 Think takeaway code. We have a solar battery program today with Paul Maday, regional operations manager for a national solar integrator and Larry Lee, energy consultant for the same company. Before we get on with our guests, let me ask, when is a duck, not a duck? Hmm. When it becomes a race car, do you have batteries in your Belfry, Howard? Let me explain. Something called demand profile for electric utilities. At six in the morning, the demand for electricity is really, really low. It begins to climb, climb, climb, climb, pretty dramatically, reaches a daytime peak around 9.30, 10 in the morning, and is pretty smooth all day long until in Hawaii, Hawaii's uniqueness, the curve goes up, up, up, up, up as everybody comes home and turns everything on and all the tourists come back from their tours and their beaches and so forth, turn all the hotel rooms on, all the restaurants on. So we have this evening peak goes up to about 7.30 and gradually starts coming down again. And that is the traditional utility demand curve, but Hawaii, as you well know, leaves the nation in photovoltaic or PV installations and what's happened to that curve is it's going up, up, up, up, up till around 10, 10.30 in the morning and then it starts going down, goes down, down, down, down, down, down and reaches its nadir low point around 1.30 in the afternoon and then starts gradually going back up and by now the low is so low and that old evening peak is so high that the profile looks in the morning like a duck's tail then it goes down to that swooping duck's back and it goes up to the head of the duck and then goes down so you get the peak of the duck. That's what we in the utility business call the duck curve, but Larry and Paul are going to explain to us a technology that is going to raise that midday depression and level things up just like all of us need to do which will be the essence of their explanations. Oh, so race car. So the new demand profile will ideally look more like a race car kind of sleek in the middle of the day and then go up just a little bit at night and we will, I've gone on long enough, we'll explain all the virtues and everything like that. So Paul, would you begin by giving us a little background about NEM and the demise of NEM and the demise of solar permits and these new emerging storage technology that's coming on? Absolutely, thank you hard. NEM, Net Energy Metering, which is what we had in Hawaii for many years here. Like you explained, doesn't jive so well with the demand curve here because solar and renewables in general are very intermittent in their delivery, their generation. They peak when the sun comes out midday or when clouds pass or when the wind blows for that matter. And it doesn't really align very well with the utility demand curve. So when we hit a point, a saturation level such that Hawaii has at 17 and 19% of all residential households or something there about with PV, that's a lot of sort of uncontrolled indiscriminate generation out there with not a lot of demand to soak it all up. So Net Metering has expired and has been eliminated. It's no longer an option for PV here in Hawaii like it is many other places in the country. We're several years ahead of the rest of the country in regards to how much PV we have. But there are pockets in California, New Jersey, places like this where they've had good incentives and the industry's been booming that aren't too far behind. So while we may be the Canary in the coal mine here, there are other places, other markets that will follow suit. So what we're left with right now is the customer self-supply program. You might explain what that is. So what that is is basically a tariff that has mandated now that we have to produce, store and consume all of our solar generation on site. We are not allowed to put any electricity back onto the Hawaiian electric grid. Whereas Net Metering counted on a buyback credit essentially of one kilowatt hour in exchange for one kilowatt hour return for one kilowatt hour production put onto the grid. We're no longer allowed to put anything on the grid. So what that means to offset a substantial amount of customer residential homes usage is we need to generate a lot more electricity during the day when we have available sunlight, store it on site and then use it at night by in most cases, discharging a battery, charging and discharging a battery. So what we're seeing here in Hawaii now is the onset of solar 2.0, solar plus solar photovoltaic plus battery storage on most if not all of the new installations. Yeah, and this looks like it's going to be, I was gonna say the wave of the future. Actually it's more like the wave of the present. Again, Larry, we lead the nation in this field. So how quickly are we going towards the battery? And you don't have to go self supply. You can do battery and still interconnect with the utility, isn't that correct? Well, at this point, Howard, the only option it is only self supply today. Oh really, you can't have a battery and say I want a little bit here and a little bit there from the utility or? The self supply program still is a grid connected system. So we retain or a customer would retain their meter on the property. Just the solar is set up via the programming, the firmware on the inverter. So as to monitor how much the house is using and delegate where it sends electricity to either the home, the battery or in fact, if all of those loads are addressed, it's able to curtail production. So it's never overproducing and pushing anything back. This is more complex than I understood it then. Yeah, so they are grid tied. We're not off grid. These still are tied to the grid. Yeah, yeah. So is it the future? Is it the present? I'd say it is the present and it is the future at the same time. We're moving towards that mark. And just given people that empowerment power, allowing them to create their own power on their own routes, generate power and store their own power. I mean, technology has moved and this is the future here today. In virtually all my programs, I like to cite Moore's law. It was invented by a professor, Moore, who was one of the founders of Intel. And way back when he noticed how quickly computer technology was evolving, not evolving, revolutionizing. And he said the storage capacity of a computer is gonna double every 18 months while the size is gonna go in half. And he was pretty well right on the money. He did this 40 years ago, such that if a Volkswagen Beetle, which prevailed back then, had followed Moore's law, it would get 200,000 miles to the gallon, go, no, go 200,000 miles an hour, get 2 million miles to the gallon and cost six cents. That's how Moore's law revolutionized. And the point being that the rest of other technologies, they're not going that fast, but we live in revolutionary times and storage batteries are a prime example of this. Indeed, yeah. Capacity is increasing, size decreasing and cost coming down, cost per kilowatt hour. Manufacturer and in turn retail costs to the consumer are dropping substantially, such that 10 years ago, if you'd have told somebody what technology is available right now and what they would have laughed at you. So I don't see that stopping, especially with economies of scale, as we start to deploy more and more of these, the more you build of anything the cheaper it's gonna get. And there was a heck of a lot of research going on which is making, and there's competition like men, making the technology better and better and better and better. This is a virtue of competition. If 10 years ago, you would have said every teenager in the nation is gonna be glued in his or her hand, this rectangular shape, and you're gonna have to pry it loose from the hand with a crowbar, people would have laughed at you. Exactly. Exactly. So one of our goals is to make PV plus battery as ubiquitous as a water heater, a hot water heater in a house. It should be just an appliance that essentially everybody has. And from my standpoint, I've worked for the State Energy Office. We're shooting for 100% clean energy by the year 2045. You get a technology like this into what I think there's over 200,000 single-family residences in this state. You get them into the majority of them. And that big curve that I described is just gonna be a small little minimal curve which will enable the utility to use only its most efficient power plants. Right now it has to fire up any efficient power plants to meet that evening. Yeah, and that's, so when you talk about solar plus storage, you can look at it on the residential homeowner level, a distributed resource. And then of course you will see these utility scale, solar plus PV, large scale installations. Both have their merits, pluses and minuses to both, but they can be used in that demand response capacity to eliminate those inefficient peaker plants. They can store that intermittent generation that we talked about earlier, when the clouds pass or when the wind blows and bank that generation, when it's available into the battery, discharge and smooth out that curve very quickly. It's very responsive. How about microseconds? Yeah, yeah. Because in utility you need those microseconds. You just can't have a blink of one second off. Your computers are not going to be very happy with that. Correct. Extremely responsive, always there, very reliable. And you don't run the risk of major environmental catastrophes with them as well, like we've seen in California with the Eliso Canyon leak. Yeah, which we will, let's do that in the second half of the program. Believe it or not, we've already reached the halfway point. Howard Wigg, Think Tech, Hawaii with Larry Lee and Paul Monday of a national solar integrator back in a moment. Look and energize your Friday afternoon. Tune in to stand the energy man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Lakeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world. Scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. They'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii for a Lakeable Science with me, your host Ethan Allen. Aloha and happy new year. It's 2017. Please keep up with me on Power Up Hawaii where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. Please join me on Tuesdays at one o'clock. Mahalo. Good afternoon again, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Think Tech Hawaii, Paul Meckie and Larry Lee of a national solar integrator. We covered the Hawaii scene and we are the leaders in many ways, national leaders. But of course, California has about 40 times our population. No, not 40 times, about 33 times our population and they are doing big things when it comes to batteries. Can you describe that? Yeah, so we hit on a little bit earlier. The natural gas leak that by all accounts was the largest man-made greenhouse gas release in history, absolutely catastrophic for the environment as well as many people sick and displaced because of it. And this was a methane leak and methane is a very, very potent greenhouse gas. Correct, and even locally we've had with our distributed energy resources the Cahuca Wind Farm fire with some of this old technology and that was a battery but it was the old style lead acid batteries The batteries that you and I used to grow up with that were in our cars. So in response to that, both of which were eye-opening, we have seen the advent of large-scale utility storage in California, again that methane leak was fuel for a peaker plant to combat the rolling brownouts and blackouts that they have in California. Now there's actually three major installations totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 megawatt hours maybe a tick less of battery storage that was deployed in record time. Some of those projects went in in just a matter of months from essentially the signing of contract to flipping the switch. Yeah, because this was an emergency. Absolutely, absolutely. And the Cahuca Wind Farm while it was blemish on renewable plus storage has done nothing but further the safety aspect of this new round of battery technology made for a much safer product. Yeah, disasters have a way of waking people up. Unfortunately. Yeah, so we're talking hundreds and hundreds of megawatts and just to put that in perspective the peak demand for O'ahu is about 1200 megawatts or maybe it's down to 1,100 now. So 300 megawatts, that's a huge chunk of all of O'ahu. It is. Just to put that, and I believe there's more and more and more batteries coming up in Southern California. In Southern California as well as Hawaii here. Kauai in particular is a leader in utility scale PV plus battery storage. There was just a large installation completed and another one or two, I know one absolutely in the works that'll be the state's largest. Yeah, and Kauai only has 65 million people on post-tourist and already there was a one point, I had the president Dave Bissell of Kauai Electric on a few months ago. There was a point once when 100% of Kauai's energy fed off of solar in the middle of one day and with more coming on, that's gonna be common for them. I believe they may be the world's leaders in this. Per capita, very possible, yeah. And they have been able to integrate the battery technology into the grid technology in a wonderful way. They have, yeah. And KAUC, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative has been driving that, if not for their ambition to beat the state's mandates, that wouldn't be happening. And so the lead acid batteries caught on fire and I think that was fire number three. I think there were two minor fires. I was talking to the deputy fire chief and they put those out, okay, and then came the major one. Yeah. So, but how about new battery technologies? Do they have any such dangers? Well, I mean, anything's possible in the world but there's the new technology, be it a lithium ion or a flow battery or any of the several viable technologies out there have a number of fail-saves built in to prevent what's known as thermal runaway in the industry where one battery cell heats up and triggers the next and the next and the next and it's a domino effect. So, the major manufacturers now are building these batteries in such a way to isolate the individual cells and prevent them from triggering their neighbor cell from heating up and running away. In fact, the National Fire Protection Association has a test where they actually insert a heating element into the middle of one of these batteries and intentionally trigger a thermal runaway in a cell and try to get that to propagate and in several of the, now not all the manufacturers have gone through this but the ones that have, they've proven very, very reliable. I've heard that from other battery representatives to the point where some batteries are actually indoors now. Yes. Yeah. Correct. Larry, we hit a permitting, I won't say disaster, serious downfall when the NEMs went out. What about permitting for batteries? I think I've been hearing some good stories. At first it was the permitting guys didn't know quite what to do but what's going on with the industry now? Yeah, I mean, we all heard the horror stories of the net energy metering and how long it took and all the reviews that was going on. But I believe that today around the nation all the AHJs is trying to keep up with the industry's growth. ASJ? AHJs, yes. What is an AHJ date? That's the authority having jurisdiction. So, the city and county of Honolulu in our case. Especially working to the constraints of what they have is a little hard. They are working collectively to make things more efficient and the timeline has gone a lot shorter. So that's great news for consumers, of course. Yeah, I heard that it used to be months and now it's down to weeks or maybe just a couple of weeks or? We'll be looking at anywhere from two to three months. Oh, still? Oh, okay. Total timeline, I would say the city and county permitting process on average takes three to six weeks depending on zoning and a few other qualifications. Yeah, I always want to know about flood zones. I know about that. Correct. Yeah, yeah. You'll put the timeline between the permitting and installation that wraps about two to three months. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you're kind of behind in installations. You have the work you can handle or you have to schedule people. We certainly have more capacity. We'd like to be running both the utility approval and the county permitting process. They certainly are working with the industry but it's a more in-depth review than we were used to seeing in the past. I think there's a bit of education that still could be done to make everybody feel warm and fuzzy about it. But overall, it's been going surprisingly well compared to what it would have taken to permit a job with a battery a year ago. It's 90 day difference. Yeah, because the permit checkers, last thing they wanna do is permit a technology, battery or whatever, that is gonna burst into flames or somehow harm people. Their first line of defense is health and safety. And if they don't understand a new technology and there's always varieties of batteries, yeah. So while that one might be safe but is that one safe? Is that one safe? Yeah, yeah. And understanding that perspective and being able to work collaboratively with them and still be looking out for the customer's sake in the way of timelines and everything as a delicate dance. Yeah, you wanna please the customer and you wanna do a good installation. Correct. Yeah, yeah. So Larry, what about financing? You guys do in-house financing or are you just explain financing very carefully to a would-be client? Because of course he wants a good return on his investment. Sure, we have quite a few financial institutions, Howard, that have stepped in and created these PV loan programs for consumers. These programs allow homeowners to afford solar in a way that it makes economical sense to them. And of course, getting their return investment in a certain amount of timeline is most important. And the way that I track electricity prices is I read all this literature and the utilities say this, that and the other price but I look at my own utility bill and I'm on the low side because I don't consume that many KWH but I divide X by Y and I got my bill recently and even though prices have dropped quote unquote my last bill reflected 27.6 cents, a KWH hour that's still almost three times the mainland average. So you of course build that sort of factor into your financing estimates. Definitely and without bringing out our financial calculators, Howard, for consumers, I mean, a high retail cost of electricity is the obvious driver here. Yeah. In regions where grid is relatively unreliable, you have backup power is another selling point as well, right? People are starting to realize that when the grid goes out, Howard, a standalone system will also go down as well with it. And you see the commercials all the time where you have a neighborhood and everybody has rooftop solar but once the power shuts off there's only one house that's remaining that's watching the UH team right now. So it tells in itself there. Well, you know, that is very, very timely because at 4.30 yesterday afternoon what was going on in virtually every household in Hawaii, we were watching the Super Bowl and as I understand it all the way from Kaneohe way up the windward coast, there was stormy conditions over there and they went down, it went down for just a brief while for I think over 10,000 customers just when that fourth quarter was really warming up. I bet the phones were blowing up downtown at Hawaiian Electric. Or even worse, you look at what just happened recently with the windstorms over on Lanai where they were out of power for days on end or Hurricane Zell over on the Big Island where we had some of our customers down for over a week and a battery now can offer something that your net metering system could not in the way of backup power. Let's keep that Super Bowl rolling by George. Well, we just got a one minute wrap up do either of you have a supreme word of wisdom? Yeah, definitely Howard. I mean, to see where the industry has come from in the last few years, the tax credits have decreased. With tax credits anything could happen. Tax credits are put in place to award the early adopters, right? And I truly believe that the tax credits will either decrease or they might even do away with it. So now is the time to go solar and allow people to, we like to give people the ownership and the authority to make the only decisions. And we believe that consumers have the best deal today. And I, as a state employee and member of the energy office, I hardly embrace all technologies that get us closer and closer and closer to 100% clean energy by the year 2045, which is what, just 28 years away, something like that. But we are making, thanks to people like you, we're making very, very rapid progress. We're ahead of schedule already, yeah. Wonderful thing. Yeah, yeah, and if we just emulate Kauai by George, yeah. So that does it for another day, Think Tech Kauai, thank you. Paul, Mehie, and Larry Liu of a National Solar Integrator. See you next cold spring, thank you.