 Party again, I mean Wednesday again already, where did that week go? This is Mitch Ewan and we're with Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And we are funded and sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, of which I'm a member. And also the money comes from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, HNEI, which I am also a member. So we have a really cool show for you today. We're going to be talking about air conditioning in a hot climate. And we have these, a friend of mine started this company several iterations ago. And we have the president of the company today, Greg Tropso. He's actually phoning us from Colorado, although the company is based in Florida. So Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks, I love to be in your beautiful environment today. Yeah, you said it was going to be minus one degree in Fort Collins, Colorado, yeah. So eat your heart out. All my classmates who live up in Canada, I love the backgrounds we have here. I always try to, you know, taunt them with this. So anyway, so Greg, tell us about Blue Frontier AC and all your secret sauce and what you guys do. Yeah, I'd be happy to do that. And thanks for inviting us onto your show. It's my pleasure to be here. As you said, my name is Greg Tropso. I'm the president and I'm a co-founder of Blue Frontier. And we have some graphics we can swatch to the next slide. There we go. There you go. That's me and we'll go to the next slide. Yeah, so what you, you probably know that the last five years were the hottest on record. But what you might not know is that air conditioning consumes 10% of global electricity production and is responsible for 5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. And we can switch to the next slide. And the problem is the demand for air conditioning is spiraling out of control. The number of air conditioning units on the planet is going to double by 2025 and triple by 2050. So, you know, it talks about 10 new air conditioning units are going to be installed every second for the next 30 years. Wow. And so that creates a huge demand for energy for air conditioners. So as the planet warms, we use more air conditioners. We create more greenhouse gas emissions. So we had to break that cycle and that's what Blue Frontier does. And in fact, recently the International Energy Agency named air conditioning as the blind spot in global energy policy. Well, we're sure you're going to hear on why. That's for sure. Yeah, you do. So the problem for the electric utility is air conditioning units. You can go to the next slide are all gulping for power at the same time. And as temperatures rise, the demand for electricity spikes and wires begin to overload and under extreme conditions, we hear about these circuits failing. So you can think about air conditioning is rush hour traffic for the grid. And what happens is on the third day of a heat wave, when air conditioning, you should source buildings and they struggle to keep us cool that rush hour traffic becomes gridlock. And so we start to get these power outages. And you read about them recently in New York. And unfortunately they're happening in their friends in California and around the world. So what we do is we solve that problem for both building owners and electric utilities. So if you go to the next slide, I'll tell you a little bit about our company, Blue Frontier. So we create this environment where we can all relax in our air condition comfort, but consume the power for our air conditioning when we choose, when it's the lowest cost, perhaps, or more importantly, when it's cleanest for the environment. And we aggregate all these air conditioners on commercial buildings using artificial intelligence and a cloud based service. So they can automatically respond to price, clean energy, or even electric reliability signals. So next slide, please. So our technology really is truly revolutionary. And Carrier invented this technology more than 100 years ago, and it really hasn't changed. So this is the first time that air conditioning for commercial buildings and eventually for residential users is being redefined. So for the environment, we deliver an 85% reduction in CO2 emissions. You may know that air conditioners use this thing called a refrigerant, which has a very high global warming potential. It's like 2,000 times more potent than CO2 itself. So by eliminating that gas in our design, we do it a great thing for the planet right there. And then for renewable energy, because the sun is setting from noon to six, as the demand for air conditioning is increasing in the afternoon. So you need energy storage to be able to shift that renewable energy to the more useful period of time during the afternoon. So we embed really low cost and high performance energy storage as a part of our air conditioning unit itself. And for the grid, we dispatch that stored energy permanently, and we eliminate this temperature weather driven demand that's continually locked together with utilities. The hotter it gets, the more power you need on your island. So we break that continuum. And finally, for the user, we deliver this huge breakthrough in energy saving. So we're reducing the amount of energy used by 80%. And that really translates into an 80% bill savings in most cases. So it's a dramatic shift in performance and cost savings. Now you're going to tell us how you do that, right? Yeah. So we've been collaborating with the National Renewable Energy Lab for the last five years or so. And we're commercializing their 12 patents. And we've negotiated an exclusive license for that patent. And those patents cover this revolutionary method for cooling buildings. It's a low cost design that uses unique membrane-based heat exchangers that provide independent control of humidity and using a liquid desiccant and temperature using a novel indirect evaporative cooler. Blue Frontier introduced the idea of using this liquid desiccant as a means for low cost storage of clean energy. And we received a grant from the US Department of Energy and we actually built some prototypes and we tested them at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories. And we validated the cooling and energy savings performance against all the climate zones. So this works in climate zones like Hawaii from kind of moderate temperature, but higher humidity to tropical environments to high desert environments. So it's really designed to be used across the globe. So what about in colder environments like in Canada, for example, like during the winter? Well, you know, it will cool buildings in Canada on hot days. And I think that's the issue you have in areas like Toronto that they have to build the grid out for these three or four heat waves a year. And it's very costly to the utilities who has all this excess capacity. In fact, in New York, I think it's 11% of all the assets that Con Edison has on their distribution system are used about seven days every other year. So that's a lot of pentatonic capacity sitting around waiting for a heat wave. So you go to the next slide. So what we really do here, this is, you can go to the next one, go ahead, is this is a rendering of our air conditioning unit on the right. And it's a like for like replacement for what's called a package rooftop air conditioner, which you see on a lot of commercial buildings. And on the left is our energy storage modules. And what's unique is we decouple the consumption of electricity from the supply of cooling. So we can store that renewable energy at night and during the day. And then in the afternoon, when the grid is peaking, we can deliver cooling to the building using just about 100 watts of power, which is compared to maybe 7,000 watts of power. And the way we store and we shift energy is a platform for valuable energy management services. You know, the grid operators these days are trying to do distributed energy resources and use these as flexible resources to manage the grid. And we're part of that solution set. Next slide please. So this initial product is a like for like replacement for what's called a five ton package rooftop air conditioner. And it's truly ubiquitous. This is why it's useful to the utility because it's going to be found on all their distribution circuits. So 97% of all commercial buildings under four stories are going to have a unit like this. And we talk about lower cost of ownership, this 80% reduction in price. So on average, it's going to be higher in Hawaii. This is based on 16 cents. You're going to spend $48,000 of your money buying air energy for that air conditioner. But when you put in a blue frontier unit, we're going to drop that by a full 80%. So maybe $8,000 over the useful life. And we expect to have lower maintenance cost and lower operating costs. And it'll be installed by the same air conditioning trades that we have in the market today. So if you go to the next slide, I tell you, there's more than just break through energy efficiency. This behind the meter energy storage will last for up to seven hours. And it avoids seven kilowatts of demand and 50 kilowatt hours of energy. You can think of that maybe as the equivalent of three Tesla power walls, except it has a 90% lower installed cost. And because we don't have an inverter, so we're using this stored energy to provide cooling to the building. So it's just specific for cooling. We don't need an inverter, and we don't need electricians. And we don't need to talk to the utility about how to interconnect it. And of course, fires and toxicity are not a concern. So all these things that we love about batteries, but make them a little bit difficult, we solve that problem by embedding it right into our technology itself. So what about the fluid that you use for your energy storage? Is that environmentally benign, or is it hazardous material, or what's the story with that? That's a great question. So it's called a liquid desiccant, and it's a salt. So it's actually food grade. It's non-toxic. And you can use potassium acetate, or you can use lithium chloride. And it's a very low cost, long-lived medium. It's corrosive. And that's one of the secrets of our technology is how do we manage that corrosive salt to make a long, useful life product. But that's a great question. Thanks. So when we talk about two high-growth markets that our business is addressing is this behind-the-meter storage and this hyper-efficiency for buildings, really zero-net energy buildings. So in summary, what we bring is a high benefit-to-cost ratio, really breakthrough energy efficiency. We eliminate this summer peak-demand problem. We store and we shift clean energy, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, operating expenses, and enabling the zero-net energy building kind of model. So it's something that's... Another quick question. So you've probably heard about the duct curve. So how would this help us out with our duct curve problems? That's the best question I've heard in a long time. So the duct curve is the increase of air conditioning between noon and six and the decrease in solar energy between noon and six, noon and six. So as that solar energy is going down, the demand for air conditioning is going up. And that's because the sun is heating up our buildings and our air conditioners are starting to be engaged. So what we do is we completely eliminate that duct curve because in that afternoon, when the air conditioning... Which, by the way, the demand for air conditioning in terms of power of kilowatts per ton increases as temperature increases. So as the hotter it gets, the more power it consumes. So in our case, we've stored that energy and instead of 7,000 watts going maybe up to 8,000 watts, we're using a constant 100 watts. So we completely eliminate that summer afternoon demand and shift the solar energy. So it's the perfect fit for the duct curve. Good, huge. It's a big problem here in Hawaii. Yes, it is. And we're happy to be a part of bringing these solutions to market. It's not easy commercializing high technology solutions that are asset-based, but this is something that our team has done before. And we bring a great team. You've got to show that slide of our team. You can do that. Dr. Daniel Betz, who's the CEO of the company and myself, I've been in this clean energy business since 2000 or so. And Matt Tillman, who is our CTO, is a Princeton undergrad and he's got two Stanford degrees. And Matt Tillman is great at getting products manufactured into the market. So we thank you for the opportunity to share this clean energy business with you and with your listeners. And we hope to bring it to Hawaii soon. Okay. So that's kind of the end of the slide show, right? Correct. Yep. Okay. But we have another 15 minutes to go. So this is a great time to stop for our one little 30-second or one minute break. And then we'll be back. Stand by. We'll be back in one minute. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Monli and the Friends of ThinkTech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography, Research and Education. Collateral Analytics. The Cook Foundation. Dwayne Kurisu. The Hawaii Community Foundation. The Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group. The Shidler Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. We're back from our break. Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And we're delighted to be able to bring you Greg Trapsa from Blue Planet Frontier. Or Blue Frontier AC. And he's here telling us all about the magic of their new technology. It just sounds really awesome. And now we have a chance to do some Q&A. So I'm going to start off with a Q. And so my Q is... So there's two flavors of utilities. There's the electric utility. And then there's the gas utility. So I kind of understand where the electric utility would play a role in this. But could you elucidate a little bit more how a gas utility could be involved in this type of technology? Well, yeah, that's a great question. Because the method of air conditioning with desiccant regeneration is actually a heat-driven process itself. So the way we cool buildings using the liquid desiccant is we pump it into our heat exchanger and it absorbs moisture out of the air. Well, now I've got moisture in our lithium chloride solution. I've got to reject that moisture out so I can reuse the fluid. And you do that with a low-temperature heat, like 80 degrees C kind of heat. And in one instance, we have a heat pump that's electric-driven that is used to regenerate that heat. But in another instance, we use a fuel cell. And so the user gets the power from the fuel cell and we take the waste heat from the fuel cell and we use that to regenerate the liquid desiccant. And this could work. So it's like a micro-combined cycle heating and cooling unit where instead of using the heat for hot water and having to do the integration of the hot water through the fuel cell, we actually bring our own load with us. So we put this whole kit up on the roof. And it can work within the internal combustion engines or simple burner systems. So it can be used to shift some of that electrical demand to the gas grid. And that's very efficient because the site-to-source transmission of gas is very efficient. So when I transmit a unit of gas, 98, 99% of that is useful at the site. When I generate electricity and transmit it to the site, I might lose 66% of the energy in the process. So it's used of clean natural gas. This is actually a greenhouse gas-saving solution for many environments. So I'm a fuel cell guy and a hydrogen guy. So this was music to my ears when I heard fuel cell. One of the issues we have in the fuel cell world with PEM fuel cells, Proton Exchange Membranes, like a solid-state fuel cell, is that they really produce a low level or a low grade of heat. It's like just slightly below the boiling point of water. And so it's not really useful, but it sounds like your process could actually use this lower temperature heat and therefore increase the overall energy extraction producing both electricity and heat from the fuel cell to quite a high number. Would you care to comment on that? Yeah, that's exactly right. So this is low-temperature heat. So we're talking about 80 degrees C. And so yeah, it is useful. And in fact, interesting when some of our models, because we're using that waste heat, you drive high efficiencies above 95%, let's say. And so even as the fuel cell begins to degrade over time, we capture that degradation in terms of useful heat. And we convert that heat to a kilowatt offset, electric offset. So if you have, let's say, a one and a half kilowatt fuel cell, we add another seven and a half kilowatts effectively of electrical displacement by using this form of air conditioning. So it's a very cost-effective solution. So can you tell us where you are in your technology development cycle? What's the status now of the company? And are you doing any trials? I mean, what's the testing program here? Yeah, so Blue Frontier has built prototypes that have been fully tested. So you start with the lab phase where you build models, and then the next stage is you actually build full-scale prototypes and you test them in independent labs. And we've done that with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And recently, Blue Frontier has been the recipient of a very large grant from the New York State Research and Energy and Development Authority, commonly known as NYSERDA. And what we're doing with NYSERDA in collaboration again with the National Labs is we're creating the design for manufacturability. And so within about 18 months, we will have pilot production units that will then be installed on commercial buildings and then tested on about two years from now, we should have product available for commercial sale. Okay. So do you have a bulk? I mean, you talked about numbers. So let's just go over the economics again to reinforce the value proposition here. So yeah, absolutely. So at the end of the day, what we like about this product is just toe-to-toe against the ubiquitous, in-situ air conditioning industry, we're a lower manufactured cost. Now we have a disadvantage because they're making 400 units per minute. Wow. But honestly, if we made more than 1,000 units, we'd be a very happy business. Let alone make them for a minute. So how do you compete? But by eliminating all of the copper, so we have no copper, we don't have any electrical compressor motor, we don't have expansion valves, we don't have evaporator coils, it's a simple, beautiful thermodynamic cycle. So it's actually lower cost to manufacture. Now out of the gate, how do we cross the chasm with low volume manufacturing? But even at low volume, we hope to be able to price our unit competitively on a first-cost basis to a high-efficiency package rooftop unit. So you might expect to pay $7,500 for a high-efficiency package rooftop unit. So let's talk about, Oh, sorry, I had to bring more revenue into the company, because we also include energy storage. We contract with the electric utility to provide the energy storage services on a competitive solicitation process against batteries or other demand response assets. So that's called a non-wires alternative, where the utility could invest in upgrading a wire in many environments now in California specifically in New York. Utilities are free to buy behind-the-meter resources under contract. So we'll get paid for the energy storage module too, and so we'll have nice healthy profit margins at Inception. Could you talk a little bit about operating this in a corrosive salt air environment? So for example, I have heat exchangers on my Chiller units out at the Marine Corps base. I got to tell you within two years, the radiator, which was aluminum-finned, turned to dust, and everything else just all fell apart. So I think you guys have some kind of a technology that will help on that side. Can you talk a little bit about that? Well, we do. Yeah, we do, because those rusting parts are called the evaporator coil and the condensing coil. Those are the two elements of heat rejection, and we don't have either of those. So we completely eliminate all of those parts that corrode and rust over time. And it's just another fabulous part of the design of the device itself. What kind of a maintenance routine is required then, given that you don't have any of these corrosive parts? I mean, so obviously there's going to be a lot of savings and potential savings in your maintenance cost and in addition to your operation cost. Do you have any kind of a feel for that? So here's what we suspect. So your filter changes are going to be the same. So if you change filters semi-annually or periodically, you're still going to have your same HVAC service company, servicing our unit, by the way. We're going to be working with local mechanical trades. And so the idea here is this is a great job creation opportunity for skilled trades. But the common failure modes of an air conditioning system are coil freeze up. So as the filters clog, the evaporator coil freezes up. And that's the most common failure mode. And we don't have that failure mode. The second one is refrigerant charge. And since we're not using refrigerant, we avoid that one. So then you get to condenser coil cleaning and maintenance as you described. So the things that corrode that are on the outside, they also fallow with dirt and dust and leaves and things like that. So the major maintenance items are eliminated by our design. But you will have a periodic maintenance visit and an annual maintenance visit, very similar to what you have now with your standard air conditioning contract. So one of the other issues I'm faced with with my hydrogen stations is I have a monster compressor and then my electrolyzer. And they all reject or pass off a lot of heat. So they have to be chilled. So can your system be applied to those kinds of applications? I know we're talking about air conditioning, but what about chilling water and things like that for these kinds of heavy equipment where we're rejecting a lot of heat? Yeah, that's not a good fit for our application because the main energy use inside buildings for comfort cooling is latent. So taking the humidity out of the air and in this environment, what you're describing is a sensible heat. So we do address sensible heat also, but probably not the best fit application. It can be used in data centers, though. So that's an area of. Yeah, very good. Yeah, they use a lot of electricity to keep those computers cool. Yeah, so this is not an interstage cooler kind of technology. It's more of a for direct things that are in direct contact with the air for cooling. Well, we're closing in on about the last three minutes. So is there anything we missed that you would like to talk about and fill in any of the holes here? Or, well, you know, the idea of this global decarbonization of the grid, it can actually be a great opportunity for local job creation and really reducing the carbon footprint and avoiding these gigatons of carbon from the grid. So, you know, we at Blue Frontier are very passionate about our statement for the environment and doing something good while doing something well. So, you know, that's what we hope to do is we hope to contribute to solving this problem as emerging markets around the globe. You know, I think several billion people are in the hottest areas of the world, don't have air conditioning today and will have air conditioning or will require it as a feature, a function of living in these hot environments. So we want to be a part of the solution for the planet. One last question came to mind when we were talking about decarbonization. What about carbon credits? Is it possible? Are you looking at how you can evaluate how much CO2 you're saving and then sell that as a carbon credit? It sounds like you could get a lot of carbon credits. Yeah, so whether there's green tags and white tag markets, we can easily quantify the carbon savings because of the energy savings and then also because of the greenhouse gas, the refrigerant itself. So a lot of jurisdictions, in fact, the Kigali Treaty, which is an amendment to the, I think it's the Kyoto Protocol or the Montreal Protocol, the world seeks to eliminate this refrigerant. So it definitely has a strong element that can be materially counted or tangibly counted to savings and then sold if that's the mark. And then you can sell it and then offset the cost of your acquisition and your ongoing maintenance cost of the system, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we're down to our last 30 seconds. So any last final thought? Going, going, gone, almost. The last final thought is thank you and aloha. And I wish I was in Hawaii enjoying the weather with you today. I'm sitting here lamenting and my mind is one degrees best to you and to your show and to your viewers. And thank you so much for the opportunity. Okay, thanks so much, Craig. We really appreciate it. And to all our viewers out there, that's our show for the day. I hope you found that as interesting as I did. That's fascinating technology. There is a cure for carbon and this is one of the solutions we have. So I won't be back. I won't be here next week. I'm attending a fuel cell seminar in Long Beach, California. We're going to get the latest and greatest hot skinny on the new technologies coming out. And so the following week, I'll see you. And so it's aloha from Hawaii, the state of clean energy.