 Well, I guess this means we're halfway through our broadcast week. Here we are in our flagship energy program, Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, and Wednesdays at 4. And we do this with the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. My co-host, I'm Jay Fidel. My co-host today, Veronica Rocha. Hello. From DBED. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. It's been fun. We have three guests, actually. We have the first guest who is going to stay through the show, and that is Erlin Miley. She's a manager of distributed energy resources operations, a Hawaiian Electric company. And to her left is Ted Peck. He's the CEO of Holu Energy and a member of the Distributed Energy Resources Council of Hawaii. Welcome to you both. Aloha. Nice to have you here. Yeah. So, Veronica, could you define this part of our show? What is the scope of our first discussion today? Okay. So, the overall discussion is going to be about distributed energy resources, what's the status, what's new, and let's also talk about the future. So, there's going to be two segments. The first segment is going to be focused on advanced inverter features. What are they? How can they be helpful? Any potential concerns from industry? The second segment is going to be around this concept of hosting capacity. So, to get us started, why don't I ask, first question for Erlin, what is an inverter and what's an advanced inverter? And then maybe we can ask Ted a follow-up question that, actually, he and I were talking about earlier today. Erlin, before you get to that, can you tell us what distributed energy resources is? So, distributed energy resources is a more global term than just saying like rooftop PV. So, it's any kind of a resource that's distributed throughout the system. So, not a utility source at our power station. You're an engineer, aren't you? Yeah. You can always tell. Well, anyway, so, answer Veronica's question now. So, Veronica, your question was what is an inverter and what are advanced inverters? Okay. So, we have devices that take the energy from the rooftop PV and convert it so that we can connect it into our system and use it on our grid. So, the newer, more advanced inverters, these have functionality that we have been looking at for the last several years and they really fall into two different categories. So, we have autonomous functionality and then functionality that can be triggered by, say, a cell phone signal. We've really been focusing on the autonomous functions and basically how these autonomous functions work is, for example, if the PV starts to see high voltage, then the advanced inverter will adjust the voltage before it gets to a point of causing power quality issues or even damaging people's equipment. And Hawaiian Electric, we've really been on the leading edge of this and one example would be in 2014, we were the first utility to actually require that the ride-through capability and this is really important because what happens is when we have a generator trip offline, without that ride-through capability, what was happening is the rooftop PV would also trip offline. So, as you can imagine, we already have a situation where we don't have enough generation and this would just make it even worse and it could also run into a situation where we'd have, you know, just collapse of the grid. So, with the ride-through settings, it keeps the rooftop PV on so things don't get worse. The challenge has been since we are leading the industry, we are actually ahead of the equipment manufacturers and, you know, the standard body. So, we've been having to work really closely with them to, you know, help them to get where we need to be. You want to motivate them to go further and faster. Right. So, Disturbing Energy Resources Council, which your company is one of the, I guess, companies that are part of that council. Right. What's your take on advanced inverter functions and features? Is that something that you guys are really excited about or... Well, it's... Yeah, what are your thoughts? It's actually one of the core reasons why the DER Council exists is because technology, as we know, can move very fast and DER Council was formed as an industry group so that those companies which were bringing those advanced capabilities to the grid would have a singular voice, a coordinated voice, working with the utility and working with the PUST commission and the legislature for helping shape the system, really the grid of the future that we've been talking about for a while. So give me an example of how these advanced inverter features. This question is for both of you. You provided one example and, by the way, I've been involved in this the Straight Energy Resources Docket now that's been going on for several years. And there are so many terms that are tossed around. Vova, vova, frequent, all these things, right? But let's just whittle it down. What does it mean in terms of being able to interconnect more renewables and why should we care? It really is important because with these advanced inverter functions, there's a really good possibility that you can avoid some of the traditional upgrades that we're used to. So rooftop PV, just because of the nature of the PV, where it comes and goes, it works during the day, it doesn't work at night. And that changing with the advanced inverter functions, we probably don't have to do line upgrade or line replacements. And that saves everyone money. Yeah. You said before that there were two kinds of autonomous and cell phone. Remotely controlled. First of all, how big is an inverter? How big is it? Is it big like a cigar box? They're like it's like a box on a wall, depending on how many kilowatts. It's not big enough. It can be. Well, a home system. And one inverter goes through one cell panel or one inverter can go from many cell panels. There's a technology called microinverters. Enphase was the leader in that, where it was under, every panel has its own inverter. And so you have alternating current or AC, like what's in your house, through the whole system. The panel itself, as Erlene was talking about, produces direct current. And so you have to, at some point, convert it. So that's the whole thing. You need an inverter no matter what. That's right. And the primary function in terms of the electricity is you're converting from direct to alternating current. Right. So now you've got the possibility of an autonomous system. And they're very smart. Autonomous system is very smart. Lots of software in there. And then, which is driven by whatever it is, it's driven by the power that's going through the system, through the inverter. And then you've got this cell phone kind. It strikes me that if you want to have all of these things working together, sort of like a swarm of drones, you know, they're all connecting, talking to each other, you want to kind that remotely connected, right? Ultimately, that would be what we would want to be able to control. Because right now, it's collectively, rooftop PV can be the largest generator in our system. It is uncontrollable by us. That's tough. So yeah, collectively, it would be good to have control over all these features. We're not there yet. But you know, this has been kind of a controversial issue. So this is my question for you, Ted. So in terms of controllability and distributed energy resources like PV, which inverters would be part of, what sort of opportunities does it bring to the market? And what sort of concerns does the market have? Yeah, so I'll go back a little bit and kind of talk about the wave that was five to 10 years ago. For lack of a better term, the inverters were pretty dumb. They just basically took DC and convert it into a waveform. And it really didn't care what was on the other side, right? And as Eileen talked about, if the frequency of the grid varied a little bit, if there was a transient, they just trip off to protect themselves. And that ended up exacerbating that transient. So opening up that bandwidth, which they would ride through, really helped the grid. Technology being what it is, there's just a relentless race in the market for people adding capabilities and making the inverters very interactive, both to the load and to the grid. And so whereas in that first wave, there was concerns and they were largely valid that the more distributed energy resources you put on the grid, you weaken that circuit because those resources, as Eileen said, weren't controllable and they would kind of drive what happened on that circuit. What we're seeing now is that the inverters that are available actually add strength to the grid, as Eileen was mentioning, so that you don't actually have to pay for upgrades to the grid. What's strength here? What's, my understanding is you need to have a black box to cooperate with the other black boxes and give the utility a better quality of power. And the customers, yeah. And the customers, a better quality of power. How does it do that? How does it, what strength mean? In my mind, it's sponginess. It means that the grid is resilient. I hope, you know, because this is gonna be the final exam. Sponginess, right there. It means that the grid is responsive to transience. It's responsive to inputs. It means that if there are needs on when it comes to bars, which is reactive power is what it's called. We don't need to, it's a very technical. You can talk with engineers for days and I think I kind of understand it, which means, I understand it from a physics level, not from an engineering level probably. There's, you know, power that's being delivered, the voltage and the frequency. These are all things that the utility is responsible for and the inverters that are coming available now in this new wave of technology, they help the utility to manage those functions, those assets on the grid rather than the products. The big question is the population of the system with these things. So do I go out and buy my own? Do you approve the one I buy? Do you buy the inverter and give it to me or install it somewhere? Does it have to be at my home? Can it be somewhere else? I'm asking a multiple compound question. My ultimate question, Lane, is how far along the path are we? Are we 100% in smart inverters or are we 10%? Where are we? We're starting to require smart inverters. The standards are still, you know, being developed. We have on our website, you can always go to our website and see which inverters are, are meet either the old inverter standards or the new inverter standards. We are starting to offer customers, if they're in a situation where they're not able to connect, we are offering advanced inverters as an option. And we do have people coming back and saying, yeah, here's your, do a study, maybe have to pay for upgrades or put on an advanced inverter and be connected sooner. They're jumping on that. Yeah, so if I have an inverter in my house right now and I want to take advantage of this new technology, presumably more efficient and stronger, more resilient, whatever, I don't want that, because I always want the latest technology. What do I do? You talk to your inverter man, or your contractor who installed your system and I would have them come out and take a look at what you have and whether you want to replace them. Down the road, there is going to be a point in time where you are going to need to replace your equipment. I'm going to guess that by that time, you're going to need to go with advanced inverters anyway. That's some of the old ones are just starting to be phased out in a way. You're not going to be able to get them. You know, yeah. I won't sell them anymore. Oh yeah. Well, should I, you know, but like a lot of technology, should I wait for the next model or is the next model here? You can always wait for the next model with technology. It depends how soon do you want to connect? Soon. I'd go with what you got out there. Go to our website, find the right model. All right, the website is? www.hwineelectric.com There you go. Veronica, can you summarize so we can take a break and switch out? Sure thing. So advanced inverter features are the next generation of inverter features. They help make the grid more spongy. They help with more adoption, more deployment of renewable energy. A lot of the standards around advanced inverters are still being developed, and it sounds like you have a little bit of time to wait before you really have to rush out and switch out your old inverter for your new advanced inverter. So with that, I'm really appreciative, Ted and Erlene, for participating in this session, and I guess we're going to be right back, right? Okay, we'll take a short break. We'll be right back. Ted Peck, Erlene Miley, thank you so much for coming around. Thank you. And Erlene, don't go. Don't leave. Thanks for having me on the show. Very nicely spoken. Thank you. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science, where we'll dig into the science, dig into the meat of science, dig into the joy and delight of science. We will discover why science is indeed fun, why science is interesting, why people should care about science, and care about the research that's being done out there. It's all great, it's all entertaining, it's all educational, so I hope you'll join me for Likeable Science. I told you, I told you to be back and be back. That's Veronica Rocha on the other side, my co-host on this program, and somebody who stayed around for the next time, this is Erlene Miley. And we got a new face, and that's Arum Shumovad, he's your chief executive officer of KevalaAnalytics.com. And something, let me ask you, Arum, Keska say Kevala Analytics, what do they do? What do you do? How do you spend your day? I spend my day trying to make sure that we are as efficient as possible, gathering information about the electric grid and the built environment. So we map all of the country's electric grid, all of the buildings that produce or consume electricity and describe their relationship to each other to try to figure out where value is in the electricity markets. Wow, and you're sitting here at our table. There's a lot of interesting stuff happening here right now. Okay, Veronica, why don't you define the scope of this quarter hour? Absolutely, it's very much in line with what Arum's work is, like Kevala. So we're gonna be talking about hosting capacity. What is that, and how does it relate to being able to interconnect more renewable energy at both the circuit level but also at the system level? So my first question again for Aline is, what is hosting capacity at the circuit level and at the system level? Can you get us started with that concept? So what hosting capacity is, is it's a methodology for our planners used and they model the system and the hosting capacity is the amount of PV that could be connected either at the neighborhood, so the circuit level, or on the larger system at the grid level, so the system level. So that's the amount of PV that can be safely connected. Yeah, I got the word hosting. Hosting. I mean capacity, I got capacity. That means you can take more. Okay, but hosting, who's the host? The grid. What does it mean? The grid is the host. The grid is the host. So you say hosting capacity, I mean this much can go into the grid. In this particular location or in this neighborhood or on this circuit or on this larger system. Okay. But correct me if I'm wrong. The beautiful thing about hosting capacity in the context of the way the HECO has implemented it or is looking to implement it because it's still yet to be approved by the Public Utilities Commission is that hosting capacity is, call it like at a point in time, right? So it's the capacity up until when you start to encounter either circuit or system level challenges. And at that point you're able to then evaluate what are the things that are costing those issues and what would it take in terms of resources including money to be able to make upgrades and then allow for greater hosting capacity. At least that's how I think about it, but maybe you can. No, that's a really good way of looking at it. What I like to think of it is the real benefit and it is something that is considered a best practice hosting capacity, but the way I think of it is really what the benefit to customers are is that we know what that hosting limit is or what that upper limit is. And so it's actually the customers have benefited because they've been able to connect faster. As long as we're under that hosting capacity that their analysis is done, they can get approval. So if there's hosting capacity that customer still has to submit an application and then you just immediately stamp it and let them interconnect or do you still have to do more studies? We do still need to check on the secondary side to make sure everything's okay, but there's a couple of other benefits for the hosting capacity and one is it gives industry, we have areas that are saturated and so they know where those areas are. So it helps the PV, people that are selling these systems, you know, like that's probably not a good area. It's very transparent. You should, you know, over here has a lot more hosting capacity available. And then it also helps us with our planning because we know where these hotspot areas are that we should be looking at when we do our upgrades anyway. Well, this could change things then. What's it called what you're doing now? It's the reverse of hosting capacity. What's it called? Just regular distribution planning. Yeah. Okay, so when you have hosting capacity, you're changing the way you look at things. And we talked before the show I compared and you felt this was a reasonable comparison to retirement plans. There's two kinds of retirement plans. It's defined benefit plan and defined contribution plan. So now we're on the contribution side, but we're gonna change that to a defined benefit plan. We're actually already using it. We're already using it. Yeah, we are using it. But you said something a minute ago. I said the PUC has to approve it in some way. What does the PUC have to say? That they agree with the methodology. Okay. And how is this gonna affect me? How's it gonna affect you? As a customer, how's this gonna affect me? Are you applying for PV? Let's assume I was. Okay, so for one thing, you can look online and you can see we have these maps that are updated online. So you can kind of look at your neighborhood and if your area is already red, you're gonna kind of know you'll have trouble. But just because your area is green or very good, you still might have trouble on your secondary, but at least you kind of have an idea to start there. Does this mean that some people who can't get on now will be able to get on? Chances are there's, if there's upgrades that need to be incorporated or like we talked about in the last 15 minutes, they might be able to, if the issue is just on their secondary side, advance inverters. Ah, so the two are connected. Connected. Veronica, it's brilliant. Ha ha ha. Two parts of the shoe are directly connected. And actually, it's also connected to Aram's work. And so, why don't you talk to us a little bit about what Kavala's doing and how does Kavala view hosting capacity in making the information that you're gathering and that you're evaluating publicly available so that people, everybody can take advantage of it? Sure. So I think it's a very good description of what hosting capacity is. It really is the point at which you start to, the utility in particular, starts to incur costs for trying to put more of a resource on the grid. And being able to have visibility into where that occurs can let companies that are trying to be as efficient as possible figure out where they should be focusing their attention. The concern becomes, if you're in an area where it's been determined that it might be more expensive, are you sort of left out? And one of the things that we are trying to do is look at the total value to the system to figure out are there areas where, even though it may cost a little bit more to put solar on the grid here, it actually delivers more value. And as a result of that, we can find ways for facilitating increases to the hosting capacity in areas where it actually is a savings to all rate payers. Aram, how do you do that? Yeah. You talked about analytics, which is really to me a magic word. It involves all kinds of algorithms and special dashboards. And magic. It's computer magic. That's how we do it. It's artificial intelligence. We do a little bit of artificial intelligence in some of our data ingestion, but most of what we're doing now as part of this process that we call Pog, the pathways to an open grid, is really trying to build an understanding of where this value might vary. What's the value you're bringing in this context? So it might be, as an example, an area where Hawaiian Electric might be able to save some money on the losses associated with delivering electricity from far away to a given neighborhood, say, well, we could actually make electricity on these rooftops, which is closer, avoid those losses, and then be able to spend a little bit more money increasing the hosting capacity in a way that actually makes everybody better off. So in order to do this with your dashboard, you have to have a lot of data. Very, very large amounts. Large amounts. How do you get this data? We use computer vision algorithms, machine learning. We digitize very large amounts of information about the built environment. So we look at, for example, the size and age of buildings, the socioeconomics of their occupants that might tell us a little bit about how much electricity they're likely to use and when, and all of that rolls up into some estimate of how much you can fit of a given technology on the grid, the hosting capacity, and where there might be opportunities to save money by driving more localized acquisition of those distribution infrastructure resources. We were using the old-fashioned model, you know, Hawaiian Electric as the generator of all power and sending it out to the world. We wouldn't need you, but we need you because we now have distributed energy resources. Is that it? Or would you have been relevant in the first phase? It used to be for about 120 years, we did a pretty good job just averaging out the costs. You decide that there's enough need for a new power plant. You go build it over the life of the power plant. You charge just enough to recover that cost and everybody is very happy. Now. What has happened now is that technology costs have come down for things like solar or storage. And as a result of that, there are opportunities for people to deliver, maybe produce their own electricity or shift when they consume electricity to periods of time when it's cheaper in ways that complicate the ability to capture the value of those larger bulk power resources like new power plants. And so we have to bring new tools to the table, to the regulatory process, to the utility planning process and really to the way we actually think about markets maturing over time or we're building inefficiency into the system precisely at the point where technology is accelerating the ability to arbitrage that inefficiency. When we talk about the advanced inverters before, it's clear that Hawaiian Electric and Hawaii is sort of ahead of the curve on this. We're pushing the envelope. How are we doing in this capacity issue? Are we pushing the envelope on that too? Absolutely. Hawaii is way out in front. It's not necessarily the most comfortable place to be. The spirit tip is the first part that gets poked into things. But it's actually a great place to be learning and Hawaii as both as a utility Hawaiian Electric, the state as a whole and the different elements of the industry are all learning a lot as a result of this process. I will say that it's okay to make mistakes when you're out in the front. All of those are learning opportunities and we will collectively get better at that process as long as we're open about evaluating them and trying to make sure the maths being done are reasonable. Well, when do we come to a resolution? When is your job done? When do you reach Nirvana? Kavala, Nirvana, that's what I'm saying. I think a much longer time than many people think. Be mindful of the fact that many of these older resources have been around for a very long time. The first power plant in the country that was five megawatts or larger, there's still a substation there 115 years later. And now it's been replaced with a bigger power plant but the wires that are running, they're still there. So this system moves very slowly. There are trillions of dollars invested, even more hard to move things like rights of way, right? Which is that you ran transmission line through there, you paid a farmer for the right to use that land or the air above it. Those things don't move. They don't go away for a long time. So it is hard to move a system that is as large and complicated as this is in a speedy way. It's unwise to. And so things like smart inverters and things like deliberative stakeholder processes are designed to do that in a safe way. One more question, Kailen. This is all that's been talking about, the inverters in the capacity building and the new way of looking at things. Does this make the grid more resilient, more secure in the face of potential outages and the like? I would have to say no. Okay. I mean, we're getting there with the advanced inverters but the way things are now, no. And if you just think about it, it has to do with about, you can't really depend on these. I mean, so PV is great when the sun's up. Yeah. A large cloud bank passes over, it's not. Wind turbines work when there's wind blowing. Yeah. You still have those issues. Yeah. I'm just gonna change on that score. Yeah. But what do you think of them? Yeah, I would actually argue the exact opposite. Obviously in a respectful way, I think what has happened is for the last century we got really good at overbuilding the system to build in that resiliency. And so we would do that by saying, let's pretend the largest power plant shuts down. And as a result of that, we need another power plant that's just like that. And that level of inefficiency at scale is very expensive, large transmission lines, large power plants. And when those fail, it's actually a big shock to the system. Yeah. So a cloud passing over a small neighborhood, a portion of an island, is actually a much smaller impact than losing a whole power plant that might supply a quarter of all of the electricity to the island. And so we're in a period of flux right now, but I think that we're going to end up with a much more resilient grid as we move through this transition. Well, you know, The technology catches up. Yes, yes. And that's the mission. Right. Find it and to frame it and deploy it and so forth. It's great to talk to you both. So Veronica, time for you to summarize the second phase of our show today. Absolutely. So the second part of the show, we talked about hosting capacity. It's basically a methodology that the utility uses to assess, at a given point in time, how much more renewable resources we can, the grid can take at the circuit level as well as the system level. Vivaldi's looking at some really interesting modeling that's not only looking from the technical aspects, but also looking at economic and value aspect. There was a question around, is all of this new technology, all of this renewable energy storage, et cetera, advanced inverters making the grid more resilient? It sounds like there's mixed reviews on that, but I also feel that there is an optimism that as new technology, I guess becomes a more commonplace in the market, standards are developed around it, et cetera, that there really is a huge opportunity to make the grid as a whole more resilient and more secure. So with that, thank you so much, Ram. Thank you so much, Eileen. And of course, you, Jay, for having me on the show. It was so fun. Well, I'm very optimistic. That's an optimism in the operative word that will also be in the final exam. Thank you, Veronica. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.