 Good afternoon. Howard Wigg, Think Tech Hawaii Monday, October 16th. Do we have a guest for you? Maybe one of the world's leading authorities on storage batteries. What's so big about storage batteries? Well, you are just about to learn about this. A little bit of background. Hawaii leads the nation possibly in the world in having PV or photovoltaic energy available to it. It has so much photovoltaic energy out there that in the middle of a sunny day such as today the PVs are producing more electricity than the utilities can absorb. Utility power plants, and you can correct me Nick, can only throttle back so much and if they throttle back some more it's just like a car engine that's idling too slow. It stalls so they can only go back so much but the PV energy just keeps pouring on pouring on and a lot of that is just dumped into the ground. Huge waste. What do we do about it? We store that excess PV energy in not our little flashlight batteries but in big batteries that are about as big as refrigerators. Tesla is probably the best known but there's a whole slew of batteries out there and the idea is that they absorb all this beautiful free energy during the day and what happens to Hawaii's demand for electricity just as the sun sets and the PV energy goes away? Zoom. The demand for electricity goes up. Why? Everybody comes home from their schools and their work. All the household appliances goes on. The refrigerator door is opening closing, opening closing. The compressor is going like mad. Mom probably throws some wash into the laundry. Kids taking showers. Everything's going on at home but there's more. Our economy is dominated by tourism and what's going on with those beloved tourists? They're coming home from shopping the beach, touring whatever. They're pouring into their hotel rooms. All hotel rooms are going great guns and as soon as they use up a whole lot of hotel room energy what do they do? They go down to the restaurants and bars. Hundreds of restaurants and bars and that's going strong. Therefore you have this peak of evening energy. Enter storage. All of that excess energy you stored during the day now can be applied towards that peak so that the utilities don't have to turn on what are called peeker plants which are small generators that run relatively inefficiently. It's costing them more energy or more dollars to produce those kilowatt hours. So now with all of that nice stored energy we shave that peak, make life much easier for the utilities but there's more. Within that storage industry there are dark clouds on the horizon in the form of inverters not progressing as rapidly as Moore's law. Moore's law seems to be dominating every energy industry under the sun but not inverters. Hence we turn to our guest Nick Dizon, CEO of Nidon Computers and I think it half does in other companies and again possibly the states leading authority on storage batteries and inverters. So Nick get us up into the wonderful world of inverters here. Yeah well batteries are only as good as the inverter they're connected to. And what does an inverter do? The inverter takes the solar energy and puts it into the batteries and then when the sun goes down and I'm trying to make it as simple as possible the inverter converts that DC power which is storable DC being direct current power which is storable in a battery is chemical energy and then taking that discharging that out into the load whatever the load is the grid or a home or a business or a building or a micro grid that's what an inverter does. It sounds simple but it's actually a very complex activity that inverter handles charging the storage as well as discharging storage so it has to have programming and hardware and power conditioning to balance input output simultaneously. It's poorly understood by primarily by customers and also by design engineers as a result the demand for inverters is such that residential demand is up but commercial industrial demand and utility demand isn't high enough to sustain the industry to continue innovating and growing. They're not putting all these dollars into research and development that they should be. In fact there's fewer inverter companies now particularly that are US based. You saw my comment on LinkedIn an article came out about how inverter manufacturer in the United States is you know the numbers of them is declining. I recently saw in LinkedIn the announcement of a primary sales person from a company I won't mention that was on the leading edge of intelligent inverters for commercial industrial and that person is no longer there and that person had been at that company for a number of years and was well recognized across the industry for selling that particular brand of inverter which again was a leading edge one that without saying their name has been involved and approved for deployment in Hawaii. So this is a very troubling sign that even as new battery technologies come out most of those batteries are being aimed at residential and of course Hawaii and California particularly California where there are new laws saying new homes within the next couple of years all need to have renewable energy in it for merely PV battery. The market is gearing itself towards sales in California primarily and secondarily in Hawaii too but far less in Hawaii. California is the driver and now in California having all these multi-day outages. Of course all these PV battery inverter companies that are gearing up for residential they're feeding the airwaves in California and on LinkedIn and all the other social networking or customers in California to start scooping up batteries and inverters for their homes which a lot of that is cookie cut a lot of that can be done. Most companies do not design those properly either so you'll probably pay a lot for an inefficient system but at least when PG&E turns you off or whoever turns you off over there you will have power for a period of time which for a lot of people going up to five days without power that's going to be worth it to them to do that. Oh so isn't this a huge stimulus to the market that because we know more of these outages are coming PG&E has no choice. Right so the grocery stores the drive-ins the gas stations the mom and pop stores the strip malls they are all without an option. If they have 120-240 split phase loads no three phase motors and they have the physical space yeah they could put PV and inverters and batteries from these residential size systems but if they have two eight three phase forty three phase they have reefers they've gotten motor loads that are three phase they're out of luck. Reefers being large commercial refrigerators. Right and as as anyone who's gone to an extended outage knows your number one appliance at home is your refrigerator freezer when Puna went down on the hurricane and I didn't have an electricity for weeks on end they were hunting high and low for ice truck loads of ice were being brought in for them so that they could have something to preserve food and have cold drinks and all of that good stuff because they had no power. So that situation of the inverters not being available on the for the commercial industrial it's it's really coming to a head so I've been approached to design a lot of these systems and when it comes to four eighty three phase or two eight three phase I have a very small amount of choices that are approved for deployment in Hawaii. And what kind of commercial industrial applications do we have in Hawaii? Well one of the big the resorts or something. Well the resorts are our big one but they're not actively pursuing us to do work right now it's agriculture. So marijuana and CBD so THC and CBD this is a where you know we're one of the we're actually I believe we're the only guys that successfully did a USDA grant off-grid battery project here and so when a lot of these companies come to Hawaii and look for who has experience from the USDA's point of view the USDA website points a lot of them to us so we get contacted a lot and we're looking primarily again at one two one one twenty two forty split phase as of now that three phase stuff is coming and with the twenty forty five one hundred percent renewable that situation will have to be addressed we're addressing the the efficiency side that's where that first slide comes in we're the we're bringing in this only approved solar assist device which we're now deploying statewide we have really the best of breed contractors since I'm not a contractor we have contractors that are all BIA BBB licensed approved guys bonded guys putting those in so he just showed a slide of a recent installation over in Hawaii Kai and what that does and you can see the photovoltaics in the back so okay yeah I see the photovoltaics so we're doing houses in fact through the end of this year my contractors are booked solid putting in air conditioning with that solar assist device for the air conditioning and PV we're effectively building these houses off grid capable of off grid right now wow and that includes running the refrigerator at minimum the refrigerator and also the air conditioning and the only thing we're not running on it is the dryer and the stove yeah but everything else is on it including water heating we can do that as well hmm be more efficient to have solar water heating but right so um on these on a lot of these newer houses if you show you have an alternative way to make hot water that's not from fossil fuel which is what we're doing yeah yeah then uh then then we're approved wow okay well we need to take a break but we're just really really getting rolling here think tec Hawaii code green nick is on CEO of need on computers and the future of inverters in Hawaii back in a minute hello i'm stan oserman stan the energy man every friday here on think tec hawaii if you're really interested in finding out what's going on in energy especially here in hawaii but also all the way around the world and especially if it has to do with hydrogen look into stan the energy man every friday 12 o'clock think tec hawaii either aloha aloha my name is wendy lowe and i want you to join me as we take our health back on my show all we do is talk about things in everyday life in hawaii or abroad i have guests on board that would just talk about different aspects of health in every in every way whether it's medical health nutritional health diabetic health you name it we'll talk about it even financial health we'll even have some of the miss hawaii's on board and all the different topics that i feel will make your health and your lifestyle a lot better so come join me i welcome you to take your health back mahalo good afternoon again howard wig code green sink tec hawaii nick is on CEO of need on computers and the inverter guy i think i'm prejudiced but the inverter guy or the for all of hawaii and he's pointing to a whole new way of approaching the combination of photovoltaics storage batteries we have we know what photovoltaics are but in that last slide why don't we run that last slide again and you tell us just what what's going on here now all right so that's hooked up to a um i believe that's hooked up to a daikin air conditioner so that daikin air conditioner if we were to put pv on there for it that there is around 32 square feet of of solar thermal panel we would need the equivalent of 238 square feet of pv to do the job of that one thermal panel that's a ratio of 10.25 to one just about yeah well yeah maybe a little bit less but it's still it's still 238 square feet versus 32 square feet yeah it's less than 10 but we're we're really shrinking down the amount of roof space which also means that the amount of pv battery that you would need to run that house needs doesn't need that 238 square feet of pv that would be tied up by the air conditioner what makes and i i shouldn't dispute you on numbers but i'm pretty sure it's a ratio of 12 to one yeah you could be right what makes that little area so much more efficient than pv arrays i mean pv arrays are what already 22 percent efficient something like that yeah but it's the pvs are doing electric to thermal conversion which you know there's a physics penalty versus thermal to thermal that solar panel is cut into the circuit in the super heat cycle between the compressor and the condenser and what that does is it causes a compressor in in hawaii's climate to back off by over 50 percent so if that compressor normally is has a running load amps of 25 amps it can drop below 15 it can drop down to 10 so if you're instead of running at 25 amps all day long you're running at 10 to 15 at most you're saving significant power uh can you go to the next slide please so this here is a commercial installation and we can see the industry and back there we know where we are yeah well that's actually honolulu concrete and dredge hcnd's sand island office they had a old york five ton two stage that ran at 35 35 to 40 amps we replaced it with a carrier two stage five ton that dropped that down to around 28 amps then that panel that's on there dropped those amps on that branch so there's you can see behind him is the sun track panel and to our left in the corner is a brand new carrier five ton two stage that carrier five ton two stage never runs at more than 10 amps so that was a 70 improvement or reduction in electricity to cool down the same space and in this case they're you're you're on top of an office and it's cooling down the office in in there yeah that's correct so we've knocked down the electrical costs to run those air conditioners by 70 percent because that's a commercial site they got accelerated depreciation so they got the 30 federal the 25 percent i mean the 35 state and they got you know there's there's a half a million dollar cap on that they got nowhere near that so they were able to fully utilize the 35 and then they had 17 percent on top of that first year for accelerated depreciation that's a ridiculous amount of savings in year one definitely and in that particular case what if the office the people need to stay well after sunset the sun's gone away the when the sun goes away those same sun track panels in that super heat cycle there's an inversion process that happens where they become five to 10 percent instead of being 50 plus efficient they now drop to being 10 percent five to 10 percent efficient over norm that's because they act as an extension of the condenser right and now you're dumping that heat that's coming out of the room faster versus at night you don't know you no longer need that solar energy as the ambient temperature drops at night you want to be able to dump the heat what what heat you do have quickly and now the sun track panel helps dump that heat and what kind of heat are we talking about sounds like i rather you don't you want to take a bath in this stuff yeah this is really hot and we're talking over 140 degrees because you're you're the refrigerant goes into the room to absorb the heat from the room right and then it's not hot enough for it to be dumped quickly out into the air from the condenser that's so the compressor provides heat and pressure for that efficient dumping of the heat so during the day we're using solar energy to do that on these panels and at night where we're having those panels help dump it so it's even a lot of mechanical engineers and refrigeration forget that or because if they haven't been doing refrigeration cycle stuff they'll forget that that's what it is how does more hot make cold well you need that delta up there to cause that heat to dump when it gets to the condenser totally counterintuitive that's right a lot of us have trouble with that so the end result of all this for hawaii as it relates to inverters means that we need less inverter less battery less portable ticks to achieve the 100 renewable target of the state of hawaii without this strategy and without inverters that are have the programming ability in it we won't achieve the state's goals and the downside pressure to meet the state's goals is the fewer choices of inverters so why don't i'm sure you've been approached on this why don't you just get some of these guys who are quitting and you've got a big company just hire them to work here well there's a certain level of that going on yeah you know me well you know when i see an opportunity i'm not gonna sit back i've actually engaged into negotiation to actually manufacture an inverter with the with the software that we're jointly developing with this other company so that the load side and the charge side and the battery side are all dynamically adaptive to load changes which does not exist today these are complex algorithms which is the core of ai artificial intelligence so we are building artificial intelligence we've been doing that for a while on the software side so that our ability to support loads and to charge batteries and to balance that with the pv with the load we've been doing that for a while now we're working with a specialty inverter manufacturer to incorporate that with their inverter algorithms so it can dynamically adapt to the load charging source charging batteries and grid interconnections simultaneously there is nothing else on the planet that's even close why is this not surprising and i presume this is going on in california where the market is no no no it's uh california market is overly focused on residential you mentioned that yeah the intelligence to do um this these kind of elect power electronics is in the russ belt russ belt's not so sunny though that's true that's true which is why on my next think tech uh visit i will show you what we've done to bring the russ belt into renewable energy right now they have half the year with solar d and i just drops through the floor and so the and then of course they don't have the state tax credit and the cost of electricity there is low so they have a nem in much of the russ belt but their net energy metering credit is 2.9 cents a kilowatt hour it's not very sexy no it's not so we had to come up with another way to incorporate pv into a holistic renewable energy system that includes batteries that works where you have four seasons and we've done that our first pilot system is going on the line in the next 60 days and the goal is to collect data on that through the winter when that and so when that data we have that data it'll be first and best in the world so that means we here in hawaii are setting up the basis for residential and commercial and industrial power systems for energy storage and inverters that's not going to be you know we're going to be the source for it i'm well and hawaii leads the way to 100 clean electrical energy so what better state than to lead this charge i think we've got a couple more slides and our time is running out here oh yeah what what is this okay so there's only two battery technologies that i deploy currently i've deployed four but i've reduced it down to two this is the uh the lithium iron phosphate olivine battery from sony marata currently carried by blue planet energy carried by blue planet they are the distributor for that really so they've expanded this is the blue planet yeah it's the for-profit side blue planet okay okay okay so that battery is unique in the lithium ion world any because all other all other flavors of lithium ion battery regardless of chemistry in excess of 30 degrees centigrade or 86 degrees Fahrenheit you degrade the lithium ion battery and here it is middle of october i was just out in the sun it's above 86 degrees right now in october and as i told you before the islands are littered with dead energy store lithium ion energy storage they died in less than two years because ambient temperature is over 86 degrees and so you if you read the fine print on the warranties from all these guys and i won't name them they'll say that they'll begin they begin derating the battery and then there's a pro rata and after that exposure to 86 degree plus temperatures is extended it chills the warranty can't you just put the batteries in number one in a shaded area and then if necessary just blow their exhaust air out of there to get some airflow and keep it under 86 that would seem to be simple four stairs not enough because they have not designed the charge discharge profiles at all um most people just do a rough sizing and then they they brute force it in which means that the amperage draw for a charge and and discharge is high driving up the temperature of the battery and if the batteries are cited close together and there's no it four stairs not enough now and passive ventilation convection is not enough now you need to actually introduce cooling which is what tesla has done on the power wall too but doesn't that reverse what you're trying to do does that mean you have inefficient terra losses vampire losses bentum losses yes so every tesla power wall to a lot of the other brands they all put cooling in there and by doing that you just efficiency right and now if there is no chance of a return on investment on those batteries and we do have one more slide left here what is this green guy here yeah so years ago i was bringing in the aqueon aqueous hybrid ion slash salt water battery the safest battery ever they went bankrupt because their marketing strategy was fail so that green batteries literally called a green rock it's the descendant of the aqueon battery now manufactured and distributed by a austrian company called blue sky energy so actually flew to spi a couple weeks ago spi bean solar power international to meet this the ceo slash director of blue sky because i've been buying testing and deploying their batteries and their batteries have been very very good now what they are interested in blue sky energy and the blue ion people is that i put those two batteries together on on the same system because for motor in rush current the lithium ion batteries a better solution force for up and down quick low amperage switching loads the green rock is better if you have the green rock try to handle all of it by itself it'll degrade quicker if you have the lithium ion try to handle it by itself it'll degrade quicker if you split that job up to their strengths those batteries will last two to three times longer you do have fluctuating current we need to go but i'll just point out there's some something called clouds up there nice sunny boom cloud comes amperage drops how it goes away exactly yeah and on that very cheery note we must bid fond did you again too nick is on ceo of need on computers thank you so much nick we've just begun this conversation in a few months we're going to resume it with even better news yeah thank you very much howard wig think take away see you next time