 Y'all, I just came back from Houston, Texas, so I had to throw in a y'all in there. So here we are, Wednesday again already was only a short week ago that I was talking to you from my dining room in Houston, Texas through the magic of Think Tech Hawaii and their technical staff. So today we're here with Hawaii, the state of clean energy. This is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum with funding from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So very pleased to have a full court press here. We're going to do this guys. Yeah, okay ready? Ready, set, go. Ready? Okay. Speak no evil. See no evil. Speak no evil. There we go. No evil. So that's my co-host here, Jay Fidel. Hi Jay. Hi Mitch. Welcome back. Thank you. Y'all. We have Peter Rossig from Hawaii, from Hawaii. Yeah, the big utility. He's going to talk to us about their latest electric vehicle mass charger. Right. And then also pleased to have Michael Cooney from HNEI, who's a chemical engineer with, you know, expertise in biotechnology. And he's going to talk to us about climate change and what we can do about it. So I'm going to start off with the give the floor to Peter. He's going to tell us about the latest and greatest from Hawaiian Electric. Absolutely. So a couple of weeks ago now we opened our 10th electric vehicle fast charger on Oahu, 17th across our service territory that's owned and operated by the Hawaiian Electric companies. And it's in Haleiva, Haleiva town, you know that shopping center. It's, you know, got a lot of nice stores, restaurant and a place where my wife goes to spend money on clothing and stuff. Exactly. And the important thing is, first of all, it's another DC fast charger for people who are, who are transiting that area obviously. But the nearest one going in one direction is back in the Valley of the Temples area, Kolaugh shopping center. And then going in the other direction, the nearest one is at the Dole plantation. So those are far enough apart that I think some people might be worried about that distance. Most people don't drive as you know that far. But if you're a visitor or if you live out there and you've commuted to town and so forth, I think it'll be reassuring to reassuring to people to know that there is a DC fast charger there. Customarily it'll, you know, in about 15 minutes, it will give you about 43 miles of charge. And there is a speaking of charge, you have to pay for it. But it's a reasonable rate and it is, it operates with our time of use rate. So best if you can do it not in the middle of the day, not during our peak five to nine p.m. And this is part of our continuing effort to get, especially get to strategic locations where either because they're remote or because there are a lot of high rises in the area where we think people will welcome it in town. As you know, we have a couple at Ward and we have some out by Costco in Ivalet and going out in the other direction toward Hawaii Kai. But especially the ones in town are good for a lot of the people in Kakaako who may be living in high rises not have charging capacity in their building. You know, most people of course charge at home and that's fine if you've got a single family residence where you can have a charger in the garage. So we're trying to put them in strategic locations as part of a continuing effort to get the state to electrify transportation. We're not just talking about cars, of course. We're talking about buses. We're talking about the cranes at the ports. We're talking about a lot of different aspects where today we use fossil fuels which we're going to hear about a good deal about in a moment and get it on electricity. Because increasingly of course we're using more and more renewable energy to create electricity and as we do that we will get further and further off off of fossil fuels both for transportation for electricity. But even if you think of your vehicle as being charged entirely by the fossil fuel component you're doing less in the way of climate change damage I believe if you use electricity generated even by oil. But 30% roughly of our of our electricity today is generated from renewable sources. So as that number continues to go up more and more of what you put in your car will be electricity from renewable sources. So you referred to DC. I mean DC fast charging. How is that different from what you have in your house? Sure. In your home you have basically you'd go off alternating current. It's the same stuff that's coming out of the plug where your toaster is or whatever. And that I guess to be very technical about it you could say that moves more slowly than the direct current which is what we're able to pump into the car from these DC fast chargers. That's why you're able to put more electricity into the car more quickly than at home. A typical home charger if you recall level two it might take you you know six hours or so overnight to charge to replenish your car. And if you're just using trickle or what we call level one just plugging it into a standard plug it could take eight to ten hours which is not a big deal if you get home at six in the evening and go out the next day at six in the morning trickle is all you need. And most people will continue to charge mostly at home. But if you're out on the road and you're worried you're looking at that little meter on your on your car and it's getting lower and lower it's getting range anxiety exactly. It's good to know that without not a great deal of distance. And there are a lot of other level two chargers out there but in a lot of supermarkets or shopping centers or so forth. But very often for those there's a line because it takes an hour people you know take an hour or two to charge up. So a fast charger is fast and you can get enough to get home to your you know your dearly beloved home charger in a relatively small number of minutes. And you know we know that it's not going to be heavily used. The ones in town the ones at Ward for example are very heavily used. Sometimes there's even a line not too long a line but they are evil a we see people have to wait 10 or 15 minutes. But out at how I believe I think most people will not find a line but so they know they can always get a charge. It's like knowing that triple A is driving along right behind you when you run out of gas they're going to pay you up and move you on. It's just that kind of assurance and we've found that that's important to people. So that's our our mission is to get those fast chargers out where they can do the most good as part of our overall support for electrification transportation. This means I have two questions. Okay. If I kept talking can I get it done? Maybe you answered it you know inherently anyway but it sounds like one electric is building out a system which is going to you know deal with range anxiety and sort of connect the dots around Oahu anyway. Right. And you keep on you keep on adding these charging stations all over the place. But you know query two things. You know am I if I can finally have say a hundred mile range on my car. Say it's an older one. Yeah. Okay. Am I always going to be assured that there's one within my range. Maybe my effective range is even less than that. Is there going to be another one close enough so that I can go to hopscotch around the island and never worry about not finding. And I don't mean only your stations I mean all the stations and shopping centers wherever they are gas stations wherever they are. Is it are we up to that point now. I think we are at or very near the point that even the first generation of electric vehicles those leafs that are out there they were getting 80 or 90 miles. Even when they first arrived and we did the testing we had people were able to drive from the convention center out to the north shore and back without a recharge. But that last 20 or 30 minutes getting back to the convention center was kind of you know what happened the air conditioning isn't working here I'm sweating I'm sweating getting back to the to the place where the charger is and that's just not comfortable. So I think right now you could travel all around Oahu with the assurance that either one of our fast chargers or one of these level two chargers is always an access and you can find out where exactly they are with an app on our Hawaiian Electric app. I knew that. So with the Hawaiian Electric app you can you can find out where the fast chargers are and with another app a plug share it's called plugshare.com you can find out where the other accessible chargers are. And so I think you know anybody has an assurance on this island that they can get where they're going. On the big island we have chargers in Hilo we have chargers in Kona side we have a charger along the Saddler Road in in where the the grocery store is GTA whatever. Anyway KTA. That's right where the KTA is. So even on that you know heavily traveled course you're in pretty good shape. If you're going down to South Point yeah I think you have to be a little more concerned because we don't really have a fast charger down there and probably the number of regular chargers are kind of few and far between. Well it's encouraging I mean because it sounds to me like there's a plan so that you know in the next years no charging station will be further than x miles from the next one so I can always hopscotch around the state any island and my car will always work. That's encouraging. That's the goal I mean that's what you've got right now with gas stations of course and we have to replicate that for electric vehicles or people will always say well I don't quite I'm not quite sure. So we have to replicate that that seamless ability to always know you have enough enough fuel and you can get more fuel if you need it. Assuming this is not classified information when where's the next one going in and when. Well I can't tell you that because I don't know we've got we've got we always have two or three in the works and you know it it is we're negotiating with landowners and getting the permission these things are not you know casually quickly done unfortunately so you know we've got several in the works and I don't want to say this one is next when it turns out to be that one but you know I'll come back here to think tech when we do the next one you know that. Let me uh let me leave the floor to somebody who has something even more important than mine. I'm still glad I asked. Okay well thank you very much for that absolutely and now we're going to turn to Michael and Michael is a chemical engineer with a biochemical engineering background he wants to talk about climate change you know what the issues are and he has some unique solutions that he's going to tell us about so Michael all right or is yours. Let's just kind of think about the entire earth in the biosphere right that is the accumulation of biomes and ecosystems it's all biological life is in this biosphere that kind of goes there. There's many scientists and I agree with them that are starting to propose we're entering into historically a state shift in the biosphere. This is a state shift this is global this has got to be in geological times and historic change that we're starting to enter and it's being driven by climate change which is underneath it is global warming and greenhouse gases changing the temperature they have. What a lot of people I think kind of miss on climate change is it sounds like storm but that's that's only one part of climate change the bigger underlying more sinister problems of climate change is think of precipitation pattern we're going to have water falling in regions where it never fell before we're going to have regions that used to get water through snow and stuff no longer get it so regions that were water plentiful are going to become drought places that were fertile valleys or more desert orient are now going to get floods and if you really want to think about it when our current you know planet evolved with the stable climate system that we used to have where water fell people grew to live and build civilizations we water formed rivers and lakes and natural places and human civilizations evolved around it when that changes then the entire equation of where people live and how civilizations work changes it's a whole new dynamic and where the water now falls will not naturally be a natural catchment so we're not going to be able to collect but one of the things that's really pressing about climate change water I want to just kind of bring this into it water water water so I've been in a natural energy institute and I've been working in sort of the energy area for a long time and in the beginning when natural energy renewable energy came in it was all about let's replace fossil fuels which are the right that was the big word peak oil peak oil and the cost and and and why it was isolated and so I think we need to evolve where we think about energy derived from fossil fuels whereas it's not just about resource which is kind of why we fought world war two but it's now about the use is actually polluting the world right so we used to worry about emissions from biochemical plants because of acid rain we used to worry about flooding our rivers with raw sewage and we fixed it we have to think about energy use now it's not just about having access to energy for air conditioning for transportation for food production for food storage we have to realize now that we're polluting the planet with it and the level of pollution is is if you want to believe the 15,364 scientists that just wrote a second warning to humanity if you want to believe the United Nations report if you want to believe the 13 federal United States agencies that all put out reports 2018 that are giving extremely dire predictions this is a global issue and it is amounting to co2 emissions that comes from our use of fossil fuel so you have a question nope we're going to cut for a break okay one minute break so you've elucidated the problem very well and when we come back let's talk a little bit more about the problem but we have some really innovative ideas on how we can solve this so we will be back in one minute's time hello ha I'm Jane Sugimura our host here at think tech Hawaii a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii we provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii we are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going we'd be grateful if you'd go to think tech Hawaii calm and make a donation to support us now thank you so much Aloha my name is Mark Shklav I am the host of think tech Hawaii's law across the sea law across the sea is on think tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and hawaiiana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again aloha so we're back from our break and we're here with Michael Cooney from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute a chemical engineer and he's going to talk to more to us about global warming and what we can do about it so but before the break we're kind of talking about the problem and I hope I made a case that it's very severe and it is something that that humanity has to take care of so at H&I for a long time in my research originally I was working from renewable fuels from the biomass and you can't help but realize there's limitations to how much energy you get out of it there's also limitations to how much energy we're going to get from solar and wind there's just physical limitations there's thermodynamic so this idea that we're going to live as we do today with just bringing on renewables actually is not work and we had the added problem we actually have to begin by 2050 removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so I've evolved into thinking about how to do this how to bring in solutions that can work for society because in sustainability which is something I teach a lot of you have to get business involved you got to get culture involved you got to get the science involved they all don't agree we end up in this wars that we've seen between the Obama and the Trump administration where you know they're using executive orders to do something take it out so I've come across environmental management environmental management systems is a set of guidelines put out by the international standard of organizations and they also they are a historical organization in a Geneva that has come up with a lot of volunteer kind of procedures and guidelines for a lot of things including food safety and this kind of they've gotten very involved in the environmental they came up with an environmental management system based on their guidelines for management and the idea is companies and organizations can put into place an environmental management which is a set of rules procedures monitoring how to do internal audits how to give that information up to review board to execute new changes every year and you're trying to achieve some simple objective for the environment but my idea is to have our state government legislatures and governors get involved and start giving tax tax breaks or subsidies or whatever incentive you want to businesses to put in place environmental management systems get certified with the goal of reducing their carbon dioxide emissions the beauty to this approach is that environmental management systems are always tailored whatever that particular organization how they want to do it they make it up themselves it has to be certified I would like it to be certified because that has all the parts in it that make it certifiably good right and then that includes auditing to actually show that you're achieving your metrics all this state would have to do is just provide what they want the target and what they will give as an incentive and then you allow the private sector to do the certification and you allow companies to go out and decide for themselves how they want to reduce or how they want to contribute to the reduction in CO2 emission and as long as they put in a proper management system it kind of follows the guidelines and they get certified they're good to go and then it's a way to incentivize how people behave rather than beating them with consequences which they really don't like we basically played a greed and help them become more competitive by achieving what we need which is for them to reduce emissions of and the key is while they're doing it they're making money they're improving their bottom line absolutely without question which you have in in the united states economy in our capitalist society you have to let businesses pursue making money that's what they do right and so let them go down that path by doing the right thing which then helps everybody and it saves them money in the future because they're not going to lose business after all the other sorts of consequences so the scope is that pretty well everybody in this world has a job so how does that the trickle down so the business decides it wants to make money by you know meeting this environmental management plan requirement yeah and so then everybody's incentivized because a the company's going to make more money because it's a profit and if they're a good company they'll have profit sharing in their company so the employees get more money so like they're they get incentivized to do it i used to do this in one of my companies i ran i gave profit sharing every month and you would not believe how incentivize those guys were all of a sudden to cut out waste and abuse and guys sitting on their rear ends not doing any work get to work you know this is profit sharing now yeah so do you want to talk about that so i really agree i once had a wise boss tell me that uh this is at the university and it was a dean and he said um took me aside and he said and he laughed when he said it but he said i have absolute power now at the inside joke is at the university nobody really has power over anybody but he said i have absolute power because i can get all my faculty to do whatever they want to do whenever they want and then he left but it was a very subtle management technique because his trick was to get people to do what he wanted them but he let them believe what they wanted if you try to get people to do what you want whenever you want you get natural reasons so these environmental management system through incentivization you're getting people that want to do it and i really believe people are generally concerned about their but they don't know how to get involved so companies and organizations at all levels at all scales kind of start to do one they can be very simple they can be very complex you can start them out simple and you can improve them every year it's an easy buy-in once people start to do just one thing they like it once they get used to that one thing they'll want to do a second thing the idea is to start slow starts off to keep the incentives to keep going and then they'll become a critical mass where people start to realize it's a real problem but they're actually doing something about it they get excited about it you get competitive you know then we're going to start having the an olympics on carbon reduction yeah there you go and so it's a way to get people to do what you want them to do whenever they want to do it because they believe they're doing what they want to do when they want to do right that's that's what they want to do it yes and that's that's how we align okay so jay do you have any thoughts on that reminds me of tom soyer in the picket fence the white picket fence remember right you got it you got the other guy to paint the picket fence but no in terms of you know the practicality of this uh i mean i maybe i missed part of what you said but doesn't does the government have to do anything here is this all operate by itself because if the government has to do anything i have great concerns we haven't even gotten our act together on top 21 22 23 and 24 so we you know we're we're really not committed don't you think we should do that first as a national policy you know deal with the climate change you know agreement and organization well okay so first of all what the government has to do is basically put in place the incentive tax breaks they have to pass that legislation and they have to set the objective what they want how much they want a company to be reduced and that's it after that they're done just the government now with the government in 2020 well possibly the government in 2024 so in my opinion and this is just coming for me it is really time for everybody to stop thinking somebody else i believe the predictions that if we don't start removing co2 by 2050 in this my lifetime in my children's lifetime we will start to have die offs of two to three to four billion people i think we're hitting we're gonna go to war is war is actually common i don't think there's any excuse for anybody anymore to say no everybody's got to do it at the state level community level at the national level and if somebody doesn't start no one else is going to start so it's time to start finding ways to say yes rather than no no matter who you are and otherwise this is going to get this problem is going to become an avalanche that we can't stop it's that serious it is you imply that you imply that things will happen to accelerate the process you know we we see this as a threat that might be a little bit distant we can manage okay and somewhere down the road where we have kicked the can you know we'll we'll have a reckoning with that but i would i think what i hear you saying and certainly what i believe is that there are things we cannot exactly anticipate right now that would accelerate this to the point of you know having it happen at a surprise time a time that is much closer to the current time than we think right so i mean i think we could be in on the other hand one more point and i'll stop and that is maybe we need to be refreshed we need to raise our consciousness on this by having events like that you know we have all these weekly disturbances in weather and you know it's indicating clearly indicating we're in the middle of climate change and yet you know the government and for that matter of business government and many people media for example they don't connect it oh we're having a bad storm and whatever state it is nobody nobody says that's a climate change storm man don't you understand and it's going to happen again and again exactly so you know i think we're going to need a shock therapy that's my point i think it's your point too i think it's a good point to wrap up but i want to bring you back michael because we're out of time right now so thank you very much thank you for that and sharing your thoughts and we'll develop those further thanks for the pleasure hands across the table welcome back y'all yeah y'all so that that's our show for uh today and we'll be back in one week's time in hawaii the state of clean energy and big ideas