 Good afternoon, Howard Wick, Think Tech Hawaii. This is the Hawaii State of Clean Energy Show, and we have some whiz bang guests for you. You're all familiar with Hawaii Energy. Guess what? We have Brian Kealoja, the current Executive Director of Hawaii Energy, and Ray Starling, the former Executive Director of Hawaii Energy. We're going to talk efficiency so that it is imbued in your soul. I have, speaking of which, a couple of efficiency slides to start off with before we do the general conversation. This is a chart put out by Hawaiian Electric before next era became history, and it starts on the left with the current year and ends with 2045, 100% clean energy. And note that the upper, oh, the blue is the natural gas that they were going to use with the next era. This has all totally changed, but I want to point out that the all over direction of energy consumption from left to right is up. What happened to efficiency? Well, the first slide would indicate that if the building energy efficiency, building code were passed, that black line across would result in about that much savings. But that's not all. We go to the next slide because we're going to update these codes periodically. By 2024, we're going to have that much savings, and we go to the next slide. There's more. And by 2030, that much savings, and finally by the year 2045, that much savings. That is a huge chunk just by energy efficiency. That is the power of energy efficiency. Did I pull these numbers out of the habit? I sort of did for those, but if we go to the final slide, this is from the Pacific Northwest Natural Labs, and the slide on the left shows the gains in efficiency towards their zero net energy, the green part is efficiency. And then the same people did an analysis of what energy would cost Hawaii between now and 2045. And you see all those cents, 10 cents, 19 cents, 20 cents on the far right, that purple little bloop that is 2.2 cents per kilowatt hour for energy efficiency versus all those other costs. So is that a good stage to set up a really exciting venue for making a case for energy efficiency? Absolutely. I think you laid out just one of the things that we often hear is energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit, right? And 2.2 cents a kilowatt hour, how could you not be taking advantage and looking at that first? As we look at the 100% clean energy picture, we're going to need all the different components of this. And you pointed out on that slide just how much energy efficiency can bring down that overall need for generation, which costs more than energy efficiency itself. One of the things that I like to reference, and we had been talking about this around the clean energy day that was at last month. And we talked a lot about just the low hanging fruit, Secretary Chiu, former energy secretary, too, said that's the fruit on the ground. I mean, it is just lying there to be picked up. And I think oftentimes people don't think of energy efficiency in the same boat as renewable energy. But your chart really showed the need to combine the two to get to our 100% quicker and faster. Well, one problem is that it's not sexy. We've often tried to come up with a photo for energy efficiency. And we've got this guy up on a ladder changing a fluorescent light fixture. How exciting is that? Whereas you have your beautiful photovoltaics and so forth. Right, right. It's definitely an image. There's something to having panels on your roof. There's something to be driving your electric vehicle. So it's raising energy efficiency to that same level in the conversation. I agree. Somehow we've got to make it exciting. So Ray, what words of wisdom has you had years of experience? Well, I had the program for the first seven years. And of course, the program was actually something that the legislature decided needed to be in the hands of a third party. And back in 2007, I believe they passed legislation that they told the utility that they were going to take some of the money from the ratepayers and put it into a fund, the public benefits fund, and actually have the public utilities commission to go out and submit or make a request for bids. So that independent third parties could come in and bid to take over the program. And that's how we got it. And we were the first, the company was called SEIC at the time. It later changed its name and made some adjustments. And it's now LIDOS. That's what Brian works for. And that's who I did work for before we came to the end of the seven-year contract. And we actually went out and bid and got the new contract, which is possibly about nine years. This one is even longer. So that process sort of gave us a start in movement of the energy efficiency sexiness that we needed to get in everybody's head that this is really important. And so we got it through the first seven years. And I think we made some good progress. But Brian has come on board. And he comes from a little bit different point of view in terms of what he brings to the table. He's been a contractor out there doing this kind of stuff. And so he's come on board. And I'll let him talk a little bit more about it. But he's really driving this thing. He's kind of put it in second or third gear. And we're going for fifth gear overdrive at some point. And it's been a good movement forward. But as you showed on your chart, we've got a long way to go. We've got to get those lines going down, not up. And that's going to take some work on Brian's part. I'll be watching. But especially since, as I understand it, your current budget per year is a bit lower than the previous budgets. But your targets are a bit higher. So you're going to be doing even more with less, which is hard for me to imagine, because I work closely with Hawaii Energy. And as far as I was concerned, they were just maximizing the effect of every dollar to squeeze every bit of efficiency they could out of that. Right, right. It is going to be a challenge. There's no doubt. But the opportunity to come on the show today and just get the awareness out, I think is a big part of how we're going to have to do more with less is educating, doing more to help consumers, businesses, and families make smart energy choices. And a lot of times I think people want to do the right thing. They just need to better understand what they can do as part of their daily lives or within the work that they're in. And coming up next month, since we're almost at the beginning of October, it's Energy Awareness Month. And we're really excited about that as we, again, bring energy efficiency into the conversation of 100% clean energy. We're going to be doing a lot of things to help raise the awareness of efficiency, help educate the families and businesses of Hawaii. Yeah, yeah. When I associate a lot with these people in the Northwest, I showed those slides. And they talk about culture. And I've had one scholar say culture isn't just important. Culture is everything. And I think what you're attempting to do is get a culture of super energy awareness among the general populace. Because we three, we eat, live, and sleep this stuff. We go to cocktail parties, and that's all we can talk about. But normal people, oh, really, that saves. Oh, those blue lights are just so looky. Right. And they have negative connotations or no connotations whatsoever. Right. Raising the awareness is really, really important, yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's where I think one of the shifts that we're trying to make and really help people understand how it makes a difference to them personally, both on their energy bill, but also in the bigger picture. You talked about culture. I mean, living here in Hawaii, we have such a beautiful environment. And for us to be able to protect it when we look at the effects of climate change across the world, and particularly with islands. And our economy being so dependent on tourism, it's important that we protect the environment. We protect what we have here. And so raising the awareness of what's at stake beyond just 100% clean energy, but getting back to our ancestors and what the native Hawaiians and the ahupua system of really living sustainably and not wasting. It's in our DNA. It's in our core. And again, making that connection so that people really understand the bigger picture to things will hopefully help bring some of the sexiness back to efficiency. Well, one part of that is interior air quality or health. Where I hope we in Hawaii don't do this, but the average mainland person now spends 90% of his time indoors. And study after study shows that indoor air quality is not nearly as good as outdoor air quality. So just for instance, I'm the energy codes guy. One thing I built in to the tropical climate zone is allowing for jealousy windows, which would not be allowed under the mainland code. They do have a little bit of air leakage, but even in central air conditioned homes, you get a nice cool evening, especially during the winter months. Shut off that AC, open up those jealousies, and be healthier and save a lot of money in the process. Right, right. And again, I think a lot of that is getting back to the architecture of a lot of our buildings were 50, 60 years ago and the plantation style homes and how we optimized for the trade wind flow and utilizing what we have here. It's kind of getting back to our roots instead of necessarily adding more and more load and air conditioning. Yeah, another aspect of the tropical code, which we devised was encouraging long overhangs over the walls. Because I personally measured on a bright sunny day, a wall that was shaded and it came in at maybe 95 degrees. And then I go to a portion of the wall that's under shaded and getting the direct solar gain, we're talking 135 degrees. So just by shading, you're dropping your temperature by 40 degrees there. Absolutely. And so there's that much less temperature to penetrate from the outside into the inside. Right, right. And you think about even a lot of our old neighborhoods where we had tons of mango trees in the backyard and some of the shading too that that provided for the homes that was natural shading beyond our architecture. And those are again, some of the things when we look at technologies today like solar attic fans and other ways to get now that the heat's in the house. How do we get it out? And instead of conditioning the space, it's ventilation. Yeah, again, I've talked to contractors who have gone into hot attics. And one contractor quoted me as 160 degrees. I guess the attic was totally enclosed. Put in solar attic fans, boom, that temperature drops to about 105 degrees. But on that cherry note, we need to take a very brief break with Brian Kealoha and Ray Starling, Think Tech Hawaii, back in a minute. Aloha, I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii is My Mainland. Every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. I also have a blog of the same day at kauilukas.com where you can see all of my past shows. Join me this Friday and every Friday at 3 p.m. Aloha. Hey everybody, my name is David Chang and I'm the new host of a new show, The Art of Thinking Smart. I'm really excited to be able to share with you secrets on giving yourself the smart edge in life. We're going to have awesome guests and great mentors of mine from the political, military, business, nonprofit, you name it. So it's something for everybody. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to stay on The Energy Man at 12 noon. Aloha Friday, here on Think Tech Hawaii. Good afternoon again, Howard Wing, code green, Think Tech Hawaii. My beautiful guests so, so, so aware with this. Coignant questions, Brian Kealoja and Ray Sterling. Ray, I understand that you have a question with deep wisdom attached. Well, yes, I wanted to tap into the wisdom we have at your end of the table because you are the codes guy here. And I think a lot of people don't really understand the energy codes that you are dealing with and how that will be a major player going forward in reaching our goals out there in the decades to come. So could you tell us a little bit about where we're at, where the obstacles are and what you see going forward in terms of the codes? What are they going to affect? Okay, well first where we are at, except for the island of Kauai, we are still at the 2006 energy code. Technology is taking off like a rocket. Government is proceeding at the pace of a Galapagos tortoise. We are way, way behind the times. But your staff has done surveys of homes, the new homes, and they are incorporating a lot of the new energy code provisions anyway. So what are just to be simple to stick to single family residences? First and foremost, the code does what it can to prevent that sun's heat from coming through the roof. And what we did first at the Hawaii level is encourage reflective roofs. The more you can reflect the sun's heat back out, the less heat is going to penetrate. We led the way and I participate in national codes. Now for climate zones, one, two, three, plus Hawaii, those are the southern climate zones. Reflective roofs are mandatory. They are such a cost-effective way of keeping the heat out. So does that mean I know if you're putting in a new roof on a brand new building that the code would apply, but does it apply if my roof is 40 years old and I need to replace it? Yup, excellent question. The new code, which hopefully will be adopted in the next few months, requires that when you strip the roofing material off and you expose the sheathing, the plywood, and that is not insulated, you need to insulate it. Or we put in a Hawaii amendment. You can make it reflective or you can exhaust it. We changed the mainland code in that way. That's interesting. I didn't know that. Because the roof is the first line of defense for keeping our homes naturally cool or reducing our air conditioning load. And then we have windows, the windows that we grew up with. I won't speak for young people, but we grew up with single-pane windows that admitted about 87% of the sun's heat that was striking it. So we went right in the house and stayed there. Now the code requires what are called high-performance windows where through the magic of nanotechnology, almost, well, 70%. No, new code 75% of the sun's heat is reflected, but we don't know it from looking at the window. We're still looking through a nice, clear window. That's required by code. And then keeping the walls from having heat penetration also is another aspect. For residential, that's the nitty-gritty of it. Well, is there some education that you're looking at for people who might not understand the codes or are there things that they can go, places where they can go to find out sort of what the code requirements are? We have that on our Hawaii State Energy Office website. We have all the new code outlined. And then when the time comes, we do training for the front-line people, architects, engineers, and contractors. Those are the people who really need to know this stuff so that they can follow it. So we do extensive training. But, Brian, I'm interested in what new and different revolutionary ideas you have for it. Sure. Well, before we leave the codes piece, I would say that, and the role that Hawaii Energy would play is when we move the codes forward and we adopt some of these higher level of codes, is that this isn't necessarily the highest bar of what we can achieve in terms of efficiency. And so the Hawaii Energy programs will incentivize additional efficiencies beyond the code so that we can reach that much higher level of efficiency. And your staff is very aware of it. They bird-dog me, they follow me around like a puppy-dog, getting every little nuance to it and saying, well, we've got to adjust it like this. We've got to adjust it like this when the code comes in. Right, right. And just, I think optimizing it, so it's user-friendly for the people who are designing buildings, but also applicable so people are incentivized to want to take advantage of the code. And we always, in looking at these changes, we always consider cost-effectiveness because we want your incentive, of course, but if it's cost-effective in the first place and then you sweeten it with your incentive, people just cannot help but go out and take advantage of it, yeah. Right, right. And it goes back to the chart that you showed earlier, just the cost-effectiveness of doing these projects from an energy efficiency standpoint, when people really understand the economics behind it and how much savings it'll bring to them both immediately on their bill and long-term on what they're going to be able to do from how they can spend that money in better ways and driving it back into our local economy, it's that multiplier that really has such a great effect. And we didn't mention the fact that we, in Hawaii, spend a huge portion of our growth state product on imported oil, the more efficient we become, the less oil we import, the more dollars stay here at home. Right, the more that stays here at home, there's a multiplier effect as you invest in these energy efficiency technologies and contractors are benefiting from the installation of these and that goes into their families and that gets spent again in the local economy. It's such a multiplier. As far as kind of some of the things that are coming up in the future, probably one of the most exciting things on the horizon is that October 5th is actually energy efficiency day. It's an inaugural national event here in the state. It will be also energy efficiency day in Hawaii. So we're really excited again to just start to get the awareness out because there's a lot of things people can do without any investment, right? It's simple things such as washing your clothes with a full load and washing your dishes with a full load to reducing usage by using a clothesline instead of a dryer. Again, some of the things that we always used to do, but also along those lines, it's just an awareness. I think none of us would walk out of a room and leave the faucet on in the sink, right? But we'll walk out of a room and leave the light on. And just being able to change some of those behaviors are real simple. They don't cost anything. It can drive real savings. So that's coming up later this month. Good, and I would say that as far as I'm concerned, the incandescent light bulb is a total, total dinosaur. I've measured it at 400, no, 460 degrees, a 100 watt incandescent lamp. Last thing we need in our homes is more heat. Shift over to LEDs. You're reducing your wattage by a factor of five, saying going down from 100 watts to 20 watts. And those LEDs produce virtually zero heat. So you're naturally keeping your home cooler. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you were one of those that was really on the forefront of your sock experiment. I always remember those days of the burning sock, but you're right. I mean, the incandescent bulb was a heater that emitted light, right? And now we're using technologies that are really geared toward providing light. And LEDs don't have to be those awful blue, glaring things that I always hear about. You can dial up LEDs to any color temperature you want, including exactly the color temperature that the old incandescence gave off. Exactly, it's really fascinating. And in some countries in Europe, they're the tunability of LEDs. Even within a setting, you can set it to different settings depending on the mood or the activity level or the alertness that you want. There's been some of that done in classrooms just to see what the effect is on children and calming them versus exciting in different times of the day. So the technology is going beyond energy savings, but also how do you improve the environment? And when you talk about schools, how do you improve the learning environment? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so any other exciting initiatives coming down to Pike, we're getting low on time and we barely get warmed up there. Right, well we do have a lot. Unfortunately, I don't know if we'll have enough time to get into all of it, but one place you can always check out is our website at hawaienergy.com. This, as Ray mentioned, we're at the start of a new program year. It's a three-year program cycle. So we have a number of new programs, both for businesses and for residents, along with some of the programs that we've always offered. One of them that we're enhancing this year is really around a lot of the retro-commissioning of buildings and spending more time and effort of, these buildings are in existence. They have a lot of times the control mechanisms to really manage the usage, but over time either those settings have moved or the building operators aren't as aware of how to use it. So we'll be spending a lot of effort there because that's again a very low-cost behavioral type recommissioning effort that can bring a lot of savings. Retro-commissioning referring to the fact you'd have experts, engineers enter an existing building and with the building manager's permission, go through and examine, especially the air conditioning system that can get way out of tune. I liken it to getting your car tuned up periodically. We would never dream of just driving our car for year after year, but that's what happens in some buildings with bad energy effects and sometimes bad health effects also. Exactly, right. Exactly, right. We have an energy efficiency auction that we'll be rolling out in this three-year program cycle. We did that initially a few years ago and now that we have this three-year program horizon, it's a lot easier to get the right information out to people that can come in and bid and bring the cost of these savings down and really allow for innovation in the marketplace to come in so that we're not always having to create or come up with the solutions and let the marketplace that's very innovative come and bring solutions to us as well. Sounds good. Can you give an example of what the auction will look like? Sure, so essentially what we would be putting out there is for either businesses or contractors that have opportunities that they see, they can bring in a lot of energy savings through a particular device or by aggregating perhaps through a demand response portfolio, just a number of different ways to allow either technologies that we currently aren't rebating or haven't been proven to things of how do we just aggregate and build scale to it in a way that maybe the Hawaii Energy programs can do on their own. Those are the types of things that the auction will allow. You mentioned demand response, that's where the utility can interact with say a large air conditioning system or lighting system and say, hey, we're getting near to overload, can we take a little bit of your load out? Right. Generally they can and the inhabitants don't notice the difference, but that prevents the utility from having to fire up a new generator, saves all kinds of energy there. Exactly. Yeah, so I know that demand response works very, very well in some mainland utilities. I'm glad to hear that you're gonna be initiating that. Right, and it's becoming even more necessary given the amount of solar energy that's on the grid during the day, yet a lot of the usage is driven at five to nine at night and we need to find ways to shift that load, to balance it and efficiency, demand response are all big components of that. And we're just about to wrap up, but you brought in a whole new subject, batteries. What about, and very briefly you're gonna be dealing with storage batteries? Sure, I think it's something we're definitely looking at how does that integrate in to the picture of the value of energy efficiency at different times of day. Batteries themselves are not energy efficient upgrades. So it's just pairing storage with renewables and energy efficiency and seeing if there are some things that make sense to combine this all more holistically for customers and for the grid. Definitely, and on that cherry note, we have to bid Aloha oi, this is Howard Wigg, code green, Brian K. Aloha and Ray Sterling of, or an X of, what the energy, thank you very much.