 Stanford University. So hi everyone, we'll continue now with the program. While in the previous sessions we had a set of both plenary sessions as well as the lunch panel discussion providing a broader overview on how the research that we have planned for earnest can support different types of stakeholders. Right now we're going to get technical. A little bit more technical and we're going to start with a series of three sessions where we are going to outline the work that is planned for the pilot projects or case studies. So these next three technical sections are going to focus first on challenges and solutions for interconnected systems followed also by challenges and solutions for city. And before that we'll welcome the first technical session on solutions for remote and isolated grids. And with that I'll pass on the baton to our moderator for this first technical session, Dr. Priya Daunty, now Professor Priya Daunty, Assistant Professor at MIT. Thank you. All right, yeah, thanks everyone. So I'm excited to introduce our four participants in today's panel. So they are Mani Venkatesubramanian who's a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Washington State University. Claudio Canyasares who is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Executive Director of the Waterloo Institute of Sustainable Energy at the University of Waterloo. We have Quinn Tran who is a Power Systems Engineer at the University of Hawaii. And we have Michelle Wilbur who is a Research Engineer at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. And they're each going to spend about seven minutes each talking about different work that they are doing to help to plan and operate remote or island grids. And then we should have about ten minutes towards the end for questions. So please do have those queued up. You're going to hear, I think, a lot of interesting stuff. So with that I'm going to hand it over first to Mani. Thank you, Priya. I was delighted to be here as part of the Ernest Consortium. Today, our presentation, I am here representing our team at WSU including several of my distinguished colleagues who are not able to attend today. And also we are working with the local utility Avista who has been a strong partner in this effort. So our project is about the pilot for one of our Native American tribes in Pacific Northwest, the Spokane tribes. We are working with them to develop a resilience plan for a microgrid solution for them. And how do we advance the slides here? Yes, there's a big green button on there. Okay. I have to learn technology first. The motivation, this, you know, we have had, we hear about wildfires here in California for us in Northwest as well. And especially when we have a catastrophic event like wildfire, it affects the remote communities especially severely. And for instance, the Spokane tribes, they were without electricity for several days when they had this fire event in 2016. So now they are looking at potential solutions and some of the key priorities are resilience as well as the tribes being nation within a nation. Energy sovereignty is key cultural priority for them. And so the question in the context of earnest is how do we include these priorities in coming up with resilience plan? How do we bring in the cultural aspects into the formulation as well as into the studies for our project? Just to give you a quick background, I know time is short. The tribes, the energy framework or the energy loads are like what is shown in this diagram. We have a remote grid which is, there is no substation in the reservation. It is just fed from distribution transformer. And the plan will be to study and model the energy demands in the community. And then to work with them in prioritizing what we should do in form of the micro grid solution. And again, just to give you a geographical perspective, you can see it is a heavily wooded part of the state. And that is why wildfires as well as wind related outages are a key concern for this community. So, we will be working with them in modeling the needs and also the different objectives they have as a community. And then we plan to test the resilience plan in the form of simulations and what kind of tools that we need to do the study. And a key aspect would be how can we quantify the benefits of implementing solution A versus solution B so that they can make those educated decisions for the community. And I should mention that currently there is an ongoing project which is funded by the state commerce department in Washington state. And this is current feasibility study by Avista to develop resilience evaluation for this community. And we will continue to work with them and then also grow the collaborations. And we are also working with several other tribes in the Pacific Northwest including the Northwest Indian College is an important partner for us. And we, you know, this is something that Lisa mentioned in the morning. And, you know, key part of the project will be to listen to the cultural priorities as well as the needs of each community. I don't want to really go into all of the details, but the two technical challenges will be how do we quantify or how do we formulate the cultural priorities into technical problems. That can be included in resilience study. And the second would be how do we quantify the benefits that come from microgrid solutions so that the community can take educated decisions. And so maybe I will stop this and say that our plan is to develop a blueprint for remote communities such as the Spokane tribes, which hopefully will be applicable to other such communities in the region as well as across US and now I understand from Canada as well as in Mexico. Thank you very much. We look forward to your questions. Okay, my turn I guess. Good afternoon. My name is Claudio Canizares. I guess you've heard about me already from University of Waterloo in Canada. Okay, I think I'm missing a title here. Okay, so the topic or the focus is going to be within this context of developing pilots is focused on green hydrogen and the GEN is highlighted because of an issue with the SOP. Fooliness and solar PV. The researchers involve myself, which I'm leading the group, and we have three other researchers from University of Waterloo with different expertise. Sahar, which is focused more on the DC protection, DC systems. Xiaoyu Wu, which is focused on hydrogen and ammonia. Merda Prina, which is focused on optimization and AI. Now, what is the context? The context of this project is that we are embedded in this issue of Northern Arctic communities, which is very similar to what is happening in Alaska. We have done quite a bit of work for over a decade or so working with remote communities in the context of other projects in this type of planning issues. And one of the main issues is the pollution issues associated with diesel generation, which you have heard already about. And the issue is not as much how many emissions or how big of emissions because it's not much. The population is relatively low. However, the local impacts are dramatic. One of the examples is SUT, which basically melts ice a lot faster. And now this is embedded in the context of the issue that in Northern communities, climate change or heating of these communities happen is taking place four times at four times the rate that is happening in the rest of the world. So it's quite dramatic. What is happening in those local communities is quite significant. And we're embedded within the context of Canada, we're embedded within this clean energy for Indigenous communities act or initiative in which basically there's a lot of funding being provided to move these communities towards renewable energy. So we decided to focus in a particular community. We have done work across the Arctic. We review many communities. But in this case, based on an experience, we focus on this community. Now, why this community? Because it's not really an example of the rest. It's very unique in the sense that it has, well, first of all, the most diesel and heat and power in the Northwest Territories. And it's also unique in the sense of the power grid. They actually have a natural gas generator, which you don't really find in this community. So that's a different, interesting distinction. The other issues that the amount of pollution or emissions is quite significant, although, as I mentioned, per capita is not that large, but it's significant compared to other communities in the territories. Now, NTPC, one of the issues is that this community has already reached the NTPC, the Northwest Territories Power Corporation, limits on renewables. They already have reached that limit that was set at 20% of the P-power. And I guess one of the issues that we need to deal with is how to increase that share. And this 20% is fixed, so it's associated with the fact that renewables, variable renewables can have an impact on the microgrid. Now, what are the research questions we're trying to address? One is, well, in particularly we're focusing because of our partners and the experience we have had in these communities in the issue of hydrogen and ammonia, because it has other utilizations and it has this capacity of seasonal storage, which is an issue that needs to be addressed or can be addressed in these communities. Solar is only six months of the year, so how do you save that energy? And the other thing is how you improve the resiliency and enhance these systems, existing systems. Now, the methods we're going to be doing, so the idea is not to build a pilot, but plan and design a pilot. So in that context, we're interested, as I already mentioned, the integration of hydrogen and ammonia and solar PV in this context related to our partners. Based on that very extensive experience of what we have written many papers on this, we have worked with the communities and we believe that we have the expertise to basically look at these problems from the point of view of modeling and planning. Now, the issues how to integrate these distributed resources, the capacity and size of this pilot that we are trying to design, why? Because our intention is with the help of NRKAN or with interactions with NRKAN, eventually apply for funding to actually build this pilot. At this point, the funding we have allows us to do the studies and build a case for building a pilot with funding available through NRKAN. Now, we're trying to identify in this context what role the DC systems would play and also algorithms, modeling, etc., for making this happen. Now, we're also looking at EV charging, because it's an important part of all of this, given that the characteristics of INEVIC, a good part of the mission is transportation, and also looking, as I already mentioned, seasonal and storage, communications as well, and thermoelectrical systems, because one of the important energy demands in these systems are thermal. And we're trying to look at different aspects as well as the feasibility of eventually a grid connected microgrid, because things are happening in the north in which lines are being built that allow to incorporate these systems. Now, who are the stakeholders? Our industry partners are few positives. We are a new company focused on hydrogen and ammonia. SC2 Technologies, which is the one who recommended INEVIC, because they have done some solar PV deployments in that area. And in the process of doing this, we're trying to establish some engagement with the Northwest Territory, NTPC, which we already had some interactions with in the INEVIC community, which is part of our effort here. At this point, we don't have that engagement, and it's going to be part of the development of this work. And our collaboration with NRCan, which we already have an MOU. Now, how are we supporting the earnest goals? We are basically, the engineering challenge is how to integrate hydrogen and ammonia in this, which is somewhat unique, into these remote communities. The issues of resiliency from the point of view of control, improved control in the presence of variable renewables, and also look at fossil fuel issues from a point of view of decarbonization, an issue of enhancing the access to energy in these systems. And we're looking at an economic solution. So our intention is to minimize cost, overall cost, which is what we have done so far in all of our work. Now, what do we anticipate as fundings, as my last slide, is basically multiple financial mathematical models that may include some AI and machine learning techniques based on the expertise of our group. And also the important of collaborating with indigenous leadership and communities and NTPC in the north. Now, we are also looking at the value of these for the community and the social implications of what we are planning to do, because that's very important. We might want to build something, but we need to interact with the community to see whether that is something feasible. And looking at a pilot in the future. And the issue of being part of support of these SDG7s, affordable and clean energy efforts that we are trying to be part of with that. Thank you. Oh, nice. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Queen Chuan, the power system engineer from Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Today, I am presenting for our research group to introduce our Hawaii pilot project, investigation of energy management for isolated creates equipped with hybrid storage system and high variable renewable energy resource. So the pilot system is located at the Coconut Island, not east side of the Oahu Islands in Hawaii. University of Hawaii at Manoa under different funding resource has been already worked with the local to design a remote micro grid which ensure reliable powers. And for critical loss during the grid interruptions, events and provide clean solar power transportation options. As you can see in the slide that we have the current models of the remote micro grid. This one is have the bold combinations of the DC and IC system which make the problem is more complex to address. Under this funding opportunities, we want to investigate the energy management's models and then develop and controllers to further future advanced system simulation including the extent additional controllable loads next generation hybrid storage system and to like secure the energy stability and achieve close to 100% renewable energies. Check it. So the method we to implement this pilot project we will analyze the field collected data to understand the current system and then we will develop the framework and algorithms to optimize the models for the advanced controllers. So we can optimize the energy cost to maximize the utilization of renewable energy and support resilient options. The whole control system going to be evaluated by HNEI hardware in the loop testbed using the collected field data from the Coconut Island. Currently we just only have the one stakeholder is the Hawaii Institute of the Marine Pathologies. And we keep continuous collaborate with this institute to understand the current power crisis challenges and zenith in energy. Well, the project will be continuously updated through the workshop meeting and conference to make sure that the community and partner can update the projects and then incorporate feedback from them to put into the planning and decision making process. So what this pilot project supporting for the UNESCO it's going to be it's going to develop a model to determine the viability of incorporating energy storage solution to enhance the enhance the micro grid resilience and achieve near 100% renewable energy utilization. We also want to develop an advanced control system we can maximize the utilization of the renewable energies and then provides resilient options for the isolated grid. We are the worst wind focus on the isolated communities to ensure that the pilot project will address the specific communities and the challenges. We have the three anticipated findings that is a framework to analyze the feasibility to for integrating the hybrid energy storage system with including the new battery energy battery and hydrogen storage system for the remote micro grid communities to enhance the resilience. We also want to create a demand choice control system for assisting the dispatchable load to meet the power system stability needs in the grid interruption events. And the last one is going to be advanced micro control that can optimize the energy cost maximize the utilization of renewable energies and support the Brazilian options. And we thank to the Department of Energy Stanford University Hawaii's Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology and University of Alaska Fairbanks for support and collaborated efforts in this project. Thank you. Hi good afternoon everybody. My name is Michelle Wilbur and I am a research engineer with the Alaska Center for energy and power at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Although I myself actually live in the tropical balmy city of Anchorage which I didn't put a map of Alaska anywhere in these slides but if we're down here and Alaska's up here in Canada's here. Fairbanks is way in the middle of the state. They're about negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit Celsius doesn't matter right about now. Anchorage will be negative 20 Fahrenheit later this week. So we're quite a bit warmer and many of our project partners are in the rest of the state but we work a lot with folks in the Northwest Arctic borough up here in this part of the state. You could drive. I had a very long day got here about nine o'clock last night after getting up at 5am see on the runway in Anchorage for two hours waiting for them to deice the plane. But you could drive from here all the way through Canada to Anchorage certainly not to Kotzebue up here in the Northwest Arctic borough there's no roads that go there and to many of our communities. Power lines do not get through Canada into the US even on what we call the rail belt which is a subsection of the road belt. There is a small grid here that we're on that's kind of a collection of large micro grids and about 200 of our communities are not connected by road or grid waterway maybe mostly airplanes certainly to the rest of the state and nation. So when we talk about a resilient grid it's kind of resilient grids. So anyway in that context we are focused on this project on our smaller micro grids more than what we call the rail belt the larger grid. There's a lot of challenges affordability burning diesel fuel a lot of the things our other partners have talked about. You know certainly we're looking at many of the same issues as Waterloo and Hawaii and all of our partners on this stage. But we have communities that are less than 10 households many of our communities are around 40 households. Some of our partners in the hubs have maybe 1000 households. The school is 25 to 50% of the community electric load. The airport might be a part of it if there is really an airport more than just some runway lights and a weather station. There's maybe a GCI cell cell tower. There are not many loads and there's not many generation sources and a couple illustrative examples. We sent a power meter out to a new diesel generating plant that was going into a small community called Port Hyden down here on the peninsula before you get to the islands out in the Aleutians. About a couple dozen households maybe and they put that into place and they used our power meters because they were having the new generation system trip offline over and over again. It turned out that the airport was on one of their three phases and some big load there was enough that every time it came on it was a big phase imbalance and it tripped off the system. So small number of generating sources, one diesel generator in that case, small distribution system, no transmission, small number of loads really easy for things to get unbalanced and not work right. So reliability is a constant concern, resilience is the next step up and we have both things that we need to look at. And we have communities like Kotzebue, Kotzebue is a leader. They're doing the work, not the university. Kotzebue Electric and the community of Kotzebue are envisioning the future, choosing what they want, put in generation after generation of wind turbines. They're now up to two megawatts of nice reliable wind turbines that are working well for them, about a megawatt of solar that's installed capacity that's equal about to their three megawatt load. But it serves about 25%, maybe 30% of the total load over the year because of the high variability of that resource and no geographic distribution. So how can we do a better job of integrating these resources? The communities are already wanting the transition. They have differences in geography and resources and things like that, but there are a lot of similarities between many of these communities as well, including right now a very high reliance on diesel. And as we can see, the diesel can be a reliability concern as it trips off. So we are looking within our kind of, the rest of my colleagues might take offense at this, but small and scrappy research organizations. So I will tell you what we can bring to earnest, but we are really excited about earnest about what this consortium of other researchers looking into the same things with their own experience and expertise and the national lab partners and everybody else. Can help us with as well. I'm extremely excited about this collaboration. So we want to look at novel energy management systems and long duration energy storage is really of interest to us because if we're looking at variable renewables, not all of these communities have a wind resource. If they aren't on the coast, wind resource might be pretty non-existent. Everybody's got solar six months of the year. It's really great in a month or so when it's cold, snowy, that sunlight is hitting, bouncing off the snow, hitting the modules, producing a whole lot of power. But you know, that's not there at all in December for our communities. So we are also looking at long duration energy storage, a hydrogen or whatever else exciting might come along. So we're looking at that. We're also looking at something that has the working title of demand choice. So we are very different as far as what our communities look like and how they're connected. So we would like to go to people in the communities we're working with and say within your building, within your life, what is important to you? If we're going to maximize this variable renewable source, if you have a whole bunch of wind, Kotzebue is looking at installing twice as much or more wind and twice as much or more solar again. So you have a very peaky generation profile and there's only so much, the lithium ion batteries they have and are getting can do for them. What sort of services do you need? And people don't necessarily want to talk about it from an energy standpoint, but say you're looking at getting an electric snow machine or electric ATV instead of your gas powered one. How far do you need to go and when? What temperature do you want your building to be? How much fuel are you willing to burn in your fuel system or your wood stove to maybe match up with some cheap electric heating when that's available? Ask the people that live there what they want from the system and then help design what those maybe behind the meter controls might look like and maybe sort of a whole home load smart thermostat sort of configuration where what sort of loads are controllable within what parameters to meet the people's needs but also to meet the needs of the grid because these utilities are small cooperative utilities. Each household is part of that electrical system. They're all working together to make this work out and to meet people's needs. So doing more to look into that. And then of course we need to figure out how to these variable renewables, the maybe building level controls and the energy storage of whatever duration, how do those work together to be able to provide that reliability and resilience for the grids. Could I ask you to wrap up in the next 30 seconds? Yes. This looks like I'm helping a community member. I'm actually asking that community member to help me tell me what they want in their location. We have a history of working with people. This is Matt Bergen who works at Kotspio Electric who is very interested in this project, helping meet his goals of figuring out how much solar wind storage etc. to put in his grid and how to control heating in people's houses. So we're really hoping to get some good methods to help with those questions I asked and we have lots of partners. We're continuing to develop those partnerships and really looking forward to working with you all here. Thank you. All right. Yeah. So some really interesting work here with I think a lot of kind of synergies between and among the projects. And so we have about nine minutes for questions. So kind of borrowing from a previous moderation technique, I'll sort of ask for about three questions and sort of let the panelists respond to whichever kind of speaks to them the most. And I think that'll actually bring us to time. So yeah, any questions? So I actually have a question if that's okay. Yes, please. So I'm Jenny Millwick with the Precourt Institute for Energy help shape their research portfolios. I have a question about the long duration storage in Alaska, and particular constraints or difficulties about thinking about what the technology might be considering your temperatures that you mentioned and you mentioned hydrogen. But is that constraining any choices that you might be able to make there? Thank you. We'll take two more questions and then we'll come back to them. Okay. See one back there. Hi. Ben Hittle again, PH4AI. Do you guys do biomass in Canada and especially Alaska for your wintertime needs because it would do the heat and the power potentially? Thank you. I'll make the question back there. Hi. I'm Ben Taub. I'm a PhD student at MIT. And I was wondering if any of you could speak a little bit about the tradeoffs between investing in these microgrids versus investing in energy efficiency in the buildings when you have limited resources. Are you taking into consideration spending it in efficiency so you need less of a grid to support running these buildings? Thank you. All right. So we have just a recap here. Questions on long duration storage constraints due to temperature or other things. Biomass and its use as well as kind of microgrids versus building energy efficiency. So I see Claudio has a hand up so I'll let you go and then Michelle after that. Yeah. I just wanted to address the issue of hydrogen. It's an interesting question. Hydrogen has been already shown for the longest storage to be a feasibility Velakula in British Columbia was shown that hydrogen can be used for long storage. Now the issue of thermal management of the system is an interesting question. And that's what we are looking at trying to integrate ammonia in all of the system because it brings different type of characteristics for storage and thermal management as well. So we hope that that will address some of these questions. But certainly that's an issue that you need to be aware of the issues of temperature control. Especially when you are compressing decompressing these these gases. Thank you. Michelle go ahead. Yeah. I can answer all three of those very quickly. I think so it's all about other people. So Paul McKinley in the audience here is our hydrogen researcher. And that is one of the very first things he has to look into is all of those logistical challenges with seals fail in the low temperatures or do we need to put them in heated buildings? What does that do about the fire danger? Where's the water source? How clean does it have to be? All kinds of challenges that we are looking into. So yes, need to be answered. As far as biomass, there are biomass projects. I will not get into the sustainability of those from a carbon perspective in the timescales that things decay. But when we're looking at Amazon boxes, my friend Chad Nordlum has talked about what can we do to insulate our buildings in Kotzebue better because they are not well insulated. And that's a big deal to get into the efficiency first, which is extremely important. We need to use less energy to meet the same needs. So maybe we can make insulation out of those Amazon boxes and insulate our buildings. Thank you, Michelle. Money. Yeah. Just wanted to highlight on the hydrogen question. We also have one of our lab partners, Indrel. They have a pilot study of hydrogen as a long term storage for community in Southern California. So maybe if you are interested, Inesh can provide more details on that pilot study as well. And on the biomass question, I will say something similar to what Michelle said that it's a cultural issue that whether a specific community will be warm to the choice of biomass as energy resource is something that we have to take into consideration in formulation of a solution. And on energy efficiency, from what I have seen from our discussions very much so, that is included or that is inclusive in a potential solution and how we formulate it technically and how much energy savings versus the other effects that something that we have to look into. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So I went to support for the answer about the energy efficiency slice. We know that when we do the resilience activities and we have to increase the reverse energy on the battery, that is a trade-off path. It may reduce the economic efficiencies for the whole system, not only the buildings, but that's what we secure for the system and critical loads operating well when we have the interruptions from the grid. And I think it's worth to do that. Yeah. Awesome. Cool. If I can add something about the efficiency. I'm not sure about biomass. I think it's relatively low production of biomass in these communities. Especially in the Arctic, there's not a lot of vegetation to deal with. But however, in the issue of energy efficiency, it is true that it's the long-hanging foot. However, I'm aware that this is being a challenge, it's been looked at for many years. It's been a challenge from the point of view of the social issues that these communities they have to deal with in terms of house maintenance, and there's a lot of issues with broken glass, not fixed, and there's an issue of interaction with the community and the social housing. So those are issues that need to be addressed as well. Absolutely. Yeah, we got money. One of the important aspects, especially in the context of earnest, is the cost involved and the affordability for the community in terms of the energy justice that is a key objective for the earnest project. And especially, we can talk about federal investment to help out the communities in the initial installation of some of these resources. But then we also need to have a plan for long-term maintenance and support and training. All of that need to be included in developing a solution, which is one of the key priorities for us as well. So, yeah, a lot of, I think, kind of techno-social political problems at play here with a lot of kind of deep cultural and local context and a real need to think about kind of capacity and such in the loop of that. So in the last minute, I didn't prep the panelists with this, so apologies for the last question. I just want to prompt each of you just with any kind of final takeaway that you would really like for the audience to leave this panel with, and I may start. I just wanted to add that, like Michelle, I'm looking forward to this collaboration. I think it's very exciting to see what other people are doing, the problems they're dealing with, and hopefully we can help each other. That's a good note to end on. I can think so. All right. Well, thank you so much, everybody. Thank you.