 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program under the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm pleased to welcome our guest, Mark Glick, who's the chair of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. So Mark, welcome to the show. Hi Mitch, glad to be here. So our topic today is technical assistance for remote communities. Mark is gonna provide us an overview of this new US DOE program that provides technical assistance to remote communities, and remote and island communities to carry out clean energy transition projects and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute role as a regional partner. So Mark, tell us everything we need to know about this new program. Sure, this is called the acronym for ETIP, but it means the Energy Transition Initiative Partnership Program, and HNEI is a regional partner. It's a collaborative effort that was undertaken by the US Department of Energy. And I'd say that HNEI and the Island Institute from Maine and the Renewable Energy Assistance Project from Alaska were really key players in getting the line item funding for this approved by Congress through our delegations. And unfortunately, it took several years for sort of this place-based technical assistance program to actually hit the streets, but we're now in the second year. We've had two projects come from Hawaii out of a overall set of, I think, nine overall projects nationwide, 11 projects nationwide. And we're about to enter the second cohort, the group of projects that are gonna be solicited. ETIP, it's a collaborative effort set up by the Department of Energy, but it has six regional partners, HNEI being one of them, and it also involves a collection of participating national laboratories who provide direct technical assistance at their own cost at no cost to applicants to deal with sort of whatever assistance that a remote or islanded community might need to make an energy transition, to deal with things like solar, wind, geothermal, water, energy efficiency, resource options, just to name a few. So essentially it's free to the client, how we call it client. So the entity doesn't have to come up with their own money, that's already provided. So what's the ballpark value-ish of what this kind of a program would be worth? Well, the annual budget for the program is about $3 million. And as I mentioned, we have six regions and typically the objective is to try to get at least two major projects in each region. So basically it means that there's a value of that that probably ranges from $600,000 to $800,000 per project. The combined value of that technical assistance. That's significant money. Yeah. Yeah, so it's based on what's been sort of accumulated in that program, it would definitely be no less than say $400,000 or $500,000. I mean, it's a significant amount of investment for the time provided by the national laboratories and the regional partners provide some of that technical assistance support, but also we're really critical to the community engagement and the identification of good projects and then helping make sure that these projects are carried out properly. So I'm really curious, like before we get into the nitty-gritty of the program, what were the first two candidates in the first cohort? What kind of projects did they sign up for? Yeah, so these projects got selected late first quarter of last year, got scoped during the second quarter. So we're kind of in the middle of them now. The two projects, one was to map the hybrid microgrid opportunities for the island of Oahu. So that means Hawaiian Electric made the application. And they really wanted to help developers that were looking at these more complex microgrids that might involve movement of electrons over the utilities-owned electrical infrastructure over their own distribution lines. So if they involve multiple meters that had to go through their lines, where would these be located? What kind of use cases or issues would you be solving by creating a microgrid? And where could these be best developed? So that any developer that really wanted to look at developing a hybrid microgrid would get a sense from Hawaiian Electric where these are located. The result will ideally be a map that identifies these locations. The other project is in the County of Kauai where the County of Kauai was really concerned about improving mobility and particularly in the light of natural disasters that might create congestion on the highway system because of the over-reliance on single occupancy vehicles. So what could be done, particularly among tourists, to be able to look at more mass transit or shuttle options, to be able to kind of get more people off the roads to kind of reduce these vehicle mouse travel and also to replace some of these vehicles with cleaner or renewable energy vehicles like electric vehicles. So how does HNEI manage this project? I mean, do we have a project manager at HNEI that oversees this project or how does that work? Well, I'm the principal investigator of the project and was responsible for essentially responding to the solicitation to become a regional partner and also assembling the team. We have two graduate research assistants from the University of Hawaii who are assigned to this effort and we've been very fortunate to get really good graduate students that are really adept at being able to help and work with the national labs on the specific approaches we've done a lot of data collection, for example, and we're also thinking through the strategies on the mobility modeling. So we're directly engaged in that respect but even more than that, the labs are really relying on us to be able to ensure that the community is fully engaged and that all of these key players in the case of the County of Kauai working with Kristina Kezer who's the energy program manager there, she's done a phenomenal job of reaching out to the department of transportation, all of the different key players in the transportation scheme, the economic development office and other key players that are necessary to pull off this kind of planning effort. So that's a really good experience for the two graduate assistants. I mean, what a great opportunity for them to flush out their resumes and get this grassroots expertise working with all these different organizations. So that's really good. Yeah, I mean, the transferable elements of this is that the remote and islanded communities, which is really what this program that's about resilience, improving, making more resilient these remote and islanded communities, they face unique, we all face unique energy challenges because of our isolation, our great geographical isolation our limited connection with centralized energy systems and that leads to problems or issues with access, quality, affordability and reliability that essentially these students who are basically forging new careers will be able to deal with any place that has those issues and have some practical experience on their resume. So we're excited about being able to provide that kind of support. All right, so you brought some slides along and we should probably launch into your slide deck just to flesh out the description of the program and how it works. So why don't you start going through some of your slides to tell the people out there in the audience how they can participate in this program? What's the process here? Yeah, I mean, I've already talked a little bit about ETIP, so I think we could probably jump to slide number four. Sure. And with that, we essentially are looking at the kind of communities that would be applicable for having technical assistance. And we're really dealing with potential applicants who could be groups of individuals, households, businesses in geographical closeness or proximity to one another. So the communities, what do we mean by that? Remote or really those isolated from population centers with limited access to centralized energy systems. Island communities are isolated, of course, from the mainland. So every place in Hawaii is essentially an island community but we do have remote communities and anybody, even from Oahu knows that as you approach the North Shore, there are places that are almost isolated hamlets. And if something goes, you know, essentially, especially the coastal, low-lying coastal areas that are in flood inundation areas where they can become extremely isolated in times of natural disasters. So being able to operate a safe and reliable energy system in the face of those kinds of issues is something that, you know, perhaps they could get help in getting support to kind of plan how to make their energy system more resilient, be an ideal sort of application for this program. So I think your next slide really identifies what kind of technical assistance is available. Let's have a look at the next slide and you can go through those. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in terms of, you know, the overall kind of analysis going on with a technical assistance effort, you know, so, you know, if you're an applicant, in addition to describing your community's energy system vulnerabilities that you would like to get some help in resolving, we ask what kind of technical assistance your community really needs. So technical assistance can take many forms and we wanna provide some options to help you start brainstorming your application request. So at the core of any technical assistance is typically a question or a set of questions that technical experts, including us and the DOE's national labs can answer, let's say using data-driven economic and environmental or grid analysis might be things that you wanna start asking about. So the question might include how much of my community's energy consumption could be met with locally generated energy resources or what efficiency measures would have the greatest impact on my community's energy consumption. What's the most cost-effective path to meeting our renewable energy goals and how can we increase our power during extreme weather events to improve reliability? So those are some of the things that, you know, if you have any of those ideas or concerns, the application process will help you that you can find and we're gonna show you later the links to get to the application will allow you to sort of explain those issues. And if you have a compelling story, you'd be a really prime candidate to get this kind of technical assistance. So what about field work? So I see, for example, you know, I have an item here for reliability. So can you actually send people from say NREL from H&I out in the field to look at the community, kind of do an inspection, as it were to say, okay, so what are the obvious spots? Like there's, you know, some pretty old telephone poles here, the power lines are looking pretty bad. We've got trees overgrowing it, yada, yada, yada. So is that part of what we would call part of the process is really identifying what these liabilities are? Well, I mean, it's, you know, in terms of, you know, that level of scoping, strategic planning really involves more of a dialogue with the community and key members to, you know, discuss and explain energy priorities, including those that fall into larger community plans. And it could also involve training, you know, educating the project stakeholders about those specifics in the energy transition process. And as we say, you know, as we discussed before, could involve specific modeling or it could come up with, you know, might involve, you know, coming up with a plan for how microgrid, given what the technical specifications which would probably be accessed remotely, you know, through either, you know, requests to the utility or through the local planners on that kind of information. We were able to gather, for example, with Kauai, the County of Kauai was able to provide critical information, critical data, as well as the State Department of Transportation, as well as the county's transportation planners to be able to give the labs the hard data that could be analyzed and modeled. And of course, a lot of that can be done extremely well remotely because there's a really wonderful data shapes and maps and accessible information to be able to develop those plans. But there's a lot of collaboration because of COVID in the first cohort, there weren't actual on-site meetings but there were like everyone else in the community of these Zoom meetings. And it's almost like we were sitting in the room with everyone as we were, you know, sort of struggling with getting the data and looking at it and essentially creating the plans. And then ultimately, as we near solutions, there's a lot of communication involving summarizing these project goals and outcomes to the broad audiences that really need them and to get community input on the next steps. Sure, so let's bring up the next slide which could drill us down a little bit more into the process, starting on the left, I guess, with convening and committing. You have to make the commitment first, I guess. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna go into too deep of discussion of this. This essentially is taken directly from the energy transition. This is coming out of the Department of Energy's transition, energy transition playbook that Hawaii has been very helpful. In fact, it was the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. It was just one of the primary inspirations of this playbook. And when I was energy administrator, I actually participated in writing chapters of this. So essentially, if you go to, I guess we can provide these links, but if you go to the Department of Energy's website and you actually type in energy transition playbook, this will pop up. And this essentially breaks up the community energy transition activities into seven phases from convening and commit to engage and envision all the way to operate and maintain and improve and iterate. So it's sort of their jargon for what steps community might be in. We just think it's probably good for you to look at this to kind of get a sense of where you are in the process. But frankly, you don't really need to do this. It just might be helpful as you make your application to kind of give you a sense, are you in an early stage or an advanced stage? So if we go to the next slide, I think the key is about this extensive partner network and what are you really getting? The idea, the theory is to employ a community driven approach to identify and plan these strategic clean energy and energy resilience solutions to address your specific challenges. So you would need to again, pretty much know what is it you're missing that you really need help in doing. And so we've been very pleased that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, of course the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, NREL, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories are there with a team of people that if we describe precisely what this issue is that you're concerned with, we can find the right experts in the labs to be able to be assigned to this. If you're picked. And then over a 12 month to 18 month process, we'll develop this program and carry it out. Usually with the first three months, it's really scoping it out and coming up with a very specific project plan. Again, great value to being able to do this with those kinds of partners. Pull up the next slide and look at the regional requirements. These are actually, this kind of gets you a sense of the national program and how kind of diverse it is. You can see us in the island's picture on the bottom left. Hawaii is the regional partner over all of Hawaiian islands and the Pacific. Basically the Pacific, any place in the Pacific region that's an American territory. So we have that broad expanse and Alaska has two representatives that are sort of dealing with that region and then we have four other partners from different places, the Island Institute in Maine and two other regional partners. So this map kind of shows you the full extent of that, but you can also find places where you can identify the regional partners and to be able to reach out them through email. I am the contact for this region. So very happy for you to email me at mbglick at hawaii.edu if you have any questions about this program. So Mark, apart from the Think Tech Hawaii, how do we get the word out? What's the most effective way of letting people know that this program exists? Well, how did the first cohort, how were they found? Right. Yeah, so the key way, and I think the most important way, because again, there's only two, you know, in cohort two, there will probably only be two projects from our region that will be able to be funded. So, you know, people are really motivated to apply. You know, what I did in the first round was, you know, not only did we use this white state energy office and their contact list to send out the links of this program, we also used the energy policy forum and, you know, its network, there were emails that were sent out and we, you know, used, you know, various sort of, you know, email and social network websites to be able to send out the links to this. But, you know, it's a nice sort of, you know, wonderful thing about the Think Tech program is that we're able to talk in a 30 minute expansive way about how this thing really works. So hopefully through, you know, this program, anybody that's sort of been on the fence about doing this or had just found out about it, please go to the links or contact me directly. You have until April 15th to apply. So you still have plenty of time to put together a credible application and make it work. Yeah, you can see now the, you know, the, I guess the information on the program on that link. So I have another question, a curiosity question. So you go through the program, you get your plan, analyze and you come up with this document about, you know, how you can, you know, is it the implementation part, which will take money? So does this put the community in a good position then to go out and solicit funds to actually implement the program? Can you comment on that? Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point because, you know, a lot of people, you know, wonder, well, is there money for deployment involved in this program? And while it would have been nice to have that, the first step is usually having a very credible plan and to really fully explore and understand the problem that you have or the issue needs to be resolved. So once you've done it and you've done in cooperation with a regional partner in a national laboratory that's been assigned to this, you then have, you can typically answer the question of a funding agency and particularly under the, under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, you know, where there are 72 programs that are being solicited, you may very well find yourself, you know, that's fitting into one of those programs. If you've fully explored it and you've come up with some potential solutions, it should be much better to apply for the actual grant to deploy. Right. Can I raise a big hand to you, Mitch? Yeah, it certainly does because there's stacks of money that are lined up there and like you said, if you have the national labs behind it, it gives credibility to your application for these funding authorities, including the US Department of Energy and all the national labs work for the DOE. So that's a really good vehicle for getting the money you need to actually implement the program. So I think it's really a great program. Right. So we have about a minute to two minutes left. So, Mark, I'd like you to wrap up and give us some major takeaway points that you might like to give the audience. Sure. Well, and again, thanks for the opportunity to visit with you, Mitch, and to talk through this really fascinating program. I mean, I think now that you have a sense of ETIP and the kind of technical assistance that could be provided to help you think through your energy transition and to make your community more resilient, I would love to talk to you and to walk you through the application process. So we've shown you where to view the application and I've given you my email address, mbglickathawaii.edu. Very happy to walk you through the process. We've had discussions with a number of potential applicants for this cohort, too, but we would love to see more exciting prospects and to hopefully be funded this time. And if not, there will be another cohort in another eight to 10 months through the next solicitation. So we'd strongly encourage you to reach out. We're looking for clear and compelling descriptions of your community's need and essentially coming up with some sort of reasonable technical assistance project that you would like us to help you with. That's great. Okay, we're gonna have to leave it there. You've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy on Think Tech Hawaii. Today, we've been talking story with the chair of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Mark Glick, about the technical assistance program for remote communities. So thanks to our viewers for tuning in and I'm Mitch Ewan, we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, aloha. 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