 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Well, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on ThinkTek Hawaii, where community matters. Stand Officer Meniere from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And it's been a busy year, all right. It's been a busy week so far. I'd like to thank the folks from Hawaii Gas who dedicated or blessed their Honolulu'i wastewater methane recovery system that went into action earlier this week. They had a great ceremony on Wednesday, and they invited us to put our hydrogen generator, our 5,000 watt generator out there to provide all the power for the entertainment and the sound system and everything. And it was a great experience and really good food. Thanks for the invite, Hawaii Gas. But anyway, today we're talking about energy storage. And you know, the more and more I do reading on energy, the more the term energy storage keeps popping up. And it's because it's so critical as we start absorbing more and more renewable resources as generation of power, because when you can store it, you get back from power, good base load power. But the trick is to store it properly and store it efficiently. And a lot of times people think efficiency is just amount of energy in to amount of energy out. And that's all we look at. And they say, well, batteries are really efficient. We'll just use batteries because we're used to it. And they're really efficient with energy out for whatever you put in. But there's a lot more to consider. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So my guest today, a little bit out of sync. He's usually here on the third Friday of every month. But we've got him on the second Friday. Ryan Willbins from Burns and McDonald. That's good. Thanks for joining us, Ryan. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So we're talking about energy. You know, we talk about energy all the time and energy storage. But it's really more of a system. You know, people think you could just plug a battery in. But even a regular car battery, a lead acid battery, you have deep cycle batteries. You have high cranking out batteries. You even have different kinds of batteries. So let's talk a little bit about batteries and how they fill in that energy storage piece for the grid and transportation. Yeah. As for the grid, batteries have their role right now. And we see that it being expanded almost daily. They've come a very long way in a very short amount of time, as far as the utility grid operates. Well, battery is a very generic term in the sense of explaining a chemical reaction that's happening somewhere else. Somewhere not exactly where we're used to operating on the grid. That chemistry can be made in a lot of different forms to supply very short term, high energy output. Or something more, I call it a little bit more of a power battery or maybe a more of an energy battery that we can change the chemistry that's going on in there so that you're getting much deeper, longer release, something I want to really charge up and then bring back out. Then you start talking about, well, how much do I really need to use these batteries? I'm going to charge it all the way up and bring it all the way back down. That's when we start talking about the deep cycle technology. So if you're going to be using something on a regular basis, you start talking more of a deep cycle. If you're going to be having something more for just an emergency, just in case, give me just enough time until the power comes back on then we start talking a little bit more in a short term type of chemistry. When you make those calculations or you look at that choice, you have other things that fall into place. So example, if you take a deep cycle battery and just quick hit it all the time and never deep cycle it, what happens to the life? Yeah, you're going to shorten the lifespan of that battery. They are engineered particularly for very specific jobs. We don't have the one magic bullet battery chemistry that's just going to give you everything. Lithium ions come out and it does a lot of things, great. But that doesn't mean it does everything the best that it can do. So you start to see other technologies getting paired with batteries or even batteries being paired with different types of batteries. Yeah, so again, it's back to a systems thing. And batteries aren't the only choice. We talk flywheels. We talk capacitors. We talk other things that fill the gap. So what are some of the things like a supercapacitor brings to the game of energy storage? Yeah, the capacitors are great at the very short term high energy discharge. Capacitors are used in a lot of different senses right now. I mean your phone's going to have a ton of capacitors just sitting on a very small scale. We can size these capacitors up to a very large scale, utility type sizes. Where they were traditionally used before is a matter of providing a VAR correction. It's a power quality issue on the grid. That's what capacitors were used for before. When we start saying supercapacity, that's when we start saying, hey, I want to use some of the power that's in that. It's a very short term high energy discharge. That short term, that term short, is getting extended. But it's still shorter than what we think of with a traditional battery. So what are the timing we look at for capacitors and supercapacitors? Seconds or milliseconds or microseconds? We can get into the seconds phase, absolutely, and in the multiple seconds. I think the way you stack them up, we could get even longer than that. If we want to start going more down the timeline we can start getting ourselves into more of the flywheel application where you want to start talking 10, 15, 30 seconds. We're probably not talking minutes with flywheels. That starts to get a little bit tough because you are moving a piece of mass constantly. That takes energy just to keep something moving. And when we want to get outside of that, then batteries start to get into the conversation. That's kind of where we like to play. Okay, so on a continuum, at least what I'm familiar with. You have capacitors and supercapacitors which give you a lot of power really quickly and for short duration. Then maybe you move to flywheels and some batteries where you get a little slower reaction but still get quite a bit of power and can handle the power surge input and output. Then you get to a little bit more sophisticated batteries and even the flywheel extending out to maybe minutes of energy going into your system, consistently nice steady power. Then you get into flow batteries at that farther end of that where now you're talking maybe hours of putting power back in at a fairly good rate. And then outside of that, you start getting into your other means. What I look at is other means of storage, compressed gases, pumped hydro, hydrogen, maybe methane or ammonia, things like that that you can store a lot of hydrogen in and then put it back in a fuel cell and bring it back in terms of maybe hours to days to even weeks. And then also on the power scale or excuse me, the energy scale, more up in the megawatts, multi-megawatts and gigawatt scale. Yeah, you got a spot on. There's a point when batteries are starting to struggle to meet this multi-megawatt, multi-gigawatt, and let's go from hours and start talking days. It would take a lot of batteries. You can see it on something, a small device, where you start stacking in double A's and it lasts you so long. If you wanted that to last four times longer, you're likely to be adding four times as much batteries. It starts to take up a lot of space. These other fuels can pack a lot higher energy density, so the amount of space that they actually energy can be stored in sitting is much, much less. We can talk energy storage, everything from being renewable in the sense of hydrogen, but something that can also be relatable to think of is just the way diesel sits right now. That is an energy storage medium. It's a matter of getting the conversion of the process to get the electricity, the power out of it. A large tank right now that sits, the tank in your car is a form of energy storage. We just think of that as more of, well, how many miles can I get? Battery-operated cars, that's a conversion people can make. When we start on a massive scale, the way the grid operates, it's not as easily of a formula of how many miles I'm driving. It is a scale of the number of, let's start talking gigawatts, multi-megawatts, and hours and days. Then the equations start to really change. Any amount of fuel in the mediums we're using, they're vastly different than where we are on that shorter time scale. When you start to talk about scale, one of the big factors that kicks in is when you get to larger scale, does it work or does it work better? Some things work great at only its scale. For example, when I talked to Dr. Krock about ocean thermal, he says, you can't do ocean thermal for a one-megawatt system. You've got to do like 10 or 50 or 100 megawatts to really make it worthwhile. You're going to have to put a big system out there to get your economies of scale. You have that same issue, especially now we're talking from a cell phone to a car to now the grid and getting up to maybe a gigawatt worth of energy storage that you might need. Now you have batteries at large scale. Are they still efficient on large scale? What kind of things are happening with batteries when you have them at the gigawatt scale and you're only using it to take up loads at the top end or just cycling that little bit? Yeah, the technology gets to a point where you have a scale and issue, absolutely. Just the way batteries were produced is a great example that batteries still weren't that financially viable until recent history subsidies certainly helped to that, but building massive battery factories where they start getting the economies of scale and start shaving prices off of just the manufacturing process. That's how batteries have done really well with getting into the market now. Now let's talk about using them at scale. When you get to the gigawatt hour type of application, there's very few gigawatt hour renewable energy because a coal plant has multi gigawatt hours sitting right outside. So I'm going to convert to just saying more of a renewable, ready, readable fuel. Geothermal could be considered that type. Hydro and let's talk hydrogen and start looking at these massive scales. A battery can store renewable energy, absolutely. But if you want to talk gigawatt, there's not a gigawatt hour stored in the world right now. It is being produced. The largest factories in the world are producing hundreds of gigawatt hours of batteries a year, but they're also going into things like cars or your phones are just being used for different things. It would take up an incredible amount of space in the infrastructure to be able to use a battery in the multi gigawatt scale. It would have a great use, but that's one gigawatt. I want to start talking five, 10 gigawatt hours, even more than that when we start getting to a hydro scale. Not something we can pull off here in Hawaii unless we start flooding a valley, building a dam, which would be probably not any time soon. But we may have the need for that type of energy storage. We may have the need for that type of energy storage if we want to consider ourselves energy independent. We can always buy and import renewable energy. That is a possibility, and likely will happen in the next 25 years, is that we will be importing renewable energy until we can make that final leap. We want to be energy independent. Now we need to start talking massive scale energy storage of renewable assets. That's not a very common topic right now. You're exactly right. I just saw an article this week that said down in Australia they have a big wind farm that's putting in the largest battery that's ever been put in a grid system, and it's 100 megawatts. That's as big as they got, and they say that's the biggest one in the world right now. Like you mentioned, you can make batteries at scale. We already figured out how to do that pretty efficiently, but employing them on the user side at scale is a whole other story. We're going to take a quick break here and come back and talk more specific. Maybe even get into Oahu's summer requirements in a few minutes and talk about what it would take to really meet our goal of 2045 being 100% renewable here in Hawaii. Hello, 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. I'm Jay Fidel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on Think Tech, aloha. Hey, thanks for joining us here with Stan Energyman on another beautiful aloha Friday in Paradise, coming up on Christmas pretty soon to get all your shopping done. That's energy intensive right there, getting all your shopping done. Not only that, but mailing it, getting it out in the mail. We have to mail everything out of here except for our immediate family. Anyway, we're talking to Ryan Wubin today about energy storage and how important that's going to be on the grid, particularly as we start looking more and more towards renewable energy on the grid because a lot of the renewable energy that's available, like solar and wind, it's only available when the wind's blowing or when the sun's out. So we have to capture what we can, when we can, store it for when we have nighttime or low wind or times that those renewables aren't available. And we don't have in Hawaii a whole lot of hydroelectric. We do have some on the Big Island, probably some on Maui. Imagine you could do a tiny bit here on Oahu. But we have limited numbers of renewable energy resources that give you good firm base load power. Again, with the exception of maybe a little bit of hydro and geothermal, of course. But geothermal comes with some cultural implications here in Hawaii. We don't like to do things that disrespect Hawaii's culture and the beauty of the island. So even wind power here on Oahu, we can't be putting wind turbines up on every single mountain side that we have, or it would just be disrespectful. And you'd have a lot of people just saying, we're not doing that. It's just not going to work. So energy storage is critical. And energy storage at grid scale is something that we just don't do right now because the grid doesn't need it. The grid right now takes generation at one point and pushes it one direction towards the consumer. But now we're starting to get renewable energy out in the community in terms of solar and then wind farms and things that also push energy into the grid and, again, need the storage. So we're talking a little bit, Ryan, about the different kinds of storage and getting up to scale. What are some of the implications when you get to multi-megawatt scale? Like I said, in Australia, they're doing like 100 megawatts. And that's the biggest they say that's been done in the world. But what's that compared to what we might need here in Oahu in 10 or 15 years? Sure. So yeah, 100 megawatts is that's big. That's very large. When we talk gigawatt hours, which we're going to talk a little bit, that's 100 megawatts is only 0.1 of a gigawatt. So 10 times larger that is when I start talking the gigawatt storage. So if you look at the renewable watch on the utility website today, you can add up a little bit. And I think I did a couple rough numbers and just said, hey, you know, it might be a good idea to have about 25 gigawatt hours of storage. Now this is to become energy independent, right? This is not a need. I don't want to confuse the difference between 100% renewable and energy independence. So I do want to make sure I bring that up again when I say these numbers because energy independence means, hey, let's produce all the power that we need to use, let's say, within a day on the island. I don't want to be bringing it in from other countries or the mainlanders. Which is the whole goal. So if I look at the amount of load and add in a couple of figures for a little bit of growth, or maybe even a decrease in load, 25 gigawatt hours was enough to just about get us one day where we need to produce all the energy today so that tomorrow, if there's no sun or the wind comes down, that, hey, we need to ride this through. Maybe some of our other baseload assets, if it's geothermal or something else, maybe they're down for maintenance. But one day of 100% storage, which you have now in diesel fuels, 25 gigawatt hours. That's a very large number compared to the 100 megawatt hour battery that we were just talking about before. When you talk one gigawatt hour, just a small fraction of what we need, the amount of space needed to store a gigawatt hour is sizable. I mean, it takes a lot of footprint for an island nation to start to dedicate. That's one. Some of the figures I haven't tossed on that make that number even larger are the transportation grid. Right now, transportation is not renewable. It's mostly carbon-based combustion. So when we make that renewable, that is an energy consumer that needs to change to a renewable energy. So we need to become not an importer. We have to produce more for that energy being consumed. So the 25 number that I'm talking about is low. What also makes that number possibly low is the constant supply of fuel that's being imported right now. There's multiple ships already on their way. They're storage in the pipeline basically. They're essentially in the pipeline, so to speak. They're on their way, which is important. So when something like a hurricane starts coming by and we need to delay the next ship coming in, we can ride it out a little bit, but soon we're going to need that to dock and offload the fuel so that we can start powering back up. When those ships aren't there and we are an energy independent, we need to be ready for those ships. We need to be able to be ready to call to import energy. We've got to be ready to pick up the phone and say, you know what? We didn't have enough. Send some energy to us, which would generally be renewable based so that we can plug it into our machines, whatever we're using at the time. That is a time factor. So if it takes five, let's say a week, if it takes a week to pick up the phone and get that energy shipped to us, now on that, not just 25 gigawatt hours for the day, I'm at time seven. I'm at a very large scale. Now those numbers start to get scary a little bit. I'm talking 100 gigawatt hours. I don't think we're in that area. You've got to be really smart about how your generation mix is made so that one factor doesn't knock out all of your generation. You can start refueling our renewable assets. Being smart about where and how we're using our power is the next step to minimizing that risk of not having power. Is it also good then to think of the future grid in terms of multiple microgrids versus one single big grid? Is there an advantage to that when it comes to storing energy? There is a really big advantage to that. So today, when I say 25 gigawatt hours, that's the load on the island right now. If everybody had the technological and financial ability to just have a solar plus battery on their house, that is actually a really good application. The solar is a high return on investment. The battery has a great return on investment. The battery is good right now for that application. I want to store power today, use it at night. If I have a cloudy day tomorrow, maybe I need to import just a little bit of energy. The calculations I'm talking about is no distributed energy, 25 gigawatt hours. Everybody here bought their own 10 kilowatt hour battery. That's a big difference. You can take them, it's not really just a million, you take every household times 10kwh. That's a big bite out of that gigawatt. But that battery is good for that scale today. Will hydrogen be able to replace that? I think so when the technology is developed more and we have the two kind of mirroring each other and pushing each other's technologies more, then it may be a hydrogen-based microgrid on your house. Then expand it out to the community. Now the community is invested in their own generation and storage assets. That takes a bite out of the multi-gigawatt hour requirement. We can keep everybody putting in their own assets as you go out. You're distributed generation, you have distributed storage. It makes the larger need much more palatable. It's a lot easier. But a place like the downtown, where you have high rise, very high density. They're the ones that aren't going to really just do their own. That facility, that community, will always be an energy importer. It's up to the other communities or the overall utility to providing that energy importer. But it doesn't need to be the massive number that I'm talking about. Well, okay, when we do look at batteries, so for scale at large scale, now there's a big price factor that comes in. Right now, people when they look at hydrogen for energy storage, they go, well, hydrogen is too expensive. It's too expensive to make and store at scale. That's because we don't have anything that scale to even produce a hydrogen scale. But when you start projecting forward and saying, okay, if we could, if we had geothermal to make hydrogen for the state and ship it within our own state rather than importing it, and we have that opportunity, and you could compare apples to apples with batteries for energy storage and hydrogen for energy storage, which ones in the long term, like over a 20-year period, where you capitalize stuff and pay it off, what seems to be making more sense? I know you've kind of done quite some numbers on that. Sure. When we start to scale it, it's absolutely in favor of hydrogen. I mean, by 10 plus fold. At that point, it's not even close at these larger, larger scales. When you get smaller, the equations really start to hinge on the price of the fuel a little bit, as much as the price of the producing, I mean, you're taking it off of the grid and on the grid. So it's a little bit different when you talk about the price of the fuel, but the price of the storage, the hydrogen storage is pretty easy to deal with, where there's no chemical process in a tank. This is put in a tank. So it's simpler, but then there's an infrastructure on how much input output am I planning on. So there is a place for each of the technologies, but as hydrogen as a fuel starts to scale, its economy of scale will change the economy of that equation. It absolutely will. I mean, keeping an eye on Japan would be my recommendation. Watching what they're doing is going to change the economy of hydrogen globally, just as that one nation. I think we share a lot of similarities with them. So what their decisions they make will change our renewable economy just because of their scale, the amount that they're consuming and producing will have an effect on us. They may be able to find a way to purchase and consume so much hydrogen that the price drops. Maybe it goes up because of the demand, but I would generally foresee more production of hydrogen would also allow more distribution of hydrogen, better storage, and that would change it here as well. Well, it just so happened to have seen a report this morning. I was just looking for some other files that I could bring to the show, and it was a study, not very old. It was 2016, where they looked at geothermal on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island. The Big Island's a no-brainer. Maui and Oahu kind of surprised me that we have geothermal potential on these islands. So I think maybe one of these shows, we need to sit down and look at geothermal potential for Oahu, where they are, how big we'd have to make it, safety issues and things like that and start looking at it, because I know that we can store hydrogen in tanks. I mean, I have a friend in Phoenix that has hydrogen tanks from 1917, and they're still passing their hydrotesting, and they're still using them. If your storage vessel can last 100-something years, that's a pretty good clue as to what's going to be cheaper for hydrogen or batteries. So maybe we can couple some geothermal on this island in Maui to take care of the loads on our islands, with good base load power and the potential to build extra storage in hydrogen and keep a backup reserve for those five-day, seven-day, 10-day outages we may have for weather storms or things like that. That might be the thing to do. Yeah, that's a great topic. I think I got a couple seconds here. The way that current nations are becoming renewable, 100% renewable, is they have a massive hydro plant. They don't have a massive hydro plant. They have a massive geothermal capabilities. These two big, constant, we're talking multi-gagawatt hours in production of energy available to them. It's tougher for us. That's why it's a really technologically difficult to be able to pull off here, but it is possible. Tapping a source such as geothermal is very valuable. Well, let's look at that for next show. Let's see if we can talk about some local geothermal for the next show. That's going to wrap it up for Stanley Energy Man this week, and we thank you for joining us. Next month, we'll look forward to having Ryan here. We'll talk about some geothermal options here in the state of Hawaii and maybe the implications of what that could be for other communities. I mean, they call the Ring of Fire around the Pacific for a good reason. We have lots of geothermal all around the Pacific, and I think Ryan's suggestion of watching Japan will give us a good clue as to how it all pencils out economically in the future. So, thanks for joining us, and we'll see you next week on Stanley Energy Man. Thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studio for making all the magic happen, and we'll see you later. Aloha.