 We are so happy to be back with Josh Powell. We keep trying to have this shown, and we're finally going to have it right now. Are you excited, Josh? I'm excited. I'm excited, Jay. He's the CEO of Revolucen. And when we talk about Revolucen, we talk about solar in Hawaii, we talk about policy points and the future of solar and energy in Hawaii. Clean energy, if you will. In fact, this is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. That's what we're calling it. That's right. Josh, just give me the depth and the breadth of Revolucen. What is it? How big is it? What does it do? Revolucen was founded on Oahu 10 years ago. This is our 10th year. We've installed about 7,000 systems island-wide. We have operations currently, Big Island, Oahu, and a little bit of commercial activity on Maui. We've installed on most islands at this point. We also have franchise branches, headquartered here in Hawaii, started here in Hawaii, but franchise branches now on the mainland in two states, Idaho and Massachusetts. Massachusetts we've been in for about seven years. So we've been at it for a while, a lot of experience, and really feel like at this point we've been through a lot of the technical changes and ups and downs that solar markets can have. Most exciting in the last few years, as many people know, Hawaii has really transitioned into a PV plus storage market, which is really what we all, at least in the industry, I think it felt for a long time PV should have been from the very beginning. The resilience we want, it creates the resilience we want, it creates its complete independence. It starts to deliver true economic parity between consumers and other energy producers like utilities and other private businesses. And then I think as we see the electrification and transportation, it just opens up everything. So really exciting time to be doing what we do. Exciting times, yeah. Well, I've always seen revolution as creative and innovative. Even from the very beginning, when I first started following you guys, I noticed that you were doing things that nobody else was doing. You were figuring solutions to problems that nobody else was really able to solve. And I think it's still that way. And that means that you have a special obligation to show Hawaii's leadership in this area. And you are. You're going to the mainland. I mean, that's really something. You're taking your best practices to the mainland, and that speaks volumes, actually. So let's talk about the current direction, the current effort about solar in Hawaii, especially rooftop on a single family, and I suppose small businesses as well. Where are we? We have a lot. We have a lot of people who have adopted. They've gotten into it already. They probably did not. Most of them did not put storage there. And the issue is, how can we get them to do that? And then, of course, is the not so low-hanging fruit, the people who should do it for purposes of resilience and reliability and hardening against the extreme weather and the like failure of the grid. And so the question is, how do we make it more attractive to them so the less than low-hanging fruit will come around and also install both solar and storage at the same time. Complete the picture, move the needle ahead, get to 100% through this particular approach. So first, talk about the people who already have solar. What's their situation? How do you move them to add storage? So 30 plus thousand systems out there, probably close to 40,000 systems out there that are grid-tied PV systems without storage. And an amazing asset when you think about it in terms of producing energy, but that much more beneficial to both the users and the state if storage is integrated. And I think the legislatures tried a few times to sponsor, or various folks in the legislature tried to sponsor various bills to incentivize storage adoption and do it with or without associated PV. I think if the state looks at it just from a resilience point of view, there's some pretty strong incentives. If we think about some of the costs associated with energy restoration after a storm, volcanic corruption, the mobility particularly of PV plus storage at the residential level and how it drives into the community and creates nodes of resilience, I think there's lots of benefits beyond the normal economic assessment we make with photovoltaics in Hawaii. And that's always been the big driver. One of the really exciting things to us as a business, you talked about innovation, I think a lot of our innovation has been creativity that sort of responds to and is inspired by what consumers want. And really listening to what the consumers want in our market, it's surprising how much wisdom there is locked up in that. And the Hawaii PV market really started with a big economic gap between the cost of retail energy and what you could do for yourself. But as you start to own your own energy production and really own both ends of it, storage gives you the nighttime durability and resilience, a whole new array of things open up for consumers in terms of opportunities, whether it's transportation energy. I mean, charging your car. Yeah, so charging your car, resilience, lots of different values start to come into play. And so it's economics, but you think about it like any other consumer product. We don't just buy a home because it's cheaper than everything else. We have lots of things that factor into how we make those decisions. And so really learning what that is, what's the value to consumers. And really in the energy market today and the distributed energy market, we're learning right now what consumers want and what they respond to. We found as a business that we can provide other services in addition to energy because they kind of are parallel to- Like what? We started air conditioning contracting three years ago. I mean, in many ways you could say that's sort of one part climate change. That's a lot to do with energy. Hawaii's gotten hotter. So we have a lot of customers that are asking about it and interested in it. And it obviously efficient air conditioning and efficient homes has a lot to do with your energy budget. So that has driven us into areas like that. Also it's a good way to stabilize when the energy market can go up and down. You have other things you can fall back on. Roofing, another one. Most of our systems sit on a rooftop. So we got a roofing license. And that includes putting those brackets on the roof so it won't fly away. Making sure that's worth the price of eggs right there. You bring up one of my favorite topics. I'm an architect. I'm a licensed architect in the state of Hawaii. And when I look at PV, there's an opportunity when you're applying panels to a rooftop to actually make it stronger. So if you're using an adequate rail system or a rail system that's actually strong in and of itself and the modules are tied to it in a way that you can actually create essentially a sheer diaphragm, an additional one on the roof. And it's something we think is a differentiator. But those little bits of technology can make a big difference. And for some of our single wall homes, having a little bit stronger roof could make the difference in a hurricane or some other kind of storm. Well, if you assume that we're going to have extreme weather and some roofs that are not tied down are going to fly across the street and damage somebody, it's in community interest to make sure that the roof is tied down. And so much so that one of the points that I would raise is that existing solar panels that were put on five, ten years ago, because that's the timeframe we're in right now, maybe 15 years ago, they may not be anchored the same way you would anchor a solar panel today. Oh, yeah. When we started in the industry, you know, a decade ago, I was coming out of, I started my career as a naval officer, was in the civil engineer corps at the construction site of the Navy and moved into professional sort of general contracting construction and looked at the solar industry with my partners. And, you know, one of the things that we saw was there wasn't much professionalization of the construction business in solar. Most of it was pretty simple, you know, people that had been at it for a while, but self-taught. So you saw some applications like you'd see people screwing things directly into a roof, maybe with just some... That's a problem, isn't it? Yeah, you know, so we've seen over the last decade those practices have pretty much left the market. Like, those don't really exist. If you've got systems older than 10 years, you might find some of those things still. Sure, we've learned a lot. We find solar hot water collectors still that are direct screwed into a roof sometimes. So what I'm thinking though is that if we look today and we are interested in reliability and hardening against the extreme weather, we want to identify those installations that need to be reattached. And, you know, I'm sure that if I called you one day and I said, take a look at my old installation, can you improve it? You would do that and you would probably help me with my roof in general. But there's a lot of people who won't do that. They won't do that. They won't call you and they won't do anything and it'll be a danger not only to the supply of electricity for their system, but for the neighbor across the street when the thing flies off. And I wonder if you have any ideas about how the government, you know, weather, first weather, and how the government could actually make sure that people take a look. You know, in my car, I have to take it in for safety inspection once a year. It's not only to protect me, it's to protect the other cars on the road that my car is, you know, working in certain ways. But isn't the same rule of community stability inspection apply for solar? For sure. And I mean, a PV system, as it stands on a Wahoo, gets an electrical and a building inspection. So, and, you know, they definitely, they get out there, they look at systems on both sides. And the building side is looking specifically at the racking, whether the, you know, there's offsets for how close a system should be to ventilation, things like that. And so they're looking at that. And I think at least in the last decade or so, you know, I know DPP has gotten a lot of flack recently from some contractors in terms of speed of plan review, things like that. But I, you know, I don't feel like there's a lack of inspection on PV systems today. I think it's fairly comprehensive. And that's a good thing. There's a lot of inspectors out there. I do think when you go back, some of these things were unfamiliar, you know, 8 to 10 years ago and earlier. And, you know, whether it's the consumer contact and somebody to go look at it, we certainly do that. We just have a flat rate to inspect an existing system. Oh, you do? Yeah. See, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, we do a $250 inspection for any existing system. And then if there's like repairs or something, if we make recommendations and the customer wants us to do stuff, we credit it back to... You've got to do that. It's not only for efficiency, but it's for keeping the whole thing in place. We do more of that for realtors. So when realtors are in a transaction, they'll call us, we'll go inspect the existing system, give them some sense of what's going on. Yeah, because if I'm a buyer of a residence, the seller is going to say to me, look, Jay, we got this great system on the roof and I say, yeah, let's see how great it is. Right. If I'm going to have a soil inspection, I'm going to have a term out inspection, I'm going to have a roof inspection. No, you know, Jay, and I think, I mean, you mentioned like some companies do. And, you know, we saw, you know, the PV companies that are left on Oahu today have been through, most of them at least, have been through a couple of cycles in this market. And in, you know, 2012, 2013, there were, I think, up to 240, some kind of crazy numbers. And we've seen that number go down to, I think we're probably 30 or 40 that are still actively in business. You expected that though. I think so. In the consolidation period. Sure. I think we expected that. You know, we had companies coming from, you know, all sorts of companies from the mainland. And we're moving, I'd say we're moving into another period of fairly heavy installation. And we have a tax credit, a federal tax credit that's going to step down at the end of this year. So those kinds of things can motivate the market. And we might see some other mainland companies kind of jump in again. But, you know, we, I think any company that's really lasted, and certainly we count ourselves in this group, you know, you're not, you've got to be looking at more than just the energy system. It's, you know, one, I'm providing something that, you know, the customer is going to have for 20 plus years. The useful life is actually well more than 20 years. In many ways it's the heart of the house. Yeah, most of the systems we sell today have a power warranty that's 25 years. Some of them have product warranties that last that long. So it's a, you know, it's a long term durable thing. We want to make sure we're there to maintain it. You know, we've come up with over the years financing programs for some of our systems. So we're one of the first companies in the country really. I remember that. We introduced about three years ago. That was very important. PV plus storage. Making it available to every access to the market. Yeah, what's called third party ownership. So we're the only local company that self sponsors that. But you're still doing the maintenance. It's still. Yeah, we do it for the life of the buyer. I mean, if I'm one of your customers, I'm, I feel better if I know you're going to, you're going to stand behind it over the years. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's almost like a utility contract. You're in a 20 year arrangement. It's a flat monthly fee for your energy. We maintain it for the life of the system. But, you know, obviously we want to make sure we're around. So, you know, bricks and mortar, you know, we have, we have an accessible showroom for customers. We have other products that sell. Right. But those kinds of, I think that getting into, you know, I tend to think of our business. And this is also, you know, in the industry itself on the mainland, you hear these terms a little bit. You know, we talk about energy services, businesses and, and home services businesses. And really that's what revolution is today is we're a home services business. There's ancillary products we provide. And the point is, you know, I've already developed this trusted energy relationship with my customer. And once they trust us, I mean, what else can we do that's going to be beneficiary? Sure. Just like it's like any contractor, you know, develops a piece of the house. He adopts the house. He becomes your uncle or the uncle of the house. After this break, Josh, I would like to, I would like to talk to you about storage and where it fits in all of this. And what the state of the law is, or maybe should be going forward, given how. Storage is the center of it all, right? Yeah, right, right. I agree. Let's take a short break. We'll be back with Josh Powell, CEO of Revolut Sun. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keeping you safe. Aloha. Okay, we're back talking energy. Hawaii is the state of clean energy with Josh Powell as the CEO of Revolut Sun. So Josh, I wanted to get into this, you know, something you mentioned earlier, namely storage. Storage has taken a centerpiece role in clean energy in Hawaii. And in the country, I'm sure, because we are leaders. We are. Absolutely. So where are we in storage? Because storage is now come of age. Yeah. Don't you think technologically? Yeah. So this is a shorter part of the story because there wasn't much going on in the first seven years we were in business in terms of grid-tied storage. Most of the PV integrated storage we think about would be some guy with a house maybe in a remote area with some lead acid batteries that they managed. And, you know, what's happened in the last three years is HECO changed some rules that essentially made exporting PV energy not economically valuable. And technology converged at the same time to reduce the price of lithium-ion storage and improve the technology that we use to deliver it. And so those three things coming together in the last three years we moved from essentially no grid-tied batteries to today almost 100% of residential systems have a grid-tied battery. And so, and most of that is because it's economically beneficial. So, you know, in Hawaii today you're still going to save 20 to 30% on your energy bill with a Tesla Powerwall or some other kind of storage integrated into your PV system. And so that's a, you know, for anybody buying a new system that's great. And in many ways, like if you waited, you're kind of lucky because now you're getting these great systems that are all tied in. Whereas if you got it a few years ago, you probably, you know, you don't have as much of an economic reason to get a battery. You're probably still saving a lot on energy. But, you know, so that market transition is actually, you know, it's really unique. You know, Hawaii has gone through something that probably most other consumer energy markets will go through at some time in the next, say, 20 years. But we've just gone through it in the last three and we're really, we're kind of out the other side. You know, three years ago, I wasn't sure where this was going to go. We kind of had made our bets as a business on it. And we'd been putting a lot of money into studying different batteries, testing different batteries, mostly testing it on ourselves. Got a lot of junk that I wish I didn't have. Fortunately, not on consumers homes, but as products entered the market in the last couple of years, we've seen a couple of manufacturers really rise to the top and deliver really great products. And the reliability, you know, you basically can control the product on your iPhone or your smartphone, just an app-controlled system. They're land-based. So in the event of a power outage or communication outage, it still works at your home. It's got its own wireless signal. So intelligent, just like an automated car. It's no surprise that we see Tesla sort of leading the charge on some of that because they're so far in that technology already with the cars. So we see higher adoption in Hawaii than any other place in the country. And there's only a couple other places in the world that are really close to what we're doing. Germany and Australia have some interesting markets too. So I think anyone getting a brand new solar rooftop system now would include solar. You're going to get a battery. I mean storage. It would not be reasonable. Any consumer. So residential homeowners, single family, condominium, you're absolutely going to see that. When you get into the business side, it's not as dense. Because the clothes at night. Yeah. So businesses tend to operate when the sun is shining. So the battery isn't as significant for a business. Homeowners tend to operate when the sun isn't shining. So the battery gets really important. So we see almost 100% with the homeowners. With businesses, it's probably more like 40 to 50%. But you would be surprised if a homeowner came to you and said, just give me solar. Forget about the story. I would actually really look closely at what they're asking for because I don't want them to go away unhappy. And one of our concerns would be they'd be putting a PV system on that would just get curtailed. It just wouldn't produce energy because they wouldn't be there to use it. You've got to use the energy right when it's being produced. So I have a thought now. You know, if you put in a new system, brand new system with solar and battery included, seems to me that would be easier in terms of the installation and the integration of the equipment than if you came around and added a battery to an existing solar cell. Am I right? You know, I mean, there's certainly a convenience and a scale to that. There's two different types of batteries. I don't want to get too deep into technology. DC-coupled battery systems and AC-coupled battery systems. And most battery systems are still DC-coupled. And DC-coupled has the good thing about DC-coupled is we've got DC energy, direct current energy coming off the roof with most PV panels. And so it's more efficient to store it, less cycling, less loss of energy. In comparison, you know, a coal-fired power plant like AES's plant loses, you know, 60% of its potential energy in combustion and another 30% or 40% in line loss as it's distributed. Solar energy. And about carbon into the atmosphere. So a DC, right, a DC battery versus an AC battery or AC-coupled battery, you might have a, you know, 7% to 10% difference in terms of energy that you're retaining in the vessel. Now the advantage of an AC-coupled battery is it's essentially an appliance. You know, you're plugging it into an existing system. You know, you need an interface that can disconnect you from the grid. But other than that, it's really not that complicated. And so, you know, Tesla, again, innovated in the marketplace by delivering sort of a consumer-level AC-coupled battery about two years ago. And that really turned out to be the right thing to scale. This is the one they use in Kauai, K-I-U-C, right? So you think that's a power pack. That's their big industrial battery. What I'm talking about is a power wall. It's a kind of smaller, cuter version. And you can hang it on the side of the house. It's not that big. Exactly. And it's scalable. You can have as many as you want to meet the need. Yep. Yep. So, you know, the other thing I was going to ask you about that is when you're doing it with an existing solar system, can you put these new batteries on there? Do you have to change out other equipment in order to connect them? No. And, you know, the PUC is actually, for the last couple of years, what you're talking about is essentially what we call a NEM plus or adding on to a NEM system and a net metered system like what most people would already have on their homes if they already have preexisting PV. And over the last 18 months, the PUC and the solar community and HECO kind of gone back and forth about the rules to do that. And in the last couple of months, those rules finally came out. They're pretty straightforward. You don't have to change out old inverters. You might want to. There could be other reasons you want to do that. Technology has moved ahead. Just to update the tech. But you don't really have to do that. It's not uncomplicated because you do need to think about how is this existing PV system or how much of this existing PV system is going to support the battery in an off-grid mode. If I just wanted a battery that would just support my house and not charge from solar, that's really easy. If I want to integrate that old system into the battery, that means I'm going to be moving some things around so there's going to be some electrical work. But it's not super complicated. But this is the kind of analysis you'll have to make when you do that. Every system in that sense, there's some customization. You've got to look at what's there and then decide which parts are going to move to the PV. With all this storage available, all of this is going towards storage connected with batteries. What about the idea of connecting to the grid? Connecting to the grid sounds to me like a resiliency question. I wouldn't want to not be connected because if anything went wrong, I wouldn't have any options after a bad storm that, for example, tore it off my roof, although even though we screwed it down really well. My question to you is, do you ever suggest to people that they be independent of the grid? Or do you always suggest that they connect? The vast majority of the installations we do are grid tied. We do and have done off-grid systems and we've had a very small number of customers essentially leave the grid. We don't try to persuade people one way or the other. I think the grid is a huge resource and it makes a lot of sense to continue to be interactive with the grid. What I think is happening and what's really important to recognize is that as a consumer gets their own energy system and as they get a storage system, it's like the relationship with the grid manager, the utility, whoever's been producing energy has been heavily one-sided. You want the energy, you don't have any real control over pricing, when you use it, that's shifting, that's coming into balance. What really has to happen is that has to be recognized. Now, the distributed batteries that are out there on homes are potentially a massive resource to the grid. We installed 10 megawatt hours of batteries last year on residential homes. That's a big resource that could be tapped into to push and pull electrons when the utility wants to produce something, maybe they have a cheap time period or they have an excess because it takes time to spin up and down. So it's more flexibility for the home owner. And these are digital. So the controls are all digitized, very easy to communicate with, very easy to control. Now, there's some permissions if the consumer owns it, and that's where the parity comes into place. Now, it becomes potentially transactional, right? Okay, I'm going to let Hiko use my battery for so much time, a year or a day, but there's a price to pay for that. Okay, but that's where it's going, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Everything balanced. If we're going to have a utility, and if we're going to have a grid, it's absolutely going to have to go that way. One other thing is if I have my electric card, and everybody does, and in fact, we need to have more of that, I probably want a charger at home. A fast charger for that matter. Gas station in your house, without the gas. Right, a beautiful thing. And enough to charge me up every night to get in Hawaii, anywhere in Hawaii, where I want to go. My wife drives a car purely powered by solar. I tell you, I either have a car or want a car, electric car in my home. How does that change the configuration of the system? I mean, we have inverters right now that have charging ports attached to them. So, you know, you can have that. It's just like almost like an accessory to your PD system. Even fast charging ports. Yeah, wow. So, we install different chargers for customers based on what they want, level one, two, three. It's all amperage. I mean, it's just moving some loads around. But we're seeing these technologies come closer and closer together. And I mean, like we have an inverter that we sell that a company called SolarEdge has a basically integration. And you just plug the, you pay a little bit, you know, slightly more for that inverter. And you can just attach a pigtail to it and charge your car. That's great. That's great. And that's an incentive to buy an electric car. One other thing I wanted to ask you to talk about incentives is the tax credit. Right now we have a tax credit on the installation of solar alone or solar and battery. Right. Brand new, but we don't have a tax credit. Just for batteries. Just for batteries, which seems to me in the old vernacular silly. On resilience alone. Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, you can imagine a, you know, let's go a year down the road. You know, we've got a severe weather. Let's say this summer we end up, you know, I hope it doesn't happen. But if we end up getting, getting hit with a hurricane, we've seen it on the big island. We've seen it other parts of Hawaii. In retrospect, we will be kicking ourselves for not doing everything we could to put batteries in as many homes as possible. You know, Hawaii, Ohana and our neighborhoods are really important. I know that, you know, when stuff like that happens, you're going to have people sharing, you're going to have extension cords running from houses that have batteries to houses that don't, plugging in the refrigerator, all those things. So the more we have, the better. Yeah. You know, there's already a couple thousand out there, and that's great. You know, that'll be a big help. I mean, in Puerto Rico in contrast, when we saw, I think, Hurricane Maria, you know, you didn't have very much in the community. It obliterated everything. And people were really struggling for several months. So you can avoid, I think, a lot of that by putting the resilience out there now. So you've already really revealed what I was looking for, but I wonder if you could address the legislature. They're right behind Camera Four, all of them. Hundreds of them. They're all listening to you. I wonder if you could give us some advice about the bill that is presently pending. That would allow a tax credit for upgrade to include batteries on home storage. Yeah. It's a no-brainer. But don't leave PV behind. I think, you know, Hawaii has this amazingly unique opportunity where we lead the nation in many ways the world in these kinds of technologies. And really, the state has an opportunity to support that. And the state has done a lot with the 2045 initiative, 100%. If we're going to get there, we have to push things along. And I think the benefits that come back to us in terms of research at UH, integration with other global economies, they're hard to put a price tag on, really. And, you know, in many ways the state incentive for PV has gotten us, you know, at some level where we are. Yeah. Important changes in that over the years have helped to stabilize and create a really strong PV market in Hawaii. And, you know, I look at it like there's no turning back. This is where we're going. The faster we get there, the better. And the faster it has to be seen in light of the fact that this is an El Nino year. Yeah. And we are more and more likely to have extreme weather. And this is a hedge against the extreme weather. And how often, you know, El Nino, when I was a kid, was every eight to 10 years. Today, El Nino is happening every three to four years. Yeah. Or sooner. And this went through a two-year warming cycle in the Pacific. So. There's no time to waste. Yeah. Thank you, Josh. Yeah, thanks, Jay. Josh Powell, revolution. Pleasure. Thanks for coming down. Thank you.