 And welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii, where we're trying to bring you the best and the brightest in energy. So today I'm going to start off a little bit different. You know, a lot of people talk about diversity and thinking and diversity in all kind of ways. And most people, when they hear the word diversity, they think of either racial diversity or religious diversity or maybe gender diversity and things like that. But Stand the Energy Man thinks of right brain, left brain. And I guess it's just because I was exposed to that concept back in college and kind of always kept up on it. But for those of you that aren't familiar with the concept of right brain, left brain, it's the concept that right brain people are your artists and your nonlinear thinkers and the creative type people, the dancers and the painters and the Leonardo da Vinci types. And then the left brain people are your linear thinkers or your really deep thinkers that organize a lot of thoughts and make them make sense. They're Einstein's and your engineers and your folks that put together complex machinery and make it all work. And when I think of diversity, I think of diversity in terms of the job that we do now, I think in terms of combining the best of both of those right brain and left brain characteristics when you work on a project. And so today as an example, we're going to talk a little bit about putting together a microgrid and I want you to think about how this is important in terms of diversity right brain, left brain. Most of our grids today were designed and built by engineers. And they grew over time or it started off as a fairly simple power starting here and going to the community, a small community. To the point where nowadays we have grids that are huge power generators and huge distributors across wide areas with power coming in from several directions, from different power providers on the mainland, they'll be on other state lines, from different sources like you'll have nuclear power or maybe a hydroelectric dam and then you have solar panels on people's roofs and things like that. So they become really complex but they were designed by engineers. But what we're asking the engineers to do now is to think out of the box and design a new grid and it's hard for them to do it because they're not the kind of people who generally tend to think creatively. They solve specific problems. They give you specific answers. They think in very straightforward like you ask a generator, how do I back up, I mean an engineer, how you back up a grid and he'll say a generator. I put a generator on it, an diesel generator. And they're really happy with that answer because they're comfortable with it, it works and it solves their problem and they're done. They quit thinking about it, they already solved the problem. But if you give it to an artist, they'll go maybe there's other ways you can make, maybe you can have a wind turbine, maybe you can have an anaerobic digester hooked up to some kind of power generation. So maybe you can have a flywheel, maybe you can have this or that or my favorite hydrogen. But the best of both worlds is to get both of those brains together in the same room to solve the grid problems of the future. Because when I started in my job and I started working with one of the electrical engineers that we work with now at Burns and McDonald. It was kind of interesting because I knew nothing about grids and he wasn't very creative. And so when he'd tell me about something I'd propose, well, can you solve it this way? And he'd give me this funny look and say, I never thought about trying to do it that way, I guess it's possible. He'd do a bunch more homework and find out, hey, we could do some of these things. As a result, we started looking at renewable energy microgrids where he was challenged with a whole new set of problems to solve and a whole new set of ways to do things that got him really excited. And that kind of led us into what we're doing at Hickam with the Air Force now. We're trying to build the Air Force a renewable energy microgrid. And that's not a simple thing to do. Because the grids that are out there today were designed 100 or less years ago and take power from generating stations and push them out to the community. And unless the utility can control solar panels and things on people's houses there, there's a point where the grid becomes very unstable with too many people putting things on it. And solving that problem is going to take both right-brainers and left-brainer. That's how we're going to approach today's show. First of all, I'd like to start off with a video that talks about the kind of grid that the electrical engineer John Bottoff and I came up with to start off on our project so we can show that video. There are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy. But the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable. Natural disasters, cyber attacks, and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy, and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro, and others. These microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission. Especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports, and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats, and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand, and maintain. And they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves, and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy, and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean, renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago when energy needs were simple, with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources, and transportation. Now our old grids struggle to keep up. We require new ways to generate, store, and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable, and efficient energy for generations to come. That was a video that we had put together here at HCAT to explain microgrids as we envision them. And that product was actually the baby, the birthing of Ferns and McDonalds, John Bottoff and I, when we thought about how we wanted to make this grid work. We wanted to have lots of renewables, more than 100% of the power required. Outer renewables have energy storage, have ways to move the power between the microgrids. So that's something that's really different than the grid that we have today or even a lot of the microgrids that people are envisioning. Our microgrids are actually going to be able to shift power from one to another and be able to cover each other. So we may have some microgrids with a little bit more energy generation or storage than others that can actually maybe make up one and a half microgrids and they can contribute or collaborate together and provide power, especially when it's critical. So if you can imagine, if you have a city that was built on this microgrid concept with islanded, separate islanded microgrids, if you have a disaster in that city, then all those microgrids could get together and make sure the hospitals and the wastewater treatment plants and the critical infrastructure to keep the city going, the refrigeration for food and things like that could keep operating even if you didn't have lights in your house and you had to use flashlights. So this is a concept that we're working on out at Hickam with the Air Force and my favorite electrical engineer, not that John's not my favorite, he's kind of like right next to this guy, but my favorite engineer is Brian Wubbins and he's on the show today and Ryan has actually been doing the nuts and bolts on our microgrid and really into the details and helping mellow the creativity of the HCAT team with the engineering skill sets and the creativity at Burnside McDonald. Ryan, thanks for joining us today, appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me again. Yeah, talk about some of the stuff that's been a challenge for you as you started the program, working on this microgrid and kind of getting your head around what John and I started working on. Sure, the neat challenge is that we come across our... We're the other side, if you want to say the artistic-minded or the creative-minded are the ones asking the questions and providing the requirements or the what-ifs because engineers are very good at answering problems or answering questions or providing a solution to an issue that they're provided. That doesn't mean that the engineer is the best at asking a question or at least asking the question in a matter from a different viewpoint. So when you power up the two and you ask a different question or different viewpoint of the question, you're going to get a different solution or a solution that may not have been provided originally. So that's been the neat start of the project. Where we started was a lot of distributed generation keeping power flowing between entities and keeping that as a dynamic, always changing problem as time continues, if you're in a microgrid scenario and you decide, oh, this isn't really my most important place that I need my energy to be placed right now. It actually, at this very instant, my energy is best used in a different location. Now, I'm still within my circle, my bubble of influence, but what if I want to change it and say, okay, well, we can do that. We can add some variables in it and change it dynamically. And you say, well, you don't have enough power to do that. Okay, well, I got power over there. Why can't you just move it? And then you go back to the engineers, like, okay, well, yeah, you do have power over there, but here's why or why not you can move it, so to speak, over to that other location. So the questions being asked from your side and then from the Air Force side are great in ways of providing a little bit different to your unique solution on the engineering side. The big questions are moving power around dynamically and changing that as time continues. It's setting it up at the very beginning is rather simple, but having that change instantly see that change on the other side within an automated system, that's been a fun solution to provide. Well, you mentioned automated system. As one of the solutions or one of the tools that's helped you solve the problem been the advancement in computers and automated switch gear and things like that. Have they been able to help you bridge that gap to be able to adjust the grid and changes on the grid fast enough to where the grid can stay stable? Yeah, absolutely. Our tools or our arsenal of devices that we can use to provide solutions are advancing at an extremely fast pace. As the world of smart grids is developed and pushed and pushed further and further, we're able to use those components in our microgrid because we're doing a lot of the same things. In a smart grid, you're providing a lot of capabilities, whether they're automated or manual, but they are decisions that are performed remotely to have an impact on a grid. In a microgrid scenario, it's a lot of the same decisions that you're making. You're using a lot of the same components, maybe a little bit different, maybe your algorithms or your logic that you're programming is a little bit different, but the components need to have the functionality. That advancement happening in the industry on smart grid and grid modernization absolutely enables the microgrids to be more autonomous and have a lot more capabilities. We could build a microgrid mechanically. It's been done and it is still done in a lot of installations and there are wonderful machines that are all completely autonomous by all mechanical devices. I mean, cars were at one time. Even the governor on a engine used to be just a reciprocating spinning device with a couple weights on it. As they spun out, you'd change the fuel intake on an engine, so those devices are still and we're made for even microgrid installations all the way down to mechanical relays, but the capabilities may be a little bit less. There are safety functions that might be better with some electrical devices, so pulling from those different pieces of equipment and using them in different ways, having a diverse background in electrical engineering is one way to start pulling in those resources, but then you couple it with the more creative and changing questions. It starts to create a very neat product. We're going to take a quick break here and be back in 60 seconds and when we come back, we're going to ask Ryan about actually the challenge of balancing a grid and start off with that so people understand what the utility has to deal with when they have intermittent renewables like wind and solar and things like that and they have to balance it along with just the load changes on their grid from people turning things on and turning them off and big equipment kicking in. We'll be back in 60 seconds. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. You recycle, right? Yep, it's confusing. It's hard for all of us to recycle properly when it's this confusing. Yet recycling is the number one thing we can do for the environment and the economy if we do it properly. We have a solution and it's working. The standardized labels help people recycle more and they help people recycle right. Let's recycle across America and let's recycle right. To be part of the standardized label solution, visit Let'sRecycleRight.org. Hey, welcome back to Staten Energy, man. Again, on my lunch hour, at least for the next month or so. After that, it might be on my own time, which is good because then I can spend more time down here and think, maybe I'll even get on the Trump show with Jay and those guys and give them some opposition forces on the other side of that table. Anyway, we've got Ryan Womens here from Burns and McDonald and I asked him to start to talk a little bit about the challenge that Hawaiian Electric or any public utility has balancing their grid. Because to most people, that's a big mystery. In fact, I've even had people come up to me and say, oh, that's just a bunch of baloney. The utility's making excuses, but it's not there. There's some serious challenges, especially as we absorb more and more solar power and wind power on our grid. So Ryan, can you kind of give a quick answer, a non-engineering answer to the non-engineers out there on how this duck curve and power issues work with the grid? Duck curve, reverse duck curve. We've got a lot of names that we can talk about, but the electrical utility grid is the most incredible machine of last century in this century. It is the most advanced machine that we have. Some could say that what's the internet does done is a machine of its own, but the grid still is highly complex and it is a very sensitive device where you were to think of a market, think of like a grocery store where you have a product and you're gonna buy a product. The grid, it's very much the same in the sense that I need a kilowatt, I'm gonna go buy a kilowatt. And at that point, the similarities stop. The grocery store has a system of storage. It has a place where they're going to, okay, let's bring the product over here and set it down on the shelf and you can go and consume that product as you want. The grid, it is at all times an instantaneous, to the speed of light. I mean, it is basically instantaneous. Does the stock put stuff back on that grid shelf every second? Every one sixtieth of a second. I mean, it is down to nothing. I mean, for how instantaneous that is, especially for where we're talking here, that exchange, you turning your light switch on has an instantaneous request to go buy that extra kilowatt from the utility and the utility provides at that instant. Now, you get sized enough when you're bigger and bigger and bigger, you can handle these small variances a little bit better. But as you're smaller and smaller, those dynamic changes at balancing act becomes even more so critical. So when we're talking these islands, it absolutely is a difficult equation to balance out every exact instance in time. And that kind of explains why when you have a island-wide power outage like we might have here after a hurricane or something, you don't just turn HECO back on, everybody's power comes up right away. It's a long process because they have to bring pieces at a time in till it's stable and then bring the next piece in till it's stable and then bring the next piece in till it's stable, until the whole island's back up, you can't just let the light switch. And to put it in real basic terms, it's like if we could get everybody to go home and sit there and turn on all their light switches at the exact same instance, that would be a huge problem for HECO. Absolutely. One switch at a time, couple here and there, not a problem. But if we could somehow synchronize a bunch of people hitting the grid with a power surge at one time, I'd be like everybody flushing their toilet at the same time. We could overwhelm the system. And in some senses, that's what we're concerned about with cyber warfare is somebody coming in and artificially manipulating the system and making the power plant believe there's either a big surge or a big drop or a big something and making the whole grid react to it until it actually physically destroys itself, trying to keep up with the changes that the cyber guys are saying are happening. Yeah, from a cyber perspective, that would be from a cyber terrorism perspective that that's your goal is to provide that long term damage. That issue of turning all the lights on at one time, you have to have this reserve, this very quick reserve ready to give all that power to make that instantaneous transaction happen. That same theoretical instance of turning all your light switches on if everybody had solar on their house at one time, it is the same thing of a big cloud hitting the island. So that cloud comes over and your solar decides to stop because it doesn't have the sun. It is the equivalent of everybody turning their lights on. That's where we start to get these issues where the utility is trying to provide this reserve of energy. When I say reserve in the ad, I told you it had to happen instantaneously. They are similar. We have a little bit of time where we can start ramping up a generator and provide an instantaneous transaction, so to speak, but it does create you a little bit more inefficiency in your system. Sure, because you're running a generator all the time just in case you need it. Just in case you need it so you can provide that instantaneous. So now that solar that everybody put on might cause us to be a little more inefficient. Does that mean that we're gonna cost more or less? That's debatable in another conversation, but that's why that transaction is very important and that's why the discussion with how much solar can we provide, it's a complicated answer. It's just not time to stop adding solar just to stop it. It's a delicate equation that needs to be looked at as over time. So he's been doing a good job of monitoring that. We have the same problem in microgrids. If you wanna produce a microgrid with a lot of solar, we're the same problem. We're actually that problem where I said we're going from the mainland providing that instantaneous transaction to these islands and that's more difficult when you get to a microgrid. It is more difficult as well, but there's a scaling issue where maybe I can know exactly what everything of all my power is. Maybe I have more control. It costs less to make a microgrid a very modern grid to make that smart grid today. If a Wahoo was extremely modern with all the bells and whistles already, which is impractical thing from a cost standpoint, but if it was, it would be a lot easier to deal with these changes. In the microgrid, we bring in a lot of higher end components, modernize the distribution within, and then your capabilities go up and you start to deal with these issues. So one of the key components there is storage, energy storage. So you have to A, be able to generate the power that you need for that area, but then you also need to be able to cover those surges and changes. And then you also have to, especially if you have a lot of solar, at nighttime the sun ain't shining, but you have to be able to literally provide all the power that your customers require at night. If you've got solar, you've got to have some kind of storage. So what are some of the storage options and reaction options that you have that you're looking out of the microgrid? Sure. So even here at Hickam, we have a lot of solar because the return on investment is so great here in Hawaii as far as solar goes. We don't have the sun at night. We also sometimes lose the sun during the day. So we got to be prepared for a few different things on an energy storage perspective. We want that short-term, maybe the cloud hit, maybe we started up a big machine and it's going to draw a lot of power. We need something right now. Give it to me quick. A generator's great, but we're trying to get to that next level of 100% renewable. So when you get to those 100% renewable devices, what's providing you that instantaneous, that very short-term energy supply? Flywheels were in the equation one time to provide that very quick, short-term energy boost. Lithium ion batteries can be provided to provide that very short, quick boost of energy. It depends on the battery chemistry. I mean, lithium ion can be built to be more of a deep cycle type as well. How you build your battery and the different chemistries, you can get a very short term or you can get a very long term. When you go to the long term, we've really started to push the envelope on what hydrogen can provide for long-term energy storage. Microgrid is great for a five-minute outage, but it can prove life-saving if it can go seven days, two weeks, 30 days. Especially here on an island. Especially here on an island. If something were to happen where we can't receive oil or diesel through the island for an extended amount of time, that can be very detrimental to our capabilities to keep the grid operational. 100% renewable microgrid in any instance where you're creating and consuming all of your energy within your boundary is incredible. So how do you get to that seven, two weeks, 30 days, 90 days of energy? You're not gonna get it with these short-term batteries. It's gonna prove too expensive. Hydrogen storage is something like 10, 12, 14 times cheaper per kilowatt hour on the energy storage. So we look at a balance for the return on investment. So how much lithium-ion battery do you want for that short-term high efficiency energy storage? Maybe a cloud hits. Maybe I just wanna go through the night. I wanna size that battery so much. I don't wanna oversize it like an engineer would have a tendency to do because it's very, this is expensive energy storage. Sizing that up to cover myself would prove expensive. Now hydrogen, you have to balance out the short-term and higher-cost energy storage with the hydrogen machine where we're talking about electrolysis into a hydrogen production and then a fuel cell coming back out. Cheap AWA chart per time, our energy reserve. I'm not including all of the components. Battery has an inverter. Not including that. Hydrogen has our electrolysis and our fuels. I'm just talking energy storage. When we scale this, those are minute. So in this case, find the balance between downsizing your expensive storage and increasing your long-term energy storage and prove the concept of energy resiliency at 100% renewable at, what do you want? Do you want 30 days of energy storage renewable? You can prove that with bringing together these different generation assets and these different storage assets. So another thing that actually a lot of folks don't think about when they're talking to the grid or speaking about the grid is when you do have those fluctuations from solar, but you also have over-generation from solar, the grid tries to function at a base load where they can operate constantly. But sometimes you can actually get too much solar and it doesn't pay to tune the generators down to absorb all the solar. So the electric company will do what they call curtailing. They'll say all you solar panels just have to stop for now we're gonna tune you down and just keep our base load power going the way it is. And then, but that power's wasted. An interesting thing we can do in the microgrid is to take that curtail power and turn around instantly and make hydrogen, use that fuel or that electrolyzer as a load and take all that DC power and put it right into the electrolyzer to make hydrogen. Now you're automatically taking what normally be wasted power and you're storing it for nighttime or you're storing it for long-term energy and you's complimenting the energy storage with grid stabilization. So that's something I think that's often overlooked. Yeah, I'd say it's a great tool where we use the term stranded assets if we can't go and reach a generation source because it proves too expensive to go get to it and turn it in, add it to the microgrid or any course. Curtailment of solar is the same thing, it's stranded. We decide not to have it. It is being provided to us, hey, you can have all of these kilowatts or these kilowatt hours, you can have them. And when you say no and you curtail it, it doesn't go anywhere, it just turns off, it doesn't come to an existence, you block it. Being able to accept it, curtailment's a real issue and you do need it, but you have the option of curtailing by saying just stop producing it or hey, instead of go ahead and produce it, I'm gonna make you long-term energy storage. If you have the two available to you, you're gonna put it into your energy bank at that point and just start building your bank account. Yeah, I'm all about building my bank account. There you go. I'm all about hydrogen too. Anyway, that's a little look on how we approach our microgrid at Hickam with a little bit of right brain creativity and a bunch of left brain engineering. And we think it's a pretty magical combination. And we're hoping that when we finally get it up and running in a couple months, we'll be able to stand proudly next to it and say, hey, this is a model for not only Hawaii to follow, but maybe a bunch of the rest of the world to follow. Until next week, thanks to Ryan for being on the show. Eric in the control room in Sydney or miking us up and keeping us all under control. We'll see you next week on Stanley Energy Man. Aloha.