 to stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii on the 10th of February, 2017. And if all the political stuff in the newspaper and on TV and on the radio is starting to get to you, just kick back and enjoy a little stand energy man on your lunch hour, and we'll fill you with more useful information than you'll get on any media, including social media for the next, at least 30 minutes. So welcome to my show today. I'm really, really excited. I've got a Skyping in guest from California, who's one of my very favorite mentors, and especially in the hydrogen world in the drive train, electric drive train world, Abaskadarzi, the president and CEO and overall guy in charge of US hybrid and US fuel cell. And he's coming to us from Torrance, California, right there in the heart of Los Angeles. And he's just an incredible wealth of knowledge when it comes to anything that has to do with electric drive trains and hydrogen fuel cells in the transportation world. He's internationally known, internationally respected, often quoted, just an incredible guest to have on. So Abaskadarzi, welcome to the show today, and I thank you so much for being a part of our day here in Hawaii. And I'm so glad we finally got you on, even if we had to do it via Skype, finally got you on the show. So thanks for being here with us. Aloha, Stan, Aloha, Hawaii and Aloha Clean Tech community. It's a pleasure and an honor to be in your show. Uh-oh, he just warped on us. Hey, yeah, we lost you there on Skype. Well, we'll try and get you back here real quick. But Abaskadarzi is coming to us from Torrance. I'll give you a little bit of his background. He's a professor, he's a teaching professor at the California University System. He's also been an aircraft engineer for Hughes Aircraft. He's been working to... Hello, did you get me back? Okay, we got you back, Abaskadarzi. I'm just telling him a little of your background. I said that you're a professor, you've worked for Hughes Aircraft. I was just getting ready to say that you've done a lot of work in wind power and wind energy, and now have your own company with how many employees are you up to now? We have about 68 now. Okay, and why don't you tell everybody how you got into doing what you're doing, especially after coming out of the teaching and aircraft and wind power industry? Well, it's a pleasure to be sharing the story with you. I have always been fascinated by the electric motors. And even during my high school time, I used to build motors and build motor control centers. So at the school, one of my advisor, Professor Hoft, he was an ex-GE guy. And he did all those drives. And I was fascinated by electric drive motors. Then during my school, I was exposed to electric vehicle. Then we started looking at using motors for traction. I started that back in 1980. The idea was, how do we make electric motor that is suitable for vehicle traction? And that has been a long, fun journey. And then during one of the projects I had, JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was looking for advanced motors for the lunar rover. So they contracted University of Missouri, Columbia, which that's where I was with the MIT. MIT was doing one concept, brushless motor. Columbia was doing another concept of the brushless motor. And believe it or not, those motors are the foundations of all the traction drives that is used today. So basically electric drive, there's nothing new about it. But to apply it to vehicle, we have to be one-tenth of the cost, one-tenth of the size and 10 times faster and last 10 times longer. All of this with no instruction. That means we call them idiot proof or we just call them general user. Other than that, all the challenge with electric vehicle, electric traction, has been on an issue of advancement of the material. This is power devices. Advancement of low-cost power processing. These are macroprocessor and digital signal processors. And all of this has enabled us to provide a more efficient, more cost-effective propulsion. So, well, right off at school, when I finished school, I became a professor, but of course I was doing a full-time professor and a full-time running a company. And we did what's called direct drive windmills. The company used to be called US wind power. We produced 7,000 windmills. And that company eventually was bought by GE. So we did all that activity because the EV, after 1980, slowed down. The windmill picked up. Then when President Reagan came in, he pulled the plug on the wind support, then that industry was slowed down. And that's when General Morrow decided to produce the so-called impact. That was the first name, then they call it EV-1. Then a recruiter came after me to head that program, and that's where I joined Hughes Aircraft to run that EV-1 program. And my job was very simple. Make it producible, make it manufacturable, make it reliable. Now, we are looking at 1988. And people were doubting whether electric vehicle can provide a performance that people can be happy with. Whether we can actually put 140 horsepower under a hood of the vehicle. So it was a question whether it is feasible. Many people don't realize how far we have come because these days we never, we no longer question whether electric traction, electric drive is good or can do the job or not. Now you will see. It looks like we lost you again, Abbas, but I know where you're coming from. You basically look at a Tesla and how quick it can accelerate. And the kind of torque you get out of electric drives nowadays, and you don't even think about is it good? Is it powerful enough? Is it efficient enough? It's just never even questioned. So we've certainly come a long way with electric drive vehicles. And- Yes. Okay. Am I, do you have, do you hear me? Yeah, we got you back now. Okay, sorry about that. I don't know what's going on here. But anyway, we have come a long way. However, now the focus is on a commercial aspect. That's one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is that people are now, there is unanimous decision, unanimous agreement that the future traction is electric. Nobody questions that. The future propulsion is electric. Remember, our train has been running electric for the last 40, 50 years. Right. So the future propulsion is electric. Why? Because electric way, it decoupled traffic from good use. It allows you to shut the engine down because the electric motor is efficient across the board. It doesn't care about traffic. Number one, number two, when it is stopping, it actually covers energy. So that is the fundamental of electric drive. But the jury is still out whether the energy source, what the energy source is gonna be, whether we're gonna be running on batteries, whether we're gonna be running on hydrogen, whether we're gonna be running on national gas, or whether we're gonna be running on diesel. The question of the energy source still is debatable. But there's a fundamental understanding the future of propulsion is electric. So basically, Abbas, if I can interrupt this thing, what you're saying is that there's no doubt that the electric drive has got the power, the torque, all of the performance capabilities. And over the last couple of decades, we've gotten the size down, the cost down, the power up, all the things that need to be met, the ruggedness that needs to go into a transportation mode versus sitting on a steady pedestal mode. We've got all that stuff set. And the fact that electric motors, they don't care whether you're in town or on a highway. They have no such thing as highway mileage and city mileage. They are either on and performing at a good efficiency level or they're off and they're not doing anything and not using any energy when you're idling a car. It's still using energy. It's still using gasoline or diesel or whatever. And now we're looking at, if we're gonna go to electric drivetrains, what's the proper fuel source? Correct? That is correct. That's correct. So the energy is electric. So the question becomes, what do we do in terms of how much battery do we need? Or what can we do? Should we use hybrid? In terms of natural gas hybrid, diesel hybrid, gasoline hybrid, like the Prius one, should we go plug-in or should we go fuel cell? Those questions are the one that is still are not technical challenges. They're all economic challenges. They are all depending on what the emission or the politics of energy is. Do you hear me now? All right. We've got you loud and clear, but I tell you what, we're gonna take a 60-second break here and come back in 60 seconds and you can catch us up to the discussion on the correct storage. All right, thank you. Aloha, Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three in the afternoon. Do not tune in in the morning. My topic is energy efficiency. It sounds dry as heck, but it's not. We're paying $5 billion a year for imported oil. My job is to shave that, shave that, shave that down in homes and buildings while delivering better comfort, better light, better air conditioning, better everything. So if you're interested in your future, you'd better tune in to me, three o'clock every other Monday, Code Green, Aloha, and thank you very much. Howard, with... Welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Stan Osterman here on my lunch hour, by the way, and your lunch hour too, filling you full of useful hydrogen knowledge. And we've got one of the best fountains of knowledge that I can imagine with us for a guest today, Bosca Darzi from U.S. Hybrid and U.S. Fuel Cell, who actually was one of the founders and designers of EV1 and has kind of taken us through a history of electric vehicles and we're up to energy storage. So, Bos, can you come back in and start to have a little bit of a discussion about where we're at with energy storage and hybrid versus maybe straight electric and how we store the energy in batteries or we keep it in liquid fuels and things like that? Looks like you're frozen again, Bos. I don't know. Anyway, we'll start the discussion and then we'll pick it up in a few seconds here. But we were talking about it being an economic challenge more than a technical challenge. We pretty much know what we need to know about hybrid vehicles. We've got the Prius, we've got a lot of hybrids and almost every manufacturer out there makes a hybrid vehicle. And for those of you that don't understand what a hybrid is, it's basically an electric vehicle, but instead of running a gasoline engine or diesel engine all the time to generate power it runs a diesel generator or an electric, I mean, excuse me, a gasoline engine that just runs a generator at its most efficient performance level. So what you can have is you can have like a diesel engine that's designed to run at 4,500 RPM all the time at a steady state. And all it does when you turn it on, it runs at that RPM and it's set to be torqued right for a generator and powers a generator that makes electricity to charge your battery or run your motor. And then you have electric controls on the motor that let you accelerate and let some of the energy go to a battery and store it up. And then you also have the ability when you take your foot off the accelerator that generator turns back into a, I mean that motor that drives the car turns into a generator and can also charge the battery. Okay, so now we got a boss back live. So I just finished talking about a hybrid drive train and we'll jump back into energy storage of us. Take it away. Yes, so the question is going back to our discussion is that battery passenger cars, fantastic. You have come a long, long way. Well, when I was on General Motor, we used to talk about something which is called battery to the car weight ratio. Now, if you look at the car makers Tesla or so-and-so, they make the vehicle light. They use carbon fibers and so-and-so. Now we add more batteries. So we can get some range. I have done my math and I encourage you guys to do your math. If you make a vehicle from battery only, that means make a battery that put a wheel on it, it gives you about 600 miles. Now, if you turn the air condition on, it gives you about 500 miles. So when somebody says my car does 250 miles, it means half the weight is battery. That's what it means. Now, for passenger cars, this is possible because passenger cars are designed not to carry load. So now we can get 200, 250, even 300 miles. It's not an issue. And they're a fantastic product. Now let's talk about commercial vehicle. Commercial trucks and buses are meant to carry cargo. That means we really cannot put battery onto the axle because it exceeds the axle weighting. Axle weighting. So if you look at some of the buses today, whether it's a Protero bus, which is carbon fiber, by the way, or glass fiber, which is lighter, they add more weight battery so they can get about 200 miles range. Or some other manufacturers, they put extra axle to carry the battery, which is good. But what happens now? If your vehicle has to run 24-7, two-shift, three-shift, like the trucks in the port, like the taxes in New York, that's where people are starting to look at, hey, wait a minute, I have a downtime now. I have to charge. And charge means your asset is on hold. So you don't get full asset. Now the question becomes, what is my option to have zero emission and a fast charging? Fast fueling. That's where fuel cell kicks in. Now, fuel cell is just basically engine that has no combustion. It's a combustion less engine. It basically is a static converter. Hydrogen comes from one side, oxygen comes from the other side, and we extract the electron from hydrogen. There's no more efficient way of doing any energy convention because energy is in hydrogen. People don't know that. It doesn't matter whether you use diesel or coal used to be high-carbon, low-hydrogen. Then we go to diesel or gasoline, which is relatively good-hydrogen, carbon, good-hydrogen. Then we go to natural gas, which is highly rich hydrogen. Then we go to pure hydrogen. All of them, energy is in hydrogen. So the fuel cell or the fuel cell engine extracts the electron from a hydrogen, but it has much higher density. So if you have to have heavy weight, carrying heavy weight, high torque, high power, continuously, not a 10-second acceleration, 20-second acceleration, is not burning rubber. It's providing full torque, full power to pull 80,000 pounds that highway. That's where hydrogen kicks in because now you have the efficiency, density, and you have the zero emission, no pollution. Besides, you can fully charge it. So this is why we really don't ever see 18-wheelers that are plug-in electric vehicles because they'd be so full of batteries they wouldn't be able to haul any cargo in and they would be illegal to take on the road because their axle weight would be exceeded and they'd be damaging the roadway. Is that correct? Oh, looks like we lost you there, boss. But we've, a boss makes a really important point here. Hydro, we call them hydrocarbons, but basically all the fossil fuels that we're burning now and all the ones that we talk about, like natural gas, they all contain hydrogen and the hydrogen is the energy part of all these fuels. Okay, we got you back now, boss. Am I back on? Yep, you're back on. I'm sorry. Anyway, so yes, following what you're saying, we are having trucks operating at the Port of Los Angeles and in other areas. We've used the best battery, lithium ion battery, and I can get about 80 miles at full power. If it's light power, I can go up to about 110 miles. That's about it. Then that asset has to park to be charged. Now, remember, that is a good solution if you don't have to have 24-7 operation. Remember, I am one of those supporter of electric vehicle, electric truck, electric buses. Don't get me wrong. I started an electric vehicle, we do electric powertrain. The whole company's product is electric powertrain. But as we get to commercial vehicles, we are starting to focus primarily on commercial vehicles that it has to run two-shift, three-shift, whether it's a taxi in New York or a truck in the port or a transit bus, like the one running at AC Transit. Fuel cell, five years. 13 of them, zero fuel cell failure. So it's not about technology demonstration. It's not, the reliability has been proven. There's zero emission has been proven. Now, let me give you an example. When those fuel cell buses were deployed in 2010, people were scared or were considering, should I get on a bus or not? Today, they wait for that bus to come. So a lot has happened. A lot of common education has happened. So going back to the point of, what kind of energy source can I have? That is zero emission, it's abandoned and it is, and it is basically fast refueling which has the conveniences of what are present operators are used to. It is so funny because everybody, natural gases are national fuel. National gas is what made America competitive. National gas is what made us independent. So people consider natural gas to be good and safe and American, but for some reason, they still don't understand hydrogen. And they say hydrogen is potentially dangerous whereas hydrogen is actually safer than national gas. Hydrogen is pure than national gas. Hydrogen is zero emission compared to national gas. So given all of that, we are focusing on the fuel cell for commercial vehicles because we think not only provides the most efficient, not only provides zero emission, not only provides the full convenience of the end user to use as asset 24 seven, but also hydrogen is the link that connects renewable to the transportation. Otherwise, I have to use a renewable energy as stored in a battery. Then from that battery transferred to this battery, then I have to have half the weight of the vehicle to be just battery. Can you imagine that? That means I'm using half of my energy just to carry the battery around. Exactly, that doesn't sound very efficient at all. If I do that for a short time, that is good. Like a school bus, fantastic. But if I have to earn my living off of that by running 10 hours, 20 hours, 12 hours, eight hours delivering goods, then I need a fast, reliable zero emission. That's where fuel cell comes in. And even companies like Walmart are looking to switch to hydrogen fuel cell forklifts because they run 24 seven, all their logistics are 24 seven. And if they have to set aside part of their forklift fleet to sit in charge while the rest of the forklift fleet is working, that's a waste of time and a waste of money. And business is all about the bottom line, right? Exactly, but remember, all of this means what? All of this means we have come a long way that that means our technology challenge is over. Financially, these projects make sense. Now we look at the convenience of it. Now we're looking at this technology to actually enhance our operation efficiency. So it's an added benefit. It's like what Apple did to iPhone, to the cell phone. It added a lot of features that now our cell phone is not just a communication device, but it's everything. The same thing with the fuel cell now. These guys are looking at it not only as... Nope, we lost you for a sec there, Abbas. I'm gonna come up with a question here for you and I hope you catch the whole thing, but I'd like to ask you a question about the future of fuel cells. Just you're talking about cell phones and how they've sort of grown and they're no longer just a way of telecommuting, but also instant messaging and taking pictures and everything else. But the fuel cell, I mean right now we're still looking at energy storage and storing hydrogen and there's a lot of different ways to store hydrogen. We're just now starting to look at nano tubes and nano carbon single atom thickness, carbon layers to store energy. And so that kind of energy storage presents a lot of ways that maybe we can get vehicles to go more than several hundred miles, maybe a thousand miles running on hydrogen and not really increasing the weight of the vehicle. So I think we've kind of lost the boss. We'll keep trying to get him back, but we're ticking down near the end of our show. I'll tell you what I'd like to do there. Why don't you throw up some of the vehicles and I'll talk about these vehicles. These are vehicles that US Hybrid and Abbas's company has made for us. This is an R12 refueler that we have out at Hickam and this is one of those vehicles that will drive underneath the wing of your airplane, hook up to a hydrant and then pump the fuel from the hydrant down below into the aircraft. And that's just one of the vehicles. It's very efficient, very quiet, no heat signature, which the Air Force really likes and it's really, really efficient. That's this one here is our hydrogen fuel cell bus. This is our most popular vehicle. I was driving on it the day before yesterday taking some folks around, super quiet. The loudest thing in this bus is the air conditioner. You can sit in the front seat or the back seat and carry on the conversation while you're driving around and there's no noise, there's no engine noise. There's a little bit of road noise, though the windows rattle a little bit, but it's most of the noise is just that and otherwise silent. Some of the other vehicles we have out there at Hickam include this is a really interesting, we have three vehicles of this kind. This is in the shop, bring up the next one, Zuri. This is the vehicle in action. This is actually a U-30 tug that's meant to haul C5, C17s, Boeing 747 size airplanes around. And it presented some unique challenges for US hybrid because it's gotta stay heavy enough so that it can actually get the traction to move a big airplane, but it's also gotta have a powerful enough motor and changing out all the components to electric. And Boss's company and the company that makes this, the called Tug, have actually started talking about ways that Tug can improve their whole fleet to go electric and here's another view with the maintenance doors up where the hydrogen is actually stored in the doors. The next vehicle we have up there is what we call the Spod, secure power on demand van. It's actually a van that can provide electrical power to a regular facility like a command post or it can provide AC or DC power on the flight line to an aircraft or to a maintenance troop that's out to fix an airplane. And the last shot we have is actually a weapons loader that's designed to load ordnance on fighter aircraft and is also running purely on hydrogen and air and producing only water for the out of the exhaust. And this thing has the added advantage of being much quieter than the original equipment and just as powerful and just as capable. So that's just a little bit, I hope. I mean, it was tough losing a boss here and there and I think we're gonna have to get him back in person to really get the most out of him. Maybe do two or three shows but he is just a foud of knowledge and we thank you, Boss, for being on the show and I hope that you'll be back here next week with us on Stand Energy Man and pick up more on some hydrogen tips. Boy, that was tough.