 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Sam Osterman, coming to you live and direct from the beautiful metropolis of Kailua, Hawaii on the windward side of Oahu. And for those of you that haven't started making your plans to visit Hawaii, it's never too late. Just keep checking on the stupid state rules for COVID so you don't get stuck. But other than that, the weather is beautiful, the surf's looking good, especially on the south shore. Come on out and visit Hawaii. Anyway, we've got a great show today. I'm going to start off with some good news. If we enroll that picture, we delivered our first Toyota fuel cell vehicle to the big island of Hawaii. It's a Toyota Mirai right here, still covered in encrusted in salt courtesy of young brothers. It was delivered to Kauai Harbor on the big island, and that's Paul Pontio from Blue Planet Research using his Millennium Rain fueling station to put some hydrogen in the car. And he's been driving it around, washed it up, cleaned it up really good. It's looking beautiful. So now we have a hydrogen fuel cell car in the big island for folks to try out when they go up to visit Paul at the ranch there at Blue Planet Research. So thanks to everybody who helped get that together. And today's show, we're going back to visit an organization that I interviewed 2019, about middle of 2019, as I recall. And it's one of my favorite utilities here in Hawaii because it's a co-op. And it's the only co-op that I know of that does electricity in the state and is independent of Hawaiian Electric and their operations. They're also really well-established, not only locally, but they've got a great reputation nationally. And they're doing some pretty innovative and some pretty advanced things with their intermittent renewables, solar and wind and things like that. So the guest today is Mr. Brad Rockwell. He's running operations over at Kauai Island Utility Co-op. And welcome, Brad. Good to have you on board today. Hey, thank you, Stan. Good to be here. Yeah, it's been a while. It has a couple of years and things of, I guess, you know, with COVID and everything that's keeping us keeping things interesting over here in the electricity business. I bet. Well, why don't we start off by giving the audience a little bit of background on yourself and what you do at KAC? Sure, yeah. As you said, I'm Chief of Operations, so I oversee our generation, transmission, distribution, basically keeping the lights on and grid operations and also our renewable development, our IT department, our planners. So, yeah, I like to say, you know, keeping the lights on is kind of how you boil it down. Spent a lot of my career in developing our renewable projects here on the island of Kauai, extremely proud of the fact that we've gone from 8 percent renewable about 11 years ago in 2010 to 67 percent for 2020. So we've been on a very aggressive push to get toward the 100 percent renewable and been pretty successful along the way. Learned some lessons as well. My background is as a mechanical engineer, always been in power generation. On the civilian side of my career, did some time in the Navy as well, active duty and in the reserve. So I've been here with the co-op. We've been here on Kauai since 2001, the co-op formed in late 2002. And I became a part of that shortly after they formed through an acquisition they bought the power plant I was working at. So I don't know if the audience appreciates this, but most utility grids can't handle even 20 percent intermittent renewables on their grid. And you say you're up in the high 60 percent. 67 percent renewables, that includes our firm renewables, if you will, our biomass and hydro as well as the solar. And that's on an annual basis on an instantaneous basis. We actually routinely exceed 80 percent from intermittent renewables, the solar. That's a lot of that is backed up with battery storage. And when you add in the biomass and the hydro, we're routinely hitting 100 percent renewable where we're not burning a single drop of oil for multiple hours at a time on sunny days here. That's that's really impressive. On the spinning reserve side, is that where you do you still have to run a diesel for spinning reserve? So, yeah, we if we if we're running 100 percent renewable, we're going to be keeping one of our conventional units operating in what we call a synchronous condenser mode. It's not consuming any fuel, but we're rotating the generator to provide inertia, that rotating mass, which helps us with keeping frequency stable. It also provides some voltage support, some dynamic voltage support and and also provide fault current, which is something that we use. All electric grids used to provide protection across the electric grid when there's a fault like a power line that comes down, it causes an overcurrent and our relays, our protection devices, sense that overcurrent. But that overcurrent can only exist if there's devices on the system to provide that high current like this synchronous condenser generator that we operate when we're running 100 percent renewable. That's that's a really good explanation. I haven't heard too many people talk about that that aspect. You know, recently, can you see was recognized by a national organization for basically a lot of what you just talked about? Can you kind of tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah, we're really proud. We've been it was the Smart Electric Power Alliance, or CEPA, as they're known, and it's a national organization that is really focused on renewable energy and smart electric grid type solutions. We've been a part of a member of them for a decade or more. We've received a number of awards for, you know, solar installed per capita, storage installed per capita and things like that. But this was this is really nice to be recognized for sort of all of the above everything we've been doing and to be recognized as the electric cooperative of the year. They do they announce investor own utility of the year, municipality of the year and electric cooperative of the year. And we we kind of got it for our renewable portfolio standards that, like I mentioned, the 67 percent on an annual basis and also for the being able to operate at 100 percent at any one time, as well as some of our projects, some of our really innovative solar and storage projects and our pumped hydro project that we're working to bring online. So yeah, I'm happy to get into any of those details, but it was really sort of a recognition of all of the things we've been working on and have achieved. When I read the article, I was really impressed. And I think I even wrote a comment I saw it in Pacific Business News and I wrote a comment back to the newspaper saying this is really a great accomplishment for a small local local company to get that kind of recognition, especially for what you did. I mean, again, I got to emphasize that they have that much renewable on the grid, especially at times 100 percent production and so much of it being solar. That's no small feat. And I I'd venture to say even Hawaii Electric is probably pretty damn jealous of of KAC right now, because I don't think they could come close to doing that. They have a bigger grid, of course, and a lot more complex issues. But, you know, still you guys have stepped out where very few utilities have gone. Let's talk a little bit about the solar side of that, about what percentage of your generation is solar in terms of I know you say at times you run 100 percent solar, but in terms of what you average use average and how much of your grid you kind of count on for solar on a daily basis. You know, how many how many kilowatts or megawatts do you generate? Yeah, I mean, you know, depending on how you slice it, if we look at an annual basis, we're getting about 40 percent of our energy from solar. And so it's just eclipsed. It's just become the number one provider. You know, our four sources on this island are solar, small hydro, biomass and oil, of course. So solar is now the predominant form. Oil is second at around 33 percent. And then we've got biomass and hydro. So on an annual basis, about 40, like I said, it's an instantaneous basis. If you look at those times, we're running 100 percent renewable. We can hit as much as 80 percent coming from solar. And like I said, a lot of that is backed up with battery storage. So, yeah, and then, of course, at night, we're getting, you know, nothing from solar. We're still getting some from our battery. So it's it's it varies quite a bit. But is is most of that solar going to battery? I would say about probably about half of it is have the numbers in front of me. But we have, you know, our island all time peak demand is 80 megawatts. We set that in the summer of 2019. And and if you look at how much solar capacity we have installed, it's well over 100 megawatts. So clearly, you know, on an islanded grid where we don't have a connection to any place else, we have to always keep things in balance. And so, you know, we can't clearly take 100 megawatts of solar if our all time peak demand is only 80. So a lot of that has to be stored in batteries that we can then use later on at night when we don't have the standalone solar competing for the time. And you mentioned biomass. Could you describe that system? You know, what is it a gasifier or what exactly are you running? No, it's a conventional boiler, a traveling great boiler. So it's a unique project in its own right. It's a closed loop biomass plant. So they have their own plantation of eucalyptus trees that they're growing and roughly 3,000 acres. And then they're continuously harvesting those trees and chipping them up. And then they they, you know, haul the wood chips from the field to the power plant. They they put them on into a sort of a fuel hall. And then that goes over to the boiler where it's combusted and generates a steam, high pressure, high temperature steam that drives the steam turbine generator. Right. Is is that similar to the technology that what is it on the Big Island Honua Ola is going to be used? I think it is. Yeah, I don't know too much. I haven't seen, you know, the specifics of Honua Ola, but I think it would work essentially the same. Yeah, what did they do for carbon capture in that process? You know, there is no specific carbon capture. They do have, you know, rubbers, emission control equipment. Yeah, to meet to meet their air permit requirements. But as far as greenhouse gas emissions, it's, you know, I know that sort of whether you look at it on a life cycle basis or not, you know, is debatable, but their greenhouse gas emissions, they claim are, you know, offset by the trees that they're growing. Right, right. So yeah, they're they're using the trees to collect carbon. Right. And and then they put some of it back in. And OK, that's kind of a net neutral. So how about your in stream hydro that you've got? No, you know, I'm actually really intrigued with in stream hydro been exposed to a little bit on the big island. But I just can't imagine if we if we took the time to refurbish some of our old blooms from sugar plantations and pineapple, why we couldn't do some small scale in stream hydro that would add up to a lot of electricity over time, because basically got water running downhill all the time, you know, and right now it's just running downhill. And if you could put some generators in that stream along the way, it could actually generate overall quite a bit of electricity. What's your experience with in stream hydro over at Kauai? Yeah, we I mean, I think there is some untapped potential. We we have a number of sugar plantation era in stream hydro plants that operate, continue to provide a valuable contribution to our renewable portfolio standards. And we're also looking to develop or in development on a new in stream hydro combined with solar PV that's going to use that solar energy to pump water uphill between two existing reservoirs that need to be refurbished. So we're going to instead of using battery, chemical batteries to store this solar energy, we're now going to use more conventional, you know, water reservoirs and pump that water uphill about 1500 feet. And then we'll run it down in a new modern, you know, hydro turbine generator. Well, you have a catchment system at the bottom. So when you're pumping, you basically just recirculate recirculating the water between two reservoirs where when you have excess energy, you're pumping water up hill. And then when you need energy, you let the water run through your turbine and you generate power, which is really a great long term energy storage option. Especially if you have the space to put in a really big reservoir and pump from a really big reservoir, you can start quite a bit of energy. So about what percentage does that system take up on your on your grid right now? Well, if that project is successful and coming online, it will amount to about between 20 to 25 percent of our annual energy. And like I said, there's a hydro component of it and there's solar components. So most of the energy will actually be coming from the solar, which we then just, you know, either send some direct to grid. But most of that will be used to pump water up hill and then come back down through the hydro turbine. So I think we count that as we probably will count that as solar energy, even though it's coming to the grid via hydro turbine because it's really produced. It's created by solar panels. That initial energy to pump it up a hill came from the solar panel. So I agree with you. I know last time we talked, I kind of hit you with my favorite subject, which we started this show up with, which is hydrogen. And and actually, even though I was disappointed that you guys weren't using it, I thought your explanation of why the utilities haven't really kind of gotten into hydrogen for larger scale energy storage was really probably explained best by you compared to any of the other utilities I've talked to. And that's just that the technology is still growing, still becoming more cost effective, still not in mainstream use on the grid. But I noticed that in San Diego, there is finally a utility that's going to be using hydrogen for energy storage. Has KIUC thought about that at all, at least maybe even considered it for future use? Yeah, I think I think we think about. I mean, I know I personally do as the guy who's kind of responsible to figure out where our, you know, power needs are going to come from in five, 10, 20 years from now, you know, at some point. And we can continue to do solar and storage in this pumped storage hydro. And but, you know, what else is out there? We're not going to be able to build those types of renewables to get us to 100 percent. We're going to need our existing conventional generating units to probably handle that last five to 10 percent, just because, you know, the contingency situation of a week of clouds where you don't get solar energy or something like that. It's going to always be there. And, you know, we need to be able to provide the power. So those conventional generating units might be powered with a liquid biodiesel, which is renewable or it could be hydrogen. You know, we've got a number of gas turbines. Our GELM 2500 is our single largest generating unit here. It could set up to run on gaseous fuels. You know, you could run a mix of hydrogen or maybe even pure hydrogen. Oh, geez, done some tests on that. And and we're kind of keeping our finger on the pulse of that. But I mean, a gaseous, a renewable gaseous fuel is definitely of interest to us. And especially where we might be able to create that fuel ourselves by using otherwise curtailed solar PV energy to run an electrolyzer and then, you know, store that hydrogen that we can then use on demand. The key to getting to 100 percent renewable grid is going to be long duration storage, whether it's this pump storage project we're talking about or having a tank of hydrogen or tanks of biodiesel. You need you need more than what battery technology can provide, which is, you know, just a few hours. We need days of storage if we're going to really do 100 percent. I think people really don't appreciate the amount of energy in a barrel of oil or, you know, a couple of gallons of diesel fuel, or it's it's rather energy dense. And, you know, when you think about how much energy we actually consume over a 24 hour period and then translate that into OK, how much solar do we need that only runs five, six hours a day in terms of rated capacity up the solar panels? You know, we've got to store an awful lot of energy to have that two or three weeks of backup that right now oil provides without even thinking about, but when it comes to renewables, we're going to have to be, you know, resilient enough to operate several weeks potentially on some kind of other stored energy. And batteries certainly are great for the quick quick response in the hours. But for days and weeks, it's probably not the best option. Your pumped hydro storage is actually kind of in the same category with hydrogen for long term storage. What kind of compared to batteries? What is a project like that cost compared to batteries over a long term, like 20, 30 years? It's pretty comparable of where we've put out that the the average cost of energy from that project will be about 15 cents a kilowatt hour. And when you consider the long duration storage, we get from it and the firm capacity contributions from it. We think it is on par with slightly cheaper solar and chemical battery storage projects, which, you know, we've done in the 11 cents per kilowatt hour range. But I think more recently, they've been around 12 cents and things like that. So this is a unique project that aside from the benefits that provides the electric grid, there's some wonderful community benefits as well. It's going to be bringing water over to Department of Wine homelands. So they have irrigation, the ability to use irrigation water and to allow their pastoral lessees to use that water to do some farming and ranching on some lands that are pretty arid right now and don't have any sort of infrastructure. We're going to improve the road access so people have roads and have the ability to get electricity up there and things like that. So it provides some nice benefits to Department of Wine homelands as well as taking care of some damn liability issues for Department of Land and Natural Resources and also helping the Agriculture Business Development Corporation and Kaka Ag Association and their agricultural pursuits. Would you say that that aspect, the collateral benefits to agriculture and things is maybe one of the strengths of KAUC as a utility? That you're able to actually assist other communities and other industries like agriculture to meet their goals? Would you would you consider that to be one of the real keystones to your operation? Well, it's the strength of KAUC in general. We have seven cooperative principles and one of those is concern for a community. So we're always focused on the community and what's nice about the electric co-op structure is we don't have shareholders per se. We have our ratepayers, our shareholders. So we're completely aligned with our constituents, the ratepayers and what their needs are. So we want to do whatever is going to benefit our community and we don't have sort of external interests that are pulling at us that we need to try to satisfy. So after almost 20 years of having your KAUC in existence, have your customers, your members, do they seem fairly pleased with the results of having their own customer-owned utility? I mean, I think so. That's a broad question. There's always people who aren't too happy with their electric company. I don't care where you are. I hear you. But, you know, we've done member surveys every year for many, many years now and the results are getting better. We think for the most part, the fact that we've been so successful in renewables, which I think all of our members appreciate and the fact that that has translated into very stable and lower electric rates, especially when you consider inflation, has been appreciated by our membership. And the fact that they have a voice, you know, they the board of directors who we have nine board of directors that are elected by the ratepayers. They're all, you know, leaders in the community. Our members have a voice to reach out to them. And they're the ones who set, you know, the strategic direction and they provide the governance. They hire and fire our CEO, my boss. And so they have a real tangible control of, you know, the electric future of this island. So, you know, that that actually is a microcosm of what I think could be fixing our country right now is, you know, we're supposed to be up by and for the people. Well, when you're running a co-op, your customers basically are the people that vote you in and out of office. So to speak, as you said, with your CEO being on the cutting cutting table, if everybody's not happy with them. So I'd say you guys have a really great model and I'm really thrilled to be able to talk to you and, you know, get some insight on what you're doing and hear about your success and your ongoing success. So we've got a couple of minutes left. Can you tell us anything that, you know, that you can? I'm sure a lot of us close hold on what KAUC is doing to go into the future and maybe even make things better. I think we're I mean, we're looking at using technology in a number of ways. You know, we've talked enough about renewables, so I won't go there. But trying to improve reliability, you know, over here on the Garden Island, it's probably no surprise that we have, you know, trees that contact our lines and, you know, keeping the growth in check in our rights away or can be challenging. So we're looking into things like satellite, advanced satellite technology that might be more efficient than sending people around to look at where we, you know, our rights of way are getting encroached and in satellites that can look at both horizontal and vertical, you know, where is this growth starting to creep up a little too close to our line so we can be more proactive about it. We've also got an amazing automated metering infrastructure system. So essentially the whole island, about 95% of our customers, our members have smart meters. So we're able to do a lot of things with that. We know when the powers out for our members before they do in many cases and we can roll a truck to fix it before they ever have to call us. We can give them notifications about it. So that's pretty amazing. Our customers can see their energy use on a 15 minute interval. So there's some great things like that. We're looking to do some more with cybersecurity, which is of course on everyone's mind making sure that we're not a victim of some sort of an attack and that that impacts, you know, everyone on the island relies on us doing our job well and doing it right. So we need to make sure that we're always there for them. Great. Have you guys considered, especially for some of your isolated communities maybe doing dispatchable power or like little micro grids for quadrants to your island? Or is that a little bit too far down the road yet? No, we have. I mean, we're looking at one of the challenges is providing reliable power to the North Shore here. We've got the transmission line that goes over the mountains and we tried many years to go to run one along the coast and that sort of got stopped and we weren't able to complete that line. And so we're looking at, does it make sense to build a redundant line up there or maybe just do some sort of a micro grid capability up there? Land is, you know, space is pretty tight up there so it can be a little challenging. We have some experience with micro grid for the Pacific Missile Range Facility. We just finished within the last year we brought online a new solar and storage project out there that has the ability of island at the base loads if there is a problem with the grid. So that's exciting. That's being done completely with that solar and battery project and no conventional generation. So we've got a little bit of experience there and hopefully we can leverage that for some other areas that make sense. Great. Well, believe it or not, Brad, we've kind of ripped through 30 minutes and we got a lot covered and I learned a lot of new stuff too. And again, really proud of what you guys are doing over there. You're doing a great job. And I hope that a lot of other utilities can learn from you. So keep up the good work. And if you don't mind, we'll get back with you in another few months, probably not as long as it took since the last interview and we'll catch up with K.I.U.C. again. Will that be okay? Sure, no problem, Stan. Thanks and keep up the good work with the show. All right, thanks, Brad. Take care and we'll see you next week on Stan the Energy Man. Aloha.