 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man. Before I get started, today I'd like to say thanks to my buddy Walter for breakfast this morning. Awesome breakfast and we solved all the world's problems, everything, everything from Congress to Iran in just two hours. So if you guys need any help out there solving world problems, get ahold of Stand and Walt. We'll be glad to tackle them. But on today's show, I wanted to explain why it's so hard for the electric utility to move the totally renewable to totally renewable resources to provide power. A focus here in Hawaii is it's what I know best, but also it's less complex than most of the other systems on the mainland. A lot of people are looking to Hawaii though for the examples that we use on our grid. Most electric utilities are over a hundred years old and are designed to push power from a generation source to the customers. Today that source is a power plant, a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power plant. But today's customers are opting to install photovoltaic panels and in some cases small wind turbines to their homes and businesses to produce power while remaining connected to the public utility for added security. This causes some challenges for the grid that it was not designed to deal with. Taking power from different directions rather than pushing power from a single generation source, it stabilizes the currency and frequency on the grid. So for the electric company, a generation station like a power plant or a hydroelectric dam produces what's called firm power. But things like solar panels and wind turbines produce intermittent power. In other words, it goes on, off, up, down depending on the wind and whether it's clouds or not. The public utility is required to give us its customers reliable, clean, consistent power and they're very capable of doing that with their firm power generation. However most utilities find themselves challenged managing more than believe it or not 15 to 20% of their generation when it comes from photovoltaic or wind power. So what happens when the utility has to accept more intermittent power than it can manage which is where now and why we're pretty well saturated at about 18%. They stop allowing any more wind or solar on the grid unless they can control it at the source, in other words at your house. So often when you hear the public utility talk about upgrading you to a smart grid they're talking about the ability to turn off some of your appliances like a water heater when there's too much demand for power on their system and then turning it back on when the demand decreases. In the case of solar and wind a smart grid also usually entails controlling your inverters so that if you're pushing too much power to the grid they can actually cut off the power and the flow of power from your house back into the grid. They also would use this system at the inverters to make sure that they shut you off if there's a power outage so that you don't activate their system while their guides are working to restore power for the rest of the grid. If the rate structure in your area lets the utility buy any of your surplus power and you never need energy from the utility you could actually be making money but if you do not have control of your own power generation you may end up throwing away power that they can't use. Now this may be okay if it's only a short interruption in your personal system but if the utility refuses to take the power from your solar panels or your wind turbines for extended periods the power they refuse to buy could be a significant amount of money. This is what's commonly referred to as curtailment. The smart grid from their perspective continues to give them the control and make sure that the electric company's stockholders maintain a profit. So what are some of the things that utilities should be considering when precious viewers are looking at like to control this their grid in the future. Things like efficiency and using renewable resources of all the renewable resources available. What about storing energy and traditionally it was stored on the island in the form of oil or coal that won't be available when you're all on renewables. What about the increased demand for electricity as we all try to decarbonize transportation. You know here in Hawaii our electric grid only uses about half of the energy that we use in the state the rest is transportation. Imagine doubling the electric load on the state's infrastructure all at once or over the next couple years. Most critical thing that the utility should look at is modifying their existing grid by dividing it into multiple smaller grids that are easier to manage particularly if they're grouped by user type and location. This offers several opportunities to address efficiency, storage and transportation. For example a residential community with a lot of houses producing clean solar wind use a little bit of power in the morning. Generally a whole lot of power is generated by their solar in the afternoon is not used. And then as the sun goes down the residential community starts using more power than the solar and the wind can produce. At night when there's no solar at all and the people are on their computers watching TV doing dishes and using a lot of electricity then there's no power being produced by their panels until maybe 10 or 11 at night and the power requirements slowly taper off for the grid. Some houses may even need to buy power from the utility if they can't store it somehow from their solar panels during the day. This residential cycle is often referred to as a duct curve and generally the utility's entire power cycle looks like the residential duct curve but because residential areas also don't have many power requirements that make large shock loads like big motors, running compressors or large air conditioning systems or maybe even things like blast furnaces. They're more efficient and they're a bit less complex but if the utility did some analysis of their customers it could divide their customers up into geographic groups. It would be easier to manage because their loads are more predictable. They use less complex infrastructure and they could accept more intermittent renewables if they organize these communities operate as what we now call a micro grid. These micro goods wouldn't just be easier to manage. They're also more reasons like efficiency survivability and survivability after disasters, man-made or natural disasters. From an efficiency perspective because the utility has to provide high quality power without interruption or degradation it always keeps extra generators online and running but not pushing any power out or not pushing much power out so they can instantly react to a surge requirement on the grid. This means that the electric company is producing power and throwing it away 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year and they're usually doing so with generators that are running at their least efficient operating range when they're just spinning. That's a just-in-case scenario in case they need have a sudden need for power. This costs the utility a significant amount of money particularly if they're burning fossil fuel to keep those generators online at their most inefficient rate. An alternative that is rarely recognized to serve in this role is the modern flywheel. The flywheels are rare in large grids however in micro grids spinning a flywheel or several spinning flywheels could provide all of the spinning reserve required on that entire micro grid using very little fuel or energy to keep them up and spinning. It's a matter of scale. Flywheels aren't ever considered for large grids because they do not scale up well but in a micro grid they make a lot of sense. In fact I talked to some of my electrical engineering friends after they really got to understand flywheels and the light bulb came on they said this is the ultimate spinning reserve no pun intended. Flywheels are just a big heavy weight spinning on zero friction bearings. When you need power you can instantly connect them to a generator. Another another large inefficiency that exists in the current grid design is the fact that power has pushed long distances and high voltages through power lines. This requires transformers and substations to increase and decrease the voltage and stabilize power along the route. Any electrical engineer will tell you that there's resistance whenever you send electricity through a wire and that's why you can't simply string hundreds of yards of extension cords together without causing a problem like losing voltage or possibly even starting a fire. You have to have the right size wires and the correct voltage when you're pushing power through hundreds or thousands of miles of wire in a grid. The longer you pull the wire the more power you lose. This is typically called line loss so when we take communities of geographical locations and size and size them properly we can avoid a great deal of the line loss and we can store more intermittent renewable energy in the same location where it's produced on those solar panels from your roof. For use at a later time we could be absorbing any extra intermittent renewable surplus energy that would normally be curtailed so how might this work? So say for example you had a community with 400-500 homes you could put between 10 and 20 panels on the typical roof which would be between about 3 kilowatts and 6 kilowatts of production on any household roof hopefully facing the south so you get the max exposure in the northern hemisphere and they would generate all the power that house would need in a 24-hour period over a typical day. Here we use between three and five hours of quote-unquote rated production per solar panel per day as a rule of thumb so we're looking at between maybe 30 and let's say six 30 and 70 80 kilowatt hours average daily for the panels that would fit on the house and that that electrical power produced per day would give you enough to cover what you use and a little bit more. You can get your actual usage off of your electric bill my house for example uses between 19 and 20 kilowatt hours per day I have no air conditioning I have an electric clothes dryer enough electric water heater and electric range in oven so even with all those electric hydroelectric appliances I only use an average of about 20 kilowatt hours a day or 21 kilowatt hours a day. Here in Hawaii because we're closer to the equator than most of the rest of the US we actually can count on between five and a half and six hours of rated power from our solar panels unless our house is in a valley or have large trees around it or something else that's blocking the sun from your solar panel and you may also live in an area that's known to be cloudy a lot of the day because of a constant weather pattern like in Manoa here in Hawaii. Most houses in our notional microgrid would use about 70 and 80 percent of their power so you'd have a little bit of a buffer there and the power that they produce may be capable of even more surplus. Any surplus power that you produce could be stored in batteries or nighttime and rainy days or put in long-term storage such as hydrogen or maybe even those flywheels we talked about earlier. The discussion on hydrogen for long-term storage as opposed to batteries is going to be a subject of another show but in short batteries are important for helping us balance our home power that changes as it changes and smoothing out that power and also gets us through the night when the sun's not shining on our solar panels. Batteries tend to work efficiently for short duration outages and lower power requirements but hydrogen is more economical at larger scale and longer duration storage such as days weeks or even longer. In a microgrid hydrogen would function as a long duration power storage but it could also be used for heating or cooking because it's flammable you can actually use it in your clothes dryer your water heater or cooking if you need to you just have to change the burner a little bit. So what might your microgrid area look like? The 500 houses with solar panels on all the roofs they even have some wind turbines out there with them. If they're in the significant wind zone in that area each house with a bank of batteries would be able to store enough energy to carry it through the night and through maybe part of another day if it's cloudy or rainy and the batteries don't get charged all the way you still would be good for a 24-hour period. Anytime the solar panels are producing excess power that electricity is sent to an electrolyzer once the batteries are charged that electrolyzer produces hydrogen gas and that gas may be sold to the gas utility or stored in the house for other uses. Besides making pure oxygen gas that electrolyzer also hydrogen makes pure oxygen and it also gives off some heat. If this oxygen and heat are collected for the community to use oxygen can be sold for medical or industrial use or other things like aquaculture and even heat that heat can be used to heat water in your house or make more electricity. A hydrogen could be used in a fuel cell to make the power needed to charge your batteries from your own house for example or any long duration power shortages could be right there and handy to run your house and recharge your batteries off of your own fuel cell. There's no need to be tied to the grid at all if you have this kind of long-term storage. Hydrogen can be pushed into a large fuel cell and provide electricity for that entire micro grid or a small fuel cell or even a car to provide electricity from the home. From your car can you believe that you could actually run just as an example a Toyota Mariah has a 114 kilowatt fuel cell it has way more power than you need to run your house. If you could take the power from the car and turn it into power for your house you'd be all set. We're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds and we'll talk a little bit more about this notional micro grid. Hey hello everyone and welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studio. My name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of Pretty Matters Hawaii. We air here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time trying to bring you issues about security that you may not know issues that can protect your family, protect yourself, protect our community, protect our companies, the folks we work with. Please join us and I hope you can maybe get a little different perspective on how to live a little safer. Aloha. Hi guys I'm your host Lillian Cumick from Lillian's Vegan World. I come to you live every second Friday from 3 p.m. and this is the show where I talk about the plant-based lifestyle and veganism. So we go through recipes, some upcoming events, information about health regarding your health and just some ideas on how you can have a better lifestyle, eat healthier and have fun at the same time. So do join me I look forward to seeing you and Aloha. When we left before break we were talking a little bit about getting power from your car but there's actually so many things that you can use hydrogen for at home for backup energy power for your back to charge your batteries, power for your car to cooking to your appliances and it's also very easy to move and if you sold the excess hydrogen you're making to somebody like the gas company to store it and they could provide you with very inexpensive plastic tubing it could bring the hydrogen right back to your house used for cooking if you're not storing it right there on your own property with your own storage tanks. So it's really a versatile thing and maybe we can talk more about the perfect home storage for hydrogen in some future show. But if you want to take this concept even further you put a few more solar panels on your house than you need and you could have the fuel for your house or your hybrid car that uses hydrogen in its fuel cell to get everything down just imagine clean reliable power for your house carbon free and fuel for your car at the same time. Now another shortcoming that I was thinking about as we talked about transforming the new grid I can tell you that as a former general in the National Guard I have quite a bit of formal training and experience in responding to large-scale natural disasters and I can tell you that even during major disasters there are always pockets of a region that aren't totally devastated in the disaster unless it's a cataclysmic scale. So if you have communities that are that are resilient and they're not touched by these disasters they can fully function and provide the power and refrigeration and cooking gas in the form of hydrogen and things like ice and oxygen for hospitals while the hard-hit communities are focusing on recovery. So the picture I'm trying to paint here is not it's not just an efficiency thing it's also highly practical in a world that is constantly throwing natural disasters our way. I mentioned briefly the hydrogen powered cars and that brings up a critical point if we're truly going to remove fossil fuels from our energy portfolio in our state that means our grid will nearly have to double in size to accommodate the electrical needs for our vehicles including our new rail large trucks and large buses especially if the vehicles travel long distances or uphills hydrogen fuel cell vehicles always beat batteries. Future transportation will not be powered by batteries alone there'll be hybrid vehicles that have have to have some form of energy storage other than batteries to provide the kind of performance that we are used to like hundreds of miles of range or being able to fill up just once a week or so. In this case hydrogen fuel and fuel cell vehicles are vital to get the range and performance needed especially in large vehicles and buses and it also makes typical passenger car transportation much more available from clean renewable photovoltaic and wind power and if you're under the impression that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are someplace far in the future then you need to understand that today there are over 6,000 hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicles operating in california alone and the thousands of vehicles in europe and asia as well. Toyota, Honda and Hyundai are just three of the companies that are all producing not prototyping producing hydrogen powered vehicles and selling them. 80 percent of all the car manufacturers in the planet are planning to produce hydrogen fuel cell vehicles many of them by 24-25. These are not prototypes they are production vehicles that would be on your streets today if the hydrogen stations were available. Currently california is the only state in the u.s that has incentivized construction of transportation hydrogen stations and has nearly 50 built statewide but that's a discussion for another time. There's a few states on the east coast that are also starting to build stations in asia and europe the stations are already on the streets and they already have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. So what i like to do now is throw in a video here that talks a little bit about micro grids just so you can get a better picture of what micro grids can really do that says it probably in a more concise way than i have. We're going to watch the video. 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 micro grid represents a different path for the future. Renewable micro grids 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 micro grids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission especially to critical facilities like hospitals airports and military bases unlike our current large-scale systems micro grids 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 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 micro grids 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 micro grids are a potential long-term solution that will provide safe clean reliable and efficient energy for generations to come that video gives you a really good first eye view of some of the advantages to micro grid but really it's hard to get a public utility to change its spots so to speak when it's been working a hundred years with the same model they want to keep controlling they want to have control from their end and so for some insight as to why micro grids and distributed generation are critical the addition of renewable to the addition of renewable energy to everyone's energy portfolio you just have to understand they have to redesign the grid we won't be able to divest ourselves of fossil fuels efficiently without reconfiguring our existing grids and taking advantage of the technologies that make micro grids and hydrogen energy storage possible so something that I've been talking to some local companies about is actually making a community a residential community from scratch it has the ability to not only produce hydrogen at the household level but produce hydrogen at the household level send it back to a storage maybe contractor or maybe Hawaii gas or some other utility store it and that would be the backup power for the house it would be the cooking gas for cooking water heating and clothes dryers and then it would be a non-wired backup electrical system for your community and as I said the cars that are coming out now a lot of them don't allow you to actually export power from the car to a house and that I've talked to the manufacturers and they said that's strictly a cost-cutting reason it adds a lot of cost to the house and they're already on real tight margins making these first fuel cell vehicles and getting them out for people to buy but eventually you should be able to take the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and actually use them like a power source to turn hydrogen back into electric power for your house so you could take your car put hydrogen in it from your own storage tanks or from a system that's that's supplying hydrogen from a central storage location directly to your house in underground buried tubes that are put in the ground the same time they put in your water lines or anything else and or your fiber cable whatever and those lines are small they're all made of reinforced plastic tubing and they can come right to your house provide hydrogen so you basically have no connection to the grid and no reason to go to a gas station to get gas in your car because your house would be producing everything that you need for power at home for your for your electrical appliances and also the fuel for your car it's really a neat concept but it's not pie in the sky it's things that are happening every day now in fact one guest that I have on you regularly is Mike Stritsky from New Jersey runs a project called hydrogen house you can look that up online hydrogen house uh uh New Jersey and he has a couple of examples of how he takes his house completely off the grid with just solar panels and he lives in the northeast so he makes all of his hydrogen that he needs for the year just in the summer time off of his solar panels and he stores the hydrogen at low pressure and only and he uses propane tanks for that so it's only 250 pounds per square inch pressure and not the typical hydrogen pressures which we use in vehicles which are 5 000 or 10 000 psi so there's so many things to look forward to in the not too distant future that will bring us clean good solid power and hydrogen stored in tanks are brought brought through a pipe system it's just like the base load power that the utility gets off of its big turbines and generators it's solid firm power so it's not intermittent like we get off the solar panels and off the wind turbines you're basically taking that intermittent power and turning it into firm power for your grid and if you do that you basically run your own grid on your own house so I hope that gives you a better understanding of what the public utility has to deal with in running their grid day to day and how we can really take that utility restructure its business model so it's the power the power provider or the power system main maintainer or big subdivisions or large areas that want to be off the grid they could be the folks that come out repair your equipment and help your system keep up to speed and spend less time working on down power lines during storm I hope that works for you I hope you get a little bit out of that and I'll be looking to see you next week I'll be broadcasting from the big island probably from Blue Planet Research and talking about electrolyzers that can pressurize off the stack and give us some of that money back that we normally spend on compressors until next week and the energy man signing off