 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Welcome to Stand at the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And under the category of Better Late Than Never, I closed last week's show without wishing everybody a happy Memorial Day weekend. And thanks to all the military folks out there that served, especially ones that didn't make it back and gave us all the freedoms that we have. And we get to enjoy. So thanks for all that you guys do and your families. And welcome to Stand at the Energy Man. My guest today is Mitch Ewan from the University of Hawaii, H&EI, Mitch. Welcome. I know you've been on before and I appreciate you coming on. But we kind of go way back. In fact, you go way back farther in hydrogen than me. So you're the real expert. But let's talk a little bit about Big Island. That's what the show's about today, is what you're doing at Big Island. But let's go back to early Big Island when you originally started your stations that were going to be at Puna Geothermal. So let's just kind of talk a little bit about what's going on in the Big Island for folks that don't know much of the geography of Hawaii or anything. And people have been calling us and saying, are you guys okay? Are you guys okay? Well, yeah, we're like 300 miles away from the volcano. So it's no big deal. But tell us a little bit about what Puna meant to you when you started looking at building, doing hydrogen out there. Yes. Well, when we started the project originally, we were going to supply hydrogen to the Volcano National Park. And we were lucky enough to team up with Puna Geothermal, who gave us a deal on space and electricity and water and all that sort of thing. So we planned to put our hydrogen facility right at the Puna Geothermal plant. And so we went through about four years of site evaluation, environmental assessments and all that kind of stuff. And got to the point where we're about to close on all those deals when in 2014, they had the original lava flow, which came within like a few hundred yards of the main road. So we're pretty concerned that, you know, $7 million worth of equipment was going to get stranded there. And not only that, how would we deliver the hydrogen from there? To cut off the road. Yeah, to cut off the road. We would have been, you know, a project without a, you know, without a customer. So we made the command decision, as I call it my ex-military training, made command decision to shift to the west side in Kona at Nell Hall. And in hindsight, I guess it looks like a brilliant decision, but who would have thought that, you know, we'd have an eruption like we're having now. And it's a real tragedy. It looks like the plant didn't get hit too hard. And I know from talking to the plant way back in the day that they actually planned for having an eruption and being inundated by a lava. So they planned how they built their wells, how they mitigated it. And so fingers crossed that that works and that they'll be able to resurrect the well after all this eventually passes whenever that is. Yeah, there's kind of not a big controversy. A lot of folks are wondering whether this means the end of geothermal in Hawaii or the beginning of geothermal in Hawaii, because there's an awful lot of energy flowing out of the ground over there. And we're just letting it flow down the hill into the ocean when we could be turning a lot of it into electricity, steam and other great things. Well, it's a significant impact on our renewable energy targets as well. I mean, they provide about 25% of the big island power. And that's the significant part of the renewable energy quota that they have. And they could be providing 100% easily. Oh, yeah. They think it's a huge resource. Yeah, we're kind of looking, we're hoping that geothermal is still alive on Maui and the big island and maybe even Oahu, because as a baseline power, baseline power, that's perfect for here. And we can generate a lot of power from that. Yeah, it's perfect. We can do it. Perfect for hydrogen, too, having that baseline 24-7 steady state power. That's exactly what we need for the hydrogen economy. Okay, well, speaking of hydrogen, now that you've made the command decision to move to Kono with your station, and it's been a while in the works, but it looks like you're on the one-yard line and getting ready to push into the goalpost. So tell us about what you're doing out there. Well, it's been a long haul. First of all, we relocated to the Nelha site, which is basically a sub-agency of D-bed, so it's actually a state property. And so that helped us out a lot. They have pre-existing EISs and EAs in place, so we didn't have to go through all that. And so then we had just had to come up with a new design. So we came up with several iterations. We actually, you know, looked at three separate sites at Nelha, and eventually we're located in what they call the Research Park right down at the bottom of the road, and right opposite the main administration building. So it's a really good site for us. They have existing infrastructure in place, so that helped us reduce our costs. But we put in a significant infrastructure there. I've got to say that Nelha has been a great landlord. In fact, they took over the project management of actually putting in the infrastructure at the site. So we basically sub-contracted Nelha to do the job, and they have an excellent project manager, Alex Leonard, who was with Nan Construction, was a senior guy, so he knows all about construction and how to get things done. I've been trying to get Greg Barber on the show, but he's been so busy helping you with your station. I can't get him on the show, but we can bring up that first photo of the station and get a look at it. And you have people in orientation. This is kind of southwest of the airport proper in Kona. So Nelha is the natural energy laboratory for Hawaii, and it's a big compound that they do like Mitch says. It's kind of like an economic zone where there's lobster farmers, there's fish farmers, there's water bottlers that pull deep water up and purify it, export it. There's a lot of business going on down there and more room to do more, and that's where you're at. In fact, the water bottling plant, I'm not sure of this year, but they were the biggest exporter of goods out of Hawaii for many, several years. I think they're expanding too. Let's pull that picture back up and get a quick look at that station and you can describe to folks what we're looking at. Looking from this view behind me would be the administration buildings and that setup there. What you see here is the entrance to the hydrogen station. And to the right is the dispenser, which looks just like a gasoline dispenser you see at a normal gas station, and we'll have close-up views of that. You'll see a 40-foot shipping container just over the top of the sign, and that contains all the major equipment, an electrolyzer to make the hydrogen, a huge compressor to compress it, and then an electrical room that distributes the energy. This is the energy for the station from the grid. The grid before the geothermal event was about 83% renewable energy during the day, like a good Sunday. It drops down to about 50-53% at night, so basically our hydrogen had a high component of renewable energy in it. So if you want to go back to the drawing, the rendering, the second image and 3D rendering. So there's a layout, top view, bottom view. Go to the bottom picture. You see the 40-foot shipping container kind of in the middle, and on the left is the dispenser, and you see a helion rendering of a helion bus. That's part of the project. We funded the purchase and conversion of a 29-passenger shuttle bus for the helion bus service. And then on the right, you see a bunch of canopies and what look like horse trailers. Those are hydrogen tube trailers that we use for transporting hydrogen from Nelha to Volcano National Park, where we will be putting in a second dispenser. That'll bring us up to three dispensers on the Big Island once we're through with that. So just to orient people, the helion bus is actually part of the county's bus service to get employees around the island between Hilo and Kona. But this particular shuttle bus will be operating primarily, as I understand it, between the Kona Airport and Kona Town Proper to help move employees to the airport for their work. And it'll be hydrogen powered all the way. And then the two tube trailers you see on the left of the top image there, those are going to be going and servicing Volcano National Park. That's quite a haul, though, from going from the Pune Geothermal where it was originally planned to hauling those all the way up to the top of the mountain. But the main thing is, if that's your only source of hydrogen, then you've got to do what you've got to do. But we want to show the technology and we'll talk about those buses a little later in the show. But I wanted to point out another thing, and you can go back to either one of those images, Robert, one thing that I wanted to explain to people is when we first started looking at building hydrogen stations for the military here, we had these big blast walls up and all kinds of mitigation equipment. But you've gone through the county and the building permit process and all that. I noticed that there were fire sensors or heat sensors in there. But is there any suppression? I don't see any blast walls. That's code now. Yes, so basically the main design element on the hydrogen safety part is to have setback distances from your actual hazardous area, which is basically the vents on the top of the stack. So you allow a certain distance between all that. So for example, you go back to the rendering. So there's a wall there right at the front of the picture and that's our electrical panel wall. So we had to move that around slightly to make sure that we fit within our setback distances. That's the wall in the lower picture? Yeah, exactly. And all the electrical equipment is on the outboard side, rather the inboard side. So yes, all the setback distances. And we brought in a consultant from the mainland to do a safety analysis of it. And we worked closely with the planning department. This is the first one they've ever done. And so they had a lot to learn. The codes and standards for hydrogen is a pretty thick book and it's a lot of heavy-duty reading. And so it took us a fair bit of time to put this together. But of course, we're the scouts out in front of the wagon train. Now that we've done the basic work, the planning department has become more familiar with hydrogen. The fire department is familiar with hydrogen. It should be easier for the next person coming along with a hydrogen station to get their permitting in place. And that's what the university does. We're there to blaze a path, find out what all the problems are, come up with solutions and help educate and provide outreach to the local authorities having jurisdiction on what it takes to put in this in place. And that's all part of this project. So you did that on the Big Island and Surf Coast doing that over here in Mapunapuna with their station. Correct. With O'ahu folks. But you know, one thing I want to point out to the viewers, you know, when we start doing these stations and you saw the image there, that's about the size of a regular gas station. You could have three or four more dispensers and really wouldn't be adding a whole lot to that. But what you're really looking at is an oil field, an oil pipeline, an oil tanker ship, a whole big refinery and the delivery trucks that deliver gasoline all in one place with one 40 foot container and some dispensing equipment. So you're looking at the entire energy system that it takes to make the hydrogen all in the footprint of a gas station and you're missing all that other infrastructure, all those chances to spill oil, all those chances to contaminate environment, all those chances to mess things up and all the transportation costs. So when you start really looking at, does this pencil out? Well, if you just took the transportation costs of gasoline alone, it definitely pencils out. You just got to get your power cheap enough to make it worthwhile. And I know that with wind power on the mainland going for four to seven cents a kilowatt hour, that's cheaper than buying gas once you put it in a system like this. Exactly. Actually, it's cheaper. It's around two and a half cents a kilowatt hour. Yeah, it can get down really low. So if you dedicated renewable energy to hydrogen production and just said, well, we're going to amortize this over so many years and write it off and didn't have transmission lines and transformers and everything else that the utilities have to do, you could be producing hydrogen pretty darn cheap and store that energy and using it whenever you want in stationary fuel cells. So something important to look at when you're looking at a station like that. We've got a couple more images that show more of the details of the station. So, Robert, why don't you throw those up? And we'll talk to them as they go through. Pretty close. Okay, those are? Yeah, so that's the entrance to the main gate and what we're looking at are those fueling posts that Stan talked about earlier. They're an interface between the electrolyzer and our hydrogen tube trailers. We have a space for two hydrogen tube trailers that would back into there and they would connect up to those posts and be charged up with hydrogen. And there's a close-up view of it and you can see the crash barriers. That's to help guide the trailer, make sure we don't run into one of those fueling posts. Good idea. What you don't see there is all the underground work. So these are all interconnected by tubes and electrical wires and sensors and all that because this station is totally automated. It's remotely monitored and it's designed for unattended operations so that the driver of the bus can drive in there. Self-service. Self-service, just like your self-service gas station. Yeah. So it was a big, a large amount of construction. It was done by NAN construction. And the pad is grounded as well, right? Oh, it's got more re-mar than you would ever want to think about. Everything is grounded. And some of the later pictures I'll show you, even the barbed wire, the individual strands are all grounded. Right, good. And there's some more close-ups of some of the dispensing equipment here. That's where the bus would actually fill up then, right? Or a car if they wanted to bring a car in. Yeah, exactly. It looks exactly like a normal gasoline dispenser. You can see it at a normal gas station. And the actual operation is the same. It has a hose with a nozzle. And the only difference is that you have a gas-tight lock between the dispenser and the vehicle through your nozzle. And then you hook on. And then the dispenser is totally computer-controlled. You don't have to sit there with a trigger and operate it. The dispenser does all that. And doesn't the dispenser talk to the vehicle electronically? Yes, it does. It measures the temperature of the tank and everything. And the pressure and all that. And so it's pretty sophisticated, but it's user-friendly. Yes. Really user-friendly. Yeah, exactly. Well, we tried to take the man out of the loop as much as possible. So we tried to think of all these things. All right. Well, we're going to take a quick break here and talk about some other shows here on ThinkTech. And then we'll be back with Mitch Ewan to talk a little bit more about the station and the vehicles. Hi. I'm Ethan Allen, your host on ThinkTech's likeable science show. Every Friday at 2 p.m., we delve in the magical, fascinating world of science. How science applies to your life. Why you should care about science. What impact science has on you and on those around you. Why you need to know some science. It's a fun, interesting, painless way to learn some good science that you can use. See you there. Hi. My name is Mark. And every Monday at one o'clock, I'm the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's research in Munna. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes, and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. You owe me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to ThinkTech Hawaii's research in Munna. And see you then. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour. That's really important because I'm a state employee. I'm here on my lunch hour. So, we've got Mitch here, and we're talking hydrogen stations. The first hydrogen station on the big island outside of Blue Planet's ranch up in Puvala. And we're hoping that now that the stations are there, the vehicles will follow. And then they will. Mitch has made sure of that right off the bat. But when we're talking about the stations, one of the other things about the dispensing is that's not just the kind of you invented that dispenser. It's standard, right? There's an international standard for those. Oh, yeah. There's codes for the actual dispenser. All the systems, they have codes and standards that the manufacturer follows. Yeah, so all the vehicles that are being built are being built to either be fueled to 5,000 PSI or 10,000 PSI currently. Correct. And there's actually two separate kind of nozzles to fill the two separate kind of vehicles so you don't put high pressure into a low pressure vehicle. Yeah, that's correct. So, your station is geared up for both or just one? No, our station is geared up for 5,000 PSI, which is what heavy duty vehicles like buses and trucks fill up on that. Because they have the real estate, i.e. the space available to store hydrogen tanks whereas a light duty vehicle like a car has very limited space. And so that's why they go to the higher pressure. Right, okay. Yeah, but it was important. This is how people think hydrogen is such new technology that we're like breaking ground here. But hydrogen has been around a long time. There's a lot of research done on it. There's been a lot of standardization done via California and the Northeast States and Europe and Japan and Korea. And this has been well thought out, well orchestrated, especially by California. And we're just basically plagiarizing everything we can from California. Thank you to Tyson and those guys in California. And doing what we can to get Hawaii accelerated. And I think the big one is going to be the one taken off here real quick. I think so. Especially the fact that we will have actual hydrogen buses, which allows the general public to actually experience a hydrogen vehicle, which if you just have light duty cars, unless you have a friend who has one, you wouldn't be able to do that. Right. Whereas anybody can get on the bus and go for a ride, whether it's the Helion bus or the two hydrogen buses we'll have up at Volcano National Park. Okay. Is there anything else about the station we forgot to talk about? Otherwise we'll move into the buses and start looking at them and you can explain that. Yeah, sure. Okay. So, Robert, why don't you bring up one of the bus pictures and we'll talk about what's going on with the buses. Oh, we did. This is more of the station. Yeah. This is the electric work. The thing to point out on this is it's all stainless steel. Right. Have you noticed the ocean in the background? Yeah. I'd like to point out that that stainless steel is already starting to corrode. Yeah, it does. We've got to go on wire brush it down and put some wax or something on it. Good news for you, stainless steel still has steel in it. Yeah. It's kind of unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Oh, those are two of my guys, Gunter and Aaron who are working on that dispenser and hooking up the various sensors and making sure it all works. So, I wanted to get a plug for the guys. Yeah. So, it was a hot day, too. Hey, there's the Hellingham bus in Torrance, California. Right. So, this is a El Dorado cutaway bus, 29 passenger bus in this case, fully ADA compliant. We have space for two wheelchairs and a lift. I'd also like to point out that we are, we developed or developing an export power unit with our partner, U.S. Hybrid, who is here in Hawaii as well, to put in a 10 kilowatt power export unit so that you can export, so you can use the bus as a portable generator. Yeah. So, for example, if you had an eruption that wiped out a certain part of your infrastructure and you had some critical loads like refrigeration at a drug store to keep your drugs. Or you had a command post. Or a command post, you could drive the bus up and plug it in, and it has enough energy between its batteries and the fuel cell and hydrogen to provide 30 hours of power at full power at 10 kilowatts, which you can do a lot, that's a lot of power. Yeah. And so, and the other advantage is, is that when you use it up, you can drive it back to the hydrogen station in 20 minutes, so you can fill it up. And drive it back. Put another batch of hydrogen in, you got another 30 hours to go back and provide your loads. And therefore, if you had several of these vehicles, you'd probably never interrupt the power. You just plug one in, unplug it, plug a new one in, go back in there. Yeah, exactly. You know. And they can self-power the station, but one of the problems when you have a, you lose all your grid power is your dispensers don't work because they all work on, but in this case, you can self-power your system just using this bus. Yeah, we're actually, for the Air Force, what HCAT's doing is our last vehicle will be delivered. We call it SPOD, Secure Power on Demand. It has the same kind of power takeoff capability as that bus. And we're going to be demonstrating what state civil defense here during their next hurricane exercise, along with our two generators and our two light carts. Right. And you're right. It's amazing that in like the size of those trailers that you have, our generator, that goes hours. I mean tens of hours, like 20, 30, 40 hours, depending on the load that's on them. It's pretty impressive. They just keep on ticking. The light carts, we had them filled half, we had the tanks filled halfway. Those lights carts, we've used them for about 15, 20 hours and I've hardly seen any pressure drop. Maybe 50, 60 PSI. And that's it. So that's a whole new way to leverage your investment in your public transportation is in an emergency, a hurricane or whatever, you have these mobile power sources that can be used to, like we said, power up critical infrastructure. And you put a big PV array outside of that and now you don't even need an electric company to get you your power. Right. You start making your own fuel right there and delivering your own power. You know, and it's all clean. Yes. All you need coming out of your tailpipe is water vapor. Pure water, yeah. So you start off with carbon free and you're carbon free all the way through the process. Right. And what do you need? You need water and electricity. Right. We got plenty of water. In fact, we have this 2,500 mile moat around us that we can be pulling a lot of water out to be making hydrogen. Right. I know that's why you and I get excited about this stuff. Well, it provides additional justification. I mean the vehicles are coming down. They're almost at a par now with diesel buses. So why would you want to buy a diesel bus anymore? But when you add these additional benefits on top of it, you know, what are you going to use? Your diesel bus to go and power up a critical load. I don't think so. Well, this next image here is, we call it the Havel bus. So these are the buses that are going to go to Volcano National Park. And they have some special equipment in them that makes them kind of unique. So what the audience is seeing is three of the four buses on the planet that are running on hydrogen all look like this, all converted by the same company. But these two buses that are running on Volcano have a piece of special gear on them. Yes. So as we all know, the Volcano at Volcano National Park, they have a lot of Vogue. And if you drive your hydrogen vehicle through there, the sulfur compounds in that Vogue would what we call kill your catalyst or your fuel cell, which is quite an expensive component. So what we decided was we developed what I call a smart air filtration system. So we have sensors in front of the inlet for air and the outlet of the air after it goes through the filter. We can determine how well that filter is working and filtering out the impurities. And at a certain point, then the driver will know, oh, I've exceeded my limit and therefore I have to either return the base or just go on battery-only power. So it's practically shut down the fuel cell so that fuel cell does not get damaged. By the sulfur dioxide or whatever. By the sulfur dioxide or hydrogen sulfide or whatever's in the air, all the nasties that could be in the air. So this could be applicable, not everybody has a Volcano like us, but you look at cities like Beijing or New Delhi or even LA and places that have a lot of smog and a lot of air pollution. This would be ideal for those locations for preserving the integrity of your fuel cell power system and reducing your costs. So those have been developed and installed and now as soon as we get our hydrogen up and running at Volcano Park, then we'll deploy the buses up there and we'll be able to run them through that kind of environment. We know that the Volcano folks intend to use those buses between their visitor center and Thurston Lava Tubes. They have a real parking issue there. But every once in a while, they plan to take those buses all the way down to the shoreline and so we talked to the... I went over there with the U.S. hybrid and we talked to the operators and said, look, if you know you're going to go down that hill, turn the fuel cell off and let your batteries run down. Because going down that hill, you've got regenerative braking. All the way down the hill, you're making electricity off of your motor. It's turned into a generator and you're coasting down the hill and it's making electricity to charge your batteries up. That way you can actually get to the bottom of the hill with full tanks of hydrogen and full power batteries. All you need to do is go downhill. That's another advantage to those buses. How many vehicles can make their own power just by going downhill? Another advantage to the hydrogen technology and electric drive technology. They're really good on hills. We heard some of the battery electric buses which have their use. Here in Hawaii on Oahu and also on the Big Island had trouble going up some of these long hills. Eventually the battery started to lose its charge and they started to slow down. It was like the train light said, I think I can, I think I can. Whereas we took, remember we did a ride and drive on the Hickam bus and we charged up these hills like no problem. Fully loaded. Fully loaded. We had about 20 people in them. We have that extra boost to handle some of the big grades we have here in Hawaii. Mitch, we've hit our 30 minute point. I think it goes by so fast. Thanks for being on with us today and giving us a look at your station and your buses. We're looking forward to that station coming online. This summer. If you're on the Big Island, be looking for it. If you want to find two bigger hydrogen heroes in the world, you're looking at them right here. We've got the tag team of hydrogen junkies right here in Oahu. We thank you for joining us today. We'll have Mitch back on later when his station's up and his buses are running and we'll get a real-time report from him. Maybe we can go over there and do a ride. That'd be great. We'll do a show from the Big Island. Until then, see you next Friday. Standard Juman with Cindy and Robert here in the studio. Signing off.