 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man on Statehood Day here in Hawaii. The 18th of August is the date that Hawaii in 1959 became a state. So happy Statehood Day and I hope everybody's out there at the beach and not working. If you have to work, sorry about that. But I'm off today. I'm going to go to the beach after this, I think. Anyway, this week we have got Ryan Wubbins from Burns and McDonald again. I'm going to have him as a regular guest because he's my favorite electrical engineer. And we get to talk more technical stuff about things that may impact you. What I'd like to do is start off today's show by talking about an event that I went to yesterday with Rachel James from our office. And it was sponsored by Hawaii Electric and it's been going on for several years and I don't remember the exact name of the event, so I'm sorry I should have brought this stuff with me. But it was a sustainable housing and event that brought in stakeholders. There were architects there. There were builders. There were folks who put up solar, state entities. The new director of the state energy office was there with a lot of her staff. Eugene from D-Bed, our main economist in D-Bed was there to talk about the economic implications of housing in the state across the board, all kinds, apartments and everything. And we basically just talked a lot about the impact of renewable energy as we move forward towards more and more renewable energy on the grid and also some of the projects that have been going on in energy efficiency and also in what we kind of termed now tiny homes, which it's not like where you put leprechauns and stuff for Mennahoney. It's actually an architectural trend across the continental United States where folks that want to have a home but don't have the capital, maybe they're paying off their school loans or whatever, they get into these three and four hundred square foot homes. Some are on wheels. Some are temporarily on wheels and they can be put on a slab. But they're basically three or four hundred square feet and that's the whole house. Kitchen, bathroom, shower, bedroom and it's almost like living on a boat except you're on land. In fact, that's a pretty good analogy. It's a lot like living on a boat. Every square inch of space is used under the stairs of storage or shelves or drawers or something so everything is accounted for every square inch that you've got. But they make these things very efficient, energy efficient and they're really kind of a neat model. So we spent a lot of time yesterday talking about not only the tiny homes and the implications of saving energy, but we had one presenter from the big island who was helping the low income folks that live, say around Milolei, around South of Kona on the big island who are already so far off the county system that they're on catchment of water and quite often off the grid. And there were cases where some of those folks were so far off the grid they basically had to drive somewhere every two days to get enough ice to throw in their coolers to keep their food cool and their water catchment systems were so old that they had to go and buy bottled water to have drinking water. And so she was explaining how she got some USDA grants to help these folks get some PV on the roof and establish some portable solar and some fixed solar on the roof to get them freezers or to get them enough of a water purification system that they can at least have drinking water coming out of the tap, which is something they never had before. So today's discussion, we're going to kind of start there. And with the premise being, you know, electric grids are pretty complicated things and Ryan understands all about those. But when you start to roll that back and get to a simpler and simpler mode, is there like a sweet spot that certain communities can take advantage of where being off the grid maybe isn't such a bad thing? I think some people want to be off the grid. Other folks have to be off the grid and a lot of folks could be off the grid, but they're lazy. They don't want to, they don't want to have to understand anything. They just want to flip a switch on and pay Pico for the power. But there's probably technically a really good range in there where people could come off the grid and that's what we're going to talk about. So, Ryan, welcome today. Thank you. See you again. Yeah, see, I, I thought I climbed my way up the electrical engineer list to the stands, favorite electrical engineers. That's, I've been trying on those. You're at the pinnacle. Yes, congratulations. You could go home and crack a bottle of champagne over that one or something. All right. But thanks. But you know, you heard me, my entry there, what do you think? And can, when we have these little tiny homes, they're, they're pretty basic and they're pretty simple. Is that something that's beyond the reach of the average person to set up their own off the grid kind of system in a, in a small home or even a medium sized home? Yeah, absolutely. So the best thing about a tiny home or a small home, let's kind of lump those two together because you might have the tiny home, which we kind of think maybe that's on wheels and that's RV like house. Great, RV size anyway. Yeah. And then sometimes let's just go to small homes and kind of lump them into other than less than 100,000 square feet. It's not that big, it's a few bedrooms in the living room. The best thing about these houses and getting yourself to possibly off grid is they're just simple and they, in being smaller, they're much more efficient because you're managing your living space to be less. You're going to need less light just to hit your floors and your ceilings. You're going to need less air flow. If you have a fan, you have one instead of three. Maybe you don't even have AC being here and you probably don't. You might not need it. Even if you do, it's going to be smaller. As you see, the air conditioners are sized for square footage. You're consuming less load. The less load you're going to consume, the much easier it's going to be for you to become off grid. That's the best part about them in that aspect. There'll be some other aspects are a little bit harder on how technically involved is it? Do I want to be in my system? How energy efficient do I want to be in my system? And there's some different ways to help manage that, whether it doesn't always have to be just you. We can start grouping some houses together and then either that community goes after a way to work on this together for the utility comes in and helps provide that service. So one of the things that you got to consider, especially if you're using solar, is you get sunlight. I mean, certain communities, you're up against the mountain. You don't really get the morning light. And by the afternoon, the mountains block in the afternoon light. Like on a windward coast, maybe in Kahalua and stuff. It could be kind of tough. What are some of the things that you want to consider when you start thinking about solar first, I mean, besides the sun being there? Like how big is the system? Like say, for example, you knew that you used in a small house maybe 15 kilowatt hours a day. And what are some of the things you'd consider in sizing your system? How many PV panels and how much battery and things like that? Yeah, absolutely. The big numbers are going to be what's your peak load? What's your kilowatts? How much kilowatts do you end up using at a certain time? And then how many kilowatt hours are you using, let's say, over the course of the day or week a month? Let's stop there and explain something. So the peak kilowatts are like the worst case scenario appliance that you turn on, and it puts a big load on your system for a few seconds or a second. And that's the peak load. That's the peak load. And then the average load or the total load of the day is over the whole day how many kilowatt hours. Because when you get your bill for more electric, it bills you in kilowatt hours. But what most people don't see is their house is set up for 50 amps or their size for a certain load, and that's kind of transparent to most people. So the two big considerations are the max load you ever put on your system at one time and then the amount of energy you need all day long, correct? Yep, absolutely. And that it's not going to be an average of that bill that you receive from the utility that says, OK, I was an average of this many kilowatt hours. That's my kilowatts. When you turn on your washer, your dryer, your microwave, that's just going to drive up little peaks. So when you want to come off the grid, you've got to be ready to supply the energy for those peaks. If it's solar, you can't just ask the solar, hey, I need a little bit more. Just give it to me right now, because solar is just, I'm taking on the sound, and I'm going to give you what I got when I can. You can do a little things with the solar, but you're still limited. You've got to ask something else there to start managing. That's where we start talking about an energy storage device to really go off the grid. Or some loads are going to, I don't want to say suffer, but they might drop out for a little bit as you give a little bit of power to your dryer to start up, maybe, if you have something like that. So you've got two options there. You either build a little bit more energy storage or solar than you really need for future growth or for maybe heavier loads than the average person. Or you get real akamai, real smart about when you do your laundry. Like, on purpose, don't do your laundry while you're trying to cook something in an electric oven or electric stove and run your skill saw. And turn on all your lights and your fans. You basically have to be thinking more as an individual what you're doing to your grid. Is that pretty sure? Yep, that's exactly it. And sometimes you're already experiencing this. If you're in your garage and you're building a boat or something, you've got your power tools running and maybe the dishwasher or something's going at the same time and you just keep it in the trip because you're doing too much at once. You're already naturally, oh, let me turn this off and go over here. It's something we're already doing in some cases but not instinctively all the time. And that would change if you're going to build your system to be really efficient, really, really tight. You're going to be, you're already be built for that mentally to just, OK, let's turn my washing machine on. Right now I'm using the dryer. Instead of this, I'm using this. Yeah, you'll build that in. What are the advantages? I know as a general rule, we go for efficiency first. So we try and build an efficient system before we put PV on. You don't just throw PV on the roof and then decide to figure out whether you can save energy. You might as well put in the right amount of solar and batteries and things. But one of the big energy hogs I would call it in your house is a water heater, especially if you have electric water heater. So is putting a solar water heater on your house pretty simple or is it complex or is it, I mean, is it something that you would consider energy efficiency move before you go put PV on your roof for electricity? Yeah, the nice thing about a solar water heater, they work really well. I mean, they're capturing as much sunlight as they can, even in a little bit of a cloudy situation. But they're not affecting, let's say, the utility, like a solar wood. When you go to solar now, you're going to have to start asking the utility or you're going to have to start permitting that because you're tying into a bigger system. So the solar water heater, they're relatively simple in how they work. They're not as simple as an electric water heater, but they have great payback. And I would recommend installing them wherever you can. So you could do it in your own net metering. Yeah, exactly. How about those instant on kind of heaters, gas or electric? Would they do a similar trick? Would they actually help you out? Yep, they are going to help you out as far as energy efficiency because your electric water heater or even your solar, it's holding a tank of warm water on the side. And you're always keeping it warm in case you need to start using it. You can't just flip it on and say, I'm going to use it because it's going to take time to heat that water up, just like you boil tank water on yourself. So an instant water heater is basically just saying, hey, you want hot water now, I'm just going to heat it really hot. And you're only using what you need at that time. So they are a more efficient. That's a heat exchanger, right? So you've got a bunch of coils wrapped around a heat source, and it's got so much volume of water in it. And by the time it goes from start to out, it's heating up the whole way. So it's pretty much on-demand water heating. Yep. The thing to think about that, if you're going to go electric on those, they draw more current when they're heating the water up because they need to heat the water up really fast. As compared to a water heater, it's just keeping in mind. So that's one of those surge components that you talk about. OK, we're going to take a quick break here. And we'll be back with Ryan Wubin's in about 60 seconds. Talk more about not only designing these systems, but maybe some of the permitting issues that come into play when you start doing things like putting PV on your roof or, in Warren's case, he does a lot of industrial size or commercial size work and what the impacts are for him. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Ted Rawson here, folks, you're host on Where the Drone Leads, our weekly show at noon on Thursdays here on Think Tech. When we talk about drones, anything to do about drones, drones, remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, whatever you want to call them, emerging into Hawaii's economy, educational framework, and our public life. We talk about things associated with the use, the misuse, technology, engineering, legislation with local experts, as well as people from across the country. Please join us noon on Thursdays and catch the latest on what's taking place in the world of drones that might affect you. Hey, welcome back to Stand to Energy Man, but not on my lunch hour today. We're on my day off, so I'm glad to be here on Think Tech. And it's always fun, especially fun talking to Ryan. He's, like I say, he's my favorite electrical engineer on the entire planet. And it's good chatting with him because I get so smart when I talk to him. And it makes me feel more comfortable when I do my job. So thanks for being here, Ryan. And we kind of left off talking about some solar and solar water heating and things like that. But I wanted to switch gears just a little bit and talk a little bit about permitting, too, because we work on projects together for the military. And it's no longer, a lot of times, just a building permit. And some of the issues we talked about yesterday with in that sustainable housing thing was how some of the, even the county permitting for these tiny homes was almost restrictive or prohibitive because it was designed for bigger dwellings or bigger facilities. And the permitting actually stopped people from doing some of the things that were fairly common sense and simple for a smaller home. And so some of the initiatives we talked about yesterday were getting the county and maybe some of the state agencies to change their policies or change their rules on permitting. But what are some of the things on your scale, on the commercial scale, industrial scale? Some of the kinds of permits that you always end up having to look at for environmental, for health, for building, things like that. Sure. So permitting on a larger scale, something much more industrial, will have some correlations to permitting a series of tiny homes or smaller houses. And the correlation comes with basically how much changes to the infrastructure you're making within an area. When a tiny home you think, I'm just dropping a little house, I'm not really causing any problem. Let's look at it on an industrial scale. Some common questions would be, how am I affecting the storm water system? What am I putting in place here that's going to redirect water when it rains? We get plenty of rain here. That is something that you need to be actively aware of all the time. It's not even what there is a storm, if it happens, you gotta be ready for it. Wastewater treatment, what water am I consuming? Is it ready for me to take? And what am I gonna do with it when I'm done with it? And electrically, I need X amount of load. Maybe I'm gonna, I want to have some solar. What am I going to do to that electrical utility? The permitting process will apply to all of those and a lot more, especially with environmental and carbon emission type on the industrial side. But let's just focus on like a wastewater. Wastewater I think is gonna be easy to explain. When we add a bunch of tiny homes within an area, you say, why can't I just put in my house and have everything work? Well, when you watch those shows on the tiny house things, that a lot of times they're gonna have a composting toilet. And people will look at the composting toilet and half of them are saying, ooh, the other half, yeah, yeah, I can do that. Let's say it's not a composting toilet and it's just like the traditional house, right? You know, you're hooked up. You are adding, well, you're adding crap into the system. When you add in tiny houses, you're going to have a tiny house here and next to it and next to it. And you start adding the amount of people that are adding to that system on a daily basis. Somebody has to come for that, yeah. Somebody has to come for that. And the system was built, the system, the wastewater piping and the wastewater treatment plant were all built upon an infrastructure long before we started talking tiny homes and getting everybody closer together. So you're already having to account for adding that harmony in the back of the lot. That is an increased burden on the system that needs to be permitted. That's the important part. You're saying you want to do something, you can go back to the utility and say, hey, are you ready to take on my stuff right now? Because I'm going to add all this. You know, if it doesn't, it starts to back up and we have a lot bigger problem. It's very much correlated on the electrical side too. You can't just go to the utility and say, hey, I'm ready to drop this load. Now on a tiny house here, you're a little loud and it's going to be more manageable. You'll likely catch less from them as you will the wastewater side. It is very important to have loads. If everybody started adding these systems, fire protection is another one. On their own, without going through that process, you can create unsafe situations, not only for yourself, but for the community as a whole. And that's where it can become a little bit more of a bigger problem. So the permitting process is important. I'm not sure of all the regulations that some people have issues with or what they don't have issues with, but they are there for a reason. Some of them, some of great reasons, some maybe less, but they are there for a reason. So to basically try and simplify, the more impact your construction, your dwelling, your whatever you're building has on external infrastructure, the grid, the wastewater treatment, the storm drain system, whatever, that adds complexity to the overall urban planning or whatever. So when we go back to talking about tiny homes or small communities, and especially communities that are already on water catchment there, and maybe septic tanks or something rather than being attached to a sewer system or a county sewer line, you can start checking those off in the permitting phase and say, well, I'm not impacting the water from the county, because I don't use county water. And I'm not impacting the sewer system because I'm not on county sewer. And I'm not impacting HECO, HELLCO, MECO, whoever because I'm gonna be using my own electricity. Maybe I am impacting the fire department. Can they get to my house because the road's not wide enough? Can, is there a bridge before my house that won't support a fire truck or an ambulance or a police car or things like that? So basically though, I guess I'm getting at, is the simpler your structure and the simpler your community, and the more those things you take into account, we probably could customize some of the permitting where it could be fairly simple for a community, especially of tiny homes or off the grid homes to get permitted. And maybe be permitted as a group, but is that a fair assumption? Yeah, absolutely. If you were to go in and say, instead of I'm just gonna build one house here, I'm gonna make a system of tiny houses, but I'm going to build it and design it in a way that I'm gonna release the burden on the other utilities, it'll be easier to permit. I'm not gonna say it's going to be easy because now you added a level of engineering to that system. Now, electrically, we can make it go off the grid. We can grid tie it and add an energy storage device so that you could still receive power from the grid, but it's gonna be less of a burden on the utility. I think we'll get into that, not today, but maybe next time we talk about how that works. Wastewater, if you all want to in that community be on a composting toilet, that's going to shift the amount of permitting you have to do. You can't just add a cesspool anymore, that's why I just changed, I think it was last month that cesspools won't be allowed, I could be off on that, but... No, I remember there was like a grandfather piece about bringing in old septic systems and people had to upgrade. So you might want to say, and to kind of tie into that a little bit, why can't I just build a cesspool because I'm not burdening that system? Well, in a way, you are burdening the overall system that is out of Hawaii that a cesspool will basically just put everything into the ground and then the ground deals with it. Well, the ground is part of our overall system as well. The ground water is feeding back into that wastewater plant or we're using that to clean up and provide water for everybody else. So if you're going to make that worse, then you are impacting us. So you can make it easier and I don't know exactly how I think it's neat that the idea could be there for how can we build larger communities that are at a reduced impact on the overall system to ease the permitting of it, theoretically, yeah. So most of these considerations we've talked about so far are pretty much county building permit issues. But then we have state issues and even federal regulations, environmental protection regulations, maybe even like for some of the stuff we've done, FAA will have us do a glare study to make sure the PV array we're putting out doesn't blind pilots when they're trying to fly an approach or things like that. So what are some of the less typical ones that may impact a residential work that are kind of on that state and federal level? Can you think of any besides the glare study or? Well, for example, I know this isn't your expertise, but an environmental assessment versus an environmental study that timelines and things, I know you've probably worked on some projects, but we've gotten into some traps here in Hawaii where we think that an environmental assessment, which is a fairly short process can be done because there's already similar stuff going on around that they can go, yeah, well, they're doing it and they're doing it and it's okay, so we ought to be okay too because we're doing the same thing. And then find out that the EPA goes, no, you need to do a whole environmental assessment thing. Again, he did a whole study, cradle to grave, what you're doing, those can add a lot of money and a lot of time to your projects. In fact, one of the reasons I wanted to talk about permitting is I've done construction for 25 or 30 years here, mostly when I was younger. And we were at a point then where you could literally take a, if you're just like adding to your house, adding a few feet to your house or something, you just take in a piece of paper with a sketch on it to the building department in the county and sit down with a building inspector and he'd make some recommendation and changes and sometimes you can do them right there. Sometimes you had to go home and redraw the drawings and put things in and bring them back a couple of days later but we could get a permit to build something in a couple of days or a week. And it's like, seems like nowadays you just can't do that. Why is the permitting gotten so cumbersome? It becomes when it wasn't as big of an impact on the overall system, it was easier to handle. Now, as we start to throw in high rises, every few blocks, we start changing dramatically that system all the time. So there's a level of programming city-wide, county-wide, statewide that has to take into place but at the same time, the funding support that we typically give those is not relative. I would guess that those are probably related. Okay. Yeah, I think that that probably hit it right on the head because for example, right now we're kind of going through a building boom in Kakaako. We've got the state bird, the tower crane out there, you know, lifting concrete all over the place and it's getting kind of wild out there but we've got 2.7 unemployment rate in the state and that's mostly because of the construction going on. There's a lot going on and so getting a building permit from the county now can be a real challenge even for a small project because a lot of their inspectors and a lot of their folks are out busy working a lot of other projects but they don't fund more inspectors or, you know, because that's cost and you can't do that. Well, believe it or not, we're pretty much blown out of time and I'd like to thank Ryan Williams from Burns and McDonald from coming down again and we'll see him in about a month because I'm gonna have him on regularly and we'll talk some more about solar I think. We'll try and get more into the solar discussion on the next show. So thanks for joining us down in the energy man. Thanks to Cindy and to Ray here in the studio for putting us together on Think Tech Hawaii and we'll see you next week, aloha.