my neighboring towns is is is to help people begin to think about that because um things happen suddenly and unexpectedly my sister sister-in-law a couple weeks ago lost her hot water heater she had water all over the floor and she didn't know about heat pump hot water heaters and so I was able to um help her um do something

quite different from what the technician who came to her home uh recommended and save her a bunch of money not only on the purchase of the water heater but also on its lifetime Savings in terms of energy use so um and as said earlier induction cooking is fast and surp and and precise heat pump hot water heaters cost much less to operate than conventional electric ones and heat pumps for space heating can Harvest Energy savings for those heating with oil next

breaker panel in somebody's basement here and if you Electrify your home if you get rid of some of your fossil fuel power appliances and and go with electrical ones you may find you need to upgrade your panel or put on a sub panel or you may have some wiring that needs to be redone and there's a tax credit for those um and it where it says they're 30% tax credit on labor and materials it's not just the purchase of the physical item um up to a $600 limit

I assume everybody knows how that works but I wasn't sure myself so I checked so let's say you have a$1 th electricity bill for this work um you can take uh 30% of that would be $300 right and since it's under the $600 tax credit limit you can reduce your cost by $300 next

main uh uh let's visit their website now and take a look at um some of the rebates and some of the other features it's a very rich website sometimes it's a little hard to find things at it and so I want to recommend to you that there is a tollfree number um very easy to

find on their website their toll-free help is available uh weekdays only during the day and um if you call with a question the the operator who takes your call Connects you with somebody who's an expert in that particular field of what efficiency main does so it's a great thing to know about next slide one of my favorite uh pages on the efficiency main website is this one it's a uh cost of heating calculator and if

you look across the bottom of the slide you can can see all the different ways that you can heat your home and the white dollar uh mounts at the top of each bar that's the annual amount spent on average for that particular kind of heating right here in Maine and I downloaded this web uh this web page on January 14th because it's changed um they updated every month and the other cool thing about it is that you can put in your own number numbers in a calculator um that's related to this graph on their website and uh if if

prices have changed or you want to model something else uh cost-wise you can do that now uh I've highlighted with red arrows two bars the 3,373 bar is heating with um an oil boiler and I highlighted that one because more people in Maine use oil than any other heating source for their space heating of their homes and that's the annual cost on average about

1,698 that's the cost of operating a ductless heat pump for a year it's less than half of the oil now In fairness uh to the oil folks this is not an Apples to Apples comparison because a ductless heat pump is not sending air to all the rooms in your home so it can be somewhat important if you get a heat pump to have a fairly open floor plan where the air gets moved around uh well um but in our

case we have a two-story home and we have two heat pumps so so our heating costs uh may come right around very close to what we're spending on oil that hasn't been my experience and I'm not sure why I I think that um the the upstairs heat pump is smaller and I think that a lot of the heat from the ground floor makes its way up to the Upper Floor so maybe we're only using about one and a half heat pumps uh as we keep our home warm I just want it to be fair about that so let's go to the next

Outreach guy for efficiency main explaining how a heat pump works has two parts the head mounted on the wall inside the home and the condenser unit on the outside and what's going on here uh is that uh when it's cold out the heat pump is moving heat from Outdoors which seems counterintuitive uh to the inside and it's doing that by press uh compressing or decompressing gas uh and um I can't remember which way it works but that's the way the the warmth is harvested from outside cold air and then in the summertime it reverses and can act as an air conditioner only it's to me it's quieter than an air conditioner it's very very nice um and um ficiency main

has had a hard time convincing people that these things work at really cold temperatures but there's plenty of evidence that even down about minus 15 degrees they work just fine they they use more energy to get the job done but they're still uh viable and efficiency main is is very anxious for people not to turn on their their backup heat if they have an oil burner as well or something else like natural gas um when they should just be letting their heat pump run um something else but it'll come back to me later next

take a quick look it's really uh complicated enough that you want to go to efficiency main website or have your contractor explain it if you get a contractor to do this there's a new effort to uh provide rebates for whole house heat pump systems these might have one outdoor unit that Services two or three inside units in different rooms and the rebates can be as high as 8,000 but notice the up two that's very important to notice because this will be the maximum rebate for somebody who's fairly low income and then you can also take the federal tax credits up to

heat pumps what we call i' they used to call the Mini Splits now they're calling them duckus because um the outside unit is directly connected to the inside unit through the wall of of one of the walls of the house and they get tax credits too over on the right side of the slide you're looking at a heat pump hot water heater these are tall and so that's one

factor you need to consider when you decide where to loc at them you also want to make sure there's plenty of air circulation they do cool off the air somewhat because they're harvesting the warmth from the air to heat your water um Lowe's has a particularly attractive deal right now I um there's a

$1,050 rebate or discount they're calling it now so that brings the price down to $349 for the physical purchase of the heat pump and then uh what you as a homeowner want to remember is that you if unless you're handy with plumbing and Electrical uh you've got to get installed and so um

Plumb plumbers and electricians do not come cheap as you as you well know I'm sure so you're not going to U have a heat pump water heater functioning for $349 um but um the latest wrinkle is if you go to say Lowe's or Home Depot I know they do this uh there's a QR code near the hot water heater um pump hot heat

pump hot water heater that you're interested in purchasing and if you focus your camera on that QR code up will pop a website you don't take a picture of it you just focus the camera on it up Pops a website on your camera screen you click on that and it takes takes you to a form that you can fill out right on your phone and then you go um you've made your purchasing decision you take this to the um checkout counter and uh you get the the U rebate as a discount which is nice because then you don't have to pay interest if you were going to purchase it with your credit card you don't have to pay interest um you know well if you if you pay pay the bill on time I guess um let's go to the next

efficiency main is the reg registered vendor page where you can find uh a an installer for some of these appliances that you might want to buy um and you can search by ZIP code so that you find somebody who's close to where you live you can search by distance 25 within 25 miles Within within 10 miles within 50 miles and then you can also find out how many uh of the what you're interested in like a heat pump hot water heater say how many they've installed so when my sister-in-law's um uh water heater

failed um we we chose a contractor who was right close to Harpswell where she lives and U and had done a lot of heat pump installations and he came right out got the job done uh next slide so let's move on to weatherization next slide so this is really about uh something we jokingly like to call negawatts you know about kilowatts and megawatts well this is negawatt a negawatt is a unit of energy that you don't use and obviously if you don't use it it saves you money and and many of us are still using uh fossil fuels to heat our homes and if if you can Harvest your negawatts obviously you're not going to be spending so much money on those things that are causing um the bad things that are happening to our climate and uh if you reduce your electricity use you're also cleaning up make it making it easier to clean up the grid because there isn't going to be such a demand for more electricity and it's important to

remember that um making these Energy Efficiency changes is not designed to make you more uncomfortable it's designed to make make you comfortable because if you eliminate the drafts from the tiny little holes and places that cold air is getting in obviously you're not only saving money you're going to be much comfortable in your home when it's cold out next

at a a schematic of a house showing uh where all the cold air gets in those are the blue arrows the purple arrows and where the warm air gets out and you'll notice uh generally uh the warm air is going up because warm air is lighter than cold air so it rises and that creates What's called the stack effect which um creates the drafts in your home and wastes the energy that you uh are spending on so one thing uh that

contractors do if you haven't seen this before is to set up a blower door test the technician with his computer there in the middle of the screen has set up a blower door test it's a a nylon uh formfitting uh contraption that mounts in your door your door is open on the outside and there's a fan in the bottom of it it sucks all the uh it's sucks a lot of the air out of your house depressurizes your house and and of course the effect then is it pulls in cold air wherever you have leaks in your building envelope often um a second or third person comes along with a cocking gun or a little uh smoke candle or a UV

an infrared H camera and they see where the air is coming in um with these devices and CAU them on the spot while the air is being pulled out of the home um there's a fairly inexpensive way to get this done through efficiency main without having a whole house energy audit which is quite expensive and that's something you might want to look into so the guy on the left there he's cocking while the guy downstairs is is quantifying um how much uh airs you're

uh heat you're losing out of your home next slide so uh the picture is uh somebody's attic probably there's uh 12 or 14 inches of uh loose fill U insulation there uh if they've done the job right U it would probably be that thick unfortunately if you are you're in a house that already has insulation in the Attic it's hard to get at some of the places that you might be losing your warm a downstairs because it's going up through light fixtures uh Plumbing penetrations these are things um that are hard to find unless you want to go wandering around in 12 or 14 inches of of uh you know loose fill

insulation but look at the rebates they're very substantial uh up 30% up to $1,200 um I'm sorry not rebates these are tax credits uh $250 for a new door door uh towards the new door $500 maximum Windows new replacement windows uh tax credit of six up to $600 but be very careful because the doors and the windows have to be certain designs even Brands you have to go to the IRS website or your contractor will and he'll know or she'll know uh which um which windows will or doors will qualify and which won't so the other thing about this is that some of these tax credits from the inflation reduction act reset every year so that uh $1,200 cap uh um if you time do your if

you time your projects to go from one year to the next you can reh harvest the same tax credit several times over a number of years next slide blessing and a curse the department of energy says that about 30% of um your money is being spent on

heat that goes out through the windows of course it's wonderful to have light and in the wintertime and fresh air in the summer time when you open a window but um of course that run in the winter um if you have leaky old windows you you have larger energy bills next slide so there's a nonprofit that I've been involved with for over a decade called window dressers it was started in Rockland Maine and since 2011 window dressers has built with

Community groups all over the state of Maine and all over the state of Vermont and now also in New New Hampshire 68,000 insulating window inserts so the woman in the slide is holding an insert it's a 1 by two frame with foam weather stripping around the outside it's screwed and glued in the corners and it has two layers of polyphen one on each side um volunteer measures come to your home measure each window individually we guarantee they'll fit it's a pressure fit so they're easy to take out if you don't want them in during the warm weather and they'll last for around 10 years or so eventually the the polyol and plastic will fail uh they're vulnerable to cats swatting at flies and

and cactuses a cacti that you have on your window sill uh but they make a huge difference and uh one way I know this for sure is I've had them in in my home homes not everywhere but in the windows that need them the most and on a really really cold day where before I install the insert there was condensation all over the window um when you put in one of these inserts I've never seen a drop of moisture on the inside and that's because the surface on the inside is warmer um and you aren't so you're not losing as much energy they're pretty good-look and um you can sign up for them at our website which is wind addresses. org all one word and um the

other cool thing is that we raise money from foundations and contributors individuals and we are able to supply about onethird of U our inserts free at no cost to lowincome customers and we don't have any paperwork when the measures come if it's clear that somebody is struggling to pay their energy bills we can provide up to 10 inserts now there's a catch here and the catch is a wonderful catch actually I think the catch is that you have to help build the inserts if you can't because you work uh you send somebody else or you come to one of our evening or weekend shifts and in the course of a week here in Brunswick we build about um next year we're going to try to build 300 of them um and they'll probably go to about 25 or 30 different families um and so

that's just something I wanted you to be aware of even though it doesn't qualify for a tax credit or a rebate the average cost for one of these for a midsized window is about $45 and that we know that is exactly what it's costing us we have a very small staff and so forth and then there're the materials involved next slide solar systems we're getting there folks um solar is clean no carbon or methane

pollution locally produced right here in Maine you don't have to have a truck come to your house to get that electricity with net metering a solar owner in Maine is credited for the Excess power generated that goes out to The Grid so you may be making more electricity than you're using and you get um a one for one credit for that so that when the sun isn't shining like at nighttime for instance you can take electricity back from the grid and it it won't cost you of course it's important to size the solar system approximately the size of your usage if you make it too big you're throwing away money usually they make it a little bit smaller than your usage solar is difficult uh to finance

it's expensive um three or four years ago when my church put solar on their roof the system cost uh $23,000 and I'll tell you how we financed it on the next slide I think go ahead oh well first the tax credits um they will be available until 2033 so this is something you can take your time about if you want to raise uh the cash to pay up front it allows you to deduct 30% of the total cost of installing a

solar energy system from your taxes so $24,000 system that would be uh close to $8,000 off the cost and you can carry the tax credit over from one year to the next if you don't uh if you don't have enough of a tax uh liability to get it all in the first year and there's a website that that's quite informative about uh solar here on this slide it's called Energy sage.com

electrician uh at my church he's um installing the inverter solar electricity is made uh from the panels is uh in DC form direct current and it has to be converted to alternating current before it can you can use it in your in your electrical needs in the building or and you certainly can't send it out to the grid until it's converted so that's a part of the cost of the solar system you need to own your own home to obviously and to install solar you need to have the right to install it on your roof there can be land use code restrictions in some places and you might want to think if your roof is in tough shape to get it re-roofed before you put the panels up because it's it costs several thousand dollars to remove it and put it back up and then you want to pay attention to the home orientation and the tree shading and the way you do that is you hire um a a contractor to come out it'll go up

on your roof with a wonderful machine that tells you about all that next for themselves in roughly 9 to 12 years but the panels will function for 2 to 30 years uh so you can uh use the money you're saving uh on your energy bills uh ours we have a cons Community solar farm share and our bills for most of the year are down around well they're under 20 bucks each month um and you also might

want to consider um make oversizing the solar system if you think there's a possibility you might get an electric vehicle in the next couple years or even several years um because then uh you're powering your car for pre energy next

our panels finally went up that's my church The Green Building um we discovered we were in a historic Zone where solar was forbidden that's why I mentioned the land use code uh we had to spend an extra year working with the planning board to get them to change the the zoning regulations and which and we were successful so now with the proper preparation and the proper qualifications you can have uh uh solar panels in the historic Zone um that are

visible from the street now the way we finan ours was uh we found three lenders uh actually Four lenders excuse me who lend us at a very at a 3% rate and we're paying them back over five years and then we'll loan the system free and clear if you belong to a nonprofit that would like to do something like that by all means call me I can tell you more the way a homeowner is more likely get a loan is if if you can with a home equity line of credit be interest rate is usually pretty low and interest rates are coming down now with inflation more under control so um a loan is definitely something to consider because this is a big expense to get it up and running next slide oh by the way we didn't have we couldn't take a tax credit because we're a nonprofit right so the church doesn't benefit from that okay we're into our last topic and I'm going a little over I I'm sorry I have ATT tendency to talk a little too long but

we'll go pretty quick next slide um what's to like about electric vehicles or EVS as they're called here well they cost less than a gas vehicle to operate there's reduced maintenance fewer moving Parts no oil changes no exhaust system to worry about you um it

you can charge them overnight at home and they're really fun to drive uh we bought ours a year and a half ago and my wife didn't want me to buy it and now I can't pry it out of her there there's they're cleaner they're really clean they're fewer emissions cleaner air less dependence on fuels from away as well next

the car we bought it was a Chevy bolt which unfortunately is no longer in production but there were so many people yelling at Chevrolet when they took it out of production and they're going to put it back into production in 2025 and last winter when we bought ours um if you qualified for the tax credit there are Income restrictions on that um you could have this car it's very small but it's very nicely done for under $20,000 after the $7,500 rebate so I'm a little sick and

tired of these $50,000 uh Teslas and other very expensive Vehicles we need more of these more affordable Vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy B and I'm sure that they will be coming to the market um it's really important that we do something about Transportation because 54% of Main's carbon pollution comes from from fossil fuel transportation and a typical gas vehicle emits over 5 tons of CO2 per year more

than four times the amount emitted from an electric vehicle charged from the New England grid now if you have a solar panel a solar system large enough to to uh charge your car with then uh you're doing really well um and get this if we

went fully electric which I don't think we will but if we went fully electric wide uh uh Nationwide by 2035 on electric vehicles in the whole country now we're talking about not just Maine we could avoid over 89,000 premature deaths over two million asthma attacks and harvest close to1 trillion dollar in public health benefits one of the things I like best about electric vehicles is that they don't cause air pollution next

slide so just quickly um there's a lot of concern about range and charging and there shouldn't be I wouldn't own an electric vehicle if it was the only car I had because I have a son in Connecticut that I need to visit and I'm I'm impatient about the charging because there aren't enough charging stations that are functioning well uh without interrupting your trip for several hours at a time the bolt doesn't charge particularly uh quickly but there are new batteries on the horizon already factories being built for them they're called solid state batteries they don't use lithium or as much lithium I'm not sure um and they are really U they give you more range and they're going to be less expensive and they're going to be easier to recycle so there's going to be a lot of change that's coming our way and so the the misinformation you hear about this this being such an awful thing to have an electric vehicle I

think it's a bunch of baloney frankly um over on the right are the three ways you can charge an electric veh vehicle you can plug it into the regular outlet in the wall but it's pretty slow might take 13 hours you can use a a um 240 volt

circuit uh what we commonly call a dryer circuit that would operate your dryer and get it charged overnight in 7 hours and it varies from vehicle to vehicle of course or you can go to um a DC charger which is called the level three um you find these at dealerships Tesla has a bunch of them um but it's not necessarily good to use those too often because they degrade the battery a little bit faster and down in the box at the bottom of the slide Maine has received 15 million a$1 155 million Federal grant to install nearly 600 vehicle charging stations in more than 70 cities and towns and that money is just about to arrive here um they started by putting the Chargers along the interstate routes they wanted to do those first but now they're thinking more about people who don't have who don't own homes who need to find a way to get their um their cars charged in more urban areas in towns

next slide so there's an awful lot to learn if you're going to buy an electric vehicle and again efficiency main is a great place to grow go uh the right side of the image here is I took off of uh the electric vehicle section on efficiency man you can see all the things that you can learn about there there is a state

um um incentive provided by the Volkswagen settlement that uh reduces the cost of your vehicle on top of the tax credit but before you put any money down on any vehicle you know you've got to be really careful about this because many don't yet qualify for the um tax credit in the United States you actually need to copy down the VIN number and then go to a certain website and find out where it was manufactured because if it wasn't manufactured in North America you don't get the rebate um and this is changing all the time more and more vehicles are going to become eligible because the car manufacturers want to be selling cars in this country uh and there's been some controversy about it um because of these restrictions but um

obviously the administration wanted to help American car manufacturers first I get that so that's why that is okay next slide so tax credits $7,500 on a new vehicle 4,000 on a used vehicle um and now those tax credits you don't have to wait for the year following when you purchase the vehicle that's CH a change in 2024 when you purchase the vehicle the dealer takes the tax credit and passes the savings on to you so that means you can take out a smaller loan uh which is great um you

can also get a tax credit on the installation home charging equipment up to a $1,000 limit next is that uh they're now going to have a an electric bike incentive coming soon I was a little confused by this at first wondering why the heck are they doing this but then I thought about all the people I see on the side of the road walking to work riding a bicycle to work people who obviously don't have the income to own a car and I've been told that this bill is going to be set up particularly for low income folks who need some form of electrified transportation to get around and so I think that's great next slide that's it lots to think about many opportunities to make our homes more energy efficient using tax credits and rebates electrifying everything that we can tightening up our homes solar options and electric vehicles I didn't talk much about the solar options but um obviously rooftop or Community solar

farm or the uh the deal where you get a discount on your electricity bill of 10 or 15 per. so my advice to you if you are interested in any of this stuff is to make a plan and it should be a multi-year p plan probably especially if you're going to get solar uh it gets confused to try to do a lot of things at once at least for me at my age and I

really recommend uh getting familiar with whatever it is you want to do first and getting it done it's a wonderful feeling when it's done even if you're a little bit poor for a while and keep at it until the end goal of course in my book is to try to get off of fossil fuels as much as you possibly can next slide so I asked Annie Meyer of efficiency main what should I tell people about where they start and he saidwell you know people think you have to get an energy audit first before you do anything else and those cost about 500 bucks he said let people start wherever they want they may want to start saving money with a heat pump um and then make

a plan and uh and go one step at a time as I said earlier I forgot to read you two factoids and then I'll stop um nearly one out of every heat pump wait a pump on average of every five to six minutes 24 hours a day so they're really

going off the shelves because they save you money and nearly one out of every 10 heat pump hot water heaters sold in the country is also being sold right here in Maine so um we've made a great start as a state to do something about climate change and um thank you very much for listening go to the next slide I think there's one more oh just a reminder about rewiring America and Efficiency Maine the two useful links I suggested next slide

been there with you I would have had some materials on a table so you could see what citizens climate Lobby is and that's a picture of us standing outside the United States capital last June I think Roberto was there weren't you not this one but I know I know exactly where the main contingent stands okay right below that man way up at the top there yeah right and uh and

uh my phone number is there if if you guys need to be in touch for any reason I'm happy to take your call um I've so enjoyed talking with you I'm sorry it's been such a one-way conversation but I hope that you harvested something from it thank you very much Sam that was great I'm just trying to think of how many websites someone would have to visit to get all the information that you just gave and nobody would be willing to do that plus the way that you add your own experience something that you know probably wouldn't be on a website so thank you so much and I'm hoping that with the recording this um lots and lots of people will get some really good information thank you if nobody else has question questions than I do you're in charge um oh we can't hear you Jess and

I didn't see anything in the they're probably I do yes I have so I have a question um I'm actually a property manager yeah so we are constantly doing this kind of work and um you know for me to be able to be educated and talk about this in an educated fashion I didn't know what um resources there are I know

you've given a little bit of an update um but obviously a lot of what I do is multifam and so it's kind of a different rebate system and different kinds of energy efficiencies that can be gained but many of the people I manage for are interested in these kind of things yeah um there is so much I mean

this was confined to um single Palm you know residents and um and I'm there's too much for me to know that I can't know I'm just exactly I'm just a volunteer I'm not a professional I would I would reach out to efficiency main or to the the main Department of Housing I do you have anything to do with that um I know they have a lot of programs okay uh that there there might be something there for you um I don't know about the greater Portland Council of governments that might be another place um but but where where are you finding the information you need um last year I had an investor send me like some random page of credits yeah but you know we're kind of bootstrapping so yeah we don't do we we're pretty behind the scenes we don't do a lot of like getting out there and networking and that kind of stuff we're just on the ground making things happen so um you know having those resources to for example you know I'm probably

replacing a hot water heater once every couple weeks right um so to help make those good decisions know the resources know how to utilize the credits in the multifam setting yeah I don't know anything about that I'm sorry let me tell you a quick story though my sister-in-law that had the heat pump had the hot water tank fail um

she she uh could have qualified for a free heat pump because she's on Main care um and she has disabilities she's on a walker she's blind in one end she can't she wasn't even in the basement she didn't know that her um hot water tank was leaking and when the technician came out and that and the technician works for a company that sells heat pump hot water heers all he said to her was get a new tank and hook it up to your oil boiler so you know that's first of

all not good for the climate and second of all it's it's costing her more a lot more money a heat pump hot water heater will save you know over the 10 year warranted life so um in the end um she she did get in touch with efficiency main find out found out who to call and the contractor list was restricted it wasn't any hot water uh tank uh

contractor and there was a month-long wait and here she is with a a tank that's about to fail and dump 80 gallons of water or 5050 gallons of water all over the floor so she had to take $3,700 out of her retirement savings and and go with a contractor who she liked so it wasn't all bad but um it's so typical with these government programs that you the more you know and the more you'll read the small print the better off you'll be right and you know for me it's like I it's I have the opportunity to educate people on these things but I don't have that education myself yeah so it's how do I get connected with that right information so I can advise things like you know I've got a three unit and two two of the stories don't have you know any heat right so we're starting from scratch and you know I'm trying to have these conversations with the electrician and they don't really know the answers you know their first

proposal is we'll do one heat pump and then electric baseboard and you know what you showed is really helpful for me now you know your little graph yeah yeah electric baseboard is the most expensive right so any solution and I had kind of a gut about that so you know we walk through just doing multiple heat pumps instead and

everything like that but even to know like what's the right layout to do and um how to take advantage of those rebates I mean there's if we can make a case for the value impact on that we it's a huge opportunity to make a big difference yeah yeah have you read about the heat pumps that they are installing in New York City now they're underneath a window like what you see when you go to a motel and there's a heating unit air conditioning unit and they're they're installing those all over the place in New York City that might be a solution for some of those apartments you were talking about so kind of like like where R are used right now in apartments yeah yeah the other thing I would definitely do is I would call um the toll-free hotline at efficiency Main and get connected to uh somebody there in that in that organization that could help you I would think they would have a lot of good advice okay I can try doing that that

yeah that cost of heating um calculator could could be helpful in convincing people that it's a good idea definitely I think and that was from efficiency main yep yes yeah yeah Roberta you had a question I do actually with the hot water heater um if I got you right um it's using the

air uh if it's in your basement it's using the air from your basement so I guess does it have to have some kind of duct work I don't know if duct is the right word but something that vents from the outside or is it just using what's inside the basement so it doesn't need any outside it just uses what's inside yeah right and it I think it reduces the temperature by just one or two degrees and at least in our basement it's not significant we don't heat our basement we have uh hot water radiators fo fueled by the oil burner we don't run the oil burner so our basement is cold and I've tried to figure out whether I wanted to inter insulate under the main floor and our main floor doesn't seem to be too cold it's carpeted in the living area so it's hard to know there's always compromises if you're working with an older home and not starting fresh right so you could have an oil burner with a uh heat pump um hot water

heater yes yeah I do I do yeah and um it works fine um forgotten where I was going to go with that there are there are there are um we we wanted we had a propane hot water heater fail at my church and the repair was going to be 42 $200 was up in the attic and um they were going to

repair it and I said no no stop and I got Fred horch out you know who Fred horch is he's a Energy Efficiency guy right in in in brenwick and uh really nice guy and he owns a uh I should have mentioned this to what was her name Barbara Bethany Bethany Bethany Fred Horse is if you're still there about any is an Energy Efficiency consultant who does great work um and he is his company is called spark applied

efficiency um and he helped us at our church we had a a situation where we had to put the heat pump hot water heater there was no basement in a bathroom and um we had to arrange for a fan to come on uh when the door was closed and uh

stuff like that um but he he uh he just did a huge job for the fork Food Lab in Portland which is one of the three largest food labs in the country um and so he he might he would surely know where to send you if he couldn't answer your questions okay and uh tell me the name of his company again uh spark applied

efficiency okay and his name is Fred horch h o r c he's the nicest guy i''d ever want to me so great thank you so much yeah anything else I just had a couple comments of fun aside there was a picture of my husband in the slide deck because he was the crew lead I guess for your um Church solar install his name is

Ian hubard um so he used to work for main Solar Solutions and so he he helped with that install but now he works for clean tap energy which is in Gray a small world in main yeah wow so was he the electrician or was he up in the roof he was he was up on the roof he was the crew lead on the roof the guy with the dark curly hair and the blue t-shirt that's my husband well say hello to him he probably won't remember but I was gawking up with him most of the day I definitely will say hello for you um and then the other thing that I wanted to comment about was I love that term um negawatts I actually hadn't heard that before um and that's a great concept because you know one of the solutions is just to not use as much energy in the first place um and I think about you know turning off lights that I don't need and um I think about my neighbors next door that just run their lights all night outside and it would just save

them so much energy if they would turn those off at night um terrible for Myra in birds and yes yeah absolutely yeah so um oh gosh something else occurred to me but it's already gone this happens to old people well that happens to me to me I could fill in with the question or actually it's not a question comment um

I appreciate that you mentioned that you don't need the whole house off it and I did not know that they how they um determine where the leaks are coming and that they could go around and cck as they go as the as the as the uh as they

find a yeah which um because that's a good option because we were thinking about you know the cost of an audit and all that do we really need it but um that is a great option I I had that done on uh this house and the last house we owned and um that it it used to be called the air sealing program and and uh it it included a before and after door uh spe

uh report on you know before they sealed and after they sealed so they could show you the before they left or when they wrote up their report how much money they had already saved you just with um and sometimes they work around fireplaces in the attics of Chimneys in the attic to solve problems there that's another Common Place yeah so I I think they've split it up now I'm not sure how it works but I think it's in the somewhere between four and six or $700 um but you'd pay spend $500 on an

energy AUD it alone the other thing I forgot to say uh is a caution about moisture because you don't want to be doing all this house tightening and if you have a moisture problem because tightening everything up makes can make it worse and cost you a lot of money and I should have mentioned that but the hordes of people that were watching probably knew about that already well it's it's in there now yeah see that's something that I wouldn't get from a website I I would never think it would just say you know make it airtight make it airtight that's great yeah well any um company that does

this kind of work Worth or salt will tell you oh should you know uh home energy performance I think it's called is one that does does that oh great thank you well thank you guys thank you so much Sam very informative and um we will have this available on the town YouTube this recording um so I'm going to stop recording now and um I guess we can say good night too could you send me the link I I always like to look Naval gaze a little bit and see yes what I said that I didn't mean to and all that stuff you know yeah it was great it was wonderful Sam thanks so much you're very welcome have a good night you guys hope to see you around the the neighborhood yes pretty sure good night