 At the Hawaii Sustainable Energy Research Facility, known as HICERF, variable energy storage technologies and smart grid applications that promise a clean energy future are developed and tested. I ask Leon Roos, team leader, to tell me more about his work. Grid Start is a practice group within the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and our focus is on looking at and bringing into the power grid renewable energy technologies and integrating that effectively into the system at very high levels and doing that effectively and efficiently. The world is changing rapidly and we need these solutions now and our team is focused on delivering that. Silesh, this is some of the technology that we're talking about that is really sort of the definition of the grid of the future. As we begin to have all of this distributed sources of power at individual people's homes, the entire architecture of the power system needs to evolve. For example, you may have photovoltaic cells on people's rooftops that in turn gets converted so that it can be used by people by this device called an inverter. So I think what's exciting about what's happening here is the integration of a lot of these resources at the home. We have batteries and the PVs and vehicle charging that are all controlled at a local level with a micro-DMS that is then integrated in with another control scheme that's aggregating all of these end uses to create a reliable as well as economical power system. That gets integrated in with battery systems within the home that helps to schedule the power and move it around. So down here at the bottom is the actual battery storage cells. Right. This is the inverter device that converts the power from DC to AC. AC is what we generally use in the home and plug it into the wall. And why DC? Where does DC come in? Solar panels basically produce power in DC. Oh, okay. But the world, you know, more than a hundred years ago decided to go AC. It's sort of a paradigm shift again. Now where these sources are DC, the battery system is also doing DC power. So you actually plug in the panels of the PV into this system and they kind of go between the panels and the battery just DC. When you need to feed power out into the grid into the home, you go through this inverter here. The other part we're starting to look at is the consumer part where you have, you know, the plugs and the conversions from AC to DC. Can we build systems that just use DC from the DC source like PV all the way down to serving the DC load? You can skip those, those losses. Oh, that's really interesting. So it's almost this whole potential paradigm shift back towards DC. Because these distributed sources are inherently DC. The other component is that transportation piece. And so we have a two-way charger outside, which is basically a device where you can charge your electric vehicle. But it also allows the vehicle to serve as a source of energy into the home and into the grid. So this not only would allow you to charge your car, so you can drive it during the day. But say you come home at night and you maybe have some need for extra power. You can actually draw power out of that car battery and utilize it in your home and maybe even to the larger power grid. The uniqueness of this one is the self-sustained operation where it can operate isolated from the grid just powering your home should the grid go down. You can operate off your battery and PV system. It's about a solution that fundamentally changes the way things happen in the world. Right? I mean, taking some of these technologies, it would be wonderful 10 years from now where it's just a regular part of everybody's life. I mean, thinking about it, it's like, you know, your radio or your refrigerator. It's there. It does its thing and it serves its purpose. Leon's team is taking a major step towards that goal by studying a pilot integrated energy system that they have implemented on the island of Maui. Here where roughly 800 residents are being monitored, a quarter of them draw power partially from the grid and partially from rooftop PV and the rest rely entirely on mainline electricity supply. This kind of situation is beginning to create some issues in managing and offering the power grid with so much renewables. We're trying to address real issues, real world and real world's implementable solutions. We're going to be bringing the technology of these smart inverters. We're enhancing these inverters to have these advanced capabilities that can actually read the voltage that is being experienced here on the grid and then operate and do things to compensate for some of the variability that results in the voltage because the PV power is moving up and down as cloud shadows pass across and sweep across the neighborhood. And so we deploy a lot of these data monitoring devices and we deploy them sort of strategically across the neighborhood to collect not only what the PV panels are doing, but also how is the power grid reacting to that. And then we bring all of that data back in and then we analyze it using various computer models of this actual power system here for this neighborhood. That's a key part of the work we do, deploying the technology in the field, exercising it in the field, but recording its performance, bringing that information back, analyzing it, refining our controls and then retesting it in the field. And we kind of iterate between this modeled environment and the real world environment. Our fundamental mission and vision is to expand that knowledge and know-how and bring it into the markets in the Asia-Pacific region. And in some ways it allows you an opportunity to maybe leapfrog into development of new technologies right from the onset. Their primary source of power, maybe in a remote village, may start off with solar. That is the core of their power, right? And then how do we then begin to interconnect individual homes and sort of build a grid and begin to hook them together in maybe a nano grid? And then as that extends out, it becomes a little bigger into a micro grid and ultimately builds out. But it's going to be built on a fundamentally different foundation of technology and capabilities that what we sort of lived with with all of our infrastructure for the last hundred years. Energy and these issues are a global issue. It's not a Hawaii-specific issue or a US-specific issue. It is a mankind issue. Helping to develop innovative concepts like grid start into beneficial real-world applications is part of HNEI's agenda at HighServe as the world inexorably moves towards a renewable energy future.