 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Clean Energy, Thick Tech, Hawaii. My guest today is the Honorable Nick Dizon, CEO of NIDON Clean Energy and a sort of frequent visitor to these tables, since he is a veritable encyclopedia of energy-related information. And while I remember it, disclaimer, during the course of the show, Nick and I will be talking about particular brands of technology, and we do not endorse those brands. I do not. The state of Hawaii does not. Nick does not. And Thick Tech Hawaii does not endorse these brands. There are competitors out there, disclaimer. So welcome to the show again, Nick. Thanks, Howard. And there are—you are right at the cutting edge of such exciting stuff. We live in revolution every time we think of the Russian revolution, the French revolution, guns going off in the streets, looting and everything. We are probably going through just as—no, we're going through a more profound evolution in terms of the explosion of electronic gadgetry of all sorts into our lives. Think of anybody under the age of 20, the only way you can get that iPhone out of their hands is to pry it out of their cold, dead fingers. That did not happen 30 years ago. We didn't even know what an iPad was. So you are at the cutting edge of a subsection of this technological revolution. I would call it, in general, storage and integrating as an energy storage and integrating that with our electrical grid as we know Hawaii's goal is 100 percent clean energy by the year 2045. And we're actually ahead of schedule on that, believe it or not. With all the new high rises going up in Kakaako, we're still ahead of schedule because of technologies like energy storage and a profound evolution of policies and procedures on the part of Hawaiian electric. They get it now. The business is no longer as usual. We hardly even know what business as usual is anymore. So can you start by telling the audience something about time of use—I'll get a little background. Time of use refers to the utility not selling us electricity at the same rate across the board 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., but reducing the price of a kilowatt hour when there is excess capacity when there's too much electricity being produced and the Hawaiian electric is saying, please, please use more electricity now or give it to you cheap. And then during our peak in the evening, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m., they're saying, don't use so much. We're going to charge you more. There's a disincentive and then there's a normal time. And so time of use is coming. I think you work directly with those engineers at Hawaiian Electric. So what is the state of adopting time of use? Well, time of use currently has a pilot going on and they're offering their lowest rate of around 14 cents a kilowatt hour of usage. So when you use power under that program, it's costing you about 14 cents a kilowatt hour. And that's running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And then the penalty comes in if you're in a program from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., it could go as high as 38 cents a kilowatt hour. That's a difference, yeah. And then there's an off peak of 10 p.m. to 9 a.m. in the morning, where it's really around 24 cents. It's not really, it's a couple cents to your favor, but not strongly. The goal is to have people use power to charge batteries or to run whatever they're going to run during the sun hours when the PV across the island is pumping. And then you get the benefit of whatever power you need at 14 cents. And then, of course, you're trying not to use any power between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. That's been a challenge because a lot of the PV guys who are now adding storage, they're trying to figure out how to do that. Most of the programs out available now are kind of like package systems that you would get that are maybe based around Tesla or Samsung or LG. And those are not necessarily sized close enough to a customer's 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. load to guarantee that you can avoid that 38 cents penalty. So there's a lot of R&D going on in the renewable energy community on that because once you tell a customer that they should go on TOU, if that customer hits that 38 cents, they're going to want to blame somebody. They're not going to be happy. So there's this big debate that people ask me. If I have X kilowatts of PV power on my roof, how many kilowatt hours should I be able to store down in my battery? I've heard different answers for that. Five kilowatts on the roof, 10 kilowatt hours. No, 10 kilowatt hours wouldn't really do it, would it, for a typical residence? Well, you know, people come home and they start turning on the microwave, the TV, the stereo, the lights, the computer. The fridge is opening and closing. They may be using ovens. How do you account for the oven? What circuit is that on? The oven is running at 220-240. Your water heater is running at 220-240. Which is a good argument for solar water heating by the way. So if you don't have all those things taken care of, you might find that 10 kilowatt hour of battery is insufficient between 5 and 9 or 10 p.m. And if the solar production was poor that day, you could find yourself more in a hole. And customers generally don't want to think about shedding load. They're not going to come home, check to see how much sun they had, what the state of charge of the battery is against the load they customarily use. So that's a challenge on the design side. And there's a lot of math involved. The math includes variables, i.e. how much sun you did or did not have, how much load you use between 5 and 10 p.m., for example, what devices you use for how long. And once you calculate that out, that might be expensive in terms of the amount of battery you buy. And then you might find out that you actually don't have enough PV to recharge all that battery during the day. If you already own PV and you want to add battery after the fact, it's going to be expensive and the return on investment may be very far out. Yeah. Yeah. This is the argument that I keep on having. I had a guest recently who said, no, no, no, no, he can solve it, but a little bit on the controversial side. But just to make a plug for solar water heating again, that's real because the minute you get home from work in school, somebody's going to want to take a shower, you have to wash dishes, use that nice solar energy. That's a big battery. There's an 80-gallon battery of hot water that you're sitting on there. Well, thermal to thermal is more efficient. A lot of people have thought maybe we can use those on-demand hot water heaters, except those will suck a battery dry real quick. And the inrush current that happens from firing one of those things up, you really don't want to have that on battery. So truthfully, for TOU to work, the system for the home or the business that's going to go on TOU needs to be designed to work with TOU. So that's the size of the renewable energy, the size of the battery against a known charge-discharge profile to make that TOU safely assured to not hit the 38 cents. Which would mean a lot of monitoring up front. You'd have to stick all kinds of monitors, and this is just residential, a single-family residence, all kinds of monitors. When does your oven go on? How, when does your fridge really consume? And then that's your model, and then you can size accordingly, but that all costs money, and that's not a guarantee either. That's right. So front work, to figure that out, requires a skill set that a lot of companies don't currently have. And once you have that information, then your selection of the equipment and how you set it up, and how you use the software that comes with that equipment, be it from SMA, the Sunny Island, or from Outback, or from Schneider, or Solar Edge, whichever battery inverter system you get, or inverter with battery system you get, the programming parameters vary from one to the next, and you need to be intimately familiar with that programming to leverage it and to get the best use of it so that you're not going to have the customer start buying at 30 cents a kilowatt hour. Yeah, so where the normal solar battery installer might just need, say, a couple of years of education from Honolulu Community College, it sounds like somebody doing these calculations is going to have to ratchet his education up to a whole new order here. And currently it's not being taught in any of the schools. I mean, the NAPCEP certification doesn't cover this. There are no colleges or schools here in Hawaii, and throughout most of the USA that teach this. Because it requires a single person to know and or coordinate multiple disciplines. We're talking electrical, we're talking chemical. There's a bunch of things that go on. And then it's understanding what CEN-DNI is, what kind of PV panels you're using, what your string is going to be on DC coupling or whether it's AC coupling. And then it ties to what kind of inverter you're going to use and whether the programming variety in the inverter will match the battery that you're putting on and that it's sized to handle the charging of the solar and or electrical and the load and charge discharge profile. A lot of each one of those represents its own math formula. Wow. And when you tie all those in, in NIDON's case, it turns into a three shock board long formula. So like if you go into any public school, then you look how long that shock board is, like four by 10 feet. We fill up three of those. OK, well, on that cheery note, we have to take a break. But let's continue the discussion on a much larger scale. I've got in mind, say, a military base. The military is really interested. OK. And maybe we can ratchet this up and have it be more hopeful here. So Think Tech Hawaii, cold green, my guest. Nick Dizon, CEO of NIDON Clean Energy, back in a minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Greetings, it's me, Angus McTech, the longtime host and star of Hibachi Talk. Think Tech is important to our community because we bring all kinds of cool ideas and I bring gadgets to the show. So you've got to watch it for sure. But for the first time, Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign that raised $40,000. Give thanks to Think Tech. We'll run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can that Think Tech in Hawaii can continue to be public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine and I'm a charge. I've already made my donation and it's really hard to get disgust when to make a donation, but I already did. Please sit in your tax deductible contribution by going to this website. Thanks for Think Tech dot Cosbox dot com. Say that three times fast. Closing on behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech, Hawaii's 30 plus weekly shows. Thank you and we're mahalo for watching Think Tech and your generosity. Let your wing gang free wherever you be. Aloha. Good afternoon again. Howard Wig, Code Green, Hawaii, my guest. Nick is on CEO of Need on Clean Energy. Nick was just painting a rather gloomy picture of how time of use could apply at the residential level. But then we came up with some very simple solutions if this does come to pass. A typical residence could put their dishwasher, clothes washer, and dryer on a timer so that they go on between say 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and make use, suck up some of that really inexpensive energy. But then Nick said also, cook with a crock pot so that it's all, the food is all nice and warm waiting for you when you get home. You don't have to use the stove much less the oven. The oven is a real, real draw. But let's apply this time of use pricing because I know it's coming to something as big as say a military base. A military base might have a few acres of PV to feed into the grid. How would a large institution maybe make use of time of use? Well, the challenge has been what energy storage pencils out on that big scale. And it can, of course economies of scale kick in. If you've got the land available for the photovoltaic array and you have a known load that's got a predictable usage pattern, which a commercial entity should have or a military entity should have, and then you slice off that segment of power that you want to be on TOU. You might identify a building because you want to have a defined load. So it's at the meter where you're going to start to have this knowledge and this interchange to make the TOU work. So once you've sliced off the load that you have, if land isn't an issue, and of course the land being like the military has the land or the state has a land or the county has a land for a county, state, or federal building or facility to start doing TOU. Oh, yeah, it's definitely possible. And their load profiles tend to be very predictable. And the other thing is a lot of these military and county and state facilities actually don't have as much going on between 5 and 10 PM. So if they don't have as much going on, then the amount of battery you need to cover that under TOU would be lower. So then it calls into the idea that what if you were able to have that battery for the county, state, or federal cover even more, like say from 5 PM to 9 AM. And then all the power that building's getting during the day is at $0.14. I as a taxpayer would really like to see something like that happen. And if they've done all the other things that you've been talking about for years, LED lights, energy star appliances, all this energy efficiency, then whatever they are buying is going to be at $0.14. And then the amount of PV and battery they need is going to be less. So that's a very useful application, especially for us taxpayers who got to finance the county, state, and federal government. Yeah, that's an excellent example. I'm thinking of the office building I work in. 7 o'clock in the morning, there's not much going on, but by 8 o'clock there's quite a bit going on. So we're in the intermediate range there. And then the peak is through the afternoon, but by 5 o'clock people are filing out of the office. And you could have a policy of boom, 5 o'clock that AC goes off. End of story, yeah. Yeah, I mean, a lot of buildings in downtown, they're on a central cooling loop. The central cooling loop is, they generally shut it down at around 6 p.m. after all the office workers are gone, for them as well. And maybe, this is getting a little out there, but there is the community solar program they're still working on. If the community solar program for a condo or office building or a hotel was invoked, then all of a sudden those buildings may be able to leverage TOU. Cause that's not, they don't call it wheeling, but it's sort of kind of like wheeling. But if the net results is your electrical costs for the daily operation of your nonprofit, your business is cut down to 14 cents a kilowatt hour during the day, that's hard to beat. Yeah, yeah. And we're not punishing Hawaiian Electric by doing this. Hawaiian Electric is trying to smooth out its load and it knows it's headed for 100% clean energy. And one of the main issues we have to deal with right now is called the duck curve, where the demand for electricity during the middle of the day goes way down like a duck's back, that's because of all the PV. And as soon as the sun goes down, for you, here comes the duck's head way up here. And they've got to smooth that thing out. Well, it's dangerous actually. I mean, Hawaiian Electric is stuck with a really old distribution network. It was never designed to handle all this seesaw action going on during the day from all this PV. And they have major parts of their grid where the amount of PV production is two and a half times the actual load usage of that area. So to having two and a half times the amount of electricity bouncing around in a circuit with nowhere to go is dangerous. This is why these days, the electricians we work with, they have to be aware of arc flash. 10 years ago, we weren't worried about arc flash. So arc flash suits, arc flash breakers, those are being required now because there's power looking for a path to ground. The last place we want it to be is one of us or one of the contractors or anybody. But right now, that is a serious situation. So you mentioned something that I'm not familiar with, customer self-supply plus. What in the world is that? OK, the PUC has been working with Hawaiian Electric to come up with programs to replace the old NEM. The old retail NEM's gone and now the whole sale. The net energy metering. So net energy metering, as we knew it in the past, is gone. Nobody can get it anymore. You can get customer self-supply plus. So that's like net energy metering, but you're only allowed to export to the grid if Hawaiian Electric thinks there's room to take it. So what's unclear in that scenario, so there's no battery in customer grid supply, plus, OK? What's not known is what's the guaranteed amount of power you would sell back to the utility under that because it would be at the wholesale rate, which means that the return on investment might be too far out. Then there's customer grid supply plus, or what they call smart export. So that's a battery system with foldable techs that is allowed to export to the grid the inverse of TOU. So into the 5 PM to 9 or 10 PM peak, Hiko would like to accept that power at that point. It's smart from Hiko's point of view because during the day, that PV was not pumping power into the grid, driving that grid instability worse. It was being put into a customer paid for battery, which now the customer gets to benefit from that excess power because they can sell it to the utility, albeit at wholesale. So if the customer has designed a system that effectively makes them qualify for TOU, theoretically on a bad sun production day, they could recharge their batteries prior to smart export at $0.14, and then turn around and sell it back to the utility at $0.14. I mean, that's a zero-sum game, but at least you're not losing. Yeah, yeah. And that brings to mind EVs, electric vehicles. Those batteries in those EVs are big, and if the EV owner wants to enter into it in agreement with a wine electric like this, could the EV battery also be a source of emergency power? Well, that's been discussed a lot, trying to use Leafs and Tesla's unused battery power to sell back to the grid. Both the PUC and Hiko are looking at that. Part of the problem, though, is they all use different battery technologies. They all use different ways of charging the batteries. And they generally didn't design the Leaf or the Tesla or the Volt to necessarily export. And that export would have to be, at this point, through the car charger out to the grid through the meter. And the equipment and the methodology by which that could be done safely, that hasn't been developed yet. OK, so this is still in the future. Yeah, there's a lot of talk about that. But even the way charging is done for a Leaf is different from a C-Max hybrid pluggable or a Prius pluggable or a Volt or a Tesla. They all don't behave the same. Even though they use level two chargers, it doesn't mean that what's happening behind the scenes. Because each one is designed with chargers and software customized to that particular package. Good point, yep. And some of that's classified or, I don't know, company proprietary. I don't necessarily want their competitor to see how it is they set up their battery packs and charge it. That's understandable to me. And we don't have a lot of time, but I did want to touch on a subject we were deep into when you were last on board, and that is the Aquian battery. I think you were on on day one, on day two, Aquian announced the chapter 11. Yeah, it was pretty amazing. We were actually at the BIA show. And the day, I think I was on this show the day before the first day of the BIA show. So we talked about Aquian, which is saltwater batteries, which are the safest, most inexpensive battery to use, and we're using those now. We're still deploying those. And saltwater does not catch on fire. Saltwater does not explode. And it's not a hazardous chemical either. So it spills or somebody hits it. We're not in a dangerous situation. Well, the next day, the first day of the show, I get a call at 11 AM, Aquian in final chapter 11. So we scrambled, and it wasn't an existential threat to us by any means. But obviously, it caused a crimp in how we were proceeding. Well, recently, just a couple of months ago, Aquian has a new owner. They announced they came out of chapter 11. And they're saying that they'll be back online with production and sales through the sales channel by April of 2018. Now, we don't know if that's going to be us or how that's going to work across the world or in the US. Obviously, we're looking forward to seeing how that works. But having said that, there are other battery technologies that we had been testing and looking at from long ago that we are deploying now. So we still are deploying Aquian batteries in the channel. And with some of the other channel members, we are holding some of those in reserve for warranty. Although, to date, we've had no need to do a warranty replacement on batteries we've designed in on a system. And on that very cheery note, we need to bid upon to do. Obviously, Nick, we're going to have to have you back in another six months or something. And you will have a new story to tell. This is such a rapidly evolving field. And in my humble opinion, each year, storage is going to be in a more and more and more important technology in achieving 100% clean energy by the year 2045. This is Howard Wiig, Code Green, Think, Takeaway. Nick Dizon, president of Needon Clean Energy. Thank you so much, Nick. And we bid you fond adieu.