 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha everyone and welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We've got a great show today on Wednesday. We've got Shannon Tanganon, I always get that wrong, who's got some great good news from Hawaii Electric with us and we've got Chris Johnson from Blue Planet Energy who's going to be talking to us about PV and batteries, the perfect marriage. So we'll start off with Shannon and she's going to give us some good news. So Shannon, what's your good news? Well the good news is we've added a lot of rooftop solar. So private rooftop solar is growing. Last year we added about nearly 4,000 systems. Wow, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's great news. And we're leading the country really. Maybe not as quickly as others would like, but we're leading the country. We have 18% of all residential customers have rooftop solar. Okay, so what's the prognosis for going forward? Do you see this trend continuing and do you have any insight on why we've seen this increase? Well most definitely. I think people are, for when they want to save money on their electricity bill. And also you want to generate clean energy. So we definitely support that. Our programs are trying our hardest to get everything online and keep the momentum going. So as far as our place in the, we lead the nation in private rooftop solar installation. And the next state behind us is Connecticut. We're at about 18%. Connecticut is at 6.8%. I'm surprised that Connecticut, you think it would be some place like in Arizona or something where they have lots of sun and desert and everything like that? California's next. Yeah. At 5.9% in Arizona. Very good. Yeah, Connecticut was surprising. Do you have any insight on the commercial side? I know that Eco announced like seven big, it was seven big projects on the commercial or at scale? Yeah, the grid scale level. Yeah. Yeah, about seven. It's solar plus storage. It's before the PUC, so the applications are in. So we're just waiting to see whether they'll be approved. We're also in the process of putting out another RFP. That'll be soon. And then we're hoping to add more different types of clean energy, whether it be wind. It's just, we want to broaden the portfolio. It's kind of tough. I think for somebody was telling me that we've kind of down to one or two good wind sites and that's pretty well it for a while. The main thing is like the view scape. I mean, people, you know, I happen to love wind turbines and I think they're beautiful but that's just me. Yeah. Lots of people worry, are concerned about it. So. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, you have, it's always, you know, you want clean energy. We have to get to 100%. So we need different ways to get there. We can't just depend on one type of technology. So solar is, the price continues to fall. You know, I was talking to a guy today and I was really surprised at the power purchase agreement rate. And I think even Peter Roszik when he was on here was talking about it's like, you know, down in around the 10 cent level, I mean, I don't know exactly where it is. Yeah. I mean, it's painful that we're getting to that price point, but you know, just, you know, whether it be a few years ago, that wasn't the case. So if we had put all our eggs in that basket, we wouldn't see the savings we are today. So we need to keep our options open for new technologies, breakthrough technologies. We can't just put everything in one basket. So as a hydrogen nut, I've got to get my little hydrogen plug in here. I mean, 10 cent and below PV cost or electricity, that's great for us. Because it makes hydrogen very viable with competing against fossil fuels. So let's keep that up. Yeah. Okay. So do you have anything else before we cut to a break or? No. I think that's about it. I think we're just, you know, wanting to spread the good news. Yeah. That's great news. So anyway, thank you very much. Thank you. I'm going to cut to a break now and tee up for Chris Johnson of Blue Planet Energy. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I'm Tim Appachella. I'm here with Cynthia Sinclair. And this is Trump week. It's going to appear every Friday at 11 a.m. between Jay Fidel, Cynthia and myself. We talked about Trump, the activities and the news stories for that week as it pertains to the Trump administration. We hope you tune in and watch the fun. Aloha. See you then. Aloha and welcome back after our short break. I'm pleased to have Chris Johnson who rose to the occasion. I contacted him yesterday afternoon. Blue Planet Energy can do attitude. They responded right away. And so I welcome you. Chris, he's the chief operating officer of Blue Planet Energy. And we're going to talk about PV, the marriage between PV and batteries and all the good work that Blue Planet Energy is doing not only in Hawaii but in other places around the world like Puerto Rico. So Chris, how long have you been with Blue Planet Energy and who's the founder? What's the core background of the company? Sure. And thanks for having me, Mitch. Great to be here. So Blue Planet Energy has been around for just over three years. And we are based here in Oahu. And Hank Rogers is a founder of Blue Planet Energy as well as a number of other complementary organizations including Blue Planet Foundation which has been around now for over 10 years working on the policy front. And we're the commercialization arm of the solutions that lead us to getting off of carbon-based fuels. And so part of what's happened there is that with the explosive growth of solar in Hawaii and the challenges to the grid that came with that, the utility put some brakes on putting more solar on the grid. And so our founder, Hank Rogers, realized that energy storage was a key to unlocking more renewable penetration on the grid. And so that's kind of how we set off on a journey to find the best and make the best batteries possible which then ended up generating our company to develop and bring those to market. Okay. So we have some slides to help this conversation along and to make it a little bit easier for Chris to be able to describe what they do and some of their equipment. So can we have that first slide up, please? Sure. We'd love for you to see our product as we get through here. So a beautiful splash screen there. As always, Blue Planet has really captured the Blue Planet logo. They've got Blue Planet on a lot of other things, which is great to see. So why don't you tell us, you know, explain what you do. Sure. Thanks. What's your value proposition? Absolutely. So energy storage is a fairly new sector and we have, we decided to bet really hard on safety. So we have the highest quality product out there that really puts safety in the forefront. And so that's why we say we have the most powerful, reliable, and safest energy storage system at the lowest cost of ownership. And so our system lasts longer. It's more reliable. It delivers more power and the warranty is longer. So it's something that you can rely on and that's what we think customers are looking for. You don't want to have to worry about a fire erupting in something that you're relying on for your energy system. Right. And Hank has put his money where his mouth is and he's off grid on two systems. First of all, his ranch at Pu'uawa on the big island. Totally off grid. He has the power lines taken out and he's got a battery storage backup using the same technology. And also his house here on Oahu, he's totally off grid there as well. So great, you know, he's proving the technology himself before he goes to the market. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's been over five years of relying on those systems, cycling every day. Yeah. You know, when you're off grid, the batteries are core. You really need to have that reliability so that the solar charges them up during the day and then the sun goes down and that's what you're living off of. Right. Is those batteries? Well, let's pull up the next slide and you can talk a little bit about your product now. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. So this is the Blue Eye on 2.0. This is our second generation product. So Hank's house in the ranch is actually running off of our first generation product. We were able to actually bring the cost down 30% with this as well as make the installation easier and faster for our installer partners. So you can see here we highlight some of the things like our 15-year performance warranty. Most batteries are only, lithium ion batteries are only providing a 10-year warranty. Really? Yeah. That's significant. It's significant indeed and lead acid, which is a lot of the technology that we're replacing sort of a long, you know, been around a lot longer is even less than that. So this is a very modular, scalable system. So we've, you know, you can get one of these or you can put many of them together to build as large of a system as you want. It's been through all the testing and certifications for safety and we've, you know, we've been deploying these now for about a year, a little over a year and a half. Yeah. And it's... So you bring out the point about cool operation. So I've been up to the ranch and seen the big modules they have up there. And by cool operation it means you can rapidly charge the battery and discharge it and you put your hand on it like, I think it only goes up like about two degrees. So you don't need a bunch of air conditioning and all that kind of stuff. And speaking of cool, I got to say the packaging is really cool. You walk in there and you look at this and it's like a, wow, it's like this blue glow. You can see a little bit of on the door there, but this is very cool packaging. So it looks not only is it functional and does all the things you think, but it really looks good in your house. I mean, you could take your neighbors too. It's almost like going to our art gallery and say, wow, look at that. Is that ever nice? Thanks, Mitch. You appreciate hearing that. I think one of the things that we have to do to make sure that we have the right hand, the right hand, the right hand signature on the company is to know that we need, you know, we strive to be the coolest company and we know that that's got to be reflected in our products as well. Right. So let's have the next slide. So this talks a little bit about the system. So why don't you walk us through it? I think you have to. Sure. So we kind of go from the smallest component up to the whole system itself here. So we start that quality and that safety at the cells themselves. So you can see here on the left these cells. I'm mentioning about the cool. The stable here means thermally stable. So sometimes you'll hear about the hoverboards or the Samsung notes that would catch on fire. That's from a phenomenon called thermal runaway. So as you operate them, the temperature goes up. And at some point, different chemistries will not be able to stop getting hot and they'll have this thermal runaway problem catch on fire and burn themselves. So this chemistry, you can see the Life Poe abbreviation here, lithium ferrous phosphate, lithium iron phosphate does not have the risk of fire. So those cells are then built into modules. So each module has its own battery management system, the BMS. This is a very robust construction. Sometimes we see out there in the industry, these are pretty hokey and put together with some substandard parts. This thing is very robust. It has physical safety features built in here. And then those are the building blocks of the system itself. So we build out really kind of some, you know, the balance of systems around those modules. So one of the key ones that we build is this battery management unit. That's kind of like the safety and brains for that whole system. And that adds another layer of software and hardware safety. Then we have monitoring software here to make it a delightful experience for the user. And we're really making sure that this product gets to market in a way that is useful and meaningful and accessible. Okay. Next slide, please. So here's just a glimpse of our monitoring software. Again, we bring this down to, you know, an iPhone app. The idea here is to make it as easy as possible for the customer to know what's going on. So they can see the state of the charge. They can see how long their battery is going to last and whether it's at the rate they're using it at and whether it's charging or discharging. Also counts the cycle life on here. So you can kind of brag about how much you're using your battery as you go through this. Because, you know, again, our battery warranty is for 8,000 cycles. What's that in yours? Sounds like a lot. Yeah. We really want people to use this as much as they can do better. They don't want you cycling it every day. We love to see it cycled multiple times a day because the battery can handle that. Yeah. So, I mean, this battery management system, all these things, I mean, they keep the cells level because I think one of the things that generates heat is when you have a mismatch between the voltage of your two cells. And that's part of your quality control of the people that actually built the batteries in the first place. Exactly. And then when you put it all together in the system, that's really, really important. The battery and shortness life. So... It kills all batteries, no matter what their chemistry are, no matter what the... Yeah, that'll degrade them quick. Yeah. So, next slide, please. Now we can talk about money. Now we can talk about money. Sure. So, on this slide, we try and compare two things. One is kind of the older technologies that we're seeing a lot of replacements for, lead-acid technologies. So, again, batteries and putting the batteries with solar is nothing new. This has been going on for over 40 years. Lead-acids kind of the technology with the longest track record. It tends to be cheap up front, but it doesn't last very long. So, with a long lifetime, like our system has, you'll end up replacing that lead-acid system three, four, five times. Right. And while it's cheaper up front to buy that, if you look at that cost over the whole lifetime, it will be up to three and a half times more expensive. And then on the right here, we reflect pretty comparable, like an average lithium ion system that's out there. And, again, while it may be a little bit cheaper up front, you're going to need to replace that before you need to replace our system. So, our warranty being 50% longer and providing more power and flexibility on the installation means that, in many cases, we actually come out being cheaper. So, yeah, it's really important to look at the total life cycle cost. I mean, people just, you know, key on the acquisition cost. And, in fact, like you said, you know, the ongoing maintenance, particularly lead-acid batteries, is pretty significant. And you can only, like, discharge them about 30% of their charge. Or, I mean, discharge them 30%. So, you still have, like, 60, 70 or 60% left in there. If you go below that, then you seriously degrade the life, the overall life of the battery. Whereas your battery can go right down to 0%. You can discharge that from 100% down to 0% without any degradation at all. Right. Yeah. Yeah, but the lead-acid and other batteries, it's like having a glass that's only, you know, but that's as far down as you can go. If it's half full, you need to fill it back up before you can drink anymore. If you get tempted to go further down in that glass, then you're going to really pay for it. You've ruined your investment, basically. Yeah. And that's what happened. People will, you know, and with the lead acid especially, it's tricky to maintain. They're quite complex. And if you get it wrong, you're looking for a new battery. Yeah. We get calls from around the islands here of people who, and we got one, you know, we're looking for a new battery. How soon can you get one here? Right. Yeah, because you have to keep them watered and fed, just like, you know, just like your pets. If they don't get watered and fed, they die. So, yeah. Next slide, please. Great. So, tell us about your market and where your customers are located. Great. Yeah. So, you know, when we started out, we thought we were going to be, this battery would be mostly used in residential settings. But what we found is we actually started out on the residential side and 60% on the residential side. We started here in Hawaii, have many installations on the island of Hawaii and several other islands. But from here, we've really expanded out, we now have installations in over 20 states. And then Puerto Rico has really been our fastest growing market. So, and then also we have installations in Mexico and Canada. And then batteries are very flexible in how you use them. And so we, you know, we have on these use cases. So again, we started with off-grid, which is a mature energy storage market where people get the value of batteries and that longevity. But now we've also seen a lot moving in resilience. So, there's a picture here with the yellow, the yellow boxes, those inverters there is actually a bank in Puerto Rico. They don't even have solar on this. This is to back up their ATMs and servers to keep business continuity going on there. Very good. So, do we have a slide on Puerto Rico? Is that it? I think this is it. So, tell us a little bit more about Puerto Rico, because of course that was a disaster and you guys went into what was essentially a disaster area. How did that work? I mean, how were you able to get in there and get your product in front of people? Sure. So, it took a lot of coordinating, a lot of outreach. So, we actually go through certified installers of our product. So, we had an installer on the island already who knew our product was familiar with it, had taken training from us before. Basically every day for months to figure out, because we're not a disaster response organization, right? There's a relief effort that needs to happen first and once we moved into the reconstruction period is really where we started our active presence there. But the people on the ground were dealing with 40 days without communications, 60 days plus without electricity. Most of the time they were trying to figure out how to make their own lives work. So, it was very hard for them to give us deep information so we could take action. So, literally we had a partner who was going to do some water pumping projects for villages that didn't have electricity where they needed water. And so, we threw a bunch of batteries on a plane and Greg and Kyle flew down to Puerto Rico and spent two months on the ground. Going around working with folks. We trained about 100 installers at that time because the PV market came out of this grid tide. Everything's based on how you monetize it relative to selling energy back to the grid with net energy metering. So, when you do that you usually don't use batteries in the sort of traditional way. And so, mostly installers had no experience with batteries. So, Kyle who leads a lot of our technical training literally trained 100 people and a lot of it was the basics of what does it mean to use a battery. And then into some of the particularities of our system and how to install it. And that led to really we're working across I'd say three use cases there. The first started with these water pumping systems so really looking at critical infrastructure. So, in these remote villages the utility decided not to rebuild the grid after Hurricane Maria. It was too expensive, not enough customers. And so, these villages were not on the water grid either. And so, now they're left without water. You only survive, you know, like three or four or five days without water. Yeah, and there's lots of illness, lots of people leaving these areas and so, we went in with a nonprofit that had a very integrated approach to creating a self-sustaining system there. So, we're very blessed to work with Water Mission on that and they have installed several of our systems around the island. So, that was kind of like a remote power setting. We also have people who now they use the grid as backup. They're basically self-sufficient. They could be off-grid but they have that grid connection there just in case inclement weather for a number of days you want that sense of security. So, instead of batteries that back up, its grid is back up. And that's also working with organizations there to build in resilience. So, a lot of the community shelters there that were set up in each village didn't have backup power. And so, people showed up and there's water and there's food and there's no electricity but there's also no pumps so the water supplies don't last very long and it was kind of a disaster. And so, now they're building in self-sufficiency for some of those community centers as well. So, do you think that the market there, the people, the population, the decision makers, do they have a high opinion of the Blue Planet offering or the Blue Planet energy offering? I would think they would. We've done our best to show just the quality of our product and the quality of our support. We're getting lots of great feedback there. And, you know, we say, vamos con blue. Let's go with blue. There they call us blue. And so, yeah, it's been exciting to work with a lot of amazing partners on the ground there. And really seal that market takeoff. So, what about working with some of the relief organizations like FEMA and things like that? I mean, did that give you some entry into those markets as well? We've been building those relationships since being there. You know, I think a lot of it, people took notice of the critical infrastructure work that we were doing and saw how that may be applied in their situations as well. So, yeah, we've been having people on the ground there as well as critical. Like we really wanted to make sure we had a relevant local presence that we didn't just sort of parachute in with something from the outside, drop them off, leave. But really built a self-sustaining community there, a business ecosystem, as well as the technical knowledge and the adoption base. So, there must be lots of folks, business people, entrepreneurs, and Puerto Rico that maybe want to become, you know, sellers for a part of the blue planet family, yes? Sure, yeah. Yeah, exactly. We do, we partner with the different inverter companies there to do trainings. Yeah. And we've been building up that network there. And one of our installers actually is one who trains anybody who wants to be a certified solar installer on the island. Very good. So, yeah, it's a great network there. And a lot of passionate people working on this. Okay. Good, well done. Are we approaching a break? I'm not sure if I heard something back there. No? Ah, don't need to take a break. Let's just blast right through. So, let's pull up the next slide. I think that might be it. Oh, is that all the slides? Yeah. Okay, so what other good news or what other areas are you guys finding to be, you know, attracting, attracted to this technology? So really this idea of resilience. And this is where we've played a little bit back and forth on the lessons learned here in Hawaii and taking that to Puerto Rico, because Puerto Rico is looking for a model. They say, who can we learn from? And they see the explosive growth of renewables here, and they wanted to learn from that. So we've taken some lessons there to Puerto Rico. But now Puerto Rico in a way is kind of leapfrogged Hawaii, because they've gone beyond just throwing up solar, but also to build in solar and storage. And so, you know, this ability to, and a lot of people don't realize, and I think here it's going to be a big wake-up call when we have a big storm that takes out some of the grid, which we're just as vulnerable to here in Hawaii as we are in Puerto Rico, is that most of that solar is not going to work when the grid goes down. So we had a really close call back in, was it September or October? We had two hurricanes, and imagine that one just like took a 90-year return just before it was going to shmuck us. Really, really good stuff. Thank God, we're literally on that one. Yes, it was scary. So having these conversations to get people to have a plan before there's a disaster, to, you know, in a way, it's the need to invest in climate change adaptation. Storms are getting bigger. We're going to have more storms. We need to be ready for them. Okay, so, you know, we're hosted by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, so I'm going to focus a little bit on policy. So what kind of barriers, or policy barriers you see here in Hawaii and kind of what would your recommendation, what kind of new policies should we be thinking, you know, to get in place to make it easier for you to put in this resilience so that we're not just like, you know, wasting time waiting for, you know, the whole bureaucratic chain to react. What's top of the pops? What do we need to do better? Well, we're making great progress on the microgrid policy. So the policies in place, now we need to actually formulate the regulations so that we know what it means. Create a level playing field and some clarity there. You know, obviously we would love to see incentives for adaptation or adoption of batteries. So some kind of, you know, property tax incentive or some kind of tax incentive because solar got a lot of incentives there for many years, which fueled the rate of adoption. And then, you know, batteries are still really early and that's one reason they're so expensive is we haven't reached a lot of the economies of scale. We need to get more of this out there. And so some kind of incentive to get that locally would be great. And I think removing barriers to interconnection agreements, you know, is always one that is, you know... I thought we were getting better at that. I mean, you know, are we or is it like still too slow? I mean, you're in business so everything has to be speed of light, but is it reasonable or do we still have some work to do there? I think, you know, and this is not just here but in many locations, utilities are still trying to figure out how to play with the batteries. They would prefer to own them and if they're not going to own them then what's this going to do to my business? And unfortunately, batteries are way better for the utilities than... but they're resistant because they lost so much revenue over the solar adoption. And so I feel like they're actually resisting the adoption that we could be having because they don't really know how to adopt their business model fast enough. Yeah. So do you have any, I guess, the new legislations have just come out in the last day or so? So it's kind of, you know, it's a long read, it's a long list, like there's over a thousand senate bills and I think there's about 750 house bills. Got to work our way through those and see, you know, what's good and what's bad. So you guys should look through that and let us know what you support and what you think is a bad idea so maybe we can, you know, help along and help get the right policies in place to support this kind of thing. Yeah, sure. We will do our best. I would also recommend you invite in our cousin Blue Planet Foundation since that's their world is working on the policy world. Yeah, sure. They do a really good job at it. I love their report card that they produce every year and Jeff Michelini does a great job and looking at things in a slightly different, innovative, interesting way that captures people's attention and puts on things like the blue line. It's a really good program and I really thank Hank Rogers for, like, funding this and, you know, supporting all of this. I mean, Hank's vision is the vision of looking out his office window and seeing no oil tankers. That's what he told me a long time ago. I think we're coming to the end now. Is there anything that I missed or that you want to talk about that we haven't talked about? Great question. You know, I think we caught a lot of great ground here today and I think especially this evolution from renewable energy as a sort of profit center and return on investment to really where we're looking at resilience and ensuring continuity of business and well-being in communities is a conversation that we're supporting and so I'm glad we were able to visit that and really how energy storage can unlock more renewable energy and thus increasing our carbon footprint. I'd love to come back when we've got some more of our success stories out there to share with you and talk about and hopefully continue to promote that in Hawaii because I think as people see it they will believe it more, especially as we get that track record. Maybe you could come back here with some case studies of people that installed it what the whole deal was up front how long it took them to get it in place and the results were like supposedly how happy are they with this system so you can brag about it. Can we take you on a field trip? We've got hundreds here. You can take them around the islands. We've been getting some great feedback and we actually do feature our customers because they love to tell that story and how excited they are about it as well as the installers. Jay Fidel who fronts ThinkTech always wants to go out in the field and take some. Can we plan up at Pugawa? Maybe we could highlight some of the stuff they're doing with your batteries because it's a pretty impressive show they have up there. Well, thanks a lot Chris. Appreciate it. Thank you everyone for tuning in and we'll be back next Wednesday at Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Thank you.