 Think Tech Away. Civil engagement lives here. Hey, welcome to Santa Energy Man here. In the middle of February already, 2018, how did we get this far as fast? Anyway, I'm all refreshed back from vacation, like great vacation with my wife down under New Zealand, Australia. Had a great time. But came back to my office and had a video show up on one of my emails from young lady that used to work with us on a hydrogen incident. And it's actually part of news story out of California. And what I'd like to do is I'm going to show you the video, but before we do that, I want to lead you into the video and kind of give you an idea of what kind of challenges I have in my day to day life talking about hydrogen. Because so many people don't understand hydrogen, there's so many misperceptions and misnomers about hydrogen, what it does, what it looks like, how it reacts, and all those things. So many bad news stories like the Hindenburg and things like H-bomb that come up as soon as I talk hydrogen, that it's kind of disturbing to me that I have to keep overcoming the negatives when actually there's positives, even in what we call a tragedy. So this story that you're going to see in a few seconds, we're going to run 30 seconds of it. We're just going to cut the thing off after 30 seconds. But I want you to listen to the words that these newscasters are using in relation to a fire on a hydrogen storage trailer being pulled by a truck that happened the last week, I guess, I think in California, I'm not even sure what city it's in. And their commentary about evacuation zones and near disasters. But then I want you to really think about what kind of fire you'd have if that was a tanker truck full of fuel instead of 20 cylinders with 5,000 pounds per square inch hydrogen stored inside, and contrast even the cleanup. At the end, there's no cleanup. But to listen to these newscasters, it sounds like it's a major disaster that's getting ready to take over a half square mile area in their city. So let's roll the tape and let's listen to how they portray this incident. Breaking news. A dangerous tractor trailer fire and explosion leads to evacuations in Diamond Bar. Desmond Shaw's live in Sky Two above the scene. Desmond. Yeah, Peter and Andrew, a pretty scary situation here off of Golden Springs of Road. This is just off the 60 57 freeway on the border of Brea and Walla. You see this truck right here. Just after one o'clock today, there were reports of a CHP about an explosion and the hydrogen containers that were inside of this truck had ignited. So there was a pretty scary fire situation you see. Okay. Did that look really dangerous to you? Did you see huge puddles of fuel below the vehicle and tractor trailer engulfed in flames? No. In fact, if you go later on in that video, you'll see during the fire from a cell phone camera that contrary to what's on YouTube, that hydrogen fire had a nice orange flame in the middle of the daylight that you could see. And it was going straight up in the air at 45 miles an hour because hydrogen is so much lighter than air and nothing around, including the tractor trailer pulling the trailer was even close to catching on fire. They didn't have to evacuate the area because hydrogen is not toxic. It's not a hazmat incident. And the tanks did exactly what they're designed to do. They contain the hydrogen. If they get overheated and over pressurized, they release the hydrogen. If there's a flame, the hydrogen burns. And when they're all done, the tanks that were still full of hydrogen, they just open them up, let the hydrogen out, bend all the hydrogen and tow the truck away. But believe it or not, the pavement under that truck wasn't even hurt. Whereas if you had a fuel spill and the fuel caught on fire under the truck besides losing the whole truck, you'd also have scorched pavement and probably have a road repair to do after the fire. So my point is you get a lot of newscasts today that they're trying to make it exciting and they're trying to make it sound, you know, like it's a really important deal. But really look at what's going on and do your own assessment, do your own critical analysis. Hydrogen is a very stable element when it's all by itself, like no oxidizer around. Those tanks are full of pure hydrogen. The tanks won't burn when they leak. When they leak and they mix with air, you'll have a hydrogen fire if you have the right mix of hydrogen, oxygen and the flame at the right point to ignite it. If you actually had an open flame there, it probably wouldn't even ignite. The blast from the hydrogen escaping at that velocity would blow the flame out. But if you had an electrical short or something like that, real high energy that would ignite it, the fire that you get is very directional, goes straight up, doesn't go sideways, doesn't expand out because there's no carbon in it, doesn't go down to the pavement and melt the pavement under the truck, doesn't catch the truck on fire. And at the end of the day, the fire department doesn't even have anything to hose down. They open up all the valves, let the hydrogen out, let it go into the air. So, hey, can we run that video one more time, Robert, and just let people look at it again and just realize, does this look like a super dangerous situation to you? Breaking news, a dangerous tractor-trailer fire and explosion leads to evacuations in Diamond Bar. Desmond Shaw is live in Sky2 above the scene. Desmond? Yeah, Peter, and actually a pretty scary situation here off of Golden Spring, this is just off the 60-57 freeway on the border of Brea and Walla. You see this truck right here. Just after one o'clock today, there were reports from a CHP about an explosion and the hydrogen containers that were inside of this truck had ignited. So, there was a pretty scary fire situation you see. So, apparently, one of the tanks leaked out of the 20, 25 kilogram containers with 5,000 psi hydrogen inside. One of the containers probably leaked, had some kind of ignition source and it was contained inside that area, ignited, started burning off the hydrogen that was leaking. Apparently, a total of six out of the 20 tanks, later on in the story, they say, leaked their hydrogen and also caught on fire and helped fuel the fire. But out of the 20 tanks, only six were damaged. Now, they were all in really close proximity. Not only six tanks were damaged, even though, and if you saw the fire, it's a pretty impressive fire come out of the top of that truck. But I'd say far from a disaster. The driver wasn't in danger. The people on the streets by the sidewalk, they weren't in danger. Other traffic going by wasn't in danger. And certainly, not a half-mile square community needed to be evacuated for this. But that's the kind of misinformation that's out there on hydrogen that we need to kind of really stop and take a breath and think about. So, just something to look at. You can go on YouTube, probably, and find that video and look at the whole thing and listen to the whole newscaster. There might be a couple out there from different channels. But let's start really being critical about, you know, what's a disaster and what's not. So, anyway, back to our real program today with my very favorite electrical engineer, Ryan Wubbins, to kind of continue with the discussions that we had last month, talking about whether or not you want to go off the grid and what's right for your home. So, Ryan, thanks for coming back today. Appreciate you coming on and bringing the electrical engineering brain power to the discussion here. But last month, we actually talked about a couple of things. I wrote some notes down. The HECO tool that you used, the typical things that go into the logarithms like your daily load, your spike loads, and what kind of storage you need. We talked about solar water heaters and other efficiencies that you want to apply before you put in your solar so that you're not putting in more solar than you really need, but also anticipating future needs, like if you got your Tesla coming and you want to get that, you don't have it now, but it's coming in the future, you might want to plan that into your design of your solar. And if you have a large house, it might be a multi-story house, which means you got a lot of square footage, but not a whole lot of square foot on your roof. So, you have to think about that when you're doing your calculations. And we also talked about energy security a little bit, you know, whether it really is a benefit to you, like you really want to have the energy security after a storm or something, and how those things would play into your decision. So, have you had any more time to think about some of the other factors or some of the other implications, or going back to your own personal model, because I know you looked at your own house. Yeah, I have, actually. We left off where I had finished up with the EECO website and given me an approximation of what my solar array would look like on my house with approximate pricing. I then actually was continuing in my own interest. Turns out for the show it's actually nice to talk about, but for myself, going on and talking to a contractor about designing and installing that system on my house, it came out higher than what was originally projected only because the original estimate did not include an energy storage system. And for this contractor, that was a lithium ion battery, 10 kilowatt hours, if I remember right. Okay. So, oversized battery, but that was just their standard model. That brought my price up a bit more than I was comfortable going with that at that time. This would have been three to four weeks ago, right after we did the show two Fridays, six Fridays ago or something like that. And they were very helpful in mapping out my roof, making sure I had the amount of space that I needed, showing me where my shade spots were and providing the information aware on the roof they would do the installation. Providing the warranties on that equipment, which was very important. I was lucky enough to be what I would consider a more reputable installer for both the solar and the battery. And they also provided some payback information for me with the information I gave them. I of course then back checked all of their numbers and they were very good on the solar and telling me how much my system should be sized at night, very close to the HECO model. They had a different prediction about the cost of energy over over time than I did. They were showing, you know, where how Hawaii has changed in the last few years on cost of energy going up and then providing that it's still going up for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. I mean that's possible. I'm not going to go out there and tell anybody which direction that's going to go. But with the Hawaii goal, at some point we're going to make a flip and we will start seeing the payback from our renewables really kicking in and driving that back down. Whether you're doing that on your own house or HECO is doing that on their side, both will help that situation. Well on the commercial buildings or facilities that we've talked about, the average payback seemed to be around seven years. Did that jive with what you came up? I was more in the nine to ten year. Because of the batteries? That happened because the roof and the shade that was getting put on from my neighbor's tree. So if anybody wants to go cut those trees down. That was what caused my system to get up a little bit larger. Also, my battery was a standard size for that manufacturer and I wasn't really using all of that battery because I don't use that much. I'm in that 12 to 14, 15 kilowatt hours a day. I'm really not using that much already. I like to think that we're already pretty efficient in our house before we go with the solar. So that pushed my payback out. But what you really want to remember when you talk about the payback and ask the questions to your contractor that you're dealing with, not only about the warranties are good into care, what's going on. With my battery, when I asked about the warranty, my battery was 10 years, I think 80% state of charge still there. So that's the manufacturer kind of placing a bet that that battery is still going to be rated for that at the 10-year mark. Well, much further, that battery will derate faster after that 10-year life cycle, that 10-year point. When that starts happening, I'm going to be getting close to having to actually purchase or refurbish the battery that I have. So that's a 10-year payback. Well, then at 10 years, I was already at a point where, well, shoot, I got to do something potentially with this battery that I already have. If it was under warranty, then it gets fixed. Well, that's okay. Stretch is a little bit further. A little bit further. But I mean, the manufacturer is placing that bet that they think they're going to be past that. So that's something to consider in your ROI as well. If you're more in that seven-year, but you do have an energy storage system, where do you think that that battery is going to fail? If cars are doing the same thing right now. Did you talk to the contractor about maybe going with a less expensive, like just lead acid batteries and what kind of duration, again, warranty you'd have on those? That's a good question. Because I would drive the price way down. It would drive the price down. I did not talk to them about that. I really focused on my questions with the battery where the warranty and the type was a lithium ion. But then I drove into the discussion on the inverter, because I was more concerned, what are the inverter's capabilities? The current installations that he will allow on their system have what we're calling next generation are smart inverters. So these inverters are helping support the grid and react to some disturbances. What I wanted the inverter to do is something that I'm doing more on what I do with Burns and McBeat, providing energy securities. I was asking for a grid forming inverter or a voltage sourcing inverter. So if there was a hurricane or a missile crisis or something that shot down the grid, I wanted to be making sure that I was buying and investing in energy security. That inverter, and it's an important question to ask your contractor and with the equipment you're being provided, if the power's out on the island or on my street, do I still have power at my house? A lot of people don't understand that. Absolutely. And traditionally it was just a lot cheaper to not have the inverter do that, or the utilities would not want the inverter to have that capability, because it will cause a disturbance. So the inverter has to know, all right, the power's out. I'm going to switch my mode of operation. I'm going to remove myself or decouple from the grid. Now you're in a state where you're not necessarily having to deal with the utility, because you're not going to affect their system. So an inverter with some type of, just an energy storage plus solar would be very capable of handling the power at your house. If you've had it sized correctly, that particular manufacturer was not capable of that. And I reviewed the list of approved manufacturers on Hiko's website before we got here. And I was kind of pinpointing a few of those inverters that have those capabilities. It wasn't many. I think we'll start to see some of that switch, especially more people like me saying, hey, I want this. Okay. I want to come back. We're going to take a quick break here and we come back. I want to pull that thread a little bit farther and talk a little bit about inverters and different kind of batteries and warranties, because that is an important aspect of the investment you're making. So we'll be back in 60 seconds. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Keeley Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government, and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Stand in the Energy Man here on my lunch hour with Ryan Wolbins talking about what we left off talking about inverters and that's really important. And I asked Ryan to kind of backtrack just a little bit and explain to to folks because I think a lot of people feel like if you've got solar on your roof you've got power and if the grid goes down boom you'll have electricity. That's not really true. You the system is more complicated than that. For example if you were generating power all the time when when the grid was down you could backfeed power into the grid and Hawaiian electrics people go to work on their grid and they could be electrocuted because you're pushing power backwards in the grid when they're not expecting it. So the inverter and how it relates to the grid is important. So Ryan can you kind of explain that in a little more detail? Yeah, so when I start talking about inverters and how they're synced with the grid I have two examples to the non-electrical side that I try and relate to. One is like an orchestra with a what's the guy of a conductor? And the other one that I like and since you're a bike guy I'll maybe I'll roll with this one a tandem bicycle with two people pushing the pedals. Think of your inverter as the back person and the utility as the front person on a tandem bicycle. The inverters most the inverters right now or or definitely the legacy inverters installed before they're looking for the utility to be that conductor. They're looking for that hey this is how fast we should be going up and down with the frequency. This is where your voltage needs to be you know follow me and I'm going to show you how to do that. So on the tandem bike that guy's doing the pedaling and the guy in the back's really just kind of hanging out following and when you get a little solar behind you it's like having that back person push in a little bit more or you're just taking the weight or the from your house and just kind of providing enough for just you. When the front person stops pedaling it's like the back person really has no idea what to do. They're not able to just pedal on their own because they're looking for that voltage reference that the the front guy had and in the conductor situation they stop throwing their arms up and the band just kind of well what's what's the beat you know how how loud are we supposed to be playing that that's gone and the old inverters they probably have the capabilities but they maybe not turned on or they just weren't allowed to be turned on so your inverter just it needs to be looking for that utility to be turned on so when they're gone unfortunately you're gone and it would take some a bit of engineering to make that switch you know if a hurricane happened Queen Samhain was on St. Martin when when the hurricane hit and he was out of power for 95 days right 95 days yeah we had friends in the Virgin Islands same thing just a incredibly long time now they have a little bit less resources than than we do on this island to get that power restored but he was able to go back into his system tie in his neighbor's solar to to another inverter change the settings but what he's doing he's an engineer he knows what he's doing there and they were able to sometimes level out and get the refrigerator running or you know a white at night when when it got dark but you know if you're buying it for that situation or at least you want the ability to do that that's a question you absolutely need to be asking otherwise you are making a large investment for something that that you may have not understood and that's not there that's not it's not a very good sell point you know selling energy security is tough you know so the sales guys tell me my electric bill is going down yeah so you have to ask the question you gotta ask that question yeah so and that's the important part about this show is we're trying to make sure that people understand that the electrical contractor and your solar installer they know what they're doing and they've got a good formula and plan and equipment but if you don't ask the right questions you could get shortchanged on your own just because you're looking for value and get the price down low and doing things so so along with the inverter you have different kind of batteries so I know that there's some batteries out there or Panasonic and Sony and those guys that have lithium iron batteries that have like 15 to 20 year warranties so that would change that calculation you were talking about as well because now you know that you've got you know 20 years worth of life out of the thing and at that point if you have to refurbish or buy new batteries maybe it makes sense because you you paid for your system after 10 years and you got 10 years of free electricity to to save up for that new battery absolutely so those are the kind of things you really need to think about and it's not going to be one contractor providing every one of those options I've only gone to one to the one I do like and I think they have a quality product and I wanted to stop validate where we were and look at my own installation and see if it was an option so with your notional system that you you've kind of figured out and kind of validated I hear HECO has some new PUC approved rate structures that you can talk about yeah this what I was doing was before this the new option from HECO which is called smart export it should be available I think on February 20th to to apply for this is just me looking at their website I don't I don't work for HECO I just read their website like anybody else can and February 20th they are going to allow on this island I think 25 megawatts to be against this option called smart export smart export is saying between the hours of 9am and 4pm don't push power back to us and but that is important because you're making it harder for them to do their job and impacting your neighbors or or even our security at the military base because of that mass export at that time but we will take it from from the residents on the off hours and I think there was about 15 just under 15 cents a kilowatt hour that they were going to offer if you export during those off hours so now I would look back at my system and I would try and run some some maximizing calculations that my my battery was already overbuilt you know at 9am in the morning when my solar's really kind of just getting waking up I probably had a battery in there that I just didn't use I would probably look at increasing the the number of panels I have on the roof to to cap out that battery and maybe that's that's an income generator that I'm using to push back to the grid now I got to talk to my manufacturer and my contractor to make sure that batteries is smart enough to make those decisions ideally the battery says okay we got 10 kilowatt hours we're full up you're probably only going to need six kilowatt hours to get to the next morning probably a lot less than that what am I going to do with that extra six to eight well I'm going to try and sell it back to the grid and the utility monitoring how those algorithms get built because if everybody just starts blasting power back right before 9am could actually cause a problem because they just get rid of it so isn't that where the inverter again is important for the interconnect back to HECO because those smart inverters as I understand it HECO can meter yeah how fast they're pulling power and and that's part of the the plan is in offering this service is that they'll buy back power but they get to control the rate that it comes back in yes yeah there is a smart meter installation and I think it's covered by the program for each applicant to have that meter installed which is pretty spendy little meter but it's important to have that and it'll end up helping once well really once we all end up with a similar meter the system will operate in concert again okay and you know going back to batteries just a little bit there's there's all kind of batteries out there I mean you got the lithium batteries and lithium iron batteries you got lead acid batteries we've been talking about fuel cells and hydrogen batteries but I know that just an automotive and lead acid type batteries you have deep cycle batteries for boats and marine applications and then you have you know that high cranking amp batteries for your car to get that starter motor turned over and and so there's there's batteries that are made to draw way down and fill back up and draw way down and if you use them that way they last a long time but if you use like a deep cycle battery to crank your starter motor you're going to kill that battery in three years so you know when you're talking to a solar contractor and they're they're offering you a battery package how do you know that they're giving you a good battery package that matches up like you're going to do that rate you're going to do that feedback to the grid with HECO and you're you're going to want to draw it down really low and then in the morning charge it all the way back up and then draw it way down instead of just up and down off the top 20 or 30 percent that's a good question I hadn't thought about in that sense it's a tough thing to figure out on your own and just looking at a data sheet the the structure of a battery can change chemically just by the size of plates and how close the plates get put together that's going to start to change some of the attributes of a fastest charger fast discharge battery so you're not really going to know just from the type you're going to have an indication let's say but the better question would be to ask about the warranty and then making sure that warranty is aligning with the use that you plan on doing it so make sure there's not a warranty out there I'm just going to make one up that it says yeah it's 10 years but if you ever get the battery down to 20% done yeah warranty's dead and yeah that's probably going to happen in this other case i'm going to probably run my battery out probably every night or something like that so making sure I would use the warranty to tip my hand to tip the manufacturer's hand or the contractor to make sure okay you know what do you guys actually like I said place your battery you guys are going to really back this up and then at that point you know there's a cost to that warranty too and making sure you're okay with that okay well believe me not we blasted through 30 minutes already already huh yeah I think next time we together we'll talk a little bit more about the bigger picture of you know as we get towards that 100 renewable goal here in Hawaii what that's going to look like on the on the big big scale community solar industrial you know solar arrays wind power will the grid shrink will we start islanding will we start doing dispatchable power things like that well we'll kind of try and get into that next time but until then hey thanks Ryan thanks for coming by again and for all those folks out there hope to see you next week on stan energy man and we'll we'll bring you some more great news about energy here in Hawaii thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studio and we'll talk to you later