 Energy 808, the cutting edge, here we are on a given Monday morning on ThinkTech, and we have on the phone from Hilo, Hawaii, we have Marco Mangostoff, a Provision Solar. Welcome back to your show, Marco. The words of our dear friend, dear friend Mr. Rogers, it's a wonderful day in my neighborhood whenever I get to spend time with my neighbor, Chief Hidalgo, always a pleasure, thanks so much. Keep thinking those thoughts. The next extreme weather is on the way, and that will not be a beautiful day. Anyway, so Marco, we're going to talk today about Molokai, the friendly island, because you spend plenty of time there, you have projects there, we're calling this show Focus on the Friendly Island, and there are new developments from Maui Electric on Molokai, and you are equipped to tell us about them. So why don't you start now, and then we go through whatever is going on in Molokai in terms of renewable energy. Sure, it's always a great pleasure for me to be able to talk about an island that is so near and dear to my heart, and just as I've probably told you, and I'll repeat myself, I first visited that island with my pops back more than 50 years ago when we went fishing, you took me fishing on the east end of the island, we went and did short casting and also reef walking, and some of the most wonderful loving memories I'll ever have of him, and it really planted the seed. It seems for me to feel a connection to that island very early on, and I've been very fortunate to have had a chance to kind of nurture those seeds, which have now blossomed and done a number of projects on Molokai Solar Electric rooftop solar going back 12, 13 years. So yeah, I recently spent a week there, came back last week and thought, you know, it would be a good idea to give people an update because I see Molokai as having the potential to be the most renewable energy energized island, so to speak, in the Hawaii Island chain. I think over the next several years, there will be kind of a race between Molokai and Kauai in terms of which island we'll be able to get to 60, 70, 80% renewable, and those two will be far ahead of Maui proper Oahu and the big island. So the interesting timing is, and unfortunately I was not able to meet this community meeting last Wednesday, but the folks at Half Moon Venture, which started a company called Molokai New Energy Partners, and they received public utilities approval last year to move forward with the, will be the first utility scale PV project plus storage on Maui, excuse me, Molokai, in the months and year ahead, which will play a very big part in moving that island to a much higher level of renewable penetration. So I came up with a number of illustrative slides, so maybe if we could get the first graphic there on the screen. Yeah, one thing though, Marco, is that I paid a trip to Molokai year, year and a half ago and I found that there was plenty of fossil fuel going on. There's an old-fashioned diesel plant there, which has been there for many years, and there's also a biomass plant that I saw that was impressive from the point of view of biomass, but I didn't see a lot of renewables on that trip. So how far down the pike are we right now? We didn't get into that and I, if we maybe get the first slide there, that'll help to kind of illustrate so we can go from the macro to the, to the Marco, to the micro. So I see the slide there now, so thanks for posting that. So let's kind of do a little bit of, the slide's gone now, a little bit of kind of overview first and if you look at the total power generation potential on Molokai there is a total of 12 megawatts of peak capacity that that plant has and by the way there's only one and only one power plant, Mico power plant on the island, so that differentiates Molokai from the other islands which have multiple power plants spread out across the service territory. So Molokai there's just one, so there's 12 megawatts of peak capacity in terms of output. Now that said Molokai peak demand is substantially less than peak capacity which is usually the case or always the case and that is a peak demand of approximately five and a half megawatts. Now this particular slide is several years old so the current figures may be a bit different but not tangibly different. So let's go to the, to the next slide when you get a chance please. So is that floating up again? Let's just kind of keep the numbers straight here. So 12 megawatts of generation capacity, max capacity on Molokai demand peak of 5.5 megawatts and again a megawatt being a million watts and what is being produced now already in terms of renewable energy this is according to Hawaiian Electric Zone data. So as of a couple weeks ago the total solar capacity in in terms of approved rooftop solar systems or and or existing PV systems on Molokai was 2.85 megawatts, 2.85 megawatts which is a substantial percentage as you can do the math of the peak demand of 5.5 megawatts. So to answer your question there is already on that small island a substantial amount of rooftop solar and in fact that has created significant challenges for formal electric over the past several years in terms of during a nice sunny day across the island from east to west north north south since typically demand for electricity is lower kind of in the midday and early afternoon hours because people aren't home and so forth. There's been surplus of solar power and the question has been what to do with that surplus of solar power and relatively recently the folks at Maui Electric came up with essentially a load bank which is a place to effectively kind of dump the surplus solar power when there ain't nowhere for it to be used and unfortunately it's not it's not a battery so it's not something you can charge up during the day and discharge but it at least allows and has allowed the folks of MECO to clear up the net energy meter in queue which you have people who were waiting waiting to go NEM and that for you know this program ended back in 2015 but waiting to install their NEM system the past several years and to MECO's great credit they were able to get creative and find a way to accept all those long-waiting NEM customers so yeah so I've seen that in fact in fact we included that on our tour it's right at the at the diesel plant just across the way in a kind of white container right right next to the Maui Electric control room control building right there in Kanaka Kaima right? No you're not Jay and what you are referring to is a battery lithium Titanate battery by Alternano Alternano that was installed several years ago as part of an HNA grant and DOD money if I'm not mistaken and that is a battery bank there in that container which you are referencing which is different than the capacitor bank which is much more recent so that battery bank which MECO essentially got for free that allowed for greater stability to be provided to that island grid and also kind of a collateral benefit although wasn't designed to do this the collateral benefit is that it allowed some of that surplus solar power produced during the day to be absorbed by that lithium Titanate battery so both of those facilities are working now yes good yes so that means there's no additional capacity for solar development then correct correct and maybe now's a good time to go ahead and start the slide deck which the folks that the Molokai New Energy partners were able to present before the Maui excuse me the Molokai community last Wednesday at a community meeting so I give my my gratitude and thanks to the folks at MNEP for providing me with with the slide deck which we're going to take a look at now it's on the screen okay so what's really exciting about this particular project is that this is going to be as I mentioned before the first utility scale solar plus storage on the island of Molokai and it is a fairly big project especially compared to speaking to the small grid side so let's go ahead to the the next slide you get a chance please and if that comes up I'll give you a few details of this project again keep in mind some of the numbers I stated before which were peak demand on the island of roughly five and a half megawatts okay now this solar array will have a DC rating what's known as the standard test condition or SDC DC rating of 7.5 megawatts we have names on the screen of the principles of the company I'm not sure that's the slide you want when we go to the next yeah we can we can continue on to to the next slide after that which is a slide number three which says major events there yes right so I'm not sure I thought a little bit there but you can keep in mind the DC that the array size of this this new utility scale array is seven and a half megawatts and the actual output when you have the figure in the inefficiencies and the DC basic conversion is going to be somewhere over five megawatts so we're talking five megawatts from a new solar power plant that will be feeding into a grid that has a 5.5 megawatt peak demand that already has 2.85 megawatts a rooftop solar now I'm not asking you to do the math but the math is pretty easy to calculate which is that there is more and more and more and more solar going in to this island grid and the question is gee how can the grid take that it has to go somewhere and one of the key components of this project from Molokai New Energy Partners is not only a seven and a half megawatt solar array but also 15 megawatt hours of state-of-the-art brand new Tesla mega pack battery storage okay so this gives kind of a quick overview of this particular project timeline so they receive PUC approval back in July 18 so more than a year ago and there was they were trying to incentivize or trying to reduce the cost of the project to ultimately benefit the consumer by using various tax credits so it noted that the so-called new market tax credits were no longer available do some type of reclassification of Maui County which effectively kind of brought up apparently the income level of Molokai so the new market tax for us are no longer available but the existing or still existing tax credits state and federal the federal investment tax credit 30% and also state tax credit is still available so let's move on to slide number four their 2019 major event okay we're on that now okay so one of the big parts of kind of this the presentation of last week or big news was the Tesla has now taken over for the previous company S&C so Tesla's now as I understand of the general contractor of record and they will be working with other contractors to put this into effect and the good news I think about that no full disclosure I'm a Tesla certified installer so I have a you know propensity to be favorable towards Tesla but they have shown their creds over the past years in terms of being able to install substantial size utilities scale solar plus storage on the island of Kauai so I think it's a very good thing that they are able to step in and kind of take over here with a target operation date of approximately a year that made pushed out some but probably not too much later so we can go to the next slide that describes the Tesla system and we're on the next slide now okay it's important to note here again is that when you're dealing with a system the size of seven and a half megawatts feeding into a relatively small grid that already has a whole bunch of solar the battery storage has to be substantial in terms of volume so the 15 megawatt hours apparently with the same storage they were going to have when the PPA was approved by the Commission last year providing Mika with the same advanced features as previously planned for grid stability compatible with the new phase two RFP issued on August 9th that's the second round point electric is doing for storage PV plus storage across its service territories and Tesla as well existing plant microgrid operations right away for added reliability service that simply means that they already have a strong presence here in the state and will be around to be able to take care of things on an as-needed basis so we can go to the next and Marco we're going to take a short break this Marco Mangostoff our provision solar and Hilo I'm Jay Fidel this is think tech and energy 808 the cutting-edge we'll be right back after this short break. Aloha my name is Mark Schlaufe I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the sea program my program airs every other Monday at 1 o'clock on think tech Hawaii most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience recently I interviewed Alex Jampel who I have known for over 30 years about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about human stories about law and life Aloha. Hey Aloha everyone and welcome to the think tech Hawaii studio my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of think tech 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 take yourself take 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. Okay energy 808 the cutting edge here on a Monday Monday my guess it's the Monday morning with Marco man goes off from my provision solar and he load joining us by phone and talking about Molokai the friendly island talking about some of the really big projects that are happening there that are likely to make it at least put it in competition for the number one island that reaches 100% of renewables so I'm talking about Tesla specifically and Marco you wanted to go to your next slide on Tesla. Yeah just to show kind of conceptually what this new Tesla what they call megapack for utility scale storage look like looks like it's essentially from what I can tell the size of a 40 if not 45 foot container with power electronics and battery storage within the container which can essentially be outfitted at a factory and brought over as you would ship over any container and pop it in place and go ahead hook it up wired up and commission it's in a pretty pretty really quick fashion so I'm not really sure at this point how many megawatt hours or kilowatt hours fit in one container but I got to believe that at least a megawatt hour probably fits in a container or in that megapack container of a battery storage so again kind of the big takeaway here is that when you are putting more and more solar and hooking it up to the grid you are trying to on some level force feed more and more electricity more power input into a grid that has of course the finite ability to be able to to accept more more power and as I've been telling people for for years you cannot put an infinite amount of power into a finite grid otherwise you run into problems in terms of grid stability and the quality of electricity so having adequate storage especially in the case of a small island like we have here with one one power plant is absolutely critical in terms of being able to manage the surplus of solar power effectively from rooftops from utility scale solar which will be going in from the Molokai New Energy Partners folks and also one of the early community-based renewable energy or CBRE projects that would that was approved by the Commission is another 250 kilowatts of solar without storage which will be going in in relatively close proximity geographically to that one and only power plant east of or excuse me west of Conakakai so my macro point here coming from Marco here Jay is that this is really Tara in Cognita when you're dealing with such a small and finite grid and the demand or the there's the movement in a strong motivation and impetus to put more and more solar and reduce the consumption of renewable excuse me of petroleum energy especially on that island is that having all the pieces fit and fit so that they work harmoniously with each other and fit so that there aren't hiccups and fit so that you don't have too much power and fit so that you have enough stored power when the sun don't shine all of that is an enormously complicated jigsaw puzzle to get right so I have some questions about that I mean yeah so if you go to Kawai you see actually there's there's two there's two solar and battery facilities one of them is Tesla and it was the first one the other one is AES by the way yeah and the Tesla facility is the same it has the same look as the slide you just showed us it's like a shipping container and one side of the shipping container opens up and presto there's all these racks of batteries in there so the actual batteries are small like a like a small desktop computer they're not they're not that big and you can see them all when you open the steel doors and and this these it's a series it's probably my recollection maybe half a dozen of these big you know container size units but down down the hill okay is this huge and I mean huge biggest one I've ever seen you know solar facility with all the solar cells and racks and and what have you a huge and this this facility the storage facility slightly up the hill manages to save about eight hours as I recall of the energy that's generated by only solar cells what what I heard you describe however it sounds to me like the Tesla facility may be further advanced more intelligent in Molokai and it it not only covers you know one field one solar farm but other sources as well and so they all feed into this Tesla system then Tesla is able to store and balance and I wonder where the brain is for that this one question and I wonder how much how many hours of energy can it store for the entire system on Molokai I think a small correction here as far as I understand this this megapack battery which effectively is the aggregation of a bunch of Tesla power packs is what you saw there on Kawhi they decided to aggregate them you know by 20 X or 30 X or however many X and then called them a megapack but the main it's what essentially one on the same type of technology and design that battery storage is only as I understand it going to be paired with this new seven and a half megawatt solar array that M&E P Molkai new energy partners will be installing it's not going to be a battery for the whole Molokai grid per se but it'll be specifically attached to and paired with and work in tandem with the new solar array and the utility-scale solar ray that will be going in next year so when you talk about the brain I mean you've got this separate project and system where you have the new solar array and the new battery pack and that's feeding into the MECO grid now the brain of making all the pieces fit with the existing combustion generation from the MECO power plant with the new utility-scale solar cluster storage with the hundreds of existing rooftop solar systems that are already feeding into the MECO grid and then add into that the CPRE project to 250 kilowatts that's where the brains of the control room men and women have to come in as they're looking at screens on a 24-hour a day basis making sure that the grid stays stable making sure that there's not too much power being generated in any given time so when you say the brains you know to what extent computers are doing this aided by human beings or the other way around I'm not in a capacity to say but there's obviously a lot of cooperation that necessarily has to take place between the grid operators actual people and then all the equipment and the pieces of puzzle that they're keeping an eye on second by second hour by hour day by day making sure that the lights stay on and the grid stays stable that all happens in the in the control room center near Kanaka Kai right the ones that I did say and where and where is this big solar farm going to be located the one you're talking about right by the right by the power plant it's going to be spitting distance of the MECO the same area then it's all in the same area yeah it's going to be on land land that's owned by Molokai Ranch which is I believe the largest private landowner of 22,000 I think acres on that island and they will be doing a long-term lease with the Molokai New Energy partner folks so you know there was there always is some pushback from the community and Molokai is no stranger to that how does the community feel about this I mean you talk about presenting these slides and you know presenting this project kind of reaction is everybody cool with this well I think everybody cool with the chase is too high a bar but I think from what I gather the large majority are cool with it I mean certainly no comparison to the pushback that the notion or the proposal of putting up dozens of 400 plus foot wind towers along the west end on the ranch land was you know there was tremendous pushback rightly so as far as I'm concerned so in terms of how that island can be I want to be diplomatic here heck can be kind of finicky when it comes to opening its loving arms to outside ideas and and and projects I think overall the response from the community has been quite good and positive and and you know you can imagine what their number one issue is which is what's it going to do to my electric rates are they going to go down and the reduction in rates I don't believe is going to happen immediately or maybe in the short term but when you're talking about putting in a project that is under a power purchase agreement where the price is fixed at somewhere around 18 cents a kilowatt hour for the next years that is an enormously positive hedge against the possibility more like likelihood of the price of petroleum continuing to go up which affects of course the amount of money that people are paying on their their their MECO bills so I believe one can legitimately and honestly make the case that projects like this where you've got a fixed price contract for renewable energy source for 20 or 30 years will over time lead to lower than otherwise expected electric rates that people are paying for their monthly bill you know one thing it came up in the question of discussion on Malachi with far as I was involved was the notion that the community had some expectation that they would be a part owner or have some sort of part interest in this project and at the very least they would have some level of control over the management of the project where is that now did that happen or not in terms of ownership I know no plans that would essentially would offer shares of this project I don't believe that that's in the works I mean it's conceivable I remember the discussions of earlier on a number years ago is that once the power plant is fully depreciated which typically happens and I believe no less than six years that once the tax credits are taken fully once depreciation has been fully once the facility has been fully depreciated then it's conceivable that you would have a plant like that's less storage which would have a fair market value of acts the X to be determined you know in the course of negotiations so it's conceivable that the project owner in this case and more like any energy partners would be open to a hui of local interested parties who would come up with X number of million bucks and say we would like to own this outright yeah you know that that takes quite a bit of effort and energy not to mention money so you know that that remains to be seen but I don't see any change of ownership possible and at least the first until the first six years play out so how far along are we when this project is finished and how much has will then yet have to be done and is there any plan to do it well I believe the plan is breaking ground either by the end of this year early next year according to their presentation last week they were projecting a completion sometime July of 2020 I think you know it's entirely possible that could be pushed out of ways I mean I've done work on that island over the years and I fully realize how challenging it can be from a manpower people power logistics perspective so I think having it done and you know actually producing power by some time second half of last year or last year that's going back in the past the second half of next year is entirely possible so they answer your question I would first see this plant being fully online sometime in the third or fourth quarter of next year and what follows are the projects in the pipeline what two other things as follows I mentioned before the CBRE community based renewable energy which kind of to go back to one of your points earlier which does have the opportunity for essentially fractional ownership by the community in terms of being able to that was the whole notion behind CBRE is to allow those people who don't have their own you know juicy roof and their single family dwelling to put solar that they can be a participant of a community based solar project so that 250 kilowatt project will hopefully be going in next year as well and then you've got this new RFP which was recently issued which is specifically asking for proposed projects of renewable energy plus storage for all of the five islands that how wine electric companies cover including me including Maui, Maui, Molokai, Lenai. Yeah that's in play right now that's in play right now wine electric was on the show and talked about that. Marco we've got to go now I'm so sorry we've got to go because we've only scratched the surface on this I hope we can discuss more of it I hope we can talk about the status of energy on Lenai which was you know very controversial for a long time and I don't know where it went but I think you can help us understand on a later show. Anyway Marco thank you so much we've had macro Marco and micro today on Molokai that's 4M's it's been a 4M show thank you so much Marco. You're very welcome just a little teaser I hope to have our friend my friend Mary Powell in two weeks Mary Powell is the CEO of a fantastic company of Vermont called Green Mountain Power and she's just a super phenomenal person and I really look forward to her sharing her experiences in the utility realm and being on the cutting edge there at the opposite end of the country of where we are Jay but you're fantastic and thank you so much for having me. Thank you Marco. Aloha till next time. Rock thank you.