 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on Thinkware. We always try and make community matter, and especially on my show we like to do things around energy, especially hydrogen energy. And so today we've got a special guest coming to us from the Big Island, which by the way has the only other hydrogen stations in the state of Hawaii besides the island of Oahu that has a couple, one on the military bases and one with our Toyota dealerships. So we've got as a guest today Mr. Greg Barber from NOHA, the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority over on the Big Island. It's actually part of the state of Hawaii under the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. And so they're attached to help Hawaii develop high tech businesses and especially use the assets around the state like our deep ocean water and our terrific climate to test new technology, new sciences, new aquaculture, ocean technologies. But Greg, thanks for joining us today. Thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Hey, thank you, Stan. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I know it's taken a while. Can I get this up? But I'm here. Yeah, and we're long overdue. I've been wanting to have you on as a guest for a long time and never seem to be able to pull it off. So thanks for being my guest this week. Can you tell us the audience a little bit about yourself and how you got attached to NOHA and then we can get it a little bit into what NOHA's basic mission is. Yeah, thank you. I've been at D-bed for a long time, started in the tourism office. And then I came over here in, I think, 2011. So I've been here for about eight years. And it's a fantastic job. We have a great team here. I have about, I think we have 14 or 15 people on our team. We're a state agency, like you said, but we're a little bit unusual in that we're a self-sufficient state agency. So we receive no general funds, operating funds from the state government. We generate all our own revenue. We generate about $5 million a year. About half of that is from the leasing of land. As you can see on the slide, we have about 900 acres surrounding the airport here in Kona. And we have an offshore research corridor where we have deep seawater pipelines, like you said. And we also sell seawater. We're a seawater utility. We sell about 30 million gallons of seawater a day to the businesses here in the park. They use it for anything from aquaculture, growing animals to cooling. Some of the LG companies, Cyanitech uses deep seawater from 3,000 feet down. And it's 4 degrees C or I think 41 degrees Fahrenheit. They run that in steel pipes inside their ponds to keep the water cool so they can regulate the temperature so they can optimize the growth of algae to increase as much algae as they can. They grow bio-asten and spirulina for health supplements. That's become real popular, too. I mean, it's in Costco and everything, the bio-asten. It is. They're doing really well. They're one of our biggest clients here. And they're the only company listed on NASDAQ that we have. So I'm fortunate to be here, have a great team. And I think we're doing really well. We've been, Nelha Natural Energy Lab is the name of the state agency. And the name of our technology park is the Hawaii Ocean Science and Technology Park. So that's the 900-acre park. So you'll hear me say Nelha. That's the agency that administers it. And then sometimes you'll hear me say Host Park. That's the actual technology park. All right. So sometimes I get them confused. But we have done a lot over the last 40 years. And we create about 600 jobs and about $100 million in economic impact a year. So I think it's a very successful economic development program. Two main missions. One is, like you say, advanced energy projects. And our other mission is aquaculture. And over the years, over the past, I would say 10 years, aquaculture has actually become more important. And now it generates about 70% of our total revenues. But that doesn't mean that advanced energy projects won't come back. We're actually trying to work the two together because we use a lot of power to pump the seawater. So I think we're good testbed for smart grids or micro grids, battery storage, testing, things like that. So it's a very unique, unique place. I think one of your most famous test projects is one of my guests was Dr. Hans Kraus, who did OTEC. He was the developer of OTEC. And you guys have that testbed out there right now. Can you talk a little bit about that energy project? Yeah. So the current tower, test tower that we have here has been developed by another one of our rock stars here, Mackay Ocean Engineering. And they have a tower that they built to test corrosion and to test different kinds of heat exchangers for productivity. And they've been doing a lot of work over the years. I think they've made some breakthroughs recently in heat exchanger technology. And just a little bit of background. That's why Nelha was established here 40 years ago because we have access to the deep ocean seawater very quickly. And that's why the massive pipeline system was built here. And OTEC is just briefly is using cold water to condense ammonia under pressure in a heat exchanger and then using the warm surface water, which is 80 degrees to evaporate that ammonia. And then that loop condensing and evaporation. If that ammonia is in a loop with a turbine at the top, you can generate power. It's unlimited power. It's baseload power, which is very important. It's not intermittent like a PD and wind. So it has a lot of advantages. But I think it has a ways to go. It's probably I would put it in the category with the hydrogen economy. There's work that needs to be done. They need to develop some game-changing technologies to make it economically viable. But you're using the surface of the ocean as a solar collector. So it's unlimited. And they'll get there someday just like they will with the hydrogen economy, hopefully sooner rather than later. We're counting on it. And I think there's actually a lot of leaps and bounds in the hydrogen side that may even surprise you. It's been changing month by month. And there's some really exciting companies standing up on the mainland that are going to do coast-to-coast trucking with hydrogen trucks that are leased. And the current model has the lease even cheaper than operating a diesel truck. And it's all clean hydrogen with better trucks, better visibility around the trucks, safer vehicles to operate. So looking forward to that. But the O-Tech project is kind of remarkable because it's basically the same as a steam turbine, except instead of using high-temperature steam, you're using different ammonia for your heat exchange medium that doesn't require the real high temperatures. And you can do it with just the temperature changes between deep ocean water and surface ocean water. But get the same kind of propulsion for your turbines, correct? Yeah, that's exactly correct. I think the delta on the heat difference is 40 degrees. Right? That makes it work. And that's not a lot. It's, like you said, steam is what? 200? Yeah, a little over 220 or so, yeah. Yeah, so using that ammonia and keeping it under pressure, you can keep the delta on the warm and the cold down to 40 degrees. Yeah. That's exactly correct. You had a big energy project up near the highway there. What was it? Sopogee. And I don't know a whole lot about it, but it just seems like it makes a lot of sense. Why did it not work out? Yeah, that was a project started, I think, around 2007 or 2008. And it was started by Sopogee. And it was solar thermal project. They had four acres of mirror. Let me pull up a slide, I think. I have one here. There it is. So this is the project. They had a beautiful project. They had four acres of mirrors. And the idea was to run mineral oil. I don't know if you can see this there. Found the middle of the mirrors. And to heat that mineral oil up and then store it and use engines to create power. For whatever reason, it didn't work. I'm not sure what the technological flaw was or whatever happened, but it didn't work. But we took over that site probably about four years ago. We talked a lot with you and Mitch Ewen at UH and Paul Panchio at Blue Planet Research. Blue Planet Research, you know, all those people. And we wanted to use it to create a hydrogen station, a hydrogen center up there and use those mirrors and maybe generate some power to create hydrogen. Things didn't work out for one reason or another. But we found a use for those mirrors. At one point we talked about selling them for scrap and I think a lot of people wanted to cry when I did that. That would be a waste of that site. We applied for a U.S. DOE grant, Department of Energy grant to use them for solar desalination project. And we received a grant of $2 million from DOE and working with a company called the Trevi Systems out of Petaluma. And so we're using that technology up there to desalinate water. The goal is to desalinate 133,000 gallons of seawater day. And then we would actually sell that to Signitech. They would use it to grow algae. So it's a perfect project for us because we had the mirrors, we had the seawater to the site, and then we have a need for the desalinated water for agricultural purposes. And so I'm very hopeful the technology there is completely different from reverse osmosis. So a lot of people talk about reverse osmosis was really popularized in the late 60s or maybe the early 60s when energy costs, as you know, were much, much lower back then. And so now that the energy costs are much higher, this technology that they're using, they're using a different membrane and then they're heating the water up, I think a little bit over 200 degrees, maybe 250 degrees, and they put a solution, a draw solution in the water. And so if they do all that with the hot water, this actually will pull the desalate dust, the salt water through the membrane and it will desalinate the water without the need for a lot of high pressure pushing, reverse osmosis pushes the water through the membrane to purify it. This uses the opposite technique and it doesn't need anywhere near the amount of power that reverse osmosis needs. So USDOE, the military, it was very interesting because you can use this technology in remote locations that are not grid connected and you don't need a lot of power to do it, but you can create desalinated water. So I think we hit a home run, Dr. Leonard of our staff put that all together. I think we hit a home run because we reused that, those mirrors and the solar collectors and had a really good project to look at desalinating of seawater at a very low cost. And I think we will have results in the next 18 months to 24 months. So looking forward to that project. Yeah, we're looking forward to it too because you're right, it would be a shame to waste that dual tracking, single axis tracking solar system. It was an awesome system. So we're going to have to take a quick break here, Greg, and we'll be back in 60 seconds and we'll talk some more about some of the other projects going on at NOHA. Okay, great. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii and on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about. Whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Hi, I'm Lisa Kimura. I'm the host of Family Affairs on Think Tech Hawaii. Join us every Tuesday at 11 a.m. to talk about the issues that really matter. Everything from policies that need to be changed in Hawaii to the fact that we need better gender equality so that we can all have a better shot. Again, join us every Tuesday at 11 on Think Tech Hawaii for Family Affairs. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stan. I'm Henry Manstan, awesome in here. And I've got Greg Barber, the executive director for NOHA over in Kona, on the Big Island. And if you're ever in the neighborhood and you want to go by and visit him, he's always open for guests. He'll open his house up to you. Well, maybe not that, but he'd be, he'd be glad to have some company over there and check them out. And there's a lot of cool companies down there that, you know, you can buy some lobster there. You can talk to some folks that sell some deep water, bottled water. There's some really cool companies there. So, Greg, what are some of the other... First of all, let me tell you what I learned about Kampachi Farms. I happened to be there about three weeks ago with a film director who wanted to stop by when we went down to see Mitch's hydrogen station. So we stopped by to talk to... What's his name, Neil? That runs... Yeah, he does, yeah. Yeah, and so he was telling us that the local fish that we called Nainui is kind of a delicacy fish to eat, but what they really found was interesting is Nainui only eats seaweed. And so it's really hard for local fishermen to catch except to spear them because they don't bite on traditional bait and hooks and things like that. So what they found was that the intestinal system in that fish, the way it digests algae, it produces your hydrogen. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to find out how they can replicate outside the fish, how to replicate the process of digesting the seaweed algae to produce pure hydrogen. I thought that was fascinating, of course, so we'll be visiting Kampachi Farms a little bit more in the future. I guarantee it. But what are some of the other neat projects that you got going on down there that you'd like to talk about? Well, yeah, Neil has another project that he's working on. He got an ARPA-E grant with Makai Ocean Engineering to... I'm not that familiar with what they're doing, but it was exciting. And I believe they're going to be growing algae in cages offshore. Makai has the cage technology to some extent or construction of the cage technology. And Neil is great at growing things offshore. And I believe the idea was to grow the algae to eventually create energy, and that's why it was an ARPA-E grant. And there's a lot of benefit. A lot of people are looking at algae offshore. A lot of people talk about it from... I was just at a conference where they were talking about it from aspect of climate change and growing additional algae and having it on the sea floor for carbon sequestration. And just a lot of benefits. People are looking at algae. We're the perfect site to blend the advanced energy aspects with the aquaculture and nobody else in the world could do it like we can do it here because we have both the cold seawater and the warm seawater. And people can mix and match the water to make the temperature that they want for increased productivity. We were talking to Neil about that project and I reminded everybody because of my aviation background that the airlines fly to Hawaii with just enough fuel and reserves to meet the FAA requirements and get here safely. And they have to onboard fuel to make it out of Hawaii to their next destination. Well, if we can make biofuels from algae using their technology, that means we could either blend or maybe produce aviation fuel off of algae that's totally renewable and sustainable rather than importing oil and refining it. So that's a game changer for an island nation or a state like Hawaii where we're 2,500 miles away from the closest land mass and we could be making our own jet fuel. Absolutely. We had a company here called Solana that was started about 10 years ago. Some of the startups here don't always make it and Solana didn't make it. But their goal was to create the jet fuel from different algae and they did a lot of work but just couldn't pull it off but that doesn't mean it's not going to happen in the future. We've got a couple more minutes, Stan. Sure. And so I've got a couple projects I just want to highlight. So seawater air conditioning like they're building in downtown Honolulu I think is really important for Hawaii when we talk about meeting our energy goals by 2045 of 100%. A lot of people don't remember that 30% of that goal is from conservation and increased efficiency. And so that deep seawater air conditioning project in downtown Honolulu is really important. We also have access to deep seawater here. Excuse me. And so right now we're looking at a regional seawater air conditioning district. Our system has the equivalent capacity that they're planning to build in downtown Honolulu but it's not as concentrated here in Kona as it is in downtown Honolulu but we're going to look at that see if there's ways where we can build a regional seawater air conditioning district to decrease our energy consumption in Kona. And I think that's a really exciting project. Do you think that the hotels in Waikalua could sustain a seawater air conditioning system? They could but it's just too far for us to pump the cold water up there. Even pumping the cold water down to Kona town which is seven miles away is going to be a stretch but the idea here is we would have heat exchangers here at Nelha or at Host Park and then we would be the loop would be a freshwater loop of chilled freshwater probably 45 to 50 degrees and we would have that loop go down to Kona town and back so there's a lot of work to be done but you know seawater air conditioning it's like 80 to 90% more efficient. You don't need any energy to cool the water. We just use our seawater here and you know the benefit for us is that once we use the seawater for cooling we can still resell the water for aquaculture purposes so that was always the idea for Nelha and Host Park is that we could always make dual use of the water. The idea with OTEC was you could use it to make power and then use it for aquaculture purposes so we're still looking at the same kinds of technology. So this is an idea of where we're down here and then over here is Kona town and once we get it up to the top of our park over here it's pretty much all down to Kona town so a lot of work that needs to be done we're just in the process of hiring a consultant to help us understand that. The project you're real familiar with I think you probably hadn't mentioned on your program before maybe once or something. So they built the Hawaiian Natural Energy Institute has built this hydrogen production and storage and fueling station here in our research campus and they're just getting ready to commission that project now they got a little bit more to go I think the fire alarm system is holding them up but everything's been completed and hopefully in the next six months they'll be producing hydrogen they have three buses as you know and I think the buses are going to go to the county and they'll be using them my understanding is in Kona and this facility can produce 60 kilograms of hydrogen a day I believe and my understanding is I'm not an expert Stan like you're the man but I think roughly a kilogram of hydrogen equals two gallons of petrol or something like that Approximately a general rule of thumb so Mitch is running this project and I think he has the capability to double up to produce I think 120 kilograms of hydrogen a day so that's pretty good amount of hydrogen we currently have 200 kW of PD here in the research campus that we can use to produce hydrogen probably in the middle of the day and we're also out to bid right now for adding another 600 kW of PD and 802 batteries 800 kWh batteries and so I think starting out initially it won't be all produced from renewable energy but maybe in another year so a lot of it can be produced from renewable energy a lot of people talk that this is a good location because we're so close to the airport and a lot of people talk about the next step for hydrogen vehicles is fleet deployment and so a lot of people talk about can we get hydrogen ground handling equipment at the airport if we can do that we're only two miles away so kind of a perfect situation for Mitch and to help advance hydrogen I'll be in your neighborhood at the end of this week at the OTEC conference there and I'll sit down and share some big island secrets with you and bring you up to speed in what hydrogen is looking like on your big island because I'm telling you people are going to be surprised besides Mitch's three buses that are going to all be used for ELeon between Kona Town and the airport a lot of other discussions going on to get the entire ELeon bus fleet into hydrogen and also bring in some vehicles, rental vehicles and maybe put hydrogen stations all around the big island before Honolulu even gets started so it's going to be pretty exciting that would be very exciting I think we're a perfect case where if you build maybe five stations that'd be enough for the whole island but believe it or not, Greg we've blown through 30 minutes and I really appreciate you sharing some time with us and bringing us up to speed and what's going on at NOHA and I hope to have you back on here and I'll see you at the end of the week so thanks for being with us and for all the audience out there you can catch that Energyman next Tuesday at 3pm and until then, Aloha