12. Market Facilitation, Marketing and Outreach

The Staff Proposal recommends that CSI Thermal incentives be combined with focused market facilitation activities to collectively reduce the up-front costs of installing SWH systems. To reduce the identified barriers to SWH, which include a lack of public knowledge of the technology and a shortage of experienced SWH installers, staff recommends a market facilitation budget of $37.5 million, $25 million from the gas-displacing budget and $12.5 million from the electric-displacing budget.¹⁷ We have already discussed in Section 10.2 above that we will reduce the portion funded by the electric-displacing program to $6.25 million, which reduces the total budget to $31.25 million.

Staff suggests that the PAs spend 40% of these monies in the first two years of the program. Environment California suggests that an even higher percentage of the market facilitation budget be spent in the early years of the program. We find it reasonable to allocate 40% of the budget for the program's first two years. We adopt a more detailed market facilitation budget as set forth in the table below.

Table 10: Adopted Market Facilitation Budget

Budget Year			2010	2011	2012-2017
			20%	20%	10% per year
Natural Gas Displacing Program
PG&E	39%	$9,750,000	$1,950,000	$1,950,000	$975,000
CCSE/SDG&E	10%	$2,500,000	$500,000	$500,000	$250,000
SoCalGas	51%	$12,750,000	$2,550,000	$2,550,000	$1,275,000
SCE	0%	$0	$0	$0	$0
Total		$25,000,000	$5,000,000	$5,000,000	$2,500,000
Electric Displacing Program
PG&E	43.7%	$2,731,250	$546,250	$546,250	$273,125
CCSE/SDG&E	10.3%	$643,750	$128,750	$128,750	$64,375
SoCalGas	0%	$0	$0	$0	$0
SCE	46%	$2,875,000	$575,000	$575,000	$287,500
Total		$6,250,000	$1,250,000	$1,250,000	$625,000
Combined CSI-Thermal
PG&E	39.9%	$12,481,250	$2,496,250	$2,496,250	$1,248,125
CCSE/SDG&E	10.1%	$3,143,750	$628,750	$628,750	$314,375
SoCalGas	40.8%	$12,750,000	$2,550,000	$2,550,000	$1,275,000
SCE	9.2%	$2,875,000	$575,000	$575,000	$287,500
Total		$31,250,000	$6,250,000	$6,250,000	$3,125,000

The Staff Proposal contains a lengthy list of possible market facilitation activities, including consumer education and outreach, installer training, development of financing programs and equipment standards, and permit streamlining. According to the Proposal, the PAs would submit annual advice letters to Energy Division with their proposed market facilitation budgets and activities for each calendar year, no later than October 1 of the preceding calendar year.

Many parties provided detailed comments with suggested market facilitation activities. For example, CCSE suggests statewide installer training efforts and a development of a technical design manual. PG&E recommends installer certification by a non-utility organization, and CALSEIA supports this proposal.

We will not mandate the exact market facilitation activities at this time, as we prefer to allow further comment and consideration of these activities through the advice letter process set forth in the Staff Proposal. We expect that the PAs will jointly market the CSI Thermal Program with the general market CSI Program, including incorporating the CSI Thermal Program into the Go Solar California website and related outreach efforts. The specific marketing activities and annual authorized funding will be determined upon submittal, review, and approval of an Annual Market Facilitation Plan by each program administrator by advice letter. The Annual Market Facilitation Plans should address each of the potential activities identified in Appendix A, as well as propose additional activities in response to market conditions. In addition, we consider the initial two years of the program as critical and we demand careful crafting of marketing and outreach strategies and tactics, with input from knowledgeable solar industry, marketing and training experts, who may not necessarily be parties to this proceeding. We direct the PAs to hold at least one public workshop in advance of their advice letter filing to obtain input from such key industry and expert sources.

¹⁷ The total market facilitation budget is allocated across the various utilities based on the same percentages used to allocate the gas-displacing and electric-displacing program budgets. (See Table 10 below.)