 Hey, welcome to Stand Energy Man. I'm Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And we're here today to talk a little bit about the reality checks of renewable energy transportation. You know, like, can we really do it? Are we just dreaming? How fast can we do it? So we've got a guest today that's going to help me sort through all the data points and all the motivation and all the realities of the engineering and production that come into actually making renewable energy transportation a reality. And before we get started, actually, I don't know if Zuri can see this, I'm going to put a plug in for this article in Hawaii Business Magazine. It's a great article and it gets right to the topic we're talking about today, which is transportation energy. We're doing great with our 100% renewable by 2045. The governor's locked onto that and everybody's stepping up to do that. But the real question is, what are we doing in transportation? Because that's the other 65% of the energy, carbon-based energy that we're using that's holding us back from meeting our real clean energy goals and getting Hawaii's economy back on track where we're not sending all of our money out of the state to pay for energy sources. So we're going to talk about a lot of stuff, but if you can check out that article, it's a really great article. I love it. It came out last month in the magazine and Dennis Hawyer, who did that, did an outstanding job. My guest today, though, is Dave Rolf. Thanks, Dave, for being here. Thank you, Stan. Thank you for your second trip. I need my year now so I can go around and invite people on for their second go around. Thanks for being here today. It's a pleasure. We're going to talk a little bit about energy stuff, but let me put that first picture up. I want to remind people that in the old days, when we first started developing the horse and carriage and the horseless carriage, we had vehicles that looked like this. Most people would be surprised to learn that that's the very first porch that ever was built and it's run off of an electric motor. And why is that? Electric motors are super efficient. They always have been. They always will be. And that should be the future we go back to. The problem is we could never store the energy. So battery power and electric vehicles just kind of never made the cut once oil was discovered. And actually, oil, oil oil, then a fossil fuel oil from the ground pretty much took over and we ended up with internal combustion engines. But we're heading back. We're heading back to electrification of the transportation sector and rightfully so because it's definitely more efficient. So I'm glad you started with the old Porsche there. You know, I was up in Detroit at a meeting with all the automobile manufacturers and we stayed at the Dear Bernin, which was right there that Ford started and got to go over to the Ford Museum. And as you go in the museum, by the way, Ford was a very close friend of Thomas Edison involved in so much production of electricity and things. In fact, he kept a lock of Edison's hair there and also kept the last breath that Edison had in a test tube. It's at the front of the museum as you go in. The Ford Museum. You passed the last breath of the son of Henry Ford was at Edison's side. I say that because I looked at the cars there in the Ford Museum and it said that in the beginning, there were 500 different car companies and most of them were electric. And so you're so right that it all began with sort of an electric car idea. Now, these many hundreds and some odd years later, we have electric cars on their return. But I think what we're going to talk about today is a different version of the electric car. That's the hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle. We'll talk about all the electric cars. All right. And let's start off with what it takes to get us there. You know, we kind of got driven into the internal combustion world with diesels and gasoline engines. And they've gotten more efficient. And but they didn't just do it all on their own. So what are some of the impetuses for for getting people more efficient? You know, I think public policy really helped way back when Linda Lengel back in around 2008, a governor here gathered people together and they had this vision called the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. And it was it was a fascinating vision. And everybody kind of said, we'll all get behind that. She said at a news conference, you said Dave, you and the auto dealers aren't going to like this because we're going to mandate it. And I said, Governor, I don't think you can mandate people to buy cars. We can't mandate them to buy them from us. I said, but we'll do everything we can to help voluntary compliance in this. And so now we lead the nation along with California. We do it voluntarily, even without the huge credits that California has. I think because our people have stepped up here in Hawaii and really earnestly and ardently, that's a that's a adjective. People use about auto dealers. They are ardent. They're certainly trying very hard to make this all work. So that's what brought us this far. And we had a very influential senator and Senator Daniel Inouye, and he was head of the Commerce Committee in Science connected to that. And so he was the one in charge of determining how the corporate average fuel economy standards would be set in this country. And I had just come back from China, where I looked where they were going for like a 60 mile per gallon standard. And we were trying to determine because we were sort of stuck around in this 24 mile per gallon thing for many, many years since the oil crisis. And they were going to bend that up pretty hard up towards 60 miles per gallon. And the question was how high could then how fast could they bend that curve? And they wanted to do that by combining cars and trucks. And I had a Ford dealer with me and he said, you know, I don't think they can change their manufacturing that fast and have been that that quick. Senator, would it be possible to extend five more years separating cars and trucks so that Ford Motor Company and others could help develop an electric car and get into the hydrogen thing and all that. And he initially a staff really wasn't interested in doing that. But we showed him how, particularly here in Hawaii, we're such a predominantly truck based economy because the SUV and the pickup truck and the van are all in the truck category. And now that's almost 60 percent trucks versus 40 percent cars. It was about 50, 50 for a while, but for a little while, while the gas was so expensive. But nevertheless, he gave us those five years. And I think the auto manufacturers stayed true to their word of trying to develop that. And they came on and every one to one signed on to those cafe standards. Those 54.5 mile per gallon by 2025. What's fascinating about that? I'm a journalist by trade. That's my background. So I go, they signed on to it. Let me see what they signed. So I went to the Department of Transportation. I was the only state auto executive that had ever gone in there and wanted to actually see the physical documents. And they brought him out for me. Actually, all the manufacturers signed almost like a Xerox copy of one same document, except for BMW. And BMW said, here's five pages that says you want us to do this. Possibly it can be done, but it'll take an awful lot of movement toward making the car a lot lighter with carbon fiber. And they said, we'll have to do hoods. We'll have to do, you know, roofs at bonnets. BMW they call. Anyway, the carbon fiber is so expensive that they questioned whether it could be done that people would then buy these vehicles because they'd be so expensive. And that's what's the question now as we have to reevaluate the cafe standards. It's a midterm reevaluation. So will the country say, OK, it's going to cause the cost of cars to go up maybe $3,000, maybe $5,000. If whether they have that that whole in economics, you know, the cold price elasticity of demand. So if you raise the cost 10%, you'll lower the adoption by 10%. So you have to really ask yourself what's going to cook. So we're at that very we're at that juncture now. So it's great to have a think tech with you. The cafe standards also include diesels. Yeah, it concludes all vehicles. So so did that. I mean, we had an issue with Volkswagen not too long ago where they they were trying to press and make those standards and kind of pressed a little bit over the line, as we say. A little bit of a software modification there. They they they've worked through with customers and they've it's been fascinating how they've they've got back to the table and kind of work that through. That's one of the largest amounts of money I've ever seen for a fix of anything. But nevertheless, they've moved forward and Volkswagen's remained a strong product line. Yes. Yeah, and I didn't mean to pick on them, but they definitely stepped up and it's got to get on the table. They faced the music and and they they definitely went through the court system and every state and every customer got relief in some way, shape or form and got some choices out of it. But my point was basically diesel engines were already pretty efficient compared to gasoline powered engines side by side. I thought you were driving a diesel for a while, weren't you? No, I don't. But I maybe a forklift caterpillar tractor and stuff. Yeah, these played a role as did flex fuel and a lot of other things. But in the end, it's going to have to be electric or hydrogen. I think I think so, too. So we've got a whole lot going on in the state. And, you know, as you know, you're on my working group for hydrogen and we've got a lot of things happening. And hydrogen vehicles are essentially electric vehicles. I mean, you can have an internal combustion hydrogen vehicle because it can burn a gas, a flammable gas and hydrogen is a flammable gas. But pretty much what everybody's looking at is the is the electrolysis to make the hydrogen. If we can steam reforming, maybe. And if if somebody besides the states doing it, we I don't think the states can ever steam reform and then electrolyte fuel cells in the vehicles to run the vehicles. So they're more efficient. They're cleaner, only water out the tailpipe. All that good stuff. But there's always that big dollar sign out there. So what are some of the issues with the car companies that as they try and because Hyundai and Toyota and Honda Ford, Mercedes, BMW, they're all looking in the 2020 ish range of actually having production models. And Toyota, of course, and Hyundai already have production models. Talk to us a little bit about how the industry is making that shift. Sure. Let's walk it back from the big public policy, you know, that public policy of 40 percent. So can we we have a chart that shows that we're trying to have 70 percent renewable renewable, but 40 percent from hydrogen or from electric or alternative fuel, yeah, plug in electric. And so what we did is at the at the capital, we went and showed that the big mosaic in the center of the capital has about 650,000 blue and green tiles on it. Yeah. But it coincides. We said to the members of the House and Senate, you know, that's a perfect Petri dish right there in the middle of our capital to understand how many cars are on a Wahoo because they're about 654,000 cars on a Wahoo. And so you could just look down there and you could see these different circles and you go, well, there's the Chevrolet and, you know, there's Ford and there's Volvo. And so you go, OK, now you've got to take 40 percent of those and turn them into electric or hydrogen cars. Well, we have this graphic that shows that we have this massive number of ways to produce electricity here from renewable sources. And this graphic shows that, you know, in almost the yin and yang type thing, you have to have by 20, 30, 40 percent of all those cars in the circle be electric or hydrogen. So how would you create the hydrogen or put the electricity in the battery? Well, you have all these sources. We have finest wind source in the world. And they're thinking about putting all those huge wind machines, you know, right off Kyena Point and certainly way off beyond the horizon out there at Diamondhead, putting it into cables and then helping power our electric grid here in the islands. But when the wind is blowing and there's no need to go on the grid and they've got access capability, then they could make some hydrogen with that. Same way with our waves, there's some of the finest in the world and there's tremendous wind energy there. There's a geothermal that we have, just unlike, let's say, Missouri or, let's say, Florida, but no, we have it right here readily available again to make electricity and then to make hydrogen. We had that ocean thermal energy conversion. The difference in the temperature differential from about 1,000 meters down that helps turn those great turbines that produce a lot of hydrogen. And then we have finest solar that we all know. And then, of course, there's all sorts of rubbish to energy and all sorts of biomass that can create. So when you look at this chart, you go, oh, my goodness, you know, Hawaii is blessed with this massive number of ways to create electricity and thus hydrogen and thus change all those cars on the road. What would happen? Well, that oil barrel up in the upper right-hand corner there, 500 million gallons of oil that we use every year has to be drained down to 150 million gallons. So it could be done as you activate all those things. And we had this vision where, you know, during the APEC conference that the President of the United States, who was going to be out here, would throw a big switch and all these things would start working and the oil barrel would drain and all the world leaders would be right there to go see in 12 seconds. I've kind of shown you how to kind of change everything here with a few, if you take all the assets that you have and turn them into something that helps solve a problem. I didn't really give you a heads up on this topic, but I don't know if you have the data in your database, your mental database, but, you know, hybrid vehicles, for me, have always been a big plus in terms of meeting cafe standards and also just starting to clean up and going electric. Because what you've got in a hybrid vehicle is an electric vehicle also, but it's either plug-in electric or it has a small gasoline engine or an internal combustion engine that runs a generator, but then the drivetrain, the rest of the drivetrain is electric. And that's actually increased mileage. I know my niece rented a mid-sized car and she goes, hey, uncle, I'm getting 45 miles a gallon on this thing and it's a mid-sized car. So she was expecting, you know, 26, 27 miles and she's getting 45. Have the auto dealers in Hawaii actually seen a marked increase in hybrid sales? Wow, it's amazing that you asked me that question because we had a discussion on this yesterday at our executive committee meeting. And I feel a little bit like Samson, the biblical Samson, tied to the pillars with my eyes poked out because we don't have any data any longer. Our data has been shut off here in Hawaii as to how many hybrid vehicles are selling in Hawaii, as to how many diesel vehicles are selling in Hawaii, as to how many vehicles that are anything selling in Hawaii has been shut off for 10 months. And no other state association has had their eyes poked out so that they can't see. I was an able aviator for 10 years and I imagine flying without any instruments. I mean, you just don't know what's going on. And so consequently, because there's no data that the dealers have, they know how many cars they sold and they know how many cars in brand I think they sold because the manufacturer will share that with. But let's say a Ford dealer won't know how many Chevy's have been sold in the market and so consequently, they all have hybrid category vehicles and let's say that the fuel situation because it's gone down, it was a 259 today as I filled up gasoline, but if the fuel is coming down like this, hybrids will also kind of, it's a direct relationship. So they're blind and don't know how many are selling out there in the marketplace and they see maybe some of their sales withdraw a little bit. And so everybody gets overly cautious because the state withheld the data for not making the contract agreements with Experian and RL Polk and now called IHS Automotive. So they had- That's one of the bills you were pushing last. I've been pushing it for months and months and months that they solved this problem, whatever it was. I think it had to do over metadata with how the data would be used. So the registered owner information which had been renewed for 14 years then was not renewed. And so this languished on for months and months and months and we didn't have any data to actually, that's what I publish in the magazine. I publish all this data when the media called and said, how many cars are selling because the economists use it to tell how the economy's gonna go and shippers use it to determine how many ships to schedule and bankers use it to figure out how many contracts are gonna write on cars and almost everybody uses the car data hasn't been around for 10 months. And to have 40 of that other states have that and to have everybody running business as usual and for us to operate totally in the blind or their eyes poked out has really been rough. Well, we've somewhat resolved that as of July 3rd but it went from October 1 in 2015 all the way to July 3rd, no data because the state and those two contract companies had not reached agreements. Now those agreements had been renewed for 14 years but for reasons that come somewhat inexplicable, you know, they weren't. Okay, well maybe between, we'll hit Louis Salvario, my boss over in D-Bed and the legislature again this session, see if we can smack some sense into that. I think we got the problem solved. So going forward, anyway, it was a long answer as to, you know, when people ask me how are things doing I really don't know. I mean, all I know is that the dealers are saying, you know, they haven't been selling quite as well and we don't know how everybody else is doing so we're getting a little cautious. And then inventories are building in that category. I bet you there's an awful good deal on the car right now. I hope so, they're great. I mean, the hybrid's a good way to go. We're going to take a quick break here and be right back with Dave Roff and talk a little bit more about the state of electrification of our transmission grid. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science here on ThinkTechHawaii.com. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science. Aloha, we invite you to join us on our keys to success show, which is live on the ThinkTech live streaming network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. My name is Danilia, D-A-N-E-L-I-A. And I'm the other half of the duo, John Newman. Our goal for keys to success is to provide a platform for professional and personal development tools and profound insights on how to achieve success in life, career and or business. We have incredible guests from all walks of life, including politicians, successful business owners, leaders, entrepreneurs and authors. As this is a live show, there are live mess ups as well, which are fun to watch. Aloha and we'll see you on Thursday. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. If you'd like that background there, that's courtesy of the Big Island. So go spend your spare time on the Big Island like me and get your sanity back. Anyway, Godday, we're all here today talking about electrification of our transportation sector of the grid. And I'd like to point out to people that once upon a time, we had gasoline powered and diesel powered cars. And then we had an electric grid and never the twain shall meet. But the first time we plugged in a car to the grid, we started on a road that's a different track. And that track means pretty soon you're gonna have so many electric vehicles on the grid that you could use them for storage or you can have so many hydrogen vehicles out there that you could use hydrogen to help stabilize your grid and have a double solution for not a, we can't absorb all renewable energy right now because it's too intermittent and it's destabilizing for the grid. But if you had hydrogen electrolyzers to use as a load and if you had fuel cells out in the grid instead of pumping power all the way from the power plant to a local community, you could actually make the power right in the community off the hydrogen you made from the community. It would be a lot easier to stabilize the grid. So we're looking to get in that grid and the transportation sector a lot closer in the next few years. So Dave, you know, you've kind of done the crystal ball stuff here for many years on autos because that's your job. And we have a chart coming up that you put together. And I understand that it was based on a lot of real sound assumptions that some of them haven't quite come to fruition but amazingly enough, your chart seems to still be tracking pretty well. The chart's dead on, it's spot on, we did it in 2008. You know, it was a little bit like Nick Cutter once said that it would take as long to transition to the electric car and the hydrogen car as it did for all of us to go from regular phones to cell phones. And you know, that was over kind of like a 28 year period the regular phones started back there in 1984. I mean, the big old brick started in 1984, I think about to roll out at 8,300. Anyway, in 2008, I created this chart which people now call the Golden Gate Bridge Chart because it looks like the iconic San Francisco Bridge. But what it shows was that you would have electric cars climbing and then eventually hydrogen cars would overtake them. And this has been spot on. The number of gasoline cars has followed our projections almost precisely and I said that there would be 300 electric vehicles brought into the marketplace. Now this is three years earlier now, in 2008, from my desk I said we'd have 300 here when they weren't even in the production line yet and lo and behold we had 311 so I hit that almost to a fairly well. The next year I said there'd be around 625 and I missed it by about 10 or so. So the chart has been right on in the electric vehicle adoption. It will start failing to continue the way it is because it would need a gigantic amount of cooperation on all parts of Hawaii. Not just the customers buying it but electric companies stepping forward with the infrastructure things and an awful lot of education to the public though which is something we're doing right here to keep that chart growing with those dark blue bars. And then lo and behold we said in 2015 I could have very well said the date March I could have said March 14th which is Pi Day I could have said that would be the day that you know the first hydrogen car would be here and again this was seven years before it was here so it wasn't even in production anywhere and lo and behold the good folks at Servco and Toyota brought in the Mirai and we were one of the few auto shows in the country I think only one of two of 22 motor-train auto shows to have a hydrogen car so if you're a person in Hawaii and you want to see what the future is and Mirai means future you could have come down to the Hawaii Auto Show and the first one in an international auto show and seen the whole future right there in the middle of it. I was there. So a lot of people were crowded around that car sometimes as many as five deep and they had product expert there one of the best telling about that so we had the privilege to see what the future looks like and it's going to start right here in Hawaii. And then the chart is you look at the 2016 bar in the chart you won't see a whole lot of red it's just now starting but we do have several fuel cell vehicles on Island including the ones that we have at Hickam that we're doing with Air Force and we have more vehicles coming by the way we have a van coming that's also a portable power station we have a big towing tractor that blows 747s and C17s and C5s coming out and then we have a dump truck getting ready to come online and we're actually looking with the Air Force Research Lab at not doing another hydrogen vehicle but our next vehicle in production is actually a hybrid it's a diesel electric what we call payloader and it's a big scissor lift that lifts the pallets up into a cargo airplane and slides them in but they can do like 12 pallets at a time it's a mass production mobility piece of equipment but all that gear is like 20, 30 years old and it burns a lot of diesel makes a lot of noise and smoke and eventually it's going to be all electric and hydrogen powered but we're showing that the progression may be diesel, electric then hydrogen and federal government funding to do all this just like there was federal government funding to go to the moon and then subsequently now we're having a lot of private enterprises going to space I think that's what's happened the federal government brought hydrogen vehicles here in 2010 the Equinox, General Motors Equinox I got to drive the first one off the boat to JN Chevrolet where they parked it and so a lot of that initial thing was done by the federal government and now privately people would be able to buy them five years later well you know why they let you do that why? because you're a former fighter pilot you knew you were fearless yeah and it was the first hydrogen vehicle and they weren't sure if it was going to blow up like they did right I wasn't so fearless driving that million dollar vehicle I mean it was one of those prototypes that I was looking around with my head snapped all around all I had to do was take it from the boat to JN Chevrolet I tell you, I flew those in multi-million dollar jets but I was more worried about driving that expensive prototype car on the highways than here in Hawaii well you did a great job I got it there so what are the things you see production wise when you look at the manufacturers because they're really the key I mean we can have all the demand in the world over here and all the infrastructure ready to go but if the vehicle manufacturers haven't got that signal yet that I mean Hawaii's a really small market I mean we have a little over a million and a half people maybe in like you see six hundred seven hundred thousand cars on a wahoo a million cars in the whole state and so we're looking at I mean we're a miniscule market compared to other countries or other other continents but a perfect place to test anything absolutely that's why I called it a Petri dish right and so you have a car company Toyota who had a visionary leader the head of it, Akira Toyota who said I'm going to just go all in on this hydrogen idea and they really pushed that heavily and so that's why I think the Fukunaga's with Servco made a great similar investment and they have brought that vehicle in and now they're putting in some infrastructure you know for fueling and the legislature you worked so hard on that and as did so many others asking for funding and now you're going to see a 1.25 million to help study a hydrogen fueling station had a meeting with Ford last week there you see it's so it's all begun and so that chart will fulfill itself if everybody kind of keeps shoulder to the wheel but it's going to keep everybody with your head down and pushing because it doesn't happen automatically I mean Hyundai is already in California with 500 vehicles how can we get Hyundai over here Servco got Toyota to bring some vehicles in how do we get the Servco you know is a distributor and so they had an awful lot of influence I think in working with Toyota out of Japan and they get a lot of their cars directly from there I understand we asked the Hyundai people and they're good folks too but that's a Zev state and they were working on fulfilling their zero emission vehicle requirements they're being Zev driven and we said that that patchwork Zev idea wasn't going to work very well and frankly it hasn't worked and my mind or but I will say this in credit to the Zev people we wouldn't have gotten as far as we've gotten probably without that big push from them it's just that they don't seem to be able to hit the goals and whereas we've hit everyone that we've done so far just voluntarily I think we could have kept doing that if we all now put the shoulder to the wheel but we'll see now whether that veers off just because of gas prices well I wish that Hyundai would step up because they did with the plug-in vehicles and they were the first ones to bring in plug-in vehicles here and work with H-CAT and make those a reality in the state so I hope that they join forces and bring them in but we're going to get ready to close here and we're going to throw up on my last pictures and I like this picture I took this picture over at the foreign trade zone when one of our participants in the working group brought over a Toyota Mirai and the reason it's important for me and I'm glad Zuri's zooming in there is when you open up the hood and you look under the hood you can tell this isn't a Radio Shack piecemeal put together vehicle it's a purpose-built hydrogen fuel cell vehicle everything's made to be a production model it is hand assembled right now by Toyota but this is the reality this is the real deal right here it's made to go into production it's made to last probably 10 or 15 years a little bit longer than internal combustion because the components just won't wear out like an internal combustion engine but I like this vehicle it's a great start I'm really glad CERFCO brought it in and I really wish that some of the other auto companies would look at Hawaii the way you do as a place to start off with these renewable vehicles alternative fuel vehicles because it really is we've got the resources and we ought to be doing it I'm really proud of our members in the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association they've stepped up they've ardently tried to fulfill that initiative well, I'd like to thank you for being on the show today, Dave you're welcome, thanks for the invitation and also thanks for all your help with the legislature and also with the auto dealers and help and keep them focused on the target at the end of the day which is helping clean up our transportation sector so thanks very much so until next week can stand the energy man we'll say aloha and see you next week on Think Tech Hawaii