 Good afternoon, Howard Wigg, Code Green, Sync Tech, Hawaii. This is March 18th, 2019, and we are talking about maybe the most important energy tsunami on the horizon, and in this case it's a very good tsunami, but it will hopefully be taking us over pretty gosh darn soon. And if we're not prepared for it, it's going to wash over us, and we're not going to know what did us, which is why we have today maybe Hawaii's leading storage guy. He's been in the business for longer than some of you out there have been on the planet, a real, real storage pioneer. So welcome, Nick Dizon, president of Need On Clean Energy. And we got to know one another, Nick, 20 something years ago. About 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and you had a project which involves storage, when we talk storage we're talking battery storage here in lieu of direct electrical current from the production plant, and that was really a pioneering effort back then. Yeah, I learned a lot of standards back then, not a lot of information on how to design battery systems, so had to develop that ourselves, myself, through most of that, gosh, most of the past 15 years. I remember you're going through fits and starts and something, you'd have to try another approach, but that's how things evolve, yeah. Yeah, battery technology has changed radically in the past seven years, but more important, or just as importantly, so has the inverter converters and the software that controls it, as well as the regulatory environment and the interconnection environment with the utility. Things have gone, you know, completely changed, and it's a high speed evolution that's picking up even more speed. Even something called density, density in the batteries, I have a little example, right, there, I've gone through some evolution myself recently, one of which is I had a pacemaker installed. Oh, okay. Yeah, cardiologist said, he showed me readouts and said, Howard, look at this, no heartbeat for three seconds, you should have been dead, okay, I guess I'll do a pacemaker, and the deal is, oh, this, if you don't know what it is, it controls your heartbeat, and it's good not for one, oh, and it's powered by a battery, right up here, not good for one year, not good for three, good for 15 years. And that's, I'm at 50 beats, so 50 beats a minute times 60 is an hour times 24 is a day times 365 is a year times 15, you're getting way, way, way up in the billions of pulses, and they think it's going to give me those billions of pulses, but there's teeny little battery here, that is what we call density. Right, I don't know if it's that, if it has that type of improvement out in the building type world, but... Well, that's where we need to be, in your case, my father had one too, the strength of the signal that's needed to keep your heart in proper time is well known, so the strength of the signal versus how much battery storage you need, so of course with the newer lithium ion technology where they're, they've micronized it so much more, they can pack in a lot of power in a small amount of space, but the key is the load is known, it's a predictable non-varied load. And hopefully it's smooth, it will better be smooth in this case. The soft, one of the improvements in pacemakers though, is they have load following capabilities now, so like if you're climbing stairs, it'll actually speed up a little to match the amount of load that you're burning. At some point, yeah, they put me on a treadmill and I can go up to 130, yeah. That's right, so in the old days though, the original pacemakers couldn't do that, these newer ones, they're programmable and based on the data it collects as you go through your day, they can tune it to match how you, how you're, what your lifestyle is. And that's a key part of energy storage. What is the load profile? Now in your human body, that's a fixed range of power, even with load following, but on a home, when the microwave goes on simultaneously with the, with Honey Girl firing up the hairdryer and maybe Pops firing up the coffee and, and Sun's over there on the computer. And the refrigerator door was going on. The refrigerator door was going on. And mom turns on the washing machine, all right? People have an expectation of energy storage that it's going to be as transparent in terms of use as being connected to HIKO, MIKO, HALCO, or a KIUC. But very few battery guys, renewable energy, energy storage guys, designed to that. In fact, almost nobody designs to that. So you're going to have a brownout within your own home and somebody, oh, oh, oh, Honey Girl, turn off that hairdryer or whatever for a while. Yeah, or you're, you're buying a pre-package system like the Tesla power wall or something from LG or Tabuchi or, you know, any of those flavor of batteries, which usually come in a couple of sizes. And those are not designed to take you off grid. And the power converters and inverters, the intelligence of the system is not designed for that. You're selling it as a backup power, not even truly time of use, but more as backup power. And in a backup power mode, you'll never get your money back and you're not going to get that kind of operation where you turn on the vacuum cleaner, the microwave, the coffee machine, the hairdryer, those things are not going to, not going to hold up. Those kind of batteries won't hold up under those day to day real life conditions. Let's back up for a minute and look at Hawaii's energy situation where I work for the Hawaii Energy Office and our goal, our mantra is 100% clean electrical energy by the year 2045, which is not all that long away. And we're ahead of schedule, but we might be reaching a point of diminishing returns here. So the ideal is that we get more and more photovoltaics on more and more roofs and more and more photovoltaic farms, plus a lot more wind farms, plus any other renewable technology, biofuels so forth that comes along. And because we now have an excess of photovoltaic energy in the middle of a sunny day such as we had today, the utilities cannot ramp back far enough to absorb all of that energy, I should say make use of it. So there's some wasted energy, so solution, more and more storage, more batteries such as we're going to be looking at, which stores suck up all that good midday energy and then use it for whatever purposes we want. Ideally, it's peak shaving in the evening. I should back up more and say that in the middle of the day, due to the photovoltaics on Hawaii's utilities, you can't absorb all of that excess energy, but then just as energy use ramps up when everybody comes home and all the tourists come in from the beach and shopping, whatever, and the hotels are going great, gun the restaurants are going great, guns everything, we have this unique situation of an evening peak and ideally we would use that storage to shave that peak cut down on the less efficient power plants as we mothball more and more power plants, that's the ideal, and then looking way down the road, we combine that with the electric vehicles which have these large capacity batteries, and the electric vehicle guys would have the option of entering new agreement with the utilities and saying, okay, you can use some of my EV energy right now, whoops, no, I need to get it charged and so forth, and that gets a little complicated, but that is, and then of course combine that with efficiency, where buildings are safer, more comfortable, and homes, but they use less and less and less energy, that's my business there. Right, so that's been the problem, and in terms of, we've built so much PV so fast, both residential and commercial, and below the substation at most locations we're at 250%, which means the amount of power that is being used there, I mean the amount of power being produced by the sun is two and a half times the amount of power that would normally be used if there was no PV, so that's excess power that's dangerously looking for somewhere to go, I mentioned it before where 10 years ago the electrical contractors didn't worry about arc flash suits, arc flash rated breakers, now we have to have those because there's power looking for ground, especially in the middle of the day, and it can be very dangerous, so what the state and the counties and more importantly the PUC and the utilities are facing, it's a dangerous costly situation, that excess power is not benefiting the utility, they're actually paying for it and unable to use it when they need it, which is in the peak, so if you can go to slide number one, this is a first generation or 1.0 lithium ion battery from Sony that we installed on a site here, this is an excellent example of what could happen in town, in buildings this small form factor that's 35 kilowatt hour of battery there in a 19 inch rack form factor, this is actually the older style battery, they've now come out, Sony blue ion has come out with the 2.0 battery and also the LX battery, which has even greater energy density, a battery like that can be in buildings in town behind the DMARC, behind the meter, and that's a situation where the customers can be incentivized to have this because of the TOU, absorb power during the day because they don't have PV on those buildings in town, but they can, there's no space, that's right, there's no rough space to speak of, but downtown they can start absorbing that excess power from the surrounding areas and in their part of the grid and have that go into the peak. And in this case, you mentioned 35 KW, you're not limited to that because these are modular, you can stack as many of them as you see fit. Correct, so those systems can be absorbing the excess power from the grid all day long, and the nice thing about it is they can be set up to be under HECO control. Alright, so HECO is able to dispatch that power into the evening peak as PV starts dropping off from 3 in the afternoon, it's a fairly dramatic drop off, which then forces the generators at CAHE, AES, KALI, LOA, H-BAR to have to react rapidly load following, and those generators have been load following all day long. And they're not made for instantaneous load following, these guys have to go, they're big, they're up slowly, they're going to go down slowly. Alright, so those generators are not new so they don't have the latest technology. And then when you have PV shading going on in unpredictable patterns across the island, they're reacting to the grid in sharp jolts, which is not good for them. And then the switch gear at the substations are also not new and not designed to do that, to cooperate with the PV, with the grid, with the generation to balance out those jerks coming from shading. Now the jerks aren't human jerks, these are what I would call spikes or dips. Right, from edge of cloud, when clouds come over, it's unpredictable what areas of the island are covered, so the PV will suddenly drop off, you may have megawatts drop off in just a few seconds, and then as soon as the cloud starts passing, those megawatts kick back in. Yeah, the load goes up and down like a rollercoaster, but on that very cheery note, we need to take a break, Howard Wigg, on Think Tech, Hawaii with Nick Dizon, President of NEDON Clean Energy. Back in a moment. Hey, Stan Energyman here on Think Tech, Hawaii, and they won't let me do political commentary, so I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff, so I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place. Just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here, so we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energyman. Aloha. Hey, Aloha. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech, Hawaii, live from the studios. I'll bring you guests. I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe, to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience, so please join me because security matters. Aloha. Good afternoon again, Howard Wig, Think Tech, Hawaii with Nick Dizon, president of Need On Lean Energy, and we are talking about storage, and we've been sort of rambling all over the place, but we've only got 14 minutes left. Why don't we go to the next slide and start getting into some specifics here? Okay, that's a residential system, and actually it's in the residential areas where we see a lot of overproduction. So in a system like... Overproduction of PV. Of PV, correct. So we have all this PV that people leave home during the day to go to work, and they've got their PV system just generating away on the NEM, kicking it back into the grid, and the grid can't take it or use it somewhere because it's stuck below the substation. In a situation like this, these batteries can be charged up, and as they are right now, and be put under HECO control for discharge into the peak. Or I would say into the peak, or as you said, PV energy goes up and down like a roller coaster. On a cloudy day, you can watch the meter. It's way, way up there. It might dip to half and then right back up again, and can the batteries handle that? Can they smooth out that? They can. Those peaks and valleys. They can, and the nice thing about something like that, and you can go to the next slide as well. So those were aqueous hybrid ion batteries. Now these are lithium ion iron phosphate batteries. That first one was in IEA. This one's in Kanioi. We choose the batteries based on what their charge discharge profile is, what the average C-rate range is going to be, and what the charge rate is from the sun in that area. So there's a lot of mathematical calculations. It's like three classroom chalkboards long, 20 lines of chalkboard to do this. But in those areas, we're putting in systems that have the capability of absorbing the excess power from the grid. And even below the substation, some houses are going to get shaded, some aren't. So we can actually smooth out what's happening below the substation. And then now this power and this ability to absorb can be under the control of HECO. And HECO didn't have to pay for it. Yeah. The customer paid for it, and then you and I, as taxpayers, paid for some of it in the form of the tax credits. Tax credits, right. So it's a way to make it more democratic, more representative that even though others couldn't afford PV and batteries, they're benefiting it from it as well. And in terms of, we're talking about smooth delivery of energy, there's something called Hertz. And Hawaiian Electric, as I understand it, likes to stay right at 60 Hertz. And they get upset if they go above 60.5, or they get upset, or the grid gets a little upset if it goes below 59.5. It has to stay in this very narrow band, which the storage can definitely help. Well, it can help with that, and it can help with that excess power. And excess power can dirty up the power as well. I mean, now what's happening to your ground potential? Because that stuff is looking for somewhere to go, and generally it's looking for ground. And that can, depending on what the local situation is below the substation, or even building to building house to house, if you have power looking for ground and it finds a weak point, that could have disastrous results. This is what you refer to as flash arc? Arc flash. Yeah. Describe what arc flash is for us. Well, arc flash is excess power suddenly finding a path to ground. All too often it's through an electrician or a Hiko worker who happens to be in amongst the switch gear. Or there can be a defect or a flaw in the switch gear or something starting to fail and nobody knows it. And so it's like, it's literally like a bomb going off. The electrical shock as it bursts out of there could kill you. But it's the shock wave, the air shock wave that hits you and throws you against the walls, the cabinets, the floor. That's where it's like a bomb going off. And like I said, 10 years ago, we weren't being required to put in arc flash rated breakers. Our guys weren't wearing arc flash rated suits. Most of the skilled pv installers, the older guys, they're so nervous about it that they're wearing gloves, all this stuff, because they could literally die from something like that. That could be serious. So that's what we're facing and really for Hiko and Miko Helco, the PUC-KIUC, finding a cost-effective way to roll this out has been a challenge. They've been looking at big utility level solutions, but the expertise, the background for that, especially as it relates to an isolated grid like ours, a lot of that doesn't exist. You're trying to invent it. And Hiko's been working hard at trying to figure that out, but it's been a challenge and they haven't found anything really that's cost-effective for them that doesn't really hurt their bottom line. Could that be compared in very layman's terms to people who worship their iPhone and then Apple or whoever comes out, look, I've got a new one. Yeah, oh god, I got that. And it's only $1,200. And in the same way if the utilities are going to upgrade from the equivalent of an old iPhone to a brand new iPhone, $1,200 for us ain't cheap. We're talking millions and gazillions. We're talking utility. Yeah, we're talking billions. Yeah. For the utility to upgrade their generators, the substations and the distribution grid is billions. And they've known that for a long time. But while they knew that, they thought they had time to gradually ramp that up. But the speed of the adoption of PV, they were caught by surprise by that. And so now they're in a situation where this excess PV is really hurting them. So part of my job is to get as much, to incentivize as much storage as possible. I don't know if, yeah, we haven't talked in a while, but I'm related to the national electrical code as well. And there's the Hawaii Building Code Council. And just a few months ago, we adopted the 2017 National Electrical Code because it has four chapters on storage. And the plan checkers, at the county level, were really reluctant to permit storage because they didn't, this thing gonna blow up. Is it gonna catch on fire? But now the submitter of the application can say, I am in conformance with 2017 National Electrical Code. Here's my stats. And the plan checker can feel very comfortable in saying, okay, you got it. So speeding up the permitting process vastly there. For us, it's been, we've actually have our permits go through on residential really fast. And we, you know, our team has a track record. You're a trusted entity. Yeah, and we've been putting these things in for years without any problem. But to make things cost effective for the county, the state, the PUC for ratepayers, one of the things they did come up with was time of use. And the time of use rates, they just, I think they just changed it again where it went down from, if you were drawing at between 9am and 5pm, I think they made it 14.1 cents now in Oahu. It used to be 19 cents. So if you're drawing at 14.1, that's a powerful indicator of how much excess power they're trying to get rid of. Let's back up a little bit and explain time of use. Just in Hawaii's example, at 3 o'clock in the morning there's very, very low energy use and it starts to ramp up around 6 in the morning and gets pretty high by 10 in the morning or 9. And I think that is kind of, what time of use is you charge a medium rate at certain times of day, a very low rate at other times of day, and a very high rate at another time of day. Yeah, it's punitive in the evening peak. Yeah. So what is happening, say, through the night and up until, say, 9, 9 in the morning, something like that, that would be the medium price. And then the example you were giving, starting around 10 or whatever, when that sun is really beginning to power up those PVs, then you, not you, the utility drastically reduces the price by 14.2, down to 14.2. Yeah, so at 9am it drops to 14.1.2. At 5pm it jumps up to like 48 cents. Let's see, the old-time off-peak, which starts at 10pm, they actually still made it higher than retail. It's at 34.1. So it's like a penny or two higher than the old rate. So if you go to TOU, you are gambling that the only power you're drawing is from 9am to 5pm. If you draw during the peak, you get hit. If you draw during the off-peak, you get hit a little bit more than the old retail rate, which was 24.7. So one of my customers, all my customers, I put them on time of use. And one of my customers on Molokai got a call from Miko. Speaking of which, I believe we have a slide to illustrate this. Yeah, in fact we can go and bring up slide five or six because what you're trying to- The next slide. That one works. Yeah, that'll work. So this is a house that has a least PV system. So he doesn't own the PV. So we actually put batteries on his house and he makes excess power. So the batteries are absorbing his excess power, so he's not injecting it into the Molokai grid. Instead, it's going into his batteries. And you can see over there at 16, that's four o'clock, 17s, five o'clock. That red is power being drawn from the grid at the lowest possible rate. Now that power being drawn from the grid may actually not be from the grid. That may be from the PV because we're not allowed to put that PV, that least PV system into the circuit. But we know his PV produces more than he uses. But what you should see is at 17 there, five o'clock, there's no draw. So we have him on a time of use programming. So you can see from five o'clock at night till 10, there's no draw from the grid. And on that very cheery note, somehow we're just getting warmed up and we run out of time. Dishon, please come back in the near future because for one thing, you'll have new news by then and we'll get much more into depth. Suffice to say this is the future and Nick is Mr. Future Man here. So that does it for the day. Howard Wigg code green with Nick Dishon, President of Need On Clean Energy. See you next time.