 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Stan Osserman, energy evangelist, hydrogen hero, green guru and professor of power. You know, in my long list of careers there never seems to be a shortage of problems. No matter what kind of work I was doing, problems were always there. And they used to bother me a lot until I finally figured out that problems were opportunities. And that problem solving was job security. So a long ago I decided that what it would be is solution oriented and be a solution oriented person. After all, it's easy to gripe and complain about everything wrong in the world, but it's the people who solve problems that make a difference. And it's the people that take chances and stretch themselves. And their abilities that get the most out of life and get rewarded greater than the paycheck. So on Stand Energy Man, we're focused on solutions. And today's guest knows exactly what I'm talking about because he actually found a job where his job title says it all. I'm happy to have as my guest today, Mr. James McKay, Energy Solutions Partner for Ambrusco. So James, good to have you here. Hi, Stan. How are you? Good to see you. Good to see you again. It's been fun working with you over the past couple of years, but I know you had some changes along the way, but you're an energy guy, so I wanted to have you on and talk to you about what you've been doing lately. But why don't you tell everybody a little bit about your past, kind of get your credentials set so they'll trust you and believe you when you come up with these solutions. Yeah, always a hot thing to get some trust established. And that's actually a key part of the solutions is you got to trust the solutions advocate, what they're selling is actually quality that solves your problems. Yeah, and your introduction actually was spot on with kind of my life path. I've never really liked the term environmentalist. I think that creates some segregations that don't help anyone, especially environmentalists, to use that term. But I was actually going to be a marine biologist when I was a child. That was kind of my dream goal was like the Great Barrier Reef. I'm very passionate about that. And once you dive there, I think you are emotionally and physically, spiritually changed forever. And when I was a child, there was this starfish, the Cranberthorn starfish, was killing the reef. So to me, that was kind of a travesty. So I thought, OK, that'll be my life's legacy. We'll go solve that problem. But long story short, basically decided it was going to be too much studying and too much memorization. I don't have a great memory, which everyone knows me actually can testify to. But I believe I've got a very good vision and I have really good ability to see connections. And when you talk about problems, like you say, it's the whole Japanese character of danger or crisis is opportunity. And that kind of whole thing to me was pretty early on apparent that the ecological crisis that I think we're very well into today, I saw very early on as a child. I didn't want to be poor, though. So your other thing about speaking to a paycheck definitely resonated with me when I was whatever, 17, trying to work out what am I going to do with my life. So I ended up going into IT. So I did a computer degree, joined a course with 140 people and 137 men. It wasn't a party university by any means. But I graduated with that in computer studies, spent the next over a decade traveling the world basically doing IT consulting. And usually became, even though I was employed as a programmer, I didn't have that nerdy mind. I really like to say that subset of weird people that could see the bigger picture and the connections. So I was employed as a programmer, but I usually found that the solution that we were employed to solve wasn't actually what the business even wanted. And no one had really planned out the strategy of solving the most important problems for the customer. So even though I was the programmer, I'd be trying to make sense of how does this fit into the big picture, business picture for whatever we're doing. So I worked in all sorts of things from healthcare to insurance to banking. And I found that generally the strategy wasn't well fitted with the requirements of the business, hence the problem. So over the years as I went by I became more internal advocates, say for green technology practices solutions. So for example Wells Fargo, one of my sort of claims to fame there that I'm very proud of. They helped incentivize Wells to use their existing home equity line of credit to basically rebrand that as a solar home equity line of credit. It's exactly the same financial tool. We just put some lipstick around it, marketed it to all their homeowners, which is the most homeowners in the US, and basically said, we can reduce the risk of their loan by incorporating solar on houses that essentially Wells Fargo themselves own anyway through these people's mortgages. That was a great program. It went well. There's a lot of positive stuff, but through that I got really into the solar industry and became really active both on the political end in Scottsdale where I lived at that point and also on the non-profit volunteering end. Volunteered for a great non-profit called Grid Alternatives out of the Bay Area. So I also got Wells Fargo Corporation to sponsor Grid Alternatives, which they still are doing today to the tune I think of over a million dollars a year, sponsorships and more importantly they get the team members out from Wells Fargo to these solar installs, which are I think really addressing an issue with Habitat for Housing projects that were a bit of an oversight where they're really for lower income people, but they don't include solar on the project. So Grid Alternatives started really to address that deficit. Again, saw a problem that needed to be solved, created their own non-profit, and there were two young really sharp engineers that said, hey, we're not enjoying what we're doing for our day job. Let's go find something that we're passionate about. They again took a huge pay cut, but they went out on a limb and now I think they have at least 6 or 7 non-profits all around the states in different cities all working with Habitat for Humanity to put solar on these houses and they use volunteer labor just like Habitat for Humanity. So great business model, great program. Still no one's making millions off of it, but at the end of the day and I think definitely for me, the older I get, the more the value of what I'm doing in my community and how I'm spending my time personally is worth a lot more than, you know, 300% more paycheck to me. So how do you end up here? Well, that's a good story. Yeah, basically I got really lucky. I know network a lot from how we met. I got a lot of events, talked to a lot of people and I think that's key not just from personal networks, but also just education. Like talking to people that have had a lot more years of experience is how you find out really, you know, what have they done and the challenges they have faced and overcome or faced and more importantly not overcome. And trying to see, you know, how do we work on a, collectively now it's a global issue and global set of problems we're working on. So I got very lucky and I ended up working for the first solar company in America, AEE Solar. And I was in Arizona. I sat off in sort of the marketing and sales division with trade shows just helping them because they were booming a lot of businesses, you know, resources are the best. They're strapped for people. So I accepted a very low paying sort of starter job just to get my foot in the door for a solar company. But I didn't really know how lucky I was going to be at the time in that the guy that started that company in the 70s, a guy called David Katz, was really the first solar company in America. And he's very well respected around the world. Like these big solar trade shows, like Solar Parent International, there'll be a line of Japanese people coming out bowing and Mr. Katz, it's just, you know, he's a real icon in the industry and just a beautiful soul working in this industry. So he really set not just a good precedent for what I wanted to do professionally, but he really resonated with me on a business level of doing things authentically, honestly, transparently, and for the benefit of the customer. So from there I worked with him for a bit over two years in Arizona. Finally got sick of being there. Much of a red state for my political taste. And, you know, I was very into sustainability and trying to make the Phoenix basin a lot more of a sustainable environment. Then one day I just kind of just realized, like with a nuclear power plant there, coal power plants, heavily dependent on water usage, that when I'd go to Vegas, every time I never saw the Hoover Dam higher than what it was previously, I could just see the water down every year. So I lived there for unfortunately 14 years and I just wanted to get out. I speak funny, I'm actually from Australia, but I can't surf, so that was embarrassing. Okay, I was having a very long trip back to Australia, which I tried to do every year and I was just losing it one trip back. I'm like, oh my god, I just want to jump out of this plane. And the moment I had that thought, the dot on the map was right over Hawaii. And I'm like, why am I flying direct from Sydney to LA, LA Phoenix? I could have gone Phoenix, Hawaii, Hawaii, Australia. So that's what I did the next year and as soon as I got to Hawaii, I'm like, I could kind of live here. This is pretty nice. So I got connected with Kully Judd, who comes over for all the trade shows in the mainland. And Kully is also a very sensible, very pragmatic, extremely hard-working entrepreneur. And he started inter-island solar supply also probably around the 70s, 80s. Very good friend of David Katz. So just from discussions with David Katz and the company had taken a slightly different tangent at that point in the mainland. And David suggested that it might be a good time for me to look for other ventures that might be more suited with my personality and my dreams of what I want to do in the world. And I'm not sure if I'd say it now, but publicly, we're in Boston. It's a great story, so I'm going to tell you. But we're coming back. And David Katz, who's the owner of this company, is saying, I hope you're looking for other opportunities, James. And I'm like, I am. And he's like, tell me with your top. And I'm like, OK, well, honestly, I'm going to go work for Kully Judd in Hawaii. I think that's probably what I want to do. And he's like, Kully, you? Yeah, yeah, why? And I'm like, I want to learn how to surf. And he's like, Kully used to be a good surfer. Kully's not a small guy. I'm like, Kully could surf? And he taps me on the shoulder. We walk and look across. And there's a billboard as we're walking down the ramp from Hawaiian Airlines. And there's a giant elephant on a surfboard in Waikiki. Obviously not real. But he's like, I told you Kully could surf. So I'm like, all right, if that's not a sign, I'm going to go live in Hawaii. So yeah, I moved over to 2011, worked for a bunch of solar companies. And I caught kind of the end, I think, the solar way. It was kind of just crashing down. I started slowing things down. Yeah. So, you know, it's been a ride since then. It's been not exactly a gravy train of solar salary rushing in. But, you know, I've survived here. I got, again, heavily networked when I moved here. I started volunteering a lot for the Surfrider Foundation, doing a lot of beach finups, doing a lot of the sort of environmental stuff. And yeah, just the beauty of the Hawaiian culture and environment is just breathtaking. Every day it's great to learn something new. If you really want to dig, you can find something that's really fascinating about living here and being blessed to live in this culture. I'm fortunate I've lived around my life too, and people from the mainland go, don't you get rock fever? Yeah. And I go, well, there's more stuff I can do here than I could possibly imagine. So I'm just fine staying here. I could stay in Hawaii and never leave. That's fine. Well, I've traveled, you know, I've traveled a lot, obviously. Australia is a great country too, but there's challenges with every way you live, I think. Hawaii is unique, you know, obviously with the Kingdom Legacy and the overthrow and all that, people talk about this. And there's some challenges, and being white is a challenge here, you know, coming over, being a Hau'li, as they can call us. But, you know, the translation of no breath, Hau'li, is, I think, more of your spiritual and cultural respect. Like, if you come over just wanting to rape and pillage and make money and then go back to where you're from, I would agree that you're a Hau'li. Like, I'm here based on the ethics of what renewable energy and energy efficiency can do to the community and the culture that really improves the culture rather than taking from the culture. And that's kind of why I'm in the business that I'm in. Yeah, I used to tell the military folks that would come over here on active duty because they'd always ask me what to do, you know, while they're here on their tour because they rotated it out. And I say, well, the first thing you do is you don't tell anybody how you did it back in Ohio or Idaho or Indiana. Nobody here gives a rat's rear-end about how you did it back there. And if you start off that way, you're in trouble. Yeah, exactly. So, you're exactly right. So, what are you doing nowadays here? You're still in the solar and you're still into renewable energy and you're still solving problems. Actually, yeah, it's kind of weird how life evolves, you know. Yeah, my background in solar trained me early on that a very important part of solar which people don't get and it doesn't get a lot of screen time is that energy efficiency is a huge part of solar. A lot of people don't get that. I even had customers... That's your first step. Absolutely. And I had customers say to me, oh, I'd say probably every month, I thought you were the solar guy. Why are you talking about lights and air conditioning and all that light? Because that's... I don't want to sell you a big system, especially in Hawaii here where we... If you sell a giant system just through even stupid attrition of upgrading your equipment over years, that system is going to be too big for your energy load. And that means the excess goes back to the utility. So, the customers bought a giant system that gets fed back to the utility and they don't get any credit. So, effectively, they bought a percentage of their solar system being a donation to the utility. Gift to the Hawaiian language. Yeah. And that's where a lot of people didn't sort of understand. So, I was told... I got my product prop here. We discussed the Hawaii energy. I was the best sales person for Hawaii energy, which is the energy efficiency rebate program in the state. So, I used to talk to everyone first about how do we lower your load and then we look at what's the right size solar system for you. So then when the solar market constricted, I ended up working for this company. As you know, I went through a lot of stuff in the military three years kind of doing what's a resource efficiency manager, which is also very similar stuff focused on efficiencies but also paybacks and what makes the best sense. So, now I'm working for a company called Amoresco, which is an energy services company they called or ESCOs is the buzz where they throw around. And just luckily in that process, I ended up... My final interview was picking a client in the state that I would do a hypothetical presentation to. So, I went through all these different entities in the state that I thought would be fun to work with. And after all I'd kind of done here I thought, you know, UH Minoa is something that's... I've always tracked, always wondered why don't I have more solar? What are they doing? So, I ended up changing courses kind of last minute to do it on UH Minoa and I ended up getting the job and then the day I started, UH Minoa released their energy services contract RFP on the street. So, all my bosses were like, oh, nice one. How's your crystal wall going? All right, it's good. So, yeah, that's what I'm doing now. It's kind of getting ready to draft and finalize that RFP response with all the team members and sort of get that, just sort of, you know, get UH Minoa in this game and ramp up what they're doing so they can deliver. Okay. Well, Jim, it's about time we're going to take a quick break here and be back in 60 seconds with Jim McKay. Talk more about energy efficiency and what it means for the future of Hawaii. She's sad. All the better to see you with my dear. What are you doing? Okay. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? Oh, yeah. This is the starting line. Posh. When this is over, you're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes. Every child. Every parent. Every day. Hello. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran. Seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veteran's advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Aloha and welcome back to Stanley Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii. Thanks for being here on my lunch hour. Here with Jimmy Kay. He's from Australia originally, beamed all over the mainland selling solar panels for a long time and finally found the bigger picture of how you can surf and sell solar panels and do energy stuff in Hawaii. You can't do that in Phoenix. So welcome. And let's pick up with what you're doing now, programs you're working on, and how you kind of see the whole future of Hawaii. You know, because you have a pretty broad understanding of intermittent renewables with the solar background and big city challenges like you have with big grid systems in Phoenix or Las Vegas or whatever. And what we're coming up with here, we've got our mandate of 100% renewable on the grid by 2045 and how are we going to pull it all together? You know, you're going to help us solve this problem. So what are your views on those kind of things? Yeah, well, I love like we're saying that respect for the Hawaiian culture and some of the sort of ethics here. Like I really like the whole analogy. We're in this canoe together. So we've got to start paddling in the right way. In sync. In sync, ideally. I haven't joined a paddling club. I don't have time to do that, unfortunately. But yeah, it's going to take all of us. So I look, logically, the military has a big presence here and you're very familiar with that. And that to me, when I could work on those resource efficiency manager contracts, which is exactly the ideal situation where it's a cash flow positive contract to the taxpayer. So it proves that we can do things differently in a more intelligent fashion that's actually better for us financially. And that's the key thing. People think, oh, it's going to, you know, I'm going to feel the pain if I start doing these things to do the right thing. But what it shows you with intelligence sort of moves on the energy side, you can actually do the right thing and save money. And that increases not just the bottom line for the organization, but the entire picture because you've got more spending power. Say, for example, a nonprofit that's spending $20,000 a year on the utility bill. If they've suddenly got 15, that's 15 that can go towards their mission, their staff, bonuses, whatever. And they're doing more in the community with that money rather than sending it to the utility. So it has this overflow effect. So really, I've kind of gone back and forth between different segments, as you say, kind of a little, I don't know if I get diagnosed for ADHD, but I think eventually like... Or schizophrenia or whatever. Any of those labels are great. Just don't call me an environmentalist. But you put all these puzzle pieces together and it's interesting to see the relationship. So an example would be... There's a lot of synergies out there. Yeah. And if you get too focused, so it's kind of a blessing and a curse. It's good to be focused, but if you're too focused, you miss kind of some of the connections that are related. So, you know, since the elemental accelerator, it's now called the energy accelerator, has come online. They're doing amazing work. And I've tried to track as many of their companies that I'm interested in, has potential. And specifically working for the Marine Corps and the Navy as that contract, I wanted to see a lot of their... Solutions to solve problems implemented under the DoD banner because a lot of the money came from the Navy to help those companies go. So, as you know, I was working a lot on trying to get like microgrid solutions and things like that really implemented so we can actually use them as a case study and use that to improve going forward. So, specifically what I'm working on now, the military being the biggest user of energy, the second biggest user in the state is the whole University of Hawaii system. So, we have a great opportunity now just serendipity as I was explaining that UH Manoa have their energy services procurement contract on the street right now. So, all our companies that are... the ESCO companies that are called are competing now to win this will be the first phase of UH Manoa's. So, it's just one of their ten campuses but it's obviously the biggest most flagship, visible and highest energy use campus. And short of them not doing this, they have a more ambitious goal than the state. So, they have a net energy zero goal by 2035. So, it's ten years before Hawaii's goal. And in order for Hawaii's state to hit their goal, UH has to basically hit their goal. So, in my mind, UH is kind of the most important problem to address because we have to solve all the problems in their campus. And so, their campus could be mirroring a city in a way because it's so big, there's so many buildings. We don't have enough sort of rooftop just to power it off PV alone so a lot of power isn't going to power that campus. So, we have to be very creative as energy solutions to provide them the ability to hit that goal. And it's going to take a lot of work, which is, you know, what we do today isn't going to be what we do in five years or ten years. There's going to be, hopefully, like what happened to the PC industry. Like just the acceleration of technologies that we've seen and the creativity of people working on these problems more and more as people want to address these is getting, you know, you can't follow it. It's boundless right now. And that's, again, a good and bad thing. So, how do we implement this intelligently, sustainably, but also timely is a key thing. There's a real issue to the cost of doing nothing. That's a really big problem. And so nothing against universities, but I saw that a lot in the Department of Defense is that studies, it's safer to do a study and redo a study. And oh, that study is two years old, we better redo it, which takes another year. But the fact is you're still paying status quo dollar while you're waiting to improve it. So, you know, I'm a big advocate of let's do it somewhere and let's learn from that and then do it better the next time. And I think, most intelligently, that's what UH Manoa has chosen to do with this contract is they've awarded it for eight buildings on campus. So it's not a big percentage of their whole building stock at UH Manoa, but I think they're going to be using that as kind of the model to move forward to do it better. And so once that happens, I think they're going to see a lot of progressive increasing traction. We'll see the bills go down and hopefully that might even, you know, get reflect in the tuition rates that they have to charge the students. Are you looking a lot at controls and also energy storage systems? Do you look into these problem solving scenarios? Absolutely. So what are some of the energy storage systems you're considering other than batteries? Because I know batteries are always going to be in the mix. Yep. But are you looking at any, like energy accelerator, how to fly wheels and some really unique energy storage things? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, definitely, I'm very familiar with Ambokinetics. They're, I thought just a really ingenious kind of solution because not just the issues with the lithium ion batteries that you hear about catching on fire and blowing up. And that is, you know, a potential. It's a possibility with that chemistry makeup. So there's that side of it, the safety, but there's also the, if we really wanted to solve, again, the global problems, how much of these precious metals and resources do we really have available to make these kind of batteries? So we're going to need a whole range of technologies to store, like you pit on, I think, the storage issue. So, yeah, I really like the concept of these, basically it's a giant metal floating magnet that spins at super high velocity. So it's powered, ideally, by solar, renewable energy resources. With zero friction. Zero friction, yeah. And then, you know, the solar sun goes away or a cloud comes. This thing can trip on and instead of being charged, it releases back the energy just from the sheer volume and traction. And the motor becomes a generator. So, yeah. So it's like you don't even have two separate things. It's just like puts the energy right back through the same thing that made the energy. So he go right now doing a pilot with Ambokinetics in Keppel-A. So that's, you know, that's fantastic to see. So I'm definitely, you know, pushing this technology to implement it, even under like Hawaii Natural Energy Institute would be a great partner to use their own campus as a learning tool. And that's kind of their mission too. That's one of their ideal goals is not, we don't come in and just throw in all these solutions behind a cloud or a screen. And, you know, magically it works and promise us this is great. It should be very transparent. We want to have faculty and students engaged in this because the students of the future and they, hopefully we've got some really smart kids at UH right now that are fascinated by flywheels and they'll be like, hey, why did you do whatever? And I'm definitely not smart enough to know any of that stuff but I hope someone out there is. And they can be like, hey, you should, maybe what if we do that? What if we do this? And then so hopefully we'll use this to test those technologies and again improve them. So as well as that, we're also looking at, there's a couple of flow batteries that have different kind of chemistry make ups that are a little more inert. They can't blow up, basically there's nothing flammable. So we'd like to look at the subset of different technologies in the storage realm and then have them implemented to not just our energy storage, but things like demand response and utility. Right, the control pieces. Exactly, the control. So yeah, it's all like very interrelated and connected and eventually that's kind of gets down to the whole smart grid thing or the micro grid where we need an intelligent framework which really relies around the computing side of the technology. So ironically I've come from like, I hate computers, I'm done with that stuff. Let's go into something more meaningful and now I'm back into oh, all this stuff's got to be computerized and it's all back to computerized. So yeah, come full circle. Funny how it works out that way. It is, it is. But each of you and I also does a lot of work, I work with them a lot in hydrogen. They have an ops and naval research funded facility right down the street from me where they work on a lot of fuel cells. So Mitch Ewan up at UH, he and I spend a lot of time working on hydrogen for energy storage and that's also a good way to store energy that also complements the transportation sector because the same energy you can store from curtailed power you can store and make hydrogen out of and sell to vehicles, the new Toyota Mariah or Honda Clarity and other vehicles and use it to solve the reduction of fossil fuels in the transportation sector. So that gets back to those synergies and those, you know, hey, if you only look this far you solve that problem but you're missing potential to solve other problems. And you've hit a big nail in the head or the elephant in Hawaii is transportation is a huge issue. And this isn't really part of that ESPC a contract that UH Manoa has put in but they've been pretty flexible on the scope. So I've kind of thrown a lot of ideas already. So I actually had thought about the hydrogen one but that's a pretty expensive technology up front. So I'm hoping they'll be looking at sort of storage with transportation and other things. So that's definitely where I'd like to get to. And I'm sure, you know, H&I, that's a natural to have a generation facility on their own campus. Like that's way ideal for them and students. So, and you know, now that Toyota's doubled down on their own station, they've set a very strong corporate vote for this is the technology we're backing which for companies like ours that so we actually own and operate the facilities or the facilities that we upgrade the equipment. So UH Manoa has a big issue what's what's called the deferred maintenance. So basically their money has been not really keeping up with the building's maintenance needs. So things are starting to break, fall apart, not be replaced. So you've got old air conditioners for example that are old therefore inefficient but also operating very badly so they're even less efficient than they would be otherwise. So that translates to a big energy cost which is usually passed on to the students unfortunately as well as all the other stuff. So we own the equipment. We replace it as part of one of these contracts. So we want to be sure that it's a good capital expense but to have someone like Toyota say hey this is where we want to go kind of wakes our companies up to be like oh well if they're going to go there we should probably be doing this with them. Well maybe you can expand your scope on that UH project and include some hydrogen in there for me. That's an offer to partner. I'll talk to Mitch. All right well that was it for us this week on Stand Energy Man. I'd like to thank Robert McLean and Cindy Manufkai out here in the studio for helping us put together today's show with Jim McKay and we'll have you back sometime later. Until next week, Stand Energy Man is signing off.