Training: Intro to ESPC – A High Value Tool for Public Agencies, June 25, 2024

okay well let's get going and folks can trickle in and join us as I kind of get us going here so welcome everyone I'm very pleased to uh welcome you to the first training session of the espc campaign my name is Laura Carpenter and I'm part of the Partnerships and technical assistance team within Doe's office of state and Community energy programs and so my team provides technical assistance and manages voluntary partner-driven initiatives that help States local governments K2 K through2 school districts and other public sector Partners uh troubleshoot issues develop Solutions and maximize their energy and cost savings so I have the pleasure of leading The espc Campaign which is sk's uh newest partnership and technical assistance initiative that supports these objectives uh so this is the first training of uh the espc campaign uh program so you will receive today an introduction to espc as well as an introduction to what the espc campaign training format looks like and you can go ahead and and Advance the slide dub so this is um a closed door session we are uh limiting participation in this training to public sector uh organizations that are either partners of the espc campaign currently or are considering becoming a partner moving forward these trainings will be limited to signed partners of the campaign so if you are still in the considering Camp I uh invite you to join at the end of today's session this we want this to be interactive so uh please feel free to uh introduce yourselves in the chat you can just drop your name and where you're calling in from in the chat uh we also have a Q&A feature so if you look for that Q&A box that's where you can put any questions that we will get to at the end of the session and I'm happy to read those questions uh or you can come off mute hopefully you all are have the ability to unmute yourselves or raise your hand in the um uh yep there's a raise hand feature on Zoom uh so we able to to ask your question verbally so you all should be automatically muted for now uh we will be getting to the Q&A session at the end of this training session and we are recording this training so that we can share it with folks who able to make it today but we will uh just do the training recording online and we will uh cut off the Q&A portion of the uh program so that you all can just feel free to ask anything that's on your mind all right next slide please so I've introduced myself already I'm also joined here today uh with by Dub Taylor dub is the executive director of The Energy Services Coalition which is Doe's training partner for the espc campaign and dub has over three decades of experience helping to advance costeffective clean energy technology and policy through his work in the public and private sectors including as the former head of the Texas energy conservation office and in addition to serving as the executive director of The Energy Services Coalition dub is active on the boards of several State local and National organizations focused on clean energy technology deployment and financing we are also joined by Chris hpen who is your trainer for today's session Chris has almost 40 years of experience managing comprehensive energy management programs and he has worked in Engineering Management and sales roles for several Premier consulting firms and Energy service companies and he was one of the first espc owners representatives in the industry Chris has uh guided more than three billion dollar in projects that include espc energy as a service power purchase agreements and Commercial Pace projects for hundreds of federal mush market and private sector clients Chris's background is in mechanical engineering he's a degree in man mechanical engineering from the University of South Florida and he is also a registered professional engineer in Nevada and he is certified by the Association of energy Engineers as a certified energy manager and certified measurement and verification professional he's been a US Department Department of energy femp certified espc project facilitator for over 20 years and now he is also a consultant for the Energy Services Coalition supporting uh this espc campaign and with that I will pass it over to you dub thanks Laura so uh the overview as you should have seen from the registration page today is this really is a pretty high level introduction although it'll it'll feel like a deeper dive into some sections about espc so we're going to you know highlight uh how to use it how it's applicable for state and local governments how to facilitate Investments through espc and bring your whole team in into the fold and uh in in advance learning for everyone so the agenda today lays out like this we'll wrap up introductions in just a moment then we'll launch and hand it over to Chris and he'll dive into what is espc kind of a Basics uh and then talk about leveraging along with espc we'll go into some best practices talk about a a variety of different resources that are available to support your your objectives and your local espc programs um closing and next steps there are a number of trainings workshops and other activities that are being facilitated through the espc campaign we'll cover those and then we should have time for a Q&A at the end and as Laura mentioned please use the Q&A feature uh believe chat was disabled should be back up and uh we'll track those questions and try to get to everything by the end and if not we'll be able to uh stay over or follow up with you on any specific questions later so who's the Energy Services Coalition if you're not familiar we are a national nonprofit public private partnership organized really to have both sides working together to advance building Energy Efficiency utilizing Energy savings performance Contracting the ESC is a National Organization but really where the where the activity is the energy is where the rubber meets the road is with our local chapters we have 30 plus states that have local chapters some superactive they meet regularly others are uh reforming now that sort of postco we have some new key players in place so uh we welcome your participation uh in our state chapters and uh we can send you more information about that later and importantly for the espc campaign uh we are partnering uh with Laur and her team to provide a lot of the uh technical support and training including webinars like this so with that we'll move over to the uh to the the main presentation and we'll start it off uh with a couple of quick polls just to get a sense of of who all is on and sort of your level of U of understanding so uh the uh the first the first poll is here uh so please take a look at this and um answer the questions so uh how familiar are you are you with espc this is multiple choice you can actually uh answer twice if you think uh you you have a basic understanding and you've also worked on projects and then the second question is what is your role uh either current or planned in implementing an espc project again you can answer multiple choices here and let this poll go for a few more seconds okay so think we've got good participation here so we'll end here and let's let's take a look at uh at the results uh so a pretty balanced mix here so uh first I'm hearing of it about a quarter basic understanding about another third or so planning the first project 20 % uh and then some other folks who are on who've had experience with projects um and uh great to see that so many of you are project leads or that you're in a position to coordinate uh the uh the project uh this is a webinar for you uh we're going to dive deep into all the things that are are meaningful in Project execution uh some of these other elements of legal review uh that's an important element as well Finance obviously uh and then maintenance so uh thank thank you for for that uh at the end of the webinar today we'll do another poll more open-ended questions that we won't be sharing we like your candid feedback and uh you'll see that toward the end so with that I'm gonna close this poll and uh turn it over to Chris uh to uh take it from here thanks Chris thank you dub and uh thank you Laura for allowing me to help out on this uh great first espc campaign training so some of you're going to feel like this is a bit of uh drinking from a firehouse and I apologize for that ahead of time but um it's always hard to do a sort of a high level overview of a relatively complex subject so um you'll note in couple of slides before there was that little uh icon it looked like sort of a light bulb with some gears around it that's basically telling you that there's going to be more on these Topics in coming trainings over the next uh 3 to six months so don't feel like oh my God what what did they say I I wish I had C captured that somewhere right so we'll be able to to get to that so so what is energy sa performance Contracting right there's lots of different definitions for it out there here's one that Doe came up with originally in 1999 um it's actually been in use since the early 80s one of the esos I worked for back in the 90s was one of the pioneers of this in 1982 doing uh espcs and hospitals um I came up with this uh middle definition myself just over the years having worked in this both on the Esco side in the 990s and then as an owner's rep since 2000 which basically says that you know it's a financial mechanism primarily that helps you pay for today's facility upgrades with tomorrow's Energy savings without tapping into your capital budget right which is a precious resource you really should be using for things that don't have truly like economic paybacks to them right um and done properly it has the performance of a hedge fund with the risk of a t- bill and this is a phrase I borrow from an old EPA tagline um but it's really how these things work right you can get really good Returns on these with very little risk if it's done properly um and at the heart of it it's really design build Contracting it's sophisticated design build Contracting with the focus on guaranteed savings so it's like fixed price or guaranteed maximum price guaranteed minimum savings right which you don't get ever really in in the public market place you get price and then there's change orders and then you get what let hope this all works right and you have one year to get the warranty stuff done and then that usually ends up with you chasing folks around to get things fixed and repaired so next slide so from a budget point of you right this is really cost neutral it's one of the beauties of this I wish I'd had access to this when I started this in 1985 I was doing energy Audits and design work and construction Administration for schools and hospitals right through the old Exon overcharge money fund that started all of these State energy offices that a lot of you work at now and by the mid late 80s that money was drying up and doe was paying half the cost of all of these upgrades that we would design but more than half of the folks still couldn't come up the 50% match so a lot of work was done but not a lot to show for it so performance Contracting is a way to really Implement all of this work that can be identified and these three bars sort show snapshots right before your contract starts you have your existing energy and operations Bud budget right electricity gas water you're paying people to keep your your ancient air conditioning and heating systems running during the espc contract right you've hired a contractor you've hired owner reps legal representation all that they develop the project implement it the financing starts the the repayment stream and that comes out of the budget that you would usually be sending to your electric company and your gas company and these contractors taking care of ancient equipment with a small net positive cash flow right then once it's completed and you get into the espc contract you run out the 15 years whatever the the case may be the rest of the savings all go to you and back to your budget right so then that's where you really see huge cost reductions but during this whole process it's pretty much cash neutral so there's no need to like go for a referendum and ask for $30 million like you have to do for a new school or firehouses or whatever next slide so why would you do something like this right and we have some you know pictures over here on the right but a lot of it is you lack available Capital right this has never been the same since the big economic downturn 10 12 years ago revenues that never come back to really fund Capital way it needs to be lots of failing facility and system infrastructure energy cost just keep Rising this can act as a hedge against that because it reduces your overall use and you can actually change your building profile or your facility profile and how you use it and when um can help you meet energy reduction goals support decarbonization electrification if you live in states that have those goals one of the best things for this uh about this for me is it creates lots and lots of local jobs right the construction and the design and commissioning all that that goes around this creates thousands of local jobs every year it can really help attack resilience as we're seeing now with crazy weather all over the place at all times of the year Um this can help you protect your assets strengthening them and protecting critical assets and then it really allows you to leverage for maximum value so instead of like just doing a lighting job or just doing a solar job or just fixing that flooded out mechanic room you see in the bottom you can do this all together at once in a performance contract and lastly integrating this Internet of Things everyone's heard about by now into your facilities next slide so basically taking where your our buildings currently right and Co show this to everybody right with the state of American hbac we have like flip phones from 20 years ago right what we want to do through this is turn it into a smartphone right and that's an analogy I think everybody can understand even if you don't really have a lot of understanding of Building Systems that is where espc can take your building facilties infrastructure next slide so some of the features and benefits right and I'm not going to read all these you can read these afterwards but it really gives you an ability to do a deep dive this investment grade order is a deep dive by professionals into all your Building Systems you know if you have Street lighting whatever the case may be water Wastewater plants this is this can be done for any sort of public asset a nonprofit asset um you get turn installation which is you know one company does virtually all this for you um it's guaranteed to Energy savings like I said before it's it's Energy savings with attached costs and we'll cover that those in in another followup training and you can really use uh espc to mitigate your risks right so when you do this through a regular design bit build all the risk is primarily on you right you hire the architect you hire the engineer hopefully they they basically um display what you want to have done the contractor gives you the bid and then the change order start right because they find mistakes and the drawings and all that there's none of that with the espc right there's no change orders unless you direct the eso to change something there's no change orders so it's it's beautiful from that point of view also allows you to open Book pricing which is one of my favorite things about all of this as opposed to like here's the price you get to see what were their subcontractor costs what are their commissioning costs and all and built up an open book pricing basis so it really is fabulous for public agencies um it allows you to really take waste in your energy budget one of my colleagues calls it Energy Efficiency Equity right and I I just learned that a few years ago I love that term allows you to unlock that equity in your buildings because you're wasting most buildings are wasting 30% of the energy that comes into them right on average you can turn that into a monetization stream for your buildings or reinvest them there instead of giving them to your treasury outfit so you can take that money that you're avoiding right it's not necessarily savings you're really avoiding those costs and you're not having to add any more debt right again like I said before these there's no referendum no extra bonds that needs to get done on top of your current tax base you're taking money you're already spending you're reallocating it you're reallocating it into things like new HVAC Windows Doors controls lighting a lot of it these days where solar used to be too expensive to be included in these deals now you can include as just another measure right and battery storage that's really a lifesaver um in the hotel I'm in today uh they had a power outage this morning and I'm like oh my God I could do my webinar for here brand new hotel right um and even e Fleet conversion so so this can be used for a lot of different things it helps pay the financing cost and non- energy facility enhancements I've seen everything from trash compaction in prisons taking liquid soap turn it to foam soap saves tens of thousands of dollars who would have thought and even sustainability projects like you know helping with recycling education and so on next slide next slide so this is a real ey chart right I'm not going to go through this whole thing so um but basically de looks at performance Contracting in five phases right there's a first one is sort of pre-qualification and planning this is where you want to kind of get started and go you know do I have facilities that really work for this one of the best ways to get started is to hire an owner's rep it's just like you wouldn't think about hiring you know building a new building with hire an architect to come up with sort of the program and really kind of what do we need and sometimes you even hire another architect to do the full design with this hireing owners rep early like what I used to do if you get an owners rep in early they can help you figure out which buildings make the most sense do we want to attack Street lighting help you come up with all the ideas that are going to be necessary to get your folks on board with this if you're mainly technical leads on this call they help you talk to finance legal budget you know pretty much everybody all the authorities having jurisdiction as well and then get everybody on board move to the next phase which is hiring aresco selecting and hiring aresco right the the the biggest takeaway from this is developing the RFP and there's a whole art to that we're going to do a whole training session just probably on on this section um and the main takeaway is select a partner not a project right and I'll talk about this some more later on um the next phase is going into IG development right you selected them now they're going to do this deep dive into your facilities and your energy bills and all this they're going to develop an investment grade audit with interim Milestones like 30% 60% 90% instead of just showing up at a a full you know thousand page Port everyone was going oh my God I didn't have any input into this like you wouldn't do that for a new building right you always have programming schematic design development construction truns right the owner always gets interim Milestone decision- making right that's key to success with this you also at the same time start developing the the uh the performance contract right the espc there the performance contract in espc and this is the legal document that is the only thing you have to be able to hold the Esco feed to the fire right they're your partner in this but at the end of the day you always need contract to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and you're doing what you're supposed to be doing um then once you get towards the end of this you select your your financial provider through an RFP um and you get on to the next phase which is implementation this is where it starts to look a little more like a regular constru design and construction project they're going to finish up the design they get all this fixed pricing for the IG using up to 30% design for most of the measures so that's you know big risk off your shoulders they're they're taking that risk of giving you a fixed price based on partially complete drawings um they do all the design they start installing the measures one of the real differences and distinctions of performance Contracting and Rel construction is this is real commissioning a lot of a lot of what happens today unfortunately is still what I call faux commissioning you know couple of guys with some checklist and they're checking boxes and it's not really commissioning right this is more like what you see if you're ever in the Navy you commission a ship and before it ever goes out to do do deployments that's what this commissioning resembles um then there's post installation MV activity so both during the the the development and the implementation m&v is going on it's a process right it's not a point in time I'll talk more about that later and we always want to get your folks involved in witnessing some of these things right we'll talk about that some more later um the last one here is the performance period so you complete the project you get into performance this is where the things are really supposed to start saving the energy and saving you money because you start to make the loan repayments right usually 30 to 60 days after that this is when the money starts to go back out the door and every year usually 60 days after that um one year anniversary two- year anniversary and so in the Esco needs to provide you with an MV report on the verified savings and that's again where another opportunity where your your owner's rep can help you next slide so this one so the roles and responsibilities in performance Contracting are different than standard design bid build as you imagine I find them a lot better because it ends up putting virtually everybody on the same side of the table right because you're there sort of co-authoring solutions with the Esco and they're your major partner in this you have one major partner is the Esco that's the one that's getting you know the 10 million 50 million hund million doar in in in costs you've got your owners are upis sort of a minor partner but like your risk mitigation agent and then your Finance year who's providing the money and then you need to you know repay them with that over time the Esco brings a lot of innovation creativity and has skin in the game again very unlike normal design B build once you know that oneye warranty period is over good luck they're on to the next project right with performance Contracting they have got to guarantee those savings the performance of the equipment and the savings over this 15 20 year time frame so they end up sitting with you and designing stuff that's high quality really good high quality construction real commissioning all of that they want this to work they don't want callbacks it's the last thing they want right so you end up actually getting much better quality construction with this than you get with virtually any other tool you have in your toolbox right and they're guaranteeing these things right and you're making construction payments from the finance here directly to them so the owners up like said they help you the nice thing about the way this is procured and if you're a procurement person in this you'll really love this you get out of the Esco procurement what would take you three to four procurements to do yourself energy auditor engineer cost estimator and a builder pretty much in one one fill spoop also in standard design bid build it could take three to five years to get the Appropriations to do this doe did a study on this because all these people screaming in the military and others that you know hey we just want to follow our our normal project path and they felt like they got a better value because PC was more expensive and it turns out normal construction is more expensive than this because of the opportunity cost right and your owners provide you with independent education analysis and validation this is key and we're going to have a whole training just on that next so again we're going to have a whole training just on MV right this is the really the Crux of performance Contracting and what sets it apart from normal construction where there's there's no real you know skin in the game like I said that that term for for a contractor and this there is and it's not a point in time like I mentioned it's a process right you're measuring the performance and verifying savings and it's on the Esco to do that with your oversight and your owner's rep oversight because honestly whether this works or not the bank wants its money I jokingly tell people it's like when your teenager wrecks your car you still have to keep making the payments on your loan right they don't they don't care whether you know you're it's sitting in the shop for two months right so what we found over time we've been brought in to do forensic analysis and so on and most of the problems the SPC projects are bad MV right the owner didn't understand what they were buying in and a lot of stuff is stipulated and so that doesn't happen in a well thought through project there's a lot of measurement that gets done and there's a great link here and you'll see there's a lot of live links in this presentation we're not going to go through them we don't have time but this one is a great one about how to do successful m&v and lastly this is contractual savings right so regardless of what your electric bills and all that say the actual savings are what's in the contract and what gets it measured right again that's f for another day next slide so how can how can State energy offices help you if you're at a state right you usually have access to your state energy office or something along the lines whoever is running your espc programs sometimes it's like Department of General services or Department of Public Works or or the sustainability Department um there again another link you can go to that link and it tells you what the enabling legislation is in your state because all of these virtually require new laws because you're superseding existing design bid build procurement uh law right what it helps you do is avoid this term that I learned about 15 years ago I can't claim this one but what you see all the time if you're in regular public construction like I talked about earlier design bid change order contractors trying to save money behind your back all that stuff and you end up with the cheapest available technology necessary to avoid prosecution right and that's it's real it's funny but it's real it's sad this is what happens right you avoid all of that because of this co-authoring skin in the game thing I'm talking about um so you can you can start off by contacting your SEO or whoever the the peer agency is and they can help you with everything training template documents sometimes detail technical assistance mostly high level technical assistance your owner is rep can provide you with really detailed technical assistance I used to basically require esos submit like whatever their Energy savings Cals were in their native electronic format no PDF files that you're trying to look at and see if the math is right or not right um list of pre-qualified es go and owners reps so that you don't have to go and try to qualify all this yourself they can help you with financing options and RPS and also one of the most important things about this and I've done work for probably seven or eight states is helping you get approval from whatever the authorities having jurisdictions are and some of them you have to go to this board then that board then that board and if you screw up one thing with one of the board you go back to the end of the line again right which is which isn't any fun also nazio the National Association of State energy officials virtually every State's a part of this has some great espc resources next so if you're a local government right you can you know do projects yourself in many states you can get help from the state energy office if not you know continue to take these trainings and we're going to really get you spun up on how to do one of these projects over the next um six months or so um and and definitely get yourself an owner's rep right they're really worth worth the written gold um if you're a larger uh local government you can help some of your smaller counterparts which we're starting to see a lot more of now because of the way um some of the federal money is coming out the state's getting money some of the bigger cities are getting money but everyone else is sort of having to you know get it from those those two sources so there's a a great uh case study here we're not going to go into it where Hamilton County which is basically the county surrounding Cincinnati Ohio got three or four other small I mean like tiny municipalities around them that could never have done this themselves right it has to be at least a half a million to a million to get an Esco to even look at one of these especially these days everybody's busy right um so this is a great way that you can both help yourself and help other local governments work together to do this um you can also provide larger pools of funding because you have better borrowing capacity I've seen this with you know really big cities borrow a large chunk of money seminate it out to the different departments within this City even some of the Enterprise departments through the city who are you know the airport and water treatment plant and all that that really can mix and match the funding and there's a great doe guide on small projects here next so I'm glad to hear most of you here are project leads so if you're a facilities manager or director of construction sustainability whatever it is and I've already said some of this that this is how you can get started right again contact your state Energy Office see what help you can get identify these buildings and other assets you have that're expensive to operate you everyone has deferred maintenance issues as a matter of how many million or how many billion you have um that really requires some renewal right so some of the stuff just needs to be replaced because it's old has nothing to do with Energy savings and sometimes it's a mixture of both like I said get get an owner rep assemble an internal espc team before you go out to the market you want everybody on your team there's going to be a whole slide about this on board and we're going to talk about that some more um and discuss this with everybody right and then there may be some overarching goals you have whether it's reducing costs you have to reduce your emissions there's zero targets you want to create so many local jobs because the economy still hasn't come back um in your area espc is a great solution for all of these and secure commitment from everybody in your team especially anyone with veto power right anyone that can stop this dead in its tracks needs to be brought inside the tent then before you is issue your first RFQ or RFP you want to get all this done next so here assembling your team right again this is another real ey chart we're not going to read all this is something good good to look at afterwards so the energy Champion is probably going to be those of you on the phone or somebody you're going to delegate this to right this is a the person that's you know ring leader Champion all these different names they're also the official cat herder honestly what ends up happening here is that they need to get all of these other folks on board with this that includes Legal Financial procurement here on the right side they're the ones that have the veto power right honestly everyone else that are sort of service oriented and legal finance and procurement make the decisions on getting the money or not getting the legal requirements met or not or being able to put this out for procurement or not right so you want to get them on board the maintenance folks right I I'm first generation my parents poor Irish immigrants right and most of my family are laborers and Tradesmen and I can tell you unless you get these folks or keeping your buildings running and maintained on a daily basis unless you get them involved in this from the beginning it'll be very difficult to make this go and most normal design and construction projects are completely ignored I've gotten some really colorful words from my uncles and cousins about that over the years so you want to make sure they're on board and if they are these projects will sink right and you can also help them get better technology to do their job better right which is something it's very hard to do otherwise and of course construction they're going to be intimately involved in a project like this and oversight whether you have folks in inside that can do this or hiring outside experts you definitely want some of this and lastly these approving authorities again what I used to do for states is before we even get to you know detailed audits we go and preview this with like State construction offices with the Fire Marshals and all those because they can stop your project debt right give them you know tell them what you're going to tell them tell them tell them what you told them next so selecting the partners right again I probably already talked about half of this uh but again owner reps one of the first things you want to do um it's not easy to find them right it's a real Niche specialty doe assembling model procurement and contract docks uh to do this that's going to be out in a few months I'm actually the one putting it together for them um they're paid fee for service just like most engineering firms so for the first you know 6 nine months you're paying them out of here utility budget Professional Services budget whatever but then when you go to borrow the money to to pay the Esco say it's you know 10 million for the Esco project you borrow another 100 200,000 whatever the number is and then you can take those proceeds reimburse yourself what you spent to date then keep that money in account to pay the owners up as you go through the construction and acceptance period and then lastly there's this link to this white paper I wrote for doe about eight years ago about um using owner reps so the Energy Services Company decision it is the biggest decision you're going to make is selecting your partner in this if you have a pre-qualified list of providers that's great we usually recommend you take that list instead of just picking somebody at least put out sort of a notice of opportunity here's what we we'd like to do please tell us what you think you could do to help us right and Doe's got some uh template docks that are coming out here uh shortly um you want to do a detailed review of the Esco proposal submissions and please don't ask them to do free energy audits that results in nothing but fairy tales right until you do the detail IG that's the only thing you can really Bank on that's why it's called investment great audit always short list and interview the top three firms in in person if you can right stuff like this is great but when you get down to it they're going to be in your buildings for years and you want them to be people you can build trust and Report with and the only way to do that at least for me I'm old school is is in person right so you know walking to the coffee machine together and talking and that kind of thing really building relationships um you want to be able uh understand the markups and indicative pricing ask lots of questions and at the end really get a good Comfort going between you and that staff not the closer who flies in in the expensive suit the folks are there during the interviews lastly the finance year this is probably one of the easier um decisions you're going to make because either you already have a financial adviser or you have someone that can help you do this in house right your own CFO and so on and there there's probably some likely suspects you already use for financing right but similar to the Esco you put it an RFP terms conditions so on you want to bring them on when you're about 30 50% through with the IGA and get indicate rates for them as the the Esco is putting together the final cash flow before you go for approval next slide okay some of the best practices around this and again there's a lot of words here but I've already talked about some of these one of the things about owner rep is try to get somebody that's not working for esos that can create a conflict of interest i' I've seen it um talk about and communicate your objectives and challenges early and often right um educate everybody we've already talked about that from The Boiler Room to the SE Suite talked about the onm staff you want to consider really Leading Edge not bleeding edge Technologies lead that to like Google Facebook and IBM um for brand new technologies you're you're you're serving the public primarily right you want stuff that's absolutely going to work um if you can integrate building occupants especially if you're in education you know getting young kids involved in this high school and college students involved in this stuff it creates a marketable skill on their resume that that's almost Irreplaceable right and please don't tell us gos we want this done that done that done that done right you you let them use their creativity give them ideas here's the things we're thinking about but let them tell you in their own words what they think will work and then you work this out together right because they can be super creative and Innovative um in the procurement side again I've already talked about most of this stand documents it's all about qualification and and past performance and who's the staff I've already talked this maximum percent of hard cost so you can get indicative pricing so that you're not going to get a price for the job it's not going to get $10 million but it's going to be like 1% 2% 3% and that's something you can compare on a table easy enough and like I said before don't have them doing free energy Audits and then before they actually start the IG and again we have template documents for this you're going to negotiate an IGA agreement with some help from your owner's rep so that you know how long it's going to take what's the scope what are the deliverables and what's the walkway fit right because esos are not in the business of doing energy audits to make money they always lose money on right that that that's just their way to to get to do the construction next so once you get into the implementation period using comment response resolution documents is something that Doe pioneered like 20 years ago when I was first starting as a project facilitator it allows you to have a Trail right and if you're some of the more sophisticated construction folks know about this where you can like track projects through uh there's Pro I forget the name but there a bunch of these but comment response resolution gives you the ability to make these interim changes see why you made those decisions you made especially if there's turnover right it really helps in the long run do lots of regular meetings weekly bi-weekly it really promotes integration and and and incremental decision- making try to keep the same people on hallway through makes sense co-authoring no surprises at the end we talked about this already uh verifying equipment meets the best in the IGA um and again I talked about commissioning it it it is so absolutely important and making sure that you of folks are witnessing this it it really helps make these things work successfully right and getting thorough training again a normal construction the training is honestly a joke right they hand you the binders and the keys on the way out and then you're left to try to read through these things here there's like real inclass and Hands-On training with recording so that as part of new onboarding they watch the safety videos the harassment videos all that and the espc videos for MV there's you know tons of these I'm not going to read through these but um we're going to get into all of this when we do the m&v session next so you've got this great project there's a lot of documentation how do you keep track of it right but you want to save everything we all know what it's like trying to save documents today it's up in the cloud it's on my desktop it's in the servers you lose connection what you do so thankfully wish we had this years ago when I was doing this full-time Department of energy hired Lawrence breley lab to create this e project Express right it's a free online uh cloud-based um service that allows you to save everything and you can run these amazing reports and all of this with it it is such an amazing tool um and there's going to be a training session on this in August I believe but we'll talk about that more later next so leverage Federal funding right this is the biggest thing to hit this industry since I've been at this right since the Exxon overcharged money went to Department of energy in in the early 80s this is the biggest by far like era funding you know 12 years ago this is 10x or more of that right I'm not going to go through a list there was a webinar about this uh a month or two ago I'm sure a lot of you saw that these links are all very helpful the real takeaway for this is that any public agency or nonprofit can get a minimum of 30% of all their solar battery charge heat pumps clean vehicles charging stations all that paid for cash by the IRS but it's done in aers so you still have to plan for paying for this whole project then a year or two later you get the money right so that that's a whole another topic the th the thing about this for me it's great to have this funding you need to be able to get the rest of it right too some of this funding can be used to pay for Technical and planning assistant like hiring legal right hiring Bond counsel hiring owner reps that can all be used for this sort of stuff here's some great uh guide books and the links in the bottom next resources again a lot of Great Links here I tested all of them they all work again on your own time you can you can run through this this pcnc one is great it has a whole course on how to be an owner's right so even if you're you're you're the the Project Lead it would be really helpful to take this one that's right in the middle you'll learn a ton and that's it for me thank you all so much not not quite it for you Chris but yeah I do want to step in here and do a brief overview of the espc campaign we not do this on every training I know several of you on the call are already partners um but again just for those who are not have joined today's training you know this is our technical assistance and partnership initiative through which we are working with States local government schools Health Care Centers and others uh universities you know to really help you um expand and enhance the use of performance Contracting to achieve your objectives and collectively we're hoping to reach a billion dollars in measured and verified savings under this initiative so through this program you can receive access to doe technical assistance such as this training um as well as really have the opportunity to share your own experiences and Lessons Learned and best practices with one another we really want to work with you to demonstrate the impact of these projects and showcase uh your achievements by uh integrating you into our webinars and other uh activities and working with you to develop case studies and other implementation models that will help others and help the market move forward so we were offering training such as this one which I understand that we're having some issues with letting you unmute yourself today so please bear with us we will make it more interactive going forward um as well as public facing webinars peer exchange opportunities uh and uh office hours time that you can set aside to really dig in with a technical expert so all of these opportunities will be advertised in the ESC campaign newsletter uh so please feel free to use that QR code or reach out after this to to uh get in touch and sign up if you haven't already okay I'm going to hand it back to you Chris all right all right closing thoughts next slide so that was a lot of information I know okay and this all sounds I'm sure like oh my God there's a there's a lot to this I didn't realize there was so much to this um and those of you that have done these projects before know right there's a lot to this but boy you you you do this the way it should be done right designed build is complicated too but it's a lot better better than build design right that's how I look at this but this has been going on since the early 80s right state of Washington state of Ohio had been doing this literally since the early 80s US Department of energy started this through epac 92 right and that really started getting going in the mid 90s and there's over 7 billion a year of this done every single year and it's growing every single year um there is National model instruments we're going to create this program in a box there a lot of resources out there and there's lots and lots of people here to provide you with help and this espc campaign is wonderful I've been doing this a long time this the first time I've really seen doe and and this office dive in like this right it's been great and Laura's been doing a great job with this and there's more and more of these third party owners reps out there right we need to grow this business just like commissioning agent 20 25 years ago people back then were like I don't know that's expensive and now you wouldn't you wouldn't build any building without a commission agent it's just it's unheard of virtually right so that's where we're going with this and uh next slide so success awaits right the benefits I already talked about a lot of this saving energy environmental stewardship creating jobs right creating jobs is so key to this and good well-paying jobs creating jobs for young people who are you know coming out of college or coming out of trade school looking for things is a perfect place and for me resiliency is absolutely that this is one of the best ways to to improve the resilience of your facilities um and for me and we I talked about just touched on it earlier healthier learning and workings Co showed us the the you know terrible condition our schools are rent from an hbac point of view I mean it really peeled back the Band-Aid right and this is a way to solve that and it really can help you reach many targets simultaneously next so as uh Laura said um there's going to be additional trainings we've got this getting started the E project Express utilizing owner reps we talked about these template documents this is going to be great I mean to be able to walk you through this really is going to take a a lot of the unknowns out of doing one of these developing an m&v plan it's we're going to create literally like the yellow brick road to success of how to do a project um there's some great case studies um like uh dub was telling me about this one a few days ago that Texas GSA did six phases of espc and it's one beautifully um espc and H high red we're going to have one applying Lessons Learned and then tips and tricks that's where these best practices I covered in like three and a half minutes we're going to do an hour just on that right and we could do a half a day just on that but this is just a taste of what's to come next and here we are