 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Hey, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I bet you can't guess what week we're in right now by my shirt. But it's the 6th of July and I kind of wanted to reach back and look at the 4th of July. And first of all, thank all our veterans, all the folks who served in our military and the folks currently serving overseas. Be safe and come home safe. But I had an interesting 4th of July and thus the title of our show. I was invited by Mr. Hank Rogers, the head of Blue Planet Foundation, Blue Planet Research, and Blue Planet Blue Iron Batteries up to his house to watch fireworks. But he's declared the 4th of July as Energy Independence Day because his house for four years has been completely off the grid and been running on solar power and batteries. So that's what we're going to talk about today is energy independence is kind of a new wave. And to start off, I've got a quick video I'd like to show you and I'm going to show these videos a couple of times so if you've watched before and you've seen it, you might have recognized this one but this is a great video. And we'll talk a little bit about sustainable energy, renewable energy, and being off the grid. There are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale, centralized power grids but the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable. Natural disasters, cyber attacks, and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy, and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro, and others. These microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission, especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports, and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats, and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand, and maintain. And they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves, and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy, and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago. When energy needs were simple, with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources, and transportation, now our old grid struggled to keep up. We required new ways to generate, store, and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable, and efficient energy for generations to come. So that's kind of a big overview of what we call microgrids. But when you start talking microgrids, especially to electrical engineers, you find that there's a lot of different definitions and a lot of different assumptions, probably even more on the assumption side. One of the big assumptions is that if you're going to have a microgrid and you're going to have renewable energy on it, you just can put as much on as you want. But what you really have is you have an issue when you start using intermittent renewables like solar and wind, things like that, because they don't provide consistent power. And what can happen is you end up with the same challenge that the utility does, which is balancing your power on your microgrid. So what you can get into with microgrids is you can get into a situation where you start to become almost knee-jerk dependent on generators like diesel generators or batteries in your microgrid. So if you ask an engineer to design a microgrid for you, he's real comfortable with batteries, he's real comfortable with diesel generators, and that's going to be the solution he's probably going to suggest. But what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to start thinking out of the box because renewables are coming and sustainability is going to drive renewables. But what do you do when you get too much intermittent renewable? You've got to have the storage and you've got to be able to do it right. And so that's the challenge and that's what we try and tackle here in Hawaii because we have a goal in Hawaii of 100% renewable on our grid by 2045. And that's going to be compounded by trying to move our transportation into an electric mode by 2040 to 2045 as well. And that comes with a whole lot more power being required, electrical power being required by our state. Something else that the video doesn't really point out is that maybe within a congested urban setting like in a city or an industrial area, microgrids may not be the whole answer. You might want to have just a segment of the area set off and the utility running it. Maybe they could run it sort of like a really large microgrid. But if you could isolate parts of the island in Hawaii or parts of your community if you're on the mainland that are fairly far from the electric generation, sometimes going off the grid is good. Being energy independent is actually a better option because every mile that you run lines you have line loss. And that's mentioned in that video, but you also have other issues. You can use all that intermittent renewable and you can store the energy and some batteries and some other things and keep yourself going. Mr. Hank Rogers, who had that party on Independence Day here in Hawaii because his house is off the grid, he also has a ranch on the big island that is also off the grid. And that ranch has been off even I think a year longer than his house. I think it's going on five years now and they have yet to use their backup diesel generator to generate power because they need it. They brought the diesel generator up when they worked on other electrical equipment, but it runs on solar electricity, batteries and hydrogen. And I'm going to talk a little bit after the break about the hydrogen piece. I'm just going to leave that for later because it's an important discussion. But I'm going to pull up a graph right now. Actually, I'll talk a little bit about it now. There's an interesting graph. I've actually compiled this from several graphs, mostly because some of the graphs have the same essence of the discussion, but they're in German or some of their language or they're proprietary. They've been put out by a national lab or by a private company. But in essence, here's what the graph depicts. When you have to store energy because you have a lot of intermittent renewables, there's different ways to store that energy, but the different ways fit in different parts of a system. So if you have a house, which doesn't really have a huge energy draw and you want to go for a couple hours or maybe even a couple days, you might be able to do batteries pretty well. And the different batteries are listed in this graph. You have supercapacitors or ultracapacitors in the red at the bottom. Those are actually super high-powered batteries that discharge really quickly and can take a shock load. And if you have a real quick draw, like your air conditioner and your refrigerator and your freezer and your electric dryer all kick on at once, it can pick up that load instantly and respond and not damage your system. Above that, you have metal batteries and that's the full range of lead acid batteries, lithium batteries, the whole range of any kind of metal chemistry batteries. And they're pretty common and that's what almost everybody looks to because we're so used to them. We have them in our cars, we have them in our flashlights, we have them all over in our cell phones, everything. On the right, you see flywheels. That's an interesting one. The engineers that work with us on our project at Hickam, they were kind of hesitant to consider flywheels in the mix, but we've had a guest on our show and I talked about them then. Flywheels are actually pretty impressive because just like those ultracapacitors, they can pick up a really heavy load instantly, I mean in milliseconds, which is the kind of timing you need to really stabilize your grid when you're doing this stuff. So the flywheels actually a very low-tech but very efficient way to pick up those shock loads and they make that kind of bridge between your grid and your renewables and the batteries when you have a quick pickup. Now above the metal batteries is something people are probably not too familiar with called flow batteries. And flow batteries have some really neat characteristics about them. There's different chemistries in those as well, but for most part they can actually last quite a few hours, but these are batteries that have a lot of liquid solution in them, sometimes not environmentally friendly, but they store energy for a fairly long time, up to several hours, almost the whole day. And they're real stable, they're a little noisy, but they take up the size of a whole room or a quonset hut, at least the ones that we've used at Hickam, but they're limited. Most of the time all those things you see in the lower left quadrant are limited to a couple hours, maybe a whole day of energy if you really, really press them, then you have a problem. Anything above that in terms of time, so on the left side you see the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, the farther up you go on that scale, the less cost effective those battery investments are. They become way too expensive for what you're getting in terms of it, or what you're storing in energy. You need way too much battery. And then if you look on the lower axis, the horizontal axis, you see kilowatts to megawatts to hundreds of megawatts to gigawatts. When you need to store in the tens to hundreds of megawatts, you also start to run into the point where batteries are just not cost effective, they just don't, they don't cut it. So you have this problem, if you're going to have a really big microgrid, or if you're going to put a lot of intermittent renewables on your grid, you're going to have to look at some other ways to generate power and store energy long term. So some of those ways were hydrogen, methane, compressed air, and even pumped hydro. And pumped hydro is basically you pump water uphill into a reservoir, and at night, say you're pumping it with excess solar power, then at night when the water runs back down through some turbines, it generates electricity at night. In the morning you pump the water back up the hill, and in the daytime it runs down. Methane and natural gas are cleaner fossil fuels that you can use to either extract hydrogen or turn right around in a fuel cell or something to make electricity. But you can store a lot of it for a long time, and it doesn't lose its energy value sitting in storage like it does in batteries. Then you have compressed air. Normally places that use compressed air have things like salt caverns or big caves underground where you can push air into these underground spaces and put a lot of volume in there until the pressure builds up. And then at night, again, if you have solar in the day you pump air in there, and at night you let the air pressure back out again through turbines that generate electricity, so you have your electricity at night. But the hydrogen one is kind of unique too. Just like the natural gas, you can store it in containers for exceedingly long times, weeks and weeks, and it doesn't degrade. You don't lose any power when you store it in these tanks. And the tanks that they have nowadays are very complex and high-tech. They're explosion-proof. They're designed to, if you rupture them with a bullet or something, they just basically leak, but they don't explode. They don't tear apart. They don't defragment and fly into pieces where people can get hurt. If they're heated up to a certain point, they have plugs that blow out of them and let all the hydrogen out. And the ones we use in vehicles even have impact sensors, so when you have an impact, they shut the valve off so nothing leaks out of any of the tubing or whatever might have been damaged in the impact. But hydrogen is also a great way, and so is natural gas, to give you that base load power. It's more stable than the intermittent renewables, so you could use an electrolyzer to generate hydrogen, and it could also be a load. So in other words, when you have too much solar, too much wind in the daytime, you can't use all the power. You put that in an electrolyzer with some water, and it generates your hydrogen just from water. And then when you use the hydrogen, you get the water back. Not all of it, but you get a good portion of it back, and it's pure water. So when you talk about microgrids, especially when you start talking about islanded communities or places like here in Hawaii on the North Shore, Windward Coast, maybe Waimanalo, Kanyue, Kailua, maybe out in Waianae, back in the valleys in Waianae, you need to look at some of these options, maybe even some of the valleys in Honolulu, where you have high residential areas and a lot of rooftop solar, but you need other ways to store that energy. And if you could island those communities, hey, if you have a storm, those islanded communities, a bunch of them are going to survive on their own and come right back up, and that means Hiko's job is just to take care of the rest of the grid that may be damaged. And part of Hiko's issues surviving a storm in Hawaii, besides the big generation plants around the South Shore, is they run a lot of their power lines over the mountains, which take a lot of wind beatings when we have a big hurricane, and could damage those lines. So Hiko's looking at all these options now, and we're hoping that they'll be looking at them with an eye towards the future, and looking at the concept of microgrids and islanded communities to help Hawaii be more survivable so that we're not as vulnerable as some other island nations. We're going to take a quick break now, and we'll be back with a couple more videos and talk a little bit more about hydrogen and microgrids. And aloha, my name is Calvin Griffin, host of Hawaii in Uniform, and every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community, and we also invite your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation, and we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii in Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock, and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert, and we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on Thursdays at 4 p.m., and we hope we'll see you next time. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii here on my lunch hour, of course. So, we showed you a video, talked a little bit about microgrids in distributed generation. We had an event here in Hawaii last month called Verge. It was a great chance for the folks here in Hawaii to be exposed to companies that make clean energy products to sit down with lawmakers and other folks and talk about possibilities of actually putting some of these systems into play here in Hawaii. One of them that we're really kind of excited about is electric buses and fuel cell buses, things like that, that we're hopefully going to be able to demonstrate here in Hawaii later on this year. But while I was at Verge, there was a young man doing some video taping and some interviews, and I'd like to play one of those videos right now that talks a little bit about what we do for the military out at Hickam and what our focus is on when we're doing these microgrids for the military. So, let's roll that first video. We slowed down a little bit on actual shovels in the ground, but our design work is pretty much set. What we'll be building is a series of microgrids. Microgrid zero, we call it, is the overarching microgrid. It's the one that controls everything else. And then we have five separate microgrids below that, and they're set up so that we can test different technologies in those microgrids. So, for example, microgrid number two will actually be the first one we pull online. And it's a Leeds Platinum Hangar and then a transportation motor pool part of the Hawaii National Guard. And the Leeds Platinum Hangar actually generates more power than it needs. So we have surplus power. We'd be adding a little bit of hydrogen storage, a little battery energy storage, and some control elements, and that'll be microgrid number two. Then we'll move to microgrid number one, which is our civil engineering building and some other photovoltaics and a net zero hanger. And then we'll be trying to integrate that with some hydrogen production and also some hydrogen use as energy storage and trying to integrate. And our goal is to basically break down the projects into three separate entities. Power generation. So that would be photovoltaics, wind, waste energy, anything that generates electricity, including hydrogen generation, energy storage, batteries, flywheels, capacitors, supercapacitors, pumped hydro, anything that falls into energy storage and the energy controls. And like I say, microgrid zero will be the overall controller capable of moving power between the microgrids and also controlling between the microgrids and the utility. The military is concerned about security. Right now, over the last 30 years, the military has kind of migrated away from generating their own power. There used to be a lot of coal power generation on basis for heat and for electricity. And they migrated away from that and depending on utilities. So they've been writing checks for all their electricity. Now they're starting to go, hmm, maybe that's making us vulnerable. With all the sophisticated communications, particularly in the Air Force, they see themselves as potentially more vulnerable depending on just a public utility that gets this power from maybe several power producers, maybe one, but who knows whether they're going to be reliable, vulnerable to cyber attacks, vulnerable to natural disasters or kinetic attacks. So they want to have the security of being able to generate their own power, store their own power and operate 24-7. Right now, that military has backup diesel systems for critical infrastructure. But in places like Hawaii, where you're isolated from the rest of the world, when your diesel supply is being used by the wastewater system in the state, the hospitals and other folks, that diesel supply is limited. And you could literally get to the point after a week or two where you're competing with hospitals for the fuel that you need to carry on your mission. We're trying to make it so the Air Force never has to depend on diesel to finish their mission. If the utility drops offline, they can take the renewables that they have, revamp where they use their power. That's the management piece of that microgrid zero. Take power away from certain facilities that aren't really needing it and pushing it to where you really need it and not using diesel. So that's just a little glimmer of what we do and the problems we're trying to solve for the military at Hickam Air Force Base. To add to it a little bit, and I think I'll talk about it in the next video, is some of the reasons that we want to use hydrogen specifically at the base. Something I didn't talk about though was when you think about where we're at right now in terms of vulnerability, not only is your public utility vulnerable to heavy duty storms like hurricanes, and we're just entering hurricane season right now, but you also have the possibility of somebody sabotaging, literally sabotaging some of your hardware, putting a hand grenade or something in a substation, we just never know nowadays what might be out there as a threat. But what probably a lot of people don't think about, but I can guarantee you that the public utilities and the government thinks about is a cyber attack. And what I don't mention in the video is that part of our challenge and what we're doing for the military is we have to make this microgrid setup that we're building invulnerable to cyber attacks. So basically, when we can disconnect from Hawaiian Electric at the Hickam, we also disconnect from the outside network. And to literally to get into our network once we've done that, you have to physically get into the LAN system on base and twist a pair into the system or somehow physically get into the system at the base to do anything. And that's pretty darn tough to do. The internet is pretty vulnerable worldwide but it's tough to get in right to a location and really get into the network. Another thing to consider is right now our vulnerability isn't just who's giving us the electricity, but when you're in a fossil fuel-based economy, it's who's giving you your oil. So for many, many decades now we've been kind of at the mercy of OPEC and other nations where we get our energy from. And part of what we're doing at Hickam is showing that when you do develop these microgrids that are runoff of renewable energy, you kind of break that tie and you're no longer just looking at another nation and depending on them to set the price of your oil or supply you with something. You can use what's available, solar, wind, right there and use it. When I talk about wind on base, these big huge megawatt scale wind turbines like you see on the Kohoku Mountain Range, those things won't work for a lot of reasons. You can't have airplanes flying around them. Number two, the radar systems on any military base are affected by big things like wind turbines. So those wind turbines that you see that you're used to seeing are pretty darn big and not suitable for a military base. But what we're doing is we're looking at what we call medium wind which is a much smaller scale. It sits kind of down in the clutter of the base where the radars can be tuning out ground clutter and things like that and the wind turbines don't interfere with the radar as much. So let's run the second video now and we'll look at some of the other things that we're talking about with our microgrids at Hickam. The situation is all about weight. Weight and cube. Most of our aircraft, you can't outgrow some. You can't put weight on them. You'll outcube them before you outgrow some. But what happens when you put a lot of weight in an airplane is your fuel bill goes up dramatically. So you can take Abrams tanks and put them in C-17s and it'll move them. But your fuel bill starts going higher and higher. And so what we want to do aside from looking at different fuels for aircraft is we're trying to get to the point where our logistics is lighter and easier to move. If we can get to the point where we're not shipping 55-gallon drums of diesel fuel into a remote base or remote operation or sending it on ships or putting it in convoys where people are getting hit by IEDs we take away the casualties we take away the actual cost of shipping. I mean a 55-gallon drum with jet fuel at a remote base isn't a couple hundred bucks. It's tens of thousands of dollars depending on how remote that base is and what the risks are of getting there. We want to take away the risk of fatalities and injuries we want to take away the cost of moving a lot of fuel and we do that by using renewable energy to make hydrogen and using the hydrogen for what moves everything on the base what makes the ground power what makes the power for their their tugs that pull airplanes around what makes the power for their utilities that need to assimilate hydraulics and we're doing maintenance to put power in the buildings and their hospitals and the bi-product of electrolysis is also oxygen besides the hydrogen and on the Navy's side it's kind of interesting the Navy's been using electrolyzers and submarines for years and years decades so they've already proven that the equipment is safe even on a submarine which says a lot if you remember how to get the Navy to certify anything they use a lot of radios and cosmic equipment that's high-tech communication that needs batteries and of course the battery does yours lithium cobalt technology and you can't put that on a submarine so we've actually talked to the Navy and said why don't you look at metal hydride storage use the electrolyzer you already have in the submarine and you're throwing away the hydrogen and keeping oxygen for your crew keep the hydrogen too and store the energy in these instead of using lithium batteries metal hydride storage and switch to hydrogen fuel cells to generate power for your radios for your special operators there's a lot of pieces there on the tactical side when you have hydrogen generating your equipment power it's quiet there's very little noise in a tactical environment you want to be quiet it's very low heat signature there is heat involved but it's easy to dissipate when you're looking at somebody targeting your assets from the hillside they want to put a mortar round in your base for the night for the place to hit well now there's no hotspots because you're taking away their heat signatures and then so you have the quietness no heat signature and if you do operate this equipment in an enclosed environment no carbon monoxide, no carbon dioxide it just puts out water water and vapor so you have no harmful output from the exhaust system that would kill your people so we see it as logistic savings for the military we see it as logistic savings in terms of just the advantages of no heat no sound and no noctis fumes and then just overall the best way to do business less casualties because you're not moving fuel because you're making it on site so two important things to take away from that video number one is the weight factor if you don't have to be shipping fuel on airplanes to get it downrange or shipping on navy ships to get it to another location you're getting a lot more fuel because that ship could be carrying other more important or other critical assets and you reduce your costs number two is the fact that if you're making hydrogen at your location you're not buying it from a foreign country if you look at lithium batteries and cobalt and the things you need for current battery technology guess who owns a lot of that it ain't the USA so if we want to get really energy independent like the show calls for and if you really want to look at doing it right let's look at sustainability let's consider hydrogen for some of your big energy storage issues and let's really take advantage of what hydrogen can do for you that's going to wrap it up for stan energy man this week thank you for being with us and again thanks to all our veterans out there for all that you do and all our law enforcement and first responders as well we thank all of you and we'll see you back here next week on stan energy man aloha