 Welcome to Stan Energyman, Stan Osterman here on Think Tech Hawaii and bringing you another show talk full of information. This one is going to be kind of a, you know, way back when machine type of show where I've been watching, you know, a lot of media all over the place, you know, the last couple of weeks, couple months trying to make sure I'm well informed on things. And this one phrase keeps popping up in the weirdest places. You know, I'll be listening to some commentator talking about, you know, COVID or talking about economics or talking about whatever. And this phrase keeps coming up over and over again. And the phrase is, is critical thinking or critical analysis. And it's like, that's really an important concept in pretty much everything that I do personally and professionally. And I'm not sure how it came about, whether it's my fine arts background, where they kind of drive that into when you're designing stuff. Or whether it's my military background, where, you know, you have to really have confidence in not only yourself, but your systems and the people that support your systems, because your life depends on it. But critical analysis has always been a real big part of whenever I do things. And when I try and make decisions on things. And so, for example, the background that you see here in this photo is actually from my big island property, where I needed to build a bridge across a 20 foot span. The old bridge abutments were still there. They're 100 years old and they're in good shape. But I needed to put the span in. Otherwise, I had to hike down into this ravine and hike up the other side with all my building materials and everything. And so I had to design this bridge. And I took some time and I asked myself some questions and I have some experience in building structures. So I just put it together. One weekend I had this bridge up. And, you know, it's actually closer to six or seven years now. The bridge is still up. Still working fine. And I'm thinking of building a more permanent bridge because this one was just supposed to be temporary. But it requires that you do some critical thinking before you jump into it. So the title of this show is Think Twice, Flip the Switch Once. And that comes from an old carpentry saying that we have, which is measure twice, cut once. In other words, take the time. Do a little bit of homework. Measure the thing twice. Look at your drawings or your plans or your notes. And make sure you're measuring it right. Before you draw the line, take out the saw and cut. Because once you cut, if it's too short, you just wasted a big piece of wood. And sometimes a really expensive piece of wood. And you can't afford to do that. What I've noticed is that there's a lot of stuff going on nowadays where people aren't thinking twice and measuring twice and cutting a good line. They're just jumping at the first solution to a problem, running with it and sometimes expending an incredible amount of money to make the thing work. And it seems to work right off the bat because it solves a problem. But over a period of time, it starts to show other weaknesses and contribute to other problems and maybe even make some huge problems down the road. Where if they had taken the time to measure twice, do some homework, think about it. Cut the one time. They probably would save themselves a lot of energy, a lot of time, and a lot of heartache and probably money. So I said also in the show setup that there's the six P's of good energy choices. This is actually the six P's that the military uses. And I had to change one of the P's to be socially correct on the show. But the six P's are proper planning prevents politically and pathetically poor performance. So proper planning prevents pathetically poor performance. You can guess which PI had to change out there. But it says everything. The six P's. Every time we would have somebody in a flying incident where they made a bad decision, we'd just say just remember the six P's. Now go ahead. You didn't follow the rules. You wouldn't think back on your training and you didn't do something you should have done. And that's why you dinged that airplane or that's why you almost killed yourself. So the six P's are important for everything, though. And they go back to critical thinking and critical analysis. So we're going to show a little bit of a show that, believe it or not, I did in October of 2016 before the presidential election. But you'll be able to tell by some of the commentary that the reason I jumped on this topic was politics. Because we had two candidates running for president of the United States and neither of them were particularly popular. And both of them were, I'd say, characters with some flaws in them, some maybe major, some minor, some social, some maybe legal. But it kind of set the stage for critical thinking and critical analysis. So we're going to start with that video and we'll run through it. And then I'll pick it up at the end. Hey, welcome to Stand Energy Man on the 14th of October, 2016. Stan Osserman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, State of Hawaii D-Bid. And this is going to be kind of a different show. I just came off of two weeks on the road. So I'm a little bit jet lagged. And as you can see, sans guest, I have no guest today. But I'm going to start off a little bit on the philosophical side before we get into the energy side. And it kind of goes in line with this year's political season, which in case you haven't noticed is squirrely, to say the least. So let me talk a little bit about one of the things that I've noticed that happens to dovetail into politics, but sure hits me smack between the eyes in terms of energy. And that would be the area of critical analysis. It seems to me that we have either stopped teaching critical analysis, or we have stopped thinking critical analysis, or we have been actually manipulated into not applying critical analysis in a lot of things that we do. I noticed this probably 2006 or 2007. I think it was like in a midterm election. And I turned on and was flipping through the channels, watching all the pundits talk about the political race at hand. And the first thing out of their mouth was, and this candidate has raised this much money, and this candidate has raised this much money, and therefore they will win. And I'm going, since when do we just start talking about how much money somebody raised? Like, is this a popularity contest? And then it hit me. No, it has to do with how much advertising they're doing, how much marketing they're doing. We've been trained over the last 20 to 30 years, maybe a little bit longer, into being consumers, good capitalistic consumers. And as a result, the industry, the advertising industry, and now the political industry, has said, you know what, we need to do marketing. And so therefore, the more money a candidate raises, the more money they can spend on commercials and advertising good, otherwise to promote themselves or to tear down somebody else. And it's become marketing. So we rarely actually don't worry that much about the actual qualifications or capabilities of a candidate. We're kind of just worried about how well they're marketed. And we're looking at advertising only. And why is that? We've gotten busy. We've gotten really, really busy. So we take our information and sound bites, and we tend to take it at face value and agree with it or reject it in a fairly short amount of time. We're busy trying to make decisions all day long about what to have for dinner, what to where to work, you know, what kind of car to buy, what this, what that. And I think it's just kind of made us poor at analyzing real facts that pertain to whatever it is we're doing. And in the political sense, maybe that applies this year, where we've got two candidates running for president that, to say the least, are not very popular and probably have some serious character flaws on both sides. But they're there. How did they get there? I think it's because we haven't done any serious, serious analysis, in-depth analysis. So what does that mean for the energy side? And that is one of the most important questions I always get when I start talking hydrogen vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is why do you want to go with hydrogen-powered electric vehicles as to just battery-powered electric vehicles? And normally, the discussion that comes across right away is how much energy in for how much energy out. Batteries are more efficient than hydrogen, so therefore discussion over batteries win. And I go not so fast. Batteries may be the best energy out, but where's our critical analysis? What have we really done to decide whether or not batteries are the best choice? I actually had a slide for this part of the discussion, and it didn't translate well in the computers here. I guess I must have saved it the wrong way or something. But basically, it was a slide that had, on the horizontal axis, it had power. So it had the power from one watt to gigawatts. And on the vertical axis, it had time from milliseconds to weeks. And the reason this chart was so important was because it actually showed in little ovals a different kind of energy storage and where it fit on the scale of power to time. And what you notice is in the lower, it would be the lower left-hand scale over here on the TV, it would show that if you needed to store energy that was required in a quick time, the best storage medium was a supercapacitor. In other words, it's like a super battery that stores energy, holds on to it, and can release a large amount of it in a really quick millisecond type response. But it didn't last more than the second or two seconds. It was only meant for a really short duration. But it could give you potentially a pretty good boost up into the hundreds of watts to kilowatts size chunks. Above that, you have your traditional batteries, which cover a pretty broad area. They cover out to multi kilowatts, up to megawatts even, and give you hours, minutes to hours on the time scale. Above those batteries, you have flow batteries, which can give you actually out to days of time and fairly high on the power output, maybe even up to the into the megawatt range, several megawatt range. Above that, the batteries just drop off, all of them do, even the flow batteries. And you get into other ovals that talk about things like compressed air storage, where if you have big salt caverns under your city or in your suburbs, you can actually compress air, put it into those salt cavities and have compressed air for energy storage. Or if you have the capacity to pump water up a hill and put it into a reservoir and it comes back down and give you energy as the water comes downhill, the distance above your level that the water is and how much you can get through the pipe determines how much energy you can get back. But those energy storage forms give you high into the multi megawatt scale and long duration. However much compressed air or how much water you can store up hill can give you long duration of energy after the fact, even at high energy levels in that same realm are some things like natural gas storage and fuel cells and hydrogen. And that's why when I have the discussion with battery people and they say it's only energy and an energy out, they're not really looking at that chart and where you're talking about. It's true that across the board, you're going to get the best bang for the buck energy wise in and out with a battery. But if you're looking at storing energy for days, hours, days, weeks or months, batteries are not your choice. Batteries will cost you more. Batteries are not as safe. Batteries have other issues with recycle and end of life, you know, disposal, things like that that are never ever brought into the discussion on energy storage. And that's where I get back to the point of, are we really doing critical analysis, especially on the energy side. So I just want to talk a little bit about what I mean by critical analysis. First of all, you have to talk about the cradle to grave costs. You have to talk about the things that are built in that maybe we don't have to pay for, but maybe we're going to another country and buying it cheaper, like labor. You know, a lot of countries don't have unions. A lot of countries don't mind paying their people 50 cents an hour or 15 cents an hour or just 10 cents an hour. And they don't care. For them, that's a good living. For us, it's projecting poverty in a third world country that we're trying to pull out of the third world. So just because we can buy it cheaper in some other country and cause them to keep their people down in the ghettos, does that make it right? No, maybe we should be looking at what it really costs and what we should really be doing in that country to not pollute their environment, not cause their economic suspension of growing and increasing the quality of life for their own people, maybe not putting their people at risk when people have to go into mines or have to do something that's inherently dangerous. And we're pushing that off to some other country because, well, they don't care. Their government doesn't regulate that stuff. They apparently don't care about their people. Is there a conscious part of our critical decision making other than dollars and cents that we need to put into the equation? Maybe we should tolerate paying a little bit more to help that country come up a little bit more. So where you get your resources, where you get your raw materials and your labor plays a lot into your critical analysis. At least it should, if you have a conscious it should. How long does it last? If you have a piece of technology and it works really great for five or six years, but then you have to scrap it down to zero and start from scratch, is that as good as a similar product that maybe costs a little bit more initially or doesn't give you quite the return on the short-term investment? But it lasts 20 or 30 or 40 years and it doesn't have an environmental impact in your country or wherever you're getting the materials from. There's that aspect to consider as well. Then there's the question of, what about when we dispose of it? I mean, just think about what you see on a little battery pack, even just your rechargeable Everettier or Duracell batteries. They say, don't throw it in the fire. Don't throw it in the rubbish. You're supposed to recycle those things so that the hazardous material in batteries can be eliminated before it goes into a landfill and starts polluting your water. So there's another point when people don't dispose of this technology properly and they do throw it in the landfill and it does pollute your water. What's that worth to you? Is that a risk that you want to take as a society that a technology that you're putting into your system that isn't handled according to what the loss is, that it's going to end up polluting the drinking water of your kids and things like that? This is all part of critical analysis and really taking a good hard look at what you're doing when you decide on a certain technology or a certain type of any decision, political decision, or otherwise. Are you really looking deep enough? So let's compare apples to apples as closely as we can. And let's look at some of the more important things. I'm going to switch now for a few seconds to talk a little bit about lithium batteries. I'm completely aware that lithium is one of the better battery technologies that we've come up with. You don't have a cell phone or a small appliance or battery or a notebook or a tablet that doesn't have a lithium battery in it and that's for good reason. They're very efficient and their weight is right. The cost is a little bit high, but it gives you great, great performance. Lithium batteries tend to perform really well until they're dead and then they drop off. Unlike a car battery that just slowly drops off until it's down to where it's not usable. Lithium batteries have a wider range in how far they can drop before they're not usable. They're just really, really great technology. So it's not that I'm whole-hum on lithium batteries. Trust me, they're the best we've got and that's why you see them in all the appliances. But they're not the whole answer. So that was a show from 2016 where we talked a little bit about the critical analysis that mostly circulated around batteries. And I didn't want to pick on batteries because as I was trying to get to at the end there, you know, batteries are important. And even though I'm a hydrogen guy at heart, even hydrogen fuel cell cars are going to have batteries in them, but it's how do we make that resource really last as long as we want it to. And right now, one of the shortcomings is that it's not the lithium that we'll run out of. And a lot of that show, I went into that point about lithium being a finite asset, just like oil and gas are finite assets, but also the cobalt. The current technology we use in most of our lithium batteries is lithium cobalt technology. And cobalt is actually a really rare material that we're going to run out of within just a few years if we switched all of our transportation and all of our grid storage to lithium batteries. So just some of that kind of critical analysis of what we're thinking of. We're going to take a quick break now and show some other stuff that Think Tech's working on. And we'll be back in a few minutes to sustain the energy man. Aloha, I'm Dan Leif. I go by Fig because I was an Air Force fighter pilot for 33 years and you have to have a nickname. I get to host on Think Tech Hawaii two shows, Figments, The Power of Imagination and Figments On Reality. The power of imagination introduces you to some of my incredible friends and their life experiences, astronauts, war heroes, Hollywood writers, you name it, they're on it and you'll be inspired and entertained. And on reality I'll give you something hard to find, non-political commentary on today's events. That's right, non-political because the vitriol doesn't help folks. So Figments, The Power of Imagination, Figments On Reality, both on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to Stand on the Energy Man and we're talking critical analysis and critical thinking. So just to say, just to show you, I'm not just picking on batteries, I use that as an example of critical analysis, but there's actually, I think even a better real-world example and I think it even happened between when I started that show five years ago and today and it's called a compact fluorescent light bulb. Now, if you remember, that's the little light bulbs that you screw into a regular socket and it looks like a little self-serve ice cream cone and that's kind of what everybody knows them as. Those who are compact fluorescents, which fluorescent lights have been around since the early 1900s at least, they're very efficient, they last a long time, they use quite a bit less electricity than incandescent light bulbs, the one with the little wire in there that heats up and burns bright. So of course, when we're trying to do energy stuff, the first thing we think about is efficiency and that's part of your critical analysis, are these things really efficient? What just so happens that these compact light bulbs, the CFLs, they're between 70 and 80% more efficient than regular light bulbs for the same amount of light they put out. Ah, that's huge efficiency and that was really the focus of what made everybody go to CFLs. They were so, so much more efficient. They would literally pay for themselves, even though the light bulbs were a little more expensive, they would pay for themselves in relatively short time, well within the lifespan that they would last. So we put a big press on for everybody to convert to CFLs and a lot of government institutions actually gave tax breaks and incentives like rebates and stuff to companies so they could sell their those CFLs at a much more competitive price to get people to buy them. And we did, we bought them in droves, they're all over the place. I have a bunch in my house, you know, they're all over. But they didn't last as long as traditional fluorescent lights and everybody went, hmm, these are supposed to last a long time, but they weren't lasting. So that was a problem that popped up probably because they didn't do enough research on like industry normally does research on on off cycles and cycle time instead of just hours. Then they noticed some other things that the color would change over time. And for most of us that's not a big deal, but if you're a photographer, if you're running a studio like Think Tech, you can't have your light changing colors all the time because it changes the quality of your images that are putting out there and your important quality is important. But those are fairly minor things. The one that really got me, there was no recycle system for these light bulbs. They were just like batteries. When you're done, you throw them in the trash, they go to the landfill, they get thrown in there with all the other garbage, they get crushed up and they're in most of its glass and wire. So who cares? Except for one thing, all fluorescent light bulbs as part of their chemistry have mercury in them. Mercury, it was known when they started fluorescent light bulbs. That's how they work. They have a little bit of mercury in them gets excited. It illuminates the gas inside the argon or whatever is inside. So we're throwing and the government paid us to throw. Millions and millions of CFL light bulbs into landfills that are going to leach mercury into our groundwater. And now we have water pollution and for eternity because of these little CFLs. Where was the critical analysis on picking that technology where we just decided efficiency topped everything else? We shouldn't be doing that. So to wrap things up, what are some of the really important things to look at with critical analysis? Number one is the source. Number one, if we're importing components or the products from other countries and they're a real critical commodity like energy, you got to think about national security. In history, OPEC could jack around with the oil prices up and down to whatever they wanted. And they could, I remember in the 70s, we had rationing for gasoline and the price was outrageous. Like I mentioned in the first video, human rights issues and pollution issues and safety issues, when we're sourcing these things, especially from other countries, are we paying attention to the manufacturing process and where the materials are coming from? Are we really, are we thinking about that? Are we using sound science? Are we looking at the full scientific spectrum of whether it's safe, whether it's efficient, whether it's going to last a long time? Are we doing our homework in the science? Are we looking at the economics? When we're subsidizing something to incentivize people to buy it, is that really, is that necessary? I mean, if it's such a good deal and it's going to give us a long term good return, maybe we shouldn't have to subsidize it. So really think about the economics. Is this really a good deal on its own merits? Or do we have to sit there and subsidize it to get people to buy it? Another S is safety. Tesla cars are awesome vehicles. I don't care whether you're talking about the paint job or the fit or the quality or all the gadgetry in it or the performance. It's just an awesome vehicle. But those lithium batteries in there, if they're punctured, they cause a fire. It's guaranteed and the fire will destroy the vehicle. You can't put the fire out. Sometimes a fire happens even when you're charging it. Elon Musk knows this. Elon Musk is switching his battery chemistry to lithium ferrous phosphate, which actually my friends and I have been begging for him to do that for probably close to 10 years. That's the kind of thing. Is it safe? Is it safe environmentally? Is it safe for the person using these stuff? Is it safe for the people working around the person using whatever it is on this energy system that we're analyzing? Is it sustainable? Is it something that we can fix and keep using? Or are we going to be trashing a really expensive piece of equipment just because one component doesn't work but it's integrated so it can twine that we have to throw the whole thing away. Sustainability is one of the key words that you'll hear attached to critical analysis. Because if it's sustainable, it probably meets all of the other pieces that you look at for critical analysis. And the last thing I would say is the end of life. If you have hazardous material like the mercury in that CFL, then maybe it's better to lease the light bulbs and have them be turned into a central location that can properly handle the hazmat, rather than leave it up to the consumer to dispose of it in their trash. Those are the kind of things we've got to think about. So anyway, I hope that looking back at critical analysis and taking some, you know, this is something again, like I say, it's been driven into me probably at school and through my career. But I just don't see it functioning in our society today, mostly because of it's a quick disposable world. It's a quick answer, a quick solution world. We need to stop. We need to slow down. We need to do critical analysis. And that goes for energy. That goes for picking our leaders. That goes from making your day to day decisions. You don't have to have perfect information to make a decision. But the more you work at trying to get to the right critical information and measure the big pieces, you'll make good decisions, no matter what they are. And I hope we'll do that for energy things. Until next Tuesday, this is Stan the Energy Man, signing off.