 Welcome to Loha Friday in Stand Energy, man. We're here today with Robert Friedman from Proton On-Site. He's the president and CEO of Proton On-Site, and that's a big deal for us that do hydrogen here in Hawaii because the biggest electrolyzers that we use are PEM electrolyzers made by Proton On-Site. We have one at Tickham that we've had out there for, I think, probably five or six years now. And then Mitch Ewen has one over at County Marine Base servicing the marine and Navy. I think Mitch is the 12 kilogram a day and ours is 65 kilograms a day. So pretty good-sized industrial equipment. Welcome to the show, Robert. Thank you, Sam. Good to have you here. Thanks for traveling all the way from the mainland and foregoing all that nasty weather they're having over there on the east coast so you could come here with your wife and have a little bit of a vacation while you're working. Exactly. And thanks for being part of our working group yesterday as well. We appreciate you making some comments there and bringing some insight. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in doing things in hydrogen and how you got started with Proton, making Proton happen. Sure. So Proton's going to be actually 20 years old on August 16th, so just coming up shortly. And myself and four others founded Proton back in 1996. The majority of us came out of United Technologies where we were working on this technology for the military for breathable life support on submarines. And we saw an opportunity to commercialize it. As you know, the hydrogen economy was only five years away at that time. Some say it's still five years away, but we were able to go out and develop chemical electrolyzers for commercial markets and grow the business and go through the ups and downs of being a small company. And today we were 95 people and doing pretty well in serving markets all over the world. We're in over 75 countries with over 2,500 systems. And places like in equipment like we've placed on Hawaii is a big part of what we do. We're also in a number of commercial markets from semiconductors to heat treating to utility power plant cooling. So some non-sexy markets, but important commercial base for the business to continue to grow and to thrive. Do you work with the Navy on their ships and your equipment is still on board submarines? We've had a contract with United Technologies for a number of years working supplying, essentially they had contacted us about 10 years ago to bring our technology, our commercial technology into the military realm. So much of the work I was doing back at United Technologies is now at proton. So we've been supplying the cell sacks to them and they supply the systems and that's been going on for many years and we expect it to continue for a number of years to come with some recent awards that we've been advised that we're getting. So we hope to be on an IDIQ kind of contract and see this kind of go for another 5 or 10 years. Terrific. I was talking to you a little bit before the show about that conference we have last week with BACOM and during the beginning of the conference they had some of the science and technology advisors talking about new technology and challenges that they have with them and one of them was a special ops guy and he was a Navy SEAL and he talked about how lithium batteries were great and everything but he has one big problem. He can't get them on submarines because they're not certified to have lithium batteries. They're hazardous and they can't take them on submarines. Even in the military you know from working in the United Technologies they have incredible certification programs before they'll let anything on an airplane or a submarine because of those assets or those capital assets are so valuable you can't afford to risk them so they're very risk adverse in certain areas. And I told the guy I said, but you do realize that you already have an electrolyzer on your submarine making your oxygen you're throwing the hydrogen away and you could maybe put the hydrogen in some metal hydride storage containers and use those instead of batteries and it was like bing you know I mean hey there's something we could look at because it's already the equipment's already on the submarines so you know a lot of what I find I end up doing is taking technology that's been around a while and just introducing people to different ways to use it and it opens up whole new doors and stuff. Well that's really important in the military especially because they get so fragmented in terms of what they're working on and there are unmanned underwater vehicle activities going on looking at fuel cells and different forms of hydrogen and how to do that but piecing the whole thing together in terms of what assets are already on board you know it takes people like you to help make that connection we try to do the same thing. I tell people I'm not an engineer, I'm a fine arts major but I can take the engineering stuff and draw a picture for you and help people understand that they normally couldn't understand the technology and being in the military for as long as I've been I had a technical life you know in the military flying airplanes and stuff I was always exposed to all the engineers and all the technology so it's kind of one of those things where I guess I just fit but hey tell us a little bit about where you think hydrogen is going in our country and maybe around the world. I mean obviously you kind of alluded to it it's five years down the road and it seems like it's always five years down the road are we at that turning point yet where hydrogen is going to take off and go? Yeah and I think there's kind of I look at that sort of in two ways I think commercially you know hydrogen has always been commercial uses for hydrogen have always been held back a little bit because it's very geographic so we have in the United States a good supply of hydrogen delivered infrastructure many plants around the US similarly in Europe but when you move into the Middle East or you move into South America or you move into China there's not as good a delivered infrastructure so I think we're finding now with the more of the commercialization of electrolyzers from proton and others that we're able to reach more people because hydrogen is a critical element in semiconductor manufacturing and heat treating and food processing and oil refining and power plant electric generator cooling so people don't necessarily think about that but we're actually being able to expand that with the use of electrolysis globally. On the energy side it's really interesting because I think fuel cell vehicles are starting to move clearly in Japan places in Europe and California in pockets but you're seeing the need for the infrastructure to come up in places like the US early on that'll be met more with delivered most likely because it'll be more cost effective when the vehicle numbers are small but over time and with the drive to make it more green you'll see more and more electrolysis in Europe and on islands and in places in Asia you're already seeing a push more towards electrolysis either because they have the excess renewable energy they can use or they don't have the delivered infrastructure to be able to easily get it there in southern China's doing a lot with buses now Japan's doing a lot with other transportation so I think you're seeing it move and I do believe it's while I think it's a couple of years away I think it's actually starting now so I think the clock has started clearly the automobile manufacturers Toyota has bet big on hydrogen and others like Honda and Hyundai and our following suit with a suite of products and what we always do or what I always like to also talk about is that electrification of the vehicle because people don't always recognize that a fuel cell is an electric vehicle and the drive train on a battery car and a fuel cell vehicle are the same so they don't have to, they can co-exist and there are uses for different things and what's really nice as you know about the fuel cell vehicle is you fill it up with hydrogen I drive a Toyota 2007 fuel cell vehicle I have for five years I fill it up at the station at Proton in three minutes and I drive it 300, 350 miles you'll never be able to do that with an electric vehicle that doesn't mean a battery electric vehicle is bad as long as you can charge it and get the use out of it it's good for short duration but the electrification platform is opened up greatly when you bring fuel cells into the picture I think that's what makes it exciting I get into a lot of discussions especially with battery people because a friend of mine noticed last month that it seems like hydrogen people like batteries but a lot of battery people don't like hydrogen for some reason it's really weird but we understand that batteries are an important part of the hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle but it seems like the battery people feel threatened by hydrogen as some threatening technology when actually it's just kind of a range extender it gives you a way to put more range on a vehicle that's an electric vehicle and you know so I always end up getting in these not arguments but sometimes really terse discussions about efficiency and everybody always points back to well you know especially if you're doing electrolysis it's not as efficient as steam reforming and it costs too much and hydrogen's not going to pencil out you know I have a hard time fighting with that argument but I say well there's other factors batteries aren't as transportable you start putting 300 miles worth of range in a vehicle with batteries you're lugging around batteries that's all you're really doing is you have nowhere room in your car to sit you've got two people in batteries so there's trade-offs and some of it's transportability some of it's hazardous material some of it's safety how do you enter the argument with these folks I know you must get into the same ones how do you talk about hydrogen as a clean technology using electrolysis for deriving your hydrogen how do you face those people and talk to them and try and talk sense to them so first thing is I always talk about it I never talk about it as the answer I think in too many people talk about the silver bullet that solves all the problems hydrogen is part of a continuum that fits on a range extender a small SUV some of the things you talked about where if you're going to get to a bigger vehicle you're going to be lugging around more batteries and you just have a power to weight ratio that doesn't make sense and then when the efficiency argument comes up I remind people that today you drive an internal combustion engine that's 28% efficient and we've in many cases dug the oil that's running the engine out of the ground in Saudi Arabia and driven it by boat all the way here to the United States so when you think about that that doesn't make a lot of sense and I think it's really about in a lot of cases it comes down to cost and practicality I think at the end of the day if you build a product that people can if the general public can go and fill up a vehicle comfortably at a fueling station where they normally would buy gasoline in an experience that they typically would get from gas then and it serves their utility 300-350 mile range and then I think they'll buy it and I think it's the kind of thing you have to put a product out there that people are going to buy and I think the efficiency thing people will say there's coming well people will often say to me well batteries are coming that are going to get 200 miles, 250 miles on a charge and I said well great because the efficiency of fuel cells will improve and the fuel cell vehicles will get 400, 450 miles so all you're going to do is continue to expand the range and then you look at transit buses and you look at other areas where you can begin to go again with the power to weight ratio you allow for full electrification of the fleet which is going to have a significant amount of batteries but also open up opportunities for fuel cells I do end up in those discussions especially with people who are really sold on lithium batteries and I say okay why don't you go on the internet and find out where all the lithium is in the world and find out where it is because if it only comes from a couple places we're back in the same boat we're going to the Middle East or North Slope of Alaska for oil or we're fracking or we're doing something for the energy that by the way we didn't make we're just harvesting out of the ground and you're right the whole hydrogen electrolyzer piece when I take people to see your equipment at Hickam I say okay we're looking at a footprint of a regular gas station it's about the same size as a regular gas station the oil field the pipeline the tanker ship the refinery and the truck that delivered it to the gas station all in one place tell me that can't pencil out to be more efficient when all that transportation is taken out of the system taken out of the formula and people release it makes sense to them then the light bulb comes on in their head and they go you're right it is but you want to get clean start looking at electrolysis so that's really our push here I work for a state agency that's promoting alternative fuel transportation and so when I work with the state I'm looking for electrolysis and usually curtailed power because I'm trying to find inexpensive electricity around my electrolyzer and as Hawaii tries to get to 100% renewables on the grid by 2045 that means the more intermittent renewals we get we're going to have to do something to store that energy and there's batteries and there's hydrogen and there's been a couple of national lab studies that say when you get to a certain scale batteries aren't the answer you've got to have a mix of some other kind of energy storage besides batteries because batteries are too expensive especially life cycle they're too expensive they take up too much space so many you have some high fire hazards that once the thing goes on fire it ain't going to be put out you're going to lose all the batteries those kind of things that are taken into account and electrolysis is one of the ways are you seeing this around the world in Europe where they're actually looking at hydrogen as a serious energy storage to solve intermittent renewables on the grid and I think again it's one of those kinds of things where what we try to do is position the technology in the areas where it has the best fit again it doesn't fit everywhere there are plenty of times where people will come to me with an opportunity to do something really really small and the answer is if you're really wealthy and you want to create a project we can do it but if you're trying to put a system out there that's economical use of battery because it's a much better play but where you have a lot of power you want to store for a long duration especially if you have the ability to store or a salt cavern or you have tanks or some other way that you know you can store it then it really becomes cost effective I look at it sort of in energy storage there's compressed air energy storage and pumped hydro those are two large scale energy storage technologies that have been around for a long time but you can only do those you can only use pumped hydro if you have the geographical assets to use pumped hydro same thing with compressed air energy storage there's come a play with the energy storage with electrolysis in geographies that are islanded like Hawaii but also in Southeast Asia and other places where it can really be beneficial to do things power costs are very high and then the other places are where there's been significant penetration in renewables causing excess renewable energy and a lot of stranded assets like in Germany and in other parts of Europe and in China where they've built China's got the most renewables in the world so there's a lot of energy that you can grab there inexpensively create hydrogen and then use that hydrogen either make power again when the renewable asset is not when the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining or create an arbitrage where you take that to fuel and have a separate revenue stream and we're seeing that industrially as well where people are saying I want to put this system up and we're going to take the gas and sell it industrially to a refinery or to a heat reader or to and it's worth a lot more as an industrial commodity than it is as a fuel but it's part of this entire scheme where you have different vectors that you can use to sell that hydrogen and make a return for the project manager for the project that it's created We're going to take a quick break here I want to be back to talk to Robert more about electrolysis and make hydrogen the right way Hi, I'm Ethan Allen host of likeable science here on thinktechhawaii.com I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2pm to discover what's likeable about science Hi, my name is Kim Lau and I'm the host of Hawaii Rising You can watch me live every other Monday at 4pm Aloha Aloha everybody My name is Mark Shklove I'd like you to join me for my program Law Across the Sea on thinktechhawaii.com Aloha Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner host of Sustainable Hawaii Thanks for watching thinktech this summer We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii as well as the world conservation congress approaches in September and the world youth congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour stand, the energy man here and we're talking electrolysis if you don't know what that is look it out actually it's split in water in the hydrogen and oxygen we use the oxygen for the medical folks hydrogen for transportation we're helping stabilize the grid we have a professional here from the mainland Robert Friedland from Proton on site who makes electrolyzers and been doing it for 20 or so years got a lot of experience in it we use this equipment out here in Hawaii what's the future look like here in Hawaii for your kind of business the equipment that you produce We're very excited about things here in Hawaii we've done quite a bit in fueling and expanding now to the Big Island with some of that but we've also recently been working with lamp lighter energy on several different projects that are going in for renewable energy storage on a fairly large scale which will take advantage and use of our newest electrolyzer which is a megawatt scale electrolyzer which will be the biggest unit on Hawaii from an electrolysis perspective and we're really excited about that to allow for some full scale utilization and bringing that to places where they're going to take solar or stranded wind or in some cases in Hawaii hydro electric energy and utilize that to generate hydrogen for creation in a lot of cases for power in the evening when the renewable asset is not working or there's no sun shining and there are developers out there like lamp lighter that are very forward looking for purchase agreements with clients and able to do the project with renewables and hydrogen and fuel cells and in many cases in their case they're using wastewater cleanup as well so they're adding in purification of the water which will feed the electrolysis so really looking at utilizing the assets within Hawaii to create these systems and it's also great here because this is a perfect example as an island energy costs are very high and the restoration has been pretty high there's a significant military presence which also is interesting in terms of some of the grid power types of things that they're looking at and you're looking at with micro grids so it's almost to the point where if you can't make it work here this is the kind of place where economically it should work then you're seeing other places it's interesting because you move from Hawaii and then you move into places in Southeast Asia where they don't have grids instead of doing it the old-fashioned way with a central power plant running wires all over the island you're going to start with micro grids so kind of a similar situation to cell phones if you're in a country that never had telecommunication and suddenly you go in there you don't bother stringing copper wires all over the place you go in with cell towers and everybody's got a cell phone and you skip that whole technology that we grew up with we had push buttons and dials and stuff same thing happening with hydrogen exactly what's happening you need forward thinking entrepreneurs because they need to be able to write the right kind of deals because you're not in the United States and they have to make sure that they can get the right credit and what not to put the deals together but from a technology perspective in looking at it all as a micro grid many times companies like Proton and others we sell equipment so we get tunnel vision in terms of if you want to buy a piece of equipment here's that piece of equipment it's really important now to be working with developers and engineering firms who are looking at the bigger picture because customers most customers don't want to assemble a bunch of discrete parts they want a system and they want a solution and it's hard for companies like Proton or other electrolyzer or fuel cell companies some are trying to do it but to really be that company writing a power purchase agreement that's not what we do so you want to find partners who do that better and can write these and get the credit worthiness and stand up a project and make a return they should be able to make money doing this and that's not a bad thing and then we can supply the technology to be a part of that we think there's a really good future we have projects pending in the United States we have them in the Midwest we have projects out here we have projects in China and we have projects in Europe so we expect a number of shipments next year they're going to go to these various places looking from bus fueling energy storage and pretty exciting stuff we got a call from one of our congressional offices here a couple of weeks ago asking us to talk to the U.S. Ambassador to Costa Rica because they actually have a similar demographics to us I mean they're not an island but they're they're the same size roughly as Hawaiian similar populations subtropical the difference is they have a lot of geothermal they have a lot of hydroelectric already so they have very little solar and wind but they have a lot of real good baseline power but they want to get into hydrogen transportation so hopefully we're going to start a dialogue with them where we'll learn a lot about their geothermal because we have geothermal here that we don't use enough of and they want to get into hydrogen vehicles and we're going to try and do some crosstalk with them and bring that up one of the things that I run into here and we talked a little bit about it is I say you know people in the next generation above me if you talk to them about hydrogen they say Hindenburg if you talk to my parents generation say hydrogen they say H-bomb if you talk to my generation about hydrogen we go can you snort it and get high and then you talk to the kids and the kids go hydrogen it's great you know when we start making our cars run off of it you know do you have those similar experiences yourself yeah we've had a program with Toyota now where we've run a fleet of 14 of their vehicles for on and off for over five years now so we take the vehicles very often to different venues as part of an education outreach program and yeah we see that all the time if we go to venues where the average age of the audience is say over 40 most of the questions we get are about the Hindenburg or about safety or about you know you know wiring batteries better and they're sort of I'll kind of call it negatively focused questions and then we take it to a high school or we take it to a bunch of college kids and it's all about you know where we're already not doing this it makes they're not afraid of the technology they've grown up with technology changing every day they think that you know obviously they're geared more towards renewable energy and doing things cleaner and greener in many cases so the whole concept of being able to not import oil or do those kinds of things is is almost obvious to them so you have any advice for us then to get the word out think the right word out do you have a good trick or technique to get the word out to everybody it's still very much a push you know I think I've been somewhat disappointed because we know we try to advertise through the departments of education in a state where it's pretty small I mean Connecticut in a lot of cases I mean maybe three and a half million people but instead of a million in Oahu but it's still geographically a pretty small state and it's hard to get that poll where the science teachers want to engage us to really spread the word so it's very much a push and we do the Earth Day things because buses tend to be some of the best or the shuttle buses like they'll be running on the big island those tend to be great because people get on, yeah because you're on a bus and all of a sudden you're like oh wait this bus is being run on hydrogen so then you feel you got off you didn't have a problem so you feel confident and then the next time you see something about it maybe you're not as nervous about it or you pay a little bit more attention to what's going on with respect to that technology so I think those are a really good way to do things and plus they solve a problem as well in terms of transportation and getting conversion to hydrogen and electrification. In fact I was talking to one of my colleagues last week and he said that in California they talked to the transit folks there's people that actually will wait for the hydrogen bus and skip the other buses because they like riding on the hydrogen bus it's quieter the air conditioning usually works a lot better and it's nice and smooth people love it so yeah I think you're right on there we need to get focused on a little bit more of our fleet transportation here and along those lines I don't know of anybody that manufactures hydrogen buses like right out of the blocks so we always end up having to convert vehicles and that's part of the challenge whenever we talk to like a local company here that wants to do tour buses they got a hundred something tour buses they want to convert them and we go okay well here's a company that does that and it's like okay we can do three buses a year and you'll have your fleet converted by the next millennium or something I mean do you think we're going to get past that do you think Ford or one of those bigger companies is going to afford Gillig or somebody one of the bus companies is just going to finally break the code and say dang it we have to just start making hydrogen buses from scratch because then they'll probably be affordable but when you got to tear the drive train out of a diesel bus and put in a hydrogen fuel cell system that's a big challenge yeah I'd say it's a fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you kind of look at the balance of trade issue associated with it China is the one who's really stepping up I mean you're really seeing China has done deals with Ballard on fuel cells done deals with hydrogenics and on the fuel cells and are looking to put them into various size 40 foot or 20 foot kinds of buses mostly for deployment in China but I think what they'll probably do is get like they've done before is get further ahead and make it harder for the Fords and whatnot to potentially catch up but I do think there's room for more people in that market and I think at the end of the day if we can get them priced at the right level and they work so be it I think so you are seeing a little bit of that drive on reducing the cost and I know the buses which used to be two million dollars a piece are now under a million so you know you're closing the gap on a five or six hundred thousand dollar diesel bus but it's not quite there yet so they do need to do that and hopefully more fuel cell manufacturers will stand up and do things like you as hybrid and some others that have the technology to be able to do it well believe it or not we've blasted through a whole half hour talking about electrolyzers and hydrogen I want to thank you again for being here and coming all the way from Connecticut to spend some time with us I really appreciate it and your input yesterday Alice that was great so we'll have to have you back in another couple months maybe on my second year anniversary and there you go we'll talk about where we're at now with hydrogen because hopefully by then we'll be in the saddle and just galloping all the way down the sunset and in hydrogen technology so I'm looking forward to that now thanks great thanks for being here and good luck with the proton on the site I know you're doing great things and thanks for joining us with Staten Energy now we'll see you next Friday here Allah