 at the cutting edge, I'm Jay Fidel, this is Think Tech, and we're talking about the cutting edge here on renewables. We're talking about how the wheels go around with Marco Mangelstorf, who is, what do you want to call it? Energy guru, and that doesn't change. In fact, he becomes more of a guru all the time. Welcome, Marco. Thank you, Jay. The key is not to have that edge cut too finely because blood may be drawn, and the key is also to keep the wheels going around and around so they don't fall off. So with that, thanks so much for having me back on you and I go back a ways, and I won't get too gushy, but thank you. I remember the day I met you. I was out in Hilo, and you were in this fantastic solar workshop there in the back, and I met your staff and you, and I said, oh, this guy is very unusual. And sure enough, I was right. I was right about that. Anyway, let's go. You say that to all the solar boys that you meet, Jay. I've heard about you. I've heard about you. Say that to all the Marcos. OK, let's talk about renewables. And you did send me a piece from the Washington Post on this. Now, it all sounds right to me, and the proposition is renewable energy can avoid blackouts. And I have my reasons for thinking that, but what are your reasons for thinking that? Well, before I take a dive into that, I just want to remind everybody that in eight days count, in eight days from now, a really big shoe will be happening at the Public Utilities Commission with the long anticipated, long waited for evidentiary hearings on the fate, the fate of Juan Jujo Nuan, not too far from where I doth sit at right here. So that'll be Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday with all kinds of stirring and exciting witnesses and cross-examination. So those of us hardcore will do the best we can in the trenches reporting from afar, but we will have more to talk about in two weeks from now. So evidentiary hearings in eight days count them. Wow. And how long did you say this hearing was scheduled to last? Four days. More days. That should be more than ample. Yep. And you have any predictions or expectations? Oh, let's see. Not right now. I'm going to wait for the evidence to be presented in the evidentiary hearing and see how that all goes down. And I promise you, dear Jay, that in two weeks I will have more from which to opine. OK, fair enough. All right, let's go to our other issues here. And there are several of them. We probably won't get through all of them. But let's begin with the one that I think is really important, and that is how renewable energy has a benefit, a special advantage in avoiding blackouts, because we should be concerned about blackouts these days for any number of reasons. So I guess I would ask you first, why should we be concerned? And what can renewables do about that? Interesting that there were two really juicy pieces and press over the past handful of days. One was in the Wall Street Journal. And the other yesterday was in the Washington Post. The Wall Street Journal, essentially, the reporter Catherine Blunt, who is one of the better ones in the energy being as far as I'm concerned, she noted that our grids writ large are more fragile than we doth believe, more fragile than we'd like to believe. And whether it's cyber attack, possible cyber attack, whether it's inclement weather, whether it's extreme weather, we need to harken back no further than what happened last year about this time in Texas, which is a debacle for ERCOT, the main entity there that deals with power generation distribution across Texas. So interesting to see, again, the contrast between somewhat of any penny, it's gloomy in terms of grid stability, and we're living on borrowed time, and then this piece yesterday in the Washington Post that was very favorable in terms of looking at a report that came from Mark Jacobson, Professor Mark Jacobson, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, not too far from, in fact, where I was born in Palo Alto. So I don't think anybody could claim Stanford as a liberal hotbed of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders Green Deal-ish ideology. And I've seen lots of reports on reports over the decades, Jay, and I've kind of jaded in terms of, OK, what's next? What does this report say? But I thought this coming from Jacobson to Stanford did catch my attention. And the backdrop of this is that utilities across the country have been raising arguments, making arguments for a number of years now, that renewable energy has some, they don't call it fatal flaws, but has some significant weaknesses, principally in terms of their intermittent. And of course, who's going to deny that sun doesn't shine 24 hours a day, which it does, and nor does the wind blow? A lot of places 24 hours a day. So that's true. Renewable energy is often can be, at least as solar and wind, as described as intermittent. And they've used that as kind of a hammer. It's not a sledgehammer, it's a pound of renewables saying, this is not good enough. We can't rely on renewables. And then the canard, the false claims by a number of people on the right last year who said, well, it was the wind generator's fault that ERCOT went down. Well, that's just penly not true. It was much, much more to do than to the failure of conventional fuel sources, coal, NAC gas, and nuclear that caused ERCOT to collapse with a small role being played by wind because of the deep cold, the freezing cold, the subzero cold. You're saying you're talking about voices on the right, Marco. I think that has to include the oil and gas industry because they don't really want to see renewables. They're making a lot of money, getting a lot of government benefits. They don't want to lose. And so they will speak against renewables every chance they get. Well, and that gives me a chance to tell one of the stats that I've had in my head bouncing around for decades or for years at least, Jay, which is, if you do a comprehensive analysis of federal funds, federal support going towards energy sources over the past decades, 50, 60 or more years, and you look at the breakdown of which industries got the biggest chunks of money, let it be said from this day forward or remind people that renewable energy, under the rubric of renewable energies, which is non-nuclear, non-coal, non-gas, non-oil, has received maybe 10 or so percent of all federal subsidies. So the federal government has clearly over the decades made its priorities known and very tangibly in terms of supporting non-renewables over renewables. Is Joe Biden changing that? Well, Biden right now, we know the story of Build Back Better, which is a, it's dead for all intents and purposes. And with the likes of Senator Manchin and a Kirsten Sinema from Arizona, it's not likely to come back in anything resembling its form or form. So I think the best we can hope for is kind of piecemeal, piecemeal pieces from Build Back Better that will stand a chance of getting adequate votes in the Senate through reconciliation and then get it to the House and hopefully get it to the President's desk. So I mean, one thing that I'm tracking, my narrow parochial self-interest here for a solar is that there is a proposal to extend the investment tax credit, the solar tax credit, the federal tax credit for 10 years and also bump it up to 30% and have it stay at 30% for those 10 years. So right now, FYI, that tax credit is 26% and barring any new legislation and becoming in the law, it will go down to 22% in 2023. So that's the only one I'm really aware of because I have a strong interest in it. So again, the playing field, as I've said many, many times, say the playing, the energy playing field is not level, it's never been level, it's never gonna be level. I'm not a Pollyanna to believe that, you know, justice will be done in absent big muddied interest throwing their weight around. But let me go back to this study here. This couple of things that I just wanted to quote because what's so juicy about this study is that it really takes on this argument of fossil fuels. We have to rely on fossil fuels. We can't go completely renewable because we'll be at risk. The grid will be at risk. And amongst other things, according to Jacobson's team, a switch to renewable energy would lower energy requirements. In other words, lower overall consumption, apparently. Reduce consumer costs, who's gonna argue against that? Create millions of new jobs and improve people's health. I mean, that's almost kind of apple pie, chicken soup, two cars, two electric vehicles in the garage, right? So that almost sounds good to be true. But again, this is coming from a well-respected engineering professor at Stanford and his team. And then I also wanted to quote another professor Cornell who chimed in on this report in terms of responding to the reporters inquiry about, well, what do you think of this report? Robert Howard, this is named Robert Howard from Cornell. And he says, quote, this is an incredibly important study. The fossil fuel industries continue to argue that renewables are dangerous or a dangerous experiment. And that grid stability and reliability will continue to bend at least in part on fossil fuels. Here, Jacobson and his colleagues clearly show that it's not the case at all. So, it remains to be seen as that's gonna play out, of course, now going from the macro of what's possible, let's say across the United States, especially the mainland, what's possible here across our state, our isolated state, where there are not gonna be any inter-island power cables in my lifetime or for the first time. Inter-island power cable would make for greater resilience, right? It would help against the object of this discussion, possible blackouts, because you have other sources that you can draw down upon, as opposed with separate islands, you don't have that. And on the mainland, you do have that. You can draw it down on resources from other states, other areas, we do have the capability. Let me intercede one point that I wanted to make. And that is the fossil fuel facilities that we have, we meaning the country, but also Hawaii, involve these power generation systems that have existed for a lifetime for 60, 70 years. Right here, we have that, but it's on the mainland too. It uses fossil fuel. You don't have to put new money into it, except maintenance. And everybody in the industry wants to stick by that old infrastructure. Well, this goes right to Biden's point, doesn't it? We have to renew our infrastructure. We're not doing that. We keep on using these facilities, power generation systems that are 16, 70 years old, maybe more in some places. So that's, if you're looking for danger, that's what I call danger. If a system like that goes down, exactly how are you gonna fix it? If it was made, for example, with parts from Germany, as many of them are, or parts for companies that have gone away, how are you gonna get the new parts? How are you gonna replace the turbines? How are you gonna replace all those generator systems? The generator sets, they're huge, they're possible to replace. And so if they go down for any reason, it's a big problem. The other thing is you say fragile, and I certainly agree. We have fragility all over the country and we have fragility here. And I don't think the public really knows how this can affect us. And so Spencer Abram was the Secretary of Energy back in the 90s. And there was a big outage in the Northeast. And the press came to him and said, you're the Secretary of Energy, what's wrong with you? How come you didn't prevent against this? And he said, let me explain to you about infrastructure. You build it and you have to renew it. You have to build it again. You can't just rely on it decade after decade because it goes down. And we here in the United States in the Northeast, we have not renewed our infrastructure. This is what you get. If you wanna avoid blackouts, have new infrastructure and have new technology. We haven't done that, we still haven't done that. And we're not doing it now. Well, I mean, how lost that you on there. I mean, yes, for the most part, we're still in kind of an Edisonian as in Thomas Edison, going back what a hundred plus years of a hub and spoke design and layout in terms of utility grids where you have the hub as a power plant and then the spokes go out from the hub, hundreds, if not thousands of miles, right? Especially on the US mainland where you have very high voltage transmission lines crossing East to West and North to South. And of course we don't have that here. The other thing I wanted to mention as well is that in terms of grid modernization, because that's kind of a phrase I think that's not too much of a mind-bending phrase, but pretty clear in its content that point electric to their credit and public utilities commission have been prioritizing grid modernization and are moving forward diligently in my opinion with modernizing our island grids. And one of the ways to do that, and of course again, I'm very biased in this regard because I've had 40 plus years in renewable and distributed renewable energy rooftop solar to be precise. One of the trends that we're seeing more so than anywhere else in the country in the United States is essentially what I call these nano power plants. I won't call them micro because that kind of implies micro grid and to me micro grid is a larger kind of geographic territory. Whereas I've kind of glummed on to the phrase nano grid. So you have, for example, my home is a nano grid where I have solar PV, I have a couple of Tesla power walls and if the grid goes down, I'm sitting pretty good in terms of power generation. So the more nano grids and micro grids that we establish here in the state, now again up until that magical big power cable goes from the big island to Maui to Linae to Molokai to Oahu to Kauai, the path ahead to me is very clear. Or one of the main parts of the path ahead to greater resiliency and robustness of the grid is to continue on the path that we're on with more and more distributed solar plus storage, distributed solar plus storage, plus storage, plus storage. That's really a key part of it. And again, to their credit, Hawaiian Electric has stated, Scott Seuss stated sometime last year, I don't remember the exact date, but that Hawaiian Electric is envisioning a tripling of rooftop solar from now, I believe until 2023 and 2020, sorry, 2030, 2030, 2030 is not that far from now. So I feel relatively bullish and optimistic about the vision that we have here in Hawaii in terms of distributed generation that is fundamentally altering the grid as we knew it from one directional to bi-directional and truly the quote smart grid, not just for the future, but the smart grid, is evolving day to day and progressing day to day and week to week. So- So fast enough, is this change fast enough? Of course not. Of course not. Of course not. But that's a good segue into a little factoid that I'll share with you, having crunched the data for PV permits on Oahu, which is of course the biggest market in the state, they were up about 6% in 2021 compared to 2020. 2020 was above 2019, 2019 was above 2018. So after several years in the doldrums after net energy metering went away in 2015, the trend line is up again and close to 90% of all new PV systems going in include storage. And there's nowhere, nowhere, nowhere on the rest of the country that's even close to that. Yeah, but the legislature still hasn't adopted the tax credit for storage systems built onto existing PV installations, which is really tragic. I mean, right now, legislature has money burning a hole in its pocket. Seems like it's spending on everything, but it's not spending on that. What's the problem? Is it not a priority anymore? Do they not feel that we need to prepare against this extreme weather or other natural disaster? Do they not feel this is important? Oh, you had to bring up that pain point. My friend, shame on you. Yeah, I mean, there have been efforts over the past, gosh, I'm gonna say five, six years in the ledge to have an addition to the state renewable energy technology tax credit that would allow for a tax credit, a state tax credit to be available for those renewable energy system owners like me and others who add storage to their existing or new PV system. And those bills went all the way through year after year, all the way through to conference committee. And what happened? Died in conference for reasons unknown to me. And that's the nature of the way the game is played with the big boys and girls in conference committee. A lot of bills, you know, will make it to the very end of the session, go to conference and bye-bye, they died. I don't know of any bills, not to say they're not out there, Jay, but I don't know of any bills that specifically would establish a state tax credit for storage only as long as the storage is connected to a renewable energy generation source. So it's something I've kind of- It's tragic, it's tragic. Everyone agrees it should happen, but it still doesn't happen. The same thing with returning to a electric vehicle credit. We dropped that. We don't care anymore. We could be way ahead on electric vehicles. The other thing I wanted to mention is, and this goes to a point you made about your own nano grid, did you call it? Microgrid. Nano grid, very nice. And your refrigerator will continue to work. But if you are surrounded with a blackout, you won't have internet. If you're using landlines, you won't have landlines. If you are dependent on the grid in some way, you won't have that. Your refrigerator will work, but a lot of other things won't work. It won't be connected. And so I think we have to make all due dispatch on having a lot of your nano grids and moving ahead with all this technology, all at the same time for everybody. And that means A, having these credits, it means showing people that this is a high priority. It means encouraging them in every way. Because if you have part of the system, it doesn't work. And the other part that does work, that's not enough. It all has to work. And I don't think we have enough time to do that before 2030. We'll have a lot of solar. We may have a lot of storage, but we won't be complete. And we are likely just, in the way of the world, we're likely to have an extreme storm. Remember climate change is inexorable. And not much is happening to ameliorate it. We're likely to have some really bad storms in that period. And those storms are gonna leave us like Puerto Rico. We are not ready, I think. I agree. I can't help but feel to some extent that we are living on borrowed time in terms of a category three or four or worse. Hurricane kind of meandering its way through the central Pacific, North Pacific. And I'm sure that the state's emergency planners have game this out to the wazoo, up the wazoo. And I can't imagine that the scenarios are very positive at all. I mean, imagine if the main port of Honolulu were to get clobbered for any length of time. I mean, that's really, really, really bad news, but not to get too Cassandra here. I mean, on a positive note, you look at this program that Hawaiian Electric has been administering that was ordered by the Public Utilities Commission to the so-called battery bonus program on Oahu where the commission said we wanna see 50 megawatts, 50 megawatts of 50 million watts worth of behind the meter storage, AKA generation. And we want there to be a financial incentive to do so. So that is only on Oahu, unfortunately. I mean, as far as I'm concerned. And it was kind of partially at least in response to the AES coal plant, which is scheduled to go offline in September, which will be a big part of the generating portfolio of Hawaiian Electric HECO on Oahu, which will no longer be there. So the checks are already, the checks are in the mail, Jay. I can confirm that, I'm glad to hear that. There have been several hundred thousand dollars worth of checks gone out so far according to reports submitted from Hawaiian Electric to the commission. There are several million dollars in the pipeline in terms of systems with battery storage on Oahu that have applied for it. So I mean, this is, it's not chump change, right? Now that said, we got to start somewhere. And when you start from zero, well, you start from zero. By the end of the year, I'm going to guess that probably not more than five plus megawatts total will be actually online, which is of course a small fraction of 50 megawatts. So it's good to set this aspirational target of 50 megawatts, which is substantial. It's going to take us a while to get there. But at least we're doing it, we're trying. And with the likes of Scott Sue, now chair of Hawaiian Electric Industry, taking over Connie and Shelley Kimura at HECO, new generation, new team, hopefully ongoing, new dynamism and pushing things harder than they pushed before in order to make this happen quicker because people's livelihoods in the state's economy really rests on accelerating these changes and these improvements. Yeah, we got to get away from the spoke in the wheel marvel you talked about. We got to get to distributed energy. We got to get it out there so people are generating their own and feeding it back to the utility. That's what we got to get. And we have to do everything possible to achieve that. And I'm glad there's a new team in place. I'm optimistic that they will see the issue the same way and that they will actually get something done in time. But if you look at what happened in Texas or worse, Puerto Rico and you plant that, you should plant that on Hawaii, we could be in for a terrible time with the very first bad weather. And remember the biggest story of our lifetimes, Marco, is climate change. And we in Hawaii cannot do too much to stop climate change around the world. But we can do something to protect ourselves from the ravages of climate change where those storms hit. So I think it's really important that we do that to survive. The damage that will be done with a serious storm and our inability to get back online will be enormous. And you talk about a migration away from the state, everybody looking to leave and it will be devastation for the economy, just one storm. So that's one thing. The other thing is, and this is a lesser thing but it's still out there. It's Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, know how to bring down utility systems using cyber attacks. Putin has done this and is probably doing it right now today as we speak in Ukraine. And we've seen examples of Xi Jinping doing it. So we live in a time where cyber attacks will continue to get worse, they become a geopolitical force. And why are we not subject to that? We are. And just as kind of an example, a Pearl Harbor icon, you know, attack Hawaii. So I'm a little worried about that too. And we have to be resilient against that as well. Are we? I don't know the answer. Well, we could do hours with talking about cyber warfare and David Sanger, sorry, New York Times, one of the best foreign affairs analysts and reporters, in my opinion, around these days. He wrote a book several years ago looking at cyber warfare and the fact that there are really, there are no treaties out there. The major cyber players are not really talking about having some type of structure like you had arms control in the 60s and 70s and 80s. So this is really kind of the scary frontier where, you know, how do you, you know, in terms of offense, defense. So anyway, I know we're at the tail end of this show and that's a whole nother story, but our grids are very vulnerable to cyber attack. The Russians essentially took out part of the Ukraine's grid a number of years ago. And, you know, that was an important learning lesson in terms of, and I think they, of course, they did it very much on purpose to saying, look at what we can do to you. Yeah. Anyway, I'm sorry, if you think that climate change is the most important story in our lifetimes, and I think we have no option not to think that, then you have to see those storms and the extreme weather and all the natural changes in the environment that follow climate change and that affect the way. And we have to, therefore, we have to see making ourselves resilient, avoiding blackouts, making a system that can stand up against any number of threats is the most important thing we can do. It should be at the top of the priority list. I know there are lots of other priorities, social priorities for sure. And, you know, all kinds of priorities that come into play every legislative session. But, you know, the problem is that if climate change and energy is not at the top of the most favorite list and other things supplanted at the top of the most favorite list, we can't let that happen. It's always got to be at the top because it is infrastructure, it is our lives. And if we don't have it, you know, we don't have to spend a lot of time figuring out how that will affect not only you with your micro grid, your nano grid, but me without a nano grid. What will happen? Our lives will change suddenly and we will have very little prospect of returning to the way it was before. Well, you know, in closing, in the meantime, we've got a governor who is his last, less than a year now in office, right? We've got a number of the pretenders presenting themselves. We've got a legislature, I want to be careful here with interesting priorities given kind of the circumstances at hand. So, you know what's gonna come out of all the sausage making when the ledges is pow in early May? I don't know, but I'm not terribly optimistic. And then we've got the backdrop of our friend, Dr. Jay Griffin, who's been head of the PUC these past years, whose term ends on the 30th of June, which isn't too far from now. So there's a lot of uncertainty and kind of relative greater instability as far as kind of the major pieces on the strategic board as far as how it's all gonna shake out. Let me only say that when I start, when I met you back in Hilo, back in the day, there was a lot of vitality in the energy industry and in the, what do you wanna call it, energy leadership? It wasn't only governmental leadership, it was people in, you know, in industry also leading. And of course, Hawaiian Electric is still absolutely the leader in such as leaders go. But I don't see the same vitality as I saw back then among those who were the leaders before, I don't see the same vitality now. And I think we really gotta get back to that and soon because we have either forgotten or it has passed off our scope because other things have taken the oxygen, so to speak. What are your thoughts about that and then we'll close. I just wanna give a quick shout out to three people who I think are trying their utmost to move the ball forward in the right direction. Number one is my friend, Representative Nicole Lohan on the Kona side, who's the chair of the House Energy and Environment Committee. I have very, a lot of Aloha for Nicole. A lot of Aloha for head of the state energy office, Scott Glenn. I think Scott's doing very best he can. And then I also give a shout out to my friend Lani Shinsato, who is the director or manager, don't remember her title, customer energy resources at Hawaiian Electric and I've known Lani for a number of years and she and her team I think are trying to move the ball forward more rapidly, more expeditiously. So there are really good people out there in key positions who I feel are doing their utmost to get progress, have progress be made. So I'll leave it on that positive note. Okay, thank you for that. And thank you for this discussion, Marco. We didn't really get into some of the points that we wanted to discuss, but there's another show two weeks hence when we can discuss this. And also very possibly what happened at the PUC in the evidentiary hearing, don't you think? There's so much, there are miles to go before we sleep, Marco. Well, as they say on the streets of Geneva where I once lived, absolutely, mon ami, absolutely. Yeah, that's what they say. All right, that's what we say here in Think Tech, absolutely, see you next time, Aloha. Thank you very much, bye-bye.