 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our sponsor is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm really pleased to welcome our guest today, Miles Topping. Miles is the Director of Engineering Management for the University of Hawaii. And today, Miles is gonna provide us with an update on the UH Net Zero Program. They've made a heck of a lot of progress. Miles, welcome to the show. And tell us about your program and how it's going. Yeah, thanks, Mitch. Great to be here again. Things are going good. Making some progress since the last time we talked and really happy and excited to present this. This was presented to the state legislature a few months ago. It was also presented to our Board of Regents. We do an annual briefing and it is updated every year and it looks back on the last fiscal year. So this will be looking back on fiscal year FY19-20. We're still collecting and assembling the data for fiscal year FY2021. The fiscal year for the University of Hawaii extends from July 1st to June 30th. So, and it takes the other divisions a little bit of time to get me the data so I can publish it for these reports. So it's a little bit historical, but I cover some of the... Anyway, let's get into the data and if people find it interesting. Sure. Okay, here's my first slide, next slide. So yeah, so we have a mandate put out by the Hawaii Vice Statute that dictates that UH will become Net Zero by 2035. And this is sort of our progress. The donated crop explains that we've achieved 5.9% and a remaining of 94%, which is kind of not super encouraging. But you can see the rate of change from the last fiscal year report to this fiscal year report is very encouraging. And these are kilowatt hours produced, not necessarily systems that were constructed or in construction, which some of you may have seen at Kapilani and at some of the other community colleges, some of the big parking structures that we'll talk about later. But this is actual kilowatt hours produced against that goal. Next slide, please. So the result is that we have reduced the amount of energy that we purchased from the donated. We have increased the amount of energy that we produced from renewables. The site's pretty self-explanatory. We're buying less and we're producing more. The next slide, please. There's a dashboard that we publish all of this information on. The last two slides were from that dashboard. And the URL is kind of at the bottom of that slide and you can make it available. But it's at hoi.edu slash sustainability. You can find the energy dashboard. And you can see all of these charts there, which are again updated annually. And you can see that we're increasing our capacity. We've increased energy efficiency that we're changing light bulbs to LEDs or optimizing air conditioning run times. We're doing all sorts of efficiency measures across the system. And you can see the results right there, up there on the slide. Like I said, you can go to hoi.edu slash sustainability and peruse all this information yourself. Next slide. Yeah, I love showing this chart because it shows the amount of installed capacity across the university system. A lot of people are not aware that we have this much PV installed across the state of Hawaii at the University of Hawaii at all of our different facilities. Next slide, please. So, if we break down where all the energy is getting consumed across all the different campuses, we kind of lump all the community colleges together if they're in the table. And then we have all of Manoa, all of Hilo and West O'ahu. And I have to mention that Manoa affiliation, when you're affiliated to Manoa, like it includes things like the Waikiki Aquarium. Who knew? The Lion Arboretum, who knew? There's Institute for Astronomy locations that are on outer islands that are affiliated to Manoa. And so that's, you know, the Manoa affiliation's huge. And if you, the bar chart there, so that's sort of the blue pie chart is all the Manoa affiliation. And 80% of that pie chart is consumed right at Manoa main campus. And the bar chart there at the bottom kind of breaks down the numbers at the top. And you could see how each of the community colleges, West O'ahu and Hilo stack up against Manoa's consumption. It looks a little blurry in the slide, but big bars Manoa is Manoa. So that's just to put that in context. Okay, next slide please. So just to interject, Manoa also has a lot of dorms and accommodations, you know, big food courts, you know, dining facilities, gymnasiums. So you have a lot of energy users on the campus. It's not just people in classrooms, it's all the supporting activities that go on at the university to make everything work. That's absolutely right. And that's also a little known fact is that, you know, Manoa is not like a department of education school. It doesn't close for the summer. And it has research that goes 24 seven, 365. It's actually an R1 research university. And if you bring up the next slide, there's a little graphic that goes along with exactly the point that you are pointing out is that it's huge, it's massive. And I kind of made a collage of all these buildings that include research buildings, you know, housing buildings, federal government occupied buildings, things like that. And we are an R1 research facility with more than 18 research buildings. We have 17 housing buildings on campus. We have three libraries, which are also huge energy users at data centers. You know, the IT Center, which houses a lot of state data is on our campus. And many of these buildings have to be pooled 24 seven research. If it's a research building, you know, it needs to be climate controlled, which means it needs to meet a certain humidity and temperature requirement for a lab space. And if you have one lab space in a building, buildings, a research building unit runs 24 seven. Libraries have a tighter humidity and temperature tolerance than humans. Libraries books will develop mold if they're left out. You ever wonder why you walk into a library and freezing cold is because they have super cold air to get all the moisture out. And that's an expensive endeavor is to, you know, house books. These are rare books. These are, we have a rare book treatment facility in the Hamilton phase three. We have precious volumes of precious knowledge housed in these libraries. And like I said, IT centers, first four foot, nothing consumes more than an IT center is just crazy. The computers are worrying and you have to cool them. They're emitting heat, you have to cool them down so they don't explode or whatever. And yeah, just the energy intensive sets of things. So the bottom line, if you look at that last slide that we put up, you know, the university is an, my main campus is an intensive operation. And at any point in time, you know, that the notional population is about 20,000 people. There's like, you know, the enrollment, like 18,000 students and staff is like 5,000 people. And so at any moment in time, and if you don't notice it when you walk around because it's so big, it's so many square feet in there, but there's 20,000 people there, you know, at any given time. That's something that is often not remembered. And it's, we consume about as much as 20,000 homes, which is funny though. And we have ongoing research. So we're actually doing pretty good. And the other factor is that you got 20,000 people who have different habits. Some people turn the lights off and turn their power bars off and their computers off. And other people just don't seem to be oblivious of the amount of energy they use or cause to be used, you know, they leave the doors open, you know, all sorts of things. In the mainland, we have heat, right? You have the heat in the mainland. And so people are very conscious about leaving the door open so they get cold inside, right? So they keep the doors closed. Here in Hawaii, we've always had trade winds. We've always had open door policy and stuff like that. So we leave our doors open, but what we don't realize that that air conditioning air is just bleeding out and air conditioning the island, not the space that we designed because it's working overtime when we do that. But you're right. So maybe bring up the next slide. Yeah, so this is an eye chart. I'm not gonna get into this too much, but we have different electrical services and all the blue buildings that you see at the main campus are fed by what's called a substation. So that's where most of this energy has been consumed through is that substation. And you can see sort of the blue bar on the left compared to the purple bar on the right. But next slide. So if I just look at those substations, I've bought the most energy usage day, like one day over a generic 24 hour period. So I have the day that we use the most, the day that we use the least and a few other statistically significant days. This is those five sort of statistically significant days overlaid onto a generic 24 hour period. And you can see here that usually that our consumption follows it's seasonal. Like why is it so high in September? It's because that's the hottest month of the year. We're in that hottest month of the year. And that's what we consume the most because most of our consumption is in the air conditioning. Conditioning those spaces, fighting the sun and the external heat to maintain lab quality, library quality and data quality conditions. So that's the point of this slide. You can see that usually our lowest day is actually on the first, January 1st because nobody's here and it's cool. But this year was a little different because of COVID. And you can see that the COVID impact there. And I get into more of that later if you go to the next slides. So there is HVAC is consuming all the energy. And if I plot the outdoor air temperature, peak outdoor air temperature against our peak demand per month, you can see that it just follows it because that's what it's doing with all of our energy, not all of it, but quite a bit of it, most of it is going into cooling, fighting that sun and fighting the external temperature. Next slide. This is another interesting little known fact is that Manoa has what we call district cooling loops. So for any like campus or like a base or something like that, they build these and they have the district cooling and heating loops. So they have underground piping connecting buildings and they have a central heating or cooling facility to provide heat to all these buildings on the campus. And you'll find that sort of all over, we don't heat, we can cool. And so we have these district cooling loops and there's five of them. So what's interesting here is that we have these anchor facilities to kind of zoom in on the map there. So in the case of that red loop C, Biomed produces all the coolness for its recipient buildings, which are listed out there as under loop C. Kind of hard to read, but anyway, there's Egg Engineering, St. John, Sherman Labs and More Hall are a recipient. So even though the energy is being consumed at a certain building, it's doing the work for these other recipient buildings. This district cooling turns out to be one of the most efficient ways to cool multiple buildings at this scale on a campus. And that's why people do that. So what's the age? What's the age of the loops themselves and the plumbing that goes in? Are they fairly modern or are they old and are you gonna have to replace them or is there any heat loss or heat gain as you pipe this around the campus? Yeah, it's interesting. The pipes are insulated, they're buried and they're insulated. There is loss in the line, there's loss in everything, as you know, Mitch. It turns out that for the amount of cooling that we do, it is probably more efficient than putting window units in every space. The comparison is like the comparison of a bus to an EV. So one guy gets on a bus and one guy gets in his little smart car. They have two-seater smart car. They drive to the North Shore, right? Which one used less energy? Well, the little smart car of course. So you put 40 guys in the bus and 40 smart cars, which one uses less energy? Right. The bus, so that's what these are. These cooling loops are buses. They're made to do a lot of work, cool enormous buildings 24-7 and reliably because you can't have an air conditioning system fail because if it fails, the lab space, the controlled area warms up, all sorts of bad things happen and research goes out the door. So not only do they have to be, you know, have to perform, they have to perform all the time, you know, reliably. So that's a big challenge to it when you have a research facility. Right. As far as the age of them goes, there's been an evolution, you know, there was a building boom at the campus in the 70s, a lot of these loops were installed in that timeframe. They have been maintained, upgraded, connected, reconfigured, improved throughout the years and in many stories on that, on the website, by the way, I talked about all of these endeavors, very interesting stuff, we'll get into it now, but I encourage you all to go and visit boy.edu slash sustainability and look at the energy section under efficiency and you can read about all the wonderful things that our facility seems to have done throughout the years. Right. Okay. Yep. So I don't know if there's another slide. Yep. There you go. Okay, yeah. So this is an extension of those cooling loops. You got the, those loops that I showed on the last step map are represented by those five sort of lines at the top, which are actually 25, there's 25 buildings within those five lines. And then the next 20, these are like the top consumers from AWH are listed below that. What's really interesting is if you look at the use type column, which is the first column, just read them out loud. Research, research, research, research, and there's one office. And then there's research, IT, athletics, library, you know, not classrooms, like you said earlier, it isn't the classrooms that are using all the energy. It's these research spaces, the things that make the university amazing, the things that make that attract people to the university, that it is a research university which attracts, you know, high powered professors and researchers and lecturers and that's what makes a university. And the money and funding that follows them because if you don't have top level researchers, you're not gonna get top level funding either. And of course the overhead costs help fund the university. So it's a basically an economic engine. Yeah, and it's weird. If you don't have the research space, you can't get the research grant. So that space needs to be climate controlled and did just apply for the research dollars, right? So yeah, that's a interesting and little known fact. And you can see right there, summarized at the top 45 largest energy user campus, research, IT, libraries, athletics. All right, yeah, next slide. So this is interesting that not everybody knows either. And this is a month by month kilowatt hour consumption versus cost plot that I did. And you can see that sometimes the consumption goes down, but the cost goes up, that means our bill actually went up, even though we use less, our bill actually was higher than last month. And sometimes we use more, but the bill goes down. So we have these two things that are sort of fluctuating independent of each other. Who knows what makes the bill go up and down? I don't know, but get eco on your show to answer that question, maybe. Okay, yeah, next slide please. And then, oh, here's, yeah, this is the slide on COVID energy impacts that kind of extended it into FY21 here. But you could see the previous year sort of the trend and you could see it, the trend is getting lower and lower each year because we're putting more solar and more efficiency. The COVID really tilted it way down there. And you can see it's still sort of harboring sort of low at the time of this report, eating COVID effects. I mean, the campus was shut down. But ironically, we actually, a lot of the eateries and the cookeries, they weren't in operation. All the housing was down. And a lot of the classroom buildings that were maybe recipient buildings, we were able to turn off their ACs to work on them. We used it as an opportunity to fix them and introduce a little bit more efficiency into them while nobody was there. So you're kind of seeing the effect of us taking advantage of the shutdown to perform maintenance, but it showed up pretty well in the energy Buddha. So yeah, the next slide. That's interesting. Yeah, the first one I showed you about the fluctuation in month to month, this is year to year. And you could see each year we buy less and less from HECO and each year we pay more and more from HECO to HECO. The orange line is our bill and the blue line is our consumption, which is weird. You would think if you used less, wouldn't you pay less? But no, if you can, they adjust their rates every year to stay sort of healthy as more and more people but solar on the roof and more and more people, whatever, they sell less kilowatt hours. They have to crank up the rate of that to get, meet their bottom line. But plus the energy is getting more expensive, right? We're moving from cheap coal to more desirable, you know, renewable sources. So that's, I don't know, I don't know what goes into it, but that's just, I'm just plotting what the bill says. But if you hadn't reduced your usage rate or your consumption, the cost would have been off the charts. But I mean, it would have been interesting to do a chart to say, gee, if we hadn't done this, how much would we have been paying? That would be an interesting chart. Yeah, it should be that. Next show. Well, you substantiate why you're investing this money, it's energy efficiency and new systems and new equipment and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I mean, one of the big, one of the big, you know, it's not just cost, right? Because the true cost, as you know, is the environment, you know, sea level rise, global warming. So being a part of sustainability, I have to remind everybody that that's the hidden cost. So we could sign a value to that, what would it be? You know, so it's, anyway, just thought I plugged that sustainability plug. Yeah, so this is something that we've added to that website and this is sort of the cumulative annual savings for efficiency projects. Like you do an efficiency project one year and you kind of get the savings from that every year, you know what I mean? So if you stack up all the efficiency projects that we've done for all of these years, you know, they've stacked up to about 7 million kilowatt hours of savings at the Manoa campus alone. And you can go to visit that URL at the bottom there of that slide and you can see and read about all the wonderful efficiency projects that we did at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and you know, each one individually. And this includes chiller replacements, which are huge, lighting upgrades, you walk around campus, you see all the new LED lights and more to come. We replaced ultra low temperature freezers. One of these freezers cools the specimens to negative 80 degrees. Well, and that's for like, you know, cancer cultures and things like that. You kind of have to preserve these things. And there's mission critical to a lot of the bio research biotech that we're doing at the campus. And each one of these freezers uses as much as an entire house, each one and there's hundreds of them. And so we started a program to replace them all with energy star certified and these freezers are expensive. So they're handed down from researcher to researcher as the researchers cycle through and they move on or work for Pfizer or whatever at the freezer state. And so we have last, you know, 20 year old technology in our facilities that we've started a program and we replaced all of them with the ones that consume a third of what the old ones consume. So we're looking forward to publishing some of the energy savings from that and other things that we're doing for energy efficiency. But yeah, this is your last information slide other than your model slide. So. Yeah, so this is it. And so, you know, we're continuing to build out an additional four megawatts at Manoa. We have an energy savings performance contract, which is what the community colleges did. We're starting one up here at Manoa. We're optimizing our lead credits for around energy performance and we are developing a strategic energy management plan that includes a PV power plant study. How much PV do you need to zero the temp to where we could put it and then energy optimization modeling, you know, what assets to invest in at which time the most bang for your buck. We got a PV farm that we've, that we're developing at UH West O'ahu to feed HECO's grid. We're just the landowner, but we're helping the state achieve its net zero goals. And then we have a few programs with HECO and our facilities guys are always doing projects to boost our efficiency, which I talked about already in a great way. And so there it is again, the URL, one last plug, Hawaii.edu, sustainability, slash energy, go there, lots of good information. If you watch this show, you'll probably really love that website. Okay, so the last slide, please. That's just how you can contact Miles personally. And it gives his email address and his telephone number. So I have one final question that we have about half a minute left and a minute left. So taking everything and distilling it down Miles, you know, what is the one single biggest barrier or problem that you have in implementing all these projects? Because this is a huge management problem. You're installing PV everywhere. They're all big projects, lots of contract work. You know, if you had to wave your magic wand, what would be the one thing that would help you go further, faster, cheaper? Yeah, I guess the one thing is that, you know, in, it's funding really. And PV is like when we build new buildings, often PV is a renewable energy. It's not part of the planning of that. So, you know, when it comes to energy, we just kind of won't go by a veto, that's the solution. But what we build a building, you know, in my opinion, it comes with a front door. It comes with a fire alarm system. It comes with a, you know, a telecommunication system. It comes with a security system. It comes with a sewer system. It comes with an electrical distribution system. It comes with a HVAC system. It should come with a renewable energy system. It really should just be a part of it and not an add-on, not something you can value engineer out. It needs to be a part of the thought process, the funding, the estimates, everything. As long as we cut out, say, well, we'll do that later, we're just gonna kick the can down the road. So I told in the legislative briefing, you know, what we can do is we can make a law that requires every state building to maximize this PV and we can fund it. So that would be, you know, that would be the one thing that I could do. Okay, well, great job, Miles. I really appreciate you coming on my show today. And so we're gonna leave it there. You've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy on Think Tech Hawaii. And today we've been honored to have, be updated on the University of Hawaii's net zero program with Miles Topping, the UH Director of Energy Management. So thank you so much for participating, Miles. Thank you, it was a pleasure. Yeah, and thanks to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Mitch Ewan. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, Aloha.