 Hey, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. This is probably going to be the weirdest show I've ever done. It's starting off really strange, anyway. We're having all kind of fun here in the studio. We're a little bit late getting started, but I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, state of Hawaii, D-Bed, HTVC. And this show is about energy. And I have a very special guest today, Dr. Ethan Allen, who happens to also be another host on ThinkTech, doesn't make furniture, not that Ethan Allen, the other Ethan Allen, the smart one with the PhD. Okay, and we're going to talk a little bit about something special, like the relationship between energy and water and how they're kind of connected in the world and how they kind of make things work nowadays and why it's so important that we focus on both of them. As we look at the future, as we look into the future, because clean water is obviously important and the need for energy is obviously important and they're not mutually exclusive. You can't be making a lot of energy and polluting your streams and you can't just live off energy alone. You can go a couple days without water and you're in big trouble. So we're going to talk a little bit more about that. So Ethan, thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. That's great. And I get to see your show sometimes. I don't have a whole lot of extra TV time, but I do get to see it. It's really cool. It's the kind of science that I can relate to, and I appreciate it. But tell us a little bit about what you do in your civilian world and your real job and the kind of things you're doing around the world. That's really kind of interesting. Well, thank you. I work for a group called Pacific Resources for Education and Learning, PREL. It's a 25-year-old non-profit here in Hawaii, but with offices basically across the U.S. Affiliated Pacific Island, so the three territories and three freely associated states. And my particular project is funded by the National Science Foundation through their advancing informal science learning group. And we get communities in the Marshall Islands, Palau, and Chukunyap states of the FSM to start learning about water in the process of doing community service projects around water. So improving surface water sources, fixing up old rainwater catchment systems, putting in first flush diverters, these sorts of projects that get higher quality water to people and at the same time get people more aware of the water issues that are just, as you point out, just increasing all the time in the region. And we talked a little bit where the show kicked off, that the world's kind of going through the double whammy right now. You have climate change kind of increasing sea levels, and so Pacific Islands, that's a big thing, because it's decreasing their land footprint, but a lot of these places are dry islands too. They're atolls that basically survive on rainwater or desalination if they can afford it. But you also have to have really good energy sources if you're going to try and desalinate. So you've got a balance there where you're trying to get as much out of your fresh water that you can, and be as efficient as you can with the resources you have. And if not, then you've got to figure a way to use energy to make your saltwater into fresh water. So do you guys have any desalination projects, or is that kind of on the high end of government? Well, we actually do some very low-tech diesel projects. So we have sort of a Votek High School in Majuro, Marshall Islands, called Life Skills Academy, and we have now the students that are building these passive solar stills, and it's a very simple design, just literally some PVC piping to form a frame with sort of some rings around it, some shallow plastic black trays put in it, wrap the whole thing in a big sheet of clear plastic, set it up at a slight tilt, you pour saltwater into these trays in the morning by six or eight gallons, and at the end of the day, collected at the bottom, is about a half a gallon of fresh water. Which will keep you alive. It will keep you alive for a day, you know, and if every family has one of those per person in the family, the family probably can survive pretty much any drought. That's true, and you know, a lot of us tend to go right to the high-tech answer of reverse osmosis or something cosmic and desalination, but a solar still is perfect, and the simplest one I've ever seen is like you go to the beach and you kind of dig a ditch in the sand and put a cup in the middle, and then take a piece of plastic and put a clear plastic, put it over, pack it down with some weight or some sand, put a pebble in the middle so it's right over your can, and as the condensation starts happening on the plastic, it goes right into the cup and you've got water right there. It's a beautiful example of sort of the water cycle written small, but also it's a nice example of the fact that it's only the water that evaporates, so you can take the filthiest, nastiest, ugliest, most polluted water and do that process with it, and when you get out there, your evaporate is nice. It's pure water. Pure clean water. It doesn't really matter what it came from, doesn't matter how much salt it had, pesticides, heavy metals, none of that stuff evaporates out basically. So we really don't have to always depend on the high-tech. Right. There's some great traditional low-tech solutions out there. There are, and those have got to be used, and particularly the abundant solar energy in the region. The sun just pounds down on those places every day, virtually, and there's so much power there. We've got to make use of that. Yeah. I had Dr. Kroc here on the show a couple months ago, in fact, it was like six months ago. I got him back, but he's the one that designed OTEC on the big island, Ocean Thermal. And the day he was on the show, it was pouring down rain. In fact, we were having thunderstorms. And as an old aviator, I started off the show by saying, you know, people don't realize, because it's an energy show, how much energy is in a thunderstorm. I mean, as aviators, we're told to just stay away at all costs, don't fly through them, don't go near them, because they're dangerous. There's so much power in them. But to really bring home how much power there is, think about how much a five-gallon bucket of water weighs. About 40 gallons. Yeah. It's about 40, 50 pounds. At least like seven and seven pounds per gallon or whatever. When you try and lift that up with your hands, and it's like, this is freaking heavy. Right. Well, just think how many thousands and tens of thousands of gallons of water in a thunderstorm. And how you've lifted that water from sea level to 40,000 feet before it drops down. And how much energy it takes to lift all that water to 40,000 feet. And his comeback when we started the show was, well Stan, that's kind of what we do with OTEC, except we do it in 1,000 feet instead of 40,000 feet. We're making power out of the thermal difference in 1,000 feet. But in the thunderstorm, it's using that energy from the sun to move that stuff thousands of feet. But so we think of energy like you're saying in different terms. And so when you start teaching this to kids, how do you approach, like when you go to these high schools on the small islands and the small nations, how do you get the kids to understand those concepts of the different kinds of energy there are and how they can be used? It's a real challenge because energy is a concept that is so ill-defined and broadly misunderstood that you have to sort of teach very specific ways that you can look at, you know, simple potential kinetic energy. You put a ball up at the top of a ramp and give it a little tap and it rolls down and takes off for somewhere. It's a very nice little simple thing here, it's potential energy and now it's doing kinetic energy. You push a spring down and watch the spring shoot something up in the air. Again, very simple stuff. But as you get into other concepts, it gets trickier as people start thinking of electricity as a source of energy. But electricity may be produced by thunderstorms or produced as lightning. It is basically, but generally you have to produce that electricity from some other source of power. So yeah, it's quite a convoluted subject actually, more power to you for working in it. Are there any opportunities on a lot of these islands to use hydroelectric at all? And when we try and mix the water and the electric generation, are they kind of rare opportunities on some of these places? They'd be pretty unusual. Many islands are who noted low islands, so they have very virtually no potential for that and even the high islands don't typically have much in the way of reservoirs. Unless you want to dam up a small stream and create your own, you probably do some small-scale hydroelectric power. Or maybe some in-stream generators that have propellers or something. Yes, right. Do you do much in Asia? We have not done much in Asia at all. Preble's done a few projects over the years in Asia. We generally work just in the islands, more or less in the US and the Pacific Islands, just sort of by accident of our history. OK, because when we think about energy and water, and you try and think about as a military guy or former military guy, I look at where your potential flash points in a region and in the Pacific, your two critical resources are oil and water. And wars have started and been fought over it. If you look at what's going on in the South China Sea now, it's a big struggle over EEZs around little islands because there's oil around there. And they want to be able to tap into that oil. But on the continental side, on the Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos side, there's big water issues that need to be addressed. Because on the one hand, you have China building dams to make more electricity for their industry, but that's restricting the flow of water downstream to those other countries. And the same time, you have climate change, rising the sea levels on the rice paddies in Vietnam and Vietnam's a huge rice producer in the region and is causing some problems there. So is there any chance that you'd be expanding what you're doing over in Asia and maybe addressing some of those other issues? We continue to look for new partnerships. We've worked some now with the Asia Development Bank and groups like that. So we do look around for partnerships. And it is intriguing how, again, that the water power business gets done. I mean, the Colorado River, where they dam that up. So for years, the Colorado never flowed at all back into the California Gulf. And finally, a couple of years ago, they actually started a program where each spring, they release enough water to let it flow for a few weeks. And it's been very interesting, apparently, from an ecological point of view, to see that the vegetation has returned, even though it's only for a few weeks a year, that's enough to get things going and start to restore an ecosystem. Yeah, nature's pretty resilient. We take advantage of that too often. We push it pretty hard. We do push it pretty hard. Well, is there any possibility that maybe the Department of Defense or some other, maybe Department of Energy could help with grants and things in that area, do you think? Or is, because you're a natural science foundation. Yeah, we've gotten some help already. We have a project going in Chuk, where the Navy has helped bring a bunch of so-called biosand filters out and get them set up there. So these are drums that are set up with coarse gravel, fine gravel, coarse sand, fine sand. And you put fairly polluted water at the top and by the time it cuts to the bottom, it's quite clean. And if you give them about two weeks to sort of set themselves up and develop a proper bacterial colony at the top to get rid of a lot of the nasty bacteria, they actually are very good filters. And the Navy helped us because these are fairly heavy units. By the time you've got the 1200 pounds of gravel and all of them, they were helpful to us. So again, we look for partners where we can find them. Do you do anything on a larger scale with wastewater treatment or I mean, bigger than what you're doing there? We have not. That's a whole huge separate issue. It's intriguing to see on some of the islands, they've really already looked at that and seen there's a real interesting issue. In this country, we take water, we treat all this water, make it clean enough to drink and then run it right into our toilets and flush it away, which is incredibly wasteful, right? And some of the places, for instance, in Majuro, they actually, all their plumbing, their toilet plumbing and all is done with salt water. True. So they don't worry about ever cleaning it up. It comes in and it goes out and nobody has to worry about, so it saves a lot of energy. Sure. Yeah, why desalinate and fix up your water and then flush it down. Right, exactly. Exactly. That's crazy. All right, well, we're gonna take a quick break here as you're very familiar with at the 1500 point. Like a quick break and we'll be back in about 60 seconds. Aloha, I'm Chantel Seville, the host of The Savvy Chick Show, which you can watch every Wednesday at 11 a.m. on thinktechhawaii.com. On The Savvy Chick Show, we are all about inspiring and empowering women and girls to be the best they can be by having amazing guests from all around the world. So we hope you'll join us every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Aloha. I pity the fool who ain't watching this show at 12 o'clock on Friday afternoon. Stan, the energy man, watch it. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve as Senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on thinktech is called Healthcare in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from mental healthcare to drug addiction to our healthcare system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting thinktech. Hey, welcome back to Stan the Energy Man on my lunch hour here today with Ethan Allen, a co-host and host host and of Ethan's likable science. So catch him on thinktech also. Don't just be watching me all the time. I don't want to hog everybody. All six of my viewers now, spread yourself in and watch Ethan's show too. But thanks for being on the show again, Ethan. Glad to be here. We're talking a little bit about energy and water and the kind of the mix and from a different perspective where we're used to thinking of the high tech. I mean, especially I work a lot on the high tech side with fuel cells and the fun thing about fuel cells with water is guess what comes out of the tailpipe of my trucks and stuff is water, pure water. And that's kind of what we're trying to get on our side is that if we start off with renewable energy and we put hydrogen in the mix for energy storage that your end product is pure water also. So it's beautiful. It's not exactly a one for one. You don't get all the water back, you know? And you do have losses like heat losses and things but you still get back pure water and it's kind of a neat thing. So I think the objective of what you do in your daily path and what I'm trying to do is kind of get back to that no harm, no foul. Let's do technologies and whether they're old school technology like the solar still or I can't even think of hydrogen as new technology it's been around for a long time too but get those things into more common use and do be smart with the resources we have. You talked about using salt water in your sewer system rather than using clean fresh water that you could normally be using for drinking or other things and use that in your sewer treatment sewer system to not waste fresh water. Yeah, we often are very unaware of how much water we would all use and we all think well we drank a few gallons of water a day perhaps and you understand maybe there is a little water in your diet coke or whatever but what you don't realize and a lot of people don't understand is how much water goes into producing this stuff. So a cup of coffee probably takes 25 gallons of water to make that. By the time you figure out the growing the coffee bean processing it. Wash the beans, yeah. Yeah, a glass of wine is 32 gallons and a glass of milk is like 55 gallons. It's actually very interesting. If you every day, if you forego having a glass of milk and instead drink a beer instead of that glass of milk at the end of a year you will have saved this planet something like 15,000 gallons of water. Do you hear that every day? It's time to start drinking more beer. I'm sure the folks at HCaT, I'm glad to hear that because they're big beer house. It's really true. That brings to my actually what I was gonna talk about on my show today was what I call the fully burdened cost and that's a perfect example of the fully burdened cost of whatever you're doing. You have to look at what it took to grow the plant or refine the thing or get it on the table and same with our other technologies like battery technology. A lot of times people go, well, batteries are better than hydrogen because they're more efficient with power in power out and they go, yeah, but where do you mine lithium? How much lithium is there? If you start putting it in every car, can you really afford it or is the price of lithium gonna go through the roof? What happens to it? What happens when it's done? You gotta recycle it and how long's it gonna last and how fast you have to buy another battery in and if you don't charge and discharge at the right rate for a lithium battery you can kill it faster than if you use it with the right cycle and so there's a fully burdened cost and we don't tend to think about that. We're so programmed to just turn the lights out of the house and pay the electric bill. We've kind of intellectually disconnected ourselves from the full process of what it takes to make these things so that's a really important point. Yeah, and it's sort of the awful side and yet the beautiful side of the Fukushima disaster is that has brought to the surface the fact that the nuclear power plants there that got wrecked and you pay for those and clean up for a century. Yes. That the cost of nuclear power that's supposed to be so cheap that they wouldn't bother to meter it. Instead you begin to see when you really do the full cycle cost particularly taking into account natural disasters that that's a myth, you know. Right, and in fact, I mentioned this before too on the show but I went to Earth Day, Texas last summer and the keynote speaker was Robert Kennedy Jr. and he's an environmental lawyer and his whole pitch was that if it's not completely sustainable, cradle to grave, fully burdened costs, then it's not economic and economically feasible, we shouldn't be doing it. So he basically saying you need to do that full analysis, detailed analysis, including potential disasters, including health risks of refining the stuff or using the stuff or dealing with the aftermath of the disaster involving that material. And until we do that in-depth analysis, we're really not doing ourselves any favor. Exactly, it's really, you know, system is thinking on a big level and understanding that nothing exists sort of in and of itself, these things are all tied together and yes, the glass of water that you drink is tied to the production facilities for the water, it's tied to the ocean it came from, it's tied to the wastewater treatment plant. All these things have to be sort of figured in and as you put it, the fully burdened cost of that drink of that glass of water and we've not done that in the past. And the idea of an ecosystem is actually our generation and that term didn't exist back in the early 1900s and stuff. I mean, I'm sure people kind of connected things but if you look at old generation, like three, 400 years ago, when people were subsistence living, they were a lot closer to the actual fully burdened costs of making things because they were involved in farming day to day themselves but our generation from the 1900s up until our generation, we really didn't have much of a connection to the ecosystem. It was kind of a new science term as I was going to college and things. And now I think people really have a fuller appreciation for the entire system and the more we were involved in the projects like yours, we get a better sense of what that system really retails. Yes, and it's been one of the real joys that I've had of working in the islands is to see on small islands, people have been and still are very aware of the sort of the systems nature things because on a small island, you have to be sufficient under yourself. Everyone has to get along with each other. There's only X amount of resources. There are only Y number of sources of water and people understand this very limited things. And it's not just sort of this infinite supply that you can go to the next town or the next county or whatever and get more of it because it's just not there. So it's, yeah. In case, so as we both go forward, you go forward in your work in the Pacific Islands and I'm gonna try and I'm actually trying to work with the military side to get them to take the same effort forward in energy. Do you think there's some ways that, like the energy production, when I talk energy, I'm talking about maybe taking solar and wind power and things like that out to the Pacific Islands as a system to generate their own electricity so they're not so oil dependent. Are there ways you think that our energy efforts can work with water efforts that you're working on to benefit these communities? Oh, absolutely. The two that who really just have to go hand in hand and be taught about it and fought about it together. I mean, if you think really on the big scale about it, the energy of this planet comes pouring into the tropics here in terms of sunlight. It heats the water up. The water has tremendous heat capacity. That water then flows around the planet, dumping that heat out, making this planet much more even temperature, more temperate all over than it would otherwise be. Finding the water cools, sinks, gets saltier, returns along in the deep ocean currents and recycles, but it is the water is actually moving the heat energy around this planet largely to the ocean and some to the atmosphere, but the water and energy are linked on a global scale. Absolutely, strictly. So what are the things that we can do to teach our kids to what are the important concepts to get across to the young kids in Micronesia and in Hawaii where we connect them back to that ecosystem, that use of how interconnected the water and what we use as modern technology here? Yeah, a lot of it does tie into that idea that there are no free lunches. Everything is connected. When you take something from here, something else has had to give them. And when you throw your trash away, something's got to happen with that. It doesn't come from nowhere and go nowhere. If it comes from somewhere, it was connected to something else and ends up somewhere else. And that connection, that conservation, that recycling, every drop of water in this world has been here essentially since very early in the Earth's history and they just keep getting cycled again and again and again. The dinosaurs drank the same water that we're drinking and the youngs know whoever's left around will still drink the same water. Until they take a line or jump on it. There we go, all right, projects, there we go. But then I'll recycle it back in fuel cells. There we go, all right. The Hawaiians hundreds of years ago had populations not unsimilar to ours. I mean, close to a million people in the islands and they were pretty much self-sufficient. They were self-sustaining and they had some pretty basic practices that kept them that way and living in harmony with their environment. Those are, I know those are the kind of things that you're also taking out to the Oceania. But do we do enough to really teach our kids now those same concepts of sustainability? I mean, are we emphasizing too much on it's easy to go to Costco and just buy a bunch of it? Yeah, our culture has made it very easy just to go out and buy more. And we don't, I mean, you're bringing up the historical Hawaiian ideas. It's great that the Wai'i, the water, was that word for water and Wai'i Wai'i was the word for wealth. Yeah, they're tied. That connection and understanding that water is central to your wealth is a very profound relationship. I think there's a lot more we could do looking backwards to get us forward. Yeah, looking backwards to take us forward. We have to do better teaching for science, education, engineering, for sustainability. I mean, all has to be deeply linked. So in the work that you do, you take your efforts and you have actual education programs for the kids besides some of these projects. I mean, are you part of the curriculum development for these island nations? We do some of that in other parts of our work at Prel, my project is for informal science learning. Although we have worked sometimes with teachers and developed units that can be used both in the school but also out of school for community education. So yeah, helping people understand where the water comes from and goes on their islands, that kind of thing. Okay, in your efforts and your compatriots' efforts, did they look to Hawaii? And do they look to old Hawaiian ways as part of a way of getting that message across? Because they're all Polynesian islands, so. To some extent, I mean, each side is very different. And I mean, the whole concept of the Hupua'a here wouldn't make any sense in the Marshall Islands. Right, that's true. They've got nothing to compare that to. So they've developed their own technologies over the years and their own ways of dealing with water issues. But yes, there are commonalities about it and most of these cultures were very conservative with water. They understood water and could get very scarce and was to be guarded carefully and cherished and cared for. We need to reinstall those values and stewardship. Are there any opportunities for local Polynesian groups or just local environmental groups to work with you and your organization and what you do out in the rest of Oceania? I mean, are there opportunities there for people to travel with you or to contribute to the projects that you do? Absolutely, we always work with partners. The work, we can't do it all on ourselves. All of my water for life projects involve environmental groups, educators, and water systems people in these islands. I don't go out there and try to do it myself. I don't know the issues that well out there. I don't know the resources that well. It's the people that live there on day-to-day basis who understand what the community needs are, who in the community is going to be helpful to them, who they need to go and sort of get the backing from. It's very, there's a lot of subtlety to it. Is there any way that folks can get in contact with you or is there a formal process for... Absolutely, through Prel, Pacific Resources for Education Learning, that's prel.org. As you go on the web, you can find me and always happy to talk to anyone about water. Or other signs, for that matter. Well, hopefully we can get some folks with some Polynesian background in environmental work and sustainable energy and sustainable agriculture and fishing and things that can work with your group and help expand your operations out in the Pacific. But it sounds like you guys do some great, interesting work and I'm sure I'll be tying with you, especially if we can get Paycom or somebody else to get some energy work out there. We'll combine the energy and the water and the education and hopefully get our Pacific neighbors a leg up on getting rid of fossil fuel and keeping their environment clean. Excellent, what a good vision. All right, all right. Well, Ethan, thanks for being on the show today. Thank you, Steve. I really appreciate it. Enjoy being here. And if you ever have a guest not show up, give me a call. I'll do it. I'll be glad to pay you back for helping me out today. I really appreciate it. Excellent. And it's been excellent having you as a guest over here. So thanks. Thank you. Thanks, Doc. Right here. Until next week, when you'll have Rachel, James on with a super secret surprise guest. And the next week after that, we're going to actually have a new host that's that energy man for a day. It's going to be Dave Malinero. We call him Guido, Guido the energy guy. And he's going to be on with my favorite electrical engineer from Burns McDonald and tell you all about micro grids and how they work. And every single question you want answered, you can just call up up and he'll answer it. So until next week, aloha. And we'll see you here at Think Tech Hawaii.