 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hey, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stand Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, fresh on the chair here from the Military Affairs Council over at the state capitol. And I got to spend half a day yesterday at the state capitol getting ready for budget hearings. So I'm about capitoled out now, so it's a real refreshing thing to come do my show today. And I've got a really great guest. It's not his first time on this show, it's not his first time in Think Tech. He's a natural over here, Mr. Dave Raul from the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association. And we're going to talk electric vehicles and thank goodness the term electric vehicles, we're trying to get it naturalized now or embedded or just implanted into people's brains includes hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. I have to say that because I'm Stand the Energy Man, the hydrogen guy here in Hawaii. If I don't say hydrogen, at least once during a show, I'm going to get severely reprimanded by my office. So anyway, Dave Raul, thanks for being here again. Thank you, Stan. And could you, kind of for the audience, because not everybody watches every show all the time. We missed you last time, a little bit about your background and how you got into doing what you're doing right now. Well, thank you. I came here in 1975. I was a naval aviator. In fact, right before that, I'd been stationed at Lauri Air Force Base where I'd asked to fly this thing right here on your shirt. The F-86, I go that far back, but I've flown the A7 and the A4 and I was a naval test pilot in China Lake, California. So I rode a lot of tech manuals and kind of helped in a lot of adoption of new technology. I've taken my Volkswagen all the way apart to a parade rest and put it all back together. So I'm not from a car guy too, but I've owned an ad agency in Honolulu since 1984 and done 24 different kinds of retail clients. But among them, I was asked by the auto dealers in 1999 to help them with their trade association. So I've worked with the Y Auto Dealers Association as their executive director since then. Great. Yeah, I think that's, people ask me all the time, okay, you're a fine arts major. How do you end up doing energy stuff? But that's why we're kind of like soul brothers because you're an aviator and now you do art too. You're a poet and you're an artist and your wife's an artist. The journalism background helps, yeah. So now you're into public relations and doing media stuff, which is great. But people oftentimes can't connect like a military career with a civilian career, especially when it's so diverse. But like for you, a test pilot, people that are like from my background, we appreciate when you say you're a test pilot, that means, oh, they tried out new airplanes. Maybe that's really cool. No, it means really large colonies because you got to really, you really got to have a lot of guts to jump in an airplane that's never been proven before or to test new equipment. Or my father was a test pilot in the Navy also and flew the Fulton recovery system, snagged the balloon and everything. And so I have a real appreciation for what test pilot means and I appreciate your art. Well, you have to be able to take that technology and communicate it. There you go. And that's why I have about 50 books on physics because I think they're the jet jockeys of communication. There you go. Okay. Well, we're here to talk about electric vehicles. And particularly the title of the show is talking about electric fields in Hawaii and the future and where they're at now. And you kind of have your finger on the pulse of electric vehicles from the manufacturer, distributor, sales side versus the Blue Planet folks here who have it from the, we want to be clean yesterday, get all those cars here now and make it happen. But that's a tall order. And so we kind of want to get your perspective on that transition and how we know that electric vehicles are going to be the future in Hawaii to a great extent. But it's going to happen on a timeline and it's going to happen with the grid or in conjunction with changes in the grid. And it's going to come with some big adjustments. So why don't you give us your perspective on some of those aspects? Well, we appreciate the Blue Planet people and a lot of those folks, the Sierra Club and others who have brought forward ideas about the electric vehicle adoption. And I think that's kept the momentum going. That's why Hawaii ended up number two behind only California electric vehicle adoption. It all started in 2011. We had to make a special call to Nissan to see if we could be a rollout market here. They were only going to do six of them. We said, please make Hawaii your seventh rollout market. Otherwise, we wouldn't have even had those 300 cars that were sold that first year that they really came out in 2011. Now, out of the million cars that are on the roadway, about 1 half and 1 percent, actually about 6,000 cars are in the electric vehicle category. And I know that the goal is to have 100 percent of all the vehicles on the roadways be renewable energy, predominantly electric vehicles and hydrogen and electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. But my goodness, that's a tall order based on how many are coming into the pipeline, how many internal combustion vehicles you would have to just prohibit from operating on the roadways. And so we've kind of brought that truth to the table and said, it looks like some cars can last 20 years. In fact, many do. The average car is average age out there is 11 years. And so we would have to start selling 60% of all our cars by 2025. All of the 50,000 cars we sell a year would have to be electric to reach the goals of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. Yeah, which is 10 times more than we have on the road to every year. It's a power of magnitude greater than what likely we'll be selling. And so that's something that we've tried to discuss with people. And they've asked, well, how can that be changed? And we have some thoughts on that. It has to do with shows like this and a lot of education, a lot of telling people the benefits of the electric vehicle. Particularly for Hawaii in producing its own energy. And so we produced a graph called the Cars and Energy Graph that kind of shows what Hawaii could do if it could make its own energy and use it in vehicles. And that's a point that's been brought up by a couple of our guests before. Is that just because you have an electric car and you're plugging it into your wall, if you don't have PV on your roof, feeding your car, you're still polluting the air because you're buying electricity made with fossil fuels. So just because you have a clean and green car doesn't mean you're not polluting. And so to really, truly, honestly, from cradle to grave be clean, we have to look at the full picture, like you say. Well, in a good book, it says in the book of Matthew, it says, under much is given, much is required. So if I could have you take a look at that Cars and Energy Graph, you'll see how much is given to the people of Hawaii. Because we lived out here in the middle of the Pacific, we have this wonderful trade wind that allows us to blow windmill blades around and make those turbines also create the generation that creates electricity. And so what I used is public art, art that's found down in the capital, that's the Tadashi Sato Mosaic. And interestingly enough, being a journalist and being an observer of things and a poet, I just happened to notice, I wonder how many blue and green tiles are in that Mosaic. Well, it was roughly the number of all the cars on Oahu. So it became the perfect graphic to explain to legislators and anybody who'd ever been to the capital. Take a look at this. This is our island here. And take a look at how many cars are on it. And if you want to have them all be electric, here's what we're gonna have to do with public policy and with adoption too, because we want it to be free market. So we fortunately, much has been given and so much is expected of course. So we have the best wave energy in the world. We have the best geothermal energy access in the world. The ocean thermal energy conversion is another thing being developed here. Of course, our solar, which you referred to as phenomenal and we've just learned that now they're gonna be coming out with solar panels that can be printed like newsprint on a piece of paper and then rolled out and imagine when that all comes about. And finally we have H-Power, where we even use some of our rubbish to create electricity. All that electricity can also make hydrogen with some of the waste energy that's being prepared. I mean, by all that wind, wave, sun and geothermal. And then it can go into the grid and into the cars that are out there that can use that energy. Well, that's why I did the kind of the yin and yang thing saying there will still be some internal combustion vehicles on the roadway, but you could make a lot of them be in a renewable energy. And the goal of the Clean Energy Initiative was to take that oil barrel up in the upper right-hand corner of this graphic and lower than the 500 million gallons of oil that we use each year down to 150 million gallons by 2030. That was the White Clean Energy Initiative. Now they've extended that initiative out and are looking at lowering it down to zero by 2045. Now that's a tall order. And so how do you do that with massive profundo amounts of education? You really have to have people embrace the greater concept of what would happen if we could use our own fuel that was created here and keep that billion dollars rotating in the Hawaii economy. Well, let's look at infrastructure for just a bit because I agree that education's got to be a big part of it, but something that struck me as kind of ironic was when President Trump said, hey, we're not gonna be part of that Paris climate accord. We're just not gonna do that. And people were all upset and everything, but the point is, well, what are you doing right now today that actually will impact the climate? I mean, we're waiting for big government or the state or somebody to do all this stuff, but it really gets down to the individual. And are you willing to pay more in a gas tax? Or are you willing to pay more to put more PV on your roof to store it in batteries or hydrogen and charge your car at home versus plug it in at work? Because right now the workplace, is your boss gonna put in a charger for you? Is Safeway and Long's drugs and everybody else gonna put free charging? 10 or 20 spots there? Is Hawaiian Electric gonna pay for new substations and new transformers to get your utility to the point where it can put fast chargers in? You know, everybody's looking to somebody else, a big business or government to fix it. You know, what are some of the options you think we have? I mean, you're right, we have all these renewables. Do we really need to start looking at the holistic picture? How does the grid interface with the traffic, with the cars, with the hydrogen, with batteries? I mean, what do you think about those kind of? The answer is found dead center of that holistic picture you talked about. And first of all, I have to admire the pioneers, those 6,000 people who bought those vehicles. And there's 29 people who bought those vehicles before those 6,000 people bought them. And I don't think we give enough credit to those 29 people. Actually, half of those folks, 14 I guess, because we had 14 dealers early on who were, they have to buy the electric vehicle first and then the customer buys it from them. So the dealer's the first one to buy the car believing that it can be sold, then the dealer has to train their electric vehicle technicians. The dealer has to pay the specialty tools cost, which was extensive. For 20-something vehicles. Correct. And the dealer then had to put in the charging station and the dealer had to put in all this expense to be able to transition to the electric vehicle without a profit structure coming back. It just didn't pencil for years and years, perhaps even 10 years that it doesn't pencil back. And I've seen dealers still willing to invest and help move the whole process forward, knowing that that first dollar of profit isn't going to come for maybe a decade down the way. That to me, I have such admiration for those, almost like founding fathers who are willing to take that big risk. Those first adopters are risk takers. And then those who bought the vehicles, after them, they're willing to see how it worked and do the charging that it takes because there's these issues of sustainability, but not actually issues that are roadblocks to purchasing vehicles and keeping them sustained going forward. And that has to do with charging time, with range and with cost. So yeah, so those are key issues. I got an article last week from a network from the California Fuel Cell Partnership that talked about how plug-in electric vehicle drivers are too smart to buy electric vehicles, which I thought was kind of ironic. But their point was that as with the early adopters who are real risk takers, the consumer now is not so willing to take the risk and they want to lease the vehicles. So with any new technology, whether it's hydrogen fuel cell or electric plug-in or who knows, maybe some thermal or pressurized gas, pressurized CO2 or something in vehicles, the early adopters are going to look to lease the vehicles. They're not going to look to buy something expected the last 11 years. And when the technology is changing every two years, it's rapidly changing. Well, that's called the leap-rogging effect because the new technology leap frogs over what someone has right now. And so you're right. You just see things about the time you have something, sort of like the cell phone. You get it and need to upgrade it and upgrade it and upgrade it. In fact, that's the best analogy I know of. That cell phone came out, as I recall, a Motorola Brick, the 8400, that you could charge. It took 10 hours to charge. And you got a half hour of talking time. And it was $3,500 to buy it in the 84. They had just a few cell towers around. That's very similar to the electric car. It was very expensive in the beginning. And the battery was very costly. And it took a long time to charge it. And it didn't give you very much range. And so if you want to look at the adoption of electric vehicles, it's going to be very similar to the adoption of the iPhone and all the cell phone technology we have. Yeah, it's just going to take time for everybody to really get comfortable with the technology. And for the technology to become, I mean, as consumers, we're very impatient. And we have a very low threshold for failure. So if you got into a car and two years down the road, this goes wrong and that goes wrong, boom. You're not buying that car again. The car has to last four or five years without any major issues, like you don't have a big transmission problem or something. Or your loyalty to that company is probably really crippled. And I mean, you're the auto dealer guy. You would know that. But so when you bring out these new technologies, like Toyota and with the Mariah and stuff, they really have the eye on longevity. Like, this has got to work flawlessly and the quality's got to be there or the customer base won't be there. Sure, and when we talked about how many will be around to 28 years to ubiquity is what we said in 2017. That's what it took for the cell phone to be ubiquitous with everybody having them everywhere. You'll see 230,000 electric vehicles on the roadways in 2045 out of the million that are out there. So we thought that would be about 23%. But 250,000 or so will be driverless cars at that point. And that really dramatically changes the whole picture out there on the roadways. Especially now that we learned today, the GM is just trying to put out 2,500 driverless cars that have no steering wheels and no pedals. And so they're gonna use them as taxis. And they're trying to get clearance for the 16 requirements of having, there's a requirement to have an airbag in the steering wheel. They don't have a steering wheel. So now they're having to get that requirement released. And so that's happening much faster than anybody thought. 2019 is when they plan to do all that. Wow. Well, with that, we're gonna give you 60 seconds to watch some ThinkTech promotions before we come back and talk to Dave Ralf about the real shaker, which is autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence and what it means to electric cars. So we'll be back in 60 seconds. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host, Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate and power and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. And we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Aloha, I'm Keeley Ikeena, and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii's Hawaii together. In Hawaii together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii together. I'm Keeley Ikeena. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man on my lunch hour as usual. Not taking any state time away from this. This is on my lunch hour. So I'll go grab something quick at 7-Eleven after this to feed myself. But I got Dave Ralf here and we'll go from the Spam Musubi to artificial intelligence and what it means in vehicles, electric vehicles, which is quite a leap, but that's where we left off about a minute and a half ago. So let's talk a little bit about how you see the future. Well, they said the autonomous vehicle really was the avenue toward artificial intelligence. And so that's sort of the doorway where you get to the big control of artificial intelligence. And the country that controls that in this space race toward dominance and AI will control productivity and will control so many things economically that that's why it's important to kind of control how the driverless car is being put on the roadway so that we can beat the everybody else who's in the race toward artificial intelligence. So is it too soon to introduce this graphic here? No, no, I think it will be first done here on ThinkTech. We've also put it in our magazine that we're just about to release. It's not officially released, but we could now show on ThinkTech a thing we call the Rosetta Stone. And those who kind of remember their history from 1799 and Napoleon's people in Egypt ran across in the town of Rosetta this stone that had graphics on it, but it had Greek and it had Doptic and it had... It was kind of the key to unlocking language translation. And so this unlocks the future in the view of we had to testify on House Bill 1580 this year about electric vehicle adoption through the year 2045. So I took what I thought would be market uptake. First of all, you have to know on this graph that the blue lines represent internal combustion engine vehicles. And it kind of goes up and comes down in a roller coaster fashion, but that's been the historic adoption rate of these vehicles up to 60,000 down to 40,000 up to 60,000 down to 40. And that will continue on just as it has for the last 40 to 50 years. Then we put on here years ago when the first electric vehicles would come in and that was 2011 and you could see that start to grow. And we hit the numbers almost exactly. The chart even many, many years ago now has been fulfilled and now we're here at 2018 and we're doing about that many cars and just exactly we predicted. And so we studied the autonomous vehicle adoption rate too and I started putting that in there, the red line and it hockey sticks out there in the 2040 to 2045 timeframe. But those autonomous vehicles are largely electric vehicles because the computer technology takes so much electric energy. So it's natural that those two would be married together and that includes hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles. So when I created this chart, this is what I thought would be the natural market uptake but it had to have this holistic view of the whole thing from the four corners. You had to have 5G technology out there that fifth generation long-term evolution technology. You had to have plenty of engineers and a lot of educational community involved in this whole process. Tourism had to continue to hold as the base along with our military spending. And then on the right hand side of this graphic, you had to have those alternative ways of income coming in, including agriculture and all the others besides tourism. Filmmaking, science and observation. Medical industry. You have a rocket ship there taken off that. Yeah, thought the space industry would play a large part too. Are you seeing that as a player? I hope so. In fact, we hope all those things can continue to hold up the base, our economy. The thing was so difficult to envision. It was just exhausting. And it's so hard to imagine how it'll change the industry so much for the auto industry. And for people who've had car dealerships in their families for many years, for decades, generations, I decided it's gonna be this hard to do. I might as well make it joyful. And so that's why I put the word joy at the bottom of the chart. And I did a proof of the joy with using Oilers Identity as the formula. And so the dealers kid me a lot about the fact that I said this is so hard, we'll just try to make it joyful. And then at the top, I put the adoption bridge that would require all sorts of inclusion in things like bicycling and like other travel because that will affect also everything going forward. And the fact you have to have TOD, lots of buildings built along the rail that's going in. Everything is on this chart and you could sit down as a thinking document and start explaining everything over the next 28 years. So if you wanted to have 100% adoption of electric vehicles, you would have to see where you would put up vectors on these lines. And I believe that the autonomous vehicle will drag the electric vehicle and the hydrogen vehicles along with it. And so the governor has come out with an executive order, 0717, saying that Hawaii would be... We're open for business. Open for business with regard to the autonomous vehicle. And he told the world that and the Silicon Valley people came in and the Department of Transportation people came in and they sat across from each other on the table and they said, what do we do to tell the world we're ready? And they said, come out with something and they came up with this idea of the executive order. So that was published now that said we are this perfect Petri dish, just like I pointed out with the cars and energy graphic, the perfect place to test all these technology and me being in the test business and coming from that background and also in the business of telling people what the value of it all is. I just thought it was a natural and so did the dealers and that's why they're 100% behind all this and ardently supporting the adoption of electric hydrogen and autonomous. I think people underestimate the message that our governor has sent out in number one and the legislature doing 100% renewable by 2045 on the grid. Our mayors jumped in and said, we want clean transportation. They put a stake in the ground and then the governor coming out with, we're open for business for autonomous vehicles. That's big, big, big, big things. And for those of you on insider trading, this is not, this is the people in Hawaii know this but for those of you on the mainland who are looking for an in here in the stock market or something, the guy who came up with putting autonomous vehicles at the airport now works in the governor's office. So I'm just telling you, if you're gonna buy stock anywhere, it's gonna be in Hawaii, so we can do this. But the governor is an engineer which brought up the, when I brought that up to the hydrogen association, they said, oh, you can't spell geek without a double E and that was based on me telling them that our governor was an engineer and they're really excited because our governor understands this technology. Our legislature's picking up on what the governor already knows and we're getting, we're sending that message. You know, I mean, when it comes to economic development and putting Hawaii on the map as innovator, a place to do technology, a place to really start this stuff. Hey, we have millions and millions of tourists coming in here. I think the last number I saw was eight million a year come into the state of Hawaii. And if you want to showcase a new technology, showcase it at the airport, like Ford Fujigami proposed with his buses. And that's how he's working at the governor's office now. He's got the vision. And there's some people here in the state with some vision that are doing this thing. So your chart shows it and I think people are gonna start going, oh my gosh, the governor and they were all for both right. Well, I don't know about it. I think the people were right in embracing the technology. Hawaii's people said they wanted to embrace it. Just as we were early adopters of the internet, I think we were one of the first really on that. We kind of came out early on that. Even way back in King Kalakaua's time, we embraced electricity early on. So the people of Hawaii have been early adopters of technology and look at our solar adoptions. I think number one, rooftop solar per capita. So yeah, I think it's a wonderful place to have the Petri dish of Goldilocks environment. They call it perfect conditions. We've said another metaphor. We said Hawaii is to the electric car when Napa is to the great perfect conditions. And so with all that said, you still have to have people buying it. They still have to find an economic incentive in buying it that makes some sense. And so battery prices have to come down and charging stations have to increase. Yeah, what makes me feel good about the electric vehicle piece is I know that batteries are kind of in a lull right now. They've kind of gotten as good as they're gonna get for the short term. And when you talk to the technology guys and the lab guys, they go, we're pushing the next leaps gonna be nanocarbon and nanotubes and things like that to store energy. And the nice thing about that is if it works in a battery, it'll work in a fuel cell for storage. So hydrogen and batteries are gonna start going right along together as technology improves your batteries, technology will improve for fuel cells and they'll ride that same curve like you say up to getting us towards our clean energy goals. And I hope Hawaii takes advantage of your rainbow of clean energy options there because I do think there's an individual responsibility. You can't sit there and point the finger at government or big business to make all the changes. Well, put the PD on your roof and put the batteries in your carport and put a hydrogen tank out back and make your own dang hydrogen and be clean. Will HECO be part of it? Well, if they start seeing the trend that everybody's gonna come off the grid, they're gonna come up with a solution where they're part of the solution. They're not just poo-poo and everything. They're going, well, we would need to be the people helping you come off the grid and make that part of our business model, but... Well, the dealers are certainly ardently pursuing it. It's not easy, but they've, you know, we found some joy in doing it. Okay. Well, I tell you what, we got about a minute left, Dave, and I'm gonna leave the last minute up to you to do whatever you feel in your heart to do. Well, I went to this exhibit of Hawaii a thousand years from now and the artist painted Hawaii in 3017. And I said, well, I see what you're talking about with sea level rise and some other things. But I think as a poet, I'll take a shot at it. So here's what I submitted to the National Poetry Contest. First came the driverless car, then the age of AI. And as work went away, with minimum annual living cost stipend, people didn't even have to try to make plowdown cillians shine. Work went away. The next century saw the eventual death of the multiplication tables. And in the aftermath, all electrical things shed their cables. We turned on lights with our thoughts. We drove to places in our minds because there was no real places left of any kind. All the days had just been too nice and the earth party ran out of eyes. An inductive reasoning became a thing of the past. There was no truth left for the press. What a mess. I know it ended with this kind of dark, what a mess. But as somebody asked me during Christmas time how to fix that end of the poem. And I said, well, for Christmas I'll add. And the answer to this is found in Genesis and again in John and the old and new become one. I made a nice ending to it during Christmas. But I submitted that to National Poetry Contest to tell folks that the car is the direction you have to figure out artificial intelligence. And that's gonna be so important going forward. And it's just happening so much faster than any of us thought. Well, Dave from Fighter, Pilot to Poets quite a leap in public relations in the middle. But thanks for me and my guests today. And I know you're gonna be back again because you're always good to have on the show. So for this week and the Stand the Energy Man for the third show, second show in January of 2018, signing off. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the control room for helping putting this on and making this come live to you and be looking for us along with the other ThinkTech shows on YouTube. Until next week, Aloha, Stand the Energy Man, signing off.