Mississippi Power to Officially Diligence PAYS
Mississippi Power, a subsidiary of Southern Company, is an investor-owned utility serving 186,680 customers. Alicia Brown, Fellow PAYS Pal and former LibertyHomes Fellow who is now at the Mississippi Public Service Commission, shared Mississippi Power’s latest DSM report which shows that they are formally exploring the possibility of PAYS for low-income customers! While this is just a consideration process, it is still exciting news!
See page 13-14 of the attached DSM report. The excerpt on PAYS is as follows: “IV. DSM Programs Under Consideration. PAYS® - MPC has been working with Georgia Power in order to determine viability (financial and procedural) to model a Pay-As-You-Save (PAYS)-style program for low-income residential customers. This would require utilization of a specialized implementor to ensure full benefit was realized by participating customers. This would be a multi-measure offer - HVAC, insulation, weatherization - to ensure savings targets are met.”
If Mississippi Power decides to diligence PAYS further, we can add another yellow dot to our national map of PAYS:
Our fellow PAYS Pals at Appalachian Voices just released their Electric Coop Scorecard for Tennessee!
17 out of the 40 points under the “Member Programs” category were related to PAYS (15 points) and other forms of on-bill financing (2 points). See the results scoring criteria here: https://energydemocracyyall.org/tn/scorecard/
Only Appalachian Electric Cooperative currently offers PAYS in TN. 17 of the 23 coops offer on-bill financing for energy efficiency. Since their ratings are quite low, those coops could follow the lead of Ouachita Electric Cooperative in AR which switched its loan program to PAYS and saw incredible results.
Speaking of Ouachita...The Smart Energy Consumer Collaborative spotlighted OECC’s Help PAYS Program
In its latest white paper (sponsored by National Grid, Energie NB Power, Evergy, and Pudget Sound Energy) SECC mentions PAYS as a way to better serve low-income customers. See Page 8 of attached pdf.
One clarifying point - PAYS is less a “recent development” and more an “increasingly popular” system. The Energy Efficiency Institute created PAYS in 1999 and it has been used for 20 years, by 18 utilities, across 8 states, for 5,000 upgrades. PAYS has been steadily growing in popularity and hit something of an inflection point this year with the number of programs doubling and numerous IOUs launching programs and issuing RFPs. Georgia Power is launching this month, Ameren MO in Q1 next year, Evergy and Spire next year, Duke, Tucson Electric Power, and Xcel Colorado are all in various stages of due diligence. The City of LaGrange GA launched a program this summer, CA water utilities are launching in Q1 next year, while several leading rural electric cooperatives have been running programs for many years.
