 Okay, we're back. We're live for Marco and me. Not me. That's Jay Fidel. Hi, Zuri. Hi, Jerry. Here's me. I'm me. I'm Jay. And I'm in Lisbon, Portugal, connecting with Marco. How are you, Marco? Hola. And if you were in Brazil, I would say oi tudo bem. But since you're in Lisbon, I'll just say hola amigo. I'd like to be with you from the low outside of the world. It's amazing that we can talk to each other like this and then broadcast it on the air halfway around the world. Fabulous. So we're talking about energy. Unfortunately, Mina cannot join us today, but what's going on about women in energy, Marco? There's been some talk about that, a program about that and an article about Connie Lau as a woman in energy. What have you noticed? Well, I think it's a really, really juicy topic, Jay. And what brought this to my attention is there was an interview in this current issue of White Business Magazine with the Hawaiian Electric Industry's CEO, Connie Lau. And she was talking about the role of women and her experience in the field of being with Hawaiian Electric for more than 30 years in some capacity. And it just got me thinking, being a male and having been in renewable energy myself for about as long as Connie has been in Hawaiian Electric, is that it's still a very much male dominated field. And I don't have the data right in front of me, but I would wager that out of the top 100 or so utility companies in the United States, which I have to believe Hawaiian Electric Industries is in that top 100, that Connie has very, very little company as a woman at the top of the org chart. I think there's probably one or two, I'm pretty sure there are at least one or two other women out of these, but probably less than a handful. And it's just still a very much male dominated bastion. And I think it's kudos to Connie Lau and to Hawaiian Electric and to Hawaii in general. And she's not the only one in terms of a woman who's at the top. There's Alicia Moye, who's head of Hawaii Gas, and a number of other positive signs that there are more and more women in the energy industry. But I mean, there's still a long ways to go. If you go to any of the energy conferences on the mainland, I mean, it's still very, very much dominated by men. I mean, that's changing. It will change over time, but it's just great to see that Connie Lau has come as far as she has. And I think doing by and large, by most people's estimation, is a really solid job. She's been there now for 10 years, which says something. And so I just got me thinking about women and energy and how there are relatively few of them, but the ones who are there, I think have been making a positive difference. Well, let me add some thoughts about that. I don't recall if this particular issue was covered in the Nathan Eagle series in Civil Beat, where he reviewed the history of Hawaiian Electric from way back to the time it lit up the palace. But if you look back down the field, look at the way energy was developed in Hawaii. I'm sure other places had parallel historical tracks. It was the engineers. It was the men who had training in engineering, the linemen, the technicians, the guy who could put a generator together. It was not women's work way back in the early part of the 20th century. And they had a Herculean task. They had to wire up the state. And at that time, I don't think women were much involved as executives in any industry, much less energy where it was all an engineering play. So as time went on, I think that became the culture of Hawaiian Electric. And I think that became the culture of many utilities around the country. So fast forward till now, fast forward to a time when the utility is more on our minds than it ever was. And that women executives are more on our minds than they ever were. And the whole thing about parity, parity of pay, parity of power, all that. So you're right to ask the question. But let me help on the answer too and say that first, Connie Lau is very knowledgeable about engineering things. You can talk to her and she will wow you with how much she knows about how the way the system is put together. And the latest and greatest technologies that are in play. She is very akamai about that and it just bulls you over when you have any conversation with her about those things. But the other thing is that if you look at Hawaiian Electric today, I think the engineers are still largely men. On the other hand, the administration has a fair representation of women. And then Inamoro, for example, is a very important force in the company. And there are other women too who are involved and who have a lot of clout within the company. So it's not as if Hawaiian Electric doesn't have other women. They do have other women. But let me add one more thing before I stop. And that is if you look at the policy area and if you look at the government staffing. And more specifically, if you look at the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, there are many women involved. In fact, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum is run by, essentially run by Sharon Moriwaki. Sharon Moriwaki is not an engineer. In fact, by training, she's a lawyer and a policy person. And I think what you find if you look around the landscape here on women in the energy industry in Hawaii, you find there are a lot of women in policy or even some engineering women in policy. And they are an important force. And furthermore, they have proven up. In other words, they have made successful contributions at pretty much every level, including new technologies and contracting and administration and connecting, bringing the players together. So I think if you look forward on this, I think we're going to find that Connie Lau is a step along the way to many women in energy. And in 10 years' time, you know, we won't even be asking this question. It'll be, you know, an automatic answer. There's at least parity and maybe beyond parity in terms of women participating in the advance of the industry. Well, I agree, Jay. Just one kind of small correction. It was my friend Eric Pape, not Nathan Eagle, who did that long eight or nine- Thank you. Thank you. I stand correct. And it was an excellent series, by the way. Yeah, I mean, and this one fell just to my own horn just a little bit. I mean, both my operations manager and my sales and marketing manager, both women, and doing a really fantastic job. And, I mean, just to kind of go back to a few Connie's words here in the article, she notes that when she joined Hawaiian Electric Companies 32 years ago, there were no, no women executives. So she's really, and hopefully one of these days we can have her on the show, because I think it would just be fantastic to hear her in her own words. Yeah. I mean, she's really seen an incredible evolution. And now there are over 40 percent, over 40 percent women in executive ranks at Hawaiian Electric, which is impressive when you realize that 70 percent of the workforce overall is male. So in that sense, the Hawaiian Electric is actually overrepresented. Women are overrepresented at Hawaiian Electric. And like you mentioned, there are more and more women in the engineering department. I know a number here at Halko and also both that, I mean, we have Sharon Suzuki, who is president of Maui Electric. And there are quite a few women engineers at Hawaiian Electric as well. So I think, you know, the engineering side is kind of the last bash, and perhaps in a sense that has been so heavily male dominated, but with more and more women getting into the engineering field in school, we're seeing that now in the workforce. And I see that as a really positive development. Yeah. And I didn't mean to imply that Lynn Onomoto is the only woman in Hawaiian Electric. There are many, and they're in important positions. She is a senior vice president there, for example. But also in government, you know, Maria Tomei, she'd been with D-bed doing energy at D-bed. And then she came over to the PUC where she is now, and she's an engineer. She's a major force, and she's an active member of the Energy Policy Forum. But if you look at the PUC, you'll find that in the previous iteration, the previous panel included Mina Morita, the chair. Right. And now it's Lorena Kiba, a serious player on the PUC. So I think what we have is, you know, a very large number of women, and I think that, you know, they are the ones, well, of course everyone has to do it, but they're an essential part of taking us forward on the Clean Energy Initiative. So at no point should we consider that not the case. I mean, it's always going to be the case. Stepping forward now, it's clear, and this is what's going to happen in the future. And that kind of gives me, gives a rise to an interesting proposal, which would be great if we could make this happen, which would be to have Connie Lau, Mina Morita, and current commissioner Lorena Kiba all in the studio there with you. I think that would just be a fascinating conversation that would merit, you know, at least an hour, hopefully, of discussion and just kind of their perspectives and their histories and what they've learned. I think that would be really cool. Well, I hope they're listening. We'll have to find them and bring them in. But let's go to a second point, and that is something that you wanted to talk about on time of use. I guess time of use is part of the Black Box, the high-tech future, the Clean Energy Initiative. Very important to make the system in general efficient and control conduct, control public conduct. This is really the most important and sound above all in terms of, you know, using energy when you have it and limiting its use when you don't have it. So can you talk about what time of use is, Marco, and how far we've gotten and what we have to do to make it a reality around the state? Sure. Be happy to. Time of use is essentially an attempt at social engineering as far as trying to get people to change their usage patterns of using electricity. And specifically, it is part of the Distributed Energy Resources DOCET or DER DOCET, which is one of the DOCETs, one of the four, kind of big four DOCETs, energy DOCETs that's before the public facilities commission right now. And a week or so ago, the commission issued a decision in order, telling Hawaiian Electric to have, essentially, a pilot program that will have as many, allow as many as 5,000 homeowners or 5,000 residents as this is not for commercial customers, but for residential customers across the three HECO, HECO, MECO service territories for a maximum of 5,000 to be able to opt in. It's not going to be mandatory, but opt in if they were to choose a time of use metering. And in a nutshell, TOU, known shorthand, is where you are paying the electricity consumer, is paying different rates per kilowatt hour, different cents per kilowatt hour rate, depending on when they're using electricity. And there are going to be three time periods that will be under TOU. There will be the midday, not midday, but daylight hours from what was at 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then the peak will be from 5 to 10 p.m. and then all the other hours left will be kind of the mid period in terms of the cost. So it's an effort to try and incentivize people, electricity users, to use less power during the peak hours, again from 5 to 10 p.m. and use more power during the daylight hours when the price of electricity, if they choose to go for time of use, will be significantly less. And I don't have the numbers right in front of me, but my recollection is, for example, midday, if you go TOU, you'd be paying 14 cents a kilowatt hour or so. And then if you are using electricity during the peak period from 5 to 10, you're going to be paying something over 40 cents a kilowatt hour. So you're heavily incentivized to use more power during the day. You're heavily disincentivized to use power when the sun goes down. So it's an effort to try to match the load more with when, for example, solar power is available because solar, of course, when the sun shines during the day doesn't shine at night. So it's an effort to try to, like I said, social engineering and get people to use power when it's cheapest and more readily available and try to get people to use less power when its fuller power is less readily available and more expensive. Well, listening to you, Marco, I realize this is all connected. Let me count five things that are on the same continuum of time of use. It begins with where you're going to get the power in the first place. And if you choose renewables that are dispatchable, then you have the power 24 hours a day. And some renewables, and I'll talk about Portugal a little while, some renewables are much more dispatchable than others and those are the more appealing because you can call on them anytime. Second of all, you can build plants like the Kapolei peaking plant where you can call on, you can make energy dispatchable by ramping it up on short notice. The interesting thing about the peaking plant is that you can push a button and it'll spin up way higher and give you, at peak hours, to give you what you need. So that's the second part of the continuum. I guess this is not necessarily in linear order, but the third thing that occurs to me is that it's energy efficiency. You tell people on, say, a carrot basis rather than a stick basis that it's better for them to be efficient in their use of energy during the day for the benefit of their own selves and for the benefit of the community. That's one other thing. And then, of course, the storage. Storage on the utility side, storage on the consumer side where either party or both can store power that's not being used at a certain time and call on it later. And finally, there's time of use. And to me, time of use is a critical member of that whole continuum, those five points of controlling the use of energy. In the case of time of use, it's a positive incentive, or maybe you could call it a negative incentive, use power at peak times because it's going to cost you significantly more. And of course, that's an algorithm. You could say, well, we're going to try to make the disparity in price between peak and non-peak X units. But if that doesn't work, we're going to change the algorithm. We're going to make it more expensive. We're going to see if we can change public habits by making the disparity in price during peak times even more costly. As a result, you can test it. You can control it. You can do social engineering and find a way to make this whole five-point system work. But I think we're missing time of... Well, missing a lot of these things, we should be further along on them. But time of use is definitely part of the continuum. Time of use is, I think, was held up to some extent by the vacuum that existed during the next era experience. That was 19 months, and I don't think we could get very far with the burden of that decision. But now, I think we're free to move on it. I think the pilot should be a short pilot. I think it's just a matter of finding a right black box. And to just define black box for a moment, time of use is the most important part of the black box. Don't you think? Well, it's certainly a major part of the black box, Jay. I mean, the only way... When you look at the typical usage pattern for a typical Hawaii home, you have a minority percentage of power being used during daylight hours because people are mostly away, right? They work, they go to school. And the majority is used when they come home, power work, and from 5 p.m. roughly to 10 or 11 p.m. So the only way time of use metering would work, why you lopped into it, is that you either are an outlier and you're using more power during the day than you do during the evening. And again, that's much more in the minority. Or you're going to need some type of energy storage to allow the batteries, essentially, to be charged either by solar during the day when power is cheapest or conceivably you could have the batteries charged by the grid itself, and then you're kind of, you know, entering into the world of energy arbitrage. You are buying at one price and selling at another, essentially. And one of the things I like to do this, now that this order has come out, is to figure the... estimate the cost of a battery storage system of X kilowatt hours and see what kind of savings would accrue day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year to be able to offset in a reasonable amount of time, of course, right, to offset the initial cost of those 10, 15, 20 kilowatt hour battery storage and see how it pencils out. I don't know how it's going to pencil out because I haven't done it yet. But, I mean, we're just beginning on the past to residential battery storage, even though batteries have been around for more than 100 years, but in terms of battery storage available cost-effective and reliable, I mean, we're just the beginning of this odyssey right now in Hawai'i and also across the world, essentially. So it's just the grand unfolding and how a pass is going to take and what kind of demand there's going to be for TOU. I mean, we'll have to see. Yeah, two things come to mind, though. One is looking at other benefits from the black box are the things that could be included, but probably are included in whatever pilot equipment Hawaiian Electric is considering and whatever equipment KIUC is using is that it's collecting data. It's collecting data not only for the benefit of the homeowner and the user, so he can establish or she can establish use patterns that are most advantageous on various levels, but also for the utility to know what the community needs at a given point of day and how that's changing, and how it can do that social engineering to see what people are calling for. So a centralized system of data, data gathering, data analysis, like in any science, like in any 21st century technology will really help the utility become much more efficient. So it's not just the incentivization by the rates, you know, the time of use rates, but it's also gathering the data. And this leads me to the next point, and the next point as well, if we have self-supply online now, I think there's a risk there that people will sort of disengage and the utility will not be able to get that data, and I think that suggests that we really all have to stay together on this. We have to stay connected so that we have information that could lead to community, electric generation and renewable decision-making. So self-supply does not mean declining to provide data to the utility. No, I mean, and as far as data gathering, I mean, that's what the so-called smart meters are more or less all about. I mean, just to keep the KIUC horn for a moment, I mean, they've had smart meters in place aside from those customers of theirs who explicitly decided to opt out, which is a very small minority. I mean, they've had smart meters for a number of years now, and Hawaiian Electric is just kind of starting that process of smart metering, but that allows for the data analysis, data crunching to be able to have much more of a clear idea and just, you know, for the sake of bringing this up, we found a device that you can get easily on the Internet for less than $200, which is really quite a deal, which allows us to essentially strap on this piece of equipment onto a common standard bubble, a glass bubble of a kilowatt-hour meter, and it sits there and monitors the power consumption from the utility company, and as long as you have an app on your smartphone or on your computer, you can actually see more or less real-time at a very reasonable cost what that particular site is doing. And that's what's going to be needed, that's definitely what's going to be needed to be able to tailor-design self-supply, self-consumption systems. You have to know what that specific pattern of usage is, whether it's residential or commercial. You can't just be guessing this because the state average is XY, that that's going to be appropriate for any particular site. So we're seeing a dramatic decrease in cost in terms of monitoring equipment. You can go and put these puppies on and get a much clearer idea of usage pending Hawaiian Electric moving a bit faster in terms of smart metering. Yeah, well, this is a great time. It's a great time to be alive in energy. Just the way it's a great time for women to look for jobs and energy, and there are jobs and energy for them, for sure, executive jobs, but it's also a great time for software. I'm reminded of what came out recently about the Samsung Note blow-up explosion problem. It's not the battery in the Samsung. It's the software in the Samsung. In Albert Lum, you know, doing open data, trying to get the software development community in Hawaii to do programming for government. And in fact, there's a really interesting hackathon going on just finished this past weekend where you bring in, on a competitive basis, software developers from the software community in Hawaii, and you say, here's a government problem or here's an NGO problem. Let's see if you can solve it. Using local talent for software that will be deployed locally. There's also something I saw today about the hospitality industry. It is also going out for what better place to get software for the hospitality industry. We know hospitality here. We can think of things, we can carve new statues out of the marble every day with local software developers. And what I'm getting at is there's got to be a ton of possibilities for local software developers to improve the software you're talking about, the analytics for all that data that can and should be gathered by the black boxes. We have, for example, one of the guys in ThinkTech is in the engineering school, and I told him, I tell him every time I see him, the future is not in plastics. The future is in energy software. What do you think, Marco? Well, the energy accelerator, folks, I think would agree with you completely. I mean, big data and being able to crunch the numbers is really important, but to what extent you can get people to change their behavioral patterns I think is the much more difficult month to crack no matter how many wonderful looking apps and how cool the software is. Well, let me switch gears for the last few minutes of our program and tell you that the people in Portugal where I'm visiting now are very enthusiastic about renewable energy. They may not have the splendid numbers that we have on solar, but renewables account for 25% now. Actually, more than that. That was in 2013. By 2014, renewables accounted for 60% and more. But here's something very interesting. In 2015, it went down. It went down from 60% to 50%. And why? Because the renewables here in Portugal include not only solar, but they include hydro, and they include wind. And so happens that 2015 was a dry year and therefore there wasn't that much hydro coming out of the mountains. As a result, the use of renewables declined by 10%. That's really remarkable. And this year, they're going great guns. And this year, they made news all over Europe in May because they were able to get along 100% on renewables for four days. This is kind of a little prize they have around Europe that if you can get along for X days on all renewables, it's a headline story. It's a kind of competitive thing between Portugal and other countries. But Portugal, don't think they're behind times. They are right up there. You don't see solar on the roofs, but I think they have solar farms and they have a lot of wind offshore. And nobody objects to it. Nobody has any cultural objection to it. Everyone is just fine with it. And it's out there pumping away as it is in the North Sea. I think it's even more effective here in the Atlantic. And the result is that people are at peace, if you will, with renewable energy. They want to see it improved. They are environmentally minded. Just as much as a lot of the people I know in Hawaii, they talk that talk and walk that walk. And so what we have here is a country that is dedicated to the proposition that is moving rapidly with community type renewables into 100 percent. They might beat us. What do you think about that? Well, it just brings to mind how much of a contrast there can be from neighboring countries, because I do happen to know. I don't recall whether Spain has any nuclear power plants. And if you know, maybe you can pipe up. But I do know for a fact that across the border, the Spanish northern border where you have France, that France made the decision years ago, and they stuck to it, damn it, to be one of the most heavily nuclear-efficientized, that's such a word, nations on the planet, where I believe it's somewhere on 70 percent of their power comes from nuclear power plants. So it's just interesting that you've got countries like Portugal who, obviously, a smaller country, right, who have made the decision not to go nuclear at some point in their path and have stuck to it. And then you have the French, who have decided to go down the nuclear path and who are sticking to it as well. So these are very interesting societal choices that these various countries are making to where should their power come from. Certainly I'm much more on the renewable pro side than I am on any other fossil fuel, let alone nuclear side. So I think it's great. I think it's great that the governments, they're the successive governments, and Lisbon have continued to be very supportive of renewable and that it's got the backing of the peeps as well. It's great. It's powerful. I'm sorry to cut in. Jay, do you have a takeaway message before we have to sign off? I do indeed. I'm really enjoying Portugal and I think we can learn many lessons. Portugal is just like Hawaii. And, I mean, my goodness, we have a lot of Portuguese in Hawaii, don't we? I can't find a balasada. I've been looking for days, but I can say that you can find a lot of good heart, good food, good karma around here and we ought to take a close look at Portugal about energy too. We can learn from them. We ought to compare notes with Portugal and other countries around the world, especially including Europe. From your lips to God's ears, thank you, gentlemen. Thanks, Ray.