 Welcome to Stan Energyman. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, part of the Department of Business, Economic Development, Tourism, State of Hawaii. It's hard to get all out at once. But anyway, thanks for being here on the show today. We're going to be talking microgrids, which is probably after hydrogen, my second most favorite thing to talk about. And today we've got a great guest, a gentleman that I work with quite a bit here at Honolulu on the projects we're doing at Hickam. And we're going to talk a little bit about what we're doing at Hickam. But I want to actually talk about the bigger grids in general to start with. But I got Mr. Ryan Womans from Burns McDonald. McDonald, not McDonald. No D at the end. No McDonald's burgers. Not making burgers, but we'll make plenty of other stuff. And he's an electrical engineer from Burns McDonald. And he's one of the key guys that we work with to do our microgrids at Hickam. So welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. And glad to have you here. Can you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started doing what you're doing and what lights your fire about being an electrical engineer? Sure. Sure. I've been in the electrical business my whole life. My family had an electrical contractee business. So I grew up watching projects just get built, whether it be in my neighborhood and around my house. I started working for my dad and became an electrician back in Iowa growing up. I'm still a journeyman and electrician to this day. I just loved electrical that much. I went on to Iowa State to be an electrical engineer. And I found my way to Burns McDonald via that path. I worked on a lot of projects the last seven or eight years with Burns McDonald on large industrial electrical upgrades when an industrial client wants to build a new unit or retrofit an existing unit. All of the new systems are becoming a lot more smarter, a lot more control and information that's being passed. And electrically, we're starting to get pushed to do that as well just to match up with the capabilities of a process. So doing that with Burns McDonald on projects everywhere from an ice cream plant to an export facility on the Gulf Coast, I see a lot of different capabilities electrically. When we start to talk microgrids, electrically, we want to have the information, the control and that distribution knowledge, not just from the industrial client side but within the microgrid. So bringing in me and some other players into that microgrid group, we can start to pull knowledge from these other industries that have those capabilities. So that's what found me into working with you guys on the microgrid today. And how long you've been on island here? I've been on island for about eight months or so, nine months, still working on my tan. It hasn't quite come in quite yet. And are you getting into hiking or surfing or anything too? Yeah, my wife and I love to hike and so we're always out getting dirty somewhere with our muddy shoes on the weekends and then we love getting in the water. Terrific. And I was going to say, you like to have a green egg too sometime and I heard you and Dave Malinare were talking about smoking. Smoking, smoking some ribs and stuff. Absolutely, we'll have to make some ribs sometime and try that out. Okay, well let's talk a little bit about some of the things that you've, I mean you obviously have the background for it. When you look at the islands here, especially Honolulu and the challenges that Hawaiian Electric has in absorbing more and more renewable, because as you know 2045 they're expecting us to be 100% renewable on the grid. And if we're going to do the same thing or something like it with transportation, that even means more electricity required for the transportation sector. What are some of the challenges that HECO faces as we get more photovoltaic and wind power coming up on the grid? Yeah, that's a good question. It's going to hit them harder than just about anybody else. When I got the call about the Hawaii and the microgrid and they say, well, the grid's changing so fast in Hawaii to meet this 100% renewable standard. This is where an electrical engineer wants to be to join in on that activity because it is hard. They have to deal with a lot of changes from their traditional what I'll call spinning assets like a diesel generator perhaps or a natural gas. What has that inertia and it spins, it helps keep the grid very stable. Solar photovoltaic doesn't have any of that inertia, they have to almost synthetically build it. So you get a different stability question when it comes to overall grid. When a cloud comes over or the wind isn't as strong, HECO has their ways of telling the future, we'll say, going into that to see that cloud coming up, but you can't ever really know what that's going to impact on your system. An engine you can ramp down and ramp up. When the cloud hits and you lose that power, it's got to be made up instantaneously somewhere else. The neat thing about an electrical market is whenever I have a demand, I have to have supply. It's not like a grocery store where I can stack up on a bunch of spaghetti until it needs to go away, it needs to happen instantly. And solar and wind aren't going to tell you when they're going to drop out. So it creates a stability question as the more and more of that potential drop or even the potential gain happens, the utility has to make up for that. So it seems that the larger the grid overall and the more intermittent renewables you have on there, the more complex the problem is. Yeah, absolutely. When you have that potential for a drop in solar and you just keep stacking it up to more and more and more solar, that's going to accumulate. So one of the ways that I know HECO is looking to handle that issue is to put storage out there. And traditionally we think of storage as batteries or something like batteries, but what are some of the other options for storing energy that can help the electric company balance those loads more rapidly when you have a cloud come over and the wind drops off suddenly? Sure. One of the easiest ways to not store it but even to just handle it is just turn it off and just say, I don't want to use you because you're not doing what I want you to do. That's a very poor use of energy because you're not using it at that point. So when you talk about battery storage, that's one option. And hydrogen storage, as you've talked about on the show many times before, is an option as well to reduce hydrogen as almost like a buffer. So as you get that intermittent energy, you're going to take maybe the base load that you know you're going to get and output that on the hydrogen side, but take that fluctuating part and just create as much hydrogen as you can at that time. There's some other methods of energy storage out there, something a lot, I'd say a little more traditional would be a pumped hydro. You pump water up uphill and you gain that potential energy as you move water up and then release the water back down to convert that stored energy back into electrical, mechanical, then electrical. Don't really have that case here because you need a very large mass to store that water and then you need the high elevation change and we're just not that high being at sea level. Yeah, that formula is important is the volume you can get and the delta in the height. Those are the two big pieces of that equation that give you your power. So we're looking at probably a lot of intermittent renewables on the grid and for me, I'm a hydrogen guy so I see that formula like you say where you take as much solar as you can use as a base load and maybe the fluctuating part, you just take whatever you get and make the hydrogen off of that and store it and maybe even use it for the energy sector on the transportation side. So hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles or turn it back into hydrogen you can put back on the grid. One of the other issues that Hawaiian Electric has to deal with is they're pushing power through long lines all over the island. So you have that main kahi power plant in the one in Pearl City, maybe a few more spots but it gets pushed out through lines and through substations and transformers and it gets ramped up and ramped down before it ever gets to somebody's house and those things cause you to lose energy along the way and actually waste energy. So when you start looking at microgrids, is there potential for us to maybe island parts of our island so that they're easier to manage where maybe Campbell Industrial Park or downtown Honolulu you're going to need a bigger base load but maybe some smaller or less or more stable that maybe they only get 5 or 10% change in their spikes versus a big industrial area, we might have big motors going off and on all the time. Would that be kind of a great place to do some of this islanding and experimenting with microgrids? Yeah, absolutely. The first comment that I'll try to respond to is the moving power over distances and Hawaii from an electrical aspect we might think it's far because it takes us 2 hours to get to the other side of the island but some of these power lines might not be quite so far. But in any case as we move power from A to B there's an efficiency loss there, there's a voltage drop and any time we do that they're actually we're losing power just for being on the line. In the mainland they have the same problem with really long transmission lines they'll raise the voltage up really high to try and minimize those. The story with microgrid starts to marry up kind of well with the reason why we start talking microgrids starts to match up really well with solving that problem because microgrids really started to gain some traction as just distributed generation lowers in cost. So solar is constantly driving down cost on an annual basis and mainland the lowering cost of natural gas and natural gas generators starts to intrigue some clients to produce their own power. When you get individual users putting in their own distributed generation they don't take the hit for that efficiency drop that you see that a utility will take out. Because of the long lines. Because of the long lines, yeah. So right where I'm making the power I'm using it. So I gained some efficiency right there on top of the lowering cost of the actual distributed generation. When I have these, I'll say assets, generation abilities if I create my infrastructure in a way to start microgridding now I can start to actually help out the utility from that standpoint of distributing that generation. Now there have to be a handshake between how that energy is used because sometimes and HECA will change their generation assets to the most efficient possible cost at any time. That's their goal is to drive down that cost as well as keep up the stability. And a microgrid takes that same philosophy and just makes it a lot smaller. More manageable. Yep. Okay. And the new technology that we have, I mean do the new switches or computers I mean the new technology does it even help that process more? So if you could take like communities and island them where they have number one a more stable load to begin with and number two really good switch gear now and good computers and good control systems you know is it getting more and more realistic and more and more cost effective to look at certain parts of the island and say maybe HECA should look at you know taking those communities and helping them not stay on the grid but stay connected and island themselves more often. Yeah. Is that reasonable? Yeah it really is and the components that we're using today have a lot more capabilities not just from the microgrid standpoint. I would say the microgrids are taking from what we'll call the smart grid industry or an industrial client who has a high level of automation. So when we talk about a microgrid we have the same issues as the macrogrid the grid tide or the HECO with stability and control. When we shrink it down we don't necessarily have all the same parts pieces engineer and maintenance crew that HECO would have. The existing electrical equipment that we're used to using is getting smarter and more capable so we might install a little bit different piece of equipment that's a lot more capable and then add the controls to it and now we start to make our own that's how we start to make our microgrid. We pull the functions and some of the equipment that smart grid applications have and then we pull some of the different applications that we pull from our power generation and then from the industrial clients with their smart controls. Kind of wrap all that into one control system and we're using the equipment from each of those sectors to supplement that. Okay so in theory we could have a couple of islanded parts of our community maybe Waianae and Mililani and maybe Waikai or something like that New Huanu, a couple of communities. When those islanded microgrids have to connect and disconnect back to HECO how is that reasonably handled from an electrical engineer's perspective? Sure right now the grid does that in some fashion with their smart closing and re-closing. When you start to add your distributed generation that's where it starts to get a little more complex than our conventional centralized model I'll say. So if you wanted to section off a city and have them be their own microgrid decoupling as long as they have their own generation and stability they can stay running decoupled. You just come off and say utility work on your stuff and then let me know when I can come back and help you out or you help me but I'm going to worry about me for right now and that might just be in its own city as long as they have the generation and the control connecting back It's not as simple as basically just throwing a light switch right because the way the power is alternating you need to make sure that you are in sync with the utility before you close that in otherwise it's quite damaging to the equipment on either side. So there's some extra parts and pieces or control I'll say some smarts that we need to put in at that point where we're going to couple and decouple. For a city it's a little bit trickier because they have to negotiate how they're going to work financially when they decouple for an individual client or let's say a community that discussion is a little bit easier. So there's a financial political piece to it as well. We're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back with Ryan in a few seconds and talk some more about some of the challenges that HECO has and some of the things that maybe we could try doing with microgrids. Kauai Lukas, host of Hawaii is my mainland every Friday at 3 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk about things of interest to those of us who live here and my past blogs can be found at kauailukas.com. I didn't listen. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on my lunch hour. Hey, we actually have a studio audience today so I'd like to thank all the members of our studio audience for being here and being good cheerleaders for us. So Ryan, we're talking about microgrids and all things microgrid but let's talk a little bit, not about just connecting with HECO but how maybe different islanded communities could talk to each other first and maybe help stabilize all of that before they reconnect. How would that work? Yeah, absolutely. So as we start to build individual microgrids, maybe it's a community of houses that wants to have their own distribution and their ability to microgrid themselves. Maybe it's a pearl or a military base, maybe it's a large city block. That could start to cause a little bit of an issue with HECO because they want to have an understanding of where that load and generation capability is. When you start to, let's say we have a large housing development or its own city, we want to keep as much of the microgrids or the overall grid powered but if you're still removed from a utility or maybe down the road there's not a utility in the utilities, it's let's say the one making all the decisions. The individual microgrids need a way to communicate to each other and say, here's how much power I can provide, maybe here's how much I want to be paid for it if I am producing it or here's how much load I need to add, can you give me more? And there would start to be a real, let's say, futuristic way to start to have the microgrids communicate to each other and maybe that's through a centralized entity like a utility or maybe that's even peer to peer or direct. You get a little blurry because there's a transmission line that's owned by somebody else in between there but I think as microgrids develop in the future and they all have the ability to operate on their own, they can communicate in a way that actually makes all of them more stable together. And the stability and the frequency are both important for HECO but when we do start doing things like shrinking down to islanded bite size grids that problem seems like it would be simpler and simpler to handle and maybe the idea of spinning reserves, do you happen to know how much HECO spins where they have to keep it online and going just in case they get hit by a big surge? I'm not sure what the number of the spinning reserve in but I would guess that they plan on at least one of their large engines dropping and then at least picking up that, I would guess they have a fairly large drop in solar at the same time 30, 40, 50 percent which is as you get that spinning reserve you take a real big hit on efficiency alone just to keep that available. Engines are just more efficient when they reach their full load. So going back to where we started where you have line losses and you have spinning reserves, so if you started basically what I would call being more efficient with your electricity by maybe not pushing it through as long a line and having your self-sustaining communities make the energy, make the power right where they need it, between that and having a more predictable load in these micro grids because maybe it's only houses, maybe it's only a residential community. That has a whole different surge profile than Campbell Industrial Park where you have big motors and things kicking off and stuff and you have more distributed energy sources so if one solar panel or one house drops offline it's not a big deal compared to one generator dropping off a HECOS line it's a big deal. So automatically, I mean if you're talking like even 30 percent of a spinning reserve and what 10 percent line loss or something, I don't know what the number would be, but we're talking 40 percent of the oil that we're burning to make electricity is just we're burning it just in case. Yeah, we are burning it for a stability or a just in case. A quality thing for the grid because HECOS contract with the people is clean, steady power that's there all the time. So a microgrid can change that to be a little more detailed per the client. A microgrid could say, what do you want to keep online for how long or can you suffer some outages briefly so that we can be more efficient on the HECOS side? So a microgrid could gain you the capabilities. Instead of increasing generation we could decrease load and that is something that a microgrid could do if you set up let's say the politics or the control system to require that. So if a whole community got together, like an organized community association got together and made a decision that 150, 200 houses and all the people in there agreed that it was worth doing, you know, they'd hire a company like your company or ideally I think they'd be great to work in Hawaiian Electric should have a group of engineers that would help a community do that. Why? Because it's more efficient for HECO too. It could actually help them out and help them with their stabilization issues and they wouldn't be wasting as much power or burning as much oil to supply that community and still provide a service and still keep linemen employed and still keep technicians employed and engineers employed to help that community service itself and keep it going pretty reasonable. Yeah it absolutely is. I think the utility model as today being a little more centralized will change to where the utility is almost, there's still going to be a large facilitator between microgrids but there will be essentially a HECO microgrid for a community of houses and there will be an agreement with how they want to operate just be a lot more control against all of Oahu operating in at the same fashion. And all that will equate to more efficiency and make the goal to achieve the 100% renewable that much more achievable. Okay. Well I know you've only been here eight months in the state but you're pretty familiar with the neighbor islands as well, right? And our biggest load in terms of need for power is here on Oahu with all the... I mean all you have to do is fly in on an airline and look at what's built up down around Honolulu and you know the biggest draw powers is sitting right here, it's not on Molokai and so we have this issue where the big power requirements are on Oahu but a lot of the renewable capability is on the neighbor islands and we've had discussions within the state of running an underwater cable which at the last time that I was involved in that it was $800 million to run an underwater cable between the islands and things like that. What are some of your thoughts on how feasible it is to move energy between the islands and maybe what's more efficient way than pushing it through a cable? When I moved here I thought the islands were interconnected and when I found out they weren't I was actually quite surprised. I think it is still a good plan if you can do it because it's going to give you a lot more energy security as a whole. A hurricane may hit a big island that doesn't hit Oahu or vice versa and you can support each other with your generation efforts through via subsea cables. I don't know the cost of it today. Love to look into that and find out what it is but the nice thing about subsea cables too is there's a level of protection being subsea and the temperature alone is actually going to help you out with your losses so you will see some loss but we're not likely not quite my realm but you'd probably up the voltage extremely high or even switch over to DC to push over between the islands. I was going to ask that. Is there an advantage to DC versus AC when you start talking distance? You have to up the voltage on the DC extremely high to help reduce the losses of the line so typical DC will at any voltage we're used to using will have a lot of loss because the current needs to go out and needs to come back so it's going almost twice as far. You need to move the electrons. In AC we're just moving them back and forth so we're moving them at a very short distance. DC when you get to extremely high voltages then you can start to see some gains. I've been used to working with but I know that's where you start to see the flip over where DC will be advantageous. Okay. We're at what on Oahu? 900 megawatt-ish? Is it about Oahus? I think so, yeah. Right around there. What's a good megawatt trade-off? If the big island had geothermal or if Lunai and Maui wanted to put more wind power up or had geothermal because I'm sure they do too and push some of that. What kind of power could we really get efficiently from Maui, say from Maui County? From Maui wouldn't be that bad. It's really not that far over there. I would imagine you could get just as much everything that they're able to give you if you build that cable right you'd be able to. It'd be the substation interface where we put that on our Oahu being just geographically constrained on what's available and how you do that would probably be more of a limitation is what you put on the ends, but the cable we can build out to move a lot of the power back and forth. Okay. Yeah, because I know we looked at that several years ago and it actually had some momentum for a while and it kind of died off, so maybe it's worth looking at again, I don't know. How about doing my favorite thing, which would be maybe liquid hydrogen or hydrogen and actually transporting a gas? Yeah, transporting a gas via pipeline, I assume. Pipelines do get a little bit of a bad rap on the oil side where we see a leak. If you see a leak in a gas pipeline or a hydrogen, instead of being a clean gas, I don't know that anybody's going to... Yeah, it's non-poisonous. It's pretty benign in terms of if it leaks out, it leaks out. It'll make some more clouds or something, but it won't really do any damage to the environment. Sure. But the technology's there to have the subsea pipelines that they exist probably more than people are willing to admit to right now in other parts of the world. Yeah, we'll have to look at that. We'll do some more homework together when we'll talk about that on a future show, I think. Yeah. But so, you know, right now, you're working a lot on Hickam with the National Guard and birds and mackin' with us at each cat. What's one of the most exciting things that you've kind of learned or figured out helping you do the pearl microgrid at Hickam? Probably the most fun part about the pearl microgrid would be just the amount of energy security we're able to bake into a very clever design that we have. And to not go for another half hour on just that, but we have created a smart grid within our microgrid. The smart part is kind of a little cliche, but we can suffer any single point of failure throughout the system, whether that's a fault on a line, a loss in communication, a break in a fiber line, a power supply to a single relay. We are bypassing intelligently around any single point of failure to reestablish power to the microgrid as a whole. So we can reroute power any direction to rebuild within a very short amount of time, and that's all happening automatically. Yeah, I'm glad you said that, but that's exactly what our objective was, was to basically make the energy security a premium there and make it really, really doable. Well, we pretty much run out of time here, so we're up against our ending, and I'd like to thank you, Ryan, for being on the show today, and I think we're going to have to have you back a little bit more often to explain some of the details on what Hawaii can do to have a cleaner energy future. So we'll have you back on the show sometime and we'll do some more talking. Anyway, thanks for joining us this week on Stanley Andrew Man. Until next Friday, actually next Friday, I think I'm going to have Rachel come on and take my place. So if you like Rachel, tune in next Friday. She's great. Aloha.