 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm the Hydrogen Systems Program Manager for the University of Hawaii's Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'll be presenting HNEI's Hydrogen and Clean Transportation Program to you today. And I hope you'll find this interesting. It's a pretty significant program for HNEI and for the state of Hawaii. So first of all I want to tell you a little bit about HNEI. So can we have the next slide please? So the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute's areas of interest includes alternative fuels. That includes biomass and biofuels, hydrogen, of which I'm part of, and methane hydrates. So we've had major programs in all of these areas. We also have big programs on electrochemical power systems. By that I mean fuel cells and battery energy storage. We also look at various renewable energy sources, including ocean energy, offshore thermal energy, ocean thermal energy conversion, and wave energy. In the picture up here at the top you'll see that yellow thing that's a wave energy buoy. And then down below that is one of our batteries. That's a one megawatt battery on the northern end of the big island of Hawaii as we say here in Hawaii. But we do a lot of systems integration and grid work. We model our grids and conduct analysis to inform policy so we can make sure that we operate the grids in the best possible way. We also evaluate transportation systems and we look at smart grid development. We have a significant program in energy efficiency, particularly building technology. And the picture you see there at the bottom, the third picture in the bottom is a net zero classroom located on our campus here at the University of Hawaii. By net zero we mean that it makes as much energy as it uses or in some cases slightly more energy than it uses. And then we have a significant program looking at policy and resilience for Hawaii so that our legislators can make informed policy decisions and come up with the right policies. So we also look, that includes the Department of Defense Facilities, that's a DOD, and also the grid, once again, the grid systems in Hawaii. Next slide, please. So I want to start off talking about hydrogen and what I call the magic of hydrogen. The reason I call it the magic is because it starts with water and it ends with water. So when you use it, it only produces water. So you start off with an energy source like the sun or the wind and you take the electricity and you run it in an electrolyzer and you make hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen can actually be used, generally it's vented off. You can also use it for other things like in Hawaii we ran out of oxygen at some of our hospitals on the Big Island and we were asked to provide oxygen to supplement our oxygen systems. We also use it in fish farming by bubbling it into a fish tank. The fish require 25% less energy to oxygenate themselves and you actually get like about 25 to 30% more protein for the amount of food you feed them. So it increases the productivity of your aquaculture. So when we don't need to use the sunlight, we store it as hydrogen and energy storage and then at some point when we need energy, we convert it back into electricity through a device called a fuel cell. And for example, the Marae, in Japan you all know about Marae meaning the future and so that converts the hydrogen combined with oxygen out of the air into electricity which drives the car. It's essentially an electric vehicle and the result of that is water. It only has hot water and then you can recycle it. It's perfectly pure water and then you can recycle it back. So it's the perfect cycle. And as I said there at the bottom of this slide I hope if you can get a copy of these slides there's a link to a website that gives an animation. It's about two and a half minute long animation. It's really good and it describes all about hydrogen and the hydrogen economy. So I really encourage you to go to that website which was produced by HAT. Next slide please. So here are the top level objectives of our hydrogen program. Really right now we're focused on fuel cell electric buses for public transportation. So why do we do that? Well first of all we're using taxpayer money right now to support the public transportation and we want the general public to get a chance to experience what a fuel cell electric vehicle is in this case a bus. And so it educates the public and generates public support and once you have public support then you can gain political support. If the public was against it then the political class would not necessarily support the program and it's hard to justify taxpayers' dollars. If the public itself or the taxpayers don't actually support the program. So secondary objective is obviously we want to provide cost competitive hydrogen. If the hydrogen is so expensive that it's a real economic liability then nobody's going to want to use it. So right now it's still pretty expensive and it depends on the cost of your electricity but we part of our program is to look at ways to drive that cost down so that our hydrogen is competitive with current transportation fuel like diesel or gasoline. In this case in buses it's usually diesel. In our course of doing that we want to increase the use of renewable energy resources. As you all know the cost of PV has dropped significantly. On the mainland you're getting our purchase agreements around two cents a kilowatt hour and here in Hawaii we've seen them as low as eight and eight and a half cents a kilowatt hour and as long as your cost of electricity is below ten cents a kilowatt hour hydrogen is pretty close to being competitive with diesel fuel and that's not looking at all the other value added propositions associated with using hydrogen like cleaning up the environment and providing a better transportation mode. So we also need to install this at scale what we call it scale that means at utility scale. These are not little desktop experiments you have to make these at the multi megawatt scale and install the infrastructure to be able to do that. So that's part of our program it's looking how we do that what's the pathway. They work with the electric utility and as a team and see how we can make that happen. Next is to leverage industrial benefits so what does that mean by that? It means that if I'm importing buses that are already assembled on the mainland in our case then I'm supporting somebody else's economy but if I can import the components and assemble them here in Hawaii then I'm promoting our own industry and providing benefits and jobs to our local people. 75% of the money would stay in the local economy and we train our people in high tech and then we have people that know how to maintain the buses and how to operate them. And finally my project is mainly on the on the big island as you will see now and that was on purpose. It was by legislation actually the legislature demanded we do that but once we have it up and running and we've learned the lessons we want to transfer those lessons learned to all the other neighbor islands like Oahu and Maui and Kauai. Next slide. So this picture is a picture of my first hydrogen station or H&I's first hydrogen station at the Marine Corps base here on Kaniui Bay where I'm located right now working out of my home on Kaniui Bay and this was a the first hydrogen station in Hawaii it was well maybe the second they had one at Hickam Air Force Base but this one is totally automated run you could monitor it remotely over the internet. It was a 700 bar that's like 10,000 psi fast fill which meant under 5 minutes and also 350 bar kind of a slow fill but the idea of this was to make it the same experience for the driver as if he went up to his local gas station and self-filled his car. So we had no attendant the driver just goes out and operates the dispenser is all computer controlled all he has to do is hit a button connect the nozzle like he would with a gasoline car and the computer system would take over and fill the vehicle and once again I have a little link at the bottom of the slide that's a two-minute little video which shows how the station worked and shows how we filled the cars. So I invite you to go to that link next slide please. Okay so here's the overall concept on the big island so on the left is the Kona that's the right beside the big international airport on the west side of the island and there we have our main production station and we also have a dispensing capability at that station but we also wanted to provide dispensing at the main bus depot which is over in Hilo on the east side which is on the right hand side of this graphic in order to do that we would have to transport hydrogen from the Kona side or from Nelha side over to the Hilo side but to do that we have tube trailers so we have three tube trailers and you go see pictures of them later on in this presentation and the idea is you drag a you haul a full trailer over and drop it off and then you pick up an empty trailer and bring it back to be refilled and in order to really support this whole program we decided we needed three of these trailers so that's essentially how it is operating and it's an example of central production and distributed dispensing just like refineries so you can look at the Kona side on the left as a refinery producing hydrogen and then delivering it to where you want it dispensed. Next slide please. So here is a 3D rendering of our station at the Natural Energy Lab authority of Hawaii on the big island that I was showing you. I don't expect you to be able to read all the labels but I just wanted to say this is what the design was looking like and I want to shout out to my tech Aaron McCall who did this on SketchUp and he does a great job so well done Aaron. Next slide please. So this is not an experiment as you can see this was a major construction project and what we see here is the size of some of the equipment that had to break ground we're on very hard lava rock I think they call it blue rock and they that's a bit massive jackhammer as you can see this is this is big stuff so it's it took a lot of work. Next slide and I'm going to be showing you several slides now so it's just not all death by PowerPoint so in this slide we see the the concrete slab being ready to be poured it's just before sunrise on the big island and I want to point out you'll see a lot of rebar those are those metal patchwork there part of hydrogen is all each of those rods is grounded so grounding is very important for hydrogen to dissipate any static electricity so it's a major part of the design process is to put in an adequate grounding system and then from that the concrete was poured and it's like watching an orchestra performing I mean these guys have it down to a fine art so next next slide you'll see it and this is what it the the entrance to the station after it was finished and we have a nice little sign there you can see the dispenser the blue thing on the right looks like your gas station dispenser and of course we use shipping containers to house all the equipment I have more pictures so the next slide please so here's an aerial view of the system looks a lot like that 3d rendering doesn't it that's that's how good my Aaron what a great job he did and so in the upper part of the slide to see a 40 foot shipping container and that houses on the right a big compressor in the middle these electrolyzer on the left hand end is our electrical room but then our electrical supplies are on a concrete wall on the other side of the 40 foot container and then you'll see under the awning we have an awning to cover the dispensing system and then on the left you'll see two awnings and slots and those are spaces where we park our tube trailers to fill them and also we use one of the tube trailers to supply hydrogen to our dispenser everything goes underground so there's no above ground pipe pipe work it's very clean and our instruction company NAND construction showed up they did an awesome job beautiful job so thank you NAND next slide here's a different angle and you can see it's a very clean looking site and a system and we did that on purpose because we wanted to look good as part of our marketing you know it's nothing better than having a site that's properly designed and looks really good so that the public can really appreciate you know what it supposed to look like and it's you know very professional and the next slide please so here's a view of the dispenser you'll see it looks exactly like a dispenser a regular gas station and you know except the only thing is it dispenses hydrogen instead of gasoline but if you look at it it's there it's like I said previously it's all computer controlled and operated and it's remotely monitored so we don't need an actual person there and and you know the computers and safety systems are set up so it's fail safe if a problem happens have a sensor sec sent something out of specification they shut the whole station down and send us a an alarm message by over the internet next slide so here's one of those tube trailers I was telling you about not quite as big as a big industrial one so but this carries about a hundred kilograms of hydrogen which is roughly equivalent to about 200 gallons of gasoline and and the next slide please this is what it looks like under that skin and this is all carefully engineered for safety and you see it the on the left-hand side that cage it's all high tensile steel every well was x-rayed and it was this was inspected by the US Department of Transportation and they qualified or license it for operation on all roads in the United States this is a federal thing it's not a state thing the federal has jurisdiction over transportation of this kind of a trailer on public roads throughout the US and next slide please so here's what it's all about this is a hydrogen fuel cell electric bus that I'm very proud of this one it's a beautiful bus 29 passengers as a 40 kilowatt US hybrid fuel cell in it and it's completely ADA compliant so we can take up to two wheelchairs on it and it's a very quiet ride and passengers are gonna love it next slide please so I wanted to point this out because a lot of people say oh the cost of a hydrogen bus is so much more than a diesel bus I have two comments on that first of all I thought we wanted to get away from diesel so why are we comparing it to a diesel bus but secondly we installed a power export unit on it which means we're able to export 10 kilowatts of 110 or 220 volt AC power for 30 hours so just think about it your bus your buses become mobile emergency backup units if a tsunami hits or a hurricane hits like in Okinawa you know they may knock down your power lines well you've got depending on the number of buses you have all these buses that can go out provide power to your hospitals to your shelters to your communications helping clearing trees you know if you have electrically powered chain saws all that kind of stuff so that's a huge value proposition where you're leveraging this asset instead of just parking it and hiding it diesel buses can't do this and the incredible thing is this bus can be refueled in 30 minutes or actually less than 30 minutes and people say well how can you refuel it if you don't have any power well we have power which we generate so we can power up our dispenser to operate and and make sure you know the bus gets refueled so it's a great asset our civil defense people love this concept and the the the taxpayers should love it too because eventually it could save their life next slide so I want to talk about a really unique program that was developed here in Hawaii and this is how you can make a giant leap forward this is the next kind of three slides are very important slides so you know traditionally at least here in Hawaii we buy our buses kind of piecemeal you know two or three one year for the next year or some years of budgets are tight no buses and so I guess this you know it's really hard to manage it and it'll take a long time to convert the fleet over to hydrogen or to zero emission buses you know if that's the way you're going to do it well this program allows you to buy a fleet of 50 buses in one shot if you want it and all the infrastructure and everything else you need to run it and we do that through a public-private partnership and it's called transportation services contracting so the the private entity comes in and they get a work order a task order to provide the buses the infrastructure on a user fee basis it's not a lease it's a user fee like on a per mile basis for example so it's similar to a contract with an electric or a gas utility but it's not providing financing to the state so there's no minimum amount of services required and here's what the financing people like what what they get is a in this case for the first contract a 10-year term and a guaranteed return on investment so it's a recurring revenue contract and so the large pension funds really like this kind of a deal because they've got a guaranteed return on their investment for their shareholders and the other thing is that the private entity can keep ownership of the vehicle so if it's not being used by the county or the state you know the government entity then they can rent it out so if I need a bus after school to take my kids to a soccer game I can rent one of these buses from the private company and operate it and then return it to the county when it's needed by the county if I wanted a dump truck on the weekend to move garbage or whatever same thing so this is a great great program that allows you to leapfrog and get moving on this thing quickly and get that conversion done so we can meet our zero emission goals that we've set especially here in Hawaii where we say we're going to be a hundred percent renewable by 2045 well we got to get moving next slide please so the first contract has actually been awarded to a company called sustainability partners Inc. and this is a template or a model that you can use in Okinawa or any place in the world so what we've provided here is there's a master agreement which was approved by the state's attorney general just like in November of this year that's like two months ago and the county of Hawaii will evaluate and explore other things that they want to put into that master agreement for example they may want to buy some buses and so this is a model as I said for converting you know government transportation fleets over quickly at scale and so what I have here at the bottom is a link to the RFP now this RFP was helped was developed by a lot of people it took many months to develop the RFP and it was reviewed by all the various funding agencies to make sure that the language in there was fundable particularly by private industry so this has been through a very significant review process so if you want to try this program out you can click on that link and you can get the documentation that we use next next slide so the other component was we had to have legislation to actually allow this to happen to authorize the county and the state government to be able to enter into this kind of agreement so this is the actual legislation that was prepared it's called bill house bill 401 and it was passed in 2019 and in it you'll see all the language for this legislation so if that's something that you would like to do in your either state or province or on your island in okinawa for example then I have a link to that legislation but you can link to that and look at how we did it and then okay you may need to make some modifications to fit your own you know situation wherever you are but that's how we did it here in Hawaii and I think that's really an exportable thing we can have in Hawaii not to make money for Hawaii but for to get everybody you know to give them the benefit of what we've learned here and I want to give a shout out to Riley Saydo the big island research and development department this was his baby and he he stick handled this through and the amazing thing is like legislation was passed in the first year normally it takes three or four years to get legislation through here in Hawaii anyway as you know as it's fine-tuned but he did his homework and so this is legislation at least that worked here in Hawaii my next slide I think is my last slide so yeah this is my last slide I just want to say aloha again and I've given my coordinates how you can contact me if you want any additional information we're happy to help that's what we're here for with the university we're here to help you and so that's that's the end of my presentation and so this is Mitchell from Hawaii the state of clean energy signing off and I hope you find this has been a useful presentation aloha