 You know, well, welcome to Stand on the Energy Man. It's Dan Osterman here on Think Tech Hawaii. And before I get started with my show, I wanna plug one of the other hosts we have. We have Lillian's, Lillian Koumet, who does Lillian's Vegan Cooking Show here on Think Tech as a book out. So make sure you look for that or maybe send her an email at Think Tech and see if you can get a copy of it. It's got some great recipes in it, even though I'm a lot more carnivore than I am omnivore. And it's certainly not a vegan, but she's got some great recipes in there and they're pretty tasty. I get to share some of them. Her husband worked with me and I got to share some of her food and she's a good cook. So check out that book if you're looking for a Christmas present or something and you know it's a vegan, a really great book. Anyway, today's show is kind of a back to basic show. Excuse me. I've noticed that I get so into what's happening nowadays and in the industry, in the hydrogen industry that I kind of forget that I have to step back sometimes and kind of refocus on what we're really, what our objective is with energy management show. So I wanna kind of start off the show talking a little bit about just energy basics in it. You've heard me say this before if you're a regular standard energy man viewer, but if you think about energy and you think about it in terms of physics or chemistry, there's the first law of thermodynamics which says energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it just changes form. And that's really, really important because what you don't realize is there's energy all around us. Every day, whether it's wind or solar or believe it or not, just a big boulder sitting on top of a hill has energy, has potential energy. And if that boulder starts rolling down that hill, it has real energy. And when it hits the ground and hopefully if it doesn't hit your house or something it has real damage potential with kinetic energy. So even just what you think is an inanimate object sitting around still has the potential for energy. And so as we deal with energy as a source it's not just energy, it's what kind of energy. And when we talk about energy in contemporary terms we're usually talking gasoline for your car or diesel fuel or we're talking electricity from the grid. And so we tend to think of it as those kinds of energy. And sometimes in the discussion and when we start looking at how we're going to do something we lose track of how important that kind of energy is and some of the characteristics of it. For example, we have cars that run on gasoline or diesel with internal combustion engines. Now, they're really powerful. They're, we get us where we're going. Bustle fuels are relatively cheap so you could fill up your car and go 300, 400 miles maybe even 500 miles on a tank and it'll cost you maybe 40, 50 bucks. And you could go a long ways, especially on the mainland you can drive across the whole country in your car. And when you break it down to how much a mile it is it's actually really cheap because gasoline has a lot of energy stored in each gallon. And we go, that's pretty good except that internal combustion engines in your car are very inefficient. They're only about 24 to 26% efficient at best. So you go, well, man if I'm burning all that gasoline and it's pretty cheap but I'm only 24% efficient where's the rest of the energy going? Most of it is going out of your car as heat. You're actually throwing away 70% or more of the energy in heat. In fact, that's kind of how you can tell how efficient something is. Is does it generate a lot of heat aside from what you're asking it to do? So when we use fossil fuels we tend to use the, and if we burn the fossil fuel to get our ultimate electricity or mechanical energy at our wheels on our car if we're burning any kind of fuel and we're creating heat along with whatever is getting us moving or getting our electricity going we are probably not being very efficient. So also we're putting out all that carbon monoxide all the greenhouse gases that we don't want to be putting out right now. So when we start talking today about clean energy we're talking about energy that you create without using without burning fossil fuels because they're a big contributor to the greenhouse gas problem. So for example, what are some of the clean forms of energy that we've had around for ages? One is hydroelectric. Hoover Dam on the California Nevada border is amazing. It produces huge amounts of electricity and all it is is water running through turbines. You know, it's clean, it's efficient the water's already there but you have to dam up a big valley to make a big lake behind the dam to have that kind of hydroelectric. So every kind of energy you generate has a downside of some kind. And the whole problem today or the whole challenge today is balancing out the good and the bad balancing out whether you have to dam up a valley to make the energy or if you have to have hazardous materials or if you have to buy your materials from a place where child labor is being used or there's other human rights violations and things like that or those materials so rare and they're owned by other countries so now you're dependent on other countries for things you need. There's all these trade-offs. So let's get real specific for clean energy in the United States you can start up with hydroelectric and nowadays there's more than just hydroelectric by dam. They have what they call in-stream hydroelectric. In other words, you put a device in a stream of water like a river and it turns a generator like if you had a instead of having engine on a boat turning a propeller you just have a generator attached to a propeller where the and it's anchored to the ground or suspended by cables in the stream and the water rushing by turns a propeller and generates electricity. That's in-stream hydro. The other one we're all really familiar with is solar power. Solar power is great and because of the amount that's out there now and the technology's been improving and improving and improving it's getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and the sun is great because it covers so much of the earth so much of the daylight hours you can anywhere on the earth from pretty far north to pretty far south. You can get quite a bit of energy from the sun and those solar panels right now they're doing like 15% efficiency so even you're not even able to harness all of the power of the sun in electricity but you can harness the heat from the sun in solar water heaters and things like that and you have wind turbines not just the big ones that you see on the big mountain sides and out in a Texas desert and stuff but you also have smaller ones that they call like vertical wind turbines or turbines built into the buildings that take advantage of a venturi effect of the wind rushing around a building to make the turbines move because anytime you have a big obstruction in an air stream you have what they call a venturi effect where the wind speeds up to get around it so it meets the same airflow on the other side that gives you the energy to turn those turbines and give you electricity so you have all those clean ways of doing it geothermal is one of here in Hawaii that I think we're gonna see more of at least I hope we do cause I think it'll make a huge economic impact for it but those are all clean carbon free they're not gonna pollute the air kind of energy sources to make clean electricity now we can move into the hydrogen piece why hydrogen stands and I'll tell you why because hydrogen is the one element that is clean from beginning to end especially if you use electrolysis to make it from water it's clean it's lightweight so anytime you have to use it in transportation to generate power there's a definite advantage of not having a whole lot of weight to it so in transportation it's lightweight it's a gas that's compressible that you can cram a whole lot of gas with enough pressure to squeeze it in and put it in the car but if you wanna go to liquid hydrogen and this is a figure I just came to last week after doing some research a gallon of gasoline is equivalent to a kilogram of hydrogen but if you have liquid hydrogen that gallon of liquid hydrogen has almost four times the energy of a gallon of gasoline so can you imagine a car that right now gets 300 miles per gallon goes into hydrogen power which is 60% efficient instead of 25% efficient and has four times the energy in the hydrogen now that car is going 1,500 miles a thousand, you know more way more than a thousand miles and it's clean it's all pollution free now the other thing that's really really really important to understand about what's coming up in the future is whether you're talking transportation which will be electric or you're talking the grid which by design is electric we're gonna need a lot more electricity and the problem with electricity as an energy thing is that if you're not using it when you make it you have to store it somehow so how do you store energy? There's a number of ways to do it we already know about batteries you can store energy in battery you can store energy by pumping water uphill and letting it flow through turbines coming downhill you can compress air and do the same thing you do with the water turbines compress air with a compressor and you have extra energy and then when you don't have the energy available like it's nighttime or something you take that compressed air and run it through turbines and it gives you electricity back there's all kinds of ways to store energy but one of the most useful and efficient and clean ways to store energy is in hydrogen why hydrogen? Number one, when you make hydrogen with electricity you're also making pure oxygen which has an industrial gas value medical gas you need oxygen in hospitals like especially during the coronavirus you need pure oxygen medical that's what you get when you're making hydrogen welders need hydrogen steel production they all need hydrogen and oxygen when you're splitting water to make hydrogen you're also making oxygen so that's one thing number one, like I said it's lightweight in transportation it's great and on the grid when you have too much production from your solar and wind instead of trying to tune all that wind and solar down or shut it off you just divert all that electricity into electrolyzers and make as much hydrogen as you can while the sun's out and store it so that at night or when it's cloudy or when it's raining or snowing now you have the energy stored there and it comes back to you as what we call firm power in other words it's just it's not intermittent you can use it when you want you can use as much of it as you want it's always there because it's stored up and it's efficient so that's why we really really like hydrogen as a stored energy source it's not the only one we're still going to need batteries we're still going to want to look at hydroelectric dams and we're still going to look at pumped hydro for storage but that's why hydrogen is so great when you get to super large scales batteries are too expensive they actually have some safety issues and we aren't going to be able to make that many batteries to put in all our cars and on the grid and solve all our problems and the battery technology we have now is really pretty much peaked out and we're going to have to have a different kind of battery technology in the future at some point and scientists are still working on that we're going to take a quick break right now and then we're going to come back and I'm going to show you a couple of videos and the first video is one that most people haven't seen before and I'll explain why that is the next two you've probably seen here before but they're really primers on hydrogen we'll be back in 60 seconds thanks for coming back to Stanley Energyman here this first video not a whole lot of people have seen it but it was a video that we produced for the state of Hawaii on a really important project we were doing at Hickam and when we finished the video the Air Force actually changed this policy on one of the energy sources we were testing so they didn't want to release this video but I still think it's a really great video so the policy change was we had in our microgrid at Hickam we had a gasifier to do waste to energy and that gasifier was rated at 10 tons a day which the military figured was a good size for about a thousand people and the kind of operations that they did and the more they looked at it the more they said this is just not efficient it's too expensive to run it's too big, it's too cumbersome and the technology really doesn't hit its sweet spot so you're at at least 100 tons a day and for real term purposes you gotta really be closer to thousands of tons a day to make that technology work so just ignore the waste to energy pieces of the video but watch the rest of it it's really the key to why we were developing the what we call flight line of the future for the Air Force so we can roll that video what does the power grid of the future look like? as advancements in energy rapidly outpace the modernization of the current infrastructure answering this question is more crucial than ever let's start by looking at the needs of our military right now, hundreds of US bases around the globe rely primarily on large utility grids powered by nuclear, coal and oil energy many of these grids are built on aging infrastructures natural disasters, cyber attacks and other threats can leave bases vulnerable to grid failures a new system, the first of its kind in the DOD is being developed that will allow unprecedented control over how energy is generated, stored and distributed and it's called PERL the PERL system uses renewable energy technologies deployed within a series of interconnected micro grids which provide localized fuel and power generation and energy storage this level of energy control is safer and more efficient excess energy can be stored on site and easily moved from one grid to another the energy can be used when and where it's needed even as the mission changes PERL improves energy security by producing fuel on site this security is further enhanced by eliminating single points of failure overall, PERL greatly improves survivability and resiliency the Air Force and the State of Hawaii have been partnering for many years in pushing renewable energy technology the Pacific Energy Assurance and Renewables Laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base started construction in 2017 what PERL is designed to do is be a demonstration laboratory for all of the Air Force and really all of the Department of Defense to push tomorrow's energy technologies to be deployable sooner we're looking for cost-effective, resilient, cleaner energy so the vision of the future that PERL really brings into reality is a much more dynamic system of distributed power generation with distributed power consumption and frankly in the world of the military that kind of agile self-healing can act as a deterrent to attack PERL also supports the National Guard Mission which of course is absolutely critical in the face of a natural disaster that may cause a wider grid outage so ensuring that the Air Base has energy assurance 24-7 regardless of what's happening with the wider grid is good for the entire Hawaii community there are real lessons that can come out of PERL that can not only be spread to the rest of the military but really can be spread across the United States PERL functions as a technology and business laboratory complimenting the state of Hawaii's mandated transition to 100% renewable by 2045 by reducing the import of energy PERL demonstrates energy assurance and resilience across the entire Department of Defense while reducing fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions PERL will support minimizing solid waste and enhancing sustainability management practices for the DOD and the country continuing our dependence on energy that is unstable, insecure and inefficient is not an option PERL is a holistic solution that is clean, resilient and efficient PERL will set a new precedent for our future infrastructure by providing mission assurance through energy assurance I hope you really enjoyed that video it's really, it was really the video that we wanted funded and the next video that we're gonna show is one of the other videos that was kind of added to the project we have two actually that we added in one on microgrids and one on hydrogen I don't know if we're gonna have time for the microgrid one but we should have time for the hydrogen one but in that PERL microgrid complex we had solar and wind turbines and just you saw that one run round wind turbine that was there it was a beautiful wind turbine that we tested we actually had it on a trailer and if you didn't know it when you have wind turbines on an airfield it interferes with the approach control radar and some of the other radar around the facility so we had to test this thing in a bunch of different locations to see if it interfered with the FAA's radar or the Air Force's radar on the base and design a system that was easy to assemble easy to transport easy to set up at a foreign location or a deployed location and still give you good power solar we had a lot of solar we have in fact we probably have more solar at Pearl Harbor Hickam than we need to we don't need anything else but the solar to run the base pretty much we were hoping that the waste energy would also give us not only an advantage in giving us some extra electricity but also help us to get rid of hazardous waste classified material things like that but we just couldn't make it all come together with the waste energy project again, mostly because of scale but the storage of the energy was a little bit of storage in batteries which is important batteries are great to help you smooth out your power on your microgrid but then the long-term storage the big storage was in hydrogen why hydrogen? Because you also ran all your ground support vehicles all those vehicles in the video were vehicles that run off of hydrogen fuel cells are all electric vehicles they use a hydrogen fuel cell to take hydrogen and air with the oxygen in the air the air that we breathe is not 100% oxygen it's only about 16 to 18% oxygen and a fuel cell can use either pure oxygen or the air's oxygen to generate electricity and make water so you can start off with solar power make hydrogen, make oxygen, store it and then turn it around and use it in your vehicles or turn it around to make electricity for your facilities and keep on going and keep on going you never have to have diesel fuel never have to have gasoline you just run all your ground vehicles off of hydrogen fuel cells and electricity and you run your grid on your base you can disconnect it all from the grid be off grid you can even keep it cyber secure by isolating who controls that microgrid from a land, a local area network instead of the internet really, really important for the DOD well before we run out of time let's show the second video which is the hydrogen video and it kind of ties it all together and brings the hydrogen story into the picture there are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy but the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable natural disasters, cyber attacks and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power fortunately, there is an alternative a renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy and geothermal that power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen flywheels, pumped hydro and others these microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission especially to critical facilities like hospitals airports and military bases unlike our current large scale systems microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters threats and power outages our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually they are expensive to build, expand and maintain and they're inefficient losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss spending reserves and theft microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency they also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs keeping money within our local economy and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy our energy grid was built over 100 years ago when energy needs were simple with the increased complexities of energy demands power sources and transportation now our old grid struggled to keep up we required new ways to generate, store and deliver energy renewable energy microgrids are a potential long-term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable and efficient energy for generations to come that gives you a picture of where the hydrogen fits in on the microgrid but in the vehicles like we had in the first video you saw the big tug vehicle and the bus we had weapons loaders we had umper trucks to move fuel from the what we call a hydrant, fuel hydrants on base into the wings of the airplane to get them fuel on board we had all those vehicles change from diesel drive trains to electric drive trains with hydrogen fuel cell and battery technology to drive them now there's, you use the hydrogen and the battery in combination in vehicles and one time if you want to use if you want to maximize your power you might have a battery dominant with a fuel cell range extender which is what most of our vehicles were but if you want to have a really responsive really powerful car that can go a long, long way you might have a fuel cell dominant vehicle with a really powerful fuel cell and a fairly small battery that just gives you that burst of acceleration at the front end it gives you long, long travel distances and stuff that's why you see most of the big trucks that are coming out now are going to be not battery powered but they'll be hydrogen fuel cell powered so I hope that kind of brings you back up to speed on hydrogen and a little bit more practical so and I appreciate you joining us today at Think Tech Hawaii and learning a little bit more about hydrogen so until next week Dan the energy man signing off and aloha