 Welcome to Staten Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Another really gorgeous day in Hawaii. Gotta love it. Glad I grew up here. Glad I live here. Glad I'm gonna stay here. But I'm planning to move to the Big Island. That'll be good too. Anyway, it's almost fall, believe it or not. We're ending up August, rolling into September. Kids are going back to school. Not hard finding parking today. Right before a three-day weekend. So it's actually pretty nice here in downtown Honolulu. We're going to talk a little bit today about a subject near and dear to me. But before we get started on that, just a little public service announcement. Staten Energy Man has been on every Friday for the last four years. And they're going to start moving us to different schedules. So Staten Energy Man is going to start being on Tuesday at three in the afternoon streaming live here from Pioneer Plaza in beautiful downtown Honolulu. That'll start on the 17th of September. So we're still good for today and for next Friday. And I think one more Friday. It'll be a Friday the 13th will be my last Friday show. That's a real scary one. And then after that we're starting on Tuesday. So we'll catch you then. For today's show, we're talking about sustainability and actually how we really start moving to sustainability. And I'd like to go back a couple months ago. I had a great guest on my show and get a huge impact on how I think about things and actually validated a lot more about what I think about in terms of energy and sustainability and decarbonizing the planet and things like that. His name is Professor Nate Hogan. And he runs a program, I think it's out of Minnesota, where he talks about energy and he talks about making choices. And it's really important that you understand where he's coming from. He uses a term called energy blindness. And I think the quickest way to define energy blindness is a lot of people know how much their electric bill is every month, roughly. But almost nobody knows how much power they use every month out of the electric bill. In other words, they can tell you that their electric bill is 180 or 250 or 300 bucks a month. They can't tell you how many kilowatt hours they use on any given day. And for the last at least six or seven years, I've been looking at my energy and it's pretty consistent for my house. And that's important because you have to have a concept not of the dollars because whether you're on a different rate schedule or whether the price of electricity was up or down, that'll change your electric bill. But how much energy do you use and how do you use it? I mean, you sit there and really focus on saving energy, which is the first step in all of the sustainability models that we do is you try and be more efficient with the energy that you have and then go for the solar panels or the wind turbines or whatever you're going to put in. And so being energy aware and having a good understanding of energy and not being blind to it is critical. So I'll give you a really crystal clear example. My house uses on average between 20 and 22 kilowatt hours a day. I have an electric water heater. I have an electric oven and I have an electric dryer. I don't have central air conditioning. I just I have fans in the house. That's the profile of my house. It's not insulated. It's single wall. I put gecko roof on in white so that it reflects as much heat as I can. And that's it's a real basic house here in Hawaii. What does that really mean? Well, if you know how many kilowatt hours of electricity you use, not how many dollars, but how many kilowatt hours, then you can actually start doing analysis. And you don't need a rocket science degree or a calculator to figure this stuff out. For example, the typical truck that we used to convert for the Air Force had 28 kilowatt hours worth of battery on board. And it would take that truck about 30 miles. Now, if that was a car, it could probably go about 65 or 70 miles on the same 28 kilowatt hours. So if 28 kilowatt hours is what a truck uses to go 30 miles, and a car would use to go 60 or 70 miles, then my house can barely get a car to go 70 miles. In fact, if the energy in my house is only 20, 22, 21 kilowatt hours, then your your car could probably go 50 miles on that. Your car would use a lot of energy if it was an electric car. But we don't think about that. We think about electric being good, and it is much more efficient, much cleaner than using diesel and gasoline to power your car. But you have to be aware of exactly what we're talking about. You also have to be aware where the power is coming from. So let's start off by talking a little bit about transportation. You have cars nowadays, and everybody asks me, Stan, if hydrogen vehicles are so great, how come we're not driving all of them right now? And the answer is fairly simple. We spent about 100 years working on transportation infrastructure based on oil, based on a very cheap, also fuel, easy to get to, easy to pull out of the ground, easy to refine, dirt cheap. And we're still using it, but the price is creeping up. It's impacted also by international issues. When we have OPEC running things, like we did back in the 70s, man, there were gas lines here in Hawaii and across the US, because that fuel is controlled by a certain group of people, and they could use it to leverage other countries. It's the same way they're currently. We're leveraging our economic strength with other countries. They balance our trade with those countries again and get it more fair. Other countries do the same thing, but hydrogen, if you think about it, no country owns hydrogen. Every country has hydrogen. We could do it. But then we take away that ability for one country to leverage over another country. So maybe that's one reason why we don't do it. Another reason, we've spent so much money on infrastructure for gas and oil. You can't compete. That infrastructure has been bought and paid for for a hundred years, but we're still using it. But it doesn't drive the cost of oil up any. It's already a sunk cost. But to do hydrogen, we'd have to start from scratch or pulling hydrogen out of water or methane or whatever, whatever we could pull hydrogen out of almost anything. It's the most common element in the universe. The bottom line is, though, if you want to start moving the right direction in transportation, you have to look at hybrid technology. But what is hybrid technology on car? Hybrid technology is an electric drive train being provided electricity by either stored energy and batteries, produced energy by a generator being run by a gas engine or a diesel engine, or hydrogen, or you could even use a flywheel, I guess, in a car. You could use nuclear power in a car. As long as there's something providing electricity for that hybrid drive train, you can have a variety of power sources. So right now, most prevalent choices are electricity from the grid, not necessarily clean. Now, if you have solar on your house and you can charge your house over your car overnight from your house, perfect. Now you're doing clean energy, clean from solar, and clean stored in batteries, put it in your car, you're good to go. But if you can't, if you don't have it, like you live in an apartment, you can't put solar on your little patio or a deny, not enough to drive your stuff and hard to wire that down to your car, sitting 24 stories down. So what do you do? Well, you get a hybrid vehicle. Now, hybrid vehicles have smaller engines that are matched with a generator. They're programmed to work only at their most efficient, efficient level, which is where regular internal combustion drive trains fall down, because the drive trains we have in our cars now, if you're if you're just straight gas engine or diesel engine, that engine produces power and follows what we need. And it's very inefficient at the low end. And it's fairly efficient at the high end. And there's a sweet spot somewhere in the middle there, where it's got its peak efficiency. And we're almost never there. But a hybrid's different. The gas engine in the hybrid is designed to work at its most efficient point, or not at all. It's either charging the batteries and giving power to the electric drive train, or it's off. And that's why hybrid cars get like 40 to 50 better gas mileage than a regular gasoline car. So you have batteries, you have hybrid electric drive trains that are run by generators. And then you have other power sources. Like I said, I don't think we'll see nuclear for a while. Although I have nuclear engineer friends that say it's the way to go. And the new power is safe, clean, everything else. I don't think we're ready for that, at least not socially. But even hydrogen, fairly simple. You take oxygen, oxygen from the air, hydrogen, put them together. It makes water heat electricity. And it completes a regular eco cycle, just like you'd want. But the key, again, is we need to start looking at hybrid transportation. Most of the car companies out today have hybrid technology. They don't advertise it a lot. But you can find every auto manufacturer makes hybrid drive trains. And they're there, need to look for them. And I would say if you're going to make a vehicle choice in the near future, look for it. Look for a hybrid drive and go with electric. Eventually, the entire transportation sector will be electric. So what does that mean in the bigger picture? That means we're going to have a lot of electric power requirements. And right now, we have grids that are struggling to maintain our current requirements and absorb more energy from solar and wind and other things. And try and balance them all together. And I can tell you right now that the current grid is just not there to handle it. What I'd like to do right now is show a short video that talks about how we probably ought to start looking at microgrids in the future and how that impact will affect transportation as we go forward for the next 20 to 30 years. 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 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's just a little picture of kind of where we're at in the grid now and where I think we should be going. That video was put together by Hcat, used to work for Hcat. And it's a beautiful video, well done, actually won some awards here locally in the advertising world for their animation. But the message is the important part. We have to be mindful of the fact that the grid of today has been stretched to its limit. And here in Hawaii, we have a pretty straightforward grid, all run by one company. That one company takes power from a coal facility, oil burning power plants and H power, which is basically a big incinerator. They try and also incorporate as much solar and wind as they can. And those things bring in some instability into that old archaic grid. So we're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in 60 seconds and we'll talk about that grid and maybe what the future of a grid should look like that would also incorporate the solution to clean transportation. Aloha. My name is Wendy Lowe and I want you to join me as we take our health back. On my show, all we do is talk about things in everyday life, in Hawaii or abroad. I have guests on board that will just talk about different aspects of health in every way. Whether it's medical health, nutritional health, diabetic health, you name it, we'll talk about it. Even financial health will even have some of the Miss Hawaii's on board. And all the different topics that I feel will make your health and your lifestyle a lot better. So come join me. I welcome you to take your health back. Mahalo. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. My program airs every other Monday at one o'clock on Think Tech Hawaii. Most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience. Recently, I interviewed Alex Gempell, who I have known for over 30 years, about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii. Those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about. Human stories about law and life. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. We're talking about the grid and what it should really look like in the future. Now, the scary thing for me is that Hawaii already has a mandate to be completely carbon-free on our grid by 2045. Basically, no fossil fuel in our grid by 2045. And the electric company says they can make it. They might even make it early. But currently, the only thing I'm aware of, and that's looking at things they have running through the Public Utilities Commission and projects they have going on with the university and other areas, is battery. And I can tell you that, doing the math, batteries are not going to be the solution. They're part of the solution. They're definitely part of the solution. The batteries even in cars are important. They're the things that can give you a quick reaction, your quick boost, just like ultra-capacitors. They'll give you a quick boost in your power and get you going. But for long-term energy storage, for massive scale and massive power like we have in our grid, batteries by themselves just aren't going to hack it. They're way too expensive. They're way too big and heavy. They use way too much what we call rare earths, which are right now controlled by the Chinese for the most part. And also, hazmat. Lithium cobalt technology is very hazardous. It's flammable. It has thermal runaway issues. And if you haven't seen lately, Tesla's been sued for some of their wall units that they're putting. Walmart, in fact, decided to cancel a bunch of their solar panels that are backed up by Tesla batteries because they're having issues with fires with the solar and the Tesla batteries. You've got to kind of use the batteries wisely and use them properly and keep them in balance. Use the right technology. There's better technologies than just lithium cobalt. And cobalt itself is more rare than lithium on earth. And we'll probably run out of yet long before we run out of lithium. So we need to start looking at better battery technology. But for certain, there's no way that you can replace all of the huge amount of energy stored in oil and do it with just battery. Can't be done. So what's the magic on the grid? Why would we need to change the entire way the grid looks? And I'm not saying you have to pull up every wire and knock down every utility pole, but you need to reorganize the grid into smaller grids for a couple of reasons. Number one is survivability. When you have one big grid that's all totally interconnected and can't sever itself without falling down, you have a big problem. Because if you're attacked, the whole grid goes down. And if you've ever been through a large area-wide power outage like here on Oahu, the whole island or in the northeast when the northeast US goes down, the power doesn't come back in an hour or two. It comes back in two or three days. And that's assuming they just had an interruption in power, not a physical actual attack on their system where transformers and substations were knocked down. It may be from a storm where utility lines go down, they have to replace utility lines from an ice storm or a windstorm or a hurricane. But the reality is, if you can isolate those grids into smaller packages we call microgrids, the solution to balancing power and providing power is much simpler. The utility has several big problems, whether it's Hawaiian Electric or a big mainland grid. The first is that they owe the public clean, reliable power. You've got to have it. That's part of the contract. If you had brownouts all the time or if your power went out every day for an hour or two hours, you wouldn't even want to pay your electric bill. You'd probably go buy your own generator or Costco and say, screw you guys, I'm on my own. And you just can't run a company nowadays and have that kind of service. They do everything they can and spend as much money as they need to to give you reliable power. And that's really tough to do when you have industrial customers, you have high density customers like in downtown Honolulu, and then you have people way out in the country that are at the end of a power line that may be only shared with two or three other people for a couple miles. It's a tough grid to balance. What makes it tougher is when you start bringing in wind and solar. Everybody thinks wind and solar are going to be great. Why? Because you don't cost anything. The sun shines for free and the wind blows for free. We don't have to buy any oil. Great. And it is. It's a great way to go. The problem is equipment that turns it into power still costs you money. You have to invest in it. We have to do that investment to eventually get to the point where we have stable prices for our power and the power starts coming down. The normal return on investment here in Hawaii for like if you took your house and pulled it off the grid is between seven and 10 years. You could put solar on your house and in seven to 10 years you'd have all your equipment paid off and the solar should work for at least 20 years and hopefully your batteries as well if you have battery backup systems. That means the last 10 years you should be getting free electricity and that should be our goal. But we're always faced with that price up front and that's why power purchase agreements are so good. But on the grid all that solar and all that wind when you're having to push it into and mix it in with the rest of the grid, it stabilizes the grid. The electric company hates that. When you hit about 25 to 28 percent of solar and wind on your grid it's too destabilizing to manage for the electric company. That's why here in Honolulu we're pretty much maxed out. On the neighbor islands the neighbor islands can actually do a lot more in terms of solar and wind because their grids are simpler. They're smaller. They have less customers. They're actually easier to control and they can actually absorb and make modifications to their system to take the wind drying off or the clouds coming over and covering the solar. So microgrids are important for a couple reasons. To help you control all that solar and wind and make it a little bit more controllable if you use the solar and want to store energy you can make hydrogen with any excess power instead of shutting down your solar or curtailing the power as they say. You can start making hydrogen and store energy and hydrogen and do it right there right there in your community and then turn around and put it in a fuel cell and put the power back into your community right there in your community so that you could use the power at night. Why would you do hydrogen? Number one the technology for making power from hydrogen is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The technology for splitting water into hydrogen is getting cheaper and cheaper. It's clean. There's no carbon if you have solar and wind making the hydrogen. You have no carbon from beginning to end. Zero and that hydrogen can be used not just for putting power back on the grid in your microgrid at night. It can also be used for your car, drive your car. It can also be used to cook with. You can use it just like natural gas and cook with it. So if you look at taking the grid and sizing it right sizing it you have a lot of ways that you'll not only get cleaner but get more efficient and more economical. You don't have to have power lines stretching across the coals or long distances to push power from Kahi Power Plant and Waianae all the way to Waimanalo when you have microgrids that can make their own power, produce the power that produce enough for the community, store it and put it back in the community at night. Therefore no line loss because you lose power every mile that you run power through a power cable. You lose power. You don't have to have as big a spinning reserve because your smaller grid is more predictable just like on the neighbor islands. You know what your variations are going to be. You don't have to have a generator running inefficiently for no reason other than to cover a load. You can use other technology like flywheels and capacitors and batteries to take up those shock loads and you don't have to run a generator for what we call spinning reserve. There's huge technical reasons that a microgrid makes so much sense. The other reason is that when it comes to a hurricane or even a even a kinetic attack, an enemy attack on our country, we know it's almost impossible unless you're using nuclear weapons to wipe out an entire region of a country and if that happens, that's more of a problem than just your grid. But when you do have an attack on a grid, currently it can wipe out a whole sector. But microgrids, being that they're smaller and they're totally separated, they can be connected but they can also separate themselves, those grids can survive. They can survive a hurricane. Even the hurricanes we've had hit Hawaii, they don't take out the whole state. They take out one coastline or one half of an island because that's where the major winds hit. They'll take out a couple major transmission lines, bring trees down and things like that. But if you have microgrids all separated, we could have a major hurricane hit Honolulu and we could have virtually three-fourths of the states still have power, still making ice, still making, you know, power and providing energy back to the people that don't have power. That's what we should be looking at. It's a survivability piece. And of course, it all gets back to sustainability. Here in Hawaii, particularly, we don't have oil. We don't have natural gas other than the methane that we get off our landfill and off our wastewater treatment plants and Hawaii gas is already tapping into a lot of that and that's their plan for the future. They're already tapping into whatever methane we have here in Hawaii. But we have to buy the rest and we have to split up with a carbon pollution from a land incinerator that's burning our rubbish. For a coal plant that's burning coal and for oil turbines that are making electricity with oil. Huge, huge carbon issue and huge waste of money. Here in Hawaii, there's just absolutely no reason why we couldn't survive just on solar and wind. But we have more than solar and wind. We have geothermal, not just on the Big Island, on Maui, on Oahu. There's geothermal. And there's technology now where you don't have to use the deep drilling geothermal that we're used to. You can actually use a lower grade of heat and still generate a lot of electricity. There was a project, most people don't remember it, but on the Big Island there's a project called SOPAG and they had a engine that ran off differential heat. They had solar concentrators that were heating oil to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. That's huge. That's a quite spoiling point. You could run steam generators from that. We could even use solar thermal energy, not solar panels, but solar thermal energy to generate heat. So there's no reason why we can't all start moving towards a cleaner, more sustainable environment. And we need to understand that electricity is going to incorporate encompass not just our grid and what we use at home, but our vehicles as well. And we need to understand that our grid needs to change in dramatic ways, but not necessarily huge infrastructure changes, but structure changes and how we do it. And if we can get there and we can do that, we'll be way ahead in the state of Hawaii and we'll be way ahead in the USA. So that's going to wrap it up here for Stan the Energy Man. I appreciate your time today. I appreciate you listening to me kind of ramble on, but this is important stuff. You know, climate change isn't going to solve by itself and you're part of the solution. So make yourself part of the solution by becoming more energy aware, get rid of that energy blindness like Dr. Hogan says, and start making the change yourself. You be the change. Aloha, until next Friday.