 Welcome to Stan Energyman here on ThinkTech Hawaii and just to let you know, we're just starting a fundraising drive here at ThinkTech and us hosts are exorbitantly paid nothing because we're volunteers, but it does take some funding to run the studio and keep all of our contracts and our regular full-time employees paid. So if you can support ThinkTech here on and Stan Energyman, we'd appreciate it. As most of the Energyman's viewers know, I'm a devout believer in hydrogen as part of a clean energy world, but few people know that there's a church devoted to hydrogen known as the church of the first element. So today, I'd like to introduce you to the hydrogen faith and its founder, Pastor Paul Ponteo. Last week I visited Paul with a friend of mine, Anthony Alto, and his associate, and we were granted permission to video some of Pastor Paul's sermon slash demonstration. I guess you could call it a kind of a sermon station. But first, I'd like to introduce you to the ten commandments of the church of the first element. The first commandment is, thou shalt recognize hydrogen as the first element on the periodic table. This is a no-brainer because if you look on a chemistry chart, you'll notice that hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. This is like a church that actually runs science with a religion. The second commandment, thou shalt recognize all clean energy technologies and seek how they complement the properties of hydrogen. That's a really important one because there's a lot of great technologies out there, and they all seem to complement hydrogen energy storage. The third one is, thou shalt rebuke Hindenburg storytellers. If they call hydrogen the villain, and this is critical because I'd say a good 10% of the people I run into, they usually don't tell me anything except, oh, like the Hindenburg or H-bomb or I get some negative thing. So follow the third commandment. When somebody starts talking Hindenburg, you don't have to hit them, but just kind of give them a clue. The fourth commandment is, thou shalt welcome battery technology sparingly even when the profits of batteries reject hydrogen completely. What you find is most folks that like hydrogen technology really like batteries. We're kind of partial to batteries in the right proportions with the right technology and the right chemistry. But for some reason, all the battery folks seem to just really get amped up about hydrogen. So you gotta be a believer in hydrogen and batteries. The fifth commandment is, thou shalt point out that hydrogen atoms love all and will join all but the satanic atoms. You'll notice that hydrogens in all your cool atoms, like the gasoline you put in your car is actually got a lot of hydrogen in it. Natural gas that you cook with is carbon and hydrogen atoms, that's all. And even ammonia, which is used in fertilizers and stuff, is just nitrogen and hydrogen. It's great. It's a really friendly, lovable little atom that loves to join with other atoms. That's why you don't find hydrogen by itself in nature, except maybe in the sun fueling the stars. But it's a good, friendly, love-endorsing atom. The sixth commandment is, thou shalt celebrate hydrogen properties, particularly energy storage and cooking. We have some video on this one. Thou shalt hold electrolysis above all other forms of harvesting hydrogen. That's important because you can get hydrogen from a lot of different ways, including steam reforming methane. But the very cleanest way is to take, like solar PV, take the DC power off your solar panels, and directly start electrolyzing hydrogen. That's the cleanest way. So we put that one above all else, at least for now, until we figure out different ways to synthesize hydrogen directly from sunlight. The eighth commandment is, thou shalt preach to all the safety and carbon-free nature of the fuel cell engine. Fuel cell engines are very efficient compared to our internal combustion engines. Internal combustion engines are like 20% to 30% at the very best efficient. Where fuel cell engines can be in the 50% to 60% efficiency range, especially if you can recapture any of the heat that they produce and use that energy as well. The ninth commandment is, thou shalt endeavor to apply hydrogen technology all the days of your life. That's a lifelong commitment to hydrogen. And it's really, I think, a good commitment. It's a good, clean commitment. And lastly, thou shalt love hydrogen gas as God loves hydrogen. Because God must love hydrogen. It's the most common element in the entire universe. So he must really like it. So you're right on there. They're pretty easy commandments to stick to, I think. And I think they'd be good ones to follow. Pastor Paul Pontio, the founder of the Church of the First Element, demonstrated his understanding of accepting battery technology despairingly. That's commandment number four. There's some visitors in his laboratory. I mean, in his temple last week. So we have a video of Pastor Paul talking to some visitors and hopefully future devotees about battery technology, but the right kind of battery technology. They have 40% more cycle life than coal. So the only thing you really, when you look at the cost of battery storage, what you're buying is how many kilowatt hours over its life will it store? That's it. You use lots of metrics to confuse people in the snowball things, and it's like, so the nameplate price of this is more expensive than the cobalt. Even though the cobalt chemistry is more expensive, it's the scale of manufacturing makes it cheaper. This is 40% longer cycle life. Sony's tested it for $14,000 cycles. That's 100% discharge, 100% recharge every day. So if you get that every day, that's 38. something years. They had 70% or 68% capacity after 38 years. So we know this is at least a 20 year battery in the 80% range. And I don't know how to beat that right now with any other technology. They just work. There's zero maintenance. We joke and we're good at touring, but we get a maintenance kit that's always sadder. Because people are gonna touch them to see if they really are hot. So, you know, joking aside, literally, we haven't touched these batteries except for the tightening of the bus bar over the time. But never touched the battery since they were sold. This was the original form factor. Generation one. Then they moved to a different format to cut the cost and for efficiency. And that's this module here. So this is a 1.2 kilowatt hour. This is a 2.1. They both use the exact same chemistry, the same cells, the late 1650 cells, these green guys. And they just string them in series and parallel to get the voltage if you want. And this is a low-voltage system, 48-volt system. You can string them parallel to get high voltage. In fact, we have a megawatt hour sitting outside that's high voltage. But the nice thing is, it's the same cells, but they're packed more efficiently. So it takes up less space. This is a 60 kilowatt hour. It replaces three of the black cabinets. So it's almost a footprint of one. But it's the same cells, they're just more efficiently packed. It's 60 kilowatts. So I have the first power wall batteries installed in the Western Hemisphere. No, I'm sorry to hear it. I'm sure you would say that. The two of them are bigger than this thing. And of course, the two of them, I think they're seven and a half kilowatt each. So that's four times. Yeah, and you can't discharge those 100%. I mean, you can, but you're shorting your life automatically. These are, when we talk about cycles, we're talking 100% discharged. And it's really hard to do to get a battery to go down to zero every day. And how much more expensive is it to use these, the initial, obviously I understand the lifetime argument that you're making, but the initial upfront cost presumably is discouraging people, right? The best way I can explain that is Sony doesn't sell batteries, assemblies, they sell the components, right? So we're system integrators, basically. Well, not even here, but our company that sells the batteries, Blue Planet Energy, assembles everything into cabinets. So this was the first product. This is a 16 kilowatt hour. And it's using the second generation modules. I believe this sells, and I'm not even sure because I don't touch sales, but I think this runs about, it's around 15,000, so it's like 900 and something a kilowatt hour. You can get cobalt batteries for as low as 300 a kilowatt hour, unassembled. By the time you put it in with a battery management system and all that stuff, you're probably looking at 500. So they're quite a bit more expensive upfront, but again, they're gonna outlast them almost two to one. The larger small batteries are not all created equal and almost be looked at for their cradle-to-grave properties like safety and environmental impacts of gathering the raw materials and the processing of them into their final form. There's operational safety and actual life cycles. I don't know if you caught that, but Paul was comparing these batteries which are lithium iron phosphate, not lithium cobalt technology like in the Tesla wall batteries, but these things can actually be cycled down to zero and back up to full charge and it doesn't harm the battery or shorten its overall life. Also, all of the end-of-life components on these are recyclable. So depth of discharge is important, end-of-life disposals, disposal issues are important. His current lithium batteries, I mean, like if you have them in your tools and things, you know, you have to take them back to Home Depot or Lowe's or wherever you bought the batteries and the equipment from to recycle them and you can't throw them into incinerators. The current lithium cobalt technology has other heat thermal runaway issues and things that you have to be careful of. But this technology that Pastor Paul's talking about is lithium iron phosphate. A little bit different, like he says, a little more expensive for now, but it's really incredible technology. Other aspects of batteries that are often overlooked is where the raw materials come from. Who's in control of those assets and do they represent a national security vulnerability if they're not available for us to use in our batteries? There's a lot to think about when you pick batteries. But large or small, a well-designed battery can be a great benefit and can make even better use of hydrogen in the long term if you couple batteries with hydrogen technology properly. Hydrogen is great for energy storage and a lot of people miss that point. I like to think of hydrogen as energy storage primarily. Pastor Paul shows a great example of how a large clean battery and its components can be coupled with hydrogen and support a water system because this is a project that he's actually doing there at his laboratory that shows how a large one-megawatt-scale battery using that lithium-iron phosphate technology can support 24-7, 365, or at least 20 years, a water system that is supplying water to over 250 customers in that area of the Big Island. We were using that second generation of Pog over the city inside and it's actually two separate 500 kilowatt-hour batteries so we can shut down one half to work on the other half without stopping the power. And this is what's required in order to maintain the well all night long. So what sort of investment is something like this? Well, this was a prototype. So in commercial manufacturing, this would probably end up being about a $600,000 battery. And so given that they would amortize an investment like that over, say, a 30-year period, presumably for utility infrastructure, how does that compare to the alternative? Well, what they did was they bought a PPA from the third party. Third party bought the battery, the solar, is putting in the whole system and they cut their utility rate in half. It's fixed for 25 years at 20 cents a kilowatt. So now we know what the cost is gonna be for 25 years, right? All pencils, otherwise, you wouldn't have done it. Yeah, yeah, they're making money. Of course, the tax credits and subsidies have a lot to do with that. Well, that's a one-megawatt-hour battery and it has quite a bit of surge capacity in it. Like you said, the two banks of batteries can operate independently. So there's quite a bit of surge capacity in that battery and also quite a bit of time that that battery can run to put out one-megawatt-hour of power. But bigger isn't always better. Sometimes, like in a disaster, you need to be able to get heavy batteries to remote locations and then use solar power to charge them. Pastor Paul can show us PowerCube that they use in the field. I had this on a show earlier this month and this is an example of a battery system that could be coupled with hydrogen to aid in a disaster recovery. Before we show that clip, we'll go to a quick break and we'll come back and I'll show you that clip of the smaller PowerCube battery. Aloha, I'm Catherine Norr and I'm the host of Much More on Medicine on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk about medical issues and I interview guests regarding medical matters and I'm really excited about upcoming guests. I hope you join us every other Wednesday at 3 p.m. Aloha and see you then. Aloha, my name is Becky Sampson and I'm the host of It's About Time on the Think Tech Hawaii, a digital nonprofit organization that's raising public awareness. Join us on Wednesday at 2 p.m. where we talk about real issues. Some of the topics will include entrepreneurship, health, life skills and growing your business. So once again, this is Becky Sampson on It's About Time. On Wednesday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man with Stan Osserman and Pastor Paul Pontio from Puva Va on the Big Island. We're getting a sneak look at some of the cool things that he does at his church slash laboratory in the wilds of Northern Big Island of Hawaii. We talked about the PowerCube on a show a couple of shows ago where Paul talked about taking this piece of equipment to a little event in the mainland called Burning Man and he provided all the power that they needed for that event with this PowerCube. So let's roll the video and see what Pastor Paul has to say about the PowerCube. This is all the solar panel. It's been poised in less than three hours. The pump container is now in three hours. This is what it looks like when it's packed. Those are all the solar panels. All the fittings and components. All of the poles, steel poles. The beams, everything's in there. So this can be paired with other eight foot cubes that have sanitation, refrigeration, water purification. This becomes the power source for a whole array of products that could be deployed fully charged in an emergency. A chenuck could sling three of these together, drop it off at a site. Power within minutes to do whatever they need to do and satellite communications that go on the roof too. So this just came back from Burning Man. We tested at Burning Man for its first test. And that was a typical day with the dust storms. This is what it powered. So all night long. Why didn't we know about this a month ago? You write Burning Man? No, but I could have been. One of mine, Larry Lieberman was there. You know Larry Lieberman? I know who he is. He's built one of these things too for his folding windmill, which they sold to Oshkosh. Yeah, that was called the Folly. It's an Irish group, Irish camp. And they burned it at the end. But yeah, it had a lot of lights and a sound system, a huge sound system, observes it, and this motorized windmill. So how much juice is put in there? Well, on the inverter AC side, it can put out 12 or 24, depending on how we configure it. And it has 15 kilowatts of PV with the 32 panels that we have right now. So that's quite a bit of power for an emergency, like a triage center. You could close this in. You can actually waterproof the panel so it stops it from raining. And do emergency surgery, triage, command center, or emergency site. Now I'm showing this to the county and to Helco because when Pona went down with the hurricane, they were down for months without any power, the whole area in Pona. So if they had a few of these deployed, they could have had some power for people to come charge their laptops and phones and run water purification, have a refrigeration for medicine. So these are the same blue-ion batteries? Yeah, so these are the same blue-ion batteries. We're generating to build another one with a different only lift-ins as well, please. Being a former military guy, I can attest to the fact that a piece of equipment like that, especially coupled and modified to do different jobs, would be a huge game changer for the US military. So I think Paul and the folks over there, Pastor Paul, that is, are gonna be showing that to the folks at Pocaloa Training, the Marines and the Army folks. And hopefully we'll get some Air Force folks interested in that as well. And if we can get those things out to where they can be deployed for disasters and military operations. But when it comes to hydrogen, one of the biggest challenges facing the church of the first element is the defeat of the blasphemous preachers of the Hindenburg disaster. The heathens that perpetuate this story appear at every turn and usually puff out their chests within, I got you this time moment, as soon as they hear a hydrogen believer start to talk. But here Pastor Paul addresses the third commandment and rebukes the scandalous and slanderous allegations of the Hindenburgers that will show him in action with his walk burner. This is my theory, but I'll stick to it. So as you saw here, the lack of radiative, right? The dirigible was painted with an aluminized waterproof compound, right? That's what they painted the fabric with when they get waterproof. Today we call that compound thermite, okay? The thermite lights, it burns incredibly hot and it can't be extinguished, it's impossible, it has to be consumed. So lightning struck the bladder, caught the thermite on fire, the skin started burning, lots of radiant heat from that, an enormous amount. It ruptured the hydrogen bags inside and a huge hydrogen fireball in the suit. That fireball is what saved the people from blowing the gondola from being baked into death. It pulled all of the heat, including the frame and the skin and the hydrogen heat up and away from the people, given the time that they were on the thermite scale. That is the most plausible explanation of what happened. I would never have known it if it wouldn't have been from my experience with hydrogen and testing it. When I started 2012 with this, the first time I lit this stove, I had it on a stick. Anyway, I was like, that's it. So I started learning more and more and more and more and you see how visible this flame is and it's a beautiful flame. That's totalist, non-positive, blah, blah, blah. So if you do know anything about the Hindenburg, you'll know that most of the people that died in the Hindenburg disaster jumped out of the gondola while it was well above the ground and literally fell their death. As Pastor Paul points out, one thing about hydrogen is it goes straight up and it doesn't just go straight up at some leisurely pace. It goes up at 45 miles an hour, 60-something feet per second. In other words, in one second, hydrogen gas is six stories above you once it's released. And it does absorb quite a bit of heat energy. So it pulled all the heat from the other burning elements on the Hindenburg away from the gondola when the gondola got near the ground, the people that jumped out and ran had minor injuries and they weren't even as burned because the hydrogen was pulling the heat away from the Hindenburg. So if you really understand the physics, the chemistry and the forensics of the Hindenburg disaster, you would never critique a hydrogen person by talking about the Hindenburg. But to show you the never-ending love of hydrogen, Pastor Paul preaches the safety and the wonders of hydrogen cooking. A good pastor knows the value of hydrogen is stored energy and hydrogen's value is a clean power when used with a fuel cell. But seldom do we hear about the hydrogen, how about, hear about hydrogen's lightness of heart, its love of freedom and its propensity to fly like an angel to the heavens. So here's a rare look at Pastor Paul exalting the glory of hydrogen so that the world will understand that hydrogen is God's favorite gas. I'll go down this and why I built it. I wanted to make a hydrogen show for Pastor Paul but we also built it to help train first responders. So I used to go with the California fuel cell partnership in the New York City Fire Department and go to different fire stations all around the islands here, to the firehouses and teach the guys preparing them for fuel cell EVs, the facts about hydrogen and dispelling all the myths and misinformation. So there's basically, first of all, hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. Everybody knows that it's one on the periodic table. It's the lightest and smallest as well. It's 14 times lighter than air. Twice as light as helium. So it goes up at 45 miles per hour. That's 66 feet of seven. So if you went at 1,001, it's six stories a day in a second. It's hauling ass. It's hard to keep it around. So the buoyancy is one thing that makes it safer than any other flammable gas. Because hydrocarbon gases are heavier than that. They're floated. So they stick around. So in a classroom usually with an 8 foot acoustical ceiling, I go, you got a leak of hydrogen. Make sure everybody can hear it in the back. Conventional wisdom be a bit of a spark that would explain it. Well, you could see a little bit of distortion maybe right there where it was actually converting it to water vapor. But it's moving so fast. By the time it's an inch from the hole, it's hit air molecules and scattered to it's not even combustible mixture anymore. The ratio is not there anymore. That's already left the building before I even started talking about it. Hit the ceiling and went out the vents at the top. It'll go through the drywall. This stuff is really hard to contain. So that makes it safer than any other flammable gas. The second thing is that, you're gonna have to come in close for this because since there's no carbon in this fuel, it's pure hydrogen. There's almost no radiant energy. And you put my finger, no touch on top, it's over five to a thousand degrees on top. On the side. But down here, don't touch it, you touched it. Okay, I warned you. Because I'm a carbon-based life form, it likes to jump right out and get you. Okay, so, put it in perspective, this watt burner, way over $200 of use. You've never repanned it, you've never touched it. Okay, that's because the lack of radiant heat, the heat goes straight up, unless you put something in it's way with a finger. And, that's cool. None of this is heating up or the paint would have, the paint would have been oxidized, you know, after 10 hours of use. So, that is the second thing, that if you have a leak and it ignites, it doesn't heat up everything around you. Have you ever seen the video of a gas car and a fuel cell car on fire? The difference is so dramatic. In 30 seconds, everyone in that car is burned. They're going, the gas only ruptured the tank, it engulfs the entire car in fuel and fire, the hydrogen is shooting a torch out of the back. Where it leaked. So, you got a six-flick torch. And even the gasket? Yeah, the rubber on the windshield isn't out. There's no radiant heat. The brothers and sisters, you have to believe in hydrogen. You must keep the faith and preach the blessings of hydrogen to the world every chance. Hydrogen is the way, the energy, and the clean power storage the whole world can have for free. All you need to do is have faith and think hydrogen. It's the gas. So, please visit Pastor Paul in Poova Va and listen to his stories on hydrogen and you too will become a believer. Until next week, Dad and Energyman signing off. Aloha.