 ThinkTec Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Happy Aloha Friday, friends. My name is Rachel James, and I am filling in for Stan Osterman on Stan the Energy Man this Friday. And today, we will be talking about too much solar, which is a little bit crazy to think about because we live in Hawaii and we love the sun, so too much of it sounds like a wild thing. But if you put too much solar on your electrical grid, things can happen, and not always great things. So today, we have our good friend, Ryan Wubbins, from Burns & McDonald, who is an electrical engineer. Ryan, welcome. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, so we're going to jump right into solar. Yeah. Well, what would you like to tell me about what happens when there's too much solar? Too much solar? Yeah, when you're here, you think, I just want to have all the solar I can, but we understand. I think people here are getting used to the idea of too much solar because of the limitations geographically on who's available to add solar on their house. So people are kind of, they have an idea of what this means, but that's more so from a transmission line and power quality issue. When you think the 2045 goals of getting all the way to 100% renewable, the transmission, the congestion on the transmission lines, let's just say we fix it. It's not just as simple as that, but let's just take that out of the equation. We still have too much solar. When you convert the, I think in the mainland terms of when you start producing a lot of solar, because Hawaii's not a massive solar producer from a gigawatt standpoint. That's when we've got to go over to California. They have a lot of solar, Arizona, Nevada, similar to the desert regions. They have a lot of solar. When you start producing too much, what that means is whenever power is consumed, it instantly has to be generated. There's no delay, there's no warehouse that we can have somewhere. We can talk batteries and energy storage in another sense. But when we turn the lights on at your house, that is a little extra power. It has to be made instantly. It's always consumed at all times. When you think about a whole country or a whole state, that still holds true. So if you have a whole part of your country that's producing too much solar, you got to do something about it, because if there's not an extra light switch being turned on when that solar is being made, it's got to go somewhere. It just can't sit on the transmission lines. What happens in some cases in California is they are actually paying other states or other regions. What? They're paying them. Say it ain't so. To take their power. So California says, if you're my neighbor in state, I'm sitting here and I'm like, hey, I got a lot of solar, I can't turn it off fast enough, Rachel, will you take my solar? And I say, if you pay me $25 per megawatt hour, I will. Exactly. So I'm paying to get rid of power I've already paid to produce. Wow. I'm paying on both sides. Cheese and crackers. Yeah. It's a great position to be in when you have too much. This also has happened in Texas, different electrical market and not solar, but they have a case where they have too much wind. Texas is in a way its own grid. They operate differently. Their wholesale and their retail markets are flipped away, but that's a whole other really cool argument for another time. It's Texas? It's Texas. Texas has so much wind that there are times when at night that they're producing so much wind, it's essentially free power. So I did actually take a page from your book and saw a little bit that they are actually advertising on billboards that there's free power in Texas. Free power in Texas. What does that mean to you in terms of what can happen in Hawaii? Are we at risk of getting to a free power place? We're not necessarily at risk of getting into a free power. So as solar and renewables are great in a sense they approach the cost of producing power, the marginal cost of producing power approaches zero. Because after you pay for that solar panel over time, the power, the sun that keeps hitting it is essentially infinite. It's always there, but you're not changing that solar panel. It'll degrade over time, but what it means is by the time your solar panels are paid off, it's free power. So everything after that, you're already producing free. So when a state has that issue, maybe you're shutting your own, if you're ever an exporter, so if the state is an exporter, we can't pay Nevada to take our power. We can't tell everybody that, hey, there's free power. You should start just using it just for fun. We'll get into a case where there's a lot of extra solar, but we don't want to just be using it just for fun. We need to be doing something proactive with it. Are we in a place where we have too much solar right now? Would you think we're in that case? Are we? Are we nearing free power? My little community energy heart is saying free power doesn't sound so bad, but I understand your technical perspective, but like from a people perspective. We're not to a free power yet. We're definitely not. I think the goal, even a 2045 is not a free power. If you're 100% renewable, that will come much later than the 2045 or 2040 if the latest schedules are made. We already seen a case where we do have not free power, but we have cheaper power. Hiko has an experimental program called Time of Use. Are you familiar with that one? I am. What can you tell me about Time of Use? I'm going to be very layman's terms here. Depending on the time that you use depends on, well, that dictates what you pay, so the rate that you pay per kilowatt hour changes depending on the time of day that you use your power. Yes. So we have a graphic. Can we pop that one up? Yes. Or we can look at me. There we go. So Rachel's right. So depending on the time of day, you might be charged a different amount. So when we look at that midday section, the reason it's a lot lower is because the power is a lot cheaper during that time. The sun's just blaring. This is a great time to be consuming solar power because that's when we have it. So what you see in this graphic is an indication of something similar to what California and Texas are seeing, but it's not really a free power. Not why we're trying to get rid of it, but in this case, Hiko's experimenting with what if we incentivize people to use power when solar is the highest? Can we actually shift the time of use on the load to the middle of the day? It's really hard for people that don't live at home that aren't there when the power needs to be consumed, but maybe you set your dryer to operate just a couple hours later after you leave in the morning. This makes me want to talk about just changing work schedules entirely and just really shifting away our economy runs and having people working the evening and not in the daytime. Absolutely. So a three hour nap in the middle of the day, go home, turn the AC on. Yes, those are great. We should all take naps. This graphic is indicating to us that we are approaching a point where there is a lot of solar and we want to incentivize the use, but something like this, what tends to happen is just more consumption in the middle of the day, not necessarily a shift. It's really hard to shift when you're not actually there. So what do you think the role of things like electric vehicles play in that shifting, I mean, as we move to an electric transportation system, the presumption is that there'll be at least a large amount of battery charging happening on buses and I mean, even people go whole scale to personal vehicles and they go to electric plug-in vehicles. There seems to be a presumption that you could shift some of the time that that charging is happening or that load. There is the assumption that you're going to be able to charge at the right time, which is not always true because you're actually traveling at the time that the sun is up and that solar is being produced. So yeah, when you're at work, you might have a charging station that is based on a time of use program and you're going straight from the sun to your car, but also generally for those people that have a solar around their house, you're charging your car at night too, which is that really expensive point, which batteries being one option for the island, but as we discussed on the show a lot of times, hydrogen is that other fuel that from a mindset for transportation is just like replacing gasoline with hydrogen. You're going to operate very much the same way. You're going to go to your gas station and fill up with hydrogen. Okay. So I have you to thank actually for sharing some information about a great replacement. It was a diesel replacement with hydrogen in a train just last month I think and that train was in northern Germany and it's fully hydrogen run. It is 100% a hydrogen run train. The benefits of this train, this is in operation by the way, it's not necessarily a demonstration. No, there's two of them running on track. They're running. Probably as we speak. They are a lot quieter because they don't have the engines, well just engines in general are loud. Hydrogen breathing push through a fuel cell is very quiet. I don't even know that you can necessarily hear it, especially from a train perspective. The transportation grid or the transportation system that we're used to can operate definitely on hydrogen and this train is a great demonstration of that. You need to get your hydrogen somewhere though, right? Even for a train you're not producing it along the line and just dumping it in constantly. An electric train actually operates a little bit different. You'll see cables being draped across the top, something more like Seattle I think is pretty popular for that one. Even our rail is planning to do the, I think it's like a supercharged track. I know that's not the actual term for it, but the train will come across it and it'll be like juiced and it'll go on. So there's different ways to do this, but producing hydrogen and we're going to rope this into too much solar here in a second, but when you have too much, when you have a need for a transportation energy, but at the same case we are providing a also a need of too much solar, storing the energy is what makes the most sense when we have that much. We can't sell it to another state, we can't tell, I mean we can tell people there's free power, but there's only so much consumption that's going to take place. The most responsible use for excess energy is to store it and hang on to it later for a different use. I like that you said responsible use, like that almost made me feel like I have to do it. Now you have to do it. We went from free power and I was like, weee, and then you said responsible use. Calm down, we got to be responsible here. It's serious business. Yes. Okay, so what is responsible using our hydrogen, I see, I'm ready to jump into hydrogen. You're ready to be responsible. I'm ready. Hydrogen is a responsible choice. Okay. When we're creating too much energy and we want to store it, a standalone battery is one way to do it. Hydrogen as we've spoken on the show is another way to do it and through a process of electrolysis, you take water, kind of zap it with electrical power and it'll separate the oxygen and the hydrogen. That's a really crude way of explaining the electrolysis. It's like the battery way that Stan makes hydrogen. So now we have these two energy storage mediums. The thing about a battery is that's just like holding a bucket of water. It's really good that I can just pour water in there, but it's going to get like topped off because of the geographical footprint that a battery needs is limited. And it's just going to sit in that battery until I'm ready to shell electrical power back out. So when we're creating too much solar power, and California's doing this right now, they are dropping some batteries in some places, but they're just going to peak out and then the battery's full, the bucket's full of water. I can't do anything else. Hydrogen can do the same thing. We can make hydrogen and when we want to use it later in the night for power, we can use that hydrogen back through a fuel cell and make power again. But something that the hydrogen is doing that the battery necessarily is not is now it's a transportable fuel. We can power things like a train. We can power things like our vehicles. So both energy storage mediums are great at consuming the too much solar, the too much wind cases that we're running into. But one has that extra use for transportation. Otherwise, you just keep transferring battery to a battery to a battery and that's only true when you're, because of the charge times, it's only true if you're not actually using the vehicle. Okay, this is sounding more responsible as you go along. We're being very responsible with our hydrogen at this standpoint. So we got about another minute. So when we create the extra hydrogen, this extra storage is, I'm going to step back here. We can use either one of these two energy storage mediums, right? Because we've said, yeah, I could drop a battery somewhere. Now I want to go back earlier. I said the transmission lines are congested. We took that off the table earlier. That's actually a real issue that we have to contain. And it's not so much an electrical engineering issue, a power quality issue, but it's a geographical issue. Which is why you'll see certain transmission lines or certain areas on the HECO map. They're like, yeah, we can do some more solar up here. We can't here. Mm-hm. It's a geographical issue. If you're going to drop a battery everywhere to store and then dump back out the excess solar that you have, it's going to just, they're not there right now. But you're going to have to drop equipment in a lot of different areas so that you can take that on. If you're a new solar provider on one of the programs for HECO, you're just putting the battery at your house. So now we've solved this issue. When that battery tops out at your house, you're not going to be exporting back to the grid and causing those excess problems. You may or may not actually be consuming all that solar with your own battery, depending on how you size your system. That's how it's handling on a small scale. Ooh, we're going to talk big scale after the break then. We'll talk big scale after. Cliffhanger, we'll be right back in just a few moments. Thanks for tuning in to Stand the Energy Man. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Hello, my name is Stephanie Muck. And I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs, and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 PM. And we hope we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for staying with us. We are back with Stand the Energy Man. My name is Rachel James here on Think Tech Hawaii. And I've had the pleasure of speaking with Ryan Wubbins, electrical engineer from Burns and McDonald for the past 15 minutes or so. At that time, we left him on a cliffhanger. We were talking a little bit about solutions. We were talking about responsibility. We were talking about too much solar. And then we were talking about geographic concerns. You summed it up really well. And we left him on that big cliffhanger. Like, so we have a geographical issue of too much solar. And we're already starting to contain that issue by saying, all right, if you're putting rooftop solar in your house, put in this extra battery. And now we've contained that too much solar to essentially your property within itself. But I still might be getting too much solar within my house. And what am I doing at that point? I'm probably the system that you have is curtailing the solar. It's not going to export, which is good. Because we have a geographical issue in that area that there is too much solar on that t-line. It might not be caused from you. So there's chances, likely chances, that we are curtailing solar on our own houses, even though. How are we curtailing? Just this is my little plug to talk specifically. What's doing that function? It's all happening for you. The approved programs and approved inverters on your house are already programmed to curtail the solar for you. So this isn't a thing that, like, me as a homeowner with my system, I'm deciding. You don't have a little dial. You're turning it on and down. It should be pretty neat for me. I would love that. Yeah, it's all happening for you. That contains you to your property limits. But now you're the one buying that battery, which is expensive. They cost a lot of money. It doesn't mean it's not worth it for you, because you're shifting your own power that you're producing to your nighttime loads, which is great. But that's a cost that you have to take on. What I want to propose is just throw out there and kind of pie on the sky type of application is when we talk about the energy storage mediums, hydrogen can replace gasoline, diesel, and it's in its application for vehicles. But now think about it from a gas station standpoint. All the gas stations, let's just say, were hydrogen stations or had hydrogen available. That's the utopia of gas stations. That's the utopia of gas. That's where they're all wanting to be. Hydrogen, because of electrolyzer, can be produced on site. So your gas station doesn't have the big tanker coming in. I mean, they may with hydrogen, but it can be produced on site. That creates a load on the electrical system, just like a battery would. To create hydrogen, I've got to zap that water with power and to make that separation. When all the gas stations are converted to hydrogen, they all have their own electrical fuel cell. Now we have this geographic network of load. Today, none of us really see any difference. We don't see those giant stacks of batteries and say, oh, yeah, that's our battery. You're just going to see fueling stations. Those fueling stations, then, you would connect into the grid. You'd give that control back to HECO and say, hey, when you think you have too much solar, start throttling your fuel cell, your electrolyzers, based around the island, as you deem we need. And now you're just shelling out a bunch of hydrogen because you have too much solar. You do two really great things. You're not forcing batteries on a bunch of people that maybe can't afford them. And at the same time, you're producing a transportable fuel very cheaply. I mean, theoretically, it approaches zero, but that's not going to happen. But in the time of use program, that's a much cheaper hydrogen to make than at night. And in grid restoration times, we could start putting fuel cells at the fueling stations, too, and they could even power back the community if it was a smaller microgrid. And you just want to isolate. So if I'm out in Ka'ava and people are hitting power lines with their vehicles like they love to do all the time. I don't live there, but I didn't know that was a thing. All the time. It's a big hobby of us on the wounded side to hit those poles. So the 7-Eleven, if there were a hydrogen fueling station, could also be a fuel cell powering back into the grid. Maybe Ka'ava just says, it's nighttime, but we got our hydrogen station to power us all up and until the T-lines get re-established, the gas station is actually powering up the town. This is sounding very community energy-esque. It's also sounding a little bit demand-response-esque. So in theory, let's say we're taking the gas station in Ka'ava and the surrounding community. Well, it's a hydrogen station now. Hydrogen gas station. It doesn't have gas station anymore. Excuse me, I was in my utopian gas place. But yes, hydrogen gas station in Ka'ava and let's say the surrounding community within X amount of radius from the station buys into the station and buys into a microgrid infrastructure. And there's a demand-response program or a time-abuse rate program, but essentially a program that allows this station to interact with the grid in a way that does some load balancing. Does that sound like a possibility or is that we're in pie in the sky, but is that too much pie? It's not too much pie. Funding for these projects is typically a rather large barrier. When you base it across the community that has a drive for itself, that's a great way to provide the funding. So it's not so much pie in the sky as you're taking one of the really hard pieces, which is funding, and having the people approve it and pay for it themselves. So no, it's definitely not pie in the sky. And from a technical standpoint, it is very possible that the fuel cell and the electrolyzer, those are both demand-response and frequency-response pieces of equipment. They can operate under grid stabilization conditions, which is very important when we start talking too much solar on the individual transmission lines. From a microgridting standpoint, generation is one of the key pieces of equipment that you need to create a microgrid. I can open up the power lines on either side of Kaaba, but now I need a generation asset within that microgrid. So it's very possible because you're tying in the power quality control devices, which should be frequency response, demand response. Demand response could even be load response. That's what we're talking about with the hydrogen stations. You get all of those pieces together, and then you also tie in the smarts needed on the inverters at your house. And technologically, pie in the sky, it's pie. It's pie on the table. We're taking it out of the sky. OK. We can have that now. So you said something that I didn't know there was a difference. You mentioned a differentiator that I'm unfamiliar with. You mentioned load, demand, and demand response. Or you said something, but you differentiated kind of that there is a difference. I'm unfamiliar with that difference. Do you mind explaining? So demand response is a program right now that'll call upon an individual generation asset. So another way to deal with, in this case, too much load is to turn on another generation asset and negate that load. It's not so much a too much solar condition as a too much load condition. There is a technical too much solar in there, but I don't think we have quite enough time for that one. So demand response just says, I'm having trouble serving in the power in this area. But if I turn on that generator with my demand response program, the utility sees a drop in load because the generator is serving that. When we have too much solar, I'm talking about more of a, it's the opposite demand response like a load response where instead of dropping a giant load bank or selling power to Nevada or offering free power to Houston, is turning on your electrolyzers and all your fueling stations and saying, start making a whole bunch of hydrogen because we got a lot of sun right now and I just, I really want to bring that load back down. That's where you want to get, instead of individual houses curtailing their own little solar, let's capture and use all of it. And that's what's going to help us get to 2045 is using and storing all of our renewable assets that we have available to us. That's sounding very responsible. That's when we're responsible. Responsible in utopia, that's a good thing. I do want to talk a little bit about just, so we're talking, we're fully brought into hydrogen, this sounds like sensible, it's responsible sounding, but we're still in like a very battery centric ecosystem. So what's that about? We're still in a battery system because there are political motives and there are technical motives behind that as well. A battery will still provide a very high efficiency rate. That's going to drive a little bit of the separation, but it's different uses. A battery versus hydrogen, as hydrogen develops more and more, the cost of that technology will come down. The round trip efficiency will have just science battling it to keep on shaving out as much of the margins as you possibly can. The reason we're there today, probably is just that it's cheaper today. Isn't that kind of how we got here in the first place? Like oil was cheaper today at some point and so we're in this mess? Yes, and oil still is cheaper today. It's really hard to battle. There's an equation, that's a great picture of the two battling. Yes, excellent. Oil has an energy rate of return somewhere between 50 and 100. So if I put in a little bit of energy to get some oil, I might get 50 to 100 times back out. So it's going to be cheap, but that doesn't make it responsible. Ooh, that's responsibility. The big R word. Batteries will have the same effect with the amount of the different chemical makeups that we put in batteries. There is a level of responsibility that we have to deal with those from a recycling program. And there's a little bit less, well there's a lot of it less, dealing with hydrogen. A few materials needed to make some of those parts, but we're way down on the, way higher on the responsibility chain compared to where we're with the other two options. But it's a bit of a mindset. When we watched Japan change over to hydrogen, that's going to be a massive market shift and a different understanding of the capabilities of hydrogen. You'll see stuff like trains. You're not going to see battery operated trains because from a transportation perspective, hydrogen has a lot more capabilities. It's just a much more powerful transportable fuel than a battery. So when you deal with these little cars, yeah, little cars can toy around with batteries all the time. And they're cheap and easy to make, but over time, the hydrogen is the, that is the better fuel, and it'll win. It's just going to take some time to get that rolling. You'll see- I like this, ending with the winner winner chicken dinner. Well, hydrogen will win. You'll start to see major manufacturer competitors with the higher transportation trains, buses, semi-trucks. That's a massive market for the United States. And we'll see who comes out of that race pretty quick, but the hydrogen-based semi-truck versus the battery-based that I'm not sure is around. But- We'll definitely have to keep our audience staying too. We'll see hydrogen on that one. For what happens in hydrogen, we wanted to thank you for your time, for coming and talking to us and sharing with us what happens when there's too much solar. It sounds like solar. Sounds like a little bit of a problem, but also an opportunity for a really robust solution. So thank you for joining us. It's an opportunity to be responsible with our energy. And there you have it. Responsible energy with hydrogen on Stand the Energyman. I'm Rachel James. Thanks for joining us. Aloha.