Household Comfort and Resilience Finance Standard

Source context & PMF recommendation

HGIA’s GEM$ on-bill program provides a useful starting point: meter-tied financing and an estimated-savings screen for qualifying customers. It is not a universal guarantee of bill savings or eligibility. PMF recommends that a Hawaiʻi offer calculate the customer’s payment from confirmed support, documented site conditions, conservative savings, and known maintenance—not future rebates, tax credits, or uncontracted VPP revenue.

Sources: GEM$ on-bill financing requirements (Hawaiʻi Green Infrastructure Authority)

Published terms · source context

The public SHARE offer illustrates why financial terms must be read in full. Its advertised equipment discount is not an all-in installed-price guarantee; its public FAQ says savings are not guaranteed and describes separate battery ownership and exit conditions. It is a useful disclosure precedent, not a Hawaiʻi program template or evidence of delivered savings.

Sources: SHARE offer, eligibility and FAQ (Rewiring America) · SHARE launch announcement (PG&E)

Priority eligibility should consider income, bill burden, housing condition, essential-service needs, tenancy, electrical readiness, and customer choice. A program administrator may coordinate the work, but each household should receive three separable documents: an installation and maintenance agreement; a finance or service-payment agreement; and, only if chosen, a grid-services agreement. A customer can improve comfort without being compelled to enroll a device for dispatch.

For renters, the owner’s consent and the resident’s informed consent are both necessary, but neither should be used to create a rent increase or automatic transfer of debt. The offer should identify meter-transfer rules, move-out rights, equipment access, repair responsibility, tenant data access, and a neutral complaint route. Translated, accessible notices and a cooling-off period are basic consumer protections, not optional outreach.

The capital stack should use only confirmed grants, rebates, and low-cost capital before calculating a payment. A reserve should cover commissioning failures, warranty disputes, meter or data errors, and provider insolvency. The program should require a conservative bill-savings buffer for priority households and a corrective process when measured results fall short. A household should not carry a loan balance caused by a contractor, manufacturer, or program-operator failure.

Storage ownership deserves its own disclosure. If a provider or equipment company retains a battery—as the public SHARE terms say Carrier retains its battery—the agreement should separately state ownership, insurance, lien or removal rights, monitoring, cybersecurity patching, maintenance response, data access, replacement, and end-of-term treatment. Those terms should never be obscured inside a heat-pump quote or an electricity-bill insert.

Sources: SHARE offer, eligibility and FAQ (Rewiring America)

Before approval, collect baseline bills and, where consented to, interval data; verify equipment condition, panel and wiring needs, permits, scope, and customer goals. Release payment in milestones: approved design, code-compliant installation, commissioning, customer orientation, and a post-install follow-up. Payment to an installer should not be accelerated merely because equipment was delivered to a site.

A portfolio scorecard should report anonymized baseline and post-install bills, payment burden, comfort or hot-water satisfaction, outages where a resilience claim was made, warranty calls, cancellations, tenant outcomes, and any grid-service value that was actually contracted and delivered. Expansion is justified only when the independent review confirms affordability, safety, maintenance capacity, and complaint performance—not when a forecast model looks favorable.