 and welcome to Stan the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm an awesome man coming to you live and direct from Kailua. Yeah, the background's not Kailua, so I have the background up there for a special reason. This is one of my favorite places in the world. It's a place on the big island called Puvava. And the reason I picked this particular photo is because it's got three separate solar arrays. You see one on a building. You see a little tiny one. It looks like it's got an X around it in the middle. And you see another big one out in the field. One of the building is an 85 kilowatt array that runs a small microgrid with about 26 buildings on about 30 acres of property. The little tiny one in the middle is called a power cube. And all those solar panels and the battery and everything that goes with it packs up into an 8x8x8 Tonics container suitable for military shipping wherever they need to go. And then the big one out in the field is a dedicated solar array. I forget how many kilowatts it is, but I think it's probably around 120. And it's set up to run a pump, which is on the far left side of your screen there on my far right shoulder. You can just see the edge of it. It's a water pump that services a community on the hillside way behind in the picture. So this little area has three separate solar arrays. One runs a microgrid, one runs a well for a community water system. And the other one is totally affordable to be deployed anywhere. And the title of the show today is the grid or microgrid, that is a question. And so our guest today is a returning guest that I hope returns a lot more because we have a lot of cool stuff to talk about. Dan Gohan from Electron Power and Technology. And he's done some microgrid programming and stuff for some big electric companies and he understands the concept. So we're gonna have him explain to us where microgrids work and where they're maybe not such a good idea, but how we can make more efficient systems and more resilient systems, more survivable systems, more synergistic systems if we really thought about how we're designing our electric grids and put microgrids where they belong and put big grids where they belong. So Dan, welcome to the show again today. I appreciate you coming on board and I'm counting on you to do most of the talking today. So let's kick it over today and let's give us a picture of some of the work that you're familiar with and talk to us a little bit about microgrids and what makes sense. Well, Stan, when you and I started talking about this, you said the microgrid, to grid the microgrid, I said, well, let's just do it. And you're like, oh, that sounds cool, let's do that. So if we can have them put slide number two up, if we could please. Okay. So what that is, now what I'm gonna use, I'm gonna approach this from a very practical standpoint, but I'm gonna use this as sort of a pattern of what we're gonna do. Here's what we're not gonna do and here's what we are. So what that is, that's the wider refinery up in East Chicago, it's on the south shore of Lake Michigan. Okay. Now that refinery, now originally what they tapped into is this oil and gas, basically the state of Michigan, the state of Michigan sits on a salt deposit, the oil and gas plugs underneath salt. And when rock salt is under pressure, that happens to be one of those materials that's impervious to hydrogen. So that's a great place for storing hydrogen. Now, whenever that gas, that oil and gas field there in Michigan went dry, there's like 36,000 depleted oil and gas wells up in the state of Michigan. That refinery, and unfortunately had to switch over to importing crude off the Great Lakes from Canada. You go out to the Niagara Falls and there's blocks out there, St. Louis Causeway, the Ionic Ocean. So that's Gulf, Mexico, Nigeria, the Middle East and so forth. So but what I wanted to talk about is some of the inefficiencies of that business, the inefficiencies are, is they're transported in crude oil to the refinery and that's truck-trained Piper ship. So they're burning fuel doing that. They either burn crude oil in the refinery or flare gas to fire a gas turbine there. And then they put that refined product or gas in your diesel, all that stuff onto truck-trained Piper ship to get to the customer. So you can look how inefficient that entire business is. So there are some things on site at that refinery that most people don't realize is that there are usually a number of several different gas wells on that site. Usually they store like ethylene, acetylene but every refinery always has a hydrogen well. Because that's where they store hydrogen. They usually make it from steam reforming. They store it underground and they use hydrogen to remove sulfur from the product from the crude oil from the diesel and so forth. So understand the petroleum business they know how to store hydrogen. They've been in the hydrogen business for probably close to 70 years, right? So that's kind of surprising to everybody in the hydrogen business that there is an expert out there, okay? Now the good news for us is that the Department of Energy has documented a lot of this for us and there's a lot of good resources from the Department of Energy on this whole subject. So, and there's actually some equipment at that refinery that's very interesting to me. Things I use in the Electromagnetic Compressor for compressing hydrogen. And we'll talk about that later on but it's what it is as the cracker unit. And I'll describe why later on in the talk when we talk about compressing hydrogen and valves and those kind of things. So if we go slide number three. Okay, so a utility guy like me that's a very important map for me. So what's on that map? You've got, it's Indiana, you've got Indianapolis up in the upper left-hand corner. That's Gary, Indiana. That's up there where the writing refineries due north is the state of Michigan. But what's on that map are high tension power lines, gas pipe lines, and more important it helps me locate depleted gas, depleted natural gas fields, okay? That's what I'm looking for. Because what I'm looking for is the intersection of the power lines and those depleted gas wells because I can use those great big huge gas wells to good use up in the town. So on just on the south, on the southeastern side of Indianapolis, there's a town called Shelbyville. And it's all along the freeway between Indianapolis one and Cincinnati. Okay, so we can go to slide number four. Okay, so that is the Shelbyville gas field. So that's from the Indiana department of natural resources, right? And all those dots are these days it's natural gas well. So back when they first started drilling and it was drilled by Standard Oil back in 1890. So they've been drilling for natural gas here for a while. About the 40s and 50s, they ran out of oil and they started doing gas. Now the green ones, those are the wells producing product, right? The red ones, those are the depleted ones. Now everybody in the petroleum business take a good look at that map. Sooner or later, that's gonna be all red and that's gonna be the future of that business. Unfortunately, that is the truth, okay? Now every state has one of these, okay, has a right where you can go and click on the dots and it'll tell you exactly where that well is, who owns it, who owns rights to it, et cetera. Now, as part of drilling these things, kind of important detail is when you go out there and drill one of the things you end up putting, for the state of Indiana, you end up putting up a million dollar bond that's put into escrow by the state, right? And the reason why, in case you go out of business or go bankrupt, the state can hire somebody as they go in there, when that well runs dry, they can hire somebody to go in there, they pump her full of concrete, they dig down about six feet and they cut the pipe off and they cover her with dirt. So if you're going out there in Indiana, out there in that farmland looking for a depleted well, you're not gonna find it because they've already pumped her full of cement and cut the pipe off and covered her up with dirt. So that also means that if we're gonna go out there and use one of these things, one of the things I have to do, and I'm gonna talk a little bit about costs and all the things we're gonna do, we're gonna talk a little bit of cost here. And then as I've got, I know of at least two companies here in the High Rail Valley to do what's called Well Services. And so I get a whole list guys and they'll go out and know how our contractors, they'll go out and redraw it. There's a type of pipe called, it's a 316 stainless steel pipe that happens to be great for hydrogen. They use it mainly for hydrogen sulfide. Well, so it's not an alien thing for the oil guys. They use this stuff all the time. You'll put in 316 pipe, 316 stainless steel pipe and you'll put in your 316 stainless steel well head. And they can also put it on your pipe. They can bury it in the ground. These guys can, you know, they can put in all kinds of pipeline for it. And you can usually do it for doing something like this. It's gonna cost you probably between two and $4 million dollars per well. Okay, can I answer? Is that 316 the size or the type of stainless steel? The type of steel. Okay. Type of steel. When we talk about the compressor technology, I'm gonna talk to you about the three different types of metallic alloys and the two different types of plastic families that are impervious to hydrogen. And 316 stainless steel is impervious to hydrogen. And I have some really great pictures of the atoms of this stuff. And I can tell you exactly why it's impervious to hydrogen. But that happens to be one of the great, the sort of virtuous thing. And the oil guys, what they use that 316 stainless steel for is for hydrogen sulfide because hydrogen sulfide is very corrosive. It just so happens that, hey, that's great pipe for hydrogen too. So, you know, don't lick a gift for us in the mouth. Just take it and go with it, right? So now also understand we're plugging in when these giant gas turbines, right? There isn't a big giant, you know, I mean, a 9HA gas turbine, 557 megawatts of power combined cycle, gas and steam, it does both. Pretty highly efficient gas turbine. If you burn the gas, the gas side heat doesn't water, produce steam, run that into a steam turbine. So the efficiency will go from 33 all the way to 47%. It's not good as a hydrogen fuel cell at 47%. Gas turbine and she'll burn anything. You can't throw stones in. But anyway, there's no bottle of propane behind the building for that, right? What's feeding that monstrous gas turbine is that is a well, is one of those gas moves. So we can go to page number five, slide number five. So that's what one of these look like. It is not a small thing. Okay, so usually these wells, the storage in these wells is usually, it averages at about 6.5 million cubic meters of storage. Right, so we're talking about storing lots of gas. And when you're talking about hydrogen, we're gonna go into the volume metrics, right? So everything I'm gonna show you, this is practically how to do this. I remember I had a, I got into a conversation with somebody and they were wanting to buy one of these grid scale electrolysisers that you packed into a 40 foot car container consuming 40 megawatt of power per hour. When I said, well, you know, that produces 22 kilograms of hydrogen per hour. And they said, well, what's the problem with that? Do you realize how much hydrogen that is and how much volume it is? Well, well, I can just put that in view of carbon fiber bottles, right? No, no. In fact, you're not gonna be able to buy bottles big enough to hold that much gas, just one hour's worth of gas, right? And then when you find out how cheaply you can produce hydrogen and how inexpensive one megawatt of electricity is on the power grid when you're buying power O cell, right? And then you'll recognize that, okay, my problem here isn't producing inexpensive hydrogen. My problem's gonna turn into a storage problem real quickly. Okay, so what are the aspects of these wells? You can look at that picture if we can show slide five again. Okay, we chose, okay. So on the bottom right hand corner there, there's a picture and I'm holding a lighter in my hand and what's in there is butane. And that butane is a liquid inside that lighter. Now there's this important concept here and that is, it's called a super critical fluid. It's different from cryogenics. Cryogenics was what we call a triple point where you can cool a gas down to the point where it's liquid at room pressure. What most people don't realize, you can compress gases and make them turn into fluids also, okay? And actually requires less energy than trying to cryogenically cool a gas. So for example, butane, it'll turn into a gas at about 25 PSI. Propane is usually, that's about 124 PSI. Ammonia will turn into a liquid at 125 PSI. Carbon dioxide is 1,055 PSI turns into a liquid. Yeah, CO2, most people don't realize that. That's kind of an important solvent for two reasons. One is they use liquid carbon dioxide to take caffeine out of coffee beans, okay? The other place where they use that liquid CO2 is in oil wells. They use it as a solvent to get oil out of a well, right? That's called advanced oil fill recovery, right? Advanced oil fill services recovery. Now the reason why I'm pointing that out is everybody talks about that CO2 sequestration and they're trying to get taxpayers to do this. Ladies and gentlemen, these guys have been doing that for years, okay? So if they're trying, so if some politician's trying to get you to pay for that, pointed out and says, oh, you mean advanced oil fill services, you're trying to get more oil out of that well and you're gonna use CO2 to do it, because that's what that is. Because you can compress carbon dioxide into a liquid and it's a solvent. And then you got ethanol and methane and usually a little bit under 700 PSI, those turn into liquids. And that's what happens at an L and G plant. So usually they spend most of their energy trying to remove the impurities out of the gas like your hydrogen sulfides or CO2 and stuff like that. But liquefied natural gas is about 90% methane, the rest of it's ethane, propane, butane, that kind of thing. Now, when you compress these gases into a fluid, they usually get really hot. And what you do is they pump. You pump this through a radiator, blow a fan through it and through osmosis, all the heat gets rated out. And then when you take this fluid, you release the pressure, it gets really cold. Now, if you say, Dan, that sounds like air conditioning. Ah, yeah, got the idea. In fact, some of the industrial refrigeration units actually use ammonia and butane to do this, or even propane, this is the same exact thing. Now, here's the surprising one, Oscanus, maybe he knows this. So hydrogen, at what pressure does hydrogen turn into a supercritical fluid? Like minus 250 C or something like that. Yeah, you're talking about liquid, you're talking about cryogenic hydrogen. You're talking about freezing hydrogen, gas to the point that runs into a liquid at what pressure? But you can turn hydrogen into a supercritical fluid just by compressing, see? And there's an important detail. So that pressure, that's about 187 PSI. So it's actually easier to turn hydrogen into a supercritical fluid than it is to make LNG. Now, if you say, why in the heck are we gonna do this? Because there's a compressor problem. That's good. There's been a compressor problem for 200 years. And when you and I talk about the compressor problem and I describe what it is, you'll say, oh, that's why we haven't been able to do this time of year. So when I tell people that it's easier to turn hydrogen into a fluid, the idea of supercritical fluid is you compress the gas to the point where it acts like a fluid. So it's not a cryogenic fluid. It's where I can compress it into a fluid. And so what most people don't understand is you can actually compress hydrogen into a higher density energy form. In fact, you can compress hydrogen all the way to this point. It's called, there's something called metallic hydrogen. So, and we can talk about that later on what that is and how to get there. Is that like metal hydride stores? No, no, no. Metallic hydrogen, the planet Jupiter and Saturn have oceans of metallic hydrogen on it. Metallic hydrogen is a superconductor. Metallic hydrogen is a lot like carbon. Carbon can is the softest substance and the hardest substance, same time. Graphite soft in the form of a diamond is the hardest. Well, you can compress hydrogen into a liquid metal called metallic hydrogen. And that stable room temperature, room pressure, it's a superconductor. It's why Jupiter has the magnetic field it has is because it has an ocean of metallic hydrogen. And so does the planet Saturn. So that's the part of this that I've been working on for quite a while. And it might be possible to do it. I have obstacles, but along the way, the plan if it is, we get to use some highly compressed hydrogen. And I can also compress hydrogen into a form that is much more energy dense than cryogenic hydrogen. So that's it. Well, this sounds like another show. We've got to get back on the mic. That is another show. So let's get to slide six, all right? And if I can get the guy to leave up slide six. So here's the thing we want to look at here. So there in the town of Shelbyville on, so the town of Shelbyville is on the south side of the freeway. On the north side of the freeway, if you get off there, there's an intersection of two high tension power lines. And there's a great, big, huge seal there. So if I bought up basically an acre of land and some mineralites to one of those depleted wells, we could go ahead and I could put a couple well heads out there, right? And what I want to tap into is the substation, okay? And what I'm going to tap into is three phase power off the substation. And it's going to be 16,000 volts is what I'm going to, right? And as long as I'm within a mile of that substation, I'll be fine. But that's right across the street from substation the other side of the freeway. On the south side, that's Shelbyville. There's a Walmart there, a bunch of service station. Perfect place for me to put in some underground pipe, defeat a couple of service stations so I can start refueling vehicles with hydrogen gas. So this industrial park, okay? What's on site? So the first thing we're going to do is the electrolysisers that I use for this. These are grid scale electrolysis. These are the kind of devices that you pack into a 40-foot card container. And usually we're tying it in a three phase pile, okay? Now, the reason why we centered on this 40-foot card container understand this electrolysisers permanently mounted it, okay? And this, so it's basically this device would consume one megawatt of power per 40-foot card container. And the two companies that are making these devices right now that I'm most familiar with is ITEM Power out of the United Kingdom, out of Europe. And the only one is Millennium Rain Energy and that's Chris Whitney's company and that's over here in Dayton, Ohio. And I actually know Chris's equipment pretty well because I know I went over there and the first megawatt grid scale electrolysis, that's electrolysis packed into a 40-foot card container, actually got the power of that thing up. So I feel honored that I was the guy that got the, you know, hit the switch on that thing and power up the first megawatt grid scale. Now, Chris and I are really good friends. I was on a Zoom call with him this morning, but you're right, he's a great guy. He's a great guy. And on top of that, he's closed the Indianapolis thing. So I can jump in my car and go to the date and go talk to Chris. So, but anyway, so the reason why we do that, now when you build equipment like this, usually you keep track of the number of hours that the equipment's been on. For example, like gas turbine, you do the same thing. What the idea is, is when she gets up to, you know, certain maximum of hours you're supposed to run this thing, either you'll contract, well, for example, the gas turbine, I contact General Electric or they contact me and I get four gas in the future. Hey, come out of such and such state. They'll bring out a new gas turbine in the back of a semi truck, right? I'll have an empty semi truck or crane will power down the old piece of equipment, you know, de-energizer, pick her up, put it in the back of the truck, pick up the new gas turbine, put her back on the concrete pad, hook up all the power and services and fire her back up. They haul the old gas turbine back to the factory to get it rebuilt. Do the exact same thing with these electrolysis, right? So what you're paying for, I'm not paying for the equipment, I'm paying for the service, right? Now, generally you wanna work with equipment that has a mean time, your favorite, right around 90,000 hours, that's like once in 10 years. Because understand, this isn't mature equipment you're gonna put inside of a building, this is something you're gonna put out in the concrete pad because you're providing utility. So that's the reason why I'm paying, while we mount an electrolysizer inside of a cargo container. That's why we're doing it that way. Understand this is a fenced in area, it's gonna have signs on it, it's gonna say dangerous, no different than when you've seen a substation it's got a chain link fence, bob wire around it, danger signs, you know, because understand this is the kind of equipment if you crack a bolt on a valve housing, the pressure's so high, it'll cut you in fit. So just understand this is gonna be in a middle, you know, in a sort of a mini industrial firm. So the center of that is gonna be an electron hydrodynamic compressor, that device is designed the same way, the power supplies and all the machinery that compress the hydrogen, that's the type of machinery I can pick up when in the back end of a semi truck put in the new equipment, you know, between two to five days replace equipment, right? You're gonna have your gas well head there and so forth. Now, one of the aspects about that equipment is, well, the electron hydrodynamic compressor is designed to handle wet gas. So whatever gas is coming, the electrolyzer is gonna be wet, whatever gas coming, that comes out of that well, understand that the gas coming in the well is gonna be contaminated with water, there might even be some natural gas in there, right? It'd be nice to say I had a hydrogen fuel cell that could produce 50 megawatts of power, right? But the downside of the hydrogen fuel cell is that it can't burn everything versus a gas turbine, it doesn't care. You know, yeah, there's a water in that hydrogen, if there's natural gas in that hydrogen, it doesn't care, it'll just burn it down. What that means is down there by the service station, you're gonna have a membrane and the beautiful thing about hydrogen is the smallest molecule in nature. So it's water molecules and natural gas molecules are huge. So it's easy enough to build a membrane that only allows hydrogen to pass in. And if we're, if we standardize on 1,000 bar net pipeline, through the membrane, higher pressure to lower pressure, put in a pressure regulator, regulate it down to 700 bar, and there's, if you've got pressure right there for your vehicles, your cars and vehicles and so forth. Now, in case of what we call a red islanding event, that's where maybe a tornado comes through, tears out a bunch of hydrogen power line and basically makes Shelbyville an island than just simply by energizing that gas turbine and burning some of that gas up to that hydrogen well, we could provide power for the town. So one of those electrolysisers will, you're talking about one million watts of power per hour per hour container, right? Well, that's, you know, so a nominal yield is about 22 kilograms of hydrogen per hour. Well, at one bar or atmospheric pressure, that says 264,000 liters of body. If most electrolysisers put out about 20 bar of pressure, like 300 PSI. So you're still talking 13,200 liters of hydrogen per hour. Again, you're not putting that in a carbon fiber tank. You need to, you're gonna have to store that in the gas flow. It's the only practical way of storing that gas. Now, what are the costs? Okay, so I'm gonna see page number seven. So what is that? Well, that's from Next Error Energy. It's the largest public utility in the country. So I like to abuse in those guys and they're great guys over there. Their CEO went to Notre Dame sort of a couple of years, he's out of the conference. So I get to talk to you. Yeah, they tried buying Hawaii in electric a few years ago and they didn't work. He probably did. He probably did. I don't think he even knows who I am, but I've checked his hand once or twice. But anyway, they own four to power light. They're headquartered out of Miami, but they're one of the largest public utilities in the United States and they have everything. They got wind farms, solar farms, natural gas turbines, coal and nuclear power. And they got into, I guess you call it the green energy bit is a couple of years ago, not before environmental reasons, they got into it because they saw basically what happened to coal, that the quality of the coal is what was killing the business. And at the same time, the wind turbines were becoming more efficient. Not only that, but they started actually investing a lot of money in making the wind farms even more efficient. So one of the companies that happens to be responsible for the wind power we have there is next era. The other guy that's actually responsible for wind turbines here in the United States is this guy by the name of T. Boone Pickens, and it will. So if you don't know that, I'll say this right now, T. Boone Pickens. And he's passed, he passed in 2019, but Boone is the father of wind power in the United States. So when I'm sitting there talking about ore refineries, I understand that some of those guys, like Boone, it's a wall guy, oil billionaire, right? But he's the father of wind power in the United States. Now, why am I pointing this out? Okay, so let's go back to slide seven here. So what I'm more interested in here are the costs. So a new firm, wind is 20 to 30, solar is 30 to 40, natural gas, that's gas driven, $30, $40 a megawatt hour, coal, 35 to 50, and existing nuclear is 35 to 50. Now, there's a part of this, and I'll tell you this right now, I can tell you right now, that is out there. So the latest data I've got at a midway, mid-continent ISO is our average price of electricity here in the Midwest is actually $18 a megawatt, right? Now I'll show you how that turns into really inexpensive hydrogen. So we have a spot market, we have what futures market, and more specifically, there's something called a PPA, and a PPA is a power purchase agreement. And what that is, so I can go to next era, I can buy a 15-year PPA, that's where I can fix my cost of electricity for 15, 20, 30 years. Now, next era, they'll take my contract and they use that to justify financing for putting in a wind farm, okay? That's how that works. So nobody has the cash to build into this, everything is financed and you're gonna go through a banker one way or the other. And I can tell you all kind of how to finance about everything, including nuclear power, how you justify nuclear power and how you can't justify nuclear power. So that might be an interesting conversation you and I have later on, Stan, about why a lot of people won't get nuclear power and the only people that probably will get nuclear power and how to justify it, we can't justify it. So, but anyway. Dan, we're gonna look down to about 30 seconds left, so we're gonna have to have that conversation later. But the bottom line, if I get it right, is that you can take a lot of these areas that have basically shutdown wells and turn them into microgrids that can produce power locally using wind or solar or some other generation and store hydrogen at the huge volumes that I think most electric companies haven't figured out they need yet. They don't realize all the energy density and oil that they're gonna have to turn into storing in something else and it won't be battery. Is that safe to say? Yeah, that's safe to say. What I'm just showing you here, I mean, doing those PPAs, the electrical cost of producing hydrogen is like 68 cents a kilogram. I understand there's a lot more cost of the equipment and storing it and so forth, but it's really driving the cost of hydrogen and the cost of electricity. And right now we can produce hydrogen 68 cents a kilogram. I mean, and those prices are going down because all the new wind and solar we're doing, we're pushing the, you know, we're gonna be down to, you know, within probably 2025 electricity, we'll average about $10 a megawatt here, you know, here in the lower 48 state parts of the United States. So right there, that's a huge game changer right there. Well, let's, can we pick up this discussion next Tuesday and continue on? Can do, sir. Yes, sir. Okay, great. Part two. All right, so for everybody out there in Think Tech Land, we're gonna get back with Dan next week, Tuesday, and continue this discussion and really get into the nitty gritty of why hydrogen makes sense in microgrids and why it makes sense to maybe even do it on the big grid and continue this discussion with Dan Gellin. So thanks again, Dan, I appreciate it. We'll see everybody next week. Aloha.