 Aloha and welcome to this week's episode of Think Tech. I'm Dave Molinaro. I'm a project manager with the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies filling in for Stan, the energy man who is on the mainland right now in an epic quest for new renewable technologies. An interesting guest for the show. He should be back next week. We've got an interesting show today. We're going to be talking about microgrids and specifically microgrids in Hawaii, but I would like to introduce my guest for today's show. John Badoff. He is with the architecture and engineering firm Burns and McDonald. John and his firm have got loads of experience and are probably some of the best engineers in the country dealing with microgrids. So again, we're going to talk about microgrids. And before we get into the conversation, I just want to do a, got to have a textbook definition of what microgrids are and according to the Department of Energy, the microgrid grid is a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources with clearly defined electrical boundaries that act as single controllable entities with respect to the grid. A microgrid can be connected and disconnected from the grid to enable it to operate from both grid and island and mode. So that's a pretty heavy definition according to the Department of Energy. I'm going to turn to John and your expertise, John. Tell me what does a microgrid mean to you? You know, I think the Department of Energy actually does a pretty good job of defining what a microgrid really is. The keys to that long definition really are it's a system of interconnected loads and energy resources that can connect and disconnect to the grid. You know, there's a lot of different definitions. Microgrids really become a buzzword in the industry that you know about and everybody comes out and says, well, we can do microgrids and we can set this up. But at the heart of what you're trying to do with a microgrid is use different distributed energy resources and loads and control both the resources and the loads to stabilize your grid and to be able to connect to a utility grid and actually help stabilize that utility and at the same time, if needed, disconnect from that utility and island yourself and secure your own loads and resources within your microgrid. Okay, great. That's a great start into microgrids. You talked about it being a utility. You talked about it being a controllable entity to provide power and energy distribution and security. Tell me a little bit more. How are they used? What are they used for specifically? Mainly if you're asking me and you're looking for my definition, I'm going to tell you that first and foremost, microgrids are about energy security. They're about providing a reliable energy source to the user. There's a lot of different pieces and parts that you can do with a microgrid, but at the end of the day, your goal is energy security because we can add resources to the grid. We can put renewables within your system and you can have financial paybacks associated with that. You can put in generation associated with your system, have financial payback with that. The question of why are you islanding and why are you designing a microgrid is because your goal is to give yourself security above and beyond that that is provided by a traditional backup generation or the utility on top of that. When you're defining a microgrid, you're looking to either make the problem of, and I use the term problem, but the disturbance of renewables that can happen on the macrogrid, if you take it down to a smaller level, you can make it simpler. We try to do that and that's part of security. If I can take the problem down and manage it at a lower level, I'm securing both the loads within the microgrid and the external loads that are in the utility in the other world. I can secure both sides. It's a security platform for both entities. So both the producer and really the consumer have a stable, secure flow of electrons for lack of a better term. Why do you think microgrids, and we hear about microgrids a lot, not only in Hawaii but worldwide, why do you think they're becoming more and more relevant, more important? We're changing the expectations of our grid as the flow of electrons become more important, not just from a power standpoint but from a computing standpoint. We ask our computers, we ask our systems to be far more reliant on data and that data transmission and that's becoming more and more a part of our society. And so those centers of critical distribution of that data and or defense of that data become very, the power to that system becomes very critical in its mode and in its use. And so the question becomes how do you protect those critical assets and that data infrastructure for the world, number one, and I would say number two portion is we're focusing on a change in our grid. There's more renewables being introduced into our grid because we're trying to back ourselves off of diesel and coal and some of the more traditional generation assets. And in order to do that, you have to take intermittent sources that are things like solar, wind, and those types of resources that aren't as predictable and can't be brought up and brought down when we need them and we have to figure out how to move those resources to the place that they're best utilized. And so again, it's about breaking the system down into parts and pieces that are more manageable and make the problem more simplified on the micro grid level. You talked, you touched on something predictability in a grid and with the power source. That is a critical element. Renewable energy is a wonderful entity, but it is not predictable. How does that affect the design of a grid? It makes the design of a grid a challenge. Utilities today have a real, it is a real problem in dealing with the intermittency of the new technologies that are coming in. And utilities have actually started in some manner, started calling them disruptive technologies because they disrupt the way the grid works, but they disrupt the mode of thinking of utilities over the last few years. It's made it fun, quite honestly, from my standpoint, being an electrical engineer and trying to solve that problem. But what essentially happens is every day the utility is trying to match the demand to the load. That's how they hold the voltage and frequency that make our grid stable and that keep your lights running and keep your hair dryer going when it needs to turn on. So there's a predictability curve that they have that utilities have over time that say this is how our grid is going to perform. Well, as you start adding renewables to it and when you have something, and I'll use a solar array as an example, if a cloud passes over an array, just a cloud, you can see a drop in the output of production of that array of 30, 40, 50%. And as that array gets a deeper and deeper penetration into the grid, that becomes a bigger impact. Well, you have to have the generation on the backside to match that. And so, and it happens very quickly, happens on a very quick ramp down or ramp up. And you have to have generation that matches that, that can compensate for that ramp up and that ramp down. And if you can't, you potentially lose the grid. It's much easier to do with an asset that you can predict and move. So a traditional generator, we can ramp up and ramp down as we need it. Well, now I have, I've always had slightly unpredictable loads. Now we've added slightly unpredictable generation and as those, and that being in photovoltaic renewables, all of those things, there's an aura of predictability, but it's not as predictable as before. And now you have two unpredictable things you're trying to match up and hold stable. So Hawaii does, it's kind of a mixed blessing that we do have a high ingress of photovoltaic because of the nature of the weather here, but it is also a engineering design issue if you want to say problem. It does present challenge because it is relatively unpredictable and you've got to balance the load with power generation source. So, well, let's segue into, let's talk a bit, a bit about how microgrids could be utilized in Hawaii. And I know we've got, you've been involved with several projects here on the islands, as well as the mainland as well too, but talk a little bit about what you see with microgrids here in Hawaii. Yeah. This is kind of a passionate opinion of mine. I know you've heard of it a bunch, but microgrids again are about energy security and doing that. And there are a lot of very important, very important defensible positions in Hawaii where we are in the middle of the Pacific. It makes us vulnerable, but also makes us a strategic area. And so providing, there are strategic areas in which microgrids provide and they provide another layer of defense against the vulnerability to our grid. On the mainland, you have multiple interconnected utilities. Between states. Right. Between states and all around. So essentially the mainland is one big giant interconnected grid. In Hawaii, if the utility goes down, the island goes down. There's nobody else that we can call. So if major generation station drops, you have a risk of loss of utility. If you have multiple failures, you can lose the island. And so on the mainland, they pick up the phone and just call somebody else and tell them, help us out, pump us more power. Here you can't do that. And so a microgrid really gives us a second level of protection on our critical assets, our harbors, our fuel depots, our airports, our Department of Defense acquisitions and things. That is a big part of it. Similarly, microgrids in Hawaii really can help and they'll help with penetrations of renewables. It's like I kind of hinted on it before. You can take problems that are on the macro level when you're designing an entire grid. If you try to deal with the entire grid issues and the things that the total solar penetration has on a grid or in the case of Hawaii, let's just talk solar. The penetration that solar has on the grid can destabilize you a little bit. And so what we look for, what we really look for is to break those down into smaller segments and make the grid more controllable on a smaller scale. It's literally biting the elephant one bite at a time to resolve the problem. That's a perfect example. Let's leave it there right now. Try to take a break, John, but I know when we get back from break, we'll talk a little bit more on a fascinating subject. So we'll be back in a few minutes. Aloha. My name is Carl Campania. Hello. This is Martin Despingh. I want to get you excited about my new show, which is called Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. And it's going to be on Think Tech Hawaii from downtown Honolulu on Tuesday afternoon at 5 p.m. And we're going to talk about to make architecture more inclusive on the islands, which is one of the definitions of humane, which is being tolerant of many people, of nature, of many other influences. So we're going to have some great guests, like today's guest, for example, my collaborator David Rockwood, who is the author of the awesome manifestation of humane architecture in the background. So see you on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. and look forward to it. All right. You're welcome back to Think Tech. Let's continue our discussion about microgrids. And we are honored today to have one of the premier engineers and experts on microgrids with us today on the show, John Bada from the A&E firm of Burns and McDonald. First half of the show, we talked a little bit about microgrids writ large. Let's get into something that a topic that is near and dear to both of our hearts. That is the renewable energy microgrid that we are building in a joint effort at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam in conjunction with the Air Force Research Lab. The project is called Pearl, the Pacific Energy Assurance and Resiliency Laboratory. Real quick, it is a Air Force funded program to basically provide renewable energy in a microgrid format to provide energy assurance and energy resiliency to the Hawaii Air Guard. And John and I are both involved in the project. And let's get into a little bit more about what Pearl is. And I'll turn that over to you, John. Talk to me a little bit about what Pearl means to you and let's tell our audience about what it's really about. Yeah. You know, it goes back to kind of what we were talking about earlier. Pearl is about energy security for a major mission that happens here in defense of the islands and of the United States. It's on a critical asset for the state of Hawaii and so focused on that. But the secondary piece of Pearl that makes it really interesting is the research and laboratory part of Pearl. It's where it makes my job fun and I know your job fun and challenging, right? But we really get a focus on finding technologies that are pushing the boundary a little bit, but that we can bring in and test at a scale that really hasn't been tested before and really push and move things to where we haven't taken traditional microgrids. My company has been fortunate to be involved with and I've been fortunate to be involved with a lot of different microgrids using both traditional generation and more newer renewable type generation and energy storage assets and this one pushes the boundary farther than we've ever gone before and so we're really excited to take on that challenge and do that and at the same time provide the security that we know we can but also provide a platform for technologies to show off what they can do. That's a great point and it should go without saying that this is a unique one-of-a-kind grid in the DOD right now and it does, it will compose, be composed of about six different grids right now centering on a portion of the Hawaii Air Guard campus that it's, again, you talked about the criticality of the mission there and this being a research lab type setup or development is also really important as well too so as an engineer, as an A&E would you talk to the audience a bit more about what your role is in the development of Pearl in particular? Right, so the first day honestly was studying the reality of can it be done. Are the electrical circuits set up right? Is there enough land to do what we need to do and is the atmosphere there and essentially what we do from there is we start putting a planning process together to say what's reality, what can we really do, what types of assets can we use, how's the electrical system configured and what upgrades and changes are we going to have to make to the infrastructure in order to really make the problem simpler, to break the problem down into a simple, into a more simple problem to solve and then to focus on, and to help people focus the mission really is one of the other things that I would say. We look at it and we say okay, here's what the overall goals are, here's what the realities are and kind of bring the two together and then help everybody get from A to B. My job is to make the state of Hawaii and the Air Guard successful, provide them what they're looking for in the mission and that's what we try to do is help everybody get from A to B and get to a final microgrid. Okay, again you alluded to the fact that you have been involved with both rather conventional grids and parole being a completely renewable, so what are the nuances between those types of grids? There's a lot of nuances between those two types of grids. That's a throw it off question. No, that's alright, that's what we're here for, right? Generators, for the most part we got generators figured out, right? We've got the controls figured out, we've got the pieces figured out, we can put them in and we can make them work. We understand the fuels, we understand how the fuels react, we understand how the generator is going to react. We're going to seek to use technologies that we think we know how they're going to act and we've tested them, they've been tested at small scales, they've been shown at small scales and that's one of the biggest things about parole is we're going to take the idea of using hydrogen and batteries and wind and all of that and we're going to take it and actually distribute it from kind of the building level where microgrids have kind of been done at that, at the building level and we're going to take it and we're going to put it out on the distribution level, we're going to pass it throughout the entire, throughout the entire fighter campus and push power where we need it, give the ability to select buildings that are the critical buildings and really make decisions with your power and that's a new thought process in today's design and in today's world is okay, I've got intermittent power generation that's not predictable, it goes back to what we were talking about, it's not predictable but I'm going to make it predictable and I'm going to make it usable. That, at that inverter based type technology where we see solid state power coming out that is a new concept to be taken care of at the megawatt level that we're at. So just to touch base with you a little bit on some of the technology, there's, you mentioned hydrogen wind, photovoltaic, there's a waste to energy system there that we think is pretty remarkable, that can literally burn different types of waste streams from construction to use tires to potentially use of hazmat such as boiler rigs and so on and so forth. That again is a type of R&D aspect that we're looking at as well too. So also on a touch base, you talked about diesel generator, well we've used generators, why is that unique and you know what's different, do you think we'll be different with this grid with respect to diesel generators? I know we talked a little bit about fuels though. Right, so with regards to diesel generators, we are going to put some diesels in and that's in the interest of reliability. The goal is when we're done to be able to turn them off and we're putting batteries in and having large scale batteries react with generators and really try to use the batteries and the renewables that are there in order to offset those generators and be able to turn them off and essentially use them as standby, true emergency, a third level emergency generation. You know when people hear batteries they think of Tesla, they think of 9 volt battery packs, what's the difference without getting too technical on some of the batteries that we're getting into for the use of on Perl? Yeah, asking me not to get technical stuff, right? You've had too many conversations with me, right? So the batteries that we're going to use are going to be large scale batteries. We're talking in the 3 meg and an uprange with large megawatt hours. When you're doing that there's limitations to how fast you can charge and discharge those batteries and there's many different technologies in the world. As you know, we're going to do the process of vetting some of them and everybody's got a new solution out there. Vetting through those and trying to figure out, okay, whose solution best matches my load profiles? Whose solution best matches what I expect to have out of this grid is a is a major challenge. And that's what we're looking for out of these batteries and it's going to be fun to work with these companies and see them perform because we're going to ask it to do a lot of things that you don't traditionally always ask batteries to do and not just be their standby but actually act almost like a generator. And we really are. We collect collaboratively with the Air Force Research Lab and some of the companies are really pushing the envelope on the technology that we are going to adapt on parole to. So we've talked a lot about security. I want you to just delve into when we talk security, we're not only talking stability in the grid itself, there's a cyber security aspect of it. And that I think I don't know, explain that a little bit to our audience about what we really talk about with respect to cyber security. Yeah, you couldn't have said it better. Cyber is one of our main concerns as far as reliability in the grid today. Like I said earlier, our grid is more and more reliant on data and information and our data and information is more and more reliant on the grid. And so we have to, in order to provide the resiliency that you're looking for out of a microgrid and the energy security you're looking for out of a microgrid, you have to secure the data that's being transmitted within that microgrid. If you can't keep the data secure, then you can't keep the microgrid secure. If I can send in, if I can send in bad data to the microgrid and shut the generator down without ever having to be, I can be on the other side of the world and shut the grid down. And if I can do that, if I can shut your microgrid down with ones and zeros without even having to do anything else to the system, then all the work you've done to secure everything else is null and void. And so we've made a, we've made a massive effort in securing microgrids at a cyber level and making sure that they, you know, nothing's, nothing's foolproof when it comes to cyber and defending something against cyber, but making it really tough and making it really hard to get into and really disrupt what we're trying to do at a microgrid level. So you've got the standards that are set for utility from a cyber standpoint. And we've been using utility and DOD standards to top that off. So not only would a cyber attack have to get through the utilities, but they'd have to get through on these bases and attack these systems too. So not that it can't be done, but our goal is to make it pretty hard in the cyber world. Well, and that's not a, that's not a what if it happens, that has happened already. I believe a year or two ago in the Ukraine, one of utility was hacked into and I think there were a couple hundred thousand customers in that utility that lost power for several days. That was an eye opener, I think, for a lot of the utility companies. And that was definitely interpreted to a cyber attack as well. So, you know, John, in the last few minutes we've got, let's, let's talk about what Pearl means to, you know, the Air Force has already defined the requirements for Pearl to provide energy assurance, energy resilience, reliability. How do you think Pearl as a laboratory will be useful to the state of Hawaii in its endeavor to reach the 2045 renewable energy mandate? Right. As you know, we're working, we're working with a lot of people on Island, along with the Air Force Research Laboratory, we're working with, we're actually working with HECO, we're talking with them, we're sharing information between the Air Guard and the state of Hawaii, HCAT, and HECO as well. And that fact, thank you. And working with all of those parties to deal with the real challenges of going 100% renewable in 2045, there's quite a bit of data gathered off of these micro grids. And in my talks with a lot of the utilities in the area and in the world, quite honestly, they're all interested in the decisions that we're making, because what's happening is a lot of the decisions we make on the micro grid level are the same ones that they're making. How do you decide on a ratio between generators and batteries? What's the right percentage of battery storage versus typical generation? And how much storage do you need to back up with a battery? What can you do with hydrogen? What are the percentages that are right? What is this technology good at that this technology is not good at? And how can I marry those two together? The data that comes off of this scale of battery, or of this scale of micro grid correlates. It's not direct one for one, but it correlates and it goes up. And a lot of the decision points that we make on the micro level are translating to the macro level. And so we stay in touch with a lot of our utility clients to share that information. And that is definitely going to play a role in the 2045 goal. The states get a lot of valuable information and quite honestly learning how to where the real risks are, and they're getting to do it on their island. We don't have to learn from we in Oahu don't have to learn from people on the mainland as to what what happened in their micro grid. We're going to stand up and say, here's what we're seeing. And here's how our solar is reacting here. And what's happening on our grid and what's best and what's best for the state of Hawaii. Great. So there is definitely a connection between Pearl and micro grids and utilization for the state of Hawaii. That's all the time we've got today. I'd like to say thank you, John, for your expertise and looking forward to collaborating with you more and your company on Pearl. And that's all we've got for again for the time for the show today. Stan should be back shortly. And as said is worldwide and never actually on the mainland for finding some renewable technology. But until then Aloha and thanks again for joining us.