 Welcome to Stan, the energy man here on Think Tech, I am Stan Osterman, retired, but it's been interesting. I've had the time off to do a little bit of thinking and a little bit of fun stuff like going to the home industry show at the Blaze Steel this past weekend was kind of fun and checking out all the things that are out there for people to put in their houses, including energy stuff, which I thought was really cool. They had some wind turbines out there. They had, of course, a lot of solar and backup systems, why gas was out there, talking about their systems and stuff, on water heaters and things, so a lot of cool stuff out there. The topic of our show today is kind of inspired by a lot of the questions I've gotten over the last six months in particular. And by some fairly impressive folks, folks that make films and folks that are trying to influence government policies and things, and the question is, what do we do to speed up adopting these technologies, especially hydrogen, and really, it's tough to speed it up. I don't know how to speed it up any faster than we're already going, and the reason for that is to really make something reliable and to make it ubiquitous where it's just like, you got it all over, and it's really, it's just happening all over the place. It takes time, because today's technologies, they're so dependent on high-tech manufacturing and manufacturing processes that take time to, and they're costly to put in place, bring the price of the product down. So even though the technologies that we have today are pretty well set, you get them mass-produced and to build the factories and stuff to make a lot of hydrogen cars, for example, or a lot of hydrogen buses, it's still not quite there, but trust me, it's getting there. And so the question isn't, how do we speed it up? What can you do to just encourage what's already going on behind the scenes and make things happen? So I'd like to start off talking a little bit about transportation in particular. You know, I've lived here in Hawaii for virtually my whole life, and I've always wanted and driven fairly fuel-efficient vehicles that are easy on the environment. But we finally got our first hydrogen fuel cell vehicles here last year with CERVCO and Toyota. Toyota brought in the Marai, which is our hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. And Toyota also built, previous to that, the Prius. For those of you that don't remember the rollout of the Prius, it was basically poo-pooed by pretty much all of the professional automakers and the auto critics and stuff. This will never take off. Nobody wants these funky hybrid cars. Well, I hate to say it, but Toyota was right, and the Prius is actually really a gold standard in what we call hybrid technology. So what I'd like to do is talk about hybrid technology first. And that is, you know, people hear the word hybrid in terms of cars, and it's actually more of a biological term than an engineering term. But the term hybrid, when it comes to transportation, means an electric drivetrain that has some kind of power source. So you have plug-in electric hybrids, like the Leaf, and the Tesla, and some of the Prius models. And then you have Priuses with and other vehicles built by all the manufacturers that have electric drivetrains, but then they have a gasoline engine inside, but the gasoline engine doesn't power the drivetrain directly, it runs a generator, and the generator and the batteries in the car run the electric drivetrain, and that's a hybrid. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are also a hybrid, it's an electric drivetrain, but instead of batteries only, or instead of a gasoline generator or a diesel generator, you now have a hydrogen fuel cell developing the power that charges the batteries and puts power to the electric drivetrain. So a lot of folks, you know, wonder why we aren't into hydrogen completely by now, but the real winner in this whole thing is a hybrid technology. There are so many hybrid vehicles out there by every manufacturer now, that's kind of the quiet revolution that's moving us ahead. So if you want to really contribute to a cleaner environment, a better fuel economy, and really, even your plug-in electrics, if you're plugging into HECO and not doing it off of solar on your own house, you're actually burning oil. So if you've got a hybrid technology that is using like less gas or less fuel, fossil fuel to generate the electricity, you're actually helping out. But what you're doing even more than that is you're helping the auto industry move towards the real solution, which is the electric drivetrain, whether it's powered by batteries only, whether it's powered by a diesel or gas generator, or whether it's powered by hydrogen, or maybe in the future, small nuclear power, you'll still have an electric drivetrain, and that's the goal that we're all trying to get to. So what I'm trying to encourage folks to do on today's show is instead of waiting for the government to tell you what to do, or instead of waiting for the next great widget or fancy thing to come out, if you're really serious about cleaning up the environment, if you're really serious about personally being involved in cleaning up transportation, it's to make a commitment to make your next vehicle a hybrid vehicle, either a plug-in electric, a gasoline hybrid, or a fuel cell hybrid car. Most people aren't aware that Toyota makes a hybrid fuel cell vehicle that runs off hydrogen and circle has them here, it's called the Mirai. Honda has a model called the Clarity, and Hyundai actually makes two different models. They have the Tucson, and I've driven all these vehicles, by the way, the Tucson was my favorite, we don't have the Tucson or the Clarity in Hawaii yet, but you know, the only way we're going to get it is if you ask for it, go to your Honda dealer, go to your Toyota dealer, go to your Hyundai dealer, and say, hey, when are we going to start seeing these hybrid hydrogen vehicles, or when are we going to start seeing more hybrid vehicles? Hyundai is also making the Nexo, which is their new, a little bit smaller SUV, it's kind of a crossover, and it's supposed to be really spectacular. GM, Ford, Mercedes, BMW, they're all working on hybrid transportation, and they're all working towards that electrical drive frame, and that's the solution we're trying to get to. So as Hawaii starts to clean up its grid and go 100% renewable on the grid, we also have to start weaving in transportation into that 100% clean, fossil-free renewable system as well, and you can do your part right now by going hybrid however you want to use. I wanted to start off with vehicles, but I brought in my guest today, Ryan Wubbins, who's my regular, every month guest from Burns & McDonald, and we're going to talk a little bit about transportation and the grid, and maybe how they merge, but how you don't have to wait to be the early adopter, or adopter. You already passed that. There's a lot of people driving hybrids already. There's a lot of people working on microgrids and renewable energy. Ryan's one of them working on renewable energy and energy. Ryan, thanks for being with us today. And let's talk a little bit about the state of the art of microgrids and renewable energy, and where are we really at? Can you literally go, I mean, if somebody wanted to take their house off the grid today, is it impossible, or can we just do it? You can do it. Yeah, the technologies are there, and would you be considered an early adopter to fill in with the previous statements here? In some aspects you may, but for the most part, no, you're taking technologies that we have available to us that have been available to us for a long time. You do have some barriers, sometimes financially barrier that you might have, a geographical barrier on how much solar you can start adding on your property, but no. Is this very achievable in today's world to go off? In practical terms, I'll use my house as a kind of average, but I use less electricity in most, I don't have our central air conditioning or any of that stuff. Let's just pick 30 kilowatt hours as average daily usage on a house. So 30 kilowatt hours, and we've got roughly five hours a day depending on where you actually live on the island of direct sunlight on those solar panels, so that would be like 6 kilowatt hour, 6 kilowatts worth of panels should cover you for a 30 kilowatt day, roughly. Let's just use that for rough figures. So how hard is it to put 30 kilowatts worth of panels on an average house? An average house you can probably get there. It does, there's some geographical constraints on which side your roof is and where you're located. Your close up to the mountains where there's lots of clouds or if you're on the plains where there's lots of sun. Even a mile said, it's not a very, not a great site to add solar on my house, but I certainly can and I can have a return on investment if you're very financially concerned about your motives for adding solar on your house. And I have a decent payback on the installation profile you could say, having it on my own house. But if you're motivated on your own, the financial reasons shouldn't be the only reason that you're going out and doing it. In that case, there's a lot of goodness that you can get from almost any instance. So if 30 kilowatts is good, but how many square foot, I mean, if average house is like 1,500 or 2,000 square feet and you cut that in half and say only half of that's good for solar panels, so maybe 700 to 1,000 square feet of space, is that enough for 30 kilowatts worth of panels? Put me on the spot here, Stan. Of course, that's my job. I honestly, I don't know. The average panel is like 300 watts, right? Yeah, about a 2 by 4 on the available panels. And I would say the amount of panels you want to use, you can assume the sum that you're getting multiply that by about five and that's about the hour usage that you're going to get out of a good day. But yeah, 1,000 square foot house or 2,000 square foot house, cut in half and say that's what's available. You're going to get pretty close. What really depends on is your usage over the year, though. An hourly monthly usage will get you pretty close, but you're going to use more in the summer than you are in the winter. And so sizing it up for your house does have some considerations to it. If you're going to stay grid connected but trying to net hero yourself, you want to consider the possible exportation in the winter if you size it up for your summer. That may not be allowed under the programs that are available. Once you have a battery, I think that's the option for energy storage. Well, let's say you're gutsy enough to go off the grid. Like you said, when you started folks in Alaska, they've been off the grid. The remote folks have been off the grid for ages and ages and out back and a whole bunch of other companies make inverters and things like that that are pretty well time-cested. So if somebody in Hawaii wanted to just say, hey, I'm off the grid, considerations as far as I'm aware of are, number one, about how much energy do you use in a day and what are your peak loads? How robust does your system have to be for whatever equipment you have, basically so you have your ability to have a spinning reserve in your house so that you can handle your refrigerator and your air conditioning kicking on at the same time and out popping all your circuit breakers. So if you've got, if you figured out that you have enough roof to put on solar and you figure out that's going to cover you for your 30 kilowatt hours for your day over the five hours of sunlight, that seems to work out pretty close. And you can cover the peak loads. Then you have to figure out how much battery storage you need to kind of carry you over the night and to store the energy surplus energy to carry you over over the evening into the early morning hours. So what what are the considerations when you start to add batteries to your solar to come off the grid? What are the kind of things you. When I'm starting to add energy storage, you want to be ready for your solar to not be produced. Even in the even in the worst case scenario of a really cloudy day, you're still going to get a little bit of so let's assume that it's just not available. Maybe you're down for maintenance and waiting to get it back up. So I'm getting ready to size the battery to be to take care of 100 percent of my load. So I got to look at my load in two ways. I got to look at my load from a duration from a time standpoint. How much am I using over the course of the day, the night or combination of. Then the the peak rating to make sure you're going to be able to output at that time, where your refrigerator, some other heavier load items are on at the same time, making sure you're able to carry both that peak instantaneous. It's a matter of on it out all at once. And then making sure that you have the depth of the number of hours. That's going to be a comfort in a case by case basis. Are you comfortable with just having a matter of hours of backup energy or are you looking more for like a two or three day in case you do have that main issue? So batteries are very stackable in that way that you can keep adding hours down the road to it might not be all at once. I'm one of the reasons we talk about hydrogen is for that long term is like you said, if you're just looking at your batteries for energy storage, you have to be real conscious that if you have a couple of days of not much fun or a lot of rain, maybe you're not charging your batteries all the way up and after a day or so you kind of be hurt. So for example, I'm planning to move to the big on, I'm planning on being off the grid. I'm planning on solar and I'm planning on batteries. And I'm also planning on a propane generator. Yeah. So my propane generator is my backup backup. My batteries to charge my batteries if we have a week of like so that's my backup. And I'm even use it when I'm like running a bunch of power tools at my top or like I want to build something drawing a lot more power than I would on an average day around the house. And if my if my solar system panels aren't going to handle it, I'm probably going to run a generator, an alternate generator, just for a short duration. Do that reasonable? Yeah, that's really reasonable. I mean, that's a way a lot of operations. You're not an early adopter in that sense either. When you look at we do have installations, a full household installation, I think in another even larger market that is doing this type of energy monitoring and energy production would be I go back to looking at the RV industry and the marine industry. So billboats, people live full time on their boat. They're very energy conscious. They know how much done they're producing, how much there's how much they're storing from energy perspective. But if you go and ask a full time cruiser, how much energy does your blender take? They'll probably tell you that both in a wattage and how many amp hours they just took out of their battery, they're still energy conscious at all times. To them, it's a reflap. Much like when you're driving your car and you know that you're getting kind of low on gas, you need to kind of as aggressive. We turn the AC off at the time that the reflaps. That is a muscle that they have built into their brain when just at everyday use. So factoring that in when you start operating and living at your house in that form, you'll have that that reflaps built in when you're ready to go around and drill for us to build something. Maybe just go for it. We're gonna take a quick break a little late. Take a quick break here. We'll be back in Ryan in about a week. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Monly and the Friends of ThinkTech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Dwayne Kurisu. The Hawaii Community Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Abarbon Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. M.W. Group. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Hey, welcome back to Stand on the Energy Man. It's Stan Osterman and Ryan Wubbins today talking about your planning on being an early adopter for clean energy. We're a little late. We've already started. So we're talking about how to do it though. So we left off with talking about, you know, what would it take to really get a house off the grid and be able to run just on solar panels? So I gave you some examples of maybe about how many square feet your house is and how much electricity you use. We started talking about batteries. So we started talking about maybe even having a backup, like a gas or diesel or a propane generator to give you coverage if you have a lot of rain, days when your solar panels are getting a lot of exposure. So we started talking about that. And Ryan brought up a really good point, which was actually the theme of one of my other shows with Professor Huggins from Michigan, Minnesota. One of those frozen countries up in the middle of the U.S. Tundra. Anyway, he called it energy blindness. And he said that people don't know how much energy they use. And I find that is pretty much standard, no matter who I talk to. You hit it on the head. Folks that live on sailboats, they know exactly how much energy they use. In my house, I know exactly what my house uses every day in terms of kilowatt hours. Somebody asked me the other day how much I paid on my electric bill. You know, it was actually the outdoor show or the home show. And I had a hard time thinking about how much I actually paid on my electric bill because I'm more conscious of my kilowatt hours. I look at that before I look at what it's going to cost me to pay my bill that month. Because I know that my house is between about 20 and a half and 21 and a half kilowatt hours a day. And it's pretty consistent. And I mean, I've been watching my house for like 30 something years. And it's right in, it's right. So I know exactly. And it's amazing. Once you get that awareness, just like the sailboat guys, where you get rid of that energy blindness, like Dr. Hagen said, it's amazing how you can actually, this is doable. I can do this. I like that term energy blindness. And we don't have to be blind to our energy consumption anymore. I think that for most people, the natural energy source that we have is we see a bill coming in. And we know how much we get. And then we know if it goes up or it goes down. We know right now, if we go hit that AC on for the night, those are the things we know. That's about as much energy knowledge that we have. Getting rid of that energy blindness is a great way to get yourself off. You can train yourself now before you go off to grade two to already have that in a way that you already have it. For other people to do it now, there are, with the amount of smart home products coming out, there are many products available just to do this energy monitor. You can get it from an outlet that speaks to your smart home devices and monitor individual loads. There are, I think, two different products right now that you can put at your home at the main panel. And it over time will figure out these little harmonics signatures that certain pieces of equipment are putting out, when certain devices are running. Another way, I mean, that you can gain that energy awareness without having to forcefully train and go create your own log. You know, seeking out some of those products, that's a great way to gain that energy knowledge and help train your mind to get off the grid. And I think that would actually help with the overall energy sustainability and energy conservation is just to be more aware of what's going on in your house, what's using power, what's not. And the different kinds of power, heat power or charging power to charge equipment or running motors. And just to be aware of all those different concepts of what energy is in your house. Because first law of thermodynamics, energy's either created or distorted, just changes form. You know, a lot of the energy that we have like heating water. Well, why are we making electricity to heat water or burning fuel to heat water when you can put solar water heaters on your roof? That'll give you really, really hot water for free. Basically, you could paint a bunch of copper tubes black and put it in a box on your roof and run water through it. You'll have plenty of hot water during the day and into the early evening. Maybe at five in the morning, if you take a hot shower, hope it is hot unless you insulate that system somehow or run it into another kind of something that keeps it really warm like a Yeti cooler or something with a bunch of coils in it. But, you know, that's energy too. Solar energy is not just the radiant energy but it's also the heat energy that you can absorb right into a solar water heater. So there's a lot of ways you can start getting smarter about energy. Use it more efficiently. I remember going to a conference one time. And I'm not sure if Hiko hired this guy, but he was a guy on Kauai who went off the grid and he didn't know anything about energy when he went off the grid. And he toured these horror stories about, you know, running out of power and food all spoiling and things like that. And I think that it was intent was to scare people from trying to be on their own on energy. It's not super complicated. You just have to have an awareness. You have to have your system design right from the beginning to cover your loads and your spikes. And you got it. You got it now. It's very possible. It's very possible. There are difficulties that you're going to come across that make you the early adopter on those. Personally, I would like to have multiple levels of redundancy and the way that you've described a system where you get down all the way to your last generator and you're still able to power people. That is a good system to have in place, especially when you have that knowledge of how your whole system works. If you even find yourself where you're completely net zero and want to stake in the grid, you can do that. There is a minimum charge to the grid. And I think there's great reasons for that connection to be there. That can actually get contained in your plugged into a goodness from a system. You can go, quote unquote, off the grid. We can call you net zero and you're not pulling anything from that meter and you're doing your part and then stake connected. That's an option too that some people may not always strongly recommend that too. How does that option work if you... Say for example, you're real confident in your system at home. And you basically just took the power switch and cut it off. Yeah. And you said, I'm not connected to the grid physically right now, but it's only a switch away. And now you've had a bunch of rain or your system's broken or whatever. For some reason, you don't have that power connection. Like, how would HECO react to you just turning the power back on? Assuming that you don't have all your lights and everything else on at one time and creating a big surge into their system, but just throw the power switch back on to a typical house. Sure. I mean, you could have everything on in your house. As much as you load as you possibly could and you're not really going to deign the HECO system. One house is small enough to be... They're going to have to react to any demand load that they could increase. One house is pretty small for a whole neighborhood or whole city. That's a little bit different. That takes some planning. But the one house, I mean, the way you can stay connected and have your meter there and have it read zero because you're open a lot of systems can be installed just with the emergency generator backup that you're going in. You're going to go flip it over to be an emergency. That can be your normal mode of operation. I wouldn't recommend that with just a standby generator. They're not really rated for use in that sense. But a solar battery system that's made to be off the grid can reside off the grid and be decoupled from the overall grid but still have your connection. That's a great way to go off the grid with a decent amount of load. All right. We're pretty much up against our 30-minute. I don't want to thank you again. Yeah, you bet. We'll be on the show today. And for those of you out in think-tech land watching this segment, it's really up to you to do what you can do to clean up transportation to maybe even get off the grid or at least reduce your carbon footprint at home. And it's possible. It's not all that scary. It does take a little bit of planning. It does take an electrical engineer to help you figure out what you need at your house but think about it. Think about what you can do right now. There's plenty of technology commercially off the shelf available. Plenty of solar contractors out there that can help you do the engineering for your house. And Hawaiian Electric can help you stay connected if you feel like you need that umbilical cord back to their big power plant. Anyway, do what you can and take the initiative yourself. Don't wait for the government. Don't wait for a big industry to do it. You give the demand signal. You have to say you want it. You have to tell the car dealers you want it. You have to tell HIKO you want it. You have to tell the solar panel guys you want it. That'll help. Until next week. See you later. Oh.