 Okay, we're back. We're live on a given Wednesday afternoon, the day before the hurricane's supposed to hit the Big Island, Hurricane Lane. Okay, and we're going to talk about that today here in Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Maria Tomei is our co-host today. Hi, Maria. Hi, Dave. You're great. And we have Shannon Tanganan. She is communications director of Hawaiian Electric Company. And we are delighted to have her here with us. Thanks for coming down, Shannon. Thanks for having me. I know you're busy. Appreciate it. Okay. And on the phone, we have Chris Burgess. He's with Rocky Mountain Institute. And he wrote a report we want to talk about called Solar Under Storm. That's a pretty catchy title. Welcome to the show, Chris. Happy to be here. Thanks. Okay, first up, Shannon. You probably want to tell us something about preparedness, being prepared for this extreme weather coming soon. Well, yes, we definitely want everyone to be prepared. We also want to set expectations. If this storm continues on the track, on this track, and we just want to make sure that people are aware that anytime we have heavy winds, torrential rain, flooding, there is going to be a possibility, highly likely possibility, that there will be outages. So we just want people to plan ahead and make sure that they're prepared for that. Has it worked? If the heavy winds push things around like towers and lines? Well, it pushes lines sometimes. It also will trigger limbs to fall on our lines. That could cause a short. There's just fallen trees, all kinds of things. It's hard to say where and when. I guess I think you worry about mostly the big transmission lines because that affects more people than the little ones. Definitely, definitely. Most of our generation is in central Oahu or Leeward, Oahu. So we just want to make sure that everything is secured in those areas where we've been preparing all week. What have you been doing? I'm really curious because I want to join the company. Sure. We're really tracking, of course. We meet every day. We are trying our best to mobilize crews to where we feel like we need to identify the locations. Identify the remote areas. Maui Electric, for instance, is identifying remote areas and sending employees to that area because we know it'll be difficult to get to these places after the storm has passed. So we're trying to strategically put people where they need to be, equipment where it needs to be. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty exciting and threatening and stressful. Well, it is. And you know, what we're, you know, we're hoping for the best outcome that maybe it'll pass us by. But it's not coming directly over us. At worst, it's coming nearby, not over us yet. Yeah, but the wind and the rain and the flooding, you know, that couldn't take us full, for sure. So what are you going to be doing while this all happens? We have a 24-hour shift. I mean, we have two 12-hour shifts. We're in emergency mode at this point. We have our, we're activating all our emergency action plans. You know, we have operations folks, planning folks, you know, our communications people. Yeah. Everyone has an assignment. It's like a military operation. Yeah, everyone has an assignment. Everybody's in touch on radio and telephone. Yeah, we have satellite phones. And you mobilize all the, all the trucks, all the linemen trucks to go wherever they have to go. Yeah. I mean, but we don't go until it's absolutely safe for them to go. Yeah. That's key for us. So where do you get your data from to know where the storm is and how it's affecting different parts of the islands? We actually get on a call every morning with the National Weather Service. And then we have folks who definitely track it throughout the day. So that we're, we're well aware of its track, where it's headed, what time we think it might hit certain areas. So. Well, if you can get there fast, you know, with the right equipment and the right skills, you can minimize, ameliorate the risk and the damage that might otherwise happen, right? Yeah, definitely. And we want to emphasize too that we've done a lot of work replacing wood poles, replacing wood poles with steel structures. In some instances, we've done about one normal course. Yeah. All the time. Yeah, we spent about $1.5 billion over the last seven years trying to make these types of improvements so that when, you know, we have severe weather, we can weather the storm much better. Yeah. So what would you like to leave with the people today? If there was one message that you wanted to give them on behalf of the utility, what would you tell them they should be thinking about and doing in the two, three days to come? There's camera one. Okay, well, we just want people to understand that there will be power outages if there's severe weather. So we just ask that you prepare for that, you know, mentally prepare yourself as well, because, you know, there's just, you have to be patient. You know, we're going to work as quickly as we can, but we're going to be as safe as we can as well. And I guess part of that is stay at home. Going out may not be a great idea. No, because you'll have the roads might not be clear. I would just hunker down. Yeah. Maria, what would you add to all of this? Well, thank you very much for coming. Yeah, I know it's a very stressful time for everybody. And the other thing too is as you prepare, be mindful that sometimes you're you are trying to prepare for the worst. But you really should also take into account safety, you know, you don't need to be getting up on your roof right now to check stuff. Don't don't do that. I sometimes there's adrenaline, there's a stress, I want to be doing something, you know, you're moving heavy things or whatever, you know, just be careful because very often people get injured in doing things that are out of the normal, you know, and they don't realize it. As I said, there's an adrenaline thing going same thing with driving, you know, drive with Aloha, you know, if the, if the cars are off, you know, if we're off the road, then the emergency responders or the people who are preparing for the storm can get where they're going more efficiently and drive, you know, just be patient. Try to keep yourself calm. It's very good. Yeah. In case you didn't think about it, charge your cell phone. It's smart to do that. If you have fair batteries, charge them up. No. Yeah, if you have batteries for your cell phone, charge them up. Because in fact, the carriers all have backup electrical systems, if the power goes out for them, so they can continue to operate and you know, your cell phone works, you can use it. If the towers are up. Yeah. Thank you, Shannon. Thank you so much. I'm hanging on from Hawaiian Electric. Great to have you here as always. Good to be here. Thank you. I hope everything goes okay. Oh, we hope so too. We're going to think positive. Thank you, Shannon. Thank you. Okay, we'll be right back in one minute, and we're going to spend some time with Chris Burgess about his report, which was made around what happened in Puerto Rico. Yeah? Yep. Okay, we'll be right back. Dave Stevens, the host of Cyber Underground. Every Friday here at 1pm on ThinkTechHawaii.com. And then every episode is uploaded to the Cyber Underground. That library of shows that you can see of mine on YouTube.com. And I hope you'll join us here every Friday. We have some topical discussions about why security matters and what could scare the absolute bejesus out of you if you just try to watch my show all the way through. Hope to see you next time on Cyber Underground. Stay safe. Okay, we're back. We're live with Maria Tomei, my co-host here in the studio. And on Zoom, Chris Burgess joins us from, where are you, Chris, anyway? I'm in Washington, D.C. Oh, okay, I knew that. From Washington, D.C. And he's with the Rocky Mountain Institute, and he's the author or co-author of a very important report, which we should look at right now in advance of laying the hurricane. Yeah, well, yeah, so I should introduce the idea here that when I saw this report that came out in June, and when we were going to be talking about sustainability and preparedness and resilience, I thought I'd really like to talk to Chris about this report. So I called him up and said, or actually it was an email and said, Hey, you know, we'd like to hear more about how to design your systems, your solar farms to be more resilient. Because you've done this interesting report going to Puerto Rico and had very down to earth practical lessons from that. I had no idea we would be sitting here the day before the hurricane. Lane arrived, but so it's timely. It's the perfect storm. Oh, God, I hope this is all overblown and nothing serious happens with our hurricane here. But I did want to thank you very much for joining us, Chris. I guess we've got your picture, and we're going to be showing some photos from your report here. Once again, here's the report. It's free. It's on the Rocky Mountain Institute has it on their website. So it is available for download. It's only about 30 33 pages. But it's very good. So it's shocking. Yeah. So the pictures are fantastic. So Chris, thank you so much for your work on the support and for joining us today. I'd like to start with the photo on the cover. So that's the first image we have. And if you could tell us about this photo, please. Yeah, sure. I mean, what might be helpful is just some background. The most active hurricane season we've had was 2017. And, you know, almost 50 years. And I want to say the Caribbean was almost lulled to sleep a little bit. The last really active hurricane season was way back in 2005. We can think back to Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and the tragedies that happened in New Orleans. And that was really the last time we've had this much devastation in one season. And back then we didn't have a lot of renewable energy systems. Fast forward, you know, was it 13 years? And now you've got a plethora of renewable energy systems all around the Caribbean and just kind of a different mindset on energy to begin with. And now you have all this devastation. And, you know, intuitive, you would think that these, you know, flimsy, you know, aluminum racks and these, you know, panels literally made of glass would just shatter and be blown away. And that did happen. As you can tell by the photo here, which is taken on St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. But there was an amazing amount of survivorship in the Caribbean as well. And we really scratched our heads and wanted to know why. So we hired three structural engineers to take multiple site visits to both surviving and failed systems. So this is how we came up with all the data for Solar Understorm. Excellent. Thanks. And so the next picture, page 13 of the report. Can we go back to that first picture for a minute? The first picture really daunting. So it looks like two things happened. One is the solar panels were ripped off their tracks, almost at random. And the second thing that it looks like from that picture is the tracks themselves were twisted and, you know, bent in many places. And I wonder, and this is the worst of it, I guess. First of all, that scene, what we're looking at on the cover of your report, that doesn't work, right? There's no way any electrical power is going to be generated from that mess, right? That's correct. Yeah, this was complete devastation. And unfortunately, this project was really haunted, but with several, you know, missteps. The first one is that many of the bottom through volts that were supposed to hold the bottom rack to the solar modules were actually not torqued or some of them were completely missing. So it was really workmanship where they did not actually complete the job to spec and there wasn't good owner's rep or engineering's representation in terms of checking off, you know, all the workmanship that needs to be done to sign off on this project. The other thing that happened was, because of the clamps that they did use, what you see is what's called cascading failure. So when one module goes, it shares a clamp with the next module. So it's kind of like dominoes when they go off. So anyway, this cover is kind of littered with all kinds of, you know, do nots. And that's pretty explicit in the report. So the next picture that I find very interesting is on page 13. That shows what looks like a devastated field at the top and a pretty intact one at the bottom. Can you tell us about that one? Yeah, so two things happen here. One, there was a topography difference that you can see with the kind of prairie hillside there that's vegetated. The other thing is they actually use two different sets of modules on this. So they didn't have one module manufacturer for the entire farm. And so literally half the farm is one module manufacturer with one clamping system to the racks. And the other one is a totally different brand and a totally different mechanism for fastening the modules to the racks. Wow, that is a significant difference. Yeah. Let me ask you, is there any any chance that any part of this farm was actually producing electricity with this damage as we see? Yeah, yeah, actually about a third of it powered back up. Unfortunately, though, this is a grid connected solar farm in southern Puerto Rico. And because Preppo was down for so many months, this could not actually produce power for the grid. So that's actually the, you know, that will happen in Hawaii too with homes that don't have battery storage. They cannot island without the electricity being on. You haven't had the grid powered up because the inverters have to sense voltage from the grid in order to operate. Very interesting. Unless, of course, the system has been designed to have a separate circuit. Yeah, unless you have a separate critical facility circuit. I'm wondering in the report that would you identify the manufacturer of the of the panels that failed and the manufacturer of the panels that that succeeded? No, we left brand names out of this report. And we just went with specifications for what's called Pascal loading, which is really the downward pressure on the panel and then the uplift pressure on the panel. And you'll see in the recommendations that we recommend a 5400 Pascal uplift rating, which is one of the highest on the tier one market for modules. So we can't name names, but we can name specifications. Then you can figure then the then the developer can figure out which which guys to use and which guys not to use. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah, there's a number of manufacturers that do 5400 uplift rating. Yeah, right. Got it. Okay. So then, you know, there were a lot of systems that were looked at and a lot of information. So on page 15, there was a fishbone diagram that illustrated how much they looked at, you know, different eight different categories of failure modes being grouped together. Everything from materials to equipment to construction methods to people to environment to system design codes and standards and business model. So I think this this is very useful to project developers. Of course, we don't have time today to go into it, but also to the insurance companies and the operators of the system. You know, maybe we can come back to this later if we have time or some other day. But I do think that your perspective on how many different things need to be thought about is very useful. And I like the way you organize the report. So I'd like to take this up again another time. I noticed there are some that are bolded. And I assume that those were the more significant issues. Those are the ones that we observed. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. And we built out the fishbone and what we're called other factors or what's called lurking failure. So there was a failure that happened. But if that failure didn't happen, is there's something looming behind it? It's almost like a mechanical fuse. Oh, right. So, so let's say the, let's say the modules had 5400 Pascal rating. Let's say they were through bolted. Everything were fine. But then there was no lateral bracing on the rack. Yeah. And the whole rack, the whole rack pushed over like a pancake. Oh dear. Right. So that, that would be, that would be a lurking failure where as the modules were fine, but the rack itself could not hold that pressure from a, from an east-west. Yeah. Look, you know, east-west for us. So it folded. So yeah, that's, that's why this fishbone is kind of built out the way it is. Cool. Thanks. Okay. So the next photo is another one showing some panels that survived and some that didn't. Is this similar? Is this one field that had two different types of modules or just? Yeah. Well, this was a combination of just some lack of workmanship. There was, you know, there was some untorked fasteners. And they actually switched, they actually switched fastener methodology halfway through the project. So the modules are the same brand, but the way they fastened them to the rack changed. Geez. Okay. People should be out checking bolts on their solar farms right now. Was the first system, was the first system more successful in the second or was the second system more successful than the first? I don't know what the sequence was. All I know is that you see the racks are fine in that picture. Yeah. It's really just the modules that were uplifted. The clamps basically failed. So this was actually an easy one to repower because all the electrical infrastructure was fine. The structural infrastructure was fine. It was really just the modules themselves that need to be reattached. Cool. Okay. So this brings us to my favorite feature of your report, which is the useful tables by topic with the most important failure modes, mitigation actions and relative cost and impact. So the next graphic is page 19 shows some low cost high impact types of failures that it seems maybe with three days advanced notice of a hurricane company coming. Sorry, it could make some difference if some trained operators of a solar farm went out to check for loose bolts. What do you think? Yeah, I mean just really little stuff like that and just getting a lot of the free debris away from the solar field. Debris can get picked up and smash on the panel. Torquing and checking the bolt torquing is obviously important. And sometimes you have a few days notice to be able to do that. Yeah. But really most of this stuff has to happen during installation. You have to have proper owner's representation checks before the signed off and the final payments for the for the contractor. That's really where you're going to get the best thing for your buck. But there are, like you mentioned, some maintenance things that you can regularly perform. We even were contemplating doing some guy wire anchors in the ground, you know, those helical screws, put those in the ground to the north and the south of the rack and then do trucking straps. So the same straps that you know, trucks would use on tractor trailers, which are canvas and Heather Ratchett. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that panel. So did you learn, you know, these have either way these farms were set up. Did you learn whether the placement of the panels and the racks was was ideal? Or did you learn that perhaps it should have been they should have been placed in a different direction, or a different contouring on the land? Did you ever get into that? And my second part of that is, did you did you learn whether it would have been useful? Aside from the guy wires, that sounds pretty good. If the developer built protective protective areas around the side of the farm to protect the wind against the wind coming and sweeping under the racks. Any thought given to that protective barrier of some kind of wall, or some kind of barrier, so that the wind could not get under the racks. Right, yeah. And so, you know, you and I have a very what we think is an intuitive mitigation, right? And I asked that same thing to the structural engineers and they smirked in each other. And what you're doing is you're adding a ton of costs, because you have to build basically a brick or, you know, center block or concrete wall. So it's an enormous amount of cost for all these large utility scale solar farms. And you're really actually exacerbating some of the wind features on the on the plant itself. So what these structural designers do, I learned this along the way, is they actually design the rack, and then they put it into, you know, like a 3D model wind tunnel, a commercial model. And then they can see on that rack from various directions where the weak points are in that rack, and then they will design to this apography. And to the highest wind load of that particular standard. Now the Caribbean was mostly category four. But after Irma and Maria now everyone wants to build the category five. So you're talking about 155 mile an hour plus. So that that's what these structural engineers are doing. What we tried to outline is some of the design steps that you should be making with your racking manufacturer and your structural engineer, but also just some simple best practices. I think the best bang for the buck is really using through bolting. So instead of using clamps, you actually through both the modules to the rack itself, and use a proper torquing method and something that's called niolock that keeps the bolts from vibrating loose. There's a ton of vibration action on that. I can loosen the loosen the nut in the bolt. Yeah. Yeah. And then once that happens, you get these cascading failures, which is a lot of the optics that you see in these pictures. So what about the what about the more detail and Maria has shown me two copies of the report. One is fairly abbreviated. Oh, well, that's just my notes less abbreviated. And then this one is the answer of them has, you know, your scientific data, test results, you know, detailed documentation. Is there is there a third copy of the report, Chris? No, like I said, we were not trying to replace any of the, you know, any of the engineering standards, like, you know, Miami-Dade wooden codes or anything like that. We were basically identifying best practices and literally identifying what we saw as failure modes in the last two hurricanes, say at the Caribbean. So we view this as an informing document for the insurers and for governments and other jurisdictions that are going to set when standards with the purpose of this report was not to go into detail for when we didn't have the budget into that's really not what the Rocky Mountain Institute wants to do. We want to make sure that we get the best information to other decision makers that they do this for a living. Curious also, the report was the photographs were taken. The report was written when a few months ago? No, we started, we, we started our investigation in late November. Field work concluded after the holidays, I guess, early February. And then we collaborated with several authors from February to about May. And then I think we finally released the print version in June. So we were trying to make that, we were trying to make that June first start a hurricane seedling deadline. So is it fair to say that the damage that is shown in these photographs has, has all been repaired by now? No, it's not fair to say, you know, many of the solar farms in Puerto Rico, you know, are still under either litigation or still waiting on insurance money. But let's see, Anguilla has an RFP up now to repower theirs. That one has not been replaced yet. Turks and Caicos and and BDI both were survivors. I mean, they had less than 5% of their modules were uplifted of damage. So they have been repowered. Yeah, it's kind of a mixed bag to say that you check. Maria, you have a couple more pictures, you know? Yeah, yeah. So there were a couple more tables. I don't know that we have much time, but they have pictures too. So the next table, page 20, had mentioned something about trackers and item three a number five will specify specify trackers included in the project be designed for worst case wind exposure, no stole position for extreme wind allowed. So I just had a quick question. Is the the trackers with a stole position are bad or they're supposed to do their analysis without assuming that it's able to avoid the wind? Do you know? Or is that just one of those? No, yeah, this really came from FDX solar, they used to work for Sun Edison, and they do a ton of renewable energy consulting around solar structures. Yeah. And we we do not have a lot of trackers in the Caribbean. I've got 26 projects in the Caribbean, none of them are trackers. Oh, okay. track. So we didn't actually have any fieldwork on trackers, they added that because it's kind of a misconception with some of the developers that they can go in still mode. And that's going to be safe. So still is not necessarily necessarily safe. It's not a free pass. All right, as you as you can see in, you know, the picture on the cover, you know, the tilt on that the tilt on that project is extremely low. Yeah, probably, you know, five percent, which would be the equivalent equivalent of a stow mode. Yeah, and tracker and that didn't see the damage. Yeah, right. So the next table from page 21 shows a problem very common in Hawaii with corrosion. Was this a major impact in Puerto Rico? A lot of the the installations of Puerto Rico were fairly new. So we actually didn't see a ton of corrosion there. That corrosion picture comes from a system on US Virgin Islands that had been there for, I want to say six years. And as you can see, obviously, it didn't use the proper galvanation of proper material there. And that just vibrated, literally vibrated loose. Yeah, okay. So yeah, this, thanks so much for putting together the report. And it gives a lot of insights, especially for those of us who have not personally been through a direct hit of a major hurricane, for example, and we don't have a graphic for this, but on page 23 item 60 says rain intrusion into combiner boxes or inverters. Even if it meets NEMA specification is hurricane wind blowing sideways can penetrate NEMA three. So I guess, yeah, there are a lot of things that you can improve, you know, just the waterproofing of things just think horizontal rain driven at high, high rates of speed are going to get into areas it shouldn't get even the findings and the recommendations of this report. What's your advice to Hawaii on the eve of its own hurricane tomorrow? What, you know, what, what should we learn? What, what would you advise us to be conscious of from this report? You know, well, first of all, obviously, you know, human health and safety is first and foremost, take care of families, stay indoors, you know, all the level headed advice that we heard in your earlier segment is front and center. In terms of solar, there's probably not much you can do right now. But in the aftermath that would be interesting to learn, you know, depending on the amount of extreme wind events that you do get on the Big Island, what survived and what failed and then we can kind of, you know, look into we'll look into why that happened. There are several things that you can probably do after the storm is just to make sure you didn't have any water penetration on your inverters or your combined boxes. You know, make sure that system's powered down before you do look at that. Go back and check the, the bolts and the rack, make sure it hasn't vibrated itself loose, or you don't have loose nuts and bolts. These are all good, you know, operation and maintenance tasks that you can do before and after a storm. And then what we really, you know, claim in this report is this isn't a Bible that is going to guarantee any type of survival. It's more of a start of a collaboration. So we've actually got a working group on a website called Carrick. It's the Caribbean Renewable Energy Community. We've got members from over 60 countries all around the world. We'd be happy to invite Hawaii to that as well. We really want to learn from, from more data. Jay, as you mentioned, you know, this, this is devoid of direct data and that's on purpose. You know, we want to make sure that we keep up a really open source database from all over the world so we can continue to improve the resiliency of these renewable energy systems. Because when they are, when they are resilient, they're extremely powerful. One of the major crisis in Puerto Rico, as we're uncovering all these investigations there, is not really that the power was down, is that the services that power provides were down, right? So your medical services, your water pumping, your water treatment, ultimately was responsible for over 99% of the desperate store. You know, the preparation from the water facilities was there in terms of having gasoline and diesel backup generators. But when they were cut off from their fuel supply, after a few days, the water stopped pumping. If those water treatment systems and those water pumping stations had solar and storage microgrids that could survive the storm, then they would have water for you know, four to six hours a day without PREFA coming back on. Well, one thing, one thing is clear is that whenever you have a storm these days in the new world of extreme weather, you have to make this kind of analysis after you have to learn from everything so that the next time you're better prepared. So your report is very important to us. And so is your appearance at our show, Chris. Thanks. Thanks for coming down. Maria, thanks for setting it up. Thanks. Unfortunately, we're out of time, I think. Yeah, I think we are. Yeah. But we can schedule more discussion later, maybe after we see what Hurricane Lane does or doesn't do to some of our systems. And as you mentioned, there's a lot being built and a lot of potential with the solar and microgrid and the backup and the more resilient system that we're going to be developing this for a long time. Thank you, Chris. Chris Burgess, Rocky Mountain Institute. Thank you so much for appearing on our show. Thank you both. And you guys stay safe. Thanks, Chris. Aloha.