 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Megan Russell. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm pleased to welcome our guest, Mitch Yuen, HNEI Hydrogen Systems Program Manager. Today we're going to talk story about hydrogen infrastructure, build it, and they will come. Mitch, welcome to the show. We are today are going to talk to you about why hydrogen infrastructure is so important to helping us meet Hawaii's clean energy goals. Well, thanks, Megan. It's really great to be here and the other receiving end as the guest rather than the host. So far away. All right. So in general, what is the status of hydrogen vehicles in the state? So let's pull up the first slide. So basically the real message is that hydrogen vehicles have arrived. You can buy almost any kind of a hydrogen vehicle these days from a bus, a full paratransit, even a class eight tractor trailer type truck. Of course, a whole bunch of different really cool cars, baggage tow tractors at airports, heavy medium duty delivery vans, like for FedEx, heavy duty garbage trucks, and the list goes on. So the bottom line is we have the vehicles. That's awesome. Why don't we have more of them? Well, let's have a look at slide two. So the challenge is it's the infrastructure. So how do we fuel them? Like I personally would have my own hydrogen car if I knew where to fuel it. Right now, we only have one public fueling station in Hawaii. That's at Servco on Oahu. And they have a fairly small hydrogen production station so they can cope with the fumarize that they lease out, but they don't have the capacity to fuel a lot of cars. So it's the infrastructure that we have to put in place to be able to fuel vehicles and build it and they will come. Perfect. So I understand HNEI has a hydrogen infrastructure program. Can you tell us more about that? Yeah, I'd be happy to do it. Let's look at the next slide, slide three, I believe. So yeah, so we've been running this program for many, many years. And what we decided to do was actually focus a lot on the infrastructure. And we're doing that to support the introduction of fuel cell electric bus fleets for public transportation. There's a lot of reasons for doing that. First of all, for public outreach and support. And after all, the taxpayers at the moment are paying for this infrastructure. And so instead of having gasoline or, sorry, hydrogen stations for fairly wealthy people with nice cars, with buses, everybody, it doesn't matter what your situation is, you can actually get on the bus, experience the bus itself, it's quiet, no diesel fumes and get familiar with the hydrogen and get comfortable with it. And like in England, I have a friend who lived in England for a while, they had hydrogen buses and they'd always wait for the hydrogen bus to show up instead of the smelly old diesel bus. And they just liked everything about it, the ride, no smells and it was so quiet, it was almost like a stealth vehicle. And so the general public will then start getting familiar with hydrogen and they're gonna like it. That's what I predict, they're gonna really like it. And if they like it, then they're gonna talk to the political class and they're gonna get political support because politicians react to the taxpayers and eventually, I mean, they're, they need to get reelected and so if they do something unpopular, they're not gonna get reelected. So it's a great way to provide public outreach and introduce the technology. The other part of the program, of course, is the hydrogen has to be cost competitive for it as a transportation fuel. Right now it's not, frankly, but for my program, it's not meant to be necessarily economic at this point in time. We're gonna work on that and look at how we can produce hydrogen cheaper than what we can get for it now. But this is a de-risking program, it's to show that the systems work to get familiar with it and over time, we can look at how we reduce the cost of the hydrogen. And of course, we wanna increase the use of renewable energy sources, particularly on the big island where they have geothermal, wind, PV and really important, a lot of municipal waste that's all now consolidated on the west side of the island. And Riley Sado and the county are looking at that as a source for making hydrogen and we think it'll be quite competitive. This is utility scale, this is not lab scale in a laboratory at a university on a bench. This is big stuff, it's big equipment and it takes a lot of big money to get it done. And we also wanna leverage industrial benefits, i.e jobs for Hawaii. So right now, when we buy a bus, we export our money to the mainland and somebody on the mainland builds the bus and they ship it to Hawaii. So why not build a kit? And I've talked to a bus company over there, they're willing to provide a kit and we assemble it in Hawaii rough back of the envelope calculation. About 75% of the money we spent for the bus would stay in our local economy. So what's wrong with that? Plus the people assembling it, they're gonna become more familiar with the technology. So it's gonna be like workforce development and it's gonna introduce a whole new industry for Hawaii. And finally, we wanna transfer the lessons learned to the neighbor islands. I mean, Hawaii always wanted to start on the big island. If you look at the legislation for the hydrogen economy, they said start on the big island first, that's because it's big and has lots of renewable energy. And then once we get it nailed down here, then we can export the know-how and show how to the neighbor islands, including Oahu. Long answer, but that's it. Oh, great answer. That's awesome information. This sounds like a really exciting program. So one of the things you talked about a lot were these buses. So why the focus on these heavier duty vehicles right now? Okay, let's have the next slide up. So first of all, it's really good capital utilization. So, you know, instead of fueling one or two cars a day or two or three cars a day, we're fueling a whole fleet of vehicles all at one time. And so that means that your capital or your hydrogen station is working all the time and it's not just sitting around collecting dust and wasting that money. Secondly, it's really important to build the hydrogen demand quickly by that. I mean, we want to generate a lot of hydrogen. The more hydrogen we need the better because at some point in time, private industry will say, hey, I can make money here. As Richard Ha always says, you know, farmers farm when farmers make money and it's the same with private industry for people who run gasoline stations right now, they'll invest in a station when they figure out that they can make money. Right now they can't because it's so new and that's why we're using taxpayers' dollars. But we want to get the, you know, free the taxpayers off as soon as possible by getting enough hydrogen so that there's enough flow through for people to make money at it. I'd also like to point out a real advantage of hydrogen is you can fuel these vehicles very quickly. The bus is quite quickly. So one dispenser actually can support about 20 buses and I have a little diagram further on in our presentation which illustrates that. But you may ask, well, what about the light duty guys? You know, the rich guys with the cars? I mean, we can still let them have access to the fueling station which is what AC Transit in California has done this. They have a pump dispenser outside the main gate to allow early adopters to come and fuel their vehicles and that helps increase the hydrogen demand which is going to help everybody and get us to the point where business can take over and actually make money at it. And it also leverages all that taxpayers' money that went into building the infrastructure. I mean, it's kind of dumb to have a station just sitting there and you have somebody who wants to fuel this car but you won't let them. So we just have to put the procedures and policies in place to allow that to happen. That's exciting. So talking about fueling these cars, HNEI has a hydrogen station. Could you tell us more about that and where it's located right now? Yeah, let's have the next slide up. It just happened to have a slide that illustrates that. So here you see a map of the big island and basically our first hydrogen station on the big island is at the Nell Hall facility, the Natural Energy Laboratory Authority. And it's right beside the Kona Airport as you fly into Kona, you'll probably see it. You'll see a bunch of parabolic mirrors and things like that, but they have a large aquaculture operation going there. So we set up there. It's the Natural Energy Lab after all and this is a great place for us to do it. It was really great working with Nell Hall. I mean, they really supported this project big time. We wouldn't be where we are if it wasn't for them. So the idea is we do production, we call it centralized production and distributed dispensing, just like a refinery where the oil comes in and crude oil comes in and refine it and then they spread it out with trucks and we're doing the same thing. So we'll have a dispenser at our site at Nell Hall, but we're also planning to put in a second dispensing facilities, you can see on the right hand side over Hilo where Mass Transit, MTA is Mass Transit Agency and who run the Helion bus. They have their main facility there right now. So we're planning to put in a hydrogen dispensing system there and we will transport hydrogen. They're using hydrogen transport trailers. I have some pictures later on the following slide and that's just hauled by a truck across the island to the other side, drag and drop. You haul a full one over and you pick up the empty and bring the empty back. So that's the basic project and how it works. So let's talk about pictures. Do you have a picture of what this station looks like or can you tell us about it, more about it? I do, I plan for this. So if we can have up the next slide. So this is a rendering, a 3D rendering done by our tech over there, Aaron McCall. He's awesome using SketchUp. So if he's listening to this, well done Aaron, but this shows the basic layout. So of course dominated by a 40 foot shipping container right at the front end on the lower level of that picture and that houses an electrolyzer that makes 65 kilograms of hydrogen per day, IE in 24 hours. And on the left is compressed by a pretty big compressor. And then on the right, we have a computer control system because this is totally automated. You don't have to have anybody there. The driver just has to attach the dispensing hose to the bus and he hits the computer screen and the computer takes over. The reason we do that is to the extent possible we want to keep people out of the loop because the less people involved the safer it is because most accidents are caused by people making mistakes. And by putting in really good software and thinking all the possible things that could go wrong we kind of designed that out of the loop. And so on the left you'll see there's a little blue unit there. That's the dispenser. I have a picture of it further on and it's covered by a canopy to keep the sun off the screen as much as possible. And then on the upper right there's our three tube trailers that we have. Each trailer carries a hundred kilograms of hydrogen. That's equivalent to a hundred gallons of gasoline. And then we have a bunch of auxiliary equipment on the right hand side. And then all the electric supply is on a concrete block wall on the other side. So that's the basic layout. And if we go to the next slide that's what it looks like in real life. Funnily enough it looks just like the 3D rendering. And all the lines everything goes under that slab. It's all undergrounded so that people can't run into it and break it. You'll see there's the orange and white crash barriers. That's in case some nutcase decides he wants to smash into it with a car. So that stops that. So when we do our HAZOP analysis we look at all the kind of eventualities that could take place. So that's kind of how it looks today. And the NAND construction did all the concrete work and they did a fantastic job I must say. And it was managed by NELHA staff. Alex Leonard was the project manager to put in all the site work. And he did a fabulous job. That's exciting. That looks awesome. And you're right. Like the 3D rendering. So congrats. So you talked about some of the maybe safe issues that come with dispensing hydrogen. Can you tell us more about how the hydrogen is dispensed to the bus? And then two about how it's stored before it's dispensed. Yeah, so let's flip up the next slide. So there you see here's a picture of the dispenser. And you'll notice it looks like a regular gasoline dispenser funnily enough. And it carries out all the same functions. But it's got a computer operated touchscreen right in the middle. Just like when you go to the gas station you put your credit card in and you decide if you're gonna pay at the pump or pay at the cashier. So it's all like I said before it's totally computer controlled. We call it a cascade fill. That's just the way they fill a hydrogen car. You use different pressures of hydrogen and you equalize it going from low pressure to high pressure. That's all done automatically with air operated valves that are controlled by the computer. It's unattended as I said before, we have UV and IR and that's ultraviolet and infrared flame detectors which are looking down at where the fueling is taking place. So in case something happens that it's all that's all connected into a safety shutdown system and fire alarm system. And the ESP is emergency shutdown. It's just, you'll see it at gasoline stations too. If something happens all you have to do is hit the button that shuts the whole station down and then we have fire alarms spread around throughout the units throughout the site and they give off either a siren so you can hear it and or a flashing strobe and a flashing strobe light. So if we go to the next slide here's a picture of our hydrogen transport trailers. I call them smart trailers because they're computer controlled at once again with these air operated valves. And on the right is a boost pump system because when you haul the trailer to Hilo and are using it to fill the bus you only get half the hydrogen out because of the way it equalizes. So that's not very efficient because you got to haul a trailer back that's half full. So we challenged our supplier power tech labs out of Canada that say we've got to do better than that. So they worked on a design and they developed the boost pump system. So it's always sucking hydrogen from most tank and keeping the pressure up as high as it can go. So we can get almost about 90% of the hydrogen out of it which is really good. And it's like reduces your transport costs by about 50% which is a huge deal. When you think it costs about $400 or $500 to ship a trailer from one side of the island to the other that's pretty expensive to do it. And if we can save half of that, that's a huge saving. So hats off to power tech and the system has been built, it's ready to go. As soon as we have our designs completed over at the Kielosai we'll be installing that system. Meanwhile, here, I call it, say here at Nelha we use these trailers as well to fill buses at the Nelha site. We don't have any ground mounted storage. So that's about all I can get out of that slide. That's exciting. So you mentioned that you have fueled buses yet. Do you have photo proof of this? Yes, I do. If you haul up the next slide you'll see our first hydrogen bus, 21 passenger bus was just delivered to Nelha on the 23rd of March. So what's that about? Two weeks ago maybe. And we did our first fueling on the 24th. And if you go to the next slide and there's yours truly doing that first fill, recognize the shirt. And the amazing thing is that everything worked. All this underground cabling and pipe work and valves and fittings and sensors and wires, it all worked. Which is what I was staying awake at night, stressing out about, well, you know, we do all this. It's all underground under the six inch slab of concrete. We had to repair something. I can't see us having a jackhammer all up. So that was a big event for all of us. That was a Miller time event. Yeah, congratulations on a successful first pump. So do you have a workforce in training to help out with future pumps? Yeah, we've developed some workforce training. I mean, this is a potential speed bump to making faster progress. I think it's something that people leave till the end. You know, they start a project and they look at all the equipment and get that all running. But then the question is, well, who's gonna operate it? You know, well, you have to have people that are trained up on it to operate the thing. And so we've been developing this for quite a long time. Aaron and I have been developing safety manuals, operational manuals for like two or three years. And what we did recently, now we're producing slide decks because it's kind of hard for people to read one of these big manuals. And so we're pulling out the highlights. And we're starting a workforce development program. We had our first session on Monday this week where we had the senior people from Robert Savoy attend for a train the trainers session. And some of the things we have to overcome is first of all, there's fear out there on safety, you know, a lot of people are concerned about hygiene safety. So we have to address that, train them up on hygiene safety, how to operate safely. They're also, you know, this is high voltage because it's an electric drive. So they have to become familiar with that. And right now this is all new stuff. So we have a pretty, you know, detailed both the hygiene safety course and then an operator's course. And then of course there's a lot of concern about job security because, you know, that's right now it's a diesel fleet and you have diesel mechanics and people who are trained to work on the diesels and they're saying, well, gee, you know, when you get these electric vehicles, what's going to happen for me? So we've got to help them make that transition over from what they're doing now so that they can continue to have their jobs and provide the services they do with this kind of a vehicle. And that should not be difficult. That's actually pretty, most actually mechanics like the electric vehicles because it's cleaner, that's pretty easy overall. You know, they don't have to get into the details of like overhauling a fuel cell or anything like that. A lot of it's a repair by replacement. And so I like to make the point. I think there's a real mistake some people are making is like we're not training academics here. You know, and I think for example, in the U.S.D., we gave a contract to EPRI and they had a lot of universities involved in it. And they went, I think, looking at their first report, I was disappointed that it seemed to be more focused on the academics rather than the blue collar workers, the guys that actually, you know, have to do, you know, wrench and hand or screwdrivers. I mean, the guys that actually do the work. So I think we need to do a better job for our blue collar workers. And that's the course we're doing right now is hands-on. This is exactly what you have to know with little check-off lists of, you know, what the procedures are. And it's not, we're not training PhDs and we're not training master's students or BSCs. We're training, you know, the guys that actually, you know, get the work done. So. That's exciting. It sounds like you're providing a lot of good opportunities for people who maybe might need to transition in the future to these alternative energy sources. So who knows for that? So. Let's throw out the next slide. So I said earlier in my pitch today that, you know, one dispenser can fuel 20 buses or 20, in this case, 22 buses. So when we're doing one of these diagrams, I looked at it and I said, wow, you know, if you calculate the amount of time it takes to fuel a bus, which is about 10 minutes, you know, over a six-hour period when, you know, the buses are back at the barn. I suddenly, little light bulbs flashed off. I said, well, that's 20 or 22 buses. And you can say the word, but you don't quite understand what it means. And still you see the picture. So the top picture is what the dispenser would look like. You see a little tube trailer there. And you see a bus in front of the dispenser. Of course, it would take more than one tube trailer to fill up all those buses. We'd have to have a very large supply of hydrogen. But the point is, is that one dispenser can fuel 22 buses over a six to seven hour period. And so that saves a lot of money because you don't have to have an individual charger. If it was a battery electric bus, each chart bus would have to have their own dedicated charger and all the wiring and the power required to run that charger, whereas we can do it just like fueling your car and it's kind of like a drop-in solution. So we need to be looking at that as part of the overall cost and how easy it is to fuel that number of buses. That's a lot of buses sitting there for one little dispenser, like we have. No kidding. Well, we're coming to an end of the show. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with the audience on this exciting program? Yeah, I wanna come back and my last word is let's throw up the last slide. This is all great stuff, but at the end of the line, I mean, the buses are great and the cars are great, but it's the infrastructure. It's like that guy said for President Clinton a long time ago, it's the economy stupid, but I didn't wanna use the word stupid in my slide, but we need to build the infrastructure. We need to build it as fast as possible because if we build it, they will come. I mean, that's what's stopping me from buying my own hydrogen car is I don't know where I can fill it. And so we need fueling stations for cars, trucks, buses, the whole gamut and the faster we do it, the quicker we'll get it done and the quicker we can meet the state's objectives of becoming a fossil fuel-free decarbonized economy by 2035, 2045. I mean, I think personally it's gonna take longer than that, but whatever, I mean, we gotta get after it and stop talking and start doing. We've proven that can be done. There's no magic back here. You can see the hydrogen station. Now let's just build a whole bunch of these and get it done, Hawaii. Right on. Well, we'll have to leave it there. You've been watching Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy on Think Tech, Hawaii. Today we've been talking story about Hawaii's hydrogen infrastructure and why it's so important in contributing to Hawaii's 100% clean energy goals. Thanks to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Megan Russell. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, The State of Clean Energy. Aloha. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.