 and welcome back to Hawaii, the state of clean energy on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Mitchell, and today on the show our guest is Toby Kincaid, my old friend from way back when, who's been on the show several times, and now is the publisher of Green Hydrogen, Hydrogen Today, which is a new magazine. We'll be discussing how Green Hydrogen is sprouting up everywhere in the globe. It seems not a week goes by without the announcement of you have another Green Hydrogen roadmap from a country or a mega Green Hydrogen production plan. So welcome to the show Toby. Thank you Aloha Commander. Good to be with you. Great to see you. So let's start with you introducing yourself and why you started your new magazine. Well really for two reasons, a personal reason and a professional reason. The personal reason is kind of twofold. Last summer we burned up and it kind of brought it home. We're in a climate disruption. I mean in Oregon it used to be April showers bring May flowers. Well now it's April drought brings May doubt and we're seeing a very serious situation. So on the personal side I've always had an yearning to want to be involved with solutions. And then on the professional side what's what's really happened in this last year and you predicted it is that something is moving and the whole world has woken up and it really started in Hawaii when you declared your 100% renewable energy goal for 2045. You lit a fire under the world and now 72 countries are following your lead. 32 of them have declared their path. How are they actually going to decarbonize? And the leaders right now are the European Union. They have taken it seriously. They're calling it the European Green Deal which is really a green hydrogen deal because that's what they're focused on in real solutions. And you know that message is coming through around the world that you know 30 years ago 80% of the world runs on fossil fuel. That was 30 years ago. You know what the percentage is now? 81. Yeah we really haven't made much progress. I mean the world has grown so much it's absorbed all of the clean energy that we've put into it. But it's really Mount Everest. If we actually want to survive and you know the World Wildlife Fund reported recently that since the 70s 80% of all the flora and fauna species around clean water bodies have disappeared. 80% since the since when I was a kid. So this is a very serious situation and it was really around Thanksgiving of this last year that I thought you know we you know as we all are facing our humanity our mortality are you know how fragile we are and our fragile life is. So I took a another look at what's going on around the world and it was really this conference in Singapore which just lit a fire under me. I was so impressed with the Pacific Rim that Singapore, Korea, Japan, and especially Australia has now embraced this green hydrogen world and they see it as a way to actually decarbonize to get us off of carbon. So professionally I thought you know this industry has matured so much we really need a trade journal. So for some reason I decided to set myself to that task and I'll tell you you know it's it's it's wonderful to not know what you don't know. But let's throw up the cover of this new trade magazine while you're talking. Wonderful. So very nice. Beautiful. Oh thank you. When I when I first conceived it I thought well I want to publish a magazine. I've always loved magazines. I think it's it's graphic. It's wonderful. What a great genre. So I always thought I would do a print magazine. Well as I looked into it I realized hey we do live in the 21st century and now we have all these modern tools and one of those two very big ones is the Apple App Store and Google Play. Now they have distribution all over the world. The Apple App Store reaches 170 countries. And I'm very happy to report since we've been up in the last week and a half we've had downloads in 11 countries. Really? Singapore, Hong Kong, Poland, Korea, the Netherlands, UK. I was stunned. And so there's a hunger out there. People need a solution and they need a real solution. And so I set myself to it and it was I gotta say it was rough. I mean there's a lot of details and but anything worthwhile is going to be a little tough. So just like any good fight you know you keep swinging halfway through you keep swinging and hopefully you'll end up still on your feet. And it took a while it was a mind bender because of all of the security layers and so forth. It's a complicated thing to build an app. But why build an app? Well you need an app to go onto these platforms because there's so many different computers so many different operating systems and sizes and they all have to talk to each other. So it was really you know don't throw me in the briar patch but boy I was in it. It took me four months every day to get through it but we did get through it. We're up live and it's really an amazing amazing thing that that the creative process that if you have it in your head you can actually get it out through your hands and out into the world and so this is my first child I'm proud to say. Well I'm happy to say that I'm probably one of your first customers and I actually downloaded the app and the magazine over the weekend so I can vouch that it actually works and you can download it and you've got a special offer too right for the first three months or three. That's right so if you sign up for the year first three months there's no obligation if you want to say hey this isn't for me no harm no foul but I sure hope that I can catch everyone to join in in this collaborative effort to focus on real solutions and the economic engine that a real solution is because a solution isn't a problem it's a solution it's how we can get through this and so I've been amazed that I've had tremendous feedback and I'm a little bit stunned and very very happy to say so. Well I think during the show we'll be uh some of our slides will just be general content just to uh samples of your content that you're throwing out there. We don't expect anybody to actually read all the print and everything like that it's just to show you you know what kind of subjects you're addressing so let's go to the next slide we'll talk about it we talk about the green hydrogen and how it's popping up everywhere so well well as you predicted uh the world is organizing around this and and you know countries like chile and and korea now these are countries that don't have a lot of fossil fuels and if you can imagine trying to compete with the rest of the world as these small countries it takes a lot of hutzpah takes a lot of gumption to say hey you know we've talked to our scientists and we've looked at everything and if we're in chile we have huge solar resources in the north we have patagonia wind in the south and we have micro hydro in the mountains in the middle why don't we create green hydrogen and sell it to the pacific rim and that is impressive. They're actually a powerhouse. Absolutely I think you know who would have ever thought of chile as being an energy superpower yeah exactly they have the resources they are yeah and then I just want to make one point is that the investments are matching the visions so we're not talking millions of dollars that these countries are allocating they're allocating billions of dollars that's with a b out there everyone just so you know these are significant large investments like the EU is like 17 billion dollars they're allocated per year they're going full tilt in fact the european roadmap and and what they're putting their money into they're they're creating hydrogen hubs green hydrogen hubs all over europe particularly the port of Rotterdam and they're going after the tough stuff they're going after the things that we wouldn't normally address and are the last to fix which is steel cement ammonia these feedstocks that are so intensive with fossil fuels you know just for ammonia I think three percent of all the fossil fuels in the world burned are to make that material and why do we have ammonia just all the people yeah it's well it's the basis of fertilizer and with all of the the major agricultural farming around the world I now personally I like organic farming in a small scale but nevertheless these are this is an 800 billion dollar a year industry and so the idea is how can we make green ammonia and what's great and what's green mean toby well green means no carbon no carbon at all so for example if you make steel you've got to make coke first which is just burned up carbon that gets all the impurities out and then they add the coke to the steel to to regulate how much carbon goes into it and then they blast furnace that and it's just tremendously polluting same with ammonia we use it for fertilizer all over the world as I mentioned it's 800 billion dollar industry very few accidents it's very very carefully managed but it's very right now to make the hydrogen that they stick to the nitrogen they use steam methane reforming so they're using fossil fuels methane and you produce 10 tons of carbon dioxide for every one ton of of hydrogen and that's what's going on in the world so the entire world industry of hydrogen just in converting to a green hydrogen base using renewables to make it out of water so you know it's amazing we can make an equation if you have sunlight and water you have hard currency since sunlight falls in a distributed way everywhere and whether it's sunlight directly or wind which is a result you put that through a machine called an electrolyzer add water and suddenly you have hydrogen and oxygen so the waste product is the oxygen they just let it go there's actually a drive for a whole oxygen market based on the the waste product of electrolyzers well actually we need oxygen you know as the covid pandemic showed I mean here in Hawaii our hospitals uh and certain hospitals ran out of uh oxygen and the industrial gas suppliers couldn't resupply it fast enough and they actually phoned me up and asked if I could provide uh oxygen from my site over at the uh on the big island at the nalha site because they're so they're really concerned about it so yeah and this pandemic is going to keep on going I mean probably at a much reduced rate we're getting much better at it but it just goes to show you that you know in times of uh emergency like this um we really need to have the adequate adequate supplies and backups ready to go like a contingency plan absolutely and and when we look at real solutions and we do the math um you know it's very popular for for uh institutions to say well we're very agnostic about what the solution will be maybe it's this maybe it's that but I would remind everyone if you ever go to a horse track that's not that I do but I challenge you to find a gambler that's agnostic about putting their bet on oh just pick a horse yeah right no no they pick winners they research it they try we've got to decide well we have to you know fish or cut bait the fact is uh we're falling off uh off the the table here I mean as you know in Texas last winter you know they're reporting it as well the severe storms of that era and it wasn't a severe storm we had a polar vortex the entire top of the world fell off and went down all the way to the gulf coast right over Texas and you went from maybe you know 40 degrees to 40 below in a matter of hours and how many critters have been killed you know when when the world starts jerking around like that I think the writing's on the wall and fortunately and and really Hawaii we owe you for for breaking the log jam for saying hey we can't go on like this we have to find something better and fortunately we do have something better and that's green hydrogen that's using renewable energy to make hydrogen fuel from water and the goodness is when you use the fuel you get most of the water back exactly you know the human beings we're mostly made of water I think we're like 74 percent water very similar to the proportion of water on the earth which is interesting but water water everywhere nor any drop to drink so in this case if we base everything instead of hydrogen stuck to a carbon that's door number one let's go to door number two where hydrogen is stuck to oxygen and that's water and as you've pointed out you're in Hawaii you're surrounded by oceans of energy and so all we need to do is put renewables into that and now anyone anywhere uh can can have all of the energy they want in modern living and this is really the message you know you and I have talked about technology and history how each century the 18th century we had revolutions in engine technology we went from from the 18th to the 19th we went from external combustion with steam engines to internal combustion with piston engines and then in the 20th century went to jet turbines well now in the 21st century it's going to be this electron engine which is a combining electrolyzers and fuel cells in one power block then this is just wonderful for balancing the grid for example one big market that's emerging is called F-CAS frequency control and ancillary services and what happens in California is they have a lot of renewables but sometimes they have so much renewables they have to curtail it they have to turn it off so with this little uh um uh green hydrogen ability you can actually if the voltage is too high you just turn on the electrolyzer and that'll add a load and pull it down if the voltage is too low you turn on the fuel cell to take the hydrogen you bubbled earlier and and boost up that frequency so what we're seeing is all of these manifestations of of how you could use green hydrogen in our existing markets and and actually do a much better job than than what we all have to face is that fossil fuels are toxic and how long how long can you do it? Yeah I read an article in the APOC times today which said that California is asking people who own electric vehicles battery electric vehicles not to charge their vehicles during the peak hours because it's going to cut you know they just don't have the uh that the grid can't handle the wires can't handle the electricity absolutely because everybody's got their air conditioner on it's like you know probably the hottest part of the day they're coming home from work they're turning on all their stuff and now they're asking electric vehicle a battery electric vehicle people not to charge their cars which is not a problem with hydrogen cars. And that's a big point you know when you operate a grid it's it's called an independent system operator in ISO these are the guys they don't own anything they just manage the grid but they've got to keep a very dynamic situation in balance demand and supply have to match your demand goes up it's going to brown out your grid if demand goes down you're going to have arc flash and have danger of electricity trying to find a path so it has to be an absolute balance and and and that's a difficult thing to do when we talk that you bring up the the debate that's now happening between an EV all battery infrastructure and an EV fuel cell infrastructure they're entirely different but as you would point out there are big advantages to going with the fuel cell because you don't need to touch the grid during peak at all we bubble the hydrogen on off peak times or during peak with solar but that's that's a great thing because you what you have now something to do with something to use the solar for so this is a tremendous it's tremendously difficult to do this so now we're only talking in california less than one or two percent of the fleet and you're still having probably wow so you know what now there's a very big business in the utility sector involved with planning because you have to plan what resources they need to schedule and they schedule capacity which just is kind of a spinning reserve then they they reserve the amount of electricity they might need and it becomes very expensive if you just go willy-nilly plugging in batteries how can they plan for that there's there's really no way and what's that that's going to do is cause them to have to schedule more capacity and that means your prices are going to go up so it's very unmanageable and that's the point the fuel cell model that you've been developing like the picture behind you it's it allows you to to help the grid instead of harm the grid instead of being a burden to the grid now you're helping balance the grid and that has a great stabilizing effect and of course being 100 percent non-toxic that's the that's the shape of the future well and you can also fill your car in five minutes as well absolutely imagine a thousand EVs all battery charging and even with DC fast charge by the time you go all the way through it you're probably close to an hour maybe a little bit less so for every thousand vehicles the fuel cell car you know fills up in less time that you know the same time you use in gasoline totally familiar to us but you know a thousand hours every week those EV all battery people are going to face that has a cumulative effect as well and so when we just cut through all of it the answer is actually very straightforward and it only involves a few kinds of components so what you've been developing and why is just vitally important because you're demonstrating to everyone how they can make their own energy that really brings us to the big point what's one of the largest you know almost insurmountable issues of humanity is inequity now if energy is a commodity which it is today you're talking about social you're talking about social equity yes in this case the the fact that the energy is a commodity means that a billion people are in abject poverty around the world I mean just serious poverty but with your green hydrogen scenario all we need to do is get them the right kit right gear right hardware and they're completely independent and look what this does imagine countries like Guatemala we're talking about this migration issue well if you get green hydrogen into Guatemala they're just going to make bed and breakfast and ecotourism and they'll realize where they are is far more valuable than moving anywhere else and it will have a great stabilizing effect on on the human the human state and so I see just enormous positive upside to us actually uh obsoleting fossil fuels well one uh one thing that just came up in the last couple of weeks is uh looking at saving our trees because trees absorb carbon dioxide but if you look at some countries like if you look at a satellite view of Haiti and the thing is the Dominican Republic you look at the satellite and Haiti it looks like a desert because people and the Dominican Republic side is this lush green jungle that's because on the the Haiti side the Haitian side um people come and cut all the trees down uh for firewood and that's what they use the for cooking and probably a little bit of heating or whatever and they've totally denuded the landscape and so uh there's obviously there's no carbon sequestration there and uh but with sunlight and water they could be um eating their cooking uh requirements their heating requirements even their fuel requirements for the vehicles and that would let the trees grow and you'd be absorbing carbon dioxide and sequestering it storing it so well I love that I love that idea it's an Oregonian it's a pretty simple solution actually so I thought that in our remaining time we could just do a quick little walkthrough some of the uh of your slides so let's uh let's have the next slide up and and you can uh just just to show you uh what green and hydrogen today looks like and you may comment on it as we go through there that the one you're looking at now was was a was a green hydrogen hub in Chile uh that what we just talked about a bit and uh and what I'd like to try you know my our typesetting skills are growing but it's just the imagery of some of these these photographs we can get are just so beautiful it reminds us of what we're doing and if we jump to the next slide there's another sleeping giant and that's the hydrogen hub the green hydrogen hub that's going to grow in India. India is the sleeping giant of the world uh they're talking very risk realistically about in a few years trying to get to a few percent of their installed capacity but that's billions of dollars I mean Bloomberg News reports that in the next five years 740 billion dollars will go into the green hydrogen space and what Bloomberg is realizing is is that they can sense it that there's there's movement to foot that the world is actually waking up they're finding solutions and finding a profitable path to implement those solutions and that's the key exactly so let's have the next slide up oh this is an interesting article on floating wind farms now most wind farms offshore are are are they have a lot of problem because of the visual impact that people don't care for and also the undersea cables are rather expensive actually but there's a there's a group in the Netherlands who have come up with a very clever idea of floating wind turbines out in the North Sea and using their retired platforms that they used for oil drilling that's where they mount the electrolyzers and then what they're going to do is tap into their existing natural gas pipelines that they used to import that gas from the North Sea and they're going to convert it over to hydrogen so now they've got a built-in transmission and distribution system and that's phenomenal and this concept it was really started by the Germans called powered to gas and they're point out that the the storage capacity of the of the natural gas pipelines is terawatts of energy so you don't need to build a battery you could create the hydrogen which is the battery and put it through the gas pipeline and that stores it there's a great study done by Dr. Brower at the the fuel cell partnership in southern California and they did a study where they actually modeled how to power the entire state of California with GreenEye quite impressive and they inject they have out in the desert the like a 20 mile area of solar farms and that would make hydrogen they injected into the existing line right at the Arizona border and it goes all the way into the LA basin to the port of LA to the Long Beach they just have it all worked out and they worked out the percentage was something like 60% wind and 40% solar they found it very complimentary at night the wind goes up and during the day the sun goes up and by balancing it through this this hydrogen as the battery all of the grid operators are happy they can they they know when to turn on the resources they need I just was so impressed Dr. Brower I applaud you and we'll be writing you up shortly okay next slide oh this is a very interesting piece on on green hydrogen and aviation drones you know how do how do we live without drones now right well drones only last about 20 minutes in flight time typically with the battery packs that they have but you can get four hours out of the drone that you're looking at with that little bottle of hydrogen and a fuel cell on board so I'm very excited about this because a heavy lift drone would allow us to take fire fighting materials directly out to where the spark is and reach it by air and then drop that that retardant right on the little hot spots so I'm very excited about the fire fighting potential of green hydrogen in drones so this is the kind of thing we're trying to look at all of the different exciting avenues and exciting projects that are really coming on board and I am flabbergasted I've just spent three days in a conference out of Montreal the ninth annual World Hydrogen Technology Conference yeah and watch out for the Canadians boy they're getting it you better watch out they are gunning for this the people at Hydro Quebec which has been a long time hydrogen green hydrogen provider actually they've been hydrogen hub for decades I think NASA buys most of our our hydrogen fuel for space flight from Hydro Quebec and affiliates and so now we're looking in this next issue we're focusing on the green hydrogen hub of Canada and specifically British Columbia and Alberta now Alberta is a really interesting story because they're a major exporter of fossil fuels but even they are beginning to look at the Pacific Rim and going hmm they don't really want to buy our fossil fuels anymore they're declaring that they want to buy green hydrogen or as close to green hydrogen as as possible will they buy a little blue hydrogen that's still made from methane and then they try and sequester the CO2 but there's no real easy way to do that and and by the way an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure why would you put billions of dollars into trying to put the genie back in the bottle when you have the option of not letting her out exactly so let's go back to the last slide because we're running out of time oh so fast freeze through 29 and a half minutes well you know it's it's it this article was about the who I consider the founding father of green hydrogen um Augustine Machot and Machot was a French mathematician in the 1860s and 70s and he built all kinds of contraptions solar concentrators he distilled liqueurs he he would cook for the for the French Legion in North Africa with solar powered cookers this guy was amazing but what he really did which was off the hook in the early 1870s as he took his his solar concentrator and he learned about seabach who built thermal piles the thermal couples you can take different metals and stack them up like Volta did basically and make a battery but it reacts with heat so at the boundary layer between the different metals you cause an electricity to flow so what this guy did is he built one he concentrated solar energy on it made enough like made enough amps to power an electrolyzer and made hydrogen fuel in in his garden and tours in in 1870 okay let's go to the last line because oh yeah please so so here's our logo we're available in the app store and google play if you if you uh you know on on the app store all the apps are free you can download any app for free inside the app they'll have what they call in-app purchases so that's when you can decide if you want to buy something in in our case i would encourage everyone to grab a free uh grab a subscription you get that free three month and then you can decide if you don't want it that's fine uh that won't cost anything please have a look at it and we'd love to have your feedback and uh you know the green hydrogen is going global and uh we're honored to be a part of that well thanks a lot Toby it's been great having you on board thank you okay so there we have it we're going to leave it here you've been watching Hawaii the state of clean energy on think tecawaii and today we've been discussing the global movement the green hydrogen and a hydrogen economy with uh Toby Kincaid the publisher of green hydrogen today and thanks to the viewers all your viewers out there for tuning in and i'm Mitch Ewan and we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii the state of clean energy