 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast of things that matter to tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Raya Salter. In our show this time, we'll cover the 2017 Asia-Pacific Clean Energy Summit that took place at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel. We'll take a look at some of the sessions, breakouts, and exhibits, and talk to some of the energy leaders and attendees who were there. The summit took place the day after the 2017 Kauai Energy Conference at the Kauai Marriott Resort, which Think Tech covered in Lihue. So it was really a big week for clean energy conferences and coverage in Hawaii. The summit focused on how the state can achieve its 100% renewable energy goal by 2045 and make our economy more resilient, exploring the policies, models, technologies, equipment, and infrastructure necessary to advance clean energy integration. The event brought government officials, military, corporate leaders, utilities, and innovators together for three days of sessions, breakouts, and networking opportunities. Aside from all the speakers who came from the mainland, the list read like a who's who of leaders from Hawaii, including Connie Lau, Alan Oshima, David Ige, Alan Arakawa, Bernard Kivalo, Chris Lee, the three members of the PUC, David Bissell, David Lassner, Mark Dunkerley, and many others. And the three days of the summit were chock-a-block, with sessions and breakouts of every kind, including models for utility ownership, U.S. and Hawaii power markets, micro grids, zero energy buildings, leadership, tools for clean energy integration, cultivating innovation, and dealing with climate change. It also included energy justice, transition under Trump, systems for rural areas, clean energy investment equity, energy efficiency, challenges in tourism, blockchain for energy, a platform for greener buildings, bio mimicry, adaptive intelligence, and cyber resilience. What a list! And it also included decentralizing the grid, renewable peaker plants, clean transportation, cognitive AI, utility-scale storage, land use and energy, hydrogen tech, offshore wind, community-based renewables, global energy perspectives, and many more. So as we customarily do, think tech, walk the floor and talk with the people we met. I think a lot of people were disappointed that our president chose to pull out of the Paris Accord, but it really doesn't change the direction of the country. I mean, it's already set, we're already moving, and we're not going to turn back. So I think all we're, David and I are saying is that for Hawaii, the 100% renewable is a reality, and it's going to happen. We have to make it happen with everybody on board. And the issues that are going to, we really have to address, and I just heard it in one of the panels, is that we have to start moving more holistically to have everyone be a part of it, and it's not just the electric companies. So the electric companies burn maybe 30% of the imported fossil fuel, so we wouldn't cure cancer this way. I mean, we would actually try to get the whole tumor. And so I think that's what we have to discuss really, and bring everybody on board, find their roles in it, and find a good place for everyone. I think people have to understand, and you do a great job, think tech, just getting the word out, because it is a complex issue, and it's not one that is readily understandable by people who choose consumer choice. People see their bills, they see the bottom line, and many times that's all they care about. That's true in everything. But where we have to start bringing the level of attention up is a value proposition. And the values are not just electrons, but it's our environment, and our roles in kind of balancing everything. So making Hawaii special. So the brand truth of Hawaii, if we are all truly aligned on becoming a clean environment, it's not just electric generation. It's everything. It is really important to kind of just raise our energy literacy here in the state, obviously with Hawaii Energy's goals to meet 100% clean energy and how efficiency plays into that. It's important for us to be here. We're actually just wrapping up a workshop around codes. Building codes is just past year. The governor signed the 2015 IECC, which essentially raises the standards of building codes here in Hawaii. And that was a really great effort by DBED, Blue Planet Foundation, and others to get that moving. And so now we're talking about how do we get it implemented, how do we get it adopted, how do we get education out there. So a lot of interesting things on that front. Caroline Carl, our deputy director, will be talking about just some of the new ways to, innovative ways to integrate efficiency out there in the marketplace. And then I've got a session on building automation systems, so it should be a lot of fun. But when you think about just the impact efficiency can make, when you look, we're currently at 26% clean energy of the Hawaiian electric utilities. We'd only be at 22% without energy efficiency. So that's a big chunk that you're not going to see it in a windmill like that, but it's making a big difference. Now that we have that behind us, we can focus again on what the future is going to be. And we all own this. We all live here, we all have to find a way to make this work, and there's no silver bullet in how we get there, and we just have to be collaborative and find solutions. We're having a lot of fun. We're doing a sort of a workshop where people are sitting at tables and discussing their visions of renewable energy for Hawaii, and then a pathway to get there. So this is one of my favorite topics, so I'm terrifically enjoying that. One of the interesting issues that we're going to have to talk about is, there's a lot of talk about conservation, there's a lot of talk about renewable energy. If we get to the point where we're 100% or 110% renewable, do we need conservation? And I think sort of morally, yeah, you should conserve, but if there's no effective downside in terms of material resources wasted, in terms of human energy wasted and so on, to profligate use of energy, then do we need to worry about it? I don't know. That's one of the things we've been talking about at KIUC, the concept of, we didn't know in 2008 when at KIUC we set our energy goal at 50% renewable, whether you could do that or how you could do that, but we sort of opened up the door and said, okay, we're looking for a way to do it. And along came a number of happenstances, renewable energy tax credits, dramatic reductions in the cost of solar power and so on, and we actually started putting more and more renewable energy on our grid and not only solar, but also expanding our interest in hydro and biomass and so on. And so we're now at 40% for Kauai, and we have projects in development that'll get us to 70%. It'll be a few more years, but that gets us to 70%. Now we have a new problem. The problem has changed because it's no longer just putting the energy on, because all of the energy that we're looking at now, at least the solar energy, which is a big chunk of it, is only storable for a few hours. So you get four cloudy days, you don't have any power. Or you're turning on diesel generators. And we don't want to turn on diesel generators. So we're looking for the next technology leap, because there's a point at which solar was great. You had so much fossil fuel power that any increase in solar was a good thing. We also checked out the exhibits. And here are some of the interesting exhibitors we met. Smartflower Pacific is the future, the future of renewables, in particular solar PV. So it's a sophisticated unit. It produces about 4.5 kilowatt hours in the day. Its peak is 2.3, but compared with the equivalent roof array of about 19 square meters, most renewables and renewable systems to this point have been less than aesthetically pleasing. That is ugly. This is very far from ugly. This is worth getting up at six in the morning at sunrise with your coffee just to watch it open. Because that's what it does. Opens automatically. It knows exactly where it is on the face of the earth. It knows exactly what time it is, and it knows exactly when sunrise is. And at sunrise, and in fact just before, it begins to open and the petal slowly open up and as they do, it cleans each of the PV cells. There's a nylon brush along each of the petal edges. We're taking orders shortly. The first units should be on the island within about four months. We're choosing our market segments with care. This clearly isn't for everybody, but it suits, I think, the tourism industry particularly well. I mean, you can imagine some of these on the beach front with USB chargers, also hooked into the grid. It provides complete autonomy because it has storage up to 13.8 kWh LiPo batteries. Therefore, you can take yourself completely off the grid. If you have a corporate policy, a global corporate policy, if you're a big enterprise, for instance, like Hilton, not that I'm trying to pitch it to Hilton right now, then you might consider using this. Solar PV is much cheaper, clearly, and can be deployed fairly rapidly. It's an understood technology. However, this thing, from turning up in its crate to establishment and plugging in, and it truly is plug and play, one hour before it's feeding you solar electricity. From an enterprise perspective, this demonstrates your green credentials like no other system possibly could. We've come with PrimoWin and we make it in Southern California, San Diego. We have many patents for everything from the blades to a custom generator, even to the way it installs with a telescoping pole. It always adjusts itself to turn into the wind, yeah. Part of our patent, that blade system makes absolutely no noise. We've had wildlife biologists come out and study it so it doesn't kill any birds or any bats. Because it's injected molded plastic, we can make it in any color. So if you put it up high and you want it sort of like a light blue color so it disappears, we've done some for a university where they wanted the blades, the school colors of the university. So we can do it any color you want. Solar installation, for example, is about four kilowatts on a resident. Our one turbine is two kilowatts. But the benefit of wind, especially in a place like Hawaii, is it blows day and night. Where solar has five or six hours of production, we can have 20 hours of production. So it can be quite efficient. But as you guys probably know here in Hawaii, having some storage along with that production is really the key. You have storage with it? Storage, ours plugs into any storage, yeah. So we don't manufacture any batteries, but anything from the deep cycle batteries to lithium ion we can plug right into. Our biggest is two kilowatt right now. And we're really focusing on the commercial world right now instead of home use. Perkins QE has about 100 energy attorneys throughout the country, but we do everything from small developing companies, like our client Primo Wind that's just down the way, to working with large developers and utilities on projects. We do all types of work for them. Everything ranging from financing, environmental, and energy regulatory work, permitting with local state and federal agencies, as well as transactional work, intellectual property, anything that an energy company would need. I'm here at Verge because I do quite a bit of work on energy projects here in Hawaii, such as progression offshore winds, the offshore wind proposal off the coast. We do a lot of work with a variety of companies, both mainland and Hawaii based and energy space. Granite Power's our company. I'm Steve Lowell, I'm the Marketing Director. What we believe we can do in the here and we're doing in the Pacific is waste heat to electricity, specifically in remote areas, high-powered diesel. We can take the heat from exhausts and produce clean, virtually free electricity out of that. We also do hybrid solutions in remote areas. We've worked throughout the Pacific, remote areas in Australia, and believe we can be part of the transition to a renewable economy in the Hawaiian islands, but add a thing that reduces costs to all the participants in the market here as opposed to trying to burden what is already a very difficult, difficult environment. The base load diesel plants here in Hawaii, we can take the heat from those plants. We don't want to sell our equipment. We'll put the equipment in for nothing in return for a power purchase agreement of which we can do, depending on the site and the term, somewhere between 12 and about 18 US cents per kilowatt hour. We're doing that in the Pacific islands. Alternatively, we can provide remote solutions where we can do very long-term PPAs with solar and storage solutions and we can get our prices down for that for very long term, somewhere around 12 to 15 cents a kilowatt hour for that provision. So we believe that we can provide a bit of a win-win. We can bring capital. We bring some expertise. We bring experience from other markets. But Hawaii is a very unique market, requires reliability standards and so forth associated with the massive grids such as the West Coast of the USA or the East Coast of Australia. Solar penetration, voltage regulations here because it's an island community make the job of HIKI very, very difficult. We understand that and we believe that we can help. We're a well-known company back in the mainland based out of Cincinnati, Ohio. I personally work in California. We've got a facility out there and we've seen a lot of projects come up here over here in Hawaii and want to have a presence and let everybody know that we're capable of supply and installation services over here on the island. So, yeah, we're really excited to be here. I think it's our fifth year being over here in Hawaii and we're looking forward to meet more people and do more business. We finished a couple of large projects over here. One of them being the ECCYPO Peninsula next to the Navy base here, a 15 megawatt ground mount. We've done some projects over in Kauai and looking to meet more people and do more business. We've seen a little bit of a shift, I guess, from more of the residential-sized systems doing less projects but larger-type systems in the commercial market. So, for us personally, that actually lends really well to what we do. We're not so focused on the residential side of business. So, for us, it's a good thing, but certainly we want to see the business growing over here in the islands for everybody that's involved with the system. We're a company that's been around since 1932. We're publicly traded under Gibraltar or Stock Symbols ROCK. Basically, we've been around for a long time. We do what we say we're going to do when we say we're going to do it. We like to be honest and upfront about everything and that goes a long way. Long duration energy storage, exactly what it says. So, it's essentially pumped hydro capability, no geographic constraints using off-the-shelf components, world, global OEMs that deploy it. So, it's very exciting technology. Liquid air energy storage uses a process which is very, very old, over 100 years old. Air is a gas. A gas can be turned into a liquid. We take electricity to do that process. We store it as a cryogenic fluid. We regassify it, put it through an expander and turn it back into electricity. Fluid's actually held at very, very low pressure, so a couple of bar. So, there's no high pressure equipment involved, apart from the pump, which pumps the liquid. And it's just stored a little above atmospheric pressure. All of those tanks are taken straight from the industrial gas sector and from the LNG sector, so they're very well proven. Air is largely nitrogen. It's about 79% nitrogen. The rest of it is oxygen and some other noble gases. When you basically compress and chill air to very, very cold temperature to minus 169 degrees Celsius, it will turn into a liquid. And it's a very beautiful liquid. It's liquid blue, the color of the sky, and it just sits there as a fluid. We recommend a non-ballasted solution now, because with the non-ballasted solution, you've done some things there that some people don't think about. You've eliminated a failure point in that system. A ballast fail, so you have to get into the fixture, replace a ballast. Tubes fail, so you have to replace tubes. When you put a tube that's, it's gonna fail eventually, but when you extend the life of that tube and now you've taken the ballast out and you've removed that failure point, there's maintenance costs that you're saving, just the effort of replacing a ballast, doing it the right way with an electrician, being safe, you've removed all of those moving parts of failure. And that's how you prolong the life. We recommend the non-ballasted solution. It's safe, proven safe, effective, and that's where you get your greatest energy savings, because ballasts do use wattage also. Well, fluorescence, a four-foot fluorescent tube, you can buy one anywhere from four to eight dollars with some of our non-ballasted tubes, which have extra circuitry inside that act as the ballast they sense the input power. You're looking, depending on the application, from 11 to $24, depending on where the tube is going and how you're going to use it. End-to-end, 10-year warranty, most manufacturers will warranty the LEDs themselves for 10 years, the LED doesn't fail, it's the driver that fails, and we warranty the driver also. So we're ensuring that you're going to get the performance that we're saying you're going to get. We're celebrating our 125th year anniversary, so we have here a reusable bag, because it's good for the environment. And we also have 125th Mahalo to our customer's notepad and also a variety of pens in various colors and also some erasable highlighters. Or a sustainability report. We have a new one, this is from 2015. We have a 2016 coming up, but anyway, this is a great report. It's kind of like an annual report on our sustainability programs and what we're doing for Hawaii's clean energy future. Did you know that June through November is hurricane season, so we want to make sure that everybody is well prepared by having our Handbook for Emergency Preparedness, energy tips and choices, a guide to energy conservation and power to save another guide to energy conservation. So Amber Kinetics is a flywheel energy storage company. Based in California, I'm the community engagement director, so I'm here at Hawaii Verge to network and learn and talk about the flywheel and what we have to offer Hawaii. Flywheels have a number of advantages over battery, chemical battery storage. A lot of what you're seeing now is a lot of chemical battery storage and for the island in particular, we have this issue with a waste post. You know, once the battery life runs out it might be seven to 10 years. What are you gonna do with those batteries? And one really excellent thing about the flywheels is that they have a 30 year lifespan and the first scheduled maintenance is 10 years down the line. So they're made of really high grade steel, kinetic energy, they're spinning really fast to store that energy and then they can recycle it basically with zero degradation back into the grid. So they're really good for adding flexibility to the system and as we all know, energy storage is a key component to being able to transition to the renewable energies and for Hawaii to achieve its 100% renewable goals. As last year, the summit was a great gathering of the energy community and a policy and technical learning experience for everyone involved. Just the kind of meaning we need to develop statewide confidence in our ability to move the needle ahead. The sessions were enlightening but it now remains for government including the energy office, the legislature, the regulators, the governor and for that matter the courts as well as industry and academia to take up on the policy and technology points discussed and bring them and our clean energy goals to fruition. There were also a great variety of welcomes, blessings, showcases, entertainment, poetry, meals, parties, hikes and of course yoga. It was as they say, a full service summit. But after all is said and done and encouraged, wait, but after all is said, done and encouraged at ambitious conferences like these, the proof as always will be in the pudding. If you want to know more about the 2017 Asia Pacific Clean Energy Summit or the speakers and subjects discussed, check out GreenBiz.com. And now let's take a look at our Think Tech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but Think Tech will take you there. Remember you can watch Think Tech on Spectrum OC 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening with government, industry, academia and communities around the islands and the world. 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And of course, the tech and energy conferences that take place across the island. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Raya Salter. Aloha, everyone.