 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man. On Think Tech Hawaii, we're Community Matters. Thanks again to Rachel and Ryan last week for filling in for me while I was on the NTE with my wife, taking care of some family matters. And unfortunately, the trip wasn't long enough to improve my fringe, but it was long enough for me to get too much sun and eat too much good Polynesian food. So it's been 30 years since I was in French Polynesia, and things have certainly changed, but the natural beauty and the wonderful people are still amazing. So being in Tahiti slowed me down a little bit, but it didn't stop me from thinking about hydrogen. And while meditating on the irony of how much sense hydrogen makes versus how little traction it's getting, even among the most hardcore tree huggers and climate change components, I think I've sorted out some of the core issues. Everyone is gravitating to batteries to store energy, even when the National Lab studies all say that batteries are not economically feasible or sustainable in many of the applications are being considered for now. All the major automakers are in production or moving to be in production and have made huge capital investments to be in production for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but the gas and oil industries are not moving at all in the hydrogen direction. Why? In the Air Force, we used to say if it's not broken, don't fix it. And I've concluded that that's the key that I was searching for. The auto industry and engine manufacturers are trying to meet strict federal mandates to reduce particulate and greenhouse gas emissions. And they have concluded that electric vehicles are the future. But there is no such issue on the fuel side. And the first fuel substitute, that meaning batteries, are struggling even to get their infrastructure in place to support their vehicles, even though Tesla and others are pushing hard. So in a sense, the current truck makers are the only ones moving towards clean transportation, but the fuel companies aren't. The oil and natural gas industries see nothing broken, while the car makers know that they need to make some clean electric vehicles or they will not be able to sell cars at all and they're not too distant future. So they have something that will soon be broken if they don't fix it. Elon Musk, the brain and brain behind Tesla is betting big on batteries. But the natural gas industry is investing in CNG and LNG and oil companies know that they'll be providing gas and diesel for vehicles for years to come. So nothing's broken with them. So today I offer you a challenge. How do we make the oil and gas industries see that they need to manage their future now? How do we show them that they are broken even if they don't see it? Maybe if we take away all the government incentives, the tax breaks and other subsidies that they have, they would be broken and they would for sure be looking for clean solutions. Anyway, send me your suggestions, we'll see what we can do. My guest today is Skyping in from the soon to be frozen Tundra of North America and he is one of the warriors familiar with the if it's not broken concept, don't fix a concept. And he gives advice to a lot of folks to keep them making good energy decisions. So welcome to Gary White, founder and CEO of Blackstart. For those of you that are not familiar with the term Blackstart, Blackstart is the electrical utility that is faced with a large portion of its grid dropping off of the line and the challenges it faces bringing that power back online. So welcome Gary White, recent retiree from the Air Force Reserves and energy expert that was given advice to the Pentagon. Glad to have you on board, Gary. Glad you could join us today. Well, thanks, Stan. I appreciate that and glad to be here. I wore this Hawaiian shirt on a Friday afternoon in DC for you. Makes me feel warm just wearing it. I appreciate it. It's a lot of Friday everywhere. So give us an idea of how you got interested in doing energy things and what has drive in your train in terms of getting out of the active duty, you know, you weren't always on active duty, but the last assignment you had on activity was very energy intensive. And what kind of got you headed down that road and starting your own company regarding energy? Yeah, that's a great question. And my story is a little, a little strange. It's not the normal, but that's good, which has led to a lot of innovative thinking and how I ended up coming up with the Black Star innovation concept. So as you know, I had active duty time and then I switched into reserves and I had various assignments. But bottom line is I'm an acquisition guy by trade. I started out as a flyer crossed into this world of purchasing everything from satellite systems to other complex, four-mil-prace sales, command and control equipment for the Air Force. And my career kind of went on as an acquirer and program manager. And then I had this unique opportunity to enter the energy world. And it was the first time since I left the flying world that I truly found a passion behind what I was doing. I felt that like it was not only giving back to the Air Force and doing a great service for our national security, but also for the nation at large from an economic perspective, from bettering the climate and the environment. So there were a lot of pluses behind it and it was quick and easy for me to get behind. And then I was put into a very interesting position, as you mentioned, working with the Pentagon or the Pentagon as the number two guy focused on our installation energy security, which kind of dovetailed into a previous assignment I had where I was senior advisor to the director of security for all of our installations across the DOD within the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence office. So they kind of dovetailed because the reality is it's all about security of our installations from the military perspective, regardless of what that is, whether it's somebody who's physically attacking it or it's a threat to the energy that supplies all of our missions, the ability to function. So it was kind of a good fit for me, even though I didn't have a traditional background in energy, I was able to quickly step in from that more operational national security perspective and easily take over that mission. And so I did almost two years there doing that effort and we had a lot of creative projects that we were working on. One of the things I quickly realized was we had such a heavy proportion of our work focused on large scale generations at our installations. And so we're talking about putting in large scale utility scales or 10 megawatts or greater solar fields. We were looking at wind turbines, of course, as a source of distributive generation of the installations and other means, but we really weren't emphasizing a whole lot on other types of technology that could really supplement that generation. A lot of the big benefit to generation ended up in my mind at least, still focusing on cost savings and efficiencies that way. And that's great. And that's a big piece of the puzzle, but there's still a lot of other pieces involved. And I would attribute that perspective, if I can interrupt there. You mentioned you came from an operational background and I think that is really a key piece that most people even inside the Air Force don't understand. A lot of folks in the Air Force kind of get stove piped in acquisition or maintenance or some other field, but even the maintenance world deploys, when you've been in an operational unit for a good portion of your career, you have a different perspective. You're not just into what makes a dollars and cents thing, but what makes the mission happen? And that's the kind of perspective, I think makes it great for a guy like you to show up and take the career path you did because like you, I had an operational background, but then I went off into plans and policy and things like that and having that operational background makes a huge difference when you're trying to help the Air Force see the future. So I think that's part of what makes your super sauce work. Yeah, absolutely. You know, if you really think about it, it's the perspective of you or the end user at one point and everybody else is working to supply something to the end users that you come in really with that perspective of what works in the field, what doesn't, and that's not just military. I think that could be applied to many other industries as well. It's really understanding what the end result truly needs to be from somebody who's utilized it. And certainly I think that's unique. And you know, my two cents on that really is I think almost everybody in a support position, you know, not necessarily needs to be tip of the spear at some point, but you know, if there's some kind of additional duty you could do for a couple of years that gives you that insight. I think that's truly invaluable, absolutely. Great. So your company, now that you've kind of separated from the military world and you're off on your own, what kind of things are you up to? We're up to everything. So yeah, so going back to what I was kind of saying, you know, I noticed a lot of pieces were missing to this big, you know, energy security, energy resiliency during installation puzzle. And a large proportion of that were technologies and projects that could potentially supplement the large scale generation stuff that we were really heavily focused on. And so when I separated or retired now, then I started my own company, Blackstar Innovation, and we're an innovation and energy resiliency focused consultancy firm. Now, what does that mean? You know, we have sort of three levels of effort right now that we're focused on and it's quite exciting stuff. One is you have a lot of interesting entities right now within the Air Force and the Department of Defense at large that are focused on innovation, right? And which is really just coming up with new ideas. But you know, these different organizations and internal incubator programs that are being set up and things like that are really focused largely on educational related programs, which is great, you know, understanding how Silicon Valley works, how things are rapidly acquired and deployed and things of that nature. That's fantastic and that's good from a human capital perspective and maybe slowly changing the acquisition system. But ultimately, they're really not focused on solutions in my mind. So, you know, a lot of these programs also in addition to the education, they focus on problems and that's great. You can work for months and years even and you can fine tune a problem. But if you're not also working or spending that same amount of effort on the problem as you are in identifying which solution areas will work in a given climate or a given region or whatever based on different factors like economics, politics, what have you, then it's almost all for naught, right? And an example of that is when we were with the Office of Energy Assurance, we would often case these large scale generation projects and we would say, you know, we'd like to have a microgrid tied into that deal somehow, which is the ability to island off from the main grid to have your own generation capability right at the source basically. And so the companies that we were relying on to do this work because we were trying to do things third party finance, we'd come back and say, well, you know, it's just not ripe in the market basically, right, that's not going to pencil out on paper. And then you know, throwing my operational hat on, you know, my mission hat that I wore at the beginning of the Air Force time, you know, I'm saying, well, that doesn't make any sense. How can I turn to that mission owner now and say, sorry, that doesn't work in the market right now? I'll get back to you in a couple of years. That didn't sit well with me, right? It didn't sit well with the general, I'm just saying on again, within Blackstar innovation, is that problem alone? So it's taking these identified problems. Acting is sort of, I use the metaphor of like a talent scalper and baseball team. So going out there, searching the nontraditional players that the Department of Defense typically isn't looking at and then saying, okay, you have a really interesting technology and bringing that back into our partners within defense and saying, look what we've found for you, there's something that could answer the problem here and let's figure out a way, which we have, to go forward and acquire this. So that's one service area. So sort of acting like a talent scout for the DOD in the middle. And the other half of that really, you know, not looking at from a defense perspective, is towards industry. There are a lot of companies, big and small, but particularly small, that one, don't understand the problems of the Defense Department or what they're looking for. And they don't understand that there are opportunities to get unique type of funding into their companies quickly. And there are a lot of companies that would love to do business with defense who have relied strictly on venture capital as one example of funding. And the problem with venture capital to them is they're under extreme pressure to get things done quickly. And so that brings the level of quality of their product down. The Defense Department typically does not provide or does not apply that kind of pressure based on their money because they're not requiring return. They don't take a piece of equity in it, you know, and that sort of stuff. So it's really a unique opportunity for companies to come in, serve their country in reality by solving a national security problem or helping to solve one. And then leveraging unique funding. So we're going out there and we're educating these companies as well. We're serving a sort of consultants to them to help them not only understand the opportunities that are out there, help them commercialize their products towards the Defense Department and the federal government is at large. And then also working with them on how they market that. So a lot of these firms are very engineer heavy. Even sometimes I have a current client right now, Prime Solutions Group, and they're fantastic. And they have hired us to help them market and commercialize their product into the Department of Defense. They have a product where they go through big data, internet of things approach to gather basically sensor data from every piece of energy equipment that you would have in an area, region and installation and then visualize that data into a nice management dashboard that someone can make a decision off of from a management level. And that's something that's just an example of something that we're working to bring to defense. Yeah. And I find that's really common in what we do here in our office is bring the military perspective not only to the potential user, AFRAL, but also to the contractors and even the state of Hawaii and show them where the technology applies in their particular application. An example would be when I first worked with US hybrid I asked them what their appeal was to their equipment to the Air Force. And the CEO said, oh, our equipment's clean and green. And I said, the Air Force doesn't care if it's clean and green. It'll help them check a box off for the EPA or something, but it's also expensive. So how do I sell the Air Force your equipment when it's expensive and all it's doing is checking off a box for an issue that the Air Force has. And the answer I told them was your equipment is silent. That's important to the military. Your equipment has no heat signature. That's important to the military. Your equipment's scalable and can deploy. That's important to the military. Your equipment doesn't put off any kind of noxious fumes and you can operate it inside and in closed space. That's important to the military. Your equipment, the exhaust kicks out water. That's important to the military. And those kind of things are really critical. And so I think you're in a great market. You know, right now we're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with Gary and he's gonna tell some of his, about some of his projects that he's got going on around the world. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran. Seen here live every Thursday afternoon at one PM on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at one PM for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Planning all week for the day of the big game. Watching at home just doesn't feel the same. Put on the list is who's gonna drive. It's nice to know you're gonna get home alive. Plan for fun and responsibility. Choose the DD. Captain of our team. It's the DD. For every game day, a sign a designated driver. When I was in the Air Force, I was always a designated driver because I was always gonna be the one getting in trouble. So I forgot I might as well just drive. Anyway, we're back with Gary White from Black Start and he was talking a little bit about making that connection between the technology and the user more so than just the economic equation that so many people are focused on today to make decisions. And I know that when Gary was working with the Air Force, one of the things he started was what they call a Jedi program. So Gary, why don't you tell us a little bit of how it started there and how you've kind of pulled that into what you're doing now. Right, so yeah, the Jedi lab was pretty exciting and it's something that's still ongoing. And what Jedi stands for is the Joint Energy Development Demonstration and Innovation Lab. Some folks told me, hey, NREL, the National Renewable Energy Lab already has a Jedi software application. I said no problem, I added a D and lowercase the I so I think we're good there. But anyway, no, Jedi's basically a governance mechanism. One of the things I first saw was nobody's talking across departments, nobody's talking across services and a lot of us have the same energy problems. So, as you can imagine as Director of Innovation, I was going around and talking with everybody I could possibly talk to, figuring out what they're working on, what new technologies and so forth. And I often found that we had the same problems that a lot of times we were even looking at the same technologies and we were doubling up on our spending on those. I thought, well, that's kind of pointless. We shall get together in a room and talk. So, really nothing cosmic that I came up with in reality, it's just sort of the basic basics of, hey guys, let's get together and get on the same page here and maybe we can join forces and leverage money across funding streams. So, Jedi was stood up and one of the thoughts was, let's take an ecosystem approach with this. Now, what does that mean? That means that I want you to imagine like a Silicon Valley or imagine Route 128 up in Boston, Cambridge area. Now, take those and apply those out wherever we want, right? Maybe a rural area that doesn't have a lot of the resources that those areas already have. How would we build one? How would we develop our own regional hubs, regional ecosystems to address the problems that we have on our installation? And so that was ongoing and I came up with some interesting designs there and that's something that we're focused on now as well with Black Star Innovation. That's sort of one of our central offerings is ecosystem design around energy innovation. So, we've designed a concept in Alaska and we're engaging with some folks to try and build that out right now. And we've come with a unique approach where you would source problems initially within the department, but then also out in the community. As you can imagine, there are a lot of emergency management services that have similar problems and similar opportunities that they see as well to separate off from the grid and have a distributed generation asset and microgrid setup, but not just emergency management. You think about small communities that don't have a backup. Some communities aren't even on the grid at all and they already have a basic quote unquote microgrid but they could use something more advanced. And so my process starts out with dual sourcing the problems and then down selecting those to ones that make sense in the market, as I mentioned before, pairing against that and then running that through the local chamber of commons yet in my development council, leveraging startup incubator and accelerator programs that not only might already have small technology companies that we can rapidly acquire prototypes from, but also programs that are willing to reach out to the wider community and say, hey, are you interested in solving a problem that your community has? Maybe you have technologists out there that have or other folks in our disciplinary that have unique skill sets that they can come in, bring to the table, whether they form their own company or join another company that's already established, they can help solve the problem by bringing resources in locally. Part of what that does as well is it reduces logistical burden, right? And so you're also leveraging the power of the Economic Development Council's funding outreach. So there are a lot of folks within different communities that in terms of venture capitalists, angel investors, those kinds of folks and then also interesting banking scenarios, so green banks, things of that nature. And then they also have the ability to reach out to different types of defense funding at that point. So when you get to that point, that might attract other folks with money or maybe folks within the Department of Energy to bring some of their resources. As an example, the National Renewable Energy Lab has an innovation program where if you come to them with a problem, whether it's another federal entity and they'll pair with a local community or a company, they'll chip in up to $175,000 of their money and resources in terms of people and experts and maybe even some lab space for you to work through. Then you take that all the way through this cycle, you start to create a prototype, you get it out into the field and test it, but then you've got a unique scenario here. You could potentially take resources on a military installation. And of course, I'm always gonna come back to military because that's my focus, that's my background. You could take these resources in terms of personnel, maybe either A, wanna contribute something to the local community or B, they have to meet a training requirement. And you could use these folks to take that prototype into the local field to train the trainer type scenario that you can have an application applied towards the base and out into the community. And then once you test that a few times, you iterate on it, you can actually get something that grows a little bit, it'll attract more capital, it can be commercialized both ways. And then you have a solution that now can be procured in a traditional means at a large scale within the department, but now out in society. And you've reduced the cost because you've obviously leveraged training resources and things of that nature. That's a basic scenario, but that's something that we're heavily working on and getting folks to try and adopt and get involved in the local community. That's a great model. And I think that application of the term ecosystem with this problem set is important because what we're finding is so many times, the things that are problems out in the community or in the military, they're identified in silos, but when you start solving them with the process you just described, they start seeing that there's a solution for this energy situation that also solves other problems or there's a logistics piece that can be made more efficient if you apply the energy piece to it. And when you start making those connections, you've got a much broader area of support from the customer. And then like you say, when you start spreading the economics out to the civilian world, now you have the economies of scale that the industry can generate to get you a lower price for that equipment that you're gonna be purchasing. So I think your model is spot on. So are there any specifics you can talk about with any of your projects you got going on right now that you can use for a good example? I'd rather not get into individual project specifics, but we can talk about certain areas that we're working with. Two particular applications, one I just wanna mention, something that you could do in a rural area, again, like Alaska, that's something you could, from a defense perspective, that's something you could replicate or at least test out and model there that you could take out into the field. So when you work in a remote area, whether it's in the desert or it's in somewhere in the Pacific, let's say, and you're in a wartime scenario, you have to work with the locals. I did that in Iraq, I was in Northern Iraq and I had to work with the local Iraqis, the Kurds, to do some airfield construction projects. I didn't think I'd be that involved with them, but maybe just a little bit on the side, but they were the ones really running the project. And so you have to learn their system and how that works, and you have to leverage their field sets which are different, unique, but also valuable, of course. And they're just unique scenarios. You really have to work in this sort of robust environment that sort of breeds innovation. And I think that's a benefit you could replicate it out. Now, to talk another somewhat specific Buffalo, let's talk about Buffalo, New York, right? You have, for example, a reserve base there, Niagara Reserve base. You also have a community in the Rust Belt that is struggling to reinvent itself. The economy has taken a downturn in that review and folks traditionally who are working in mines and brown energy field, they're trying to find new ways to contribute, particularly energy, because they've been in that world for quite a while, just from a different perspective. This serves as a real opportunity now from an ecosystem approach to take an area that has perhaps brown fields that can pass environmental standards. You can convert those over. You can use them to produce cleaner energy. And then you can train people from an economic development perspective to come in and have a new career, basically. And you can turn the economy around. New York is really great as an example because of course they're more advanced in their policy, like some other states like Hawaii and California, for example, that they're really trying to push for a larger balance of renewables and back at 50-50 split here coming up. So we are working with partners in the utility industry and folks within the local government in Buffalo and the base to try and figure out a way forward for an economic or an innovation ecosystem approach to solving the energy needs at the installation and then also solving the needs out in the community from an economic perspective. I think that's a really good example of how this approach could be applied across the board. So it's not just energy, it's not just national security. It's also more of a localized economic approach. Great, well, we're gonna pass your name onto our state energy office, so maybe help them with their perspective on things. But believe it or not, Gary, we've bumped up against our final minute in our show today. I don't wanna thank you for bringing your perspective to energy planning and what your organization does to help make things happen, not just in the DOD, but in the civilian sector. So thanks for being on with us today. Thanks for wearing your loha shirt and commemoration of our great state here. And we look forward to working with you and maybe you can get out here sometime and be on the show live. I hope so. Thank you, Stan. It's been fun. Appreciate it. Okay, talk to you later. Thanks. Take care. And that's gonna wrap it up for Stan the Energy Man this Friday and thanks for being here on my lunch hour and we'll see you next Friday. Aloha.