As things stand here in NB for the moment, the best I can hope for from our energy efficiency and net-zero power efforts is reverse metering to the point of zeroing out my bill with the electrical utility.  

It's vague and generally not enforceable in a court of law.You could be talking about a broken appliance in the garage or a 5,000 refrigerator in the house etc.I just can't stand sloppy contracts that are vague.

However, the D/I profile of my two investment propertie as a stand-alone is ~60-70%.

What someone likes for 1,2,3 reasons can be the exact opposite of what another investor can't stand.

the 2nd association it resonates is the highly consumption-driven society we live in. in my area (coastal, urban southern california) i'm surrounded by 2 distinct lifestyles. there's the majority: seems like 95% of the local population who are renters, driving luxury cars, sporting fancy clothes, jewelry, hairdos, etc but obviously living paycheck to paycheck as exemplified by hardly a day somebody or the other is spotted  getting their car repo'ed by a camera crew. the rarer are the landlords, who in this area seem to be of mostly asian demographics (chinese, koreans, japanese) who live obviously very frugally: old 80s model sedan, oldfashion business cloths, always eating simple meal from home, seemingly never splurging $$$ other than into expanding their portfolio), my observance is relatively very few landlords in the area own relatively huge portfolios, each.with the advent of these infomercials and the internet (ie, BP) more and more people want to get a 'piece of the REI pie' and more power to them. there does seem to be this dream of rags to riches and while its ok to dream, do most people actually expect their life to turn around like that, as portrayed in most of the infomercials or even in the everyday setting where the masses living paycheck to paycheck, are spending their last expendable dollars not on depositing into savings acount, but blowing $20 on scratchies etc. in summary, is my observation reminds me of my days when i worked on wall st and the 'ra trace' was so obvious with dime a dozen stock brokers makin 6fig salaries at some point but blowing it on recreational drugs apparently costing thousands of dollars a pop to the point the next week they are broke again and that $ wasnt invested but wasted.  

Although I co-own and manage a Texas based website / web software design business and have been an entrepreneur for 20 years, I have a long-standing goal of growing an REI business.  

Definitely may give you a leg to stand on if the tenant decides to turn the heat off.

Ethically, am I now obligated to stand by "first in/first consider" or is there a way I can re-position to have more flexibility on which application I consider first.  

I realized that one day standing in long line at the bank and said to myself how can I take advantage of this time waster or avoid it, my first thought was to just leave and do it some other time but that would have upset my wife, so I said what do I do for a living?  

@Anthony Johnson @Zachary HadedI've had good luck with mailers that are interesting and stand out.