 At the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute's GridStart laboratory in Honolulu, variable renewable energy resources, storage and smart grid applications that promise a viable clean energy future are developed and evaluated. Leon Roos, GridStart team leader, describes their work. GridStart is a practice group and our focus is on looking at and bringing into the power grid renewable energy technologies and integrating that into the system at very high levels and doing that effectively and efficiently. The world is changing rapidly and we need these solutions now and our team is focused on delivering that. What's exciting about what's happening here is the integration of a lot of these resources at the home. So we have batteries and the PVs and vehicle charging that are all controlled at a local level then integrated in with another control scheme that's aggregating all of these end uses to create a reliable as well as economical power system. The other part we're starting to look at is the consumer part where you have the conversions from AC to DC. Can we build systems that just use DC from the DC source like PV all the way down to serving the DC load? The other component is that transportation piece. We have a two-way charger outside where you can charge your electric vehicle but you can actually draw power out of that car battery and utilize it in your home and maybe even to the larger power grid. It's about a solution that fundamentally changes the way things happen in the world, right? I mean, it's just a regular part of everybody's life, right? I mean, thinking about it, it's like, you know, your radio or your refrigerator, it's there, it does its thing and it serves its purpose. Leon's team is taking a major step towards that goal by studying a pilot integrated energy system that they have implemented on the island of Maui. Here in a neighborhood of roughly 800 residents, more than a third of them draw power partially from the grid and partially from rooftop PV and the rest rely entirely on mainline electricity supply. This kind of situation is beginning to create some issues in managing and operating the power grid with so much renewables and so we deploy a lot of data monitoring devices and we deploy them strategically across the neighborhood to collect not only what the PV panels are doing but also how is the power grid reacting to that. And then we bring all of that data back in and then we analyze it using various computer models of this actual power system here for this neighborhood. That's a key part of the work we do. We iterate between this modeled environment and the real-world environment and our fundamental mission and vision is to expand that knowledge and know-how and bring it into the markets in the Asia-Pacific region. It's going to be built on a fundamentally different foundation of technology and capabilities that we've lived with for the last 100 years. Energy and these issues are a global issue. It's not a Hawaii-specific issue or a US-specific issue. It is a mankind issue.