 Yeah, we're live welcome back to Hawaii a state of clean energy on think-tek. I'm your host J. Piedel Our co-host for the show is Ray Starling the handsome guy over there Shot of Ray And our show today is called ice storage in Hawaii how unlikely and we're going to talk about whatever happened to it Our guests for the show are Les Taniama and Terry Andrews. Thank you for participating everyone. It's great to have you here So some background, you know, whatever happened is our series this month and Ray is in charge of that and we're covering all these Issues about whatever happened to this that and the other thing and one of them is ice storage and it presents always energy storage presents a technical challenge for Hawaii's renewable energy goal But there are many potential solutions and diversity is the day of the word a word of the day. Thank you We're going to learn about the past and present state of Storage energy storage in Hawaii from these guys as experts on the subject of ice storage So let's begin by by Ray. Why don't you tell us what ice storage is and tell us who these guys are? well We all got together back in the late late last century actually about 1996 or 7 and we started working on Ice storage here in Hawaii, which really I think they had one plant that they had tried Some years ago out at the airport and it kind of as they move things around at the airport. It got abandoned but we wanted to do it in hospitals schools and Large projects here. And so I linked up with these two guys and we put in a number of Ice storage units and of course at that time the the rates were different And there were some incentives that the state had to kind of encourage this kind of technology And it did sort of fell away fell fell away over the years for a number of reasons several of the ice storage units are still around Cuppulani women's and children's hospital and Mary in old school Yeah, mid-Pacific and so it's here But there are no new ice storage units going in but now We're interested in making the grid sort of diverse in terms of Stuff that it's that can be used on the grid to help the grid with all of the renewable energy Why why we're interested in making the grid diverse and I said the day of the word or the word the day as you like Is diversity, but why do why don't we just use batteries? Is it easy to use one technology and become expert and really, you know Supportive of one technology. Well, you know, I I think it's diversity is going to get us to the go faster than anything else and all large buildings in Hawaii have The need for air conditioning and of course ice storage Is can it be an add-on to any building that has ice or that has air conditioning requirements? and now it can be used to to help the grid to deal with the high penetration of photovoltaics and other other Items that are coming on to the grid that the need to be balanced So it's ice storage and I don't want to take up all that all of the conversation here Get less to jump in and tell us what ice storage does. Yeah, well, how does it work less? Well, basically we tried to in the day we had the tax credits So we're building up ice storage as a huge Thermal mass of storage of ice and we're melting it down during the day when air conditioning is needed And uniquely that's the oldest Air conditioning air cooling way back when yeah blow blow up air over ice. Yeah similar to that So that's why we're going to a place of a chiller. You don't need a chiller if you have ice storage Well, you do need a chiller to recharge the ice But we're charging the ice at a time during those periods when the rates were cheaper because we had off-peak rates That were utilizing now Thanks to Terry he brings to light what is happening throughout the country where we're diversifying that and not looking at total storage Disappation as opposed to using the compressors for cooling as well as the ice jointly and It provides a lot of how shall I say benefits that we didn't have so let me get the idea You're using refrigeration type compressors and you're making ice in a in a box somewhere And then now you have a box full of ice and you have pipes running through the ice in the box and now the the the ice is going to cool the water That's running through the pipes and then now you have effectively what you would get if you bought a big chiller for a building You have cold water that you can circulate all around the building and cool the building down and the operative word is You're circulating chilled water throughout the building. Yeah, so you're only using pumps. Yeah, you're not using big compressors But now we're capable of using the compressors at a smaller degree in conjunction with the ice Yeah, and that's what Terry is going to be adding to this Congress. Okay Well, it's one more point is that this is all about air conditioning then I mean, you're not you're you're saving storing the Energy in the ice, but you're not Converting the ice back to energy. No, right. So you're using this for air conditioning air conditioning type of At a later time or at a time where you need air conditioning or Reduce the loads during the day, right? Got it. You want to add something well But but the value of it is that it can match whatever the utility needs in terms of its variable needs during the day For load to come on and off that is, you know lights to come on or go off How does it do that? Well, it does that because you can run it to be making ice and cooling the building and the utility can give you a An electronic signal to turn off all of the compressors and The building will never know the difference the building still be cool because they'll go full ice and The chiller will go off until the utility says, okay, you can bring it back on and With the Kind of system that we're going to have in the future have now and are moving towards in the future It's going to be all renewable Having the ability to tell a large load to cut off whenever the wind dies down or the sun goes behind a cloud That's going to be that's going to be key Batteries do that so you could have a chiller and a battery But that's going to cost you, you know a lot of money to maintain a battery, but you can just put in an ice System with the chiller when you put it in your building and you can have the equivalent of a battery So let me clarify one thing never gonna go to Terry for Some technical if you don't mind so so you have actually you have the ice machine which creates ice Around pipes and you run the pipes water through the pipes that cools the water, but you also have You'll also have a chiller an old-fashioned chiller and the two work in tandem when you When you a good time of day, you know when solar is running high for example, you would use the I guess you can use the ice machine and store all that energy in the ice Otherwise what you would tell me how it works Terry But this is without getting technical I'm on an engineer, but I prefer to keep it on technical It's a battery and it does the same thing as a chiller It takes warm fluid and it sends it out cold right so from the larger perspective from the grid perspective We give two things to the utility and the customer and that is if you're charging Story energy by charging ice by making ice you're adding load well They're going to be times when the grid the utility needs to add load when we're adding a lot of solar And they want to keep plants running. That's what's changed. That's the big picture. Yeah, that's the grid now Traditionally, we're gonna melt ice. That's when we read the We release the latent heat of fusion and that's the energy released and we melt ice And we get cooling without running a compressor So that's a benefit to the utility at times and to the customer if they Schedule it right so it's all about schedule. It's all about schedule when the utility has plenty of power Then you I mean oversupply if you will then you're what creating the ice make right Okay, when the utility doesn't have so much power am I right you just brought off the heavy chillers that then you use the Chillers, you know, you know you turn those off turn those off and you melt ice historically the grid got more unstable as Air conditioning as the country grew and air conditioning was added the bigger and bigger more and more buildings, right and the diversity in the grid They would build a grid the match a daytime peak in less than half of it was being used at night Yeah, so traditionally there's been a sale on energy every night Historically nighttime energy has always been cheap and it was their pretty straightforward case Store of energy at night when it's cheap use energy during the day when it's expensive and Now the it's kind of exciting times because it changes in the grid and the renewables are driving everything and it's making How you apply it take a little more finesse, but also create more opportunity kill me and we go back to my attempt to Look at it from both sides when you have too much and too little so at night. You don't have any renewables, right? Correct. I mean They give away power some nights because they got to get rid of it Yeah, and you can build ice then and have basically free energy So it's whenever you have lots of energy that you would have to curtail or ground or not use Correct and and when that happens then you are going to build ice That's when you're going to use the compressor and build right, but when you don't have A lot right my right about this the other the other side of the coin is what? When you have when you have a lot of renewables, that's cheap energy You want to use it to store energy. Yeah when the renewables fall off Yeah, you want to use your stored energy, okay, right? So you never actually use the entity to drive the chiller now the ice always drive It's an equivalent chiller it's doing what a chiller does it takes cold fluid and it Tastes warm fluid and send it out cold. This is a whole new kind of chiller. Yeah, what's a very old chiller, but it's been Used the ice storage without replacing the existing chiller in the building You don't have to buy a new chiller because chillers are very expensive right and it's a tans on the type of chiller I've had to case specific well, so can I buy can I use a cheaper chiller if I have ice? It's gonna say well well no you at that point you can Use a chiller that is set up to be half the size You would normally write and then you you run the chiller and burn your ice and of course sometime during the night You you you have to build that ice back up, but so you can have a half-sized chiller, basically That's my yeah, that's my majority of our jobs are chillers that are 50 to 75 percent of the peak load you've downsized your chiller It's water cooled. They've downsized the cooling tower. You've downsized your connected load to the building so you've permanently downsized what you're pulling from the utility and When you think about it, you know what an engineer size for a hundred percent plus some plus some right and so Turns out like you know 90% of the time you're you know nowhere near that Whereas now if you've downsized little you're you're out of a sweeter spot in your operating Okay, I'm gonna take a short break you guys. We'll come back. We're gonna talk about money Looking to energize your Friday afternoon tune in to stand the energy man at 12 noon Aloha Friday here on big tech hoy Aloha, my name is Danelia D. A. N. E. L. I. A. And I'm the other half of the duo John Newman welcome we are co-hosts of a show called keys to success which is live on the think tech live network series Weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. We're looking forward to seeing you then Aloha Aloha, I am reg baker and I am the host of business in hoi with reg baker We broadcast live every thursday from 2 to 230 in the think tech studios in downtown hololulu We highlight successful stories about businesses and individuals and learn their secrets to success I hope you can join us on our next show on thursday at 2 o'clock until then aloha bingo, let's Tanya ma let terry andrews and ray starling the iceman cometh So what are the numbers like? I mean am I gonna do better? I suppose we take for our case study. We take a building that has a chiller already And I come to you on the owner or the manager or whatever and I come to you and say I'm interested in ice storage How much money am I going to save and how much money is it going to cost me to put this in? Can I take that? Well, let me tell you back The truth is right now we we don't know because we haven't been in the business here doing ice lately for a number of reasons but uh We hope to get that going back again, but when we were doing it in the late 1990s we were we were actually able to cut buildings cooling costs down by about 50 to 60 percent So that that was a pretty substantial part of the The cost of electricity likely that would apply today Well, I that's that that's one of the issues and and maybe we'll get to it But one of the issues that we need in order to make this work so that it can be part of the diverse grid is Off-peak rates or rates that Time of use you need time of use rates that are That so we can design the systems to match The best rate for the customer then the customer will want to buy it because they get a good cut on there Really critical that's so for any batteries. I mean any storage system battery. That's correct. So the question is Doesn't that exist now? Isn't it time of use now? Yes, but uh right now there's an experimental Equal tariff for residential only And they're just looking at it But then on the other hand, and I'm going to turn it over real quick to terry Understand if I'm using let's say 30 percent ice storage and 70 percent Chiller That means I'm reducing my chiller load. So I am reducing the load And using ice as the other part where all we need is pumps, which we need anyway Yeah, yeah, yeah, right So before I can turn this over real quick one thing that I wanted to stick in here is from the utility's perspective Everybody in the world as you well know is looking at how I in regards to how our utility is going to handle The amount of PV penetrations we have right now. We have so much Energy being put into the grid We're slightly below the Area where the generators want to run They like to run fully loaded So now they have some potential I'm not saying they have but they have potential stability problems on the grid Yeah Had shifting loads and balancing loads will help that and this is a good solution. So terry the uh one of the biggest Issues is when you talk about time of day rates, it gets to be a more complicated issue And I don't want to get into the weeds too much But the commercial rates are more complicated and there's a demand component And demand is how much energy you suck in in any one moment time and demand can be 30 to 60 of a bill And the point is on a building that peaks in the day and has a high demand That gives it a time of day component You can be a great candidate for load shifting for stored energy If you have no time of day energy rates and you have high demand I have lots of customers like that in other parts of the country. Yeah, so Utility rates can be structured all kinds of different ways You can do time of day rates in the in the energy section. You can have high demand utility can Encourage any behavior it wants on how they structure those rates. The other important thing I wanted to get back to is cost here Projects were done Well, but they were relatively expensive because there was a tax credit, right? So so we went big We shipped it the entire that was in the good old days In the good old days there's no tax credit on ice now. There's no correct And the tax credit went away and we said, oh, we can't do ice anymore because it's too expensive Well in the other parts of the country where we're there were not these massive Tax credits they learned to do what we were talking about earlier partial storage Put it in a chiller the 60 of the peak load have the storage cover the days when you exceed the capacity of the chiller And so first costs on extra on jobs across the country have ranged as little as zero extra To maybe typically 20 to 25 percent more and a payback of a few three to five two to five years Maybe or more but the point is here because of the large tax incentive You know jobs were were done correctly because of the funds available, but they were all done Well, yeah on a very big scale Speaking of big This works best in a big building where you have big air conditioning, right? Because that's that's where the savings you can really shine on the savings And it's a sort of economies of scale kind of the bigger the piece of equipment the more likely The more money you're going to save right for right, but it I mean typically A building that might be I don't know over a hundred tons. So what's that in terms of square footage here? um Times full. Yeah. Well It's a small building 200 times. We do churches and schools elementary school. Yeah, that would be small Relatively small buildings that too and whereas my largest single customer is the University of Arizona That has hundreds of tanks. Okay. So I guess what I'm coming to though is that is hawaii a good candidate We have we have buildings We also have a lot of single family homes Correct who are not necessarily good candidates for this not not with the president You know technology, I guess But um, are we a good candidate for this? Is this something we should we would have a great benefit about? I say yes. Yeah, go ahead. Tell me why Nordstroms a brand new Nordstroms. Yeah, ice thermal storage Really is there really There's another one that I don't I just had this brainstorm Is that for those of us that visits bars and gets beer on tap Did you know that the tap the cake is warm beer? And they run it through a bath of ice. Yeah So that they can give you cold beer. Yeah, that's thermal storage because they make the ice at night. Yeah Yeah, how do you like that example? Let me get a discount beer Let me interject because uh, you know Back when we were doing it before It was sort of the traditional system the traditional utility system But now everything has changed and that's one reason why we're we're back Looking at ice again because it can have the same effect as a battery and everybody's looking to get their battery and so We're we're thinking that that this because it looks like a battery as far as the utility is concerned And the customer controls, you know, whether he's using ice to cool the building or using the chiller And so we believe that On top of what the benefits were before There are additional benefits that haven't even been priced yet in terms of what would the utility pay for the ability to Have the to turn you off At a moment's notice when when something happens on their system And they have to either crank up a new generator to keep the lights on or they can just turn you off your Chiller and just let you run on ice and your your building is the same now, you know in affordable tech Uh, they got companies like stem Right and they deal in software about turning on and turning off and you know refining the signals and communicating Between the you know the parts of the supply chain Um, do you use do you need that what what does stem help you does companies like stem help you? I can't Uh comment tells me in stem. I've never used it but but software and controls are very important Because now it's not it's still just a chiller based system. So but it's different now. There's more a few more control points There's more operating savvy more finesse. So controls These tanks mine my competitors Are just bundles of tube. It's like a pipe. Yeah, all about controls and good controls So that's controls are very important. So the controls come with the equipment Oh, absolutely. They're going to go in with any chiller based system. Okay You're representing some chiller based or uh ice based systems. All right, correct. What what are the brand names? Who is I work for CalMac? CalMac makes as a manufacturer. We're a manufacturer of thermal storage tanks Who also do ice rinks like rocket filler center ice rinks, but um, we do thermal storage tanks We've been doing it. We developed the industry. We're the old dog and we've done typically we do half the projects in a year So what are your new technologies? The the new technology The tank is very similar to what it's been for a long time The new is is the upgrade and controls that that we're teamed with with train a big air conditioning company Who will put together the pumps and controls on a package so it's more plug-and-play You know and the thing that's exciting to do with the changes in the grid, you know How all of a sudden things are going to operational finesse makes it more fun more interesting and more again You know if I go to kailua right now and I go to whole foods I will find on the rooftop of whole foods a desiccation system And then you know about this the desiccation system will dry the air out and when you have dry air It's cheaper to air conditioning your store, which is what they do and they save I can't remember the percentage, but a substantial percentage of energy by using this Desiccation system, which is just trying out the air. Um, how do you compare with that? That's an interesting technology. Are you as interesting? I'll defer to lasso now Know that ice is 32 degrees we never run things at 32 degrees because that's absolutely too cold But you need chilled water going across these coils when you run air over it to strip moisture out Just like your cup of ice at zippies. Yeah, it melts. Yeah That's exactly what we're doing to dry the air So it's a lot easier with a pump and a whole bunch of tanks than it is with a big children compressors Okay, what stands in the way between where we are right now today And a whole fleet of ice machines all over the state in every building that's bigger than that has an air conditioning system. Okay You want to take that one? That's a big. Well, yeah, I I think the technology is pretty solid I think the technology is there we need to get with the utility and Find out what they perceive their needs are given what we can Give them what we can produce for them in terms of ability to shut off power large amounts of power fairly quickly and so we we need to get together with them and And help them to see the value that they have once they know the value They can plug it in wherever they want to and then they just tell us okay if you can do this Turn it on and off in this way and that way We will give you a really good rate Whenever you do this and and do it consistently So I think that's that's the next step. I think the technology is good Getting a price point that the that the customer is willing to pay for the customer is actually paying for this Because they get value out of it, but the utility doesn't have to build a new generator Yeah, so they shouldn't be interested. They should be very interesting. Okay Well, that brings us to the end of the show guys. This has been very interesting a new subject I've enjoyed You know discussing it with you I'm Jay Fidel and we have here Ray Starling co-host and also expert and Entrepreneur at least at one point in time on the subject Terry Andrews Kaumack who manufactures these things and including ice rinks ice ice kid That's Taniyama who is uh, he knows everything about this kind stuff And we really appreciate it. I hope we can do it again. Um, you know, keep us in mind as you develop and