Utilities partner to offer Pay As You Save program in Missouri
Capitalizing on knowledge built from previous on-bill finance programs, Spire is partnering with Missouri gas and electric utilities to help customers pay for energy-saving upgrades over time.
Through partnerships with Ameren Missouri in the St. Louis area and Evergy in the Kansas City area, Spire’s Pay As You Save, or PAYS, program, hopes to make new, more-efficient appliances affordable to the widest possible audience.
Ameren Missouri launched a PAYS program in 2021, and according to Shaylyn Dean, Spire’s director of external affairs, that initial move really set things in motion.
“Once we saw Ameren get the program, we reached out to Ameren, Evergy and our regulators to see if we could develop a co-delivery program from the three utilities,” Dean told American Gas.
The program was attractive to Spire, Dean says, because of its ability to help such a wide range of customers.
“We decided to go down the PAYS path because, unlike our current finance programs, you don’t have to have a certain credit score,” he said. “Basically, everyone would be able to qualify for this style of program.”
First, customers are encouraged to sign up for a free, no-obligation home assessment. Customers would then receive an in-depth energy analysis and the Easy Plan offer, which breaks down the cost savings from each utility. After signing off on the upgrades, the installation of new appliances takes place with minimal or no initial cost to the customer. “In most cases, we’re paying the upfront costs, which a customer will be paying back over time,” Dean said.
The cost of the appliance upgrades will be divided between the electric bill and the gas bill via a predetermined split according to the customer’s actual savings, helping customers use less energy. That leads to lower annual costs, even while they are paying off the upgrade each month.
In addition to the pay-over-time aspect, Dean says a big advantage of the program is that the cost and savings stay with the premises. If the original homeowner moves, that cost and savings is passed on to the next tenant.
The partnerships with Ameren and Evergy kicked off in May.
Participation in the early tiers has been promising, Dean says, and he expects the number of installs to be similarly encouraging.
Though he says the utilities have a history of working together to co-deliver programs, he admits the complexities of such arrangements can be challenging. If he has any advice for utilities considering a similar program, it would be to start small.
“Ideally, we would have liked to work together with regulators on the front end and done a smaller pilot at the beginning just to see the structure of all this and then move forward with the larger-scale program. Still, we’re very pleased with the results we’ve already seen since launching earlier this fiscal year,” he said.