 Welcome back to likable science here on think tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today in the think tech studios is Jason Ignacio from Hawaii energy connection. Welcome Jason. Thanks. He does great. Have you here? Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and dynamic part of everyone's life It's not something. It's just done in remote laboratories. It really impacts all of us we all contribute to it and Jason works with this group Hawaii energy connection that really I think exemplifies a whole lot of that So maybe give us a quick overview about Hawaii energy connection. Sure white energy connections Basically a photovoltaic energy installer, but that's not all we do We try to do more sustainable energy solutions as you know, the climate changes here in Hawaii with respect to policy and new technology We need to be sensitive to that. So we are a contractor that currently installs photovoltaic on rooftop and commercial and we also do energy storage and we just launched a new product with the photovoltaic for electric vehicle charging Very cool. Very cool. And you do a little piece with hot water stuff, too, right? As well as hot water Yeah, so new technology with a new twist on an old, you know, it's not your grandmother's water All right. Good. Good. Excellent. And what is it? Let me just start it by saying by asking What is it you really you really like about your work? What does it really drives you? It's always changing. It's never the same day today Be it policy be a technology Dealing with different clients I get to meet a lot of different people and explain how systems work how they can save money How it's a great investment. So there's you know financial Touches them on that there's a technological reasons and there's some sciencey reasons as well And then there's just practical and then you know statewide goals on being sustainable here in Hawaii So it touches on a lot of things that I think are are kind of need to be in touch with and it's an industry That's never never gonna go away. Right. We're always gonna need energy We're always gonna try to do things sustainably moving forward, right? We were both at the Blue Planet Palana yesterday, and they're great thing about pushing that Sustainable energy 100% sustainable energy by 2045. Yeah, what a goal what a goal and must be great to be part of that It is it's rewarding in fact that we're trying to help Yeah, right and and we're really getting in on the grassroots level where people can Kind of vote with their dollars with their own money and investing in a PV system that helps Hawaii reach that goal Right, and there's there's constant shifts in the tribe that there's been subsidies supporting it And these look like they're on their way out maybe and right and so the whole market has to readjust to that There's a lot of things that come into play financially with it At the end of the day, it's still a great investment There's different things that factor into that like what type of tariff Hawaiian Electric is gonna offer They've changed from a net metering energy metering tariff to a grid supply tariff And that will change to a customer self-supply and they all have different value implications for anyone who's investing in a PV system On the tax credit side State still gives 35% tax credit on systems and the federal government still kicks in 30% tax credits So you know about the 65% of your system paid for in a form of tax credits. Oh, that's great Incentive, yeah, I didn't realize it was still out that much. That's one. Yep. That's wonderful And it's it's really nice now that the the technology is evolving. So there's a lot of different options, right for people it can be More off the grid if they want but others can be very much integrated into the grid where they are both a user But also a supplier. Yes need be, you know, yeah energy storage is coming online very quickly Primarily because the customer self-supply Tariff that Hawaiian Electric is it's gonna be offering in the near future to offer it now But it's still grid supply is a good option because they still compensate you for some of that energy with 15 cents per kilowatt hour When energy storage becomes more of the norm We can see that price drop drastically Yeah, right now if you buy a PV system with storage It's it's as if you were buying a PV system when PV first started being offered Your paybacks in about the 10-year range, right as technology got better That price and that payback time the return on investment got to less than five. We're not far. Yeah, excellent So and there are these these different components of it. There is that the PV itself, right? But that's by no means now sort of the end of that that used to sort of be what people did, right? Which is sort of stick PV on it. We kind of call it dumb PV You put it out in the sun and it makes electricity It just blasts it when the sun is out and when the night nighttime comes it stops, right? You know and it's sort of an inverse correlation as to when we use the energy, right? So our big energy uses in the evening Evenings and there's no sun right running all their stuff. Yeah So managing that flow of energy either into a battery or onto the grid and diverting it to where it can be used at That point in time is a huge technological obstacle both for the utility and on a small scale We call edge of grid or where people are using the energy and generating it in these distributed energy resources They call DERs. Yeah, that's right I was just thinking that's got to be a very tricky Sort of algorithm because if you've got a lot of different points that are producing this energy Storing it up. Mm-hmm, but then also using it all at the same time How does the grid deal with those various inputs outputs? You know the engineering problem That's basically what happens. You need to manage it and it needs to happen at almost instantaneously it can't happen, you know over an hour's worth were calculated because Renewables are not constant. They're consistently changing. That's the only thing that's constant about them is wind always changes clouds go over PV systems a leaf can fall on it, you know Different things can factor into the production as well as the home's individual load You can have a refrigerator kick on kick off pumps lights whatever things vary during the day Measuring that and managing that so that we have a consistent profile to show to eco and the grid is super important for stability for safety and for For payback for storing that energy on a really well-managed basis, right indeed He who at various times put it more pre-case in the past than now has really had Almost objections to people feeding into it because it added elements of instability on into what instead if they've just got one Plant producing power. They know pretty much how much power is there at all times and you know they can measure it very easily but when they have inconsistent or called variable inputs on the distributed energy resource side it can cause a lot of problems on the grid but I mean it's just It's the it's the same kind of problem that's occurring everywhere though as we get new technologies, right? I mean the thing now one of the big things is self-driving cars, right? Everyone understands when we get on all the cars on road or self-driving We're gonna have a much better system right now much lower good luck. We have many fewer accidents It's all gonna be good better fuel efficiency right, but things that the transition is a little bumpy Well as they call it. It's disruptive technologies. They change the way that we do things. They're a good idea They work. It's how much can we get to that point of where we get critical mass adopting it to the point where it makes sense for Everyone there's just there's a equity equity type of question is to I'd love to have rooftop solar But I don't have a roof, right? I don't know my home Right, how do I get involved and I think one of the things we saw last night at the Blue Planet Foundation? What they're lobbying for is community solar right whereby folks can invest in a solar system Even though they don't have a roof right they can buy in and invest in one to help Offset the cost of installing those systems and help and still help move forward with renewable energy generation Yeah, I thought it was a beautiful example. It's very forward thinking absolutely technologies here. Yeah, and So it's it's it's intriguing that you've got a Some what do we want to say inertia from the system, right? We've always done it this way and you've got investments in infrastructure and equipment that was set up 10 years ago 20 years ago in some cases and yet you're now having to try to be very nimble and adjust very quickly to Changing demands changing technologies the uptake with solar and white happens so quickly. We just were in this great zone a lot of Sun good incentives and then The price of oil shot through the roof So everybody's electric bills got really high and that's when we saw the payback in the return on investment Really drop into the less than five-year time frame and you know over 12 times the expected amount of PV Suddenly appeared right. That's right. We had everybody here with 200 photovoltaic contractors here in Hawaii Over 200 contractors and they're going door-to-door knocking and hey you want PV it's gonna save you money Let's do it and before you knew it yet PV on your house So before you know he could realize that this is kind of a lot Right, so they've they tap the brakes a few times and now they come out with a with a plan with the PUC to Have a real structured environment where PV is being integrated onto the grid That's great because it's it really can't you can't operate too easily in a sort of wild west kind of environment Exactly, it's certain people drive investors away. They'll drive the public away It's not good for Hawaii when we have fly-by-night contractors come in here to capitalize on a boom, right? And then they leave right and you're stuck with a product. That's It's attached to your home, right? It's lifespan is 25 years plus or should be right in the best cases So having someone who's gonna be there and really controlling that that that uptake Kind of ran away from us. Yeah. Yeah I mean we've seen a bit of that out in Micronesia where I where I work with they'll put in they've been some some of these More remote islands they put in a big PV systems But then one component breaks and the whole system is just down and there's nobody literally nobody for a thousand miles You can fix it, you know and the equipment or a piece needed to fix it Maybe halfway around the world and nobody knows how to order it where order it from what to do and The system stays down for a six months or a year and Yeah, it's and I think that's gonna be more important as the technology evolves because like I said dump PV was pretty simple You put it on your roof you hook it up you connect it and you're done you make electricity now We have to manage it a lot smarter and with the different tariffs There's requirements now and and types of equipment that can and can't be installed and connected to the grid and You know, there's a lot of things that go into it on the customer side Sometimes they get a little baffled by it, but we as a as an integrator solar and renewable sustainable energy system Renewable integrator we have to be conscious of those things and and and flow with it or we fail, right? So a big part of this is your sort of these power blocks you call them, right? Which are really not just batteries although you sort of think of them in terms of batteries But they're they're really maybe smart batteries. Maybe is the word well Batteries are batteries are like a bucket for water, okay, right? Basically, you're just storing it how fancy the bucket is and how much it holds how you can that's great But how do you get water in and out? How do you get power in and out of a battery, right? That's the thing that really is the technical part. So Part of it they want to bring up that first image is is energy management control and that can be as Something it has to measure what's being produced by the PV system, right? And also what is being used by the home, right? So we're gonna see our image of our that first photo Hope And that's since it's technology, right? It's electronic It's something that one of our partners helped us develop because we said we need something that's gonna help us integrate And we can't just think about putting it in a battery We need to think about a larger scale like how do we how do we get reporting? How do we get a? Management dashboard and how do we get the data? It's part of the data, right? How do we integrate these things and then aggregate them, right? So we can see what all the PV systems are doing in an area and what all of our systems are doing to the grid and what? They're doing with the battery storage, right? I mean each one has its own individual history of how fast it's been accumulating Storing energy how fast it's been dumping out energy and being using energy It's patterned in terms of if it's three o'clock in the afternoon sort of what's likely to happen in the next hour Sure, both everyone's home is on a slightly different Plane from the Sun, but then yes your bigger thing is then linking all those together and being able to because that Information is very important to Hico and others to know what to expect. Yes We can forecast it we can manage it if we can measure it We can make changes that we need to if we're not measuring it that's dumb PV just pumping out electrons Excellent. We're gonna explore this in more depth when we come back right now. We're gonna take a brief break Jason Ignacio from Hawaii Energy Connection is with me here today on likable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen. We'll be right back Aloha, my name is Kirsten Baumgart Turner, and I'm the host of sustainable Hawaii at thinktech Hawaii comm We air live on the internet and also on Oceanic Channel 16 I'd invite you to come for a fresh new show Every Tuesday from 12 to 1 o'clock. I try to bring on guests that give us Different viewpoint on aspects of sustainability in Hawaii as well as trying to unpack some of the difficult concepts of Measuring and achieving sustainability particularly with regard to Sustainable economic growth and prosperity in Hawaii Please join us every Tuesday from 12 to 1 p.m. Mahalo Aloha And you're back here on likable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen with me today is Jason Ignacio from the Hawaii Energy Connection and we're talking about not just for photovoltaics, but sort of sustainable energy systems that are being sort of the new second generation or third generation maybe of Photovoltaics is it's photovoltaics, but storage smart computers basically integrating all this and It really happens on at least two levels one is for the individual home residential or Commercial center system right then to those systems all have to start talking to one another and talking to the central network Right and I think we have an image coming up here that that'll help maybe maybe allow us to talk about that a little more organized fashion Yes, yeah, so at the top of this this energy see the PV generation and that's kind of what we've had in the past In the center of this now is that computer board that I was showing it's the EMC or energy management controller That gives you visibility as to what the PV systems producing and what the home is consuming We can look at home load monitoring. We can also look at energy time of use now Those things are very important when we talk about what types of Tariffs are coming down from HECO when they start maybe doing a time of use billing. Oh, yes And also it integrates battery backup and scalable smart storage Which when you look at energy storage it helps to stabilize the grid profile meaning how much do we export and import from the grid? with a PV system integrated so let's say that We store a lot of energy in these batteries that are now attached to people's homes The grid goes down not only they have battery backup, but there could be a potential for the utility to Use the energy in your battery. You could sell it back right to the grid in those times of outages Or if there's a peak usage that not even an outage if they just need more, right? They don't have to turn on another Fossil fuel burning plant to make more energy They can have an agreement with you saying like only through these peak hours You mind if we take a little bit energy from your battery as long as they're paying you peak rates That's part of it. We have to figure out and that's something I think that that Policy-wise will come but overall we're looking at that will open up the grid Because when we're more stable on the grid when there's more ebb and flow on a local distributed level What they call edge of grid the plants don't have to work as hard, right? if indeed sort of looking at it in sort of the Ultimate case if every user basic also had a large storage capacity The whole thing is just buffered out very very evenly then To some extent almost doesn't matter what the central grid is producing, right? I've got a lot of storage capacity that can just feed in as needed or take out as needed Yeah, and that makes it Gets us to that goal a lot quicker because Running a large generating plant with peaks and valleys and peaks and lows It's it's like driving your car in traffic. You're not going to get the best mileage, right? And that's that's sort of what dumb PV was doing, right? It was oftentimes dumping extra and artificially Lowering the generating plant from HECO to a very low level and then all of a sudden when Sunlight goes down and everybody's use go up. They'd have to ramp up their generation very quickly That's a huge technical problem. It's very expensive to do, right? Yeah Interesting interesting so And then these these power blocks are sort of there's technologies in terms of I guess you talk about the control of Feeding in them feeding out in that it's constantly evolving even if the battery per se is maybe more or less can be Yesterday's technology if need be Yeah, and that's what we try to do is try to integrate stuff that's available now It'd be great if we could have you know those high-tech graphene batteries or charge very quickly can discharge quickly And they're very responsive, but the price of them is just not to where a homeowner would be able to purchase it Yeah, it's it's just not there yet. We hope that will be that's exciting stuff. Yeah, it's that's I mean Sort of cutting-edge. It's always the issue is melding these different kinds of technologies and sometimes fairly Seed-to-the-pants kind of ways And there's a lot of developing there's flow batteries that are coming online that are that are being developed I think Harvard's working on a flow battery where it's non-toxic. They're just using you know aqueous solutions to store Electricity so non flammable non-toxic very renewable long life We don't know what that's gonna look like in 10 to 15 years. So we'll see but the the management part and the Sustainability of making sure that the PV energy goes into a battery effectively is compliant with the rules and regulations set forth by the utility or You have folks that like to do an off-grid system, you know So as it's not quite feasible because you need so much battery capacity, right? It's just a lot if you're willing to invest in that and some folks have to because they're in areas that the To run a line to their house is more expensive than buying those extra right capacity batteries So we're looking at scalable solutions that help, you know, not only help to provide energy for Home use and emergency backup, but it's for grid integration. So there's algorithms that are programmed into those Circuits that measure all those uses and make split session split second decisions on whether it should curtail the PV You mean turn down the amount of generation on the PV put more into the battery We've also integrated some smart Things in there where you know future of smart home technology Maybe it'll turn on an appliance to use some of that load while the PV is still on and the batteries are full Right, you can envision in a smart home connect to a smart system It would decide you've loaded your dishwasher and it decides like when your dishwasher should best go on really to make Make the most efficient use of the power and maybe that's 2 a.m. Maybe it's 10 p.m. Maybe it's 6 a.m. Yeah, absolutely. So home management systems tied in with with your energy management system Yeah, it's really evolving to the point where you can really make a big difference in your energy use profile and maximize savings and Really help the grid So say a little bit if you would about about this hot water system This is not just a standard you're not just pumping water up through black PVC pipes on the roof so this is a system we brought in a few years ago and It's pretty ingenious so instead of using pumps like you said and pumping the water through big Thermal collectors where the water is heated within the panel It runs off of PV electricity So there's two heating elements that are actually powered by PV panels that are on your roof So instead of running plumbing up to the roof It's just conduit and wires. They're much smaller. There's less weight There's less load on the home and it integrates beautifully with PV because of the same size panels So the efficiency on them is it's you know, at least as good if not better than traditional hot water systems So these are essentially then hot water systems directly integrated and powered by Photovoltaic panels. Yes. Oh very very cute and they don't require Approval from Hawaiian Electric because they're not backfeeding electricity. They're in essence Water heater is a storage. It's storing the energy as heat in a container that's insulated, right? How we heat that water is through a renewable resource with the PV electricity So it's an electric heater, but it's powered by PV panels, right and water I hadn't realized that I was reading your yourself Heating hot water in a home is a huge 45% of those are stats from Hawaii energy and some national statistics that show that about 40% of the home energy Uses and heating water. Yeah, that's that's Amazing and so yeah, if you can just do that instead and I mean that's again It seems like sort of a no-brainer for a lot of people that yeah I think a lot of folks have made that first step and it doesn't matter what type of water heating you're doing If it's thermal or the new PV systems. It's um, that's Typically what we can see is for as savings and then you've just become that much more renewable, right? Yeah, same time you're Pulling out much less power off the grid and absolutely Your impact on the grid as you go up and down is that much lower. Yep. Yeah, so it's again It's a sort of win-win-win here. We're sure excellent. Yeah, that's super um I think we had another image issue sure if we can bring up like a simmich three This is sort of how the the electronic or electric vehicle PV charger works. So you have a what's called a PV micro grid It has a energy management controller which then can feed into The batteries and we have what's called an automatic transfer switch which If the batteries are not charged enough it can pull grid power if it needs to And in parallel it can pull PV energy from your existing PV system What it does is it charges the batteries in the daytime So you can plug your car in at night. We can go to the next image. It's just showing The basic connection. It's a regular car charger Plugging into the car and you you can't get PV at night. We haven't gotten that far technologically speaking But you can use the energy if you've stored it during the day, right? Okay So most people that that get electric vehicles, I think are Environmentally conscious they want to be responsible sure and they want to be green And and save money on gas and reduce our our our fossil fuel dependence on Driving a car that's run on gasoline right and that was one of the things jeff brought up last night That's the biggest next hurdle is transportation. Right. It's huge But when we charge our cars at night, you're burning fossil fuels, right unless you've stored that energy Right, but for the system. I see you're saying you do this at your own home And the solar energy you've stored during the day And sort of depletes your home batteries but charge your car's batteries It makes your EV even greener right now because you're using renewable energy Yeah, that's it together evens out that load Absolutely, and it provides a critical load backup outlet just in case These systems are designed To work even if the grid is down so those batteries will be charged, you know, maybe in an emergency You're not going to be driving anywhere, right because it's not safe to drive right, but the power goes out You still have some reserve power within those batteries To plug in a couple of things, you know, whether it's It's not huge loads that you could plug into it But maybe it's your your emergency, you know critical loads that you want to have plugged in Keep your freezer cold Keep the phone charge keep the radio going A few basic stuff, okay medical equipment, especially That's a huge one if you have medical equipment that needs to be on Of course, I have to have to have that kind of backup and some folks at home as well Nebulizers those things. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, this is this is great. This is it's very exciting to look at this and the scene of the as you say it sort of it's a Endless frontier is here. I mean, it's just new stuff coming all the time new technologies are kicking in new policies are enabling The better use and more effective use of things. So it's got to be very very exciting There's always a challenge with it and and folks of you know, there's there's been numerous hurdles where people say it's not worth doing anymore Well, every time that we come up against a hurdle, there seems to be an innovation that gets us over that hurdle Whether it's, you know, all the grid is saturated. We can't implement any more pv. Okay. Well, let's solve that and move forward So it's an exciting field and In it's helping Hawaii do a lot of Good things and moving towards our goals. Super. Well, it's been very exciting to learn about it. I thank you so much Jason for coming Appreciate it. And uh Jason the analysis from hawaii energy connection. You've been watching likable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen. I hope you'll join us next week Thanks very much. See you again