 Aloha and welcome to Stand the Energy Man on Think Tech, Hawaii. I'm Rachel James, also known as Rachel the Energy Woman, filling in for Stan Osserman. On today's show, we'll discover how renewable energy applications can improve small and large-scale operations. Back by popular demand is Ryan Wubbins, electrical engineer for Burns & McDonnell, and Stan the Energy Man's third Friday officiant on all things energy and engineering. Welcome back, Ryan. Thanks. You're welcome. So, before we jump into our discussion today, I wanted to take a moment to share a bit about an inspiring news. Okay, I'm sorry. I'm going to not just going to wing this. All right. So, this shirt, which is a little sweaty because I was walking over briskly and it rained a bit so I was trying to walk faster, but Elemental Accelerator, they just hosted their introduction to their 2018 cohort yesterday. And so, in sharing kind of what's happening in energy, I think it's really exciting to see what's happening in the innovation space generally, but then to see that apply to energy. So, companies there range from folks who are looking at analytics for transportation both in public transit as well as kind of what happens with lights and how people are moving about on the roads and do we need to build more roads or do we need to just better utilize the ones that we have. And then they had companies that were doing things like looking at how to manage your farmland and mapping that to applications that you could look at your phone. So, I think for today's show, I know we're going to talk about small and large scale applications of renewable energy, but if we can even just broaden that discussion to talk about what's possible as well as what might be way, way out there and totally improbable, but something that some innovator can make happen. Sound like a plan? That sounds awesome. Awesome. I was going to try to read that, but it's one of those days so I'm just going to launch in. Yeah. Okay, so what interesting thing have you learned about in the recent past about renewable energy? We'll start there. Interesting about renewable energy? I think to tie it into what you were just talking about. The interesting part about renewable energy would be how it fits in with the transportation studies and how they are treating traffic flows to make bigger roads, to allow more traffic to happen, are you smarter with the traffic that's on the road? Yeah. The way that correlates to renewable energy is let's assume we're taking fossil fuels out of the vehicles and they're powered by the batteries or the fuel cells powered vehicles. So what that means to me, you're going to make a road bigger, I'm going to need to consume a lot more energy. If you're going to be a lot more efficient on the road than on the renewable energy side, well I need to produce less or be smarter about where I put it so it's consumed smarter. So I think that would be the interesting tie-in to the transportation idea. Ooh, I like it. I like what you're doing there. Especially on an island with space constraints, the idea of expanding highways and just making things bigger seems a little bit impractical. Yep. Awesome. My thoughts on renewable energy and micro-gridding and getting to the 20-40 initiative on 100% renewables, I've come on the show before and I always say the best way to get to 100% renewable is to be smarter and more efficient with the loads you're using. If not, use less altogether. If you don't need it, don't turn it on. So relating that back to transportation, I would ask for efficiency to just go up. Instead of making that road bigger, which nobody wants, that's just eight lanes of traffic instead of four, but we're still sitting nowhere, I would ask the innovators that are going after that to be smarter and more efficient with the roads and the transportation, and that overall will cause a drop in energy consumption or a higher efficiency with that energy. I like that you mentioned the 20-45 goal for 100% because that's kind of sliced up into different things. So portions of that are related to energy efficiency. Then we have some portions that are straight up like get more generation that's from renewables on the grid. And so as we think about placing things in the best space and utilizing resources optimally, and then even as you're just mentioning specific to transportation, like being more efficient in the place that you're going to be, because traffic doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere anytime soon. So the most we can do to best utilize the energy for that, for getting people from one place to another, I think the better will be hopefully happier people as well. So it's interesting, I was one of the things or one of the companies, their behavioral analyst. And so part of their, I would say a large part of their kind of product is taking those behavioral analytics and applying it to something to see how people can better utilize energy in that space. And so they apply that particularly to aviation and with pilots and just kind of making some tweaks into habits, being able to have immense fuel savings. And so I remember sitting in an energy efficiency charrette and there was a great talk about the gains that we've had in energy efficiency. But even in using energy more efficiently sometimes that end user ends up actually using more than they would otherwise. So they're like, I'm really saving on my electricity. So now I'm going to get that air condition that I wasn't going to get before. And I'm going to get that super huge refrigerator. And they're actually, the habits don't necessarily reflect a decrease in use so much as it reflects less out of their pocket for it. Yeah, more efficiency, more consumption. Yeah, which is an interesting paradox. Like you think like, oh, with the clean green tree huggers, no offense to anybody who hugs trees. But if you're increasing the use, when sometimes just decreasing use even before you get the fun widgets can really have an impact. I think sometimes we miss the low hanging fruit. Yeah, that definitely happens. And I think that's going to continue to happen. It's really hard. At the end of the month, you save $100. Are you putting that in savings? Or are you going out and buying something pretty cool? Probably cool things. And I don't want to say that's a bad thing from an energy perspective. But getting to our goals, we're going to get there faster, being efficient and smarter. At the same time, your load is going to increase. I think as general we become energy consumers, the more the energy becomes available to us. See, this is an interesting segue. So as we talk about more energy consumption and even if we're being more efficient, the advent of electric vehicles and the increased adoption of those is likely to have a huge impact on our energy consumption. And I think the more we look to things that require some sort of a plug-in and that require some sort of a power up, the way we operate and life relies more and more on things that are electrified. So even as we're becoming more efficient, if our patterns of consumption don't necessarily change, I think surely by the virtue of what we're doing each day, we're using a lot more energy just by our day-to-day task. OK. So we're using more energy, but we can be more efficient in that use. How does that look for the individual? Maybe residents will say, we'll start out at home. How an individual home can become more energy efficient. We'll start with energy efficiency. Sure. The easy ways to do it are to look for those little energy star-rated appliances when you go to get a new one like that. It's sometimes tough to maybe look for a little bit more expensive model that has a little bit more efficiency put to it, but that's just the easiest. Almost don't have to think about it by something more efficient when you upgrade. The next part comes to just shutting your lights off. Some of the more simple things are the easiest things that individuals can do. Just making it become a habit is a little bit trickier when it's so much at an abundance. And we still, while Hawaii has a higher energy cost compared to the mainland, it still feels like it's in abundance to a lot of us. So if you change your mind so a little bit that it's not as abundant, or maybe convince yourself it's a lot more expensive, then you'll start to change your habits and become more energy efficient. Getting the smart devices that tell you, here's everything that's going on, and it kind of bogs you down with too much information. Those can be really helpful to some people, because they want to track it. It's like a little game to them to make sure maybe how much power my refrigerator consumed in a month, you're not going to change very much with how that works. But those devices that are giving that feedback can be helpful to some people. And if you think that's going to be helpful, then go out and go for it. Awesome. OK, so I'm the energy efficient person, turning my lights off, unplugging my large appliances if I can. I'm doing the low-hanging fruit things. So now I'm ready to level up. What happens next in my renewable energy future? In your renewable energy future, we'll start adding some renewable generation now. Just for you, if you're the individual, you want to try and push the limits ahead of, let's say, what your community is doing or your state, which is really fast at this base. But if you wanted to go beyond that, energy consumption as a whole, you'll go straight to the solar water heater. And then your best case for you would be to add the solar where you can on your house. If you get to the point where you're creating so much that you're selling back to the grid, let's go to tier three. And now we start talking. I made up that tier three thing that. That's OK. It's not to find anywhere except at lunch on Fridays. Now we start talking about energy storage. These devices are coming out a little bit more and more throughout the industry. They're still rather expensive. I would feel like to what they give you. But if you want to track ahead, you start looking at an energy storage medium to recapture everything you're producing extra, so that you can use it. In our case, we're talking about adding solar at night when we don't have the sun to power up the solar panels. Are there moon panels out there that just came to my head? Totally wasn't in the script, but I'm just curious. Not that I know of it. Technically, there will be a little bit of energy produced from the solar that comes off the moon from a very technical level. But it's maybe a fraction of a penny. OK. Maybe. Not worth the investment, most likely. Probably not. OK, good deal. No moon panels. Moon panels look cool. Yeah, it'd be cool to say moon panels. I have moon panels. OK, so we'll stick with solar in the sun. So tier three, I've got solar on my house. And what's happening with the energy at the nighttime? We're trying to be more efficient now, but now is when you're actually home. This is when you're actually consuming the majority of your load. It's hard to push your load during when the actual sun is producing on your solar, but that's the best time to consume it because it's the most efficient. We just created it. Let's use it right away. Electricity is a very good medium for transferring energy. When we have to store it, we take a little bit of an efficiency hit. So at night, if it's a lithium ion battery or if it's hydrogen, we've taken a little bit of an efficiency hit, but we still want to be as smart as we can with the energy we're consuming. Part of that will become leveling out your level of energy that your peak energy use. So I wouldn't go turn the dryer on and every piece of electrical equipment that I have all at once, because that's going to consume a lot more energy faster and a little bit more inefficient than if we were to just try and level it out. It's not easy, but again, this is a mindset change. This is an energy usage changing behavior. This is exciting. It's also challenging sounding because changing behavior, especially at the end of the day, like you want to do the turn the TV on, turn the stove on, throw the things in the dryer, turn the radio up so loud you can't hear the kids screaming and annoying you in the background. So it's hard to change those habits, but I guess how do you, I don't want to say make people, how do you encourage people to make those sort of behavioral changes? Like is that surely information? Is that you talking to your friends and be like, hey guys? The most effective way? Make electricity crazy expensive? Yeah. That'll work. Who do you work for again? That'll work. I don't recommend it, but golly, everybody would turn back and start being really inefficient with how that works. I'm not sure the best way to just change your behavior. But you have to want to do it, and you have to surround yourself with people and resources around you. That want to help you do that. That's about as far as advice as I could give. No, I like this. So as we expand to the people and communities around us, so if we take this little renewable energy, energy efficient model in our home, and our neighbors think it's pretty cool, and they want to join in. So how do we level up? So does this tier four now maybe? Yeah, I think we're getting to tier four. Spreading the word to the community and getting your peers to join in the cause. Yeah. I don't know. You've got to have really cool friends to convince them to join the game. But it's definitely possible, and if you believe in the cause, there is a way to get there. OK. That's an encouraging note to leave us on for just a moment. So we're going to run to a quick break, come back, and speak with Ryan a bit more about how we go to tier, I don't know, seven maybe? Yeah, we're up there, yeah. We're leveling up to the high. Let's get to 10 before we're done. Yeah, so in just a moment, we'll be back with Stan the Energy Man. Thanks for joining us. Welcome back to Stan the Energy Man on Think Tech, Hawaii. I've been here spending a good amount of time with Ryan Wubbins, who's sharing all things energy and efficiency. So we left off chatting a bit about leveling up, so going from energy efficiency to widespread renewable energy. So we're just kind of entering into shared concepts in a community and what that might look like. So you chatted a bit about this, the good segue to transportation and the break. Yes. OK, launch into that. Absolutely. So we were talking about energy consumption and being efficient as an individual and then spreading it to the community. I think as in general, the community does believe in the renewable energy cause. That's not just help to electricity. We keep calling it renewable energy as a whole. So let's keep in mind the fuel we're using in your vehicle as part of that. To reach out to the community, let's come back to the individual. We're going to get there. We're going to get there. As you create more and more energy as an individual and you're storing and consuming everything you produce at night, there is a chance that you're still going to have the excess energy from your, if we're just at solar. There's a chance you're going to end up with a little bit extra. That type of energy, right now, you can't do a whole lot with other than run the blender an extra time if you really wanted to. Or if you go to the next tier, where we're at seven or eight, we're getting up there, you reach that energy and put it back into your vehicle. So some type of renewable energy vehicle there can be sourced energy from your stored energy. You can just say hydrogen. It's a safe space. All right, let's roll hydrogen in. I really do like that as a transportable fuel and in general for storage because of the high energy density, I was going to get there on community. But we'll speed up. You've already got that. You're going to create just a little bit of hydrogen extra at night, just unless you've got a huge yard in Hawaii, then you're a pretty neat person. But when you don't, now let's get back to the community because I keep saying efficiency is the best way to do this. Efficiency in generation, you're going to produce better if your community can support the energy consumption. This will be from using energy when we make it. It also comes to the bigger equipment that it takes to make hydrogen and store it is more efficient at doing so on a per kilogram basis. So it becomes larger, takes up a little bit more space. But a community now could support an energy efficiency goal. And it doesn't need to be just within the house, and also reach into the transportation. So you can foresee a community that sets down a hydrogen fueling station. That fueling station would create the energy storage, which I said was kind of expensive on a smaller scale for the house. Now the house is, if we're a subdivision and we're all real good friends, we're producing extra power. The extra power is actually going back into hydrogen right within our community's fueling station. That fueling station then can fuel our cars for our own use. But then, let's say the power goes back out, or we wanted to level out the amount of demand we have. That hydrogen can go right back to the grid. That's the beauty of using that hydrogen with the high energy density. Maybe there's a storm and there's a long outage. Let's all stop driving as a community, or reduce our energy consumption on our vehicles, and start powering the devices that we need. That's within a community. That community, we haven't scaled other than just a few houses. That same idea can be expanded to a whole island. Like the Hawaiian Islands. That'd be a good one. Something wild. Absolutely. Couple things I wanted to hit on. You mentioned we'll give plug-in EVs some chance to integrate in this discussion also. Because I think there's a place for essentially shared resources. So if a community collectively has some sort of understanding that Bob and Joe have EV cars, and Susie and Jimmy are planning on getting some too, and you start to understand a community's ability to access renewable energy, I think that makes the task a little less daunting. So just from a behavioral standpoint, I think Hawaii Energy has done a really cool job. So I don't know if you get it in your electricity bill. You get the little thing from Hawaii Energy that tells you what your neighbors are doing. And then when you're doing it better than your neighbors, you high-five everybody in your house. They're like, Bob and Jim over there, they suck. So much better. Yeah. So in that same, we can take that same, you know, we're humans. We can take that same concept. And if there are Bob and Joe and Susie, you're getting EVs, and you're like, but hey, I've got solar, and I've got some excess, like how do we plan together to make this a system that's most efficient, then also is renewable energy based? And I think that's really something unique about renewable energy, because you're probably not going to be like, let's put a refinery in our community so that we can all get our own gasoline. It seems a little less likely. So renewable energy, I think, provides a nice avenue for people to work collaboratively, but to also have collective benefit. OK. So we've expanded from the residential to the community. We're talking about island-wide. So when we talk about really being able to take these concepts and scale them up, what happens in that scaling? Because I hear, and I know from our work with you, that scaling up is something that I think some people perceive as a, like, just make it bigger. And other people are like, no, no, you got to keep it on this scale, because if you scale it up, it's not going to work. So can you talk a little bit about that kind of progressive leveling up process? Scaling will be something, generally, an engineer. I want to make it big. I want to start to consolidate, make things bigger, because I'm going to get better gains on everything that I'm producing. I'm going to be more efficient for energy fuel. That's true with really energy fuel source that I can think of right now. That's why we're going to want to scale bigger. When people don't want to scale bigger, it's just this year cost and the size that it becomes. So it becomes a balance between how much space and money you're willing to commit versus how much you actually want to get out of it. So I'm going to tell you to push that limit, to get as much as you can out of that budget and size right away. Because in the long run, it's going to pan out better from an energy consumption. OK. And is the long run like a really long run? Is that like a five-year long run, like a 10-year long run? To get into that full energy renewable. Well, I said earlier there was a 20-40 initiative. I'm five years out of schedule. OK. I'd noted that and I was like, we're live. So I got to throw 20-45 in there sometime. But no, good deal. OK. It's available today. But we can't just flip the switch and make it happen. Everybody, the cars are the great example. I don't want to go buy a new car tomorrow. I can buy a new car tomorrow. But if we change our behavior and the way that the system around us is operating, let's just say, and maybe somebody was talking about automated cars, I know that can be a little hard for some people to think that that's going to happen. It's going to happen. It's happening. Don't tell yourself it's not. It's going to happen, guys. So automated cars are going to just build the roads so they will be very efficient. The roads will be packed, but everything's going to be moving faster. Like the Jetsons. Yeah, it'll be exactly like the Jetsons. Yes, and they just love wheels. But they'll be colored just as cool. Excellent. I love that analogy, by the way. So we've got the Jetsons network of vehicles going on around us. It'll be easier when a system like that starts becoming to catch some ground. Because now my vehicle, I'm not going to buy my next vehicle. I'm just going to. Vehicles will be like a cell phone plan. I'll buy into a transportation plan. Ooh, a transportation plan. I will ask for a car to pick me up today. And it'll act like when we used to actually care about how many minutes we used, we'll start to care about how many miles we consume. This is a good analogy. That's my thought on where we'll be headed. I like that because it's a more efficient use of the energy being consumed. It's also more efficient on the space. There's a lot of goodness that comes from being smarter with our transportation. It sounds a lot like, and I'm sorry if I'm dumbing this down, I'm not an engineer. But it sounds a lot like public transportation, like 4.0, you know? It doesn't sound super, I mean Jetsons sounds fancy, but essentially it sounds like a really nice bus ride that's not actually on a bus that's in a car and you pay one for one. Absolutely. Okay, so not totally crazy, not way out there? No, no. If we can get to the Jetsons level of transportation, we'll be doing pretty good. Are there gonna be buses still? Is that still part of the scheme? I think you will have some type of busing system as well. I think you'll see a replacement for everything that we currently have. It'll just be less of it used at a higher utilization rate, which means the vehicles will constantly be in use. Those cars, you're not gonna pile a skyscraper with the cars and the bottom, my building 10 story is a parking garage. There's not gonna sit. The car that I showed up to work is just gonna go back out, pick up the next person and move them around. So as we see less cars, they're gonna be used at a higher utilization rate. Now I'm getting somewhere with this. Okay. Because this is a safe place. Yes. The higher utilization rate, you can't have any downtime on that vehicle. The higher it's being used, it's actually to that company or to the owner of the vehicle making money. If it's sitting, charging, however long it takes to recharge the battery that's in that vehicle, it's not making money as it's charging. So you want something at a higher utilization, you wanna refuel very fast. That's where hydrogen starts to play better than an electrical vehicle. Okay. When the cars and the system gets smart, it needs to be very high utilization. So we want the cars to, they run on hydrogen versus electrical. Stop at a station, you can refuel very, very fast with hydrogen. It's run at a very high pressure, just boom, your tank's full. Electrical, as we know, it's just gonna sit. I need to have a lot of copper to move power from one spot to the other. So as we talk about energy efficiency as a whole and transportation getting smarter, and then how do we get there? You have to start to change the system and maybe even the rules that allow that system to operate within. Okay. To facilitate that behavioral change. I don't think it's gonna be me buying a smart vehicle. I think it's the system allowing you to operate the way I think it should. Okay. So you're speaking my language with talking regulations. I'm in law school, so I love this idea of like, put it into a law and people will do it. I know that doesn't always happen, but like from an idealistic perspective, it's nice to think that if you write something really good, it'll inspire people to do good things, right? So. Just put me in charge. Oh, okay. And no problem. Excellent. Okay. So we've gone all the way from small-scale tier, I don't know, zero. We started at a low tier residential energy efficiency. We got some solar panels. We expanded into a community. Got some hydrogen. Got some fueling stations. Got some, what else? We get some plug-in stations. We went island wide. We said we can scale up. We said we should go big or go home. Yep. And then we decided that to do that, we just need to put you in charge of everything to make that all good. We'll add awesome lines on some paper. We'll get it marked up and let's just go build it. Excellent. So on that note, I want to thank you for taking your lunchtime to be with us today for sharing your knowledge, your inspiration, and your excitement. And thank you, audience, for joining us. And there you have it. So we're gonna go big or go home and put Ryan in charge until the next time. Thanks for joining us on Stand the Energy Man on Think Tech Hoy. Aloha.