 ThinkTec Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hey, hello, and welcome to Standing Energy Man here on ThinkTec Hawaii, where community matters. We got a great show lined up for today. We're going to do some catch up. But before we get to our guests, I want to talk to you a little bit about some things going on locally. Last night, we did an all hydrogen powered event, which was a Gala fundraiser for Center for Tomorrow's leaders, all powered by hydrogen. And it was a great event. So thanks to Katie for inviting us out and giving us a challenge of running an event that we thought would take 5,000 watts and took 10,000 watts. So it was pretty challenging pulling it all together, but we did it. Right now, I'd like to show you a quick video that was also a highlight of this week. It was produced by Hyperspective here in Honolulu. And it won second place in the local animation professional advertisers awards. So Robert, if you could roll that video. The simplest element and also the most abundant hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe. So it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure and they're limited. Hydrogen on the other hand is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat and electricity. Easily transported, hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades. Hydrogen powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. What is a proven, safe, clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide? Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. Hey, and I love that video. So congratulations again to the folks of Hyperspective for winning the Pelley Award second place in the animation division. And we'll be showing that video some more. In fact, I've sent it out pretty broad and wide around the world because I think it's a great video to introduce folks to hydrogen. But today it's time for me to introduce my guest for today, Turmer Melton from Nicola Motors. And we talked to him, I think about seven, eight months ago, and got an introduction to what he's doing. And we in our shop think he's doing a regular rocket launch and moon launch here. But boy, when he takes off, I'm looking so forward to seeing his products out there. So Trevor, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I really appreciate you coming on this time. I know how busy you are. And I see you in the news all the time. And I'm really excited about what I see. So welcome back to the show. And we're looking for an update. So just hit it. Yeah, thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Well, thanks for having me on. We've had a lot of fun. The last year we spent primarily focusing on ensuring all the components on the semi-truck are ready for production and testing with fleet. So for the public that knows about Nicola Motor Company, we've designed the first ever hydrogen electric semi-truck that can outperform the diesel in every category and weighs less than the diesel and operates at about 30% less than the diesel also. So that truck will be finalized near the end of this year and it'll be unveiled next year in January to the world. And at that point, it goes out with fleets for testing 25 vehicles with different fleets around the country being tested full time. And really some really fun stuff being able to see that truck completely done. Is it going to look a lot like your initial model that you rolled out last year? No, it's changed quite a bit. I mean, it's still very aerodynamic, but it's a lot more aggressive looking. If you look at the old, the very first truck we ever built, it looked very similar to a bullet train, very soft lines, very rounded. The new one has got more aggressive lines, a lot more lines in the vehicle itself. But still the same type of aerodynamic shape, but it's a lot shorter too. We've shortened up the production vehicle by almost four feet. So we have a 210 wheelbase compared to like a 230, 240 on the old one. Okay, so you're more your drainage truck as it got those kind of lines, the shorter? Yeah, exactly. It's actually exactly like the day cap that you see online. Great. So the day cap will be both a day cap and a sleeper. That design will be the exact same design we use in both trucks. Okay, we threw that image up there so the folks got to see that on the screen while you were talking. But that's awesome. I like the lines in that thing. It looks really nice. I think you've done some great work there. Yeah, it's gonna be a lot of fun on building it in January. And that's not just a prototype out there built. It's actually a pre-production unit ready to be finalized into full production for 2021. So we're about five to seven years ahead of our competitors right now. Outstanding. And your infrastructure pieces, I know you were working hard to set up nationwide infrastructure for these things because they go like 1,200 miles, right, between top-offs on 100 kilograms. They can in peak, you know, in kind of a perfect scenario. So most of the time they'll get about 500 to 800 miles on a Philippa hydrogen. And that'll give you a lot of stations pretty much every 450 miles throughout the country. We have, we already have two of the stations ordered right now that go up this year. We've got 18 more next year and we've got over 700 going up over the next eight years. Outstanding. So the stations will cover the entire continental U.S. and Canada and allow you to pretty much handle, you know, being able to drive a truck anywhere you want in any direction. Are you looking and making the hydrogen in those stations available for like Toyota and Hyundai and smaller vehicles or is it going to be strictly? Yeah. Yeah. Anyone can fill up at them. Yep. Anyone can fill up at them. Terrific. And so what's the total number of stations you're looking at again at the end game? At least this first one. We've got 700 stations. So we'll have over eight years, we'll have about 700 go ups. We've got a lot of stations going up every year. Great. So what are some of the new improvements in your new design besides the lines? What are some of the other things you can talk about? Yeah. I mean, we shortened it up by about four feet. That was a big monumental task. We lowered the center of gravity down lower. We've made improvements on the drivetrain efficiency. We've made the interior of the cab more spacious for the driver. We added 14 inches more of elbow room. We added camera mirrors. We went to full screen displays. Primarily, the entire truck took a makeover from the ground up. So everything that's on the old truck has been replaced with new. Wow. And so you say January, you'll start rolling these things out. Where is the first market going to be? What are some of the companies that are looking to use this thing right off the bat? So you'll see that come out May 3rd. We have a big announcement on May 3rd. One of the most respected brands in America is going to announce that they're converting every truck over to Nikola only. And that's the first time it's ever been done. So they ship hundreds of millions of miles a year. These guys know shipping better than anybody. And every one of their trucks is going to be converted to Nikola away from diesels and away from other vehicles. So this is a kind of a big statement. Ultimately, there's a rush to see who is the leader in trucking zero emission. And Nikola is certainly the Super Bowl champ right now for sure. Are any of those 700 stations in the state of Hawaii? No, they're not. Come on, buddy. No, we hope. Oh, you mean the 700. I'm sorry. I think I'm talking about the first batch. Yeah, I'm sure we'll have a couple out there. Ultimately, it kind of comes down to the fleets and how many trucks they have and what the political stance is. If you get the right people out there that are willing to push it and want to move to trucks, and zero emission, we're happy to come out and help. We haven't seen a lot of traction from trucking groups out in Hawaii. But if they want to move to zero emission, we're certainly willing to help them. We don't have much of a market for your long haul trucks, but for your drage trucks. That's all we use here. Short beds because we haul a lot of 40-foot containers all around the state on all islands. The big island has some long runs. It's probably 100 miles between Kona and Hilo, roughly, up a big mountain and down the other side. Your stuff would definitely be plug-in electric hands down and would be a lot cleaner than the diesel stuff we're using now. I don't know if you're aware of that. Go ahead. We're all for it. Ultimately, it comes down to the fleets. If we'd seen a call to say, hey, we want these trucks, because right now we've got over $9 billion in pre-orders. Go ahead. What? Are you going to be in any of the shows that any of our trucking companies would show up at on the mainland there? I know they go to those big... In 2019, we will be. Remember, we unveiled the truck in January, the production truck. In 2019, we'll have it all over the country. You'll see it everywhere next year. Great. That's exciting. That's exciting stuff. I know you get out here to Hawaii once in a while. When's your next trip out this way? I don't know. My dad has a house out in Haiku, over on Maui, and I certainly love to come spend time there. I haven't been there for about a year and a half, so I need to get out there for sure. Ultimately, we have that off-road UTV that's really fun. I think we're going to try to bring one over to the Hawaii Islands and go drive it around. I'll try to get over there sometime this year, for sure. We just put your ATV up on the screen, and that's a mean-looking machine. We're looking forward to seeing that, and that would do great on Maui. Yeah, it would be fun. The Big Island has a lot of... Yeah, all zero emissions, fun, waterproof, it's a blast, so hopefully we can get it over there and people can start renting those instead of those gas guzzles and jeeps and mustangs. If you look at the Big Island, there's already hydrogen over there at Blue Planet, and then the University of Hawaii is opening a station over there this summer, so there's two sources of hydrogen on the Big Island already if you want to run one over there. We're still working on Maui. Yeah. Good. We got a lot of work to do. We've got to hit the whole country as fast as we can, so we'll see where we can... How quick we can get out there. All right, sure. We're going to take a quick break here and go and show some of the other shows on Think Tech, and we'll be back with Trevor in about 60 seconds. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate, empower, and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Aloha. I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on ThinkTechHawaii.com, 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons, and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up, and please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Standard Energy Man on my lunch hour with Trevor Milton from Nicola Motors. We just spent the first 15 minutes talking about some of the new models that they're going to go into production next year, and he's going to roll out for public display starting in January. This is really exciting. In fact, I hate to be a downer on your vehicles, but I'm more excited about your infrastructure plans than the vehicles, and you got some awesome vehicles, so that says a lot about your infrastructure. But let's talk a little bit more about what your, the technical side of your vehicles. A lot of folks don't realize why it makes sense to use hydrogen versus batteries when you start to talk big trucks and big buses and things, and right now we have a lot of folks over here that are sold on battery power and they think it's great and they want to put batteries in all their buses, but I tell them that when it comes to energy by weight, you can't beat hydrogen, and when it comes to transportation, weight, you know, counts for a lot of stuff. So Trevor, give us an idea of why you picked hydrogen in your designs for your trucks. Yeah, I mean the first thing to know about NICO as we actually build both vehicles, we build battery electric and hydrogen electric with batteries, so we're not, you know, we don't really care which way people want to go, we'll just give you the straight facts on it. When it comes to hydrogen, when it comes to towing loads, that's where hydrogen really makes sense. The battery electric is very good when you're not towing loads. That allows you to kind of go a couple hundred miles, you know, busing people around is very good. If you get into the heavy hauling of load, you know, where you have a trailer behind your vehicle, there's a lot of advantages with hydrogen. One is we weigh a lot less weight, so if you were to compare our truck with a, say, the Tesla semi-truck, we'll weigh between six and ten thousand pounds lighter than their truck. If you look at the refill time, we can refill in about 15, 20 minutes where it takes anywhere from two to five hours on a very expensive charger to charge a vehicle without much energy in it. It's also easier to produce hydrogen at a cheaper rate because of renewable sources than it is through storing in batteries, only to put it back into another vehicle with batteries. So, you know, we're not, we don't really care which way people go because we sell both types of vehicles, but ultimately when it comes to heavy heavy loads, hauling trailers, hydrogen certainly a much better solution, cheaper solution, lighter solution, and it's, you know, it just turns out to be a better packaging solution also. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that you're kind of agnostic about whether it's battery or hydrogen because it's really more focused on the purpose, on the distance and the terrain and things like that than just straight, what do you like better batteries or hydrogen. So, if you have short range. Yeah, well, one size doesn't fit all. That's the thing you remember. One size does not fit all, and you'll never have one product that'll fix every problem. It's a blend of technologies to fix everything. And the hydrogen vehicles all have batteries in them anyway. They're going to all have batteries. They do. Yeah, one of the things that, in fact, we had a visitor come in the shop this week and we were talking about the worldwide stores or availability of things like lithium and it's actually fairly limited. So, rather than trying to load up vehicles with just lithium batteries, probably better to spread those lithium batteries over a lot of vehicles and couple it with hydrogen. But this guy pointed out to me, and he apparently does a lot of study, that cobalt's even rarer than lithium. And the current lithium batteries require cobalt. So, you know, we kind of need to make those materials go as far as we can. And I would say that using the hydrogen would help in that part, too. Well, how about some of your... Yeah, hydrogen's the only element that's completely renewable. So, ultimately, the only thing you have is carbon fiber tanks that you can recycle. And you have unlimited hydrogen indefinitely for thousands of years where you're not using up the Earth's materials to support it. So, that's the advantage of hydrogen is it just doesn't... It doesn't take any rare Earth materials really other than a little bit of platinum and you can recycle that. So, you can run off a million of years off of hydrogen and never run out of resources. Yeah, and I think that's another important factor. You know, when people start to just look at the technologies, they're very short-sighted. The recyclability of components is important. The toxicity of end-state materials is important. The hazardous, you know, mining lithium is not exactly a clean sport and that factor has to be taken into account. We have to take in the cradle-to-grave aspect of all these technologies, how long they last, how much can be recycled, basically address the sustainability piece. And hydrogen certainly has an edge on sustainability. Yep. So, the components in your truck, do you have subcontractors making things like the fuel cell or are you guys doing all that in-house? So, we own all the intellectual property behind every major component on the truck. So, the fuel cell, the battery, the e-axle, the controls, things like that. But what we do is we sub it out to groups to commercialize it. So, we don't want to be in trying to commercialize every component ourselves. So, for instance, like the e-axle and the fuel cell will come from Robert Bosch, one of the biggest companies in the world. It comes to the suspension that'll come from Meritor. And stability control will come from WAPCO. And these are all things that ultimately we're... We don't want to do it ourselves. We don't want to do everything ourselves. So, we design it, we engineer it, we own it, and we send it out to groups to help us commercialize it. Okay. And for all the gear heads in the audience, give us some idea about power, torque, and those kind of things. Yeah. So, a normal diesel truck is about 400 horsepower, times 450, that's a pretty high-end diesel. Some of them are even down to 350. So, the Nikola semi-truck is over 1,000 horsepower. But what we have to do is we have to tune it down because it has so much horsepower, you just can't use it all. So, it has over 1,000 horsepower. It has more torque than a diesel. It can accelerate from zero to 60 with a full load, about four to five times faster than a diesel. Once again, no one's really concerned about acceleration speeds. So, it's all about safety. Ultimately, electric motors are just much more safe than diesels are. You can control the slippage, the stability, the control, the analog braking, the braking power within milliseconds, whereas a diesel takes sometimes up to a full second to even change what's going on with the drivetrain. So, these are things that are more advantageous with electric. And you don't have a traditional transmission in this. What kind of transmission or transaxle technology is in an electric drivetrain? Yeah, it's just an electric motor. And then how you couple it to a gear reduction doesn't really matter. So, with ours, we have an electric motor for every wheel. It's sitting in the middle of the frame and it has two half shafts, one to each wheel with two motors. So, we have two motors, two gear reductions, and two half shafts for every set of wheels. So, we have what we call true independent torque vectoring or wheel control, because every wheel is driven independently by its own motor. So, that's the advantage of electric motors is you can control every wheel individually. So, there is no transmission, but there is a single gear reduction. Okay, so the driver's not shifting gears all the time. I mean, we hear the drivers over here pull out of a stop sign and they're going through five or six gears by the time they're up to 25 miles an hour. So, this is totally different concept for your drivers now. Yeah, yeah, you don't have any of that. It's just a pedal, just zero to full speed on one gear. We do have something out here in Hawaii. I think we're nearly one of the first states to have it. One of our landfill folks has an electric D7 caterpillar bulldozer. And the reason he likes the electric transaxle, the electric drivetrain is not only that his guys aren't shifting all the time, but his maintenance costs go down and there's less wear and tear on the equipment because the diesel operators like to leave it in one gear and not shift and it tends to tear the transmission up. So, he's finding a lot of maintenance advantages to this electric, plus he's using a D7 where he used to use a D9, which is a bigger piece of equipment. So, that sounds like you're experiencing the same kind of revelations. Yep, yeah, all the same similarities. I mean, ultimately electric drivetrains have very little maintenance, if any, compared to any other vehicle. So, they're better across the board. That's certain, whether you go electric or hydrogen electric, it really doesn't matter. Just hydrogen electric gives you a little bit better advantages with weight and range and fill-up times. You know, battery only gives you advantages also to get the same performance is just on a limited range. Okay. Regenerative braking, is that just on the truck itself or do you envision the trailers actually having regenerative braking as well? No, I think most of them will have them in the long run, but trailers are always used separately from the trucks. So, a little harder to make sure they combine together, but as trailers get smarter and smarter and as technology is solidified, then people will begin to make trailers that are compatible with the regenerative braking as well. Okay. Yeah, that's always been a big factor for us when you factor in the regenerative braking for the battery packs. That helps a lot, especially in hilly terrain like we have here. The buses really... You can use a lot of battery power up going up a hill, and coming down that hill gives you a lot back. So, we really appreciate that. Yep. Okay, so the drivetrain is different. We've got regenerative braking. That's something that most people aren't used to. Any other factors in the hydrogen and electric drivetrain that you're finding the customers or potential customers are really liking? I mean, it really just comes down to having a vehicle that's nearly silent, having a vehicle that's zeroing mission, getting rid of all the pollution, getting rid of all the noise. It's very quiet. Hydrogen's a very good advantage because you can create it over a 24-hour period. You can take energy off the windmills. You can take energy off the solar. You can take energy off the waves. And you can create hydrogen whenever it's good. And you don't need to worry about storing it because the hydrogen is... Essentially, in one kilogram, hydrogen has 35 usable kilowatt hours. So, if you think about a Tesla car, their 100 model, which is their high-end model, three kilograms of hydrogen has more energy than that car has. So, it's all about being able to store a massive amount of energy in a very small space, and that's what hydrogen gives you. So... Yeah, I tell folks that the number of the sticks in my head, I have a little battery efficiency chart. And it shows, like, lead acid batteries are 52 amp-hours per kilogram. Most lithium batteries are in the 400 to 600 amp-hours per kilogram. If you're into hazardous material, hydrazine gives you, like, 2,000 to 2,500 amp-hours per kilogram, and hydrogen fuel cells are 26,000 amp-hours per kilogram. So, by weight, it's hard to be hydrogen for energy efficiency. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. When we're talking about batteries, I just flashed back, I wanted to ask you this. One of the things that people tend to overlook when they're looking at battery infrastructure is the charging stations. Now, for a big truck like yours, if it's a battery truck and you guys have the experience in this, what kind of facility upgrades does the average place need to have in terms of adding a transformer or things like that just to accommodate the charger for a big vehicle like this? You did mention it was more expensive to, you know, the infrastructure was more expensive for charging than most people anticipate, but give us some idea of what the magnitude is on that. Yeah, so in order to charge a semi-truck like ours, like a Tesla truck, it would cost you about $500,000 for one charger that would charge in three hours. If you wanted to charge in one and a half hours, it would cost you a million dollars. So ultimately, you got an enormous amount of money just for one charger, and then you're going to need, you know, tons of those for a fleet of trucks. So it's pretty expensive. It's very, very expensive. It's about 100 grand per 100 kilowatts for a charger, and that includes your install and your hardware. So they're pretty pricey. That's one thing people don't realize is when you go buy it, you know, when you go buy an electric vehicle, at least on a car, it's pretty cheap, 600, 800 bucks for a charger. But when you get into a truck, you have to take that in times of buy 100 or 1,000. So it's, I mean, it's just very, very expensive. It's very, very pricey. Yeah, that's part of that cradle to grave and totally burning cost I talked about. You know, we're used to just buying the car and then buying the gas, but when you're buying the gas station and the gas production, you know, and basically in electricity, you're talking about a pretty steep investment for charging. And then the time-wise, you know, if the trucks are making money being on the road 24 hours with multiple drivers and people like doing the pony express thing rather than a sole driver doing it all himself, hey, you want those vehicles on the road, they're making money and you can do that with hydrogen instead of stopping and plugging in a vehicle for two to four to six hours. So I know that's another factor. Yeah, hydrogen stations are ultimately, what we try to tell people is it costs us about, you know, right around about 100 grand a truck to build a hydrogen station and cost about 500 grand a truck to build a charging network. So it's about one fifth of cost to build a hydrogen network compared to a charging network for trucks. Yeah. Anyway, we're down to our last minute, Trevor. And what I'd like to do is just leave it with you to spend the last minute telling the entire world on stand-lander demand what you're looking forward to and what's exciting for you in the next year or so. Yeah, look, I just think it's about, you know, really changing life. I mean, how fun is it that we get it, and we get to get rid of all these oil companies and those diesel fuel and the pollutions and money just being, you know, hundreds of billions being thrown into the oil company's pocket. Time to change that. Time to keep that money local. And you know, I love that. That's what's so great about hydrogen is all the money stays local. So time to keep it local. Time to, you know, build hydrogen network out. Time to get these trucks out there. Get rid of all the pollution. Make the health benefits better. Get the, you know, it's just all around a better, you know, a very fun future for all of us and the technology is there now. So over the next two to three years, you'll start to see these popping up everywhere. Well, we'll do our part over here. We'll get the HCAT folks out beating the bushes and we'll sell some trucks here on Oahu and we'll sell some of your ATVs out on Maui in the Big Island for you because they sure got a boatload of them over there and they're pretty cool looking too. So, Trevor, I want to thank you again so much. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for being with us. And we'll catch up to you another six months and do this again, all right? No problem. Sounds good. Thank you so much. See you. Bye-bye. Best of luck, Trevor. Bye-bye. Well, that's going to wrap it up for Stan Energy Man today and we'll see you next Friday here on Think Tech, Hawaii where community matters and thanks to Sydney and Robert here in the station for making it all a magic happen. Trust me, it's like a moonshot every Friday when we do this stuff. Aloha.