 the State of Clean Energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewen. And our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, of which I am a part of. So today I'm very happy to welcome Toby Kincaid, who is a thinker. And because he's a thinker, he's also an inventor, an author, and most recently the publisher of Green Hydrogen Today magazine and, most important, my friend for over 30 years. So Aloha and welcome to the show, Toby. Aloha, Commander. Good to be with you. So we want to tap into the brain trust today and talk a little bit about water and its role in our energy system. And it's pretty significant. And I think because of your thinker status, we're taking a slightly different angle on water. Everybody knows what water is. But they might not know how it's used in the energy system. And I think we have a unique take on it. So let's roll it. Let's start with the first slide. Let's discuss all the ways that water is connected to our energy system. So I'm going to let you lead off, Toby. And if I think of anything, I'll jump in and ask another question. Hi, hi. Well, water is life. You can't have life without water. It's universal and obviously vital. And through humanity, through our civilization, we've been very intimate with water. Water has been key to everything that we do. Of course, from agriculture, it waters our crops. But from an energy standpoint, the history of water and its relationship with human beings and our relationship with water is incredible. So in the slide, I tried to capture some of the key ways that we use water. And it goes way back. The first evidence of water wheels, which is using moving water, that kinetic energy, dates back to 10,000 BC. So we're in the Neolithic. And the ancient Chinese, there's some evidence in Persia, but the Chinese particularly, we're using this thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. And that's been an amazing legacy that we've brought all the way to the modern times. And another way that we use water is we boil water. And we've been boiling water as a steam engine for, well, 300 years. But what's interesting is James Watt, circa 1750, if you look at number two there, boiling water, he realized, hey, instead of heating up and cooling down the same cylinder, why not have a place that's always hot? That's the boiler. And another place that's always cold, that's the condenser. And so he realized, hey, you can circulate water, water would go into the boiler, turn to steam, it expands, it does work, it pushes a piston or turns a turbine. And then what comes out of it is still steam. And you can't put steam back in the boiler because it won't do anything, it won't absorb anything. So what James Watt figured out is, hey, we need a condenser here so we can take the water, that steam and condense it back down into liquid water. And then that can be fed back into the boiler and we have this site. So how does that condenser work, Toby? Well, there's a couple of styles. There's a single use and double use. But the thing is, we've been doing this now for, well, as I say, nearly 300 years. And the use of water is they normally just pour it over the condenser, which the steam is going through. And then that heat is absorbed by that water. And then the steam will relax down back into water internally. So, but it's just the extraordinary amount of water. And I know that we're going to be talking about in the United States, we use something like 300 billion gallons of water a day, a lot of water. But when it comes to a percentage, I'm sorry. I think you said that was like 41% of the water. Well, he asked now of all that water, how do we use it? Well, you would think agriculture would be kind of the largest demand. It takes only 2% of all the water to run our livestock and watering our crops. But there's actually a single item that's even large. 44% of all the water used in the United States does one thing. It cools thermal power plants. And that's kind of staggering, actually. That's a lot of water. Oh, and I know you wanted to talk about what's going on in the world with water. So, you know, India is having a drought, China is having a drought. There's floods going on in, of course, Mississippi. And I'll turn it over to you to keep going on that theme because water is a disaster at the moment for most humans. And then we better fix it. Yeah. So, I heard the other day that the rivers and streams in Europe are getting so hot, they can't use them for cooling these thermal plants because the delta T, the difference in the temperature is not enough to make, you know, those condensers condense efficiently. So, it's a real problem, apart from the fact that some of the rivers are drying up and we've seen in our Southwest here in the U.S. and Arizona and Nevada, you know, some of our lakes and streams and rivers are actually drying up. So, it's a heck of a deal whereas other states have more water than they really want. At the moment, yeah, Mississippi particularly. But it's amazing. Like you say, you know, the Colorado River, 40 million people depend on that river for water and you have Lake Powell in the upper basin and you have Lake Mead in the lower basin and Lake Mead is like something like 40 feet above Deadpool. And when you reach Deadpool, it's exactly what it sounds like. You can't move water, you can't make electricity, you can't irrigate. It becomes a Deadpool. And so, water is vital, of course, in our modern life. So, you know, another way that we use water is number three, which is kind of a 20th century idea. And this is where most of the utility storage happens, is where they pump water from a lower reservoir up to a higher reservoir and then when you need it, let it run down through a penstock or a pipe and turn a turbine. So, we've used moving water. That's kinetic energy. We've been boiling water. That's number two. Number three is kind of using potential energy as we pump that water up and then let it move down again. But now there's an exciting fourth way to use water. There it is. This is my favorite subject in the world because of what it can bring to the world or what it could mean. And so, in the fourth way that we use water, this is what I call water dissociation. And what we're going to do is in number four, if it's a little crowded, but you'll see that we use an electrolyzer and a fuel cell in the same power block, which is the same kind of cement pad where you put all your power conditioning equipment. And in this way, we actually can create a hydrogen battery. Now, that's two words you never hear together in the same sentence talking about the same thing. But in this case, it becomes a water, a hydrogen battery, because we're taking water. We're now going to add energy through an electrolyzer and split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You keep them separate so that you store that energy. And then when you want energy, they come back together in the fuel cell. They release that energy and they return back to water. So you see in this kind of scratching, this is patent pending US and international. It's being developed now by a company in Portland called EV4, which owns EV Global. They bring an enormous expertise. The chief engineer, Hans Vandermeer, brilliant, very capable. But he's now developing this power block so that we can put it to use. But it's an amazing kind of 21st century take that we can use water more or less like an energy spring. We stretch it out when we separate it into oxygen and hydrogen, and we snap it back together in a fuel cell, creating electricity and water again. So water is your starting point and water is your finishing point. Yes, the perfect cycle. So you're not, and the point is you're not throwing that water away. I mean, you may lose a little bit of that water, which you have to make up, but it's really, really, really tiny. It's not like, what did you say, 33 billion gallons? Well, it's, well, we use 300 billion a day in total for the country, but you could see 44% of that is 160 billion gallons a day to cool down power plants. And that water is wasted. It gets evaporated. It gets contaminated. It's an enormous amount of water worldwide. Now we've been doing, we've been using steam engines for 300 years, and it's kind of time to maybe see if we could find a better way. And when we look at the life cycle or the round trip between going from water into the electrolyzer and out again to the fuel cell producing electricity and then back to water, that has a higher round trip efficiency than a steam engine. And so that would be a better way. So for example, to your point, a nuclear power plant of one gigawatt drinks 12 million gallons of water an hour if it's a single use. Sometimes they have some some recycling strategies, but often it's a single use. 12 million gallons an hour for a gigawatt. That's a lot of power, but that's a lot of water. And so if we go to this 21st century water-based electrochemical engine, then we don't have a thermal engine and we don't need to use all that water to cool down the condenser on steam engines, which is centuries old. It may have been viable in 1850, 1870, 1890, maybe even a good idea in the 1920s perhaps, but now in our modern world, no, we have to be a little more sensible with that. Let's talk about weight then range. So we're not talking about the weight we all put on during COVID. Why don't you explain the slide there? Sure. Last time we spoke we talked about the round trip efficiency or system efficiency in using renewable to power battery electric vehicles versus using renewable to make clean hydrogen and use that as the battery and then either dispense it directly when you want to have a fuel cell vehicle or use it to run a fuel cell to run the DC fast charge. So when we look at this next slide, what we're kind of looking at is kind of a graph that kind of tells the tale, I think. And that is when you want to increase range on a battery electric car. The only thing you could really do is, well, add batteries. Batteries are heavy. You know, lithium ions, very light, but the 85 kilowatt hour battery is about a thousand pounds. So what we see here in this graph is if you want to extend range, the battery has no choice but to add more battery, which means more weight. And by the way, when you charge a battery, they say please go from 20 percent at the discharge all the way up to 80 percent. So that gives you about 60 percent of the battery to use. And the other 40 percent is really there to support the 60 percent you are using. So if you have to keep adding batteries, this has a profound effect on system efficiency. But also you just have very heavy vehicles. It's kind of dead weight. And that's important because in a vehicle, 60 percent of the work done is to move the air out of the way. So the aerodynamics are obviously important. But the second biggest factor is rolling resistance. And that's a function of weight. You know, a dump truck doesn't roll very far unpowered. A bicycle, you'll be able to roll quite a bit away. So it's that rolling resistance. That's why when you compare it with a fuel cell, you know, a big truck, we're adding seven kilograms, maybe the tank itself. You can't even measure the difference in weight. But when you extend your range, all you do is you just need a little bit of lightweight fuel and you're ready to go. And I just wanted to mention that because it makes a big difference. So if you see on the left under battery, I drew a little car on a little light truck and maybe you could do some other vehicles in a demonstrative way. But in a practical sense, when we go to a fuel cell like a vehicle, you can run anything. Cars, trucks, buses, vans, trains, planes, trains and automobiles. We can run any kind of machine with the same station. That's what I really admire in what you're doing on the big island. Using solar energy to make green electrons. You then run the electrolyzer making green molecules. And you have a public transit from sunlight and water. I think the whole world could learn something from that. So inside, I'm just trying to remind everyone on the left hand column, the left side, that's the 20th century. We have toxins spewing out everything that we do. We have it when we dig, when we frack, when we strip mine, everything that we're doing with the oil wells and the pipelines and railroads and all of the processes that are constantly emitting all of these toxins. So in the middle of the sketch, you see the earth and there's humanity saying hello. And to the right of him is, or her, is the sun, solar energy, wind, wind energy and water. And just with those elements, just with those things, we can bring it into this hydrogen battery, this universal standardized power block, which fits in between renewable energy and humans. This renewable energy is kind of intermittent, changes all the time. But human beings, we're on demand. If we want something, we turn the switch on like this on, we push the accelerator, the car goes forward. We're very much on demand kind of species, kind of civilization. So there has to be something in between that variability and our constant and on demand needs. And that is storage. And the hydrogen battery really seems to be the best storage around because it has 100 times the specific energy density, that's by weight, 100 times over lithium ion. Now, lithium ion is a pretty good power density. You can short them, the battery across the motor and you get great traction. It's really fun, great. But the energy density in lithium ion is just not enough to run these large machines or long ranges that we need. So what's kind of need about this universal hydrogen battery is now you can provide both. So if you used to be kind of a little bit of a war against the two sides because they're arguing, whereas the batteries don't have enough materials to do it. So I think the fuel cell argument has a point. But now with this charging center, you can have both. So it's really kind of a universal platform. So I just saw a news report today that the governor of California is telling people not to charge their battery electric vehicles. So because they're expecting a heat wave and that the draw of electricity to keep air conditioners going is going to overload the grid and they can't afford to have the battery electric vehicles plugged in. Of course, we don't have that problem with your universal station because we can still charge battery electric vehicles. I'm not knocking battery electric vehicles, by the way, because fuel cell electric cars have batteries in them and they have their place. And in some applications, battery electric vehicle might make a lot of sense. But what I like about your universal charging station is you can either fuel vehicles, fuel cell electric vehicles, or you can charge them using the same system. So it's and it's all has to do thanks to water that you can drag the hydrogen or the water use it for a useful purpose. And then it reverts back to water again. The perfect cycle. So the future of energy. So again, this kind of just puts it into me a very straightforward manner. We're starting with it's just one, two, three, we're going to start with solar wind and water. That's going to so that E with the little negative sign that's electricity and water that goes into this power block. The water is separated into hydrogen oxygen. The oxygen is typically vented. You could keep it if you're a fish farmer or a welder or a hospital, that'd be fine. But just like in your system, the hydrogen comes out of the electrolyzer usually comes out a little bit wet. So it goes through a desiccant to dry it. Then it goes through a filter to remove everything else. And once you have pure hydrogen, it's very safe to work with, then you compress it and put it in the tank. Now, what's coming out of this hydrogen battery is electricity through the fuel cell. If you want it on demand or and or hydrogen fuel, if that's what you wish for your construction equipment or mining equipment or agricultural equipment. And so what we see with just these two outputs, electricity and hydrogen fuel, you can power everything we do in our modern world. And in that graph at the very top, but the on the right hand side, you'll see kind of residential commercial industrial loads. So we can do a built environment that HVAC, heating ventilating air conditioning, we can certainly power those, we can power every kind of vehicle type from light duty to medium duty to heavy duty, the garbage trucks that you talk about and bringing your municipality up to speed with converting to fuel cells. That's exactly in line. That's just what we should do. And then at the bottom of that chart, you'll see kind of the big kind of gorillas in the room. We don't really talk about much. And that is the pillars of civilization, which are steel, cement, ammonia. You know, we have almost 8 billion people. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of fertilizer because I'd like to see organic, but it doesn't matter what I'm a fan of. We're talking about the survival of millions of people here. So we make a lot of fertilizer, we need fertilizer. I wish that we would be a little more sophisticated in the micro nutrients that are required by plants. So we kind of scorch it with this kind of fertilizer. But nevertheless, we're talking about a lot of people's lives. So those are the big heavy lifting things that we do as a civilization and that we have done for three centuries burning carbon. We don't need it. Once again, it's water that allows us to do this. Amazing. Yeah. That's kind of the angle we're following on this show. It's brilliant. Water is, well, it's us. It's life. And right now, we're not managing water very well. You know, this billions of gallons a day, 140 billion gallons a day just to cool off steam engines. So for those out there who are advocating for nuclear energy, a lot of people saying bring nuclear back, I'd say, wait, wait, wait, you know, it's the most expensive. That's kind of a problem. There's a lot of cement. That's a lot of CO2. That's a problem. But at the end of the day, folks, you've got to get past the steam engine. The past is the steam engine, not the future. So all that water that it drinks is why we need to move on to better technology. And what's funny about this is that the electrolyzers and fuel cells have been known for about 200 years. And there have been moments when history could have embraced this, but there's so much money to be made with a hole in the ground giving you something that you sell to everybody that it's been pushed away and pushed away and pushed away. And so now finally, I think the world is really, everything has kind of come to the right place. We have pioneers like you who have demonstrated how you can take sunlight and water and make public transit. That's pretty incredible. And that's what we need to be applying because that's what's going to allow our children's children to survive. Because right now the world is clearly becoming unlivable. The heat waves are extraordinary. Last year in Portland, we had the driest April ever recorded. And then this April was the wettest ever recorded. Back to back. Two years. That's crazy. That's the mayor of Crazy Town. Let's talk about toxicity and non-toxicity. Once again, the theme is, you know, well, I'll let you talk about it. Well, the theme is water and how we're going to keep using fresh water. And so what you have here on the left is our world. It's the oil world that's supposed to be a mountain under the oil rig that's been chopped off and there's a dump truck taking a coal down and it gets put on a train. And then they take it to a remote far away place, ideally. And then they burn it. And you burn it to heat that water up. And then as we described our old friend, the boiler and the condenser. And then you'll see in that drawing, there's a river of water that you need to cool down that condenser basically. And we do all of that so that we can put electricity in a wire and bring it to your home on the right hand side. We throw the water away. Well, I guess some of it ends up, if it does end up actually in a river, it can be used for agriculture for the downstream. It can, but there's problems. You know, when you put it back into a river or a stream, it's hot. So it affects the critters and the fish that are sensitive to temperature. Yeah. So there's really a kind of a downside all the way around. Let's just leave the water being water instead of wasting it. And most of it gets evaporated and it's just thousands, thousands, thousands of gallons an hour just being run away. So on this picture, you see in the upper part, that's the way of the world. This is what we do. And the idea of burning fuel and spewing toxins and then using all this water to cool it. Oh boy, this, this is not, well, it's not sensible. We can't go on doing this. And on the bottom, we have a contrast because now you start with solar, wind and water like we've been talking about. You put it in this universal power block and then you have electricity for the house or hydrogen fuel that you could use for a variety of purposes. So when you compare the two, the idea is just, you know, wow. And I'm just trying to get everyone to, I hope, see that this is just no future in it and we should really get on this with the utmost dispatch. Well, I think people aren't waking up. I mean, somebody when I first came to HMEI a long time ago now said, what's it going to take to get hydrogen? And I said, well, maybe $10 a gallon gasoline because there has to be a pain point. Otherwise, you know, people are really comfortable. They get used to it and they accept it. But we're seeing such radical movements now in our energy system that, you know, a lot of people say, well, we're waking up, you know, to what the issue is. And of course, the war in Ukraine and the cutting off of Russian gas, I mean, that's smoking people up about the security of supply. We talk about that in Hawaii all the time about the fact what happens when the oil tankers don't show up, you know. And now they're showing up with much more expensive oil. So what are we doing? We're going to bump up and we're cutting out coal. So our electrical prices, our costs are going to go up by at least 7%. So far, advertised as 7%, but maybe more. So yeah, now we're starting to feel the pain. And hopefully, that'll motivate people to do something about it. And we have a solution. You know, it's not like we're helpless and the sky is falling. We just have to do it. And we have that technology here in Hawaii, thanks to the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and the people that supported it. And thanks to leadership, like on the Big Island in particular, our mayor over there, who is really promoting public transportation and converting that over to a hydrogen system. In fact, they just won an award of $23 million from the Federal Transit Administration to purchase six fuel cell electric buses, full-size buses, 40-footers, carry 40 passenger buses. And so there you go. We're on the way. We're on the roll. Riley Sado is looking at the landfill as potential energy to make hydrogen so we can use our waste-to-hydrogen plant. So we have those solutions. And we just have to like do it and give it the right priority in kinds of things we pay money for. So I've had my little rant. So let's talk a little bit more about your universal station, charging station, but not too much because we've heard a lot about it already. This last slide is just a kind of a representation of what we're doing in Oregon, but what could be done all over the world. And that is the fleet managers. These are the unsung heroes of the world, fleet managers. They manage fleets. And here you see Oregon and there's the PDX fleet. So I just put a couple of types. Again, you have all these types of vehicles. And so the fleet managers are kind of going crazy pulling their hair out saying, how do we, everyone tells us we need to transition, but how are we going to do it? How are we going to transition these fossil fuel vehicles to a clean vehicle when the infrastructure, we don't know which one we want to use. And that's why this universal charging station is so vital because it works for everyone. It'll work anywhere, deserts, mountains. It doesn't matter what country you're in. If you have sunlight and water, sunlight, wind and water or landfills, I love the concept of waste streams into revenue streams. That's brilliant. I think Riley calls it turning trash into gold. There you go. Yeah. This is the right attitude. This is what we need to do. So you bring up a really important point though, Toby. And that's when you say fleets, because that's the quickest way to transition is because you have one guy who might buy 20, 30, 40, maybe 150 vehicles all at once. And so you use your hydrogen station. That way you can build up the demand for hydrogen faster. You don't have to rely on the government to subsidize it because then it becomes profitable and then the business community will take over. So that's absolutely the way to go in my opinion. And I think we're going to see that on the big island soon. So I think we're almost out of time now. And we're going to have to wrap it up. So I want to give you a little plug on the back end. So that's Toby's magazine. Tell us about your magazine quickly, Toby, because we're almost out of time. Sure. Well, I developed a green hydrogen app. And as an app, I list all the companies that under fuel cells and electrolyzers. So it's like an industry directory. And we have other features like a green hydrogen jobs and green hydrogen stocks. So it's really a tool for people to connect in the industry. But it's in the format of a magazine. It's available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Just search green hydrogen. You'll find me. That's our logo. And I hope you'll download it. It's free to download. You'll get a preview of the different issues if you want to download the full 130 page issue. It's like $3.99. Support the channel. Thank you for doing so. And I hope you enjoyed it. It's a lot of effort and a great joy because we get to talk about people like you and what you're doing to move us from where we are to where we really need to be. So bravo. Well, I buy it every three months. So it's a great magazine. So thanks for taking that initiative, Toby. And I think that we're going to have to leave it there. So you've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, and we've been talking about water and our energy system in a kind of a different way. I still managed to sneak the hydrogen such thing in quite a while, I thought. And we've been talking to Toby Kincaid, who is a thinker, author, inventor, and publisher of green hydrogen today. So Toby, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts with us today. Thank you. We'll be back in two weeks with another show at Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, Aloha. And donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.