 This is State Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. My name is Mitch Yuan. I'm with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute where I'm the hydrogen systems program manager in my day job. But here in my television career I'm standing, I co-host the Hawaii, the state of clean energy with Maria Tomei who's out there doing some robotics today. So I'm happy to step in as a senior host. And today, oh by the way, we're sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and ThinkTech Hawaii. So today we're going to be showcasing some more UH, HNEI technology helping to solve Hawaii's current problems. What we'd like to do is show what we're doing and how we're relevant to society and the tax-paying public to show that we're doing good work in support of Hawaii. So today I'm very happy to have Jim Masqueray who's on the staff of HNEI. And we're going to be talking about NegaWatts, but I'm going to turn it over to Jim who's going to tell us what he does and all the cool and, quote, hot projects that he's working on at HNEI. So take it away. Hot projects. Hot projects that we make cool. There you go. Okay. Yeah. Thank you, Mitch, and thank you for having me on the show to talk about HNEI and a lot of the work that we do and particularly a lot of the work that just normally kind of flies under the radar unless we get opportunities like this to come out and talk about it. My background is I'm not a formal academic, I've come from a mixture of public and private sector having worked for architecture and engineering firms as well as for cities and energy management roles and even energy startups here in Hawaii. So how long have you been with HNEI? I've been HNEI for about, it's getting close to seven years. Wow. So you're almost pensionable now. Getting there. Very good. My fingers crossed. Very good. And so you do energy efficiency programs and I think you've got some material so you have some slides and a video. Yeah. So what I want to talk about today is a number of our projects that we do in energy efficiency and we've actually got several in that area. And the first one is, it's called Project Frog and Project Frog are a series of net zero energy buildings, basically buildings that generate themselves more energy than they consume. They're very high efficient, high technology buildings and we've constructed five of these in the state, two in Kauai, one out in Ewa Beach and two in the UH Manoa campus. And the intent was to demonstrate that we can build low efficient buildings and we're also using them as classrooms as well as research laboratories. So we are actually doing real tests on other types of technologies using those classrooms as the platform. So what students are using these classrooms, are the junior students or the university students? It's actually both. The morning sessions from 7.30 to 12.30 are being used by the university lab school. They were very much in need of space after some of their facilities burnt down a few years ago and so they're using those two classrooms in the morning and then in the afternoon it's the College of Education that basically controls and schedules their classes and they get used from basically 7.30 in the morning to about 8 o'clock at night. So you're going to tell us how receptive they are to these classrooms as a part of your presentation? Well, actually I will let the video speak for itself when we get to it and the first thing I want to do is just with the first PowerPoint slide is to show the image of the frogs that we've constructed. So we've got the PowerPoint and the top image is of the original three frogs and Frog stands for flexible response to ongoing growth and Project Frog is actually a company in San Francisco that has designed and constructed these buildings for us. And so the upper building is one that's in Eva Beach as well as two in Calachini at Calachini Charter School in Kauai. The lower one is the second generation frog and those two are built on the UH Manila campus and during the design and construction of the second generation we pulled a lot of the lessons learned from the first generation and have improved the performance actually quite a bit. So these are like prefab buildings, like a flat pack like going to IKI? They're flat packed, they're not so much prefab as they are, they're component based so all the components are packed and shipped but they're constructed much like a regular building. They need a contractor, they need to put all the pieces together correctly. So it's not quite prefab but it's not quite built on site. So at this point I'd like to just show a brief video clip that was produced by UH on our behalf and that will actually speak to some of the features. The University of Hawaii at Manila's College of Education is home to the UH system's first net-zero buildings which will generate more energy than they consume. Whoa, this is really cool, this is different, this is something new. The flexible response to ongoing growth or frog classrooms are part of a larger research project designed to evaluate the performance and integration of energy technologies such as energy storage, advanced occupancy sensing and advanced fan control. They were funded with a grant from the Office of Naval Research and are managed by UH Manila's Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. The classrooms feature real-time dashboards and high-efficiency LED lighting with adjustable modes and sensors that respond to natural daylight. The walls and ceilings are highly insulated and the windows feature glazing that minimizes heat. The frog buildings are also mixed mode, using natural ventilation to reduce the need for air conditioning. Using these in-action, demonstrating the principles, demonstrating the concepts that we've been talking about in the energy efficiency field is fantastic and these classrooms are actually getting attention internationally. The goal of this pilot project is to learn more about energy-efficient building design and operations and apply those lessons at scale to meet the University of Hawaii's goal of becoming net-zero or to generate more energy than it consumes by 2035. These net-zero classrooms also teach invaluable life lessons. Coming to school here in a building that uses energy so wisely is a reminder for me to do my part elsewhere. Great. Hey, great video, Jim. Really cool. And you know, we have such a problem in Hawaii at our elementary and high middle schools and high schools with a heating load for our kids like they're in, you know, 89, 90-degree temperatures, so this kind of building could be applied if the lessons learned could be applied, you know, from this project that would really help out our children. Yeah. Well, we are working with the Hawaii Department of Education on this and they're very aware of these buildings. And actually a little bit later in the show, I'll be talking about another project that we're doing with Hawaii DLE in terms of helping inform their heat mitigation project. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of what we do is collaborate with other entities, you know, with the School of Architecture, with outside consultants, with Hawaii Department of Education, with a, one of our leading consultants is a company called MK Think. And we also have a joint research project with UC Davis with the California Lighting Technology Center out of UC Davis. Right. So, we've got a number of collaborative projects which, you know, I hope to be able to cover today. Yeah, okay. There's a lot of ground to cover. Okay. Well, I'll let you start covering it then. Okay. Well, one of the, you know, one of the aspects about a mixed mode building is which with these are, it's a combination of natural ventilation and air conditioning. The hope is that when the conditions are right, then the users will open the windows, turn on the ceiling fans, likely turn off the lights because there's plenty of daylight in there without the lights, and really lower that energy footprint. Now when the conditions get warm enough, then they've got the opportunity to go and turn on the air conditioner. What we have special air conditioning controls in, and the control is such that when the user wants to use the air conditioning, they go and they push a button, an override button on the thermostat. Okay. That turns the unit on for an hour, and then after the hour, it'll shut itself off. The user has to make a conscious decision, you know, is it warm enough in here where I need to turn the air conditioner on again? Now, in a classroom building like this where classes change and schedules change every day, it's very good because it really saves a lot of energy. It's not an air conditioner that starts at seven in the morning, runs still eight o'clock at night, nonstop. It turns off when it's not being used, and different professors, different people in there actually prefer the non-air condition. Some prefer it on, some prefer it off. So we really get to save the energy by, you know, reducing HVAC assumptions. That's kind of one of the key technology keys that are in there. And if I might have the next slide, there's, you know, there's a, there's an interaction between equipment, building operation, you know, behavior and perception. And like I said, we're going to have different teachers, different professors that respond differently. Now, I just wanted to bring one snapshot of comparison of the two classrooms at UH Manoa, side by side, exactly the same time, exactly the same, same period. One professor has very committed to, you know, natural ventilation. They turn on, they open the windows, they naturally ventilate. And the other is Professor Blivi, who is oblivious to the concepts that we're trying to convey and just turns the air conditioner on when they, when they come in and turn it off. Keeps the button pressed. Keeps the button pressed. And this is just a, just a visual, a quick visual of the show that, that significant difference in energy consumption over, over a quarter that we can achieve just by the type of AC control and having them make decisions. So can we educate Professor Blivi? Can we go back to him and say, look, Professor Blivi, look at all the energy you're using compared to Professor Green. I mean, can you get your act together here? That's actually one of the next steps. You know, it's a very, it's a delicate balance to not impose our values, you know, on the way they operate a building. But if we can encourage it through, you know, educating them on what the building is about and what the intents are, then we may be able to change behavior a little bit. Good. Well done. So another thing that I wanted to talk about today is, you know, there's a saying in technology, you can't manage what you can't measure. And so we are, we are partnering with MK Think who has designed an integrated environmental sensor. It's basically a single sensor that can be deployed in a classroom or, or a room and it will detect humidity, temperature, carbon dioxide levels, noise. It can actually detect distance from it to objects, like people and, and I say noise, and illumination. And it can be placed into a classroom and it's remotely tied to the internet. So it basically will send a signal to the internet so that you can pull up live data. So if we can have the PowerPoint, again, we've got a, this is the, the sensor and this is all in a beta prototype stage where you can see it's almost a little bit bigger than a, than a standard sticky note. And it's a 3D printed cage, if you will, a decorative cage, you know, just to create a little, a little sass to it. And so it'll monitor all of these, these metrics. And can I have the next page, please? And then it goes live to a, a dashboard, which will provide you the ability to pull up the graphs and the, on any of the metrics that you choose. So along the right of the choices of metrics, you don't want to put them all in the same time because they have different, different axes in that. But, but you've got the ability to pull up all that data live real time on a dashboard. So quick question. Do you have one sensor per room or would you have to deploy more than one to? It depends on what you're looking for. Yeah. You know, if you're temperature and humidity, probably one would do it. If you're looking for light and light penetration, then you might put a matrix of them up. So what's the status of this technology? Has it been turned into a product yet? What, what do you see the timeline before we can actually start installing these? Yeah, we've got four of these beta testing down at the site. And I, I don't know what MK's timeline is on getting these into, to production. I know that they're very aggressive in trying to look at, get, get test sites to test them out in the field to work the bugs out before they go to market, but I don't have an answer on when, you know, when it's to market. So that's one, one project among several that we are working with MK. Yeah. Um, what I wanted to also discuss, um, let's see where it is, is, um, you know, I had mentioned earlier about the, working with the Department of Education. Yes. And MK think is also contracting with the Department of Education and they did much of the consulting towards the heat mitigation, trying to determine what can be done at the schools to reduce the temperature. Right. That's like an existing classroom in the existing classrooms. So they had to monitor, they monitored many, many classrooms around the state. And let's pull up the next PowerPoint slide, please. And this is a, this is a snap slide, a screenshot of a thermal comfort portal. And basically this is the DOE portal created by MK think that HNEI hosts. And the idea is you're able to select a school down on the left side and it'll, it'll pull up the conditions in various classrooms that they have monitored. And they have monitored a total of 63 schools and 740 classrooms. Wow. Really. And then in addition to the classrooms, they've also got 41 weather, independent weather stations, plus there is a network of weather stations that exists all over the state that they're tied into. So this website allows you to look at temperature, humidity in individual classrooms. It allows you to, to look at the conditions within, you know, various classrooms. Plus it provides you the weather conditions and down at the bottom it shows you, that's a, a temperature gradient that shows you the approximate temperature conditions over the course of the year. So you can see this is simple. So before we go to break, just one quick question. So can you monitor, like, do equipment health monitoring to see how well your air conditioning system, for example, I mean, if it starts, you know, falling apart or getting out of spec, this should be able to give you a trend. Yes. The, the Hawaii DOE portal wouldn't do that, but the data that we collect could do that. And, and with a, in a persistent review, yeah, it can do that because we, we track the energy. Okay. Yeah. So I guess we can go to that break now. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Living in this crazy world, so far up in the confusion, nothing is making sense. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time. Okay. So Jim, just, you know, looking at from, from just before we cut the, to break, I had no idea we were doing that at H&E High. And this is really relevant to the problems we have today. I mean, we're looking at spending, you know, tens of millions of dollars to retrofit our schools to get the temperature down so our kids can have a better learning environment. And so this is very relevant to, you know, solving our community's problems. Like in real time right now, it's not like 20 years out kind of research and development. It's like right now we can apply it and we can help the states, A, save money and save the kids, you know, an uncomfortable environment. So well done. Exactly. Well, thank you. Yeah. I'm just getting started. Yeah. Okay. Well, carry on. So one of our other key projects and passions of mine is supporting, you know, supporting the future, supporting the, our UH School of Architecture. Okay. Our architecture has what's called the Environmental Research and Design Lab and, you know, we call it URTL. And we've been supporting it for many years and they are very much our partners in crime in terms of doing research and they are, you know, my arms and legs when it comes to conducting research. So they're very supportive. And one of the projects that they're working on right now is with the Department of Hawaiian Homelands and they have monitored a number of homes out in Kapolei on DHHL properties. They've monitored the energy performance of those and then compared those and did simulations to compare those to see what is going to be the impact of future more stringent energy codes that are, that will be coming. What impact will that have on housing design? And I know Howard talks, Howard Wigg talks quite a bit about the new energy standards. And so they've, the URTL has conducted a pretty significant study on what will be the impact on those homes. But I won't be talking too much about the homes, I mean the impact on the standards. But part of the work that they've done is studying what is the impact of energy efficiency on the energy consumption in these homes. So we've got another slide I can, I'd like to show. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry, this was from the last, this is another screenshot from the Hawaii Department of Education. Okay. So we can go to the next slide. We have flexibility here. No problem. Yeah. We're all friends here. There we go. Okay, this is from the School of Architecture. And it's probably hard to read the fine print here, but this is one of the prototypes that they did the simulation on that reflects one of the homes out in Kapolei, and it's got long overhangs, PV, high performance glass, you can see the ceiling fans, but- So the overhangs provide shade, correct? The overhangs provide shade. And shield the windows from sunlight coming out. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And getting into the nuances of the energy code is a whole number, another program with Howard. Right. So let's just skip to the next slide, which compares two homes that we monitored out there. They're both four-bedroom homes, kind of funny enough, they're both each four-bedroom home with two occupants, but you can see the significant difference in energy consumption one home over another. It's like half. Right. Like half. So much has to do with attitudes, user behavior, turning the AC off when you're not there, and a lot of the habits are actually hard to break. So how do you change user behavior by providing a screenshot so they can see exactly how they're using their energy, as opposed to just not knowing what they're using, is that how we do that? We try to educate, you know, just by letting them know what their options are. Utilities and Hawaii Energy has found that one of the app, of all of the drivers, whether it's the need to do well, to do good, to do the right thing, to save money, of all the possible drivers out there, the one driver that affects energy decisions the most is knowing how your neighbor has done. Really? No kidding. A little bit of competition. So you send out in bills that this is how much you use, but you're using 20% more than your neighbor's using and creating this competition. And I'm kind of doing the shortcut version of that, but that is one of the most interesting things we've found in a while. So I was reading another study that said when you start saving money and energy, then people want to buy more electronics because, you know, okay, well, I can pile some more electronics on. So it's kind of like almost self-defeating, but you can't do the human nature, you know. That's right. It's a double-edged sword, especially with PV. You know, once you get that PV on there, I'm going to fire my air conditioner out. Exactly. All right. And so based on that DHL study, there's one more slide I'd like to pull up on that. This is basically just a short little study that they did to show what the cost reduction was by just making an adjustment on your thermostat set point. And you can go from, you know, in the order of $250 a month down to $84 a month by adjusting the temperature. And each one of those bars represents an adjustment from 72 degrees to 76 degrees. And the one next to the right is, if you're just to change the setting while you're away, Monday through Friday, you know, how much can you save? So this is just another visual, a quick snapshot visual of the types of savings. So with that, I'd like to turn to one more collaboration that we're doing. And this is with the University of California at Davis and the Navy here in Hawaii. And this is a project for what's called adaptive lighting. And if we can have the next slide. So the project is to study adaptive lighting. And adaptive lighting is the concept of you can lower your, you can have your exterior lighting at a certain level during, say, prime time. But during the middle of the night, you don't need it full blast. So on examples like this with parking lighting, and then the very next slide is a, the next slide is a parking lot. And you can see that the lights are on 100% full all night long. The parking lot is absolutely empty. So the notion of adaptive lighting is to reduce the levels of lighting during periods of non-use. And then with sensors, motion sensors, be able to detect if there's any activity. So it's going to reduce it down to 50%, it might reduce it all the way down to 20%. One of the studies that we're going to be doing with the California Lighting Technology Lab and the Navy is to, and actually Project Frog, we're going to be beta testing on the frogs and then deploying a prototype on Navy facilities that will actually reduce the lighting level, see how far we can reduce them. To see how we can network them such that we aren't getting lights in one area turning on in another area and just looking like, you know, visual popcorn. And turning how much energy savings we can attribute. Now the other benefit there is that it's always also a security feature, that if there is any action, then the whole place lights up like a Christmas tree. And somebody can go in and inspect. So the Navy is very interested from a security standpoint, from an energy standpoint. And it's, you know, our last collaboration that I've talked about. So these are very hot and very cool projects you're working on Jim, so it's really exciting to see us doing this. I mean, you know, you walk around Hawaii at night and even to the university and there's all sorts of potential there where we can use these kinds of technologies. So well done. Thank you very much. And keep it going. Appreciate the opportunity. We love it. Thank you, Mitch. Appreciate it.