 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hey, hello, and welcome to Stanley Energy Man here on ThinkTek Hawaii. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and we're really glad to have you on today's show, and hope that you watch some of the other shows on ThinkTek. There's some really awesome stuff out there, and I do anyway. It's pretty cool. Lots going on in Hawaii and around the world, and as you know from last week, I had Ryan Woobins and Dave Malinero on the show covering for me because I was out and about, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about those travels. But to start off with, the big thing for HCAT, my organization, was we moved locations. We had been on the same location on Cook Street for about 25 years, and we just moved to a new location at 707 Richard Street. And so the first slide I got is making it official. We have our Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology 707 Richard Street 616. So if you've visited us before, that's the place you'll find us now. It's a really nice office space. We don't have our cool toys and stuff outside in the work bay like we did on the other location, but this is much more conducive to us doing our contracting work. The next slide I got is the bad news side. As most of you know, I ride my bike to ThinkTek here for the show, and what you're looking at is the crime scene of where my bike was parked before it was stolen. So I no longer have my bike, but the thieves were nice enough to leave me a couple feet of my chain and my lock after they took bolt cutters and cut my bike away. So whoever did this, you suck, and don't ever do it again. If I catch you, it'll be bad news for you. I'll show you what that chain is used for otherwise. But right now I'm hooping it around Honolulu, so that's not so good. The next slide I got is what I'm really kind of proud of. You know, I'm a state employee. We have state decals on all of our stuff, so we can't throw it away or get rid of it unless it's absolutely totally falling apart or useless. So this is my remodeled desk. I re-skinned it, and I put hydrogen H2 on the side before we moved in. So my desk is now beautiful and will last another 20 years, so I'm doing my part to save the state money, and there's proof of it. So thanks for going through the swap of this. If you happen to be in Honolulu or you happen to be downtown, you want to come visit us. We should have validated parking stickers next month. We don't have them this month, but we're slowly catching up and hopefully we can purchase those and come up to the 6-4 and visit us at our new digs. But anyway, next up, I was actually going to do on today's show just a review of all of the goings-on in the industry. The next slide is actually a website that I really think that anybody who's interested in hydrogen at all, any legislators, any business people who are interested in hydrogen equipment, or just investors who are looking at where to invest money. The Fuel Cell Energy Association puts out a great, great newsletter, and this is the first page of it. So you can go and look up the FCHEA connection online. And you can tell by that first headline, Port of a Los Angeles to receive $41 million for hydrogen fuel cell freight projects. There are projects like that going on all over the world, and we're going to talk about some of them today. But that website and one by the California Fuel Cell partnerships are just fantastic for really getting a feel for what's going on. So I'll capsulize what I saw in that latest newsletter from those folks. There were things going on in Norway, where they're going to take one of the remote islands that currently uses a coal-burning power production plant, and they're going to take down that coal plant, and they're going to start producing liquid hydrogen in mainland Norway off of the North Sea wind curtailed power when they have to curtail their wind power. They're going to make hydrogen. They're going to liquefy the hydrogen, and they're going to send it to this rather isolated island, much like Hawaii, which is, I think, a model that we might be able to pick up here in Hawaii. And they'll be providing fuel cells in place on that island, around the island, and doing distributed generation using gaseous hydrogen from the liquid hydrogen as they move it. And they've even designed a ship to move the hydrogen, and I have a photo of the ship coming up later on. There's new things happening in South Korea with big fuel cell plants being built. The Olympics coming up, both the Olympics that are going to be in Japan and South Korea, are going to feature hydrogen vehicles. There's projects going on in Hawaii and around the US that are including a lot more hydrogen buses now than we've ever had before in the systems. A lot of cities are testing them. And finding the real advantages, like the distances you can cover, and the extra power you get when you have hills and things like that, that are just a great, great advantage to hydrogen fuel cell power. Some of the other things were projects going on in California to do backup power for critical communications, cell phone towers in particular, and also large data centers that are switching to hydrogen fuel cell for backup power because it has a longer duration in case the outage goes longer than a couple minutes or an hour. The fuel cells can actually carry the load of these data centers until they have time to recover and store their data in permanent storage so that they don't get caught with basically losing all their data. There's just so much going on. And every day, I get a new email from an association or a company talking about what they're doing in hydrogen. Anyway, last week was a busy week for me, and that's why I had Dave and Ryan cover the show for me. And one of the things that I did was I went off to TARDEC, which is the Army's Tank and Vehicle Research Division for the United States Army. I went to a three-day conference in Detroit, Michigan. Actually, it was a two-day conference in Detroit, Michigan. It seemed long because it takes me a day to get there and a day to get home. But it's a two-day conference. The Department of Energy was there. All of the senior hydrogen folks at TARDEC were there. Some senior leaders from the Army Research Area were there. We had people from Nicola Motors. Nell, which is a big Norwegian electrolyzer company, and I'll talk a little bit about them, they had folks from private sector, small companies, large companies, and we were there to help the Army get their head around logistics related to hydrogen. The Army's made a commitment to at least really look hard at hydrogen energy storage right from the soldier level and how you power your radios and your night vision goggles and things all the way up to heavy equipment, like tanks and mechanized heavy equipment. And they're interested because they want to make sure that they are looking into the future and not stuck in the fossil fuel past. They want to make sure they're ready when the change comes because if you don't know anything about the DOD, I can tell you it's just like their aircraft carriers. You put in the controls to make it turn, and a couple days later, the thing will finally start moving. It takes a long time to get things through the Department of Defense. And the Army is smart enough, as we say in Hawaii, akamai enough, to lean forward and look to the future and say, we need to get started now if we want to really consider this technology in the future. They've assessed it. They like it. They know that in their remote controlled aerial vehicles or surveillance vehicles, whether they're hand launched by soldiers or whether they're a little bit bigger platforms, that the hydrogen is the way to go because of its high energy density. They get longer duration on their aviation vehicles. They get lighter storage when they give their soldiers and their infantrymen radios and things that run off of metal hydride storage. So we had great discussions with them on what are the differences or advantages and disadvantages of things like shipping liquid hydrogen and bulk to a central location, turning it into pressurized gaseous hydrogen for distribution, turning it into storage and metal hydride containers and shipping and putting it out there for distribution. Making the hydrogen on site, wherever you are with water and electricity, whether electricity comes from the grid, comes from portable PV units, whatever. The Army has even developed a steam reforming system that fits in a 20-foot ISO container, standard 20-foot shipping container, that takes the standard military fuel, which is called JP-8, and it can take the JP-8 steam reform it and give you hydrogen to run in your vehicles. And the Army's been testing a GM Colorado derivative as a tactical vehicle for the last year or so. And so far, all of the users that have driven it, seen it, and not heard it because it's silent, are just thrilled with it. And they interviewed some folks and put them on tape, and we got to see the interviews of the users after they had driven these vehicles. And most of them were scouts that are usually forward of the main contingent of military folks out there on their own, trying to sneak around and get intelligence and get ahead of the troops so they know what they're heading into. And those guys were just giddy when they saw how quiet and how well they could sneak around in a big vehicle. And oh, by the way, when the vehicle stopped, it also had exportable power to charge their radios, run their computers, run their radios for hours and hours and hours. And for those of you that don't use vehicles off-road, there's one really big drawback to internal combustion engines that probably very few people think about unless you live in a really dry climate. And that is if you take a vehicle, an internal combustion vehicle, out in the field and you park it in a field with tall grass and you leave the engine running while you're sitting in the air conditioning or talking on the telephone or something, you can actually start a pretty significant fire because internal combustion engine will get hot enough that it will actually ignite dry grass and things under your vehicle and you could actually start a forest fire or a field fire with the vehicle when it's stationary and you're running equipment off of that internal combustion engine. So these tactical vehicles that they're using with hydrogen, that's not a factor. They're silent as can be and the heat signature is very low, easy to conceal. So it's hard for anybody at night to pick up the vehicle even using thermal imagery because they can conceal the heat on a fuel cell vehicle much better than on a regular internal combustion vehicle. So great meetings with the Army. The industry folks were terrific. The folks from Nell and from Nicola Motors talked about large scale vehicles, trucks and large scale production of hydrogen using electrolysis and that was really exciting. If you haven't seen Nicola Motors, we've had Mr. Trevor Milton the CEO of Nicola Motors on this show twice and if you haven't looked them up online, I suggest you check them out. They've got some just beautiful trucks. They've already built prototypes. One of the announcements in the newsletters this week is in April they're gonna roll out their first production models or pre-production models with the tooling and everything they're gonna go into production with and distribute the first few vehicles to a handful of users to put into operations to really run them through their paces, make some last minute corrections before they go into full production and these folks at Nicola Motors are not only making the vehicles, they're making the infrastructure to fuel the vehicles and they're committed the infrastructure to be all clean. In other words, running off of footable tech and wind power or hydroelectric or geothermal as to the max extent possible. Now the company Nell that I mentioned, they're the ones that make the electrolyzers and they've actually purchased a company that was called Proton Onsite. Now Proton Onsite makes all the electrolyzers. We happen to be using here in Hawaii with the exception of our small millennium rain units but all the large scale electrolyzers are PEM electrolyzers built by Proton Onsite. Now it's Nell. Well Nell has been making electrolyzers since World War II. Basically they have an entire buildings that are making hydrogen and they've been running for 50 years now. I mean the equipment still works. It's old, it's not as efficient, it's not as good so they don't use it anymore but it could be working. But the new equipment that they make is fantastic and they've scaled up. It's just doing awesome, awesome stuff and they wanna bring it to America, that technology to America at large scale in conjunction with Nicola Motors. So look them up, look up Nell and start looking at what they've got. It's really great stuff. We're gonna take a quick break now and when we come back I'm gonna talk about the rest of my week last week where I visited the Big Island and talk about some of the neat things coming up in the maritime world. Hello and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly. Today we are playing two truths and a lie and I will tell you two truths and you will tell me which one is the lie. Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly with Out of the Comfort Zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. Aloha, I'm Marsha Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000 year artisty where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all of the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us, Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour. So it was a really, really, really busy week last week. I left on Sunday night around seven, got to Detroit on Monday, went through the two-day conference, left the conference straight to the airport, left the conference around noon, went straight to the airport, took two flights, one left me in Chicago and then into San Francisco then home. I was home by 10 o'clock that night. So it was a pretty big whirlwind tour for a short two-day conference. So I was at work one day and then the next day I flew to Kona, got up at 4.30 in the morning to fly to Kona. To participate in the, it was build, build and buy Green Hawaii Conference. I had to look at my notes to make sure I got that right. It was a great get together with local sustainable wise building council on the Big Island Sector Statewide Organization. And they were focusing the Big Island on this trip. So we went with them to the Big Island and we visited several locations. So the first slide I have is I was really, really happy to see this. This is at our first stop, which was the Visitor Center at Nelha, the Natural Energy Laboratory for Hawaii, just outside the Kona Airport property. And I didn't ever see this before and I've been there several times. So I took a picture of it, but they have a really terrific graphic and it's not just a poster, it's actually a lightboard with the backlit graphics that talks about the entire electrolysis process and the fuel cell process and vehicles and even using hydrogen and spacecraft. And it talks a lot about hydrogen. I was so happy to see that. But if you ever get to Nelha, go to their Visitor Center. It's open to the public, I believe, almost every day. And you can go in and see all the displays of all the renewable. They have solar cooking and everything in there. And it's a great way to start a renewable energy visit. The next place we went, and I don't think this is on a slide, so this is the third place we went. But the second place we went was right near the Nelha entrance. It was the West Hawaii Exploration Academy. Now that's a charter school and it's the only high school campus in the U.S. and probably the world that has a shark tank in the middle of it. They actually have a, it looked like about a maybe 20 by 40 foot shark tank, nice and round, not square, with two black tiff reef sharks in there. And the spillway that empties that water out goes into what they call a touch tank where the students from the school showed us some marine life that grows on the reefs, starfish, and things like that, sea urchins, and told us visitors all about those sea creatures. So the school is basically set up and their motto is no child left inside. So they took us around and showed us stuff that the kids were working on, projects they were working on. And the kids were amazing. They really, really understood the technology. They really understood the equipment they were working with and the goals and objectives of the projects they were working on. Overall, the facility, and the reason we went was to see the facility. It's a basically, I don't wanna say net zero, but very close to net zero setup where buildings are cooled naturally and Kona can get pretty darn hot. It's just set up to reuse water when possible to one of the cool things I saw was they were growing some strawberries in separate containers with different conditions. They were using the super chilled ocean water that they get at Nelha from the deep water and they were condensing water from the air to water the strawberries. So I'm scratching my head going, I think I salt water running through a black tube. When the black tube heats up, it condenses moisture on the outside from the air and the water from the moisture on the tubes drips down and waters the strawberries with fresh water. I'm like, that's amazing. And then they found out that plants that grow in different colder climates, the soil temperature tells them when to go into bloom, to fruit and things like that. And they found that colder climates and warmer climates as you change the soil temperature can drive the cycle of the plants to produce fruit or things like that. So one of the other things you use cold ocean water for was to put cold water through the soil in tubes as a heat exchanger thing in the soil. And sure enough, the plants that were chilled and warmed and chilled and warmed show the cycles. So it was an amazing, amazing place. The next place we went the next day was, we had some briefings and this next shot is one of the things that greeted us the next slide that we could get up. It was a whole little flock of nanny goose and those of you that don't live in Hawaii, the nanny is a state bird. And it looks like a Canadian goose but it's a little bit smaller. I'd say maybe 15 or 20% smaller. But they're really rare. They're making a comeback in the environment but it's really special to see these things out here. But this location was the Kanuokaena Leadership Center, or Learning Ohana Center. And it's a location that also, the buildings are all sustainable. And they had some really interesting concepts of how they did their sustainability. You know, those of you that are familiar with the LEED certification process for buildings, the LEED certification is a scoring system that tells you how efficient and ecologically friendly you were building your building. It takes into account recycling old materials, how efficient your air conditioning and heating is, things like that, your lighting, your insulation, your use of natural elements. So they did their first building under LEED certification. And what they found was it was a little costly to actually do the LEED certification. So the rest of their buildings, they didn't use LEEDs, they just used all the techniques they learned using LEEDs to build their buildings. And they had some really, really efficient, really great buildings. And again, the school was amazing. I just wonder why I had to go through the schools that I went through when I could have probably been at these kind of schools where I would, I guarantee I would have really, you know, flowered and bloomed differently in terms of creativity if I'd gone to the schools that I saw in the Big Island. The next place that the team visited was Monana Christian Church in Waimea. And it was actually at a community center, but the folks from the church hosted us there for lunch. And we had some guest speakers from HUD, and we talked about agriculture and sustainable agriculture and some of the funding available and some of the things that some of the struggles are having with farmers in terms of getting sustainable housing for the workers on the farm, getting past zoning issues with the county and the right size buildings because a lot of the folks on the Big Island live in Hilo or Kona, but the farms are up in Waimea or other places, and it's a long commute every day. But if the folks could live at the farm for the five days during the week and go home on weekends, that would be perfect. So we all kind of did a brainstorming session and try to help them come up with creative solutions for that. Next, the group went to Hawaii Pacific, Hawaii Preparatory Academy, and I've been there several times. So I didn't actually attend that part of the visit, but they have a wonderful campus up there in Waimea. It's one of the best private schools in the United States. And the things they teach up there is just amazing. They don't just do robotics. They do robotics with sensor controls on your head. So you just think about where you want the robot to go and it goes that way. That's the level that the school's at in terms of their science and technology programs. It's a great campus. Again, the folks went to visit the sustainable buildings up there. And then after that, we went to visit one of my favorite places and that was Blue Planet Research up in Poovava. And Paul Pontia did an outstanding job with a great video presentation. And then we took everybody down to his laboratory and he finished his tour at the laboratory. And he left me with the hydrogen, the folks that really wanted to know about hydrogen, he left me with them at the electrolyzer and I got to spend another 15 or 20 minutes dedicated to just talking hydrogen to those folks. So thanks to the folks who put on that great program. It was a good experience for me. I learned a lot. I learned a lot about things. Oh, we also went to the University of Hawaii, Paloma Nui campus. Again, looking at the buildings and got a great meal from the culinary folks over there. So thanks to everyone that hosted us on the Big Island and all the folks from the architect firms and the project managers that include us in on how to do great sustainable buildings. Now I want to get into some of the other stuff. On the title of the show, I talked about and I talked a little bit about the Army projects that are going on. But what's really amazing to me is we really feel like we've turned the corner in Hawaii when we start talking to Maritime. So the first slide I have on this section is a project we did with Sandia National Labs. That was actually their project, Sandia Labs Project and Young Brothers, they put together, excuse me, what we call a stationary fuel cell inside a container. And this fuel cell container was designed to power 10 refrigerated containers on a Young Brothers barge. So Sandia Labs designed it. Hydrogenics contributed some of the technical skills and they put it together. They brought it to Hawaii. It was kind of challenging trying to get hydrogen to it because they couldn't get the permits from the Department of Transportation for the fueling at the harbor. So we came up, HKAT came up and said, you can refuel at Hickam at our station. So what they did was they just put the whole unit, the whole 20 foot container on a trailer and they would drive the whole thing to Hickam and we would refuel it. And we learned a lot from this program. We learned because most of our vehicles are only maybe 10 kilograms or cars are only five kilograms is the most, four or five. This container needed 75 kilograms of hydrogen compressed at 5,000 PSI. We thought that might take up to an hour to fill those containers. It took 18 minutes. So we really got a chance to test our systems and learn what the capacity was of our equipment in a way that we never would have done if we hadn't had played in that program. The next slide we have coming up are some of the ships. I'm gonna run through these pretty quick. These are things that are actually in the works. This is a hydrogen fuel cell ferry that's been commissioned to be built in San Francisco and they're gonna run it, hydrogen fuel cell. Next slide is, I love this one. This is a liquid hydrogen tanker and that's the one that's tied to that Norwegian project I told you about where they're gonna make liquid hydrogen from the curtailed wind and then bring it over to that island and distribute it into their grid system to make electricity completely off of the stored energy and hydrogen. The last image that I have here is we were on a conference call, HKAT was on a conference call with a former professor at Sandia National Labs and a researcher. This is a research vessel that's been commissioned or being commissioned by the University of California. And you can tell by the two tanks in the back, it's a liquid hydrogen powered trimer and research vessel. And we were on a briefing with them. This is just a concept. They haven't actually let a contract to build this. They estimate that the vessel will cost about $80 million and that's mostly because it is a research vessel. It's got laboratories inside. It's got very special power equipment requirements but it's got room for a bunch of researchers, the crew and everything else. And like I say, it was a really, really, really busy week last week and that's how it is in my office all the time now. And I'm glad I could share some of it with you. So at any rate, until next week and I've got some great guests coming up in the month of October and believe it or not, we're three quarters of the way through the year. So we'll have some great guests for you in October and I look forward to seeing you next week on Stand Energy Man. Thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studio and we'll see you next week. Aloha.