 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. It's Wednesday. That means energy day. Okay. This is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Mitch. Aloha, y'all. That's Mitch Ewing. From Texas. We do these things in various formats. Right. Okay. And today, Shannon Tinganon, and she's here from Hawaiian Electric, and we love when she comes down, and she tells us what's going on. She informs us. Welcome to the show, Shannon. Nice to have you. Thank you for having me, Jay. So, tell us what the message is this time. Well, today we want to highlight our newest project. Just yesterday, in fact, we went into service. It's the West Lock Solar, I'm sorry, West Lock Solar Project out on joint-based Pearl Harbor Hickam West Lock Aniq. Wow. So, we have, I know, say that, say that 12 times. Yeah, right. Anyway. So, it's a big project. You know, it's our first project, our first grid-scale solar project. We're really excited about it, 20 megawatt out in Ewa Beach on the Ewa Plains. Uh-huh. So. This is Navy Land. It is. This has been Navy Land forever, actually. Yeah. In Kalailoa. Yes. I mean, Ewa Beach. And so, how many panels you got in the solar array? Nearly 81,000. But who's counting? I went out there myself. So, what is this? This is a significant project. Tell us why it's significant. It's significant because it's a partnership, you know, with the Navy. And then we also, you know, it's our first grid-scale solar project. So, for the company, it's a big deal. You know, we're very proud of the accomplishment of getting this online already. And it just adds to our RPS, you know. We're trying to get to 100% by 2045, so this is one more way to get us to that point. 20 megabytes is a substantial piece. And I say megabytes. Yeah. I was just going to let that go. I mean, we think tech is our middle man. So this is on Navy Land, and therefore, the Navy is a user. It's definitely a consumer of what you're doing, but it's not limited to the Navy, right? No. It will produce energy for the entire island of Oahu. All Oahu consumers will benefit from this. And it's the lowest-cost renewable energy to date. Oh, yeah, let's talk about that. Lowest cost to date. Are you listening? Are you making notes? Lowest cost to date. What is the lowest cost to date? 7.5 cents. Wow. When you think back only a few years, it was like three times that. Neighbor islands, much more. Yeah. So this is very significant, and we're very proud of that. So what does this tell us about the future? Where is this point going forward? Well, all we can do is add more and more renewables. It's not always going to be Hawaiian Electric projects, but it's going to be independent power producers. We have several projects already approved and ready to go that we had in our first RFP and our second RFP, we just closed on applications. So we're going through those now. I think we had over 75 applications come in. That is a statement because that means a lot of people are interested in doing solar or renewable projects in the state of Hawaii. Definitely. I mean, we have to reach our goal of 100% by 2045. So this is just one project, but it's one of many coming online soon. I think the important point there is that if you want to build a lot of renewables, you have to have a lot of projects. And to have a lot of projects, you have to have a lot of RFPs. And to have a lot of RFPs, you have to have a lot of people responding. In this case, it's rec solar. You have to make a deal. You have to make deals all over the place. It's always that way. You have to make a deal with, in this case, the landowner, the Navy. You have to make a deal with rec solar. You have to make a deal with the PUC. You've got to get through the gauntlet on this. And now, just as of what yesterday, you're actually operating. And you're going to have the ceremony on Monday. Talk about the ceremony. Well, we're just going to have a Hawaiian blessing, a traditional Hawaiian blessing. We're just going to dedicate the project and just celebrate the fact that it's online now. Yeah, it's important. You've got to commemorate. And in commemorating, you're also saying that there'll be more. And you're working on others in the pipeline before you know it. There'll be another ceremony. OK, Mitch, your turn. Well, I understand this project doesn't have battery storage. A lot of the PV projects have storage plus battery. So is there any particular reason why that's the case? I mean, you don't need it. We applied. And it was denied. They give a reason why they denied it. I don't have that. Right now. I can surmise this that if you're sending it straight into the grid, the grid has other storage elements. And then a lot of our, yeah, a lot of the project, in fact, all of the projects that we have in our first RFP is soldered plus storage. And then moving forward, that's the way to go. Yeah. And there is a connection or reminiscence of the one at Schofield, which we looked at a few weeks ago, which is also on military land. Also kind of a partnership with the military and a developer, which serves the military, but also serves the community. It's the same kind of pattern. When I get out of this, this pattern is at least, as far as we can see right now, it's successful. Therefore, it should be something we'll do again and again. We hope so. I mean, this is, again, a great partnership. We don't have to purchase the land, which is really, that's how we get the cost savings. And permitting is easier too. The federal government is different than the state, city, what have you. So we've been very fortunate to work with the military on these projects. So you think about going into the service? Yeah. Mitch and I will go to the service so we can relate to that. What more you got? Oh, that's pretty roll it. It sounds like a pretty good project. So congratulations on getting this in place. Thank you. Yeah. Yes, I do have one. So how much does it contribute? Like we all talk about percentages, which is really tough because like, you know, so how much does 80 megawatts represent probably not a huge percentage because we use so much electricity here. On the big island, it would be a lot. Yeah. You know what? I'll have to get back to you on. Stay wide. Yeah, my recollection is about 1,800 megawatts, not megabits or megahertz, but megawatts. Yeah, not megabyte. So 80 is a fair percentage of that. Like the big island grid is like only 180 or 200 megawatts. So that would be like 10% of the big island grid just to kind of give it some scale. But you know the thing is you can't take half an island and dedicate it to one big project. No, you have to have many projects contributing. They've got to be around every corner. And so you add 80 here or whatever it is, and then again and again and again. And after a while, you're feeding the whole system. I guess the issue is the grid. And actually, right after this break, we're going to take, Mitch is going to talk about the grid with some entrepreneurs who are doing technology on the grid. Maybe you should meet them. Just right. One other quick item or factoid. By 2022, we'll have about 4.4 million solar panels across our service territory. So this is an exciting time for renewable energy, our core energy, renewable energy. So I think this is a significant project. And moving forward, we just want more and more. Things are happening. The project's in Schofield. This project, with all of the accomplishments, the achievements built into this project, the notable best practices that are in this project. And then, of course, you have these RFPs out there where you're going to get hundreds of megawatts from all directions. And it's going to change the landscape, isn't it? You're in the middle of a landscape change, and you've already gone a certain distance. Yeah. It's going to be significant changes ahead. You know, we're just excited to see what's in our future. Well, that means you're going to come back and talk to us some more. Definitely. Definitely. And then, tag it on. Ryan Electric, Mitch Ewen, Jay Fiedel, Rick, watch this. Aloha. My name is Victoria, and I'm a host at the Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between US 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 AM at Think Tech, Hawaii. See you soon. Mahalo. Thanks to our Think Tech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Monli and the Friends of Think Tech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Dwayne Kurisu. The Hawaii Community Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. I'm Richard Emery, one of the co-hosts with Kondo Insider, sitting next to my other co-host, Jane Sugimura. We're very pleased to be on Think Tech Hawaii and provide this show of education, news, and topics affecting living in an association. About 38% of our population lives in an association, and you have very specific needs and rules to make an effective pairing of your home. So we're glad to be a part of this show, and what do you think, Jane? And yes, we're very proud to be part of this program, and what we want to do is to bring to all of the people who are involved with Kondo, especially people sitting on the boards and the owners, topics that will assist them in governing their projects and dealing with issues that boards and owners have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. In our shows every Thursday at 3 o'clock, we hope you watch it and always feel free to send in topics for discussion. Aloha. Aloha. Hey, well, welcome back to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We just did a quick line change, like we did when I used to play hockey up in Canada, and it went amazingly well and smoothly. So here we are. I'm joined by Derek Stenslick and Matthew Richwine from Hellos Energy, a new company, a new co-start-up. And first of all, I want to ask my guests about their individual backgrounds. So I'll start off with you, Derek. Great, yes. Tell us about yourself. Derek Stenslick, I've been in the energy industry for about 10 years now. I focus that entire time on renewable integration and how we bring on more wind and solar into the grid. My background is in economics, so I've had to learn some of the engineering behind it. But fortunately, I have my partner here to help me out on that front. But look at how to bring on new resources cost-effectively and the grid. Hey, and that. Yeah, my background is on the engineering side, electrical engineering, so power systems, so electrical engineering applied to the grid. And yeah, I've been focused on what are the technical challenges of including all of this wind and solar and renewable generation onto grids like Hawaii? So I guess between the two of you, one with a background in economics, they can tell us how much it costs. And then you can surprise us with how much stuff we need and work out the economics. And can we afford this, correct? You have both. You have both. I view you as two brave guys who stepped away from a much larger company to form your own company. Very entrepreneurial of you to do that. That's a big step and a big deal. So tell us about your new company. Tell us. Yeah, so tell us energy. As you said, it's a clean energy startup. It's something we're really excited about. And it's our first year, just finishing up our first year in business and off to a great start. We specialize in analytics and technology for renewable integration, so all the other grid and planning and the modeling, the simulation that you have to do to make sure that these grids are going to operate, like you said, reliably and cost-effectively into the future as we start to bring on more and more technology. So tell me about your client list. I mean, did you already have some clients waiting in the wings or did you have to start with a clean sheet of paper and build it up? Yeah, I mean, we've been in the industry for a little while and have known some people, which is, of course, a helpful starting point. But we really wanted to focus our efforts in Hawaii because we see that a lot of the action here in the grid is, in terms of across the industry, is happening right here in Hawaii in a really applied way, where as Shannon was just talking about, they're really putting in 81,000 more panels and getting to these really big numbers. It's really leading the industry, and we want it to be at the forefront of that. I can almost look at Hawaii then. It's like a laboratory and leading the way, as you said, some leadership here. Yeah, you know, they were actually, Hawaii was actually the first state in the country to implement 100% RPS target. And since then, you've seen a host of other states follow suit from California, New York, and others. But they're a long way behind us. And I guess they haven't even started to experience some of the issues we have as you add more and more, particularly intermittent renewables on the grid. It's a big problem to manage that grid. I mean, I don't know, what's California up to? Do they have any feel for that? Yeah, so in California, a similar situation, a lot of solar growth going on, a lot of it being distributed on rooftops. In Hawaii here, it's one-third of single-family homes have rooftop solar, which is huge. The thing that makes Hawaii really unique is that as an island grid, there's a lot of additional challenges that California doesn't have to face. California, it's spread out over a large land area. So the solar doesn't all drop off at the same time. They're interconnected with neighboring systems. And so they can rely on these neighbors to help balance out the variable wind and solar generation. So here in Hawaii, it's all got to be balanced locally. HIKO is ultimately the one that keeps the lights on for everybody. And there's challenges that go along with that. I think you guys brought some slides along. So not death by power point on my head. So while we pull up that first slide, and you can talk a little bit about the slide, how are we doing? How are we doing? Yes, this slide just measures out the RPS by each island. So you can see the progression. So just tell people at RPS, because we've used that a couple of times when Shannon was here. RPS, it's a renewable portfolio standard. So it's the percentage of the load that's being served by renewable energy. And so this is a combination of wind, solar, solar, both rooftop and utility scale, as well as some hydro and on the Big Island geothermal. Yeah, and you can see these numbers where we are today and the trend and how much it's grown over a relatively brief period of time. But it still shows we're a long ways out from 2045, where we've got to get all these lines to 100%. And we're really seeing, we're starting to see the challenges now. And as we look ahead, we are anticipating a lot more challenges than that's part of our role here. And with Telecentregy is to help the companies and the stakeholders solve these challenges so that we can really hit these goals. But how are you doing that? How are you helping us solve our problems? Do we have a contract with you from HNEI? Do you have some modeling? How does that help us address these challenges? Yeah, that's right. So one of the big things we do in the power system in the industry where we all count on electric power to be there all the time. And it's painful when we learn the lessons in the field. So one of the ways that we really try to mitigate and get in front of and understand what the challenges are going to be is to model the system. And so Derek and I have, with HNEI, have very detailed models, economic models and engineering models of how the system works so that we can, in a modeling environment, introduce these new technologies, these higher levels of wind and solar and battery resources, and understand how it's going to behave and how we want it to behave before it gets in the field. And kind of going back to the HNEI, so we are out here with Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, part of University of Hawaii. And kind of in that role that University of Hawaii and HNEI has is to really be a third party, independent kind of room for analysis and policy recommendations. And really to just be there to provide technical analysis in a really third party independent way that can be used for the Hawaii State Legislature, for the Public Utilities Commission, and for HECO. So really just trying to bring in a different independent set of analysis on all these grid simulation and modeling of it. We're like a referee. We don't have any axe to grind here. So we can give them an informed independent assessment. And you obviously, I guess not obviously, but you can tell me, do scenario analysis, correct? Like you say, OK, well, this is how the grid is now. We've modeled this. I'm assuming that you validated how closely your models replicate the grid. And then you say, well, what if we add this, this, and this here, here, and here? Is that kind of how it works? Absolutely. I think the scenario analysis is a real key piece of this. Because what's not always obvious to everyone is all of the huge range of conditions that happen throughout time that the grid has to survive. And many of the times, because the electricity, electric grid is so reliable, it's easy to take for granted all of the considerations that go behind making it that reliable in terms of severe weather events or unplanned loss of equipment like power lines or generating plants, these are really significant disturbances to the grid. And you have to make sure that when these emergency events happen, the rest of the grid is able to act quickly and keep the lights on through these things. So yeah, the scenario analysis is a big piece of that. Just bringing up with this scenario analysis, brought us out here this week is actually to support and help facilitate HECO's integrated grid planning effort. We're helping out the technical advisory panel for that. And the HECO IGP, as they call it, is really looking at that roadmap out to 2045. And what does the utility have to do? And what scenarios make sense for new investments or bringing on new IPPs? Really working through that long-term roadmap of all the different scenarios that are possible out there. And what HECO as a utility needs to do to make sure all those pieces fit together in a cost-effective and reliable manner. I hear a lot of people say, well, so far we've picked a low-hanging fruit and now it's going to get harder. What does your modeling say? Going to get harder or is there still some low-hanging fruit out there that we can be picking? Or is there some obvious kind of effective solution that we should really get out there next? I'll start off with the economic part. Sure. Certainly the low-hanging fruit has largely been. So here on Oahu, there's already 500 megawatts of distributed rooftop solar, approximately. That's a lot. And then you have another 150 megawatts of grid scale. And then the HECO project, the Westlock project that was just announced, another 20 megawatts. And you think about that on a 1,000 megawatt load system in the middle of the day, you can be well above 50%, just being served by solar. And so the ability for the grid to accommodate that level of solar in the middle of the day gets to be more and more challenging. And so you have to start thinking about mitigations and what you can do to help integrate more solar. A lot of the new projects coming in, the new ones that got PUC approval, those are going to have storage included with them. So each of those solar plants will have enough storage to shift that energy into evening peak and overnight periods. And you can actually bring up the second slide. I think that illustrates it. So here you have it. This shows two days of operation on a grid. And the yellow in the middle of the day, that's the solar generation. And this is expected once we have some of those accepted projects coming in, as well as the next round of solar and storage, which Shannon just brought up. They just got bids received for that. You can see on the left here, the yellow, that's the solar coming in the middle of the day. And you can see that it plateaus in the middle of the day. And basically that blue, that's the oil fire generation. And there's only so much flexibility there. So the gray part above that, that would be solar that's curtailed. You see on the right, that's when we start to add those energy storage. And you can see it takes that surplus solar from the middle of the day. It shifts it into the evening overnight periods and helps you bring on more solar. Now, that's not the only mitigation though. And you wanna touch on a few of the others, Matt? Yeah, in terms of the mitigations, while I was thinking about, getting back to that low hanging fruit, and we've talked about a few numbers, we've thrown out a few numbers. We were showing earlier that we're around maybe 20 or 30% of renewables. And yet Derek is describing kind of there's certain points in the day where we can be over 50%. And so what does that mean? What is that? How do those numbers work together? And I think it's important to differentiate between when we talk about the RPS standards and these targets of going to 100% and where we're at about 20 or 30% today, that's in terms of energy throughout the whole year. But when you really think about it in terms of reliability and managing this, you have to consider at every given moment, the grid has to be made reliable. And so that's when you're seeing at these instantaneous moments in the middle of the day as we were showing, that you have to hit those 50, that we're hitting those 50% numbers. And so that's why, when we're talking about the challenges coming and the low hanging fruit, as we're climbing that scale of these instantaneous rates of renewables throughout the day, that's where we're really getting into those challenges. And so that's why some of these challenges are so significant and happening at relatively low levels of energy throughout the course of the year. Okay, so we have that big band of blue at the bottom of both slides, which represents like oil, fire, or fossil fuel generation. How are we ever gonna fight into that? I mean, isn't that gonna require like massive amounts of storage? Because you gotta generate all that electricity during the day, store it and or wind. A lot of people say we've kind of maxed out our wind capability here on Oahu. A lot of it maybe because people don't wanna have, you know, not in my backyard and we're seeing some of that up here on the North Shore already. So how do we get rid of that big band down at the bottom? Any thoughts? I mean, I don't, suppose you have a solution, but how do we bite into that? And that's exactly what we're here in doing this modeling, this grid simulation. That's what we're here to work on is how do you take a bigger bite out of that oil, fire generation, the carbon emitting generation? And there's several answers to that obviously. Storage is one of them. Load management is another. So how can we more closely align our load, the electric consumers with the times that the renewables are generating? So can we shift load from that evening and overnight period into the middle of the day? Can electric vehicles be charged in the middle of the day to avoid CO2 emissions from the transportation sector? And then there's a host of other mitigations making improvements to that oil fire generation. HECOs come a long way, getting those units to be more flexible and allow them to turn down to lower loading levels in the middle of the day to cycle on and off more frequently to be able to turn it off. There's limits to that too, that the oil fired generation fleet is fairly old here in Hawaii. So some of the oldest units in the country. And so getting flexibility out of the legacy oil units is gonna become increasingly challenging. And so it could be a host of new technologies that help. And I think a part of that, what one of those also is the renewables themselves. And there's a lot of capability in this new generation, but it's still, it's relatively new in terms of the span of over a hundred years of operating a power system. This is really in the last decade or two. And I think the industry is still understanding how can we fully deploy the capability there. So that's also part of this slate of solutions that we're looking at is also, how do we tune up the existing, the renewables plants to make sure that they're contributing the most that they can. Oh, you have another slide. Can we flash up the next slide? Oh, that's what we're talking about. Absolutely, and here what we wanna talk about is how can you reliably take off and retire some of that old legacy fossil generation and replace it with a host of renewables and storage. And I think storage is gonna be a really valuable tool and a really flexible tool for all the things that happen in the middle of the day, like smoothing out some of the solar variability, providing grid services, shifting that energy to evening peak. There's still gonna be challenges. It's not the only solution. It can't be the only solution. There's gonna be challenges that come up. What if you have multiple low solar days in a row? And there's times when today, having a fossil fired unit on the system, when you push that button to start it, you can rest assured that most of the time that's gonna start when you need it. With energy storage and renewables, you have to be more careful about managing the state of charge and making sure you forecast out what your renewables are gonna look like. And you have to really manage an energy limited resource and how do you plan the rest of the grid knowing that some recent resources aren't always gonna be available. And so we look at this very probabilistically and look at across many years of operation, many years of weather and look at all the possible configurations and make sure that when you need energy, there's something there to provide it or there's load flexibility to work around it. How about energy efficiency? It was really popular a few years ago, kind of the, at least the visibility level has gone down. I mean, should we be looking at how we do things differently? Yeah, I think energy efficiency goes with part of that, the state of solutions. But in some sense, as we're really, as we're shifting the generation mix, it's the energy efficiency piece is, it's really the mix, the shift in technologies more than the energy efficiency that is the hurdle that we're seeing. And so one of the things particularly is, the wind and solar generation, how it connects to the grid, it connects through a device called a power converter and that's very different from the conventional generation that used a large copper and steel machine that was connected. And so while the energy efficiency initiatives are good at kind of keeping the total demand down, it's really a technology shift that has got our attention. And I think kind of on the topic of energy efficiency, getting load management is gonna be increasingly important. So not just reducing the overall load, but how can we have it be more flexible in response to the real-time conditions on the grid? That's gonna be increasingly important. It's not just about reducing it, but making it more flexible. I see a great future for you guys. Thank you. This is a really difficult thing that's gonna go on and on and on. So I think you've picked a really good business to be in and I hear you guys are really good at it. So believe it or not, we've blown through our time. So I told you it would go fast. So thank you very much for having us. Thank you very much for having us. It was a great time. Thanks. Okay, thanks. So Aloha y'all. I'll see you next Wednesday at Hawaii, the state of clean energy.