 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man right before Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial beginning of summer and I am ready for the unofficial beginning of summer. It's not awesome in here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and doing coming up on almost two years of think tech shows. It's hard to believe it's been that long but there's been a lot going on in the past two years and today what we're gonna do is we're just gonna spend some time talking about some of the things that are coming up and what I see in the future and it's not that I'm a cleric or anything I have no mystical powers whatsoever but I do spend all day long and most of my nights dreaming about what's going on with Hawaii energy and I think I've got some pretty fair insight to share with you. So anyway when it comes to clean renewable energy few people would argue against the fact that Hawaii is one of the very best places to lead the charge towards clean power. Hawaii has no organic fossil fuels and Hawaii imports mostly oil but even some coal to provide most of its grid power right now and this provides a great economic incentive to kick the fossil fuel habit. When it comes to transportation we're mostly gas driven but the people that live here want to be cleaner and they want to be greener and what's holding them back for most part is a lack of choices. Our electric vehicles charge on a grid that is mostly carbon fueled but there's cause for optimism still. To start with the grid is tracking towards clean renewable power particularly on the neighbor islands and soon I expect that many of the folks buying or leasing electric cars will proudly charge them mostly at home from their own solar PV systems which is of course much cleaner than working off of our current grid. In addition and more manufacturing manufacturers rather are bringing out great stylish hybrid vehicles that burn a lot less gas by taking advantage of electric drive trains but instead of using a battery only they use small efficient internal combustion engines to drive generators but they only turn those engines on when they need it. The future and I dare say the not too distant future will also include hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles and when we start down that path things will really get exciting and that's what today's show is about. Why is energy future what it will look like how we will get there the extra emphasis on the word we. You know we all look at government as the entity that we we kind of focus on to help spur change but most people have forgotten that back in 2006 you know over over a decade ago the state of Hawaii committed to a clean energy future and even more specifically to a clean hydrogen economy. It wasn't a policy decree or a line from a politician's speech it took the form of a statute signed into law by the governor in 2006. It is Hawaii revised statute 196-10 the Renewable Hydrogen Program. I'm going to read the entire law to you word for word right out of the HRS just so you get a feel for what we were thinking about over 10 years ago and what we what's already in law by the legislature and the governor that we should be doing. The Hawaii Renewable Energy Program there is established within the Department of Business Economic Development and Tourism a Hawaii Renewable Hydrogen Program to manage the state's transition to a renewable hydrogen economy. The program shall shall I like those words shall and will are really good words in laws the program shall design implement and administer activities that include one strategic partnerships for the research development testing and deployment of renewable hydrogen technologies two engineering and economic evaluations of Hawaii's potential for renewable hydrogen use and near-term project opportunities for the state's renewable energy resources three electric grid reliability and security projects that will enable integration of a substantial increase of electricity from renewable energy resources on the island of Hawaii four hydrogen demonstration projects including infrastructure for the production storage refueling of hydrogen vehicles five a statewide hydrogen economy public education and outreach plan focusing on the island of Hawaii to be developed in coordination with Hawaii's public education institutions six promotion of Hawaii's renewable hydrogen resources to potential partners and investors seven a plan for implementation during the years 2007 to 2010 to more fully deploy hydrogen technologies and infrastructure capable of supporting the island of Hawaii's energy needs including a expanding installation of hydrogen production facilities b development of integrated energy systems including hydrogen vehicles c construction of additional hydrogen refueling stations and d promotion of building design and construction that fully incorporates clean energy assets including reliance on hydrogen fueled energy generation number eight there's also supposed to be a plan for implementation during the years 2010 to 2020 to transition the island of Hawaii to a hydrogen fueled economy and to extend the application of the plan throughout the state and nine evaluation of policy recommendations to a encourage the adoption of hydrogen fuel vehicles can be continually fund the hydrogen investment capital special fund and c support investment in hydrogen infrastructure including production storage dispensing and dispensing facilities and that's the end of the law as you may have noticed very little of what was mentioned in that law has materialized and in fact the initial sum of ten million dollars that was brought out in an additional piece of legislation to provide some of that initial hydrogen funding was mired in controversy and many politicians since that time have felt the effort was wasted and the future funding never materialized to support the continuation and the continued move towards a hydrogen economy other efforts to move Hawaii towards a clean energy future included a barrel tax that gleaned just over a dollar per barrel from each barrel of oil used here to support the state's efforts to reduce the use of oil in case you weren't aware about 65 percent of that tax revenue has been deposited directly into the state's general funds to support other budget items every year since its inception and the 35 percent that is roughly dedicated and directed to programs specifically to support three energy security related areas account for basically food security under the department of agriculture health security under department of health and energy security under the state energy office and hawaii natural energy institute at the university of hawaii and manoa many individuals view these as a misuse of the tax revenues because the funding mostly goes towards paying salaries in those departments and little actually goes towards getting hawaii off the fossil fuel habit it also appears to get past most folks that most of the barrel tax funds that 65 percent have a built-in disincentive to be used for their intended use because reducing the amount of imported oil means reducing the amount of tax revenues that go to the general fund and that means the legislature would need to cut programs that already exist or find other tax monies to pay for their favorite programs so the bottom line is that the state has laws that mandate we go to a clean energy economy but the political leadership now would say that also includes not just politicians but big businesses with vested interest and status in the status quo and local labor unions that have interest in keeping jobs in their particular trades and other special interest groups so that whole political interest group do what we all do so very well and that is avoid change avoid doing what we should be doing i myself have been quoted it's not if it's not broken don't fix it but the problem is things are broken we are we're just all numb to the fact that we live in a broken system and we just can't see it see it anymore it's like we're we're we're smell deaf to what's going on around us some frustrated individuals think the answer is to get all the scientists together and scream climate change loud enough and hoping that we'll get people's attention others think that if we write enough laws and levy enough taxes and twist enough arms that the government will provide the answers and get us going the right direction but obviously i just read you a law that was has been on the books for 10 years and we've done absolutely nothing with everyone wants someone else to fix things but when we get tired of being taxed and coerced and threatened with prosecution you know you get to the point where it's just like the old tv commercial from the six he says what's a mother to do so the reality is that people are getting tired of playing of paying heco for an electric bill while we're burning fossil fuels and having the government lean on them heco and us so that there's a quiet revolution starting to develop and it's going on and it's slowly getting some momentum and it is a peaceful revolution and it is very quiet it may be called a lot of different things and you might pick it up in different ways but it all points back to a fundament the fundamentals in the making of america are very roots as a nation and those things would be independence from oppression oppression of rule you rule by people and for the people equal treatment under the law freedom to choose what's right for oneself and what's family the irony is that this would be labeled conservative thinking nowadays but many places and particularly in hawaii we're pretty much died in the whole liberals and at least we less we think that we're we are because we never think about the changes even when our leaders have changed and their fundamental platforms in our government grow too large and too cumbersome and our regulations too suffocating that we fail to see the change maybe we need to get back to the fundamentals of taking care of ourselves and be doing being the we taking care of the we like the frog that sits in a pot that's full of water heated slowly and the heated water rises in temperature until we're slowly cooked maybe we've just become so numb it's time to get back to basics and take care of yourself and your family and do what's right for you and for me and for everyone else and not wait for the government to mandate it or tax it or restrict it when it comes to hydrogen which is of course what is my my big uh platform if you ask the average person 30 years ago what features they wanted in their mobile phone their initial response would be only doctors have mobile phones but if i had one i'd like it to be smaller less expensive if you ask that same question now what response would you get besides the memory size camera resolution indestructible screen you could probably think of a dozen other things like maybe have a device that is not just used as a phone but come to expect a lot more things from it like being able to use it to find a google location and a gps your way to walking or driving to any location on the planet well what about a car if you were trying to think about the future car the way we think today about our future our phones and what consumers really want is choices what would you want in a car i would imagine it would be a car that was well styled reasonably priced ran on a fuel that maybe you could even make at home that you wouldn't have to buy from a gas station from it ran on a system that operated nearly for free particularly if that system could be made at home to make fuel and you pay off the equipment and it still keeps working and gives you free fuel the car should be fast but powerful needs to be safe have great range between fuelings be environmentally friendly from the sourcing of the materials in the production cycle all the way to the emissions it's got to be ecologically friendly the car should also be easy and inexpensive to maintain have room inside to carry the things i need to carry be able to reconfigure from passengers to cargo mode to whatever i want to carry mode and it would be a car that didn't go out of style a classic that lasted for over a decade was easy to maintain and in the end be completely recyclable recyclable does this car exist today many of these features do how about self-driving what about heads up display how about total situational awareness via sensors all around your car how about full entertainment suite where you could actually be watching movies while your car drives you someplace hey maybe it could fly okay maybe i've gone too far with the flying part because i've seen you drive and until we get auto driving mode the flying is out but the bottom line is your future car will have some great features but it will probably be electric and not gas or diesel you're probably thinking electric cars have been around for years and they look they're quick off the mark and and as fast as any gas car in fact even faster in most cases but they all look like food processors with wheels on them i don't know what it is but the car companies just can't seem to design a really good looking electric car unless they're charging a hundred thousand dollars for it something's got to happen with those manufacturers okay the electric cars also only go about a hundred miles and they need to stop and charge them and you know finding a charger is not that easy nowadays and the batteries which are not environmentally friendly in the long run are expensive and when you have to change them so why would i want to give up my super cool suv that i have right now for that kind of a plug-in car with those restrictions well the reality is right now there are cars that are like the one i describe and i may have to change my name from the hydrogen guru on my license plate to hydrogen profit but i'm predicting that you'll be driving a hydrogen fuel cell car sooner rather than later and you'll you you'd never even imagine how quickly these things are going to come on the market and here's why if you take all the great features i talked about above and the ideal future car they already exist and they're in production and soon the infrastructure will start popping up here in hawaii and across the mainland and around the world that supports hydrogen vehicles and i don't make this prediction from a crystal ball or magic both fact and logic all major car manufacturers and some manufacturers you've never even heard of are already in production i repeat in production with hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles the technology is clean it's proven it's safe it's getting cheaper by the day while fossil fuel has only one direction to go it may vacillate up and down but over the long term it's going to go up because it's a finite resource the fuel is virtually endless in a hydrogen vehicle and it's boundless every country on earth could make its own hydrogen why do we fight wars nowadays why just on the news last night in the south china sea china was criticized in the us for being too close to one of the little man-made islands in the south china sea why do they have that island there that island is not there because china needs to defend itself farther away from its borders that island is there so they can claim the 200 mile economic exclusion zone around that little island so they can harvest the oil from it well if every country has hydrogen and if you have any water you have hydrogen if you have any methane you have hydrogen if you have any living green products you have hydrogen then you don't have to worry about having a war over fuel so that by itself should be enough of an incentive the other neat thing about hydrogen is when you burn it you don't lose it and when you put in a fuel cell you don't turn it into exhaust that goes into the atmosphere you turn it into water it goes back into water the fuel cell itself is basically a self-charging battery and the way it works is very simple in basic chemistry hydrogen goes into one side and oxygen from the air oxygen is about air is about 20% oxygen goes in the other side there is a catalyst between the oxygen and the hydrogen and when the catalyst accelerates reaction between the two atoms making water it gives you back two products heat and electricity yeah the same electricity as your typical battery in a dc flashlight or in your car so the big question is why aren't we already driving these beasts mr. guru and the answer is quite simple think how much money is already invested in all the oil fields and the oil wells and the pipelines and the huge tanker ships and the trucks and the refineries and the fleets of trucks that deliver the finished product of gasoline to the stations down your street what are we going to do with all that stuff what are we going to do with all the people employed running all that stuff the economics of this are huge there are 300 million people over 300 million people living in the us alone and we sell more gm cars in china now than we sell in the us think of how many people are employed in the fossil fuel business right now that's why we don't drive hydrogen fuel cell cars right now but that doesn't mean we can't start moving that way because the transition is going to take more than a decade more than two decades probably more than three decades but where do we start i propose we start here in hawaii why hydrogen fuel cell electric cars trucks and buses are coming to hawaii and the infrastructure will be here to support it and at that point you will have choices you'll have choices on what models and makes of car truck and choices on the different kinds of fuels that you use and whether you get that fuel from a station or you make it at home for your hydrogen fuel cell car or your plug-in electric car you'll have choices on how far you you can go and how clean you want to be and the government won't be pushing it it will be changed the way you want to want want to make it it'll be changed the hawaiian style it'll be hawaiian hydrogen style so with that i'd like to just share a few more things before i close for today and tell you that there are some great things happening in hawaii and i'm going to give you give us about a minute break and come back and we'll tell you a little bit more about what's going on to get us to this hydrogen hawaii welcome back to my lunch hour stand the energy man here sorry for pontificating today but i just had it in my heart had to be talking about it but hawaii really is on the road to a hydrogen economy with or without the help of the legislature with or without the help of a government in general with or without a whole lot of business inputs because there are businesses in hawaii that want this to happen there are companies in hawaii that want to make it happen there are individuals in hawaii that are willing to make it happen and will put the money into making it happen and we try and work with those companies and i predict that in the next year or two we'll start seeing companies popping up that will provide the fueling and the servicing and maybe even leasing of vehicles in all ranges from cars to trucks to big class eight trucks and buses that will get hawaii's hydrogen economy going we keep hoping that hawaii electric will consider hydrogen for energy storage and be part of the business part of their business model so that they can actually grow their business and store energy in communities to avoid line loss when they have to put energy back into the into a local community give it some resiliency and resistance to damage after storms we see hydrogen as being the answer in so many ways in our state and hawaii's perfectly situated we have more renewable energy than probably any state in the union we're the southernmost state in the united states much to the chagrin of the people in florida we are the southernmost state in united states i'm a navigator trust me and we get more sunlight than anybody we have a great high pressure system that tends to gravitate just northeast of the islands gives us great trade winds out of the northeast most of the year we have geothermal on the big island we have geothermal on maui we have geothermal on oahu we haven't thought about tapping oahu's but maybe we could because that would be a great base load power for hawaii university hawaii did a study on that back in the 70s it's still available you can still look it up it's there there's new technologies with geothermal that make it safer and make it much better to for the community and a much smaller footprint than most people would imagine and if it can provide a base load in several locations in the state i would just help hawaii electric with stabilizing their grid we have wind power wave power ocean power geothermal power solar power we've got it all if we can't do it in hawaii it isn't going to happen any place the other great thing on the transportation side is we have a couple islands you can't drive to las vegas from here as much as everybody here would love to but in oahu if we had three hydrogen stations that's all we would need to supply all the hydrogen for all the vehicles we could get on this island probably for the next five years and at that point a market will be started and things could grow at the pace that the vehicles grow and we're at the mercy of the manufacturers they work on demand so if there's a demand for hydrogen vehicles then they will produce them and they will market them and they will bring them to hawaii and our job is to help make that demand so i'm here to tell you that i predict in the next few years you're going to see hawaii develop that demand and you're going to see manufacturers bringing the products out here so without a close and say hello and thanks for spending part of your lunch hour with stan the energy man and we'll catch up with you next friday a la