Good afternoon and welcome to today's Energy Seminar. It's kind of a nice follow-on to last week's seminar. For those of you who were here, it was about federal climate technology policy, plus this week we're going to hear about the state version of that from the biggest state in the Union. And is it now sixth biggest country in the world? Fifth biggest economy in the world. But I am unworthy to introduce such a person. So I've asked my friend and colleague, Mike Master Andrea, who is the director of research at the Woods Institute Climate and Energy Program, as well as the policy director of the Doerr School of Sustainability Accelerator Program. But perhaps most importantly for this job is the chief advisor to the Energy Commission on energy and climate, specializing in R&D and technology assessment. So you may see a little bit of a link in here. Mike, by the way, is not only a graduate of the Stanford EIPER Emmett Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Research here at Stanford Interdisciplinary Program, which has existed for 22 years, three years. He is actually the first graduate of said program building on an undergraduate degree in biological sciences also here at Stanford. And when he introduced Joni, you'll see he also has an interesting and deep connection and background with Stanford. So Mike. Great. Thank you, John. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the very kind introduction. It's my pleasure to introduce my close colleague, Jonas Steinbeck, who is the director of the Energy Research and Development Division at the California Energy Commission. And before joining CEC, first he was a student here. He did a PhD in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, also an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. And prior to working at CEC, he worked on climate and clean energy policies and initiatives at the Department of Energy, at the federal level, also the American Meteorological Society, and at the White House Council on Environmental Quality and in the US House of Representatives. So I'm going to hand it over to Joni, without further ado. Thank you very much for being here. Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be with everyone today. Thanks for coming out during a busy time in the term here. I'm sure you've got a lot of demands on your time, so appreciate you coming today. And thanks to the Energy Seminar Organizers for the opportunity to connect with you all and share a bit about the energy innovation activities that we are investing in through the California Energy Commission. And yeah, great to be back on campus. A lot of fond memories of being in rooms just like this. Sometimes for exams, which is more stressful, but for most of the time, most of the memories are fond when looking back. So I'm going to be just giving you an overview of some sample projects that we've invested in, so technology innovation, research projects, and also previewing some upcoming programs that we're excited to launch with new resources, and then also briefly touching on opportunities to connect and collaborate in the future. So a lot of this work that we're conducting at the Energy Commission is motivated by global climate change and addressing the urgent need to meet our greenhouse gas goals as a state, in particular the goal for carbon neutrality by 2045. This is a chart from the California Air Resources Board showing the emissions in 2022, and then looking out to 2045 and what we need to do across all these different sectors of the economy, namely dramatic reductions in every major sector. You can see some residual emissions in 2045 that we anticipate needing to be addressed through carbon removal strategies, so either leveraging natural and working lands or engineered solutions, which I'll talk about a little later on. So the Energy Commission is the state's lead energy policy and planning agency. We work with the private sector, with community groups, with research institutions to advance energy systems that are clean and reliable, affordable and equitable. And this includes targeted investments and policy and planning in the areas of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transportation. We do analysis for the long run to meet our mid-century goals, as well as help prepare and respond to energy emergencies in the near term. So I'll just go through different sectors that are key to the Energy Commission's work towards those carbon targets that I mentioned. So in electricity, our guiding policy in California is 100% clean and zero carbon resources by 2045. We're making strong strides on this one, so over, well, in the neighborhood of 60% today, so 37% renewables. As of 2021, this charts a touch out of date, large hydro and nuclear making up the remainder. And another key development and area of leadership for California has been the deployment of battery storage. So going from 2019 to 2023, we're experiencing about a 10-fold increase of battery energy storage on the grid that helps complement, intermittent renewables, and balance the grid. So that's a key component of achieving this goal. And then you can see at the bottom right of the chart that we anticipate needing, according to this core scenario in our SB 100 analysis, our analysis for achieving this mid-century goal, as we need around 50 gigawatts, 50,000 megawatts of energy storage. So we're around 13% of the way there in terms of filling up that little battery graphic. This is a look at the individual resources or the mix of resources that we think could be key for achieving this 100% renewable future. So this comes from the SB 100 analysis that was mentioning that the California Energy Commission led together with the Public Utilities Commission, Air Resources Board, and others. And a couple key points here, just a rapid increase in the size of the grid in terms of its capacity is going to be needed, particularly as we electrify buildings and transportation. We need more electricity. And utility scale solar and battery energy storage are going to be key parts of the portfolio. But other resources like offshore wind and long-duration energy storage are going to be important in 2045. And I'll speak a little bit about some of the efforts we're undertaking to advance those technology areas. And then what's not shown here is also other key strategies, including energy efficiency, demand response, also customer solar as well, which isn't shown here. So in the transportation space, our state target here is 100% zero emission vehicle sales by 2035 in the light duty segment and by 2045 in the medium heavy duty segment. And we're making good progress here as well in recent years. So you can see in 2017, we were under 5% share in EVs as a share of the total sales. And then in 2023, we're approaching, well, hit 27% in quarter three. We'll be a touch over that by the end of the year. There's a massive buildout of chargers needed to support this growth of EVs. So by 2030, we anticipate having around 7 million EVs in the state needing about a million chargers. So it's a tall order, but we're making good progress in the early stages of the buildout. We're approaching 100,000 chargers, assuming an exponentially increasing kind of trajectory, as you see in sales, for example. And we just reached 10,000 fast chargers as well, which are important for particular duty cycles and certain user needs. And then in buildings, we've connected some analysis, looking at a 40% reduction of GHGs by 2030 and some of the different strategies that would be needed to achieve that and are implementing a range of different policy initiatives, one of which the CEC has authority over as the Building Energy Code. So ratcheting that over time in a way that leads to greater electrification, movement away from gas end use. And we also have electric ready requirements in the Building Code and are in the process of doing an update for 2025 that will be even more ambitious. And the Building Code in California is really kind of a world-leading model. So not only is it important for California, but it's also helpful for thinking about kind of the frontier of energy performance in other jurisdictions. The governor announced a 6 million heat pump deployment goal by 2030. And we just announced a commitment with major manufacturers of heat pumps. So close to a dozen manufacturers have committed to work with the state, partner with the state to track this deployment and work to, obviously, deploy and hit this goal, but also to do it in a great friendly way. And I'll talk a little bit about load flexibility. The next point is related to this as well. So we set a 7 gigawatt load flexibility goal for 2030 at the CEC together with our partner agencies. This goes beyond the building sector, but it's important as we electrify the building stock that it is able to be grid-friendly, operate in a way that helps balance the grid. We're really fortunate to have a wonderful new set of resources, both through the state as well as the federal government. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act provides over $60 billion in energy infrastructure and energy technology funding, the Inflation Reduction Act provides important tax credits for solar and storage and heat pumps. And the state level over the past two budget cycles as a state, we've made a $50 billion climate commitment, and this includes around $7 billion for the California Energy Commission. Some of the other pieces are going to other agencies for a wide range of mitigation and adaptation initiatives. And so at the CEC, we're really fortunate to have this great augmentation, a lot of it focused on EV infrastructure buildout to move from 100,000 to a million chargers, for example, clean energy, building de-carve, and greater liability of some of the other areas. And so I'm going to be focusing this talk on the R&D portfolio, and of that $7 billion, there's over $1 billion in R&D that's going to support a suite of new programs, which are shown here in the bolded text, building on some of our foundational programs like the Electric Program Investment Charge, which is our electricity R&D program, and most of the examples, project examples that I'm going to be speaking about come from EPIC. And we can take some of the progress momentum from EPIC and use it to accelerate our progress in these larger scale programs that are more deployment-oriented. Through EPIC and just more broadly, we do take a targeted approach to our investment, looking at where there are key barriers in the technology innovation pipeline. So as some examples, the CalSEED initiative under EPIC is intended to help innovators kind of the early stages when they have a concept for a product or a service or an early prototype and help move that forward. CalSEED is a program to give access to leading labs across the state and demonstrate the performance of the technology, get third-party validation, and help build investor confidence. Out on the other far end of the innovation spectrum as you're getting closer to market maturity, we have the RANT program, which is intended to support the automation of manufacturing of the technology. And then we also have these regional innovation clusters throughout the state where there's business support services, ecosystem, sorry, kind of networking support and so forth to support entrepreneurs across the state. So I'm going to be speaking about a number of EPIC project examples, as I mentioned. And so I just wanted to give you a kind of high-level view of what the program is delivering. We've invested over a billion dollars over the past decade through EPIC, and that has catalyzed over $10 billion in private follow-on investment. So that's kind of a nice demonstration of the catalyzed effect of public investment. This has led to commercialization of over 70 technologies and another piece that I would highlight is we're investing 70% of the demonstration and deployment funding in under-resourced communities. So we're trying to advance a more inclusive approach to clean energy innovation. And so now I'm just going to give you a little tour of some different projects in sort of no particular order and a little bit random jumping across different sectors of the economy. The first one is an investment in just building our knowledge base so that we can do better planning as a state, make better decisions as electricity system planners or various parts of the energy infrastructure. So this is an effort to get more granular information about the climate that we anticipate. So taking global climate models and using the latest state-of-the-art techniques to downscale those models to get more granular geographically specific information. This is an example of precipitation changes by the end of the century. And we've got a lot of different variables to help us with understanding. For example, the increase in air conditioning load associated with just a hotter climate, how hydro might respond as precipitation changes occur and wildfire risk as we have a drier and hotter climate. So this is going to be a powerful tool for us as a state and we're making this data available for broad use. So we've got the Caladapt platform that's providing a kind of broad access to this data. And you can visualize the data and there's limited data for downloading and then we're developing this new kind of pro tool called the analytics engine, which is on the right. So this includes hourly data out through 2100 of like 200 different scenarios, incredible amount of data to analyze and understand and draw insights from. And so if you're doing research in this area, you can tap into this wonderful new resource. Pause and take a quick sip of water here. Any questions before I move on? So we have an indoor air quality portfolio as part of our overall investments. So as an example, back in 2009, we funded a paper that looked at formaldehyde from new construction and specifically composite wood materials and that's led to an important update on the building code as well as a carb regulation for composite wood. More recently looking at emissions from gas stoves. So NO2, for example, can build up above health thresholds when there isn't ventilation used. And so that's a new concern. There can be issues with particulate matter as well. Some of you may be aware there was a recent Stanford study looking at benzene emissions from gas stoves. So we're trying to better characterize the emissions, the types of chemical constituents and whether the health implications might be for residents in these homes. We've invested over a hundred million dollars in microgrids across the state supporting the development of more than three dozen microgrids to demonstrate the value of these resources as sources of energy resilience in communities and improving the communications and controls for operating these optimally. So this is one example from the Blue Lake Rancheria which is in the northern part of the state. It was able to support 20,000 residents after the earthquake last December, which you may recall. And it was also credited with saving four lives by keeping some medical equipment powered. So these are really important for energy resilience and can be also supportive of the grid as well in other situations. Gradient is a really innovative firm developing this heat pump, heating and cooling technology and making it more accessible to more people. So sort of like the window AC unit you may be familiar with, but this can do heating as well and it can do it super efficiently producing greenhouse gases and saving money for consumers and it can be installed by the resident. So this allows someone to access this technology, take it with them if they're a renter for example. And so we see a lot of opportunity for these types of solutions that are kind of lower cost and easier to access. And then the next one here is Smartville. So Smartville is advancing second use or repurposing of electric vehicle batteries. So once a battery is degraded to the point where it's less useful in a car, it still has a fair amount of capacity and can be reused again for stationary storage applications for providing some resilience again locally or providing some grid support and helping us reach our storage capacity targets as a state. And it kind of builds a more circular economy approach with batteries. We're also looking at further down the line recycling the materials in batteries and looking upstream. I'll talk a little bit about upstream, more sustainable approaches to the materials that are going into batteries. 12 is a really innovative firm, Stanford PhD, Etosha Cave shown here and other Stanford co-founders. So they're taking Waste CO2 and making chemical precursors for a wide range of products like jet fuels and plastics, car parts and apparel. And so this is a really promising technology to pair with carbon capture technologies, for example, in the industrial sector and make good use and kind of provide additional value to Waste CO2. And they're growing rapidly as a firm. So this kind of example of a really successful startup. Another one in our portfolio is a YEV. So this is gonna be the first E-truck stop in California which should come online in about a year. So this is near Bakersfield, California and it's an area of the grid that has electricity distribution constraints. And so to kind of maximize what they could provide in terms of charging trucks here, they deployed this distributed energy resource approach where they built a solar array. Oh, they're in the process of I should say, still undergoing. And also paired with a battery storage system and then the controllers so that they're able to charge about 50 electric trucks over completely off the grid on average and then grid tied chargers in another part kind of lower down. So this allows charging overnight and so forth but able to provide a greater charging capacity than otherwise by utilizing distributed energy resources. Antora is developing a really interesting thermal energy storage system. So using carbon blocks to store the thermal energy, for example from renewables and then it's contained in these insulated containers and then later days or potentially weeks later accessing that thermal energy for industrial heat or they're actually developing these cells that can convert the thermal energy back to electricity. So this is pretty cool. These thermal photovoltaic cells. So this sort of like PV but rather than tuned to the spectrum of sunlight they're tuned to the spectrum of thermal radiation. Cal Flex Hub is an initiative of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. So this is looking at the controls and the communications for making, building energy appliances and equipment more grid friendly. So taking information about the price of electricity or greenhouse gas signals or flex alerts from the California independent system operator and using that to inform where to maybe shift load relative to where it may have occurred otherwise and help support the grid in that way. So this is an example with hot water heaters but they're looking at 15 different applications, CB chargers, HVAC units, et cetera and trying to better understand how to optimally transfer data communicate signals and have these devices support the grid. And here is a somewhat similar example trying to leverage the flexibility in electricity demands here for irrigation pumping close to 4% of the state's electricity use is in agricultural pumping. And so it's a major opportunity to shift around load to better match up with renewables for example or avoid periods of high demand. So Polaris was able to demonstrate 25 megawatts of shiftable load across 20 different farms in California and also showed some labor cost reductions by automating the controls on the pumps rather than doing it in a manual fashion. OhmConnect is doing something similar in the building sector. So this is aggregating lots of different residential consumers and helping them aggregate those reductions to be able to participate in the electricity wholesale market. So they're tracking great conditions and seeing when wholesale markets are spiking and then can call on their 200,000 users across the state. I think they may be outside of California now too but I think they've got over 200,000 users now and they can reduce their loads. Kaizo market compensates OhmConnect for that load reduction and then OhmConnect and then pass along that incentive to their users for making that reduction. So this is a really cool way of aggregating small loads. Sky cool systems. A number of these are Stanford connected innovations by the way and I'll highlight that a little bit more at the end so that this one was developed by a Stanford, this firm was co-founded by a Stanford PhD student. And what they're doing here is taking these sky cool panels. So these are kind of multi-layer films on these panels that are highly reflective to incident solar radiation but they also have very high emissivity so they can very effectively radiate heat. And as a result, the fluid that's flowing kind of getting piped through the panels is able to achieve a temperature that's below ambient. So they take that subambient fluid which is water and glycol I think in this application and then they pipe it over to a refrigeration unit. I think this is one of their applications on a grocery store and that cooled fluid can be used to make the refrigeration cycle more get energy savings, cooling for example, the condenser or cooling the refrigerant in that cycle. And one of the grocery stores was able to achieve like $3,000 of a monthly bill savings from this. Offshore wind is a really important emerging area for the state and I think I showed at the beginning that it could contribute very significantly to our 2045 100% clean energy future so we've got some specific planning targets for two to five gigawatts by 2030 and 25 gigawatts by 2045. The first lease sale was held by BOME and so now there are developers that are looking to deploy these technologies in the near term and we're conducting R&D to support this overall resource through technologies and studies looking environmental monitoring, anchor and mooring designs. So the little plot of the illustration of mooring line configurations is sort of a schematic of a very simplified kind of cartoon but we have a very detailed model that's being developed by NREL, National Renewable Energy Lab to look at different configurations and based on wind conditions and waves, seismic activity, et cetera, and cost considerations, what are some optimal configurations for setting up an offshore wind farm. And then the example on the bottom right is ART-CAM technologies which is developing 3D printing technology for concrete so this could be a way of doing some low-cost development of anchors and tower sections and so forth and cutting down on transportation costs. So one of the big issues is these devices are so big that it's really hard to costly to transport them from anywhere else so you need solutions that can be done, you know, manufacturing approaches that could be done for example in the port and easily deployed. And then we're also co-funding with some other states and federal agencies through the National Offshore Wind R&D Consortium. Lithium recovery, I kind of previewed this earlier, this is another important area. California is lucky to have a really fantastic lithium resource down by the Salton Sea and so this is not in the Salton Sea itself but further down the subsurface in Lawrence Berkeley National Lab just conducted a study suggesting that the resource could be big enough to support battery manufacturing for 375 million EVs. So that's a pretty significant global resource and it also has the potential to be developed in a more environmentally benign way relative to other forms of lithium recovery around the world which includes hard rock mining and evaporation ponds so here it's leveraging geothermal brine used for geothermal energy production and it can be recovered and then the stream can then be discharged back into the reservoir. A few of the issues here are scaling shown with the tape measure there so that's a pipe that's experiencing deposits of minerals so removing the silica from the brine is an important part of the process to control the scaling and cost issues, maintenance issues associated with that. Lithium recovery demonstration is another part of our portfolio so we're doing a one-tenth commercial scale system currently and then some areas looking forward are trying to recover additionally valuable minerals such as zinc and copper, manganese and magnesium and then also better advancing pretreatment strategy so handling the constituents before you remove the lithium and then we also have a decommissioning gas system decommissioning research and planning portfolio so as more customers move towards electrified equipment they will be leaving the gas system over time if that goes unmanaged you have smaller and smaller group of gas customers supporting all the infrastructure so gas rates could really increase E3's analysis suggest it could be 480% increased by 2050 if it went unmanaged and so we're looking at opportunities to pair back the gas system in a strategic way that supports kind of zonal approaches to electrification and reduces the infrastructure burden so they've identified in this example 360 meters or customers in the East Bay if you were to trim the gas system for them the savings would be in the neighborhood of $30,000 per meter of avoided replacement and repair costs so we want to do this in a more automated fashion too E3's doing very analytically intensive taking a very analytically rigorous approach so we want to be able to do this at a statewide scale and so we're also looking to develop a data driven tool to kind of automate the process of figuring out where the infrastructure may have a safety issue or need replacement soon or be of a pipe type that's more susceptible to rupture et cetera and there's some upcoming funding in that area and then last segment here is some new programs that I previewed before with the new state resources so I'll go into those now I'll take a drink of water here any questions on that so far? And I was wondering are there examples of statistical projects in the utility scale solar space and there are other opportunities to try to use the recipe Yeah, the solar is already rapidly expanding on the grids so that's one of the fastest growing segments of the grid today and I showed the battery storage as well so those are really rapidly expanding because well battery storage is critical for the grid balancing and solar is a very abundant resource with matured technology to capture it And just for the terminology Long duration here for you is like between two and 12 hours and short duration you'd say it's been a source of knowledge Yeah sorry not to clarify that before so what we're defining long duration as eight hours or more of duration and a typical lithium ion battery would be about four hour duration but we're interested in longer time scales as well tens of hours, hundreds of hours and we have some investments in that space so yeah that's a good intro into this so we have this new long duration energy storage program moving beyond lithium ion which is matured technology and less conducive for long durations and pumped hydro is also well established so we're looking at flow batteries potentially like compressed air systems gravitational systems are some of the different technology options here and there's going to be a competitive solicitation for 90 million dollars as planned in the next year Clean hydrogen production is another one of our upcoming areas so this is focused on primarily electrolytic pathways to hydrogen production so using electricity to break up water and generate hydrogen that way but we also at a more distributed level are interested in biogenic pathways using for example biomethane or other feed stocks to produce hydrogen in a way that could be used onsite so the centralized hydrogen is more envisioned to be electrolytic but distributed opportunities where the use and the production are both the same site could be more mixed in this program and then we're excited about this new area to us carbon removal like I mentioned in the scoping plan we need to achieve tens of millions of metric tons of CO2 reduction in mid-century maybe 100 million metric tons and so it's important to start to invest in performance improvements and cost reductions with these technologies the image is not a CC project but the first commercial direct air capture facility so pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then either utilizing it in the product like I mentioned with 12 or pumping it into the subsurface for long term sequestration so Air Loom just launched their facility in Tracy and have these trays of calcium hydroxide that capture the CO2 and then they heat up the end product and pull off the CO2 molecule and it's going to be used in cement production so we're going to be funding applied R&D field demonstrations and community engagement through this program and then industrial decarbonization and grid support so this is kind of a very hard to decarbonize segment of the economy industrial emissions account for about a quarter of California's greenhouse gases and coal is used in making cement tires and petroleum coke are used in making cement with glass manufacturing and chemicals as well those are the two others that have the highest greenhouse gas footprint in the industrial sector after oil and gas and cement so these are some of the areas that we're interested to try to decarbonize and make more grid friendly as we do so particularly with electrification strategies and then another one on community energy resilience so we're fortunate to be receiving some funding from the Department of Energy and this is going to be provided to grid owners and operators and some of the other entities noted here but research institutions and other entities could partner with those types of eligible entities and this is focused on storage, micro grid components including the storage or the controls of the communications to advance strategies for like reconductoring or undergrounding approaches et cetera so opportunities to build resilience to climate impacts and make our grid more robust leave it at that just a few other examples here Epic has a lot of different funding opportunities upcoming just a few noted here more on the R&D of long duration storage to complement the deployment program that I mentioned before virtual power plants the Cal Flex Hub initiative I mentioned at LBNL we're looking to create something similar for the industrial ag and water sector and then there's a lot of wonderful federal resources as well, battery manufacturing and direct air capture so we're looking to leverage those funds help California project teams and entities make good use of those funds and pair in some cases with state funds and then I alluded to this a little bit but many of these firms and many others in our portfolio have Stanford connections of one sort or another, PhDs, postdocs, undergrads, et cetera so it's an impressive network of innovators across the state and Stanford is playing a key role in training those leaders and then just wanted to leave it here with some opportunities to collaborate and connect Mike and others are leading this Stanford-CC partnership so Mike's providing advisement to the CC on R&D and energy assessments and so we're benefiting greatly from that expertise and perspective and looking to expand that and engage more people on campus so there's an opportunity to just think about a broader partnership there working with Leon now too on some opportunities for us to partner around some other areas as well so I look forward to just further conversation to see what's possible Schultz Fellowship Program is a great way to get an experience at the CC or some other state agencies where you can get a stipend and come join our agency or another for the summer there's collaboration on topics of mutual interest if you're doing research on an area I think it's of interest to the CC or maybe a class project we just partnered with the Goldman School one of their classes was doing some analysis related to the CC so welcome interest in maybe partnering on a class project or research topic and then we've got the volunteer program a nice way to maybe get some insights into state service, career opportunities as well you know I'd love to just encourage wherever I can have people to consider public service and moving into this clean energy space I didn't mention it but this seminar actually I used to come to it as a grad student and I was working in oceanography and fluid mechanics but this was a great way to just kind of get a glimpse of what was going on in the energy space so maybe some of you might be interested in taking the next step and trying out a career opportunity and funding opportunities as well upcoming and there's a couple of sites here if you want to track our upcoming solicitations so thank you, appreciate it Thanks very much Jonah that was extremely important with a lot of information in there so now we have a little bit of time for questions in the room any questions? Raise your hands Mike, if you want to go over to the next slide Thank you for your talk so yes, since you have a really good overview of all the projects that are coming up I'm curious to see are there certain problem spaces that I think more people should be working on? We need help across the board I would say but I think energy storage in particular is a really important emerging area we have wonderful intermittent renewable resources in California, a great solar resource our offshore wind is really promising as well but to bring those all together in a way that meshes with the demand side storage is going to play a fundamental role I mean I could mention every part of the portfolio they're all critically important demand flexibility on the other side I guess the broader theme maybe is things that can support grid reliability because as you go to more renewables you're dealing with more intermittent resources so how do you bring those together in a way that meets energy services that require energy at a particular time so there's different approaches either storage or demand flexibility or a balanced portfolio of different renewables that have different generation profiles throughout the day and through different seasons. Thank you for the great presentation I was really really excited when I saw the 25% market share of EVs in California I'm from Colorado and we're doing pretty good over there but what do you think other states can do to get that level of success? Right, I think building the infrastructure is sort of fundamental because otherwise you've got sort of range anxiety and so you want to build up that confidence that there's going to be the infrastructure there to get you where you need to be I mean I think that the vehicle market itself is really developing and greater ranges so that alleviates some of the range anxieties because there's more capacity on the vehicle itself I would think anything that could support infrastructure development is going to be kind of first step. Thank you so much for the talk I'm wondering is there any citizenship requirement for the state level funding because I know there is for federal level. Yeah I'm not aware of any citizenship requirement on the funding there's maybe one exception which was Russia but yeah I think it was you know if there's a company that's Russian owned there was a prohibition on that but I'm not aware of any others. Great, other questions over here? Thank you for your presentation you talk about electrification and gas decommissioning so I'm curious just do you think it's possible for like every residential house to completely get rid of gas appliances? I know it's like doable but I also noticed that many people they would prefer gas stove and like fireplaces because they like actual flames. You highlighted an important barrier which is you know customer preferences which vary and so I think our objective as a state is to make it as affordable and you know compatible with different lifestyles different consumer choices so it's driving down the cost of you know electric technologies and you know there's actually really I mean I just got an electric range and it's super high performing I mean it's very responsive so you know I told my family and they're kind of interested now and like you know they're trying it on my stove and so there's just kind of a little bit of a neighbor effects too you know as you see other people adopt technology you know the mindset maybe evolves a little bit but I think what's important is meeting people where they are what their preferences are and figuring out solutions that are compatible with that not necessarily trying to change their minds about something but maybe coming up with technology solutions that kind of incorporate the preference so what is it about the gas range performance that is underlying you know contributing to the preference is it something about you know the responsiveness or some other aspects of it and then trying to design the new electric technology to kind of satisfy that preference. Great any final questions right here maybe I'll make that the last question because technically we're supposed to end around now that's okay yeah. Hey thank you so much for your talk it's so refreshing I used to work in local government to see a government doing so much innovation work my question is about a little bit how government can get out of the way as well as supporting these projects so I've been really excited to see solar APP plus rolled out for residential solar in California and I just wondered whether you guys were exploring any utility scale solar or wind projects or the form of renewable energy projects which automate the permitting process and try and speed up the rollout of that energy. Yeah that's a really important barrier just permitting and interconnection of new resources so it's an important topic it's a little bit outside of the balance of my personal expertise but I know folks like Leong and others are really focused on these issues and so it's something that the agency is very focused on I would defer to someone like Leong to give you a lot of technical insight on that. Great, there are no other questions I'd like to do two things I'd like to thank Jonah and Mike for sharing their time with us and giving us all this information and hopefully inspiring it thanks a lot for ending with what you can do for all of you and the audience including students and then finally on behalf of Rachel and Chitanya and I thank you all for coming this quarter this is our last seminar for this quarter we'll see some of you doubtless in January when's the first seminar in January? January 8th so we're kind of offline until then but if you have any ideas for speakers continue to let them flow we benefit a lot from that kind of thing so with that said thanks one last time for coming today. Thank you.


Okay we're back we're live it's given Tuesday after Memorial Day and this is Hawaii the state of clean energy with Ramsay Brown and he's with Hawaii Energy which is dedicated to energy efficiency in the state of Hawaii. Good morning Ramsay how are you? Good morning Jay I'm doing well thank you. Thanks for joining us on the show. Let me let me get some context for a moment. Hawaii Energy this is a special agency created a few years ago to incentivize, to encourage, to promote energy efficiency in our state. Tell me how it works. That's correct Jay happy to and so we are funded by all of our electric bills in a HIKO territory formerly known as HIKOMIKO and HELCO and if you are a resident or a business within the Hawaiian Electric Territories then a small portion of our electric bills come into a fund that we steward back out responsibly in the form of energy efficiency rebates very cost effective it's the most cost effective measure we can take in our step towards 100 clean energy and we've been doing this for about 10 years now Jay that Hawaii Energy has been around and we have programs and educational programs for both again residents all of us who live in Hawaii and businesses and we we encourage folks to participate in as many energy efficient upgrades as you can to bring down our overall energy usage here in the state. Yeah and the idea being the idea being that not using energy is the best renewable of all that's right it's no imposition on the environment it's it's it's free not to use energy that's right and that unused energy lasts a long time we just keep not using it right yeah and we've been following you for those 10 years too so what kind of programs you know have you evolved to or what are your favorite programs at Hawaii Energy right now oh let me say before COVID because I'm gonna ask you what happened since COVID absolutely yeah well LED lights continue to be a strong way to save energy the technology has just advanced so much from the old days of incandescence and fluorescence to now LED lighting but believe it or not air conditioning technology has improved significantly as well there are a lot of companies looking into cleaner refrigerants technology lower greenhouse gas refrigerants pollutants and with that comes a lot of the efficiency analysis as well and so there are new ways to manage your buildings so that they use air conditioning more efficiency efficiently and new technologies and and even in our homes and of course we have rebates for those and one of the unsung heroes are transformers these boring gray boxes not the fun animated kind from our childhood or not the fun movies that you see in Hollywood for all ages very no but these transformers can save a significant amount of energy they're in buildings for at least 30 years upwards of 40 to 50 even and so the current existing technology that are probably hidden in your janitorial closets in all of our commercial buildings are pretty outdated and there's a significant opportunity to upgrade there they run 24 seven and so any equipment that runs all day all night is going to have an opportunity to save energy on the residential side water heating is a big user of electricity right behind air conditioning if your home has that we all have water heating in our homes we have good solar water heating rebates and even heat pump water heating rebates so consider taking a glance at where your hot water comes from at home and see what you can do about upgrading that as well but again to your point that was all pre-covid where some of our our hot ticket items hot ticket yeah so you know what comes to mind when I hear you describe that is a there's a kind of algorithm involved what I mean and I really like your thoughts about this is is when when you have a particular kind of energy efficiency device there's many of them there's many systems to be efficient with then you want to find out exactly how much efficiency is it generating you want to get some kind of metrics on it and you want to see for example whether it's old technology and maybe as you said it needs to be upgraded or updated to be more efficient and then there's a new metric on that and then you have all these different possibilities I mean it's endless and it's probably growing you know in terms of the technology to make energy more efficient that that's what technology is as far as energy is concerned in large part so my question is how do you do the metrics how do you say that this kind of energy deficiency energy efficiency system or device or technology is generating a return of say x x value and this one is x minus and this one is x plus then you have priorities I guess and so the one that gives you the best return for your buck is that the one you focus on is that is that where you put the rebates or is it that one or is it all of them it sounds like a very complicated algorithm but tell me how it works you're speaking my language now my engineering mind gears are turning and I could talk to you about spreadsheets and algorithms all day we do have a team of energy engineers we have an outside evaluation team of engineers who also looks at our numbers and vets them one again because as I mentioned in the start we're spending our public dollars at the end of the day and we need to make sure that we do so transparently and that the energy saving equipment that we're incentivizing is in fact going to save energy so there is a lot of measurement and verification that goes into this there are some round assumptions that we can make but in many cases we're doing measurements on the ground and doing some electric bill analysis what we call regression modeling to account for any variables and we're calculating the energy saved and able to go back and review who in fact the outside engineering firm does that at the end of our year they'll go back and verify that equipment was in fact installed and is operating as intended and they'll make sure that our program has accurately accounted for that savings and will either decrease or potentially increase the amount of savings that we've contributed toward our 100% clean energy goal so a lot of energy efficient ninjas working behind the scenes to calculate the savings from each of these equipment and it is a line by line every single rebate we have a measure we have a rebate for is calculated in one way or another and then we are able to row that all up into the larger overall savings and so you mentioned you know some of my favorite equipment are those that bring in a lot of the energy savings but also those that I like to highlight that aren't well known people begin to become more aware of where their energy is being used again if your water heater sits in a closet outside or your transformer is hidden in some storage room in your basement you forget that it's there and it's costing you money every month on your electric bill and so bringing that awareness to light is very important to the whole energy's mission as well yeah so this is just just a kind of an outreach thing where so I maybe I got a rebate maybe I should have a rebate are you gonna come and look are you gonna gonna tell tell me my water heater is in the wrong place it's next to the oven for example your two heating appliances right next to each other yeah you know one of the things that nationally efficiency programs are looking into are virtual home inspections and so that is something that's being explored again nationwide just how can we do a phone call maybe even the zoom car face time if residents are comfortable and help them to assess what their energy use is walking through you know one of my favorite tips is to walk through your home from one end of the the house to another end and unplug everything maybe you leave your refrigerator plugged in but unplug everything else and then go back through and plug in only the appliances that you need to use and you'll be surprised at some of the things that are plugged in that you didn't even realize were still plugged in ancient phone chargers perhaps old game systems that are just collecting dust that was that was in my case one of the things we found but just really understanding again from wall to wall within your home what is it that is using electricity and where can i go ahead and upgrade that oh yeah so you don't have to be there you know i'm thinking that uh be nice to have an engineer walk through my house but i i probably don't need to have an engineer walk through my house i can walk through my house myself if i just put my common sense on maybe talk to you on the phone or maybe uh on zoom i can find out from you how i can check my own system to see whether it is running at a reasonably optimal you know set of circumstances am i right absolutely and we put out videos and guidelines on our website so that to help people do exactly that if it's a product or an equipment that we offer a rebate for then there will be energy savings because we've already calculated that and so as part of the third party efficiency program it's also kind of a third party stamp of approval that this equipment has been vetted and will save energy and that's something we do on on our end you know i um believe it or not there are equipment out there that claim to save energy that in fact are not impactful or maybe just not right for the climate in hawaii and so we're vetting that as well so you can trust that there will be energy savings from installing and operating equipment on our menu of items both in the residences and in businesses um that they will save energy because we've done our homework yeah well that's that's very valuable because i mean like anything else and and we're finding out in the in the throes of uh covid that people sell you anything and they they may not really be telling you exactly what it will do so um how can how how much energy can i save how can i reduce my energy bill uh just give me a rough idea you know make impress me impress me ramsey a rough idea of how much energy i can save if i get efficient from an ordinary an ordinary user you know who doesn't it doesn't really care too much about it to a user who does care about it what's the spread yeah well we're looking at a solid 50 dollars of saving the spread would probably be 20 to 100 dollars um a year in savings uh easily with some of the efficiency measures that we have uh you might find this interesting we recently um did an analysis and found that in the summer months especially the more human months in hawaii our residential electric bills tend to be about 18 to 20 higher than in the cooler months and so of course that's heavily attributed to air conditioning maybe a little bit of more people being in the house due to uh summer vacation and that sort of thing but for the most part it's attributed to air conditioning loads and so anything we can do to make sure we're using our air conditioning wisely whether you're installing a smart thermostat that's going to sense occupancy or or make sure that you're only cooling enough that um that you need making sure you turn it off when you leave the house you're not pre-cooling and coming home to winter wonderland uh even your ceiling fans and your floor fans you want to make sure those are off when no one's in the room because contrary to popular belief just having the fan running isn't actually going to make your room cooler the way a fan works it is makes your skin feel cooler as the movement of the air passes over your skin so if there's no one in the room then there's no need to run the fan um and so again I hope those numbers are impressive enough for you and another impressive number we have is a five dollar energy kit that you can get from our website um hawaiienergy.com slash promotions and in it they have some led light bulbs um low flow water fixtures because again if we slow down how much water we're using in the sinks and in your kitchen sink when you're doing dishes and we use less hot water um and also in our showers there's a low flow shower fixture and also a smart strip a lot of times we have these fancy entertainment systems now and you think when you turn something off it's it's off but of course there are those phantom loads that are running day and night and these smart power strips help to turn those equipment off when you're not using it making sure that when the tv is off you can also shut down that blu-ray player maybe the game system and subsequent other ancillary equipment yeah I was going to ask you about that you know surely we have the technology to turn all these you know phantom power kinds of um appliances off I mean I should I go out and buy one or do you have the these outlets where you know from say uh I don't know say 10 o'clock at night to six o'clock in the morning it's off it doesn't have to be on it's off and I'm saving all the you know the base load kind of uh energy I might be using with the phantom power um what should I get that how do I get that and how much can you help me get that yeah you can get it from uh some of your retailers believe it or not the best buys of the world but we also do have it online which might be a little more convenient now of course you can probably find them on amazon we do have a rebate for them though on our website again go to hoieenergy.com slash promotions and you can click through there it's actually what we call our online marketplace for many energy efficient pieces of equipment for your home the smaller things again like the light bulbs little switches and these smart power strips and there's actually two versions of the smart power strip you can get an advanced smart power strip which is um even more um has even more bells and whistles to it but these will the way the smart power strip works to your point is you have a control controlled equipment usually in an entertainment center it's like your tv and then you have all of this other equipment that you don't really use if the tv is off right you don't need your blu-ray player or your dvd player and you don't need your your soundbar speaker on and so those will automatically turn off when the smart strip senses that the tv is off and so you press one off button and it's it's the effect of unplugging all of that ancillary equipment and so that will really save all night again all day when you're when you're not using that equipment it'll save on that energy use and it's it's just seeping out and it's a vampire sucking your your money out of your wallet we need to get that under control so uh now sometimes you give rebates sometimes you give you give equipment away free sometimes can you give me a handle on when one is appropriate and when the other is appropriate sure when we're doing our education um for different communities you know we'll often throw in prizes out there even even in some of our conferences and presentations just to get things moving I think also you know when we see that there are certain communities that are harder hit from any type of a disaster or that are just having a harder time adopting energy efficient practices you know part of our mandate is to make sure that we have energy efficiency that's accessible and affordable to all and so in those cases we may increase our rebate and it may be depending on the cost of the upgrade and you're virtually free and zero charge upfront to the customer and in those cases we definitely let people know that this is the type of program we're operating for the most part in some cases you know we like to see that the customer the the resident or the business is willing to put some money toward this efficient upgrade again energy efficiency is one of the few upgrades that you can make that's actually going to pay you back on your electric bill and so we want people to understand that and know that hey if you're still even paying a small percent of your efficiency upgrade that's a good thing your your payback is going to be one year two years maybe and after that you'll be making making a profit on this investment it's a great investment well the other thing is and if you do that if you're get skin in the game if you're going to kind of a partnership with Hawaii Energy and with energy efficiency in general you're going to be more aware you're going to be thinking about efficiency because since now it's part of your system your your home or your business and it's part of your business thinking about about trying to save money on energy so even if you you get a rebate or you're encouraged and incentivized to do one kind of thing it'll make you conscious of doing some other kinds of things maybe just don't require any money but that will nevertheless give you more efficiency so it's a mindset thing isn't it I sure hope so you know we're not able to measure mindset just yet but just elevating folks to be able to think a little more outward where they're aware of of their actions and the impact on others and of course the impact on our energy use and our environment is certainly an undercurrent I think that all of us at Hawaii Energy feel and want to be a part of and it's why we come to work every day so are you are you going to be more or less or equally relevant in the years that are coming between now and reaching our target I'm making the assumption we will reach our target I'm you know 100% clean energy by 2045 some people say 2040 but is Hawaii Energy always relevant as we proceed down that path absolutely always relevant and increasing in fact energy efficiency as a baseline is just again a wise investment it's the cheapest energy renewable energy as you mentioned you know step that we can take additionally you know we've been tasked with distributing some electric vehicle charge station funds electric vehicles are a known factor in our movement progression toward 100% clean energy and so we're looking at you know there is this argument between a cart and a horse and do you get more electric vehicles first or more charge stations first and so Arculiana part of Arculiana is to help spur the industry for more electric vehicle charge stations especially in the new construction zone which we're pushing even legislatively and then what can we do to to help get electric vehicle charge stations installed at the new construction it's so much more cost effective to get it in before you've poured the concrete and that sort of thing and also grid services in general so looking at smarter systems that can speak with the grid that can help the the demand and the load of buildings actually match that which the generation is providing because more and more of our generation is intermittent due to solar and wind and other renewables and so having that as a smarter grid system Hawaii Energy is involved and will be increasingly involved in that in the years to come you know I would I wanted to ask you also about these companies they're engineering companies that come and work for larger companies and particularly property management property ownership companies you know the kind of companies that are in the building owners association like downtown one comes to mind is Amoresco this is an engineering company right that tries to save owners money on using electricity so do you engage with them is there any interaction you tell them what to do do they tell you what they have done do you share advice and information indeed we do Amoresco is one of our clean energy allies and we have a whole group of nearly 200 clean energy allies that are working in the energy efficiency space both in residences and businesses and you mentioned the keyword their money J and where the Amorescos of the world are able to help support these energy efficiency upgrades is to provide a return on your electric bill that is going to be matched to the amount of investment that you've put into the building and so they'll do an audit and they'll identify all of these what we call ECMs in the industry or energy conservation measures and they'll work with the owner to put together a portfolio and a plan on what to install and when and how to finance it how to fund this thing so that that you get a positive revenue stream as soon as possible I won't speak for those those contractors you know each of them have their own way of doing business but suffice to say they are still doing business even today even nowadays and they're making it as a helpful and simple and streamlined for any of our our Boma our you know business owners and managers and downtown office buildings type facilities all the way to even smaller facilities that are able to and needing to finance some of their efficiency upgrades there are also new financing mechanisms that are coming online and they're they're very innovative and they just help you get your work done sooner faster sometimes with zero down and again you're able to pay it back on what would have been a higher electric bill now a decreased electric bill um one of the ways that we do that I'm going to tie this into your earlier question about measuring energy use we have a new program it's only a weeks old real-time energy management and so in real time these contractors are measuring how much energy is being used and they are able to measure baseline that against the previous measurement and seeing if there's a trend of increasing energy use they will literally call an employee or call a facility manager on the ground and help them to identify and assess where the savings or where this increased energy usage actually is coming from and how they can save energy and so that requires a lot of metering and monitoring that we're giving an incentive on but it also provides a long-term relationship between really between contractor and customer right and so the contractor is not just installing a piece of equipment and walking away anymore more and more what we're going to see is a relationship so that contractor helps the customer manage their energy usage be aware of it as you mentioned and see a trend of energy savings over time and there's going to be operational things that you can do to make sure you turn things on and off only when needed maybe even getting your employees involved doing some education with your your staff so that they're not turning on lights or calling for air conditioning when they don't need to be right there the folks in the office know best where energy can be saved they know where the hot spots are and where that freezing cold desk is that whoever sits there needs three blankets and they can help inform the contractors on where they can where the opportunities are for savings for balancing the energy use within the building and so that's something we're definitely looking into and happy to work with some of those large companies yeah it's all about technology that's I always say you know energy technology was first now there's energy and energy is the new technology you're talking you're talking about technology Ramsey so let me ask you one thing it keeps popping up and that is COVID you know you have a certain way of operating I think we we got the landscape I hope it doesn't keep popping up too much I mean you and me both so how has it affected energy efficiency how has it affected Hawaii energy I mean it's affected everyone but I have a feeling that you have ways to deal with it can you talk about it absolutely we'll have about a dozen slides here I would like to show about what way and Hawaii energy is doing and pivoting to for COVID recovery and response and on the second slide there we're able to see the impact of energy efficiency on jobs and it's been a huge industry and you may have seen in the news that it's been heavily impacted actually so you know 2.3 million people in the energy efficiency sector in the US over 5,000 in Hawaii and if we go to the next slide as we all know locally unemployment has been huge and we're going to see that there was a massive loss in total energy efficiency jobs nationwide but we were hit pretty hard nearly 2,000 total jobs on hold 50% of our own clean energy allies that I mentioned have said that they had to downsize which is just heartbreaking in our industry and so I want to go back to that clean energy ally survey that we mentioned and what slide 4 shows us when that comes up for you is some of the results there and one of the big takeaways in that teardrop on the left is that 95% of our clean energy allies are still able to operate they are deemed essential businesses and we do get calls from businesses asking if they can still continue their energy efficiency upgrades and we say yes the energy efficient industries are still working we're experiencing heavy delays 93% project delays 81% decrease in sales from our clean energy allies and over 50% supply chain disruption and again that 50% downsize in staff PPE is of course a limited commodity right now and it's difficult to get so we have some of our CEAs that are having a difficulty getting that and then again a quarter of our customers still didn't know that our CEAs were in operation and so something that we're doing is spreading the word we're letting our customers know answering the phones and telling people hey this is something that we're still able to participate in and now might be a good time to do so and so in our shift you know we're aligning with the state's recovery plan and so healing Hawai'i in phase one being stabilization you know lucky enough we have a forward thinking public utilities commission who actually gave us some guidance and we summarize them here in three bullet points ensure reliable and affordable essential services achieve clean energy in our climate goals which is great because that's a good investment to make at any time especially now and then support economic recovery from COVID-19 emergency so you're going to see that our following slides kind of build to this in the commercial sector what we have are increase in education and training online just like this where I get to talk to you Jay and doing more than ever we actually have seen an increase in participation as well maybe because people's schedules allow for a little more online training and not needing to to drive around the island to different conference venues and we're also extending some of our increased incentives from this year we're looking to increase incentives to next year you know what would it look like to have folks apply for maybe an increased incentive maybe a business that's been hit hard but they've identified a way they can save energy on their electric bill if they can ask us for an increased incentive and they can let us know why and we can we can check it against the budget that may be something that we're going to consider here in the next month or so as we start our program year 2020 on July 1st so that's a way we're pivoting again extending incentives looking at new incentives I mentioned the real-time energy management we're also really focused on commercial new construction right now because again if you can get that efficient equipment in at the start then that's the way to go for the lifetime of that building will be more efficient we've put out sector tips and guide sheets as well for the restaurant sector the grocery sector some of some of these hardest hit sectors that are still in operation even the multifamily sector those of us who live in apartment buildings and condominiums we're home all the time now and so that AOAO board and that multifamily facility engineer needs to really be paying attention to how they're using energy and so having these tip sheets have been really helpful and informing our community on what they can do to save energy and then some new technology so HVAC UV light disinfection right in the in our systems is that something that we want to be promoting is there an energy efficient form of it if not what is the energy increase that I can expect you know it's been recommended to use increased filtration filters that are more effective at filtering out different diseases well what can we do to be able to balance that if energy impact from those tighter filters for residents we've also been able to provide some tips we've been on the news most of our local channel is just explaining you know what people staying home more often now more than ever can do to save energy again be raising that energy awareness we've got games that people are playing at home on their mobile devices to help get energy tips and we've also increased our incentives and so I'm going to hover right here for a little while on these increased incentives because they're pretty significant and they're fairly new weeks old I would say most of them but if you recognize any of that the equipment there refrigerators window ACs maybe a pool pump that we can put a VFD on to control when it comes on all of that equipment is great and those are increased incentives the solar water heating when I mentioned that being one of our standard technologies is now more than ever a higher incentive and so if you're thinking on it before thinking about it before now's the time to act this is a great incentive a residential air conditioning as we get ready for summer again we know that those with AC and those with cooling 18 to 20 at least increase in our electric bills on average and so getting an energy efficient air conditioner is important and we even have one for energy star window ACs if that's all that can fit in and maybe some of the spaces in your home we also created these awesome cakey resources so working with the kids as well some coloring and games and just getting them aware of energy at a young age it reminds me of the games we used to play at zippies dying in when you're waiting for your food to get there so break out the crayons for those kids and color some of those resources and then next you know following our state's recovery plan we have phase two reopening the Kama'ina economy and phase three renew and rebuild the long-term recovery so some of the key sectors we're focusing on on the next slide are going to be government a new construction as I message as I mentioned office buildings also the multifamily sector that we've been working with already has has expressed interest in doing more efficiency now that the residents again our home more often a couple of other sectors we're going to focus on hotels you know our local hotels are really down right now but for some of them it's actually an opportunity during this low occupancy stage to install new equipment and upgrade the systems that had so what kind of increased incentives can we provide them that's still going to be cost effective and yet encourage them to take that step even in this time of uncertainty so we're working with some of our hotel customers there another case is that retro commissioning and energy audits are going to be important because they've got to balance their systems that they're looking to upgrade to recover from COVID-19 you know putting in new safety policies maybe new ventilation policies that they've never had before and this is not how their buildings were designed to operate initially and so they may need to rebalance the whole building and then that's something too important to keep in mind for us as we offer some of these new incentives that we can encourage folks to take retro commissioning and energy audits seriously now so hotels and even the health care industry believe they're not health care industry is looking to still upgrade energy efficiency our rural health care industry was hit pretty hard as they had to shift to for COVID-19 and so how can we help those rural health care facilities as well to lower their electric costs health care being quite having quite a high electric bill the next four slides are just going to build to a quick program strategy that I want to end on so providing financial support enhancing our funding maybe offering this idea of a grant that I mentioned that folks can apply for and will show us that they're actually going to invest that money in energy efficiency next we've got new ways to connect so utilizing that virtual digital technologies maybe doing those virtual in-home inspections or audits and and working with our business customers in the same frame our improved environment will be next so indoor air quality or IAQ is something that is often cited these days and so what can we do to offset some of the energy consequences of making sure that we're fleshing our spaces with clean fresh air maybe we can balance that out with the another energy savings equipment in another space and finally looking at some downturn opportunities so as I mentioned it with lower occupancy in hotels or office buildings taking advantage of this for those that are able to make the most of the time where we can be upgrading to energy efficient equipment so that in our recovery and for a long term savings they will be able to see a decreased electric bill I hope I summarized enough for you or some of our recovery plans for Hawaii energy post COVID-19 and as you'll especially see some firm changes come July 1 in our new program year 2020 maybe we can check back with you again then but it but it strikes me Ramsey that you're on it Hawaii energy is on it on every aspect of it you're you're a tech company and you're using the technology and the analysis to handle it every way you can thank you so much for coming around thank you for your participation and your support of think tech we greatly appreciate that hope to see you again soon Ramsey thank you for having me Jay aloha


Hello and welcome again and this is an interesting series. Please take all your land from here and apply it to yourself because I try to self-improve and also work on things from my processes. This is not by any means the make all and be all but it's just one of those experimentation that happens in my spare time that we get like fine magic and see how we can apply them to improve our imagery, our process because it's a self-journey of discovery and on the table of today's discussion we'll be discussing how we would like to take diffusion from the production workflow. This is a Mitchell B diffusion here that we should like using a matte box and how we can take that and put it in post and we'll be using Resolve as our main pipeline application in exploring this talk. I shot a couple of test footages with some filters I have in my kit and some of the grades that I actually enjoyed that have trained my eyes to be able to identify. Cut them together and see an A, B and C. Can you tell the difference? What are the benefits of taking diffusion and actually working on it on set?  You know when you're rolling on film there's no delete it or make the card available for more space what you have is what you get so with diffusion you are committing to it you get so you have to be serious minded about it but taking diffusion and put it in post it becomes it gives you freedom apart from the fact that you can change things but you can in prep use that to be able to craft what you will call the look you get it now becomes one of the tools you can integrate into the look apart from the experimentation the choice of lenses and everything that can happen. Also some of the things that you can actually weigh as the benefits to actually taking diffusion into post. There's a small company called Video Village that actually has something called Scattered if we quickly take a look at what I've done here like you can see I just have like a clear there like all the footage is whereby we have like black satin and some other grids of diffusion is going to come up which we're using comparing this but it's like the clear footage and on this we just have a simple notary not in very elaborate something like the exposure CDLs whereby we'll do color correction we created like a color space transform pipeline to be able to employ scatter into this so on that we'll just actually have that come in here whereby we can actually see what's going on right then on this note we get to introduce scatter so when I actually turn it on you get to see that applies a grade of diffusion so we'll just randomly run through a couple of diffusion right and in the end we can compare as I go on we can compare the results and you get to tell me in the comments how you feel about it and if this is helpful to you or spark something in your brain you could actually just leave a thumbs up subscribe leave a comment below and share this video so let's get into it so I would enable the note scanner now and if we're going through it I would turn on the effect so we can like see more of it right now it's turned off so right now it's mapped to an aero loxic pipeline using like color space transform on it and but it has other gamma curves that are available from accc t to black magic to canon lock 2 and lock 3 dji cine davinci wide intermediate like all the camera curves are like actually on it you get so you can actually apply what's native to your camera I actually did this because when recording I created a custom show lot that I used on my c70 to just record the clear test so it's already coming in with a rex 709 look and since like you can see it has like an inaccurate rex 709 look here right that's why I'm actually like using like a cst pipeline to be able to like accommodate for this so for now we'll leave it as a loxic so right now it's set to black promise and you can see this I'll toggle it off and on um I'll turn off the notes so the picture becomes big so if I toggle it off you can see what it does to the highlights and how it raises the contrast a bit you can see how that affects the image so you can actually tell how much of the intensity this would at the quarter level if you want like dial it up to taste right you can actually make it like a lot more dense and you can see how it affects the image now with and without and this could be like a plus two strength if you're actually working on set like changing filters in post you get it's quite interesting and fascinating because it eliminates the whole change the filter this way the close up match it make sure you match the filter and you can like really should pick up the speed and when you get into post production be able to dial it but there's a caveat if you're the person who shot it and you're not the person who's going to sit in post to be able to establish this workflow then all of it is for nothing it's not going to cut through if it's going to be hand off to the person there's no guarantees that the person's using this pipeline or this workflow so all of that just goes out the window that's like the big caveat but if you check the other filters there I would reset the intensity um let's see reset that back to one I believe there is a hold up for a bit see if I can access that okay great um yeah we'll just reset this back to one now if we look at it we have like black diffusion we can go in and we have other effects like the black frost what it does to um the skin and you also have um focal lens which you can go in this one we're shooting on a 43 so that was what it was because I used the dual lenses to be able to like make this test when I was working on this um this was a 43 so you can match your focal length and with compression so you can actually be true to what you actually have and I left the frosted bob that we use like hairspray to make it look all that advantage you'll be able to also get some highlight into frame um if you enable the highlight you can choose how it behaves around that what it does to the highlight and what you can see what it does how much of the color retention what's the cutoff that happens there what's the radius you get so on the highlight recovery we can get in more colors into it if we lower the cutoff and we can actually um clip it off depending on what um you intend to it also has highlighted adjustments so if the highlight is really looking out you could actually work on how that actually um plays around but this was shot in such a safe manner that you could clearly almost not see the difference because if we crank that to like the top of it you'll be able to catch more but just getting back into most of what the filtration has in stock we also have other options right um whereby you see the classic soft effects and it has like it has different strength if I go to strength of one and if I turn it off and on you would be able to I could zoom in uh okay there um let's see if we can find yeah so this with it on so that's like it on on the so we can see what that looks like right when we go back we can clearly um see what it adds to it the softening that it actually brings into um versus without if we check all the effects such one of the interesting ones that I actually like is smoke because it gives like this atmospheric presence and I've been like messing around with it for a bit but this does not transfer into like a lookup table or some kind of this detail that you can like bake into the camera you know it actually reads most of what you have and go off it so it's not like you can put it into like a show lot or some of those kind of things you get um you can see what smoke does how it actually adds like haze to the entire um footage you get and you can see I just like by working the slider would you be able to like tell what it does you can make it more intense and you get like a lot out of it but what is what is funny about this is if this is actually this great because the only telltale sign you know something like this didn't happen because in real life if this was happening and you had like a heart source coming through maybe from the background of the girl it's going to create like a real beam as the scene is it's going to set it out straight as though like there's this um volumetric quality of light that's actually happening so um I'll just put up a bunch of footage between the clay and the smoke and the rendered footage so I'll outlabeled them right with what was shot and what was against it and you tell me the comment do you think this is great enough to take into the field do you think it will suit into your workflow so in the end it just comes down to preference taste and what works for you you get the others like the Mitchell B um diffusion you can see how it softens it a lot as opposed to like I'm working the slider so I'll crank it up to the highest so you can probably catch it and I'll turn it off you can see how it affects the sharpness of the footage so if you're working with very sharp lenses like you can like just dial it off to taste maybe there's like a split difference between a grade of B and a grade of C that you want like explore this gives you the opportunity to be able to do that so tell me in the comments it's got to work to your attention does this speak to something that you would introduce into your workflow um idea better with you you found out using that I do not know so please share me put me a process and we all get to learn together but this is just something I've been tinkering with for quite a bit though and let me know what your thoughts and your take is on there so yep until next time when I get to see you improvise, adapt and overcome


Dear students, in this module, we shall discuss the structure-function relationships of organisms in detail. Dear students, the functions are based on structures. And in living organisms, the structural designs have been developed to match the functional demands. This property are this type of development of structures, enables them to play the role and fulfill their job within an organism. Here, we will take an example in which we will compare frog-feeding mechanisms and the structures involved in them and their functions. And we will see how the structures are related to their functions. In the first step, when the feeding process starts with a frog, a frog leaps for its prey. When it leaps for prey, it contracts its skeletal muscles which are attached to its bones of a limbs. After receiving the food, food reaches the stomach. Stomach has smooth muscles which grind and mix the contents of food. After digestion, nutrients are absorbed and they are absorbed into the blood. Blood flows due to the beating of cardiac muscles of the heart. In all this process, we can see that the structures of muscles have specializations for their functions. For example, the skeletal muscles are evolved and adapted for movement of bones. The smooth muscles of digestive tract are specialized for grinding and mixing of the food contents. Similarly, the cardiac muscles are specialized to pump and circulate blood. Dear students, the structure-function relationships are not restricted to muscle tissue only, but they exist at all levels of biological organization. They are found at the tissue level and down from the tissue level, they are found at the molecular and cellular and molecular levels. We shall take an example again to see that structure-function relationships exist at all levels of biological organization. Beginning with the whole organism, we can see that the level of structure-function relationships comes down to the system level, to the organ level, to the tissue level, to the cellular level and to macromolecular and molecular levels. The muscular system at the system level helps to move the limbs. At the organ level, we see that these muscles provide, are made up of group of muscle tissues. These muscle tissues itself are based on the cellular level.  The contractility in the muscles depends on the contractility of these cells, but these muscle cells have such units or assemblies, which we call sarcomeres, which are the basis of contraction. These sarcomeres are themselves made up of two types of proteins, which are contractile in nature, and these proteins are made up of molecular bases.  That is our aim. From this whole example, we can conclude that functions are dependent on their structures and the various structures have evolved to fulfill the demands that a physiological process presents.


Well, the biggest difference with cloud native applications is they're deployed in microservices and smaller components. Traditional applications were deployed inside of a data center where they were protected by the firewalls and the perimeter. Cloud native applications, they live in the cloud. They have to be secure and protected from all sorts of threats that aren't normally associated with the traditional application. Cloud native applications are different in cloud native apps because the cloud native apps tend to have a lot more components, they have microservices and those are spread throughout the cloud and different cloud providers, which means you have a much wider area of security that you need to pay attention to, where traditional apps are typically more contained with fewer components. When you think about cloud native applications and microservices, they have to be able to connect with each other and identify who they're talking to. Their APIs have to have the ability to authenticate and to secure the transactions that they're making with each other. A traditional application never had to worry about what component is calling search or what component is initiating a transaction. In a cloud native application, there are so many different attack surfaces and ways an application has to be safe that it makes it much harder to develop and deploy and to manage it from a security perspective. So cloud native apps tend to run on Kubernetes, which is a layer that orchestrates the containers that they run in, and that adds a whole other layer, effectively, in an operating system that has to be secured with a whole new set of vulnerabilities that can happen and that have to be bound and cured for. Well the software development life cycle is a critical component of developing secure applications. All too often, traditional application development has left security to the end of the life cycle. It's been something that development teams wait for security to demonstrate and approve that their application is safe to deploy. What you have to do in the software development life cycle is you have to move security earlier. Security has to be a key requirement and it has to be tested for every commit. One of the things I recommend teams to do is to incorporate security testing as a part of their pipeline so every commit is tested and validated for security. That way no new vulnerabilities are introduced as you develop new code. Yeah so when you're thinking about security, you want to get that as far left as you can in your processes of developing the software. You don't want to wait until you're about to release it to then say let's check it and make sure it's secure because if that happens and you find problems, now your release is stuck and you've got to go all the way back and have it developed again or looked at again and it's a lot more expensive to find problems the further into production or past production that they get. So what we want to do is do security testing, scanning, all of that is part of the development process and enable the developers to fix the problems so that they don't end up in the hands of operations to do it. Well digital transformation is an incredibly important trend that's happening and touching every industry. Digital transformation means moving faster and accelerating delivery of value to both meet the customer's expectations but also to be able to keep up with the competition. Software development has to change in order to go faster and I think there's three or four key things to do to go faster. You have to enable teams to collaborate across silos, to collaborate and share information. You have to think and change the way we develop to go from large releases to smaller and smaller, more granular changes. I think of it like this in making very small steps to reach your goal. You can react to how the goal is changing and this is a mindset change that teams have to go through. We call it minimum viable change and it helps us to go amazingly fast. The third thing I would add is automation, building a pipeline that automates the manual tasks and the manual tasks that go into delivering software. Automation is a key driver to enable teams to go faster. Teams that are adopting digital transformation should be focusing on how efficient they are at getting their software ideas, their ideas into software and actually out into production so that they can get feedback and they can continue to make adjustments. So one of the really good advice is to think small and iterative rather than doing a big, large development process and then only getting something out months later or weeks later even to find out that it's the wrong thing. What we recommend is doing what we call minimally viable change, which is if it's better, what you've done is better than what you have now, get it out there. Because then it's live, you can get feedback from the world, you can learn and adjust and make sure that you hit the target.