 Think Tec Hawaii, cold green on another beautiful Hawaiian loon tide. Today, we have as our guest, Marisa Kutch. She is with the city's resilience office, and she is the energy efficiency specialist. So welcome, Marisa. And, you know, not everybody has city Honolulu resilience office on the tip of their tongues. Why don't you briefly describe what in the world your office does? Because it does a whole heck of a lot of things, all with the goal of achieving 100% clean energy for Hawaii. That's right. Well, Howard, awesome. Thank you so much for having me. The resilience office, the abbreviated abbreviated name, the full name is the Office of Climate Change, Sustainability and Resiliency. But we go by resilience office. We were voted into city charter by city council in 2016. We cover a variety of areas, including energy, building efficiency, disaster, mitigation, preparedness, sea level rise, though, really just developing resilient infrastructure in response to climate change. So our office is fairly new to the city, but already just doing a lot in the six, seven years that we've been a part of the city. And what about wastewater treatment? Is that under your office too, or is that another city office? We support other city offices with wastewater, but not directly under our office. Okay. So benchmarking is another word that is not on the tip of everybody's tongue. And I was thinking of the easiest, most common possible metaphor for that. And I came up with weight loss. If you're at 130 pounds and you want to go to 120 pounds, your initial standard is 130 pounds, your goal 120, and then you benchmark yourself pound by pound down until you reach your goal. Is that a good metaphor for benchmarking? A good common way to explain it? I think so. People looking to lose weight, I think that will definitely relate with them. Yeah. Building benchmarking is the tracking of your energy and water use over time. So you're able to start tracking, build a baseline, and really see how much energy you're using over weeks or years. And it serves as sort of that starting point to just figuring out how you can best save energy in your building, and then steps to conserve from there, whether you want to get an energy audit, look further into where exactly is all of that energy waste going, or maybe you're ready to start an energy efficiency project. You want to upgrade those old, maybe incandescent light bulbs to LEDs, then you would be able to see the energy savings from projects like that over time. Somehow the phrase, you can't master what you can't measure. So you are measuring things so that you can master them. Could you give us a real simple example of what a benchmarker such as yourself would do? Do you actually make an appointment and go visit the building in question? And that starts out with the building manager being motivated in this case to save energy. Is that how it works? You go off, go over and visit them? Or you collect data first? Or what can you give us a step-by-step process here? Totally. Yeah, great question. So we start by gathering all of the data. This is the first year that the program is required by the city and county of Honolulu. So this year, buildings 100,000 square feet and above are being required to report their gas, electricity, and water usage. So we start by collecting that data. You're past the first deadline, which was June 30th of this year. So our office is kind of going through cleaning up any possible data discrepancies and we'll actually be ready to publish that data in late fall of this year. So aiming for November 1st. And from there, once the data is public, our office will be supporting buildings and sort of next steps on what to do with that benchmarking data and connecting them with other stakeholders such as Hawaii Energy, who would be able to support with different rebates and different energy saving opportunities for their building. And does the city have that many buildings over 100,000 square feet? There are quite a few. This year on the reporting list, we have just over 430 buildings being required to. Oh, this is both private sector and public sector. So this is, that's right. So the ordinance includes commercial buildings and multi-family buildings. So that includes sectors, hospitals, condo buildings, office buildings. And on the list this year, it's over 430 buildings being required to report. Wow, I knew we're a big city. I didn't know we were that big. 100,000 square foot building look like, say a residential, would that be go up to, what about 16 floors, the normal height limit? What would a typical high-rise residence be in size? Yeah, the household residence, I would definitely say it depends how many floors are in the building, but I would say we're looking at condo buildings that are over 15 floors and that total over 100,000 square feet in gross floor area. So that gross floor area is including all in-unit square footage, as well as the common area square footage. Right, the lobby and so forth. Exactly, hallways. If there's retail space on the first floor, that certainly is included also. Exactly, yes. Okay, so now you've collected the data and presumably you have a motivated building manager and he has some dollars in his pocket with which to carry out recommended measures. What, where do you go from here now after you've collected the data? Yeah, from here we connect them with other local stakeholders, Hawaii Energy Board of Water Supply. Even HIKO has different incentive programs for reducing energy consumption or installing renewable energy sources. So Hawaii Energy, they have residential programs, business programs to help install energy efficiency projects, so that could be lighting. Maybe you want to upgrade your AFI, install controls. Maybe a building's interested in an energy audit. So we would connect them with other stakeholders who could support in the actions of saving energy. Just in a small instance of that, say, residentially, a homeowner once needs a new refrigerator. The old one is kind of failing and they know it's not efficient. So they go to the hardware store and they select generally, oh, you now have signs, not you, but Hawaii Energy has signed above the requisite refrigerator saying, I believe it's a $250 rebate. The rebates are a deal, definitely. They're called instant rebates. So instead of applying for a rebate online and being reimbursed later on, the rebate is actually applied at checkout. So if you go to different participating retailers, different energy star models of refrigerators, you would be able to receive that rebate directly at checkout. So the rebates are a great deal. And if you're purchasing from an energy star certified model, you're looking at some of the higher efficiency standards under the EPA. So those are recommended models for saving energy. And then back to your 100,000 square foot building, if it's centrally air conditioned and that AC system is old. I believe number one, well, you're going to have to have an engineer come in and recommend this for retrofit. And then once it's done, approved, I believe Hawaii Energy's rebate is going to be way, way, way up in the thousands of dollars to incentivize the owner to select the most efficient system. Exactly. The Hawaii Energy rebate would definitely be significant due to the size of the project. Central AC would be considered a larger efficiency project. You'd definitely be saving a lot of energy, and therefore the rebate would reward you in that sense for supporting such a high energy saving project. So even getting an audit, if you were to pursue an ASHRAE level two energy audit, a contractor would be able to offer different model options for replacements, and they would actually be able to show the potential energy savings that you wouldn't save by switching models or retrofitting or upgrading. So in parallel to that, they would highlight the Hawaii Energy rebate that would be supported for the project as well. And a simpler rebate for a high rise, let's say this is an office with hundreds and hundreds of fluorescent tubes up there in the ceiling. And those tubes are 10, 12 years old. What happens then if recommended? If definitely in the energy audit, they would recommend switching to LEDs and even installing controls or motion sensors for hallways or even common areas during times of off-peak hours, and the rebate would be significant as well. Depending on the type of lighting a customer could receive, a standard rebate. So it would be a set rebate amount per lamp that is installed and replaced, or there's also a custom rebate route. So depending on the energy savings, there would be a monetary multiplier to get that rebate. So there's two routes Hawaii Energy is definitely open to further talking about the opportunities there. So definitely recommend those who are participating in the benchmarking program to next steps, go to Hawaii Energy for a further energy analysis of their building. And let's get back to benchmarking. So you've got all of this information now. And I guess the information must be broken out by energy use sector, say for an high rise office building, of course you're going to have a separate circuit for your air conditioning system. You might have a separate circuit for lighting and so forth. But you've done your benchmarking, you're looking at a bunch of numbers. How do you determine where your big energy savings is going to occur? That's a good question. So if you're a building manager and you've sort of done that analysis on your own, you might look at your current fiscal year budget and what you're able to support for the following year. Maybe you need a couple years of funding to support a larger project. So definitely funding is one of the first things that building managers look at when they're looking to install or retrofit different projects. But two, if you're looking at an audit that you've received from a contractor, the audit will outline the highest energy saving opportunities and from there a building would be able to review sort of the cost to benefit, the payment over time, and then the Hawaii energy rebate that's associated with it. So I would say it definitely depends, you know, as an energy efficiency specialist, I'm encouraging the highest energy saving projects, those will be giving you the highest reward in the shortest amount of time. But of course, there's other items to consider such as budget and what's feasible for the year. And then you mentioned over time, I guess that's an allowable expense because if you're going to change out the lights in an office building, that's not very convenient if everybody's at their desk and the workers are moving letters all over the place. So you've got to schedule, say them, the workers to come in at say 6 p.m. and get out of there by 5 a.m., something like that, and that involves overtime. And then retrofitting the AC system, now that's pretty tricky. You move everybody out by five on a Friday afternoon, and get your hoist up there and everything like that and hopefully get the building cool again by Monday morning. Is that kind of how that works from an overtime standpoint and you've factored that into the budget? I think typically, yeah, you know, contractors that are requested to work outside of the typical nine to five time period, it would typically be factored into the project costs if they're working, say odd hours or after the standard hours. So I would say definitely varies per contractor. And then, yeah, when you get into the details of this benchmarking, you mentioned having an auditor do this. So I would describe an auditor's report as a very sophisticated method of benchmarking. That's a good conclusion. You're not just looking at bills, you're looking at specific equipment. That's right. To start with benchmarking, it's sort of the big picture, just how much energy is my building using. You're able to compare with other similar sized buildings. So office buildings that were built around the same year, they have similar hours of operation, similar functions. You know, you would be able to compare how much energy you're using to your neighbor and say a neighbor is using a significant amount of energy much higher than their neighbor. The next step would be to look into further detail. You know, really where is all of that energy being used? Is it the lighting? Is it the EC, the central EC? And that's really what the energy audit would point out is sort of those details and the different opportunities for saving energy. Benchmarking builds the baseline, gives you a perspective of how you're doing compared to other similar sized buildings. And then the energy audit really points out exactly what needs to be done to start saving energy over time. And that could be a real incentive for the facilities manager because if he gets this report and he is generally, say, has 10% higher utility costs than the comparable neighbors, the boss is going to look at him and say, hey, what is going on here? Why are we wasting money here? So that's real good incentive to launch the program. That's right. And even condo buildings, I'm thinking of just the condo building that I live in and other buildings around that are built similar years. And a lot of older buildings are here in Honolulu. So I think it really would point out an opportunity to just not encourage competition, but more just encouraging you to talk story with your neighbor, learn what are some efforts you've done in the last couple of years to save energy and just kind of provides that community atmosphere to encourage energy efficiency and encourage conversation around it. So just in my personal experience with my building, there's a lot of projects that we would like to do and just learning from our neighbors. It helps encourage us to talk more in our board meetings sort of what priorities should be and maybe just the process of starting an energy efficiency project. Because as you know, there's various stakeholders to go through, budget to consider. So definitely just talking about it with your neighbors in different sectors is a great place to start. And factored into the energy audit is the estimated cost of undertaking this retrofit and the estimated payback time. Of course, here in Hawaii, we're paying 43 cents a kilowatt hour, which makes payback times rather short to put them out. Generally speaking, do boards or whoever is a decision maker, do they pick the lowest hanging fruit first or do they mix lowest hanging fruit with longer payback times to come out with a nice average, an attractive average? Another great question. It really depends. Definitely boards have a lot to consider in their building. A lot of equipment is aging. So maybe projects are done based on failure of equipment and they're not necessarily done up front. So sometimes they're prioritized based on need. Other times it's just again, budget for the year and what are they able to pursue for that budget year. So variable. Yeah. And you mentioned water efficiency. It's not uncommon for a high-rise residential unit for a residency on the lower floors to come into their bathroom and see a mini waterfall going down the wall, what is going on here? So there's your, now we're into what's called the health and safety issues. So that becomes a very high priority very quickly and it may result in a lot of plumbing or retrofits and maybe efficiency retrofits, but it's an emergency that triggers the event. Exactly, exactly. It's just, yeah, you want to be one step ahead of those accidents, but of course things happen and you just kind of have to mitigate from there. But water efficiency is the other side of the benchmarking program. So besides saving electricity, we are encouraging buildings to also reach out to the Board of Water Supply. They also have residential and commercial rebate programs for saving water. So that's the low-flow toilets, various appliances that buildings can install either in their common areas or in unit to water and save on your water bill. Yeah, do you have any idea in that instance, say high-rise residential, the huge majority of the water use is within each residency, each living unit? And generally speaking, this is America, you cannot force people to do something like change to low-flow shower heads or low-flow faucets. Do you have any idea how that is accomplished? The Board would make a decision and then try to persuade everybody to go along and give them a financial incentive? Yeah, that's tough, especially being in units. Owners in unit, they make decisions specifically for their unit. So I would encourage not only just saving water and saving money for boards to communicate to their residents, but also just living on an island and water is such a precious resource. We all should sort of take on that responsibility to conserve water and feel like we can directly make an impact in our units. So I think saving money, but also just that general sense of responsibility that we should all be taking steps to conserve water. Yeah, and you and I have in common, we need to instill that sense of urgency into the people we're reaching out to. And I just finished another book on the subject and the author did not use this analogy, but if one is going to get pessimistic about people undertaking energy efficiency projects seriously, it might require the environmental equivalent of a Pearl Harbor. That will instill motivation in people very, very quickly. And I'm a historian, I happen to be very certain that President Roosevelt had to let Pearl Harbor happen because otherwise there was an isolationist feeling throughout the nation, and they didn't want anything to do with another war after World War One. But with Pearl Harbor, boom, it mobilized the nation. So something is going to have to mobilize us to take similar drastic actions. Have you ever contemplated that? Exactly. You know, maybe it's crossed my mind once, but to each their own on kind of where that sense of responsibility comes from, right? If it's serving your greater community or if it's saving a couple dollars on your water bill, I definitely encourage residents to kind of find that encouragement and motivation for saving energy or saving energy and water. Yeah, that word motivation with us in the energy office comes up very, very, very often. There. While we're reaching the end of our show, do you have any last words of wisdom? Oh, you know what? Do you have a website you can bring up to show people how to get hold of you? This is, I guess, communicating to buildings that are participating in the benchmarking program this year or if you would just like to voluntarily start benchmarking your building. Our office, the resilience office with the city and county of Honolulu is here to help. So any questions you have on how to benchmark, where do I get started? What are the requirements? We are here definitely to support you. So you can visit our website at www.resilientohahu.org backslash benchmarking. So you can find several resources to start benchmarking, learn how to use Energy Star Portfolio Manager to build out your building profile, and then there's different methods to contact me directly if you have questions on the benchmarking program. And on that very, very cheerful note, we need to bid adieu. Marisa Cunch, thank you very, very much and thank the resilience office for doing absolutely great work and we will see you next time. Aloha.