 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community does matter, especially on Stand Energy Man, where today it's all about community. In fact, it's about your house. And can you really go off the grid and things like that? Some good questions. So I have my very favorite electrical engineer from Burns & McDonald's, Mr. Ryan Woobins here today. And that's what we're going to talk about. Whether it makes sense for you to even think about coming off the grid or things like that, because there's a lot that goes into that decision. And some folks have made the decision and haven't planned well and it hasn't turned out well. But there's some tools out there for you and there's some things that you need to know and it might be the right thing to do. So we're going to go through that and try to explore it as deeply as we can. So Ryan, thanks for being with us today. You bet. Thanks for having me. And being our expert, our residential Hawaii expert here. And so tell us what you've learned. You've gone out and done some homework on this and you work at day-to-day on a large scale with big companies and big plant. But what did you find out about things on the residential scale? Sure. So you approached me earlier this week about talking today and you said, what about micrograding or coming off the grid on your house? Great topic. I do that for larger clients. As you know, we've worked together with providing... Coming off the grid more of an energy security standpoint, a little bit different thought where at your house you're not planning for zombie apocalypse and coming off the grid. You're doing it for your own reasons on being renewable yourself or saving more money yourself. So I went online and went to the HECO website for me to see what their rules and regulations were and what information was available. That's a great place to start. And it turned out to actually be very helpful. I don't remember exactly which menu I went through, but I very quickly found a link to say, well, how much solar can I install on my house? What's it going to do for me and what kind of storage would I need to just level out essentially zero? It'll ask you your address and it just shows you on the map where your house is. You can decide if that was correct or not, but let's assume that it was. And it'll get you the next phase and it'll ask you how much sun is hitting your roof. That's one variable we should talk about. What direction does your roof face? Another great variable to talk about. And then how much energy are you using right now? I think those were the only three that it asked me. And it's a really simple interface and it proved to be very close. And in my case, my house is using about 15 kilowatt hours a day. It varies between 12 and 15 for me over the last year. Yeah, my house is 21. 21? You got a pool or something there? My wife thinks I will like some. So let's take 15. That was what I ended up doing in my back check of the HECO model. You can also just find that on your bill if anyone cares on where to find it. I did it myself. I have a big spreadsheet and got way in depth. And then I checked my bill because I wanted to add in some dollars and they show me right there. My kilowatt hours per day is 15 kilowatt hours a day. And then it came back and said, you know, my roof faces almost south. Let me rewind. That's talking about the roof. Which way your roof faces? South would be ideal. Because you're going to be facing the sun most of the time. Southeast, southwest, you're going to get some gains. If your pain faces the north, you're going to be building some extra structure to get it facing south. It adds that calculation in for you. And then how much sun you're getting on your roof? I think people can generally understand if you're getting shade. Are you in a valley? Or you've got a lot of big trees on either side of your house. Maybe your neighbor has a two-story building or you have a high rise right up next to you on one side. So you can go in there and say, I'm getting low, medium, high shade amounts. And it'll add that into the model. I was hoping for a little bit more that I could talk about how much shade I get. Because I'm right up against the coal out. So I kind of wanted to say that my day gets cut short pretty quick. But it was still good. And came back and said, hey, you need a 4.1 KWDC worth of solar panels being installed. And he gave me a square footage of how much space that would take on my roof. Which wasn't that bad. I do a little back check on that. And that says, OK, 4. Let's do a really simple math. Just multiply that by 4 hours a day. It doesn't work exactly like that. But that came out and it says, OK, so this software is telling me I need about 16 KWDC a day to go on top of my 15 KWDC load. So my back check against that. Pretty close. You guys are about right. And it came back and said I needed, I think, 8 KWDC of storage. So that's probably about right too. Because you're going to get a little bit lower at the evening and in the morning. But most of the time you're going to be real low. I'm like, yeah, that's about right too. So the tool was available online through HECO. I'm always a little skeptical when I see those things. Because everyone seems to have an agenda. And the tool was easy to use and it was actually pretty accurate. I would have oversized it to be an engineer. I wanted a little more fluff on some certain things. Whereas someone else might go out and skimp on it a little bit. And then you're going to be a little more unsatisfactory. Well, you haven't bought your Tesla yet. I haven't bought my Tesla. It'll be a while unless those prices come down to like 10%. So that was the tool. And it painted the picture for you of what it would be to, let's say, be net zero. Which would be, I produce and consume all my own energy at my house with solar and storage. And then it gave you the links of the applications to fill out to go after that. And a list of equipment that you could use to go after that. Their pricing seemed a little high to me. For the equipment. For the equipment. And I went back to manufacturers and tried to make a couple calls yesterday. It was a little late for some of the mainland manufacturers. But from my research, they were close. And with the government subsidies always changing. It's a little hard to always stay right up to date with that. And they'd rather overestimate than low balling. Yeah, absolutely. I don't want to be told it's going to cost me five and someone comes back and charges me seven for that. Absolutely. So I would recommend if you want or are interested in just a broad picture without calling someone. So a sales guy is calling you all the time or getting a bunch of junk mail. Go there and check it out. It's going to paint the picture of what the requirements would be. And it gets you thinking, all right, is this right for me? And then you bounce that against your reason. That's really good news because most folks wouldn't know where to start. They might call a solar company. And then like you say, everybody has an angle on this thing. But it sounds like Hawaiian Electric's website is a good place to go. Pretty accurate. You backfed the math in there and it pretty much checked out. And when it did work out, it was a little on the high side. So you're not afraid you're going to get caught with some unexpected costs. Let's talk a little bit though about maybe in some special applications. Like yours is a standard house, but maybe somebody runs their business out of their house and they run power tools and compressors and things like that. Would they have to worry about peak loads and things like that? Like equipment has a really fast draw and maybe pulls more amps than the average house does. And you may have to do something special to your house for that kind of situation. Yeah. When you make the leap to more of a commercial application or a larger facility, the amount of variables gets a lot higher. On the house side, make sure you're always looking at that inverter, the energy storage device is going to tell you what your continuous load can be and then your peak. The peak is going to be a little bit higher and it will be able to do that peak for a little bit of time. The equipment is going to get hot and it's going to start to say I can't help you out anymore. Look for those numbers to be four to five continuous. That's about what you'll use at your house. And then maybe seven or eight on the peak in case you have maybe a closed dryer that you want to start while everything else is going. That would be about your worst case scenario. In a commercial setting, it's about the same. We want to start a drill press or just a crane or a big overhead door. Those draw a high amount of energy for a short amount of time. If you want it to be off the grid and able to support that, your equipment, your peak level and that equipment needs to be sized, you can give those short bursts. You have a bigger facility now? Generally speaking, if you're over two stories, you probably won't have the square footage on your roof to cover that with solar. We're going to have to start looking at supplementing with some other renewables or having some, you know, your parking lot needs to start getting included in this conversation. But that's a little bit of a break even. And that came from, I was talking to your second favorite electrical engineer this morning about that. Mr. Bachoff? Mr. Bachoff. And that number came from him. And I think he's probably spot on there with his experience that it's rough. I mean, if you have a big warehouse and a lot of square footage, LED lights can be different. But you'll have to be sizing your equipment. It's generally going to be larger to make up for those short bursts of energy. So basically what the HECA website does for you is it takes into account some of the major factors and it kind of puts a conservative formula against them. But if you really, really wanted to do that all by yourself, you'd have to literally go through your house and look at the draw on all your motors, the peak draw and stuff, and add it all up and come up with what, if like your refrigerator and your freezer and your compressor and your drill press and your air conditioner and your dryer, all went on at once. Boom. You could get this peak load. I have to size my stuff for that. So the HECA website is great for the average residential unit, if you have a two-story house or you know you have a lot of extra equipment over and above the average house, you might want to have an electric engineer or somebody who really helped you calculate a little bit better. Yeah, start reaching out to, we'll say the professionals, or the skilled laborer to help you evaluate that. You'll want to take more measurements. If you do the same thing with the HECA website does on your commercial spot, you'll likely end up over-sizing it. Even be a little skeptical of an engineer that's going and taking a bunch of measurements, or if they're just looking at drawings, you'll probably end up over-sizing it. Well, you know, based on history that's probably not a bad thing because my house was built back in the 60s. No computers, no big screen TVs, no disposals, no electric dishwashers, no microwave ovens, and when you add all that into the load on your house, the service in my house is barely enough to handle my house though if I was going to design a PV system. But I'm sure the HECO thing is more up-to-date. But the bottom line is, over time, we're going to be using more and more electricity. Like I say, you might buy that Tesla one of these days. Once you bump John Botoff off his job and get a pay raise, you might be able to get some more money and afford a Tesla. Oh, that totally helps. And then you'd want to charge it at home so you're not using dirty coal or oil to charge your Tesla so you might have to oversize or you might even want to plan on that. If you know you're going to go to a battery vehicle or say you want to go to a battery vehicle and your office doesn't give you charging at the office when there's plenty of solar out there, you'd want to up-size your batteries and your solar so that at night when you bring your car home you can charge your car at night. Yep, absolutely. I think that scenario is a perfect segue into the other part that I want to talk about, which is I'm not going to take John's job. He's way too smart for me. So that doesn't give me my Tesla. But if I did go through buying that 401kw solar and eight megawatt hours of storage, I'm going to feel great. And as an electrical engineer, I'm going to nerd out about it for a while. But what am I going to do during the day? I'll probably flip on my little AC unit so my dog's cooler during the day. I internally will change my energy habits because I'm going to feel like I'm getting free green energy. So when you're going through that process, an electric vehicle would be a big part of that future that you want to size for. Just adding another solar panel is not as easy as it is. Leaving your square footage on the roof, it's more than that. It's that inverter that continues in peak. And then the storage, how much we're capturing during the day that'll affect an electric vehicle. That's a biggie. Smaller, I'd say it's definitely the niceties. The things that we have subconsciously figured out while power is a little expensive, let's turn the lights off, let's do this, let's not run the AC. You might start doing it once you feel like it's free. And now we weren't 15 kilowatt. Maybe you were 15 kilowatt hours, but now you're 17, 18, 21. So it just raises your awareness. Right now most of us run through the house and just flip lights on and off or leave them on or whatever, leave the TV going or whatever. And we pay the bill, and that's easy. But when you've forked out a couple thousand bucks for inverters and batteries and things like that, now you have to think about it. Leave that power on. It's costing me. I'm wasting my time here. Maybe I won't get a full charge on my Tesla. And I really need to. So it's good to oversize to a degree, but then the more you oversize, the more it costs you up front. So there's a balance there, just like everything else. You're going to pay for it, but you know, you're going to pay for it up front. So if you can afford it and you can afford to oversize knowing that you're going to have an electric charge on your car, great, we can do things like that. What we're going to do right now is take a quick break and we'll be back with Ryan Wilkinson and talk a little bit more about, should you go on or off the grid? Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark, and every Monday at one o'clock, I present Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa, where we bring together researchers from across the campus to describe a whole series of scientifically interesting topics of interest both to Hawaii and around the world. So hopefully you can join me one o'clock Monday afternoon for Think Tech Hawaii's Research in Manoa. Hi guys, it's RB Kelly. I'm your host of Ad in the Comfort Zone, where I find cool people with cool solutions to problems that all of us face. Now the thing is, we're really cool, and I only invite really cool people, but the thing is I think you're kind of cool too, so I think you should come and watch. That Thursdays at 11 a.m. here on OC16 Television with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm RB Kelly, host of Ad in the Comfort Zone, and I will see you next Thursday. I will see you right now. Thanks for coming back to Stanley Energy Man on my lunch hour. This is so much fun. I love spending my lunch hour with Ryan. I'm going to geek out on talking about energy stuff, especially if I can get him talking to hydrogen. We go crazy. Anyway, Ryan, thanks for helping us out today and talking about what it takes to move off the grid. There's actually some other things to think about too. We talked about, in general, how you would design a thing for your house, but then there's a question of do you stay connected to HECO, or do you come all the way off the grid? Are you confident enough to really just basically pull yourself off? Not only can you do it, but is it the right thing to do? I can tell you right now, just as in rough numbers, if half the people defected from the grid, the other half would be paying for the grid, and their electric bills would go exponential because it's expensive to run a grid. The way HECO's rate structures are set up, big users pay big fees up front, but residential users, it's all kind of into their kilowatt hour rate. And so they're counting on everybody's sharing, kind of like insurance. So how are some of those factors playing into this? Yeah, absolutely. So right now we all share the burden of the cost of the grid infrastructure. Similar to, I think, to correlate for people, our roads right now are paid off of tax on gasoline. When all the cars got more fuel efficient, there was less money going into to fund our roads, then we got a little more clever with how we bill cars against weight and why instead of just off the fuel tax. For the grid, it's the same thing. We're all using it and kind of paying our rate, which built into there was supporting the infrastructure when power lines get hit on command mail windward, which has happened far too often. That has to be replaced and fixed and there's labor. There's cost. It's all built into our rate to fix that. If everybody went in and just pulled their plug and they're not paying anything back out, it'll go on to the other people. That's fine. It's up to your own decision. Now you're a house sitting on your own with a roof that can put PV on it. What if you live in an apartment? Yeah, and at that point you're probably not going to be able to make it happen. If you did have the solar and the battery or the hydrogen or the storage to be able to come off the grid completely, you need to start to think about your own energy security in case you really want to pull that plug. If a coconut or something hits your solar panel and cracks it, you're going to have reduced output for how long does it take to replace that panel. A hurricane comes by or high winds and then simple like that could even just cracking or putting a little bit of a dirty film on your solar panels will degrade and I would say significantly to reduce your output. So as the individual residents, your energy security is that that line of you being connected to ego. Even if you're not using it let's make sure people understand there is a charge to be connected and that charge is because yeah, you're not using any power but you're sharing the at least the maintenance cost. That charge is I'll say valid. And it's your insurance policy to make sure that you're connected to that. You really need to judge if you really want to get all the way off and just say not for me on how you're going to handle an emergency situation or just a typical maintenance situation. You know refrigerator breaks, you just go down to the hardware store and you pick up a new one, it's right there. Solar, it's not a one for one. You can't just kind of scab things on. They do need to fit within a system and then the resources have to be there to make that install. It's much more difficult in that sense. So the times that I can think you'd want to completely disconnect and that would actually be beneficial not only to the individual but to the utility is when you're in a really rural spot. Like there's a lot of people off the grid in Alaska. Why? Because they drag a power line 20 miles from the main line to your house and put all the boosting equipment and stuff. You're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars sometimes and it's just not practical. It's better to put $10,000 in your own system and not have to worry about the utility. So there probably are some places in rural Oahu or on the neighbor islands where coming off the grid makes complete sense even Hiko wouldn't argue with you because otherwise they have to take care of all these lines and that means more cost to them. So there are times but in most cases you look at it right now like that charge, what is it? $25? $25 right now. It's a pretty decent insurance policy. Not to pay. I'd definitely say so and if you're remote and you're operating on your own micro grid you're going to handle your energy usage a little bit differently because you have a scarcity of a resource so you're a little more energy conscious at that point in time and hopefully we all get there even with our free energy or low cost energy or some people say medium or high if we all start to practice that scarcity the overall cost would come down from all of us there's some things to be learned from people successfully off the grid right now. Can I sucker you into some hydrogen discussion? Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. I'd squeeze some in. We talk about energy storage in general and we generally talk about batteries that's the most common form of energy storage that we all think of. And then there's different kinds of batteries. You have lead acid batteries, you got deep cycle batteries you got double A's and triple A's you got metal storage batteries like double A's and triple A's you got flow batteries, you've got lithium iron batteries you got lithium phosphate, you got lithium different kinds of lithium batteries so they all come with different price tags but there's also the hydrogen storage which is of course my favorite thing to talk about. So what do you think some of the possibilities would be if you say oversize your roof a little bit and whenever you had surplus energy and your batteries were already charged up some of that leftover electricity goes to a small electrolyzer and you start storing hydrogen in a tank in your backyard at low pressure and use that for energy storage and then you get your fuel cell car. Is that a viable thing? Yeah, it's actually it's not just viable but there's a lot of goodness that comes from that type of model so batteries great for short term generally small storage of energy in the house I'm over producing solar and I just want to use some of that at night and a battery has a way of just kind of shifting that over we call that solar shifting if it's hydrogen or use on a battery the really great thing about hydrogen is that's providing us that really deep amount of hours of usage but also using it for different things a hydrogen fuel cell car very popular especially in more of Japan Japan, South Korea and China are all stepping out on hydrogen fuel cell Appliances can be hydrogen fuel You can cook with it If we start looking at different use of appliances I have a propane tank so let me clarify that's probably one of the reasons my electric fuel gets a little bit lower but that could be fueled off of hydrogen Is that your water heater and your other right? What else do you run off your propane? Water heater and cooking utensils and what else? That's all I have Not my dryer. Some people's dryers are Oh yeah, that's true But I'm electric on that The hydrogen storage makes a lot of sense if you really want that multi-use, transporting as a fuel If you had that hydrogen system built into your house and now you're out or you decided to pull the plug on the utility your energy security can be almost equivalent to a propane tank You can go to the store and pick up your energy security and plug it in You're in a much different scenario if you have that ability Okay, great That's one of those things that even a long time ago I fantasized over is no electric bill no gas bill for your car and you're just your own energy provider with some solar or some wind Have you really looked at many wind options? I know wind power either comes in the super big turbines or the kind on a sailboat, you know, little dinky ones that generate some electricity for your DC system Have you seen any out there that are kind of in the medium size range or that would be practical for Hawaii in a residential application? I did a study when I was back in school and I simulated just this It was a solar wind and at that time I think it was even a lead acid battery microgrid and I built the program to analyze I think it was at one in every one position in every state what the system would have to be sized as When I went into that study I found the mid-range and small scale wind turbines at that time we're talking 10 years ago much different than where we're at today There are options out there they're not to me they weren't and maybe still learn as attractive on a cost per KW scale the nice part is you're diversifying your energy so there is a value to that that's harder to spell out and just I'm paying $100 for a widget but they are available, they don't look great and some of them look a little crazy but easy and they have more maintenance because they have more moving parts so you have those factors I know that with the big wind turbines you have problems with like birds and bats flying into them and telling them I don't think that's as big a problem with the smaller turbines in fact you can even put markings on the blades so the birds don't want to go in there and stuff How about on the electrical side is it harder to hook in than the solar or can they both be hooked in the same system and you have to design that in up front or can you add wind later it'll all depend on that inverter and the capabilities that inverter for our residential size that's kind of your power manager in a way so you're likely able to add a small scale wind after you've done the solar it'll be really due to that inverter it acts similar to solar in that it can be variant your solar hits a cloud that power output is going to drop just as much as a wind gust can hit that turbine and put it up for a little bit and then it slows back down so they have similar properties they're operating at different times the great thing about wind is going to be operating at night I should look at it here if we were to put it in just something small on the top of the house can we put it as my energy storage device because the wind is going to be helping me out you've got to plan for a night with no wind but if you've got that hookup that energy security or the minimum payment to utility then you'll be okay and you'll really need that storage as much we'll believe it or not we buzzed through that's it that's going to be it for stand energy man but I tell you what pull yourself off the grid after watching this show it's because you weren't paying attention go to the HECO website do a little bit of homework on there and think about some of the things we talked about today and see if any of the special conditions apply to you and it might be the right thing to do so until next week on stand energy man aloha and we'll see you next week thanks to Cindy and Robert in the control room for making all the magic happen aloha