 Hey Ilohan, welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and we're glad you're with us today. We're going to do kind of a little bit different show today. I think it's going to be kind of fun and it was inspired by the fact that I'm trying to design a house and I haven't done that since I was like in college trying to do architecture and of course all the building codes have changed and a bunch of other stuff has changed but so is the technology and you know as I work in my regular day job about trying to do micro grids and vehicles that are all new technology I start to think you know well how do we take a hundred year old grid and houses that are wired and have been set up for the last 50 or 60 years with an electrical system that's not changed a whole lot other than having grounded outlets and GFI units and stuff in your kitchens and bathroom. What are some of the new technologies and new ways that we could look at wiring a house that would maybe be much more efficient, much more redundant, you know where if one system failed you still have another system to back you up and maybe even less expensive because you'd use smaller wires instead of big 14 or 12 gauge wires to run your AC power. So we're going to talk about that today with my favorite electrical engineer from Burns & McDonald, Ryan Womans and thanks for being here again today, Ryan. So we talked a little bit about this while we're off the air and it's like what are some of the things that we could do, I mean I talked a little bit about maybe let's start at the top and work our way down. We've got solar on the roof and it's providing a bunch of DC electric power that are off the grid house. We have an off the grid house and that solar is being collected and used, put through inverters to provide AC power to the house which is what most houses are wired for today and then battery storage to make sure that when the solar is not running, when it's nighttime or whatever you've got stored up energy to put through those inverters and go into the AC system. So at the top of the house we have solar and it's DC by design, right? It's DC power. So we have these new LED lights that like the ones in the studio here, really bright really efficient, use hardly any electricity compared to incandescent lights, no heat, you know a lot of really little heat, got a lot of great characteristics and they could be 12 volt. How could we start at that lighting level and set up maybe just the lighting system to be DC instead of AC? Would that be reasonable or feasible or what would be some of the advantages of doing that? Yeah, so reasonable and feasible yes and yes, technically possible yes. So we get yeses all across the board. We run into a little bit of an issue and we'll just write that off for the rest of the show which is some codes and standards that will require you to do certain things in certain situations. Because sometimes codes and standards while they are all very safe and they're great and we're going to build by that as far as just talking, we can have a safe conversation about how to do something but it might not get a permit because it's a different way of doing it. And then let's think, we're an off-grid house, is that where we're at? No, off-grid house. Okay, so a few things I start to think about right away is I consider energy, we are 100% renewable off the grid house, we can start to consider our energy as a little bit of a scarce resource, at least a limited resource, anything we're generating on-site so when we have all those variables set we start to look at lighting. Right now if we're LED or sitting underneath LED fixtures they are likely they're a DC LED but they're all powered off of AC off the normal panel board. So what we're doing now with our LED lights for the most part at least in houses is we're taking solar DC power, right through an inverter that turns into an AC power to put it in your house to rent the AC power to a light that's DC power and convert it back to DC. So do we have efficiency losses there in heat and transmission and things like that? There is, there is an efficiency loss going from DC to AC. It's also another component we have to pay for it's also another component that can fail. So when we stack all those, can we get rid of them? We had DC as you say from the solar and the battery, we're consuming DC on the LED. Yeah, we could get rid of the middle components and produce and store our DC energy and then consume directly on the DC level. So yeah, it is technically doable and cheaper even to buy the correct LED light fixture to the voltage that we are storing it at and then our cable size because the LED is such a small, small amperage even at these lower voltages, it is still a relatively low current. We can put in smaller cables, now that's where we're going to talk code and standards remember we threw those out a little bit ago. So yeah, I can technically install a smaller cable for a smaller load and have it be safe and all of that would amount to be in a less cost on our off the grid house. And as a trend copper is getting more and more expensive rather than cheaper as evidenced by the people that steal copper out of our utility company lines, things like that. So let's just say right now in a standard house as it's built right now to code you come in and maybe have a 15 ounce circuit that's going to lighting to several rooms and the wire is a 14 gauge wire and it's set up so that the neutral line is all synced out but the hot line is interrupted by the switch. The switch is the one that interrupts the hot line to be to code. So you've got a at least a 14 gauge line of hot power going to your switch and then a neutral line going on to your light and the hot line coming back to the switch is all 14 gauge and that could be 15, 20 feet of 14 gauge wire for every light going back to every switch when that could be something even a smaller speaker wire or I mean pretty small. Even smaller. Yeah like what you have on your computer speakers little thin wires. Yeah. Saving probably probably a fourth maybe of the copper that's in those other wires. We are definitely saving a magnitude of cost and not just on the material but the installation itself it's easier to install and there's less risk installing voltage systems. So the first hypothetical including the code. Yeah. We have solar on the roof maybe a bank of 12 volt batteries that are set up to stay as a 12 volt system. Sure. It goes right to your lights and only your lights. That's all they do. We can do that. Okay. Pretty simple. Pretty straight forward. Yeah. Hard to wire. No. Let's do it. Okay. So now let's move ourselves down another step. See some of your bigger appliances and stuff that maybe aren't well suited from 12 volt DC. Although at this point I want to inject that your car is 12 volt DC. Your speedboat is 12 volt DC. Your RV is probably 12 volt DC. Maybe also propane or something. But you basically have a whole lot of choices even with some small appliances in the 12 volt DC range. So let's say with your laptop computer which you are also kind of like the LED have a DC system and a DC battery and you're plugging it into an AC unit with an inverter to make it back to DC and that's losing efficiency again. What if we had USB ports like at chest height where our AC power is down low and our USB ports are up at desk height or a little higher maybe above the fire break in the wall. Okay. And so it's separate for code that we're going to create after we finish this discussion. We're going to make our own code. And now you have USB ports instead of outlets in every room. Maybe a couple in every room. So when you're in there you can charge or run on your cell phone. You can plug in your computer with a USB plug instead of converting to AC and back to DC again. Is that feasible? Yeah it's feasible. If we want to stay on your mantra that we're going to try and stay on one voltage level or our lights are on we decided a 12 volt system or maybe we switch because our USB is actually typically a 5 volt system. Oh okay. So they're a little bit different, a little bit off. That's the USB standard if we're playing by those rules. We could if you want to stay on your 12 volt system put the car charging port around your house and we could plug in because that's something that has been a standardized component. But yeah let's just switch it to USB. Let's go upstairs to our light switch that to 5 volts. Okay. Now we've got a 5 volt system. It can produce a lot of light. We can plug a power light off of an ethernet cable. Okay. So this is kind of a sidebar that we didn't talk about. But you brought in the car and plugging your car charger. Well what if you could take your electric vehicle now and plug it in to charge your 12 volt or 5 volt system. You didn't need an inverter or something in there too. But that then augments your batteries or solar already in that system. So for example your solar is not working because the sun's been under a cloud for two weeks and it's been raining. You could actually take your car and pretty easily convert some 12 volt energy coming out of your car into running your house. Assuming you have a robust enough battery system in your car to not drain it down to nothing. But for a short term like for one evening or something you get through a minor power outage. Is that feasible? Yeah you could do that with my Jeep right now. I could go plug it in and wire it up and make it work. If you have a larger electric vehicle you got a lot of power there. Definitely a different voltage and different system going on in there and likely a lot of DC as well. So then we would have another conversion. But yeah everybody's car that you have right now. Okay. We could suck some 12 volt off of that and repower our system if maybe our solar broke or it's been cloudy for too long or we really want to use a lot of energy then plug in our cars. You know I'm really holding back on a fuel cell here too with hydrogen. So we won't even talk about that. I'll push that off the table. Let's add that to next time. We'll do the same thing with the codes and stuff. We'll push the hydrogen off on the side for now. Okay so we have a DC system could be 5 volt, could be 12 volt running everything above the waste in your house lights, USB ports. And it's a separate system but charging that system and also charging another battery system, maybe a 48 volt battery system is the solar. We have a more robust 48 volt battery system that now is going through inverters and giving you your AC power that you need for motors, refrigerator motors, compressors, your TV, the TVB DC also. Probably already is actually. Not like the USB port. It definitely is DC right now. So even your TV could be 4 volt DC or 5 volt DC somewhere there. But your bigger appliances that have heavier motors and stuff generally AC is a little bit better for that because you've got a little bit more robust amperage capability getting through that wire to run AC systems. Is that a good analogy? Not. In general it can be. So DC motors and AC motors both have very strong attributes to either side that make them good for different applications. When we start talking appliances, AC wins because you're going to plug it into a wall. That's why it wins. Whether it's not, it's the right motor for the right application would be up for a mechanical engineer to help debate. But the DC motors and especially at this scale are very very capable. So no, you wouldn't have to switch over to AC to drive a compressor for refrigeration or maybe a washer dryer or something like that. You could keep a DC but we need to then go back to the manufacturing world and say why aren't we building these with DC? Because I really want to do it on my one house that I've got and I want a DC refrigerator. And you can have a DC refrigerator. So I was under the impression that an advantage to AC when you had like heavy draw or big Russian loads from equipment that has motors and things like that. But DC can handle it. So really we could make the entire house DC as one option. We're kind of creating the never been made before house so we have options now and trying to figure out what would be good for the world if we rearranged all houses or most houses, single family houses off the grid to be this way. They could be completely DC. Yeah, no absolutely. We could have a DC house multiply by a couple billion and have a lot of DC houses. Well we'll shave some efficiencies by not converting. We do have different voltages so we do have some conversion going on there. Depending on how you're setting up your system and now we're talking two billion of these so we can get really efficient. If you had a 48 volt system you actually have four 12 volt systems already in there. So as long as you're pulling from the right battery and keeping them all leveled off about the same that's what's going to help you off. So it's very possible and I think at this point we got rid of the AC system. I don't think we were intending to but I can't think of a lot of loads that could not be handled by DC. We'll get into some scaling issues but very, very possible. So we may if we were going to be off the grid, if we had the choice of appliances is probably a better way to approach this. If we had a reasonably priced refrigerator unit that you could buy without spending $6,000 for a single because it's only one company makes DC refrigerators. But we got an economy of scale manufacturing and stuff and it came down to the same prices AC maybe even a little cheaper than AC because they're using less wires or whatever. We could do a whole house on 48 volt DC. That reasonable? Yeah we could do a whole house. The refrigerator won't be a cheaper DC component. It won't have less copper. We do need to have a certain amount of energy dissipated and converted. That energy will be in the form of let's say watts. Whether it's a DC watt or VA or AC we still need energy to be confirmed or transformed. So the amount of copper within our appliances will be this amount of energy in the appliance. We'll come back to this after a break and talk a little bit about what's already available for RVs, boats and cars in DC power that could easily fill that bill in an RV or in a house. Okay we'll be back in 60 seconds. Talk about that. Aloha I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa Hawaii Japanese talk show on Think Tech Hawaii. Konnichiwa Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and it's streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Aloha my name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because Security Matters. Aloha. Welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here on Energy for the Friday that we have just amped up a few more kilowatts or at least a bunch of amps anyway. And we're talking about how to change our house to a newer system that hopefully is more efficient and less expensive to install and maybe operate and maybe even simpler and safer for that matter. Using technology we already have but we're throwing out the code piece. We're saying none of this would work to code right now because it hasn't been written but it's notional. We could think about these things and maybe look to the future and develop national fire protection code and international building code that accommodates these things. So that's what we're talking about. I've got Ryan Wilbins here from Burns and McDonald and we're talking about maybe making our house. We started talking about appliances. We also have a lot of people have on the mainland, not so much here in Hawaii, recreational vehicles that are also mostly DC and sometimes propane. I think people would be surprised if they understood that in RVs and other things the refrigerator is propane. The heating and cooling is propane. There's water heaters that run off propane. There's a lot of things that can be done with propane as a refrigerant slash energy source in a system that are really efficient. I went in an RV in Alaska a couple years about 10 years ago and on an 8 day trip I used $5 worth of propane and that ran my stove, my air conditioning and my refrigerator and I thought that was pretty cool. We can even look at natural gases even though they're carbon based still. The US mainland has a lot of that. They might want to even think about that for a while until we get completely free. To help us get our economy, our efficiency down, switching to LEDs, going with DC systems and maybe going to natural gas for some of these. Let's push the natural gas with the hydrogen for now and the USB and the IBS and just talk about DC systems. You start with refrigerators. You're pretty confident we could have a double store zero refrigerator and freezer system that could be DC. We definitely can. From the electrical side there's not an issue to drive the mechanical components for refrigeration. Refrigerator, freezer, those are some of the big appliances that you got in your house. When you look at an oven or a stove if you're still rocking the electrical range there's no motors in there other than maybe a fan. That guy is pulling a lot of power. Electrical directly to heat is not very favorable from the electrical consumption. From an energy use the conversion is not great. Maybe then we'll pull back your other resource. Then we got a washer and drier with a pretty big size load. I mean, boats already have them too. TV's are a DC device. They've got their own inverter. Which brings up an interesting point. When we start converting our sensitive electronics, our computers, some TVs, if we're going to just plug our phone directly in there is a level of power quality that needs to be had and given to these devices and it can be straight. The system if we're going to just convert and start plugging in all of our electronics and take our TVs and say get rid of your inverters. I'm going to give you everything you need. There will be a very strict level of power quality that we need to place on our system. But we're going to do it once. We're going to give it to everything. We're not going to make every device try and handle their power quality on their own. Is that in a lot of cases focused on the battery and the battery management system and how the batteries work? Yeah, it will be on the battery management system but when you turn a device on, when our refrigerator turns on, it'll take a power draw. It pulls a bunch of power. And that will drive our voltage down briefly until we can reestablish. We need a system that doesn't drop voltage that it's actually holding the power. Like a built in surge protector we have on a lot of our computers right now. Yeah, so it's like a surge protector to prevent the high end rush but if it were to drop, you need to compensate for that drop and make sure that you're not failing any components. The sensitive devices they need a nice clean power signal to operate. Okay, so it's at least theoretically possible that we can convert all the way to DC for everything. Virtually everything except maybe an electric range or an electric dryer or an electric water heater. Those three I would think would be kind of more on the, let's go with natural gas on those or maybe burn hydrogen or something if you want to be clean instead of natural gas. Yeah. Then we could do that. Yeah, I would, at that point I would bring in your side of the conversation we've kind of set aside which was the alternative energy, something that has a lot more energy density. When we're converting and producing heat we're much better with something like propane natural gas, even hydrogens, extremely energy dense and very efficient at converting to heat. Even to cooling there's ways to create cool out of heat as one of our shows actually talked about, but I don't know to be a tough one to watch. I try. Don't recommend watching that. Don't try that at home folks. Don't go back and look up our show on refrigeration and air conditioning. Heat from cooling. Cooling from heat. We can do it, but at that point I would recommend if we're building our house of the future future and then the miniature step being natural gas until we get to that hydrogen house that has a DC storage and a deep hydrogen storage. The hydrogen storage then is directly used for heating our range and our water heater and our dryer. Okay. I will pull this back to hydrogen now on purpose because the hydrogen also plays another role. It's energy storage just like the batteries. So for example, we just bought our new hydrogen fuel cell car. So I've been told that a Toyota Mirai, which is kind of like a standard model passenger car, can give you about three days worth of energy for the average house just in its system. Batteries and hydrogen. So now if we throw the car into the mix, which is also DC on that hydrogen fuel cell side, and we throw that in the mix and say, okay, now we can connect your car to your house to augment your battery storage with either hydrogen or onboard batteries. Now you have another backup system and if you're making a lot of hydrogen, because you have extra solar panels and it's really sunny all the time where you live, and you can store the hydrogen, now you can even put fuel in your car from stuff making off your solar roof and it's all carbon free. So if you really want to be looking at 2045 as a carbon free utility grid and you want to get really out there, let's look at pulling it all together. Let's look at pulling the cars and the house and the solar and the hydrogen and the batteries and inverters if needed but even natural gas. If you can't bridge yourself all the way to hydrogen to convert hydrogen cook tops and ovens and gas heater, water heaters and stuff, that's going to take money too to convert those. So maybe until those become more ubiquitous, we're not going to do those yet. They'll just still be natural gas or whatever. But what we're trying to do on the show is basically say, look, there's options out there. We don't have on the table now, mostly because of the code. You try to get this put in your house and the inspector just go, I don't know about this. It's not going to happen. But if we can draw from a clean slate and that's what the show is about is the possibilities. Are we in the realm of the real here? You're in the realm of possibility and technically acceptable to make your personal carbon footprint essentially zero, I think is what you're saying. That includes the energy you're producing and consuming on your own property and the energy you're consuming as you travel. Just don't get on an airplane because that'll lead away your carbon footprint today. There's some congresswomen that might come off your case. I've got plenty of chickens and they're making up for it right now. But yeah, you can do that. It's possible. We can do that today. Great. And that's the whole, that was my whole idea when I was thinking about the show. I don't think people really spend a lot of time thinking about their power grid in their house or whatever. I mean, they go home, they turn on the light, light comes on, they're happy. They turn on the refrigerator, open the door, it's cold inside, they're happy. They don't really think about, hey, how can we do it better? And electricians are going, well, black wire, white wire, that's all I care about. Don't make it more complicated than I need. But people like you and I who are getting creative and trying to make the new future come true where we don't have carbon all over the place. You know, we think about this stuff and it is possible. And I'm not an electrical engineer and you are. And I'm a real creative sort of guy in a very weird kind of way. And when I bounce stuff off of you, that's electrical engineering and you can give me a thumbs up, I'm really happy even though you dampen it with the building code and never let you do it, Stan. But it's possible. So it gives us a starting point to talk to legislators, to talk to other people, to talk to companies that make refrigerators and things like that and make hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and things to really start thinking of how they could put the whole system together and make it so that we lower our utility costs, increase our survivability in a natural disaster by dispersing resources and having individual grids instead of one big grid that's got a lot of fail points lower the carbon if I didn't say that already and hopefully make all of us a little smarter and more, a little bit more attuned to what we're using for energy. So one of the things that I ask a lot of people is, when you look at your electric bill, how many kilowatt hours a day do you use? Because it's on there. Your average is on there. Every month shows you how many days it's covered and what your average kilowatt use is and most people have zero clue. I'm lost in eight. I know exactly what that is. But that's my point. You and I are probably the only two people that look at our bills with that kind of scrutiny but that's what I'm getting at. If everybody had the system in their house and it's not complicated, that they kind of understood that they were running themselves, it's no more complicated than your cell phone. I can guarantee you that. I hardly know how to use all those things on my cell phone. We could do a house and a car mix that are really efficient and run off of solar, maybe some wind, a mix of batteries, hydrogen and maybe even natural gas. It's all very doable. What we're saying is in theory that with the economies of scale then this does have the theoretical chance of being cheaper and safer is a loose term applied there. But cheaper and a better way to do something given the technologies we have right now. Okay. So you heard it here first on Stan Energy Man. It's all doable. You guys that do NFPA and building codes just make it happen. We can start heading down the clean and green road and we can call it the new Woobins and Osterman clean green economy. And we'll go that way. And we're not running for office because we don't like politics. Thanks for joining us on Stan Energy Man this week and we'll see you next week Friday where we'll have another interesting guest. Not as interesting as Ryan but pretty interesting and we'll see you back later on. Allah.