 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy. I am your host, Mitch Ewan, from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, which is my day job. Now I co-host normally with Maria Tome, but she's off helping our young children become wizards at robotics. So first off I have Shannon Tangonan from Hawaii Electric who's going to tell us all about those awful scammers out there. Thanks for having me, Mitch. You're welcome. Well, Hawaiian Electric companies, we just want to let people know about utility scams. This is National Utility Scam Awareness Week, so we wanted to let raise public awareness about these scams. These scammers are very convincing. They'll call you, they'll tell you that you're behind on your bills, that you need to pay right away or we'll shut your power off. And we're talking about all utilities, not just electricity, gas company, Hawaiian Telecom, and they all deal with the Board of Water Supply. So what we got together today and we're just informing the public about these scams and letting them know that we do not demand immediate payment over the phone. That's not what we do. We don't ask for payment in prepaid debit cards, nor do we ask for payment in Bitcoin. These are very sophisticated in their tactics and we just want to let people know that sometimes even the caller ID will say, eco, meco, helco. Really? That's sophisticated. Yeah. Wow. They've worked at this. Their schemes are getting a little more elaborate. So we wanted to just let our customers know that, just hang up. So this must be really stressful for some people that aren't aware of this type of thing going on? Definitely. So it's really our mission, especially this week, to get the word out. We just want them to sit back for a second and think about what they're requesting because when you panic, that's when things snowball and you're going to be giving out your financial information and you just don't want to do that. These people will scam you, they're very hard to track down. So our best defense is really to educate the public and tell them to just hang up and then report the incident to their utility and also to authorities. Right. Okay. Have we managed to catch any of these people yet? Are you aware of any successes and hunting them down? Well, I know that Deputy Chief McCarthy today during our news conference mentioned that they have been successful not necessarily in the utility scams, but scams in general, tracing people outside the country. So work can be done, but it's very difficult. So the best defense is to try to get people to just not buy into it. Awesome. Yeah. Okay. So anything else on the horizon for HECO that you can talk to us, talk us about, or is that going to be the subject of a new show? Probably the subject of a new show. I think this week we really just wanted to focus on awareness of scams and to just let our customers know to just hang up. And also, we do get impersonators as well. Rarely for the electric company, but for like border water supply and other utilities, they get people showing up at their door saying, oh, you know, we're here to check a leak or something or check an outlet or just crazy stuff like that, come unannounced. So we want people to know to, you know, they need to have a valid ID. They need to be in a company vehicle, you know, with logo wear. They just need to be mindful to watch out for stuff like that and just don't let anyone into your home if they've come unannounced, you know, call the customer service line of the utility. That was my next question. Please call the customer service line and ask whether they have someone, you know, in this area checking for some kind of repair or something. Okay, cool. Yeah. Okay, well, thank you very much. Thank you. So, hopefully this will help a lot of our people not have that stress hit them all of a sudden and, oh my God, my, you know, my electricity is being cut off and I'm on a ventilator or on an oxygen machine or something like that. Exactly. I mean, these are vital services. You know, we don't necessarily always, we take them for granted. We do. So, when someone says they're going to disconnect you, you know, your automatic reaction is to panic and pay. And pay. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever it takes. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for that. Thank you. I appreciate you having us on. You're welcome. So, my second guest is Dr. Scott Higgins from Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. And one of the themes of my shows that I'm hosting is to show the type of research and development and demonstration we're doing at the University of Hawaii and in particular the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute to make lives better in Hawaii. They're near term projects that solve immediate problems that we have in society as opposed to some fundamental research which may be 20 or 25 years off on the horizon. So, I'm very pleased to have Scott come here and he came here at very short notice. So, I really appreciate that because I know how busy you have been in getting a proposal put together. In fact, we, you were doing it finishing it off as we were driving down to the studio. So, like, well done. You're one of my heroes. So, thank you so much, Scott, for doing this. Thanks a lot for having me. So, what we're going to look at is the topic is looking at fuel cells and we've named it expanding the capability of fuel cells and making them more effective, which will, wait, we put a little bit of hype on it leading to fantastic things. So, Scott, first of all, I'd like to have a little bit of your background. So, where are you from originally before you came to Hawaii? Well, maybe I'm from the great state of Massachusetts and Gopat. And from there, I went to the University of Maine where I got an undergraduate and PhD in chemical engineering. Right. Okay. And what brought you to Hawaii? Working at HNEI, actually. I was interested in using my degree for renewable energy and, as you know, it was a lot of good opportunities here. And how long have you been with us? Came out in 2009. So, you're almost a lifer. You must like it. Nice. Well, we're really lucky to have you and before we get into the details of all the magic things about fuel cells, we're going to cut to a short break right now and come back and get into it. So, this is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. My name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts of Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert. And we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurateurs and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on a Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time. You can be the greatest, you can be the best, you can be the king conveying all your chess. You can be the one who can talk to God, go banging on his door, you can throw your hands up, you can be the king. Here we are back from our break and just to remind you, I'm here with Dr. Scott Higgins from Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. We're part of the University of Hawaii up on the Manoa campus. And we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is of course fuel cells, because in my day job I'm the Hydrogen Systems Program Manager at HNEI. And I've been working with Scott for, gee, almost eight or nine years on fuel cell systems. And in fact, we work together on some interesting technology that he's going to talk to us about right now. So Scott, you did also bring some slides with you and so why don't we start off with slides? This is not death by PowerPoint, so don't worry out there in TV land. But we just want these as talking points, so you're not just looking at some talking heads. So can we bring up that first slide, please? Here we go. So Scott, why don't you take over and start talking. Sounds good. Thanks, Mitch. So putting this technology into context, we've got to go back to your original projects, which are creating a hydrogen hub here in Hawaii. And part of that hydrogen hub is utilizing that hydrogen to power different things. Vehicles can be one of them. And so one of the projects that you and I wanted to put together was the ability to use hydrogen to power buses that go around Volcanoes National Park. And that is a little bit difficult when we go back and look at the environmental conditions of the park, where there's a continuously erupting volcano that's got SO2 and H2S coming out of the volcano all the time. And that leads to very bad air quality. And that air quality is a problem for fuel cells, and it's a problem for fuel cells not just in Hawaii, but in a bigger context. And so one of the projects that we came up with was to develop some technology that's going to allow fuel cells to be used in any type of environment, including if it has air contamination in it. And so this turned out to be a great demonstration project for developing this technology to expand the capabilities of fuel cells, which is the title of the talk on the slide today. And so we're going to be talking about demonstrating fuel cell electric buses in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. And this project came together by a U and a lot of different contributors. So do you want to talk about the origins of the project? Yeah, I can briefly talk about that. I was given the task of coming up with a task in one of our programs that we run at HDI, but what do we do going forward with our buses? I'm keying on the fact that, first of all, we're operating these buses in a high air-contaminant environment. And secondly, a lot of our funding comes from the Naval Research Office of Naval Research, and they're interested in fuel cell vehicles that operate in battle, could potentially operate in battlefield conditions. So when there's a lot of munitions going off, there's a lot of sulfur in the air when these munitions explode, and those could impact negatively on a fuel cell on its life. And so I thought, well, wouldn't it be a good idea to have a smart, heads-up display of how well you're being able to filter these contaminants out of the air so that you could shut your fuel cell down in time to save it from dying on you when you're stuck in the middle of the battlefield, and you want to get from point A to point B, and all of a sudden your engine quits, your fuel cell quits? Well, that was the genesis of it, so I put together kind of a white paper. And I went to you, Scott, and said, well, you know, here's the 60,000-foot view of this thing. Can you actually build one of these things and convert it into reality and over to you? Yeah, so that's what we ended up doing. So that was a great idea and leveraging both our funding from the Navy to make something useful for the Navy and working with Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. So we have all these players in the game. And fundamentally, like you just talked about, fuel cells need oxygen for a fuel, they also need hydrogen as a fuel, and that oxygen is typically coming from the air. And so if we're going to run fuel cells here in Hawaii or anywhere in the world, we're going to need to pull in air. And that air quality makes a big difference in terms of the performance of the fuel cell. Like you said before, if there's contaminants in the air, that fuel cell can just become contaminated and just die based on those contaminants getting stuck on the inside of the fuel cell. So I think we have a slide that shows not a battlefield condition or Hawaii Volcano National Park, but I think it's the next slide. Yeah, the next slide shows an example of what we're talking about. So there you go. So that's the smog over LA, I think. And LA is kind of an epicenter for hydrogen refueling structures at pumps and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. And so if we want to operate fuel cell vehicles in an area like LA or anywhere in the world that has smog, we're going to need to at least understand how that smog is going to get removed from the air, and then even better, like you said, we'd create a smart vehicle that understands not only that air contamination, but how to deal with it. Right, exactly. And give the driver a heads up and say, hey, you're in the yellow now, and you either have to go back to base, or you need to stop your machine and wait for it to pass, or you have enough battery power to get back to base. Which is important from not just a technological perspective where that smog can kill the fuel cell in your left stock and stranded, but also from a health perspective. So SO2 is really bad for people's lungs, and they say when it's high in the atmosphere you should stay indoors, and so it gives people heads up in terms of what the air quality is that they're breathing. Yeah, if you look at Beijing and other parts of cities in China, and even India where in Udeli, I think they shut the airport down for like four or five days because the smog level got so high that people just couldn't function, they couldn't even fly the planes in and out because of the high levels of contaminants in the air. And so an invention like this or a system like this would really help to keep your public transportation system going in these kinds of environments, and keep your bus going because fuel cells are pretty expensive to change out, like at least right now they are. They always will be if they have platinum. Yeah, so you want to protect them. We control the quality of the hydrogen very precisely. It's in a closed environment, but like you said in the air it's just whatever is in the air, which is our dumping ground for pollutants, you're just stuck with what gets sucked in, so essentially. So I'm not sure what your other slides are, but I want to talk about your air filtration test rig that you developed and operated as part of your research and to developing the system. So can you talk about that, or am I throwing you off your pitch? No, for sure. Can we go to the next slide? So here's just a high-level overview of the research that we're conducting at UH in order to push this project forward, and it's got two components. The first component is on the top level, and that's infield testing, where we're going to actually operate a fuel cell electric bus in the field, bringing tourists around Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. In order to do that, you can see the second level on the bottom is laboratory testing, and that's got two components, air filtration testing and cell testing. And those are the two components that we need to understand what the impact of the air contamination is going to be. And the air filtration testing that we do is essentially we have a test rig where we can formulate any type of air contaminant that we want, any conditions, temperature, humidity, and we can expose it to an air filtration material. And by doing that, we can understand how that air filtration material is going to perform in those conditions. And so before we put something out into the field, we can put it into the laboratory and understand the performance. Okay. So how many different types of materials did we actually test? We've tested two or three commercial materials and then quite a few novel materials. So basically we were, to some extent, just taking commercially available air filters off the shelf and testing them. And then like you said, we're also looking at developing our own materials. That's kind of interesting. We are, we've both got a colleague who's focused on air filtration material development and I'm doing some of that with a grad student as well. So in doing that, we can test both commercial and novel air filtration materials. Excellent, okay. So what was the next step or where do we go from there? So once we understand how the air filtration materials will perform, then we need to know how critical is it that we clean up the air for the fuel cells. And so that next step was testing fuel cells and exposing them to the air contaminants that we expect to see. So you went to Hawaii Volcano National Park and they gave you data on their air quality, yes? They do. They've got a few sensors up that are showing the different levels of air contamination in the park. And so we got about a year of data from Hawaii Volcano National Park and it shows what that contamination rates are going to be throughout the year. And so we have a good idea of what we can expect to see on a regular basis. And then we have occasional large spikes depending on the wind direction. Okay. So after you collected all this information, did your tests and all that then? What happens next? What was the next step in developing this new system? So after we understand the performance of the air filters, the performance of the fuel cell, then you and I together develop this environmental system technology where we have a patent pending on this. And this is a device that can go into any vehicle and it can essentially turn that vehicle into a smart vehicle. A vehicle that understands what the environment is that it's running in and then can also react to it. And so we've developed a system that we've installed onto fuel cell electric buses and it will protect that fuel cell, protect the passengers by letting them know what those air contaminant conditions are. And then also react instantaneously. So we have it set up with different protocols that say if you see this, then do this, which will protect the fuel cell and passengers. Okay. So let's have a look at the next slide cuz I think that shows a design of a bus. Yes? Yeah, there it is. So why don't you just tell us what we're seeing here without like putting us all to sleep but. So if we go through the images on the bottom and we start on the left. The left is a picture of our sensor array. Right. So that's what's actually doing the work to identify the contaminants in the atmosphere. So that's chalk full of different types of sensors for different elements, yes? It is. It's telling us very specifically what contaminants there are in the atmosphere that this vehicle is running in. And that arrow is pointing to where they're mounted in the vehicle. Okay. And so you can see how it's oriented. Okay. And so who did we work with to why don't you tell us a little bit about US hybrid and how you did it all this into the bus and all the. So we have a great collaborator in US hybrid and we came in sort of after the fact and came up with this device and brought them on board and they were willing and happy to help integrate that device for us. And so a lot of the technology that went into communicating with the control system on the bus, so it changed the way the bus operates was put forward by them and they've been great partners. Yeah. So there was a lot of work as I recall this. This didn't happen like overnight. This took many months of effort to develop all the software, build the system, order the parts, integrated into the bus, make sure the whole thing worked. And then once we got it all installed and what happened? I mean you did some testing. What was the result of that? What kind of testing did you do? Yeah, so the place we're at right now is we have one bus pretty much working and that's shown in the last slide of data that I put up there. And essentially what we have is whenever that vehicle sees a contaminant condition that's going to injure the fuel cell and be too harsh for people's health. It's going to shut that fuel cell down to protect the fuel cell and the bus is going to operate on battery technology only. And allow you to go back to base with that sort of battery power. Okay, so let's have a look at the next slide. There you go. So here's a picture of the bus which has the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park wrapping on it. And if you go to the next slide, here's a plot showing the performance of the bus when we have contaminants introduced into the system. And so if you look at the solid line, you can see when the fuel cell is operating, when the solid line is flat on the top, it's operating at full power. And each of the dotted lines is a different type of air contaminant. So we've got nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitric oxide, volatile organic compound, and hydrogen sulfide. And each one of those compounds was introduced into the system so the bus thought it was going through a cloud of whatever contaminant this was. And as soon as it trips above a certain threshold, shutting the fuel cell down and operating on battery power only. And so at this point in the project, we've got one bus fully operational. And that's going to be tested around Honolulu. With the ultimate goal of getting back to the big island, which may or may not have happened. Yeah, I must say the eruption we had has really kind of thrown a monkey ranch into our gear train here on this because, of course, we were expecting to be able to operate these buses at the park. But the eruption put everything on hold right now and we're not quite sure how it's going to all work out. And whether or not we have the resources to be able to operate these buses for two or three years, which is what we want to do to get enough data to really prove it out. So that's kind of unfortunate. So we'll see how it works and we're going to do our best. So right now my understanding is that we have a patent applied for. We've had some comments back from the examiners, which have been encouraging. And so we're looking for licensing of this technology. And part of this is we're going to be supplying this video to the Office of Technology Transfer at the university to help them in their marketing campaign to be able to sell this technology to people, to the industry. Be able to use it and get a royalty stream back to the university to support our research program at the university and make money for the university, which is a very appropriate thing to do. So and we'll help our taxpayers out there, the general public who are watching this. One of the things we want to show is that the university is doing things that help Hawaii and the university make money to become more self-supporting as much as we possibly can and get a return on the investment that everybody has put into these kinds of projects. So here's a practical one. There's hundreds of thousands of fuel cell buses are going to be out there eventually, like in China and India. Everybody wants to build these buses. I'm talking about buses right now because they're big and they have enough room to install the system. But eventually we want to miniaturize this thing down. So we can put it on cars and trucks and whatever else is out there that's using a fuel cell in a nasty air environment. So there are a couple of other projects you're working on. We have about three or four minutes to go. I understand you're working on water filtration. So could you just mention that? I mean, I understand it's a new project, but what's that all about? Well, like you were saying before, we have funding from the Office of Naval Research. And one area that they're interested in learning about is water purification, especially when it comes to desalination. Now, there are already experts in that and in the current technology, which is desalination using reverse osmosis. And that's essentially using a lot of energy to push water through very small holes. And that's very energy intensive. And so we're looking at reducing that energy intensity and improving the energy efficiency by taking a look at pretreatment steps for reverse osmosis. So there's a couple of candidates out there, including forward osmosis, ultrafiltration, nanofiltration, and a few others, where if you look at the overall energy balance of the system, you may be able to reduce that salt content enough with a pretreatment step that it requires a lot less energy to. Ballpark. How much energy do you feel without just a ballpark number in a percentage-wise? How much do you think we'll save? It's hard to tell right now, because the research is very preliminary. So we're just getting going. OK, fine. Well, I think that wraps it up. Scott, once again, I'd really like to thank you for coming out an extremely short notice to support this show and to present your really interesting technology. And thank you for, A, your efforts on the behalf of Hawaii and the university to do really meaningful work that has a value out there. And thanks again for coming out. So Aloha. Thanks for having me in. So Aloha, everybody. That completes our show. And we'll see you next week. So thank you very much.