 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii, where community matters. And we like to talk about all things energy, and of course we like to do transportation energy in particular, but we also are getting to a point where transportation energy and grid energy are starting to merge as we get more electric vehicles on the road. We start to see that cohesion between grid and the power you have to generate from the grid to charge your vehicles or to make hydrogen for matter, you know, that matter using electrolysis. But anyway, there's that load that we're going to be putting on the grid in the future. If we're going to try and get our transportation sector cleaner, there's a kind of emerging there. Like I've told several people, when it comes to transportation and people have arguments about it's going to be only a battery power or hydrogen or hybrid vehicles, and I don't remember who I got this from, but somebody said it's not a silver bullet solution, it's a silver buckshot solution. It's going to take plug-in vehicles, it's going to take hydrogen vehicles, it's going to take hybrid vehicles, it's going to take biofuels, it's going to take mode shifting, it's going to take live work play, urban planning things, it's going to take everybody's efforts to reduce vehicle miles traveled and get as many clean fuels out there as we can. But we also get into discussions about pure electric versus hydrogen and one of the things that I'm always hit with off the bat, like if I did a word association on hydrogen, the first word on anybody's mouth is Hindenburg or H-bomb or something like that. And it's really frustrating for me because I went on the internet this morning and I just said, you know how many Mariah fires have they had? They've got like 5,000 Mariahs in California, between three and 5,000, I don't remember how many exactly. And they've been running over there with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, even before that with some other Toyotas and Hyundai's and things like that, Honda Clarities. And I couldn't find any hydrogen vehicle fires, but just in the last two weeks I've heard of at least two Tesla fires. And I have a graphic just to show you that, you know, whenever you're storing energy, whether it's in a battery or fuel, it's got a lot of potential. And people think batteries are pretty benign, but this is what happens. This video here is a European photo. They tend to stay on the internet longer because somehow the fires in the US seem to be deleted pretty quickly. But this is a Tesla that caught on fire in Europe, I believe in Austria or Switzerland. And if you don't get the firefighters there right away to put the fire out, it's a pretty devastating fire. So I just encourage people, if they do drive electric vehicles and the vehicle does ignite to get out of it really quickly because that fire gets really hot and it goes really quickly. So don't be taking your time thinking you're in a battery vehicle, so it's really safe and you need to just, you can afford to take your time to get out. It's not really safe. You do need to get out, especially lithium fires get really hot, really fast. And there's not a whole lot you can do to stop them unless the professional firefighters there were the right equipment to put it out. So just a caution thing. Hydrogen vehicles haven't even heard of any fires on the hydrogen vehicles. I heard of a trailer fire about a month ago or a month and a half ago. And that was it. And it was pretty benign. So anyway, whenever you're driving or using fuels and energy storage and any kind of density, you always have to have safety precautions. I like Teslas. I think they're great vehicles. They're impressive vehicles and I really want to see more of them on the road. But just like anything else, you have to drive them safely. You have to operate them safely and you have to grade it for contingencies. So if you drive a Tesla, I hope you're using solar to charge it up so you're not just oil burning off of HECO. But be careful if you do have an incident or your batteries are cut from a piece of metal on the road or something, that you take the precautions and get out of the car right away. Next up, I'd like to show, before we get to our guest today, show a short video that leads into our discussion today. And it was put together by a company called Hyperspective here in Hawaii. And it's basically talks about microgrids. So if we can roll that video. There are over 300 million people in our country. And the vast majority rely on large scale, centralized power grids for their energy. 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. Grids 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 I think that video gives you a good start into our discussion today. And who we've got for yesterday is Ryan Wibbins. Ryan, thanks for being here again. Yeah, thanks for having me. My regular most favorite electrical engineer, and especially in the state of Hawaii. Don't tell John Baught off that. Ryan is here every third week in the month to talk to us about mostly grid stuff because that's his kind of his specialty is working on microgrids and grids and interconnected grids. And what we're going to do today is talk a little bit about being that Hawaii has a goal of 100% renewable on the grid by 2045. Kind of talk about what that really looks like and what changes are going to have to happen between the grid that we have now and the grid that we anticipate by 2045 and some of the challenges that HECO has and things like that. So Ryan, thanks for being here today. And I know you've done a little bit of thinking on this subject since we met last and had you on the show because we had to skip you last month. So you put some rain power into this. I'm going to turn it over to you and let you get started on what this is going to look like. What's our grid going to look like in 2045 or 2040, right before 2045? Sure. So it's going to be vastly different in a sense that we're just switching from our conventional generation sources over to our renewables. A few forces come in at play to direct that in, let's just say, a couple of directions. But some of the forces at play would be the government-side mandate that says, hey, we're going to get there. We're going to be renewable. But then you also have the financial side of the open market that are making their own decisions on their own. And both of those are going to happen in parallel and not really fight each other but work with each other to define what that's going to be in the future. It's not just one person that gets to say, yeah, it's going to be A, B, and C, because we've already seen the high increase in the amount of rooftop solar. That's an individual making a decision that it's good to me, either I want the renewable power or it makes sense to me financially. So when that decision gets made by a lot of people, that changes the grid on its own. I mean, we do have some revelation that enables or prevents people from doing that in certain areas for technical reasons that are very important. But when you combine those two, what does it look like? It is because of the financial capabilities of rooftop solar and as the battery systems that are out there today are decreased in price and the new technologies developed. What happens is the primary generation sources that we have right now start to become distributed so that that generation starts to happen at my house, at your house, at our corporate facilities, in your neighborhood. When that power moves closer, it changes the way we are today from a large centralized unit. But it also changes with the difference that happens in between those two points. So just because you're generating your own power doesn't mean it's always there. There may be some downtime that you need to expect in that time as well. Now we need the cooperation between our decentralized grid to communicate and move the power to where it needs to be. So it's very complex in making that switch. It's not just moving where the generation is, but it's a communication between the devices to make sure that I'm down, I need power to come from this direction. Can that line even, even is it capable of transmitting the power to me? But is that generation source that's out there capable of ramping up? And is that the most economical sense to happen? So it becomes a very smart grid, it's a term that's been used for a long time, but it becomes a very intelligent system making decisions very quickly. As compared to right now, we're a very smart system, but we're making isolated decisions. Now we're going to switch and be very distributed. Well let's kind of paint a picture of what the grid looks like now. Basically you have several power plants that generated a pretty steady state and they have to maybe even spin, but basically run some generators idling in case there's a big surge in the system. So Electric Company has kind of a good balancing act to do, but they have good control over their generators pretty much. But when you start getting a lot of solar and wind in there, now you have other sources out there in the grid that are providing power, but a big cloud comes over and all the PV starts to drop off on what it produces or the wind stops and the turbines slow down and they drop off and Hawaiian Electric now has to ramp in and put a bunch more power in. What happens when you get to the point where there are no generators? You're only looking at renewables. I mean, are we going to have to have some kind of base load power that mixes in with the renewables, like some kind of large battery capacity or hydrogen storage with fuel cells or backup generators where we actually have to keep generators going even though we're all renewable just to cover those loads? What does it really look like when HECO has to manage the grid assuming it looks similar to what we have? Or are they going to have to completely look at a different style grid where you have islanded and dispatchable pieces that they run, that they maintain? You go to a neighborhood and say, okay, we're going to sell you the equipment to run your solar in your house and everything, we're going to help you maintain it, we're going to fix it when it's broken and that's part of now HECO's new services. What are the kind of options out there from where we're at now to where we're going to be going? Sure, so right now, the large generating plants are, they're producing the power quality from a voltage frequency and what we'll call power and reactive sides of electricity but for most people, let's just assume that power is the only thing that we're concerned about, which is only half of it. When you start to get all the distributed generation that starts to make their own decisions on producing things and maybe it's just renewable too, making their own decisions on when I'm going to produce, when I'm not going to produce, the primary generating plants are either baseloaded and then you have other plants that are compensating for that lack of generation that just hit on the solar and so they're quickly ramping it up or maybe it was already spinning and we're ready to fill that gap when it's even, that just be like a solar plant in one location as we distribute it across a lot of different places, it gets even harder because each one of those is individually making their own decision on what they want to do to provide power quality, let's say, provide the power that needs to happen at that instant in time. The less and less muscle that the primary generating plants are producing, so as they go down in their capacity that they're producing and the distributed comes up, it's kind of like an arm wrestling match that the distributed generation, now if they were to get high enough that that gets to be the prime mover and the decision maker of what that power quality is going to be from a voltage and a frequency real and reactive power standpoint, then what used to be the base plant now is kind of getting muscled around. So we can't just make that switch today and say, okay, all those other distributed generation assets, they got it, it's fine because they haven't been made traditionally manufactured to perform in that way. The network together. Yeah, they can, but we're not exactly sure how that's going to behave and to what level of quality that's gonna happen at. So even if we were to flip that switch today and just say, okay, turn on the capability, let's just say it works, they're not going to operate because they're an inverter, they're not gonna operate in the same way that the primary rotating machine used to or still does operate is your solar inverter is simulating a rotating machine. It's constantly turning on and turning off, turning on and turning off to simulate as if it was a generator spinning. Just in that difference that it's operating, it controls voltage, frequency, real and reactive power differently than the rotating equipment. Kind of fakes it in a way. So we need something to bridge that gap at the same time. As we become more more distributed, there's likely something that we are putting in place to make up that gap between, I'm gonna say, handing over the keys to the power quality or I would say more so studying the transition that's taking place over time. So something to network everything. It's a network, but it's also a power quality issue because we wanna make sure we're getting all the voltage we need, the frequency, the right real and reactive power. Some devices aren't as great or they're not currently programmed or financially incentivized to provide the reactive side of the power. So as until those financial incentives come into play, there may be something that we're missing on the reactive side to fill that void. All right, we're gonna take a quick break now and we'll be back in 60 seconds to explore this a little bit deeper. And maybe we'll even talk about how much real solar do you need out there and how many acres of solar do you need to actually give a lot with the power that they need. Aloha, I'm Keeley Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at two o'clock PM on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at two PM on Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Munna and see you then. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. Stan the energy man here with Ryan Wubbins from Burnsa, McDonald. Again, my very favorite electrical engineer on the planet, especially here in Hawaii. So Ryan, we're talking a little bit about kind of the balancing act that HECO performs now and the transition is not simple going to this distributed power system and everybody kind of producing their own, maybe having their own battery systems, the different kinds of power between spinning generators and solar with inverters and those kind of contrasts. So obviously it's not a simple solution. Is there any place that you know of on the planet where literally a fairly large swath of territory is run just by intermittent renewables? Not hydroelectric dams or not, you know, something like that but something that's just intermittent like we're kind of anticipating here in Hawaii. Is anybody doing anything like that or networking those things? At this scale, not that I know of. There are remote islands in the Caribbean and across the Pacific that can do it but their demand for power quality is what I would consider less or the amount of downtime they can experience would be more. When we talk a large size load, is it possible to convert to 100% renewable? The first answer would say yes, yeah we can but we'd have to draw a line on how renewable we want to be. Let's say it's 100%, okay well how much do you value your power quality in respect to time? Is it 99% of the time you want power? Sounds like a lot. To a hospital that sounds terrifying. They need 99.99999. Yeah they can't afford an interruption. They can't have the interruption, they have to have the power. Folks are on life support. Exactly, you can't, in like a data center state, you don't even wanna blip. You can't even stomach the one cycle or three or four cycle loss in time. That's what drives the difficulty for renewables because of that intermittency because you gotta fill that gap. You might have a cloudy day, you might have four cloudy days, six, seven, eight, nine cloudy days that they're just wearing on your reserves that you have in behind you. So yeah, you can be 100% renewable but some of those places that are doing that right now have the ability to lose power, to my knowledge. Okay, so they're a little bit less risk averse. They can afford to take some risk here and there. Yeah. Like maybe their hospital has some blinkless capability in their system, extra battery backup or something on critical equipment, things like that. Okay, so, but give us a rough idea. Let's just speak of Oahu. If Oahu, with its current loads, which, how much is that, around a gigawatt? Yes, yesterday I looked at the renewable watch. I think we peaked out around 1,100 megawatt hours and that one peak, I think it was 1.1 gig. Yeah, so we're just around a gig in terms of average power production like Ico's gotta come up with. Yeah, nice round number of about a gig and if you multiply that by 365, you come out. Well, it's around 3.65. You could say we were using around four, was that four million gigawatt hours, four million megawatt hours a year on Oahu. If you were to just take that number and convert it down using something, let's say it's 15 watts per meters per foot squared, which is a reasonable number to use right now. First solar panel. Yep, multiply that through using, see which way I wanna go on the math. It comes out to be somewhere around 10 square miles, go up seven to 10 square miles of solar panel. That doesn't even have like the gaps that you walk between and that's just a giant 10 square mile panel. That would cover just that number that you need on an annual basis. That's the very minimal. That's without going to those 0.999s and making sure we have all the power reserves. That's just enough. Let's store it during the day. We had a great average sunny day. Every day is the same. We ride through the next day, 10 square miles. Next time I could show you a picture of what that looks like. But in practical terms, you need more than 10 square miles. Absolutely. You gotta plan for some of the equipment to be down from a maintenance perspective. Geographically matters on where you put everything because the transmission lines have to get it from A to B and sometimes because a unit is down, A is now transmitting all the way to where C is. You need a lot more. And when you start to stack on some of these reserves that we place, mostly because our risk adverse is we can't lose power. We don't want to. You start to go to maybe we need 20 square miles. 20 square miles is the same thing of when I was looking at it. Basically all the residential and commercial area from Diamond Head, all the way at the shoreline, wrap in Pearl Harbor in the airport to the stadium and wrap it all the way back every valley in there. That came out to like 20, 25 square miles on my quick check. That's one solar panel with no gaps. So it takes a lot of solar, just solar, to accomplish what we would want. Now it's still, as you start to distribute it, put it everywhere you possibly can. You start to make leaps and bounds in getting to where you want to be. But it does add up to get to our level of reliability that we want to have. That's in addition to the whole technical battle that we deal with, who's providing and what kind of power quality is each device providing back to the grid. So what kind of role do you think and do you think it'd be important that we consider ocean thermal, wave motion, some things where we take this production offshore where we have more acreage sea than sitting on land? I think you're gonna have to grab anything you can that would be considered renewable or sustainable. If that's not taking from something else in large amounts, geothermal's a really great one because that is just an immense amount of energy that's hanging out there. Some companies and other countries are looking into floating solar. I mean, we have a lot of water out here. It would be very difficult in a very harsh environment, but there's a lot of square footage there. 10 square miles is actually pretty easy to obtain offshore. So it's maybe one day that's going to become a little bit more of an option. Floating wind, not just offshore wind is becoming more of an option as well. Where we're hard on the Pacific is it's very deep, very quickly, whereas a lot of offshore wind right now is a little bit more shallow waters, I think, than what we're dealing with. Like North Sea is, about how deep do you think they're going? I don't know, deep enough to get there. Out here it'd be very hard, but floating wind is out there in the last company ever. It said they wanted to be competitive by 2030 against land-based wind. You know, just having fished around Hawaii a lot, just three or four miles off a line and you're in a mile deep water already, and it gets deeper after that pretty quick. You got some areas like penguin banks between Oahu and Molokai that get 25,000 or so. You'd probably put something out there, but then you're competing with fishermen who want to fish and stuff too, so. Yeah, there's no perfect solution at all, and it's going to probably be, just like I say, a buckshot solution, all the above. We may need some wind, some solar, some offshore, some onshore. Storage, how important is storage when we're talking about renewables? Storage is what gets us, it's what gets us to 100%, unless we find the magic fuel that's going to give us on-demand power reliably all the time. Storage is what makes that final leap in addition to power quality issues. Storage is costly right now because we haven't needed it for the last 100 years we've been operating in a grid that isn't based on storage. It resides in a pile of coal, not immediately available and dispatched. You want to diversify your storage portfolio just as much as you're going to be diversifying your generation portfolio because you're going to want that deep, long amount of, I want to say, massive energy scale, massive energy storage scale type power bank. At the same time, you want to have your really high efficiency, quick hitting storage and using those two in unison because the one that's big and deep is not likely to be something to be very quick and very round trip efficient. Otherwise, we'd be doing that all over right now and we haven't found the technology to quite get us to be that really high efficient, massive scale of energy storage. But on a smaller scale, I'm still talking in the megawatts, one to 10 to even the 100 megawatt battery that's planned here, that on the battery platform, your round trip efficiency is still, it's really high, but it's a one time, when that square footage, when that battery bank is spent, it's gone and there's only so much square footage we have for generation, there's only so much square footage we have for storage. Yeah. It's obviously a pretty complex scenario that he goes dealing with and we'll keep working with him and see how they're headed in the future, but believe it or not, we blasted through 30 minutes talking about the future of why he's grid and covered a lot of territory, more than 10 square miles probably and we'll have to hit this next week. How about next time that we get together, why don't we look at that option to be maybe make a couple outriggers out of a couple oil tankers and see how much solar we can get out there and see what kind of dent we could put in a floating platform. If I have a feeling that floating solar would be a lot less obtrusive offshore than floating wind turbines, at least if they're big ones like we have here and I don't know how the big wind turbines would work on a boat as with that much sail area, they may actually tip boats over and stuff. So we'll look at that for next time. So next, watch us the third week of next month, Brian will be back and we'll be talking catamarans with solar on, trust me, but thanks for being with us on Standard Energy Man this Friday. Have a great weekend and we'll see you back here next Friday and talk more energy. Aloha.