 Welcome to the State of Clean Energy. I'm Maria Tomei and with me I have Roger Martin from the bus. It's Energy Wednesday and we're going to talk about not only the energy sources powering our buses, but also how the buses are part of a larger energy efficient transportation system here in Hawaii, specifically on Oahu today. So Roger Martin, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, I know you have a lot of stuff going on and a lot of exciting developments both technology wise and in the planning stages. Yeah, we have a lot going on now. Of course, we have our biggest project on the island is rail and a lot of my staff are planning on how we can provide the best service when we start operating rail, hopefully in 2020, in Trump, maybe 2021 and then later when we extend it to Alamoana Center. So that probably takes up a lot of my time is thinking about that, but sort of related to that is what type of vehicles are we going to interface with rail. Rail itself, as everybody knows, it's going to be an electric mode of transportation. It's going to be connected to the grid. And our political leaders have both our governor, our city council and our mayor have committed to finding a way that we can start transforming our public fleets into electric fleets as well. And that's something that even today we were talking to some of our partners. We have a federal grant that allow us to get our first vehicles that way through the federal grant. And we're well down that road of trying to plan out. The more that we dig into this, the more we understand how awesome and how complicated and how many issues there are. I like to tell my staff the easiest thing we could do is to buy electric buses because they're now commercially available. They're proven. They work. But we've got to have an infrastructure also that goes along with that. And that's a little bit, that's more challenging than even just getting electric buses. Yeah. Yeah. I guess next month you're on the high tech side, you know, the short term news because your buses won't arrive for a little while. So we can talk about that. Sure. Well, I mean, we had been testing a couple of electric buses. We had a pro-terra bus here a couple of months ago and we just stopped and we did about a month long test of that. We sent it all over the island to see how it could perform in all of our environments, all of our duty cycles. And that's a company that comes out of California that's basically from Silicon Valley is where its roots are. And then this last month we just stopped the test of a bus that's made by a company called BYD, Initial Stand for Build Your Dreams, and that is that parent company is a Chinese company that is, among other things, it's the largest battery company in the world. 10% of the company is owned by Warren Buffett, and so it is a real going concern. It has more experience in electric buses than any other company on the globe. It's interesting in China and Shenzhen, BYD runs 16,000 electric buses. That's a tremendous accomplishment that they've been able to do over the last five years, just to show the speed at which these kind of mega projects can unfold if there is the political will and the funding for them. So those buses have left Oahu, they've left the island? No, I think they're going to go on to a different test. Not sure where they are right now. I know they were going to be transiting around to some of the neighbor islands. And then there is a DOT test at the airport to test out a variety of different types of buses. I think they're testing a fuel cell bus, a natural gas bus, and an electric bus to see what could be the next generation of rent-a-car buses. There is a central rent-a-car facility that's under construction now, and it's going to mean that many of the private rent-a-car buses are going to be consolidated into a single bus line at the airport, and they're looking at different technologies to determine what is the best for the airport environment. Yeah, interesting. So you mentioned before that you have a grant to support the arrival of some bus a-bus, some buses for your fleet, and I guess you're designing the charging system or figuring out how they'll get their juice? Yeah, and we're pretty far along on it. We got a grant about seven, eight months ago. And the grant is called a LONO grant. It's a federal FDA grant, and the purpose of the grant is to basically get local transit authorities familiar with electric buses. So we were successful in getting a grant, and our partners, and we have a bunch of partners in that grant. There is the city and county of Honolulu. They are the main proponent. There is us at O'ahu Transit Services. We're the operator. We also have a relationship with Hawaiian Electric, who's stepped up and is helping us with some of the infrastructure planning and some of the in-kind support that they're going to provide to us. Our partner developing the bus is a company called GILIC, which is in Hayward, California, and they are the largest manufacturer of our bus fleets that we have. And then another partner is the Cummins Corporation. Cummins is a large engine company. They're on the Fortune 500, the largest engine company I think in the world. And they're going to be developing an electric drive system for GILIC. And it will be one of about three different places in the US that will demonstrate this new technology. And then finally, we have a partner in Atlanta, a nonprofit entity called the Center for Transportation Energy that helps us, that is familiar, and has done this around the country, and helps us with the modeling and other things that go along with trying to figure out how we can operate these electric buses and where's the best place to start. Yeah, thanks. But electric buses are going to be a long term issue for the island. There are lots and lots of considerations on where we'll operate these in the long term, what routes, where we would, how would we power them, how would we get enough Hawaiian electric power to all the places. Because the amount of power on a bus is huge. If we powered up all of our buses, all 550 of our buses and we had electric power on them, that'd be about the same storage that the Island of Kauai has. So it just gives you an idea of what a huge undertaking it is to transition to an all electric bus fleet. So are you considering what time of day they would be charged and are you considering what energy sources are available at that time for you? Yeah, and that's actually one of the things that FTA liked about our grant. In Hawaii, we are actually unique in the United States because we have such a high percentage of solar power. We also have a lot of wind power and more every year. And so most places on the mainland would get their cheapest electric rates overnight, what they would call the off-peak period. But in Hawaii, because of our tremendous amount of solar power, Hawaiian Electric is offering time of day rates for EVs, for cars and things like that, with the lowest rate being midday, between 8 and 5 p.m. And so the challenge for us or the opportunity for us, and there are both challenges and opportunities, is to figure out an operational strategy where we can shift our energizing part of our day so we can take advantage, first and foremost, of that midday period. Secondary, take advantage of the real off-peak area, which is after 10 p.m. and totally avoid adding more demand during the peak periods, which would be between 5 and 10 p.m. And the rates will be incentivized so that we're incentivized to do that. But it helps the state meet its clean energy goals so that we can shift demand to a period when we have abundant renewable energy available. That's our goal. Yeah, interesting. So if you're charging it during the day, is that like when the buses stop at a station? It's interesting because when you plot our peak demand, and we have peaks too, we peak in the morning when people are going to work, and we peak in the afternoon when people are going home. And in the middle, we get a little lull in our service. So we go from about 450 buses at our peak times with maybe 300 buses at our off-peak time in the middle. So we can use that, and that kind of almost, not quite, but it kind of mimics the way electric utilities have their peaking too. So during our peak, we want all of our buses on the road serving customers. And so it's not quite exactly coincide, but I think we can figure out a way where we can do that. We can figure out a way that, like for many of our routes, I'll give you an example of the one we're planning with our LONO grant. We have a route with three buses on it at peak times, but only two buses on it in the middle of the day. So we can figure out a way that we can charge all of those buses during that middle of the day period when we have about a seven-hour window, when we have a good window for charging vehicles. That's going to be part of the trick for us. It's going to be that it's not only going to electric, but it is really changing the way that we operate, the way that we schedule our employees, the way that we regulate, the way we design our schedules. So all of those things change. And that's where I think the opportunity and the challenge comes in, because I think through some simulations that we can figure out a way that we can make a driver's work schedule better, and we can make our service more reliable and more regular through this method than the method we have right now of one driver on one bus. And whenever that bus gets to the end of the line, that's when we start the next one, we can do better than that. Yeah, yeah. So when you mentioned that you have the off-peak, the peak in the morning and the afternoon during the middle of the day, I thought, well, that's when the buses would possibly be charging under this particular scenario. And that's when the maximum sun production is on sunny days at any rate. So, and even when it's not sunny, you only lose some percentage, but those solar panels are still pumping electricity into the grid or into the batteries. Yeah, and from the utilities point of view, it allows them to accept more rooftop or alternative energy into the grid because they, and to avoid making them increase their system size by making the peak periods more demand in the peak period, that's huge to a utility to be able to do that. And we hope that they're going to recognize that too, and we'll get pretty good rates from them because we are doing something that has a synergy between the utility model and the transportation model. Yeah, and I've seen different designs for the charging. And I guess in California, they have one where there's the bus stop and then if the bus is opportunity charging, it has this thing on top of the bus that goes up and... Well, there's two predominant methods now. Initially, there was a lot of opportunistic charging, that's where you charge the bus up after every cycle of the bus, every round trip. And the conventional is that you need six minutes of charging for every hour of operation. Use as very high capacity chargers, 450 kilowatts or in that ballpark to charge up to get that kind of charging time. And that usually works pretty good because usually the drivers need to take a break at the end of the line anyway. So if you can figure out that you get to an end of a line, the driver gets a break, the bus gets charged up, that's one model. The other model, and that's becoming more predominant now, is that bus manufacturers are just putting more and more more battery capacity on the vehicles. And that allows the bus to then operate almost a full duty cycle so that the bus can go out in the morning and come back at the end of the day. Now that has a few costs to it. One of the costs is it costs a lot more for more batteries. Another cost is that that bus weighs a lot more than it would if you didn't have as many batteries in it. And that costs you a couple of ways that reduces the efficiency of the bus. It also probably bangs up the streets more because the vehicle is heavier. And so there are different ways to do it. Now for us in Hawaii, I'm a proponent of a middle ground where we have enough battery capacity so that we can totally avoid those costly and expensive peak periods. They're about five hours long. And at the same time, usually we would be charging up after every trip, but we would have enough power that once we got to the high cost demand period, that we would not charge until that was over. And then we would top up the bus after the demand period. It's a little complicated. We've simulated it a few times. Looks like it works, but it'll be a learning process for everybody as to how this is gonna work in the real world. And that's why we're gonna start fairly slow, fairly small scale and learn what issues that we should really be concerned about before we go with hundreds of buses, which is where we will go. We'll go with hundreds of buses ultimately. Yeah, yeah. Well, we're gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll hear more about the stuff that's happening with Along with Transit Services, Roger Morton. Thank you. This is Stink Tech, Hawaii, Raising Public Awareness. Living in this crazy world, so caught up in the confusion, nothing is making sense for me and you. Maybe we can find a way, there's got to be solutions, how to make a part of... I'm Ethan Allen, host on Stink Tech, Hawaii, of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Hey, welcome back. So Roger, you were telling us about the electrification of your buses and you're starting with a grant and I just wanted to hear a little bit more about how that's going to develop and then what else do you have in your plans? Well, as I say, the most complicated part is figuring out where we should be charging and where, and the grant's gonna help us do that too. We have money in that. But beyond the grant itself, the city council has earmarked money for us to develop, number one, develop some infrastructure at our Kalihi Palama facility and we're starting to plan out additional charging for that. And in the current budget, it's under consideration by the council. There's additional money that would allow us to buy more vehicles and put in more infrastructure and there is money to help us develop a longer term plan for where all that should be. And so these are monies that our elected officials have inserted in the budget. I'm just amazed at the tremendous island-wide state-city cooperation on partnership on this. I mean, everybody seems to be behind this electrification project. And so those are gonna be, we really desperately do need a good, solid plan on how we're gonna migrate it. For me, at least for the next four or five years, because we gotta figure out what buses we're gonna buy, what charging strategies we're gonna have. And while I was talking a little bit about the opportunistic, there'll be many routes that we do the other one where we just run the bus for a full schedule and then bring it back and charge it back at our bus facility. So we need to figure out the split between what makes the most sense in one service type and what makes the most sense in another. Then there's a lot of disruption going on in the transit industry right now. We have the ride-hailing companies. They certainly had an impact on some of our ridership. And we need to figure out how do they play in this landscape? We are building a metro system, a rail system that's gonna connect up our western suburbs with Honolulu, with the downtown in Alamoana. We need to figure out how that's going to impact the bus system. And it will have a large impact on the bus system. We need to figure out how we would provide, continue to provide service to places like the University of Hawaii, to Waikiki, at least initially until rail is expanded to serve those places directly. So those are complicated issues. All this, you know, the ride-hailing business, so how do they play in this? Bikki is in town and it can provide a last mile solution. Can you explain just briefly the last mile for some folks who may not be familiar with the term? Well, the last mile means that in many trends, especially on the mainland, in many transit environments, there's great transit. But you still, after you get to the closest point to where you wanna be, you've got another mile to go. So you have your transit corridors and then the last mile and everything at the end. You know, we use that term in Hawaii and frankly it has less resonance here because our bus system goes so many places that we're really seldom further than a mile away. But nonetheless, when the last trip is a mile long, let's say, Rio gets to Alamoana Center and people are going to the Ilocai. Well, that's only, that's less than a mile away. So there could be other modes that would provide that service. We would probably provide the service too, but we need to figure out what the mix of all of those different modes makes the most sense. Maybe that mode is bicycle. Maybe it's a scooter, who knows what it could be. And then we have probably a few years down the road later than that or maybe sooner than I think we have autonomous vehicles coming. Both autonomous private vehicles, maybe autonomous Uber type vehicles, or maybe even autonomous bus vehicles. So there's, all of these technologies are coming together and they're being powered by technology, by communications, by computers. But they're impacting all parts of our economy and the transit business is not immune from that. So it's a very exciting time for transit as it is for many. So talking about integration of the transportation system with the communication system and the economy. So right now you have bus pass. Yeah. Okay. Talk to us about what that might look like in the future. Well, not so far in the future because we have bus passes now, we have cash, single ride cash fares. But we are transitioning to a smart card system. And that smart card system is what is known as an account-based smart card system. There's been a couple of systems that have embraced this technology so far. Chicago was one of the first pioneers. Embraced it about two years ago. TriMet in Oregon embraced the technology about eight months ago. And we are gonna be one of the first to use it. And the reason why it's a little different is I'll explain the architecture of how it works. Ours is an account-based system. That means that all of the information about your account, your transit account, is gonna be held in the server in the back office. Up until now, most of the transit smart cards have been card-based systems where the amount of your balance is kept right on the card. You tap it and it comes off the card. Ours, you tap it, it goes into a communication system. It comes off in a back office and it comes. And that means that we can be much, much more flexible in the products that we offer through the smart card system. It means that we can integrate with other modes a lot easier. They don't have to have expensive equipment on it. They don't have to have that. So, conceivably, we could integrate with Bickey. We could integrate with Rail for sure. And that's one of the driving forces is you can use your transit card to tap onto a gate that will open and get you onto the rail system. We could integrate with Bike Share. We could integrate conceivably with parking. So, there's many, many opportunities that we have. And we've been working on this project for about four years now. And we are ready to launch our large scale pilot in September. Oh, this year. This year. Wow. We are already, almost all of our buses have the equipment installed. I think it just, maybe there's a few buses left, but by the end of this week, all of us will have the information and the equipment installed. We have our inside staff of contractors and some heart officials and some DTS officials out in the field now that are doing inside tests. And we're gonna be recruiting a large scale of our rider base to participate in a beta test that will maybe involve as many as 3,000 people. Starting, and our goal is to start that in September. And then our rollout for the general public and rollout means it might take us two years to roll it all out, two, maybe even three, but our rollout is scheduled to start around January. Now, things can go wrong and we can extend that, but that's our current plan right now. Oh yeah, that sounds interesting. Yeah, so, but you'll still take cash for the occasional rider, at least for the foreseeable future. For the foreseeable future, we'll take cash on the buses, but rail will not take cash. Rail will have vending machines so you can convert cash and get a card. But there'll be other incentives to get a card. For example, ultimately we will withdraw all of our paper products, our passes, our day passes. We've already withdrawn our transfers, our paper transfers. So all of those activities would only be allowable if you had a card. That gives people an incentive to get a card. Now, when we start rolling this out, we're going to try to flood the community with as many cards as we can and we're going to give them away free. Oh. But after the first period, those cards are going to be three dollars a piece. So I urge all of the people watching, once we start rolling these out, find out where you can get a card and get one because the first one's going to be free. Oh, cool, yeah. And so going along with this idea of the transportation system, the communication system, very often you want to know when the next bus is coming. Yeah. And I thought I had heard something about some work you guys are doing on accuracy of your bus arrival predictions. Yes, we're going to make an announcement. We're actually doing a soft launch right now, but we're going to make an announcement next month about a partnership with a technology company on the mainland that will allow us to improve our predictive capabilities. We make predictions now electronically with computers, but we do it in a fairly simple way. And our partners have developed a methodology that is more complicated, that also involves looking at historical periods and mining the data. So in our internal tests that we've done so far, it's about 30% more accurate than our own. Now, this is like seconds difference, but it's important to us. So that'll make a big difference. And then once we get our communication system with our smart cars, that will involve using a router on our buses, a cellular router, rather than what we use now, which is a radio system. And that should allow us to get improved updates of where the bus is, maybe down to every 15 seconds. My staff's goal is they want folks to be able to look at a Google map and actually see the bus moving. That's our goal is to get it that way. So those are all ambitious plans. We've got a lot going on at the bus right now. Yeah, we have a couple more minutes. And I know your Google maps, I just thought when that first came out, wasn't Honolulu one of the first cities to do that? Yeah, we were actually. We did it in, there were three cities that Google reached out to, to be beta testers. There was us, there was Portland, Oregon and there was Seattle. And our folks took a, one of my staff who's now the deputy director of the Transportation Services for the city was one of the architects of coming up with the schema that we all use it now globally on how to define what a transit trip looks like. That was John Nucci, who's the deputy director for the city now. And he, and you know, Google Transit now, you can go to Istanbul and use Google Transit, it's global now. And I'm really proud that it was, started in the US, started in the western states between us and Seattle and Portland. Well, congratulations on all the good things that you've done, the successes that you've had and your plans for continued success in the future. Is there any last thing you'd like to encourage people to do? Well, I think that, you know, we have a great bus system on the island. I think our island folks have a history of patronizing it where one of the most highly utilized systems in the country. And I look forward, I tell my staff, I mean, I'm getting a little long in the tooth. So I'm looking forward to the next 25 years and I wanna make sure that we get an organization that will stand the test of time and that we'll be able to go for the next 25 years. Yeah. Well, thank you very much. And thank you for watching and don't forget, get your card, what do they call it again, the smart? We call it the holo card. The holo card. That's our name, the holo card. Okay. When it's available, make sure you get it and be nice to your bus drivers and you guys have a slogan for, you know, driving cooperatively. Share the road. There you go. Share the road with us too. There you go.