 It's a completely exciting stand energy man here, Stan Osserman come into you live and direct from Kailua Hawaii here in the beautiful Aloha state kind of quiet Aloha state right now with all the airplanes and a Harvard up but you know we're doing okay out here in the middle of the Pacific and I think we'll get through this virus thing okay. We miss all the tourists and we'd love to have some of you come come out and start visiting us open up. Today's show is kind of an extension of a show we did about two months ago with a gentleman named Andy Marsh and he's the president CEO of a company called plug power, which isn't exactly a household name that you know right now but it will be so you might as well get used to it. It's, I'm certain it's going to be on the lips of a whole lot of people in the next few years. And, and Andy, it's great to have you on the show again I always enjoy talking to you and you know you're the you're the person that I know best for having the contacts at the very center of industry when it comes to hydrogen you're on the hydrogen council you're, you're probably I would say arguably the most successful hydrogen corporation in the US for sure probably in the world that focuses exclusively on hydrogen equipment. So I really appreciate you taking the time to join us today and talk a little bit could you, could you start off by giving us a little bit of an update of what you've been up to the last couple months since we last talked. Hey Stan, it's always a pleasure to talk to you and I wish I was in Hawaii we're expecting snow on Friday here in upstate New York. So, a lot of your listeners I'm sure are local and where they lucky. You just have to take the corona test 72 hours before you get here and you're good to go. That sounds good. That sounds, I may be on my way soon. Hey, so it's been exciting since we last talked we had a huge investor day at the end of September called the plug power symposium. And I think the last time we talked we talked a great deal about green hydrogen and plug powers efforts to move into green hydrogen. It's a electrolyzer company, which as you know takes renewable electricity creates hydrogen and gas is formed. And we bought the only company that ever built a private large scale hydrogen facility that's able to liquefy hydrogen and send it around. Last time we talked though and now during that during this symposium we talked about we just signed agreements with Brookfield, which is a $500 billion asset owner of items like solar plants and wind and apex to provide us the renewable electricity to feed our future green hydrogen plants. And we'll have five of them which generate 100 tons a day. So it's really exciting. But we need things to power. And part of that was an announcement that we made that will be powering regional aircraft probably could be used to fly from Maui to Honolulu. And when I, when we, we made the announcements with a company called Universal Hydrogen and led by the old CTO of Airbus, and they've come up with an exciting platform how you can convert all regional planes into hydrogen power regional planes. Wow. That would be awesome. So, when you say regional planes that's up to how many passengers. It's about to 50 passengers. Okay. And so if you, if you think about it's pretty cool. You know, what I really liked about Universal Hydrogen is they're incredibly practical. That, you know, we built this business a plug by being practical. And Paul came up with this idea about, Hey, it's going to be tough to have lots of hydrogen infrastructure their airport. So let's bring hydrogen isn't in as a container. And you actually just take that container on and off the plane. And that container actually feeds hydrogen into the fuel cell, which is in, which is located in the cell. And then there the electric motors there. And that really provides the propulsion. And it's at a weight that's equivalent to the present weight of regional aircraft. And we'll actually be doing first flight in 2024. So it's really exciting thing. So that's, that's really interesting because, you know, in airplanes, you have to balance them out all the time. And if your fuel is in a module that you just basically insert into the same weight and balance point that that makes your calculations a lot easier and it also probably is a lot safer because you can lock it down really tight. And probably doesn't slosh around as much as fuel would. It's much lighter. So that sounds really interesting. He does have a good concept there. Yeah, and stand. So it's about 1.5 megawatts of fuel cell. Wow. What's really interesting is the fuel cell module is the same modules that we use for on road vehicles and for large scale backup power systems. And using kind of stand everything about it is how do you use standard building blocks actually move into the aviation industry. And to me it's just such a, you know, instead of how do you get between now and 2035. And this is really an ideal way to move into electrification of airplanes today, not sometime long into the future. I think that's the key, you know, in this election, we're talking a lot about fracking and fossil fuels and stuff. But the idea is you don't get rid of all that and then come up with a replacement. What you do is you start building the replacement and putting into play. And, and eventually phase out the old technology to bring in the new technology and get your infrastructure built up and things like that in a, in a, you know, the way the plug power did it in an incremental very deliberate very structured way. Yeah, you know it's we're talking about aircraft here today but this morning I was with a large power producer where they're looking to move a portion of the energy that goes into their turbine into green hydrogen. So the turbines may have a mix of 15 to 20% hydrogen to burn, which makes them considerably greener, and you know helps them reduce their carbon footprint in a rational logical way. And I think that whole concept that I think you're right on the money stand, how you have that evolution from fossil fuel to a totally clean economy. You have to think through how you use the present infrastructure on that journey. And I think what we're doing here with folks at universal hydrogen is the same concept of, you know, you're not going to throw away an aircraft. There's that asset's valuable. But look, you as you know the engines have to be changed occasionally. And there comes points of time where you have to change it out and it'll be perfect time to make that transition. And that's, you know, those kind of ideas is what gets me excited. I'm exactly right Andy and especially in the aviation world. We don't just, you know throw airplanes off to the side after a couple years. The Casey 135 that I flew right before I left the Air Force had already exceeded the age of the all the pilots that were flying it. You get on the flight deck and there's a crew of you know, 20 and 30 year old kids flying the airplane at 60 years old. And it all has to do with the type of maintenance you do in the aviation world. They call it time compliance inspections and replacements, even if a part's not broken at a certain point in time or flying hours or cycles you always take it out and change it whether it's worn or not. You have to keep those airplanes flying and do it safely. And certainly airplanes aren't made the last just 10 years they're, they're made the last quite a bit longer. The Casey 135s and the B 52s that the Air Force flies. They were made in the 1950s and 60s. And that's, that's a pretty amazing speed, especially considering how the military is not exactly the most gentle user of airplanes in the world. You know, Stan, I think people don't recognize all the time how long infrastructure last. You know, I did a design, I was an electrical designer when I was younger, and I did a design for undersea cable, which power repeaters, and that power supplies actually still use today. You know, I hate to say this 45 years later. So that's kind of, so you're right. So when you're thinking back. And even when you think about our main business that we started with, now going into for clip truck. We don't change the for clip truck. We change the battery and put a fuel cell in there when the battery run and comes to end of life. And that's really how I think people have to think about this transition. Be it planes, be it large scale turbines, be it vehicles. What does that transition look like and how do you leverage the infrastructure that exists today. Well, I'd say the success of long lasting infrastructure is good design to begin with. And, you know, I'd say that's a credit to your skills as an early electrical designer to come up with that technology but that's really important and I'll say for Boeing. The KC 135 and the 52 are two great examples of an airplane that was designed from scratch to be good and strong and last through the cycles that airplanes fly through the metal fatigue issues. And the KC 135 was upgraded to basically twice the power in the engines that it was designed for originally. And the airplane is still flying, but they had to do some serious modifications to the airframe to make it so it was structurally sound enough to do that. But it all starts with good design. And I think that's critical. You know, so as we look forward, you know, we both look at mostly in your case, material handling equipment and vehicles. But as we start to look at hydrogen on infrastructure in grids and my pick my favorite example is on off the grid home. If you had a excess solar power, and you can turn it into hydrogen you can be cooking with hydrogen you can be running your car off the hydrogen. What do you think that transition is going to play out. No, I actually think Stan you'll get in your beginning to see this in Japan. That's eventually though we will be hydrogen pipeline, very similar to natural gas pipeline. You probably don't have a lot of natural gas in Hawaii would be my guest. Here on Oahu, we actually have over 1000 miles of pipelines 125 miles of high pressure, and over 1000 miles of low pressure. I did not know that that's kind of cool. So, when you think about the natural gas pipeline today, take somebody like national grid, the national grid which is a huge utility. We don't have them in New York but they're really UK base. They're looking to take their natural gas pipeline and convert it completely to hydrogen by 2040. So, you know, you'll start by injecting a small amount of hydrogen, but eventually what they'll do is they'll use large scale wind power off the North Sea, create the electrolyzers hydrogen and just put that into the pipeline. And so you're taking advantage of electricity at low cost, because as you know, I'm sure you have this issue in Hawaii that there's a lot of stranded renewables where it's not used. And what's the best thing to do with that stranded renewable is creating the hydrogen. So, you know, it's another example. How do you take established infrastructure and turn it into something that's clean and usable in the modern world. You know, I'll give you another example stand we're looking at. I mentioned to you we're looking to build five hydrogen plants over the next four years. Many of the places we're looking to do that as believe or not, so cold plant cold power plants because you have all the electrical infrastructure there for distribution and feeding the plant. And that energy that once was used to feed cold power plants can be used to actually to provide power to electrolyzers. So, you know, it's, you know, there's ways, you know, there's ways you have to always be thinking about what exists, and what you can do cost effectively. And with aircraft. It's the same item. But you know what else I really like about aircraft. You've flown in those regional air like perhaps right there are miserable rides. That's what we have up in Albany top bouncing all around the plane. You know when you start, when you start putting electric motors in there. You know, instead of having that jerky life that's so uncomfortable electric motors will actually give you a nice smooth ride without, you know, without, you know, from a passenger point of view so you're getting not only the environmental that actually providing passengers a better product. And as we talk about, you know, you have to think about infrastructure, but you also have to think about, you have to add additional value to customers that help make this transition faster and quicker. And that's really what we think about when we make an offering for fuel cells, how to make our customers life easier. And in this aircraft world with universal hydrogen, in reality, that's what they're doing too. Yeah, it's all about the customer in the end when you're in when you're in the public service business like you guys are. So Andy we're going to take a quick break here we'll be back in 60 seconds and we're going to talk some more about pipelines and infrastructure. And aviation sounds good. Welcome back to stand awesome in here and stand energy man show with my, one of my very favorite guests Mr Andy Marsha plug power. And we've been talking about how we actually make that transition to a cleaner environment and cleaner energy via hydrogen, and even cleaner aviation So we're talking a little bit about pipelines and what I talked to Andy about during the break is what we've discovered is those pipelines are important, not just for the actual pipes themselves, but also for the easements, because many cases, gas companies have easements that are approved by the government. And getting those easements is not easy, it involves a lot of lawyers and a lot of money, and they already exist and some of them are becoming obsolete so moving things through a pipeline is a whole lot cheaper than moving them in big trucks and moving them on highways and railways so if we can capitalize off that that'll really help us out what do you what do you think Andy. I think I know there's a project that we're working on in the Netherlands, where they're looking to use renewable electricity, create hydrogen move it through pipelines. And it's about seven or eight times lower cost to transport the hydrogen via pipeline and transmitting the hydrogen via trucks. So it is, it is a, I will call it a game changer span. But again it's another big driver how you reduce the cost of hydrogen, and also how you make hydrogen a more ubiquitous fuel, right. Now that's one of, one of the challenges this industry's always had is, how do you make hydrogen easy. We talked about this concept for aviation where you just, and we talked about earlier how you loaded and unloaded on to the plane. That makes it easy. And so, us in the hydrogen industry, you know, you can talk about all the new technology all you want, but you really have to think about how you make that experience simple. And one of the drawbacks and challenges for the industry has always been infrastructure and the work that you were talking about in New Mexico, about how do you use the pipeline. Putting hydrogen in containers and putting it on plane. That kind of work just makes it so much easier to have hydrogen is readily available. Because once you move to electrification, once you use the hydrogen, so many things become simpler. Just think about the automatic guide of vehicles and electrification. You know, real self vehicles, which are powered by hydrogen. You know, because they're electricity can do just so many more things with electric devices, and you can do with old mechanical devices. And so, from just data generation data knowledge and maintenance and how you make sure it's safer for people. And that comes into play when you move into electrification because you just get so much more data. So, you know, I think people forget about all the advantages of electrification and all the advantages that hydrogen and all the applications hydrogen can enable if it becomes readily available. And as you mentioned, pipelines is one of the ways to do that. I was even amazed to find out that they're considering hydrogen fuel cells and things like cell phones and and small appliances and that kind of boggle my mind because I see it kind of like you do is more of an industrial transportation, kind of on a larger scale. It's hard for me to miniaturize a fuel cell things down to a cell phone or small appliances but it's happening. I probably, I probably think that's probably not the best application. I actually have a little electrolysis that sits on my desk would provide cell phone backup power to me from cell phone. So, I actually use devices like that, but I would say that it's probably not the perfect application. You know, when I think about the, you know, the whole clean energy spectrum, and how you power devices. I think there's places where batteries of perfect right cell phones are a perfect example. I think vehicles that have to travel less than 100 miles. I think, you know, battery soft many many storage which is four to six hours. Then if you have assets that really have to be used heavily. That's really where fuel cell and hydrogen it in perfect. And that's everywhere from for clip trucks to long range transportation to buries the railroads, all those kind of items hydrogen makes sense. And then I think there's another class stand and I think international transportation for airlines, for example, I think biofuels are the right answer just because of their energy density and weight. So, I mean I think that the future clean energy world has to be a mixture of all those technologies to be to really be able to meet the carbon goals set out by the Paris Accord. And here in Hawaii we have a saying that there's no so silver bullet to the energy, you know, defossilization of our energy grid. It's a silver buckshot. There's got to be a lot of different. Do you have deer in Hawaii? Yes, we do. We have access deer and we have, I believe, black tailed deer on Kauai. Only one island has black tailed deer several islands Maui, Linai and Molokai Maui County essentially has access deer. Yeah, we have we I don't want to divert too much but are those years native or were they imported. They're all imported they're usually gifts to the royalty here. Okay. Interesting. Oh yeah we can get into a whole cultural thing on cowboys and cattle and deer and birds and everything but you know another an interesting story that we have here you know we we worked a lot with the military. And we were at a conference one time where navy special ops guy got up and said hey, you know it's, it's kind of a tough problem if any can help us solve it but our navy seals. They can't take lithium batteries on the submarines because they're there have thermal thermal runaway issues and stuff so we have a limitations there and after so after you finish talking and on a break I went up to him and I said well, you know that on your nuclear submarines you you have the capacity to make oxygen right and he said yeah, I go you know what you throw away and he goes, No, I go you throw away the hydrogen. And you can be using metal hydride little cells and places of batteries, and you can be charging those with the hydrogen that you already make on your submarine. And if you know anything at all about getting anything on a navy ship, especially a navy nuclear ship. It makes incredible amount of science and study and testing and proving to make sure it's safe enough. And it was a real surprise to the guy, and I know now that the navy is actually working on that stuff, because it's solved a problem for him so hydrogen does solve some unique problem. And we have a, you know, we made an acquisition of an electrolyzer company that did lots of work with NASA, developing electrolyzers for 47 years. And one of the products actually runs the electrolyzer for a satellite going one direction. And so you know we create hydrogen. When required so it has solar power, connect creates hydrogen, but then you can run that same stack as a fuel cell, and it can generate electricity. So the same device actually creates the hydrogen, and then uses the hydrogen to create the electricity for the satellite. You know, plug power has lots of hidden technology that, you know, can be leveraged into commercial application is really one of our core strength. Well that's why I like you guys so much because you're, you're not only good at what you do but you're looking to the future and you're looking to, you know, make other things happen and that's impressive. So I'm excited to hear from your background and doing electrical engineering and stuff that you have that kind of mind that can put the good design applications to good use. That makes sense. And I'm excited to see what plug power is doing. So that's why I like to keep checking in with you from time to time, because I know it's always going to be enlightening for everyone. In our application we're spending a good deal of time on stand. And that's actually in this one you, your, your audience may not be aware of is that the power backup power data centers, and even like distribution centers is becoming a big issue. So in the state of California, I think many of your folks know about the grid issues they're having in California. The state has gone to large companies like Microsoft and Wal-Martin said, you have to provide your own 96 hours of backup. But by the way, you can't use diesel. You know, I will, I'll, I'll contend for that level of backup because of the energy density of fuel cells versus batteries. There's no other solutions but hydrogen fuel cells. So what you're seeing is that these companies are really beginning, you know, Microsoft, there was National Hydrogen Day since we met on October 8. So National Hydrogen Day Microsoft, you know, presented three times during that week about the long term they're looking to move fuel cells to replace all their diesel engines at data centers. And when you start looking at that potential market to replace all the catapult generators and other generators, it's over a $36 billion annual opportunity. So there are large, large markets for hydrogen fuel cells that stop problems people are demanding it stop. That's, that's impressive to and I know that it's a great application for fuel cells of power, power backup. Especially when you get to large scale and running a big 24 seven distribution center, or data protections, you know, data center is for 90 something hours, you know, for nearly a week. You're talking, you better have the reliability. You know, the fuel cells can provide it. So, yeah, I tell you what, Andy, we blasted through 30 minutes here and I really, I really appreciate it but we still got a lot more we can cover. So you mind if I invite you back sometime early next year we absolutely wouldn't be 2021 without being on your show. Okay, great. Thank you for your time, Andy, and, and, you know, find Aloha from the Aloha State and just remember take a quick, quick test and you're out here in no time. It sounds good. I, you know, thanks a lot. I look forward to being there in person. All right. Okay. Bye now. See you next week and stand energy man back in my regular time at three in the afternoon along.