Below is the text version of the EECLP Webinar 4: Residential Energy Efficiency Deep Dive Part Two, presented in December 2014.
Odette Mucha:
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the webinar. Today we'll be talking about the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Loan Program. You'll be hearing from experts from the electric cooperative community as well as the Departments of Agriculture and Energy. Today is the fourth of the webinar series.
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And our speakers are listed here. You'll hear from Gerry Moore from USDA, Amy Bryan from the Jackson Electric Membership Corporation, Danielle Sass Byrnett from the U.S. Department of Energy Better Buildings Residential Programs, and I'm your host, Odette Mucha, from the U.S. Department of Energy.
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The next series in the webinar will be on on-bill financing, and we're excited to announce that we have speakers from the first two EECLP applicants. And that's Roanoke Electric, as well as North Arkansas Electric Cooperative. So we hope you'll be able to join us for that. And that again is January 8.
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So our first speaker is Gerard Moore from the USDA. So take it away, Gerry.
Gerry Moore:
Thanks, Odette. Hello. My name is Gerry Moore. I'm with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I work in the Rural Utilities Service, called RUS. I want to remind you that we recently added energy efficiency as a new eligible activity for RUS loan funds. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Loan Program, also called EECLP. These funds became available in February of 2014. This new purpose allows eligible RUS borrowers to relend RUS loan funds to their consumers. This relending is for the purpose of helping consumers realize energy efficiency in their homes and businesses. Here are a few facts about the new EECLP to keep in mind. Efficiency upgrades must be within the borrower's service territory. These upgrades are to be located on the consumer side of the electric meter. RUS borrowers can charge an interest rate to their consumers for these loans. Start-up costs of up to 5 percent of the loan amount are available to help get an EE program under way. Loan terms are based on the useful life of the EE upgrades. Now, we all know having a more energy-efficient home can help consumers save money, never mind increasing the comfort level for our rural citizens. Residential consumers make up a significant part of an RUS borrower's service territory. So, there's plenty of opportunity to improve energy efficiency in rural homes. Now, this series of webinars was designed to help the potential RUS borrower understand efficiency program in rural areas and get exposure to some of the best practices associated with energy efficiency. We hope the information provided here helps you, and we look forward to your feedback. Next slide, please.
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Now, I've given you just a very brief overview of EECLP. There's so much more to discuss. If you have a chance, please take a look at our website for more information, and consider applying for an EECLP loan. We'd love to talk to you about it. Thank-you. Now back to you, Odette.
Odette Mucha:
Great. Thank-you so much, Gerry.
Danielle Byrnett:
OK, great. Well, thanks, everyone. I'm looking forward to talking to you about some resources that you have access to. I'm going to walk you through a few particulars.
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This is based on feedback from the webinar last week. So we held a residential energy efficiency overview webinar last week, and at the end we got some votes from folks about what particular things they were interested in digging deeper on during this week's webinar, our deep dive. And the response was great. As you can see, we had about 200 responses about what kinds of things folks were interested in. And so we've crafted today's presentation around an attempt to tackle these issues, and then you'll get to hear from Amy about how she's done that in her locality, with their energy efficiency program.
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So I did want to give folks a reminder. As Odette said, there have been a number of other webinars. The responses on the poll last week indicated a greater interest in data collection and evaluation and in financing as the top two items. And I wanted to remind those who weren't able to make it, perhaps, for the November and December, really December webinars, that there was one on cost- effectiveness, which relates to data collection and evaluation, and on evaluation, monitoring, and verification. And as Odette said at the beginning of this webinar, there will be a webinar on on-bill financing in early January. So those are great resources on a couple of those topics. What I will cover today is a few complementary items. And we'll specifically walk you through how you can find them in a resource that we call the Better Buildings Residential Program Solution Center.
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So I will give you a quick, very quick, overview of that. We talked about it last week, in case folks were here for both. So the Solution Center helps those who are running residential energy efficiency programs understand what the best practices are out there, what's been done before, so that you can build on those experiences and not be testing something that's been tested numerous times and hasn't worked. It's really a living repository of examples, lessons, resources. I'm going to give you a pretty good sense of that over the next 15 minutes or so. And to reiterate the point about it being a living repository, this is where you can find the webinar slides from the last couple webinars, and you'll be able to find today's, as well. Those are hyperlinked in my slide and will be at the end. And this presentation will be emailed out to everybody afterward. So the website, if you want to go to it yourself in following along, is energy.gov/rpsc, for Residential Program Solution Center. And it is organized around these six icons you'll see in the center, and I'm going to give you an example of content in each of those six icons, six areas. These are the central operational components of any successful residential energy efficiency program. Even if the folks who are running the program don't necessarily think of it in these buckets, we have worked with hundreds of programs over the last 10 years, particularly the last five years, at DOE, to identify what they do, how the successful ones are successful, what kinds of considerations they've taken into account in order to get to successful strategies, and really what they've learned. And that's what you'll find in the Solution Center.
So it is organized along these central components. It's also organized, as you can see on the left-hand side here, based on different sort of planning and implementation stages, so if you don't know where to start, if you want to be thinking about evaluation, marketing, or contractors, you can instead get started by working on strategy development, or developing your planning documents, etcetera. Multiple ways to work through it. And again, you'll see to a limited degree because it's only 15 minutes, there is step-by-step guidance, there are tips for success, and these, there are examples, there are tools and templates. And also some customization features that you can use. You can actually create your own favorites folders, fully customized only for your access, if you create an account in here. And you can get, you can subscribe to content and get emailed updates when new content is added. I do want to point out that the tips for success, the examples and tools, are from a wide range of folks who have run residential energy efficiency programs out of state energy offices, local sustainability offices, municipal and cooperative utilities, large IOUs, and also nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations. So, the lessons and the resources are not just coming from the largest programs. There are also plenty that are coming from local programs that are working in rural, suburban, and urban areas. But there are rural examples and small community examples that I'll point to.
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So I'm going to spend the rest of the time here actually going in and showing you a few particular things that in strategizing on this webinar we thought would be helpful as you're considering developing your applications and/or actually rolling out a program. So, it's a market position business model piece, which talks mostly about what kinds of opportunities you have in an organization, relative to other market factors in your area. So as a rural electric cooperative, you have a distinct set of strengths and challenges that you face. And the business model market position piece talks about or walks you through how to think about that and what kind of partners and activities might be appropriate in light of your own strengths and opportunities. So I'm going to point to a particular tool called a pro forma tool or spreadsheet tool that might be helpful for some of your planning. In the program design and customer experience base, this is really where the program itself comes together. And we highlight the term "customer experience" because no matter how brilliant your program might be, if it doesn't consider the customer first and foremost, and ensure that the customer's going to have an easy and productive and happy process, they're not going to go through all of the rigors that are required to actually get their home upgraded. And if you have a happy customer, you get referrals. If you have an upset customer, they can really tank your program and your reputation. So we have that first and foremost, and we're going to touch a little bit on the resources here around continuous improvement. How to collect information over the course of implementing your program and using it to improve your processes, your program itself.
In evaluation and data collection -- and both of the last two could also be considered evaluation and data collection -- but I'm going to specifically point to our energy data fact page in the Solution Center, where you can find some valuable standardized information that could be helpful for back of the envelope calculations and estimations. More broadly, the evaluation and data collection component talks about process evaluation, impact evaluations, market evaluations. That piece does tend to speak a little bit more toward the EM and V that was described in an earlier webinar. Then we have the marketing and outreach. This is the part that most people get excited about and are interested in digging in on right away. I'm going to flag where we've got some information about community-based outreach that might be relevant in rural communities, based on the experiences of others. On financing, I know that this is a financing program from USDA, and also that you may very well want to offer financing to your members, to the homeowners who are in your service territory. That does not mean you have to offer the financing yourself. You do not have to become a bank. You can and probably in many cases will want to partner with existing financial institutions. So I'm going to point to some resources around how to make that happen. And then, last but not least, it's critically important in the contractor engagement and workforce development area: We're going to talk about quality assurance. I'm going to point to some resources around quality assurance, because I know you have to come up with a quality assurance plan as part of your application.
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More broadly, within this program component, we talk about how to develop true partnerships with contractors. Some of you might end up actually doing this work yourself on the ground, but hopefully many of you won't and you'll be partnering with contract -- building contractors, trade contractors, in your local area, and incorporating their perspectives in the design of your program is really critical for success. Making sure that you have an ongoing relationship with them and you are incorporating what they're seeing out in the field while at the same time holding them to high standards, is all a very important part of the puzzle. Because ultimately whomever it is that's doing the work is the one that's going to have the most interaction with the homeowners and with their customers. So they are truly critical to your program. So we're going to jump in now. I'm going to actually take you to the website and walk you through those six content examples. It's a little bit slower because we are in a webinar.
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OK. So this is what the Solution Center home page looks like. Very quickly, again, I'll give you an overview tour and then, like I said, we'll go through these specific examples. First, in the upper right corner, there's a nice search box. We'll use that later. There's also a log-in and a register box or button. The register option gives you access to additional customization features. I think I mentioned this previously. You can pull different documents, handbooks, etcetera, in a favorites folder instead of clogging up your own Internet browser favorites. And any time you log in, you'll have access to those. You can go to them and use them as reference. It will also give you the opportunity to get email alerts if you want to subscribe to particular resources or handbooks. We also have on the home page recently updated resources, and you can see right here, the webinar series for this -- this webinar series has recently been added. So you can click to them right from the home page. There are others, as well. And it's worth mentioning that this entire resource was reviewed by peer reviewers, expert reviewers who operate in the program space, and so all of the information you're seeing here has been looked at by external parties. It's not what DOE thinks but we've tried to reflect what others in the field actually think and what their experiences look like.
So let's dive in on the program component. And we're going to go left to right, top to bottom, as I mentioned. The first one I said we're going to do is I'm going to point you to where we pro forma and a couple of other important resources that might be valuable. But this is your first look at the handbook. And the majority of the content in the Solution Center is organized in these handbooks. The same set of tabs for all of the program components and all of the planning stages. The description tab tells you what it is that you'll learn by working through this handbook, what kind of information is in here. And what you can expect to take away from the kind of resources and materials we have. So this is around market position. It's talking about the overview and really describing what market position business model is. It then gives you the option to drill down into different handbooks that go into more detail around things like assessing the market, identifying partners, developing an evaluation plan, and communicating impacts, etcetera. So we'll look at a few of the handbooks.
The tips for success are the result of a lot of back- and-forth between DOE and past residential program partners. We asked them in numerous forums what were the things they wish they had known at the beginning, what was it that they had to learn the hard way and they would love to save somebody else the time and effort in learning through trial and error. And they gave us these tips for success. Each one includes detailed information. You can open one of these drop-downs and you can get a synopsis of what barrier was overcome through the tip, and see examples from specific residential efficiency programs that have been run in the past few years, and they describe what it was that they did and why this was successful, ultimately. We also have a tab with examples. Examples include case studies, program materials, and presentations and reports, all written or developed from a program's perspective. So, case studies, of course, with these presentations and reports, many of these are from webinars or conferences, and it's programs talking about -- from their own perspective, what they did and what they learned. And then, example materials from programs. (inaudible) business model handbooks, or you're seeing a lot of business plan resources.
The toolbox includes templates and forms, tools and calculators. So these are materials that you can take and use for yourself. And this is where I wanted to highlight a couple of things in particular that I think that might be useful as you work on applications and moving ahead. Under the Tools and Calculators, again it's in Business Models, we don't have time to go into all of this, but there is what's called a contractor pro forma tool. This is really a tool that's actually more than just contractors -- it's for programs and contractors to be able to model out some assumptions about how your program is going to grow, how many people it will reach, how many audits you need to do in order to get X number of upgrades or retrofits. What your cost will look like. So this is a tool that might be helpful for you as you're trying to model estimates for what your program will cost and how that relates to its implementation and your loan application to USDA. You'll also see here that we have some toolkits developed by and for specific programs out in the field. One of the ones that I wanted to point to here is the Small Town Energy Program Toolkit. This is developed by a town with 900 and something homes in it. It is a suburban area, but it is still a small community that really operates with a community fabric. And they've provided a toolkit that includes all of their partner materials, all of their outreach materials, surveys they conducted, everything that they used to be super-successful. They ended up engaging 30 percent of the homeowners in their community, in getting them to participate in the program. So these are a couple of pieces that seem like they might be worthwhile for you to know about.
The last tab that's really relevant for you is Topical Resources. This is the kind of stuff that you usually find on a website. These are general informational materials, reports, and presentations. This is where we also have web tasks that relate to particular handbook topics. And so could be used as great reference material. So ...
The next thing I wanted to do is show you what we have on continuous improvement. And you can see that they did, just to jump around here, we have the same program components that were on the home page listed here on the left-hand navigation so you can get anywhere you want pretty quickly and easily. So within that program design and customer experience handbook, we talk about the need for assessing and improving your processes. So improving your program's efficiency and effectiveness, through regular information collection, assessment, decision- making, adaptation, and communication. I want to dig in on this particular handbook for just a minute or two. So under this handbook, and there is an assessment-proof processes handbook for each of the components, it describes a cycle of continuous improvement. And it gives you some suggestions for the types of activities you might want to take, and it points to the right direction for getting more details on this. And it describes in particular that really what you're going to be doing is tracking data in order to assess, on an ongoing basis, your impact, establishing internal processes, regular reviewing your metrics -- all of these are things that can be done rather informally, if you have a small program, but they're still important to think about and make time for. And then it describes how you can drill deeper into each of these for your financing, contractor engagement, marketing and outreach. So I'm going to do a quick -- quickly show you what that looks like from the contractor perspective, or working with contractors.
The one thing I haven't shown you yet in the demo is our step-by-step, and step-by-step in all of the handbooks other than the overviews give you particular steps that you might want to take, and then when you open any of them, you can get more detailed information. And it will provide you suggestions for what you actually want to do and links for how to do it, and tools that will help you do so. So we are looking at assessment-proof processes for workforce or working with contractors, and this describes some of the kind of information that you might get from contractors and that you would want to be tracking. Program operations data, that you might want to be getting. Customer feedback related to your contractors, and we've got some examples here in these three boxes. There's even templates for surveys that you might want to use. There are also examples that are more detailed around how other programs have used customer feedback. How you survey the contractors to improve their programs. And then we've got some additional details around getting contractor feedback and specific tips or suggestions for good ways of getting contractor feedback. Like many programs learned, you really need to have your meetings at 7 a.m. before contractors are out for the day, as opposed to meeting in the midafternoon when it might be frankly more convenient for some of us who work in an office. So these pieces give you a variety of information that might be valuable to you as you are looking to develop your improvement plans and think about what kind of data you might be collecting, you might want to collect.
So the next piece that I was going to show you is our energy data facts. And this is on the left-hand navigation. You can get to it from the home page or anywhere else on the webiste. The energy data facts are data points and sources that we at the Department of Energy get asked about all the time. So something like, what does the average household spend on its energy bills? Of course, you will have access to particular information relevant to your customers, but if in the course of estimating benefits or estimating impacts, you want to be looking at any of the emission factors, for example, that you might want to apply. You can come here and find what we have at the national level, and everyone else includes a link to its source. Furthermore, we have a link to -- for our really primary data sources that we use for getting this kind of national and to some extent state-level data -- the residential energy consumption survey has state-level data. So these are pieces that might be valuable as you're putting together your plan. Perhaps what people had in mind when they asked for data and evaluation deep-dive. OK.
So the last three pieces we're going to touch on are outreach, our financing partners, and quality assurance. So for outreach, I'm just going to show you, you can go through Marketing and Outreach on the home page, but we also have a handbook index here. And so the handbook index gives you a snapshot and hyperlinks to every single handbook that's in the Solution Center. This is a really easy place to start from, if you're not quite sure where it is that you want to navigate to or what you want to go find. And as I mentioned at the beginning, it includes strategy development, planning and implementation, and evaluation breakdowns. We're going to do a quick look at marketing and outreach around making design decisions. Some really great resources and examples here, under the Tips for Success, that are particularly going to be relevant for some of your communities. So things like partnering with organizations or individuals that customers already trust. And we have some specific examples here around working with community groups, working with employers. We have an example highlighted, including a case study, that's a PDF, in a rural community in (inaudible) County, Vermont, and the approach that they used to reach their citizens. They increased the number of upgrades that were happening more than tenfold from before the program existed. And then the reference to our small-town energy programs. So there are lots of examples. You might go through the Tips for Success and then, of course, in our Examples tab.
But in the interest of time, I'm going to move quickly back to the two last points: one on financing. And just reiterate that you don't need to become a financial institution yourself. You absolutely can partner with financial institutions who already have all of the regulatory mechanisms in place and who operate loan programs on a regular basis. So in order to find a financial institution to partner with, you might go to our Identifying Partners handbook. And this will provide step- by-step information around identifying lenders, engaging them, figuring out how you're going to actually contract with them. So soliciting proposals and actually evaluating them. And then tips for negotiating and executing a lending agreement. What kinds of things you want to make sure are in a lender agreement and some templates that you can use. Beyond that, there's quite a bit of information around making decisions for what kind of loan products you'd want to offer. And one of the things that we've tried to do throughout is be clear on our terms. So if financing terminology is not familiar to you, you can also find a glossary of financing terms, in addition to some suggestions or guidance on how to actually go through the decision-making process, and determining in particular which functions your program's going to perform and which functions your partners -- your financial institution partners might perform, what makes the most sense to them.
So last but not least, I'm going to show you that we have numerous resources around quality assurance. And I'm doing that by just hitting "Quality Assurance" in the search terms. Any search that you do will bring up all of the resources that are tagged with those key words, which is valuable, but you can also filter them by what type of content. For example, if you're only interested in case studies or you're only interested in webcasts. You can also filter them by what state they're describing, whether it's multifamily or single-family, and even by organization. So if you think of one organization being more relevant or related to what you are doing or want to be doing, you've heard about something that is going on, you can filter by just that organization type. So in the interest of time, I'm going to close there.
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And remind folks of the website address and that we will send the slides out, as well. Thank-you.
Amy Bryan:
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I'm Amy Bryan, director of residential marketing with Jackson EMC. I've been here quite a few years, designing and implementing the residential programs. And prior to that, I was at Oglethorpe Power for five years working on the statewide level with programs. Next.
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This is an agenda, and my presentation is kind of brief. I'd just like to give an overview, history, what our manpower is. I'm going to stick to our current existing home programs, and then give one example of marketing and advertising. Next.
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Jackson EMC, we're located northeast of Atlanta. Half of our customer base is actually in a suburb of Metro Atlanta. We have 215,000 meters. We're serving a fast-growing area. We've had a long-term dedication to energy efficient programs and services, so for many years, when people got out of energy efficiency, we stuck to our core competency and stayed in the game. And one of our primary motivations is customer satisfaction for our members. Being a cooperative, our members own us. That's our prime objective. And customer satisfaction is directed at providing programs and services that help keep our rates as low as possible, and also keep our members' monthlyenergy bill satisfactory to them. A second thing on our agenda is just to generate revenue. Being an electric company, we promote electric heat through heat pumps, and electric water heating. And the next bullet: Being in a high-growth area, we're interested in strategic load growths. So in our largest county, large developers come in and they develop 1 to 300 homes, and we have programs on the new home side to get electric heat and electric water heating. Next.
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This is a history of our programs. And this is a new construction timeline of our programs. We began in the 1970s. In the 1990s, we introduced home performance testing to new construction through the Comfort Home program, which is a national program. And some of our objectives were to overcome perceptions in the Metro Atlanta area that gas is more comfortable and cheaper. So the Comfort Home program brought with it a one-year comfort warranty and a three- year energy usage warranty for heating and cooling. In the 2000s, we've created our own brand-name program. It's called A Right Choice home program, and we also have a one-year comfort warranty and a three-year energy usage warranty. Next.
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This is a summary of existing home audits. And I know probably everybody on the call has the same history. But we've been offering walk-through and high-bill home visit audits for over 50 years. We've had online energy education tools for 20. We have a do-it-yourself online audit, and also a do-it-yourself mail-out kit audit. We've been doing that for 20 years. And we have the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® audit, and now it's the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR; it's more program oriented. We've been working with that for 13 years. We have customer service reps and marketing service rep online tools. Next.
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So as far as manpower, we have four district offices, and they're run separately and have really a different demographic in each one of them. The first one, the largest one, near Atlanta, we have two marketing reps handling our existing programs there, with around 106,000 members. In our Jefferson district, we have one existing home marketing rep and one new to handle 25,000 members. The same thing in Gainesville. Lawrenceville is Metro Atlanta; Gainesville is located on Lake Lanier, so it has a resort kind of atmosphere to it. And there are large homes in our programs. Some of the custom homes are 8,000 to 11,000 square feet. And in our Neese district, it's small and our most rural area, and it's located just outside of Athens, Georgia. Next.
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So for existing home audits, we don't advertise our walk- through audits, our high-bills, of course. We promote a do-it-yourself approach, and an energy education approach. So on the left side, our do-it-yourself energy evaluation, we direct customers to our Home Fitness Monitor, and we partner with Apogy Interactive with their home calculator. And for about a year and into next year, we're going to keep the home fitness approach. "Get Energy Fit" is kind of our umbrella. So the calculator is called a Home Fitness Monitor, and this imports the customer's bill and disaggregates it and indicates to a homeowner where their energy dollars are going. And then, as I mentioned before, we have the Home Fitness Checkup Kit. It's the mail-out kit that we send to homeowners that are interested. And we utilize Pat Simpson from the HGTV network to be the host of that video. He was real effective in making it interesting and carrying the customer through the details of walking through their own home. On the right side is our home performance testing approach to an existing home. And we call that the Personal Home Fitness Evaluation. This is where a blower-door test is done, flows and testing on the air flow on all the supplies and all the returns, infrared camera, walk-through visual. And then a report is given to the homeowner, which is a Personal Home Fitness Evaluation. And the ENERGY STAR approach helps us learn to rank the recommendations that we felt were the highest to the homeowner. So if it's an A or a B recommendation, we're guiding the homeowner to make those improvements first. The audit costs $350 for the home and the first heating and air system, and we have a $200 rebate back to the homeowner against that cost. If it's a larger home that has additional heating and air systems, our testing company charges another $100 for each heating and air system. And our rebate against that cost is $50 for each additional system. Next.
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Here's an example of our rebates and incentives. This is what we call a contractor cheat sheet that we give to the contractors, because they work with their distributors and manufacturers and other utilities, and it's just an easy way to help them keep our programs and rebates straight. And help them know what they are and when they change. On the right side, Home Diagnostics Solutions is the company that we partner with to do our high-tech field audits, the ENERGY STAR version, which is the Home Fitness Evaluation. And they're an independent third party giving an independent recommendation to the homeowner. We do customer satisfaction research on our Home Diagnostics Solutions company, our marketing reps, our participating contractor network, and incorporate that feedback as quickly as we can to keep it a good experience for our homeowners. We have a loan program. It's called the Home Plus Loan. We implement that program through Georgia EMC Federal Credit Union. The stimulus funds were acquired for the State of Georgia. For the EMC, our statewide association used this credit union to implement those stimulus funds across the state to EMC. And we kept that partnership going. And what we do is we kept the exact same standards for the stimulus funding. It's 24-hour turn-around. The first $5,500 is at a 3 percent APR with 36 months as a term. Jackson EMC buys the interest rate down to 3 percent for our members. A homeowner can get more money through this program with a credit union. Another amount of money up to $7,500, which is at 8.5 percent, and up to $25,000, which would be 6.5 percent. We worked well with the credit union, and that's been satisfactory. We do field verifications on all of our installations that we pay rebates for, and Home Diagnostics Solutions, they do a test-out on improvements that are made as part of that program. So there are field verifications done on all of our loans and all of our rebates. As far as quality control inspections, we randomly do quality control inspections, and we utilize our RESNET provider that works with Home Diagnostics Solutions and our ENERGY STAR providers to do some of that. We have software to track the field audits, the Web activity, the rebate payments. And next year we're buying a simple tool -- it's not real expensive, but it will help us again to utilize some CRM types of strategies in our customer relationships with consistent processes and procedures and emails that go out when they schedule an audit. And you can see our rebates on our left. I won't go into those. And next.
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Here's an example of the board report that we give online. As of the end of October, we had closed 112 loans. There are 18 in the pipeline, and probably by the end of the year, we'll have 130 to 150 loans. This is not the loan volume that we had with the stimulus funding when the interest rate was 0 percent. But it works for the customers and the contractors, and we're happy with it. Next.
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Here's a monthly dashboard that I use for my management to report to the board of directors, the CEO, and the other higher-level staff on what's going on in residential marketing. The first box on the left is where we have set goals and we report a year-to-date achievement against those goals. Monthly to upper management and quarterly to the board. The percent electric saturation -- that's for new, first installations. And currently, as of the end of November, for all the new homes built in our territory, and the partners, we have 79 percent of them that have electric heat and water heating. When I came here about 15 years ago, my manager and I sat down to look at this number, and it was 20 percent. So we're real proud of implementing programs that have affected our objectives of getting more of our product out there and having satisfied customers. On the third line is the Metro Atlanta district, which is currently at 65 percent. When we started working on increasing these numbers, that percent saturation was 8 percent and plummeting fast. We also report on energy audits in the next box down there. We lump them all together: the do-it-yourself, online, high-bill complaints, and field audits. And there's a sales goal at the bottom for the new home team to acquire new subdivisions, lots and apartment units. Next.
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Other areas of tracking and reporting. We contracted with an engineering firm in Atlanta to do an impact study on our programs. And I just pulled out four as a sample. But they gave us three different measurements of our demand-side management, energy efficiency program impacts. The total resource cost is the one that we focus on the most. The rate impact measure, RIM, is also used by a lot of utilities. And the one on the right, the participant cost test, basically focuses on what the homeowner receives as cost and benefits on your programs. So on the far left, the higher the number, the better it is for us as a utility. On the RIM in the center, that one really has to be greater than a 1 to be considered successful. So next.
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The next slide is other ways that we used the impact study. And Odette, can you hear me?
Odette Mucha:
Yes. Yes, I can hear you.
Amy Bryan:
I have lost my screen on my computer, so you may have to coach me a little bit. But this one is on tracking and reporting to RUS for Form 7, Energy Efficiency Addendum. And we take some of that impact study information and report annually on the total annual kilowatt-hour savings and the annual mBtu savings for all of our programs. Next.
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What you see here is just one campaign that we started this year. And it's called our Home Energy Fitness Challenge. And what we wanted to do is push some of our online tools, especially the Home Fitness Monitor. And our goals were to increase customer interest, make the phones ring on all of our programs, and add fun to the process. And so we created a contest. Next.
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So the Home Energy Fitness Challenge started in the summer months. All of the advertising directed the members to the website, and there was a contest atmosphere with prizes. Next.
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The JacksonEMC.com/challenge -- when you hit that on our website, this is the page that came up, and a customer could enter the challenge. And it was very simple, 1-2-3. We wanted the customer to sign up for "Track My Progress" and to create a home profile for their own personal energy report using the Home Fitness Monitor, and to set energy saving goals. On our Home Fitness Monitor, when you set goals, you can ask to get updates on those goals, either monthly, every other month, or quarterly. And that was the basis of the contest, is to get people to look at their energy usage and see where their energy dollars were going, and decide on what were some things that they would like to do to lower their bill. Next.
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This is a screenshot of their home energy report, when they use the Home Fitness Monitor. And at the top, the pie chart shows them where their energy dollars are going for the different appliances in the house. The next box underneath there lets them know if their bill went up or down, how many kilowatt-hours, how many dollars, and it compares their bill to last month, and also current month to last year. And underneath this is also a box where it talks about the impact of the weather. It normalizes the weather for the customer and lets them know how that made their bill go up and down. And also, it tells them if there were an excessive number of days on their bill cycle. Next.
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So the prize that we gave away, we gave away seven iPads at the end of the contest, and that was the carrot to get people to enter. Next.
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The results of the summer campaign were 450 signups. The number of energy reports increased by five times, and the online audits increased by 30 percent. Next.
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Our goals were to continue this, this winter and also the summer and winter of next year. And we decided that we needed to streamline the signup process, involve more marketing channels, overcome internal barriers. We're a very high-touch company with a call center staff to take a lot of calls, and this contest pushed people totally on their own to online services. Next.
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Here's a sample of the new challenge entry Web page. One of the better things that we're doing this winter, it started in December, is to give a prize that's sports-related. So we're giving a gift certificate amount to Academy Sports, and also we're giving away FitBits. Next.
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And that's my program. Thank-you very much.
Odette Mucha:
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All of the webinars that we've had so far in the series have been recorded. And you can go to the website listed here, which is the website that Danielle was walking you through earlier. We have posted all the recordings for the webinars, and so you can go to this website and access the recordings anytime. And as always, you can email us anytime, and we can answer your questions directly.
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So thanks again to everyone, and a reminder that our next webinar in the series will be on January 8, and it will feature the CEO of Roanoke Electric, as well as Sherry Jackson from North Arkansas Electric Cooperative. These are two co-ops that have already applied for the EECLP, and so if you have any questions for them, we really hope you'll join us for that. Thanks again, to everyone, and have a great day.