 Okay, this is Jay Fidel here on Think Tech, and I feel wise today. And a much wiser person is Marco Manglisdorf, because he's in Washington, D.C., he joins us from Washington. Hi, Marco. Now, watch out about being a wise guy, Jay. You're a good wise guy in every sense of the word. So greetings from the nation's capital to you. Let's call this dispatch from D.C. This up on the national solar scene, and nobody could be better qualified to tell us, A, because he's done this with Provision Solar for the last 200 years, and B, because he's in Washington, where the conference took place in Utah, and he was there in Utah, at Salt Lake, and now he's in Washington to ruminate about what happened. Marco, tell us about this conference on solar. Well, now you promised never to talk about my age, Jay. So let me take a moment to compose myself and take a deep breath here. So you outed me, but hey, one shouldn't be ashamed of one's age, right? No, no, no shame. Yeah, so I decided to continue East after several days at what is kind of considered the be-all and end-all, and the big whoop-de-doo, dark and pony solar conference on the planet called Solar Power International, SPI for short, and this year the organizers chose a beautiful Salt Lake City in Utah of all places, which is a little bit of an odd choice. Not that they don't have plenty of sun there, but they don't have a whole lot of solar in terms of roofed up solar utility scale solar, but nonetheless it's a charming place to visit, and it's kind of an overwhelming experience. I don't know how many trade shows you've been to in your lustrious-wise career, my friend, but this particular trade show was one of many that I've attended for almost 40 years. So again, I'm dating myself, and I say the number one reason to go is usually to see people you don't see otherwise, except for these shows, but also, of course, to kind of get a thing around the pulse to see, what's the solar industry doing, where is it going, who's doing what, where, why, and how, you know, the typical questions the reporters ask, and what's clear to me is that it's an interesting time as far as solar now is becoming more integrally connected to and working harmoniously with energy storage. So there was no shortage of battery peddlers from Japan, from China, from European countries as well, because the only way we're going to get to most people believe we need to go in terms of vastly more intermittent power, non-firm power, renewable energy, i.e. solar and wind, is to take these power sources and combine them with storage so that we get closer and closer to what the utility companies believe and describe as firm power and be able to provide a base load dispatchable, dependable, firm power, so to me, specifically for my company, I wanted to see what else is out there as far as residential solar plus storage, and I'm, you know, I'll go on a little bit of a sub box here, you know, I've been a Tesla certified installer my company has for the past several years, and it's just amazing to me, and of course I somewhat bias, but I'm mostly objective, but Tesla continues to lead the pack, and not just by a few months, but by seemingly several years, so whether it's automotive or electric vehicles, or whether it's for energy storage, both behind the meter for residential applications and commercial industrial applications, and also utility scale is Tesla continues to be far ahead of the pack, in my opinion, but fortunately, other companies, whether it's Sony, a company called Sonin out of Germany, LG out of, which is part of a big conglomerate of course in South Korea. So over the next one to two or three years, it's going to be a lot more choice to be able to take a solar, electric system, rooftop solar, and utility scale solar, and combine it with cost effective reliable, reliable battery storage. That's kind of my number one takeaway. Well, there's two things at these conferences that I'd like to break it down. You know, one is the new technology, and that means the exhibit hall with all the hundreds, probably you are thousands of exhibitors who are demonstrating their new technology, their new systems. So what did you see in the exhibits, you know, that turned you on? Was there anything there? That was remarkable. That was, you know, ahead of the game. Disruptive, if you will. I would have to say on the whole, no, Jay, I mean, crystalline solar PV modules have been around since the 1950s and the original solar cells developed by the folks of Bell Labs, you know, 70 years ago, and the improvements in solar technology have been greater reliability and also higher efficiencies in terms of inverting sunlight striking the servers to electricity, actual usable power. But we are reaching kind of the practical limits of increased efficiency. I mean, it's definitely been creeping up, but you know, solar modules, the best solar modules on the planet haven't been made by a company called Sunpower, and they are maximum of 23, 24 percent efficient. So that's obviously, you know, quarter. You know, a lot of physics says nothing is ever 100 percent efficient and never will be. But the likelihood of, in my experience of 40 plus years of a solar module going to 50 or 60 percent efficiency, you know, while you can get up, jump up and down and hear about these reports out of this laboratory in Finland or that laboratory in Japan or some Tinkerer somewhere that's achieved a breakthrough or a disruptive solar technology, I mean, I'm kind of jaded in a sense in that I've gotten excited, you know, time after time after time after time only to find that stuff doesn't seem to make it to the marketplace. So I think we're dealing with incremental increases in efficiency, which is still a good thing. We're dealing with a substantial decrease in the cost by 80, 90 plus percent over the past 10 years. I mean, the cost of solar modules now is incredibly cheap, especially compared to only a handful of years ago. So solar, I think, is pretty much down. I mean, in terms of efficiencies are up, liability is up, prices are down. And the next great frontier is to, as I mentioned before, mine now was storage, storage on a massive scale, on a massively exponentially greater scale. So I think that's where the industry is right now. So to go back to your question, you know, anything that was massively disrupting that I saw, I would have to say no. No, I mean, the only thing that's kind of disruptive is you're wandering through these halls and, you know, these vendors have spent tens of thousands of dollars for these glissie displays and screens that are 20 by 20 and show surfers, you know, diving down 50 foot waves and so forth. I mean, that's kind of disruptive to one's psyche. But other than that, as far as technological breakthrough, I would say that's not the case. Well, a couple of thoughts about that, Marco. You know, you probably saw the presence of other countries there, for example, China. So beyond South Korea, beyond the U.S., beyond Germany, I understood that China was making a lot of solar cells. Did you see them there? And did you see, you know, a change in the pie slices on who was contributing to the marketplace, you know, who was feeding in technology and who was their present there, you know, in the conference? Did you see a lot of Asia? Did you see a lot of Europe? Where is it going to? Well, certainly no shortage of companies and individuals from the People's Republic of China and just to a lesser extent, Taiwan. In fact, I was walking down the hall and I saw in the distance, I thought, I think I looked familiar. And it turns out to be with my friend Vincent, who works for a company called Suntak in Wuxi, China, which is not far from Shanghai. And I met Vincent 15 years ago during my first trip to the People's Republic. And it was an incredible pleasure to see him and to connect with him. So you have plenty, plenty of Chinese, both in terms of photovoltaic modules and also in storage. I mean, if you look at the total market for PV across the planet, I'm going to say that somewhere in the 65 to 70% of all photovoltaic production is taking place in the People's Republic of China and in Taiwan. So a lot of that is going to meet domestic demands in China. And since the these tariffs, tariffs wars have been going on, gosh, pretty solid for the past seven or eight years. There has been a lot less or significantly less Chinese PV coming into the US market compared to four or five years ago. What about graphene? Did you see any graphene there? You know, graphene came up on my radar probably four or five years ago. And I wonder if anybody is trying to commercialize or market graphene? Not that I saw there. And again, you know, my threshold to get my attention, Jay, is what technology, what product is going to be readily, commercially available in the near term, as opposed to, oh, this looks super hot in the laboratory. They're getting a 45% efficiency. It's going to revolutionize the market and all sorts of other hyperbolic claims. And I need to see it actually being introduced to market at scale and sticking around for at least one or two or three years, because, you know, again, there are so many so much spin and bright, pretty bubbles that come out of press releases, or somebody touting the latest breakthrough. But to me, it has to be able to make it to market. And it has to show that it deserves to be there. You know, we've had a number of shows lately about hydrogen as a storage mechanism. In other words, solar runs an electrolyzer, the electrolyzer creates hydrogen. Now the hydrogen can be exported and transported and so forth all over the place in these tanks. And of course, for vehicles, it's faster to charge your hydrogen car than it is your electric car. I don't know about other uses, but I wonder if there was anybody in this huge conference who was trying to sell hydrogen as a storage methodology. I did not see anybody. Then again, I wasn't kind of Marco on a mission to find, you know, homebrew, residential scale, electrolyzers, which, you know, is not something you typically need to order. You cannot order from Home Depot or put an order on Amazon, as far as I know. So it's, I think we're a ways away, unfortunately, as far as being able to have a small scale H2 production at a home. I mean, we both know Hank Rogers is ranch on the west side of the Big Island. He makes his own hydrogen. But, you know, Hank is a, you know, fairly affluent individual and can can afford to do really cool stuff like that, you know, which is great. And he can set an example. But, you know, in terms of, you know, spend 899 bucks and then pay another 2000 over the next two years through monthly payments, and you'll be able to create your own H2, which can then, you know, compress it into a tank at 5,000 or 10,000 psi, and then use that to pump up your Toyota Mirai or your Hyundai Santa Fe. I think we're a little bit of ways away from that. You know, you and I have talked a number of times about the need for and the possibilities of overnight storage, overnight battery storage with Tesla or one with other companies that are making Bessoni. This is not this true. And I wonder if you saw anybody who was, you know, either either realistically or hyper-hyperbolically suggesting they had a battery system that would go overnight or for days and days while the sky was dark for one reason or another. Do you see any storage systems that were advanced in that way? Well, I mean, it's not, you know, proverbially, it's not rocket science to get storage that's going to last 12, 24, 36 hours. You just need a lot more of it. So far, utility is both in Hawaii, IEK, IUC, and also on the US mainland are putting in storage for solar that typically has maybe four or five, six hours worth of capacity. And, you know, five, six years ago, we didn't even have that. So where is it going to take to go from five or six hours to three or four or five X that? It's just going to take a heck of a lot more storage. And, you know, it is going to take continued decreases in the price of storage and working out the power electronics so that it all plays nicely together. But it's not any type of Einstein type of challenge or Hawking type of challenge in terms of my goodness. How do we figure this out? No, I mean, it's pretty nice and both. You just need a heck of a lot more storage and it's got to come cost effectively. And I have no doubt that as there continues to be more competition amongst the Americans, the Europeans, the Chinese, the Japanese, that storage will come down. It will be more cost effective. And you're going to have more and more utility skills, solar and wind that will have much more capacity, much more ability to be able to ride through and provide discharge, you know, over more and more time. So it's definitely happening. Well, I'm sure the conference was really stimulating. I would love to be there. Next time you go, I'll carry your suitcase and we can, you know, examine it together. But in the meantime, you had some charts that I think we'd like to discuss showing a comparison of what is it, 2007 and then more recently. 2009, excuse me, the US energy consumption by source. It's very interesting to see the delta factor. Can you explain this chart? Yeah, I'd be happy to. And the recent thoughts that would be appropriate to talk about this is, you know, being in the nation's capital, it's kind of a heavy place for someone who is spending a fair amount of time in the political science world, which has kind of been a parallel track career wise for me over the past 40 years, is I thought, well, what can I, what's going to be kind of juicy to talk about in terms of kind of national energy and try to determine some trends here. So the slide that you put up there is total energy consumption in the United States by energy source and it's measured in in BTUs or quadrillion BTUs, BTUs being British thermal units. So to me, the takeaways on this particular slide, you see roughly about 94.578 quads of BTUs for for all of 2009, which is you know, roughly 10 years ago, right? And you see petroleum there is 37 NAD gas 25 coal 21 and renewable energy, the combined renewable energy of 9% and then nuclear also at 9. So if we go to to the next slide there, which is the most recent data I could get eight years later in 2017, I couldn't find anything for this year, of course, the year thought over and I couldn't find anything as recent as 20 2017. So I don't know if you put the the 2017 slide up, I'm still seeing no, we have it up now. Okay. Okay. So the to me the striking difference in the course of the past eight years is petroleum petroleum is is flat is still a 37% and which I guess shouldn't be a surprise perhaps because petroleum has become more abundant these past seven years in terms of from various fracking fields across the continental mainland US. So petroleum is is steady at 37% that gas went up by 4% points from 25 to 29 coal is really striking J coal went down by one third from 21% 10 years ago to 14% as of 2017. Of course, that's no big surprise, right? I mean, it's been all over the news these past years that coal is an effect, I believe terminal terminal in terms of yes, we'll continue to have coal plants, but there's no way despite President Trump's desire to bring coal back as he's been talking about for the past several years, a market forces just are not going to allow that to happen. Nuclear power steady at 9% same as as 2009. And then renewables went up from 9 percentage points that to 11% which is of course not not huge but what kind of struck me is that both solar and wind although still relatively small percentages of the total total combined production of all renewables is a solar and wind went up significantly. So there's there's quite the quite the carving amongst the the non believers, I'll say the non believers of renewable energy quite the carpeting as far as the will solar and wind too expensive. It would take you know the entire state of Texas to have enough solar panels to provide power for the country and you know wind turbines are are are big and bulky and a lot of people don't want them in their backyard and so forth and so on and you know the reality is that solar and wind and other renewables aren't going to happen just overnight and and then when we're seeing you know very positive trend lines and again with a combination of lower cost renewable energy and lower cost storage I mean the future on a macro level looks incredibly bright across the US writ large then you know I asked myself what's the the connection between these macro numbers to what's going on in our little state in the middle of the Pacific and we are in some some sense where we're kind of an island you know no puns intended here I guess actually puns are intended we're islands into ourselves because as I think I mentioned to you and I still find so striking we use more petroleum to produce electricity in Hawaii than the rest of the mainland combined so we're dealing with different sets of challenges and issues in our isolated state would be interesting it'd be interesting to compare that 2017 chart with what's happening why won't we put it back up again and make a little bit of a comparison you know for example I think relatively speaking we have more solar than than the country as an average we probably have less wind than the country as an average because then on the chart the national chart shows a oh gee wind is three times more than three times the amount of solar that's certainly not the case in Hawaii we you know we we don't have any natural gas to speak of I don't think our biofuels so that much or our wood for that matter or our hydroelectric so it'd be very interesting to make a chart just like this you know with the same kind of you know divisions and colors and the like just for Hawaii to compare it against the national averages because it is different the other thing I want to mention Marco and I sort of like your view of it you spoke before about demand and I think that's a very interesting term in terms of energy especially with climate change so we have a show called energy in America we have a fellow named Lou Pugirisi who is an energy consultant but over time it's been clear that he's consulting on oil and gas mostly and he goes all over the world he spends a lot of time in Asia most recently he was in Nanjing a couple days ago reporting for what's going on in China in Nanjing and elsewhere in China and the message you know that I get out of all of that is that you can say that the US has a certain certain direction towards solar and renewables in general but the world is building infrastructure or natural gas at a very rapid rate and the world is using oil maybe not so much as you you know we saw percentage-wise you know a few years ago but the natural gas is is taking is taking the share so to speak of oil in many places so what we've got is fossil fuels are actually on the rise and they are you know relative to investment relative to share of the energy marketplace and relative to government policy in this country with your president Donald Trump so we're spending a lot of time and money and policy direction on fossil fuels right now and so is China and so so are a lot of places and so you know we talk about these percentages of renewables we talk about the decline of coal you know but the fact is we're in climate change and Greta Thunberg is not kidding we are doing exactly what she has told us we're wrong to do and we're continuing to do it so our goals to me whatever they are are too remote our goals to me according to Greta anyway we're not moving fast enough and you can watch the weather you can watch the change there in our ecosystems our environment our whole planet and you say hmm should we be shouldn't we be doing something more dramatic here what's your response to that Marco? Well I was incredibly moved by that four or some in a speech that Ms. Thunberg gave before a panel there she was on a panel at the UN not two weeks ago at the General Assembly in New York very moved by her the passion and the anger and the hurt so I you know I agree wholeheartedly with her of course the reality is we you and I would both agree it's a hydrocarbon based fuels i.e. oil i.e. that gas and coal are going to continue for the decades to come to play a very very big role in in the world's in the world economy and national economies and that said you know we still need to go farther farther faster further deeper in terms of getting away from hydrocarbon based fuels and one of the things that struck me is as I looked at those two pie charts that that you showed today is the increase from 2017 to 2009 again eight years right the increase in total quad quadrillion BTUs in terms of total energy consumption in the US was 3.3 percent okay 3.3 percent over eight years so just stick that in your brain for a moment I happen to know it's not because I'm so smart it's because the data is right out there I happen to know that many developing countries including ones I'm interested particularly in the interest of these days in Southeast Asia Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar those countries are increasing their energy consumption per annum by rates of six, seven, eight or more percent per year per year so you play that out over five or ten years you're talking about substantial increases so is that increase Marco is that increase in fossil fuels or in renewables well it depends on the country Laos is incredibly Lao PDR is incredibly blessed by hydro so they make so much of it they export it to the hungry Chinese of the north the hungry tribes of the south but Vietnam for example they are a kind of a really important crossroads in terms of their economy is bubbling along will continue to do so for the for civil future they hope and we have this direct relationship these past decades where more economic growth corresponds commensurably with higher energy use because that's just kind of the way it's been so they're at a crossroads in terms of they need a heck of a lot more electricity where's it going to come from so they're talking to the Americans are talking to the Chinese they're talking to the Russians so it's kind of all in in terms of we need more electricity where's it going to come from so it's not an academic exercise to these people and it really portends you know for some serious decisions as far as whether the Social Republic of Vietnam decides to go on a more soft energy path or or believe that the the costs are such the economics are such that cheap coal from Australia or nuclear plants from from elsewhere are the ways to go but again I was so struck by we become the American the United States has become much less energy intensive in terms of breaking that traditional relationship between quantitative economic growth leading to quantitative increase in energy we're becoming you become much better one of the world's best in terms of doing that but developing countries many of them are still very much locked into that the greater the economic growth the more energy they need so that that's a real concern well I think the US could be a leader was a leader is not a leader now Trump is not a leader in this in fact it's just the other way I mean he's he's he's left a cop 21 2 3 and 4 and the whole notion of climate change it's amazing in a time where climate change is revealed every day he still rejects it and so what you know what I come to think of you know is an irony about Hawaii being ahead in its way on on renewables it's not enough we we can't we can't stop climate change here in these islands with just too small but we can develop it here we can develop an energy system that is more and more renewable and something we can be proud of and export and go speak about and just like Greta Thunberg makes an appearance at the UN you know and and stirs people up over the issue raises raises consciousness about it Hawaii could do it too this would be a very uh a most and everything for us to do to send emissaries like you for example to speak to other places and say wait a minute you guys here's what we've done in Hawaii we want to do it better and we want you to do it better so you know I think it's certainly worth just a second it's certainly worth our effort to try to be a leader even if the country itself is not being a leader just a second just one second okay yeah you there yes I'm just going to say I couldn't agree more and I'm you know it's easy to get kind of downcast by the challenges ahead but then you know we do have people like Hank Rogers and people like Jeff Avon at Value Act and you know Stan Osterman and and the folks at Elemental Accelerator and other other people who are committed passionate right dedicated to trying to not trying but also you know may actually making happen that Hawaii is on on the forefront in terms of the of the energy transition uh that's not just kind of a luxury I mean to me it's an absolute necessity and while I may have issues at times with with Governor Ege in terms of his decisiveness I mean the state government is you know in fits the starts is moving in the right direction so I you know we need as I think we've spoken about before we need multiple champions who are out there you know beating the drum day after day year after year and continuing to to challenge us to to do to do what we're doing faster with with more conviction well we we've spoken about it before we need to speak about it again we need to talk about whether our our goals and targets are realistic uh and for that matter whether we can move them up faster and and thus be even more uh an example for the world to follow and we should talk about the kind of things and people that we would send overseas to talk about this and to blow our own horn but also to make a contribution to the world conversation and in effect participate in saving the planet Marco you and I we really have great conversations and I'm looking forward to the next one when you're back in two weeks I guess right yes yes indeed and I've I've confirmed with a little bit of luck that's Mary Powell who is current CEO of Green Mountain Power she will be joining us in about a month in November for for show and she's going to be great she just recently announced she is resigning retiring from the CEO position of Green Mountain Power later this year to allow for and bigger bolder opportunities and I'm real happy that she'll be joining us because she's just uh she's stellar that's great Marco thanks so much talk to you soon aloha thank you my friend bye bye