 Think, Tech, away. Civil engagement lives here. You've got it. Now you know. It's 3 p.m. on a given Monday. Code Green. Everybody knows that. I'm Jay Fidel and I'm the guest host. And I'm also a future EV driver. Joining me today as a special guest is the regular host of Code Green. You got it. Howard Wigg. Howard, thank you for coming down. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm stage-strung. I always knew that. You'll get over it. Anyway, we train people not to be stage-strung, but Howard remains stage-strung. And let me tell you that we're talking today about the intersection of building codes and the future of electronic vehicles, then I say electronic electric vehicles. And what's really important is that we have a fleet, so to speak, of cars in the state of about a million cars, Howard tells me. And of that, we have like 6,000 or maybe 6,500 electric cars. And that would include hydrogen cars, because there's only a handful of hydrogen cars, despite the efforts of Mitch Ewan and Stan Osserman to increase the number of hydrogen cars. In any event, so here we are, and we have 2045 on the horizon. It's not that far away. How many years is it far away? It's not that much. 23 years. Oh, this is almost the end of the year, 22 years. OK, 22 years. This is not far. And so are we making adequate progress in acquiring and deploying electric cars in the state of Hawaii? There's some great cars coming out. Every time you look, there's more great electric cars that are really worthwhile. But for some reason, it doesn't go there. It doesn't creep up. And one of the problems, Howard, I'm going to tell you something you already know is that charging stations are not ubiquitous. Fine electric has been putting in new charging stations, but you have to have way more charging stations than you actually need in order to incentivize people to buy the car and be comfortable that they should not suffer range of anxiety or get stuck. So Howard, the building codes, where do they intersect with the consumer decision about buying an electric vehicle? Oh, what a question. Sorry. I love questions like that. I wish everybody at every cocktail party I go to would ask a question. Now, let me tell you, Howard goes to quite a few cocktail parties, never mind. So last week, I was in Lihue, Kauai, and the county council was considering the adoption of a new energy code called IECC 2015. You don't have to know the whole story, but a Hawaii-specific provision or two provisions we put in there was number one for commercial buildings for all new commercial construction. There shall be at least 10% of all parking spaces that the new building provides equipped with EV-ready stations. That means that the electrical conduit, when they're wiring up all the other electrical systems for the building, goes right up to these designated spaces, and then there's a little plug. And when you're ready to put the EV charging station in, you unscrew the plug, put the charging station in. You don't have to put the charging station in that one. Because that's extra money. That's extra money. Just buy a few of them. That is really cheap. You know, you've got the dirt torn up already, you're putting electrical conduits all over the place. Just stick another one in. Lovely, Howard. Isn't it? What a great idea. Has this got history somewhere else, or is this the first time people are thinking of a model like that? This is the first. Well, California might be ahead of us, but aside from California, we, to my knowledge, are number one. We, meaning Kauai. Hawaii. Yeah. And there's more. There's the residential section to the code. And likewise, when you're putting in your electrical stations, there shall be a conduit to the garage, hooking up, and be EV-ready so that when the homeowners are ready, chook-chook-chook, unscrew the plug, boom, boop, and goes your EV charger. This is maybe the first in the nation. What's the difference between the first one and the second one? That is for commercial buildings, and commercial buildings have multiple parking spaces. So X percent of those parking spaces shall be EV-ready. With a residence, you have one EV station. And then, generally, the residential EV charger shall be type one, which is a slow charger. And the commercial has the choice of type one, type two, type three. Probably type two or three would be much more practical. Much more powerful. They charge up the EVs. Yeah. And time is money when you're doing business in this commercial operation. If you're in a store for one hour, by the time you get out back to your car with just one hour of charge, you're ready to roll here. Yeah. When you say commercial, you include commercial retail, like shopping center? Yeah. Commercial in the building code refers to anything that is not low-rise residential, like a high-rise residence, all high-rises going up in Kakaako. Those are commercial buildings. That's commercial, even though it's just a condo building. Yeah. That's a good definition for this purpose, it seems like, to me. So this would be great. So new buildings, you have to get it wired. And then does the ordinance require, I mean, as ultimately, hopefully passed, does the ordinance require that the owner or the operator or the manager actually go out and buy the chargers and have them available? Nope. That is a customer choice. But EVs are coming down the pike. It's predicted that by the year 2030, in this nation, there shall be 130, are you sitting down, million EVs on the road. Some pro EV advocate probably. I hope so. You get a lot of polls and predictions that you wanted about. So what about Hawaii? I mean, Hawaii seems to be moving slower than other places in terms of adopting electric vehicles. Well, what's holding us back, Howard? Do you think this intersection of infrastructure, of building code and connections, are holding us back? Well, no. Not if we have one of the most progressive building codes in the entire nation. There's a lot of other provisions in that building code that will put us, we're almost the worst, we will be the first in many areas. Now the changes you mentioned, both for residential and commercial, have they passed? Are they the law? No. It's going to be a county by county adoption. And we had, Hawaii was the first county where they're last week, and there were at first significant headwinds to adopting this code. And they disintegrated, and the whole council, except there's one person sick, whole council with a big smile on their face adopted, or passed first reading on this new code. They did adopt it. They did it with the smile on their face. First reading. So there's what, three readings? Yeah. So then it has to get signed by the mayor. And the mayor is, the current mayor is totally behind it. We gather that the new mayor will be totally behind it. Plus, there was somebody sitting in the audience who accosted me after the meeting, very nice accostation, and gave me her card and said, I'm a councilwoman elect. And I am adamantly pro EVs and pro energy code. Did you testify? Yeah. Yeah, I was the sole speaker. Why do I feel you supported the bill? Because I wrote it. Okay. He wrote it. That's why he supported it. And I got this. Okay. So this is one element of going forward on electric fuel. I think a big limitation has been the old-fashioned range, range anxiety, the old-fashioned, it all gets stuck without an electrical charge or, and mixed into that is that when they tell you the car can go 150 miles, it never goes exactly what they tell you. It goes 120 miles or 100 miles. I mean, it's always like that. It's like gas mileage in general. So the question is, how big a factor is this charging station problem, not only in these buildings you're talking about, but everywhere, in holding us back from deploying electric vehicles? It is a major factor, but the tide of history is going with us, because although you may have been a totally, totally green person, 30, well, I was going to say 40 years ago, but you were still in kindergarten 40 years ago. Thank you for that. 30 years, you've been green as a four-leaf clover, only now is mainstream America catching up with you, and there's been one climate change report after another that has come out and it makes dire, dire predictions. The conversion in Hawaii from gas-powered automobiles to EVs is going to solve two problems, maybe three problems all at once. Number one, EVs are much cheaper to operate. Mainland cost at gas-powered vehicle costs about $1,400 in fuel per year, EVs, $500. Interesting. Yeah. And that's charging at home, the extra you'd pay on your electric bill or something like that. Yeah. Well, the extra you'd pay in a charging station environment somewhere else. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Just a digressionary point, Howard, and I know you know that I'm going to ask you this question. What's coming out of that pipe? What's getting charged in this electric vehicle could have come from fossil fuel. It could have. So we don't know that's going to, you know, be really any benefit at all unless we change the source of the electricity, right? That's exactly what we are doing, as I told the Kauai County Council, Kauai is ahead of the rest of the islands in terms of clean energy. KIUC recently reported that there are about 70% clean energy already, and the rest of the island is going with it because we have already an excess of PVs, photovoltaics on our roofs, and the utilities are building more and more mega solar farms. Why in the world are they doing that? Because right now, at the peak of a nice sunny day, we are producing more electricity from those PVs than the utility can absorb. The utility can throttle back their production plants only so far, otherwise just like a car that stops its idle, the production goes down, or it goes to zero, so they can only go down so far, we're producing too much. Here's the answer. Well, to me it seems like you've got to do both at the same time, or you can do them asynchronously, you can start getting electricity from non-fossil fuels, from clean sources, or you can wait till your charging stations are all in place, and then you can do it, but it has to be part of the same plan, otherwise, well, you run out of gas, I'm sorry to say that. So what's happening is, it's been on everybody's mind, the Hawaii Building Code Council recently passed and the county of Kauai recently adopted the NEC 2017, isn't that exciting? It is, but let me ask you this, Kaskase Kusar. Okay, the NEC is a national... That means what? What the blankety-blank? So the NEC is a national electrical code, and why is that exciting? Because what differentiates that, the 2017 from the earlier version, 2014, is almost all the new provisions are dedicated to electric storage. Oh my God, it's a cliffhanger, it's a cliffhanger is what has electric storage got to do? This is actually a three-way intersection, and right after this break, we're going to come back and we'll find out, Kaskase Kusar, electrical storage, and how it fits in the big picture, how it wig is described. Hand in glove, and that's a velvet glove. Hi, my name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii. With ThinkTech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch, for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay, and aloha. Aloha, this is Winston Welch. I am your host of Out and About, where every other week, Mondays at 3, we explore a variety of topics in our city, state, nation, and world, and events, organizations, the people that fuel them. It's a really interesting show. We welcome you to tune in, and we welcome your suggestions for shows. You got a lot of them out there, and we have an awesome studio here where we can get your ideas out as well. So I look forward to you tuning in every other week where we've got some great guests and great topics. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to come away inspired like I do. So I'll see you every other week here at 3 o'clock on Monday afternoon. Aloha. All right, Code Green, and more specifically, Building Codes and the Future of Electric Vehicles, and the missing element in that is storage. It's not in the title, but we're going to cover it anyway because it is inherently implicitly involved in this conversation with Howard Wigg, who is a regular host of Code Green. So as we left it, Howard, in this cliffhanger question, is what is electric batteries? What has storage got to do with all of this that we're describing today about EVs? If everybody asked me that at a cocktail party, I would be excited. Again, he goes to a lot of cocktail parties, never mind. So a little diversion. First, what I'm talking about now are my own opinions. Everybody else has no official opinions. This is my vision of the future, codes and electric vehicles. I hope you're writing this down because it's going to be on the final. Yes. So storage, I mentioned that already we have so much PV capacity that in the middle of a sunny day we have too much, we just have to dump some out. Put all that excess capacity into storage and we still have what's called not the duck curve. The duck curve defines electrical demand. You have kind of a smooth back in the morning. Then when the sun really gets powerful, the demand goes down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. And then the sun sets and for other utilities, there's just this shape of a duck. We are extreme and we go much higher, so we call it the Nene curve. I would have thought we'd call it the Affleck curve, but never mind. The Nene curve. Nene curve because the Nene has much longer neck than that is a duck. So what we do with all of that excess electrical capacity that we have stored in the day is we shave that evening peak. Okay, but suppose that the electricity, that excess is coming from fossil fuel. Okay, now once we have all of that storage capacity or we're getting it, oh back to the NEC 2017, the permitting process for storage batteries was slow because the building plan checkers were looking at proposal, great big battery by a home, huge battery by a building. What if it catches fire? What if it explodes? We had that. We had that. Extreme batteries. It was here. It wasn't here in Oahu. It was in Oahu. And the thing burned and exploded and it was toxic and the fire department wouldn't go near it because they were afraid of getting toxic fumes and nobody wanted to deal with extreme batteries. They ultimately went bankrupt. Yeah, as they should have. Those were lead acid batteries. It was way over capacity. You don't stack lead acid batteries like that. That was fire number three, the deputy fire department. Three fires and you're out. Yes, yes. And that went, all they could do was just look at it and make sure that the underbrush around it wasn't catching fire. So that was a disaster. Bad news travels fast. Now we have NEC 2017 saying this is how you specify batteries. This is how you install them. In a residence you install them this way, in a commercial building you install them this way. Now all the plan checker has to do is say, okay, now is he really following? NEC 2017, yep, okay, got it boss. And so storage is now coming on like gangbusters and it's eligible for the same tax credits. Does that happen? Yeah. Until when? How long does that last? Not sure. It's not over for a while. It's not over for a while. This is federal or state? Federal and state. And state. And this is so good that I as an optimist am pretty darn sure it'll continue both as well as the United States. Oh sure, it's a great incentive for an important social policy change, you know? But I think what's interesting about this is that there are, obviously there are changes in the technology around batteries where they used to get hot and too hot and now they're better. And somebody had told me the other day that Sony batteries don't get hot. They don't have this risk of explosion because they don't get hot at all. We had one of the guys from the Sony battery company, Hank Rogers controls that I think, sitting here and he was telling about they're expensive, but they really do well in terms of long term service. They are arguably better than other batteries like Tesla that do get hot and that are not as advanced technologically. Do you know about this? Not that specifically, but I do know that battery technology is getting better and better and better. And I also know that there's a brand new concept called heat removal. If something gets hot, you get the heck out of there. It's a really radical concept. Any way you want. Cooled, water cooled, grills, what have you. Any way you can. And also you site the battery away from the residence. You don't put it right inside the residence or anything or the commercial building so that the heat doesn't adversely affect anybody. Well, new batteries, new technology and batteries, it comes up in more than one way. One is you can put it on the continuum from the generation of the electrical energy at the utility level on the way to the charging station or whatever and charge it so that you have overnight capacity and hopefully then you change the source over time and you get a renewable source into the battery, into the charging station. That's one way. But the other thing is the cars themselves, they have to benefit by this. Right now for a replacement battery in one of these electric cars, it's thousands of dollars. But I predict for you and I think you'll probably agree with me that over time, maybe the next four or five years, we'll have batteries that are much cheaper, much more long lasting, much more powerful. That can give a longer drive, therefore less range of anxiety too. You brought up a very, very nice point. I should invite you to my next cocktail party. I'll be there. That Ford and General Motors have combined forces on EV research and development to do exactly what you're talking about plus Ford has dedicated another 11 billion dollars, which is nothing compared to Volkswagen, which is dedicated 40 billion, that's a B, billion dollars to EV research and it certainly includes the batteries. And Volvo is now going to produce nothing but EVs. These are the future. Every major car company in the world is shifting to EVs plus, let's see, China, India, France, Great Britain, those are pretty nice chunk of countries. They have all committed to have nothing to do with gas burning vehicles between the years 2030 and 2040. That's how rapidly this technology is evolving along with policy, government policy. Well, I predict also that after the Trump administration is over, it should be soon. We will have a much greater effort at deploying EVs in this country and charging stations in this country. With the change of the house, House of Representatives, I think we're going to see some noise made about that very, very rapidly. So what are the downsides? If I go out and buy an electric car, I have to cope with the little woman at home who may not like the idea of doing anything risky or new. What kind of conversation can I predict and what do I say to her when she opposes the idea? That you ask her, aren't you a mommy? If you say yes, don't you want the best for your children and your grandchildren? Yes. Have you heard of climate change? Yes. What are two of the main sources of the greenhouse gases? Oh, must be electrical production and ground transportation. We're solving both problems at once by overwhelming the grid with clean energy and by converting to electric vehicles because the power that they're getting before too awfully long will be entirely 100% clean, either solar or wind or another source. And that's already, Hawaii is leading the way in this way. Well, speaking of which, California is in the process of banning gas-powered vehicles also. That's great. By the way, I'm going to show her this video so she can see what you had to say. Matter of fact, after this show, Howard, would you mind coming home with me? Because I'd like you to have this conversation in person, if you don't mind. What's for dinner? And do you have? Something green. Okay. So Howard, what kind of car should I get? I need to know from you. And should I consider a hydrogen H2 car? What do you think? Because you would make great cocktail party conversation. Well, you know, a fact, CERVCO is renting the Marais now. It's just coming around. And you can rent a Marais for something just over, what was it, 400 bucks a month? And this is a $50,000 car. And you can have a supply up to $1,500. I sound like I'm rolling up my sleeves here. So let's say $1,500 of hydrogen, just kind of drive out to Mapuna Puna and get it. But you can keep on getting fueled. And when you get the hydrogen, you know, you can fill up your tank in a matter of seconds. You don't have to wait 20 minutes or an hour. It's pressurized and it goes into a pressurized tank. It goes right in. I guess it's a liquid or something. And then now you have immediate energy in your tank, which effectively, you know, creates the electrical energy by fuel cells, right, in the battery, in the car. And that drives the car. And it's kind of a modified electric is what it is. Should I consider that? Howard, is that consistent with all of your, you know, your thinking on this subject? Absolutely positively, because as you know, the pioneers get the arrows, the settlers get the land. So you can be a pioneer and see what happens. We only progress through experimentation. Yeah. You will be one of the experimenters in this state of Hawaii. It'll, as I said, make great cocktail party conversation. But you see the difference is that there aren't enough charging stations for me to just drive down the block. Yes. And I don't have one at home. I'd have to refit. That would cost me, what, $1,500, $2,000 to refit my house with even a, well, I guess a level two charger, which is what I think I'd want. And so, you know, then I have to deal with that business about replacing the battery. And there are problems there. And so maybe the hydrogen car can handle some of that, make it a little easier. On the other hand, I still have to wait for sources of hydrogen. I still have to wait for the infrastructure. And so the building code that we started out discussing, you know, that could help also. Couldn't it? I mean, you could go to the various counties once they adopt these residential and commercial building code, rather electric cables, you know, into the parking structures. You could go and also you could modify codes to permit hydrogen too, couldn't you? Or is that too dangerous? No. You know, I'll be headed in the spring to the mainland to attend the IECC 2021 national building code. And we know that there's going to be a mix of PVs and other renewable energies into the building code. This is going to be a first. We've designed buildings just about as tight as they can go. Now when we go towards net zero energy, we need at least those PVs on the roof. So that was step one. That's going to increase the number of PVs all over the place. And then next will be the 2024 building code. Why don't we stick some hydrogen in there too now? Yeah, that would be great. So remember this show, remember this discussion. Yeah. So, you know, it's all coming to us. I'd like to leave you with the opportunity to speak to the people, look at camera one, and tell them what message you, the host of Code Green, would like to leave with them today about hydrogen. Should they act now? Should they, hydrogen and electric cars? Should they act now? Should they wait? What should they wait for? What should be their attitude toward this? If you care about the air that your children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren breathe, about the rise in global temperatures, about the proliferation of hurricanes, then do the green thing go for right now, for electric vehicles, because we're in the foreseeable future, that's going to be an entirely green technology, because all of that electricity you're using will come from clean sources. Then if you want to be a futurist in just a few years, you join forces with Jay and you get a hydrogen-powered vehicle, even though there may be just a few charging stations by then, in the city of Honolulu. Thank you, Howard. You know, it's really important that we appreciate climate change that's happening around us. You might have known about it before. It seems more present, more immediate, more of a danger than it was. The pace is picking up very rapidly. Yeah, and the report issued by the White House just over the weekend, probably without the president's consent or approval, about the national assessment in climate change, including a part that was written by Joanne Leong as the principal investigator on climate change as it affects Hawaii. Okay, should be of great concern to us. Plus the Department of Defense came out with a similar report. Really? Yes. Well, there it is. It's all around us. And Howard is all around us. And Code Green is all around us. And soon enough, electric vehicles are all around us. Thanks for watching Code Green. Thank you, Howard. And my huge pleasure. Aloha.