 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here, commonly live from Honolulu on another beautiful Friday in Honolulu. Thanks for joining us here at Think Tech Hawaii, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and our show's going to be a little bit different today. All my shows aren't a little bit different but today we're going to focus on hydrogen co-figure, like my favorite subject, but we're going to talk about it in a little bit different terms because one of the things that struck me recently is that everybody's in a hurry, everybody's in a hurry for climate change, we seem to react to crisis and I spent probably 40 years of my life doing crisis management and I can tell you that we're really good at it but it's a lousy way to do business and what we really should be doing is critical analysis and critical thinking and good, solid planning and so when people ask me how come hydrogen isn't already ubiquitous, how come we're not all driving hydrogen cars already, how come we don't have hydrogen infrastructure, I go just be patient, it's coming because it's coming faster than most people think but it's not going to hit you right in the face where you see it and all of a sudden it's here, you just got to take your time and plan. And the example I like to use is a few years ago we were all encouraged to be a little bit more frugal with our power and be efficient with our power at home and one of the things they told us is we got these compact fluorescent light bulbs, CFLs, they're the greatest thing, they're really efficient, they use a lot less electricity, they last forever just like the long tubulars, fluorescent lights, they're great, we got to do it, they were subsidized, the government got involved, people were advertising it, a lot of the green hugger, tree hugger folks were all wrapped around it, they're full of mercury and we're throwing them in the landfill one after another now, you know 5, 10, 12 years later, they didn't last, they don't last as long as the long tubular fluorescent bulbs, I've run through a bunch of them in my house already and it's like, they end up in the landfill and that mercury is back in the water aquifers and just so we didn't want to happen, so why didn't we think about that and some of the greatest, you know, environmental folks in the world were looking at it and encouraging it along with everybody else and it's like, why do we do that, why don't we think through this thing some more, I can tell you that my guests and I today have thought a lot about hydrogen and we've been talking about it for years and we've really come to the conclusion that hydrogen is the right answer, but we'll weave them into the discussion, but I guess today is Mr. Dave Rolf from the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association, former extraordinary fighter pilot, so we talk with our hands a lot, do this stuff, I don't wear my watch anymore because it got shot down but Dave and I have really gotten into hydrogen and he did some touring around this week to visit the hydrogen facilities in the circle and he had a real busy week coming up to last weekend where he was putting together the Hawaii Auto Dealers, Hawaii Auto Show with First Swine Bank, right, they sponsored it again, so Dave welcome to the show, thanks for being here, thank you Stan, well tell us what kept you busy last week with the auto show and what struck you as being unique or different about it this year? Sure, thanks Stan, thanks for having me here and thanks to ThinkTick viewers too, this year the auto show was just an amazing thing, different than all the other ones we've had in the past, there's 20 of them, Motor Trend helps to put this show together for us and they do 20 shows across the country, but our show has the, here in Hawaii, it's the First Hawaiian International Auto Show sponsored by First Hawaiian Bank, it's unique in that it has the highest density crowd of any of the 20 shows, more people per square foot per hour, so a lot of people come down to see what's being introduced in the automotive sector, what was fascinating about this year's show was that we had these riding drives, these test drives of electric vehicles and so they were out front, we even had an $80,000 eye pace out there from Jaguar with Mercedes out there, and so you could come to the auto show and test drive vehicles from the Port Couchere, also inside of course we have that Motor Trend patented carpet, here's someone looking at the wonderful hydrogen car there that SerbCo has put there, that's the Mirai, and you get to sit in it and kind of ask questions about how it works and it gives off eight ounces of water and you learn all these wonderful kind of things, how it'll go 300 miles and then we just had all sorts of things there from new vehicles that were brought in, just 2020 vehicles, some of them didn't have any VIN numbers on, so they have to be crushed afterwards, in other words because they can't go on the roadways, we had the very famed 2020 Jeep Gladiator of course, and that was perfect for a while, the doors come off, the roof comes back, it's a truck and so a huge amount of attention for that, a lot of 2020 vehicles were on the floor this year because the manufacturers really knew how popular the Valle show was and so they sent those vehicles, and Madsen and Pasha agreed to ship in pre-production electric vehicles and feature cars, so we just have the best of the best going on here, not a little bit. And you mentioned that and everybody goes, well, yeah, of course they would ship them in, no, it's hard to ship them in, not only that but if you don't have VIN numbers and it's hard to ship, if you never ship vehicles between states or off island, if you don't have all the paperwork right, none of those companies will even touch them, they won't move them at all, and I know from moving our vehicles from the mainland to here that don't have VIN numbers or have experimental VIN numbers, it's not a small feat, so congratulations, that's a great job that you do get in those things in here. Thank you. Yeah, this was a pure joy and it was just fun to be part of it. Well, let me see, and then you went to surfco a little bit too, I think we can jump into those images too. So when was the last time you went to surfco before they had the hydrogen station there? I was there when they dedicated it, and when Kahoo was there to help bless it, and I went back because I'm privileged to be on your show and I wanted to see how that really works now because people can go in there and actually fuel their least hydrogen cars. I mean, this is not some existential thing that's out there in the future, people own these cars now, actually lease them, and the hydrogen is included in their lease. So they phone ahead and then they have somebody come out and help them us service it right now. So it's really kind of like the old days of the service station, you actually have someone come out and help you with it. Although eventually people can be able to fuel themselves right there too, it takes about five minutes. But right now with it in this just beginning stages, a surfco just takes that phone call from some of the hydrogen owners and they bring their cars in and they fuel them right there. And most of the stations in California are self-serve. So you just come in, it's just like going into any of the local quickstop stations and run your charge card and take out the dispenser, hook it up. It actually the high bar dispenser hooks on just like a regular gas nozzle, except it actually latches on to your car. And what most people don't realize is that actually also talks to your car. It has an infrared sensor that sends traffic between the car and the station, because what you don't want to do, and it's a lot of people links for safety, but it's really more for giving you a quality fill is it monitors the temperature of the tank on the car to make sure it's not overheating. Because if you put in hot gas in the tank, and they drive away 20 minutes later and it cools down, you don't have a full tank anymore. So because we're dealing with a gas, a compressible gas, not a non compressible liquid like gasoline or water or anything. So you can't just pour a gallon of it, you have to keep it at a constant or a real close to a constant temperature. So those stations talk to the car and keep the temperature of the gas pretty constant. So there's that aspect to it, but there's also a safety aspect because if you keep heating the tank up and cooling it and heating it up and cooling it, it's just like an airplane that we supply where pressurized, depressurized, pressurized, depressurized, with temperature also, it, it starts to break down the structure of the tank. And it, it decreases the lifespan of the tank. So for safety, it's good to keep the temperature constant you as you're, as you're filling. And then of course, as you're taking fuel out of the tank into the fuel cell, it's cooling. So you can actually get really cool. I'm not sure if they've gotten sophisticated enough where they can actually run air conditioning off of the tank when it's cooling, but that'd be a neat thing. They cool that down to minus 45 degrees centigrade to put it in the car. That's because it expands a little bit as it goes in and expansion causes some heat. And so I learned about all that. They took me through Thor, Toma took me through the whole process. And it was like walking the inside of a clock. There were so many parts and so many valves actually in there, all activated you, you know, you, you start with the water and you distill the water, because you're going to pull the hydrogen out of water through an electrolysis process. And then another machine that, that actually does that. So you distill, then you have the electrolysis. And then you impress and then you cool and then you dispense. And so all this is going on in that wonderful facility of theirs, it's a magnificent thing to go through. You've got it. You just are in awe looking around, asking about every valve and every dial. It's like being, well, I think you'd mentioned seeing in the inside of a cockpit of an airplane, you see all these dials and things that make the thing work. It all makes sense. You've actually given the process really accurately, because the last thing you do is chill it down so that when it goes in and it heats up, it averages out at a good temperature. So they pre chill it as they're putting it in the car. And that's what let me do it. It was that simple. They just explained, press that button, and you just take the nozzle off. And you're right, you just connect it there. And it's talking to the car and the car talks back and it fills up and five minutes later, you're ready to drive off. Silently, I might add, you know, it's electric cars, so there's no sound. And so simple, a fighter pilot can do it. I could even figure it out with just minimal instruction. I could, I could fly that nozzle. That's right. So the Toyota uses high bar 700 bar pressure, which is 10,000 millibar, 10,000 PSI. Somebody mentioned that 750 millibar is 750 atmospheres. So it's high pressure. It's high pressure. As opposed to your tire, when you fill your tire up, that's 33 PSI. And you're talking about putting 10,000 PSI and a scuba tanks like 2,500 PSI. We're talking 10,000 and 1000 PSI. And I think you have to you press it down, compress it that much because otherwise it'd have the car would have to be as big as a bus. It would hold so much hydrogen. You just have to press it and those tanks are so strong with that carbon fiber that actually surrounds the whole tank. They say you can drop it off the entire state building. And I believe I've seen videos on shooting 50 color rounds through it, race around through it to try and get it to explode stuff. It just punctures it. It leads out the hydrogen no fires. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. So the systems are pretty well matured. I mean, most people think that hydrogen technology is pretty new. But even the fuel cell technology, it's improved a lot. But that's technology, it's almost 100 years old already. And it's been refined and Toyota, I have to give them credit. And I don't work for them. I don't even add one there. I've never owned a Toyota, by the way. But they have spent a lot of money on the fuel cell vehicles. And they have gotten the technology down to where the fuel cells are like 95% cheaper, much smaller. They've, they've just dumped a whole lot of research into developing fuel cells. And they're convinced that they're the future. In fact, what is the word Mariah stand for in Japanese? That stands for the future. The word future. Yes, they've they've kind of pushed all in on hydrogen. And that's fascinating to watch how the Servco people here have invested in that station. And it's a magnificent thing to see in operation. And just it's so beautiful out there. It's a beautiful station. It's really made the sub buses could go in there too. That's why it's right. So it's it also is made to handle forklifts, because forklifts are perfect for using using hydrogen fuels. Yeah, we're actually trying to purchase some forklifts. And Toyota is one of the companies that makes hydrogen fuel cell forklifts. They don't sell them in Hawaii yet, but we're trying to get them to. And then Yale does hydrogen fuel cell forklifts, along with plug power. And so we're actually getting bids, because we're we're a state organization. So we're gonna, we're gonna request prices on hydrogen forklifts in the 4000 pound range. And we're gonna put them at the foreign trade zone, let them use them. And we'll have one trailer that we can move it out to Hickom and we need it move it back and forth. But we're planning. I went back to kind of where hydrogen kind of started off in the Congress. And it started off with our US senator back in the 70s was Senator Spark Motsanaga. He was the one who helped create the first hydrogen fund. And that's named after him now. He did two other things that he's really known for. He created the Poet Laureate. And he created the Peace Institute. So you add hydrogen, poetry and peace. It all seems to kind of come together under Spark Motsanaga's great vision. And it was a Hawaii senator who put that all together. And now that we have all this research and development happening here, and we have that bill that you and I talked a little bit about that HB 624, that restructures some of government to put everything on the table together so we don't have all these investments in different silos, maybe we'll be able to move forward with research and development and make this the perfect place to come and do all that research, development and commercialization. I want to see it all happen. We're going to take a quick break and then we'll be back in 60 seconds to spend some more time with Dave Rolfen. Maybe grasp a bigger picture of Hawaii's future, especially the future of hydrogen. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech Hawaii. Konnichiwa Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and is streamed live on Think Tech at two p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Hey, local, welcome back to Spanish Energy Man. On my lunch hour, as usual, can't be charging the state money when I'm here doing this show for free. So thanks for coming back and joining us with Dave Rolfen from the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association. Fresh off a really successful Hawaii auto show. And that was a good show. I always enjoy going to the auto show, even though I'm just bought a new car, so I don't want to buy the new one for a couple more years. But always great. We sure appreciate all the manufacturers sending in all those new vehicles. But this year, I especially appreciate the sponsors of the test drives. And that was HIKO and Ulupono Initiative, sponsored those wonderful test drives out front. And 400, pardon me, 394, almost 400 people signed up and the lines were short. It was handled wonderfully. And they put that ride, made right hand turns right all the way around the center and got back. And you see them leave silently. It was kind of like a carrier launch and a carrier recovery. It was just a lot of activity, a lot of moving part. And you know, and people, you know, they think that like a conventional internal combustion engines, that roadie sound with a nice, a nice muffler job on your truck or whatever sounds so cool and everything. But I'm telling you that unless you jump in an electric car and stomp on it, you have no idea what acceleration. I don't know it's very few unless you're at the real top end Ferrari and things like that cars. And you jump in and get kind of acceleration, you kind of other one like that's hydrogen fuel cell or battery plug in. It doesn't matter. You get instant torque to the wheels and you're going. It's like a cat shot. Yeah, you remember as a little kid with your electric train set, if you threw it all the way over to the right, you can, you know, it'll just get off the track. And yeah, off the track. So it comes comes fast. You got to get used to that a little bit when you start. They're good vehicles. And you know, I'm all of the above kind of guy. I love hydrogen vehicles, but we need the electric vehicles in no matter what form, whether they're hybrid gas electrics, whether they're plug-in electrics, whether they're hydrogen fuel cell electric. I like all of them. I think we should try and adopt them as quickly as we can. But one thing you just you talked a little bit about the station at Surf Co. And the one thing that I mentioned during the break when I was talking to you is that most people don't realize, though, that that whole footprint as complex as it looks is like the size of about a regular gas station. It's maybe 2000 square feet or something total. Well, yeah, the whole thing, including the outside of the production and the production station is only about as big as your living room, right? As opposed to an oil well in the ground and a giant refinery behind it, you they're actually making the hydrogen right there. So when you drive up to that Surf Co. station in Mapuna Puna, you're looking at the oil field, the oil pipeline, the oil tanker that took to get into the refinery, the oil refinery and the truck that delivered the gasoline to the gas station, all in the footprint of a house. About the size of your living room. And yeah, and the real manufacturing piece is about the size of your living room. And it's using all clean energy from solar. Surf Co. is mostly solar from the roof. That's coming, but right now they're using a lot of grid power right now, but their plans are to make it all solar. And they do have a lot of solar on that facility and they do use a solar to make a lot of the hydrogen. But it's all carbon-free if you can make it from solar or wind or any other renewable. You have carbon-free fuel that you're making on site with water and DC power. Period. You don't need to ship anything. There's no shipping costs. There's no safety issues. There's no environmental hazard issues. You don't have oil spills in the ocean, things like that. So in Hawaii, as conscious as we are of cost and everything, hydrogen fits the bill. If we could start manufacturing our own hydrogen from curtailed power, that's kind of the future. It's a future where we're headed. And that's why I'm so bullish on hydrogen. Well, that particular station illustrates how the dollar that you put in there circulates and stays here in the islands and it circulates back through the rest of the economy and then back and that's the lovely thing. It doesn't go off island and I was most impressed by that. And when Thor explained to that just understanding all that clock work that's in there takes quite a bit of education and background. So it's a really well-paying job to be able to be one of the engineers back there helping with all that and absolutely fascinating. Let's bring up one of the other images that you said you brought with us today. We've got the Rosetta Stone, we call it first I think, and that's, there you go, that's not the Rosetta Stone, but that's... That makes a good statement though. This is a good lead into the Rosetta Stone. I mean we're talking about, we're talking about the vehicles becoming more part of the grid than, you know, we look at energy currently as gasoline, diesel, and electricity as separate entities, but we're morphing towards that all electric. And I would say even in 20 to 25 years a lot of the aircraft are going to be also electric. They may not travel quite as fast, but that may be the penalty that we pay for making sure we're cleaner and more efficient and maybe even more economically. Not to digress from your image, but I send you some videos from a THD. And the one thing that the takeaway from that video that really got my attention was we've been sucking free energy out of the ground. It's not free because we have to build the infrastructure to pull it out of the ground. But we didn't make that oil. Nature made that oil over millions of years with tons of energy and tons of pressure to get it to where it's at. And now we're refining it and we're lighting a match to it and burning it in our cars and things like that. But that we're going to start running out of that energy over the next 100 years. Especially as our energy needs grow and they are growing. I mean the industrial age of man has only been the last hundred or so years. And if you look at use of energy as a whole you go from almost flat to a spike that's like 20 times higher. And we're going to run out of that free oil pretty soon. And it's going to be hard to get shale oil. It's going to be hard to get natural gas. It's going to be expensive. Just yesterday the Arabians cut back the production on their oil out of their big oil fields because they're saying yeah we kind of need to stretch this out. It's not as much there as we thought. So the idea of kind of running through all that oil really quickly because it's cheap and it's easy. It's getting harder to get to. It's it's not going to be cheap anymore. So as we transition to this more electric economy how are we going to balance the cost of energy. It's certainly if we just try and jump in all at once it's going to kill us. It's going to try and change the infrastructure overnight. So there's there's got to be a route to it. There's got to be a growth to it. And I think that's where your Rosetta Stone graphic really kind of tells the story. That Rosetta Stone we call it that because in 1799 Napoleon's troops in near the town of Rosetta came across a stone that had hieroglyphic, doptic, and Greek on it. And by using the Greek endoptic they could understand hieroglyphic. Because now we can see the adoption of vehicles all the way out to 2045. And how many are going to be electric and we think how many are going to be hydrogen and how many are going to be connected autonomous vehicles. Because we can have a fairly good idea of that. So far the graphic has been just spot on over the last eight years. And I likely will follow that very closely all the way out through the next 25. If that's the something we could plan on and Mattson looks at that to plan when they have to replace their ships. And the dealers look at that as to how many technicians they need to have on board. Actually the state government looks at it to see how much tax revenue is going to be coming in. So a lot of people are using that graphic to make plans. And so we found that you can factor just about everything from that graphic. Let's put that graphic up by those. You can factor how many electric charging stations we'll need in the future. And you can factor how many hydrogen fueling stations we're going to need in the future. You can factor how many 5G. Well we know that the 5G towers are going in out there in Honolulu. We have 40,000 light poles and utility poles and about 10,000 will have 5G towers that will help control the autonomous vehicles. It helps us see how many high rise buildings need to go in to handle our housing needs. You know we have 65,000 homes we need backed up right now. And so I can plan on this graphic where they go, how they go, when they need to go in. You can see that tourism and conventions and militaries still needs to hold the base. And because this was going to be so hard, we used Euler's identity to prove joy because it's going to be really hard to do all this. But eight years ago I predicted that the first hydrogen car would be in Hawaii on Pi Day, which is 3.1415, March 14th, 2015. And because I helped put on the auto show, I could kind of help know when the show was going to be that year. So it turned out we predicted the arrival of the hydrogen car to the hour. Yep. And so I was there. I know. So sort of go put their Mariah on the floor. And I was just so tickled that we had predicted eight years ago that it would happen on Pi Day. We have made all these predictions about when these cars are going to come and that the internal combustion engine will be here as they modify that. And it gets more miles per gallon and all the new attributes these cars have. But you'll have internal combustion with us for quite a few years. It's not going to stop in 2030 as some people have kind of indicated. It was a professor who thought that after 2030 it would just be all renewable fuel. But the transition will take quite a bit longer just because of the economic aspect of the whole thing. And that's kind of the theme that we're talking about. You know, I started off talking about. And you have to kind of really look ahead and take a lot of things into account. Jobs, you can't just change career fields overnight. Some jobs are transportable. You can you can move and go to a different city and some aren't. Farmers have a hard time picking up 10,000 acres and moving it to another state and do farming. So, you know, but certain industries you can move manufacturing around. You can do things, but it still takes time. You don't set up a factory in six months. You set up a factory in a couple of years. You have to get the tooling. You have to get the robotics and you have to get the workforce trained. You know, so to sit there and try and change things overnight or to try and force legislation that says we're going to have all electric vehicles by 2025. It's like why do that? Why? Why try and push everybody so fast when all you're going to do is create a lot of problems? Well, that's why we've enjoyed working with people we call hyphenated with us in a way. It's had a hyphen heco and would work with them on that test drive. Same way with how to hyphen ulupono, I think, this last week is wonderful. We work so closely with the Hawaii Association of Broadcasters. We feel like we're hyphenated with them. One time I needed some help to give that message out that in 2009 that, you know, we could get the tax credit for the DET and the Hawaii Association of Broadcasters knew I needed to get that out. So, they helped me produce that commercial and had it on the air that day and be able to tell everybody something that fast. So, it's wonderful to have a small trade association of 30 individuals whose names are on the buildings and they've had it in their families for many generations, many of them have. This is a group of individuals who have a deep care about their community and their neighbors. And so, it's wonderful to see how they're taking a leadership role and having a lot of these problems. And I think we're going to see a lot more electric vehicles on the road and we're going to see a transition in our grid as well. And I'm patient. I'm waiting for that to all happen. I'm anxious as anybody to see it happen as fast as we can, but I'm not impatient. I think everybody needs to just take a deep breath and look at the big picture and make sure we're doing it right. We could put a thousand people to work today and have them all unemployed tomorrow. If we don't do it right, we need to make sure everything, the jobs and everything fit together and it all flows. Believe it or not, Dave, that's hit a 30 minute point here on the show and thank you for being here again. Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Stan. We'll have a chance to talk to you again. We'll have you here before the next auto show, so you can give us a preview instead of a post view of the game. We'll have to do that. Thanks for joining us here at Think Tech Hawaii and Stan Energyman. This Friday we'll see you next Friday. Aloha.