2013-11-21 13.31 U.S. Department of Energy TAP Webinar_ Tools for Page 1 of 4
Designing and Implementing Better Clean Energy Finance Programs
Glenn Barnes, Molly Lunn, Jen Weiss
Molly Lunn: Hello and welcome to today’s webinar on tools for designing and implementing better finance programs. I'm Molly Lunn, I’m with the Department of Energy’s state and local policy and technical assistance team. I want to thank you all for joining us today. We're going to give folks a few more minutes to call in and log on so while we wait I’ll go over just a few logistics and then we'll dive into today’s webinar. Today’s presentation will be recorded so everyone is in listen only mode. We will have question and answer session at the end and you can also submit questions as we're going along here. So feel free to put your questions, submit them electronically, as we're running through the slides there's a box on the right hand of your screen where you can type those in and we'll definitely take breaks for clarifying questions and so on as we're going. So please don’t feel like – if there are things you're not quite catching let us know. Next slide please. So we've got a great agenda for you today. Today’s session is focused on two new resources that the DOE is making available for designing and implementing finance programs, but the department a whole slew of resources in this space and a bunch more coming out in the next few months, so I'm going to start off with providing a brief introduction to those. Then I’m going to hand things off to my colleagues, Glenn Barnes and Jennifer Weiss at the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina, and they’ll introduce the Clean Energy Finance program structure, options, brief, sort-of a primer material, as well as a program return on investment modeling tool. This particular iteration of this is focused on residential energy efficiency. I do want to mention that the webinar and these resources highlighted today have been a collaborative effort really between the Department of Energy, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and our technical assistance providers at UNC, the Center for Climate Strategies and the EP Systems Groups, so thanks to everyone for their great work on these products. Next slide please.
So before I dive in too much in terms of the resources we have available I just want to mention sort-of the context in which we provide assistance to state and locals. So the Department of Energy and our office of energy efficiency and renewable energy, that’s EERE, believes it can't achieve its clean energy goals by itself. We believe that state and local policies and actions are really critical to advancing our mission and in many cases you all are the ones who are already leading the way. So one avenue by – through which the department supports and accelerates state leadership and local leadership is by playing a number of different roles. One is a convener, one as an innovation enabler and one as an unbiased technical resource which is sort-of the role we're playing here today, and we're – our – this team is located within the weatherization intergovernmental program. That's the WIP acronym you see there. So next slide please. So the kinds of technical assistance we provide fall into five main areas. Strategic energy planning, program and policy design and implementation, data management and EMNV, technologies and finance strategies, which is obviously what we're focused on here today, but it’s important to note that you know, finance is just one sort-of piece of the puzzle. Within each of those priority areas we develop resources including the kinds of general education and tools, materials we'll be reviewing today and then we disseminate those resources through peer exchange and trainings like today’s webinar. We also offer in depth, one-on-one assistance for high impact efforts at the state and local level. Next slide, please.
So I want to talk just a little bit about specifically some of the finance resources that are available to you all now. We feature these mostly on our state and local solution center, which is our online website, and in – for each of our priority areas we have a portal. So we have a finance portal, you'll see that little dollar sign on the screen shot there, and that – if you click that you get to all of our finance resources. That includes pages for specific types of mechanisms as well as sort-of general concepts like credit enhancement, and some of the different kinds of program options you'll hear about today. We have a couple of new resources that have come out in the last couple of years that might be of interest to you all. That includes a financing guide for K through 12 schools but it’s really very relevant for all local governments. It covers things like bonds and lease purchase agreements and other specific clean energy mechanisms for finance, and then if you're focused on not just your own projects but the residential and commercial sectors, we have a clean energy finance guide, which is really sort-of a companion piece to the resource we're introducing today. The clean energy finance guide is a very in depth, detailed resource for developing programs to support the residential and commercial sectors. And so the resource we're introducing today is kind-of that introductory level resource for people who are maybe not quite as advanced in finance yet who are just starting – getting started on finance programs. And then finally earlier this summer we released a guide to federal finance facilities for clean energy, so this is a guide that outlines all of the different programs across the federal government that support clean energy and that state and local governments can take advantage of. Next slide please.
So I also wanted to highlight some of the resources we have coming out in the next year. That includes both a facelift to our finance portal, which is in process now, the existing portal is just fine, I definitely encourage you to go visit it, but the new portal will be a little better structured so that it helps sort-of guide you through the process depending on where you are and what kind of entity you are. We're also, as I mentioned, releasing a number of these sort-of 101 level briefs over the next 12 months. So in addition to today’s resources, we'll also be releasing a resources on working with financial institutions, have a webinar for that in two weeks, which I'll mention at the end. We have a energy efficiency finance primer and credit enhancement primer which are both coming out of our state and local energy efficiency action network. Those will be coming out in the next couple of months and then we have a brief on setting up internal revolving loan funds that'll be coming out later as well. I also wanted to mention a resource that'll be coming out I believe in December. It’s called getting the biggest bang for the buck and this really talks about before you’ve even decided that you want to do a finance program, sort-of that first step of why am I even thinking about this. And then also what are some experimental design options so that you can design your program to make sure that it's you're learning from the outcomes of the program and that'll be coming out a little bit later in the year. And then we have two more advanced research papers for folks who are a little further along in the finance process. One focused on on bill finance, and another which will highlight some of the lessons learned and recommendations for the future that have come out of all of the Recovery Act funding that went into things like revolving loan funds and then loss reserves, and that'll be out in the spring. Next slide, please.
So in addition to this slew of papers and tools we have coming out, we like to get these out and into the world, and the way we do that is mainly through two main avenues. One is webinars like the one you're on today. We offer about one to three of these a quarter and they’re typically focused on these new resource or trends. They're archived on the solutions center including lots and lots of sort-of 101 to specific mechanisms and I encourage you to go there. It’s a searchable database and you can pull up the full recording with a transcript. Then we also have something called the better building finance strategy project team, and this is really a peer exchange opportunity. We meet once a month, we talk about finance issues, you hear from a peer who’s maybe working through a specific issue, or focused on a specific kind of program and then we provide some one-on-one assistance as a part of that peer exchange opportunity. And that's a part of our better buildings initiative and you can learn more about that on the website there. And then finally, next slide.
Finally we do provide one – sort-of targeted one-on-one assistance for – by application. Those applications are reviewed to determine sort-of the level of effort we'll be able to provide based on near term and long term impacts, opportunities for replicablity for other state and local governments and really meeting a niche where maybe there aren't already technical assistance resources available in that space. So some examples include helping you compare finance or funding options for a program, as well as design and implementation guidance for specific mechanisms. So we do a lot of work on QECBs, again, on bill finance, commercial pace, RLFs and loan loss reserves. Last slide, please. So the – this sort-of summarizes how you can access all of these different resources I've talked about today. Again, our state and local solutions center is a great first place to visit and that website is available here. On the – that page you'll be able to submit your application for one-on-one assistance if you’re interested in that and then if you'd like to stay up to date on all of our latest and greatest, you can sign up for our newsletter and mailing list at this e-mail address, technical assistance program at EE dot DOE dot gov, and again, will be posting – we are recording today’s webinar so that will be posted on our solutions center with the recording and we'll send out the slides after today’s presentation to everyone who’s registered, so you'll get these slides, as well. So thanks again to Glenn and Jen for joining us and for all of you for taking the time. I encourage you just to take a minute at the end and fill out some of the feedback questions we have in the survey because we really design these webinars to be as useful as possible for you. So I think with that, I'll hand things back over to Glenn and Jen.
Glenn Barnes: OK, thank you Molly and good afternoon, everybody, or good morning. We appreciate you taking some time with us today to talk about these interesting topics on energy finance. My name is Glenn Barnes, I’m a senior project director at the Environmental Finance Center based at the University of North Carolina. I've worked with the Environmental Finance Center since 2006 and in addition to doing a lot of work on energy and sustainability programming, I also do work on other environmental issues such as wetland finance and drinking water finance with people who provide environmental services all across the country.
Jen Weiss: And hello everyone, my name is Jen Weiss and I'm a senior finance analyst here at the Environmental Finance Center, I've been here a little over a year but I’m a commercial banker by trade, so I come with a big finance background. I’ve been working primarily in the energy field here at the Environmental Finance Center, I’m working with a lot of local governments and schools.
Glenn Barnes: In addition to the resources that Molly shared with everybody, I just wanted to add our own resources on our Environmental Finance Center website. For those of you who we've not interacted with in the past, we are a university based center at the University of North Carolina, we are one of ten in the country and we do work with folks like yourselves who provide environmental services, specifically looking at how do we best finance and manage those services in sustainable ways, and so our website which is up on the screen here and will be available on the slide deck we'll send to you, has additional resources on energy and sustainability in addition to the ones that we'll be sharing with you today through our work with the Department of Energy. And so I encourage you to take a look at that and our contact information is on the site as well if you'd like to reach out to us individually with questions.
We've been very fortunate for the past four years at the Environmental Finance Center really since the beginning of the Recovery Act program, to serve as technical assistance providers, we're contracted, as Molly mentioned, through the Center for Climate Strategies team and working with EPC as well, and this map shows some of the places around the country where we have provided individual assistance to units of government, to community organizations, and others who have created environmental and energy finance programs over the past four years. We've been fortunate to cover, as you can see, a good span of the country including all the way out to some of the Pacific territories, and a lot of the information that we'll be sharing today on program structures and on returns on investment came out of the work that we did for these individual states and local governments and community organizations and so throughout the presentation we'll share some of the information that we've learned over the past couple of years of doing this kind of work and we certainly look forward to any questions that you have. As Molly mentioned, you can enter your questions through the question box and we'll be sure to get to them and provide that information to you.
Now, before we get started with the proper presentation here, I do want to pull up a quick poll question just so we can get a sense of who is on the call, and so would like you to answer the question that's about to pop up here on what type of entity do you represent. So what type of entity is your organization, are you a unit of government, a non-profit, a for profit, a utility or something else, and then we'll be able to share those results once we see them come in. I think we'll go ahead and close the poll now and be able to share those results. So we've got a good mix of people on the call today. Good mix from government, non-profits and for profits pretty evenly and then a couple of people from utilities and few from others as well, so very happy to see that broad range of entities represented because as we'll talk about, we have seen successful energy finance programs from all across the country from all of these different types of organizations, and each have different strengths and challenges when it comes to offering these types of programs, so thanks for answering the question we'll do a couple more polls as we go on through the presentation today.