 Good afternoon. Howard Wigg here for the State of Clean Energy, Think Tech Hawaii, and we have a full plate for you today. I'm not here alone. I'm with co-host John Cole of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and the kick things off Keith Block, commercial building manager, something like that for Hawaii Energy. And then after Hawaii Energy, we are going to bring on David Bissell, CEO of the KIUC, Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. And when he comes on, hang on to your socks because if you don't, they're going to be blown off. Let's start with Keith and you have been doing some horrendous things, great things with restaurant roll because you can imagine how big the air conditioning system is for that entire complex and you have done something with it. Yeah. No, we wanted to bring a video today for you to show you some of the projects that we do. This one, a little bit unusual because like you said, it's a huge project. I mean, if you imagine how big restaurant row is, the cooling plant that cools restaurant row is equally as huge, but that's what makes it really, really interesting. Interesting to me, hopefully interesting to your audience as well. I didn't realize I'm a little bit of a tech geek and an engineer, but hopefully, you know, it'll resonate with your audience is techie. Yeah. So yeah, let's take a look at the video then because it's pretty cool system. It's new chillers without everybody in the building go down. They've got new equipment, reliable equipment, the ability to meet their diverse load at night. For these guys, it was really number one. It was how how can we save money on such a plan? We're spending too much money on maintenance. We're spending too much money on our utility bills. We have to find a way to save. And that's when we came in and came up with these. The new technologies we installed has the ability to ramp the systems down, run more quickly, even though it doesn't sound like it's going to be more efficient, but when you run more at a slower speed, they tend to get a little more efficient. And that's really what we're utilizing here is trying to get those efficiencies driving the plan. So Hawaii Energy helped us a ton. At the end of the project, we metered the equipment, looked at the utility bills, ended up coming to agreements that we saved almost over a million KWH annually just from the central plant equipment. That accolades to a $250,000 rebate back to the owner at the other project, which was, I mean, just icing on the cake at the end. Okay. Keith, I didn't get any numbers out of that. What was it before consumption and the after consumption? Yeah, I got a bunch of numbers here for you, but what you actually saw there were two 800 ton chillers, three cooling towers, variable speed frequency drives on all the pumps. So they took out three chillers. There were two 575 ton chillers that they took out, one 250 ton chiller, and again replaced with two 800 ton chillers. The variable frequency drives that they put on all the motors allows them to save pumping loads when they're not at full load. But the 800 tons actually increased some of the capacity of the plant, but the 800 tons allows them to run at part load where those chillers are really efficient. They're actually magnetic bearing compressors. So they're called oil-free. You don't have to oil them, but the compressor shaft actually floats on a magnetic force field. So extremely efficient at part load. So, you know, that's why they put so much capacity on it so they can run at part load. And then variable frequency drives on all the pumps and allows them to scale back the amount of water they're pumping. If you don't have to pump so much water, you don't have to cool so much water. You save on your pumping loads. So the entire project itself is about a $2.5 million project. Our incentive to that was $249,000. So almost 10% of the costs we contributed to that project. It's saving the customer about a million kilowatt hours per year. So that's about $169,000 savings to the customer. And actually this whole thing, as you can imagine, a project of that scope, you know, took years to get going, right? So it actually started with a study we funded back in 2012. And from that, they said, you know, the study determined that this was the best design and then two years of construction. But the other thing that was key about this, too, is in that two years of construction, they were able to stage a bunch of different things so they never lost cooling to the entire facility. So truly an extraordinary project. I was, you know, we're thrilled to have been a part of it. And we worked with some good contractors, you know, to do that installation. But and you saw the contractor there that was, you know, he's equally proud of that project. It's really an interesting project, I think. And there's so many tenants in restaurant row. They probably all have different time schedules. But because of variable frequency, you probably got sensors all over the place saying, I don't need any cooling right now and I need all the cooling I can get right now. And it'll automatically sense and flow in accord with the demand, which I would think would be a kind of a variable demand. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. I mean, they have a nightclub there that's open till late at night. They have office tower. So there's, you know, traditional office hours. So yeah, that's the other reason why I was saying, you know, the two chillers allow them to stage those chillers so that they operate optimally. And this whole system came with a new controls package where you're doing exactly what you said, monitoring different set points, you know, with a chiller plan of this size, there's various things you can do. You can change your set points on your cooling, your temperature of your chilled water. But then you've got to pump more of it and then blow more air across it to get the same temperature in the building. So you increase loads on your pumping and on your fans, but you save it on your, you know, your compressor. Or the other way around, you can make colder water that you don't have to pump as much. So I mean, it's truly a difficult task to optimize this. And in the past, what you used to do is you'd kind of find an optimal point at some point in your load during the day. And that's just where you'd leave it set at. This one is dynamic. It senses all those points and changes everything as it's going along. So it's really an optimal system, real cool design. Cool, so to speak. And you heard it from me first. You estimated a 1 million kW weight savings per year. My seat of the pants, I guess, is it's going to be more than that. Yeah. And the key thing there too is, you know, a chiller plant is going to last 20 years. So that's a million kW age per year for at least 20 years. And, you know, it has the flexibility as their occupancy changes, you know, they get more people, they get less people, you know, they can flow with them and still be operating at that optimal level. Beautiful. Well, we have to bid fond adieu to Hawaii energy at this point. And this is Think Tech Hawaii. Thank you, Keith, for the video and for saving us at least 1 million kWH per year for the next 20 years. This is Think Tech Hawaii. We will be back with part two, David Bezel of KIUC in a moment. Hi, I'm Stacy Hayashi and you can catch me on Mondays at 11 on Think Tech Hawaii. Stacy to the rescue. See you then. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Lakeable Science on Think Tech Hawaii. 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You're just sitting at home, figuring out what to do, go to the beach, spend some time with Think Tech Hawaii, spend the time thinking about how you can contribute to Hawaii and make it a better place to live, and start watching some of the programs on Think Tech, including Stand the Energy Man. Well, you'll learn all about everything energy, especially hydrogen and transportation. So we'll see you every Friday at 12 o'clock noon, Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Chantel Seville, the host of the Savvy Chick Show, which you can watch every Wednesday at 11 a.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com. On the Savvy Chick Show, we are all about inspiring and empowering women and girls to be the best they can be by having amazing guests from all around the world. So we hope you'll join us every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Aloha. Good afternoon again, Howard Wigg, the state of clean energy, ThinkTech Hawaii. And we've got a full lineup. My cohost is John Cole of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. And our guest star, we were so lucky to have him in town today, is Keith Bissell, CEO of the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. And I do research in a reading about a lot of utilities across the nation and certainly follow what Hawaiian Electric is doing. And I think that KIUC, out of the hundreds of utilities nationwide, may be number one in terms of getting close to 100% clean energy generation, as we will see somehow the phrase small is beautiful comes to mind here. Does Kauai still just have 65,000 people? No, they're up to 70 now. It's about 70,000. 70,000 people. If you drew a circle with a quarter inch diameter around where we are in downtown Honolulu, you'd probably have 70,000 people. So you've got a certain advantage there, but you've done exceptional, exceptional things. So welcome, David. And why don't we get rolling with the first slide? Because we don't have all that much time here. What in the world is this? Thank you, Howard. What this slide is, and I'm not a technical person, I'm a little intimidated up here on the think tech thing. I'm an accountant and a financial person. So pretty easy numbers 40% and 70%. 40% is where KIUC is today on our renewable portfolio standards. And that's up from about 8% six years ago. So we're really pleased on Kauai that we've met the state 2030 renewable target already. And the 70% is kind of our next goal on Kauai. We've been in strategic planning as a co-op. We've been holding community meetings over the last couple of weeks on multiple locations on the island of Kauai. And I'm pretty confident that our board's going to come out and say 70% is the new target on Kauai by 2030. So we'll should stay 10 years ahead of the state mandates. And we're making great progress on doing it with an awful lot of solar, solar biomass. We've got legacy hydro trying to do new hydro on Kauai and really doing some innovative first in the industry type of things with battery storage. And we've broke there's been ground broken on the solar city Tesla renewable PV project with storage so it'll be dispatchable solar first large dispatchable solar project done in the industry will be taking 52 megawatts of energy generated during the day it'll be a 13 megawatt PV field running into a battery and bring it out at nighttime during our peak most expensive part of our dispatch profile. Wow. Did I tell everybody to hang onto their socks? I mean, I read about other utilities. This is way, way, way above what we're used to other utilities are struggling even to get to first base on in this area. Well, in Kauai we have a lot of advantages compared to Oahu in particular, we've got a lot of land underutilized land. So we can do big solar projects, we can do a lot of big solar projects without eating up the land and really having a visible footprint problem on there because we've got so much we got 10s of 1000s of acres of land available. So even if we did 1000 acres under PV, it's not going to be taking up a huge amount of the island. The problem we have is that the lack of available load during the day, we've, we've already put in 30 megawatts of utility scale solar on Kauai and keep in mind that our daytime load is in the 50 to 60 megawatt level. We've got 6.7 megawatt biomass plant. And we also have five or five to eight megawatts say of any time of the day, hydro energy. So very little available load during the daylight periods, we've maxed that out. So the next frontier is moving at the nighttime. Amazing, amazing. Why don't we look at the next slide? And John, John, why don't you take over from here? Well, I'll let David do the slide. But first I wanted to congratulate him. He recently got a energy transformational award. It was given by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and presented by the governor last month. And it's for a lot of the things that David's talking about, to quick move toward renewable energy, some of the high penetrations they've been hitting and how their system has been able to handle it, and just how they've been moving forward at a marching pace. Whereas it seems, Oahu has gone quite a ways in the rest of the islands under the HECO companies. But KAUC has really been leading the way as part of the award. So congratulations on that, David. Well, thank you. Thank you, John. I just want to be clear. It's not my award. It's KAUC's award. It really does belong to our engineer and operations people on Kauai, because they're the ones that are pushing the envelope, technically, to make this happen. If you talked out of mainland grid, any of the operators out there, they would say this is absolutely impossible what's being done on Kauai. So my job is really to say, yeah, it makes sense. Let's do it. Let's figure out how to make the money or obtain the money to make the project happen or to sign the deals. But it would not happen without the engineers. We've got great engineers on Kauai at KAUC and our operators that are actually making this happen. And you said you're an accountant, so you're the numbers guy. You just let them do the real work there. We're kind of interesting from an accounting versus operations and engineering thing, because what I say is, can we do it? Why not do it? And what we're really fortunate is my engineers on Kauai have a culture of saying, why not? Let's try this. Make it happen. We'll figure a way to make these industry leading projects go forward. They don't have, they could be saying, no, no, no, no, we absolutely can't do it. And nothing will get done. So I really want to give those guys credit. Well, let's take a look at the no smoking slide here. And that now you got some specific numbers coming down here. Yes, we've hit a really remarkable 97% renewable at times on February 10th on this slide. 97% 77% of that coming from solar. On Kauai we have really two legacy power plants, our Port Allen plant, which is shown in this picture, which is a lot of small diesel units. And then we have a Kapaia plant closer to Lohui. And every day now when it's sunny, we're shutting down the entire Port Allen plant for hours at a time. And that was the legacy, that's what KAUC and Kauai Electric before us was founded. That was the predominant power plant for the island of Kauai 15, 20 years ago. And now it's shutting down every day. And Clear Day is 80 to 90% renewable. We couldn't do it without having the batteries we've been putting in place. We have about 10 megawatts of utility-skilled batteries that KAUC owns. Six and a half megawatts of that is lithium ion ones that are on a whole of the solar plant. And those batteries are every day going off hundreds of times to help us with frequency control and to keep our grid stable with all the renewables, in particular intermittent renewables of solar that go up and down every time the cloud comes around. So a lot of technology in play. Yeah, just that one slide is, we could spend hours building into every one of those, but it's all exceptional. Why don't we go to the next slide, because we've got to move quickly here. This is a mind blowing slide, at least to us, takey types. Yeah, it really is. And what this is, this is a KAUC dispatch from a, it's not necessarily a typical day, but it's not an atypical day, March 4th, 2016. And it's showing, starting at midnight, going forward till midnight the next evening, our load profile. And you hear a lot about the duck curve in California and a little bit here. I don't even, I don't even know how to characterize this curve, because during the midday hours, when the sun's out, we have just a remarkable amount of solar energy. The greenish, greenish color at the bottom is the biomass plant that's just producing stable, about 10% of our use. And below that is the blue is hydro, and above that is the yellow solar. And in prime sunlight from between 11 to 2, you can see on there the remaining piece I didn't talk about is our fossil fuel, the black piece there. And you can see it gets down to just a very, very small amount of fossil fuel. Typically that's one small generator running for, to keep our system with a frequency and a little bit of backup on it. And it's nowhere else is the curve like that in place in the United States. So it's pretty, pretty amazing. And look at those jagged lines, even at the bottom, that's where your batteries kick in, isn't it? That's right. Yeah. And if you're really looking at those jagged lines, I think that's a 15 minute chart on a second by second. It would be up and down, you know, hundreds of times. And you can go that fast. And it's not unusual to see some of our big plants go from 12 megawatts down to two or three in a matter of a minute or so, as the cloud comes over. Yeah. And the kawaii is pretty garsh-darn cloudy, too, so, you know. Cloudy and frequent winds. It's the cloudy days with wind coming by quick that really impacts the system. If it's just cloudy, it's not problematic because it kind of keeps stable. But when you have fast-moving clouds that we get on kawaii, that's, that's what's the challenge from a technical side. Yeah. Again, we could spend hours on that slide. Can we go back to that? I just have one question I wanted to talk to you about. So the black areas that right now are the oil or diesel generation. To go all the way, those are going to have to be filled in by renewables. So, I mean, do you envision more biomass, batteries, some kind of mix, or... That's a perfect segue. If we move forward to the next slide, that talks about what we're looking at on kawaii. And we don't... On kawaii, we don't have a huge amount of options with today's technology. This is, this slide shows really the conventional biomass or conventional renewable opportunities in Hawaii. And we've done one biomass project, but we just don't have the scale to do more on kawaii. So the cost would be prohibitive. Bio-fueled really throughout the state now and throughout the industry is the pricing's not there. The pricing is typically cost of diesel or oil plus. Waste energy, we're too small on kawaii. It's clearly possible over here and working on a wahoo, but we don't have the scale on kawaii. Geothermal, we have no... We don't have that there. We don't have the thermal activity that we do on the big island in Maui. And tidal wave and ocean isn't commercially available. There's some really cutting-edge technology and research being done in Hawaii, but it's not commercial right now. And wind is also very widely deployed on Maui and the big island and over here on a wahoo. But with our endangered species on kawaii and small scale, wind's essentially off the table. So that leads us hydro and solar. And that was well illustrated in the previous slide there. And speaking of slides, we'd better move along to the next slide. This is a cutting-edge draft strategic plan on kawaii that we've been working on. Again, kawaii is a co-operative. A little bit different than any other islands that are investor-owned. So we've got an elected board. And the elected board works with our members. Everybody that takes electricity on kawaii is a member of our cooperative. And they elect the board and the board then sets the draft, sets the strategic plan. And they've recently updated strategic plan with a draft that we've been out meeting with the community. And I talked earlier about the 70 percent renewable. And the second item under there from a financial side is important. We could go to 100 percent renewable in a couple years. We could double down, quadruple down on the PV and batteries. But there's technology risks on that. You don't want to put too much, too many eggs in one basket. If the prices of batteries drop radically, we don't want to lock in 2016, 2017 pricing. If it's going to be a third less or half less down the road. So we really are looking towards technology risk as a big part of our timeline. We want to ladder in our renewables on kawaii. Similar to what's being done on debt with most enterprises. Because you don't want too much at any one time. So we're doing that. We continue to have cost control as a focus on our island. We're a cooperative. We don't want to spend money. We don't want to have to raise rates. So we're really trying to watch our expenditures carefully. And then we're moving to rate design. Rate design is huge on kawaii. Huge throughout Hawaii and really throughout the industry. And we're concerned about rates fairness between member classes with right now with we've got 1950s rates. And it just wasn't set up to have on kawaii. We have 12 percent of our membership as rooftop and distributed solar. And we don't want that to be subsidized. The ones that have it subsidized being subsidized by those who don't. So we've got to look at our rates. We want to get more fixed cost which really reflect the way the grid operates. The grid the cost of operating the grid doesn't go down or change. If all three of us are the grid and we each have two of you have PV and you're the grid costs aren't going down. It's just would all be funneled over to me. And we don't think that's fair and want to work hard on that. So at those are really big pressure points on kawaii that we have to get. We have to get straight to help us move forward to be in a position to be the best utility we can. And I'm gathering that built into this is possibly time of use pricing. Yes we have a small time of use pilot program on with about 300 members. And we try to keep it simple because we we really wanted to just assess whether we could change behavior. So what we came up with was for four or five hours in midday we're offering a 25 percent discount to our retail rates. And it's early it went into effect Valentine's Day our first report showed people are shifting some of their usage into that time but there's kind of a other outcome and we didn't anticipate but their usage is going up throughout their whole time frame. So they're moving more into the cheaper period but they're also using more throughout the entire period. So we'll see if that holds holds fast going forward. We do believe and it makes total sense that PV pricing is gets cheaper and cheaper and to the extent the cheapest way outside of efficiency to bring improvements and improve the quality of life is to move more of the use into that lowest cost generation period. And we we believe we're going to have pretty aggressive rates during that time frame probably much more than a 25 percent discount but maybe down to eight ten cents a kilowatt hour for a four four hour period. And we could spend a lot of time on this but we are running out of time and I believe we've got another slide. This is a just a little bit of kind of kawaii specific items that we want of course every company needs to maintain a prudent financial structure. Big one for us is we're now really looking at should we be regulated by the PUC. When we were formed in 2002 we had a commitment we made a commitment to the PUC that we would stay regulated for five years. It's now well past that it's been 14 years and our board is increasingly starting to question whether we need that we've kind of grown up co-ops are in 47 states and only 12 of them have any 12 states have any form of regulation. So we're definitely on the very high end of regulation for a co-op. We don't you know as a member elected board there's nobody we don't need a watchdog to say take care of our membership because if the public is not happy with what's happening they're going to vote in a new board. So we spend a lot of money on that a lot of time are good people at the PUC. John knows as a former commissioner and they really do a good job but they've got limited resources and we're starting to believe more and more of those resources are and should be focused on the investor-owned utility and not on the cooperative. So we look at that that's not going to be an overnight movement but it's definitely a direction that the board is interested in pursuing. Wow not bad for a small one we're just about to wrap up John any parting question. No thank you David I just Wow very interesting and I'm really impressed by the the work KIC is doing and moving forward toward the RPS so quickly. Yeah and I my guess would be the PUC says just we'll keep our hands off you just keep doing what you're doing and let the rest of the not the rest of the state but the rest of the nation see what in the world you're doing and see what they they can emulate here. Well thanks both of you got a good group on kawaii good management team good board and good engaged community so we're firing on all cylinders and hope and hope to continue. Wow well on that cheery very cheery note from us techy clean energy type people we need to sign off Howard Wigg Think Tech Hawaii with John Cole of HNAI and our honored guest David Bissell CEO of KIUC see you later