 And welcome to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Energy 808, The Cutting Edge. We're going to talk to Hawaiian Electric this morning about its partnership on smart charging for electric vehicles. And we're going to talk about its program for the development of an app. Very interesting. And for this, we have Team Word 2 fail. Team Word, thank you for coming on the show. We always enjoyed talking to Hawaiian Electric. We like when Hawaiian Electric tells us stuff. Welcome. Thank you, Jay. We really appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. So, okay. You're the program manager for Smart Charge Hawaii. So let's unpack that. What is Smart Charge Hawaii? So Smart Charge Hawaii is a pilot program that we kind of launched through the PUC's Innovation Pilot Framework. So for some background, we started developing this pilot last spring. And what we proposed doing was launching Hawaiian Electric's first residential EV program. So it's an 18-month pilot. And as the name suggests, the Innovation Pilot Framework, it's kind of a pathway that was created between Hawaiian Electric and the Public Utilities Commission to help drive and launch innovative utility-related projects and experiments. And so for my team, electrification and transportation, we're kind of focused on e-mobility-related technologies, anything that would help advance EV growth in Hawaii. And so one of the big challenges we identified is that we haven't really had a good sense of what's happening on our grid with respect to EV use. So we don't know who our EV driving customers are, what kind of equipment they're charging with, and where and when they're charging. So one of the ideas that we came up with was to use EV telematics data to help us understand what customer charging behavior looks like. So when you purchase or lease an electric vehicle, drivers are generally opted into the car manufacturers' terms and conditions, which would allow the manufacturer, like, say, a Tesla, to collect your telematics data. So everything from your speed, location, the state of your charge, and more. But then the car manufacturers use that data for their own R&D purposes. They also work with startup companies like our partner, EV Energy, which we can get into in a bit. And these companies kind of repackage the telematics data and find other uses for it. And so in this case, they're helping utilities to learn more about EV charging behavior. And so they've created these dashboards and easy-to-use charts on a cloud-based platform that Hawaiian Electric is going to be using. The hope is that these insights will help us with the development of future charging programs and EV-specific rate options. But from the driver's perspective, if you were to sign up to Smart Charge Hawaii, you'd effectively just sign up for a free account with EV Energy on their app or their website. You'd sync your EV with their platform, and then you'd receive a sign-up bonus, for $150 or 10,000 Hawaiian miles. Oh, I have so many questions and reactions. Sync. They're going to sync their database, essentially, with your EV. But how do they know your EV is compatible? How do they know your EV will sync with them? So on the Smart Charged website, they have a list of all the compatible vehicles. And when we were doing our due diligence, EV Energy, our partner, had the widest coverage of EV makes. So that's really good for Hawaii. We kind of reach out to all kinds of different customers using EV Energy. Oh, very cool. Okay, so you're synced now with them. And they get the data about what you're doing in terms of charging and driving. A lot of your habits are reflected in that data. It's like all those issues where tech companies get data on you, and we have a kind of love-hate relationship with tech companies collecting data. On the other hand, this is no surprise. It's like you wonder why they didn't do it before. It's not like a great idea because they can analyze that data and help everyone. And I'll tell you the truth, I wouldn't care. They can know how often I'm charging where I'm going, how much time I'm spending in the car, et cetera. So as far as most people are concerned, I would say they're fine with the collection of the data. Now, the data, is the data something that EV Energy can share with others, or are they supposed to keep it to themselves? They can sell it to others. So their arrangement with the vehicle manufacturers does allow them to sell anonymized aggregated data to their customers, like us. So it's true. I mean, all of these OEMs are collecting that data anyway. This is just a way to kind of get more use out of it. But we're not going to know, if you sign up for this, we're not going to know where you've parked and how long you've spent there. We're just going to see a line. And over the course of the pilot, we're going to start to see trends. We're going to start to see where in Oahu and our neighboring islands people are charging, what times of day, where there are charging deserts, that kind of information. So that means Hawaiian Electric gets the data too. I mean, it sounded that EV Energy gets the data and analyzes it, what? And then they give you a summary, or do you make your own summary? They will analyze it and create summaries that we'll have access to. But they'll also share the raw data with us too that we can also do our own analyses on. But for EV Energy, just getting that data isn't as valuable. It's the utilities in the regions that they're getting this data from who are going to get the most use out of it. Because they have to prepare for the load, right? Yes, that's exactly it. Well, so gee whiz, it sounded like what you're doing and what they're doing is very, very interesting. At the cutting edge, if for all our show it's called Energy 808, the cutting edge. So this is really perfect for our show. And it strikes me that you can have data today at a certain level of analysis, but tomorrow you can have the same data, the same raw data, but you can have a better analysis. The word AI creeps in on this. There's so many articles lately about what AI will be able to do with data and find new ways to analyze it, new ways to project using all kinds of algorithms. Algorithms we don't even know what the algorithm and then find out what the patterns will be going forward. Am I right about that? Yeah, although getting into AI is way past the scope of this pilot. But yeah, there's certainly some possibilities there. I can speak to a bit more about the scope of this pilot and kind of what the results were hoping for, if that helps. Sure. So the objective of this pilot is really to enroll EV drivers onto the platform, gain some visibility into EV charging behavior, but then also share those insights with other interested stakeholders in Hawaii to kind of see how useful that data is. So it's kind of an experiment for now. We're targeting 2000 drivers for the pilot. That represents between 8 to 10% of EVs in our service area. So that's Oahu, Maui County and Hawaii Island. And that would be a statistically significant sample size. If the pilot proves successful, we can start adding more participants in the future. The hope is we'll be able to open it up to everyone who's gotten EV. But some of the results that we'll see from this pilot include an interactive heat map of where EVs are being charged across our service area. So like I said, you might be able to identify where there are charging deserts. You'll see customer charging trends, a breakdown of customer vehicles and what kind of equipment they're using. So are they just plugging into the wall socket at home? Do they have smart chargers? Are they using public chargers? Now there are other departments within Hawaiian Electric that will find this information helpful. So one example would be the group that's working on developing time of use rates. Oh, yeah, sure. Yes, because that's a big thing too, right? During daylight hours, we have lots of solar energy on our grid. And that's when electricity is cheapest. So in the long run, it would be ideal if we could get people plugging in their vehicles then versus late at night when the sun isn't shining. But outside of Hawaii, oh, sorry, go ahead. No, I just had a question. What you said, if you know where the deserts are, I love that term. That's a great term. If you know where the deserts are, then you can identify the locations where additional charging stations ought to be installed, right? That's exactly right. So we heard from a bunch of our external stakeholders like the cities and counties, the department of transportation, that the telematics data that we get from this would be helpful for them when they build out their own public charging infrastructure. So for instance, if we find out that a certain region in Oahu has lots of public chargers, but they're not being utilized as much, maybe that's not an area where we need to install new chargers. Instead, we'll kind of focus on those charging deserts. Wow. Well, that's exciting. You know, there was a company that thought about this back when, I guess it must be 10 or 15 years called a better, better, better place, better place. The guy was in Israeli. He was trained in Germany and high tech and he had ideas similar to this. But it was, unfortunately, he couldn't keep the company going. He's trying to be too international too quickly, I think. And these were things that were in discussion then, but now they're coming into a reality. So tell me about EV energy. I mean, what is it like? How big is it? What is its specialty? What is its level of development? Absolutely. So EV Energy is our main partner. They're a certified B corporation based in the UK and also Palo Alto. Their whole mission is to make EV charging greener, cheaper and smarter for both utility and their EV driving customers. And so when we were looking for a telematics vendor, because Hawaiian Electric doesn't, isn't able to collect this data. We don't have partnerships with the OEMs. But we were really impressed with EV Energy. Tell everybody what an OEM is. Original equipment manufacturer. So that could be the Ford, the GM, the Teslas and yeah. And so we were really impressed with EV Energy's team and their platform. We felt they would be the best match for our customers here in Hawaii because they had the widest coverage if EV makes, which opens it up to a larger customer base. Their driver facing app. So what you would sign up with is really highly rated on Android and Apple. And we also had outstanding feedback from some of their utility customers who have deployed similar pilots over the past few years. But for this pilot, EV Energy is really administrating the entire thing on our behalf. So they designed the landing page. They're handling the driver signups. They've even got a customer care center to support the customers. And of course they're collecting the data. They designed the app. But they're also helping us with marketing initiatives, ongoing customer engagement, processing the incentive payments that's not done by Hawaiian Electric. So it's a full suite of services. We're really happy with it. But I should mention that we do have another couple of partners who are helping out on this pilot in a cost share capacity. So one of them is Ulupono Initiative. It's a local impact investment firm. They wanted to sweeten the deal for the EV driving customers and felt that so we're originally going to pay $100 for sign up, which is in line with what some of the mainland utilities pay. Ulupono said, maybe we can do a bit more because the cost of living here is a little expensive. But they offered to fund us so that we could increase the cash incentive from $100 to $150 per participant, which is huge. That's really appreciative of that. But we also went to Hawaiian Airlines and partnered with them. With Hawaiian Airlines, they're working towards sustainability goals as well. Last year they announced a strategic investment with an all electric sea glider company. So we thought this could be a good alliance. And what they offered us with it was a heavily discounted Hawaiian miles exchange program where you can get 10,000 miles in exchange for the $150. So two fantastic cost share partners there. Yeah, that's great. So when you sign up assuming you're one of the people who can sync up with the app and assuming also you're within that tap of 2,000 drivers. You actually get this benefit on the sign up. So if I do that, what are my obligations? I just got a check for $150. I got all these miles. What would I have to do? Well, so once you sign up, you'll eventually get enrolled onto the platform. But you won't get the first... We split the incentives up into two tranches. So you would get $75 or 5,000 miles later this year. So you'd have to stay connected to the app for at least a few months. EV Energy will provide more information about exactly when the payment will happen. But you have to stay connected to the app. Once you get the first tranche of the payment over the course of next year, you've still got to stay connected until the pilot ends in December. If you drop out of the program or you sell your car disconnected, you won't be eligible for the second half of the payment. So we wanted to give something for signing up, but we still want people to stay participating for the whole pilot. That's when you get the rest. So as far as the driver is concerned, I mean the car owner that it's turned for, he's obligated for a one year period or longer? It should be one year. I mean, we'll start collecting data over the next few months. So right now we've got 400 people that have already signed up and we went live just over a week ago, which is great. We'll start enrolling those 400. More people will continue to sign up. And then the performance period is generally next year. So January 1st till the end of 2024. But the key thing here though is we want to make sure we have good representation for the neighboring islands. And so the goal is to have at least 300 participants in Maui and Hawaii Island. Once we have that floor, we can kind of open it up to anyone who signs up. Beyond the 2000. No, 2000 is the cap. So I mentioned before we got the money through the PUC, we wouldn't be able to afford any more incentives beyond the 2000 cap. Now, if this pilot's successful and we turn it into a full term program, then we can think about how to get funding for more incentives and more participants. So here we are. I really love this part of the discussion. And we have come to the end of our pilot. And we are considered, we, all of us, you know, the, you, the PUC, the energy, all considering whether to extend it and make this into a permanent fixture. And that would come, you know, pretty soon, I suppose. But when you sit at the table and decide whether you're going to go from pilot to permanent, what are the considerations? Well, so one of the important pieces of this pilot is that we're not kind of waiting for 18 months. And then at the end of it go, okay, well, here's the data. Here's what we learned. Do we make it permanent? Over the course of the pilot, every quarter, we're going to be meeting with a PUC, Drive Electric Hawaii, a coalition of stakeholders invested in this. And we're going to be sharing the data, providing updates, serving our customers, serving all of these stakeholders to see if there is value in this pilot. So we're going to know before the end of next year if it is worth making this more permanent. Some of the things to consider are, so EV Energy is a startup. Some of the other players in this field are also startups. We don't know what they're going to look like a year or two years from now. They might be acquired. They might go out of business. So we don't know which partner we end up working with at the end of this pilot. There's a lot that's kind of up in the air. But again, we're going to be having these touch points throughout the pilot to kind of make sure we're getting value out of it. Yeah. So, you know, Hawaii has got to be the best state of all the states for electric vehicles because there are no great 500 mile, you know, distances to drive. And it's all sort of under control in terms of the geography. And it's also under control in terms of, you know, installing charging stations and all that. But the last I knew, we had somewhere between 16 and 18,000 electric vehicles after 10 years of trying to sell them. I mean, sell the public condom and so forth. And some people just love them, but other people are reluctant to buy them. They want to stay with their classical car. Okay. So, and I guess the question is, are the dealers involved in your coalition, your, you know, your organizational group? Because if, for example, this program is going on, and there's a lot of sales of EVs, that would be a clear indicator that it's working, that people aren't taking heart by it. And they like getting the incentive and they feel the government and Hawaiian Electric and, you know, Pono and Hawaiian Airlines are all behind it. You know, it's a nod. It's an institutional nod when you do a program like this. And so, let's assume for a moment that you're looking also at people outside your group of drivers who might change their minds about buying. Are they at the table? Yes, absolutely. So the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association is a partner of ours. We've been in talks with individual car dealerships across our service area. In many cases, they're the OEMs they work with manufacturers are requiring them to start installing EV charging equipment at their facilities. And they're slowly transitioning to all electric vehicles for their fleets anyway. So the dealers are trying to work with us on building out their own chargers. But the SmartCharge Hawaii is a great program that they can sell to their customers and they can say, look, if you buy an EV, here are some of the incentives or rebates that you might be eligible for. One of them is SmartCharge Hawaii. And so Blue Planet Foundation has an EV sort of dealer certification program. Part of their training could involve talking about SmartCharge Hawaii if it became a more permanent program. Well, this has got all the right feeling about it. But I have the thought that the legislature is, they must have allocated some money. This is state money, right? This is how the PUC gets the funding to pay the EV owners to enter the program, right? This is the state of Hawaii money, right? The state of Hawaii money, yes. So it's a credit to the legislature or whoever is running that funding that they did that. But there are other, and this is not related to your program at all, but there are other incentives that have expired for one reason or another. Haven't they renewed? I mean, for example, the tax credit Hawaii used to have on EVs and doesn't anymore. The parking arrangements, the number of stalls and buildings and so on. And the airport free airport or partially free airport for EVs. And I wonder if you put all that together and you circled back and all those incentives, the legislature had adopted earlier and you add them to the package. We'd be talking about much greater growth, much greater public interest, right? Yeah, absolutely. And if you don't mind, I'll tell you a bit more about the state of EVs in Hawaii, because it's interesting you mentioned all of that. So over the past few years, we've been seeing EV market share grow every year and Hawaii is trending up along with the rest of the world. What do we have now? We've got the second highest number of EVs per capita in the country, which is huge. And the total number? It's about 23,000 last I checked. But as a state, Hawaii has very progressive decarbonization goals. Just like California, we're trying to be carbon free by 2045. And electrified transportation is one of many ways to get there. But we've got a lot of tailwinds that are supporting EV growth here. So you might be aware of this, but many entities like the military and the various cities and counties, the DOT, logistics and car rental companies, they've all got fleet electrification targets. And in some cases, they're building out their own charging networks. On top of that, you've got the federal government that's investing billions into the EVs through infrastructure and inflation reduction acts. I don't know if you watched the Super Bowl, but if you did, you'll remember almost every other ad was about electric vehicles. And that's because these car manufacturers are setting their own aggressive electrification targets. They're investing billions into their own EV commitments. I think I mentioned before, car rental companies are doing the same. As a tourist heavy environment, it's really important for Hawaii. Hertz is spending $4.2 billion to purchase 100,000 Teslas that will be in Hawaii. And they claim that 30% of their fleet will be electric by the end of 2024. So that's really soon. Enterprise and Avis also announced that they're transitioning to electric. And as for Hawaiian Electric, we're also coming out with programs and incentives to help with EV adoption. We've built out our own EV charging network. We're hoping to expand that. We've got some make ready programs, which I think you spoke to Tandy about, E-Bus, which helps lower costs for customers that want to install their own equipment. And then we've got our first residential program that we just launched, Smart Charge Hawaii. So there's a lot of things coming together to make this happen. Well, we know we're supposed to be carbon free in 20 years or so. Are we going to make it? Is this a big part of the incentive, rather the initiative? This is part of it, yes. I'm confident that we will get there. Okay, let me say that this program sounds very exciting. And it sounds like it's the kind of high tech that I love to see developing. And I guess the question is, are we learning the technology? In other words, a lot of people in Hawaii would like to see Hawaii, not everybody, but we'd like to see Hawaii become a more tech industry kind of place where we have programmers at the university and elsewhere who are developing the very kind of technology that you're talking about, which is so powerful, which will be so powerful in the world to come. I really have to, I admire EV Energy for doing what they've done. It's visionary, and their marketing is visionary in the sense that they give it to you effectively turnkey, which is a really, really good idea. But what about the students, the men and women in Manoa, who are studying computer science, what do they get out of this deal? Are they going to be working for this company? You told me it was based in the UK and in California. That does not include Hawaii as a base of operations for the company. Where are we going on this kind of technology? Wouldn't we like to see a local branch? Wouldn't we like to see programmers collaborating? Yes, that's definitely a growth opportunity. One of the challenges we had when we were developing this pilot is that the PUC would like us to look for vendors that are based in Hawaii. Now, for Telematics, which is a very emerging technology, there just weren't any vendors here that we could work with. And so we had to go to the mainland, go abroad. But if we start deploying these kind of innovative programs and pilots, the hope is that it garners interest from people in Hawaii. People who, you know, people's children who play with the app, see the CV Energy thing, that there may be interest in that. And perhaps they'll focus on studies in computer science or other clean tech fields to kind of, you know, if they see this as a popular, cool technology, they may want to be more involved. Certainly within Hawaiian Electric, when we start sharing this data and make kind of publicizing it more, other groups will be able to start exploring what we can do with Telematics data. And, you know, we'll see what that turns into. Yeah. Do I get access to it if I'm a driver? Yes, please sign up. We have space. And what I mean is access to the data. You could, in theory. The PUC has asked us to share this data with anyone that wants to look at it. Again, it's anonymized, so it's not like you could do any, you know, stalk anyone. But, yeah, as I mentioned, we've got stakeholders that want to look at this data. We may be working with other utilities on the mainland to kind of share some of the learnings from similar pilots. Well, I'll tell you what comes out of it for me, Timar. And it's a sort of, comes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this discussion. So here's this data. I'm a computer science, I'm a data nerd at Manoa. And I love data, I love to cross-cut on data. I love to take data from, so, you know, so many departments at UH, which are in science, they get data from government agencies and they put it in a database or they get a database and they process it and they learn stuff that way. Okay, it's the same thing, it strikes me the same thing here. If I was a student or a researcher at UH Manoa or elsewhere and I got this data anonymized and everything, I might be able to take it a step further. Even further than EV Electric. I might be able to use my skills and develop my skills to analyze this data using whatever kind of analytical programs that I could muster and help you. And for that matter, how my electric could do that, you know. If somebody presents as someone who can analyze the data even better for the local utility, for the market, that's pretty attractive because you can go further than the other analysts elsewhere in the UK and Silicon Valley and you can analyze it here for your own purposes, right? Yeah, that's exactly right. I forgot to mention one of our partners is Hawaii National Energy Institute. And so they do work with UH on research activities. So they are one of the stakeholders that would be interested in receiving this data. And you're right, they have the capacity to do all of these experiments. They've got the data scientists that can play with this data. My team can't do that. I can't do that. So yes, absolutely. We'd love to see what they can come up with once they have access to this data. That could put us ahead of other places. Even though we were doing this turnkey thing with, you know, EV Energy, we could still be at the cutting edge for our own analysis. I would love to see that. It's actually a sign of the times. It's a sign of job opportunities, of computer opportunities. It's a sign of utility opportunities. Because after all, you want to be as efficient as you can be. It's not just the cost of, you know, creating the energy. It's the efficiency of distributing the energy. And you're a big part of that. So I think this program is great. I think your situation is great. I think this partnership is great. It goes well. Thank you, Jay. Yeah, this is only a handful of utilities are using this kind of telematics data for pilots like this. So that really puts Hawaii on the map as one of the more progressive places. So this is great. This is just one footstep towards a more high tech and cleaner Hawaii. So what's the next step now that you said? Well, so Jay, it's hard to say right now. We just launched this a couple of weeks ago. We've still got to manage it through all of next year. But we're always keeping an eye out for innovative ideas related to EVs or any kind of interesting solution that other utilities might be adopting. Things like curbside EV charging using streetlight poles, mobile EV charging, or even vehicle to grid or home applications. But it is important to keep in mind that we're still a regulated utility. And as you mentioned before, some of these R&D type projects are probably better served at academic institutions or maybe the vehicle or EV equipment manufacturers. Ultimately, our pilots would need to benefit all of our customers. So one thing that we're working on this year is our electrification of transportation strategic roadmap, which is a mouthful. But that will essentially outline our priorities for the next five years or so. And it'll include some of the innovations I just mentioned. But what we're doing this week is we're holding community workshops in Oahu and our neighboring islands with feedback from key customers, government agencies, and other community members to find out what they want to see built out in our ED ecosystem here. And that feedback will play a huge factor in our innovation roadmap. So for example, if we find out that public charging is a consistent pain point from our customers, then maybe our next project might be something geared towards that instead of say vehicle to grid. But the main thing is that we're not going to come up with projects in a vacuum, even with Smart Charge Hawaii. We were engaging with community, the PUC, the consumer advocate to help develop the program and get feedback along the way. I'm sure you got good feedback. I can't imagine anybody giving you resistance on this. It's a great program. There's no downside at all. Is there a downside? Tell me about the downside. Oh, there's almost a risk. I mean, let's say, this is unlikely to happen, but let's say EV Energy went out of business in the coming months. Then that kind of stops the pilot. There isn't really an alternative. If some of the OEMs, the car manufacturers suddenly decided, hey, we don't want to share our data with these startups anymore. We want to make our own platform like Tesla. That also, there's kind of a risk there. But I mean, I don't see a downside. The drivers are getting an incentive. We get the data. If the data ends up not being as helpful as we thought, that's okay. This is a pilot. If it fails, that's a lesson learned. The next one will kind of design differently. Well, the elements of what they're doing, what you're doing with them, really sound like they will work. And I'm very encouraged by it because it goes beyond justice kind of innovation. It talks of a spirit of innovation. It talks of a spirit of computer science and technology and data management. Very important going forward. Gee, how the utility has changed in the past 20 years. It's really remarkable. Timor, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. It's been a great discussion. I've learned a lot. And I hope we can circle back later and see how it's going. Absolutely, Jay. It was a pleasure. Thank you.