 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey Aloha and welcome to Stanley Energy Man today, wrapping up November already. Thanksgiving's next week. Where did this year go? I just don't know. Anyway, we've wrapped up some technical difficulties here so we're starting it over again and I think we've got that covered but apologies for last week not being able to connect in from California like we planned. We tried about six different ways and just couldn't pull it off. Next week I'll talk a little bit more about what we did in Long Beach. It was a great conference with a couple important segments to it but overall if I could say one thing it's just that hydrogen is starting to really take off in Europe on the mainland and particularly in Asia and you can see a lot more things starting to happen in Hawaii with hydrogen I can guarantee you. So we're going to pick up here on today's show with a guest that's on regularly. He's on actually the third Friday of every month with me here on Stanley Energy Man and last month he was talking to Rachel about electrification of the transportation sector which includes adding more electricity demand to the grid, dealing with as the grid tries to absorb more renewables, potentially putting some storage on the grid with cars that are plugged into the grid, things like that and they just got the discussion started. So Ryan Willbins is my favorite electrical engineer and I have to tell you that the title of today's show, You Can't Spell Geek Without a Double E, comes from my meeting in New York where I met with the Hydrogen Council and I told them the Governor E. Gay was an engineer. The engineers on the Hydrogen Council all stood up and started waving their hands and one of them said, yeah, you can't spell geek without a double E and they were all happy that we have a governor here in Hawaii that understands all this technology. So Ryan Willbins is my favorite local double E geek and he and I love to talk about everything electrical and hydrogen and the way we can solve all Hawaii's problems. So Ryan, thanks for joining me today even if it's over the phone and we've got our picture up on the screen now and it looks like we're twin brothers about 40 years apart with me being the older one obviously and the bearded one but thanks for being with us today. Thanks, thanks for having me. It's nice to know that I've got a lot to look forward to as I age. Yes, you know, how handsome you're going to be in 40 years? Oh, I can't wait. Okay, well let's get started with talking about where you and Rachel left off last month with electrification of the transportation sector and talk a little bit about some of the impacts you got. You envision as an electrical engineer looking at large projects and looking at how the grid overall is going to be reacting to all this new infrastructure that's going to have to be put in to take care of electric vehicles, plug-in electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles, the rail project we have coming up and all those things. Absolutely. So our last meet with Rachel was a great conversation and show if you haven't seen it I highly recommend you go back and check that out. We got into a conversation about the utilization of the current transportation industry and how that transitions into a renewable transportation, so sourced by mainly electric vehicles sourced by either batteries or hydrogen in that manner. So we were getting a conversation that you don't necessarily need to be when you make a road wire and allow a lot more traffic to flow, that just means more overall energy consumption even if it's gas or diesel that the equations the same you're allowing just a lot more to happen whereas I think the push would be more towards the smarter side if it's automated vehicles then we can be smarter with how we use our current infrastructure be a lot more efficient with the energy that we're consuming at that time. That was the last conversation I think it pairs well into today's conversation where we talk about what does that really look like as we start to electrify the transportation? What do we have to do to really allow that to happen from an infrastructure standpoint? It's not like the roads really have to change because the car is just a car as electric vehicles travel on our roads today but the grid is what's supporting the energy that's being consumed by these vehicles and the grid today is just not built to facilitate that today. So we would have to make an immediate change if we're going to support full-on 100% electrical vehicles. Okay, so like we've talked about this before one of the first things that you do is you go for efficiency so to your point that you know we don't want to make more roads and bigger roads to accommodate more traffic what we want to do is try for efficiencies first in the system and try and do things like maybe a mode shift, get people to use more bikes and public transportation maybe even the concept of live work play like they're doing in Kakako where you put high-rises in where people work near where they live and then play in the neighborhood with lots of shops and entertainment and things like that to help reduce the overall traffic load and reduce the overall energy consumption for transportation. But let's get into some of the infrastructure issues that we're going to have to deal with. Even if we do the mode shift and we do all those energy savings activities, we run into some challenges and one that comes to my mind right off the bat is you know you only have so many charging stations out there and so you definitely want to have more if you're going to have more vehicles because the folks that have electric vehicles now have a hard time finding a place to charge sometimes and then there's people illegally parked in those charging stations and you're going to need more of them. So one of the challenges that I've been made aware of pretty early on in my research into this was the fact that with the grid infrastructure as old as it is, a lot of the buildings around town just don't have the electrical service where they can absorb rapid chargers and chargers that actually require more power to be put into that building. So a new transformers on order and that's $50,000, $100,000, a half a million and some of them are really expensive. The electrical services have to be upgraded. Can you talk a little bit about that aspect of what we're facing in terms of challenges? Yeah, absolutely and to get this perspective we have to understand it's not necessarily a cost issue with the charger as the charger is usually even built into the car itself. You're really only talking a cable to get from let's say the power line from the grid down to the car and the cost comes into us being actually us being the grid actually been able to support that. So here's a couple of numbers from the Department of Energy 2016. The average household consumes about 10,700 kilowatt hours a year. Bring that down to a month. It's just under 900 kilowatt hours a month. Bring that down to the hour. Any house is using about one to two kilowatts at any given time. When you're using your stove, electric range or maybe you're using your dryer, air conditioner, it's going to come up a little bit more but not a whole lot and then to bring it back down to average, you're going to be using less than one kilowatt a lot of the time. So that's your average household. Your average transformer that feeds a house or two is only 15 to 30 kilowatts. We really measure that in KVA but for this conversation we can consider that being equal. Your average house, one to two kilowatts at any given time. The supercharger you talk about, I took a peek at, there is a few different models but of one certain manufacturer that size charger was 145 kilowatts. That is a lot bigger than just what your average house is consuming. Now we don't all need a supercharger but that puts in a little bit of perspective that to move electrical energy quickly, the scale and the amount of copper it takes, at this point we need amps or we need a much higher voltage, is very difficult and we're not built out for that. When we built the grid, we're sinking the houses are a couple KW a piece at any given time and you go out to a neighborhood, that's fine with the amount of diversity some people are using, some appliances, some aren't, it starts to level itself out. When we all go home with an electric car and want to charge it at night because that's when we aren't using our car, the neighborhoods would all really rise the amount of energy consumption at night when our primary renewable resource here is not even being produced. So now we have to shift that energy to capture that renewable that we produced during the day. That's when the storage starts to come into play. So that actually makes that what we call the duck curve problem for HECO worse because right now their biggest demand is when all the renewable energy is tapering off when the sun goes down and they're already faced with a high demand at dinner time when people are cooking dinner and watching TV and now you're saying that's probably when you start charging your cars too and that even adds more to the problem that HECO has already and you were talking about a single family home but what about condos where now you've got a building which is like a compressed community that had a transformer put in 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 30 years ago and I think of the impact of that transformer that has a hundred units attached to it. Yeah absolutely. To build out a parking lot for a condo or a hotel apartment complex, anything that's high rise where you start stacking the amount of people per square foot is going to have this problem magnified. Your parking lot that supports all these vehicles in this case would end up having a small substation just to support the amount of power flow that needs to go to these vehicles at night. Your what you would want to do is to have the ability for them to charge it those vehicles during the day if they're not being used which is a little tough because that's typically when we're driving and now we're at the workplace. Well now that I have to plug in at my workplace, is my workplace expected to buy this infrastructure and then their transformers have to be upgraded and then that utility grid has to be upgraded. You start to talk if that's how you want to charge your vehicles, the grid as it is right now you could almost gut it and replace it because you start talking the ability, the load possibly going up everywhere but you don't know it's going to be at work, it's going to be at home, there's no question it's going to be everywhere. The cost starts to add up and it's well beyond that one charger that you might look at when you buy the car. Okay, well I tell you let's take a quick break here and when we come back let's try and bring up some solutions that might work to help solve this problem, is that okay? Yup. Great, we'll be back in 60 seconds after we look at some other ThinkTech shows. This is ThinkTech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Aloha and my name is Matt Johnson, I'm the co-host of Hawaii Food and Farmers Series. ThinkTech is important to our community because it gives us an opportunity to tell Hawaii's untold stories. For the first time, ThinkTech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000. Give thanks to ThinkTech. We'll run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can so that ThinkTech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. I've already made my donation and look forward to yours. Please send in your tax deductible contribution by going to this website. Thanks for ThinkTech.CauseVox.com. On behalf of the community enriched by ThinkTech Hawaii's 30 plus weekly shows, mahalo for your generosity. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour with Ryan Wolbins from Burns & McDonald. Before we get into our discussion, I want to just put in a plug for ThinkTech. You know, they do a lot for our community and they do a lot to influence legislators and leaders in our community and they're doing a fundraising campaign right now. So if you're watching Stand the Energy Man and you want to help keep us doing our programming, look up ThinkTech on the website there and see if you can drop a couple coins in the pot. That would really help a lot. So Ryan and I were talking about the serious problem that electric chargers are having, you know, with infrastructure and there's good reason for it. It's not that people are being unreasonable or just not wanting to do stuff, but there's a serious bill to trying to put in the chargers that we need. So there's some companies out there that are being creative and they're like putting advertising out to pay for the charging systems and putting things online. There's already legislation that requires commercial parking lots with more than 100 stalls to install electric chargers. We could certainly enforce those laws a little bit better, but there definitely is a cost to all of this and you know, so Ryan what are some of the suggestions that you've thought of that we can help maybe spread the cost out or help spread the pain on this and get things going because we all know that planning is great and planning to have all these vehicles out there is great, but it takes action to make it happen and to get people moving to action, you've got to have something that they want to do. So what are some of the things you've thought of? Absolutely. There's two parts that I want to bring into the solution and one starts to kind of become a little bit of a mantra of what I keep talking about is being efficient and reducing your overall energy usage or at least being smarter with it. So the first thing you can do instead of just upgrading everything all at once because you think that's what you need, that's a little bit of a bandaid. Be smarter with your energy usage. A little bit of a fan, but when we talk about that, it's moving where you were closer to where you live or it's the automation of cars or the protection of the vehicle that allows more traffic to flow on the existing roads or a higher utilization of the infrastructure we have. That's kind of step one or two. It doesn't have to happen first, it could happen second, but the technology we have and where we're going will allow us to do that. In addition to that, don't go all on the electric vehicle stance today. Maybe you think the cars that you could get are really neat in that sense, but start to think about the hydrogen at the same time because hydrogen now allows us, you could almost think of hydrogen as replacing gasoline today. Gas stations could be hydrogen stations and to you as a consumer, it's not going to feel any different. In fact, it'll feel faster because you can fill up a hydrogen car faster than you can fill up at the pump as opposed to a charging station where you might be sitting there for an hour because you had to go sit at a supercharger. That is not the same to you today as your gas station where you're in and out in a short amount of time and you're refueling a high amount of let's say miles into your car in a very short amount of time. Hydrogen starts to bring in a lot of opportunities in replacing gasoline while being renewable at the same time. That's a bigger solution that might have a less of an impact on our overall cost and how we move to renewable transportation. You bring up an important point that I always try and make and that is right after you go with efficiency, our transportation challenge requires an all-of-the-above solution. Hydrogen vehicles are electric vehicles. Plug-in electric is one kind of electric vehicle. Hydrogen vehicles are a self-charging battery basically and that's the other kind of electric vehicle and there's vehicles that run uncompressed air. There's all kinds of things you can do. On the building side, one thing I noticed at a conference this week or a forum this week and they talked about changing all the lighting. If you had a big condominium and you took out all the fluorescent lighting and incandescent lighting and you put in LEDs, that would be an expensive investment in that building but it would also drop your overall energy use in that building and maybe allow you to put in a charger or two downstairs without having to put in a new transformer because you made that efficiency move in the building. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. That is definitely an option to us. Our current transformers and buildings were built with less efficient products. By getting more efficient on our current consumption, we do open the door up to electric plug-in vehicles a lot easier. Okay, you mentioned when you start talking about hydrogen, you really kind of open up a, yeah that's a great idea, Ryan, that you have all those convenience of quick filling and things like that but you still have to make the hydrogen and you still have an electric component there especially if you're going to use electrolysis. How could HECO combine hydrogen for energy storage to help them absorb more of that intermittent renewable? How could that be coupled up with hydrogen production to solve some of their grid stabilization issues? How would that work? So the neat thing about hydrogen and electrolysis being the method of where you convert, use electrical power to convert water into hydrogen and oxygen, you kind of split it. The neat thing about that is when you start to receive a high generation, we can start to create hydrogen as a load and bring it, use that excess energy to start creating our renewable storage of that of hydrogen. That doesn't mean we have to just start using that for cars and transportation and the semis and who knows, your weed eaters and your lawnmowers, it could go all the way down but it also can, that process can be reversed and now we push that, instead of pushing that hydrogen to fuel cell in your car, we can push that through a larger grid scale fuel cell and start to produce power back onto the grid. So it's an energy storage medium that is renewable but can be scaled really, really big. So we can start storing a lot of hydrogen for long-term outages or in times of in crisis. So HECO or utility could use hydrogen as a renewable energy storage medium that can get really deep in the number of hours stored. Can you talk a little bit to the fact that if HECO adopted something like this and they decided to, say for example, put an electrolyzer in Mililani town and use that excess solar from that area off the roofs of people's houses to make the hydrogen, what would the energy savings be like if that fuel cell could turn around and put the power right back into Mililani at night versus having to push it through wires, transformers and substations all the way from Kahi Power Plant to Mililani. I mean is there a line loss savings that's significant enough and maybe even a spinning reserve component to this that you have a known community that only has so much variance in it so you don't have to have as big a spinning reserve? Are there those kind of things that the utility can look at to make sure that it makes sense and help encourage them to use hydrogen? Sure, absolutely. So in theory, yes, there is a line loss that will happen when you have excess production and you try and move it to the other side of the island. The way our grid operates today though is actually very efficient on how it transfers power even across the island. It's not going to incur a very large loss. I would say that that loss would be less than storing it with hydrogen or storing it even with the battery as both of those storage techniques take an efficiency hit right when you decide to start storing. So your best option even going all the way across the island is to use renewable energy immediately as it's produced. Storage and even if you have to go to the other side of the island with that usage, the part that gets tricky is are my cables big enough to push it from A to B? And making sure that that renewable is produced, let's say close enough or not through a bottleneck of where it's going to be consumed. Efficiency though, it's actually relatively high. Where the advantage comes into play, this is the benefit to a utility such as Heco is you have a utility islands where groups of houses are all considered an island because when you lose power it's all your neighbors too. You guys are all kind of on the same island from the utility standpoint. That renewable hydrogen station that was storing energy can then bring power back up to that island. And now all of our individual communities are a lot more reliable and they're a lot more resilient where they can survive power outages to some of the major generators on the island and support themselves with their renewable storage. Well and that's important too because it makes a survivable after natural disasters and it also helps Heco bring their grid up quicker if they can bring it up in little batches, those little islands and do them one at a time. But you know aside from the line loss efficiency which you seem to have addressed really well, but keeping those lines up, I mean part of the issue with the grid is somebody's got to pay for the grid which is all the power poles, all the power lines, all the maintenance that it takes to keep those things going whereas if you can produce hydrogen stored on site and turn it right back into the community you don't have all the lines, you don't have all the issues with the lines. So I think it's something worth the looking at if you're a public utility definitely looking at energy storage with batteries and hydrogen and flywheels and other options as well. That's very true. Distributed generation is the first step that a little bit of a buzz word that I think the industry is using that says people are installing their own solar, their own little generators, commercial entities are doing what they can to produce their energy on site. Distributed generation also needs to consider distributed storage and that's enabling individual communities and commercial entities to be a lot more energy independent. That doesn't mean they're necessarily getting off of the utility but they need to start to share some resources. Okay so just in the short time that we've been talking about this we've talked about trying to be more efficient with the systems that we have. So going to other modes of transportation, moving your work and your residence closer together, using more efficient lighting and buildings to maybe free up some of the electric power and make it available for charging stations for electric vehicles, be more efficient with the way we manage our grid, maybe even eco-developing different models of what their service should be. Maybe they should be building and running these electrolysis systems and energy storage systems and dispatchable islanded fuel cell systems and they should be servicing them and that should be part of their model. The linemen that may be displaced by string and wires could be going into maintaining fuel cells and maintaining electrolyzers and helping customers build their houses so they're more resilient and able to fit into this new network. Would that be something that's pretty reasonable to do from your your opinion as an electrical engineer? Yeah there will definitely be a labor shift or a labor addition when we start to make our grid smarter and more renewable. When we add storage, storage isn't something that the grid want. I'm not a big person that's pushing storage as an electrical engineer. The grid operates very well with the amount of storage that we have but there will be a labor addition when we start to add the renewable resources and the renewable storage. Okay so we've looked at efficiency, we looked at trying to find some ways that we can get plug-in chargers going and maybe add some hydrogen for the transportation sector and and those are actually encouraging. What's it going to take do you think to really increase the number of electric vehicles on the road? Have people got to take that infrastructure cost on themselves or do we need to work with the PUC and the electric company to come up with innovative ways to help them lobby for things that will support building out the infrastructure? Should we look to the private sector to help us build out infrastructure? Or should car companies kind of build that into the price of the vehicle and help the utilities build out the infrastructure? What do you think might work? It's going to be all the above. The best place where it's going to start is for the want and the desire to be within the community. The people need to start to want this and make that thought and that idea contagious. Now we all can start putting pressure on all of the items that that you had discussed, the manufacturers, the government, the private side, the public side. All of those have to happen at once to really make this push. You want to make it happen really, really fast? Tax gasoline and diesel to the point where it's not even feasible to drive or turn your car on for two minutes. That'll push it really fast. I don't think we're going to be that happy about it, but you'd start to see some stuff move under that pressure financially. You need to start where the people want this to happen and start pushing all sides because this is a, as you mentioned before, this is a energy and transportation solution that needs to be holistic. I agree, Ryan. Like you, I know that there's economic ways you can leverage and in fact, in some government scenarios, that's what they do. They tax it. I mean, cigarettes are one. They're tired of people smoking cigarettes and going to the hospital and driving up medical costs. So they start taxing cigarettes to the point where it costs a small fortune to just smoke nowadays. You could do the same thing to get people incentivized, but what kind of strikes me as ironic is everybody seems to be very focused on climate change right now. But when you look at the aggregate of activity that's actually solving the problem versus just talking about it, there's not a whole lot of activity. So you're right. Everybody's got to take a stake in this. Everybody's got to do their part. The consumers have to put out the signal that they want these electric vehicles. They want to convert. They want to do their part. They're willing to pay a little bit more in some cases. They're willing to shift the way they get to work and go with more public transportation. We've got to start doing our part on the individual level to make all this stuff happen. And for the record, this is our plea to the legislature and to the companies out there, the big companies, electric companies, Hawaii Gas, all those folks, to really start making a concerted effort with the community. If you're really concerned about greenhouse gas, if you're really concerned about climate change, if you're like me, if you're just concerned that we should be polluting a beautiful state like Hawaii, just because the trade winds blow that stuff off shore doesn't mean it's good. You know, we ought to be fixing this problem and we all ought to pay a little bit more of attention to it and actually put our money where our mouth is and start doing this stuff. So I tell you what, Ryan, we've blown through 30 minutes already and I'd like to thank you for being on again this month and I really value your opinion, especially as a professional engineer. You make a lot of sense and I hope the folks out there appreciate your ability to to basically talk about, you know, complex situations and what we need to do. So thanks a lot and until next week, stand the energy man signing off.