 Hey, Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology is part of the Department of Business, Economic Development, Tourism, State of Hawaii, I think. Anyway, welcome to Stan Osserman this Friday, a long Friday, hope you're going to have a good weekend. We're going to start off with a great discussion about something we don't talk a whole lot about and that's making energy using something called differential temperatures and thermal. We're going to talk about OTEC with Dr. Hans Kroc a long time ago and this is kind of a similar technology but it's just another great clean way to make energy and use waste heat from things to make electricity. So we have as a guest today Mr. Michael Markrich, right? Yes. Got it right. An old friend Mitch Muen from HNEI, welcome gentlemen, thank you, got to have you on the show this time. And it's good. We don't get to hit different kinds of energy sources too often and this is one that amazes me because it actually is really simple old school but in the high tech world it's really pretty remarkable and can give you quite a bit of power. So let's start off, Michael can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got started working with Granite Power and your background. Sure. My background is I'm a writer and economist here and I was doing a number of studies on different, all these different aspects as an independent contractor of different aspects of the Hawaii economy and on the ocean, on agriculture, tourism and sooner or later all of these studies came back to energy. Right. It was a repeated theme, you know, the cost of energy is so high in Hawaii it's higher than everywhere, you know, on the United States practically. And you know, it's a major cost to doing business here. Yeah, it's a big import. And so, you know, I began thinking, you know, are there some transformational technologies and I became involved with a company in Seattle called MicroPlanet and they make a very advanced kind of voltage regulator and that was a startup. And then I was doing that and then the opportunity came to get involved with Granite Power which is a startup from Australia and I started working with Granite Power and Granite is a very interesting company, it's very dynamic, it's, I started 10 years, they've been working at this and basically they started with Geothermal in the outback of Australia and they started with, you know, what could they do with heat and, you know, there was waste to energy heat but are there other ways of using heat and now, you know, is there a lot of heat that comes from diesel engines that's not being used, that could be used for something, you know, and a lot of it or from, you know, from a gasifier, you know, there's enormous heat, right? And it's just expanded into the atmosphere so they were thinking, oh, let's go and find places in the outback like the mines that generate a lot of heat because, you know, they have a lot of diesels and they're doing things and they're hauling things so they began experimenting and they found that they could actually stick a small generator on the side of a larger diesel generator and they get about 10% of that energy that was expanded and turned that into power and so then, you know, all of a sudden the dynamics of that became clear so if you had, you know, 10 megawatts you could actually create a megawatt of power which is enough for 650 homes so all of a sudden that math became clearer and clearer and they began working on this very exciting technology that they had developed at a university at Newcastle in Australia and it was like, you know, steam is a very efficient, very well thought out way of using energy, you know, you use coal and then you heat water and develop steam and, you know, and this has been going back 100 years and people have been doing this very well. They have a lot of practice doing it, particularly in British Isles in Australia and Canada, you know. And so the thought was, well, why not use something different, more efficient than water? Why don't we use something like a refrigerant, which, you know, we can go down to an even lower temperature and then that became the essence of granite power. How can you make this work? And so then they started, like, these experimental projects where they say, well, we can do it off a diesel engine but can we do it off solar panels? Can we do it? Can we make a solar field and can we take that heat and power something? And so what they did was they went to this municipal pool outside of Newcastle in Australia and it was cold all the time and they thought, well, maybe we can get permission to heat this pool because that's something no one would object to. And so what they did was they put these solar panels out on the field and they built a little concrete structure and they put big rocks in it and filled it with oil. And then that became essentially their heat storage center. And then they got the heat from the solar panels and then they heat the oil and then the rocks held the heat. And then from that they hooked up the heat exchanger and well, it worked powerfully. Actually the pool became too hot so they had to lower it but the people were so excited that all of a sudden they could use the pool again. So this led to more projects and a carpers plant, a chemical plant in Australia and then they were thinking, oh, we're doing this with isolated places in Australia which are like islands. So why not go to an island? Now why not go to Hawaii which has just incredibly expensive power? Let's do it there. And so then they came here three years ago and I got to meet them and they're very dynamic people and they're very resourceful and they began thinking about all of these different things they could do, you know, diesel engines, gas fires, all these kinds of, you know, different we've been looking for applications and now we have discussions going throughout the western Pacific discussing things with people in Hawaii, in Alaska, in Southeast Asia. Everybody basically who has an old diesel can use this as a means of transitioning to renewables because it's very hard for a lot of small utilities to instantly say, okay, we don't want to use diesel gas, diesel gas anymore, we're going to go completely renewable because, but what they can do is if they can take 10% of the power that they have and save that revenue and put that revenue aside, they can transition over 10 years and pay for renewables. So that's the position that we're really presenting our technology as, as a transitional step to renewables. This is the most of waste heat that's not being used and let's change the world that way, let's change the world towards renewables. So Mitch, I know you started off in Canada flying submarines, but you're flying underwater, but you're working at UH now, HNEI, so give us a little bit of your background so that everybody has your credit. Well, I'm the hydrogen systems program manager at HNEI, Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and I'm doing a big ticket project, so I'm installing a hydrogen production and fueling station on the big island at the Nalha right beside the Kona Airport where we'll be supplying hydrogen to a helion bus there and plus trucking hydrogen up to Volcano National Park. So I've been in the hydrogen game for about 30 years and so I came out here to initiate these kinds of programs at the demonstration scale here in Hawaii. Great. So what's really neat for me about this technology is, you mentioned that it starts off as capturing heat from a diesel engine. Right. Well heat is just another energy source. So diesel and internal combustion engines generally around 20-something percent efficient if they're running at their best capacity and then other 80 percent is almost all heat that's lost through friction heat, things like that. And if you can capture that you're really just capturing the energy that's being wasted by an internal combustion engine. So you're taking this heat and you're running it through an organic rank and cycle system which is totally Greek to me and probably almost everybody else that doesn't do energy stuff. And you've kind of described it and it has to do with temperature differentials and you talked about using a refrigerant in the mix to maybe even make it more useful in terms of temperature range. So let's talk a little bit about that in detail. So kind of take a step by step. We have the waste heat coming off and heating up an oil off of a solar array like a concentrated array that's given you a hot like 600, 500, 700 degrees temperature. I mean exhaust off of the car is about that much. So it's temperatures in that range and then you're taking that hot gas cooling it down and then an expanding back out. So the expansion from a liquid to a gas and that expansion just like water to steam is what drives your turbine and gives you the power. So why don't you just kind of take all those pieces and put them together for us in a nice tight package and describe how the cycle works. This is the part where I say I'm not an engineer. You can capture Mitch if you need to. So this organic rancid cycle has been around for a long time because people have been thinking about this. They've been thinking about a typical as you say a typical engine is only using maybe 20% right? Everything else is just wasted. It's just lost. So what do you do with all that? It's a problem. It's a big problem and we just live with that problem because we've just accepted it. So people do different things and they try to make things tighter. They try to increase the capacity of boilers. They try all of these different things and the idea of using this organic rancid cycle came about because people wanted to use geothermal in Australia because there's a lot of that. So geothermal heat is about 120 C which is about 248 Fahrenheit, something like that. That's about the lowest that we can go. Usually our comfortable spot is about 300, 400 in terms of the heat. So you take this heat and you put it through, as you said before, a heat exchanger. It takes something that's a liquid and makes it turn into a gas. So the liquid is pumped through the place of the heat source. The refrigerant becomes hotter and it expands. This sets all kinds of things in motion. It gets the turbines turning. It gets the generator turning. It goes into the loop and then it goes through the condenser. It pulls it back down to the liquid. Then it goes back and it's pumped towards the heat source again. So you keep having the liquid expanding and contracting just like steam engines. That's right. The water is expanding to steam and then usually being exhausted. You have to keep pumping water into a steam engine. That's right. So it's not uncommon and not like I say it's old school because it's just like a steam engine or very similar to a steam engine. Just a couple of tweaks to it. You don't let the liquid go. You actually keep it in the cycle and keep it in a closed loop. So the heat exchanger basically, though, it's like a radiator. It has the liquid going through coils and then it has an outer chamber that has another material that's capturing. So you're only exchanging the heat. You're not combining the liquids or combining the elements together. Here's where it gets really neat is what Mitch is doing with the fuel cells. You can go to a waste dump, a landfill where there's gas emanating and that's oftentimes just being flared up and just washed completely. You can stick one of these on there and you can have a complete closed system and you can generate power from it. You can generate electricity that you can then use to create fuel cells and the fuel cells can then be placed in buses and then you can run maybe a quarter of a bus system on this continually. So you're using all of this waste that's coming from the landfill and you're multiplying its value exponentially by powering buses with what will otherwise cost you a large amount of diesel fuel. So isn't that one of the key elements? We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to have Mitch come back and tell us the academic answer that the accountant and the fine arts major haven't quite articulated well enough. We'll just talk about that in about 45 seconds. Aloha, my name is John Waihei and I used to be a part of all the things that you might be angry at. I served in government here and may have made decisions that affects you. So I want to invite you in. I want to invite you in to Talk Story with me and some very special guests every other Monday here at Talk Story with John Waihei. Come on in, join us, express your opinion, learn more about your state and then do something about it. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. We have a huge man here with Michael Mark Gritch from Granite Energy, which is where we got our rock solid energy title from, just to play on words, I'm trying to be creative here. But we were talking about the organic ranking cycle. It's a lot like a steam engine and we're just cutting into Mitch's scientific definition and explanation of how this all works. So Mitch, hit it out. One of the advantages of this system is that it's a closed cycle. In other words, you don't. You have this working fluid that's totally encapsulated in their unit and it doesn't mix, like you said, just towards the end of the last segment. It doesn't mix with anything else. So it's pure and it doesn't get contaminated. Whereas landfill gas is all full of all sorts of nasty chemical stuff that you have to clean up like saloxanes, like sand that's, you know, you get that from your cosmetics and all sorts of things that go into the landfill. So if you just took that landfill gas and ran it in a diesel engine, eventually all the components inside that engine would get this coating of silica or like glass inside the engine and start breaking off and then your engine's like written off. Whereas with this one, what you do is you capture the heat in this closed loop cycle and generate your electricity so you don't have to have all the cost of cleaning up that gas. And like Michael says, all we're doing then is producing electricity which we can use then to run an electrolyzer which breaks water down into hydrogen and oxygen. We capture the hydrogen and we use that in buses to run fuel cells and so then you can run your buses. But the key element is that the organic ranking cycle is this closed system and you never have to open it up. It can operate for like 30 or 40 years without any maintenance at all because it only has like two bearings and they're all not, they're like magnetic bearings so they're not rubbing against anything. Okay, so let's try and do a practical application and we say okay, we take the hot lava rocks and we take a big solar collector field and maybe even some geothermal on the side because we happen to have some. And we have basically a swimming pool full of lava rocks and oil heating up. Okay. And during the daytime it's getting really hot, maybe even up into six or seven hundred degrees and then you're storing your energy in that heat and at night you're running your ranking cycle. So basically you can take this and make it a base load power. Yeah, absolutely. You could run it 24 hours a day because... That's right. And batteries have all kinds of issues, right? And they don't last that long and they're things you have to worry about and they decay in a pretty place. You have to worry about all that pollution and everything whereas, you know, rocks have a certain benefit. And into the big on, they just happen to have a couple of rocks later on. So yeah, it is a pretty, I'd call it an elegant solution. You have the ability to store energy in rocks versus batteries. That's not all we do, but I think that oftentimes it's so... These things are so complex that we can only think of them in complex terms when sometimes the easiest solution are the simplest ones. Yes, you're exactly right. So that just seems to be one of the common sense options that the utility companies would have to store energy, especially with intermittent solar or even things like that. If they have an intermittent source and they can store the energy as heat in a system like yours, then it's available. And you can push as much out as you need depending on... You can turn the cycle up or down to match whatever power generation you need to put out, right? Yeah, exactly. But I think the other point to make is that we have these landfills and this gas and the landfills, I mean, this is very valuable. And we're just burning it and sending it up into the atmosphere and we're worrying about global warming and climate change, but we're doing it. Why aren't we using this for something else? Yeah, the good news is sending it out in methane is way worse than sending it out in heat, but it's still sending away energy that you should be making electricity. So are there any examples you see coming to Hawaii right now? Are there any things that may be granted powers looking at to introduce this technology into any of the islands specifically? Are there any specific projects that they're looking at right now? Are they proposing any? Well, we are proposing, but they're still in the proposal state, so I shouldn't talk about them. But you can't talk about them? Yeah. There's some very exciting ideas that we're developing. Well, good. That's good to know. And I realize that when you're in that delicate negotiation stage, you can't do a whole lot of detailed discussion. But that's good. I'm hoping that the utilities are part of these discussions. They are. Okay, good. Good. And are you looking at examples on all the islands, possibly? Well, actually some islands, you know, this is just used for this on all the islands. Absolutely. There is. Does it scale well? It scales very well, yeah. And the question is on some islands, the need is greater than others. And of course, the smaller neighbor islands, the power is more expensive. And the transformational costs, the transitional costs are higher. So I think, you know, those are the places where the application is probably the best, the most immediate. Yeah. I hate to ask people questions that I haven't already talked to them about. And I hate to do public math. But I'll ask this question with full knowledge that it's probably not going to be answered here just hard. When you take this kind of system and compare it to photovoltaics in terms of acres of land needed or size of your field, your solar collector field needed to generate power, how does it compare to like photovoltaic or anything like that or wind power in terms of like acres of land for how much power do you happen to know about? If you don't, I don't want to hold it to you because that's more math than I do in my head in a couple of seconds. I would just say there are some specific places where this would work best. Okay. And there are other places where combinations of them work better. I don't think it's either or. So is it a space limitation? Or what makes it work better in some places and other places? Is it the amount of space you have available for collectors and things like that? The amount of space. Okay. And of course, the amount of sun, that kind of thing. Okay. On the windward side, it wouldn't be as good as on the leeward. Okay. Mitch, have you seen any of your experiments at H&EI or anything that focused on this kind of technology? We haven't looked specifically at this technology. I mean, as you know, I'm continually conceptualizing projects of how I might be able to use it. And you might be in negotiations with him weekend. No, no, not yet. But the landfill gas is really an interesting one. Also, anything that uses biomass and has this waste heat as a byproduct is a target. Over at the Natural Energy Lab on the Big Island, of course, they have a big solar collector field up there, which unfortunately was not successful, but could be maybe regenerated and produced. But the key element is the quality of your input energy source or your heat. So that's why landfill gas is great because the flared gas is really hot. Or our sewage treatment plants, which also flare off gas as well. So those are interesting sources. We have a coal plants, and we have the H-Power plant. They all produce waste heat. It goes up the stack, like 70% of the heat of a steam plant is waste heat going out of the chimney. And that's a huge amount of energy. Think about it or just throwing it away. 3,000 ton of the H-Power plant? Yeah. They produce, what, 90 megawatts as their capacity. And they're still throwing away heat? They're throwing away heat because it's a thermal process. They're basically burning all this garbage in the furnace, generating steam to run steam turbines. So it's almost the same as burning oil. Except that you're capturing your waste, which is a lot cheaper than oil. But we could still use their excess heat. Exactly. So anybody. Or just a diesel engine plant. Like I think you're working with some Pacific islands that have, you know, most of the Pacific islands have big diesel generators that supply that heat. Just like Hawaii. Yeah, right. Exactly. Okay. Well, being that you have an economics background, you probably know my friend Brubaker, my neighbor. Sure. Yeah. Trying to get him to cut his trees down in his yard, but he won't do it. But economics is a big part of this. Right. And every time we talk about energy, we start with energy efficiency. And this is, again, a way of making waste heat into a product, meaning it's more efficient. We're using more of that energy towards producing the electricity that we need. And when it comes to an economic impact for Hawaii, can you kind of give us a snapshot of all the oil we import means all those dollars are leaving for Indonesia or the Middle East or whatever. What would be, if you can give us a kind of a rough gouge as to what would be the economic impact of Hawaii if that bill was just gone? If we suddenly found ourselves waking up next week and everybody had solar or we were using all the renewables we could and we weren't sending all of our money out of the state to buy energy. What kind of things would we see in our state that would, what would be the real economic impact? I mean, I think that people would still have costs because it wouldn't be like everything would be free because you have to support the grid. You have to support the grid. You have to support the electrical company. You have to support the engineers that were on the electrical company. And none of this comes cheaply. And so there's that. But I mean from the standpoint of our world and the climate and the fact that we don't have to expend these enormous sums and send them out, that gives us more investment capital to put into things in Hawaii. That's what was focused on. Kind of a macroeconomic side. That's what you'd be looking at. Like all of a sudden they'd be able to substitute instead of spending money on things that are outside the state. You can invest in things in the state. And maybe this would provide more jobs because you'd be building more of this solar infrastructure or renewable energy infrastructure. And we'd be able to develop new ways of doing things. And maybe we could become a little bit like, and this is not a very good example, because all of a sudden Iceland found itself with all these renewables but incredibly well they became all of a sudden like this country which had no money and just lived off basically codfish. Suddenly became like the Saudi Arabian North Atlantic. And so of course then they immediately went into banking and lost everything. But they did go into, that was a sobering process. And they used this to go into things like developing computer games, developing high technology, developing all kind of industries, a film industry, and all these things using intellectual capital that they were free to do in Iceland that people would have thought impossible before. So I think you can think of it that way. Sounds a lot like Hawaii. That's right. So I think if you did this, you know, you could think in terms of freeing up a lot of the great ideas that people have and all of a sudden finding a larger pool of capital and people willing to invest in them. Great. Well, we've got 30 seconds left and I'm going to leave those to Mitch to give us his final words about what we could do to make Hawaii a little bit cleaner and greener using this kind of technology. Well, like I said, you know, we can't afford to just waste 70% of the oil that we import just by ejecting heat up the smokestack. So if we want to get to 100% renewables and be totally self-sufficient, you know, we do not have the luxury of throwing away 70% of that barrel of oil just in heat. So this technology is one of the technologies that we can use to harvest that waste heat and offset our energy costs and achieve this 100% energy for Hawaii. Perfect. And there you go. You got it right from the horse's mouth there. Granite power and Mitch Ewing. Powerful combination. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Michael, thanks for coming on, Mitch. Thank you. Thanks, sir. And I hope you gain a little bit of knowledge on how we can be even more efficient than we already are with heat sources, which I think most of us just take for granted that we just throw it away just like a lot of the energy that we should be capturing. So until next week, Standard Energy Man signing off and we'll see you next Friday.