 to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome back our guest from our last show, Toby Kincaid, for another episode. And he's an author, inventor, founder, and an electric vehicle charging systems visionary. So Toby, welcome back to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Yeah, so today we're going to be talking a story about a winning team, batteries and fuel cells. Most people think that batteries compete with fuel cells, but actually they are a winning team. They work together. They have the various characteristics. And we're going to find out why they're a team here today with Toby. So Toby, let's launch off and start talking about a winning team, batteries and fuel cells. Wonderful. I first have to say our hearts go out to Maui, to everyone in Hawaii, what a gut punch. And hey, folks, we've got to change this. We've got to fix it. Let's honor them. Let's fix it. So we could start with that, I think. I just want to say we're heartbroken. But in the first slide, I wanted to label it, but I just couldn't. What's the point here? It's the earth and humanity. And the earth, Mitch, you're a longtime sailor, your whole life, you're a Navy man. So the idea of a vessel, of a ship to you, is hardwired. And I wanted to label this sketch, save our ship. We are in big trouble here. We're burning up. We're in a heat wave. We've been burned out. Paradise, California, now in the middle of the ocean, you guys are getting the full weight of our carbon addiction. So I just wanted to start with that, that this is the point. And I was going to draw lots of people, because there's 8 billion souls aboard our ship. But I just drew one, because it's the dignity of the individual that is our cause. That's the most important thing. So starting that way, I just want to say our hearts go out. So we only have one planet, earth. And it's almost like a lifeboat for us. So having been a captain of a ship in my previous life, you're out there 1,000 miles away from shore. And that's all you have. So if you screw up, you may last in the lifeboats for a month if you're lucky if you eat each other. You read stories about people being in lifeboats. But we have to take care of our lifeboat. We don't have a planet B. So this is what it's all about. So you're totally right. We have lots of humanity. And we owe it to people to come up with solutions that work and are sustainable. Absolutely. So in our next slide, let's talk about how are we going to win? How are we going to beat this? So here's our earth. And then we have three aspects of our civilization. We have our economy, the environment, which we all depend on, and our energy paradigm. And unfortunately, everything is in opposition. The economy, we can't get low-cost energy. It's volatile pricing, can't plan. And then when we burn the energy, we destroy the environment, which our economy depends on for agriculture and everything else. So what's the common denominator between these three realms? Well, water. We're mostly made of water. The earth is mostly covered with water. But water is the key to unlock our future. So I just wanted to mention that there is evidence. There is a common denominator. And if we work in this common denominator, we can get to the right answer. So next slide, please. Okay. All right. So here's our problem. For 300 years, we're burning carbon. And the oceans and atmosphere and lands have been absorbing and absorbing and absorbing. But now this is it. We're what the chemists call saturated. We are super saturated. So on the left side of this column, this is what we've been doing for a very, very long time. And it's based on carbon. How do you like your hydrogen? The energy is in the hydrogen, but how do you like it? Do you like it stuck to carbon or can we have it stuck to oxygen? Because it's an entirely different paradigm. You get a lot of energy and we can solve all of our problems. But I'm kind of nerding out a little bit because it's the chemistry that we need to change. We need to move over to the right-hand side of this column. And we can base everything on water. And right now, as we talked about earlier, 44% of all the clean water in the country goes where? The agriculture? No, that's number two. Number one is cooling down thermal power plants. You know, we run on steam engines. Oh, we've been doing steam engines for hundreds of years. So, and the problem with the steam engine is you haven't had a boiler, so you've got a burn fuel or split atoms. And then you have that condenser. You've got to cool it down so that the steam can return to water and come back and be boiled again. So we put rivers of water to cool it down. 44% just wasted. Some of it gets evaporated and then you're left with highly mineralization. And so it becomes a condensate, ah, it's a big mess. Okay. We throw a lot of it away too. It's such a valuable resource. Oh, incredible. So when you hear people saying, hey, we've got to go to steam engines or a nuclear, which is a steam engine, hey, just call them out on the water. Where are you going to get the 12 million gallons an hour per gigawatt? Wow. So where are you going to get it? Come on, it's the last century. We're in the new century now. So we need to get different. In Hawaii, you know, we don't have a lot of spare water right now. We've, you know, not fresh water. We have, we're surrounded by ocean and sea water. But of course that takes energy to distill it if we're going to try to get fresh water. We need fresh water. And so what was demonstrated in the Maui fires is they were running out of water to fight fires. And, you know, that's just one example of why water is so precious and why we need to conserve it. And we certainly don't need to be using it just to cool a thermal plant and then throwing it away. Yeah, absolutely. In this world, it doesn't fit at all. So let's go to the next slide. Yeah, let's jump in. Talk about our favorite subject, which are batteries and fuel cells. And I just want to make the point once again, that, you know, even though I'm a fuel cell and hydrogen guy, I'm not a high, I'm not a battery hater at all because they each have their use and their value proposition. And one of the things we want to talk about is, you know, are we using the right value proposition for some of the applications that we're using them in or should we be adjusting it to match their value for providing the overall solution and not forgetting something? And we're like going totally overboard on hydrogen or going totally overboard on the batteries because hydrogen vehicles have pretty big batteries in them themselves. So I'll stop talking and let you carry on with that theme there. Well, you know, that last show we talked about some of the big problems and there are big challenges if you think of everything being battery powered. So there's a place for everything and an application and a use case, which makes the most sense. So I put these kind of problems up and I flipped it around like a question. So let's just look at the left side of this graph and you'll see that, you know, what's a big problem, lack of materials. And we, do we have enough battery material for all just the cars? Not even just the cars. Well, there's a billion and a half of them. It's a lot of cars. So that's a problem. Huge loads on the grid. That's a problem because you're charging these cars in a fast charge with, you know, 30 to 300 houses worth of power. So that's a lot of capacity that you're gonna put into one vehicle. So next problem, are there unscheduled loads? Well, yeah. When do you get a charge? The operator doesn't know. The system operator has to kind of look for patterns, plan for capacity and bring those online. But if we're charging with, you know, just 150 kilowatt fast charges, 30 houses. So it doesn't take many vehicles to really kind of be a big thing. So unscheduled loads, problem. The next thing is toxic sources. You know, I hate to say this, but we're all burning some toxic sources in our grid. Very few are actually a hundred percent. And in Hawaii, I mean, you're in the middle of the ocean, but you have the most expensive and the dirtiest grid in the whole fleet. So I know that you're dealing with reality, but we're gonna move this reality and move the goalposts so we can clean this whole thing. So the next big problem is grid overload. I mean, we're talking about 1,000 cars, a million cars. If you're talking about DC fast charges, the way you wanna do it, the numbers get really tough, really fast. Very expensive. California says they're gonna need $50 billion in grid upgrade just to handle the 12 million new battery cars they expect by 2030. So 50,000 million, before you do anything, that's what you gotta pay. Who's gonna pay this? Well, everybody, we're all gonna pay this. So these problems are significant. I'm sorry, you're gonna- Well, I was just gonna say, we're actually gonna have 12 million cars by 2030. That's only like six years away from now. Yeah, that's a little bit- How fast can we respond to all this? Let's not, we need to have a bit of reality as well in what we're trying to, our aspirations are great, but there is a reality that, it takes time to do all this stuff. You don't just add triple or quadruple your six stuff, let your grid in like six years. I mean, that's just impossible. Well, it's trillions of dollars. So I don't know where that's gonna come from. And then there's even other problems. There's the idea of when you want to power with solar, you actually have to be connected to the car. Solar is real time. So if you're not connected, we call that a capacity factor mismatch. The sun is in up 24 hours a day, it's up for a few hours. So how available a resource is really does matter. So we start building up all of these barriers and for a couple of million cars, I'm impressed you can get that far, but the idea that we're gonna decarbonize our transportation sector with batteries, that's really hard math to make work. And the last little thing on this list is the charging time, which I would argue is not a problem. If you're parked for hours, you can level two charge just fine. It's the DC fast charge, which I'm a fan of, I work in the industry, but there is a reality to it as you point out. And so on this chart, when I list all of these major barriers on the left side, and then on the right side, let's ask, well, if you had a green hydrogen fuel cell paradigm, do you have a lack of materials? No, I will say some fuel cells, the PEM type proton exchange membrane, they like to have as much power density and energy density as possible in these devices. So we use a little bit exotic materials, iridium, platinum, you don't have to, that's just the best. And as with batteries, this chemistry is evolving. But is there a fundamental lack to fuel cells and electrolyzers? No, material. I'd like to make a point here. I'd like to make a point is, you don't throw the platinum away. Like they can recover 98 to 99% or maybe all of the platinum when it's over. So it's not like you're throwing this stuff away. I don't know about the freedom, but. No, no, exactly. That's why they're stealing all the catalytic converters, do you need? Exactly. What do you think they're doing with those? As far as a material kind of making, we have enough that's not going to stop us from electrifying transportation. That's what we're trying to do. But we've got to do every sector, every segment, aviation, maritime, light, medium, heavy duties. This is a tall order and we're not making enough progress. So when we look at this chart and you compare the fuel cell, which is the electric vehicle you never hear about, you always hear about batteries. In fact, in the discussion, in the media, they just assume you mean a battery. No, no, no, there is one other kind, which makes the energy on, well, in real time. So actually you're using a 1% battery and 99% fuel cell. And we'll talk about that in a bit versus a 100% battery. But when you go down this list with the fuel cells, are there lack of materials? No, huge loads on the grid? No, it doesn't touch the grid during peak time, only off peak. Are there unscheduled loads? No, because it's, you can fuel any time from the hydrogen. So it's not grid connected in the real time. So are there toxic sources of electricity? No, because it's green hydrogen, it's clean hydrogen. But we make that with renewables. So solar and wind, that's the green electron. And then you add that to the electrolyzer with water and you have oxygen and hydrogen. Let the oxygen go, the hydrogen's there, you dry it, filter it, put it in the bottle, ready to go. Perfect cycle. Yeah, it's straightforward. And you've got no grid overloads. We've got no capacity factor mismatch because 100% of the time, you're connected to the green sources of electricity that drive this. Now you can connect to the grid and use other people's excess renewable and that's a variation. But when we look at this chart, all of these seven problems are not trivial. They're big and they're expensive. But on the fuel cell side, it doesn't even come up. So everyone wants to go on the left side. Maybe they're just not aware yet that the fuel cell vehicle is beautiful. It's quiet, it's clean, it's powerful. You fill up in five minutes, you have 350, 400 miles range now with these extended, they're having larger tanks. You know, what a vehicle. But the important thing is it's not just for cars. You can run anything with a fuel cell. Anything you have a diesel engine in, pull it out, put in a fuel cell stack, a fuel cell engine and you're good to go. That's what I love about your system because we can take it anywhere and provide fuel directly for medium and heavy duty vehicles which everyone in the battery world is saying, oh, you know, we'll get to it eventually. But hey folks, we've got six years. That's what the IPCC says. And we're still here in Oregon. We're still speaking goals about mid-century. I just want to shake them. What are you talking about? You're not going to get there. We've got, we have this decade and if we fail, we fail everyone. So let's talk about the guy who's got a fleet of vehicles because, you know, one of the early applications, particularly for light duty vehicles and heavy duty vehicles is fleet, fleets, vehicle fleets. And you know, one of the things is, you know, from the point of view of infrastructure, you know, if you have a fleet of vehicles, you have one set of charging infrastructure or fueling infrastructure. You can service many cars as opposed to like the way we have it now for light duty gasoline vehicles and what they're looking at as some of the chargers. You've got all this distributed charging or fueling spread around. So let's talk a little bit about the fleet operator. And this is, I'll let you do the talking there. Well, you know, I love fleet managers because the ones are going to save the world. It's the fleets, you know, when we make a decision about our own car, that's our own car. But when you talk about a fleet, the fleet manager is very well aware. Well, you have to maintain this vehicle, fuel this vehicle, change the oil, do everything you need to do to keep these cars running. And so I thought, well, maybe as an example, we could take a fleet example, very small. Of course, this is just an example and it's just one type of vehicle. So let's say a hundred cars and each car is going to go 600 miles a month. So you need 60,000 miles. How are you going to do it? What's the best way to do it? So let's grab the next slide. So this is what we're trying to do. And here we've discussed five clean options last show. It was getting crowded on the slide. So I just drew three at a time. But the first option is level two and level, there's three levels, one, two and three. Three is DC fast charge. Level one is from your wall socket, 120 volts, very slow, but there. Level two is faster, about up to seven kilowatts and around 20 to 25 miles per hour as a charge rate. Now, level one and level two are actually both AC charging. And that's interesting because the battery is DC. So what's happening? Well, the charger, it's a rectifier. That's how you go from AC to DC. That's actually in these small powers, you can put it in the car. That was that way. That level two, just actually it's like a big light switch. You're putting AC power into the car. The charging equipment is in the car. Now, when you get to DC fast charge, now you're talking about big power and it's DC to DC. So that big power is so the equipment is so large you can't put it in the car. So that's gotta be at the station. So level A, the solution A is just level two, very easy to do. And I said for this hundred cars, let's use 25 dispensers. I'm imagining they all come to the parking lot in the morning, they can charge a bit, but you still don't have 100, you only have 25. So you have to share. But if you add up the seven kilowatts to 25, you get to about 175 kilowatts. That's the peak. Now that's kind of okay. If you're under 200 kilowatts, no grid upgrade probably is gonna ever happen. So you're good with that. But now when you go to section B and we go to DC fast charge, now let's take our hypothetical fleet and let's say, okay, we don't need 25 level twos, let's use 10 DC fast charge. Now maybe you can get away with five, but we're servicing 100 vehicles. So I thought, okay, well 10 seems kind of reasonable. Well, you get a great advantage because you have much faster charging. So you're not using so much time. And in the level two, it took 2,400 hours of charging, which is sounds kind of rough, but hey, 24 hours per month per vehicle, doable. When you're parking or when you get to DC fast charge, man, we're talking about power because the only way you can fast charge a big battery is brute force. You just have to push it in hard. And when you do that, it's a lot of power. So our 10 dispensers now have a peak rating if they're all used at once at one and a half megawatts. Now that's a lot of power for a parking lot. You're gonna need some great upgrade probably for that. So you get some advantage in the user experience, but we're talking about hardware. We're talking about infrastructure. You now have to support that. And let me tell you, it's a heck of an electric bill. Right. So in level two, and then DC fast charge, you have an electric bill. Okay, then we get to your system, but I'm a big fan of this. Maybe you can tell. But I love direct fueling because now you can use green hydrogen. Now we can use renewable energy to make clean hydrogen fuel from water. And that's done in a machine called an electrolyzer. So once you have the hydrogen, it comes out a little bit wet from an electrolyzer. So it has to be dried through a desiccant, then you filter it, then you put it in a bottle. You compress it and stick it in a bottle. And once it's sitting in the bottle, it's completely inert. Doesn't do any chemistry. It'll sit there for maybe a century. Years. It just sits there. It's for long-term storage, which lithium batteries cannot do. Oh, hydrogen. See hydrogen is nature's battery. It's the perfect battery. It has 60 times more energy density than lithium ion, three times more energy density than gasoline. So if you want to run big machines and we have big machines, hey, hydrogen's your way. But I love your third system here because now we're really talking about the big picture. We're talking about how we're actually going to provide an infrastructure that can move us around in our modern lifestyle. So we're not going to give that up. The only problem is the fuel is toxic. Just change the fuel. And that means you've seen some machines, but it's not like you have to change everything. We're just talking about swapping up the engines. That's not crazy. So I'm really happy about that system. So what do we have? Well, let's talk about the team now and the team approach. Sounds like you're fashioning batteries. So let's talk about how they all work together. Well, that's right. I mean, what you've had is the battery camp and the fuel cell camp, and they haven't been getting along and the infrastructure is different. So you almost have to pick your poison. So in this little cartoon, and thank you for encouraging me. This is my attempt at one. You see on the top, you see a battery and a fuel cell. Yay, but Elon Musk's idea and everyone following him is, hey, let the battery do all the work. 100% of the time. And if it goes down 50%, hey, carry it with you. You got to carry all this dead weight. So look at this little battery. He's sweating in it and the fuel cell. Hey, I'll just sit in the back, go ahead and take me through the park. I love the park. This is really just crazy stuff, right? But the truth is they don't have to be in opposition. They can work together and look at those guys fly down the road when they're working together. See, the battery is great for what a battery is great at, running electronics, quick transition, high power density in the moment. So if you want to accelerate, it's going to pull on the battery. But just enough to get you going. Then the fuel cell gets up to speed and goes, I'll take it from here. And now the fuel cell takes it over and the battery goes, whew, that's great. Now I can get charged. And so of course the fuel cell charges the battery. And so you only put hydrogen in this car. It doesn't take very long. It's five minutes. And it doesn't weigh a ton. Yes, that's a big deal. So the fuel cells and cars, they weigh actually a ton. And then you look at some of the R and D in the car companies, what are they trying to do? They're trying to take the weight out of the vehicle. So they go to magnesium engine blocks and aluminum body parts, everything to get the weight out. And then they add this humongous one ton battery to the equation and it doesn't go away. When you use it, it stays. Yes, and if you're talking about big trucks, you're talking about big batteries and trying to fast charge a big battery. Now there's a new standard coming out called megawatt charging standard. And this is for the big trucks they wanna do, but they're not having much luck with it. I think the Pepsi did the first group with battery trucks and the charges weren't really up to speed. But we're talking about a megawatt and a half for one vehicle. Oh, that's, yeah, that's 300 houses of capacity. We have two million trucks. Look, folks, we don't have 50 years. If you had 50 years, I'd say knock yourself out, have fun. We don't have 50 years, we have six. So if we're gonna do this, oh, we gotta get serious and really push. I mean, here in Oregon bless their hearts, but our policy makers, they're talking about goals in the mid-century still. You're not gonna get there and setting goals for what your children are doing. No, no, no, folks, folks, folks, please. Let's get serious. And we can save this world, we can save ourselves, we can save the species, but you gotta get off the addiction of oil. It's that simple. Right. Let's move on to our reversible hydrogen station, which is the next slide. Thank you, yeah. Okay, this is number four, and this is the one I love. I mean, this is really something. Oh, now, first, I'm looking at the screen. This is the little island picture, yeah? Oh, no, no, okay, no, no, I got it, yeah. Great. So what are we doing here? We're doing what you're doing. We're taking solar and wind. We're making green electrons. We know how to do that, but it's in real time, so you gotta do something. So we add water, and now the water and the electrons go in the electrolyzer. They produce oxygen and hydrogen. The oxygen gets vented. The hydrogen goes into a system where we dry it, filter it, put it in a bottle, and now you have everything because you can dispense that fuel directly as you've pioneered. We could put it in the medium and heavy-duty vehicles and aviation and maritime, but if you want electricity to power a building or a commercial process or DC fast charge without touching the grid, then we just run it through a fuel cell. So you take the oxygen back out of the air, the hydrogen you stored, it releases the electricity and returns back to water. So bingo, you're not overloading the grid. It's a standalone system that is not connected to the grid at all, but can produce the massive power required to recharge these fast chargers for these big trucks and heavy-duty vehicles. Exactly. That's a perfect application here. So you've covered the whole menu of vehicles that can be charged at that station. That's why we call it a universal hydrogen station. It could be just a universal energy station. Maybe we need to change the title on this slide. Yes, and these are being developed. Let me tell you about a variation. There's a company in New Zealand, innovation, what is it? Renewable innovations, I believe, and they use like a 40-foot container and they're using a big fuel cell stack to drive what they call rapid charge, what's New Zealand, we call it fast charge, but for the hydrogen, what they're doing is they're making the hydrogen at some facility where it makes sense for them to do it, where they have the scale to do it, then they load that hydrogen onto a tube trailer and then they bring it to this 40-foot container and they put it in the container and block it down and then take it. And now you have instant DC fast charge. So that variation is really nice. Now, with the universal station, this is being developed by EV4 in Oregon and he's adding the Hans Vandermeer, he's adding the fuel cell stack to a hydrogen station and that kind of is what makes it a universal platform because now whatever you're doing, whatever vehicle you have, you can use this station. So it's kind of bringing together the battery world and the fuel cell world and saying, hey, guys, we're not in opposition, let's work together. We're a team. We're a team and teams win ball games. Right, so we're kind of getting to where's the end of it. So I want to skip over the next two slides and go to our last slide where we talk about the economics and the value added proposition, so. Okay, now this is for, we talked about last week, which is, what is a gasoline station cell? Gas, what is a charging station cell? Electrons, so for me, it's not a gas station, it's an E station. So if you're going to power an E station with a sun, what would you call it? Well, a sun E station, sunny station, oh, sunny station. So what's important about this picture is not what things cost, but what you avoid. So the idea here is that you're going to put the solar power level two chargers in parking lots all around the island. And what you don't have, and I'm going to pull this up so I can see it, I can't quite see the screen, but what's important here is what you don't pay for. All of the 15 categories, there's no electric bill, there's no connecting to the grid. There's no survey that has to be done so they can determine, can we connect you to the grid? These just require a parking lot that you drop down. There's no trenching from the electrical source. There's no electric bill, of course. There's no unknown costs, there's no future impacts that you don't know about, there's no unknowns. This is a really practical, reliable thing and the amazing thing is how productive it is. Each station can put in, at level two, can put in about 80 miles a day in Hawaii per station. Now there are 30 days in a month so that's an incredible 2,400 miles of 100% clean mobility that comes from a station in a parking lot and it's got a beautiful canopy, there are different manufacturers, different vendors, you can take your pick. This is my favorite because I just love the design of it and it's practicality, but what's really amazing to me is 400 of these stations would produce a million miles a month of clean mobility from the sun. Oh, that's wonderful. Now it's not fast charge, so this is the case where you go to work and you're going shopping or going to lunch or something where you park for a little while and if it's right there, just plug in. So for battery cars, I think the solar charging is a tremendous opportunity that Hawaii and us, everyone around the world should be putting solar chargers in their parking lots because it makes a lot of sense to do it. It's practical, it's there and it's potent. And one has- With those happy words, I hope we've demonstrated to everybody the teamwork between batteries and fuel cells and hydrogen and universal energy stations that we need to do that or the sunny station. So we're going to have to leave it there because you know what, we ran out of time again. So I'm going to have to bring you back, Tobey. I've been watching Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy on Think Tech Hawaii and today we've been talking story with Tobey Kincaid, inventor, author, publisher, you name it and he's done it about the combination of batteries and fuel cells and transportation systems and how they are really a winning team. So thanks for participating, Tobey. Thank you. And thank you to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Mitch Ewan, we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy. So Aloha everyone and have a great two weeks.