 The Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, familiarly known as HNEI, has been devising, evaluating and reporting on tests of alternative energy technologies since 1974. The oil crisis that year prompted the state of Hawaii to initiate serious steps towards ending their reliance on fossil fuels. And HNEI was born. Join me now as we meet some of the talented people who make HNEI the noted development and research institution it has become. I begin with HNEI director Dr. Richard Roschlow. In terms of where renewable energy and alternative energy is, there's been a huge shift from development of technology to integration and implementation. Chemical power generated from the motion of waves promises the islands of Hawaii a limitless power supply. HNEI scientist Pat Cross shared his thoughts about a series of experimental wave energy devices that are being deployed at the Navy's Wave Energy Testing Site, or WETS, located in Kaneohe Bay. Four of the planned five devices are what are called point absorbers, which are essentially just an ocean buoy designed to move around. And the different companies have different approaches to converting that movement into electrical generation. These are prototype devices, experimental devices, they're pre-commercial devices. The main goal of the test site is to find out what needs to be improved in order to take the next step in the direction of commercial liability. In a completely different approach, HNEI supported Mackay Engineering as they evaluated different heat exchangers in their Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Tower, known as OTEC. I interviewed Mackay engineers Jovan Ryzen and Duke Hartman about their project. In tropical regions, we have warm surface water and we have cold water in the deep ocean. And with that temperature differential and with the gigantic thermal mass that's available in the ocean, you can generate huge, huge quantities of electricity. The potential is immense. Heat exchangers are really the key component to OTEC. And we've got three different slots for heat exchangers here. And the reason for that is this is a research facility. We need the flexibility to be able to transfer heat exchangers in and out, to be able to swap them out easily and test different versions of the same unit. Because ultimately what we're looking for is a high-performance, low-cost and long-lasting heat exchanger. There's been a renewed emphasis on the need to diversify how we make our electricity and it's now expanded into also how do we diversify our transportation fuels. Hydrogen is a fuel that might rise to the challenge. And that's all well and good if a cost-effective way to refuel hydrogen-powered vehicles on a mass scale can be found. HNEI's Mitch Ewan told me why the experimental fast-fill hydrogen refueling station he is evaluating could be an answer. Our Marine Corps-based hydrogen station is the first really dual-fuel fast-fill hydrogen station in Hawaii. And we learned a lot about what it takes to put in a hydrogen fueling station here in Hawaii, which we can transpose that to industry. When the natural world helped us to produce clean energy from biochemical sources, I asked Scott Turn, biomass researcher, to tell me why he believes it can. We're not just producing typically one product, something called the bio-refinery concept. So as the biomass comes in, it gets transformed into a slate of products, one of them being fuels, maybe chemicals, bioplastics. There's a whole suite of things that could be made. We need to find the mix that makes the economic sense. A lot of our activities are actually how do you use energy, how do you integrate different energy systems into the mix. We still do things to look at new generation technologies, new processes, but a lot of effort goes into how do you use solar, wind, biomass, geothermal, more effectively how do you integrate them into a system. In other words, simply evaluating and testing renewable energy projects is pointless, unless some of them find their way into the real world. That's what lead researcher Leon Roos and his GridStart team is all about. GridStart aims to integrate a wide range of alternative energy sources onto a smart grid that delivers a steady supply of low-cost, reliable electricity. That's a key part of the work we do, deploying the technology in the field, exercising it in the field, recording its performance, bringing that information back, analyzing it, refining our controls and then retesting it in the field and we kind of iterate between this modelled environment and the real world environment. Senior smart grid program manager Mark Matsura also explained GridStart's methodology. So I think what's exciting about what's happening here is the integration of a lot of these resources at the home. So we have batteries and the PVs and vehicle charging that are all controlled at a local level with a micro-DMS that is then integrated in with another control scheme that's aggregating all of these end uses to create a reliable as well as economical power system. So the problems we're solving for Hawaii will be transferable to other locations. As the world comes together to create a sustainable energy future, HNEI's contribution cannot be overstated. Dedicated to evaluating technologies that have real world applications, the people of HNEI have for more than 40 years played an invaluable role.