 Welcome to Hawaii State Energy. This show is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. Today we're coming to you from Houston, Texas and the Big Island through the magic of Think Tech Hawaii's technical team and technology. Today's show features Riley Sato, energy coordinator for the County of Hawaii. He recently briefed the County Council Committee on Public Works and Mass Transit on the status of hydrogen buses. The meeting was videotaped by Dave Corrigan of Big Island Video News who's kindly permitted us to use it on this show. Thanks Dave. I would also like to acknowledge the leadership of Council member Kleinfelter, chair of the committee who requested this briefing and also introduced recently a resolution urging the County administration to acquire hydrogen powered buses for mass transit. Finally, I would also like to thank the County Council members themselves for their support. So with that said let's roll the RIT video. I'd like to see what you have and then we'll do some follow-up questions. You can see my screen. I can see behind you. Yeah so I'm Riley Sato at the research and development. Mitch Ewan I'm the hydrogen systems program manager. I've been in hydrogen game for about 30 years. Built the world's first PEM fuel cell powered car back in 1989-ish. So I've been at H&EI for the last 18 years. We started this project here for the Big Island almost 10 years ago. It's gone through multiple sites. I won't go through all of them but we're now at Nelha. We're maybe weeks away from our hydrogen station actually coming online. We have our first bus is over on Oahu just going through its final commissioning. It's a 29 passenger fuel cell hybrid bus brand new. Looks awesome and so as soon as my hydrogen station is up and running we'll bring the bus over here and then we'll do final commissioning with some of our contractors just making sure all our software and communications equipment is working. So we're basically ready to go. It's a 29 passenger full full ADA compliant and I upgraded the fuel cell, increased it from 30 kilowatts to 40 kilowatts and we put in a power export unit which allows that bus to be used in civil defense in case of a disaster relief and humanitarian assistance because then the bus becomes a portable power supply. It's good for 30 hours. It can produce 10 kilowatts of one 10 to 20 volt AC power and then we can refill the bus in about 15, 20 minutes and you got another 30 hours. So just the concept is that all your buses can then be dual tasks in emergencies to become aid to the civil defense organization provide critical power, lifesaving power to people that need to have that power. So for somebody on a dialysis machine or something like that this bus can actually help help them through these kinds of emergencies which we know we're gonna have. So I'll stop talking and let Riley get on with it because he's got some great pictures of some of this equipment. Okay just a quick overview slide. Start with the policy and planning context which is upon us with the Mass Transit Administration. The interest in how we got our tow in the water with battery electric buses and why hydrogen buses are being considered at this point. So overall there's HRS 225P-5 which is zero emissions clean economy target and basically to have this entire state zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and you cannot do that without sequestering the vehicle transportation aspect of it. There's some figures say that if we took out the buses, all the buses and made them zero emission on this island they would reduce the greenhouse gases by 25% just the buses alone. With the Helion Transportation Master Plan that was developed over three years that really is was completed in last August. You are all familiar with it provides the goals the guidance that we need to follow in order to move forward with elevating the performance of the Mass Transit system. Then along those lines in relation to the greenhouse gas goals, R&D took a look at the doing a pilot. How would we manage a pilot of electric buses to see how it would handle our topology, the life cycle cost as a compared to compared to a diesel bus because in the master plan it's all laid out that the types and capital expenditure that would occur in acquiring diesel buses. But if we are acquiring diesel buses will never make it to sequester greenhouse gases. So the pilot of battery electric bus implementation plan was completed in December 2018. It was based on two two bus pilot project looking at the life cycle cost analysis, the charging, where, when, how, how long it takes, and actually that the routes that might be considered and looking at the deployment of a full fleet of electric buses. And as a result of the top three, we ended up with looking at hydrogen technology, which was pretty much placed in our laps with Mitch's work, in which it cost the county zero dollars is all based on external funding. And so it's a it's a great opportunity. Now with the battery electric bus implementation and deployment plan, the conclusions came that where we have, it would preferably be shorter routes because of the topology of this island. It's very challenging on the battery vehicles. So and it would need to be base yard charged, meaning back you run it all day and you come back and you charge up overnight. There is an option of a rapid on road charging system. And basically what that is, is you have a like a, like a garage roof open that the bus drives under. And then these charging arms comes down kind of like scientific thing and poke into the head of the boss and it charges in like 10 minutes. But that Matt, you would know from your background that that causes a demand spike of like 300 KW. Boom. So that's very expensive unless you know, you have some other form of energy preventing that from happening. But it may be necessary on longer routes that therefore the recommendation is pretty much to stick to shorter routes. It would base yard charging. And as I mentioned, topology has a major factor is a major factor on on the life of the battery and the charging time needs to be overnight. So we needed, we looked at optimizing routes for battery electric buses and the life cycle costs of diesel buses. And that's where the blue line and the red line meet. So actually the life cycle costs on the shorter routes, base yard charging are match up. The blue line is the diesel and it starts lower because the cost of a diesel bus is lower, like 400 to $500,000 for a 40 foot bus versus a electric bus would be about $750 to $800,000. And so but throughout the lower fuel costs and the lower maintenance costs during the life cycle costs of a bus, they do meet up. So in parallel with that, the there are two grants that collaborating on the state and county levels. And this is where the pilot idea came in because we knew that possibly would get these pilot electric buses is that through a Volkswagen settlement trust fund, the state was awarded $8.1 million that and through a low, low grant, that means low emissions or no emissions grant. The state was awarded $1.5 million. So total $9.6 million. So the State Department of Transportation and the four counties collaborated together to meet the requirements of these grants, but using a consolidated purchasing and infrastructure charging, consolidation of the order, so to speak, to get better pricing and to and scale. So that went through, it was approved, it's in place right now. The vehicle charging phase is going on because if you there are some some cases where municipalities acquired buses, but they didn't have a way to charge them yet because that's the more difficult part is actually working out your infrastructure for electric vehicles. The but as so it's targeted for 2021, the co-share for the county for the three buses is approximately $250,000 per bus that includes the charging infrastructure. But that said, with the we still need to resolve the longer routes, medium and longer routes in the county. And that's where we looked at the hydrogen because hydrogen as a fuel source and hydrogen is is only the fuel source that the actual bus is an electric bus. The electricity gets generated by a fuel cell that is fed by the hydrogen. So through pretty much what Mitch went through, the HNEI through grant funding has ahead this actual picture of the actual bus that that's on a while that that is the charging fueling station is that now huh right on the point and it can provide enough fuel per day to run this bus 600 miles per day. Okay. The and there's the other two hydrogen buses that were grant driven for Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The park has agreed since their their infrastructure, they're still trying to recover with that. And so they're pretty much transferring the ownership and operation of these buses to the to the county that happened about three four weeks ago. And and those are little smaller 20 past 19 passenger, but but all of these buses are wheelchair capable to each ADA compliant. We're looking at having all three being able to export power. So they're a portable power generator. And and these buses can handle the topology and long distance of the Big Island. There's also I had this last bullet potential to convert Helion gas fired fleet to hydrogen. That technology does exist. In fact, I think this Helion bus was a Ford 350 bus. I mean, it was a gas fired bus that you change out the actual power train, the engine and the gearing and all of that. And with that, you get rid of all the petroleum based lubricants, fluids and to freeze and all of that. That all goes away. So there is a potential to convert buses in that manner. Now, so this this new flyer of America study shows that the zero emission bus buses between EVs and hydrogen there, the capital costs will meet about in the year 2021. So now remember that analysis? I had it the EV versus the diesel. The diesel had a lower capital cost. So now the hydrogen is is in parallel with what was on the EV line. So it's the same capital cost. So it's the same life cycle cost as a diesel diesel bus. So once you take out the initial capital cost, then it becomes a question of what your infrastructure would be, how much energy it takes to produce the fuel and other operating considerations like recharge time, refueling time, maintenance time. So with the hydrogen bus, then this is not to scale. You put in the infrastructure, the fueling infrastructure, how to produce the hydrogen itself, which we already have at Nelha. So you have that. And if we wanted, since it can produce three times more than the bus can use in one day, we could actually have three buses. And that's assuming the bus goes into a Kona and covers 200 miles, which it would not. You can't drive around Kona in 200 miles in one day and just traffic would stop you. So with that, we have this additional capacity. And so there's two things you can do with it. You can store it in tanks. Then you can transport it anywhere on the island where you need it to run an emergency generator. But you can store this fuel. And unlike diesel, it has an unlimited shelf life. Diesel goes stale, sour when you have to switch it out or refresh it every three months or so. But the hydrogen bus, you build the infrastructure and you can add on vehicles with no infrastructure, additional costs, no incremental costs. Now with the electric bus, it's pretty much the opposite. The more buses you have, the more charging stations you need, because pretty much they need to be charged at the same time at night. And you only can charge one bus from one charger. So it's very, it's as you increase your bus fleet, you increase your infrastructure costs. Now with hydrogen, the main, I may I should have started with this because everyone thinks that hydrogen is dangerous that is going to blow up and from the airship. So this is an example of actually, I didn't think the video would run, but there's a video online on this. You can just Google hydrogen versus gas car fire. And so the car on the left in zero seconds is a hydrogen vehicle in which there's a failure in its charge port and it catches fire. The car on the right is the leak at the fuel pump for a gas vehicle. So in three seconds, the you can see where the fire for the hydrogen is flaring directly up. And that's because the hydrogen is 14 times lighter than air. And how many miles an hour it goes up? Goes up at 45 miles an hour. Like 66 feet per second. Yeah, correct. Something like that. So if there's a leak, it's gone. You can't you can't try and stop it. Even if you wanted to. And so in 60 seconds, the the the tank is pretty much half empty for the hydrogen is still flaring straight up while the gas vehicle is starting to be totally consumed. And in 90 seconds, the hydrogen vehicles no longer the gas is all gone because it's so dynamically lighter than air just moves the molecules just move. So it doesn't pull like propane or propane is actually heavier than air. So it would gather on the ground. So if you had a propane tank in this room, it will slowly fill the room up. And if somebody lit it, then whereas hydrogen would just like leak out of every small space that you can find. So with the fueling station, this is an actual picture. It's not an artist concept drawing thing. You can drive down there, feel it, touch it, smell it, whatever you want to do with it. And it's pretty much can power three buses in one day, or provide the emergency critical load for civil defense for 30 hours on a full tank. Each bus is capable of carrying or a trailer where you could attach a trailer to the bus and it could carry the trailer of 100 kilograms. So you actually could have 550 hours of electricity wherever that bus went of 10 kW. So Mitch and I were working with Brenda on looking at installing a fueling station at the mass transit base yard in Hilo to fuel the two volcano buses that are coming. So we provided her equipment, pricing for the everything hydrogen related and also a photovoltaic system with a battery to run the electrolyzer. So it's not based on any fossil fuel. And so we provided that to her last week that she submitted in a grant. And so this is remember I talked about the infrastructure costs, right? And the cost of energy. How do you make the hydrogen through water? So you get the water, you run it through a electrolyzer, you have hydrogen, you also have oxygen that's medical grade oxygen as a byproduct, which you also could bottle. And so but here's you see this flaring on the left. That's actually occurring on the big island at the West Hawaii sanitary landfill. We flare 270 standard cubic feet per minute. And this is a great thing because we're compliant with EPA. The landfill has like no bad marks on it is compliant. This is what the EPA says we should do. You know, say we do require that we do. And this is this gas is produced by all the biomass breakdown underground. Once the you dump everything in, you cover it up. And there's a natural breakdown of the material, the biomaterial and that produces methane. So the landfill actually has this network of pipes that that allow the gas to some place to go. And it just there's no pumping, no pressurizing, no moving parts. It's just mother nature, breaking down, taking, taking things back to its original chemical state. And that produces methane. So that methane is one example of source of energy could use solar PV. You could use wind. You could use other renewable sources to create the hydrogen. And the tipping point is if you can get, you know, we pay residential, we're paying something like 35, 30 cents a kilowatt hour. And so if you're to produce hydrogen at that rate, offer like at home at that rate, it would be like three, four times more expensive than diesel fuel. The tipping point is 10 cents a kilowatt hour. Currently the two large solar farms that are being built with battery with all the interconnection costs of a very expensive, you know, adders to that are selling helco at eight cents and nine cents a kilowatt hour, the solar farm and the energetic solar farm. So if you took out the additional, the battery and all of that just had a simple solar with a simple electricity generation to run the electrolyzer, it's about five to six cents. So that makes the fuel half the cost of diesel. So these things are possible. And so the with the graphic, the electrolyzes, what splits the H two and the old to create the hydrogen that you pressurize and place into canisters that you can actually mobilize and move a distributed store. And that or you plug it into a fuel cell that produces power and your transportation, whatever transportation vehicles you would like. And so with that, the that number that's 270 standard cubic feet of energy that we're flaring that is equivalent amount. If you take it and you produce hydrogen from it off of the standard molecular cables, so to speak, it's enough to provide 30 buses fuel to run 700 miles a day. 30 buses 700 miles a day. That's so much. That that's the volume of hydrogen fuel that we're burning right now. So we're looking at these things. It won't happen overnight. But certainly the the all the economic analysis and modeling and things along those lines, there's no show stoppers. You know, environmental management is in the loop, automotive is in the loop. And we've got great scientists with good minds that keep, you know, can get the vision too crazy. So and as far as this is my last slide, the actual hydrogen trip for the for the County of Hawaii started in 2006 and maybe before that with a S with HR is 196 dash 10. In 2006, along with the first version of SB 661, SB 661 is related to procurement and procurement priority of vehicles, electric vehicles. And it actually outlines that any government agency when purchasing vehicles would consider EV vehicles first than hydrogen. And this the 2006 version. And at the bottom of that list are gas fired vehicles. But I'm not sure if you know, that actually occurs. But it is in law. The HR is 196 actually has a hydrogen renewable hydrogen program designated for Hawaii Island to transform the Hawaii Island to a hydrogen economy by the year 2020. So we only have a year and a half left. But it was written in 2006, the HB 401, which is past this year, waiting for the governor's signature allows third party finance vehicle vehicle fleet fueling and charging infrastructure financing by third parties. So a broad example would be a third party finance or could buy 30 hydrogen buses and charge us on a per passenger mile basis and sign a contract with us. That that's the but because it's fueling and charging your state in for infrastructure, they could also produce the hydrogen at the landfill and finance it and charge us on a we will buy it on a per vehicle mile or per kilogram break basis. So that's waiting the governor's signature. And then SB 661 was advised in 2019 to put the fuel cell vehicles as a number one priority in the purchase order. HB 401 also could be applied to transformation of county fleet vehicles. Well, that's our show for today. And once again, thanks to Dave Corrigan of big island video news for allowing us to use is really excellent video. And once again, thanks to think tech Hawaii team who put this together like joined Houston to the big island to Oahu and their studio. So thanks so much guys. And we'll see you next Wednesday. So Aloha, y'all from Texas.