 and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii, Stan Osterman. Coming to you live and direct, actually from Kukaiyo Ranch. That's the background in the picture for me. And my guest today is Paul Pontio from Blue Planet Research on the other side of the Big Island. And he's got Puglava in the background, what's that? The nice beautiful, the best rainbow we've ever seen on film behind Paul Pontio. So Paul, thanks for being on the show today. And we're gonna be talking a little bit about microgrids. We're actually listening a lot to Paul talk about microgrids. Because I think for a lot of people when you say the word microgrid, it means a lot of different things to different people. And what we really wanna do is just kind of, you have a real practical look at how microgrids are put together and what you should consider as you're putting them together. So Paul, thanks again for joining me today on the show. And could you start off by explaining up at Puglava where the ranch is there for Blue Planet Research and the microgrid that you've set up and designed with the two solar arrays and all that's connected to them and the logic how it all fits together. You're standing always a pleasure to be with you. So the microgrid that we have covers about 32 acres in size of property. And it powers several different homes as well as several different workshops in our energy lab of course. The first original system was 85 kilowatts of TV that was put on the lab roof. And that was tied into a Vanadium Redox flow battery. That was our first storage solution that we experimented with. And it had some nice features and advantages over conventional batteries as where the power side and the energy side were both independently scalable. So if you needed more storage kilowatt hours, for example, you could add more of the electrolyte tanks. If you needed more power, you could add the actual cell modules that convert into electricity. So that had some issues in the fact that it took a long time to charge those. The efficiency was about 70%. So 70% of the energy that was being put into it would actually get stored. The time penalty was the major factor in us moving away from that and going to a lithium chemistry of battery. So we got together with Sony and Sony was making a specific chemistry of lithium called lithium ferrous phosphate. It's also called iron phosphate in the industry. The initials are LFP. It was night and day between the flow battery. The efficiency on the Sony's were about 97%. So literally the batteries, if they're given enough current, they can charge from zero to 100% in about 90 minutes. That's phenomenal. And it can do it very safely as compared to the other lithium chemistry that's commonly used, which is a cobalt. NMC is the abbreviation of that. It's a nickel cobalt manganese, or nickel cobalt aluminum, they have several versions. But the cobalt was the issue that we didn't like. It was the one component that we thought had too many safety features around it, vulnerability on the supply where it comes from, mostly out of the Congo region of Africa. So there were a lot of things we just didn't like about it. And it was mainly the safety factor of the LFP, which is, it's an olivine based chemistry. So it uses an abundant mineral that's I think the fifth most abundant element on the universe, or on the planet at least. So it's a wonderful battery. It can't catch on fire. It is heavier than the cobalt chemistry. So it may not be adequate or applicable to put in cell phones and laptops, but they are moving towards LFP for autos now for cars. The weight penalty for stationary storage, obviously doesn't matter. So it's a really good choice for large safe storage. So that worked really, really well, but we wanted to expand the system after a few years. So we put in another 50 kilowatts. We have 85 on the lab. We put in another 50 kilowatts of TV on the what we call the workshop or the pavilion where we do our Puku Friday events. And we put in another bank of inverters and batteries. So before I go any further with that, the one thing that I wanna stress, I know you know this, when you go off grid, it changes the dynamics of the design of the system. You have to account for every day in all kinds of weather. And you can either do that with a very large system, or you can do it with a backup generator or some kind of backup generation source in case the TV is hit by days of bad weather and the batteries go down and you can't get them fully charged. So what we did was we originally had a diesel generator as our first backup. And then we started incorporating the hydrogen component into our system. So like I said, every single day counts, you've got to make enough energy to get through the night until the sun comes up in the morning and accommodate also for bad weather conditions. So we added a component of taking our excess energy in the morning because at Kulhava where we're located we have a microclimate. It's beautiful clear skies in the morning and by noon, it's starting to look like what's behind me. It gets overcast and cloudy. So our PV production goes down, but we have enough power to charge our batteries up within about two and a half hours in the morning. But we also have excess power during that time. So we take the excess energy, we split water into hydrogen and oxygen and we store the hydrogen for later use for both fuel cell vehicles as well as stationary fuel cells as our backup generator. So the beauty of this is it allows us to be fossil fuel free even on our backup generation side of the equation. So going back to the addition, we put in an additional 50 kilowatts and we put in another 80 kilowatt hours of battery storage. So the lab has about 140 kilowatts hours of battery storage plus the 80 that's in the other shop. So before I go any further, I should explain because probably a lot of viewers and we see this when we do tours and we talk to the people up here, a lot of people don't understand the difference between kilowatts and kilowatt hours. And that is power versus energy. Kilowatts are the amount of power that can either be put out by the system in watts or kilowatts or can be put into the system. And kilowatt hours is power over time. And the best example I know of is to make the analogy between a hairdryer that uses 1,000 watts or one kilowatt. If you run that hairdryer for one hour, you've consumed a kilowatt hour of energy. So that's where the battery storage comes in. That's your kilowatt hours or energy. The problem with putting in two systems on the same microgrid is that they'll tend to not play nicely together unless they're controlled by some kind of software program. To make a microgrid work, you have to have intelligent controls. There's no other way to do it. It's the same as the problem the utility has with multiple generation sources all pumping into the same grid. So we have an underground grid that covers about three quarters of a mile around the ranch. And it's buried on the ground. It's an aluminum conductor, a single conductor with what's called a coaxial ground. And that carries a high voltage AC power to all of the different places on the ranch. And then we step it down with transforms back to 240 volts. So high voltage would be how much? 7,200 volts is the system that we have. And that minimizes the transmission losses. It's the same with the utility company. They have to pump their voltage up really, really high. That allows you to use a much smaller conductor because volts times amps equal your power. And the higher your voltage, the lower your current has to be. So wires are designed to carry current and voltage, but it's the current that really relates to the size of the conductor, the size of the wire. So we have a very small wire that runs around at high voltage and then we step it back down to common household currents, 240, 120. And that works out good. The problem is we actually have two different brands and technologies of inverters. So we take our DC, we convert it to AC with inverters, but one is a transformer system, the other is a transformer system. They're both two different brands. We have Outback and Solark. And if you were to just let those put power into the grid, they would backfeed each other and then they would crash the grid. So with our software that we have, it's called EMC seed. It just stands for environment monitoring and control center. And it allows us to monitor and control everything that's happening on the witness, whether it's making hydrogen, whether it's charging electric vehicles. But in this case in particular, it allows the two systems to play together nicely on the grid without damaging each other. And then we can actually access it on your phone, right? Yes, any smart device over a browser, you can access the system. You can actually control and manage and add things to the system. You don't need another program and you don't need to load up the new version of the software every time. So it's a very user-friendly software. But here's the scheme we used. We decided that we could take the lab system and put it into grid-forming mode, which it acts like the utility of the grid. So it sets the frequency and sets the voltage signal. The other system up at the pavilion or the shop, we put it in grid cell mode. So it thinks it's selling to the utility, to our underground microgrid. But the way it works is that we monitor the loads on the branch and we take a percentage of the load and we give it to one of the systems and we take the balance of that to the grid cell system. And that way they're equaling the exact amount of power they need to put into grid. So it works really, really well. We control it by the second. So every second EMCC sends a new value to the other inverters to sell. And that equals up to half of the load or a ratio of the load. We can say put 30%, put 50%, or put 70%. And it works very smoothly and they play nicely together and everyone's happy. So when you calculated how much PV you would need for the ranch, well, number one, you kind of almost have to overproduce because you're microclimate there, right? You have to make more electricity than you actually use. And you're storing it in batteries for the quick response and smoothing the power and converting it to AC. But you're storing the hydrogen kind of for long-term storage. Can you kind of comment on why you'd use batteries for some things or super capacitors and then why you would use hydrogen for energy production? Sure, this is what we've determined after years of research and study with this, that the most economical and feasible, practical way to use the two energy storage systems is to use your batteries for your daily turnover of electrons, basically. So your daily needs in kilowatts, kilowatt hours should come from the batteries and then your long-term backup storage comes from hydrogen. And the reason for that is the hydrogen side of the equation equals about one fourth of the cost of the battery side. If you combine them in the right ratio, it gives you the perfect equation for power and energy. And a good example of that would be the military. The military needs 14 days of autonomy according to a mandate that they've been given. So they could do it all in batteries. It would be incredibly expensive and not very smart in a logical way because the batteries storing their long-term energy would be just warehousing electrons for months at a time until they're needed. And that's not a good use for a battery. Batteries like to be cycled, even though the lithium battery chemistry today have a very low self-discharge rate, it can be as low as just maybe 1% a month or 2% a month. So it can store the energy for a long time and you can keep it topped off. But you haven't put your money to the most economical use at that point. But if you use hydrogen for your energy storage, now you're doing it more economically and there's another bonus because once your backup hydrogen is filled, the equipment you're using to make the hydrogen can still be used on a daily basis for things like transportation or cooking. So it gives you the best of both worlds and it actually gives you options that you wouldn't have alone with just batteries. Okay. You mentioned cooking and of course for the audience, I experienced some of Paul's cooking last weekend and he actually cooked up some really great fish that was sent to him from his relatives on the Gulf Coast and pretty darn good stuff. And we've had Sam Choi cook with hydrogen. But tell us some of the kind of unique things about hydrogen gas when you use it for cooking because you do a great demonstration at the ranch for people when we have tours. And it's pretty amazing. I've showed it on the show a little bit but it's always good to have you explain it. Yeah, so I tend to boast about hydrogen being the safest flammable gas in the universe. And the point is that it's just that it's a flammable gas. You handle it with respect like any flammable gas but it's actually safer than other flammable gases. And the reason for that is that first of all, hydrogen is the most abundant and lightest element in the universe. So the buoyancy is a key factor in the safety of hydrogen. It's 14 times lighter than air so it goes up at 45 miles per hour, 66 feet a second. So if somewhere to leak out in 1001, it would be six stories away as soon as you could count one second. So it's moving incredibly fast and unless there's an ignition source right near the leak, it moves so quickly and hits air molecules and scatters that it's not flammable anymore from a foot away. And we do a demonstration as you mentioned where we just open the valve and hold the lighter over it and it just blows the flame out if you get too close. You have to get within an inch from where the gas is coming out from for it to really ignite easily. So the second thing is since it's purely hydrogen, one element means there's no carbon in it at all, there's very little radiant heat. So when it's burning, the heat from the hydrogen flame goes straight up unless the wind is blowing it, it goes literally straight up and everything around it stays cool. It doesn't get heated up. If there were a hydrocarbon gas, it would heat everything up in a 360 degree bubble basically. So the people who have witnessed it and seen the Watt burner that we use, the Watt burner still looks brand new after over 300 hours of use and that's from the lack of radiant heat. The other thing about hydrogen is that since it's such an easy gas to produce, the only difficult part is the amount of energy it takes to make hydrogen. So if you have an economical source of especially renewable energy, you can make hydrogen to be the cleanest, greenest fuel that we can possibly make. So this is where we really need to move in the future to hydrogen. And when you're cooking with hydrogen, you don't need to mix the oxygen or the air and the gas into a certain ratio. It has a wide range of flammability. But what you'll hear most people say when they're afraid of hydrogen it's because they think it's explosive. And anything can be explosive under the right conditions. Grain elevators where they store tons of grain, soybean, rice, corn. The dust from that stuff that the right mixture with air is incredibly explosive. Now if you mix hydrogen in a small space with oxygen, it's also very explosive. But as a gas for something like cooking or running through fuel cells, it's incredibly safe. So you mentioned in the fuel cells and the electrolyzer early on, you actually when you're making the hydrogen to store in your system for your grid that you let the oxygen go and you store the pure hydrogen. But when you talk about using it in like a third world country, you can actually electrolyze hydrogen pretty simply and get HHO, right? Hydrogen and oxygen gas mixed together but you have to use it right away because it is flammable right as it comes out of the electrolyzer. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it might play into countries that don't want to deplete their trees and things like that burning firewood and how they could make use solar and make this HHO gas to use in their stove? Yeah, it turns out that about two million people die every year from cooking indoor with wood or duck from the smoke particulates and inhalation causes a lot of illnesses and eventually death. So the idea is that we could cook with hydrogen and specifically what you just mentioned HHO and HHO is simply hydrogen and oxygen that is still mixed together. Now in any sizable volume that can be a very dangerous situation because it is the perfect ratio of oxygen to hydrogen to be the most flammable it can be and that can be explosive if it's contained in any volume of an area. But if you make HHO on demand and it's only delivered through a very small little tube to the burner then it's relatively safe because you don't have enough of it to do any real damage if it backfired or ignited. There's no storage of it. It's just being made on demand as you're using it to cook with. So that's the difference between HHO and pure hydrogen. The advantage of HHO is you actually get one third more volume of gas which helps and it burns hot because everyone knows oxygen makes everything burn more violently. Under control conditions it can make the ultimate stove. Okay, but you have another system up there on the ranch besides your microgrid that is actually running a pump for the local community water system, Napaul water. And that project has taken a while to get underway because mostly because of bureaucratic paperwork to be honest with you. Getting a lease for pasture land where the wild sheep are grazing took like five years. But that system, could you describe how that works? Because it's kind of a microgrid too except it's a very purpose-focused microgrid on pumping water. But can you give us a little idea of what the components are in there and how that works? Yeah, it's actually a fairly complicated system like our ranch's system in as much as we have different generation sources feeding the well. It's also grid tied, right? Yeah, and it's grid tied. So the well is a community nonprofit water well. It supplies the community of Puanahulu, Pualani subdivision or Pualani Ranch, our ranch as well and all of the Illinois land around Puanahulu. So it was used for years running off of just Halco power. The well is 2,500 feet deep. So we're pushing water up a small pipe for almost half of a mile. So it takes a lot of energy to do that. So it made the water, the most expensive water on the Big Island. We pay a premium price for water up here, as you know, and it's the equivalent of watering your yard with peri-a. So the system was put in to, one, reduce the cost of the energy needed to pump the water and hopefully will reduce the customer price at some point. The second is for security. We now have water in the case of an emergency or disaster. And if the grid goes down, we can island this and pump the water with just our solar and our battery system. So the way the system is designed, and if you wanna put up the slide of the PV array, what it is, it consists of 330 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels that are adjacent to the ranch property on state land. It's a lease from the state. And the 330 kilowatts feed a DC-DC converter, which is the equivalent of a big charge controller that someone could have at their house with their system. And that in turn goes to a 250 kilowatt inverter and a one megawatt hour battery. So we built a 1,000 kilowatt hour battery specifically for this project to allow the energy to be stored during the daytime for pumping at nighttime. And in addition, as you mentioned, we are still grid tied. We had an existing grandfathered in NEM agreement, net metering agreement from Helco, that is part of the mix. So we can use the utility as our backup generator, basically, create all of our own power with the PV during the daytime to run the well and also charge the battery. And at nighttime, the battery takes over. And again, this is all controlled by EMCC as well. It orchestrates the power flow from all the different sources. It also calculates the billing for the customers. This is a PPA, a power purchase agreement. So this was put in to give us a reduced rate per kilowatt hour without any upfront costs to NAPU water and cooperator, which is the water company that serves the community. So that's a really good system for a couple of reasons. And as I've said before, too, when it comes to running a business, even if it's a non-for-profit business, think the water company there, to know your cost of your power or to have a stable price on your pumping your water, not having to worry about your electric prices going up and up and up if the power company's using fossil fuels and that price for the fuel changes. If you can do a long-term power purchase agreement and stabilize your costs for your electricity like you're doing with that solar array and your battery, now the water company can actually guarantee the service at a set price and not have to worry about jacking up the price every time there's a spike in oil and things like that. So we're about running out of time here, Paul, but I'd like to thank you again. And if folks wanna learn more about that EMCC, that's really something that Paul has worked on with some other really sharp people and it's available to run other systems. So if you wanna learn more about it, we can look you up with Paul. And also, we're gonna plug in the photo of the array for YouTube when we come out on YouTube. So we'll be putting that in there, but Paul, thanks for being on the show today. And as usual, a half hour goes by really quick when you're talking about interesting stuff. And I hope that everybody really got something out of your discussion because this isn't really cosmic. It's not simple. I mean, it's not like elementary school work, but it's not overwhelming. And people are afraid to come off the grid. In fact, the reason that water company still gridside is because the board of directors was afraid of not having the power of the electric company to run the well. And really, quite frankly, it's caused more problems trying to stay grid side than if we had just gone with an off-the-grid solution. So people need to think about it. There's a lot to consider and you don't go into it, not doing your homework, but it's all doable. And Paul's got several examples of doing it. So thanks again, Paul, for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Stan. Okay, so until next week Tuesday, Stan, the energy man here, signing off from Think Tech and keep using clean energy. Good for the environment. Check the trees behind me. They're doing great. We'll see you a little bit later. Aloha. Aloha.