Why the Future of Architecture Is Off-Grid: Climate-Resilient Design Without Compromising Aesthetics ft. David Sells (Hawaii Off Grid)

In Hawaii, resilience isn’t a trend—it’s a business necessity. With some of the highest energy costs in the country, an islanded grid, and growing climate risk, the built environment has very little room for inefficiency. The question isn’t whether buildings should change—it’s how to do it without sacrificing comfort, cost, or design.

My guest today has built his entire practice around answering that question.

Joining me is David Sellers, founder of Hawaii Off Grid, an architecture firm that made a bold decision to only design net-zero buildings—and has been delivering fully off-grid architecture since long before it was mainstream. David’s work sits at the intersection of sustainability and smart business: buildings that generate their own power, lower operating costs, and look exceptional doing it.

He also developed Surf Block, a new building material made from surfboard waste that’s fire-resistant, mold-resistant, and insulating—turning a local waste challenge into a scalable resilience solution.

Today, we’re talking about what it really takes to design resilient buildings that people want—and why this approach is moving from the fringe to the future.

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[Host: Lauren Scott] Welcome back to another episode of The Resilience Report.

This episode is going to be so complimentary for our listeners who have listened to previous podcasts, and where we've talked about, for example, the pressure buildings, whether they're residential or commercial, are putting on the grid, maybe some of the grid constraints, how much energy buildings are taking these days, because today we're really going to look at how there is maybe a more responsible approach that we can have when it comes to the built space, with an expert who's going to walk us through some of the latest innovations in the area, and certainly his passion for this particular space. So with that, I would love to welcome David to the show.

[Guest: David Sellers] Thank you, Lauren. Nice to meet you, and I'm really excited to talk with you.

Well, I always like to start the top of our conversation off on a high level, because while we have listeners from all different sectors, it's always great to level set, so that everybody understands certain terms that we're going to be using. So when we talk about something like a net zero building, what does that really mean in the broader landscape? 

For me, I've simplified it for us, and it's based on, sort of, our impact and maximizing that impact. : 80% of the carbon associated with a building is related to its operation over its lifetime. So what we've committed to at is that any new building that we build will be net zero. When we say net zero, we mean that over the life of that building, it will not emit carbon to operate, i.e, we will be generating the building's own power on-site. The strategy there is, if we can take big chunks of carbon emissions and get rid of them, then we can focus on the smaller, you know, chunks. We are focusing on the smaller ones, but the first thing is that big 80%. We can get that out of the way. Thanks to advancements in technology and the, sort of free market, the lower prices for some of this technology, it's more accessible and easier than it has ever been.

Well, to that end, you've been in this space now for a number of years, and I think probably more people have become familiar with the term net zero over maybe the past or so years, but I'm sure when you first got going, that was not the case, and that you were having to do a lot of convincing and taking risks at the beginning. So, I would love to first understand what made you want to take that leap. And then, what was some of that adjustment period like at the very beginning? 

So, I've wanted to do this for a really long time, and I'd like to say that I'm really smart, and I figured it all out, but honestly, it happened to be a coincidence of technology advancements, delivery to market, a little bit of economic factors. Why Off Grid? We started years ago. We just finished our 10th year of being an architecture firm. Five years ago, in 2020, we said, okay, we're gonna make a stand. COVID was just happening. We were like, you know, we may not have a business in a few months, so it was kind of like, well F it, like…We're just gonna do this.

Kind of a funny story, but we had a client that we weren't sure we wanted to work with, and when we were in the meeting. I said, you know, we require all of our new builds to be net zero at a minimum, ideally off-grid, and really what we're trying to attain is carbon sequestration with our architecture. And, this gentleman, who's now a friend and a long-time client kind of pause, and he's like, okay, fine, yeah, whatever, that's fine with me.

And so we walk out of there, and one of the staff that was with me in the conference room said, we require that now? And I was like, well, I guess we do. So we just kept going, and nobody has ever, you know, said no. The name of our firm, , was meant to be a little bit of an identifier of our values and our ethics to kind of connect us with those that have kind of the same morals and values. And hopefully, at one point, we're planning on having a branding change, and we're just going to be HOG, because it'll no longer be necessary, because everybody in the industry will be providing net zero buildings, and there won't be any distinction in our name that will separate us. But for now, we're gonna continue with to kind of put that out there. But I think for me, you know, being net zero is really just about having a little bit of freedom, feeling good about where you are, and having a little bit of hope that we can make a change and make a difference. We have everything that we need to do that right now. All the equipment, technology is there, it's just the will. So, we connect with the people who have the will, and we show them that there are economic benefits to doing that, and it doesn't necessarily cost you more money. We just need to plan from the beginning. So that's why our sort of mission is to… all of our new buildings. It's really hard to retrofit an old building when you can't start from the beginning and position the building correctly. orient and design the roof the way that you want. So… so yeah, so… so net zero has a lot of different meanings, but for us, it's just hitting that % of that carbon that we're emitting into the atmosphere. If we all did that as architects, we would make a huge difference, almost overnight, and we hope that people emulate us.

It's interesting, I find with any change, you have to first start, obviously, there has to be the desire there, but then there's also such a deep element of muscle memory, so when you're trying to work with customers who maybe see the value of going off-grid or going net zero.

But they're just used to doing things a certain way. How do you kind of bring them along and help educate them, but then also, I guess, encourage them to do the uncomfortable and to make the changes with you?

Yeah. First, we try to provide an example, so we have enough examples and enough different circumstances where we can show clients, like, here, you can live off-grid, you can have multiple electric vehicles, you can have air conditioning, you can have swimming pool, you know, you can have all of the things, the creature comforts that you're used to. What you won't have is you won't have a monthly power bill. What you won't have is you won't have aging infrastructure that is intermittent in its power supply. We're fortunate in the fact that we do work in a rural setting. You know, Hawaii, for the most part, outside of Honolulu, is a rural, you know, kind of environment. So in a lot of places, and this is where we really try to focus, in a lot of places, it's economically - the best solution to be off-grid. So if you live, you know, yards from the nearest power line, and you need to bring in two, either, you know, telephone poles with, you know, power lines on them, or you need to bury the power, you know, in the ground and bring it to your house, there's a cost associated with that that you have to cover. Typically, that cost is a large portion, or is equivalent to the cost of an average energy system. So, once you make that investment in a capital improvement of copper and conductors and conduit, and all this stuff, all you're locking yourself into is a monthly bill, regardless of if you use power or not. 

In Hawaii, we pay, well, for the most part, with the exception to Kauai County, which has a co-op, the main islands of Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii Island, we are all under the Hawaiian Electric umbrella. We pay the most in the country for electricity. So here's where we really want to focus, is not on “You need to be a, you know, hippie-ish, granola, tree-hugging person.” What you need to care about is, do you like to pay more for things, or do you like to pay less for things? We want to show you, and I always kind of say this, like, being green is about money. Like, money is green. So if we can save you money, and we're saving carbon from being emitted into the atmosphere, then it's a win-win, and that's what we've got to, as professionals in the industry: focus on that. And that's another thing where we're really trying to use style and aesthetics to bridge that gap. We are not trying to convert people's ideology on whether the climate is changing or what's causing it. I don't want to talk about that at all. You can come up with your own conclusions. I want to talk to you about this will save you money, it will provide resilience for you, you don't have to worry about intermittent power with storms. You can take care of yourself for less money. And oh, by the way, it does fulfill a personal climate pledge that I have, but for that customer and that client. We want you to have beautiful, aesthetic architecture that you want, and oh, by the way, it turns out that it's off-grid. So that's really, like, kind of boiling down the essence of what we're trying to do.

Just to double-click into that for a second, if we have listeners who are far away from the built space, and you were explaining to them how you were able to do that. Of having that aesthetic, beautiful space, and then being off-grid. Where does that magic happen? 

Well, so, you know, we passed kind of a little bit of a rule in our studio a few years ago. We said, you know what? We want to think about, and part of it is the evolution of things. It's happened so fast. When I was mentioning earlier that it happened to be an intersection of timing that was… is really allowing this to happen. I've been wanting to do this for a long time. And it just so happened that in , about , we designed our last energy system. This is just pre-Hawaii off-grid, and I designed a large energy system, and it used lead-acid batteries. It comes around, and we felt comfortable, we started testing lithium-ion batteries. on, so the last years, basically, we've only specified lithium batteries, and the price has come down about -%. So, we're now kind of… we've been able to go through this fog of technology being sort of thrust upon you and quickly changing, and we're able to look backwards a little bit. So we can see a little bit more perspective. We see solar panels, and we think about, as architects, we think about materiality of things. What are solar panels, essentially? They are typically large planar surfaces that are made of an impervious material in its class, typically, with maybe some aluminum. Glass doesn't rust, which is important in a maritime climate where we are, so there's no corrosion. It's waterproof. Glass lasts for a long time. Everybody has seen really old buildings with original glasswork. So, if we start to use this material for its materiality, then we stop thinking about it as a pasted-on application. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to increase the sort of renewable production and the aesthetics. At the same time, we're trying to tell a story about the place that we're in, culturally, technologically, climate, politically. And… and that should be evident. When you look at one of our buildings, we want it to tell a story to the observer. 

So what we've been able to do is we've been able to use solar panels and renewable energy in a more aesthetic way. If you see one of our energy systems, they are beautiful. We've packaged them in these really sleek boxes, and they look like an appliance, a high-end appliance. And if you look at, say there are several of our houses, when you look at them, you can tell, like, oh, wait a minute, this whole lanai, this covered, you know, porch area where there's outdoor eating and seating. That's all solar panels. But they're beautiful. They're glass, they're sleek, they're kind of elegant, they're bifacial, so any of the light that's reflected from the surfaces underneath make the solar panel more efficient and productive. So instead of pasting those on top of an existing roof, which is… the roof is a multi-layer system of structural components and impervious surfaces. So it doesn't make any sense. If someone in our office, one of our architects came and said, I've got this impervious surface that I've designed and I'm gonna put this other impervious surface on top of it ,everybody's like, what are you talking about? Why would you do that? So we want to think about, you know, and this is, again, it's a luxury that we've been doing this long enough to where, you know, about years ago, we were able to say, you know what? Let's treat this as an element, as a materiality and integrate them into the building. And by doing that, we can get rid of the impervious surface for, say, a lanai or a big overhang on your roof structure. We can lower the cost, and then instead of having, you know, wood framing, plywood, TNG decking, a moisture membrane, standing seam, metal roofing, and then solar panels. We can just get rid of all that, and we can just put the solar panels. So now we've cut the cost of the solar panels, and you have no cost. And now, it's not only producing energy for you, which is saving you money, but now it's become a beautiful aesthetic element that's unique to that exact place, because the solar is responding to the natural forces of the environment, the sun, the trees that may be around it. So, it starts to, again, tell that story about that place and time and the people that are there inhabiting and using that structure. So yeah, so that's kind of how we're trying to think about solar and architecture together.

That's brilliant. I mean, it makes it so much more functional at the end of the day. It's not just a nice-to-have, it's actually the core of what you're offering there. 

When you're trying to do these big changes and really rethinking and disrupting the industries, it does also sometimes require reaching out and creating relationships with members that might otherwise have been viewed as competition. I know you've worked with other architects and… or firms in the area. What has that looked like with traditionally, you would view somebody as a competition, but at the same time, you're trying to achieve these, maybe, broader goals of moving the industry forward?

Well, you know, having a sort of niche and a specialty, in an emerging technology and sort of in architecture, hopefully, a new sort of zeitgeist. It's allowed us to work with some of our sort of architectural heroes, which is really cool. At first, it was odd. We have had a client for a number of years, and he kept telling me, no, I want to talk to you, I want to build this house, and you helped me previously, and I'd love, you know, work with you again. It's a… sets up a meeting. I was really excited, and I get there, and and I see a set of plans on the table and I look at the title block. And it says, Olson Koundig on it. I'm like, no! I'm like, no, I thought we were gonna get to design your house.

And, and he said, you know listen, I'd like to have this house designed by Tom Kundig, but I want it… it needs to be off-grid. I want it to be off-grid, and you've helped us with that before. would you be willing to work with them and help them integrate that? And of course, I said no. I was like, no, are you kidding? Not those guys. I said yes, and I was like, of course, we'd love to, and so that developed a relationship, and then I'm able to then proselytize to Tom and the rest of the team over there, and I'm like, hey, you know, if we can tell our clients that they need to be net zero, then you guys can, too. 

Like, who are we? So, we're trying to, like, nudge and push them, and and in the end, we were able to bring a little bit more dynamics. I told them, I said, look, I'm not gonna put any solar panels on your house. I was like, let's do a separate structure that the client wants. And in the end, we came up with a design that integrated water catchment / cisterns that were inside the building, and the building drained into them. It's a huge, you know, photovoltaic array that we're incorporating hydrogen production, because in off-grid circumstances, we have… most times, we have more power than we can use.

Because we have to design for the worst-case scenario. And in this particular building that we designed, we kind of sent it back over to Tom and the team over at Olsen Kunding. I'm getting back with it sketched up and said, I really, I really like this. I'd like to change the house to kind of mirror what this building is doing. And that, for me, was, like, one of the most complementary, you know, points in my career. I was like, wow, you know, look what we just did, you know? We're like, we're practicing our little craft that we have this little niche for, and people appreciate, respect it, and it has… there's something to it. I think there's a timeliness. We can't deny that - most of us can't deny that - the climate is changing, but how do we respond to it? And again, you know, that kind of sense that % of the carbon emitted today into the atmosphere is coming from buildings. It solely places a lot of that responsibility on architects, because we've been the ones that have been designing these buildings, right? Another -% is building materials, so again, those are choices that we make, and so that's in our practice, we've really doubled down on that. We're trying to make our own materials that are carbon neutral, or actually sequestering carbon and increasing performance. 

And then the other aspect is, you know, % of the carbon today is going to be sort of for general transportation. We designed you know, developments, whether it's neighborhoods, you know, urban planning for towns, so we do impact and have an influence on how people, you know, work with public transportation or private vehicles. So again, a lot of responsibility on architects. So, now, for us getting to work with other architects, and have them being influenced, or kind of motivating them to do similar strategies: I mean, sometimes I have to pinch myself. This is crazy, I can't believe we're getting to do this. So, it's a whole lot of fun in the end.

Well, you touched on the building materials piece, too, I think sometimes. So I'm… I professionally work more in the operations space, I'm very aware of that, but then often you get to talking about embodied carbon in terms of the materials, and really what that looks like, and so much of it is we're relying on old material, or material we've been using for decades and decades and decades. We're not really rethinking at it from the ground up. However, you've really taken, I think, both a local aspect with the material of what you're converting over to this new building material that's just incredibly innovative, so if you could share a little bit more about that, that would be wonderful. 

Sure. Well, it's something we're really excited about. So, about years ago, when we first opened our office, our office is located in the historical Powella Cannery. It's an old pineapple cannery that was built years ago. We're about to have our 100th anniversary, for when the building was built. And the pineapple operation stopped in the late 60s, and it was vacant for a bit, and then it's become a makerspace. So it's this huge industrial building, and now we have or surfboard manufacturers, one pretty large one. And then we have a cabinet shop, a millwork shop, and a few other, sort of creative spaces, plus our office. So, I would go out to the dumpsters to take out the trash, and yeah, I remember the first time I opened the dumpster, and it was just full of styrofoam. A big, full-size dumpster, it's full of styrofoam. I was like, wow, that's a lot of styrofoam. Close it, go to the next one, open it up, it's full of styrofoam.

Gosh, this is… that's a lot of Styrofoam. And it's all going to the landfill, and this is what I found is indicative of Hawaii. We are sort of at the tip of the spear for all of the issues that the world is sort of facing, because we're an island, right? So we have all of the circumstances and factors that everyone is dealing with, we just have them condensed in a very small space. Landfills are controversial. Nobody wants a landfill in their backyard. And the things, this culture of just throwing things away: it has to… at one point, we have to, like, okay, how are we going to change the way that we do this? You know, we have, like, William McDonough and sort of the cradle-to-cradle aspect, but when are we really going to implement that, you know? And what are we gonna do as individuals? It's interesting to have this sort of strategic thought and theory, but how are we going to start to implement that? So when I look at that dumpster full of styrofoam, I'm like, we've got to be able to do something with this. And I had learned years ago, I had helped a really good friend of mine build a house in southern Washington state where it's very cold. And it's very kind of a remote, place, and, common for the power to go out there, so heating the house is often, you know, by sort of a fireplace. So we needed to be real efficient. And he said, hey, I found these… he called them big gray blocks, and they're insulated composite concrete forms. And I looked at him, and I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And so we built his house out of these forms, and I got to help him stack the blocks, and that was a lot of fun. And so when I'm looking at this dumpster, I'm like: I could make those blocks out of this styrofoam.

I grabbed a couple pieces, and I chopped it up, and I got a weed whacker, and I chopped it up with the weed whacker, and I mixed it. And, in the end, it took us about or so years, and we kind of figured out how we can do it. And about, two and a half years ago, the county offered us a grant. They said, hey, we, we have an issue with our landfill. We're running out of space, and we don't want to, you know, have to buy or, worst cases, use eminent domain to take over more land, to create a landfill. We're looking for solutions. We'd heard you're working on this little, you know, sustainable building material project. Would you like, you know, some money to help get it going? And I was like, well, heck yeah, that sounds great! I've never done a grant before. I didn't realize that we'd have to, like, hire someone to just take care of the grant, and in the end, I was like, you know, we probably should have just done a couple more jobs and then taken that money and, you know, actually done this ourselves, but it was great to have that partnership and a little bit of nudge. Fast forward a couple months, we had started developing our first prototypes, and then the fire in Lahaina, happened in 2023. We put everything on hold. We responded to that, and we kind of did what we could to help people get, you know, sort of stabilized and provide temporary housing and temporary schools, etc.

And then once we, kind of, we're able to catch our breath, and you're like, you know, this is really important. This is a non-combustible material. It creates an R40, you know, wall assembly, which is double what our energy code requires. It's impervious to termites, impervious to mold and mildew, which we deal with in the tropics. It's resistant to hurricanes. It's magnitudes of times stronger than a wood-framed house. So we, we just went all in, and so now we have a , square foot, small factory where we're producing it. So we basically take surfboard waste, and this is where it gets really nice, and really, you know, makes you feel good inside. Surfing was invented in Hawaii, you know, the sort of pre-Western contact. This is a sort of an essential element to Hawaii, and now we are producing surfboards and shipping them out to the rest of the world and using them right here, and the waste from that, we are turning into resilient houses that are high performance, and they're responding directly to sort of that climate crisis that we're going through, which is, sort of the increased natural disasters. In our case, it is wildfires, but we're also susceptible to hurricanes, and we're susceptible to earthquakes as well. It kind of just really hits that sweet spot. And it really makes people smile and feel good that, you know, you could have a house that's made out of surfboards.

It's brilliant, and to your point, there's such beautiful storytelling there, too, but real impact as well. Do you feel like, whether it's the materials or just more broadly, the off-grid or net-zero homes and buildings, do you feel like it's getting any closer to mainstream. I think in terms of at least the topic, more people are familiar with it, but do you feel like it will always be niche, or do you think that we're ultimately all going to have to end up in that direction? 

I kind of make an analogy a lot of times, similar to the implementation of residential scale air conditioning. In the 1930s, 1940s, like, it's very niche, like, it's very expensive. To retrofit a home was cumbersome, it wasn't meant for it, it wasn't… it didn't work out well. But as we pushed into the 1950s, and sort of the boom, and the economy, and the growth that we had in housing, we started to put that… those air conditioning systems into houses from the beginning. Amortize them into the, you know, the overall cost of the home, which spread it out over a long period of time, which is an important factor. And then it just became ubiquitous, and we didn't think about it.

So, that's similar, like, it's really nice to have air conditioning. It's not a necessity. The same thing with solar, renewable energy, battery backup. It's really nice to have it. It's not a necessity. But as it becomes more available, lower cost, and we now are, you know, like I said, it's a timing thing. So, just in the last years has it become really. The technology has made it possible to have a small footprint and a very powerful, you know, equipment. So we can now put that into a house without a big, huge room or an extra, you know, little outbuilding or something of that nature. We can amortize it into the cost. If it means that when a storm comes, you don't lose power, in the case of an emergency, you feel better. We do a lot of things in our houses to make us feel better. Sometimes we don't actually even use them, you know, but we have security cameras, we have motion detecting lights to make us feel better about where we live. And this is one of those aspects, and so you're just going to see it, you know, more and more, sort of distributed in our housing sector, and you see it right now. I have friends that are in the, sort of, development space.

And right now, it's kind of hard to sell a home. We have higher interest rates, materials, labor, we've got a lot of inflation. So as homeowner, or home sellers, developers are trying to sell homes, you see them offering things to potential buyers, like solar systems. Like, hey, we'll throw in a solar system if you'll buy this home, you know? We will knock down a point on your interest rate if you will buy this home. So it gets to be something that is, you know, an advantage to the people that are trying to sell, which again, we're using the private market, the sort of the economy, to do its job. 

I think what we're really gonna see in the next few years? Electric vehicles. As electric vehicles become more ubiquitous. And here's the thing that I love about electric vehicles, is the performance. So I'm kind of a gearhead. I grew up as a mechanic and around racing. So, if you get into a high-performance car, and you press that accelerator pedal, and it throws you back in the seat, like, it makes you feel good inside. You're like, whoa, this is… it's like a roller coaster, you know? It's fun, it's exciting. You can do that and get amazing performance with no noise, and it's so smooth, and you've got air conditioning, you have all the bells and whistles.

And then you can go home, and you can plug in and charge that car for basically free, Like, there's nothing better than that. I have clients that they call it driving on sunshine. Like, it makes them smile because they're driving a car, and they know that the sun has powered it, and it's come from their house, right? And a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it's so slow to charge. It's a paradigm shift. It's similar to the paradigm shift of having - we used to have phones that were connected to a cord and plugged into a wall, and we had to leave them places, and then we got these phones that we could take with us anywhere, we just had to charge them up. So we would come home at night, we still do, we'd plug our phone in, and we'd charge it up. And now, it's not awkward. I don't remember if we ever said, oh, darn, I've got to charge this phone up, you know? The phone at the house, it never runs out of battery. But if I told you that, hey, I'm gonna give you a barrel, and every day, it will make gallons of gasoline, and you can go home and pump that gallons of gasoline into your car, would that be better than you going and, you know, stopping at a gas station and taking minutes, minutes out of your day? Potentially, if you have to wait some places in cities, you have to, you know, a line of cars? People would say, yes, it's the same thing. I live off-grid. I come home at night, I typically don't get home before the sun goes down, but I have my energy system set up to where I can take about kilowatt hours out of my home battery bank to put into the car. What does that mean? For my personal vehicle, that turns into about miles. The average amount that the average driver drives in the United States is miles a day.

So, if I can every day put a little bit of power back into my car. And again, I live off-grid, so I've got to balance powering the car and powering the house. And I've found that balance through smart controls. So now I can come home, I plug the car in, and before I leave, I unplug it. It's very little, sort of, inconvenience on my part. And, you know, I do drive a lot sometimes, so I don't have enough power to put back into it completely. But then on the weekends, I try to stay home. That's my thing. I, like, want to stay home for the most part as much as I can, and most of the time, my vehicle is parked, so whenever it's parked, I just plug it in. If there's sun coming and hitting the panels, it goes straight into the car. By the end of Sunday, it's typically charged back to %, and I start the week over. So, as people start to see this, as they start to experience, like, electric vehicles and renewable energy, coupled that at home, it's a no-brainer. You know, once we get over the paradigm of, I've got to have an internal combustion engine, that's what my grandfather had. But, you know, life expectancy is longer. We live longer than our grandparents, we have more amenities, we have cell phones, we have the internet. Things change, some parts of life just change a little bit slower, but when they do start to change, sometimes they change really fast. So I think in the next to years, you're going to see a huge change in how much we have, how many electric vehicles we have in circulation, and how much renewable energy, because they are real complementary to each other.

Do you think another accelerator might be on the regulatory front? Because it sounds like those elements you're talking about is really kind of the consumer change and consumer demand. Do you feel like that might be another lever we can pull? Or… I mean, that's also assuming there is a desire within any administration to be able to do so, but do you think that that is one lever that can help accelerate net-zero buildings? 

For sure, and it has been for a number of years. You know, we have really taken advantage of the % tax credit for renewable energy, the $, tax credit for electric vehicles. Obviously, everyone's probably aware that those are not available now. 

So now we need to rely on market forces. And now it's gonna come down to the reality that this is actually more economically advantageous to make these decisions. Once we can illustrate that to people, and again, we want to show people. So, I want people to look at a house that we designed, and let's say they… somebody gets to come over to my house, and they get to say, oh my gosh, you've got a super cool electric car. And then I said, yeah. You know, and they're like, oh, isn't that expensive? And I was like, you know, it actually costs me less money a month than my diesel truck costs me, because I don't have to buy diesel anymore. I'm paying more for the car payment, you know, a couple hundred bucks more. But my typical diesel bill was about $ a month. So, now I'm saving $ a month. That's… that's a pretty, you know, that's nothing to laugh at. And then it's like, and I've had people, especially, you know, friends of mine call me, like, oh, you know, we're gonna meet at a coffee shop or something, but the power is out, you know, this storm has moved in and the power is out. And I'm like, oh, it's out? And they're like, yeah, you didn't know the power was out? Like, no, I'm at home. Power doesn't really go out. If it, you know, if I need to turn on the generator, it does it automatically, and, you know so, I'm not aware of these things. 

So, hopefully people can see that and experience it, and so ideally, you know, they say the greatest form of flattery is emulation or imitating someone. We want people to do that, so we want to give them that example that they can imitate, and they can replicate, and show others, and little by little, we'll continue to make advancements. I'd love it if the regulatory side was working with us. But if it's not, we've got to do our part. So that's why we want to make sexy architecture that people look at, and they're like, that is beautiful, I want that. And then, oh, by the way, it's off-grid, it's gonna save you money in the long run. That's just a bonus, but we don't want to focus on that, because we… we need to bring a lot of people along, and we don't want to focus on those things that maybe are dividing us, the political realities of our different opinions. We just want to focus on beautiful, aesthetic, and sort of functional aspects of architecture.

I think that's brilliant, as we bring more people on board, and towards more innovative solutions there. I'm sure your list is long, but I am curious to know if you're working on any specific projects at the moment that you're really excited about, and that you can share with our audience? 

Well, right now, we have, a, a project that we're working on with, someone who is a hero of mine, Shigaru Ban, and, I'm actually really excited because, we've been working with him for a couple of years now. And, I just actually, had sort of a successful, bid to, nominate, and he was accepted as the 2026 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal winner. So, really excited about, about that, but we are working on, prefabricated, sort of… it's a… how do we say this? We call it, kind of, as a nickname in our office, we call it Project Caterpillar. 

So it's a building that adjusts to different sites and circumstances. A lot of the places that we're implementing these pre-K hubs, there are existing topography features, there are existing trees, which we love, because we can focus them around those trees, and that becomes an outdoor covered play area that's protected from the elements. And so we're rolling that out, we're working on this project with our Lieutenant Governor, Sylvia Luke, and she has a program called Ready Keiki, and so Keiki in Hawaiian is children, and it's basically free daycare, free, free childcare, from, I guess it's 2 years old to 5 years old. And so that is something that is going to be very impactful for our community. And it allows me to work with one of my heroes, so… and we're doing something that, again, is very beautiful. We're able to work with them to make sure that it's beautiful, and then we're able to have our influence of having it net zero, battery backup, so it's a resiliency hub as well. 

And so we, we're just about to, apply for our first permanent, and we have more sites across Maui that we'll be working with the County of Maui to implement. And through that program, the state will be building these buildings, and then the county and other nonprofits will be running them. But it's gonna have real-world effects, as in you know, our firm, we have multiple, you know, young parents. We can have an opportunity for them to have free pre-K, which is a huge expense, it's very expensive, and locally, like, close to our office, which is amazing. So it's kind of double, you know, it makes me happy on multiple fronts, like, it's like, your kids get to go to pre- preschool in a Sugar Bond, beautiful building, well thought out, and we've been able to make it net zero and add our little flair to it. And that's, like, the number one, like, dollar for dollar, if you're gonna invest in a society. Pre-K has the biggest effect. It's… it increases the rate of high school diplomas, increases overall, sort of earnings, which increases your tax base, reduces the rates of incarceration, like, it is just amazing. So, as an architect, like, getting to build buildings that I know are gonna be impactful to a whole society for multiple generations, like, that is… that's… it's not why I got into this, but once I figured out that that could happen, it's like. I cannot believe that I get to do this for a job. So, yeah, so that's the… that's one of the projects that we're really excited about right now.

Well, it is so cool, and I'm so glad that that's becoming part of mainstream. I was obviously doing research leading up to this, and was reading that at one point you said you felt like you were kind of the fringe green guy that has now crossed over to maybe what's more of a mainstream conversation.

I know I've certainly felt that, and I know our listeners have also expressed on different occasions that it's been interesting, because I think maybe a decade ago, we felt like we were that weird tree hugger in a group saying, like, hey guys, there's a better way to do this. Now we're part of the mainstream conversation. I have personally always found it interesting in that I felt like I never fully fit in, maybe on the tree-hugging side, because I also saw there was the business side. And then I haven't always fit into the business side, because I also saw that there was a better way to do things. It does feel like the worlds are coming a little bit closer together to allow for that, but I would love to hear a little bit more about that from your lens.

For sure. You know, in Hawaii, we just hit 50% of our homes in Hawaii have rooftop solar. So, even though we're a small state, we're not the smallest in population, but we are relatively small, but we are a leader in renewable energy. A good reason for that is the high cost of electricity in the Aloha state. But… That being said, you know, sort of mainstreamed. We're also a huge tourist destination, so when people come to Hawaii, they get to see and sort of be desensitized. You know, I notice in different places, I remember a few years ago when I flew into, I think it was New Jersey, I was surprised about how many rooftop solar systems I could see as we were landing. And I learned, you know, through some architects there, I was giving a talk on something, and I was like, you know, I noticed all this rooftop solar. They're like, yeah, our state government has really pushed and has been successful in, you know, distributing rooftop solar. And so, it is becoming more mainstream, and it's amazing how fast it's changed. Like I said, it's a sort of a nexus of the technology advancing, the costs coming down, and people just becoming more accustomed to it, and it loses its stigma, in a way. 

Really fun story I've been excited about: my own, brother. I grew up in an oil field in Texas, basically. So very, very, you know, sort of pro-petroleum, you know, renewable energy is not really something that has, has, you know, much of a conversation at all. And recently, a huge solar array has been built close to my hometown. And also, my own brother, who has a young family, he had, young twin boys, and they're a little bit, you know, to take care of, and he has a cabin, sort of out rural, that's off-grid. And so he got this golf cart, and so he could drive around and kind of go out into the forest and take his boys out. And, it's battery-powered, and I was like, you know, I'm gonna get you something for your birthday. So I got him a solar panel, a charge controller, and I said, you know, now you don't have to plug your golf cart in, because you don't, you know, your cabin doesn't have a power source. And so for years, he never plugged it in. He's like, it's great, I just park it outside, because that's where it's always parked, and every time I go to get in it, it's ready to go. Fast forward a few years, the boys grow up, they are racing the golf cart, they jump it, and the big heavy lead-acid batteries drop through the bottom, and kind of destroys the batteries. These are rowdy boys, and so my brother tells me, I'm like, well, you should get a lithium ion battery. It'll be about 300 pounds lighter, you'll be able to charge it faster, you'll have times the energy density. And so he's like, okay. So he buys a lithium-ion battery, and then I said, you know what? I'll get you a charge controller for the solar panels we already have on it. I said, here's what we're gonna do, too. I'm gonna get you an inverter that's gonna be the same voltage, and you're gonna be able to run your cabin off of the golf cart.

So now, he has a golf cart that he can pull up next to his cabin, charge himself, and then he can run all of his lights and, you know, have comfort without running a generator, and he loves it. The ability for it to be economically feasible and easily obtained. It's going to have tentacles, you know, it's just going to spread naturally, just because it works. So, I'm hoping that that then translates into him saying, you know what, I'm tired of the, you know, we have more frequent storms and our power goes out more often, so I'm hoping that that's gonna turn into, I want a solar system for my house, and then I'm just gonna be like, yes we did it. I didn't have to nag, or like, you know, oh, you've got to do this. Just happened naturally. Be patient, and be willing to give examples. And, I think that, you know, over the next years, regardless of what regulations are, regardless of what the politics are, we're going to see more and more implementation, because it just works.

Well, if we do have listeners who are maybe in the architecture space, or in the design space, and they're ready to make the jump over to this world of possibility. Is there anywhere that you would recommend that they kind of start? Is it research? Is it, I don't know, are there schools now for this? What is a starting point to begin that career journey?

Well, I think just taking the leap, one, you know, kind of making a stand. I always joke, every time I give a talk now, sort of the last slide is like, hey, let's all commit to this. So, if, if, you know, it's like saying you have a client that comes to you and says, I want an unsafe building. And you say, no, well, I can't do that. Like, that's below my ethics. And so they go to the next architect, and the client says, I want you to design me an unsafe building. No, I'm not gonna do that. And they just keep going down the line, and everybody says, no, we're not gonna design an unsafe building for you.

It's the same thing. The fact that we keep making unsafe buildings in regards to our long-term climate health. We all just need to say, we're not gonna do it, and the client can go to the next architect, and the next architect, and we all say, no, we're going to design a high-efficient, net-zero building, and that's… that's all we can do because I… at the end of the day, it is about safety, and it's about, you know, welfare of our society. So that's kind of an extreme thing, and I kind of say that hitchy, but one way that we've been able to do it. And you're seeing some of this now, in other ways, where architecture firms are starting to branch out and diversify. So we're a design and build firm. One of the ways that we've been able to be successful and profitable as a company is that we have a niche specialty of renewable energy. 

So, years ago, when we started designing our first houses and buildings with renewable energy systems, I noticed, very astutely that the electrical contractor made more in total profit installing the energy system that we designed on the house that we designed. They made more in profit than we made designing both of those systems. And I was like, whoa. Wait a minute. They're like, you know, it is very difficult, because they don't understand the technology. We have to go out and do the programming, we're doing all the designing, and ultimately, they're kind of like, you know, we don't know about this, you're responsible for it, but we're not reaping the benefits. So instead, I said, you know what? How about we do that? We develop, we are the contractor for the energy system. And so now we've got a new revenue stream into our business, so we're being sort of savvy businesspeople. We're diversifying our income stream. And it just makes sense. So, there's other opportunities in this space, and that's one of the beautiful things about a new industry. If you look at the history of economics and sort of our, you know, wealthy elite, whether it's Rockefeller or Elon Musk: all of these people who have propelled to be sort of the richest people in the world, or very affluent, they have started because… they've gotten that way because they got in on an industry very early, right? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs. That's where we are with renewable energy. If you get into it early, and you take a risk, you're inventive, you find new ways to use it, new ways to implement it. That you will be on that first wave. So, that's where I encourage people, you know, you can make that part of what you do, because at the end of the day, we kind of touch everything. So, as architects, we like to have a diversity of projects, we want civil projects, we want residential projects, we want commercial projects, but now we do energy projects, too. So, whatever's happening with the economy, hopefully that means that we are still a profitable company, and we do that through diversity. So, diversify. And this is an opportunity that we have right now that we can diversify our current business models to incorporate a new revenue stream.

And then on the flip side of that, for the average listener, including myself, who is selfishly thinking, okay, how the heck do I take the first step as a homeowner. Well, I guess there's two pieces to that: you mentioned at the top, the approach for a new build is completely different than it is for a retrofit, but if we have our listeners who are maybe just thinking, I want to take the next step towards having a more resilient home, what would you recommend that they do?

Well, the first step would be to talk to a professional, so whether that's a solar installer, ideally, you can talk to somebody who has a little bit more of a holistic approach to it. So, looking at your current, sort of energy… not energy system, but your, say, your water heating, your air conditioning, you know, can you switch to a heat pump? You know, where are you at? How old is your home, right? So, if you are already at the end of your current air conditioner's lifecycle. Then what… you need to make an investment anyhow. So, how much does it cost to upgrade to a newer technology, like a heat pump? Once you do that, now it's like, okay, well, how much does it cost… now that we have heat pumps, and they use so much less energy, how much does it cost to add in solar panels to power that heat pump?  And now you're like, okay, we're lowering the cost of what the operating of this air conditioning system, you know, costs us, and then with that savings, we're now going to invest in a renewable energy system that will then lower our overall cost. Once you take one step, you just take another step. Like, little baby steps, one by one.

And, you know, you're… we're seeing more and more businesses that are popping up that are, sort of taking this approach. We have one of our largest solar installers in the state of Hawaii, or one of the largest in the United States, Revolution. They don't just do solar, they do, you know, air conditioning, heat pumps, and smart homes, right? So they are electricians. You need an electrician to install a new air conditioning system. And now they're able to add, sort of, smart home technology, load shedding, so they can turn off, you know, your air conditioner or some other large load when there's peak demand on the grid and prices are high. So, all of these new technologies, we can start to implement them into, you know, the existing infrastructure and existing housing stock as that life cycle starts to time out. So just be open, you know, the internet is full of sometimes not so good information, but also good information. You know, there's a lot of state, sort of energy offices that provide, you know, ENERGY STAR, the National Energy, National Renewable Energy Lab, NREL, they have great information. So the information's out there, it's at the tip of your fingers, just be careful where you do get your information, and obviously, be careful of who you're working with, but, you know, there are reputable businesses that are located all over the country that can provide this insight.

And of course, we want to direct everybody towards learning more about you and your organization, so where would be the best place for them to go? 

You can come to our website, that is HawaiiOffGrid.com, so HawaiiOffGrid.com, and then our, our other company, surfblockmaui.com, and that's where you can learn about Surf Blocks. Or if you're in Maui, and you happen to be in the Haiku area, come by the, Powella Cannery, and, come, come say hi. We'd love to talk to anyone who's interested.

Well, thank you so much, David. I honestly could have talked to you for another hour or so, but I want to be respectful of your time. So, with that, I just want to ask you one last question, which we ask all of our guests, which is, what do you think it will take for businesses and leaders to be resilient going forward? 

I think that it will take the economics to align their values and ethics, and for us to come to the realization. But we do have an issue with the climate, and we do have an issue with how we are interacting with our atmosphere. And I think that's just a matter of time. I have a lot of… of hope in young people, but I also know that there are old people, like myself, that are here and want to make a difference today. We're not waiting, we're just waiting for everybody else to come with us.

Thank you so much. Thank you for all that you're doing, it is so inspiring. I do really encourage our listeners to go check out the website, there's some amazing collateral there that you can see in depth the work that's going on, so thank you so much, David, for your time. 

Thank you, I really appreciate it. Look forward to talking with you soon.