 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good afternoon, Howard Wiig, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. My guest today is, I would say, an energy revolutionary, because I and a lot of other people are part of the energy efficiency establishment. And we know exactly what we're doing. We know exactly why we're doing it. We can cite numbers all day long and twice on Sunday, including dollar numbers. And my guest, Mr. John Borland, CEO of JOB Technologies, is about to turn all of that on our heads. This is going to be a very, very exciting program. So welcome, John. Thanks so much for coming. Thank you, Howard, for inviting me. So let's start off with, as you wanted to, Puerto Rico. We're all reading that the island was devastated. The production infrastructure was devastated, continues to be devastated. I think the majority of the population still is without electricity. And those of us, again, in the energy efficiency establishment, say, let's do microgrids. We're going to have individualized power plants. We're going to feed off of solar. We're going to have batteries here which feed in and batteries feed out. And we're going to have our EVs, where their big batteries are going to take off of them. And this microgrid is going to work like magic. And we will vastly reduce our dependence on fossil fuel because of all this solar-powered energy on this microgrid. And you are saying, John, the heck with the microgrid? Let's just produce more of, most of our own, this is for residential now, single-family residential townhouses, produce most of our energy by PV and a couple other technologies and then just when we need it on our high-use days, then we feed into the grid. Every revolutionary, and we'll get into this later, you say, the heck with efficiency because we in the establishment say, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. And you say, nope, nope, nope, can all be done from solar energy. And I did catch you on one thing, though, LEDs. You converted to LEDs. Those are the simplest, easiest, a six-year-old can convert to LEDs. Here's the light, Johnny. Screw it in. Got it. Screw it in. It's simple. But aside from that, you're saying we don't need to do all of these efficiency measures because we can take care of it all with the what's up on our roof and harvesting our abundant sunshine and then distributing it at the right time in the right way. So why don't you, you wanted to start out with Puerto Rico. Why don't you start out with Puerto Rico? So as I was telling Howard, Puerto Rico has shown a good example of why we need 100% renewable energy today. And by achieving 100% renewable energy on a residential level, you basically become off-grid. So therefore, you're no longer dependent on the utility. So Puerto Rico is a clear example where I think this morning they're saying, it's still like 29% only have electricity and 71% is still without electricity. And it's been over six weeks now. And so again, that's why if the people in Puerto Rico did what I've done for the last seven months, there wouldn't be an issue. And I also refer to another example again, is Hawaii being an island, again, it's even more isolated than Puerto Rico from the mainland. And if those remember back in 2006, we had the earthquake on the Big Island. And O'ahu and I lost power for 24 hours because of the generators shut down because of the vibration. So again, if I had my system then, I would be happy just running off-grid and not relying on the utilities. So that's why we're very susceptible to natural disasters, be it the earthquake or hurricanes. So that's why if you do this one home at a time on O'ahu, basically we will get rid of the duck kerb problem from HIKO. And in fact, we'll save more money. If you look at the cost analysis, even if you do these so-called micro-grid or utility-scale renewables, we'll still be charged from HIKO at what, say 25 cents a kilowatt hour? My latest bill was 28.47 cents. Well, yeah, mine was 30 cents per kilowatt hour. But I did the calculations for my current, what I call, solar energy plus multiple storage option. My energy usage is about 3.7 cents a kilowatt hour. And so therefore, at that low rate, why do you ever want to pay utility or pay HIKO or pay anyone else when, again, if you do it yourself, you're at 3.7 cents a kilowatt. So that's my estimation, which means you have solar PV electrical, you have solar thermal for hot water, you have multiple storage. So I have both electrical battery storage. I have hot thermal storage for the hot water. And I also have cold thermal storage. And so by using all that properly, and you also have to have the right home energy management system. So that means, you know, when, how to optimize your key home appliances, you need to modify some of your key home appliances like, like Howard mentioned about the lights. I used to have a plasma TV, a large screen TV. Luckily, it died last December. And so when I bought an LED TV, my electrical bill also went down by going from plasma to LED. So there was another efficiency measure there. Exactly. And I also replaced all my light bulbs with the LED. So again, that way overnight I'm only using two kilowatt energy for the room lights. So all of those benefits and allow you to go off grid and use your battery overnight to supply the energy. Okay. So let me back up to the duck curve for those of you uninitiated in the wonders of the energy world with all of the PV panels that we in Hawaii have on our roofs today, the demand for electricity from Hiko used to go get up to ramp up to speed around 9.30 10 in the morning. And then it was pretty flat through the day and have a little afternoon peak and so remain pretty flat and then it would go up in the evening when all of us came home from our homes and schools and all the tourists came home from shopping and whatnot. That was flat, a little bump. Then the PVs came along and the middle of the day when the sun is hottest, the demand for electricity went down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And then when the sun started to go down, the demand would go up, up, up, up, up, up. So you've got this swoop and up and this is the head of the duck up here and this is the back of the duck down here. So your idea, John, is to manipulate things. Instead of just your one house, we had 100,000 single family residences and townhouses. With your type of system, you would absorb a lot of that heat during the middle of the day to put in storage and then you would use it whenever you, gosh darn well, wanted to use it. Right, because since you're not selling back to Hiko, Hiko won't have this feed-in into their utility. And again, because you're storing it for night use with the battery, again, you're also not demanding from Hiko. So your overall, Hiko overall level should go down and be flat. So it's good for utilities and it's the cheapest, most economic way for the homeowners and my return on investment is 2.7 years based on that. That is absolutely amazing. Again, this is another completely revolutionary offer that you're putting before us because we normally say PV plus storage plus this plus that, minimum 6, 7 years and you've got it down to... Less than 3. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's absolutely amazing. Maybe you could try to run the numbers for us a bit. Yes. So, Walt, it's easier if I had any equation to show or I'm gonna have this one chart. So by not having the graphics, this is how I explained it. So before solar, I would be using on an average, this is now based on my past five years Hiko bill. It was 1,500 kilowatts a month or roughly 47 kilowatt hour per day. That's my normal... That's a lot, by the way. That's 2.5 times your average home usage. That's why I'm surprised at how does the home usage average come up to 500 a month. That to me is mind-boggling, but I was at 1,500. So basically... So being at 47 kilowatts per day, when I first added just solar and battery, the traditional stuff, it only dropped it by 50%. Not by solar, you mean conventional PV. The PV with the battery storage that people say will save money. I wasn't saving money. It made my return on investment 16 years. Well, you did save money. You reduced your use by about half? Yes. Wasn't that it? Yeah. But I put out a lot in capital expense to do that. Yes. Yes. Yes. And invest the money elsewhere for 16 years based on return or in the equipment for the solar. So I'm saying 16 years of return on investment, better to do it in stock market or someplace else instead of in utility. So then you were unhappy with that 50% reduction. So I then worked with my solar vendor and battery vendor. So working with both Poncho Solar and Tabuchi Electric, I had to install three different energy monitoring systems at home because I wanted to identify the root cause of all of my energy usage. Root cause meaning which appliances or which equipment in the home causes that draw and when. And when also. Right. So the one hour resolution for the monitoring wasn't good enough. Five minutes also wasn't good enough. I tried the Blue Planet Foundation Bigly approach. That was five minute resolution. You need at least one minute resolution to see the energy spikes from the date. Meaning you have to go minute by minute by minute. Use is going up, going down, going up, going down, yeah. For example, like the microwave oven, you talk about one minute to 90 seconds. So again, the one minute interval clearly shows the spike of that. Again, when your pool pump comes in in the morning, you can see the one minute spike from the pool pump ramping up. So you need to have the right resolution. So once we identified the root cause, I get in, go and look to see what are the renewable energy options I have to replace that grid by. So let's take the number one power usage is the electric hot water heater. So I also have solar thermal hot water. And so that's great most of the time. However, I still saw a deficiency where I would still have to use grid by luck on cloudy days or other days. So I then decided to use my solar PV energy to power the electrical heater element. How are all of it or just boost it beyond what the solar panels would supply? Well, they sort of run and complement each other because the solar hot water really doesn't work until more later in the afternoon. However, if it's cloudy, then it's too late to wait till then. So the electrical may boost it up to about 135 degrees Fahrenheit. And then the solar thermal will boost it or will supercharge it to at least 165 degrees Fahrenheit. And this is to create reserve. Right, you don't have a full day, so it's based on each family size. So I use four full baths a day. So that means I need to have all that stored capacity to do that. And on that cherry break, we need to take break number one. We're barely even getting warmed up. John Borland, president of J-O-B Technologies, and I will be back in a moment. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, raising public awareness. We have this crazy thing going on today. I was just walking by and all these DJs and producers are set up all around the city. I just walked by and I said, what's happening? Guys, they told me they're making music. I had no musical talent and then sat down and kind of played some music. I saw it do it. Third afternoon again, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Stink Tech, Hawaii, with John Borland, president of J-O-B Technologies. And before I forget, disclaimer, John is mentioning specific products. Neither I nor the State Energy Office nor Stink Tech, Hawaii endorses these products. These are simply here for illustrative purposes. Now, back to the fascinating stuff. Let me tackle this business of 3.7 cents a kilowatt hour. Again, we think it's not possible, but you say your total cost was $29,500. That's for the panels. The whole system, total system. Everything, and there's three different energy management systems, I think. You have to monitor, right? Monitoring the energy usage system. And again, another key point of that is, so everything really relies on the total cost of the system. And so because I was at several solar conferences, both in the U.S. and also in Europe a month ago, the cost of the system for the United States and in Hawaii is, I'm just surprised, three times more than Europe. So for example, the cost per watt in Europe is 80 euro cents per watt, which is about a dollar per watt. So my friends in the Netherlands installed home residential solar, they only pay a dollar a watt. My case in Hawaii, I actually looked at seven different vendors a year ago. The price went from like 320 a watt up to like 480 a watt, so the huge price difference. The national average in the U.S. now is $2.80 a watt. So there's a lot of other factors that affect the net final cost of doing business in Hawaii. It's like buying a car, you know, but therefore, yes, so that's why I went with the lowest cost, because I realized that I'm wasting about 35% of my solar PV is not being used. So the total cost isn't really, you know, you want the low cost how to use it efficiently. But if you take the cost of the system, Hawaii is 5.5 kilowatts per day radiance. That means that on a typical day, you're going to produce 5.5 kilowatt hours per day, yeah, and times 365 to get your per year, times the size of your PV system. So my inverter will output 5.5 kilowatt hour. So that times that, then you times it by 20 year life of the system. Some people use 25, I use 20. So you get those large numbers, and then you divide that by the cost, total cost of your system, and that gives you cents per kilowatt hour. And that's where I came up with the 3.2 cents per kilowatt hour. Over that 20 years. Over that 20 years. And that's why, if you recall, there was an article I read that on Kauai, the cost to buy electricity from a solar PV farm is like 11 cents a kilowatt. So 11 versus my three. So that means there's a 4x, what I call profit that that solar farm person is making over with the solar utilities. And then Kauai utilities will sell that 30 cents to the residential. So you have all these markups. So if you do it yourself, you're going to get the lowest possible cost, which is a 3 cents a kilowatt hour. And then you're not totally off grid because there's at least one day a week when you have this peak demand. And so it's at that point when you engage the utility and buy something from them. Right. So like for example, like we had the rainy days this week. So on a rainy day, of course, your solar output is diminished significantly. So on those days, I turned the grid power on, connected to the grid to both charge my battery and to use the dryer and other key home household appliance. Yes. And we were, excuse me, talking about the fact that the utility isn't going to make a whole lot of money off of this. I mean, they want to be selling all the time. But when we reduce the demand significantly, say 100,000 homes imitated you, the total demand would go way, way, way down. So that they could shut off either one or two of their least efficient. Right. Those obsolete power plants, right, they shut down. And that saves a heck of a lot of fuel use, a heck of a lot of personnel, heck of a lot of distribution. So that cost is going to go down. Correct. Just as the downtown power plant was shut off a few years ago. And this brings us a lot closer to the state school of 100% green energy by the year 2014. So, Guinness, as Howard was saying earlier, that's why my point is that you don't need to make your home super efficient. That's what my comment to Howard when I first met him was, forget this thing about insulating your home, about testing your air conditioning for the leak tightness. I'm using my excess PV to power my AC during the day. So in fact, turn on your air conditioning during the day to achieve cold thermal storage by cooling your room down. So when you come home from work, your house is already cool. You don't need to turn on your AC and so that demand goes away. And that's what I call cold thermal storage because you're chilling select rooms at home with all this excess PV electricity, which is just wasted anyway. And you mentioned time of use. Hawaiian Electric has not yet instituted time of use to my knowledge, has it? I have. I was one of the 3,000 that volunteered. So since May, I'm on time of use with Hawaiian Electric. But there's two definitions of time of use. My first definition is time of use of household appliance. That means only run your major appliances like the washer dryer between 10 in the morning and 3 o'clock when you had the peak solar generation. So that's time of use of key appliances. And you're using your own storage. Right, yes. And then the other time of use is on the utility rate from HECO. So I basically would always turn off the grid tie at 5 o'clock in the evening and then turn it on after 10 o'clock in the evening to avoid the peak time of use charge. Even on a rainy day, I would still turn it off during that time and then turn it back on at the lower rate. And to relate that to the duct curve, the Hawaiian Electric's most expensive electricity comes during that evening time when the duct's head is up there because they have to turn on additional power plants. They call them booster plants, which are less efficient and cost more money. But that's the way they can meet that peak. You are shaving that peak. You're making it go away. It goes away, right. So there's no evening and there's no morning peak. It's all flat. Correct. And then you've got a very unique way of heating your water. I think you said your solar panels heat to about 135 and then you boost from there using PV. No, the PV will only get it about 135 and I use the solar thermal, which will get it up to, my peak so far has been 190. But typically 165 will last a full night capacity when I supercharge it to that level. Because electrical heater will not get it that hot. But the solar thermal will get it that hot. And again, that's why I have a prior analysis of, again, I rake the source of renewable energy. So for the hot water, my first main primary source of energy is solar thermal. Second backup is the PV electrical. Third backup is the battery electrical. And then the last resort, fourth source of power is the grid buy. So by having this, I pick which to use to get the cheapest to the more expensive use of energy. And by solar thermal, you mean that the sun's heat hits the solar hot water panel. And the water is circulating through it. And it's colored black to absorb maximum amount of heat. Water passes through heats up and goes down into the tank. That's solar thermal, which many, many, many of us have to have on our roofs. But you're not using it, I think, properly, where you get, the key is to supercharge it for one full day. So whichever family size you have, it needs to be heated up to one full day capacity. So that you'll never have to tap into the grid. But for the grid, exactly. Otherwise, you're going to have this 4.5 kilowatt energy spike, like at two o'clock in the morning, to power your hot water heater. And the idea is that the hotter the water, when you turn on to take a shower, say the less hot water you're going to need, because you're going to put a heck of a lot of cold water in there, to get your, what do we take a shower at 105, 110, something like that? Yes. So again, so that means your hot water tank becomes your battery hot storage. This is a hot storage battery. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I always tell people, think of that 80 gallon tank as one great big battery. And so basically, I use about 16 kilowatt hour per day storage in my hot water tank. That will allow me to have the four full baths. Yeah. You're converting that hot water to two kilowatt hours. Yes. Yeah. And then, oh, and then, yeah, the whole concept of stored cool, where you air-condition the heck out of your house during those times, when there's abundant abundant PV generation, you cool it down. And I assume you've got a pretty tight home then, where it's not all leaky, like a typical Hawaiian home or? I mean, it's just yet, so it's not just cold air. Again, this is the word concept of cold thermal storage. So it's having thermally absorbent material. So you know how you go in a hotel room, especially in Hawaii? It's freezing cold, because they have thermally absorbent material, like the granite countertops, tile floors. Yeah. You don't want to walk barefoot on those tile floors. So it's not just the cold air. The concept of cold thermal storage is having, so if you were to build a home or room, I would build it from a cold thermal storage point of view. How would you optimize that? What would you use to absorb? What materials would you use to absorb? Like in the kitchen, you have the floor tiles. You can have the granite type counters or metallic surfaces, all of those thermally absorbent material, not carpets. Carpets, in the worst case or cloth, it's not absorbent. So again, glass material, all thermally absorbent. So it's however you want it. But again, the key there is cold thermal storage, not just air, but it's the material to make the room stay cold. And again, therefore, the leakiness of the room isn't critical as much as having to write thermally absorbent material. Okay, this is another revolutionary concept. I've been in this business for a while, and I've never heard of this. Again, because the hotel rooms are just this old cold, and it takes forever to heat it back up. Well, you know, we're getting into the winter months. I live in Manoa, and I get up very early in the morning, and I absolutely must have slippers on. And we've got one more minute. Do we have a slide with John's information on it? Oh, okay, John, why don't you give your email a look? Yes, if you want to contact me at johnoborland at aol.com. And that's B-O-R-L-A-N-D. Yes. At aol.com. Yeah, as you can tell, John is a very, very, very fascinating young man, and I certainly look forward to associating with you continually in the future to look at your... Are you doing this full-time? You're promulgating this? No, this is, I would say, this is a hobby. Hobby, okay. Because my main area is in semiconductor device processing. But as an end user, I'm also promoting solar now, yes. And you've given three talks to IEEE, the International Energy Efficiency... Yes, so on November 15th, I've given this talk in Japan at the Photobotek Science and Engineering Conference. Yeah, definitely getting the word out. It's a hot topic. People are very excited about off-grid 100% renewable today on a residential level. And on that cheery note, we must leave the bid you a fond adieu. Thank you so much, John Borland. We just barely got warmed up, pun intended, and see you back in two weeks. Think, take away, cold, green. Good evening.