 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. We're now on a soggy Monday. Howard Wigg, Think Tech Hawaii, Code Green. I have the honor today of having as my guest, Miles Topping, Director of Energy Management for the entire UH system. That includes all the community colleges. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks so much for being here. We've got a, well, you know what you, your ambition is to get to net zero energy. That's not just for the Manoa campus. That includes all the community colleges. That is a pretty gosh darn ambitious goal. And as a fellow state employee whose mission is 100% clean energy by the year 2045, the UH system is a big, big, big user in the entire scheme of things. So this is a real important goal that you have. So why don't we, because we've got a lot of material to cover, why don't we jump right into the first slide and you can just take it away here, Miles. OK. Skip slide. Skip slide. Skip slide. So just some context, the UH, so out of the state of Hawaii, the largest energy user is, of course, the feds and then the state. And then out of the state, the UH is the top energy user. UH Manoa has a $30 million annual electric bill. And it's unsustainable because of growth and rate escalation. And it's a real good opportunity for us to redirect some of that budget into education. And we also receive the net zero mandate, which talks about the UH getting to 100% by 2035. And what that means is that the UH needs to produce as much as it consumes. So if you go to the next slide, here's this chart that is produced every year and is given to the, it's a report that's provided to the state ledge every year. And this shows our progress towards this net zero mandate. And so there's the statute. And you can see that to consume, we've defined is used by our facilities and properties. And produce is produced on our facilities and properties. And you'll see later why that's important next slide. And here's a breakdown of all the different campuses. You can see that Manoa is really the juggernaut in usage. And the other campuses are just kind of minor. And that's because Manoa is an R1 research facility. It's on 24-7. It's got those big libraries. It's got the dorms and everything. It's just huge. Believe it or not, I think there are over 200 buildings on the Manoa campus. There's 350 structures. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it, but when you really get down into it, yeah. Yeah, next slide, please. So this again sort of shows the stack up. The community colleges have been disaggregated. This is an analysis that was done by Hawaii Energy back in 2014. But it's just illustrating that UH Manoa is the big user. Next slide. So that's why we're going to focus on Manoa. And like I mentioned before, we have all these research facilities that are on 24-7. We've got dorms. We've got sporting arenas with huge lighting and stand sheriff is air conditioned. We've got a huge data center, which houses a lot of the state data. And out of all of that, we actually have some lead buildings, too. And we are mandated to, from now on, each new building needs to be lead silver or better. And just to clarify, when you say research facilities, very often those include laboratories that are very, very strictly climate controlled. Yes. Three, 365 days a year. Yeah, that's right. And laboratories require special climate control. So in 100% air exchanges for biological research, if there's animals or stuff in there. And that's the most expensive way to provide environmental, indoor environmental quality is through 100% air exchanges. Normally, even in your car, if your AC isn't kicking all the way, you switch it to recirculate so that it gets colder. So it can use some of that cold air to help with the cooling process. But if you have to switch over, then it just has to work harder. And that's where a lot of the energy is going. Libraries, it turns out, even have a higher, tighter tolerance because of their humidity and stuff. So those are very expensive to control. Libraries and research facilities. So if we could have the next slide. OK, so here's a snapshot of the campus. The Manoa campus, as well as some other campuses, are actually microgrids. So they're fed. HECO sort of stops at the substation shown here on the chart. And these two substations, either one can power the entire campus. So there's redundancy built in there. And you can see here on the chart next to it is the lowest usage day, which happens to be January 1. And the highest usage day, which is like on or around the first day of school. But it really, what it is, is it tracks the weather. And so that 10 megawatt base is basically, it's a cold day. Nobody's there. Everybody, it's January 1. We're basically closed. So in sleep mode, the UH Manoa does consume quite a bit of energy. Yeah, 10 megawatts, that's substantial. That's substantial. That's like 10,000 homes or something like that. Yep, that's about it. And what a lot of people don't realize is that a large part of the AC load is dehumidification. That's right. Really wet day like this, even though it's cool, the AC still has to work like mad to get that moisture out of the air. Yep, yep. It's a whole other topic of discussion. And it's really interesting, especially with the right speaker and the right charts, which I am not an expert in air conditioning. But to dehumidify what they do is they blow the hot air across cold coils, which basically rings the moisture out of the air. And it's kind of like what happens on your soda, how the moisture collects through your soda, same kind of thing. So what's dripping out of the back of your window unit is, of course, moisture that was once in the air. And so what blows into the space is now dehumidified, but it's very cold. So in order to make it tolerable to humans, you have to kind of reheat it a little. So you're using energy one way to dehumidify, and you're using energy the other way to reheat it so that it's tolerable for us. Yeah, we have to figure out a better way to do that. That would be neat. Yeah, that would be neat. But next slide, please. Yeah, so here, just driving home the point, we know through modeling, we know through measuring, and we know through auditing that most of the energy is going into the air conditioner. So this just kind of sends it home. You can see in that Bachmann Hall consumption measuring that the midday rise when that sun goes above head, that's when most of the energy is being consumed. And then as the sun starts to taper off, so does the energy consumption. You can see there, there's a day with a very low, that's a Thursday, that's actually Thanksgiving day. And nobody's there, so the AC is scheduled off. And then the next day is the AC, the central system is scheduled on, but there's a lot of small systems around it, like split systems and window units that a lot of people took both days off. So even though the central was scheduled on, the other AC loads didn't come on probably. Well, I don't know, I didn't have an occupancy sensor in there, but you can kind of see it in the data. Next slide, please. Yeah, so UH Manoa, I didn't know this before I got there, but it's got a bunch of cooling loops, sometimes referred to as like district cooling. A lot of campuses have this for their heating, like on the mainland or for the cooling is they have all the buildings sort of connected with underground pipes supplying chilled water to the different cooling, the different buildings that need cooling, just something I throw up there for people to get an appreciation of these giant, giant air conditioning systems sucking up all this energy. And the idea I think is to have one big, very efficient chiller feeding several different buildings rather than having a bunch of smaller chillers for each building. That is an idea. There's pros and cons, there's some merit to it. It looked like we looked at it from a financial analysis. If you stretch it out over enough years, there could be some payback, but there's also redundancy and some other things are kind of locked into a big system in case something better comes along. But it is being looked at, yeah. Yeah. Next slide. Yeah, here just driving home the point again, you can see the energy consumption sort of per month, the peak, you can see it peak up when we start up school and that's right when the temperature is the hottest, which is the orange curve. And as it just tracks the temperature, that blue curve is sort of the peak energy usage and the orange curve is the temperature measured at the airport and you can see that it just tracks, that's where it's all going, there's no doubt about it. But note that there's not a direct correlation and again, when did school open in August these days? Yeah, that's hot and there's a lot of humidity in the air in August, September, October. Yep, direct correlation. Yeah, yeah. Next slide please. So we're using a lot of energy, it's costing a lot of money, but if you compare it sort of on the national scale, we're actually pretty low. I mean, national scale, if you look at this chart, it's like the lower numbers, I can't even read it from here, but we're well under the... 54 KVP. Yeah, we're 54, the national average is like 180 or 200 depending on how you measure it. And we should clarify, EUI is energy use index, which measures the energy intensity of a given building. For instance, an older elementary school classroom or building will just have lighting in it and it'll be only going for 2,000 hours a year. The opposite end of the curve is a hospital that's going 24-7 and you have these big air changes or your labs, 24-7 big air changes. So they're very intense, an elementary school is very un-intense. Thank you Howard, yes, that's exactly right. And you can go to the next slide. So the point of this, that slide was that we're not actually that bad on the national scale. That's because we don't have to do a lot of heating and stuff. Yeah, yeah. So you can go to the next slide. This presentation was pulled together from a energy tour that we had done, so it may not be directly applicable to this talk, but there's some slides in here that are common. So you can't manage, which you can't measure. So we're going through this process of putting in digital submetering, which allows you to do not only historical trending and profiling, but if you hook it up to your control system, you can actually turn loads off if you need to because or manage demand. So we're in the process, we're in phase three of building out this metering from replacing the existing analog meters with digital meters. Next slide. And I have to say, Manoa, if you look historically back, I mean, the energy consumption has gone way down because of just organic sort of ongoing O&M things that we do. So we practice Manoa Green Days, which is where we shut off buildings that aren't in use over the holidays. And you saw that in my last slide. We have just, every time we replace a piece of equipment, it is replaced with something that's efficient, whether we do a recommissioning or just the controls, it's always done with efficiency as part of the vision. So not just replacing like with like, but replacing like with better. And some of you may have heard or seen of the frogs, which are net zero buildings on the College of Education, which is an experiment actually being run by H&EI and Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I bet frog is an acronym for something. It is, it's, what is it? Yeah, it's something response to ongoing growth. I forgot the F stood for it, but I could Google it right now if you want. Okay, well, on that cherry note, we do need to take a break. Howard Wigg, Code Green with Miles Topping, Director of Energy for the whole UH system. Back in a moment. Aloha and Richard Concepcion, the Holes of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despeng, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Good afternoon again, Howard Wigg, Code Green. My guest today, Miles Topping, director of Energy for the entire whole UH system. And Miles has some really aggressive goals that he's setting. Why don't we jump right back into it, Miles? Okay, yeah. Yeah, so it's the next slide. So of course, performance contracting is in our arsenal of, you know, to attack this beast of a problem. And just we wanted to mention here that performance contracting is on this sort of this sliding scale of what a P3 is, a public-private partnership. And, you know, it's kind of at one end, but there are some other colleges that have gone kind of with a full extreme, so kind of like what you were talking about, doing a central utilities plan and totally privatize it. And, you know, that is in the spectrum of P3. I mean, we're not, you know, currently thinking about privatizing the college at all, but it is a performance contract is in the spectrum. So it is a form of P3, which a lot of people sometimes forget. They think of P3 as total privatization, but it's not, it's a piece of the spectrum. It's a real agreement, a working agreement. We should mention performance contracting is a facility like UH enters into a contract with a firm that specializes in energy efficiency and they enter the college says, you will do all of this work up front, all the engineering installation monitoring at no cost to the university and then you will be repaid through the savings that you achieve. That's right. That's how they're supposed to work. And in fact, the community colleges are in phase two of a pretty successful performance contract. Performance contracting has been done across the state. Howard probably can talk more about that, about the successes that they've had there. So it is definitely in our arsenal. We're going after one of the cooling loops that I showed earlier, which is the Holmes Hall cooling loop. For several reasons, it was one of the original cooling loops. It's kind of in that research corridor. There's a lot of research buildings next to it. It may be a good opportunity to hook up post, which is another building in that district, but not on the loop. So, yeah, so performance contracting, P3 is in our arsenal. You can go to the next slide. Another thing that's in our arsenal, which is very interesting is space utilization. So, there's a lot of space and there's not a lot of space to kind of depending on who you ask. And so we have been analyzing, so all of this is kind of data-based, right? Everything we're trying to do now is sort of knee-jerk or somebody said so. It's all data-based. And so we've been analyzing our spaces and we went into a deep dive with classroom spaces. And the gray bars represent the number of classrooms with the space down at the bottom of that gray bar. And the green bar represents the number of bookings for that type of classroom. And you can see that there is, we've kind of shifted away, I guess that, I don't know if the teaching pedagogy is shifted from large lecture halls to more interactive type of hands-on working spaces, but that's just in the data. That's what it's showing us. We also have recently published a building design performance standard, which has been adopted on a couple of recent projects, which basically says to model in energy efficiency as part of the design process. And with each submittal comes an energy model and to consider things like mix mode cooling because we know that all the energy is going into the AC. So if you're building a classroom building or something like that, it may be good to consider a mix mode, which is where you have the fans on, most of the time you only switch the AC on if you have to, now if you're in a library or a lab or something like that, that kind of changes, you may not be able to use or utilize mix mode. We have the best climate in the world. We might as well enjoy it as much as we can. And ironically, the frogs were built with the same concepts that are in the building design performance standards, and which was kind of mentioned to me as sort of common sense stuff, but we put it down into a standard and we have a format to follow and a checklist and everything. And if you follow the standard, not only will you're building the high efficiency in performance, but it'll also meet lead silver. So without going over after some of that lower hanging fruit. Yeah, and of course you can't just emulate mainland campuses because they've got a heating load. That's right. Yeah, that's right. So another exciting initiative is this green revolving fund allows us to track harness and reinvest savings. So kind of like how a performance contract would go in and build something and then you'd pay for that upgrade through your utility savings. If you do an organic one or an ongoing one, like turning off buildings over the breaks or putting in a more efficient air conditioner, we can do that too. I call it self-esco. We can use the utility's budget savings to fund further efficiency projects. And so we have that set up and it is working in effect. We just made a purchase from that to get some energy star scientific freezers and this is our first pilot. So to collect on that savings and refund the account would be, we're right there. We're gonna see how that plays out. Up and running, that's exciting. Yeah, our next slide please. Okay, so renewable energies, next slide. So yeah, so I've done a sort of a spatial analysis using just GIS and there's about 3.3 million square feet of rooftop space. And so I said, well if I can use 30% of that rooftop space, not using 70% of it, I think I can put about 17 megawatts of solar based on a 300 watt module. I mean, and the picture there, you can see some of the buildings, you just can't go on. Some of the buildings are good for solar, so. And I should say that once you put solar panels up on the roof, you put the panels up on little platforms. You don't land directly on the roof. That's correct. So you have a little airspace under there and suddenly the roof, instead of being as hot as 150, 160 degrees on a sunny day, it's just the ambient temperature. If it's 80 outside, it's 80 on the roof. It helps with the temperature. It helps with the sun degradation. It hurts in other, you know, there's the roofs leak without anything on them anyway. So the more stuff you start putting on the roof, the more chance you have of leaking. There's mold, possibility for mold. So as long as you install them in a way that you can still maintain your roof and maintain your panels, it'll be synergistic. So we have plans to do that and we're moving forward with solarizing the campus. And again, that can probably be done by some form of financing because you're gonna be producing electricity. Yeah, so we're talking, so if you wanna dive into that a little bit, we're talking to PPAs like how much would a PPA be if you included the rear roof, right? So you could wrap it all up into some master finance program. And in fact, I just got off the phone with one provider today. So we'll see where the, you know, kind of quotes start landing. And if there's something, if there's some traction there, we'll get some permission to do it and then we'll go on RFP it and yeah. I can hopefully almost guarantee you, you will get that traction. And we've got just a few seconds left. Any parting words for the audience? Well, I do. And that is that if you are in a PPA, a PPA being, a Power Purchase Agreement, that it may make really good financial sense to buy it out at year, if you're in past year six, it may make good financial sense to go ahead and buy that out right now. And there's a bunch of people out there that are in that position. And that way you get all the benefits kind of passed through to you, especially if you're a state agency, if you have no tax appetite of your own, all that's been, you know, exercised or whatever. So the tax benefits have been absorbed by the private funder. Right, yeah. And so they'll kind of just pass on to you and you can get probably a really good deal much better than what you're getting now. So that would be my advice. And ideally those panels are gonna last for 20 years or more if they're done right. Yeah. So on that cheery note, we must bid fond to do, thank you Miles Topping, energy manager for the entire UH system. We're back into soggy Oahu, not exactly a good PV day. Thank you very much. See you next time.