 It's Wednesday afternoon and time for Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our sponsor is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the University of Hawaii's College of Social Sciences with financial support from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest today, Chuck Collins. Aloha, Chuck. What's up? What's up? He's the founder of the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance, my favorite subject hydrogen. We had to get that in there. So Chuck, welcome to the show. Thank you, Mitch. I'm just going to give a little bit of a background on Chuck. Chuck, it actually lives on Maui for his leads, efforts, and energy efficiency and renewable energy project development. He actually has 25 years in the energy industry, and I met him when he was with the US Department of Energy. He's also worked for energy services companies called ESCO and a large mechanical contracting company. So he also works with a variety of nonprofits and serves on a number of boards that work to advance zero emissions and clean energy resources in Hawaii and across the Pacific. So welcome again, Chuck. And first of all, tell us a little bit about the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance. Who are you and what are your objectives? Sure, Mitch. Thanks for the opportunity today. The Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance is a nonprofit based on Maui. We're focused on providing green hydrogen resources, so production of hydrogen from renewable energy resources here in the state of Hawaii. We're focused on educating folks about hydrogen, why it's important and the benefits of it, hoping to change or gear some policies in the right direction to kind of open up some opportunities here and then seed some projects to show a lot of folks about the cool things that hydrogen can do and the different types of applications that hydrogen can fill. Well, that's all music to my ears. Anytime I hear hydrogen, somebody talking about hydrogen projects, especially green hydrogen, which is the next big thing. It's not the next big thing. It isn't the big thing right now. And also policies because we're part of the energy policy forum. So that's something that we're very interested here. So just for a start, tell us about your membership. Sure. So the membership is really comprised of large and small private organizations. So manufacturers of hydrogen products, fuel cell products, those types of things, smaller companies with patents or patents pending on unique hydrogen or fuel cell type applications or technologies. We also have governmental organizations as part of the group. And then there's a kind of a cadre of alliances across the globe for not only clean energy, but also green hydrogen. In the past year, Mitch mentioned that he met me a long time ago when I was at the Department of Energy. You know, a lot of us, a few of us have been working in this industry for a long time. And I can tell you in the last few years, we've seen a lot of these alliances and groups pop up similar to our own. And it's been important to reach out to these groups and talk to them so that we can lay the land on who's out there, who's doing different things in different areas of the globe and how we can help each other move this ball forward. So how many just back of the envelope kind of a calculation, how many organizations are out there now around the world? You know, you mentioned that you have this kind of global membership way. So what is the level of activity out there and how do you see, you know, say in the last two years or so, how has the green hydrogen been developing the industry? Well, I think because of a number of different convergent reasons, you know, number one, we take climate change, you know, here in Hawaii, we don't have the same issues as some other places like Shanghai and Los Angeles have where we wake up every day and the air is dirty, we have a very, you know, we breathe it, we see it, we smell it, we feel it. We don't have that problem here in Hawaii, you know, typically the emissions blow away. And so a lot of the companies that we are focused, you know, that we have in our group are focused on sort of, you know, advancing the ball forward for, you know, cleaner projects that reduce emissions, not only at transportation level, but on a grid level as well, right. And so some of these alliances have different what we call opportunity fuels throughout the globe. So here in Hawaii, we're very blessed with a lot of solar and wind resources. We also have a lot of ocean resources around us. Well, that's not true everywhere else. So does that mean that these other places in the globe can't do hydrogen? No, not necessarily. They're just going to have their own approach towards it. So certain things that we do here in Hawaii can be transferred not only to other remote Pacific Island type places, but other remote applications as well, whether they're Pacific, you know, tropical environments or whether there's harsh remote environments. And so a lot of our company member companies sort of are pushing, you know, a lot of them have products in the world today that are commercialized and getting into real market products today. Others are kind of research focused. So their projects are more for, hey, what can we do to drive material costs down? What can we do to, you know, improve economies of scale so that full scale fuel cell and hydrogen projects can be more economically viable and competitive? Great. Can we have slide number four up? So I want to talk about your education program and title that leading by example. So tell us about your education program and leading by example. Well, you know, really there's, you know, when a lot of folks, whether you work in hydrogen or not, a lot of folks, when they hear the word hydrogen, there's two things that they think of, both of which are not very pretty pictures, right? They think of the, you know, typically the Hindenburg or hydrogen bombs or very explosive events that are not kind to humanity, right? Well, hydrogen is really not that at all. In fact, if you look at the Hindenburg, you know, it was the material that the coating of the balloon was made of that actually caught on fire, not necessarily the hydrogen itself. So one of the goals of the organization is kind of rebrand hydrogen as a very safe fuel that has a place in today's economy that is not really anything to be necessarily afraid of in any kind of irrational way. I mean, gasoline is a lot more explosive, if you will, than hydrogen is, right? So we just want to kind of get that word out. The other thing we want to do is seed projects. So there's a lot of good projects out there, whether it's, you know, your hydrogen fueling station on the Big Island or some other, you know, advanced projects that are going up the military here in the state. We want to talk about this project and talk about, hey, did you know this is out here? Did you know that you can now fuel a vehicle off of this? Did you know how much it costs? So kind of get the word out to try to push projects forward, not just educate about hydrogen, but also educate in a targeted way that really pushes project development forward. Because that's really what our members are most interested in, is developing projects for their products. Right. So let's talk a little bit about policy as well, because we are the policy form, so we're very interested in policy. And you were a member of the legislative brief, I guess it was only what the week before last now, where you had a chance to talk to the legislature. So tell us a little bit about, you know, your policy program and leading by example. Well, policy is one of these strange areas that, honestly, as a, you know, a young aspiring teenager, I never really probably wanted to get as involved in policy as I have been over the years. But it really, energy policy is a fascinating tool because it connects a lot of these R&D projects and labs, as well as commercially ready products to the marketplace. There, policy is a connector, if you will. And so if we never really create the policies to sometimes push the products forward, the products don't really sometimes make their way into markets because of, you know, lease cost purchasing or those types of things. So policy oftentimes says, hey, look, we believe in the environment, we're gonna protect the environment, right? And so then downstream of a policy that says, we're gonna protect the environment, we need to then do things that actually accomplish that. So zero emissions, transportation, zero emissions grid, those types of things, right? But that comes from a policy standard. So policy, you know, there's very small fixes that can be made sometimes in hydrogen, how to measure hydrogen, right? So gasoline is often measured in gallons, right, hydrogen's measured in a completely different way. The vehicles that we drive are typically measured on a fuel standard of how far we can drive per gallon. Hydrogen is really not, hydrogen vehicles are not really measured the same way. It's how far you can get on a tank, right? So there's certain things that I think the industry needs to clean up, possibly from a policy perspective. So we here in the state can put our, sort of plan our flag and say where we stand so that the market can kind of rally around that point and assist us with achieving, whether it's our climate objectives, zero emissions, zero cost energy, whatever those objectives are, those markets and those marketplace players can help us get there. So Chuck, you know, I don't wanna put you on the spot but, you know, having been familiar with Hawaii for a long time, have you found any gaps in our policy that could be helpful to the hydrogen industry in developing a hydrogen economy here? I do, you know, Mitch, you know this about me. My background is really in stationary projects, what I call grid projects. Sometimes people delineate those into utility scale projects or building level projects but I like to call them all grid projects because really at the end of the day, they're all interconnected by the grid or to the grid, whether it's by the utility company or by a customer. And so one of the places that I see in a gap for hydrogen and fuel cells is combined heat and power and onsite cogeneration. We talk a lot about hydrogen for transportation but we do not talk about hydrogen for buildings. There is a very, very compelling case from an energy efficiency standpoint for providing heat and power from a single point of the source off of an opportunity fuel such as hydrogen here with our high rates and our sometimes difficult, you know, getting fuel from one point to another and also the resiliency benefits of having onsite localized, combined heat and power cogeneration projects. That's one area where I think we could do a lot better in. We're about combining, you know, if we look at a grid application, combining, you know, the long-term energy storage, masses of energy storage using hydrogen combined with batteries, which traditionally provide like near term, say four to 11 hours worth of backups storage whereas hydrogen can provide up the days or months of storage. What are your culture thoughts on that and what kind of policies might be out there that can help introduce that to Hawaii? One of the things, one of the movements we're seeing particularly on the US mainland right now is what's called, when you have an overproduction of renewables, typically what's happened is is they've given that they've sold that or given people money to take that electricity. As we approach that here in the state of starting to increase our penetration of solar and wind and these what's called intermittent renewable resources, sometimes the demand doesn't exactly track the supply of these intermittent renewable resources. So one way to deal with these intermittent renewable resources is storage. And you can store it, you know, sometimes whether it's electrochemical storage or hydrogen, sometimes you can do it with heat, right? So store them all in a bunch of hot water tanks. I mean, those types of things, right? But it's about really utilizing your grid in a very smart way that not only, that kind of realizes that there's a nexus between electricity, thermal energy, water and transportation and really realizing that the more we keep corporate interests separated here in this state, the longer it's gonna take us to really realize and achieve a nexus between those areas. Can you explain that a little bit that last thought about corporate interests separated? What's the situation there? And what's the solution? Or how do you think that should work out? I can only speak from example. You know, I've worked with utility companies that have owned gas and electric resources. It's been a little easier to get a heating rebate out of them where I'm converting an old electric boiler to a gas boiler. Hey, look at that. Now I can get an energy efficiency rebate out of it. Here in this state, if I'm switching an electric boiler over to a gas boiler, Hawaii energy doesn't rebate on that because it's fuel switching. But maybe, just maybe there's system benefits to that that we should actually look at, right? So sometimes shifting resources is a good thing. And we actually want to incentivize that. And sometimes we're stopped by doing that at the lack of incentives, which really tracks back up to where the incentives come from. So here in this state, the renewable, the energy efficiency incentives that Hawaii energy gives out are a part of the public benefits charge that comes from electricity bills, right? So there's a disconnect there between gas rate payers, right? So it's not to say that combining the two companies is the fix, but I can tell you, based on my experiences working across the eight states on the West Coast, that working with what we call integrated gas and electric utility companies, it can often be a lot easier to do some innovative things such as hydrogen or fuel storage or electric storage or really any of those types of things. So looking at Maui, I mean, I know a lot about the big island, I know something about Oahu, not too much about Kauaii, but you live on Maui. So what are the, where do you see the opportunities out there on Maui for a hydrogen economy? You know, one of the things that really bothers me every day is that a lot of our, I don't, you know, Maui electric could probably give me an exact number to this, but I wanna say 99% of our electric lines are above ground. Our propane, we don't have a pipeline here on Maui that transports propane to critical sites. If we have a major event here on Maui, we're in really, really bad shape for a very long time. Hydrogen can help fix that through, because again, producing closer to the source will have benefits, because you can use that fuel closer to the point where you actually need it. Instead of having to transport a fuel, you know, we have about a month's storage of propane here on Maui and on the outer islands. And you know, I should probably clarify that this propane situation is not only true on Maui, but it's also indicative of the other islands as well. Oahu is the only island that has a pipeline. The other islands are propane, and they're all served by vehicles, trucking them around, right? So again, we talk about resiliency. We're not in very good shape here on Maui. When we talk about energy efficiency, we do a lot better here on Maui. We have very, very few of these, what I referred to earlier, these stationary combined heat and power projects, whether they're propane fired or hydrogen fuel cells, which we have none. So there's areas definitely where we could do a little bit better on Maui, but I can tell you, one of the things that really scares me the most is the resiliency aspect. So I've heard that there's a lot of wind that's curtailed on Maui. Like you have great wind resources and you have a lot of wind turbines there. What's the situation there from your understanding? Well, that was the talk of the town for a few years. You know, we were very excited to get our first wind farm here on Maui and you know, all the people over in KIA and Wailea side could see all the bright red lights shining up at night up onto the poly, which was something we had truly never seen before on this island. So the Nimbis, you know, got their day, but hey, that's okay. And so what happened was, as loads started to shift, demand started to decrease, energy efficiency really started to take off a little bit. The generators, the fuel generators that Maui Electric owns were really running on pretty low idle. And so, and turning them off actually costs more than shutting the wind power off. And so for a little while, yeah, we were actually turning the wind power off, not literally, but yeah, we were just not accepting the wind into the system, but then that's been recently fixed, I believe through the PUC. Yeah, I think the wind farms are getting or the utilities are getting much better at managing the grid. So there's not as much curtailed energy as there used to be, because I recall, you know, when we went to the farm on the big island, they were curtailing stads of kilowatt hours, and they were looking at, you know, maybe producing hydrogen with it. And now that's kind of gone away because, you know, the operators, you know, they've, you know, adjusted their algorithms and how they control the grid. So there's hardly any wind that's actually curtailed now on the big island. Yeah, we've, in this particular wind farm I was talking about has recently installed batteries. And so they've basically fixed that problem by shedding or shifting the load to a different, or a supply at a different time. Yeah, let's shift to slide six. So we want to talk about, you know, projects and leading by example, this is one of your slides. So maybe you want to talk through, you know, what are the projects and how do we do by example and what your thoughts are on this? So the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance is really an education-based advocacy group and nothing I can tell you in my 25 years of energy speaks louder than actual projects. Projects that people can visit, people, projects that people can write about, projects that people can go online and see the actual output for on a real-time basis. These are the types of things that get people excited. These are the types of things that start to become replicable because people start to see things and they say, hey, you know what? I didn't know that was possible. Does that actually work? How can we get one of those? The questions just start to roll from there. But without these real projects in place, it's all just conversational. It's all kind of limited to research. You know, I get a lot of conversations of when I do, talks about the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance, one of the main talks I get is, Chuck, is hydrogen ready? We hear a lot about the talk about it still being in the research phase. Well, I can tell you it is not. In the 25 years I've been working in energy, I've seen, I mean, it wasn't 2000. I saw a fuel cell or wastewater plant. Mitch, you probably know a lot. There's a fuel cell energy up in Washington State, right? I mean, there was a fuel cell energy model 0001. I mean, I saw a fuel cell at a post office in Anchorage. I've seen those fuel cells at universities in California. These things are out there. They are ready to go and we just need to get them out there more. The more we get them out there, the project costs will drive down. Equipment costs will drive down. People will become more familiar with how to install these things and operate them. The cost will go down. The other thing that our friends Mitch and some others are working on is material science. So getting away from things like platinum and palladium and getting to polymaterials that act like platinum, but don't necessarily cost as much, right? Take two again, try to drive these costs down. If you take this conversation about hydrogen and fuel cells, relay it 15 years ago to where we're talking about solar. Do you remember all of you out there when and where, how many solar projects you could point to 15 years ago? How many probably on one hand probably, right? Now look at how far we've come. We expect the same type of thing to happen in hydrogen and fuel cell, but possibly quicker. I was on a webinar this morning and now hydrogen gave a pitch. You probably know Steve Samansky well. Photon on site, but now they've got bought out by now. And he had some two interesting graphs showing the cost of wind and solar were both around 40 cents a megawatt hour, which translates to four cents a kilowatt hour. And he had another graph showing that their objective is like if by 2024, they will be able to produce hydrogen for a dollar and a half a kilogram, which is that includes the capital cost of the equipment and the cost of the actual electricity. Electricity makes up about 70 to 80% of the cost of the hydrogen. So the real key for green hydrogen for hydrogen is to get that electricity cost down. Do you like the comment on that? Yeah, we're working with a number of partners who are interested in providing a full scale microgrid to powered system to provide hydrogen production. Yes, we don't want to, what we, one thing we don't want to do is add to the grid for production of hydrogen, right? We don't, you know, we have a Kahluwai power plant that's pretty dirty. It's expected to go offline here in a few years, but the electricity it puts out is not exactly carbon free. So we don't want to take grid power over the next couple of years and necessarily produce hydrogen out of that. We're open to working with Maori Electric on them owning it, but we just don't want to take that power plant to produce hydrogen. That's not really what the group's about. So, and we don't have to. We can take solar with a battery, install it off grid and produce hydrogen with the prices of where solar is at today with pricing. It's actually very exciting. Talk to us a little bit about membership. How do you become a member of the Hawaii hydrogen alliance and how much does it cost? What's the process for becoming a member? So we have three tiers of membership, mainly depending on your level of involvement in the hydrogen industry and how badly you want to be involved with projects here. The advocacy group that we have, the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance is really geared towards, again, developing projects in the state. It's basically a matchmaking service where we take, you know, Mitch, you know this well, doing business in Hawaii is all about relationships. It's all about who you know. And, you know, I'm from Maui, I know a lot of the people here in Maui, I know all the major facility managers and all that. So what we're gonna do is we're just gonna take these hydrogen companies with these great products and try to find homes for them, right? So the way, so if you have companies with products that are interested in projects, we have one kind of set of membership guidelines for them. We also have a different set for groups that just wanna receive our newsletter or do things like that or kind of be in touch and kind of keep an eye on us and see what we're up to. The easiest way to do that is to visit our website, www.hawaiihydrogenalliance.com or email directly admin at hawaiihydrogenalliance.com, either of which we'll get you directly to the folks that you need to help you through that. So I'm just kind of stepping back a little bit. So do you have any interesting projects? I mean, what is the menu of projects without sort of giving, obviously giving away any secrets here, but what is the level, projected level of activity in Hawaii? Is this gonna be like a good market for people and do you perceive that? We are seeing a strong interest, you know, not only we're sifting through it pretty quick, you know, we know what's a real opportunity and what's not. And so we're really focused on, if I can show my cards a little bit here, we're really focused on the ocean and ag waste. We've a very strong agricultural community here in the state and we wanna help support them with their products. We really want to help support them with their products. I'm gonna say that like six times because I really want the Department of Agriculture and all their companies to really understand that. There is a nexus between what we are doing and water and energy. I mean, this all comes together. So we want to help them with their products and their operations. The ocean, you know, let's talk about the ocean. JFK, JFK was very resounded when he made the statement that if we can get to desalinating the ocean, we have really done something. I'm showing my cards when I talk about ocean desalination. We have water shortages here on Maui. What a cool thing if we could create what called, you know, coincident projects that somehow fix a little bit of water problems and a little bit of energy problems and a little bit of climate problems all at once. So, you know, again, this kind of leading you down the path there of a couple of the projects that we're working on. But we also have, you know, some companies that are kind of doing things the outside the box way. So traditionally, ocean desalination has been very strong for hydrogen production. You need to clean up the water before you take the hydrogen out. Otherwise, it's just very, very inefficient. Well, we have companies now with products and patents that don't need to do that. Very, very exciting stuff. And of course, they see Hawaii and the Pacific Islands and the Pacific region as a home for them to kind of build their business. And we'd love to help them do that. Okay, so we got about 30 seconds left. I told you it would go fast. So I gotta turn it over to you, Chuck. Do you have any parting comments that you'd like to make either to your members or to people that are interested in becoming a member? Now's the time to do things differently. The hydrogen economy is coming. Green hydrogen is coming. It's gonna provide base load power for transportation and grid resources. The renewable resources that you see are very, very helpful and they have helped move the ball forward for on a whole for renewable energy. But base load power is yet to come. Hydrogen will provide that. On behalf of the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance, we appreciate the opportunity today and great talking with you again, Mitch. Okay, well, thank you so much. Our guest has been Chuck Collins, founder of the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance and that's our show for today. I'll be back again next Wednesday with another show. And so this is Hawaii, the state of clean energy signing off Aloha.