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Episode 21: Live from the PACENation Summit

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This week is the first ever life taping of Experts Only Podcast at the PACENation Summit 2018 in Denver, Colorado. This episode has a bipartisan panel that discusses the different perspectives on PACE, how it relates to policy goals and the wavering support from the federal government. The Panel is a lively discussion of PACE administrators who are well versed in federal policy, as well as leaders in both Residential and Commercial PACE, and affinity groups.

The panelists on this podcast include Genevive Sherman, Head of New Markets and Partnerships of Greenworks Lending, Keith den Hollander, National Field Director of The Christian Coalition, Michele Combs, Chairman and Founding Partner of Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, and Cisco Devries, Founder, and CEO of Renew Financial.
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Listen now

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Transcript

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Jon Powers:

Welcome to Experts Only Podcast, sponsored by CleanCapital. You can learn more at cleancapital.com. I’m your host Jon Powers. Each week, we explore the intersection of energy, innovation and finance with leaders across the industry. Thank you so much for joining and listening to CleanCapital’s Experts Only Podcast.

Jon Powers:

For folks in the room that aren’t unfamiliar with the podcast, what we do is explore the intersection of energy, innovation and finance and talk across the industry about what’s moving, what’s happening, what the future of the markets look like. It’s a great dialogue. For us at CleanCapital, a great way is to stay educated about where the industry’s moving. So I’ll be honest, this is our first live recording of a podcast. We’ll see how this turns out, but we’re pretty excited about it.

Jon Powers:

For folks listening, we are live at PACENation Summit 2018, here in Denver, Colorado. You can expect a really fascinating conversation on the perspectives of PACE from this really incredible panel. For those who are listening to the podcast and are unfamiliar with PACE, hopefully you in the room are pretty familiar with PACE, but we did an earlier episode.

Jon Powers:

So I challenged you to go to that first where I interviewed David and did a PACE 101 to help folks understand what’s happening in the market. It’s a great primer for this conversation. Just to level set, Property Assessed Clean Energy, PACE is a financing mechanism that enables low costs, long term funding for energy efficiency, renewable energy and water conservation projects.

Jon Powers:

PACE financing is repaid through the assessment of the Property Tax Bill. And depending on the local legislation, it can be used for commercial nonprofit for residential. Most of you in the room probably understand, that’s more for the folks online. Our panel today is going to talk about different perspectives, not so much on the policy side, but the way we approach it on PACE and how it relates to our goals. Also about how to engage with policy makers so that we can get PACE into more jurisdictions and hopefully continue to grow to market.

Jon Powers:

And then just a warning for our podcast listeners. This episode is significant longer than our normal episode. So make sure you budget your time appropriately. You can find more episodes at cleancapital.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Jon Powers:

I want to start off with a special thanks to the organizers who put incredible work in to make this happen. We’re really excited about the conversation. Let’s get started. I’m going to ask each of the speakers to introduce themselves through a question as we’re talking on this versus just reading bios.

Jon Powers:

But I think for the folks in the room, our first speaker, Cisco, really needs no introduction. But he’s the CEO of Renew Financial. After growing up in the mountains near Yosemite National Park, where he raised pigs, goats and chickens, Cisco’s also a licensed pilot and I learned last night, the chairman of a little league baseball league, which is fantastic.

Jon Powers:

For those in the room, you know him as a key leader in the industry. So Cisco, you’ve seen the progression of PACE from being an idea on the back of a napkin to an industry that is growing quarter after quarter and thriving in a new way. For the folks in the audience, can you talk a little bit about that history, some perspective on the history and then why today? Why are things really starting to click now?

Cisco:

Well, thanks. First, it’s great to be here. It’s great to be on stage with these folks. It’s kind of a dream come true after a lot of years. I’m really honored to be here. There are parts of the PACE story that I only tell over beer. It’s a morning session here. Some of us probably had too much beer last night, so I will stick to some of the other parts.

Cisco:

But I was reminded yesterday, a California energy commissioner recently said PACE is the single most successful energy retrofit program in the history of the state of California. Well, it sounds great and I’m super proud to have been part of that, but it does make you go back and think about when that wasn’t the case. This really all started for me and for all of us with a hole in the ground.

Cisco:

Back when I was at the city of Berkeley, California, we were trying to help a neighborhood who was putting all their poles and wires underground, underground utility district. It’s about the most boring thing you can do in government is to dig a hole and put wires in it. That process of a neighbor choosing to do this voluntarily, of choosing how to pay for it, of the city making this an option to them, and then these homeowners taking assessments on it to pay for this project that they wanted to get done really got me thinking about how we could use that tool potentially to solve some other challenges. We have notably the climate and energy issue.

Cisco:

For me, a lot of this started around climate. That very, very beginning, I think kind of starts off the story of PACE and how we built on something. It’s really important then as we go through the years and I won’t go through the years, but to say, what-

Jon Powers:

Give us a few years.

Cisco:

What made PACE different from the beginning that made it possible to be here, that made it true, that all of us would be here from our different backgrounds and that an energy commissioner would say something serves big and bold like that. I think a couple of things. First, local government exists to solve problems. And as much as politics has become difficult, there’s a place where a lot of stuff still gets done. Day in and day out, people fill potholes and turn on lights and do these things.

Cisco:

I think local government’s are core to that, and it’s really not been the partisan place that a lot of other government. You’re allowed to kind of try new things. The second about this, that made PACE really important over the years the real difference, I think gets down to Palm Desert California.

Cisco:

My work in Berkeley started with the folks in Palm Desert, California to get going on at their own PACE program. In fact, Berkeley’s in Palm Desert started at about the same time. Palm Desert is as Conservative as Berkeley is liberal. It’s as hot as Berkeley as temperate. They’re literally accepted, they’re in the same state, they are nearly opposite places. But PACE solved a problem for them too, which was very high energy cost, particularly in the hot summers in the desert.

Cisco:

They used PACE… It was even more popular there than it was in Berkeley, where I don’t think anybody in Palm desert was thinking, “I’m trying to solve a climate problem there.” No, they were trying to solve a, “How’s my home going to be comfortable and not super expensive,” problem. And that notion that we’re just trying to solve a problem with PACE and that problem doesn’t have to be ideological, it’s really simpler than that is kind of… It seems simple. That’s a breakthrough, right?

Cisco:

The energy policy to sort of put aside the rest of the motivations and just focus on how we’re helping people solve a problem. That I think has been core to PACE all along. Giving people individual choice, not putting taxpayer dollars to work, helping them solve problems. In the end, behind the scenes, I feel like we’re making a real difference in climate. But that’s not what motivated a lot of folks to start programs or to do projects and I really feel like the history of PACE is about figuring out how to do that.

Jon Powers:

When this was starting, you were a champion in Berkeley making this happen? Was there a champion in Palm Desert that was driving this and were you guys communicating?

Cisco:

There was. It’s funny. I’m reminded a couple years later and this is one of those stories that probably shouldn’t be told out loud, but I went to Texas… They had an event and they wanted me to speak about PACE in Texas. This is probably 2009. It reminds me about Palm Desert because Palm Desert, amazing folks, great folks. I got to be friends with them. They cannot say out loud that Berkeley had anything to do with the beginning of this program.

Cisco:

When I went to Texas to give this talk, right before, there was like hundreds of people. And they’re like, “Okay, so what are you going to talk about?” I’m like, “Well, let’s talk about the Berkeley story.” And they’re like, “Shh! Yeah. Not so much on the Berkeley.” I’m like, “Well, it’s fine. California, there’s a lot of great stories.” And they’re like, “Maybe not so much on the California.”

Cisco:

I’m like, “This is going to be kind of a short conversation I guess, but all right.” My point on that is they’re great, they did amazing work, they figured out a bunch of stuff that I didn’t figure out. They didn’t want to talk about Berkeley. That’s fine. I think when Rick Perry signed PACE legislation in Texas, he didn’t want to talk about Berkeley either. That’s fine too. Because it was solving a problem and it really shouldn’t matter where it came from. It’s rare that we actually get past where things came from and actually just work on solving problems. I do think us, all taking a back seat to fame and glory and just letting people go out there and be a… There’s been fathers to a 1,000 PACE programs has been a huge help.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. Part of the reason I asked this and we’ll talk more about this in the conversation later is with PACE and local programs, many times I’ll have a local champion, but need advocates to come in and help build that support. And you need to build it in a way that messages to that community because Palm Desert’s messaging will be completely different than Berkeley’s messaging.

Jon Powers:

For Genevieve Sherman, she’s the head of New Markets and Partnership at Greenworks Lending. Genevieve decided to get into public private partnerships for financing sustainable infrastructure. After working at the planning department in South Africa’s Western region, I have a 1,000 questions about that, but we’re not going to go there and where she witnessed firsthand the tough investment decisions that governments face when building for climate change.

Jon Powers:

Going from South Africa, you ended up going to Connecticut, similar places. You started working at the Green Bank on the Commercial PACE program and it grew to be the fastest in the nation. Can you describe a little bit about commercial PACE, but also in your perspective from the Green Bank, how did you begin to implement this policy, overcome these challenges and then overcome the obstacles so that commercial customers begun to trust this new program and the C group.

Genevieve Sherman:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, since I’m sitting right next to Cisco, you all know that the Green Bank did not invent PACE or Commercial PACE by any stretch of imagination. We were one of the actually much later states to start a commercial PACE program. We always liked to say we had the 28th state advantage because there were a lot of early attempts and ideas that we had the opportunity to observe and say, “How can we improve on this?”

Genevieve Sherman:

But when we launched our program in 2012, there were several commercial PACE programs around the country. Most of them were focusing on trying to fund a first project. Commercial PACE was very much a sort of boutique, sort of esoteric, structured finance opportunity or option for a building owner. There were a lot of challenges on the credit underwriting and the capital markets side for, well, what is commercial PACE as a financial asset class and who really is going to use it and who really is going to buy it.

Genevieve Sherman:

The Connecticut green bank had a very interesting mission as a governmental agency, speaking of things that local government can do. We were tasked with trying to find new ways to bring private capital into infrastructure and buildings and to move away from subsidies and rebates. That was our goal and we needed to find ways to raise private capital and put it to work. When we looked at PACE on paper, we said, “Wow, this is a really great idea and this is a really great way to not spend taxpayer dollars and to not use our bonding capacity.” We really should be able to raise private capital into this structure.

Genevieve Sherman:

That was always our vision. We made some decisions to innovate on commercial PACE in a way that we thought could really start to scale of the market. There are a lot of different things we did, but I think there were three pretty important ones.

Genevieve Sherman:

The first is that we took PACE from a local program, from municipal to state. Which at the time was quite innovative. Connecticut is of course a small state. It’s probably the size of the bay area in California, but it is a state and it’s comprised of almost 200 individual tax collectors. We knew that we needed to simplify the public side of the public private partnership. We took a lot of the administrative burden, if you will, of operationalizing PACE, we took it away from the cities and we moved it to the level of the state and that made it much easier for municipalities to just kind of opt in but allow the economic development tool to sort of be made available without them having to staff it and put time and resources in.

Jon Powers:

That’s great.

Genevieve Sherman:

A second thing we did was we brought the mortgage banking industry to the table. This was really important for us. We wanted commercial banks in Connecticut, in particular, to actually get involved in the Connecticut green bank. We wanted them to put their capital to work in solar loans and solar leases and so on and so forth. We needed them to be supportive of commercial pay. And we found a way to do that through things like mandatory consent of mortgage lenders, non-acceleration of PACE loans, but non-extinguishment of PACE loans.

Genevieve Sherman:

We did some working out of what that product needed to look like and it made both the mortgage banks and the PACE investment community safer and more secure. And the last thing that we did was we started pooling commercial PACE loans. This was a big innovation, which is to say every commercial building has kind of its own special snowflake.

Genevieve Sherman:

Unlike homes where there are many standard metrics for credit underwriting for homes, there are databases, there are decades and decades of analysis on what is a safe bet in terms of investing in a home. That does not exist for the vast majority of commercial building types. We’re talking everything from churches, YMCAs, big shopping centers, little strip centers, office buildings, hotels. We needed to start bringing all of these commercial properties together in a portfolio approach. That was really the beginning of, I think the capital markets and investment community, having an opportunity to kind of look under the hood of what a portfolio Commercial PACE asset looks like. I think the industry really took off from that point.

Jon Powers:

Is that what led that work? Your partners at Greenworks lending and you guys spun out of the Green Bank. Talk a little bit about that process and what motivated you to do that?

Genevieve Sherman:

Yeah, absolutely. We spun out a company. It’s called Greenworks Lending in 2015. It really sort of got going in 2016, but we had seen the Connecticut PACE program really rapidly kind of start to grow. I know some of the Green Bank folks are the audience, so I hope I get these numbers right still. But I think we did about $30 million in just our first year of operations.

Genevieve Sherman:

That quickly grew to about a hundred million dollars after the second year of operations. When we looked at what our strengths were, but what the limits to growth were, we sort of added up those columns. There was more in the limits to growth than there was in our advantages being in a small public interest bank. We knew that in order to really scale up and scale out, we had to spin out this company.

Genevieve Sherman:

But we very much we’re able to incubate this idea within a public agency and that is quite unique. But we’ve replicated many of the strategies I’ve just mentioned on the capital market side within Greenworks and we’ve been fortunate but also we’re very happy to see many of the states that have now either sort of rejiggered their PACE programs are started new ones, they have replicated in their own way, in their own local way a lot of the features of the Connecticut program. So not every state has a Green Bank, but many states have made an effort to have a statewide program or it to be standardized for there to be a single low cost administrator and to basically open up a commercial PACE sort of marketplace in the way that Connecticut was able to do.

Genevieve Sherman:

That has helped Greenworks with its mission of scaling up and scaling out the lending side of commercial PACE.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. It definitely brings efficiency through the whole process, right? Our next two speakers, I met for the first time in Washington D.C. I was invited to speak to a group of young Conservatives who have come to Washington to talk about clean energy and climate change. And I wanted to speak about my background was in the military and what we were doing in the military for clean energy.

Jon Powers:

I was absolutely blown away by the sorry for the pun, but the energy in the room of these group of Conservatives, who for me I had never envisioned were coming in to be champions and I was completely wrong because of the leadership of the next two speakers.

Jon Powers:

I’m going to start off with Michele Combs, who’s the founder and president of Young Conservatives for Energy Reform. Who would’ve thought that a very Conservative Republican girl from South Carolina who worked for the late Senator Strom Thurman, Lee Atwater and former president George W. Bush, would be heading up a group of young Conservatives advocating for clean energy. And especially at the time of such partisan divide here in our country, we’re now beginning to see, see something like clean energy or PACE, help bridge the divide. So Michele, can you talk a little bit about what makes you a believer and why you found this organization and what you are all doing for the community?

Michele Combs:

Sure. Thank you so much for inviting me here today. I’m thrilled to be here and learn more about PACE. The more I learn about it, the more I like the system. I have a personal story, growing up in South Carolina, very involved with Republican party, former state chairman of the young Republicans there and clean energy never really…

Michele Combs:

I think it was because it was so partisan and the messengers at the time. When I was pregnant, like the women in the rooms that have children, you cannot eat fish when you’re pregnant. I went to my doctor and I said, “Well, why can’t I eat fish?” And they said, “Because of the mercury.” I said, “Well, where did some mercury come from?” And I found out that it comes from coal fired plants that are all over the country. And I’m like, “I cannot believe as a Conservative family valued person that we’re not more involved with clean energy.”

Michele Combs:

I started talking to some of my concerted friends and they said, “That’s a liberal issue.” And I said, “No, it’s not. It’s a family issue.” So I decided to talk to a hero of mine who is also my Senator, Senator Lindsay Graham. We went to see Senator Graham and we talked to him about clean energy and he loved it. He said, “Yes, this is something we need to work on. And I am behind you 100% and I will work with you.” My mother, who is the National President of the Christian Coalition also got involved with this issue. So we started partnering with other groups around the country and started working on clean energy.

Michele Combs:

As I went around the country, I realized that the young Conservatives of this country really get it. They grew up with the renewables. They grew up recycling. They grew up with not the stigmas that the older Conservatives. I know from being grassroots all my life, the way you get things done is you have to organize. I organize grassroots, organize the Young Conservatives for Energy Reform. We have state chairman all around the country and we work with state legislatures, we work with the federal level and we’re really turning not just legislation, but we’re turning the minds of people in the Republican Party and the Conservatives. So I’m so excited to be here and to be a part of this and just see this is part of we’re… I feel like we’re all on the journey together.

Jon Powers:

Michele, for the audience who come from a lot of those 50 different states, how do they engage with those organizers in those states and maybe help educate them on what they’re doing in their estate about PACE.

Michele Combs:

How does my group…

Jon Powers:

How can some of the audience engage your group?

Michele Combs:

We’re organized in each state. We have about actually about 35 states organized now. We have state chairmen. And what we do is we work with the local min municipalities. We work on the State House level. Last year, we worked with solar legislation in Nevada, we’re working with solar legislation today, as a matter of fact, right now in South Carolina. We work with different clean energy legislation all over.

Michele Combs:

If you want to get… We have a very active website and we can get you involved with those people so you can work on a state level, because the young people, like John said, they’re excited, they’re motivated. We took a poll last year. We pulled a thousand young Conservatives from around the country and they actually see this as a value issue, which is very exciting to me because I grew up with the family issues and the marriage issue. But they see this as the new value issue of the young Conservatives.

Jon Powers:

What’s the website?

Michele Combs:

It’s yc4er.org.

Jon Powers:

Yc4er.org.

Michele Combs:

.org.

Jon Powers:

Gotcha.

Michele Combs:

Yes.

Jon Powers:

That’s great to hear by the way. I got into this issue as an Iraq veteran and there got interested in the ideas of energy security and climate change through that national security lens. There are now thousands of veterans across the country who engage in these issues. The same thing, they see it as a value, they see it as a mission for them to continue.

Jon Powers:

I feel because we can begin to communicate more with those stories and locally we can drive these critical policies forward to get hopefully the growth we need in the renewable space. Next I want to talk to Keith and Keith, I make sure I get your last name right. But it’s Keith den Hollander, right?

Keith den Hollander:

Right.

Jon Powers:

All right. Who is with the Christian Coalition. Keith grew up working on his grandparents’ farm outside of New Jersey in the border of New Jersey and Pennsylvania. His mom was one of eight. His dad was one of 12. I imagine the holidays were pretty crazy.

Keith den Hollander:

Just a little bit.

Jon Powers:

So talk for a little bit about your experience growing up that got you interested in this space. The Christian Coalition is not a group that many in the audience would traditionally tie to being clean energy advocates. Can you talk about the progression of the organization and this thinking and how we get to a place where today they’re really helping to lead the fight?

Keith den Hollander:

Absolutely. Again, thank you for having me here. It’s great to be here, as Michele said, learning more about PACE and learning more of the details. I did grow up in a big family. Energy efficiency came natural to us because I was one of seven children. So we had a household of nine. My parents decided to carry on the tradition of their parents and have a big family. I grew up in New Jersey and if you’re from that area, you know the cost of living there. Raising a family of nine. My dad wanted to send us all to private school. We had two choices, energy efficiency or summer vacation.

Keith den Hollander:

If we weren’t efficient with our energy, we weren’t going on vacation that summer because it just wasn’t going to be affordable. I had half the equation down already. I didn’t have the clean energy aspect of it, but the efficiency side, my dad would follow us around the house and turn off lights and close windows that we left open and things that we weren’t doing that we should have been doing.

Keith den Hollander:

I also watched as people like my grandparents tried to make a go of farming in a time when it was harder and harder to be a farmer. I saw projects like wind farms come in and provide lease options to people to be able to lease their land. And so clean energy was creating opportunities as well for people to be involved in their farming business for a longer time than they would otherwise be able to do. Fast forward to when I moved to Michigan, after I got out of high school and I spent eight years owning an insurance agency.

Keith den Hollander:

So I was in the risk mitigation field. We did all of it, property, casualty, health, life. I was used to people trying to limit their risk. And about five years ago, I decided to get out of the insurance business because I wanted to move. And insurance is very local. If you move your customers, aren’t going to follow you hours away. And so I decided to leave the insurance business and I responded to an ad from the Christian Coalition that they were looking for a state director for the state of Michigan. And I met Michele’s mother, Roberta, who’s just a wonderful woman and a wonderful mentor and a real visionary. I interviewed and long story short, I got the job as a state director and Roberta said to me, “I want you to work on clean energy policy.”

Keith den Hollander:

I was completely confused. “What do you mean? That’s what you’re looking for a state director, to work on clean energy?” And she said, “Yeah, let me tell you about why.” And she started talking about national security and she started talking about health implications and she started talking to me about the economics of what clean energy could mean for our country, hedging against fluctuating fossil fuel costs and the more she talked to me about it, the more it made perfect sense. I really was able to catch her vision and say, “Yeah, this makes sense.”

Keith den Hollander:

We started out working on state policy, trying to increase Michigan’s portfolio standard from 10% to 15%, increasing our energy efficiency standards and doing it in a state that had a Republican governor, a Republican legislature completely controlled by Republican rule. This was something that, to my knowledge had never been done before.

Keith den Hollander:

John was talking about, about the military aspect of this. I met with an admiral named Lee Gunn and he came in to speak about clean energy. He said something to me that really resonated with me. He said, “I want you to think about the Kuwait war. We went over there. They cut off 4 million barrels of oil a day. The price of gasoline in the United States doubled. Gasoline’s a globally traded commodity. And we can’t control the price here. Even though we have plenty of it, we can’t control the price because when there’s disruption in the rest of the world, it affects our prices here.” He said, “Imagine what would happen if Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz and cut off 16 million barrels a day and suddenly the price of gasoline went not double, but four times. Our entire United States economy would collapse within 30 days, according to the Military Advisory Board’s risk assessment.”

Keith den Hollander:

He said, “The only way we get out from under that is to make ourselves less dependent on globally traded resources like that. As we have more electric vehicles, as things like that, we’re not going to be so dependent on this.” And he took it a step further and he explained to me how that was going to impact our energy markets going forward on the electricity side. Coal plants are closing all across the country. No utility will tell you they’re looking to open new coal plants today.

Keith den Hollander:

It’s just not feasible. We’re replacing almost all of them with natural gas plants, nuclear plants are struggling in a lot of places. There are organizations that have permits to build new nuclear and are not doing it because it’s not cost effective. We’re left with two options. We have natural gas plants and we have renewables.

Keith den Hollander:

Well, natural gas is not globally priced today, but I believe it was the last year of the Obama administration we opened that up and said it was allowed to be exported, but our ports still aren’t ready to export. We’re retrofitting our ports to be able to export and I’m sorry if many of you know this or not and I didn’t know this at the time. And it really touched me as I listened to it.

Keith den Hollander:

Once these ports are retrofitted and we can start exporting our natural gas, that’s going to be a commodity that’s going to become globally priced as well. I started looking at the prices here in United States compared to the prices around the world. If you look on FERC’s website, the landed price for natural gas in January was somewhere around 2.78, I think. When I looked at what it was in Belgium, it was $10 and 80-something cents.

Keith den Hollander:

There’s a huge disparity between what we pay and what everyone else in the rest of the world was paying. Canada was the closest and they were seven and something. And so I thought, well, once we start trading, this what’s going to happen? We’re not probably going to go to 10. But what happens if we go from $2 and 70 some cents to $5 or $6? That’s a doubling of the price of natural gas. If we’ve closed our coal plants and we’re left dependent on natural gas, everyone’s electric bill doubles too. Who can afford that? There’s enough people struggling to pay their utilities as it is today.

Keith den Hollander:

It’s important that we address this now, we don’t wait until down the road when that happens, because it’s going to take time to increase our use of renewables. We’ve got to build wind farms. We’ve got to build utility scale solar. We’ve got to put in residential solar, we’ve got all these projects to do, we’ve got to increase efficiency so we use less. So our demand is less. All these things to protect the American people from this burden that’s going to come on them if the price of natural gas were to increase that way. And so I realized it was a hedge. It fit right in with that hedging our risk that came from the insurance world.

Keith den Hollander:

This is a way for us to hedge against those rising costs by using domestically controlled energy. And then when you look deeper into it, I saw the jobs that came with it. Local communities when they put up a wind farm and all the people who were taking the leases that they were signing, taking that money and going and spending it in their local community.

Keith den Hollander:

I saw the solar projects doing the same thing, leasing land. I saw people becoming energy independent and that’s a very Conservative principle. Conservatives by nature tend to want greater independence. It fit very well with our Christian coalition member base to want to be energy independent. In order to make that a reality, we needed a fair system. Net metering suddenly came into play and then I learned about PACE and how PACE was putting these tools into the hands of everybody.

Keith den Hollander:

I thought, “This is really cool.” It’s been a journey for me. I spent two years in the state of Michigan. We did get the RPS increased from 10% to 15% through a Republican legislature and a Republican governor. We increased our energy efficiency requirements as well, so we have a combined goal of 35% now for the state by, I believe it’s 2021.

Keith den Hollander:

After two years as a State Director, I became the regional director for the Midwest. And then this year I became the National Field Director. So now we’re taking this program all over the country. We have programs in many states, we’re working on similar issues as well.

Jon Powers:

That’s amazing. Quick round of applause. That’s awesome. Now, that you’re a national field director, you can do it in all 50 states. Just get it done, right. For folks that don’t know, Keith mentioned the MAV, the Military Advisory Board, the Military Advisory Board is a group of retired four-star admirals in general is that now for well over a decade have been putting out some really fascinating thought leadership on climate change and energy security. It actually built into the Pentagon, the momentum for them to do significant programs to put in place. For instance, the Army, Navy and Air Force all have one gigawatt, renewable energy goals each. Not total, each. That many are on track to achieve through third party, long term financing.

Jon Powers:

But many in the federal space or more importantly, this current administration, the federal policy around clean energy is not as friendly or I would even argue right now is not really totally defined. It’s changing sort of regularly with the president, but also you’ve got Dr. Perry who in Texas signed PACE legislation, could be a champion on this, but at the same time is bringing coal empowering policies to try to get for it to change.

Jon Powers:

So it’s a really interesting time at the federal space, but it’s also a really interesting time for the industry as a whole, because we’ve matured, financing is coming in whole different buckets now that 10 years ago would not exist because people didn’t know if solar panels even worked or what energy efficiency was.

Jon Powers:

Cisco, can you talk a little bit about the role in energy financing to help accelerate the country’s position to increase renewables, increasing energy efficiency, but also maybe in specifically on the federal level, what the uncertainty of the policy footprint does for that and what’s the role of the financing community to maybe even change that?

Cisco:

Great. Yeah. A lot’s there. One of the things that’s great about this, when I first started off on it, I convinced the mayor we should work on this is, but we don’t have any money. Whatever you do, you’ve got to find other money. Immediately, there was this notion that we needed private capital, but then I needed some money to even figure out how to do it. So I wrote a grant proposal to the then George W. Bush EPA. They were, I believe the first, if not maybe the second, there were only two grants that came to get that first program working, going.

Cisco:

So from the very beginning, we had some national sponsorship and assistance from a Republican administration to try and figure out how this tool could work. That, I think, set on a really nice precedent. Hopefully we’ll continue that in the Trump administration, as they sort of settle into things.

Cisco:

But regardless there was this notion, there is not enough government money. Whether you’re at a city or a state or federal government, the change. Yesterday, there was a lot of discussion about the fact that the retrofit of our housing stock, which is a crumbling infrastructure, if there ever was one, in order to be more energy efficient, to create energy independence, it’s going to take trillions of dollars. There isn’t any possible scenario in which the government provides that money.

Cisco:

The only way that works is if the private sector and private finance come in, in a public private partnership fully privately to help people make these changes. A lot of what we’re trying to do with PACE now is to say that for 100 years, billions of dollars of low cost capital went to build utility infrastructure.

Cisco:

We now need to take some of those trillions of dollars and move it towards individual homes, individual businesses, individuals making choices to do infrastructure there. Because a lot of the infrastructure needs right now are back at the end of the grid and we’re going to need the same large scale capital, low cost capital sources that built the grid to now build out the edge of it so that it is energy independent.

Cisco:

I think when you look then at where… There’s only one place where that capital comes from and you can like it or dislike it or we can talk about the financial crisis of the past, but ultimately it’s in Wall street. That is where that capital exists. A lot of what I did when I left the city to start Renew Financial was to figure out how do we connect that large scale, low cost capital into this market where it is so desperately needed and has never before.

Cisco:

I think again, the big part of the last 10 years has been the success we’ve had in getting that done. And in general, how the industry has now really made that connection. I’m very excited about what private capital can do. I’m also certain that without it, we can’t be successful. And then at the very end of that train, there’s homeowners making individual choices about what to do. I think that’s that individual choice, empowered by their local government, but funded by private sector capital is the best thing that we have going.

Jon Powers:

When I was at the White House, we launched a public private partnership program with the ESCOs and did over 6 billion in energy performance contract. Same idea. We did no upfront capital, we used private capital to do it.

Jon Powers:

We actually received a letter from 163 members of Congress, mostly Republicans. Your friend Lindsay Graham was on there. It was the most successful thing from the Obama administration that we had done from a bipartisan perspective, because we were going at an achieving goals, partnering with the public sector, actively bringing down our energy use in the public sector.

Cisco:

Exactly. I think we need to get back to that. What this panel says, if nothing else, is that these solutions do not have to have a partisan thing to them. And so as we look now at a very partisan, we say, “What can we as PACE do?” And the first is we’ve got to support PACE in Washington through Congress. There’ve been a lot of great bipartisan support in the house and the Senate side for this effort and I think that’s been very successful, as we’ve had some difficulties with mortgage bankers and others.

Cisco:

But the other part of that then is it kind of… PACE provides an immunity from federal policy. Not totally, but it really says look, regardless of what is happening there today, we can still empower local folks, communities to make choices that are going to make their home safer to make their energy more energy independent, to save energy, do something for the climate, do something for the environment.

Cisco:

Those things… PACE is one of those ones that can run, even if we’re not having for what I would consider a very helpful federal policy frame on these issues today. It can continue. And I think that’s one of the great things about us all being here is that it didn’t change. PACE continued to grow even as the things in Washington changed. I think we’re also providing an example that hopefully they can get behind and we can move past some of the partisan gridlock.

Jon Powers:

It, it’s not like it’s smooth sailing. There is an anti-PACE effort being led by folks that as an industry, we have to fight to overcome both at the federal level. But as you mentioned most of the clean energy fights today are moving to the state level because whether it be on RPSs, on PACE, on the Green Banks, on net metering, all these different policies are becoming state level fights.

Jon Powers:

I think which is exciting for the industry, but it makes the role of many of you in the audience that much more important. So you can engage folks at the state level and tell your stories. Genevieve, you were at that state level in Connecticut and now you’re working across a variety of them right now.

Jon Powers:

Can you talk a little bit about how to engage those states? Sort of the roles in the states? And then we’re also going to talk with Genevieve and Keith about how to go in and specifically start to message towards those more Conservative states and how do we bring those conversations forward?

Genevieve Sherman:

Yeah, sure. Well, certainly on the political side, Keith has a great deal of experience with these state battles, but I think that the major challenges at the state level always are trying to make sure that we have all of the tools that all of the different stakeholders need all at the same time.

Genevieve Sherman:

When changes are made like increasing in RPS or if there is a PACE law that has passed, I know we have some folks on the real estate side here, there are mandatory benchmarking and disclosure laws that are becoming more popular now from the city level that’s moving up to the state. Everyone is impacted by these changes at the state level. That could be the utility sector, real estate, labor and so on and so forth.

Genevieve Sherman:

What is so critical is to remember why. Why we are creating these new laws, why we’re increasing RPSs and so on and so forth. Cisco and Keith spoke so eloquently about those reasons. What can be a challenge on the political front is when you get one thing to move, but then you don’t get the other pieces of the puzzle you need to make sure that everyone is empowered to still sort of have economic prosperity out of these changes.

Genevieve Sherman:

As we transition our infrastructure, our energy infrastructure, also our buildings to be more energy efficient, to be more water efficient, to have renewable energy, we want to make sure that everyone is a winner and that there are not winners and losers. It’s really important to try to bring everyone along together. What I’ve seen with PACE, I’ve been involved in supporting lobbying efforts. We support legislators, we support stakeholder groups when they’re getting PACE legislation pulled together is PACE is one of the very few state level policies that really does create winners across all sectors of the economy.

Genevieve Sherman:

Because it’s going to open up the opportunity for financial institutions to lend money and to a great extent that is Wall Street, but increasingly that is local banking institutions and main street banks when they’re getting involved in PACE, it opens up opportunity for workers. They now just have more financial resources to sell the products and services that they’re out there doing already.

Genevieve Sherman:

It just makes it easier for them to renovate our buildings. It creates more options for commercial property owners and managers and it creates a new tool for economic development for local governments. It really is this kind of like win, win, win, win, win and it is very complimentary to other state initiatives or policies that might be happening more at the sort of utility energy sector.

Jon Powers:

What more can the industry now that it’s maturing and growing do to drive those, I think critical conversations and fights and education at that level.

Genevieve Sherman:

Each state is a little different. These fights are happening in different places, but I think actually a lot of it gets to the utility sector. It actually is not so much at the local level. We have to figure out how to really transform our entire electricity infrastructure and transit infrastructure to new technologies. That is very much a question of a new business model for everyone involved, for utility companies, for energy generation companies, both natural gas plants, solar farms, wind farms and for the companies that own the wires and deliver us all the energy and the buildings. The people, to Cisco’s point, that are at the end of the circuit who are part of that infrastructure.

Genevieve Sherman:

What is really going to drive this change in my opinion, is if everyone can kind of look at the end result. I think there are certain states that are much further along in that, for example, California, New York state in saying, “Well, if we could all look 50 years into the future, what would that actually look like?” It involves our existing grid, but it would be renovated. We would have more real time data and analytics and security infrastructure on our existing grid.

Genevieve Sherman:

Our grid would be plugged into new sources of energy, not just large solar farms, but also solar on homes. We would have real time information and new businesses entrepreneurs sort of growing up and jumping onto this grid and saying, well, we can provide services and we can add choice for consumers. I think there are a couple of states that have looked at that future and then they’ve tried to back out of it and say, “Well, what is the investment? What is the capital investment required to get us there? What information about our grid do we need? What do we need consumers to know so that they can make informed choices about what energy they’re purchasing and so on and so forth?”

Genevieve Sherman:

The laws that are getting us there are cobbled together. It’s a combination of renewable portfolio standards requiring utilities to actually map our grid infrastructure. So we all know what’s actually there so we can all plug in and do what is most economically efficient to bring us to that future. Those are the types of laws we’re going to have to see passed, but most states are kind of inching their way toward it because of the political realities of sort of who’s winning and who’s losing. So you’ve got to kind of get an inch here and there until you build it up.

Jon Powers:

A lot of folks today, much smarter than I have compared to what’s happening and to the power delivery system to what’s happened to the telecommunications in the 1990s, when we went from to distributed cell towers, to the smartphones we have in our pockets today. That was driven a lot by federal legislation.

Jon Powers:

There was a Telecommunications Act that broke up the and started that. We were not going to see that come out of Congress no matter what party is in charge for a long time, I think because of the stakeholders, which makes those state level fights that much more important.

Jon Powers:

Keith you’re really helping to engage at those state level fights. One of the things you’ve done, the Christian Coalition did was help to lead a fight against an anti-PACE initiative by ALEC. And for folks that don’t know ALEC, ALEC is the American Legislative Exchange Council, it’s mostly a Conservative group of policy makers around the country. They come together pretty regularly. ALEC has been known for really putting together framework, legislation that you’ll see pop up state after state, after state, because they get their policy makers and local legislators involved, educated and then literally take those documents and go and file them at the state level. The fact that the Christian Coalition led a fight to stop an anti-PACE initiative was significant there. Can you talk a little bit about how you did that?

Keith den Hollander:

I think like with any fight, ultimately the fight comes down to relationships, right? It’s got to be relationships. And the work that we’ve done across the states, working on clean energy policy, educating lawmakers really was the fertile ground that we sowed to be able to defeat that effort at ALEC.

Keith den Hollander:

We’re actually not members of ALEC. We were able to get in as a guest under someone else’s membership. It’s fairly expensive to become a member of ALEC. Nonprofits have a little bit better rate, but if you go to every meeting, you attend everything, you’re going to spend $30,000-$40,000 a year being a member of ALEC going to these meetings.

Jon Powers:

What does the membership gain to folks that are-

Keith den Hollander:

Voting privileges. Once you become a member… So membership allows you to attend the meeting. But if you actually want to sit on a committee, you have to also pay to join the committee. I want to say to become a nonprofit member, it’s maybe 3,500 a year and then for each committee, you want to sit on, it’s an additional $5,000 to have someone sit on that committee. So you can spend significant amount of money joining committees to be able to have a vote.

Keith den Hollander:

The committees are made up of a combination of lawmakers and public sector companies and individuals. If you want to have a vote on that committee, you have to join. And the resolutions come up before the committee, the committee either adopts them or doesn’t adopt them. And then it gets sent out to their committee as a whole. So we learned that this resolution was kind of circulating through three different committees, tax committee, energy committee, and one other, I don’t remember the other committee that was involved and that it was an attempt to basically condemn PACE and suggest that states back out of their approval of PACE and go in the opposite direction.

Jon Powers:

Do you have a sense of, if you could say, who was behind that, driving that from a stakeholder perspective?

Keith den Hollander:

My understanding from folks that were there was that the Edison Institute was quite involved and some other similar organizations were kind of leading that battle. We decided to actually go to this ALEC meeting, found a way to get invited and attend as someone’s guest. We started working the relationships we had built with the lawmakers there. We didn’t need all of them. We just needed enough to stop the measure. The way a measure works in committee is it has to pass both the legislator vote and the public sector vote.

Keith den Hollander:

There’s two votes taken. One of the private companies, one of the legislators and it has to pass both. We had a decent showing among the companies that were there. There was a decent number that had committed that they were opposed to this, but we were concerned about the legislators.

Keith den Hollander:

We started circulating amongst the legislators on the committee, speaking with them saying, “Hey, remember we talked to you about clean energy. Remember why clean energy’s such a good idea. Remember, this is no longer a right versus left issue. It’s a right versus wrong issue.” This is something that you need to support because this is creating greater access for people in your state to those clean energy resources they need. And if you fight this, you’re going to be moving in the wrong direction. You’re moving backwards from what your constituents want. Our polling within the Christian Coalition shows consistently 70 to 80% for more clean energy amongst our members.

Keith den Hollander:

The Young Conservatives, it’s the same thing. Michele was speaking about the results there, how supportive they are. You’re going to get on the wrong side of your constituents if you go down this road. It wasn’t that we were there giving them technical details to say, “Let us tell you all about how the intricate workings of PACE work and why you should continue to embrace it.”

Keith den Hollander:

It was the relationships that had been built and the understanding that there’s trust. I think that’s the important lesson learned is that you can have all the knowledge, you can have facts on your side, you can have fact sheets. When you get down to a vote, you already have to have the relationship built. You can’t wait until there’s somebody trying to attack what you’re doing to build the relationship and trying and say, “Okay, I’m coming in now. I’ve got all these facts for you. I’m going to hand you this fact sheet. You should look at this and this should convince you that you need to change your mind.”

Keith den Hollander:

You need to have built those relationships over the years and you need to have built them personally, so that when you go as an individual and you ask that legislator, “Don’t vote for this.” They go, “Okay. I know you, I trust you. I’ve met you before. Your information you’ve given me in the past has been good.” And so it was really all relationships and having the right messenger there. There were clean energy companies, there were several wind developers who were fighting. There were several companies that are represented here that were there fighting the battle. But you have to have the right messenger. That was I think the key takeaway in that battle was when the right messenger’s there to deliver the message, you can achieve the desired outcome.

Jon Powers:

Yeah. That’s interesting. Michele, I want to come back to you for a second for a question. I’m going to open it up to the audience, I think after this question. So if you’ve got one, please think about it. I know there’s going to be mics circulating the room, but before my question to Michele and Michele, I’m deviating a little from the script here, so I’m just warning you. Raise your hand if you’ve been to a meeting with your local legislator.

Jon Powers:

So for the folks who are listening to podcasts, about 40% of the room maybe. If there’s anything to take away from this panel today, it’s the need for us as the industry to go have these conversations and to engage through groups like PACENation to help those dialogues. Because as Keith just said, it’s those relationships when things get hot that make the difference and help drive.

Jon Powers:

Michele, with that in mind you guys are working, as you said in states all over the country. Can you talk a little bit about how folks that are engaging with perhaps a Conservative lawmaker that may not be as familiar with issues, how would they go in and have that conversation? What’s sort of the messaging that you have found that works in those dialogues?

Michele Combs:

Well, I agree with Keith. I think it’s the building the relationships, but it’s also the messenger. I think it’s a lack of knowledge to these legislators. What we do is we go in and we talk about clean energy and we talk about how important it is. It’s amazing though, especially when we’re on Capitol Hill, that when we go in and see the Republican legislators, they’re so excited that we’re there. They’re so excited that they’re talking about clean energy.

Michele Combs:

I think that they really like our group because we give them the cover. Like these maybe hard right Conservatives can’t really criticize them because they’re partnering with us. So when we go on the state level, we normally have a certain bill and we talk about the certain bill. For example, we went in last year to Nevada and talked about net metering.

Michele Combs:

Net metering is such a win-win, especially for the state of Nevada, but because of the utility companies and what the argument that they were giving, they were a little confused. So once we went in and talked about how it’s saving consumers, all this money, which are your constituents, which will help you. I think we go in from the savings part.

Michele Combs:

And we also use, I think the national security issue a lot. We bring in generals and admirals when we go into different states and start talking about what Keith was talking about, about what’s happening in the Middle East and sort of ease into this country. And our generals always says that the military wants to be faster, more efficient, safer.

Michele Combs:

I think that’s sort of a way to… Even the hardened, the real far right Conservatives. There was a story I have to tell you all we were at a Christian coalition meeting and there was a climatologist there, a Republican climatologist who was talking about climate change. Afterwards, he came up to this climatologist and he said I always thought this was a democratic conspiracy until I heard it from you. There really is a messenger problem in this country and I think that’s what we are trying to ease the part on the Republican side and on the Conservatives, that this is not a left right issue. This is not a Conservative liberal issue. This is an American issue. That’s what we’re really trying to do. And this is a family issue.

Jon Powers:

That’s awesome. You may not be comfortable talking about a specific bill. You may not know what the Senate bill, whatever is, but I think when you work with advocacy groups, they’ll go in and be the experts. It’s your stories that make the biggest difference, especially if you live locally within that district. It’s really how you connect with the lawmakers.

Jon Powers:

I just want to open it up quickly before… I’ve got other questions, but I would want to get the audience a chance to ask and please use the mic, because we are recording this as part of the podcast. Please introduce yourself. Any questions out there. Can we get a mic over here. Thank you.

Paul Schwab:

This question is to Michele and Keith. Thank you so much. I really appreciated your perspective. My name’s Paul Schwab. I work here at the National Renewable Energy, Colorado from the Republican side. I was curious how… I’ve a lot of perhaps the Tea Party side of the Republican party is very interested in some clean energy policies and that it’s freedom of choosing provider. How does your experiences within the Republican party fit, like Tea Party constituents. Is it primarily Tea Party constituents that are interested in clean energy or is it broader than just that sort of side of the Republican party? What are your experiences with that?

Michele Combs:

For me… I’ve heard… You’re talking about the Tea Party is what you’re-

Paul Schwab:

Yeah, Florida in particular.

Michele Combs:

Yeah, there was a group, I think a green Tea Party or something, but we work with all the groups. We work with just Republicans all around the country and different legislators, but that’s great, what they’re doing, the energy freedom. But we have done similar things all around the country. We welcome any group that wants to work with the Conservatives.

Jon Powers:

And I think what you’re asking, was it limited to the Tea Party? I think Michele you’re saying it’s sort of across the whole spectrum.

Michele Combs:

Yes, yes they are. I know that they’re in Florida or Georgia, but there are groups like that all over the country now that are partnering with us and with the Christian Coalition in different groups.

Jon Powers:

I think Michele maybe undersold us earlier when she talked about the net metering bill in Nevada. Her group was incredibly critical to overturning what was a terrible policy in Nevada and could have handcuffed solar growth there for decades. So the leadership that you all showed in those conversations, I think helped continue the growth that we’re seeing in that state.

Michele Combs:

Thank you.

Jon Powers:

Other audience questions before up front here?

Stephanie Mah:

Good morning, Stephanie Mah from Morningstar Credit Ratings. Thank you for a great podcast this morning. My question is, I’m curious to hear what the panelists think of Senate bill 2155 that was passed by the House, the Senate last week, which is proposing to include a provision to have PACE fall under the Truth and Lending Act.

Jon Powers:

Can anyone explain that?

Cisco:

I’ll take a crack at it. Last year, there was a bill introduced by Senator Cotton of Arkansas that would’ve probably pretty much killed all PACE programs. It may not have been the intent, but that was certainly what it would’ve done. That bill didn’t go anywhere. But as the Senate banking reform bill started to move, there’s been a discussion about whether there should be a component in there to bring some level of federal oversight to PACE. It’s sort of interesting because what you found then is this debate where there’s some more Conservatives who are asking for the CFPB to be regulating a state financing program and Democrats who are like, “Whoa, too much!”

Cisco:

That’s a overlook of federal overreach there guys. There was a little bit of irony which everybody enjoyed, but there was a lot of good discussion among senators and Senate staff on both sides of the aisle. At the end of it, what came out of it was legislation, which we can support. I can’t speak to the broader bill. I can only, this one little piece.

Cisco:

Which says one of the issues with PACE that people want to see some consistent standards is just making sure that we are consistently measuring people’s ability to repay a PACE obligation. That has been passed as part of the California legislation. The notion in the bill is that the CFPB should come up with some rules, ultimately that would create kind of an ability to pay rule for the country.

Cisco:

There’s a lot of complications, PACE, different laws in different states work very differently for PACE. It’s not a place where a large federal presence would actually probably work, but there are certain really key places where there could be some productive level setting.

Cisco:

This bill is moving forward. It does have language that the industry is supportive of, comfortable with and we’ll see whether it gets going. But I think it was one of those great examples of a bunch of debate, kind of, unfortunately, the last minute, where in the end, Senator Bennett was a great advocate of getting this done, came together, came up with Senator Warner with some good language. Everybody said, “Okay, let’s go forward together.” I was proud that we could have been a participant in that discussion and that we got to at least, a reasonably good outcome.

Jon Powers:

What were the forces behind Cotton’s initiative?

Cisco:

It is always easy to sort of ascribe motives to people. I don’t know. PACE is not particularly active in Arkansas. There’s no residential PACE at all in Arkansas. So this wasn’t coming from somebody who had a problem in Arkansas. The mortgage bankers have certainly claimed credit for it. I would go ahead and give them the credit for getting that more introduced.

Cisco:

I think in the end, the focus that the mortgage brought to it is pretty one sided there. There’s a disruption happening in industry in general and they’re not sure which way that’s going and that makes them concerned. But because you’ve got folks in political office who understand PACE, who are fighting for it and who are persuasive, in the end, we’ve got somewhere that we can all agree on.

Jon Powers:

I think we’ve got time for one more question, but before I open it up, if there aren’t any more questions, just a warning to the speakers. I’m going to start with Keith and work down for any final comments. Any questions out there? All right. With that in mind, Keith, any lessons you want to share or thoughts, final thoughts?

Keith den Hollander:

I think as you consider building relationships, sometimes you can be the messenger, but it can be valuable to have a validator with you. That’s a role that we’ve played across the country for a lot of different organizations where they’ve said we have a relationship, but at the end of the day, clean energy for years has been relatively partisan. Not necessarily clean energy as an industry, but clean energy as a movement, the environmental side of it, the organizations that have supported clean energy.

Keith den Hollander:

If you look back at groups like The League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, some of these groups that have typically fought for clean energy policies, they’ve also been out there attacking legislators on the right for years for not being supportive. Just because they can come and speak knowledgeably about the issue, it doesn’t mean that the legislator’s opinion of everything they’ve ever said about them over the years is going to change.

Keith den Hollander:

Sometimes those of you who work in the industry get painted with the brush of those in the activist space who have created some of those negative opinions. Sometimes it’s valuable as an industry person to say, “I’m going to take a validator with me.” Who’s going to say… I’ve done this with a solar company. I won’t mention their name because I didn’t ask them if we could, but we’ve worked with them and they wanted to have some meetings with legislators and asked us if we could come in and sit down with them with the legislators. We just were there not to provide technical knowledge. We were there to provide a validator role.

Keith den Hollander:

We were there to say, “We’ve worked with these guys. They’re great. We’ve seen what they’re doing in the community. We’ve seen the projects they’re working on. They’re good actors, they’re doing a great job and they’re really bringing value.” And just the fact that we were there with them provided the validation that the legislator needed to feel comfortable saying, “Okay, I can support.”

Keith den Hollander:

This because their natural mindset, otherwise would’ve been to validate them with one of the groups that used to attack them or was still attacking them. When you think about advocating for your own interests in this field, think about who has advocated for those interests in the past and the kind of taste they may have left in people’s mouth and how that might reflect on you and think about what you can do to change that by bringing in a new voice or a new validator who doesn’t have that same stigma attached when working with a legislator on the Conservative side of the aisle or working even with grassroots to help educate them.

Jon Powers:

Thank you, Michele.

Michele Combs:

I second everything Kieth said. I look forward to working with you guys around the country. I look forward to, if you guys want to work with our state chairman. I like the idea of PACE because it is non-discriminatory, it’s not a left, it’s not a right, it’s not a Republican or a Democrat it’s available to everyone and I think that’s great. And I think that’s very appealing to people across the country. I look forward to working with you guys.

Cisco:

One it’s been, it’s great having this conversation. I can’t tell you much I enjoy the fact that we’re all here together working on this. You step back and PACE has been successful because we’ve given people individual choices that help solve a problem that they have, whether it’s a business owner or a residential property owner, we’re not trying to push an ideology. I’m not trying to convince somebody of something they do or do not believe in, regardless of where I come from on that issue.

Cisco:

We’re trying to solve a problem in a way that makes our country better, our environment better and helps those folks live safer, better, cheaper, cleaner lives. A lot of what we’ve done over the last 10 years has been to figure out how best to do that, how to use this tool, to empower individuals and communities to make choices that make sense. That part of it is not ideological.

Cisco:

It has been very successful. As I hope, as we go forward in keeping that focus down on how you help an individual make a better choice for them and their family and for… We’re going to be successful. Ultimately the politics will fall away from that because the power of that choice is too much to deny.

Genevieve Sherman:

I don’t know that I have that much to add other than I also have really enjoyed this conversation. Particularly with perspectives of folks that I’ve recently met, because Cisco has been doing this for forever and I’ve been doing it almost forever. But if I could add anything, it’s that you asked Cisco, what is the role of financing in all of this. When you get very into the weeds on kind of what is PACE and what does it do? At the end of the day, it’s capital it’s money that is coming into a set of activities and priorities that a lot of other folks are interested in. There are many conversations I have with building owners candidly, when energy savings never even are discussed.

Genevieve Sherman:

They may just have a need, a problem. As Cisco said, they have something that’s breaking and they have a tenant who is uncomfortable and they need to solve that problem. I have always seen PACE as something that’s additive to the priorities of a lot of stakeholders in the energy efficiency space and renewable energy in jobs, in construction, in addition to having a validator and having folks help us to get this done at the state level.

Genevieve Sherman:

This is still happening in many states right now, in Pennsylvania and other places where there are bipartisan PACE bills that are moving their way through. What we all have to remember is that PACE will thrive even more in states where there are other policies that support clean energy and energy efficiency and so on and so forth. Getting the financial incentives fine tuned for everyone to buy into energy efficiency and clean energy technologies is as important as having PACE there to then put the money behind all of those folks that they want to kind of implement all of those technologies and services. That’s what we have to work together to accomplish.

Jon Powers:

First of all, thank you, fantastic panel. But I want to put a challenge to each of you in the audience, both sitting in the room today and those listening through the podcast. I think you’ve heard it loud and clear from this conversation that your voices are incredibly powerful here.

Jon Powers:

And so you’ve got to figure out how do you get involved? How can you bring your voice to the table? You don’t need to be a policy expert on whatever bill is moving through your local municipality or through Congress. You just need to bring your voice. I challenge you to make sure you pay attention to what’s happening at PACENation. There’s lobbying days, you need to take a part of, if you have a chance to meet with a local legislature. The simplest thing is that meeting, building that relationship.

Jon Powers:

To take it to the next step you own or manage or finance projects, great initiative for your summer interns is literally going through by zip code and figuring out who represents those projects. Why does that matter? Because if you need to influence that member, you can go in and have a conversation about a project in their community that used PACE or used whatever you’re advocating for in this space. Simple things you can do to make a big difference. I think if we continue this fight and continue this momentum, we’re going to be back next year continuing to talk about the growth in this space.

Jon Powers:

For those listening online, thank you for joining the podcast. For folks who are in the room. You can go to Experts Only, which is at cleancapital.com to learn more and listen to other episodes. I’d like to thank the staff for helping to organize this. It’s been a great conversation. We look forward to continuing this conversation well into the future. Thank you.

Jon Powers:

Thanks for listening in today’s conversation. Find more episodes on cleancapital.com, iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you like what you hear, be sure to subscribe and leave us a five star review. We look forward to continuing our conversation on energy, innovation and finance with you.
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