 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's noon on a given Monday, and I'm here with Marco Mangelsdorf. Hi, Marco. It's great to talk to you always yet again. Well, just to have Tuan Moa on for a change, even though we love our guests. We have over the past month, and we've had some great ones. I mean, it's great to be just Tuan Moa again on this Monday of February 11th. So thank you so much for having me back, my friend. Absolutely. Energy 808, the cutting edge. So let's talk about something about, talk about. Let's talk about the talk about. And that's namely, you know, the problem with making Hawaii, from an energy point of view, reliable, having reliable systems, and having resilient systems. There's an awful lot of talk about that. There's so many conferences, and so much you see in the newspaper, and everybody, you know, expressing themselves on the issue. Can you help me define what we're talking about when we talk about reliability and resilience? We'll not be happy to. I mean, the good buzzwords are the bright baubles of the day. Terms of utility planning and power generation seem to be focusing on R&R, not so much rest and relaxation, but to resiliency or reliability and resilience in terms of what needs to be done, and in my opinion quite a bit needs to be done. What needs to be done in order to, or if you're a vegetarian tofu up, the grids across our island chain to be able to be more robust and more able to withstand adverse events, whether it's a lava flow like we've had here on the island for a number of months last year, or whether it's adverse weather events like the whole state has been enjoying, enjoying in quotation marks just over the past couple of days. I mean, there were gusts on the top of Mauna Kea here on this island up to 191 miles an hour over the past 24, 36 hours. And that, of course, those kind of wins can play havoc with the utility grid in terms of blowing over poles, knocking trees into power lines, and there weren't a small number of people across the state, tens of thousands of people who were without power at any given moment or for hours or longer over the past couple of days. So what needs to be done in terms of making our grid more robust and reliable in terms of staying on, and then the resilience part, according to our friends at FERC, FERC being the federal, they define resilience as, quote, the ability to withstand and reduce the magnitude and or duration of disruptive events, which includes the capability to anticipate, absorb, adapt, and to and or rapidly recover from an event, close quotation. They use some alliteration there, anticipate, absorb, and adapt. So it sounds to me like reliability is at the front end, it's preparing, it's making yourself stronger, and resilience is developing systems to recover after you've had a problem of some kind. Right, so reliability, you can harden the system so to speak, whether, you know, harden an IT system against the likelihood or possibility of a cyber attack, or harden the actual physical infrastructure and backbone of utility grids. And I know Hawaiian Electric and the folks at KIUC are putting a priority on doing this, but my great fear is, Jay, my huge fear is that we are living on borrowed time in a sense that last year we had six major weather events cruise on through the central Pacific, four of them were hurricane strength and one of them managed to get up to a category five, which is the highest category. So sooner or later one of these pull an aniki on Oahu, Maui, Kauai again, the big island, as what happened on Kauai 1991. So what can we do, question number one, what do we need to do, question number two, in a short term time frame to beef up, harden our electrical infrastructure so that it won't be catastrophic in terms of the results as the folks on Puerto Rico are still dealing with, which is going to require essentially the rebuilding of that grid to the tune of multi-billions of dollars and where's that money going to come from. So we don't experience what Iniki wreaked on Kauai 91 or what a couple of hurricanes did to Puerto Rico in 2017. And amongst the various priorities that our legislators and our regulators and the general public at large, what priority do they put on increasing the reliability and resiliency of the electric grid versus other societal priorities such as homelessness, education, deferred maintenance of UH, and on and on and on and on. And my case would be, I would make the case that this should be a high priority item. Well, this is survival. This is survival. And if you don't do this, lives will be lost. That's the part that escapes me because, I mean, that concerns me. We have so much discussion about these things. So many organizations and commissions and nonprofits and conferences, Hither and Yan, and they all come to make the point that, you know, we are going to suffer extreme weather. We better get ready for it. Okay, I know that. You and I know that. I'm not sure the legislature knows that, but you and I know that. So how do we go from there from that conclusion, which we've already made, to taking some steps? Well, let's try it out a little bit right here on the show. Now, narrowing the focus here is we're talking about the electrical grid because we see that as a very high priority in a way higher than any other priority because of the disastrous results if we don't have a working grid. So the question first is, you know, I'm not assuming that not much has been done to really harden it or to develop resiliency systems. So the question is what is likely, most likely, again, a priorities list, what is most likely to happen? Well, it's not, you know, climate change in the sense of sea level rise. We have to deal with that later. That's not a priority right now. What's a priority right now, especially in the year of El Nino, is extreme weather. And we've seen it, you know, every day, including this polar vortex thing, including, in my opinion, these high winds. So the question is, what are we likely to suffer? And you pointed out that we likely to suffer another iniki and worse of course in Honolulu. And what can we do to harden the system and to make the systems in general more resilient? So if I gave you a checkbook for a billion dollars, Marco, where would you start in taking these affirmative actions? Well, I'm glad you asked that question, Jay, because my response is that the easiest, in my opinion, one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to move in the direction where we need to move in, a massive, massive increase in the deployment of battery storage across the board for the state of Hawaii, because we want to call it distributed energy resources, or DER for short, or distributed generation. The idea and the concept of going away from the traditional centralized power hub and spoke model, which is very Edisonian going back more than 100 years, where you have a central power plant sending transmission distribution lines far hither and yon to provide power to people, sometimes hundreds on the mainland, thousands of miles away, that effectively over the past 20 years has been shifting and metamorphizing to a distributed generation where you have small power plants on people's homes, power plants on the roofs of people's businesses. So by adding energy storage both to these nano grids or making nano grids for people's homes and also energy storage for or shopping centers, that you are creating a much different architecture, not just of the future, but hopefully of today of the present, where if a particular area of the grid is hard hit, infrastructure is taken out, poles are down, power plants are damaged, then there will be at least other parts of that grid that will be effectively micro gridded or nano gridded to be able to provide power to those people within that circuit or even possibly export that power to other parts of the grid that are undamaged. So to answer your question in a nutshell, batteries, batteries, batteries, and that is what we can do in the near term, as in not the next five to 10 years, but the next 12, 24, 36 months. So one of the ways that our government and our society can support that would be to get a bill to Governor David E. Gay by the end of this legislative session, which would have a separate state tax credit for the addition, supporting the addition of battery storage to existing renewable energy systems and the same bill failed in 2018, 2017, and 2016, never made out of conference committee. So I'm yet again holding my breath and lighting my pooja sticks and my incense that maybe just maybe there will be success this time because we just don't have the time to waste, in my opinion, and battery storage exponentially increased in terms of deployment will get us where we want to be in terms of a greater and more robust electric grid for our isolated island grids. Okay, so let me unpack some of that. First of all, gee, I'm with you on the timeframe. We've got to do it as soon as possible. I can't for the life of me understand why you can't get a tax credit when you want to add batteries. It's so obvious that that will make the whole thing more resilient if we add batteries to existing solar facilities. It means that these individual homeowner facilities will be able to stand by themselves when necessary, otherwise they won't because no sun at night, no electrical power. Not only that, but big batteries are bigger than we've been thinking before. So in order to do that, you've got to spend the money. The tax credit obviously is going to affect conduct. It's going to encourage people to do that even if they wouldn't do it otherwise. It's going to say the government has considered this and cares about you and cares about making us more resilient. So here, have a few bucks, have a tax credit, get some storage. So that should happen right away. And for the life of me, I don't understand why it hasn't happened already. The other aspect though is that only deals with the single family residents and possibly a community solar kind of installation. Are you talking about storage for the larger utility scale solar farms as well? You haven't really identified whether your suggestion covers that, does it? Well, the new solar projects, which are now going through, will be going through the approval process. Seven of them I believe that Hawaiian Electric announced not too long ago, which will have to meet PUC's scrutiny. All of those systems, two on this island, two on Maui and I believe three on Oahu. All of those would have utility scale solar as in multi-megawatts of PV arrays and utility scale megawatt hours of battery storage. So pretty much every new substantial commercial, not commercial but utility scale PV or wind for that matter, virtually all of them I think going in from hence forth will most likely have substantial amount of battery storage to do two important things. One is to minimize the surplus renewable energy power being fed into the grid when the grid doesn't need it, which is let's say during midday hours because there's already a fair amount of solar. And two would allow that during daylight hours to be discharged to the grid when people need it the most, when the grid needs it the most, which is typically between 5 p.m. to 9 or 10 p.m. So what we're seeing with these new projects is battery storage is parting, has become thanks in no small part to KIUC leading the way several years ago by pioneering this in our state, but has become the way to go. So no, I'm not dismissing it at all, it's a very important piece of the puzzle but I'm thinking more from my perspective as a small to midland solar contractor that there is tremendous market potential for retrofitting the 80 plus thousand rooftop solar systems on people's homes and businesses with battery storage. Let me return to the larger utility scale for a moment. So I mean I don't have solar on my house and a lot of people don't. I mean there's a lot of people who do but still more people don't and they rely on the utility to provide electrical power. So you have an issue here and you talked about the wind knocking down the power lines and all this. So you can have some great solar and great storage and utility scale solar facilities. But what happens when the power lines get knocked down? It doesn't mean much to me. Now I don't have power because the power lines aren't there. How can we make the system more reliable when it's not that I have it in my house, I don't have it in my house, I rely on the utility. How can we make the system as it affects me more reliable? So I understand your great question Jay. So let's assume that it's not a total worst case scenario which is that Jay Fidel's home has had power poles knocked down to the right and to the left and you are physically disconnected from the grid. Let's just assume that that worst case scenario did not happen. Let's assume that you are in a circuit which hasn't been directly hit in terms of power poles being knocked down feeding that circuit. Where we are moving towards I believe and this will take some time but we're moving towards where there are these entities called aggregators that can take and are taking the X number of rooftop solar plus storage systems in a given name and offering the so-called bulk services or grid services of those PV plus storage to the utility operator where your neighbor or your neighbor two houses down or three houses down, let's say you've got a whole bunch of people in your neighborhood who have PV plus storage, it's conceivable. And again I'm not on the cutting edge in terms of the engineering on this but it's conceivable conceptually that you could have the Jay Fidel neighborhood or block that would be stand alone, could stand alone as a micro grid by you essentially taking advantage of for remuneration but taking advantage of and benefiting from your neighbors having solar plus storage. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. It's like compartmentalization in a ship or submarine where you limit the damage by having separate compartments and I'd be interested in all in favor of that. However, we're not doing it now and we don't have a system to do it and it hasn't been worked out on a regulatory level and gee Wiz, you think we could do that by the close of the session this year? I don't think so. Perhaps not by the close of the session but I know for a fact that Hawaiian Electric is moving forward with a program to be able to dip their toe in the water and then their whole foot and then their whole leg and then their whole body, the whole eco body so to speak, where they are working with these aggregators who have proposed providing various services and benefits to HECO to be able to have HECO tap into the benefits that these individual PV plus storage homes and businesses could and will provide to Hawaiian Electric over time. So this is, as far as I know, I don't know of anybody else in the country that's doing this stuff. It sounds a great idea Marco. It really does and it's logical, it's consistent and at least theoretically it's doable. So I'm encouraged to hear that Hawaiian Electric is looking into it. We're going to take a short break Marco and when we come back I'd like to talk about whether it's necessary either on a single family or small installation or on a utility scale installation to re-anchor, rebuild, strengthen the supports and structures around the solar panels and for that matter around the batteries so that they can better deal with a storm. When we come back let's tackle that and for now let's take a one-minute break. Marco Mangostore, HoVision Solar. Hey, loha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because Security Matters. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech Hawaii. Konnichiwa Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and it's streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Energy 808, the cutting edge. We're here with Marco Mangostoff, who joins us by remote from Provision Solar and Hilo. And we're talking about reliability and resilience in the case of extreme weather, which is probably coming. So, you know, we did a show a couple months ago about Puerto Rico and we had some guy who had studied it in Washington. He was with an NGO in Washington and he had these photographs, these large solar farms in Puerto Rico where half of the solar farm in each case would be installed by one company and one type of installation system and the other another kind. And what was remarkable about it is that one kind of installation system was way better than the other and you would see that the wind tore up half of it and left the other half alone so much so that the other half was actually still working after Maria had done her damage. So what it shows to me is that you can have systems that are really strong and systems that are not so strong and you've got to make sure that they're strong. And so my question to you is, do we need, either on the rooftops of single family homes or on larger solar facilities, do we need to go through and make an analysis to see which ones are the strong ones and which ones need to be short up somehow? Well, here you're talking about design, construction, building practices and what the requirements of the, what we call the authority having jurisdiction or AHA for short, what their requirements are in terms of constructing a PV system, whether it's a ground mount, we're using thousands of modules 10 modules on someone's home. So I can't comment all that well on what happened in Puerto Rico other than, you know, there are micro climates of course that you could have a wind speed of X in one part of the island and then maybe just two miles away is going to be X plus 50%. So I don't know why some PV arrays took off in the wind and others stayed put, but as long as, the reality is that if you get a wind speed of, you know, a gust of 191 miles an hour like we saw on Mauna Kea, there's not a whole lot that can be done in terms of keeping stuff batten down with typical construction practices. So the question is, the more you require of businesses like mine and engineering companies to have super, super hard and hardened PV arrays, it's going to drive up the cost. So you can't necessarily, and you shouldn't design for the worst case scenario of 175, 191 mile an hour winds for all applications because that would drive up the cost, you know, to be cost prohibitive. So there's got to be some type of modus vivendi here between what are good standard engineering practices and building practices to keep the vast majority of PV systems on roofs versus spending a tremendous amount of money to harden it to such an nth degree that it becomes cost prohibitive. And you know, as we tell people, roof takes off in a big wind while the solar system is going to take off with it, you know, so you can only design and build for so much before you have to take a step back and decide what is cost effective, what's reasonable and prudent. That's probably kind of a, not the most satisfying answer for you, Jay, but that's the best I can come up with right now. Okay, well, what bounces around in my head is that every year I have to take my car for a safety sticker inspection. And that, you know, of course it makes it safer for me, but it also makes it safer for the other guy on the highway. And when you have the roof coming off or the panels flying around, it's not only that you're losing the panels of the roof in your house, but you know, your neighborhood is at risk as well. And so I really wonder whether we are ultimately going to have to deal with an inspection system where somebody goes out and makes sure that the way the thing is anchored, it's not likely or less likely to fly off. I know that hasn't happened yet. We don't have such a system. We rely on, I guess, the license of the installer and the insurance of the installer in case it all flies off. But I think ultimately if we want to have real reliability here, and I hate to suggest the need for government action because that's always a layer of bureaucracy. But at some point along the way it probably would behoove us to have some system to make sure that what's on there, even if it was well-installed at the beginning, is still well-installed. And it's not likely to fly off and after 5 or 10 years and we're entering that, you know, that area of time now, after recent installations, we do need somebody to look at it. And without some kind of, you know, system, nobody will look at it and that's regrettable. One other thing before we close up because we had two words that we were dealing with. One was reliability. We've talked about that. And the other is resiliency, which means coming back after some kind of disaster. So, again, the same question. What action points would you suggest right now to improve our resiliency after extreme weather, especially about the grid? Well, I'll just reiterate having an exponential increase in battery deployment makes a tremendous amount of sense for me. I'm also encouraged that I know Hawaiian Electric and KIUC take disaster planning very, very seriously. And I think my friend, Jake Nassio, who just recently retired from Helco after, gosh, 12 years, well, 11 years at the helm. I mean, he did a fantastic job. So I firmly believe that the utility companies sure get it, and they work closely with each other, and you'll see MECO trucks on the big islands sometimes, and you'll see MECO trucks on Kauai. So the attitude of we're all on this canoe together, and we've got to help each other out. So I think, you know, I give us a lot of credit, give our utility friends a lot of credit for doing what they have been doing with the drills, having incident management teams ready to go. So that really helps. I absolutely agree that we've had a number of discussions with Hawaiian Electric with respect to, you know, incidents of bad weather over recent times, and they do have tremendous systems where everybody in the company is deployed to try to get things back together again as quickly as possible. It's notable, and it's worth mentioning that we've had experience with bad weather, and they have had experience in building their resiliency systems to put things back together again. But who knows, you know, how serious these storms will be, who knows how much more serious they will be than the storms we've had and the damage we've had, and so you can only make a model based on reasonable expectations. You can't expect 191 miles an hour all the time, but you know, there are probabilities and we ought to look at the probabilities and figure out what kind of system response we need to have and I think that is largely within the hands of the utility to figure out what to do. In terms of the individual homeowner, what's he going to do? He doesn't have another system in his garage. He's not going to be able to go up on his roof and fix it. I guess the important thing for him is to stay connected to the grid which gives him another option in case his solar system and his batteries fail for some reason in the extreme weather. So it's probably better for him to be connected at the end of the day that completely disconnected because then he won't have that secondary option. Well, I just, you know, sincerely hope, Jay, that we collectively see this for things along with homelessness and other things that stare us in the face on a more kind of daily basis and we are more proactive than lazy in terms of really putting some time and effort and some money, some general fund money if necessary to be able to move in the direction of making our islands more reliable and more resilient. Yeah, and it's really important. Lives are at stake here. This weather is going to be unforgiving and we better be ready for it and ready to recover after when the legislature has to, and the executive for that matter, government has to pay attention to this. It is an issue as you and I agreed which is paramount which has to be at the top of the heap and we cannot attend to small issues when we have this huge large issue that has to be addressed. This session, this session we want to meet. We, we. We, we. Okay, we got agreement on that. I'll see you in two weeks Marco I look forward to that. I always do. Mahalo Nui, my friend. Aloha. Bye-bye.