 Extremely, exceptionally exciting and the energy man, Stan Osterman here calling you from deep within the heart of Kailua in Honolulu, Hawaii, the county of Honolulu, and we're going to stick in Hawaii today for our show and we're going to talk more Hawaii energy things, particularly some of the less common renewable energy sources and storage mediums that we actually have available to us here in Hawaii. And to address those issues, I have a colleague, I'd like to call him a colleague, I'm probably not his peer, that's for sure, Marco Magelstorff. He actually, I think the first time I associated with him was on a think tech show that Jay Finokun knows called Mina, Marco and me and Jay couldn't be on it so he asked me to host the show and that was the first time I think I talked to Marco but I know Mina from a long time ago at the PUC and working hydrogen issues. Marco, thanks for joining us today and thanks again for helping with that town hall last week. That seemed to go over pretty well, at least Kai was happy with it and I got some good feedback from some of the folks that watched it so Marco, could you tell the audience a little bit more about yourself? I mean you've been on before but just... Well first of all, Stan, a big pleasure to be with you, just the two of us, it's something I've looked forward to doing for quite a while so it's a real treat for me, saying greetings from beautiful Hilo town Hawaii here in the Big Island. So yeah, about me, well I've been doing renewable energy principally solar for 42 years now, coming up on 42 as of next month, which kind of dates me as one of these old renewable energy guys, although I don't have a great beard because I choose not to have a great beard so I've been doing that for a very long time. I've been a provision solar for 20 years, I moved here in 2000, a provision solar was then provisioned technologies, part of Hawaiian electric industries and unregulated subsidiary, kind of sort of like Pacific Current is now, the latest new company from Hawaiian electric industries and we are kind of a middling solar energy contractor, I'm a licensed electrical contractor as well as supervising electrician in the state of Hawaii so I've gotten my knowledge from the ground up so to speak by actually doing it and I also on a parallel track over the decades, I got a PhD in political science from University of California Davis and I've taught both at UH Hilo University of California Cal State System that said these past years my train, the Marko train has been principally in renewable energy although I have an idea for a new course that I've been kind of gestating for the past several years that I'm very interested in doing which just briefly would be looking at energy, security, politics and the environment along the Mekong River southeast Asia where I've had the pleasure of getting a chance to explore a fair amount several years and I plan to be back there again before it's too long once the COVID craziness stops and the countries start opening their borders again so I'll just leave it at that. But yeah I didn't know that that you had that kind of bet because when I was at USPACOM Vietnam was one of the countries that I did bilateral defense dialogues with and my last trip to Vietnam was actually attending a Mekong Delta Initiative conference so hey we should get together and talk about that because I think that would be a great great subject for you to be teaching. I have a bachelor's from UH and a master's in international relations from University of Oklahoma and man we should team up on that stuff. Good thing we're doing this show I'm learning all kind of stuff about my guests and anyway let's get back on topic. You know here in Hawaii we actually have quite a few options in terms of clean carbon free renewable energy and of course you know you've been in solar business and you know we have wind too but talking to a lot of the constituents and some of the legislators here you know wind has a kind of a mixed appeal it's okay but until it's in your neighborhood and then the people really don't like it so I'm not real bullish on wind here in Hawaii but we have solar we have wind we have geothermal which is potentially a game changer here in the state and then we have some kind of more traditional ones like hydroelectric that I don't think people really think that much about and can you tell us a little bit about what the big island has in terms of hydroelectric. Sure sure well let me kind of riff a little bit off of what you said earlier Stan which is you know one of the things that I tell people freely is there's no such thing as a free energy lunch which I mean what I mean by that is simply that every energy source has its upside and has its downside so you know while wind turbines tend to maybe be more visible from a great distance they certainly are because they can be through 400 feet. There's also some pushback at times toward large-scale solar farms depending on where they happen to be right so there's no cost-free choice in terms of energy and here on the big island I believe we are blessed more so than perhaps any other island in the chain as far as having sun of course having two wind farms that have been going for a number of years now one down to South Point and another in north the Kohala hubby we have some hydro on this island not a whole lot in terms of the percentage is rather small of the total a total generation portfolio and then we have Puna Geothermal Venture PGV for short and lower Puna which has been out for two and a half years or so and there's actually going to be a virtual town hall meeting tomorrow that or Matt and PGV will be doing which I'll be attending so to speak kind of want to get an update on what's going on with them and as we talked a little bit before we went on the air there's also the potential on the silent for what's known as pumped hydro which to for the layman and laywoman what that is essentially is you take water assuming you have water to take you pump it uphill you store it in a reservoir and then you let it come back down and when it comes back down of course it's got some gravity feed and and energy has this flowing down through the pipe and you spin it through a turbine now of course a lot of physics says you will never get the same energy out that you put in to get up there but nonetheless it's seen as a as something that can be done in certain instances on certain islands or certain terrains if there's adequate water to be able to use essentially surplus power produced let's say by the sun that the grid can't take at any given time where the batteries more conventional batteries happen to be full or from a wind farm that instead of curtailing the output of the wind farm you can use that to pump water uphill so hey I you see my friends at Coy Island utility co-op are have been pursuing a pumped hydro project for a number of years now and I don't know exactly when they expect to go online but I know they are going through the final hurdles to be able to hopefully before too long actually go live which will be the first pumped hydro that I know from hydro pumped hydro project here in the state which hopefully will serve as a guide kind of do's and don'ts for other potential projects so I think we're very blessed here on the big island in terms of being able to get to close to 100 perhaps sooner and faster than any other major island now Molokai could conceivably vault ahead of us if they because that's a small grid small number of customers and if they have a multi megawatt solar plus storage they could conceivably get to 80 90 percent within a handful of years but in terms of Maui the big island of Oahu and Kauai now Kauai I have to take my hat off to Dave Bissell and his crew there I mean within the next I'm going to say year two they could easily be somewhere in the 80 percent range in terms of renewable so you know we're we have a ways to go here on the island you know the big island and we took a hit when PGV went down two and a half years ago in terms of our total percentage of renewables but you know Hawaiian Electric has big plans for 100 plus megawatts of additional solar here in terms of utility scale hundreds of megawatt hours of storage they're supporting more and more rooftop solar so it's just going to continue to be very very dynamic stand I'm convinced of that and they're going to be challenges along the way and stakeholders you know understandably going for their position and I don't see it as a particularly rosy path it never is but the potential is there the good will is there the consensus is there and it we just got to continue continue to walk the walk as we talk the talk well if it wasn't for the neighbor islands Hawaiian Electric couldn't claim all the renewable energy that they own because you couldn't put more than much more solar or wind on Oahu than they already have they pretty much saturated their grid with intermittent renewables that around 18 percent and they're probably pressing a little over 20 percent now and they're they're getting to the point where there's certain areas where they won't entertain interconnect agreements anymore with solar because that particular sector of their grid is over populated with intermittent renewables so it's it's you know we're kind of looking that there's the more basic grids like on like you say Molokai in particular Kauai and the big island are a little bit easier to manage than Oahu's industrial you know touristy Waikiki huge scale high-rise buildings kind of fluctuations you get from those big you know power suckers so we kind of have to almost overproduce on the neighbor islands to help Oahu and then it gets into how are you going to move that power from neighbor islands to Oahu and we've already looked at undersea cables and things and I don't know that that's going to work so we can we can talk about options for that my favorite would be either hydrogen as a liquid hydrogen or possibly ammonia the ammonia comes with its own set of drawbacks and things too but let's talk about the pump hydro just a little bit in KIUC's case of on Kauai how you know about how much they're storing in terms of gallons and are they storing in tanks or are they are they buildings like small reservoirs I believe it's a reservoir stand and I'm afraid it's not something I've boned up particularly I mean I kind of keep Ipanayana from afar and I have contacts and friends at KIUC too because I'm very supportive of what they've been doing and very big and you know very big fan of co-ops in general so I'm not really privy to the the details I do know it's been it's been a long slog understandably because as we both know anytime you deal with water changing a natural course from point A to point B or even if they think it's being changed even if you take it if you move it temporarily up and you bring it down and it's going to go exactly where it went to anyway in the end you get the multiple layers of the government get involved and have to study it and analyze it and approve it and it goes out for public comment and on and on and on but as far as I know I mean I you know until they start pumping their first gallons up that pipe store it and then have it come down and spin a turbine they probably won't quite be ready to you know break out the champagne but I do believe they're getting closer and closer to to being able to do that and then not too just in future well are most of their permitting issues federal or state or county do you think or a combination of all probably a combination of all and you've got the public utilities commission of course which is involved as well as it must be because it's of course representing the interest of the public you know we're at large so there are multiple layers of approval and you know whenever you do something like this it's not for the faint hearted right nor for someone who would demand immediate satisfaction because that's not going to happen for for something like this but you know clearly they believe KIC does that it's worth whatever effort they're putting into it and will allow them to continue to build up the greater capacity greater generation capacity for for intermittent renewables non-firm as utility calls it and be able to use the access to pump up the water up and then have it come down when when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow it is a guy Remington is it Brad Remington is there operations guy over there uh Brad Rockwell is Rockwell Rockwell guys yeah Brad's a great guy yeah I need to get him back on the show I think I interviewed him from Kauai on my first moonshot where I was broadcasting from Kauai from the McDonald's in uh by Port Allen um while the people were going to the bathroom behind me and he was he was in his office and we were doing a shot all the way back to Honolulu but yeah he's a really sharp guy and I have to talk to him about his pump hydro we're going to take a quick break here and throw up some think tech thank you and then we'll be back in 60 seconds and talk more with Marco on some of Hawaii's renewable energy and sustainability options Hey welcome back to Stan the energy man of Stan Osterman and Marco Mangelsdorf I'm on Oahu he's on the big island but we're talking Hawaii energy no matter where you are and we just were talking a little bit about pump hydro which is not very often spoken about but the theory is that when you have surplus energy from solar wind or any other generation source and you can't use the power you use it to pump water uphill to a reservoir or tank and then when you need the power you let the water run downhill through a turbine to another reservoir and let it sit there until you have excess electricity again then you pump the same water back up the hill and of course it means you need the source of water because you're going to have evaporation and stuff like that but it's a technique that we're experimenting with on the island of Kauai and Marco gave us a little briefing on that but it's amazing we have in Hawaii when we had sugarcane and pineapple we had quite an extensive irrigation system here in the state of Hawaii and a lot of it has fallen into disrepair or just you know not being used or maybe some of it's being pulled off for potable water for the rest of the state but there's an awful lot of water available especially on Kauai and on the big island probably Maui too it could be turned into clean what we call in-stream hydroelectric or just take a little bit of water out of the old sugarcane flume run it through a generator turbine and then back into the same sugarcane flume and let it run downhill so Marco on the big island how many examples of that are you aware of that but are in use right now well there's a utility scale hydro plant along the Wailuku river in and around Hilo my rec collection five to ten megawatts so you know you look at the total or peak demand for this island in terms of power somewhere 180 to 190 megawatts so clearly five lower even 10 megawatts this kind of a drop in the drop of the buckets so to speak and there are a number of other kind of private hydro plants you know our friend Richard Hall has one that's been legal for not quite a number of years Ed Campbell who I forget what his legacy is so shame on me but I mean he you know his land holdings are considerable in terms of the trust trust that he has that he's been looking at various or he's he's talked to a number of individuals our friend Paul point you as well in terms of setting up you know not megawatts worth of hydro as far as I know but you know in hundreds of kilowatt range to be able to do interesting things such as create green hydrogen for example so I mean there are a number of you know kind of boutique you want off projects sitting around the island but as far as I know the only one that's really putting on megawatts is the one and only utility operated or utility power purchase agreement I forget if it's owned by Helco or it's a long-term PPA this along the Wailuku river so there hasn't been a hold there's not a whole lot of hydro here and you know the potential to do more hydro I'm sure there are studies out there stand I haven't been up on them relatively recently so I'm not really in a position to to comment too much I mean the now the challenge when you talk about hydro is you have to have confidence that the water is going to be there when you need it right and anybody who lives in the islands knows there can be tremendous variation in water flow and it happens because there can be variation in the rain flow so I mean just you know point of fact I've got a stream by my house that I love and love and love to go sit by and listen to the water go by and watch the water go by and it stopped running essentially in May it came back briefly several weeks to go for about a week or 10 days and it's it has been off since so now we're in November we got about half the rainfall that we usually do in October and November remains to be seen so my point simply is you know there's a downside like I said earlier with every energy source if you don't want to go to town bet all your chips on any particular one energy source whether it's the geothermal because we know Madame Palais has something to say about that solar can be periods of prolonged cloudiness the wind can also vary so you know the if you're a utility planner you want to focus on the d-word right diversification and not put too many of your your eggs in one basket because that's just from a planner's standpoint that's just way too risky so the question is you know where do you put your big bets right yeah and well I would I would add the big O also and that's overproduction I mean you almost have to overscale what you want to have to make sure you have at least the basics to get you through so yeah diversification and a little bit of overproduction in your planning factors is probably not a bad idea when you're talking about renewable energy so find find the most cost effective practical reasonable politically acceptable socially acceptable way of storing the energy you know and to me there's a case that again the d-word right diversification and clearly battery storage has become very very big just in the past several years you've got major players whether it's tesla lg chem samsung people companies in europe as well and china of course and so it's a vastly different world in terms of energy storage now compared to five let alone 10 years ago but we should we put all our all our bets on on batteries that use cobalt or use nickel use five you know these various chemicals sometimes rare earth elements which can be hard to come by in terms of the supply whether it's the conga where those people's are holding in china so you know i'm a big fan of diversification and man stand like you i've heard stories for years and years and years about hydrogen being not so much a miracle fuel because there really no such thing you'd want to put too much on a pedestal but you know to be able to find an energy source to be able to create green hydrogen cost effectively and be able to store it and use it and then transport it i mean that's kind of a holy grail and i think we all would like at least you and i would like to see it move a lot faster and you can speak to that a lot more than i can and uh couldn't have it soon enough yeah i'm i'm uh known to be a little bullish on hydrogen but uh i'll take all the support i can get from anybody who also supported with me yeah it's it's amazing though because you know the old saw used to be hydrogen is the fuel of the future and it always will be right but it's it's actually starting to show up now and i was just talking to an investment advisor a little earlier today and um her and her company the analysts aren't looking at hydrogen here in the u.s but i've been telling her you need to start looking at what's going on in europe and asia with hydrogen because it is really really really taking off uh even airbus put on their website three aircraft they're designing right now to be flying in 2035 and all three are hydrogen liquid hydrogen powered and one of them is a turbo actually two of them are turbo some kind of turbo engine so jet engine it runs off hydrogen and the third one is a commuter that can carry up to 100 passengers 500 miles also on hydrogen but it's a turbo prop kind of a design but airbus that's Boeing aircraft's competitor and in the uk there's a company called zero air avia that just flew its first commuter 20 20 passenger commuter airplane uh on a completely hydrogen powered um drivetrain electric prop and everything and so it's it's taking off and um no pun intended taken off but it's really uh it's really going to be the difference and you know as an avian or myself i can tell you that when it comes to any kind of transportation whether it's rockets airplanes ships trucks cars it's all about weight and being that hydrogen is 14 times lighter than air you know you got to compress it a lot to squish it into a container as a gas but as a liquid i just looked this up yesterday too so if you what the rule of thumb we use is a kilogram of hydrogen is equal in energy to a gallon of gasoline but a gallon of gasoline is a fourth as energy dense as a gallon of liquid hydrogen so you know how energy dense gasoline is because we use in our cars right now and how flammable it is but that's why hydrogen is rocket fuel it's almost four times more energy dense than gasoline in a liquid form and what's what pressure what pressure do you have to use to get it to liquefy you have to take it in temperature you have to take it down to minus 260 c it's super cold it's way colder than liquid natural gas and um so it's it's a challenge but they've got technologies now where there's almost zero boil off over a period of months which has never you know over our lifetime see and it has a great safety record too nasa's been buying liquid hydrogen from canadian producers and putting it on rail cars and sending it from canada to cape canaveral since the 60s and you don't hear about big rail accidents where hydrogen leaks out and the community's you know devastated or because it basically evaporates goes up in the air and makes clouds so you know it's it's uh going to be the future i just i'm i'm really certain of it and i know we don't have too much time but let me ask you a really quick practical question so you're on a walk right now if you wanted to could you buy yourself a toyota marae number one and two if you were to buy one obviously you would want some reasonable prospect of being able to fuel it right is that possible for the the average stan oserman or anybody else who's interested in a in a toyota marae on a waho to do right now i could probably pull it off because i used to run the station on hickam and and i have access to hickam as a military retiree so i might be able to feel some from them right now surf go hawaii has a publicly accessible hydrogen station where they make green hydrogen off of solar power and it's available to vehicles that they lease so they bring the toyota marae in they lease it including three years worth of hydrogen and in that three-year period they're trying to work with the state to figure out how to certify the metering of hydrogen into the cars because like if you go to a gas station all the gas meters have stickers on them from the department egg it says a gallon's a gallon you know and we certify that it's it's accurate so that's a challenge that's coming up what's what's really neat though and i know we're going to close pretty soon you can buy used toyota marae in california for like 12 000 and you could bring them over here and surf go could service them and you could buy a small self-contained appliance that'll make your hydrogen for you all you have to do is hook up the electricity in the water it can make two or three kilograms a day and those appliances are less than a hundred thousand dollars stan if you get if you get a used marae from california for 12 000 you should you know a couple thousand to bring it to oahu pick it up at young brothers can you take your used marae and get fuel get hydrogen from surf go right now right now they're not doing it because the state hasn't certified how to sell it so it's really the state's fault has they haven't caught up a surf goes willing to they when they open the station they announced that they want to sell to anybody and hunday honda and tourniquet are in production Mercedes bmw board and gm are going to be in production with fuel cell cars in the next couple years so that's what you can look forward to but that bringing bringing the used marae to the big island don't be surprised if you don't see that happening within the next two years i'm working on it with paul and some other investors to make that available in hawaii including the fueling so that's that's uh to be to be announced at a later date but that's what we're working on in secret secret dark rooms and in full va va so oh marco thanks for being on the show with me today and um we'll have to have you back and talk a little bit more about some of your projects that you've got going on but thanks for joining us today and for the viewers out there uh stand there's your man signing off until next week tuesday hello