 Hi everyone and another Wednesday afternoon with Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, Mitch Yuan from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm your host today. We are sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum with funding from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. Today we're going to be talking a lot about solar. So first of all I have Miles Topping who is the UH Director of Energy Management. So Miles, welcome aboard, electrical engineer. And then we have Greg Shimakawa from Hawaiian Electric who's the man of the hour under the gun trying to put out some pretty major EV RFPs. So Greg we're going to start with you. I had the opportunity of reading your draft, just one section of your draft RFP that you put together. I put out some RFPs but I've never seen one that's like over 1200 pages long so I'm really in awe of you and what you guys have done. Very thorough but enough of me talking why don't you tell us all about this RFP initiative you guys are doing. Sure. Thank you Mitch. So this RFP or series of RFPs is really going to be the largest proposed renewable energy push in the history of Hawaii. We're excited to get started and just to clarify it's not just for PV in our RFPs that we ran last year. We did get all PV and storage projects but we're open to different kinds of technologies this round and so we have RFPs getting set to launch on Oahu on Maui and Hawaii Island. The green services RFP in parallel with that and then Charlie to follow RFPs on Molokai and Lanai as well. So we've got the island in the Hawaiian Electric Company's service territory covered pretty well and so we're looking to make good progress towards the 100% RFP as well. So you mentioned everybody understands PV or whatever other renewable energy source but what do you mean by grid services? That's probably not familiar to most people. Grid services are the rest of the things that are needed to make the system run smoothly and it's not electric engineering but it's a simple language. It's voltage and frequency regulation and things to make sure that the quality of power that goes out to customers is good enough to use. So it's pretty critical that we keep for example frequency within just a certain narrow band because it runs things like clocks and radars and your computers. If it goes out of outside of those limits things start shutting down. Sure yes and so those are things that our big invention of power plants provide a lot of that but as we move away from conventional generation and more towards renewable resources and distributed resources as well we're looking to get those sort of attributes from other organizations. So we talk about storage which I understand is very important especially with intermittent renewable energy so it's like solid not going up and down like the sun's over some clouds go over the PV array or if your wind's going up and down. So what kind of level or what size of storage are we talking about? Are we talking about kilowatts, megawatts or gigawatts? Well in the aggregate it's in the gigawatt hour range and really what we're looking for and not just to cover for the intermittency of the solar or wind or you know other kind of renewable resources. It's really to meet the demand need which you know here in Hawaii is really in late afternoon and evening periods when solar is not producing and so having that ability to shift the generation to shift the energy that generated during the day into the evening peak is really important to be able to meet demand. So for all of you out there last week last Wednesday we did a session on the duct curve. That duct curve factors into what you guys are trying to solve it's a big problem now for us to be able to get more and more renewables we have to do something about the duct curve, right? Yes, I mean that's exactly what the low shifting aspect of overseeking in these RFPs is intended to do. You knock the head off the duct part and then you fill up the belly so it's like more smooth throughout the day rather than this big dip during the day for on the point of view of your generation and then when the peak when everybody goes home turns on the air conditioning, lights up the stove, gets the showers going and we have this monster peak that we have to address. I mean that's one of your requirements you have to be able to provide power for that. That's pretty expensive power too, is it not? It can be. It could be. So the ability to shift hopefully more reasonably priced renewable generation into periods of the day that will show some benefit to customers. So when do you think the RFPs going to hit the street? So we filed our draft our proposed final draft with Public Utilities Commission on July 10th and we're you know working on in-app refinements and we're anticipating getting approval to launch to issue those RFPs in August. We're working hard to get ready to do all that. So just so the people out there know it's not you know fine electric or HEI doesn't just write these RFPs in total isolation and just throw it out on everybody. It has to go through a bunch of regulatory steps like we just said the PUC reviews it maybe the consumer advocate reviews it to make sure it's fair and everything you say all above board not that it would never be below board but just so that everybody you know understands what's coming out. It's no surprises when it comes out correct? So there's a established regulatory process that get something like this approved and issued and out on the street and it involves you know quite a bit of not only input from the commission or the consumer advocate but from others stakeholders in the community and so that's the purpose of filing drafts and you know there was a common period for stakeholders or otherwise to provide feedback to the drafts and so we've had a pretty extensive process with the commission other stakeholders throughout all of 2019 to get us to the point where we are today. We are moving quickly and very ambitiously to get as much as we can as quickly as we can. I was very encouraged when I read it I actually read 1200 pages of one of the one of the annexes and I actually saw the word hydrogen in there as a legitimate energy storage technology that you know you could put in there. So my statute hydrogen is included as a qualified renewable technology and so it's to be seen whether you know the market will bear out if that's a viable technology today. Well as a hydrogen nanos really encouraged to see that in there so hopefully some will come in with a hydrogen solution as well. So well I think we're going to take an early break. Is there anything before we do though is there anything that I missed or that we missed that you want to tell the folks about? I think the one thing I'd like to highlight is just that you know we do have updates and information about RFPs are on the Hawaiian Electric website so HawaiianElectric.com slash competitive bidding that'll be kind of the one stop for updates and other information about the RFPs. We encourage folks who are interested in posing a response or otherwise just interested in the process to keep checking that out and for updates. So how much time have companies got to prepare it did about approximately? So what we did last year when we did our last big procurement effort and what we're doing this time as well as once the final version gets approved and we get to issue that there'll be 60 days for the other proposals so including getting things like their sites worked out so with folks like UH possibly to making sure that their land agreements and things are all in place in 60 days and turn that around. Well I've responded to very large RFPs and way back in the good old days and it's a heck of a big job so not only writing the RFP like you did but actually responding in 60 days so hopefully I'm sure all the legit bidders have been working on this for months and months and months. We hope so and so we're looking forward to getting strong proposals again. We recognize and appreciate the hard work from our Hawaiian Electric team from the Commission and others who've been reviewing and been participatory in the process. I think we're gonna get a good result for all companies. Well I'd just like to thank you for all your effort you put into it. I'm sure you work weekends and nights and throughout this because like it's like a huge jock I bet it's about that. We have a very hard-working and dedicated team of folks. I don't think people out there really realize how hard you guys work behind the scenes to make all this stuff work so thank you very much and hopefully it'll be a good result for Hawaii and for your company. We hope so. Thank you. Aloha. Thank you. So we'll just go for a break. We'll be right back in about one minute's time so here we go. Hi I'm Rusty Kamori host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on ThinkTek Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world. Won't you join us on thinktecawaii.com or on YouTube on the ThinkTek Hawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Well here we are. We're back from our break still live in Hawaii and I'm now with Miles Topping from the University of Hawaii. I'm going to read a little bit about what Miles does. He's got a huge job. I'm so impressed. I never knew that before when we're out there having a few beers out on the city but Miles is the Director of Energy Management for all of UH. He's responsible for system-wide leadership and the system includes all the community colleges. Planning, development, coordination and implementation for a strategic energy plan and program that supports short and long-range sustainability resiliency and net zero energy objectives for the University of Hawaii. That is a huge job and you know until I got ready for the show I never had any idea how much you're actually doing Miles. I'm totally impressed. You are an electrical engineer by background and how long you've been at UH? I've been at UH for about three years now. I want to say that I'm not doing it all alone. We've got a good solid team of you know experts in every part of the process from procurement to installment, operations and maintenance. Everybody's excited. Everybody's excited to you know move and help Hawaii move in that direction so UH is doing their part. Yeah I think UH is really taking a great leadership role and you've done a lot of the background work. Now you'll be seeing the audience will be seeing in the slides all the work they've done. I mean I go to UH every day and it's like as I never look up at the roofs I mean how can you do that and I had no idea we've been laying down so much PV over the last couple of years like which you've been responsible for you and the team. I realized there's a whole team required to do this kind of stuff. I was pretty darn impressive and you know as a public university it sets a standard and also a learning curve for the rest of Hawaii so that we can leverage your lessons learned and it also shows that a large company can actually make things happen as opposed to just little normally small companies or individual residential but you know to get the level of penetration we want to get with renewable energy we need to have some big companies make a move and it's really it's really impressive what you've done. Well there you go. Like I say I can't take credit for much of it. Well you'd take a lot of bad credit if it didn't work up wouldn't you? Absolutely. Yeah you gotta have the team but you're the guy you're the orchestra leader there so it's like when I used to be in the Navy I was the captain but you know I had a great team I couldn't have done it without the team that's for sure but if anything went wrong I was the guy that fell on the sword so there you go. But enough of that we have some slides and we're just gonna use them as talking points and go through it and you know just we'll just talk story about the program how it's going lessons learned and you know how we're moving forward. Yeah let's pull up that first slide and you know basically says what you have to do I mean this is this is legislated. Yes this is a Hawaii revised statute that you know the UH must become knit zero by 2035. That's only 15 years away. Yeah that's the goal you know that the state has a mandate to become 100% renewable by 2045. So UH is 10 years ahead of that. Yeah. Mandated to be 10 years ahead of that so. A lot of people you know we first came up with this like five years ago it's like mission impossible but like people are actually hitting their targets. Yeah yeah in fact I don't know if you heard this story about Maui but there are in the next pretty soon gonna be like 98% net zero with their big ESPC project that they got going on over there. Really? Yeah yeah so that's that's pretty exciting. There was a big write-up on it and publication that went out about that. A lot of the community colleges are moving in that direction pretty rapidly. Yeah. Which is good you know it makes it makes my job easier I guess if you will but but like I said it's not just me it's a it's a whole collection of people and efforts and stuff. Yeah it's a huge bureaucracy you know so you've got almost one bureaucracy layered on top of the state bureaucracy so I'm going through that I know exactly you know the frustrations and the delays and all that kind of stuff but once you get it you know signed off and all the paperwork finished then it can go really smoothly after that. Yeah it's like any project it's gonna maybe have its issues and it can you know would you just got to work through it just like any science project or construction project you're gonna you're gonna come to a point where you got to solve the issues and you got to say problem-solver and that's what that's what engineers do so. Exactly. So let's crack up the next slide which is a really pretty slide but do you want to talk about that slide? Yeah well I mean the the caption to the slide really speaks to to what the intent is behind it and and you know as part of just being sustainable as part of the sustainability office is to you know preserve what we have now for the next generations to come and you know we need power and we need energy to advance research to to teach which is our real mission is to teach in a comfortable teaching environment well and learning environment yeah right you know and so we need energy not only for that but even to do research or discover the cure for cancer or whatever else it is that we're doing out there or study hydrogen. So you know that's that's the challenge is to how do we power our operation whilst you know I guess keeping you know the environment first and foremost you know like preserving and and just you know not contributing to global warming or sea level rise or pollution so it's all that stuff so it and it's a challenge it's gonna be a combination of when we design new buildings you know we're gonna design efficiency in it's a it's a whole you know there's there's all sorts of publications and things to follow on how to orient the building how to you know shade the building how to power the building how to operate the building how to cool the building so there's there's so much information and standards out there like like lead for example and a lot of research going on like H&EI is actually doing quite a bit of research on on that on the campus so we have a kind of a living lab on campus and so if we can you know use the campus to show the state that we can do it we can get to 100% you know net zero and and that's what the university should do that's that's almost you know people are expecting of the university sure we're like the Indians out are the scouts out in front of the wagon train and we're the ones learning it and then we pass it on to the people following us behind to make their journey a little bit easier and they know what the what the hooks are yeah and how you know solutions that overcame that yeah so let me ask you a little bit about efficiency you know you can generate power but it's you know they call it negawatts I mean the less watts you need to use up I mean they're the cheapest ones we can get so talk about our energy efficiency program what we're doing yeah so there's a lot of activity we have some energy service sorry energy savings performance contracting we have an RFP going up for a fairly large performance contract for the science quarter on the Holmes Hall loop and the community colleges are on phase two of their energy savings performance contract and they've got really good results I mentioned Maui and so that includes retrofitting old air conditioners with new technology new efficient technology variable speed stuff so you can kind of crank it down when people are in there you know sensors carbon sensors and it's just a whole bunch of technology that wasn't there when the buildings were built you know the University of Manoa for example at a building boom in the 70s yeah and that boom you know they they built they built building energy was really cheap then and if you look at the curve it's exponentially grown since then like right when all the buildings were finished building energy started to become exponentially more expensive we're talking about the days of the rotary phone of the incandescent light bulb who's got one of those dodged art every family had like a v8 sedan you know what I mean nobody thought about efficiency back then and the technology wasn't there it just wasn't there but nowadays you know you would never build a building the way you did back then it there's just new technology you wouldn't build a car the way you built it back then either and so going into these old buildings and retrofitting them with the new systems including LED lighting updated air conditioning systems and solar and batteries and everything else we can throw at it is not cheap and it's not easy because you have to it's like the whole infrastructure of the building has to be retrofitted so we we're doing it carefully and we're not rushing but we have a plan you know to get there and and we there's been ongoing activity and I would like to show a slide the next slide actually that this kind of shows results of some of the efforts that we've been doing so this is our consumption across the system has been trending downwards and this is you know due to everything that we've been doing not only retrofitting systems and doing that kind of thing but also operational efficiencies like turning rooms off when they're not in use so you know the old systems weren't designed to do that so it's not you know it's a manual process until you can put in the controls to do that so this is a you know proof of some of pretty steep downward curve especially this year compared to 2017 yeah yeah so we're doing good there and if you go to the next slide you can see that we're also increasing the renewable energy production it's it's been you know doubled and I think we're up to six million kilowatt hours actually so it's like what about we talked about in the car almost like three million dollars worth of savings yes well yeah this is there's some of it is PPAs and some of it is you know there's a mix of procurement methods for it but but the fact that it's renewable that that's that's really what we want and that's really what our target is you know and so it may be cheaper to build it ourselves or it may be cheaper to have somebody else build an operated on our properties and so we're just constantly doing the math and figuring out the economics of what what works best for the university I think what people are finding those they build on operate or have that all contracted out that the contractor has an incentive for those panels to work for the equipment to work otherwise not going to get paid so it tends to be maintained a lot better than if you just you know just in the pile of oh another thing to maintain yeah that's the operation of maintenance is a big big component of our decision-making and you know PPAs have been attractive they can come in cheaply and and you know we're just throwing everything we got at it we're not only doing PPAs we're also building them and like I said as we build new buildings they're coming solar you know load in I think we've got some examples of some of your new buildings yeah slide oh this is this is the whole system that Miles and his team now are working with so yeah so this is just that you know this is a graphic that you know you don't see it necessarily everywhere but it's all over the place and has been so this is not I didn't build all these systems some of these systems were in place before I got there some of them are coming online in this slide next year will be like doubled I mean there's going to be so much more in the next year in the next year we're just going to continually increase that they are renewable portfolio to meet our mandate next slide so this slide is shows all the various installations yeah so we put together a PV gallery and you can go to the sustainability website at hawaii.edu slash sustainability you can find these this gallery and you can click on each one to kind of explore it a little but just to show you know just this is just at Manoa are associated to Manoa all this all the systems that are that are in place that that not everybody knew because you know there's not a roof you can't see them and you know you drive around you see the trees but you don't see the the renewable energy systems so they're there and this is just the way to sort of highlight them oh next slides next slide please so here's some more at the various colleges yeah this is just pictures of all the rooftops of from that map and stuff so you can probably go to the next one too yeah and so like I talked about you know where we also have a mandate that that requires us and our contractors and our teams to design to strive for lead gold that's the requirement and so it's a very high standard it's a you know and and we're really focusing in on the points that matter so you know trying to build a net zero building you know or really energy focus that's get efficient systems built in when you build the building yeah instead of coming in a retrofitting it's way more expensive it's much a better idea of when you when you build the building from the ground up with the efficient technology build it with LEDs build it solar put the battery in there everything so that's the direction that we're going next slide we're almost running out of slides this is our last slide yeah and and this is the the philosophy that we that we've chosen so everything we have a advanced metering system that's been sort of deployed throughout the campus and campuses and we're monitoring our data so it's our feedback mechanism to to show us how how good we're performing and and how to optimize that and continually improve that so how good is that new leads gold building working the gym I mean it's a beautiful building it's in it it's very comfortable yep that's that's the intent of lead is not only to build something that's efficient but something that's comfortable yeah and something that's like a steward of the environment you know so all of the bells and whistles that are in there it's got a Lutron lighting system that Imms and Brighton's automatically like the frogs do it's got frogs are buildings by the way H H N U I net zero classrooms it's called the frog project and and sorry yeah it's like it's got solar on the roof it's also got the thermal collectors for hot water for the showers a bunch of good features on it and it's beautiful you know and so you want to be in there and that's that's a real big part about lead is to not only be environmentally friendly but also to be to make you feel good when you're in the space yeah so indoor environmental quality believe it or not miles we've blown through that half hour and I really appreciate you coming down we want you to come back and keep us updated yeah I'd like to come back and show you next year maybe the what that slide looks like yeah yeah that would be great to that energy use go off the cliff down yeah down in the thanks so much thank you very much glad to be here so that's it for our show this week everybody and hopefully we'll be back next Wednesday with another Hawaii state of clean energy and I hope you found this useful and that your public University University of Hawaii is getting out there and being a leader so thank you very 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