 Energy. I'm your host, Mithun, and our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, HNEI. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest again, Tobey Kincaid, a deep thinker, an inventor, an author, and most recently the publisher of Green Hydrogen Today magazine, and my friend for the last 30 years, and he always bails me out by coming on my show at almost zero notice. So thank you very much, Tobey, for stepping up to the plate. My pleasure. Okay, so today we're going to discuss electric vehicle charging scenarios in Hawaii, navigating a changing landscape because it's continually changing and it's changed today, but you'll have to listen to the show. We'll tell you what the change was. So Tobey, welcome back to the show. Hello, Commander. Thank you for having me. Great to be with you. So let's get the seconds, I guess, the first slide up. Okay, so I have a question for you. So it's complicated. Yes. So in simple sailor's language, because I'm a sailor, I'll lead us through the different types of electric vehicle chargers and their power requirements. Tobey, give us the bottom line here, an idiot's guide to it. Well, it's all about turning renewable energy into spinning wheels. So how do we get the sun into your wheel well and turn those wheels? That's the real question. And when we talk about battery charging for battery electric vehicles, there are good points and tough points. The good point is that these cars are available. And so there's a push by the government and other interests to put in the appropriate charging infrastructure to do that. But there are a little bit, there are some challenges here in that idea. So we'd like to kind of frame it and then lead to what HECO is now doing. They put out a new schedule to encourage people putting in DC fast charge or level two chargers. So we'll get to that. But first, on that little sketch, I'd like to kind of show the guy freaking out because he's looking at his bill and money's flying everywhere. And really when it comes down to charging batteries, of course, the electricity you use is the important thing. And you're in Hawaii, you're in the middle of the ocean, you're 2300 miles from any major land area. So on the mainland, if we have trouble, we can just wheel energy from another grid. But you don't have that option on the islands. And so it's really I take my hat off to HECO for even keeping the grid going because in the saltwater and in all of the temperature and humidity, very difficult to do. So hats off to that. So when we look at the electric bill, you're really charged down two ways. First is the load. So that's the maximum over about a 15 minute period that you draw in any billing period, usually monthly. So if you have a party during the weekend, you're cooking all weekend using a lot of power in the rest of the month, you're not using power, you're still going to be charged for that peak high water point of your demand. That's called the demand charge. And that's usually charged by kilowatt. So it's by power. Now, then you pay for the electricity. And that's by energy, that's kilowatt hour. And it's some fee for that. So they put those together. And that's just the normal billing method of utilities. Well, the challenge becomes if you want to charge battery electric vehicles, you often use a lot of power. So back on that chart, if we look down, there's really three choices. You have level one, level two, and then level three is called DC fast charge. And what we're doing is they're building up more and more power in these dispensers to push the electricity into the battery faster and faster. Now, batteries don't necessarily like that, but we'll get to that. So on that sketch, you could see level one has a power rating of about 2.5 kilowatts or less. And I drew a little house on the bottom and a line going down just to kind of give a little context of what power we're talking about. So level one just uses the normal socket, 120 volts. And you can see it takes about a half of a house. A normal house is about five kilowatts if you turn everything on. So level one is fairly slow. It takes a big battery, depends on the battery, but around 12 hours to charge that. But it's done efficiently. And that's very useful for people who have the ability to put that in. Then we go to level two. And level two charger is an attempt to put more juice in. And this is usually the circuit that you have for your washer and dryer. It's a 240 volt service. So if you put that in, the power rating is about 7.5 or 7 kilowatts generally, some a little less, some a little bit more, but usually about seven. So you could see, you should expect about three times faster charging. And in fact, we see that we, that would charge your big battery in maybe four hours. So then we get to the third option, which is DC fast charge. And now you can see that DC fast charge has had a range. It usually has been over the last five or six years around 50 kilowatts for a dispenser. So that's about 10 houses worth of power to service that vehicle. But now the big push is to go for these really powerful 350 kilowatt dispensers. And that'll push the power in much faster, although it's often the least efficient way. Batteries don't really like to be pushed, but we're humans and we're overlords and we say, do it. So we push the batteries. But the trade-off is, the challenge is, you're talking about 70 houses worth of power, everything turned on. Get that visual, just to service one DC fast charge at that 350 kilowatts. That's a whole neighborhood. That really is. It's a lot of power. And for the main lenders, that's not such a big, well, it is an issue for the grid in many outlying areas because they're not set up to handle that capacity. But we can manage it because we have a western grid that allows us to wheel back and forth. Now, you don't really have that option. Every island is independent. And so the challenge is, how do you satisfy customers' needs for a fast charge but not brown out your grid in doing it? So a fast charge is like, if you drive your car up to the North Shore to go surfing and you didn't have a chance to charge it at home and it's only half full and you get up there and you say, oh my God, I've only got 10% left. How am I going to get home? I don't want to have to have a tow truck or an Uber. So you're looking around for that fast charger. Absolutely. And you've hit on kind of the biggest concern that consumers indicate and that's range anxiety because there's a gas station on every corner but not a fast charger or even level two charging. So that's a challenge for an island-based grid. So maybe if we go to the second slide, I'll continue on that level one, level two, level three. So what you see in this chart is part of the problem. At the top, you see kind of what we're trying to do in the traditional sense, use as much renewables on the grid. But as we talked about earlier, the capacity factor is how often is the vehicle actually plugged in because renewable energy is a real-time proposition, either use it or you lose it. So this is very challenging for the grid operators because it's unscheduled. They don't know when you're going to fast charge. And I can tell you a lot of the independent system operators, the discussion on the mainland is how are we going to balance all of this? We're putting on renewables, but we have to balance the load and the supply. So if the load goes up, the supply has to go up to meet it. If the load goes down, the supply has to be curtailed back. Otherwise you over-energize the grid and that causes some arc flash, which would be dangerous. So the grid operators are excellent. They know what they're doing, but this is a challenge. And if they have to curtail it, we're wasting renewable energy, and that's not the objective. We want to use as much renewable energy as possible. Exactly, exactly. And that curtailed energy is a big number. In the Pacific Northwest, we have something like 16 terawatt hours a year of renewable energy that's not usable. They have to turn it off. And as you point out, after you build a facility, turning it off is not the point. So it's a real tough challenge. Now, I rarely have a chance to praise utilities, but I'm going to praise them when they deserve it. And what HIKO has done is come up with this schedule called EVJ. And what they've done is really progressive. I mean, this is a really aggressive idea. And what they're trying to do is promote people putting in chargers at their facility, their apartment building, the hotel or wherever, the strip mall, wherever you want to put some charges in a parking lot. Now, their schedule is amazing. And I'll give you a kind of a reference to the top of that sketch. The reason we really don't see 350 kilowatt chargers on Oahu or any other island is that's a lot of juice. That's a lot of power. And in another sketch, I'll show you a calculation where if you had a thousand vehicles charging at 350 kilowatts, that's 350 megawatts. And so a thousand cars at that rate would draw about a third of your grid. So that's not practical. That's not going to happen. So what HIKO did is they realized the big issue is demand charge. So for example, if I wanted to put in a 350 kilowatt fast charger, the demand fee used to be about $24 at the commercial schedule per kilowatt. So 350 times 24, that's $8,400, something like that. That's per month. I'd pay for one dispenser before I pay for the station or the electricity. It's very tough. So obviously, HIKO understands what they're doing because they said, okay, look, we're going to put a schedule together for midday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. And we're only going to charge you $2 per kilowatt for the demand charge. So in that case, instead of $8,400, you're only going to pay about $700. That's a much more manageable figure. I checked your math, by the way, you're right on. Very important. So what they've done is they've made that demand charge low enough to be practical, very, very good policy. And they reduced the electricity cost during that 9 to 5 to 3.85 cents per kilowatt, 3.5, almost 4 cents per kilowatt hour. When is the last time Hawaii ever saw that kind of rate? I'm paying 50 cents a kilowatt hour on my hydrogen station on the big island. I mean, wow. Yeah, makes a big difference. Incredible. Yeah. And so by doing this, I really think you should get an award for it. Hiko, you did good because you're moving the ball forward. You're looking at the private sector and saying, how can we help you install? Now, if you draw before 9 a.m. or after 5 p.m., that's kind of on and off peak, as they differentiate between the midday, then the rate goes up to about 12 cents, but still very good. And then there's a little bit of a fine-tuning with their power factor, which really relates to how easily the grid can deliver the power that you need. So there might be a little adjustment and they have a, in the fine print, they'll add another 10 cents. I believe for that adjustment, the adjustment won't be very much. So 5, 10 percent, typically. So for the most part, you've got great rates for now trying to facilitate getting people to plug in and charge. So, Hiko, I took my hat. So if you own a strip mall or, you know, a mall, a strip mall, and you have electric vehicle charging stations, you know, like they have in front of the grocery stores and places like that. So this could really help that out a lot for that business owner because, you know, the difference between paying three or four cents a kilowatt hour and 50 cents a kilowatt hour is tremendous. But also people are attracted by those, quote, free chargers. And if you can get, I mean, if the business guy can still attract customers to a store and they're charging the vehicle while they're buying stuff, and it's only three or four cents a kilowatt hour, that's a heck of a good deal for the business owner. Amazing. Yeah, very much so. And then when you add, on top of that, under the Recent Inflation Reduction Act, now they are allowing any, what they call EVSE, Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. So that could be level one, level two, it could be DC fast charge, it could be hydrogen fuel cells. Under the language of the IRA, this Inflation Reduction Act, you're also qualified for a 30% tax credit off the top. So those things together, coupled with HECO's new EVJ schedule, is really very progressive in trying to get charging infrastructure on the island and up and running. So very interesting. But you got to figure it out. Yes. And that's what we're trying to do on this show. At least introduce people to the problem and how to figure it all out so they can do models and find out when's the best time to charge and when's the best time not to charge. That's what we're trying to do is de-complicate it, make it sailor friendly. Absolutely. Let's go on to the, oh sorry, go ahead. Oh no, maybe we'll just jump to the third slide and we'll just keep going on related to what's involved. So what are the charging levels? Yeah, so here we've got one level one, level two, and level three. And I kind of rewrote and tried to draw some of the plugs so you can see another challenge is format. They're not all the same, they're not all the same. No, they're not all the same. And in fact, I've got a little bit of a funny story about that, but I'll see if we can fit it in. But when you look at level one, that's 120 volts, you're just going to plug it into your wall and every EV comes with a little pack. And actually for level one and level two, the rectifier, the thing that changes the AC to the DC in the battery, that's in the car. So you could just plug in it and actually those little level one and even level two chargers, the dispensers, don't actually do any charging, they're just basically a fancy light switch and it turns on the juice that in the car can deal with that. Now that's different when you get to DC fast charge, that's where you have to have DC high voltage, usually over 600 volts, pushing into the car. But it's kind of interesting at level one, we're dealing with that power at two and a half, pretty manageable. When you get to level two, there's a plug called a J1772. I don't know why they call it that, not a marketing brilliance in my view, but it's a J1772. And that is kind of universal up to level two charging. So every car is going to be able to take that plug format. Now when we get to DC fast charge, now it gets even more a little complicated because now you have different formats. We've really kind of narrowed it down to basically three. You have a Chathamplug and those are usually for the Japanese manufacturers or Asian manufacturers. That's the standard they developed. That's a different plug. Then you have CCS which is combined charging system. And that is kind of standardized and that's mostly from the European manufacturers. That was their push. And then you have a Tesla as a third party with their own format. Now what's really funny is CCS in America, and I wrote CCS, well, it's actually CCS one. If you go to Europe, they have a CCS two, which is not compatible. So if you brought an EV from Europe directly to states, you'd have trouble plugging in unless they have an adapter, which I've not heard of yet. So there's all these formats and this is a little bit different and difficult. And, you know, if you look at kind of the buzz on the street, people are early adopters, you know, they're doing the best they can with these chargers. But you have a lot of companies that are actually running the station. So you have to have their app to fit. You have ChargePoint, OpConnect, Greenlots, EVGo, Electrify America, which is now using EVGo. But mostly you have to kind of, if you were doing a long trip in the mainland, you'd have to have four or five apps to be able to accommodate everything. So if I absolutely mean adapters. Well, they have an app so that you can actually interface with the station. None of them have like a card reader for your credit card or debit card. They don't do that for some reason that the owner operators or at least the back office, the one that does the charging in terms of charging your wallet and allowing you access to the charge, that's really been a little bit of a mess. Now in Europe, they said, look, years ago, maybe five, six years ago, they said, look, we're going to make sure that every car that's a battery EV can charge at any station. So they standardized CCS, CCS2 in the European style. And they said to Tesla, hey, you can put any chargers you want, but you have to have CCS2 so anybody can use it. That was a very smart idea. We didn't do that in America. The government doesn't have any, if what's really at all doesn't set any standards actually, firms of how any mandate to what's accessible and what is not. It's all kind of done by private interests. So it is a bit of a challenge. Now, on the bottom of this page, I put together kind of a look at a Wahoo. Now if we look at the grid on a Wahoo, if you turn every generator on, it's about 1.6 megawatts, excuse me, 1.6 gigawatts. That's the whole grid. That's with everything on. The normal peak of the grid on a Wahoo is somewhere around 1.2 gigawatts. So you need 1.2 billion watts to run this island available at any particular time. So then we get to this calculation on that sketch. At the bottom, I put 1000 times a battery electric vehicle at 350 kilowatts. And then we get this 350 megawatt draw for only a thousand cars at that high level. So that's very challenging. That's a 30-year grid. So not a practical, there's a limit then. And HECO recognizes this and said, okay, at least under our new EVJ program, they're kind of, as I read it, they're envisioning kind of level two chargers that are put on. But in the EVJ schedule, they point out that they will install three-phase if you wish it. I don't know if there's a fee for that, there usually would be. However, they are saying that HECO will pay for all of the grid improvements if under this program. And I should also point out that there's a limit, I think, of a thousand sites that they'll allow this. So between the big island, Maui and Oahu. And let's talk a little bit about charging efficiency, our favorite topic here. Yes. Well, it's an important one for sure. And here's the thing about batteries. As we know, there's two types of electric vehicles. There's the all-battery style, and then there's the hydrogen fuel cell. They're both electric vehicles. The fuel cell makes the energy in real time from the hydrogen. And the nice thing about that is you can make clean hydrogen like you're doing on the big island with your solar arrays. And so what we have here is that this new schedule would allow for a level two. But I would say that you could go to level three under that schedule as long as you stay another parameter is you have to stay under 300 kilowatts. So obviously at 300, one 350 dispenser would not qualify. So one dispenser is already disqualified. But if you lower the power of those DC fast charts back to say 50 kilowatts each, then you could conceivably have six. So you're much faster with the DC fast chart, but you're drawing, of course, much more current. So when we talk about these batteries, what I see on the top chart is see the little 20 percent. Now you're told if you have a battery EV, not to discharge the battery more than 20 percent or further down, and they don't want you to charge it beyond 80 percent. So you have kind of 20 percent at the top and 20 percent at the bottom that you're not really supposed to use. So I think in a conversation we had it almost was like a turtle, right? You carry your house on your back. So you're carrying around a lot of EV weight. And that's kind of when we look at this chart, you'll notice that the 20 percent you're starting, the efficiency is really fairly high because the battery is thirsty. But as you charge a battery, and that's great. But as you start charging a battery, so increases its resistance to being charged. So it's very much like a metal spring. And you're going to grab both ends and you're going to stretch and stretch. Well, it's kind of easy in the beginning, but then it really protests. And that's kind of what's happening in a battery. It's the batteries like everything slow. They prefer to charge slowly and they prefer to discharge slowly. But batteries work for humans. Humans say, hey, go fast. But they don't like it. And I'm not a horse whisperer or a battery whisperer. But I know enough of their language to know that if you touch a battery and it's hot, it's mad. It's protesting. It's trying to tell you, stop. Why you gave me something to drink. That's great. But now you're just pouring water. Stop, stop, stop. But no, we push them. So when you look at the battery as style, you know, I've worked with batteries for decades and I have a lot of respect for batteries, but they should be used properly and not necessarily the whole load as a battery. That's very difficult because batteries don't have a lot of energy density. They have pretty good power density. You can get that short right across it and boom, you go fast, but you can't sustain it very long. So these are kind of the quagmire that we have to balance. So now when we look at the bottom of that sketch, you'll see that if you want more range on an EV, you have no choice but to add more battery. And that adds more weight, that adds rolling resistance. Now compare that to a fuel cell truck. The largest fuel cell truck I've seen coming out of Europe has 70 kilograms of hydrogen they can store in their tanks, but that's 150 pounds, something like that. Not very much compared to the weight of a fully loaded truck. So the weight difference only gets better. It doesn't actually go up if you want more range to any significant amount. So these are kind of the parameters that the battery guys want to do, the government wants to do, city planners want to do, and okay. And with this new aggressive EVJ, HECO, Bravo, well done. I think you're going to see a lot of response to that because it's a great deal. Yeah, especially for business fleet operators. It's ideal for them. So let's go on to the next slide and talk about various charging scenarios. You got your A, B, C. Yeah. Well, so where does that lead? In my view, in my opinion, you've got essentially four scenarios here. The top scenario A is basically business as usual. Try and put as much renewable as you can, but it's a real time operation. If the car is plugged in and can take advantage of that renewable energy in real time, great. If it's not during the sunny hours, then you're using whatever mix the grid has. So the top scenario is basically connecting directly to the grid. There's the power conditioning equipment. And again, the equipment is between the car or the consumer and the grid. All of that is called EVSE. And that comes up a lot because now the tax code is referring to this specifically. So that's a great progress there as well. And EVSE means remind us again. I'm sorry. Remind us what EVSE means. Oh yes, forgive me. Electric vehicle supply equipment. So that applies to everything. It could be level one, level two DC fast charge and hydrogen fuel cells as well. So there's a 30% tax credit available for that hardware now. And that's pretty significant. Very, very helpful. Certainly before it was active, you'd have to come up with the other 30%. So that's a good thing. So that's your first scenario. But you could see that that power demand is really tough on the grid because it's in real time. And I'd like to point out in an emergency if a typhoon, knock on wood, this doesn't happen. But if a typhoon swings around the big island or comes up underneath and nails a wahoo, your grid is not very well hardened. It's going to be splinters. And that means that nobody can charge at all. There's not even electricity to pump the gas. So there is a vulnerability with scenario A. Now, another approach is a technology where they put a solar canopy on a mast. And then you see in scenario B, I have a car there drawn. But take the car away and you see that kind of big plate. That's a big steel plate and it's covered with rubber. And that's a ballast mount. So the kind of cool thing about this is you don't have to, you probably don't even need a permit because you're not drilling into anything. It's removable. It installs in a day or several hours. That's just all you need. The downside is it tends to be a little higher cost. So that's a little something that, again, that 30% might help alleviate. But the other issue is you're limited to level two. See batteries and what's neat about this capacity factor is if the car isn't there, the solar energy is wasted. But in that scenario, number B, they put a battery on the mast head to collect all the energy when you're not there and then run your level two charger. The problem is you can't really get to DC fast charge from small batteries. It's too much of a draw for them. So that kind of then leads us to scenario C, which is my favorite, which is what you do on the big island by putting down electrolyzers. And now you could build all your renewables. You could over build your grid in renewables because there's somewhere for it to go. This is the brilliance of your design on the big island is and why connecting it to the grid was such a good idea. It means the perfect teaching power plant because you're demonstrating green hydrogen, but you're also saying, Hey, let's take it from the grid at night and use other people's renewable energy. That's the idea that you're going for and it's a great way to go. So in scenario C, we're kind of, there's a technology being developed by EV4 by Hans Vandermeer here in Portland, where they're putting a fuel cell stack and we're going to run the DC fast charge from the fuel cell. So normally a fuel cell is in a vehicle, you know, hydrogen fuel cell vehicle as a fuel cell, but we're going to put it on the station as well, because now we can take your hydrogen, run the fuel cell, do DC fast charge at any level that you want to design it for. And there's no grid impact because the grid doesn't see the fuel cells. They only see the electrolyzer and that's a scheduled load. And it's much smaller than the fuel cell. So for my money, I say go with option C. And then just to finish it, option D is option C without the grid. If you just wanted to run solar and maybe some wind at night, if a smaller wind perhaps, because large wind isn't terribly popular, but the smaller wind would probably work very well in terms of keeping your electrolyzer going and producing hydrogen that you then use for DC fast charge. And I love that idea, because you're kind of putting in half the infrastructure you need for when you do dispense the hydrogen from those sites, you've already got the electrolyzer in the storage and all the filters and dryers and everything is there. So you just add dispensers and a little more compression and you're ready to go. So the future is definitely going to be fuel cells because of the advantages, fast fueling, long range, very little rare earths, if any, depending on what technology you choose. That's very scalable. Plus, you can take all of the solar and wind that you have and turn it into energy where none of it is curtail. That's I think the future for Oahu and Hawaii. I totally agree. So let's go on to the next slide. We're running out of time. We're on the down slope here, which is good. So let's talk about charging made simple. Yeah, this one, you know, that's the thing, you know, people have, if you monitor it and I try to, you hear people complaining that all these different standards and all the things, this one's not working and you get all this trouble. So I'd like to say, if we were doing DC for fast charge, I would just slap on a QR scan code sticker and sign up with Apple pay. And so you drive up, plug in your car, snap a picture of the code and the app goes, Oh, hello, Mr. Perkins. I see you'd like a DC fast charge. Yes. And you're done. So I think that's the way to go. And but all of these other interests, the green lots and the other companies that I mentioned, they have a business model and they have good apps in there and they're there to manage the money to authorize the charge. So it'll grow. So at the start, we really named our show well by saying navigating a changing landscape because hot off the press today, the period was announced that the PUC is adopting this time, another kind of, I'm not sure what the details are, but time of use rates for the eco companies. So it's kind of like the, you know, your EJ, your EVJ billing code, but they just come up today. So we'll get a chance to do this show again, Toby, and update it as we go along so that people that have the latest scoop here. I love it. The other thing on that last slide I just mentioned is I love the idea of someone just saying, Hey, for 10 bucks, you get 100 miles in about 10 minutes. Now that would take quite a DC fast charge. You'd have to get up to around 150 kilowatts to do that. But if we use the system that you're doing on the big island, that's not a problem. So I think some creative marketing, make it easy for the customer to interface. And I think that's a winning combination. Yeah, you know, I think going forward, the reason it's going to change is as we get familiar with the system, we can figure out better ways to do things. So all of this is based on, oh, maybe it would work better if we do it this way. And sure enough, it does. So we're going to change the rules to make it easier for everybody. So that's the process. Yeah, that's a good process. So I just want to call up the next slide, which is a little bit of acknowledgement to you. Oh, well, thank you. I didn't invite everyone to go to their Apple App Store or Google Play and develop an app called green hydrogen today. It's magazine. It's in the format of a magazine. But the app functions are really getting exciting because we're adding every, it's quarterly, and every issue we're adding more companies in the green hydrogen directory. And this would allow you to find electrolyzer companies, fuel cell companies, engineering companies, finance companies, storage companies. So all of this is just to increase the industry. And happily, it's growing. And so I'm happy to report we're still here. It's a great magazine, Toby. So that's it. We're going to have to leave it there. We just ran out of time. So thank you so much, Toby. You've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. And today we've been talking to Toby Kincaid, my friend, author, publisher, and deep thinker about EV charging in Hawaii and standby. It's going to change as it did today. So thanks for participating, Toby. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. So I'm with you and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.