 Thank you, thank you all for joining us this evening in this time of unrest. I would like to remind folks that the Sierra Club centers its work on the key principles of equity, inclusion and justice that celebrates people from all walks of life. And we stand in solidarity with Black Lodge Matters, our indigenous neighbors whose land on which we stand and for gender equality. I hope, beyond hope, that after this that democracy prevails and we come out of this unrest and pandemic in peace and in good health. So Nat now will introduce our new director. Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Leighton. I am the new chapter director for Sierra Club Maine. I am just finishing up my second day on the job. So this is a very exciting time for me as well. Thank you for having me. Great, thank you Sarah. And before we introduce the speakers, so I'm Matt Cannon. I'm another staff member at Sierra Club Maine and I'm sure many of you have been on Zoom at this point but we will ask everyone to mute themselves for the presentations just to help with background noise. And these meetings are recorded live by Facebook. There's folks out there in that sphere listening and we'll also record it and post to our website. So it'll be available afterwards. And if you do have questions we ask that you post them to the chat and we'll do our best to answer them promptly after the presentations before eight o'clock. So thank you all for coming and Joan do you want to introduce our speakers? Yeah, I'm briefly going to introduce the speakers and since we have a lot of good information to hear tonight. So our more information on them are on our website and we have a slide where you can get where you can see their websites as well for for more information about them down the road. I just want to welcome our speakers and Jim Wilson, president of Eloho Power Company and Molly Siegel who works with him from the is an Island Institute Fellow. Steven Strong is president of Solar Designs Associates and Kay Akin is CEO of the software company Introspective Systems in Portland and they will all share their piece of the action in the development of the solar plus storage generator hybrid microgrid design to replace the aging underwater cable supplying Eloho with energy. Jim Wilson and Molly will go first and as president of Eloho Power he's done a lot of work and on this whole process and he is he is a retired University of Maine professor of marine science and economics focusing on fisheries ecology and resource economics and he and local Islanders along with Molly have worked together to solve critical energy supply problem and secure the financing for it. Steven Strong is president of Solar Design Associates in Harvard Mass is acknowledged as the premier preeminent authority on integration of renewable energy systems and buildings. He has pioneered the concept of integrated design with applications such as solar electricity solar thermal and wind and has worked around the world and Kay Akin is CEO of Introspective Systems in Portland holds a degree in energy slash sustainability engineering and she's helped the island project using her knowledge of the application of complex system designs in relation to a variety of problems focused on the integration of distributed energy resources into the electric grid. So welcome all of you and hopefully we're all set where we can hear everybody and see everybody and will Jim and Molly take it away? Okay well why don't I start you give a little bit of the history of the project and the company and give you all a little context that might help better understand what we're doing. Our company is a co-op actually a member owned co-op we're a regulated utility probably one of the smallest in the country. We're member owned and we have I should say a lot of infrastructure for the number of people we serve. The island is rather large and it's not populated very heavily so we've got a lot of lines running around that are expensive to maintain. The company was formed in 1969 by Pat Tully who is an incredibly clever guy who designed the system and adapted it to very how could I say primitive conditions in Iloho and made it work from 1989 or 69 until 1983 the company ran a diesel an old Korean war diesel that was obtained very cheaply then in 1983 we got a new cable that we put in cable runs from Stonington to Iloho it's about six and a half miles long and follows a very tortured route out to the island mainly because it was put in by a fisherman who knew all the places scallop draggers were likely to go and put the cable where they weren't likely to go and the result is we've had a pretty well-functioning cable ever since 1983 all right but we realize now we've got a 37 year old cable it's probably 15 20 years beyond its expected lifetime and the point with this project is to kind of set the island up for a transition to a different source of electricity when the cable fails all right and that's where we got into the solar array that we're talking about in the storage system the six eight ten years before our current time the co-op looked into a whole variety of different ways to solve this problem we considered in this table wind generation fuel cells micro turbines tidal joined the meeting and when we sorted through all these things it became apparent that solar with storage was by far the best alternative from an economic view there was very little discussion about going green all right it was basically about how we can make an affordable system for the island so what we wound up with was a design that is going to put in about 300 kilowatts of solar panels that's about two and a half three acres of panels and a one megawatt hour of super capacitor which is the equivalent of a battery and it has attached to it something called a server which is the equivalent of an inverter and a microgrid controller the island is we're fortunate that because we purchased power from America we had a meter that recorded hourly consumption every year since we've been hooked up to the cable in 1983 all right so we know by our what the island is consumed for 37 years all right this makes it easy to figure out what you need to do if you're going to continue service in the future built two competing models of the system to see how it would work I built one and case partner Carol Johnson was responsible for building another Carol used a very mathematical approach used data from satellites I used data from the airport in Rockland collected by Noah and did it on the spreadsheet and the two approaches came out very close to one another close enough that we feel confident that the models are good all right the in order to service the island the solar system will generate 420,000 kilowatt hours of power every year join the meeting the island only consumes about 270 to 300,000 kilowatt hours so we've got almost 50 percent over capacity and the reason is because of the intermin latency of solar power all right it's intermittent on a daily basis obviously but it's also intermittent on a seasonal basis the amount of power coming in in january is awful lot less than the amount of power coming in in june or july all right so the problem that this poses for the design of the system and steven and k will talk more to this I will is that if you have to anticipate that you're going to lose your connection to the mainland grid and have to plan a system that is off grid and reliable and functioning all right you have this problem of intermin latency you have the problem of producing a lot of excess power and you have the problem of making that trying to get as much value out of that excess power as you can all right it's kind of a challenge in design of electricity that is perhaps people say what we're going to face on the mainland five 10 15 years from now much more widely so in a sense this whole project becomes a pilot project of sorts so I could go on but let me just stop there with that context one of the things I want to add is we are really fortunate to have had a number of people who have contributed an awful lot to this bill stevens who used to be our production manager our general manager of the company was very active until you retired last year contributed an awful lot bill had been with the company since 1960 69 steven strong has been a tremendous contributor if it wasn't for steven I don't think we would have gotten very far at all with this project Kay and her partner carol have contributed a lot of ideas that have been very helpful especially around the excess power question and people like molly ryan carol who's our current general manager and a number of other people on the island of all contributed it's been a real good team community effort that has been fun especially for me to work with so why don't I ask molly to talk at this point and give us a little perspective of the community on this whole project and what they think about it molly all right you want me to talk about the heat pumps or do you want me to talk about the community community okay all right um well let me first say that I I came onto this project after it had mostly been designed and so I'm not responsible for any of the craziness that these guys have been up to um this was all new to me when I moved to the island a couple years ago but it's been really interesting to work on so far just a little bit about isle hoe for those of you that aren't familiar there's about 55 54 year round people that's this year last year it was 56 so we've gone down one or two but there were also some babies born so that was that was a big deal so a tiny year-round community and then the seasonal summer community is between 200 and 300 it's really hard to estimate because there's folks that stay on the island for six months and there's five months and four months and people that come for just a month or three weeks so it's really hard to estimate what the actual size of the community is um and that kind of shows up in our census counts it's always a little bit off and it's more accurate to just drive around the island and point to each house and say who lives there who lives there so it's it's an interesting place to live and as Jim mentioned the intermittency of solar power there's also intermittency of demand so there are certain times in the year when there's a ton of demand and then there's certain times a year when there's basically nobody here and so that just it creates another factor that we have to deal with and also the year-round people are here all year and they're needing power all year but then the summer people come in and have this huge influx into the community and they're really important to our community and they also use a lot of power and so the the array as Jim mentioned needs to be sized to deal with the increased demand in the summer which sizing the array larger raises the whole cost of the project and it would be unfair to put that all in year-round people so it's it's been I think a challenge and an interesting challenge to sort of even that out between the different parts of the community so that's one thing that I wanted to mention there there are strengths and weaknesses about being a highly seasonal community and it's definitely a challenge that is not always recognized from my perspective I'm an island fellow which means that I work for the Island Institute but I live on Isla Ho which is really awesome because it's an amazing place to live and it's even more amazing when you have an actual full-time job which is cool and I've been really fortunate to live here year-round and to spend a lot of time getting to know folks and really becoming integrated into the community I feel like I'm a real islander now and I think from my takeaways from conversations with folks are that people want number one reliable power Isla Ho Electric Car Company is really well known for being a reliable source of power it's pretty amazing when the power goes out usually it goes out because it's gone out in Deer Isle where our cable comes from and so power will flicker off and then about five minutes later I'll see Brian our manager driving by in his pickup truck and I'll know that he's going to start the generator and then the power is going to come back on in about five or ten minutes so it's really like that we have super reliable power we never have to live without power for more than an hour or so which for many of you that live on the mainland it's like you know you'll go for three days and CMP doesn't have your back and it's and it's awful but we really have it have it good here and it's important because we're isolated in a lot of other ways and so people people really rely on that and it's a source of pride Jim was mentioning the story about the cable being laid on the seafloor and I just wanted to mention there's an awesome video that some of the school kids made a few years back it's a shadow puppet video and they made it in collaboration with figures of speech theater I think and so if you if you search figures of speech theater ilahoe it's this really cool video I would highly recommend watching it a lot of good history there so people want reliable power and they want it to be affordable we have a small year-round population a lot of them are fishermen or contractors or do odd jobs they're not sitting with a ton of money so we have to be really really cognizant that for some people it's the cost of living is high here and we have to keep power affordable and that's one of my roles I work with affordable housing on the island as well so reliable power affordable and then you know whatever worldwide recognition comes along with having a cutting-edge solar microgrid which people are like yeah that's awesome but if it's not affordable if it's not reliable who cares so my my main goal is to um help keep to make sure that this microgrid is benefiting everybody on the island specifically the year-round residents because if we don't have a year-round population it's not really as as good a community to live in and and it's a really special place to live right now so we want to keep it that way Steven so maybe we can go now to Steven Strom who I think is on board here and hear how he has influenced this whole process on your phone even I think you call in you it looks like mute I'm using my phone there he is we can hear you now great perfect yeah sorry for the miscue when I started to load up zoom said oh you can't join this meeting you need an upgrade and when I look upgrade it was probably a 20 minute process so I patched it together through the the internet and so you'll be seeing me speaking into the phone in any case I'm glad to get to talk about one of our favorite projects Jim Wilson has been quite dedicated to this effort I don't think it would have ever happened or even been thought of without Jim and this is going on three plus years now at this point we work all over the world as was mentioned and are very excited about solar plus storage both in utility interconnected and off-grid applications and I thought the best way with Joan would be to give you a quick tour of an island scale microgrid that we completed a couple of years ago so if if you are controlling the images I will pull up on my screen a tour of Cuddy Hunk Island Cuddy Hunk lays to the western end of the Elizabeth Island chain which lies between the south coast of Massachusetts and Martha's Vineyard it's a very popular island because the harbor is very unique and quite sheltered so it's a favorite destination I think you Stephen I think you need to share your screen for us to see the pictures well the problem is I'm not on zoom you probably have to accept oh goodness do you see a do you see a share screen button at all with what you're doing no I couldn't join zoom I'm joining by internet so did you see my picture we can see you but we can't see your pictures yeah well I'm afraid this is not going to work then because there's there's no way I can share my screen through the internet is it is it like a powerpoint presentation could you send it to me uh yeah I guess I could try that um not it's not that large but powerpoint ends up being large even if it's what's your email address Sue Levine S-U-E-L-E-V-E-N-E at gmail.com so while that while uh Stephen is doing that Bill Turner has asked everyone uh and maybe Jim you could answer this um those winter folks would they be able to use heat pumps to use the excess power sustainably there are about four to six houses that summer people have that will use it uh during the winter the year round folks are the major target for the installations our plan is to start with the town hall the school the store and then move to year round homes the last heat pumps that will be installed will be summer homes that are heated partially during the winter when we get say let's say 10 heat pumps operating will consume close to 60 of that excess power will add about 15 to the revenues that the company collects and the people who employ the heat pumps will cut their heating bills by about in half so if you look at the savings the company gets the savings users get that increases the value of this whole solar array and storage process by about 30 which is not insignificant is that a good answer that's great thank you um Sue how is uh Stephens um I have he looks like he's wandering around I haven't gotten yet but I'm maybe we want to change the order a little bit want me to start because I have a lot of technology here and go ahead okay thank you um I think I can share no you just you've disabled it so I'll just talk oh you need you want I can put it up hold on you need to share something k yeah it's just easier to do it graphically for people okay how about now you guys can see my slides yep okay yep now I gotta change I gotta change my uh okay now you can see that so this this presentation actually was given to the smart electric power alliance I actually interestingly I was in Israel when I gave this presentation to the United States on travel so um this graphically so people can understand how the project is laid out and what it is so two-thirds of the island of Iowa Ho is actually Acadia National Park um the 55 residents that Molly talked about are mostly on the north side and a little bit um Jim Wilson is is connecting to us all the way down on the far south side in a place called Head Harbor he's as far away from the ferry as you can possibly get um so it's six miles high uh north south and two miles wide and the high level goals that Jim really started this and most of this was his idea on how to uh use he's a he's actually a quite a good engineer he may be an economist but he's actually quite a good engineer and he saw that there is a three to one ratio between summer power use and winter power use and in order to meet enough of the power for the summer we needed to find more load in the winter and that was the whole point behind the heat pumps but overall the high level goals is is assume that the grid tie currently to stonington was going to fail so we had they had to be completely self-sufficient it had to be locally maintainable and in order to create one of the island institutes big mantras is sustainability for the islands Molly will talk about that at some point and it's about stabilizing energy prices for the long term um they also wanted to be as as close to renewable as possible that was cost feasible and try to minimize other fossil use on the island so the result is up to 20 heat pumps will be put on what's unique about these is um many of them have thermal storage there are air to water heat pumps that actually store warm water in their basements the town office has a system like that that's currently going in right now also they have a product coming out of Canada New Brunswick which are air to phase change material this is sort of like a polymer gel that goes into a small monitor on your wall and it actually stores heat in that phase change material and then the actual micro grid which was what Steven's firm did is actually designed the electrical system to put in the solar and the storage um and then our portion was not only doing system optimization down in Portland was designing exactly how big the solar array needed to be exactly how big the storage had to be but was also involved in we actually are providing the control the actual electrical controls for the system and this is something called transactive energy and transactive energy is a new way to balance power in the electrical grid based upon the economic value of that power at that moment this is being promoted by something called the grid wise architecture council which is the lead advisory board for the U.S. Department of Energy which I happen to be on it's as my program manager for the Department of Energy says this is the next next grid and actually um as far as I can tell Iowa Ho will be the first transactive commercial transactive energy project in the world or at least in the United States so Maine has something to brag about and what it actually does is by deciding what the price of power is in real time it actually the a artificial intelligence at the devices so at the heat pump in the person's house makes a decision is it is is a good time now for me to store heat or not the store heat is it a good time for me to let the set point in the house drop because my uh my I like to make the AI kind of have a personality so maybe the the AI knows that no one's going to be home for the next two days so it will let the temperature drop so this creates this optimal allocation of resources it says as Jim said it says utility money because the storage is actually smaller than it had to be it also says a consumer money by providing them inexpensive electrical power rather than using hundreds and hundreds and thousands of gallons of diesel fuel of fuel oil every year so this is basically the the grid the way it is is there's the solar array with the storage and the backup generator and this is all the work that solar design associates has been doing the transformer to transform that power to voltages for the grid and then all the little heat pumps you can see little green heat pump signs those are the heat pumps scattered out onto that grid that actually help balance the supply and demand on the main grid and our controls are actually very unique in the fact that it's very very cyber secure prices are sent to the individual controllers in the in the buildings in a one-way fashion so that hackers can actually hack your heat pump and work their way up to the chain and actually make the you know potentially do some harm on how the system is controlled the heat pumps don't have a direct connection to the devices up above and then i will if steven is ready leave that for steven are you ready steve can you send me your email again sure s u e l e v e n e add gmail.com okay this is on its way to you but it may take a while all right um so i'm gonna i'm gonna share one more slide can you see the island institute slide everyone i haven't seen your powerpoint you're still looking at my powerpoint okay let me try this again that said island institute at the bottom okay that's perfect okay that's what i want because um i'm pleat molly please please um take please thanks susan mcdonald because this is from susan mcdonald who's i think she's head of energy for the island institute i just wanted to show her slide because this really talks about the whole concept that jim honestly jim thought of at the beginning is how to think of energy as a way to improve the community how to improve the viability of the community and this was how to overall um combined systems because as a as a as different combined systems together you actually can be more efficient it's the idea of building an ecosystem i like to say in our company we build engineered ecosystems um and the idea of having both the power generation which is the microgrid and also having the consumption in the in the case of the heat pumps contributing to the overall balancing and environmental sustainability of the system is a pretty powerful concept and this is actually something i think susan mcdonald this is a one of her conferences a few years back in 2017 herself which i think steven and jim we're both speaking now talking about i'll hold microgrid um are you ready uh i can go on you know me i can keep talking if i get the files right there so it's still got a ways to go how about if we can maybe go to some questions if people some have some questions good idea it looks like um real quick becky i think i don't know if we answered bills do we answer bills question yeah we did okay so becky go ahead i just wasn't clear on um is the um the isle of hoe i um energy co-op purchasing the um the heat pumps for everyone is that it sounded like or is there a grant to purchase them how is that being funded you want to leave your gym yeah it's a mix right now um we we got a couple of uh heat pump units donated by um given to us by the company that makes them um and these are air to hot water units so i'm not sure that anybody mentioned that yet that um well k did mention that one of the types of heat pumps that we're installing are not just air to air like the regular heat pumps they're air to water and so they store the heat energy in huge water tanks um which is then there's a heat exchanger in there and then that energy is transferred to your emitter system so your fan coils or your um lower you know whatnot that puts the heat out into the building and that's what's going into the town hall um and so those have already been acquired and then we got uh k and jim wrote a grant to efficiency main for this pilot study which was a $60,000 grant um which had funding for consumer incentives um to basically on top of the rebate that consumers can get from efficiency main for heat pumps to add on some more rebate incentives and so that's going to help for the private homes and we're also pursuing other funding to be able to install these units in homes that are owned by the affordable housing organization on the island the icdc and also some homes that are owned by the town because the town maintains three affordable rentals so as jim mentioned the the goal is first to get the the town buildings outfitted with heat pumps that would be the town hall the school and the island store which is another co-op on the island then the affordable houses where a lot of our year-round families with kids in the school live um and then folks that are maybe more have more resources and are able to put in the money to these so yeah the answer is that we have some funding secured and we're pursuing more to really be able to implement the heat pumps in affordable homes if i could just insert here i put in an air to hot water heat pump in our house uh it will generate heat at the equivalent of purchasing fuel oil at about a dollar eighty a gallon all right and that's using 16 cents a kilowatt hour electricity people on the mainland can get five cents an hour electricity in the evening which makes it possible to generate heat at a much cheaper rate than you do right and from the island's point of view the money that is spent on the electricity to run the heat pumps and the savings on the fuel oil all stay on the island rather than being exported to another community i see mal with his hand up you have a question you can maybe i can unmute you you might have to unmute yourself there we go question for jim can you sell any excess power while the cable is still functional back to emera and do you have seasonal power rates so how are you about it's good to see you i'm fine thanks i've escaped the plague so far so we could sell power to emera but in order to put in the protective devices that would protect emera workers who might be working on a down grid uh it's going to cost us probably more than it would be worth to actually export the power i'll answer that really quickly it's it's about 50 to 60 thousand dollars worth of equipment to do this and the x because the system's been designed very well by both steven and and my company um the the selling what we would be able to sell is about two thousand or three thousand dollars a year not just didn't pay thank you so sue how are we coming with uh steven's powerpoint i do not yet have it but i see some questions in the chat matt you want to go through them yeah so um bill and a couple were answered by k but just for those who are not on the chat is there any movement to require utilities in main to entertain this type of technology and do you want me to answer that yeah please so as i answered to i think uh david um as many of you know the uh main climate council is pushing to reach the 2045 carbon neutral uh challenge by governor mills um in order to go that way to do that there have been six working groups i happen to be on the building infrastructure working group and one of the strategies that we are proposing for the main climate council to take up is something called grid modernization and all of these basically a a lot of the concepts that are happening on iloho have been wrapped up into um that um strategy it was been written by a couple of us but i think the main authors have been michael started from efficiency main who many of you might know and myself so we are trying to push utilities and the state to incorporate this technology into our electrical grid because that's the only way we're going going to be able to get to a hundred percent carbon neutral by 2045 great thank you for that um and then just a couple other follow-ups the jim's tank is 550 gallons insulated and inside the basement um and there's one other question in this regard can you use the water for hot water to use in the home i don't know if that's a question from molly or k uh potentially yes but it's not set up that way i think jim you do use it right no i don't you don't okay i have a separate hot water heat pump okay it it is possible to do that um these systems have not been designed that way and by the way also the the tank in the town hall is actually a uh two two thousand gallons is that correct that's right two thousand gallon tanks that's right one and they are fully insulated they will be foamed they're actually septic tanks that are being used for this purpose not used they're they're new brand new please but it it is pretty interesting that bill steven's the guy that's installing them he's building them from scratch out of his own imagination and um so he's just he's putting together you know finding these interesting ways to put together things that he has on hand like septic tanks because he puts in a lot of septic systems and he's building the heat exchangers that are going in them so it's pretty interesting to watch his process it's real island ingenuity um and maybe we can just do one more quick question before steven um sue asks would cmp and amara be receptive to this technology yeah i was just answering that when i watched that um can i bash cmp is that okay uh yeah i think i think we're close here i may be able to patch it through zoom okay um just to answer that really quick cmp and amara hasn't have not been very receptive but a lot of other utilities have been uh duke energies looking at stuff um green mountain power caliphate for new utilities uh the northwest uh state what was in state in oregon utilities so there is movement in the utilities just not ours how is the state working with micro grids in general to authorize them statewide um there was a micro grid law passed last session um it needs to be strengthened to allow uh in my opinion this is my opinion um that is one of the strategies that's coming up on the um strategy from both the energy working group in the main climate council as well as the um building an infrastructure working group uh it was my understanding that that got through the house but did it pass the senate and did it get endorsed by the governor so it there there were a couple micro grid bills uh one of them got it's called was called a community solar bill so that was passed however there are our problems with it because it did get watered down in the senate so the community solar thing is uh sort of that intermediate step where you can gather together 200 individual unit owners is that correct that is that is correct okay there's parts there's parts of it that start start to go on the path of enabling micro grids but it doesn't quite go far that's why we like i said we were working on putting in new and and saying you know these are the steps actually have to get passed and we'll see what happens in the next legislature so so we're still waiting for micro wids to actually be approved by the state well micro grids can be approved by the state it's just the interconnection time is very very uh long and hard hmm it's it's it's it's very hard and time consuming awesome we can see see steven screen so that's great news i think there was another question too no um i was going to answer quick this may be a uh just quick statement that uh the consumer-owned utility might be much more open to uh this kind of system for the whole state um yes um my opinion again this is my also got the pictures here steven if you'd like me to do it that way i think that's a that's that's gonna cost a lot more than people realize we need to hold cmp to the fire steven can you hear us yes um want me to put them on my screen i can i can do it that way if you'd like i have them now that sounds like a good idea okay um maybe if i just can you guys see that great yes okay why don't you go ahead steven and just tell me to switch the sides and i'll keep moving them down all right great thank you i think island lies off the coast of uh southern massachusetts between the bedford and massas vignette it's a very popular island especially in the summer because of the very sheltered harbor next please cruising crowd loves this because of harbor shelters and they do suck up a lot of shore power in the summer building a solar plus storage microgrid on the island are challenging the next you've got to bring everything across this is the tractor trailer bringing the drilling rig we were managing construction on the project as well as engineers of record but fortunately we had people familiar with the folks on the water and they were good enough to line up all the transportation the batteries couldn't fit on the barge and so uh next slide they found a small ferry that wasn't uh in use at the time or was able to take on extra cargo and amazingly next slide they got both battery containers into the rear deck only one area that was suitable for the solar array south facing and not developed and it was about a mile and a quarter away from the powerhouse up in the upper right corner so we had to run medium voltage connection along the existing roadway uh from the solar array to the powerhouse and this used some issues involved with um induction across the line when the array would start up or shut down batteries etc so the engineering was a little bit more complex the next shows an aerial view of the array it's sized to meet the island's summer requirements there's a surplus in the fall winter and spring as you might expect uh the same will occur on isle hoe until jim completes the conversion of the buildings from oil fired heat to heat pumps next slide shows the array inverter and switch gear and the data acquisition there's a 350 kilowatts there on a south sloping site and the stepping transformer next slide the powerhouse has multiple generators because unlike isle hoe they never had and could never qualify for a cable undersea from the mainland because their load was too small to justify the investment so they have multiple generators on site i call it the baby bear the mama bear on the top of there and they rotate them to try and load follow spring and fall winter and of course summer in the left side in the background is one of the battery enclosures you get a closer look at it in the next slide and then uh opened up in the following slide these are not shipped in the enclosures because it would be way too heavy uh they are being loaded in almost like technology draws into the slots and the wiring comes down the front what it takes to have a micro grid solar plus storage and the generator hybrid interface the generator interface was a bit of a challenge as i mentioned the next slide is one that will provide some open expectation among all of us and that is that you can see the cost of solar at utility scale and wind at utility scale are now lower than all the conventional quote unquote alternatives nuclear is way out of in the stratosphere coal is pretty far up there even combined cycle gas is more expensive now than solar plus storage wind plus storage and this is the case for cola nuclear even if it's fully depreciated plant the total cost capital cost of installing designing engineering purchasing and installing a solar plus storage system plus its operating costs over its lifetime is still less expensive than keeping the cola nuclear plants operating that are fully depreciated so i was hoping in my long career which is now over four decades that we would be able to see that i would be able to see this tipping point where it's not about the environment necessarily it's not about being other than economics even if you don't like solar which is a lot of the utilities warren buffett is not a tree hugger but he uh has committed to shutting his coal plants down in sequence and he is invested in gigawatts of new wind and new solar plus storage that's the end of the technical presentation you've got two more inspirational slides and i can take some questions if desired sorry for the technical difficulties when i tied into zoom it said oh you can't join this meeting you have to have an upgrade and that looked like it was going to take 20 or 30 minutes so anyway thanks to sue we persevered steven i was like go go ahead becky and then after becky i think there's some questions in the chat i'm just wondering steven can you give us a sense of what those batteries cost let me i don't have access to that uh information off hand i think k can ask the answer i think i can answer that because we're selling them um the the batteries the one megawatt hour battery for ilaho is around six hundred thousand dollars um the overall project cost is 1.45 the 1.55 million dollars but what interestingly what it does is in 20 years the price of power with inflation if they had kept the grid and and the grid was able to stay the cable was was still still had lifetime and would be able to stay there the price of power would have been about 19 cents a kilowatt hour and the price of power for the island will go down to about 10 cents a kilowatt during that time frame so they're actually bringing the cost curve down rather than having it go up slowly and the there's a question about the storage technology i didn't really mention that really quickly um the properties batteries actually are super capacitors and super capacitors are very unique in the fact that they have um typically they have some major disadvantages when they use in storage but there's a company based out of new york city but their manufacturing is actually in dubai in the middle east um that has solved a lot of the problems of super capacitors by using power electronics and they ultimately have the great capacity to actually live survive on an asset basis for 30 40 50 years and that's a game changer when you're looking at very long-term assets currently most companies are using lithium ion batteries and lithium ion batteries depending upon the use case and how you use them will only last between 10 and 12 years and then you have to replace the battery again and that was a that was a big problem for the island because the island won't have access money in 10 years to replace the batteries any other questions well yeah actually i'll ask a follow-on to what you're just saying which is how sustainable are these batteries as far as the materials used and that kind of thing so that's another that's another great thing is lithium ion is pile of toxic chemicals exactly um super capacitors are metal plates with carbon nanotubes on them that's all they are it's all becky you want to have a question becky yeah i i think i had this discussion with steven earlier and i was i'm curious to have steven talk a little bit about making the super capacitors uh able to to not dump all their their power at once well that's that's the technical challenge that uh kilowatt labs and max well and several others have addressed and apparently they've worked it out it's the secret sauce and none of the companies are really sharing it as k suggested it's not actually i can't answer how they do it but and it's not secret well it is secret sauce but it's um um i can explain it actually a relatively easy way if somebody wants to know well i mean i just see it's a totally different kind of battery system so what it's not just kind of depleting itself over time right so can you talk a little bit about that i mean so applicable in larger scale that's what i guess we're all interested in so full process is like a faucet it's an electronic faucet that allows the power to flow in concert with the magnitude of the load okay they really uh haven't offered a whole lot more detail than that maybe k has some i don't know right so so every battery either ellipthia myon battery or super capacitor made up a lot of small cells um i don't have my purse with me i have a little small cells that look like a double-a battery that's about the size of the individual cell and in a megawatt hour like aila ho there are probably three or four hundred thousand of them and what um kilowatt labs has been able to do is actually able to control each individual cell in concert i call it playing the piano and they're able to move charge at will anywhere in the battery from one cell to another cell or out of the battery and they're able to control it very very aptly to um match the load like like uh steven said about it's like a boss wow thank you yeah it looks like sally is your hand up do you want to say something no maybe not okay so um steven or k or or jim could we apply these to rural main for instance or other areas i mean and and how you know how much testing has been done to be sure that they actually can play the piano as you said um how how how can we be sure that it's the piano is going to keep playing so if i could answer that this was a big concern that we had the co-op and the board and we did a lot of homework we're basically relying on the experience of three companies at&t verizon and a montana utility called northwest energy at&t is putting these units in on their cell phone towers in remote locations they just put in two uh in the sierra's and a hundred more on order by the way okay and verizon is as i understand it about to do the same uh the utility in montana northwestern energy is put it has put in a 200 kilowatt hour unit but has three megawatt hours on order uh these companies have put a lot of engineering effort into this and we're relying to a great extent on their engineering judgment but uh they're putting big investment in the stuff so we feel pretty safe and i have two units being uh being delivered on thursday they're shipping on thursday for me well it looks like i don't see any other um questions looks like we're wrapping up there's one uh question from facebook from our friends at the um north american megadam resistance and they're working with indigenous communities in quebec and they're wondering if the presenters here would be interested could share this information with their group as well sure no problem all right that'd be great all right well um well matt with this uh recording that we've done would that be sufficient to send off to the number yes and we can definitely send um yeah it'll be available both on facebook on our facebook page and on our website and if that's enough that's fine or else they can get a hold of the presenters and they can do it again our audience of one no i'm sure we'll be a bigger audience she has a lot of people under it but she knows i think this is a really exciting movement forward in you know as much as it sounds a little bit dry as you're talking about it you know it's been the dream for such a long time that we would have batteries that would do this kind of thing and so it's i think it's really exciting and you know hats off to isla hoe for for you know risking this but uh living on an island myself i also understand this process so it's really really great that you have done this jim and molly and steve and k it's really really exciting to hear about well if there are no more questions i just want to say thank you very much for those of you who attended and for the speakers have done a great job in spite of low technology burps matt do you have any that's it thank you all for coming and yeah we'll um this link will be on our website it's also on our facebook page and thank you to all the presenters and we'll see you in two weeks for our next community conversation with representative chloe maxman um on main green new deal and um yeah we hope you'll join us stay tuned on our website on the community conversations page and on our facebook thank you all great thank you all for inviting us