 To think tech on OC-16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Kaui Lucas. And I'm Raya Salter. A few weeks ago we brought you the morning half of a special energy meeting in Hawaii, one in which a number of German companies and officials came to talk about the German energy experience. But we only covered half of the program in that episode. Now we'd like to cover the second half, part two of our coverage of this very unusual event. The symposium took place at the Sullivan Conference Center at the Medical School in Kaka'ako and involved a number of participants from both Hawaii and Germany, which as you may know is a global leader in clean energy. The program featured a number of cutting-edge German clean energy companies seeking to partner with the Hawaii clean energy industry. They were Mercedes-Benz Energy, Sonnen, Stornetik, Adcor, PUL Energy Solutions, and Geth. The program was entitled What Lessons Can Hawaii Learn from the Latest German Innovations in Energy Storage, Renewables, and Efficiency. It was hosted by the University of Hawaii and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy. A few weeks ago, ThinkTech on OC16 covered the first part of the program. That included remarks of Rene van den Hovel of the German-American Chamber of Commerce and Dennis Saal, Honorary Counsel for Germany, with presentations on energy initiatives and technologies in Germany and Hawaii. The morning included remarks by Representative Chris Lee, Chair of the House Energy Committee, Brian Kealoha, Executive Director of Hawaii Energy, and Miles Topping, Director of Energy Management at UH Manoa. It also included remarks by Martin de Spang, a German architect and Professor of Architecture at UH Manoa, and Fritz Rettberg, Head of Innovation Management at the Institute of Energy Systems at Dortmund University in Germany. Scott took us through the morning of the program and part one of our coverage. There was much more to come in the afternoon, including presentations by a number of German clean energy companies and U.S. clean energy experts. The afternoon also included presentations by Leslie Cole Brooks of the Distributed Energy Resources Council, Sandra Triton of Sonin, James Karabakis and Jesse Schumaker of Mercedes-Benz Energy, Scott Sue, Vice President of System Operations at Hawaiian Electric, Reddy Toody of Hartnett Cordes, and David Lassner, President of UH. So, Daimler has five major wings of the company. As many of you probably know, there's a big car portion of the business, as well as trucks, vans, buses, and a financial services wing that has supported all of them. And now we can add to this Mercedes-Benz Energy, a real energy company under the Mercedes-Benz logo. So how did we get to having an energy company? For us, that all comes back to essentially the automotive core of the business, and we have committed, as a car company, as Mercedes-Benz, to electrification of the fleet. So that started years ago with the first traditional hybrid vehicles, and has moved into plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Now we also have several fully electric models on the market, and a deep expansion of that. I don't know how many saw the Paris Auto Show. We revealed a new EQ line, and EQ SUV will launch in 2019 at approximately the same price point as a regular gasoline SUV, which is going to be huge for the industry, with a range well above 200 miles. So we're really, really committed to electrifying our full fleet over time. That's all Mercedes cars over time. And that, for us, dovetails perfectly with stationery. As part of the automotive business, we guarantee spare parts availability for 15 years. And when your cars are electric, one of those main spare parts is batteries. If you've got batteries sitting on the shelf in a warehouse to keep them alive, you have to run current through them. So we decided that that spare parts warehouse in Germany to provide good services. And so we brought, what is that one? That one is 12, oh no, the spare parts is 18 megawatt hours of capacity online in Germany right now providing frequency regulation. And so also with electrification, we started retiring some batteries out of vehicles. And they still had a lot of life left. So we started doing a second life facility. And we now have 12, that's the 12 megawatt hour facility, I think in Hamburg, providing frequency regulation there too. And so that was just a natural progression. And then for us to do some off-grid stuff in the telecom sector in Sub-Saharan Africa, we really learned a lot from all of these and decided to come to market in a big commercial way with front of the meter grid scale products, CNI behind the meter products, and residential behind the meter as well. And we are really putting money to back up our commitment. What you see here, as with any good German presentation, there's a picture of the facility. On the left-hand side is our R&D facility in Stuttgart. And the right is our production factory in Commons in East Germany. And at that production facility, we just broke ground, what about two weeks ago, on a half a billion euro expansion of that plant's manufacturing capacity. And that's all lithium ion. And that plant supplies the lithium ion batteries for our entire fleet. What they do there is they take cells, package those cells in series into modules, and then three modules in series goes into a full EV pack. Yeah, nice system. And here are some references for applications and where his technologies gets deployed. This is distributing in Munich, where they have a custom solution for providing heating in the city of Munich. Probably are like cooling for the Oktoberfest, to cool the beer. That's where the ice system gets used. They have also an application and a project in London, where they did social housing. 3,000 allowance. Yeah, so 3,000 units in a social housing, low income housing, where his systems, and we see a snapshot there of some of the system where it provides hot water for showers, as well as heating and cooling for each of those units. This is another one in the heart of Frankfurt, which is Germany's also largest airport. And here's another complex system where they provide heating, cooling, and hot water. And also electricity generation for those units. This is another application, also, which has some application and ties to Hawaii. We heard in some meetings that there's also supposedly a project where you would use sea water to cool some of the apartment buildings. And, yeah, Geneva doesn't have as nice speeches as Hawaii does, but they have a nice lake, and actually, that lake water gets used to provide heat and cold for 3,000 housing units. And I think you have two more of those projects already in Switzerland, so this is also one application. And it also works with geothermal as well as solar, so the system can be combined with those kinds of technologies. This is another from Frankfurt project. And we want to show one more, which is now on the larger side. This is a large TV station from Germany in Munich. And here they have a co-generation plant. Pio has a co-generation plant. And so they, with that system, they provide cooling for a large server park, but also using the process heat out of that co-generation plant. They use that to heat and cool the building. And here you see a snapshot of that live view system, the controlling and monitoring system, where you see what gets produced at any point of time, and then also what goes into heating and cooling. And the system actually looks at what is needed and then generates that electricity and heat accordingly so to save energy. And here's a more technical view of how that system in Munich looks like. You see the turbines over here producing electricity, but also heat, like process heat, waste heat. That can be used to heat up water. And that water then can be, with an absorption process, be used to cool also, to cool the server park, but also provide heating and hot water used, for example, for showers in that TV station. So while we're here, we're in Hawaii. And what could be applications here in Hawaii? So that's how the energy supply looks like. About probably 60% to 65% is oil and gas. And that production has only for electricity, 35% efficiency. And the rest actually goes to waste. It goes into the atmosphere. And that's where his technology comes in. So he can actually reduce the loss of the electricity and the loss of energy and provide heating and cooling for the residents of Hawaii. And so, yeah. These are our references. As you can see, we are working for a lot of big companies. Germany is not only a beer country. So we are also doing some really pretty cars. So we are really very manufacturing agnostics. And we have also a lot of suppliers for car manufacturers. And we are working for them. We are pretty much specialized on hospitals, which is very high potential. And we are talking about energy efficiency because they are mostly 24-7. But it's not easy doing road checks there because they are 24-7. So you have to plan it really very detailed. And as you know, the Germans are famous for planning in very detailed. There is one example we did for BMW in Landshut. I picked this best case because of the high savings we did for them. And it was an interesting thing because we recovered heat in a 2.8 megawatt thermal energy potential. And we switched it into 298 refrigeration tons and 305 refrigeration tons with an absorption chiller. I don't want to go into details. By the way, if you have any questions after my presentation and you want to go into details, you can ask me whatever you want. And we installed a CHP on a high level and high quality base. It was a very complex system. And we did a financing for that. So BMW doesn't have to pay anything. And we get paid out of the heat we recover, get out paid out of the cooling we are delivering, and get out paid off the electricity we are delivering them. So it's a really interesting project. There's another one I want to show you. It's a hospital, a really big hospital, the same where we did the financing. It's a possibility to do the financing for us, but it's not a need. So we're also happy if the client has the money to finance it. And here we rebuild the ventilation system. And my impression was it's the last two days when I was talking to some people here that the ventilation and especially the cooling system might have a huge potential here from the control side, from the efficiency side, from thinking about different control systems and control parameters at the end. Then we installed a heat recovery system in the HVAC. So just using the here, you have to use the cool air bringing back to the room and using that fresh air that you need not to sleep. But there are some rules I think also here it's about from the actually 30% minimum fresh air you need. Then we install the adiabatic humidification system. It's always the same when I want to pronounce this word. Then we installed a new cooling unit and optimized also the illumination. So we are also doing lighting as a small part in our business, but it's still a potential to also to get a focus on the lighting. First, just as a matter of context, our peak load for the HECO companies, so that includes HECO, Anahu, MECO, which is Maui, Linai, and Molokai, and Helco, which is the big island. It's about 1,500 megawatts per peak. And as you see, the generating capacity is approximately twice that because we are an island. And if our stressed out engineers make a mistake, they can't just go buy power for somebody else. They have to sort it out. Also, we're making good progress. We're at about 24% of our renewable portfolio standard. And that does include distributed generation. If you look at just what the utility is generating plus PPA is plus third parties, it's at around 14, 15%. We had 300 megawatts of distributed rooftop approximately. I know that must seem really tiny to you as I saw from the previous presentation, but if you just keep in mind that we do have the highest per capita installation of rooftop solar in the nation. And also another interesting fact is that we have the highest per capita installation of solar thermal in the world, say Cyprus. So we are the most isolated island on the planet. We have the highest electric rates in the nation. People have an environmental ethic here. And thank goodness we have the leadership to move us forward. Oh, that's better. I was kind of crouching like a vulture up here. So all right, so I couldn't begin to put all the challenges on one slide, right? Completely impossible, but I kind of have. I just did it right here. The first challenge that we have here is obviously technical. We have an aging grid. We just do. And even though it's paradise and perfect, there are some issues that are sort of insidious. Now as a great anecdote, when I get ready to go to the mainland or occasionally to Europe, I pull out the winter coat, right? And the zippers are always fused shut. I have to get out WD-40, and I had to squirt it into the zipper to make it work because the salt and humidity makes everything corrode. So it's hot, it's humid, and it's salty. And I think it can really play havoc with power electronics. We have our 100% mandate for renewables. A lot of it's going to be intermittent renewables. Obviously, sun and wind. And the grid is not designed for that. And we're finding solutions for this intermittent resource that we're having to bring on board. Safety and reliability, it's kind of interesting how in some of our discussions with our power supply improvement plan of looking at what does the utility do if our biggest generator on Oahu, for instance, goes down. AES is a coal-fired plant, 180 megawatts. It's a lot for us. Well, you've got a shed load. You have to manage the load and generation. Well, what if a lot of your solar resources are on those circuits? You don't want to shed that. You make it worse. And so having to update and re-figure how it is that we're going to move ahead. So technical, not to mention voltage issues, frequency issues, the whole gamut that I know that you all know about yourselves. Okay, the finances. So where do we get the money? Does the rate payer pay for it? Does the individual customer who installs a distributed resource pay for it, the cost causative principle, or the next hundred? Do they get a $10,000 bill because they want to put in a rooftop system with a 10kW battery? Oh, that doesn't sound right. Do the shareholders pay for it? That makes people's eyes kind of bulged out of their eyes. So how do we do that as a combination? So coming up with the way that we're going to invest, who's going to pay and what's fair is a difficult puzzle. And then the policy. We're blessed with having innovative and forward-thinking policy makers. Well, clean energy is part of our sustainability agenda for the University of Hawaii and obviously also for the entire state of Hawaii. This is a great opportunity for Hawaii to share what we're doing. This is an amazing place for clean energy with solar, wind, ocean, wave. You can do pretty much anything here. And the opportunity for us to understand what's going on in other places, in this case Germany, which has pulled some things off that we haven't yet to understand both from a technology and a policy perspective, how we can do even better and maybe even provide the opportunities for some of our Hawaii entrepreneurs to connect with German entrepreneurs or identify opportunities in Germany for what we're doing here, including our great university research programs. Germany, as we know, has developed many cutting-edge energy technologies and has exported them to the world. Hawaii, as we also know, is a laboratory and leader in clean energy. So it's a good time for the two to get together to compare notes. This symposium was perfect for that. This program was a great statement of our progress in clean energy and the promise of an important new relationship we can have with Germany. This kind of program is clearly in Hawaii's interest and we hope programs like this, with Germany and other countries, can happen on a regular basis. It's part of our natural leadership role in clean energy. Not only can this kind of symposium teach us what is happening in energy in Europe, identify the latest and greatest technologies and products, not only can it help us establish win-win business, academic, and government relationships with contributors around the world, it can also help us find our own path, refine our vision, meet our goals, and save our state. And now, let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them, but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia, and communities around the islands and the world. Remember also that ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends, and some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or you wanna replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links, or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows and uploads. ThinkTech has a high-tech First Amendment green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. 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For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or host, a producer or an intern and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being a part of our ThinkTech family and supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification, and global awareness in Hawaii. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Kaui Lukas. And I'm Raya Salter. Aloha, everyone. Raya, thanks so much for being host in this program. Now, you're an energy lawyer. The German-Hawaiian energy symposium, what does that mean? What kind of impression do you have about it? It's actually a great and fascinating opportunity. Germany is truly on the far-cutting edge of renewable energy, high levels of renewable energy penetration, very progressive policy. And that Germany would be seeking to partner with Hawaii as the state with the highest level of solar penetration in the United States, I think is an excellent sign on Hawaii's clean energy leadership. So there's two issues that are worth mentioning. One is that Matt Lynch of the University of Hawaii put this program together. And that's to his credit. A shout out to Matt Lynch. The other thing is that we have to follow up. We have to have more such programs with Germany and maybe other countries in Europe, I like Europe. But it could be Asia. And finally, the most important thing is we have to follow up on the conversations with Germany. They're selling their products. They're selling expertise. They want to learn from us. We can't let it stop here. So how do we go forward and make sure that there's a lasting effect? I think that's a really important question. It's essential that these conversations move forward. I think the state has shown a commitment to international dialogue and engagement and should continue to do that. I think it's also important that we here in Hawaii set the stage for industry so that they feel confident that they can continue to reach out and really try and get the most innovative and cutting edge projects, including those from Germany, and bring them here. Thank you, Raya. You're very welcome.