 Good afternoon, Howard Wing, Code Green, Think, Tech, Hawaii, I have as my esteemed guest today, Glenn Gabbard, Chief Operating Officer of Gabbard Energy Group. And for those of you who know me, I love to talk about Moore's Law, the rapidly, rapidly, rapidly improving state of energy using technology. And what Glenn is going to share with us today is a perfect example of that. I like to compare what Glenn is going to be talking about to a very, very well-oiled machine where all the parts fit together exactly. They're lubricated exactly as they should be. The energy efficient is heck, and they are delivering exactly the product that the consumer of this machine wants. In this case, the machine is the entire building. And all of us know that there is a lot of waste in not just buildings, but lo and behold, our own homes. Think especially if you have teenagers in the home. Is there any energy wastage? Yes, there is. Or in my case, I have a couple of rental units attached to my home. And there's a lady tenant who I swear does one towel a day. And then instead of hanging them out in the nice sunshine, she goes to the dryer. And I'm just waiting for that dryer to die from overwork. And I'm just watching my electricity bill pile up. An example of very simple energy waste. So we can detect energy waste any way we want. People like Glenn and myself can walk into a building and just go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. We're down 30 percent. We're down 40 percent. 50 percent. And we render the occupants of the home or the building more comfortable and even healthier. So is that a pretty good introduction to you, Glenn? Absolutely. It certainly is. You know, it's a pleasure to be on with you, Howard. And as you were saying, we are very excited about the projects that we have done and the projects that are in process right now in Hawaii as it relates to overall building efficiency. The key thing that we see in Hawaii is all of the buildings tend to be older because the cost of new construction is so expensive. And in order to meet the sustainability goals that the state of Hawaii has, much like the state of California, there's going to have to be a lot more energy efficiency in every one of those buildings. Well, let me jump in with a statistic there. You'd never know it from looking at Kaka Hako, but on an average level, we replace only 1 percent of our building stock per year. Therefore, if we're going to reach any kind of energy goals, we have to go into those existing buildings. And they were not constructed and they're not operated in the most energy efficient manner by any stretch of the imagination. It's absolutely true. And so as you said in your introduction, there are three of our technologies that I wanted to discuss and highlight with you today that we're actively working with in various projects throughout Hawaii. One of them relates to the overall building optimization, which is building IQ. And there's actually five different solutions to building IQ depending upon whether a building has a building management system, what type of equipment they have that can be provided there. And then a second solution I wanted to discuss today is with a partner of mine, cyber switching, that relates to specifically sub-metering. And in particular, we're seeing a lot of interest in the work that we're doing with Hawaii Energy from owners of condominiums that with their board's approval have the ability to be able to sub-meter. But we're also seeing a lot of interest in terms of commercial buildings where they have retail tenants. And again, a lot of the doors are open and they're trying to get a better handle on the energy use. And then last but not least, the area of smart thermostats, especially with the dependency of Hawaii on tourism. We do a lot of work with the hospitality industry. And so when you look at guest rooms and guests leaving for the day with a thermostat that may be at 68 while they go to the beach and come back, there's an awful lot of savings there. And I think the important thing is that in every one of these areas in the building IQ projects, Hawaii Energy has customized rebates that as we speak, we're taking advantage of on a project by project basis. With respect to cyber switching and sub-metering, when it comes to condominiums, $150 a meter incentives are involved for commercial or other entities on a case-by-case basis. There may be some customized rebates. And then with respect to hospitality and the smart thermostats, with respect to that, there's an opportunity if there's a centralized system for $100 a room rebate to offset that cost. So we know that HVAC represents 40 to 50% of the total energy bill in a typical building. The biggest impact that we can make is certainly if we can reduce what's consumed there. Absolutely. And just, well, let's see. First, a question. When I hear the word cyber, I think computers and I think wireless communications. Is that where to sub-meter a building, you don't need the hard wire? You're absolutely right. And in fact, in both the building IQ and the cyber-switching sub-metering technology, we're able to do it on a wireless basis, a variety of communication methods. In essence, what we're looking at is the building IQ technology and the cyber-switching technologies become cloud-based technologies where the user has, either through web access or a very user-friendly dashboard, the ability to be able to see what's going on every single day. But the other part of it is it's not a matter of simply crunching data. The other part of this is the human element. And so with building IQ, whether it's overall building optimization or whether it's just working with sub-metering and on an energy platform, there's a team that has assigned 24-7 to work with the ownership, the management to go through and explain, answer questions to identify any projects, anything we can do to be able to save additional energy. And there's quite a lot to be saved. We found in large commercial buildings, typically 10% to 25% reduction that we can get in HVAC usage. Sub-metering, we found, for instance, we did a project with Hawaii Energy on the Big Island and we found with one of the large resorts, we found that kitchen is an area where with equipment, even new equipment, there can be waste that you would not expect, air handlers, waterfalls, pools, everything. And so it's a very powerful tool, but you have to have the human element as well. And therefore the building manager or whoever is in charge at any given time can actually talk to a human being or email a human being with questions. Absolutely, absolutely. And our commitment to Hawaii is that we are always working, of course, with local contractors, electrical, HVAC, whatever the case may be, constantly, and we're always expanding our partner base in terms of who we work with on the islands. Okay, and we do have our first slide up. So this is what we've been talking about, Building IQ, 10-25%. Oh wow, your big outfit here, 600 buildings, 60 million square feet. Yeah, publicly traded, okay. Yes, Building IQ was originally an Australian company. To give you an idea, just to highlight a couple of clients. The IMF is a client. Portland, we work with a lot of utilities. Portland Electric literally uses the Building IQ technology to monitor over 400 buildings in downtown Portland. And Portland is one of the most progressive and energy efficient cities in the entire nation. Yes. Not a whole lot of competition there. Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, well let's move on to our next slide if we could. And here's the big three that you were talking about. Yes, we feel that to really, the executive overview of what Building IQ does in terms of working with building owners, building management on one building or a portfolio of buildings is to combine tenant comfort with operational efficiency and energy savings. Well now we all have seen the statistic that while energy use in a building is important, 90 percent of the gross building product, if you will, goes to human salaries to pay people like you and me. And if we can keep those occupants more comfortable, more productive, fewer sick days, their bottom line goes right, right up there. Very true, very true. And we just feel that in all three of these technologies that tenant comfort or in the case of a smart thermostat, guest comfort is always paramount. In addition, it's not being replaced by energy efficiency. Energy efficiency is complimenting it. As a quick example I could give you in a hotel guest room with a smart thermostat. If I left the hotel that I was in today and it was 68 degrees when I left, that's the temperature I chose. I'm gone all day in meetings. With a smart thermostat, the owner of that hotel has the ability on a customized basis after 15, 20 minutes to be able to let that temperature float maybe to 72, 73 so that they can get energy savings. But when I come back into the room, the system automatically would then bring that temperature back to the temperature that I left it at ensuring guest comfort. So again, that's a perfect example of combining energy savings with guest comfort. And the same thing is the case in buildings where we see these overall 10 to 20, 25% savings, it's not because the tenants are suffering that there is so much that is lost in energy in a given building that just by doing your daily, your minute by minute tweaking, you can really get significant energy savings. And just to emphasize the importance of HVAC these days, everybody, his brother and sister and uncle, aunt and cousin and dog, and if there were a Hawaii Energy person in the room today or she could attest to this, is converting to LEDs. And you and I are sitting under an array of LEDs and this room used to be hot with the old fashioned lighting. I don't know about you, but I can feel zero heat gain from those lamps and it's an extensive array. The whole point being that LEDs produce, well, number one, they reduce the wattage even over fluorescence by 20, 30, 40%. Number two, they bring the heat gain down to virtually zero such that the lighting slice of the pie for energy use in a building is going down, down, down, down, down. And the HVAC slice of the pie is going up. You're absolutely right. And you mentioned something earlier that I wanted to make a quick point on with one of my partners, Cyber Switching. And the comment that I think about internet security or wire all that. The other thing that I want to really stress in these technologies is that for building IQ or Cyber Switching or verdant environmental technologies and the smart thermostats, the security is the highest security that you can have. Clearly in today's world, that's critical. And when we talk about a cloud-based system and having all this data and making adjustments to a building management system, this always comes up as it should on the part of ownership, what's our risk here? And so I just wanted to make the point that that's something that we also have absolutely addressed and continue to enhance as it relates to these technologies. Okay. I think we've got another slide coming up that is not the most transparent in the world. Maybe we don't. Oh, here it is. Now, we can't read this, but if you could summarize what's going on there. I definitely can. And here, the key point here is as follows. What's happening with valuation of buildings is that in order to get an increased valuation in today's world and going forward, they need to get greener. That's really the key point. And so to put it very specifically, if you take two hotels that are really identical properties and one of them is very energy efficient and the other isn't, the one that is more energy efficient will simply be worth more. And when you look at commercial property owners and different hotel groups that may be looking at a given property and want to resell that property in six or seven years, that now is a big factor, along with the obvious need to be able to reduce our energy consumption. And that would be especially true here in Hawaii where we have a very large Asian influence and the Asians have got energy efficiency down hands down over us. We Americans, we Americans are just now getting really into that game. But the Asians were doing it a long time ago. So the added value would be even more valuable in that case. And I'm not sure you know it. We do need to take a brief break. Howard, we're cold green. I think Tech Hawaii. Glenn Gabbard is my guest back in a minute. Hey, how you doing? Welcome to the Bachi Talk. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm your co-host. And we have a nice program here every Friday at 1 o'clock on Think Tech Studios where we talk about technology and we have a little bit of fun with it. So join us if you can. Thanks. Aloha. Hi, I'm Ray Starling and I am co-host for Hawaii's Wednesday afternoon state of clean energy. And with me today is Leslie Cole Brooks and she's going to tell you what's happening this month with our shows. Hi, everybody. I'm Leslie Cole Brooks, the executive director of the Distributed Energy Resources Council. And this month is the focus is on distributed energy resources. We just had a great show on smart grid technologies and the rest of the month we're going to discuss storage, different strategies, microgrids, and then we're going to have live man and woman on the street from Verge. So it's really exciting, very informative, lively, and just worth doing. So see you next Wednesday. Good afternoon again, Howard Wigg. Code Green, Think Tech, Hawaii. My honorable guest this afternoon is Glenn Gabbard, COO of Gabbard Energy Group. And we're talking about, well, I was going to say smart buildings, but everybody uses the term smart buildings. This is going one step beyond where we've got a big three set of considerations to make render guests or occupants more comfortable, reducing the maintenance factor, and at the same time, of course, saving energy. So if we could bring up the dashboard slide, please. Okay. What's going on here? This is kind of an overview slide I mentioned earlier that at Building IQ when we're working with the overall building energy efficiency, we have different solutions. So very simply, because there's a lot of detail, of course, in the slide, the point that I would make is the biggest impact for a building that has a building management system is what we call our energy optimization program or what would be described in there as predictive control. But many buildings that are energy inefficient do not have a building management system. And so this is where, for instance, the energy platform that's described in there, let's say a building has sub-metering, but it doesn't have a building management system. Well, the energy platform is a great platform to be able to then take the information from the sub-meters and turn it into actionable items. And then the other one that does relate to getting energy efficiency projects done is what we call our facility platform. So for a building that does not have an automated system for work projects, for preventive maintenance, with their internal staff and with external vendors, what happens here is facility platform is a very cost-effective platform that integrates with the energy solutions. And so when we come up with an energy solution, because of the monitoring we're doing, it automatically generates a work project, whether it's for the internal staff of the building or for the external vendors that they're working with. And it also will automatically make sure that preventive maintenance is done. The other thing that I would point out that doesn't relate directly to this slide but it relates to everything that we're talking about, all three of these technologies reduce the run time of the HVAC equipment that they're dealing with, which then provides another benefit because typically the lifespan of that equipment will increase. And as a result, that helps in terms of operating expense and potential with expenditures for the building owner. A good analogy there might be running your car. If you drive your car 20,000 miles a year, it's going to have a lifespan of maximum five years probably. If you drive it only 10,000 miles a year, it might not have a lifespan of 10 years, but it's going to be a whole lot longer and the wear and tear year to year is going to be a lot less. Absolutely, no question about it. So if we could look at the next slide very quickly, human capital, we've talked about this. We have. This really goes to the point I made before that this is not a matter of simply crunching data. There's got to be the human factor which is involved in all of these technologies. And you know, in my dealing with building managers, sometimes the systems are in... the people in charge of the systems have not gone through engineering school or nothing even close to engineering school. The training has been, let's say, spotty. So if you can have an automatic system like this plus a human being to talk to, I think this increases the effectiveness of the individual building managers and helps them to reduce costs and keep the system going better. We agree completely and it does and it makes it much more likely that we're going to get the projects that need to be implemented, implemented sooner. Again, a car analogy. If you take really good care of your car, you go in for your maintenance all the time, you look for any warning signals on your dash, your car is going to be very much more fuel efficient and it's going to last a lot longer. Absolutely. Yeah, same principle. So let's dive into the sub-metering aspect and you call it a verdant sub-metering, which is a very intriguing word. Well, just a verdant environmental technologies has the smart management system. Cyber switching has the sub-metering that we do and basically the concept behind power sub-metering. First, cyber switching has spent the last 22 years involved in power grid management and so they've been working in Silicon Valley, they've been working with Large and you can see here what the problem is that the amount of energy consumption that comes from commercial residential buildings, the large condominiums we were talking about, 72% of the electrical usage domestically comes from these types of buildings and so if we look at the next slide, this shows what sub-metering really can do for a commercial building, for a condominium, for any kind of structure, we can really focus in on the energy use of interior lighting, exterior lighting, HVAC circuits, the power receptacles, water pump and other circuits. And again, if it's hospitality, you throw in kitchen and some of the other things that we were discussing, but if you can't measure it, you can't control it. Which we hear all the time. So this is what sub-metering does and again in a user-friendly dashboard that allows us to prioritize actionable ideas. I talked about the project that we did with the resort in the Big Island with Hawaii Energy and the customized rebate. The return on investment, which we haven't touched on, on that particular phase one project was less than one. And I will tell you that as a firm and with our partners, that we basically use as a benchmark two years or less for any project. The other thing I might mention, while it doesn't relate to electrical usage, it's important to note that when we use these technologies, we also not only help to measure electricity and control use, but we also measure gas and water. And so again, not to be ignored wherever we can conserve and wherever we can find things to make us more sustainable. And water is very, very important. The less water you use, the less water needs to be pumped around. There's your energy component there. So we've only got a few minutes left. I know we have a couple more slides here. So this looks a little complicated, but you can... I was going to say this basically, because cyber-switching has been doing the sub-metering for so long, this just gives a simple example of how it works. And the only takeaway here, and we can move to the next slide, is that cyber-switching has the ability to be able to fit into the typical circuit box when they're doing sub-metering, which is a very important aspect, and also deal with any kind of voltage that different kinds of voltage that a building might have. So that, especially for the older buildings, is important. So you can see, again, the information here, total power demand, peak demand, and demand by load type are three areas that we really address and can reduce with sub-metering. And sub-metering doesn't sound very sexy, but say in your typical residential high-rise, you have the AC component. Some people are going to leave that AC on 24-7. Why? Because I'm not paying for it. On the other hand, you have very conscientious people who, when they're leaving the building, or even in the morning when it's nice and cool, shut off the AC, open up the windows, and just leave the windows open during the day, and it's still pretty darn comfortable when they come back any afternoon. Those are the responsible ones. But they're, without sub-metering, the same bill as the irresponsible ones. What happens when we're, you're absolutely right, and what happens when we sub-meter a condominium now is that part of that that's required is that we provide the individual billing to the tenants. So then, all of a sudden, those tenants that you were describing that are being responsible are rewarded, and those that are being less responsible are being held accountable to hopefully change behavior positively going forward. Yeah, absolutely. We could talk about that a whole lot, but we are just wrapping up. Let's look at our final slides here. This is a slide that just simply demonstrates the dashboard I was referring to, and again, as you talked about before, Howard, everything is very user-friendly in terms of what we do. Okay, and next slide. This is important because it relates directly to hospitality, so important to Hawaii and all the islands, and it relates to the smart thermostats, and this is where verdant environmental technologies comes in. You can see 45% of the energy on average in hospitality properties used for air conditioning in Hawaii and other parts, heating and air conditioning. And we have in little old Hawaii up to 70,000 hotel rooms. Yes. So it's a really big chunk of the pie. We still have a lot of work to do in that area. We're very active with the HLTA and et cetera. And then this is the other two other quick points that I would make about these smart thermostats. What verdant does is there is the occupancy detection is 100% effective in identifying when a guest is in or not in a room between a combination of thermal heat and motion. The other thing that's not reflected on the slide is that when it comes to customized management of these setbacks by the ownership, the verdant system does not require the hotel's Wi-Fi. It's actually, as an engineering company, it's a proprietary radio frequency. So the point being that, again, it's designed to be very user-friendly, completely customizable. And with guest comfort in mind, it allows the ownership to decide what the setback levels are that they feel most comfortable with. And on that very cheery note, wow, terrific, terrific energy savings. We need to close up. This is Howard Wigg, Code Green, ThinkTik, Hawaii, with Glenn Gabbard as my guest. Thank you so much, Glenn.