 It's made by Malink. Good afternoon, Howard Wiig. Think, take Hawaii cold green. My honored guest today is Queen Nguyen of Hawaii Energy Systems. And boy, we're going to talk about exciting stuff. Exhaust hoods. Wow. You thought I had some sexy topics before. This is going to blow your socks off. Well, welcome to the program. And thank you so much for joining us here. Well, thank you very much, Howard. Thanks for having me. Yeah, we're going to talk about stuff that most people don't know about, but they darn well should know about. So if we could have our first slide, this would be a general slide, and this is Hawaiian Electric's pre-projection for 100% clean energy by 2045. This is when it still was with next era, and they still were looking at liquefied natural gas. The blue part of the spectrum is liquefied natural gas. On the left is current date. On the right is 2045. And then that sea foam green thing on the right is an unnamed type of new fuel. Well, this is what happened was next era left and then synthetic natural gas left. So this projection by Hawaiian Electric is no longer the future. And people like we and myself look at losing efficiency to start where we are on the left and just go on a straight line, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down until we get to zero. And we'll talk about all the wonderful ways, not all, but many of the wonderful ways we can achieve that. So we talk a little bit about what Hawaii Energy Systems does. Yeah, so Hawaii Energy Systems, we're based in Lava Valley. We're an energy management and controls company, and we focus on demand control for energy savings. And so we go into a lot of buildings and install DDC and energy management systems and specific control systems in the end goals to save energy. And if for those who aren't familiar with demand control, think of a father in a house with three teenagers and he's going around, who left these lights on? Who's taking a 30-minute shower? Don't you kids, you think money grows on trees? And by turning all the lights off and demanding that the daughter get out of the shower and not use six trillion gallons of water, he's doing demand control on a rather... Right. And that's exactly it. So I mean, that's what our company does, it's all automated rights done by computers and by logic. But yeah, exactly. It's delivering the exact amount of air conditioning, for example, for the minimum amount of energy and so. And so that applies to any type of system. Could be refrigeration, air conditioning, hot water, lighting, exactly what you just said. Yeah. And just to give another very simple corollary, say you have an AC system and you want to walk into a cool house, so in a bad old days, you kept the AC running all day long. Now you have remote control for the AC so that when you and the family are headed home, you activate it, save 15 minutes in advance, and you walk into a cool house, but you didn't have it running all day long. Another very simple analogy. Exactly, yeah. So let's get into our slides here. Castle Medical Center, I think this is one of your very, very proud achievements here. Yeah, so this is Castle Medical. We have our control system there, and it's doing energy management. It's tracking all the important pieces of equipment for the HVAC system there. And so what you see on the slide is a control panel for the children plant. And you see there's a couple cooling towers. It might be a little bit too small, but on the top there of the graphic, there's a cooling tower. In the middle is a chiller. There's a couple pumps on the left and right. And so each of those pieces of equipment kind of work individually in their control system. So what we do is we install our algorithm that takes control of this plant and gets the most efficiency of this plant as possible, using it as a system, not an individual piece of equipment. And so the goal is to deliver, that screen says 411 tons, the goal is to deliver that amount of energy or cooling with a minimum amount of energy. So the goal is to minimize the K-2 per ton. So you see on the graphics 0.75, which is pretty good. And since we've been in some very, very muggy weather and we all have memory of that horrible weather we had last year, and it's all a combination. That was El Nino plus global warming. Now at least we're in the La Nina phase. But what's interesting is the more moisture you have in the air, the harder the AC has to work. And I'm sure that you have sensors that sense the incoming humidity and say, okay, we've got to ramp up. But then as soon as we go back to our tree winds, humidity goes down, then you have controls that say, okay, we can relax a bit now. So air conditioning is not just sensible heat, but also latent heat. Sensible is dry bulb temperature. Latent heat is the humidity that's in the air. And so for air conditioning we're trying to take care of the humidity and temperature. On really humid days, not only is there more air conditioning needed for the building, but then the equipment doesn't run as efficiently. So your cooling tower doesn't get as cold of water as it'd like to. So you're kind of embellishing both things. And so yeah, we measure for dry bulb and humidity. And then based on that, we can control our system to run as most efficiently in those conditions as possible. And even though a hospital is a 24-7 operation, I'm sure that there's a heck of a lot more activity going on during a workday than there is at three o'clock in the morning so that you adjust the flow according to the activities and the heat generated internally and all the activity, all the machines on and so forth. Correct, yeah. So if you look at a typical building or hospital, you'll see kind of a load curve. And the peak is usually about 3 or 4 p.m. And then if it's 24-hour building, the minimum amount of energy used or cooling needed is usually 3 a.m., 4 a.m. or something like that. So yeah, this system automatically adjusts to the load of the building. And so it senses for... We have temperature sensors and pressure sensors throughout the building that we take in that input and the algorithm determines what's the best possible operating conditions for maximum energy savings. Yeah, and can you actually shut down chillers at two in the morning or they just go into a sweet spot? Yeah, so the algorithm determines if it's shutting down compressors or shutting down chillers entirely. So if that graphic shows it has a couple chillers that are online, two chillers are online and then there's four compressors online with two that are offline. And so based on the building load, the outside conditions can cycle off compressors or cycle off even chillers depending on the load. And that's measured in real time. It's very fast. Instant. Instant, correct. And how much has Kessil saved as a result? Quite a bit of energy. So they have new chillers and so you see that Kato per ton, 0.75 before we got there was up in the 1.4 range. Ooh, that's almost double. Yeah, and so they save quite a bit of energy. It's in the 50s and $60,000 a year. That's just a control system. Of course they've done a lot of other work that I'm not accounting for. And that's something about efficiency. You do have to put out your initial capital investment but it gets repaid. Right. And most projects, DDC projects and control projects pay back within two, three years. And so your investment gets paid back fairly quickly and then after that it's all revenue up that. Yeah, to say a three-year payback that's kind of equivalent to a bank hanging a banner out of its front porch saying 33% interest paid. Correct. People would go invest. People would invest it right away. It was a 33% return. Mm-hmm. Well, let's see what else you're doing. Yeah. I think there's something called an Intellihood. What in the world is an Intellihood? Yeah, so what you see here is this is a demand control kitchen ventilation system. And so it's the same idea. So what we're doing is we're, that's a kitchen with a exhaust hood. And explain what an exhaust hood. So exhaust hood is capturing all the smoke and heat that's generated during cooking and it's exhausting out of the building. And there's typically maybe a five or 10 horsepower motor on the roof that runs full speed. A lot of times 24 seven or at least 18, 16 hours a day moving air out of the building. A lot of times that's air-conditioned air as well. And so what this system does is we install a temperature sensor which kind of see the middle, top middle and then also a optic sensor, kind of a laser that goes across. And what those things are doing is sensing for temperature changes in the duct. So an increased cooking activity increases the temperature and then the optic sensor is looking for smoke. And so with those two inputs this system ramps up and down the exhaust. So when there is no active cooking there's no smoke. The refugees go down to lower speed for energy savings. And talk about varied use. I mean sometimes say seven o'clock on a Saturday night this device would be used continuously to the mechs and then three o'clock in the afternoon maybe nothing going on. Correct, exactly. So these kitchen hoods, if it's on 16 hours a day there might be four hours of really active cooking. The times in between between the lunch hour and the dinner hour there might be very light usage but the exhaust runs full speed during that time. And what this system does is senses that automatically and changes the speed of the fan and then saving energy. And consider we live in a tourist state and depending on who's estimating it we have up to 70,000 hotel rooms in this state and very high occupancy all those visitors I think there's something like 100,000 tourists in this state at any given time. They've all got to eat and most of them are going to be eating in restaurants. So that equals one heck of a lot of restaurants. I have no idea how many there are. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and so you get this type of savings out of hundreds of restaurants and you are talking substantial numbers here. Correct, yeah. Hundreds of restaurants maybe talking thousands of horsepower at full speed and so it's very significant. Hawaii Energy the rebate folks recognize this as well and they provide $700 per horsepower on this type of project so they recognize the need for this and so it's a pretty good solution for some of the problems that we have. $700 a horsepower. $700 horsepower. So if it's a big unit 10 horsepower that's $1,000. Correct, yeah. That's a good incentive for a restaurant to retrofit, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's typical payback. We see two to three years on these type of projects. Again, two to three years. Yeah, that's they do very well. I said a lot of the times they're exhausting air-conditioned air and so you're really paying for energy twice. Precisely. The air quality also because it's not just heat coming out it's all kinds of particulate matter which is not particularly healthy for the kitchen occupants. So you want to get that stuff out of there. Correct, and that's why that optic sensor is there to sense for smoke and if there's smoke particulate matter it goes up to 100%. Yeah. Make sure it removes that particles. And on that very cheery note we need to take a break. Huy Nguyen, my guest today, back in a moment. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science here on ThinkTechHawaii.com. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science. Aloha! I'm Chantel Seville, host of the Savvy Chick Show on ThinkTech Hawaii and I'm going on tour. I'm taking you around the world. We're going to Canada and then we're going to, well, we're in America, then we're going to San Francisco. Staying tuned, 11 a.m. every Wednesday on the Savvy Chick Show. We'll see you next time. Hey, Stan the Energy Man here. I know you're bored this summer. You're just sitting at home, figuring out what to do, go to the beach, spend some time with ThinkTech Hawaii, spend the time thinking about how you can contribute to Hawaii and making it a better place to live and start watching some of the programs on ThinkTech, including Stan the Energy Man. Well, you'll learn all about everything energy, especially hydrogen and transportation. Every Friday at 12 o'clock noon, Stan the Energy Man here on ThinkTech Hawaii. Aloha! Howard Weg, again, Code Green, title of the program, What's Cool in the Hood with Huey Nguyen of Hawaii Energy Systems. What is this? It's not neighborhood, anything. No, it is exhaust hoods over commercial kitchens and there are hundreds and hundreds of such kitchens in little old Hawaii because we're so tourist oriented and you multiply this and we're going to get some very serious savings two to three year payback. Yeah. So let's resume our slide looking at what a intriguing slide this is. Sure. So this is the whole area serving the kitchen. Now, what kind of savings can we garner from this? What in the world is going on here, Huey? Yeah, so you see this graph here. It's showing from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., which is pretty typical for operation for exhaust hood. And so what you see in the kind of the grayish color, that's a constant volume system. So that's a exhaust fan running 100% of the time from 6 a.m. What you see in green is the difference in fan speed for the intelligent system. So we ramp ours down to 30% when there's no smoke or change in heat detected. You see during the lunch hour and kitchen hour there are some spikes and that's kind of what you want. You want to exhaust the smoke when it's there. You see those large spikes that go all the way 100% that's smoke being present. The dark blue graph or the dark blue area you kind of see, that is more of a typical installation where it's temperature only, where you might see some exhaust hoods, some of our competitors. That's kind of what they do and as you see without detected for smoke, they have to exhaust based on temperature changes and so they go to 100% down to 50%. Basically it's almost a on-off control almost where our system can ramp down sensing for temperature and smoke at the same time. So it looks like your overall savings is easily in the 50% range I would guess? Well it's actually more. What you're seeing here is actually fan speed because of the fan infinity loss. It's actually an exponential savings so it's to the third power. So if you're saving 70% on fan energy, you're actually saving 97% on fan energy and so when you see 30% there that's, you're only using 3% of the power that we use at 100% fan and with 50% you're using about 12% energy compared to 100%. So the energy savings graph would actually look even more drastic than this. And one reason why traditionally the fans have been going on all the time is it's not just an energy issue it's a health issue also. We want to keep that error clean. Yeah, so that's correct. So you do before when technology isn't as advanced as it is now you are on the safe side you exhaust as much as you can now with the technology now that we actually measure and determine if fan energy is needed or not based on demand controls that's kind of what this product does. So all over we're talking 70% savings? Generally 70% savings overall is typical it might be even more we've seen some 247 fans that don't ever shut off and we might see 80% savings on those type of applications. That is just amazing. Well what other kind of tricks do you have for us here? Oh my goodness. This is colorful. Yeah, so this is an energy dashboard so one of the other systems that we install is called a proton energy management system the first dashboard that we saw was the Allerton energy management system that we install more for hospitals, larger buildings, enterprise level control systems more for restaurants and smaller warehouses what we recommend is something like this a proton energy management system which it does scheduling, energy monitoring has a dashboard just like this it can do some alerts and alarms but it's priced very competitively for some other smaller buildings that don't need enterprise level 200 VAV control system this more typical of a smaller 10 package unit AC building. So that's kind of what you see here is showing energy usage for lighting and mechanical systems here. Each one of those different colors is a different energy using system. So the green one is a mechanical plant the red is lighting for the office and then the purple is the office power that's the plug loads and other electrical systems and so for the system we just saw like the IntelliHood we can integrate different types of control systems into one dashboard and this is kind of what this graph is showing. So why are all these peaks and valleys here like in the middle there's some very very high usage? Yeah so some of the valleys you see are weekends right so you see some of that power drop during the weekends which is what you would expect for office building and so through our controls we can schedule things to make sure things turn off during the weekends I've gone to a lot of buildings where it's a flatline Monday through Sunday which is not good meaning air conditioning systems aren't turning off and they're not scheduled correctly so this system here can do that and can change the schedule on weekends make sure things turn off at night and that's what there's some valleys you see some of the peaks you see whether related though that's the green mechanical plant. Yeah that's probably a humid day where it goes all the way up Correct. Humid to plus heat. And so your estimated percentage savings is Through control just through scheduling I've seen 20 to 30% energy savings just making sure equipment is off I've gone into buildings where they don't have control of their AC units yeah they run 24-7 run through the night through the weekend and just by scheduling them off that's the most energy efficient piece of equipment one that's off so typical is 20-30% savings on just doing controls 20-30% savings that's very very remarkable and I bet you have yet another trick up your sleeve here. Yeah something to do with refrigeration or yeah so another application for especially the restaurant space that we're talking about how many dinners we serve you know in the state refrigeration controls another demand control system with refrigeration we have air-conditioned compressors that cycle on and off through the day and especially at night when doors are closed the kitchen isn't active the compressors are off but yet these fans run 24-7 and so what you see there is what's called an EC motor and the EC motor by itself saves about 40% energy over the standard PSC motors or the shaded pull motors but beyond that we can control these cyclone down to lower speed when the compressor is off and with the technology we have this cool-troll by NRM it actually not only controls this fan and this motor it controls the freezer cycle time or the defrost cycle time for the freezer and also the door defrost cycle time for the freezer as well so that you're defrosting at an optimum time or it senses when defrosting is needed or yeah correct so it's demand controls again right so rather than just doing it on a timer which is what most applications are it's on a timer what we do is we sense for when defrost is needed and it goes the defrost based on actual temperature sensors rather than just on time which saves an amount of energy so again it's two to three year payback for these type of projects you keep saying that two to three year payback totally, totally remarkable yeah so these are three fans here and those fans run year-round full speed now is this a freezer we're looking at this is a walking cooler so this is a cooler so those fans run full speed all the time but the compressor cycles on and off when the freezer or the cooler is cool enough the compressor shuts down and then when cooling is needed it turns back on however those three fans they run 24-7 so what the system does it cycles those fans with the compressor and then along with that there's some other things that we can do to save energy wow and again we don't see these things very often but any restaurant is going to have these yeah and every hotel you walk into is going to have a walking cooler every fast food chain fast food restaurant has a walking cooler you'll see them in 7-elevens and in convenience stores other convenience stores supermarkets have walking coolers and so it's everywhere food processing areas again we're talking about a couple hundred a couple thousand horsepower out there we can save some energy wow very very remarkable well that we've got a few minutes let's go back to this concept of efficiency as a really really delicious way of achieving 100% clean energy by the year 2045 these units you install them I guess very very regularly and each time you install a new unit what you're doing is trading in a car that gets 20 miles per gallon for a car that gets 40 miles per gallon and you're doing this on a continuous basis you don't have to do any EIS environmental impact statements and you don't have to deal with zoning it's just happening as regular replacement so yeah energy efficiency I think by far is a much better investment than there's ways to that first graphic showed to we can take care of renewable energy but the best way is for energy efficiency to trim that demand down and just using example if I had a hundred dollar week Starbucks habit I mean the idea is not to get another job so I keep up with my Starbucks habit is to kind of take care of my Starbucks habit I guess that's one of the examples I kind of bring up sometimes but yeah energy efficiency I think the best way is to reduce your consumption and then once you get to a point where you're efficient and then you can think about renewable energy and then the state will be a hundred percent sustainable by 2045 and we oh here's a solution yeah this is more of the refrigeration this shows you another application to the left is it looks like a bakery where they have it's a food processing place and you see there's hundreds and hundreds of these fans just like this out there and so energy savings is pretty easy to spread through the state and there is a website available yeah right there it is yeah so that's that's the NRM website one of our partners on this project well on that sure note we have to close Code Green Think Tech Hawaii we new in Hawaii energy systems thank you so much well thank you very much whoever thought there could be so much excitement in exhaust hoods well thank you thanks for having me