 Okay, what's the magic word today, here on a Wednesday, here on Hawaii, the state of clean energy? What's the magic word? It's Lani Shinsato. That's two words. Lani, for sure. Hi, Lani. Hi, Jay. And that's Mitch Ewan. That's the second magic word. Aloha, y'all. Back from the war is in Long Beach. We'll talk about that. Exactly. So Lani, I guess congratulations are in order. Talk about the changes you're involved in at Hawaiian Electric. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. So thank you for having me. We're under some exciting changes right now. We've merged with another department and we've rebranded it. And we've also done sort of a one company change. So all of our tri-company folks who work on rooftop solar and batteries, what we call customer energy resources. Used to be distributed. Used to be distributed energy resources. Customer energy resources, our new name. We're all under a unified theme and vision and leadership. The message I get is the magic word is really customer. Exactly. That's a big part of why we did it. We wanted to make things more simple for our customers and have a more customer-friendly name. Distributed energy resources was sort of falling flat on the normal person, like my mom. What is distributed energy? Yeah, I did send her a technical thing. Distributed energy resources, but it's kind of techy. Yeah, it's too techy. And we merged with demand response, which had a similar problem. No one really knew what that meant. Sounds very interesting, sexy. What does that mean? Who's demanding what? Who's responding in what way? It's provocative. I don't know. Good. So now it's all in one place. All in one place. And you're running it, but you have a partnership going on? Yes. So my co-partner in crime now, Yo Kawanami, we would have loved to be in here today, both of us, but he's under the weather, so we'll have to come next time and talk more together as a team about what we plan to do with our new team. Okay. Shout out for Yo. Yo. Yo. Yo. Aloha, Yo. Yo. Come on down, Yo. Yes. Yes. We will bring him down for sure. So what does it mean, though? I mean, tell me what it means conceptually before. Maybe it's close to the same now, but the nomenclature is different. What does it mean? Where does it fit? You know, in terms of the company, you know, the fulfillment of the company's mission, the engagement between the company and the customer. So thank you. Great question. I don't know if many people know this, but customer energy resources are a huge part of our future. So you both know that we have the 100% RPS goal by 2045. Sure. Actually, I have that tattooed on the inside of my eyeball. I feel like I have the same tattoo. But our customer energy resources are going to make up a huge part of that resource mix. So we need to figure out how to expand what we already have now to that huge scale that we need in the future. And you know, too, that we already have a lot now are leading the nation. So it's kind of daunting for us to think, OK, we have to do even more. But that's a part of our plan. And so having that in our minds, we wanted to have this very customer-centric team to do that and name so that we can go out and start to market more of our programs and make sure that we're able to get that kind of continued adoption of customers. Yeah, these are exciting times, aren't they? In the sense that we have been sort of around the issue, around clean energy for almost 20 years. You were 20 years younger then, by the way. I was, yeah. And now we're getting closer to 2045 or 2040, as the case may be. And it's right out there. And somebody's got to be thinking about it 24 by 7. Yes. Somebody's got to be bringing it to fruition. And what I get is that you are critical in that part of it. You have to find a way, find a path, find the momentum, find the vitality, whatever it is, you know, the mission-oriented thinking, take us there. That's absolutely right. How do you sleep at night? It's hard. But that's absolutely right, Jay. I think we've done a lot, right? And we're getting a lot of recognition for having done a lot. But our team had to sort of press pause and take a step back and say, you know, we've got to innovate even more and figure out the strategy going forward for how we're going to get more. And do it in a way that's not an easy thing to do. You can't just interconnect everybody all at once. You know, we have to think about, you know, making it safe for the grid and making it so affordable for all of our customers. Some may not want to do customer resources like, you know, PV your batteries. And we have to think about them. But it has to be fair and sustainable over time. Well, you're carving it out of whole cloth in the sense that we are involved in a great experiment out here. And you're really at the point of that. But Mitch has a question. I have a couple of questions. So, like, how do you make it easier for the customer? Things that come to mind are permitting, financing, approvals by the utility company, you know, not having to do these very expensive engineering studies. Is that all in the list of things to make this easier for the customer to go to a PV or a wind turbine or whatever he's going to have? For sure. All of those things. And we've made some progress in those areas. You know, in our past, when we had a lot of solar coming on all at once, we had to kind of stop and do some studies and figure out how to do some traditional upgrades to the infrastructure in order to accommodate the solar. Thankfully, we've sort of moved past that. We've started to use advanced inverters more and advanced metering that helps us, you know, not have to do all that stuff that slows it down. So we want to continue using technology to streamline the process and be able to accommodate more and more customer resources going forward. Another thing we want to do is right now we have a lot of different options for our customers. And in a way that's good, but what we're hearing from some of our stakeholders, our customers, our solar industry is that it's sort of overly complicated at times because we've got too much. So we want to be able to simplify offerings for our customers and sort of narrow them down and take out kind of all the technology and the stuff that our customers probably don't care about and have it be very customer-friendly, sort of a simple menu of options. So these are the things that we're kind of thinking of right now. So one other question. What about the interface with the PV companies themselves? They probably carried a lot of this stuff with them when they went to a customer and made it easier for the customer. How are we going to interface with the PV industry? We absolutely need to be partners in this future because they're a huge part of it. And we can't afford to have sort of start-stop these famines in the market if we need to hit the 2045 scale of customer resources that we need. We have to make sure we're doing this in collaboration with our solar industry. And so we try to meet pretty regularly with them and build healthy relationships and get their feedback. What kind of feedback are you getting from them initially? I know it's early times, but do you have a feel for it yet? Some of what we've been hearing is that we want to have a clear path forward. And I agree with them. So we're trying to create that. They want some stability. They want to make sure for our local contractors, they want to make sure that they're a part of the picture and it's not going to be just kind of big industry, solar industry type of players playing here in the state. And we absolutely want to see a place for all of our local guys. Making space for everybody. They got to eat too. And as a matter of fact, I saw a piece the other day where they were 67% up. I'm talking about the installers, the solar installers. They're doing okay as opposed to earlier years when they were trending down. Anyway, Lani, our time is up. The parting is such sweet sorrow. We're going to go to a break and then we're going to talk to Mitch and find out what he's been doing with his spare time. Sounds fun. Thank you so much for coming down. Thank you very much for having me. You want to see the power of our electronics? Watch this. Aloha, my name is Victoria and I'm a host at The Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between U.S. Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office and its partners where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs and small businesses. Talk about how to start a business. Talk about great tips for small business owners. Please join us every Thursday, 11 a.m. at Think Tech, Hawaii. Nice. Mahalo. Hey, hello, everyone, and welcome to the Think Tech, Hawaii Studio. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii. We air here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time, trying to bring you issues about security that you may not know, issues that can protect your family, protect yourself, protect our community, protect our companies, the folks we work with. Please join us and I hope you can maybe get a little different perspective on how to live a little safer. Aloha. I told you we would return and Lani's gone. Oh, okay. But Mitch is still here. And you can talk about his trip to Long Beach. Just came back when he talked about fuel cells. And the question is whether you learned from them or they learned from you, Mitch? Well, I think it was a little bit of both. The show was really well attended. The mood was up. The hygiene industry is rejuvenated. Fuel cell energy got an investment of $200 million and then from one venture capitalist or a funding organization, then Exxon has put an additional 60 into fuel cell energy. So that rose everybody's spirits. There was all sorts of really new gear and we got updated on the latest through the art. I made a presentation there on Hawaii, the state of hydrogen. And I say that because... So we have this show called Hawaii the State of Clean Energy. Hawaii the State of Hydrogen. Well, they look kind of both the same thing, really. Of course, it's the same thing. So why don't you throw out that first slide and I want to show off my seat now. What a beautiful logo that is. H2YE. So it's Hawaii the State of Hydrogen. And we really are. So let's look at the next slide. So really it's the law. And the reason I say that is like about 12, 13 years ago, we actually passed the law on the books. You can see it. Hawaii revised statute 196-10. It really said that Hawaii has to transition over to a hydrogen economy. Now, one that they didn't say how soon that was going to happen, but it's on the books. I'm not sure there's any other state in the United States that has that mandate and that's policy. And that's... I think it was Calvin Say who sponsored that. Of the House at the time. Of course. It was the same statute that created the hydrogen fund, wasn't it? Absolutely. And it was very forward thinking and he actually funded it with originally $10 million. And that was meant to bring in big contracts like from the U.S. Department of Energy like multi-million-dollar contracts where there's a requirement to have cost share. And before that we were doing kind of small projects that would like take the cost share out of our hide and do some innovative financing but you know, write off people's time or downsize it. When you get into multi-million-dollar contracts you need a multi-million-dollar cost share to leverage that. You get about a four to one or a five to one benefit for every dollar that you put in the feds would put in four to five dollars. I think we've used it pretty well. Several of my projects have leveraged that fund. For example, on the Big Island my project at Nelha most of that infrastructure was paid for out of the hydrogen fund. We have another slide please. So this past I mean I've talked about 12 years ago but just this year this last legislative session we passed two really important pieces of legislation. We finally got hydrogen electric vehicles classified as an electric vehicle. Same status as a battery electric vehicle and we get the same benefits. You can see some of them there like using the high occupancy lane we get parking etc etc which we didn't have before. It took us six years believe it or not to get that through, around six years to get that through the legislature. Two minutes took so long. Senator Lorraine Inouye who actually sponsored it and got it through. If you want to throw that slide back up again the same slide. No, back a slide. Okay, second bill was House Bill 401. Now this is transformative. What it did is it established what we call transportation services contracts. That was the brain child of Riley Seito who's the deputy on the Big Island the County of Hawaii R&D department. And what it essentially does is just like an energy savings performance contract. It allows the counties to go out to private industry and fund their transportation. So for example Big Island, I would like to see a fleet of 50 to 60 hydrogen buses or some of them could be battery electric buses. It should happen soon. But the way we do it is every year we may buy three or four buses so it could take 20 years or 15 years before we get that fleet in. With this program you can go out with an RFP to industry and say look, you guys supply the buses you supply all the infrastructure i.e. where you're going to get your hydrogen from or where you're going to get electricity from charging stations and maintenance and we will pay you a services fee based on some metric like for example passenger miles traveled and so that allows us to make a leapfrog to really convert our vehicle fleets a lot faster. I'm just using an example of buses but the county has all sorts of vehicles, dump trucks tractor trailer trucks that can convert their whole fleet over and so this allows us as I said to make this big leap really fast allows us to meet some of our energy goals and transform us faster to a hydrogen economy in my case that's one of my pet projects. How does this dovetail with what Lonnie was saying what's the connection if there is one? I've got to absorb it a little but basically hydrogen is an energy storage technology so it could compete against batteries. She talked about batteries and rooftop solar. It's part of her department her program. Yeah part of the energy mix so you know we're looking at hydrogen for energy storage for example if you have excess wind for example as being curtail we can use it to make hydrogen and store it for long periods of time and the data shows that it's more economic at large scale at what we call at scale to store energy like gigawatt hours of energy for long term storage whereas if you're just storing it for a night or you know one or two days a battery is perfectly satisfactory. That's true but my battery my phone all my batteries degrade it roughly a percent every day. Sure. Something like that and so hydrogen doesn't degrade that way. Doesn't degrade you know you can store it in a gas bottle and it can last for ten years or longer as long as your valves don't leak they don't usually leak. Yeah it's still there it doesn't degrade sunlight doesn't cause it to grow algae in it like diesel fuel does I mean diesel fuel you have to every three months basically you have to you should be filtering it and that's people don't you just let that diesel engine sit there as a backup generator and then when you really need it. That degrades too. Doesn't work like Hurricane Sandy in you know New York and New Jersey that's what they found all their diesel generators failed. The only thing is sitting there for years. Yeah the only things that work they had about 25 fuel cell stationary fuel cell systems that work and that's what kept the communications going all the critical loads same kind of a concept here. What about the technology on fuel cells I mean fuel cells as you said they're highly efficient it's great technology but somewhere in this progression there will be technological advances to fuel cells and I wonder if that was something that was discussed at the conference. Absolutely they had several speakers talking about the technological progress like they're getting more hours on them for example there's some fuel cells on buses and AC transit that have operated for over 32,000 hours without failure that's something and they're still going and of course the other part of it is the prices are coming down I wouldn't say they're exponentially going down but slow and steady progress on reducing costs designing it better one of the big costs is what they call balance of systems all the pumps and the valves electronics are all getting better more robust as we go along. Well HNAI doing research on fuel cells what's the cutting edge what are the points of research these days what problems are people trying to solve if you could discuss it. Well I think the big problem right now that people want to solve is just to get the cost of them down I think we've pretty well solved the durability and 32,000 hours is a lot of hours so like how much more are we going to make there the other parts you're trying to solve is where we get the hydrogen from so for example based on a huge order for electrolyzers from Nikolai Motors once the electrolyzer manufacturer got the contract starts producing them the cost of that electrolyzer will go down 40% is what they're predicting that's huge. That's a big thing that brings it within the grasp of the ordinary person right technologically the improving the efficiency you only get like incremental it's very slow you can't there's no dramatic leap in efficiency but now you've got the cost down that's very significant it reduces your capital expenses and of course talking to my walking father this morning and we were talking about the relative cost of a fossil fuel car okay versus and why people like them or didn't like them and an electric car and we concluded that the difference is largely in the cost of replacing the battery I think we got to buy the range anxiety thing already now people are worried that a few years down the road are they going to call up AAA and AAA is going to come out and charge them $3,000 for a new battery or more so my question to you is as a similar problem a similar issue exists with regard to fuel cell cars hydrogen cars I don't think so basically like I said the fuel cell stack or the thing that generates the power will last forever your tank is going to last hydrogen tank is going to last forever so there's not those kinds of things I mean really what they want to do is get the cost of the hydrogen down that's the significant thing and the cost of the hydrogen is directly related to the input energy you have to put into your system to make it so that's why if you can get really inexpensive solar or curtail wind or the best in my opinion geothermal power operates 24-7 that will get the cost of the hydrogen down to ours totally competitive if not better than fossil fuels and fossil fuels aren't going to stay cheap forever I mean we're enjoying this this lull as Richard Ha said with all the gas they're getting the natural gas but he's projecting that's going to start going up in the next couple of years so we've got to be moving fast so we don't get caught we've discussed this before with Richard Ha a couple of times is the Big Island is kind of like the main laboratory it's HNEI and the Big Island and PGV so the question I'm interested in is how important is the restoration of service at PGV to all the projects you have in mind on the Big Island it's pretty critical we can do it with other resources but like I said the best resource is the geothermal plant because your equipment's operating 24 hours a day whereas if I have a solar array you may get 5 hours of sun and then you've got all this heavy all this expensive equipment sitting around waiting for the next day and what if you have a storm so that's the issue and same with wind it's only like the best wind resources are about 40% of the time you have them whereas what you really want 24-7 the other one is Hydro I mean there are some Hydro resources on the Big Island the Wailuku River northeast of Hilo and there's some down in Ka'u they're looking at the old irrigation ditches over there have been reclaimed by some people and that's a resource that's so you go to Long Beach and you talk about hydrogen you talk about fuel cells generating hydrogen which is a critical part of the whole examination how do the people on the mainland get their hydrogen they don't have PGV they don't have geothermal many places they don't have the Hydro either how are they getting it well right now they get it from natural gas they reform what break down natural gas carve off the carbon with oxygen and then they vent off all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you're still getting a benefit because the overall process is still more efficient than a gasoline engine for example and so they're saying that you get a reduction not necessarily more efficient but you get a reduction in the amount of carbon that you're emitting about a 30% reduction if you're using that process even with a fuel cell with an electric car for example people look at the electric car and they say because I'm plugging into the wall electricity must be clean but it's not it depends on how you got it so if you have a high a high percentage of fossil fuels or whatever most of them are using natural gas on the mainland to generate electricity I have a thought for you Rich yeah sure seems to me that when you're storing hydrogen putting it in that tank for future use you're not really sure when you're going to use it it could be days, weeks, months even longer it's not critical that you generated on a rapid basis you can generate it slowly it's okay to generate it slowly so maybe in the future I'm just a thought here the technology that would create and store hydrogen in the tank for future use that technology could be slow because slow technology could be cheaper somehow and it could be like a trickle charge just a little every hour, a little every day before you know what you've filled up the tank and hopefully you've done it in a technology with a technology that is cheaper than anything we can think of today yeah we're talking to the Marine Corps base for example resilience is a very important thing with the military now they want 14 days of critical load and yeah the grid is very pretty stable it doesn't go down every day so you could build up that 14 day supply over several years until you actually need it when all of a sudden something happens and you lose all your power to the base pile into your your hydrogen supply so you don't have to have a monster electrolyzer churning out thousands of kilograms of hydrogen today it's like you say you can take little slices here, little slices there keep loads even so like when and look at time of use for example if the grids got very expensive power at the end of the day you don't use it then you wait until it's cheap it must have been a great conversation because you know to put a whole bunch of experts about hydrogen in one room like that have many rooms that were very exciting bringing from various walks of life, various backgrounds, various companies that must have been a real thrill for you and I'm wondering what it was like in terms of running into soul mates hydrogen soul mates did you meet people you didn't know did you meet people who wanted to come to Hawaii and see what you were doing did you meet people that were brothers in hydrogen over time all of the above I'm already getting some follow on emails from people I hadn't met before who want to know more about what we're doing here in Hawaii what kind of opportunities might be there for them and their technology plus guys I've known for 30 years in the business it was like all home week it was great PS, collaboration always helps yes it does collaborators is a real benefit in that yeah you revisit what people are doing like for example US hybrid who is here in Hawaii they have a small operation here and they're supplying my fuel cells for my buses they were there with a couple of their brand new fuel cells on display and their president Abbas Qadarzi gave us all a big rundown and I brought people from UH and other people there to see them this is the latest day of the art which is very good I might say we're really lucky to have them here in Hawaii so yes it's a way to trade ideas what are you doing oh I didn't know you were doing that that's interesting how can I leverage that and use it for Hawaii that's what it's all about you've been working on hydrogen for as long as I know you and it seems to me there's a momentum going on in hydrogen and around you and HNEI and the big island and there ever was am I right about that you're right about that you had a show yesterday with Tim Richer council member Tim Richers on the big island and Stan the energy man and Stan Wasserman and yeah we're getting pretty close to deploying those first buses just going through the final commissioning issues the failure is not an option so we want this thing to be really smooth and roll out well our bus is already ready to go it's just sitting here in a walk we'll give them the green light ship it over and then we can start operating it once we actually start operating the bus that's going to be a key milestone because then people will get a chance to ride on it see the advantages of it and it won't be vaporware it'll be we have to cover it we have to cover it because the world should know and there's all kinds of benefits in having the world know yeah we should do we should set up a movie set over there and when we roll it out we make a nice video it's all set Mitch thank you so much hydrogen all the same clean man clean and mean