 Welcome to Stand on the Energy Band. I'm Stand on the Energy Band and I'm currently retired on my third try, I'm getting better at it every time. I'm glad to be here at Think Tech Hawaii at Pioneer Plaza and trying to bring some good energy news to you. Last week when we had Ryan Woven's on the show, we talked a little bit about having the courage to be an early adopter and having the fortitude to go out and just be the change. You just go out and do it instead of waiting for the government to tell you or waiting for somebody to make an incentive, like put it on the sale or give me any kind of incentive. Just go out and get yourself off the grid, make yourself sustainable. We talked about it, but it's a lot harder to do when you don't have the experience to do energy things. This week's guest is Russ Kohler and he's the president of the Hawaii chapter of the Association of Energy Engineers and he's going to talk to us a little bit about the folks that are out there in the world, in the community, that can help you make good decisions on energy choices, particularly if you're on a larger scale, but even if you have a smaller project, they'll help narrow down the search for a good engineer and good folks that can help you out. So thanks for being on the show today. It's my pleasure, Stand. So give us a little bit of background on yourself and then we'll start talking about your organization. Well, I'm originally from New Jersey. I went to a Merchant Marine Academy. This is where I started learning all about energy and really the study was about cogeneration. I've always felt that a ship was the best form of cogeneration that we know of. I graduated with an engineering degree. Immediately came out to California to work with my dad, who had started an energy management company, California American Energy Savings. So that's when I really started cutting my teeth on energy management. That was way back in 1976. So I've been involved with energy for quite some time. We're going to talk a lot about the Association of Energy Engineers and how it kind of overlaps my experience. AEE was actually founded in 1977. Oh, so you predate AEE. I predated AEE as an incorporated association. I actually joined with my brother in 1980. I've been a member for quite a few years. I got my certified energy manager certification in about mid-early 90s. I became a life member in around 1999. When you started, you talked about going to the Merchant Marine Academy. I had a show a couple months ago where we talked about maritime fuel cells. Some of the technology out there, and there's a company out there now, shoot, I can't remember the name of it, and they specialize in cogeneration. And they have a technology that uses low grade waste heat to generate power. And they claim that on a ship, they can produce 20% of the ships. This is a cruise ship, so they've got a lot of power requirements. 20% of the cruise ship's energy off the waste heat from the engine. That's probably true, Stan. And that's probably an organic rink and cycle system. I've been involved with a couple of organic rink and cycles. You mentioned fuel cells. I've worked a lot with fuel cell energy out of Connecticut. They actually produce a cogeneration style of fuel cell using natural gases to fuel, breaking up the methane from the O2 and the water and just using the hydrogen. And it becomes a cogeneration system. I almost put a 11 megawatt system into our pharmaceutical company in California so that we could eliminate boiler load, at least 2,700 horsepower boilers, producing steam with the fuel cell, and certainly being almost near zero emission, no combustion. Orc cycle is definitely a good way to use waste heat. Fuel cell energy built a 15 megawatt plant, or I can't remember the name of the utility in Connecticut, that did not have any use for the waste heat. So they put the organic rink and cycle on the far end, took all the waste heat from the fuel cell, produced another megawatt of electricity that went directly into the grid. That's great, because I know that when we talk about building systems, energy efficient systems, sustainable systems, one of the first things you do is go for efficiency. Absolutely. Before you throw a bunch of PV on a house, you might as well make the house efficient and then build a PV to meet the requirements. Exactly. You make it more efficient, you'd have to put less PV into the house. Let's talk a little bit about your organization and some of the criteria that the qualifications you have to have to be a member of the organization, what is that like? So one qualification is obviously schooling, an engineering degree of some sort, whether it be civil, electrical, mechanical, what have you. Otherwise, you can have enough experience within your lifetime within the field that will qualify you to be able to sit for a certification. The prime certification from Association of Energy Engineers is the Certified Energy Manager, CEM. There are 23 different certifications. And really what AEE is about is teaching. They bring this teaching not just to the state or nationally, but it's an international organization. We're in 100 different countries. And my favorite thing to do annually is to go to their world conference. This year happens to be in Washington, D.C. Gives me two benefits. My son is actually at Georgetown grad school. Oh, me. I get to spend some time with him, but also spend a time with some great people and a lot of people that are focused on the same areas that I am and certainly you are. Last year, 2018, I was honored by being inducted into the Association of Energy Engineers Energy Manager Hall of Fame. Oh, well, congratulations. Thank you very much. Out of the, you know, 18,000 plus members of the Association, there's only 64 that have been inducted to a year. In fact, I nominated a person from Hawaii this year, George Benda. You might know George. He's been in the energy field for many, many, many years. Founded the Chelsea Group here in Hawaii, has since retired. He didn't make the nomination this year, but the induction, but I'm going to nominate him again next year. He's plugging away. Absolutely. Plug away. He was our Vice President of Malachi, Lanai. In his previous years. So you get a background either before my education in engineering or, you said or by experience, because you give us an example of the kind of experience that would allow you to get us, get certified. Sure. In fact, I'm trying to help a person at the base, the military base that I work at. He's got a lot of HVAC experience. He's got a lot of energy management system control experience. Those are two of the primary areas of experience you need for a certified energy manager or many of these certified energy auditing. So when I say experience, I'm talking probably 10, 15 to 20 years experience. And how many people belong to the Hawaii chapter? About 130 on all islands that belong to the chapter at this point. And how would people go about contacting these folks or why would they contact them? Would people be seeking out members of the AEE to get expertise or are they consultants? They are. They're all walks of life out here from HECO, from NAVFAC, Johnson Control, Zamoresco. Any one of the major companies out here, even a Chelsea group that I mentioned, which has now become part of Amoresco, they all have folks that have a CEM certification. We offer classes. In fact, I have two classes right now that we're working on. One is in December, December 8th, which is open to the public for certification of energy management. It's going to take place here in Honolulu at a HECO site. And I just arranged another one for NAVFAC that's going to take place October 21st. It's a one day class. It's a four day class. And the half a day, fifth day is the exam. So you have to pass an exam and I would say study hard. Lots of math. Door and a week. There's enough math to give people a scare. But Vicky, who you met not too long ago, she's actually a CEM and a CEA. So she's quite a good secretary for me. She's secretary of the YA chapter, that's correct. She's from the Big Island. I plan to be working with her. She wanted me to introduce her to the Blue Planet Research folks. I connected her up with Paul Ponti over there and I'm hoping that works out well because I think she struck me as being a really sharp individual and Paul's a really bright, he's actually an architect. She is a very sharp individual. Before she got her CEM, she actually is a PhD in a different subject. She mentioned to me an event at Blue Planet at the end of the month, August 30th. I don't know exactly what's going on, but there's going to be an exhibit there showing all the different wares, including the hydrogen barbecue. She's asked me if I wanted to come out and I would take her up on it. I'm going to go ahead and take her up on it. In fact, if you ever get invited to go out to see Blue Planet Research's laboratory and what they do, I would take that opportunity right away. I want to. The Hawaii chapter covers a lot of folks that are employed in the industry to deal with energy. It's really more like a certification that kind of piggybacks on or adds to your actual job. Absolutely. Some of the qualifications for a lot of the positions these days at the, anyone on the military bases, they call resource efficiency managers. I'm a senior energy engineer. All of those positions required to have a CEM. What I'm noticing, even throughout NAFAC, even the energy manager I mentioned earlier at my base, these guys come into these positions and are required that within two years they get their CEM certification. I've seen it now nationwide where it's actually a qualification on the position. You either have it or you guarantee to get it within a certain amount of time. Right now, Hawaii has an energy portfolio standard that requires us to be 100% renewable on the grid by 2045. To me, that's a really tall order. I don't know that most people think much about what that really means in practical terms, in terms of the grid architecture and things like that. What are your thoughts on trying to meet that 2045 goal and where we're at now getting there? I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. In fact, I spent a lot of time thinking about that before I even came to Hawaii. I didn't mention, but I've only been in Hawaii full-time since summer of 2017. My wife was born and raised there. She's a local. She went to high school. We got married out here in 1985, but I only transitioned out here in the last couple of years. I've spent a lot of time thinking about Hawaii and that 2045 goal, which it's a very tough goal for Hawaii to achieve. What makes it so tough? I think I understand why, but a lot of people out there I don't think appreciate the complexity. Could you give us an idea of some of the complexity? One of the complexities is that Hawaii Electric that supplies all of our electricity is still running on fuel oil. For them to transition to what they claim to be biofuel, in my mind, it's still a combustion fuel. It's still carbon-based. It's still carbon-based. It's still going to put out an emission. For me, that doesn't make that qualification. That right there tells me there's no way you're going to meet that 2045 goal. I have looked at many different things and just to talk story, the AES coal plant is going to go away. What's the thinking on how are we going to replace that 180 megawatts of load? I know what I've been thinking about with firm power. I think we should be replacing it with fuel cells. How would we do that? How would we generate or produce all that hydrogen to do that? To me, it's a two-way thing. You've got a pipeline going right through there that's got natural gas from Hawaii gas. You could start out with natural gas fuel cells, for a lot of that load, and you could back that up with hydrogen fuel cells. Right now, fuel cell energy has a model fuel cell that will produce hydrogen. It'll produce electricity and hydrogen. It could be used both ways. Take another step. You've got the 90 megawatt incineration plant. I'll call it an incinerator. H-power. H-power, thank you. H-power is an incinerator. That's emitting worse emissions than even HECO is with the fuel cell. In particulates and everything you can think of that's bad. Why don't we take that municipal solid waste and convert it into hydrogen? You've got all that municipal solid waste coming from Oahu that could easily be introduced, put into gasification systems. Gasification systems are going to create syngas, turn the syngas into hydrogen, and there you go. This way you're doing two things. You're eliminating what's going to the landfill, just like what they're doing with the incineration, but you're doing it now with near zero emission. If not zero emission, you might have a tiny bit of emission coming from the gasification system, but even that's supposed to be zero percent oxygen. I tell you what, we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds and talk some more about some of the details that get into 2045 in clean energy. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success, and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person, and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Wendy Lowe and I want you to join me as we take our health back. On my show, all we do is talk about things in everyday life in Hawaii or abroad. I have guests on board that will just talk about different aspects of health in every way, whether it's medical health, nutritional health, diabetic health. You name it, we'll talk about it. Even financial health will even have some of the Miss Hawaii's on board and all the different topics that I feel will make your health and your lifestyle a lot better. So come join me. I welcome you to take your health back. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand to Energy, man. We just started launching into Mission Impossible, that is trying to get Hawaii off of fossil fuels by 2045, at least on the grid. We just started rolling before the break, so we're going to get right back to that. Russ, we were talking about some of the options, but another thing that makes the hydrogen piece kind of interesting to me on our grid is that if we're going to keep using solar and wind, those are intermittent renewables. Unlike the coal, unlike the H-power, those are intermittent and that gives HECO fits in terms of balancing their grid, stabilizing their grid. That's correct. So when you have that kind of instability, one of the perfect things to do to help stabilize your grid is throw electrolyzers out there. So when you're producing too much solar or too much wind, you dump it into those electrolyzers and make hydrogen to make energy for later in the day or at night when you need it. So is that one of the possible solutions, maybe doing hydrogen in combination? Absolutely, it is. Let's take a base. A base that I'm familiar with has a landfill. It has a wastewater treatment plant and it has lots of land. We could take that wastewater treatment plant and we could take all that sludge material, put it into the same thing, gasification system, turn it into sin gas, renewable natural gas the way Hawaii gas is doing out at the Huli-Huli. On the Huli-Huli. On the Huli-Huli wastewater treatment plant, making renewable natural gas. In our case, we could turn it into hydrogen. On a base that I'm particularly familiar with, I want to make that wastewater treatment plant, it's on microgrid. Perfect. Because if you don't and you lose that, you sort of lost your heart. Oh yeah. You know, the heart of the system. Well that's what we know when we talk about one of the other challenges with our grid is that if you have a natural disaster and you lose power, now all of a sudden your sewage systems and your freshwater systems and your hospitals and other things that require energy or require pumping to move things around are dead in the water. Whereas if you build the system correctly, your wastewater treatment plant becomes self-sustaining. You fix whatever little minor things might be happening from the storm itself and then it's taking care of itself. You don't have to wait for the grid to come up or you don't have to find diesel fuel someplace to get a generator in there. That's exactly the point. Everything that we deal with now at a base has to do with being resilient. Department of Defense is requiring every base up with a plan to be resilient for a minimum of 14 days. And that's what you said, natural disaster. It actually is for a natural disaster or a man-made disaster. It could be an attack. I was recently, well recently a couple months ago, I was at the Joint Base Pearl Harbor Industry Day because they're looking at putting a resilient plant in. And the number one thing they opened the entire conference up to was we've got threats. We've got threats from China. We've got to deal with this. We need power. All of your forward bases for any sort of a response is right here. This is it. Hawaii to Asia is, you know, Schofield, Hickam, Marine Corps Base Hawaii, and Pearl Harbor. Those are the forward bases for anything that happens. That struck me very seriously because it told me that you need this power like tomorrow and they need 100 to 150 megawatts of resilient power. I didn't quite agree with how they wanted to do it, but that's okay. I already have my strategy for the base that I work with and that we have a hydrogen fuel station. Just like you have down at Hickam, yours is much bigger than ours. I would like to expand our hydrogen fuel station so that we can have enough hydrogen for firm power, not just transportation power. And then use our landfill to create as much storage for hydrogen as we can. As we've talked about wastewater treatment plant, microgrid that plant by itself and use the resources that we have. We need to bring in more hydrogen. Fine, we bring in more hydrogen, but that needs to be a self-sustaining operation within the base. I've carved out a section of this base for wind turbines. I've carved out other areas for larger solar farms along with battery storage and hydrogen energy storage and potential for geothermal. So currently though, I'm familiar with at least the Air Force side. The critical facilities, facilities you need to have up and running, maybe your clinic and your commissary or, you know, for food storage and things like that, you have diesel generator backup systems or communications networks and things like that. But I point out to the DOD, I used to do that, we're on an island. If our ports are impacted, damaged, and can't receive cargo, or our airports are closed out and can't receive aircraft, we only have seven or so days worth of fuel that, at that point, now the hospitals and everybody else are going to be all wanting that same fuel for priority reasons. And the DOD becomes competition for those assets. And the DOD should probably be more self-sufficient. Couldn't agree with you more. It sort of weighs into a segment that I mentioned during that Joint Base Pearl Harbor victim conference. I questioned the lead civilian for Pearl Harbor. I said, do you consider fuel oil to be a resilient fuel? And he looked at me and I said, I don't. That has to come over here by ships. You're talking about war. You're talking about tsunamis, hurricanes, and potential for war. That to me is not a resilient fuel if it has to come over here by ship. What fuel can you produce here in Hawaii? Not natural gas, and it's not fuel oil, it's hydrogen. You know better than I that hydrogen being the most abundant substance in the universe is something Hawaii could take advantage of. Every one of the states can take advantage of it. Everything I mentioned about doing it at the base translates to eco. Translates to the rest of the island and the rest of the state. And that's where I tell my board with AEE, this is what I'm doing here at the base, but this is all stuff that I want to translate out to the island of Hawaii. This is what we should be doing. We need to be talking about more than just transportation, we need to be talking about firm power. And the discussion has literally come full circle now because you think of Kojen, you think of using waste heat, and you think of the big island as not only a big beautiful island but has some of the hottest territory right under the skin that could be generating electricity like nobody's business. And we could be importing that energy to Oahu in the form of ammonia or hydrogen or some hydrogen rich liquid fuel or gaseous fuel and providing that base load power or eco to be able to carry on in their new micro rated system. Absolutely. Eco could be doing the same thing that we're talking about. On the statewide scale. On the statewide scale. I didn't mention but years ago when I was now running the energy company that my father built and founded, we were representatives of two co-generation systems. Eco-jen, which is a small 454 Hulman and Moody engine co-generation package, but then capstone turbines. Capstone turbines were used in buses and all sorts of different scenarios but there's a lot of mainland, in fact Maui has a hotel with several capstone turbines running for their waste heat using all the waste heat in the co-gen. I tried to give a capstone turbine to Eco back in the early, back in the 90s and didn't want it. I just wanted to send it to him, let him test it. Well I hope that we can convince Eco to broaden her aperture a little bit, work with folks like you and the folks at the EE to really get us to that goal because it's pretty ambitious, it's a lot more complicated than people think, but I think we'll get there. Believe it or not, we've hit 30 minutes already Russ. I told you I'd go by quick, but I want to thank you really for being on the show today. You're very welcome. My pleasure. It was fun. Well we'll have let you a little more time over at Kanoi and maybe if you can get the military to let you talk about specific things over there while having back on the show and talk about some of the issues that you're working with. That would be fantastic. Well thanks again and until next week Friday, we'll see you here on Stand Energy Man of ThinkTech Hawaii. Aloha.