IRA Home Energy Rebate Programs Informational Webinar (Text Version)

This webinar highlights design considerations for the Home Energy Rebate programs authorized through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) Sec. 50121 (Home Energy Performance-Based, Whole-House Rebates) and Sec. 50122 (High-Efficiency Electric Home Rebate Program). The webinar also highlights IRA Sec. 50123, which authorizes State-Based Home Energy Efficiency Contractor Training Grants.

Video courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy

Description:

Text version of DOE webinar discussing how states, tribes, contractors, homeowners, and other groups can prepare for distribution of home energy rebates.

Text Version:

>>Michael: All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the webinar on the Inflation Reduction Act Home Rebate Programs here with the Department of Energy. We're going to go ahead and get started in a couple of minutes. We're going to give people a chance to log on and come in from their previous meetings. But we'll get started in just a minute or two.

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And folks that are just joining, we're giving people a couple of minutes to log on. So we'll get started shortly.

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All right. Well, let's go ahead and get started with this webinar. Again, thank you, everyone, for your time. We'll be talking about the IRA home rebate programs, the Inflation Reduction Act Home Rebate Programs that will be coming out here shortly.

Before we get started I want to go ahead and do just a quick bit of housekeeping. We're going to be using Menti to gather data and ask questions. So you can either type the URL into your web browser, you can click on the link in the Zoom chat box, or you can scan the code here with your smartphone, which will help bring you to that site.

Menti is a very helpful tool for us. We really want to collect your perspective, we want to learn about what you'd like to see, and we'd really like to – I mean how do I say this? We'd like to get to the what-abouts and those technical questions that many of you I'm sure have.

Next slide.

So I want to go ahead and just welcome everyone here to this webinar. My name is Michael Forrester; I'm the Principal Deputy Director here in the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, or what we say in government talk, we call ourselves SCEP, at the office of the United States Department of Energy. I'm joined here by a couple of my colleagues that were helping me to support and develop the rollout of these major provisions here under the Inflation Reduction Act that we're going to be discussing today. And our goal really is to provide as much information as we can about these forthcoming programs that are going to work to help homeowners, to help residents, to really help them improve their energy efficiency, reduce their energy bills, improve their indoor air quality, and help mitigate some of the energy burden that we see across our country right now.

So we hope that you find these programs really informational and continue to engage with us, continue to ask questions, continue to participate in this dialogue. And I just want to preface before we really get into the programs as a whole that these programs are still very much in development. So we're going to share with you today what we can, but there may be questions that we can't answer because there's still additional information that needs to be collected and determined as we go forward.

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So what we're going to discuss today, we're going to start out, I'm going to talk a little bit about my organization, the State and Community Energy Program, one of DOE's newest offices. Then we're going to discuss the impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act, and then finally we're going to talk about the actual IRA provisions that SCEP is managing, get into a little bit of the details of the program, and then finally go into kind of the immediate next steps that SCEP and DOE are taking to administer these programs and bring them forward.

So what we're going to talk about really – what we're really going to focus on today is the Home Energy Rebate Programs, the Residential Energy Contractor Programs, and again, I would really encourage anyone, if you have specific questions to please place them in the questions box so we can gather that information. I mean obviously with almost 400 people on this webinar we're not going to be able to answer every single question, but we do want to gather that information so we can take that into account as we go into program design.

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So let's go ahead and kick it off. We're going to talk about our new office at the US Department of Energy that's going to be rolling out these programs. I'm really excited to share a little bit more about SCEP.

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So SCEP was formed in January of this year, and really our overall goal is to accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies, reduce energy costs for households and business, create economic development, and create high-quality jobs for individuals. I mean if you listen to the Secretary Granholm speak, she focuses on deploy, deploy, deploy, deploy, and SCEP is a result of that focus of deployment. The Department of Energy has historically been a research and technology agency focused on things like appliance standards or developing new and innovative technologies.

But now we've shifted; we know that in order to address the climate crisis we have to deploy, we have to put steel in the ground, we have to move these programs forward. And SCEP is a direct result of that need to deploy. SCEP is obviously in full support of President Biden's Justice 40 initiatives, which goal is to deliver 40-percent of the clean energy investments to historically disadvantaged communities and those that are experiencing the impact of climate change the most. So our organizations will consistently engage with environmental justice groups, labor groups, and communities to help shape the programs that are delivered and help speed up their implementation and execution.

All said and done, SCEP manages a portfolio of nearly $16 billion. That is a combination of annual appropriations, appropriations from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, otherwise known as BIL, and the Inflation Reduction Act, AKA IRA. And these programs we're going to talk a little bit more about on the next slide.

So what SCEP is is we're a combination of foundational programs that have previously been in DOE for over 40 years, things like the Weatherization Assistance Program, where we work to weatherize low income homes across the country. And currently we annually weatherize approximately 35,000 homes across the country; however, with the increased funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law we will weatherize approximately 500,000 homes. We also have the state energy program where we provide direct funding to states to allow them to execute and deploy energy conservation programs in their states to meet their needs. These are programs that are developed exclusively by the state, so we will provide funding directly to the states, but ultimately the states, based on their own unique situation and their needs, will develop programs to meet their stakeholders.

We also have a lot of new and updated programs such as the Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant Program, or EECBG; the Local Government Energy Program; and the Energy Futures Grant. These are programs that are dedicated to helping local communities build their energy – to build and execute energy conservation and decarbonization programs, and as well as to activate the local communities and community stakeholder groups to move towards a more clean and green future.

But what we're really here to talk about is we're here to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act. So if you look on this slide here you're going to see these blue bubbles, and these blue bubbles represent the programs that have newly been added to the SCEP office through the Inflation Reduction Act. And this is what we're really going to spend the bulk of the time talking about today.

So quick question. As I've introduced myself, I want to find a little bit more about you. So we want to go ahead and ask who's here on this call today. So we're going to pause for just a second to allow people to really put in, you know, who's here, what is the audience that I'm speaking to, who do you represent? We want to find out a little bit more about the audience going forward. And so I'll pause for just a second right here.

And so what we see here is we see kind of the word graph of what's really coming out. And do we can see we have a number of utility representatives, we have a number of state energy offices, local governments, manufacturers, all sorts of individuals that represent both those that are deploying these programs, such as our state energy offices; those that are dealing with the impacts of some of these programs, like our utilities; and then the manufacturers, who are also very essential in growing the technologies that these programs are going to help implement. So this is really great to see that, and welcome everyone who has decided to join us.

All right, next slide.

>>Adam: We also have a question, where you are calling in from, and it's primarily a question of where you are based. So please put a pin on the map and we'll see the full diversity of the geography that we have represented here.

>>Michael: Yeah, we want to see dots all across the country. This is a wide-reaching program, so we'll pause here for just a second to please allow everyone to put yours in. We've got 150 responses right now, we've got 400-plus people on this webinar. Keep plugging in, plugging away so we can see who's here, who's interested, who wants to tell me that they're there.

Great. Great to see. Great to see. We've got wide representation across the country, showing a lot of interest.

All right, let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

So what is IRA? What is the Inflation Reduction Act? This is a law that was signed by President Biden in August – August 16, 2022, so it's a relatively new and it's a really big deal. It's a really, really big deal. It's the biggest swing that the United States has really ever taken at tackling our climate crisis. So this legislation seeks to reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40-percent by 2030. It's going to spur investment in green energy, it's going to create jobs, and it's going to reduce energy costs for Americans.

But I just want to pause right there and repeat, reduce carbon emissions for 40-percent by 2030. That's eight years from now. So we need to execute and implement this program quickly and efficiently in order to achieve those carbon reduction goals.

This legislation contains a lot of great programs, some of the key provisions that are going to help homeowners make energy updates to reduce their energy costs. And so if we do this right, if we implement IRA correctly, we're going to shift the market. It's going to bring down costs and increase demand for our clean energy workforce. It's going to act as a catalyst for shifting us towards a clean energy economy and it's going to make these durable long-term changes that creates that market shift, that creates that demand, that revolutionizes the way that we do business around energy, that reduces our carbon emissions into the future.

So we've said that what we're looking at here is we're looking at IRA as an overview. We can see that it's approximately $369 billion in climate investment, which is a huge investment over the next ten years. But what it does is a couple things I want you to notice here when you look at this, is that we can see that there's approximately $277 billion in tax credits. Now I don't know if you've been following the tax credit market, but the tax credit market over the past couple of years around renewable energy, energy efficiency, has oscillated back and forth, will they, won't they, will these tax credits be extended, will they not be extended? And that causes market paralysis, because the market needs long-term planning in order to have time to develop and execute a project.

So what IRA does is it really provides that stability over the next ten years that those tax credits are going to be around. It also provides a direct investment to consumers with incentives that then we'll talk about that in a little bit, that will deliver thousands of dollars in home and transportation energy savings. And it's also specifically focused to benefit low and middle-income consumers, those that are in historically disadvantaged communities and those that are going to be impacted by community – by the transitions to clean energy.

So for example, you know, a program is in the EPA to help increase investments for zero emissions in ports, and there's also funding for direct investments in environmental justice communities. And that's outside of DOE, but it's important to note that this really does touch all of the federal government and much of our economy.

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So what you're looking at here is really the direct investment of IRA in DOE specifically. So IRA is going to provide approximately $35 billion in the Department of Energy to invest in clean energy. So $14 billion of that investment will go to our loan programs office for business innovation loans to help spur the next generation of clean energy companies. We have $9 billion for home and building efficiency programs, $6 billion to improve our clean energy manufacturing environment, $3 billion to improve our electricity grid, additional money for research around our National Laboratory infrastructure, and over $1 billion for our Defense Production Act.

So what the Defense Production Act does is it recognizes the key national security issues of a clean energy environment, you know, recognizing that funds must be utilized at EPA as a tool to accelerate domestic clean energy manufacturing, and so the bills, rebates, and tax credits are going to provide that certainty and stability to allow manufacturers to invest here in America and to prevent supply chain disruptions that we've seen over the past couple of years through the pandemic.

So all said and done, all of these programs are going to transform our economy, they're going to clean our air, they're going to decarbonize our economy, and they're going to help improve our local communities in hugely beneficial ways. So both the infrastructure law and the inflation reduction law is dramatically improving the capacity of the Department of Energy and across the federal government to develop and implement these key core programs to help meet the president's energy and client proprieties.

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So here in SCEP, which is what we're really here to talk about today, two of the home energy rebate provisions live. We have approximately $8.8 billion to make electricity and efficiency upgrades in households across the country. So these funds actually come in two separate provisions. One provision is focused on the energy performance of the home, how much energy savings can improvements be made to the home. So if you reduce your home's energy consumption by a significant amount you can receive a rebate on those installations. The second one is an incentive focused on efficient electric technologies for low and moderate income households. So you can go or install a specific appliance and receive a rebate for that appliance.

We have approximately $200 million for IRA to help fund residential energy efficiency contractor training, so we need to make sure that we train our workforce up to be able to install these technologies. And so we want to make sure that we invest in the American worker. And finally, we have approximately $1 billion in assistance to state and local government to support the adoption of the latest building energy codes. So as we retrofit and build new buildings what are the energy performance requirements or appliance requirements as we construct those buildings? And really that's the long-term play, because we know buildings, as we build them, as we retrofit them now, their lives are significantly expanded and they'll be around for, you know, 50-100 years. So if we're to meet our climate goals we need to make sure that the buildings that we're building now meet those high-performing energy code or net-zero code standards.

So what we're going to do here, given our last little bit of time, we're really going to focus on the first three, the two home rebate energy provision, and the energy efficiency contractors programs. So more information is going to be coming about the energy codes, but really we want to take this time to focus on those three provisions.

So quick Menti questions to the audience here, because again, we want to hear from you. So given that, or given what you know about the Inflation Reduction Act, can you let me know what you're excited about? What are you interested about? What makes you pumped?

So we've got smart electrification, electrification, market transformation. All of these are great. So we can just see things as they keep going. Helping low MI, low to moderate income homes, electrify, which is great, consumer tax credits. Awesome. Again, more low income assistance. Yeah, more durable market change for decarbonization. I'm actually really excited to see the way that these investments move the market over time. Again, workforce development – a couple of workforce development focuses. Excellent. Excellent. So we can see there's a lot of things in here that a lot of people are really, really excited about. Keep putting in your comments; keep taking a look at everything that's there.

But we can see there's something in here for everyone around that lasting impact. You know, is it jobs? Is it technologies? Is it energy savings? Is it impact to the American citizen? I mean all of these are great things, and so we're excited to see all of this.

Okay, let's go ahead and flip it back.

We'll talk a little bit about the home electrification rebate programs. So now that we've gone over SCEP and now that we've gone over IRA we're going to dive in a little bit deeper into the $8.8 billion dollar program for home energy rebates, and we'll talk about the contractor training as well.

Next slide.

So real quick here are some of our overall goals around these IRA programs here in SCEP. We want to make sure that we have a positive and significant impact both in the immediate future and in the long-term. We want to make sure that we're helping households across the US lower their energy bills. I mean we also want to improve the comfort of their home, because an efficient home is a comfortable home. We want to make it easier for people to access these incentives, we want to make it as simple as possible so that people can take advantage of these opportunities. We want to make sure that we have a qualified, well-trained workforce to help our residents, to help our citizens install these new technologies. And we really want to help spur this market demand for residential energy efficiency, because we will show the value of these energy upgrades.

And frankly what I'm really excited about is that this will be something that Americans will be talking about. You know, they'll be talking about their new HVAC upgrades. They'll be talking about their new water heater upgrades. I know that that's dorky, but really like the opportunity here to educate the American consumer about what they're putting in their home and about how their home utilizes energy is huge, because this will be on their mind as they're looking to upgrade their homes and as they're looking to improve their homes. Which is great because we know that home energy – you know, home energy uses are approximately 20-percent of our US carbon emissions, and energy bills are a huge part of someone's take-home pay. So these rebates and these conversations and this market transformation is really going to help reduce our carbon emissions and reduce the costs to the American citizen.

Next slide.

So real quick we'll talk about these home energy rebates. So it's actually two separate provisions, as I talked about. One provision focuses primarily on home energy retrofits and it's based on energy savings. So you're trying to reduce the overall consumption of your home, and based on that reduction you can receive a rebate. The second is for the installation of specific electronic appliances and equipment. So we're going to refer them as the Home Efficiency Rebates Program and the Home Electrifications Rebates Program. So the Home Efficiency is that reduction of energy, and the Home Electrification is that appliance – are those appliance rebates. And so together they make up our homes rebate programs.

So Congress has made these funds available long-term, so it's not something that is set to expire in the immediate near future. Both of these rebates are available out until September of 2031. And Congress has also allocated a specific allocation for the home electrification rebates to Indian tribes. So approximately $225 million is directed specifically for Indian tribes.

Overall these funds can be used to develop and implement residential energy efficiency projects in US households, and state and Indian tribes can use the funds to provide direct rebates to households, contractors, or other property owners. A couple of key points, some of these programs the amount of those rebates will be determined based on somebody's income. We want to make sure that people are working with trusted contractors who can help streamline the administration of these rebates. We want to make sure that we're able to verify the quality of the installation and that we can document that these home upgrades are completed. And we want to work and help develop programs that allow households, you know, bundle and utilize these rebates to reduce these upfront costs.

Next slide.

We also have a third provision that we were talking about, the Residential Energy Contractors Program. And so this is going to provide workforce training funds, and these funds are going to go directly to states. So they're going to help offset the costs of training contractor employees. They're going to help fund testing and certification of these contractors, and it will also allow for states to partner with nonprofits to help deploy these activities across the country. We want to utilize these workforce training funds to be able to help contractors prepare to deliver these home energy rebate programs. And we want this specific program to work in tandem with some of our other bipartisan infrastructure jobs training programs, such as funding that we have for energy auditors or career skills as well.

So actually next week DOE will be releasing a request for information around these workforce provisions. So if you or an organization that you work with have input for the Department of Energy and for SCEP around how you would like to see these programs implemented, questions or concerns that you have about these programs, we would love to hear it. So we'll put some links in the chat about places that you can find out more information. But we want to make sure that you all are aware we are actively soliciting input – or we will be next week actively soliciting input around the design and implementation of these workforce programs.

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So where the Home Rebate program is going to go? How is it going to be implemented? How is it going to be executed? Where are those funds going to go? So of the $8.8 billion that has been fully appropriated approximately $8.5 billion is going to go to states, tribes, and territories. Most of this must go directly into the rebate programs. So directly into the residents' and consumers' pockets. Approximately $6.8 billion must go directly into the rebates. Of that $8.5 billion 20-percent is going to go to states. These programs are actually administered by the states and so they are allowed to have a certain percentage, up to 20-percent, to help administer those programs. Again, to monitor waste, fraud, and abuse and make sure technologies are being installed the way they're supposed to be installed and those sorts of things.

So while there are specific requirements on how these rebates are deployed across our country, and we're going to go into the long list of improvements as well as building types, you know, most homeowners are going to be eligible for some sort of rebate. Now the amount of that rebate or how that rebate is applied will be different based on income level and will be different based on technology installed. I want you to understand that this is a wide-reaching program that's going to have impacts across our country.

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So as I said, these are going to be directly administered by the states, and last month the Biden-Harris Administration did announce the allocations for those home energy rebate programs. I believe we can drop a link to those allocations here in the chat. And so these funding amounts are the combination of both rebate programs, but it does not include the residential contractor program. So we're still working on the allocations for the workforce development program. It's also important to note that these allocations do not include the $250 million for Indian tribes; we're still working to develop the exact formula for that $225 million will go directly to Indian tribes. But this is – for the Home Rebates Program this is the allocation that your state will be receiving.

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So before we dive into how these programs are going to be used we really want to get your thoughts on these programs. You know, what's going to make it successful? You know, what are the project objectives that DOE should be taking into consideration? Are there other objectives that you would include or things that we should be aware of? Obviously ease of access, we want this to be very, very easy for people. And we'll go into that in a little bit. Equitable disbursement of funds, absolutely. One of my big things is we want to make sure that we educate the public because these technologies are a little bit different than some of the traditional home appliances. For example, if you have a heat pump water heater you need to make sure that it's adequately ventilated. You can't put a heat pump water heater in a closet; it doesn't work. You know, it's important that the electrical wiring and the electrical panel are able to maintain – are able to support the electrical load of these new electrical appliances.

So there's a lot of other things that we need to make sure. Simplicity obviously is huge, point of sale. A lot of these are focused on execution. So this is great.

Yeah, it seems like the big consensus here is to try and make this as simple as possible. And we're absolutely going to be working with our state partners to try and provide that clear guidance and ease of administration.

Okay, next slide.

So we're going to talk a little bit more about the technical details of our home energy rebate programs, how that money is going to be spent, how it's going to be deployed in individual households based on the technology that's physically installed and the resident's incomes.

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So when we talk about this, when we look at our types of equipment that can be installed, the legislation clearly defines eligible equipment for our electrification program. Please note that all of these must be Energy Star Certified and the rebates can be used on single-family, multi-family, or rental properties. So just real quick we can look at the types of technologies that can be utilized here. You'll notice that electric heat pumps, air ceiling, duct ceiling. And one of the things that I really want to point out here that we should have, but I don't see it on here, is wiring – wiring and electrical panel upgrades. Again, it's very important as we look at eligible equipment and we work to electrify our homes, that the electrical box and the wiring is upgraded and able to manage that increased load.

So next slide.

So how much money is available per house? So when we look at the home efficiency rebates there's a couple of things that we really need to take a look at. So first of all is the project's energy savings. You know, how much money or how much energy is the project physically saving? So there's two different tiers of energy savings. One, if you save between 20 and 35-percent of energy you can receive up to a $2,000.00 rebate. If you achieve above a 35-percent energy savings you receive up to a $4,000.00 rebate. That's actually doubled if you are a low to moderate income individual with an income below 80-percent of the area median income. So that’s' a big impact. That's a big impact here.

As far as the home electrification rebates go, that's really – that is a more income determined program. So you'll be able to receive a rebate up to $14,000.00 based on the appliances that you purchase. And if you're between 150-percent to 80-percent you receive a rebate, but up to 50-percent of the cost of the improvement. But if you're, again, below 80-percent of the AMI, these rebates can pay up to 100-percent of the costs. So both of these enable two different types of programs. One is a whole-homes rebate program and one is an individual technology by technology program. The rebates cannot be combined together; they must do one or they must do the other.

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So what we're looking at here is we're looking at two different households. Just to give you an example of what we're talking about, we have two households; one are the Smiths in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and the others are the Joneses in Columbia, South Carolina. And please, these are just illustrative to show how some of these rebates can be delivered.

So if we look at our Smiths, they insulated and air-sealed their home, good decision. Improves their comfort, reduces their energy bills. And because they're in a lower-income bracket the project is expected to save 24-percent of their energy use. So the rebates can now cover 80-percent of their cost of that air sealing and insulation, provided it does not exceed $4,000.00.

Now if the Smiths decided to talk to their contractor and decided not only do those energy envelope improvements, but also do their heating system. You know, they wanted to do a more efficient heating system, and they bumped up their energy savings from 24-percent to 35-percent. They can now qualify for up to an $8,000.00 rebate or 80-percent of the overall project costs.

Now if they were not a low-income household, they were in the higher income bracket, above that 80-percent AMI, they would still be eligible to receive rebates, but the cap would be half as much, so they would only be able to receive $4,000.00 – or I'm sorry, $2,000.00 on the 24-percent or $4,000.00 on the 35-percent or higher. But they can only receive approximately 50-percent of their total project costs. So these are income-specific programs.

For our second example our Joneses in South Carolina – in Columbia, South Carolina. They're doing individual appliances. You know? They're interested in specific pieces of equipment and electrical upgrades, and they are – you know, they're not super low income, they're not 80-percent AMI, but they are below 150-percent of the AMI. So they can get approximately half of their costs covered with the rebates. So if their income was below 80-percent of the AMI they could receive approximately 100-perecnt or $12,800.00 would be covered. However, all said and done, they're not eligible to receive more than $14,000.00 in rebates.

So we've got one, the Smiths, that elected our home efficiency rebate program, where they improved their energy efficiency and reduced their overall energy consumption. Then we had another, the Joneses, who went the electrified appliance route and reduced their energy and consumption that way.

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So another Menti question. So we've described the ways that these funds can be distributed to households, so the big question is how do we make sure that these funds are used equitably? How do we make sure that the LMI communities are educated that these rebates are available, that we've done specific outreach and communication to Black and Brown communities across our country? You know, how can we make sure that people understand that these rebates are for them and that they can be utilized to help improve their home comfort?

Building trust is a big one. Reducing upfront costs. Yeah, that's a big – something that the legislation requires point-of-sale rebates, and so we're working very hard with various partners to figure out how best to deliver what a point-of-sale rebate would be. I see contractor certification. Contractors are going to be a key part of this, both in deployment, you know, working with the consumers, installing the technologies, but also their education to make sure that what they're installing is done correctly. It's incredibly important. Don't ignore rural communities; completely agree with you there.

>>Joan: So Michael, this is _____. Just wanted to say to the folks, first of all, thank you for so many great questions. And I'll probably say this again later, in case people don't hear me now. But there's an e-mail inbox in the chat that you can send questions to, as well as the RFI, the Request For Information that Michael has mentioned, I believe. And lastly, if one of us does not respond to your question, as I said in one of my chats, it's because we're not sure of the answer or I'm not sure about your question. And so feel free to resend it to that inbox and we'll do the best we can to answer you.

>>Michael: Yeah. Actually we love the questions that we don't have the answers to because we need to know what those are. We need to get a little bit more clarity around that to be able to provide clear answers. So again, thank you, everyone, for all of the information that you're putting out there.

>>Joan: And we have one other Menti question for this break. Can you share any insights from successful models? Go for it, Michael.

>>Michael: Yes. If anyone has any programs, utility programs, state programs, we want to tap the crowd's knowledge here and, you know, try and, again, one of the previous comments said "Don't reinvent the wheel." We'd very much like to not reinvent the wheel, so if you have programs that we need to look at, if you have suggestions or models that we need to be aware of, all of this is incredibly, incredibly important. Because again, you know, we want to administer these funds effectively and efficiently and we want to make sure that we're utilizing best practices that we've seen across the country.

All right, next slide. Can we get the next slide up?

So now that we've kind of talked about these programs we want to give you a little bit of sneak peek about what's coming, give you a little bit of an idea of about what our timeline is to help make these programs and make these funds available both to the states that will be implementing the programs and ultimately to the households that will be utilizing them.

Next slide.

So what we're doing right is really these engagement sessions. So we've kind of – we're doing a number of listening sessions to a wide variety of stakeholders, directly conversing with states, with tribes, with labor, industry, utilities, and environmental justice groups, and those to help get input on how these consumer rebates – or how these rebate programs can be implemented. So we're doing these listening sessions now; we'll be continuing to do them over the next couple of months. Following these listening sessions we're going to actually release a request for information that we'll be looking to receive formal input from in early 2023. So I believe in mid-January is our tentative timeline for when we'll be releasing a request for information. And we encourage you and other community stakeholders to provide input. We're going to be asking a number of questions that will help ultimately shape the program implementation and guidance that will be issued.

Next slide.

And so this is kind of our long-term timeline. You know, we have the RFI that will be coming out in January, we do anticipate taking some time to digest and analyze what we receive back from that RFI. But we anticipate releasing programmatic guidelines to the states and tribes in mid-2023. So at some point in time in mid-2023 we're going to release kind of the administrative rules and guidelines. The states and then tribes will then need to submit to us how they plan on meeting some of those key requirements that are laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act, such as the income verification, such as the deployment verification, all of these sorts of things that will help the program function.

So we are going to be working with those stakeholders, we are going to be working with the tribes to really help lean out on technology and programmatic elements to help make that program run as smoothly as possible. We do anticipate in working with those stakeholders to have these rebates available to the American public, hopefully by the end of 2023, potentially the beginning of 2024. But we do want to roll these out as quick as possible. Unfortunately, given the complexity of the program, we're not able just to flip a switch and make it go. We do need to coordinate with our state partners, we do need to coordinate with our tribal partners, and we do need to coordinate with the business community to make sure that we deliver these programs efficiently, effectively, and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse.

Next slide.

So we do have a number of key questions that we're looking for that will likely be put out later here in Menti, but also in our RFI. We're trying to get a wide range of input, and so some of the really key things that we're looking for information on is some of the program design elements, some of the technical assistance needs from our state and tribal partners we'll need in order to successfully execute these programs. Any streamlined strategies or technologies that people have specifically around income verification. As I talked about, this is a large part of the upcoming program. It does influence the amount of rebate or eligibility that someone will receive should they choose to participate.

So we're going to also be exploring monitoring software for modeled and measured energy savings, ways to leverage these funds with other programs, such as our weatherization assistance programs. And then we also want input on how these programs and rebate programs would integrate with state and utility incentive programs as well, and how people see that influencing the local efficiency markets.

The next slide.

Again, we're interested in hearing from you if you have any questions or issues that DOE should be considering while we're developing this guidance. So what do we need to be looking at as we develop these guidance, what are those red flag issues that we should be aware of? What is that technical support that we should be looking to provide? What suggestions do you have for successful true execution and implementation as these programs roll out later next year and likely will be offered for many years into the future?

I'll pause there just to make sure that we give people a time to put in their information. I'm seeing things about software and seeing things about supply chain. This is all great information.

So I see somebody brought up the better time to respond to RFIs. If people want to suggest how long they would like to respond, love to hear that quick answer to those questions as well. You can drop that in the chat for the questions or answers. You people have leveraged PACE or C-PACE, good. All right.

Let's go ahead and go to the next slide.

So obviously we want to succeed, we want to do all this together, we want to work with you, we want to work with utilities, manufacturers, laborers, contractors, to make sure that these programs are successful. We also want to make sure that these are being coordinated with other programs as well across DOE and across the federal government as a home. As a whole programs like our Energy Efficiency Tax Credits, the new state energy efficiency revolving loan programs, and potentially our weatherization program as well.

We want to find ways to connect these programs together so that we can provide a maximum benefit to citizens' home energy efficiency projects. And we know that here's going to be a significant benefit with this investment, and we want to make sure this benefit is long-term, we want to make sure that it's sustained, and so we want to hear from housing experts, contractors, utilities, states, tribes, and really anybody, to try and figure out how we make these programs as meaningful and achieve the long-term market change that we're looking to do. I mean this is an incredible opportunity to not just invest in peoples' homes, but to invest in their comfort, to invest in the American workforce. You know, we have over 120 million homes here in America, and that far exceeds the $9 billion home rebate program. But if we're able to use these funds to activate a market, to activate a workforce, to activate manufacturing, we can achieve these long-term transformational changes where we significantly increase our energy efficiency, we significantly decrease our energy bills, and we work together to grow a clean energy economy.

So we're really excited to work with you and all of our various partners to try and move this forward.

Next slide.

And so we do have a couple of ways that you can keep staying in touch with us here. We have our website that actually just came up I believe last week, a little bit about the program that could be found right there. And of course if you have specific questions, please utilize our IRA Home Rebate e-mail that you see on the screen here, or our workforce development program e-mail that you see here on the screen as well.

So we're really excited about these programs as we come forward. We're excited to work with you, we're excited to invest in our American homes, and we're really excited to achieve the overall climate goals of the Biden and Harris Administration.

Next slide.

And so with that I just want to say thank you, everyone, for your time. We will have a little bit of time for questions here. I know that this presentation is scheduled I believe just until 2:00, but I can stay a little bit longer for people that would like to do that as well. With that I'll turn it over to the DOE team.

>>Joan: Great. There's so many great questions in here and I think we're at 92 that we still haven't answers. So we've answered a lot of them, but we're definitely not going to be able to answer them all within the next four minutes. So we'll do the best we can and if you didn't get a response to your question, as I said before, please feel very free to send it or your comments to IRAHomeRebates@HQ – which stands for headquarters - .DOE.gov. It's in the chat. There's a website that's in the chat that you could also go to to get updates as we make them. I'm not saying it's going to be on a daily basis, but we're trying to make as much progress as we can.

And please respond to the RFI. As Michael said, your questions are illuminating the fact that there's a lot of unanswered issues, and that's why we can't answer some of these questions, because they're not simple. The ones that I thought we could answer I tried to answer – or we tried to answer, I should say; others are answering too. And I think that's it. It's been a great silent dialogue going on here with all the questions. I don't know if anyone else wants to add anything.

>>Michael: Joan, we've got like there minutes, so are there any specific questions that we want to just kind of tee up for people?

>>Joan: Yeah, why don't we – I'm sorry, because I've been responding to the questions I haven't been listening to everything. But, Adam, do you want to ask the questions? I know there was one question on the retroactivity piece, so maybe kind of that.

>>Michael: Yeah, let me jump into that one really quick, because the retroactivity is a big question that we hear a lot. So the appliance electrification rebate program does not have a date in which the retroactivity would apply. So it does not appear that retroactivity applies to the electrification rebate program. The home energy efficiency program does state that it comes into effect on August 16th. So while we think that the retroactivity may apply in that situation, we think it would be very difficult for states to develop a program which can utilize and verify the energy savings associated with those programs. So it may be doable and states may be able to do it, but we do think it will be difficult to provide the information necessary to justify the release of those rebates.