 Welcome to another exciting Friday afternoon with Stan Energyman here. Stan Osterman used to be with H-Cat, now I'm just retired and I love it every minute of it, every day is a Saturday. He can have retired, I had a retirement function on Wednesday evening and it was great. I would like to thank everybody at H-Cat that put it together and everybody that attended. We had folks from the congressional offices, folks from the state capitol, folks from private sector, folks from non-for-profits, state energy office was there, all of H-Cat was there, a bunch of H-TDC was there, it was a great time. So thanks to everyone for being there and helping me celebrate six years with the state and H-Cat. Today's kind of a different show aside from being a solo show for me. I'm going to be starting next week on Tuesday. My show will be on Tuesday instead of Friday so don't wait for Friday to look for me. I'm going to be on Tuesday at three o'clock in the afternoon. It's also Friday the 13th which is always exciting and we've had some recent events that have come to light that have gotten my attention and I've talked about energy and the weather on several shows before and you know it's really kind of appropriate that we really get serious about it. It is hurricane season right now and with Hurricane Dorian that just smacked Jamaica really, really hard, I started thinking about local scenarios and whether we're really ready, especially on Oahu for the kind of weather that they just got hit with in Jamaica. And to give you a little background on me, I have 35 years in the Hawaii Air National Guard. I'm also a former police officer and in the National Guard we have to know how, besides doing our Air Force jobs, we have to be able to do military support to civil authorities and disaster response and we actually have some fairly formal education conducted by the folks at FEMA and also other agencies including some National Guard contract agencies that help us prepare our states and plan for natural disasters and how to interface with other agencies including non-governmental agencies and state agencies and local police and civil defense agencies. I do have the background and some of the background training I've had has had some really great firsthand experience from some great planners and planning is the key. Planning is the first step in getting ready for a natural disaster but I have to tell you it's almost ironic that in my formal training two of the planners that came to brief our class, one was from New Orleans and one was from New York City. This is before 9-11 and before the hurricane set the Gulf Coast that really spanked New Orleans Battle Africa which hurricane it was but the interesting thing was that New Orleans had an awesome plan. I mean it was incredible. They had buses moving non-ambulatory patients and elderly people moving them to safe grounds because New Orleans is basically lower than sea level so they have a very sophisticated dyke and a system there to keep the water out of the city and so when you have a hurricane coming and it's really important that you have good planning I was really impressed with both plans that were presented. Interestingly enough though they couldn't be executed. As beautiful as the plans were the city of New Orleans was not ready to execute the plan that they had To give you an example, the buses that were supposed to be there to move people who are non-ambulatory from mental hospitals, from hospitals, elderly folks from care homes, the buses weren't fueled, the buses weren't there and the drivers weren't aware of where to go to get their buses and all the details behind the plans that need to be there all the practice that needs to be there it was all missing that's really a scary thought by contrast New York City had a hurricane plan and they briefed it and it was really kind of interesting because they weren't hit by a hurricane they were hit by a terrorist attack but certainly the plans that they had they fit they worked and the agencies were able to function together and work together in spite of the totally unexpected, totally off the wall attack that was rendered by civilian airplanes being flown into high-rise buildings so with Dorian behind us now and you know that kind of destruction evident and a couple years ago Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands being hit, Oahu narrowly missed a big hurricane with Hurricane Lane last year and Hawaii has had several hurricanes and even some tsunamis in my lifetime I've lived here 65 years and you know we've had some some disasters come through most of them have really hit Kauai Hurricane Iniki and Hurricane Eva pretty much spanked the island of Kauai and we've had some earthquakes and some lava flows and and other things happen on the big island but when you really think about it in the last half century we haven't had anything seriously major hit downtown Honolulu and the island of Oahu Now to give you an idea of how energy connects with all this I want you to think about I'm really I'm really big into this I like to put a practical side to everything that that we talk about here on the show and it's an energy show I just want you to think for for an instance I want you to imagine going and getting two five gallon buckets and filling them up with five gallons of water and then walking over and picking up both of them at the same time so you don't hurt yourself picking up the two five gallon buckets of water and feeling how heavy they are and that's only 10 gallons of water well I did some math this morning and I'm not a math major but I'll give you my formula too so you can check it yourself if one inch of rain fell on one square mile of land that would be 17,396,121 gallons of water on one square mile one inch deep now a hurricane a hurricane dumps hundreds of square miles and hundreds of inches of rain can you imagine how much energy it takes if you're standing or holding those two five gallon buckets how much energy it takes literal physical heat energy to get 17 and 0.4 million gallons of water up two or three miles in the sky as rain to come down as rain that's an incredible amount of energy and we're not even talking about the wind power and things like that to come with a hurricane or if you're thinking in terms of a tsunami a huge wave that moves across the ocean at 400 miles an hour and picks up millions of gallons of water and throws it on the shoreline can you imagine the energy there and can you imagine the destruction that comes with that energy well the formula I used for that was 144 cubic inches times 0.0043 gives you 0.624 gallons per square foot if it's only one inch thick so if you do that math it comes out to 27,878,400 gallons and then when you figure how many how many gallons is that over over that square mile that's where the 27,878 comes from so Hawaii's had the two major hurricanes in my lifetime and the most serious storms have just been the hurricanes and we've had a couple small tsunamis but Oahu has really been dodging the bullet for a long long long time and we have plans I know the National Guard has some plans they could be better they could be more fleshed out but I can guarantee you as a state overall we're really not ready let me give you just a glimpse of the scenarios I'm just going to give you two the two most likely and the two probably most deadly scenario one is a tsunami first of all if there's a major earthquake at quake in alaska in california in chili in northern south america in the south pacific it could generate a tsunami that can impact Hawaii and what would happen if it impacts the south coastline well first of all a tsunami no matter where it's coming from has what we call wrap-around effect so those waves and the impact of the tsunami is going to happen not just on a coastline that's directly facing where the the threat was or where the the earthquake was it can come and wrap around the islands the most damaging effect will be probably a straight line just think if we had a south america or southern hemisphere earthquake and a shifting of the ocean floor that caused a tsunami Waikiki in downtown Honolulu would be hit that's our most dense population area lots of high rises lots of people living there all the coastal areas will take a hit but guess what our main harbor that our containers all come in on that's all in on the southern shore our airport our main airport which is only a couple feet above sea level in fact most people don't realize that there's there are waterways that lead in from the ocean that go under our runways and taxiways at the Honolulu international airport and come up near Nimitz highway which is a good mile and a half away from the ocean that water is going to come up through those underground conduits and come up and start flooding our wastewater treatment facilities we have some major ones along the coastline our power generation is mostly on the coastline our turbine generators that run in oil which is mostly the most prevalent power we have is on the Waianae coast and in pearl city right next to Pearl Harbor both of them only a few feet above sea level for a tsunami a lot of the roadways that we have especially on the north shore the east shore that run along the coastline they're going to be underwater a lot of residential area on the windward side going to be hit by the tsunami so it's kind of a bad scenario but scenario number two is even worse because with a hurricane you're going to get a lot of those same effects especially along the coastline but with a cat two or higher hurricane you're going to get all that damage plus wind damage and flooding to the interior areas well inside away from the ocean and those things will cause landslides mudslides and down power lines that go across the mountains carrying power to the whole island so what are the implications of all this implications are not only power out for a couple days or a couple hours there'll be power out for weeks or longer there'll be limited drinking water there'll be limited what wastewater and there'll be limited refuse handling there'll be at least a week I estimate without hardly any assistance from the outside world because we're 2,500 miles away from any state if you notice during hurricane the latest hurricane in the south and all the hurricanes their states in the south and the southeast have mutual support compacts between the states where they allow law enforcement and national guard and utility agencies to cross state lines with their equipment and guarantee they'll pay for the help if they have to come in and help in a disaster we don't have any states next to us we don't have anybody and like I said those those airports and those harbors that bring in all our major supplies they're all right near near the south shore and they're at sea level they need they may be shut down for weeks and even the airports to get equipment down to clean them off is going to take time because the roads are going to be damaged and closed and we only preposition so much stuff outside all of that we're going to have limited fuel for emergency power generation and that means fuel for hospitals fuels for pumping water and and taking care of sewage if those plants for those plants that aren't damaged badly we're going to have limited public service and limited security our police our national guard our sheriff's department and even just our state agencies that are written into our plans to help support all those other public service agencies are going to be stressed to the max and a lot of the people that are supposed to be supporting are going to be victims themselves in addition like I mentioned on the south shore especially we have a lot of folks in high-rise apartment and if you don't think about it high-rise apartments after a couple days the water reserves they have up on the roof are gone so therefore there is no water in your high-rise apartment there is no toilet operating in your high-rise apartment your elevators are not going to be working so you're going to have to bring up all your water all your food everything you need to your apartment from ground level if you can get it because guess what if the stores are all shut down and guaranteed even though we feel like we're civilized there's going to be looting there's going to be unrest there's going to be people are absolutely panicking say they weren't prepared they don't have food there's going to be limited communications there's going to be serious public health issues so we really have to think about the implications of what we potentially are facing not if we're facing them but when we face them really think a quick break here i'll be back in 60 seconds and we're going to talk about how energy dependent we really are aloha my name is victoria and i'm a host at the adventures in small business this is a collaboration between u.s small business administration hawaii district office and its partners where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs and small businesses talk about how to start a business talk about great tips for small business owners please join us every thursday 11 a.m. at think tech hawaii see you soon mahalo hi i'm rusty kamori host of beyond the lines i was the head coach for the punoho boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship this show is based on my book which is also titled beyond the lines and it's about leadership creating a superior culture of excellence achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness if you're a student parent sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you tune in and join me on mondays at 11 a.m. as we go beyond the lines on think tech hawaii aloha hey we'll come back to stand the energy man on scary aloha friday which also is friday the 13th and we're talking disasters in honor of friday the 13th we finished up by talking about how energy dependent we are i i had a guest on earlier this year named professor um nate hoggins and he introduced me to the concept called of energy blindness and that's really kind of the focus of us not realizing how energy dependent we actually are most people can tell you how much their electric bill is but they can't tell you how many kilowatt hours they use per day in their house and that's because most of the time we really don't pay attention to how much energy we use for anything our cars are like 200 horsepower plus i mean some are really heavy duty but 200 horsepower i mean i have 200 horses worth of energy just to get me from kailua to town and do 45 or 50 miles an hour i mean that's a lot of energy that we take advantage of we really don't appreciate there's a lot of energy in storms and we really are energy dependent in ways you probably didn't think about um i really feel sorry for folks that live in high rises if we have a major incident here in honolulu but even the folks who don't live in in downtown they may have invested in solar on their house they have great solar portable tx cells on their house if you don't have a battery system that's capable of helping you the uh and giving the giving you the ability to disconnect from the grid you won't have any power either with that great investment you put on your roof all the solar panels and you think well when everybody else doesn't have electricity i'll have it well if you're interconnected to the grid hawaiian electric will make sure that you don't come back on the grid they control it and they that's part of the the contract you signed with them because they can't afford to have energized lines from people's houses while they have people trying to refurbish their grid and reconnect everything so unless your your pv is made to disconnect from the grid and unless you have energy storage on your side to help the grid help your pv get activated and come up and provide power and recharge itself you're really not as independent as you think so in all disasters not every area of the island for example is severely impacted even in a tsunami never tsunami yet the coastlines are going to be devastated but inland there's actually a lot of areas that won't be impacted that the roads will be fine um and everything should be pretty much normal except that all the shipping and stuff that comes through the ports and the airports is going to be tough for a while but really there's no reason why we shouldn't be more energy independent we have plenty of solar we have wind we have geothermal we have ocean thermal we have um so many we have we can we can actually gasify our rubbish and make some power that way we have many ways that we can make enough energy in fact if we could tap into geothermal geothermal is available on Oahu on Maui and on the big island relatively easily we should be able to get good solid base load power even during a disaster but more importantly our grid is not set up to be divided into little sub-grids and what we really need to do is look at our infrastructure and have HECO or somebody decide how much each community can handle on its own with its own solar and start designing what we call microgrids now microgrids are great because they can take care of themselves when they need to if they're isolating themselves from an outage or a big disaster that way if the folks down on the coastline have been inundated have been pounded have been you know taken offline we can have part of our community that can actually make ice and maybe even make fuel like if we have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles we can charge batteries and we can make hydrogen for vehicles that can help clear the roads clear the runways picks up the ports to help us be able to accept the theme of responses and the aid that we need to get when it comes in and when we're our limited supplies are running low we should be much more sustainable but that sustainability means we have to start doing it now we can't wait for the disaster to be in our doorstep we need to start doing it now we can't wait till 2045 when somebody decides that's when we need to finally come off the fossil fuels for our grid we need to actually start taking our grid sectoring it out making sure we have a reasonable chunk of the island that can can take care of itself and then have the software and the computers that can interconnect the grid and leave it connected and operating but be able to isolate itself into micro grids for survivability and resiliency the definition of resiliency being that if you're hit by some unexpected event you can come back and bounce back and it's if you're really resilient you can actually bounce back stronger before the disaster and that should be hawaii's goals not just to be resilient to the point where we can sustain ourselves and recover to bounce back even stronger and that's what our state is really good at and we should we should really try to make that our main goal and start working for it now before disaster is we need to network our grid for survivability and resiliency we need to be able to fuel our own electric fleets and not have to wait for gas or diesel to be refined in our refinery which is also on the south shore by the way or to arrive on a ship and we need to develop large-scale energy storage with my in my personal opinion using hydrogen and batteries and be able to fuel our own vehicles and operate our own machinery without the need for fossil fuel so in conclusion planning isn't everything but not planning is criminal we can't keep kicking the can down the road and it may seem like the only option in today's curtailed and constrained environment budget environments but it will be nothing compared to the loss of life and the suffering if we do not prepare for disasters now we know we're only waiting for him to happen it's not a matter of if it's just a matter of when like to do now i'll show you a quick video um that i've shown before but i'd like to show it again to drive the point home microgrids are a great way to help hawaii become resilient and survivable and this is a good example of what it looks like there are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large-scale centralized power grids for their energy but the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable natural disasters cyber attacks and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power fortunately there is an alternative a renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar wind hydrogen waste to energy and geothermal that power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries hydrogen flywheels pumped hydro and others these microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission especially to critical facilities like hospitals airports and military bases unlike our current large-scale systems microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters threats and power outages our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money grid outages cost up to 33 billion dollars annually they are expensive to build expand and maintain and they're inefficient losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss spending reserves and theft microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency they also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs keeping money within our local economy and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy our energy grid was built over 100 years ago when energy needs were simple with the increased complexities of energy demands power sources and transportation now our old grid struggled to keep up we required new ways to generate store and deliver energy renewable energy microgrids are a potential long-term solution that will provide safe clean reliable and efficient energy for generations to come so that was a quick video that hcat put together a couple years ago and we like showing it and keep showing it and i've got the approval of the folks that run hcat now to keep showing it but it's important and even if your microgrids can't support the whole community then it gets its power from at once if you have a hospital in that area it guarantees the hospital keeps going you have police and fire in the area and make sure they have electricity and if there's any electricity that can be spared at night hopefully the communities can also share some of that and share a few hours of power to make sure their food stays fresh and they can do things microgrids are the way to go and one of the main things that hcat is working on right now is a renewable energy microgrid for the air force they're demonstrating it at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam Burns and McDonald's designing it and they're going to be building it it's been approved for construction and we're we've just had our final program review to look at implementing it and getting it in the ground and we're hoping that once it's in the ground and people actually can see it touch it and understand how it works and see the reliability and the versatility of it it'll make sense to a lot of folks a lot of big electric grids and the military and they'll see the the benefit of being self-sustaining and resilient all based on renewable energy microgrids that's going to wrap it up for today on Stanton Energy Man and don't forget we're not on Fridays anymore starting next week we're going to be on Tuesdays and I'll be doing next week's show directly from the big island of Blue Planet Research I haven't told Paul Pontio yet so if he's watching today get ready Paul we're coming to have a show on Tuesday over there and we'll be talking to you from the big island on Tuesday until then aloha