 Good afternoon Howard Whig, Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. Do we have a spectacular program this afternoon? Intelligent plug loads. What could be more scintillating? And to lead us in this discussion is Kevin Howes, the COO, or COO, that's not a bird, of, wait a minute, bird ibis, okay. Ibis networks of Hawaii. And just very briefly, in my layman's terms, before you get delused by Kevin, if you looked at the energy use profile of a commercial building, say just 20 years ago, it would be dominated by lighting and air conditioning. If you had an energy use pie, those would be two huge slices. And then everything other would be this small slice. Well, that pie is looking very, very different today because you've heard me talk about LEDs. The LEDs are shrinking, that lighting load down, down, down, down, down, while delivering better lighting. And air conditioning is becoming much more efficient. So that part of the pie is shrinking also. But guess what's becoming bigger and bigger and bigger? Plugloads go into any typical office and look in the back of desks and you think that it's a bird's nest constructed by a huge bird. All these wires just tangled up all over the place. And each one of them is attached to some kind of electronic device and every one of those devices consumes energy. Put that all together, it's called plug load and it's a big, big, big slice of the pie. So let's move right on to Kevin. Good afternoon, Kevin. And thanks so much for being here. My first and most relevant question is the name of your company is Ibis Networks. Now I associate the Ibis bird with something I see on Egyptian, what do you call it? Hiroboros. Hiroboros, yes. So we're in a world that Ibis come from. Actually, and the logo isn't an Ibis bird, but the origin of the name is actually from an acronym that we came up with early on, which is Information Based Savings, or IBS. We then kind of turn that into Ibis, which actually works out pretty well because there are a lot of connotations that come along with the Ibis bird in ancient Egypt as well as even since then. But really kind of the more meaningful part of that is that it's not just about being able to control the power on and off, it's also about getting a true understanding of what's happening with all that plug load. So you understand which devices are drawing the most and when, and then be able to take action based on that knowledge. Yeah, that brings to mind a phrase that we in the energy business use frequently. If you can't measure it, you can't control it. And I think that's exactly what you're all about. That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let me, before we launch and do the specifics, say that I'm the, or not the, one of the energy efficiency guys for the state of Hawaii. And the reason, one huge reason I love efficiency is we all, you're a very intelligent audience out there. You all know all about the Hawaiian electric demand curve at six in the morning, demand is very low. It rises, rises, rises, rises up until around 10, 10, 30 kind of levels off. And then these days, suddenly it begins to dip, dip, dip, dip down in the middle of the day, what in the world is happening? We've got 72,000 PV systems, photovoltaic systems out there statewide and the sun is going strong. They're feeding electricity back into the grid and it's carving this great big chunk out of the middle of the load. And that's creating some headaches to put it mildly for Hawaiian electric. But then Hawaii's peak use is between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Why is that? Everybody's coming home from school and work and all systems in each home, hundreds of thousands of homes are going full blast. And here's the kicker. We are a tourist dominated society. All the tourists are coming in from the beach, from shopping, whatever. They're taking showers, turning on the TV and then they're going to all the restaurants and bars and they're all going full blast. So there's our evening peak. Now to get back to energy efficiency, what I like about energy efficiency is it shaves the load evenly. Whatever the efficient product is, it follows the existing demand profile including that evening peak. So the more efficient equipment you have out there, the lower that peak is going to go. And as soon as we can really, what's called, shave that peak, we can begin to talk about shutting down some more of Hawaiian electric power plants. So because there's, well, I won't go into the details of that. So anyway, why don't we go to the next slide and look at plug load challenge. Well, actually I covered some of this, but go ahead. Yeah, sure. And as you mentioned, lights and air conditioning, HVAC is more commonly known, do still account for about two thirds of a building's energy use. But what a lot of people realize is that all of that accumulated, aggregated plug load basically can account for up to 40% of the rest of that. So very, very significant. And while to your point, there's been a lot of work in optimizing HVAC. There's been a lot of ongoing work with LEDs and other mechanisms to help with lighting. Firstly, nothing has been done with plug load. For most building engineers and owners, it's just a black hole. They know it's a huge part of their energy use, but don't know anything more about it. And so that's where we come into play. We have tools that bring the internet of things principles to energy management. And we've shown that we can save up to 40% or even some cases above 40% of the electricity usage on managed devices in commercial buildings. Now, before you go on, I hear the internet of things all over the place. Are you maybe one of the few people in the universe who can clearly describe what the internet of things is? Well, without trying to make it too broad, essentially what that means is that all of these various sensors that, for example, ours put around and sit between the devices and the wall, all of those sensors have real-time data and communicate using internet protocols up to, in our case, a cloud-based system. And so I can go in from any browser on my phone or tablet or computer from anywhere in the world and be able to see real-time data of what's happening in my system as well as then-exert control, turn things on and off or set algorithms or schedules to manage it. But the key point there is that because we're using internet principles, essentially all of these little devices almost are like little computers all communicating to each other and to the internet and to the cloud. So that's the internet of things. It brings to mind a kind of humorous story. We were having a presentation by a national fellow in a similar business and he said, he was trying to explain this and he said, for instance, I think he was from Seattle. He said, let's see what my dog is doing. And he pushed a couple buttons and there was a camera in his home, not there, and then there's a living room and bad doggy, you're on the couch. Yeah, sometimes you're not sure, but you wanna run that demo live, but that's exactly right though. And so we're applying it in a slightly different way. The other thing that you hear a lot about with internet of things lately is about some of the security risks as a lot of these kind of sensors and networks are fairly open and or easily hacked. And so that's one of the key differentiating points that we bring with our system is security. This was developed originally for military applications. And so we apply proprietary algorithms and encryption to avoid some of those issues such, you're probably not too worried about somebody being able to log in and see what's going on with your dog, but you'd be very worried about people being able to somehow hack in and turn things on and off. Or you have secure proprietary information in there. It's unique to your own company. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so I think that that's one of the areas in internet of things that's going to continue to be a focus area for companies is ensuring that level of security and being able to address that as well as scale, which is the other big issue. It's one thing to be able to look at one camera or turn on and off one device in your house or maybe even two or three. But what we've tried to do is approach it as a commercial building and say, what if I've got tens of thousands of these devices, monitors, printers, copiers? How can I manage that in a way that makes sense? Yeah, it's mind-boggling to a non-techie such as myself. Exactly, so that's a big part of our system is addressing just that. Yeah, so we're on the next slide. Now, plug load opportunity. Yeah, and I think a lot of people may or may not realize most office buildings are actually empty two thirds of the time with nights and weekends. And yet a lot of these devices stay running either in full power mode or often in sleep mode. Sometimes it's called vampire or phantom load as these devices continue to use a little bit of power. Copiers, for example, or printers will stay on in somewhat warm even in sleep mode or water coolers that keep the water hot and cold 24 seven, whether anyone's around or not. So by just by turning these devices off when nobody is in the office, then turning them back on before the first person comes back in, you can save significant amounts of money just based on that. And then we can apply other types of strategies too to the point about having real-time data. And you said if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Well, that's exactly right. But once I have real-time data, I can understand which devices are more or less efficient, which devices are becoming less and less efficient over time so I know when it's time to repair or replace them. And I can enforce user behavior policies. So if I tell people to turn things off at the end of the day, I can go in and check and see if they've actually turned them off or not. And all of those strategies taken together, we can accomplish significant savings. So when it comes to not just that peak shaving but also if you think about overall state goals for moving towards renewable energy, it's not just about generation. It's also about cutting consumption. So we can go a long way towards cutting that. So when you mentioned everybody goes home at five, six o'clock, well, if I can cut a lot of the power in the commercial buildings, I can offset what they're turning on at home. And then let's say I think we're in a building that's 32 stories high here and a whole lot of people go home at 435, 530, but some people are still staying. So how can you, how do you manage, you manage floor by floor, office by office. We actually can manage all the way down to the individual device. So depending on your office, your company, your department, your individual person, I can adjust those schedules to meet their work hours. And as well, we also have an override so that if you need to stay late, you come in on the weekends, God forbid. It's very easy to restore power to anything you need. And so we make sure that we can accommodate the actual real world situations of offices. And I would point out that every one of these devices, no matter how slow, are producing some kind of heat. The more you have them on, the less heat produced, the less your AC load. And if you go into an office on the weekend, there's no way to see, you're more comfortable because the temperature is lower, because there's not all of these devices all over the place that producing heat. That's absolutely right, yeah. Okay, well on that very, very cheery note, we already have to take a break. Think Tech Hawaii, Code Green, back in a minute. Hi, I'm Donna Blanchard. I'm the host of Center Stage, which is on Wednesdays at two o'clock here on Think Tech. On Center Stage, I talk with artists about not only what they do and how they do it, but the meat of the conversation for me is why they do it, why we go through this. A lot of us are not making our livings doing this, and a lot of us would do this with our last dying breath if we had that choice. And that's what I love to talk to people about. I hope you enjoy watching it, and I hope you get inspired because there's an artist inside G2. Join us on Center Stage at two o'clock on Wednesdays. Bye. Hey, Style Energy Man here. Make sure you tune in on my lunch hour every Friday from noon until 12.30, at least. Maybe I'll go a little long if you've got good stuff to share with you. But we'll talk about energy, all kinds of energy. My favorite is hydrogen, and my favorite, other favorites, transportation and hydrogen. But we'll talk about all kinds of energy. Be with us every Friday at noon, Style Energy Man, aloha. Good afternoon again. How are we, Code Green, Think Tech Hawaii? My guest, Kevin Howes, of IBIS Networks, we're just beginning to get into the nitty gritty of how you control that big, big, big segment of energy use in a commercial building. So if we could bring up the next slide, how it works, system overview. So I want you to take it away, Kevin. Sure, and I mentioned before that we've got these sensors or what we call, kind of, telesockets that we plug in all around an office. Actually, I've got a couple of samples here on the desk. They're very small and we have, we accomplished so various kind of sizes. So for various voltages and amperages, we can accommodate them. These happen to be our two kind of low power, 110 volt kind of devices for your basic office equipment. And we plug these devices in. They communicate kind of with each other and pass real-time data through a proprietary kind of firmware over ZigBee, which is kind of the radio frequency we use so it doesn't impact your Wi-Fi networks, and then through a small, essentially, router up to the cloud. And I can log in from any browser-based system and understand, see what's going on in real-time, run reports, run analytics, set schedules and manage not just the devices, but also the power to the devices, essentially turning things on and off when they're not used and, or being able to run analytics, as I mentioned, so that if devices are starting to become less efficient or look like they're behaving erratically, I can send somebody to check on them. So that helps extend device health and life so I can get much more of the equipment I have. Now, say this building hired you to control energy in all 32 floors or whatever, how would you do that? Would you start on floor two and wander around and look at all the devices and then go up to floor three and then up to floor four? How does that work in here? Yeah, we would work with the, this is a multi-tenant building, so we would work with the different tenants to understand the equipment that they have, which equipment is more or less likely to be candidates for a device like this. There's really not much benefit to putting this on a pencil sharpener or something that's very, very low power, so we would go through, understand the kinds of equipment that is either mission critical that they really want to be watching and or that we could effect either by understanding the data or through schedules and then the voltages and amperages that we would need then come back to install it, very, very easy install, plug it in and then we'd establish a baseline, see what the energy use is happening in real time and then work with the tenant, work with the building owners to establish whether it be schedules or other tools to optimize the energy so they can get more out of the equipment while still saving energy. And if I were a smart building manager, I would get every tenant to cooperate with this by saying you are individually metered. Well, no, individual, it varies, doesn't it? It varies a lot by building. In a multi-tenant building, the electricity is typically included as part of the lease so it's a set amount. So we're still working with building owners and managers to figure out what types of incentive programs can be put into place. As a great example, there's buildings even in downtown Honolulu where you've got a law office which maybe two or three guys in their laptops not using very much energy at all and another floor you may have a laboratory or something with a lot of heavy equipment or a printer that's using a lot of energy. So working with the building owners and the tenants to find ways to better incentivize and reward tenants that are more energy efficient. Yeah, I'm the energy codes guy and I put into the new codes the fact that all tenants over 1,000 square feet, including living units, shall be individually metered and that metering data shall be accessible by the individual tenant. And we have actually found that user behavior can change significantly just by exposing that information to the users. Before you even like go and market or tell them or create policies around it just by letting them know how much energy that refrigerator or that space heater or whatever is using, you can impact their behavior just because nobody wants to be wasteful that most cases are just not aware of how much energy these things actually use. Okay, well, we don't have all that much time. What do we have for another slide here? Well, I think what would be useful, yeah, is very quickly we can talk about where we are. We are Honolulu based, we're a spin out of a local engineering company called Oceanette and we have actually advanced the technology we're in our third generation of the hardware and the software. Because it's important for commercial buildings, we integrate with building management systems over something called back net, which is just a industry term. And we've been demonstrating this in commercial pilots across Hawaii and mainland and even overseas some. We're on a couple of military bases with pilots. We've been doing a lot of work with schools, including the UH system and the Department of Education. We're in a number of public schools here, which we're very excited about and of course commercial buildings. And with that, I don't know if it's the next slide, but I thought what would be fun is to show just a little bit of data from one of our installations at the University of Hawaii. And I'm not sure how well you're able to see this, but essentially UH has a very significant energy usage profile and roughly about $40 million or so of energy use here. Can you tell us what the peaks and the valleys are because we can't read the boundary? Absolutely, so the graph in the middle is essentially a typical week of UH Minoa. And you see the peaks there are your weekdays. You see a couple of days there and then weekends where it's not quite as high. But I think what I like to point out about this slide is that those valleys, the overnight, middle of the night when you think the energy use would be at its lowest, it is, but it's still literally 50% of the peak. Yeah, the bottom part, that solid is called the base load and that is one heck of a base load. Exactly, and that also represents a lot of opportunity for savings. And that's where being able to apply some of these strategies we talked about can make a huge difference. And as I mentioned, we've been able to show by applying various strategies, we can save over 40% of energy use on managed devices which equates, if you look at the entire electricity bill to about 10%. So very significant, especially if you've got a $40 million bill. Wow. And is that 40 million just for Manoa campus or is that the entire university system? I believe that's the Manoa campus. And do you incorporate, can you incorporate AC, HVAC into this or that's a totally separate issue? That's really a separate issue. Most large buildings have central air conditioning which is managed through different types of systems. But where we can apply this is for smaller window air conditioners or in some cases, split systems. So for example, with the heat abatement program that the DOE is putting into place, a lot of that's gonna be portable and window air conditioners, some of which are gonna be PVAC, portable tech but still have a plug load component for cloudy days. And so we can still provide a lot of benefit in those types of systems. And we're really excited to work with the DOE to help them understand kind of real world use what these air conditions are actually going to be using and then help optimize that. Yeah, I'm so glad you're doing that because there's hot kids, hot kids, nobody wants hot, sweaty kids or teachers for that matter. But if all of those thousands of classrooms were air conditioned, there was no way on God's green earth that DOE could be the electricity bill. So you in working with them are hopefully gonna be able to offset. We can offset a big part of that and we can make sure as an example that they get turned off. Despite best intentions, a lot of times air conditioners or space heaters would not get left on at the end of the day. But if they run overnight or over a weekend, it can add up very quickly and across 12,000 classrooms in the state, it adds up. So we can absolutely make sure that they're turned off as well as provide real world data which brands of the air conditioners are more or less efficient. And what's the actual energy load that it's putting on the school so that the school and HECO can appropriately provision the school to make sure that their airsees are running but not over provisioning and wasting money in that regard as well. Yeah, that's gonna be so important and I'm so glad you're working with them and with the University of Hawaii, their AC bill is... It's significant as well, absolutely. And I know we're a little bit short on time but we can also do some other really interesting things such as HECO's moving towards a demand response program. I have a demand response right on my notes here. Oh, there you go. Good, good, yeah. Well, we found we did actually a pilot program with hotels and hotels typically don't like to do demand response because they need to be on 24 seven to service the guests. But if you go in and you can selectively choose devices such as the ice machines or some of the vending machines to participate, then it's fine, not a problem. And if you think about all the ice machines and all the floors and all the hotels in Waikiki, by turning them off when you hit that 5 p.m. peak, you can make a very significant difference. So from a grid perspective, it's a really interesting proposition. You might clarify for our guests what in the heck is demand response. And I might say that Hawaiian Electric is looking really, really closely at demand response. And in my humble opinion, it's gonna be one of the major ways that they're gonna be able to reduce energy. So what is demand response? So demand response is essentially if you think about electricity provisioning, you've got the generation and the supply side, then you've got the demand side as well. And so it's always difficult to balance those and make sure that they're essentially about equal. So if your demand spikes and you can't bring up your supply fast enough, you end up with brownouts for other issues. So there's a technology that's in place and there are a few different approaches to it that essentially can dynamically go in since that imbalance is happening and selectively turn off certain demand side appliances. So we mentioned icemakers and things with hotels, but generally speaking, it tends to be more like commercial businesses that have industrial lines that they can bring down on a fast response for 15, 20 minutes until the supply can catch up. And I should mention that the Hawaiian Electric just doesn't go in and intrude, they enter into agreement with these clients. Yes, these clients are due by in, and in fact, Hawaiian Electric, our most utilities actually pay them to be part of this program. So there is a reward for them to participate. Yeah, yeah. And any wrap up notions here? I think we ran out of our slides. Oh, okay, here's how it works. Well, we've kind of already visited that. I think that if there's a takeaway is that, really when it comes down to thinking about, why is goals and what we're trying to achieve from energy dependence, demand side and what's going on with the conservation and energy efficiency needs to be absolutely a part of that discussion. And it's not just around HVAC and lighting. Now we've got new tools such as ours that can go in and help address even some of the other devices that are around the office. Absolutely, this would have been inconceivable 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago. There were energy management systems, but they were complex and the operator had to know how to do it and... And they still are. There's still a lot of those systems, but we're trying to simplify that as much as possible. But you're absolutely right. Even five or 10 years ago, this would have been just a matter of concept. But now we can see it applied in real world and we're actually seeing the results. And my mandate is HCEI, Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative, 100% Clean Energy Electricity by 2045. This is gonna be a major contributor to that. And on that cherry note, we have to close Kevin Howe's IBIS networks. Thank you very much. Thank you, Howard. Enjoy being here. Thank you.