 Welcome to Stan, the energy man. Stan Osterman here, coming to you again live from Kailua, Oahu, Hawaii, in the city and county of Honolulu. And I'm going to kind of carry on a little bit from what we talked about last week with Kelly Iaquina, kind of tends toward a little bit more of the economic side of energy. But I think you'll find it interesting because, you know, as I look at where things are trending, and I look at companies, I look at a lot of companies and their technology and stuff, and you start asking yourself, how do I know that this technology is really solid and it's really going to take off? And, you know, is it going to, there's a thing called the Valley of Death when you start a new business and it's making that leap from you got a good idea and a good product and then getting it marketed and getting it through the, the manufacturing process and then getting it into the logistics system. And it's quite a challenge for a lot of companies. So a lot of companies that have good ideas, they just never seem to make it, especially nowadays in the energy energy world. A lot of those companies that sound really good, they stumble along the way for one reason or another. And as an example, one company that's been in the news a lot for the last year in the energy world, Fish and Hydrogen Energy World, is a company called Nicola Motors. And they started off to great fanfare. They were going to have big 18-wheeler tractor trailers that pull all those cargo trailers across the U.S. and get a thousand or 1200 miles out of a, a fill-up of hydrogen. And, you know, it was really exciting and they were going to be building the stations and the trucks. And, and then they, they did a demonstration and, and actually their, their vehicles capable of doing what it showed in the video, except that they falsified the video. And the CEO that authorized that fake video to go out, he ended up getting fired from his own company. And the company's stock fell and about 80 bucks a share almost overnight. But it's still a solid company and it's going to be coming back, I feel. But just one mistake like that can really, really mess things up. So, so how do you really know? How do you, how do you tell? And one of the ways that I've figured out, you can tell is when the government either backs it up with money, with loans or grants and things like that, or if the government backs it up with policy. And to give you a local example here in Hawaii, a little back about four years ago, the state of Hawaii set a really ambitious goal to take our electric grid and have 100% renewable by 2045. And of course, along the way, there were certain percentages where the grid had to be, you know, more and more fossil free up until 2045 when all of our electricity is coming from renewable resources. Well, just that one policy statement set a whole lot of things into motion for a lot of different industries and a lot of different companies, including the Hawaiian Electric Company. And that's one of the indicators you know that that something's really going to happen is when the government sets a policy. In California, they do hydrogen vehicles and hydrogen transportation and they've really kind of led to charge as far far back as what Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor. And they haven't taken their foot off the accelerator as it were. California, though, also not just policy wise, they put a lot of money, state money into building hydrogen stations and building the infrastructure. Because in in the energy game and the hydrogen game, there's already so much money invested in infrastructure that it's really hard to get new things started because the people have been in place for so long, like the car companies and the gasoline companies, all the oil companies, they pretty much they've got a monopoly on the market. It's hard for anybody new to break in no matter how good that company is. So in the states or the federal government start to put a lot of money into grants or into subsidizing stations or tax credits or just fixing some policy things. That's one of the best indicators that that technology or that company is is moving the right direction. And one of the things that we've noticed this legislative session in Hawaii are some of the bills that you really wouldn't think if you saw this bill going through the legislature. Most people would scratch your heads and go why why is this important? Let me talk a little bit about that bill. It's called House Bill 113. And it's a really short bill. And it's actually just amending an old law. And the old law it's amending is the law that says how you have to measure gasoline and how it has to be certified. And the state of Hawaii will inspect your gasoline pumps every year to make sure that they're actually giving a person a gallon of gas when they pay for a gallon of gas. And that it tabulates right when you say it costs $5 a gallon or $3 a gallon that the price is right on the machine. So it looks like a pretty benign bill. And you're like why would they be changing this bill right now? And the reason is because we're coming into a reality that electric cars and then including fuel cell or hydrogen fuel cell electric cars are really getting ready to step into the onto the stage. So why would it make a difference that you have to amend a bill about gasoline to say, Hey, these other electric cars need to have some relief from this existing statute that's in law. And the reason is because hydrogen, unlike other liquid fuels, is a gas a compressible gas. And for those of you that, you know, do chemistry or physics, you know, that liquids don't compress really well. Gases compress really well, but liquids don't. There's, there's not a whole lot of space you can compress liquids into without huge amounts of pressure. So for example, you know, when you do a belly flop in the pool, it really hurts because the water doesn't compress it. It's pretty, it's almost like hitting a wall when you hit it, or if you're, you know, surfing like I do, and you eat it on a really big wave by the time you fall six or eight or 10 feet with the force of energy and the speed that you're doing, you can hit the water where you skim across it like a stone because the water doesn't compress the gases do. So therefore, when you try and measure hydrogen out of a dispenser and put it into a car, you have a different set of physics problems. Because if you just keep pushing the gas into the car, under pressure, as the gas leaves the station tanks, it cools down and you can actually see frost building up on the valves. As a, as the gas escapes from the tank, it chills it down. The same concept actually the air conditioning does. When you have a gas that's, that's up depressurizing, it'll actually cool down. On the other side of the nozzle, where it's going into the car, and it's pushing all these molecules into the tank, it heats the tank up. And then the gas wants to expand. So if you didn't have the correct measuring equipment, and you didn't monitor the temperature of the car, you could never get the same amount of fuel or, or energy into the car, because at different temperatures, the gas would have different volumes. And so the idea is, as you're fueling a car with hydrogen, you have to keep the temperature pretty constant. And to do that, the station, the new modern hydrogen stations under the call J 2601, the station actually talks to the car through an infrared information exchange, right at the nozzle. So as you plug your hydrogen car into the gas station, the hydrogen going into the car is going in the nozzle, but there's a little infrared communication port in that nozzle. It's talking to the car and saying how how hot's your tank? What's the pressure? How hot is it now? What's the pressure? And the idea is the station is supposed to keep that tank within a fairly narrow range of temperature, so that every time you fill that car up, it gets the right amount of hydrogen, not not amount not like if it was a car that gets 10,000 psi. If you didn't regulate the temperature, you could grab a whole bunch of really hot hydrogen into that tank. And then as the guy drives away with his car, you know, maybe an hour or two hours later and the tank cools down, you might he might be down at 8000 psi and he hasn't lost any hydrogen, he hasn't he hasn't used it in his car. It's just so as the tank cools back down to normal temperature, the gas the amount of gas in the tank changes because it's cooling down by volume. So you have to kind of be, you have to be aware of that when you switch from liquid fuels to hydrogen as a gas. And people say, Well, what about natural gas? Isn't it a gas also? And wouldn't it do the same thing? Well, natural gas does have similar properties and the same bill that is being amended or the same statute is being amended by this bill recognizes that if you have a natural gas or a propane vehicle, it sets limits for a propane that are that are similar to hydrogen. But hydrogen is turns into a liquid state at such a really low temperature. It stays in a gaseous form for so long that it's still way more sensitive than propane or natural gases to pressure and temperature. So this old law that allowed for vehicles to run on gasoline or diesel or natural gas had really tight margins on it for accuracy. And the reality is that if you're refueling with hydrogen, you have to open that mark that error rate just a little bit wider, so that you can you can still get a pretty accurate reading from the from the station to the car. And and not have to have so such expensive equipment like you wouldn't have to keep the temperature within like a half a degree or quarter of a degree, you could go a couple degrees up or down and it'll give you pretty much what you what you need. But it's not as precise as natural gas or gasoline in a liquid form or a gaseous form. So this ancient law that was written, you know, I don't know probably in the 40s to make sure you got a good gallon of gas in your car was probably updated for natural gas is now being updated for hydrogen. And if you don't understand what I just explained about hydrogen gas expanding, you would scratch your head and wonder why the legislature is is even looking at a law like this even more surprisingly and more to the point of government gets it is that the man that helped craft the bill is one of the senators in our state Senate who has been listening to hydrogen companies and and vehicle companies talking to him about hydrogen for so many years now that he he gets it and he realizes that our local Toyota company who built their own station can't actually sell their hydrogen to anybody but the people that buy their Toyota cars or lease their Toyota cars because if you don't have relief from that old bill that lets you use the new system, it isn't quite as as tight as with natural gas on making sure everything's perfectly in balance that they won't be able to stay in business and they won't be able to bring the cars in and these cars are clean cars that don't have any pollution and don't burn fossil fuels and they're zero emissions or only water that the cars only produce water, heat and electricity. That's it. So when the state legislature gets smart enough to look at these laws and say, hey, we got to change this law or that hydrogen these guys bringing in the hydrogen vehicles are dead in the water. That's one of the key ways you know that things are really happening in the industry. The other way you really know is when you start to see companies, big companies that aren't in the particular industry. Again, I'll use hydrogen as an example, because it's my favorite thing to talk about. When you see a company like Cummins Diesel, a company that's been making diesel engines for heavy equipment and all kinds of applications for decades, suddenly goes and buys hydrogenics, a company in Canada that makes fuel cells and has been making fuel cells for probably two or three decades. That's a real good indicator. And what we've seen across the board is we've seen a lot of big companies like Chrysler and Domler Bend partnering up with hydrogen companies. Companies like Shell Oil and Total Oil have entire divisions that are looking at hydrogen and looking at companies they can acquire that have understandings of how to produce hydrogen, make hydrogen. So that's another really good indicator of how you would find these companies and how you know they're really on the right track in terms of their product or their industry or their technology is at a point that it's getting ready to take a big move. So we'll take a break right here. And when we come back, I'll give you some more concrete examples of why hydrogen is on the move. We'll be back in 60 seconds. And there's a man back with you after the break here. And again, we're talking about how you know a technology or a business model is ready to take off. And in the hydrogen world, one of the first indicators that I got was that the company, the auto manufacturer Toyota, who had just finished rolling out the Prius maybe 10 years before, against all odds, and all the all the people in the industry said there's no way the Prius is going to hybrid vehicles are just they're not going to make it. It's, you know, why would you buy one of those when you could just get a regular car and be a little cheaper. And then all of a sudden the Prius took off and people were buying them like crazy. And the rest of the rest of the professionals didn't even see that trend. Well, then Toyota and other cars that car companies have been working on hydrogen fuel cell cars for many years. But Toyota not only rolled out the Marai, which means the future in Japanese, they, they rolled it out and said, by the way, we own all these patents on this technology. And we're letting anybody use the patents. We're not going to have any court cases infringing on our patents. Here they are, and anybody can use them. So they were sending a signal to the governments and to a lot of other folks that, Hey, we want this technology to succeed. And we're going to open up and not try and be greedy about making money off of technology that's been licensed to us. And we're going to, we're going to let everybody use it. And that really started kind of a role going with hydrogen in the in the transportation marketplace. And several countries have stepped up. I mean, so again, the government and the private sector both play a role in in rolling technologies out. Some of the things that have been happening internationally are the country of Australia, and the European Union overall, particularly Germany and the European Union, have both set government policies to move to a hydrogen based energy economy. And they've set kind of like the same standards that Hawaii set for electricity, by 2035 or 2040. And I've actually heard the, the science advisor from Australia briefed their country's policy. And they are indeed actually rolling it out there. They're making hydrogen with solar. And they're selling that hydrogen to Japan and Korea. Because in Asia, hydrogen is taking off. And the European Union and some European countries like Portugal and Spain are literally having hydrogen produced in North Africa. And they're piping it or shipping it into Spain and Portugal to support their industries. Countries in the European Union are using North Sea wind. And they're taking that excess electricity when they can't sell it. And they're putting it into hydrogen. And they're pushing that hydrogen in the gas pipelines all over the country to help generate electricity and also support transportation. You see transportation trains being built from hydrogen in Europe. There's just there's so many industries that are picking up and so many countries that by policy are supporting it. So Australia and European Union are really strong. There's a serious market in Asia. And I just got this this email today. Although Toyota is has kind of made the big push here in Hawaii in particular. There's a South Korean company called Hyundai. And you know, they're probably not a household word as much as Toyota or Ford or GM or whatever. But I'm going to read this to you. As of October, Hyundai Motors has sold more than 10,000 hydrogen fuel cell powered Nexo SUVs in Korea, according to ministry data. The nation's leading car maker in South Korea accounted for 82% of global sales of hydrogen vehicles last year, selling 6,025 vehicles worldwide in just one year with Toyota selling 1064 vehicles worldwide and and Honda selling 218 vehicles. Now those are really small numbers for a car company. And that makes it even more impressive because you don't make the money until you got the volume in a in a market like that. But Hyundai gets it and they're not just selling the vehicles they're selling the fuel cells that go in the vehicles to use in other industries like forklifts and all kind of things. They're also developing and I think it's it's out now. Large scale delivery trucks and tractor trailer like the like Nicola Motors is making and Toyota is making to do long haul transportation of freight. They're developing the trucks and I think they're already Hyundai's already leasing them. I don't think Toyota is leasing the big trucks yet, but they're certainly not far off from hitting the roads. And you just see this trend, you see this picking up momentum and you see things happening. Other big companies that you kind of watch on the international stage that tell you things are happening are companies like Air Lequid and air gas that are that are making the infrastructure possible. They're already into manufacturing industrial gases. But when you see them all of a sudden, start to build up one of their divisions in hydrogen that was used to be small. And now they're building they're building up those divisions to be able to produce more equipment to make hydrogen, especially clean green hydrogen, which is electrolysis. You know, they're getting serious. And I mentioned this before on the show that in just the past year, there's, I believe, four new liquid hydrogen plants being made between Texas, somewhere in the Southwest, I think one in California, that's making they're going to be making liquid hydrogen primarily for transportation and for forklifts. And those things normally you make liquid hydrogen for one purpose only. And that was NASA for space travel or rocket fuel and for we're helping, helping produce electricity in space. And the interesting thing is, those plants for that supported NASA, they're only one or two, and they produce 20 tons a day, that's kind of the scale they work at. The plants that are being planned right now, all four of them are 30 tons a day. So they're more than doubling the number of plants, and they're doubling the cure, a 33% bigger capacity on all the plants. So that's another way you know, things are happening. Another company, it's one of my favorites is plug power. Plug power, and the longer history is, I've been watching plug power for probably 10 years. And when I first started talking to their company, and their their CEO has been on my show here, at least three times. They were in the red. I mean, they lost money every single year up until about four years ago. They started getting close to breaking even and then, I think just after four years, about three years ago, they started making money, not a whole lot, they were making money every year. And they kept making money as their industry grew. And then you'd see news where they were buying other companies, and they were teaming up with other companies. And suddenly, they're their big business. And in the stock market, they're doing really well. And that's another again, on the business side, when you see the money happening, you know, it's it's for real. So plug power used to brag that they had 10,000 hydrogen fuel cell, forklifts and pallet jacks, you know, running around in Amazon or Walmart warehouses. They're up to over 30,000 now, they're partnering with aviation companies to make hydrogen fuel cell aircraft. They're partnering with other big companies to provide fuel cells to provide hydrogen for their equipment in their warehouses and also on the transportation side. And so that's again, another indicator that this is how you know the businesses are taken off. In the aviation side, some of the stories that have come out just in the last couple months, there's a small company called Zero Avia. And for those of you who watch the show live here or see it in the next day or so, if you go to the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum website, I don't have it handy, but it's Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum. They're actually streaming a broadcast on Friday at 8 p.m. or 8 a.m. Hawaii Standard Time. So on the mainland, that would be somewhere a little later in the day. But here in Hawaii, it streams at 8 a.m. for a company called Zero Avia, who are making commuter sized airplanes and have already flown a hydrogen fuel cell airplane, I think it was about a 20 passenger airplane. And they're very bullish on making that airplane commercially viable in the not too distant future. They're already getting certifications from the IKO, which is International FAA, if you will. And they're working hard on that. But Airbus came out with a very ambitious goal of by 2035 having three commercial airliners on the market. And these airliners go from just relatively short range 500 mile range turboprop type airplanes to almost space age looking, they are space age looking blended body airplanes that they look like the new stealth airplanes you see in the military. It's the wing and the body are blended together. It's not we used to call traditional airplane as a paper towel tube with wings on it. Well, these blended body airplanes look more like triangles. They look a little bit more like the B2 bomber, which is a flying wing concept. So Airbus is coming out with that by 2035 in production. They want to be in production by 2035. And Boeing followed suit saying they're also going to be pursuing hydrogen. In the shipping transportation side, Kawasaki is making ships that run on hydrogen. And even more important than that, they're making ships that run on hydrogen that carry liquid hydrogen. So even in the shipping world, you've really got a great piece of technology. I want to show before we have to go, I want to show a really quick video because we here in Hawaii are kicking off something where the private sector is putting the money into it. And the government sector is changing some of the laws and doing the policy stuff. So let's roll a video real quick. Aloha, everyone. It's Saturday morning. We know what time that is. It's Hawaii, the state of clean energy time. Welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osterman here, as usual, coming to you from the great state of Hawaii, the beautiful community of Kailua on the windward side of Oahu, our main island. And we're going to talk about sustainability. Pacific players, they're calling it green hydrogen. So I said, okay, that's it. Green hydrogen. That's what we call the answer to what we've been looking for, how to solve global problems with a local solution. It's a sneak preview of what hydrogen Hawaii stations are going to look like. And they're rolling. They want to start putting these stations out this year. So that's another indication. By the way, I just found the website. So it's Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum. And it's marketing at Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, all one word.org. And that'll get you to their website. You can sign up for that aviation hydrogen web webinar or show. That'll do it for this week for Stan Energyman. Well, thank you for joining me. And we'll see you next week. You're right on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha.