 Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan, and today on our show, we'll be discussing the Association of Energy Engineers for Hawaii with our guest, Russ Kohler, who's the president of AEE Hawaii. So welcome, Russ. And let's turn it off. Okay. Aloha, Mitch. Aloha, y'all. It's nice to be with you. Nice to have you. And let's just start, I just wanted to start off a little bit with your background of how you became an energy engineer in the first place. Well, I graduated from a Merchant Marine Academy, Maine Marathon Academy, studying marine engineering. And I've always said and very clear to me that a ship is the most efficient cogeneration combined energy system in the world. That got me into energy. While I was at the Academy, my father in California at the time started an energy management company called American Energy Save. By the time I became a senior, I was very interested in getting into energy management and energy efficiency. And so when I graduated and got my Coast Guard third assistant engineer license, I moved to California, did not get on the ship, decided to stay on land, and get into energy management and become an energy management expert. So that's what I did. That's how I did it. My first position was at a hospital, where I, within a couple of years, became chief engineer. And it was arguably the most energy efficient hospital in the state of California. My dad was a director at the time, and I was the one who was putting all the projects together for the chiller plants and boiler plants and all the different energy management control system stuff we were doing in the hospital. So that was mid-70s. I took over the company with my brother in 1980. And from 1980, for the next 25 years, that was my life. Quite a bit of alternative energy, cogeneration, energy efficiency projects. So that's where I was cutting my team. So that was a consulting company. So you had a wide range of various systems that you were able to look at and become smart on, right? That's correct. That's correct. Everything from lighting retrofits to cogeneration. Well, that serves you very well in your current job, I'm sure. It sure does. When I tell people that I was actually involved with renewable energy in the early 80s, they look at me with disbelief. But believe it or not, that is when the solar industry started to cut its teeth and the wind turbines and things that started out as tax shelters and got their wings. Now it's about AEE. What is it and why should we be interested in it? Well, AEE was founded in 1977. So a couple of years before I joined, I joined in 1980. I got to know the founder of AEE quite well, name of Albert Tuman. I developed AEE to essentially be a teaching and educational society so that you could bring the knowledge to all energy engineers and be early adapters to college universities, to engineering students with the goal of always to make the world more energy official. Combat carbon, carbon to carbon footprint around the world. It was all being done at early stages. His goal was to take this internationally. It's the only international energy engineering society in the world. We're in 100 countries. There's over 18,000 members worldwide. And as I say, I joined in 1980. So do the math. I've been a member for 41 years. I became a certified energy manager in the mid-90s, shortly after the program was developed. The certified energy manager program within AEE is the gold standard for the organization. There's 13,000 or 14,000 certified energy managers worldwide. And again, it was to develop younger engineers and students and bring them into the field. A lot of the talk today is about how many of these energy engineers are going to be retiring, and do we have enough energy engineers coming up through the ranks to take those positions? Is the CEM recognized generally across the industry? He said it's the gold standard. Is that a certificate that the industry recognizes? Yes. It's internationally recognized by ANSI. And I can't quote off the top of my head. I didn't write it down here. But one of the European organizations is the CEM. One of the European organizations is also recognized as worldwide. In many cases, and I did put this down on a slide, and I'm not reading from the slides, but many positions worldwide, you have to have a CEM or you have to be capable of getting a CEM. I've seen many cases where someone will get a position with the stipulation that within a certain amount of years, within two years, let's say, you will achieve your CEM. And I've seen, too, where if someone didn't achieve it, they were looking for another job. What goes into getting a CEM certification? I mean, is there a course that you have? I mean, a set of courses you take, and you have to write exams, and all that sort of thing? Is there a normal program? Yeah, there is a formal five-day course with an exam on the fifth day. But backing up from that, if you don't have any formal education in electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or some form of environmental sciences engineering, the test is very difficult. It's not something that you can just take the five-day course and expect to achieve a passing grade. In fact, you have to be able to qualify to be able to take that course. You have to either have a college degree, be a professional engineer, or be in the business for X amount of years just to qualify to sit for the training. And then think. How is the training actually given? I mean, maybe pre-COVID, was it an in-face, in-person kind of training program? Or was it online? Or was it, I mean, how do they deliver the program? Prior to COVID, it was all face-to-face training. You either, for instance, with the chapter, I've looked at bringing instructors over to Hawaii to do the training. They'd be training along with us as a chapter. The chapters, in a lot of cases, will act as tutors for the students because there's quite a bit of math involved with the test. It's a pretty intense program for five days. I can tell you, one of my colleagues at Amgen who was an electrical PE, I talked them into going through the training, and he did not too well on the test. And the reason is because it's a diverse background. It's not just electrical. It's HVAC. It's generators. It's all types of things put in together, water efficiency, lighting, all these different things. So does AEE have a textbook that people can study all these various disciplines? AEE has quite an extensive, I won't call it a library because you've got to buy the books, but it's a very extensive list of books that you can buy and start getting yourself acquainted with a lot of that stuff. The training program itself comes with a binder. It's very extensive. Lots and lots of information, and it's not just a day training. You've got to go home and do homework and study. So it's a pretty intense five days. There's been quite a few trainings here on Hawaii, on Oahu. There was one on just before, and I mean just before COVID, or I should say to shut down, in March last year there was, of course, an exam on the big island. In fact, my vice president of the big island was in that training, and she passed the test. But there again, she had 15 years' experience with ECO or Helco on the big island. So she had a background, she had a background in some renewable and some alternative energy. Is the exam open book or closed book, or how rigorous is it? You know, that's a good question. It's very rigorous, and it is open book. But yet it's still, if you don't have the background in a lot of these subject matters, you're not going to do well without a lot of studying. And I certainly recommend the tutorials that are offered. So how long does it take for your president to, your vice president, to re-qualify to take the test again if he didn't do that well? Oh, no, that's not my vice president. I was a colleague of mine at Amgen. Oh, OK. He was an electrical engineer that I worked with at Amgen, the biotech company. A sharp guy, someone that I had been teaching, but evidently I didn't teach him enough about HVAC. It is pretty critical to these days because there's such energy hugs. Everyone that's on my board of directors has a certification. OK. I had mentioned in a slide that I was just talking about 80 Hawaii for a minute. Board of directors, pretty diverse group of people. My vice president of Kauai is, she works at Kaua on Kauai. My vice president of Oahu is a VP of engineering with Bank of Hawaii. My treasurer is president of a consulting, energy consulting firm. There's a lot of work utilities on the mainland. Vicki, whom you've met, she is actually a resource energy manager for the Army National Guard. Again, I mentioned earlier, I mean, she couldn't have gotten that position without having a CEM. Myles is stopping. You know, he's the energy manager at the University of Hawaii. Yeah, no, not miles well. He's an interesting one because he had to take his first exam was the certified energy auditor, the CNA. It's listed on, I think the second slide is where it's listed. And when I interviewed almost all these people I'm talking about except for Vicki and Ray, my treasurer, and recruited them into the chapter. Myles was interesting because he didn't feel like he had enough experience. And I convinced him finally that you have enough experience to take your CEM. And he did. He took it. He took it out here in Oahu a year ago. And actually, it was 2019. And he passed the CEM. And that was great. So each one of these guys, my director of scholarships, he's got his CEM, CDA, he's a solar PV expert. He's one of the foremost solar guys here in the state. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tell us a little bit about the scholarship program. This is something I hadn't heard about. So young upcoming students here, is this something for them? Or is this for people who have already graduated? But anyway, tell us about it. Well, it would be for either one. If you wanted to go back to school and you were doing your graduate studies, we actually had a young lady who worked for her. His name is Fred Brooks. My solar guy, my director of scholarship. And we nominated her for scholarship. She's at the University of Hawaii. She's an electrical engineer. She takes most of her classes out of the same building you're in. And she lives in, I believe, the state of Washington, Milana. And we nominated her for her scholarship. It really just depends on where they are in their studies and in their interests. Here she is, an electrical engineer. She's working for a solar PV maintenance company. And she, to me, was a perfect candidate for a scholarship. So yes, we're trying. The student side of our chapter is fairly new. We're trying to build it up. COVID didn't help. We had plans to get with the dean of engineering, miles being down there, setting up meetings. But this was kind of a dead year for that. So it's something that we plan to do for the future. Well, I'm hoping this interview will be helpful to your outreach program for the young engineers or want to be engineers that are coming up the line. Well, I do, too. In my position over at the Marine Corps base of Hawaii, as you know, I get involved in a lot of teaching. I'm presently teaching a young, what we call, energy NCO. The Marine Corps, in fact, the Marine Corps base of Hawaii is the only base in the entire world that has an energy NCO. And my job is to teach them and get them up to speed. And primarily AMI metering, which is advanced metering infrastructure that we have. But reading meters is one of the main things. But I get involved in a lot of different things. She's new as of November. She's my third energy NCO. And I enjoy teaching. We're starting to learn about teaching and about energy auditing. We've got her involved in a very interesting subject future project yesterday. I was called by the environmental group over at the base. And of all things, if you read through this, it was about sea turtle hatchlings. Sea turtle hatchlings, mama sea turtles, there's more sea turtle hatchlings in Oahu than they ever have historically recorded this past year, which is amazing. And they've never had them over at the base. And the reason that they called me is because what's happening is these hatchlings are hatching and they're looking for the moon to direct them to the ocean. And what are they seeing? But light pollution from the housing. Street lights, house lights, walkway lights, and they're walking into the backyards of base housing. I think if I'm not mistaken, they've recovered. They've saved about 50. Unfortunately, some didn't make it in Paris. They get into the streets. And I went out there and I looked at all this yesterday with environmental. And I brought my energy NCO and my energy engineer colleague, Yako, who I think you bet. And now she wants to get into the training with environmental so that she can actually work with environmental with the whole sea turtle program. And I was thrilled. It's like, if I never brought you here, you never would have known this. And just in that meeting, environmental basically invited her to a training later this month, which great, everything she can learn is great. A couple of years ago, my colleague, well, the energy NCOs that I was working with, the elementary school on base contacted our public works officer. She asked me if we could put a program together. We put a program together. And we wound up teaching 400 elementary school students from third grade to fifth grade. Obviously, the third and fourth graders, we taught more basic. The fifth and sixth, they said sixth. It was third to sixth. We taught a much more advanced. I put a curriculum together on renewable energy. My slides about your program is there. Hydrogen, hydrogen station, wave energy technology, which is another HNEI technology that's been out at the base for quite some years. Geothermal, which is another thing we're studying with the University of Hawaii. All the different aspects of renewable energy is what we taught. And then, as you know, I invited you and Pat to come and teach the fifth and sixth grade gifted students on some renewable, on hydrogen technology and on wave energy technology. And I know that we all enjoyed it because we were asked very interesting questions. And I got to tell a story, a quick story. I have the right to do that. Those kids were so smart, and they asked such great questions, like really good questions. And I have to compare them to this group of students I had from Stanford who came to my system, you see over the shoulder for a tour. And there were 20 of them, and I didn't get one question. They were totally disinterested. And you compare that to the gifted student. I couldn't believe it. I asked, what the heck are you guys even doing over here? You're just like bumps on a log, curiosity. Vacation, spring break. Do you remember the best question this young lady asked you about fuel cells? She said, well, if everybody in the world starts using fuel cells and the byproduct of fuel cells is water, what are we going to do with all that water? Isn't that going to raise the level of the oceans? No, that was a pretty amazing question. That's a pretty good question that she's thinking through the problem. She's already looking at it as a system and saying, well, it's producing water. What do we do with the water? So that's a great logical thinking. So we're getting close to the end. So first of all, another question is, how can all these actually engineers out there become members of AEE? How do they do that, Russ? Well, they can contact me or they can go onto our website, aehawaii.org. There's a tremendous amount of information in there. All of our board members are in there. They can contact any one of us. Any one of the board members would be happy to help them get involved. We have what I feel is a great blog. They can see all the different things that we've been working on talking about from a hydrogen fuel station. It's a great website. It's still evolving. That's how they can get involved easily. They can call me at any time. So what's the fee structure? So AEE National, the main AEE is $300 a year. As you know, you don't have to be an AEE National member to join a YA chapter. To join a YA chapter by itself is $50. But you can join a national, including the chapter, of the $350 a year. Students are different. We were only charging $10. Oh, well, that's a no-brainer, really. We're only charging $10 at this point. You know, we want to get as many students involved as we can. What can I say? In fact, I got a call yesterday from the AEE National vice president for region five, which were part of region five. And she was talking to me about doing an online training course for high school students. It would not be great. Training is training in seminars and conferences. Education is really what AEE is about. You know, I have pretty much the same goal as you to help the state of Hawaii to reach its goal. But we want to reach a goal with zero-emission technology. And that's a whole other show. And I know you do those shows all the time. But OK, so we're almost out of time. But I'd just like to give you an opportunity to give one final pitch to our viewers and to the engineers who are not members yet. So here's your chance to give your quick elevator speech, Russ. Well, please go to our website. Check it out. If you like it, contact me. Contact any of the board members that you might know that are in there. I'm happy to talk to you about any subject and energy management that you would like to talk to, talk about. And we get involved in some really, really great things. I mean, just some of the trainings that we're working on is our HVAC, how energy projects are affected by maintenance. And that was widely praised when we did that. We were working with you, Mitch, on a hydrogen program seminar. Now working with Nicole Loutz on a geothermal seminar. And so some of the tours that we're looking at doing is going down and seeing the new OE-35, wave energy technology, WEC, wave energy converter, it's down in Hollywood Harbor. And again, COVID has kind of stymied us from all this. OK. Please go to our website. You have any questions? Thanks so much for us, so. You're welcome. OK, we'll have to leave it there. You've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. Today we've been discussing the Association of Energy Engineers, AEE Hawaii with Russ Kohler. Thanks very much for participating, Russ. I really appreciate it. You're welcome, Mitch. Take care. Aloha, everyone. Aloha.