 Technology you can figure out from NASA and finally I think got this up and running so thanks to Robert and Cindy in the studio and Jay and Eric over here on Kauai to make it all happen. And thanks for the patience. Brad over there at KIUC in Ligui, holy mackerel what a day you've had today. Anyway, today's show is all about looking at the utility grid and I want to say pretty unique in the whole wide world. Over here in Hawaii we have Hawaiian electrical mostly grids in the state of Hawaii but we also have one island that happens to be the island of King Kamehameha never really captured because he couldn't get his canoes over here without thinking his fleet. He lost half his fleet on two tries and gave up trying to take over the island of Kauai. So the folks here in Kauai are really independent and they have their own independent power source now and it's Kauai Island utility co-op. And Brad thanks for joining us today I really appreciate you having the patience to stick this out and welcome to the show. Thanks for having me Stan glad to be here. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do at KIUC? Sure. I'm the power supply manager for KIUC and what that means is I oversee our generating plants, our power plants. I also manage all our purchase power contracts and the grid operations falls in under that as well so just the day-to-day operation of the electric grid but I spend a lot of my time developing our renewable projects around the island. I'm a mechanical engineer by trade but also got my executive MBA from UH. I really enjoy both the operation and the engineering, financial, all sides that KIUC allows me to get my fingers into. So did you grew up here in Hawaii, specifically Hawaii? No I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles, California. Went off to school at the Naval Academy, did some time in the Navy in California after the Navy. I worked for Solar Servants which is a division of Caterpillar and then later General Electric in their power systems division and when I was working for GE I did a project here on Kauai at the Port Allen Power Plant in the summer of 2000 and that's kind of how I got to know some of the folks in the utility business here on Kauai and coming back permanently about a year and a half later at the end of 2001 to help get our new, well then new, Kauai power station completed and online. And so you were at the Navy before that's great because the Port Allen here was pretty active at the parking stands and doing Pacific Missile Test Range work and did that have anything to do with you kind of coming this direction? No, yeah it's funny because I remain an officer on the Navy Reserve to this day and people always kind of think, oh you must work at PMRF and I say, oh I work for KAUC they really don't have a lot to do with PMRF other than the current commanding officer being my classmate. Otherwise, now I do most of my reserve duties off Island and when I'm here on Island I'm working on my KAUC now. Well, I think like you might have heard on the intro, I think KAUC is pretty unique in the world in that most public facilities can't take more than 15-20% intermittent available site solar and KAUC has quite a bit more than that and is working towards 100%. What percentage are you guys up to now? So, and this might be a good time for Robert to throw up the image one and what that's going to show is our kind of our 2010 power supply mix which was kind of where we were for most of the early 2000s and as recently as 2010 we were about 92% oil and 8% renewable and really all those renewables were hydro. Solar total today which is a big part as you can see in the next image wasn't really viable, wasn't really cost effective at the time and we've been real aggressive in pursuing solar over the last decade and you'll see in image two our current mix is 54% renewable, 46% oil with the biggest chunk of that coming from solar now. That's been really the best fit for this island as well as some hydro, some biomass but solar continues to be very modular, very cost effective and it works well here on Hawaii. Wind is notably absent. We are challenged by a few other things that some of the other islands are faced with in trying to bring some wind online so we push hard on solar. Well you mentioned that you have hydroelectric, is that from the old sugar flumes and the agricultural side? Yeah exactly, they're pretty much all like a seed plantation hydroelectric plant. Okay well HECO talks about their duct curve all the time and how hard it is for them to balance their grid. You're a much smaller grid than HECO obviously on Oahu but tell us some of the challenges that you have managing all that in renewable on a grid the size of your operation. Sure and just to put things into perspective our grid all time peak was just the air under 78 megawatts. We're not really seeing that these days. We're seeing closer to more than the 72 to 75 megawatt range and that peak comes about within an hour after sunset each day. So during the midday when we're getting the high solar penetration you know around the near into 1 p.m. hours our demand is typically more in the 50 to 65 megawatt range depending on the week and time of the year and we have currently over 100 megawatts of solar installed on the island that's name plate capacity so we have about you know on some days two times as much as actually demand on the name plate capacity. You can break that solar capacity down into roughly one third buckets about one third is customer owned rooftop type stuff on businesses and homes about one third is utility scale solar projects without any significant energy storage and then the last third is you know solar for little things that are backed up with significant energy storage and allow us to store that energy midday and then shift it to an evening demand time. And how much energy storage and I think it's all batteries is that correct? How much energy storage do you have until what hours? We have we just do the math really quick. We have about 40 megawatts of energy storage in a power rating and energy rating it's about a hundred and sixty megawatt hours and then we got a project in construction right now at the startup site that is going to add another 14 megawatts of batteries in 70 megawatt hours. Okay so in one location what's the largest solar energy storage that you have in a battery like what's the biggest battery collection you have there in megawatt hours? That's our AES Lawhi project it is on the south side of the island and it's a 20 megawatt 100 megawatt hour battery. Okay 100 megawatts at 20 megawatt size. Okay well we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds with Brad from TIUC and we'll continue to talk about some of the unique challenges that you have when you have to balance a grid this size using a bunch of renewables. We'll be back in 60 seconds. Hey Loja my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that you know may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because Security Matters. Aloha. Hi I'm Rusty Komori host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business sports and life which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Hey welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour as usual and we got the technical wizards working on everything here. We went from a crowded noisy inside to a crowded noisy outside trying to improve the sound over here but hey Brad thanks again for putting up with all this stuff. Can you tell us some of the challenges you have working with the utility scale operation that has this much intermittent renewable in it? You know I mean a lot of people can't appreciate the challenges there because you not only have to be able to carry the average load of the systems on your grid but you have to be able to handle the spikes and the peaks and valleys and keep everything smooth because your customers demand good power and you're obligated as a public utility to give them good power but I know that's pretty challenging. Can you explain some of those challenges? Yeah I'll do my best Stand the Energy Man. The challenges are a few different, can kind of be spoken down a few different areas but first is the intermittency of a resource like solar and you know for solar specifically here in Hawaii we get typical trade run weather out there always moving across between the sun and the solar panels and so it's causing large swings in the power output of each solar panel and these utility scale solar farms and so that basically that means frequency around all day long on the grid so we have to mitigate that variable frequency in order to deliver good power to our customers and to not cause a problem like load shed and things like that and then the next thing is to just going back to how much main plate capacity solar we have I mentioned that we have twice the amount of what we have on demand during the midday so we have to manage supplying demand just balancing out all these excess resources if you will and supply assets and with our demand at every second making sure that if we have an excess we're appropriately storing it or we're curtailing as necessary and we're managing all those assets so that we can deliver the low cost renewables that we have as much as possible and that's been really something that's taken us most of the last decade with changing the air permit requirements on our conventional units that allow our oil fires to operate at their bare minimums typically conventional units are limited to only going down to 50% of their rated output we've gotten ours down to essentially zero so we can run them all the way down specifically our largest generator now operates most of the day what's called a synchronous condenser it's providing support to the grid without consuming any fuel and it's available to come back and provide power if we need it within a couple of minutes so that's just basically making our generating fleet our conventional fleet that consumes fossil fuels very flexible and able to complement our net solar resources and now I could probably go on and on but I'll just stop there I was going to say you've gotten so far how soon do you think it's a realistic goal for Hawaii to come off fossil fuels completely and just go with your renewable sources and storage first of all when we talk about 100% will we ever never consume the drop of fuel to power the grid I think that's far out there for me to see because the reality is we would have to significantly over build the renewable resources if we wanted to ensure that we never consumed the drop of oil to generate electricity that assumes we don't use biofuel liquid biofuels or something which I think would be an easy solution to that issue but we don't want to have to overspend and over develop for this goal we want to do it while we're keeping rates low and stable and so if we can get 90% above maybe even 99% very soon it's really just a matter of how quickly we plan our step on the gas pedal we here at KFC try and take somewhat of a portfolio approach when we're pursuing our renewable goals so that we don't induce too heavily in any year we think that similar pricing is going to continue to get better and so we wouldn't want to do everything this year for example and not be able to do anything next year or a year after so we like to kind of do the always in continual project development mode and developing new projects and rolling out older and more expensive ones replacing them with newer and better technology that hopefully is cheaper You mentioned something really important to me there and that is when you're using so much renewable energy on your grid storage when you don't have fossil fuels available becomes critical because people don't realize how much energy is stored in oil or diesel or what you're putting in your oil fired power plants it's a very energy dense way to store and very inexpensive Did Kawhi utilities ever consider using hydrogen energy storage like using any of your curtailed or your surplus energy to make hydrogen store it and then use fuel cells to put it back on your grid Yeah, you're exactly right with that energy density and I think that is a whole other subject that you can get into about how renewables are going to change the landscape of our island to arrive at 100% renewable reality with a lot of it coming from solar and wind but hydrogen as long as we have here on Kawhi as we are somewhat of a small system we're very cost conscious we don't want to get too involved in things that aren't well commercially proven I always like to say if I can't go buy something from a TV or something like that then we want to make sure we're being careful about it so we haven't looked seriously at hydrogen yet I hope that becomes an option that's more viable and that proves out to be cost competitive with battery storage but right now everything's sort of in the lithium ion battery storage that's largely driven by the consumer electronics business the automotive business and we're able to kind of take advantage of that We're going to have to have some conversations just the two of us maybe some other folks from the utility here because I'm kind of bullish on hydrogen I just came back from the department of energy for hydrogen systems across the U.S. Even Dr. Chu from President Obama's administration who was kind of not a big hydrogen supporter when he was in the sea for eight years has finally come out and said hydrogen looks like the way to go in the future and it's because the technology is becoming more commercially available and the price point is dropping down there so I'll come over one last question because we're probably running close to the end of time here Is your network actually have any island capability where certain communities can kind of be pulled off by themselves in the event of a hurricane like I know Hawaii is taking the brunt of two at least big hurricanes and the survivability and sustainability of your grid Is it islanded at all or do you have any of those kind of protections built in Yeah we do it's not something we typically do during the normal course of operations but yeah following a hurricane let's say our main transmission line down between Port Allen and the U.S. we'll be able to while we are awaiting that transmission line to be restored if we could operate power in the U.S. one grid and no power along the west side of the second grid one of the benefits that he gets from these renewable projects being all over the island and specifically those with energy storage or significant energy storage that you've got these assets now that can actually operate the grid in those areas and our Tesla solar and storage project has specifically been set up to be a grid forming resource that can operate the grid without needing any external solar sign. Okay I tell you we're coming up against our end of time here but I really really really want to thank you for being flexible today this has been a real adventure for all of us over here in Hawaii trying to pull off everything together we spent the morning up at Kokei at the radar site talking to those folks so thanks again Brad and I definitely want to have you back on the show sometime when I more settle down and less hair on fire and get to talk to you a little bit more about the future of Hawaii Island energy co-op so thanks so thank you so much for your patience and we'll be talking to you sometime in the future. Yeah sure thing let's do it again thanks Stan. Okay thanks for your time today next week signing off. Aloha.