 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii, where community does matter. We're trying to make communities better, not just in Hawaii, but all across the world. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and we like to bring everything new and good in transportation and energy, especially hydrogen stuff. So I'm going to start off today before I introduce my guest with some things that have been going on around the world in hydrogen. I've been getting a lot of text messages, emails, and industry newsletters that are talking about what's going on worldwide in hydrogen, and some of it's really exciting. The first thing up is that Hyundai has just sold its first Nexio, which is their second production hydrogen vehicle. So Hyundai is the only production automobile company in the world that I know of that has two different models of hydrogen vehicles in production. That's not prototypes. That's not, gee, they may be here someday. They're in production and for sale, and they sold their first one of the new model in California this week. Also in California, they just stood up their 37th hydrogen station. They're quickly pressing towards their goal of 50 in the next year or so and getting up to 100 eventually, and those stations, everyone they build, they're learning from, they're improving, and they're getting it better and faster. The permitting's going faster, so the state of California is on a quick learning curve to build hydrogen stations. Toyota and Kenworth are working together on 18-wheeler vehicles, the big heavy-duty trucks, we call them Class 8 trucks, and they've got 10 of them slated to be built and used between the ports in Southern California and some of the warehouses in Southern California, all running on hydrogen. Fuel cell energy is building a 7.4 megawatt stationery fuel cell into a grid system in New York, New York State. Air Products has announced its 30-ton-a-day liquid hydrogen plant in Southern California, or in California, and that's the second liquid hydrogen plant announced within the last 30 days, one by Air Lequid and this one by Air Products. They're all dedicating liquid hydrogen to support the hydrogen stations being built in California. Just to give you some perspective on what that means, the average liquid hydrogen plant in the U.S. today that supports NASA is 20-ton-a-day. Now there's two of them being built in California that are 30-ton-a-day each. That gives you an idea of the scale and the scope that these stations mean in the industry. Intelligent Energy has now a record. They've got a 5-kilogram payload airborne under a UAV for over an hour using a fuel cell technology and electric drive systems on their quad-propeller UAVs, which is a record book thing. NEL is building a heavy-duty hydrogen production and refueling infrastructure in Denmark and Norway. The two governments have announced just these massive infrastructure improvements in Denmark and Norway supporting hydrogen. I know Norway is looking at actually making liquid hydrogen and using it to send to some of its outlying islands that have a fairly large population to help support their grid. I actually met a nice lady from Denmark about two years ago. She was in charge of making an entire island in Denmark hydrogen available across the whole island. That whole island is completely covered by hydrogen stations for their vehicles. Norway and Denmark are really doing great things. Aerolikid is building H2 infrastructure in China. There's a lot going on in Asia with fuel cells, especially in Korea, Japan and China. China is really trying to get ahead of their pollution curve and they really see that fuel cells are a big part of that. They're going in big with infrastructure being put in by Aerolikid. The U.S. Department of Energy is pressing ahead with a thing that they call H2 at scale. This is a big initiative that the Hydrogen Council, which is an international council, and the U.S. Department of Energy are pushing to get hydrogen to the scale where it can compete financially with other fossil fuels for energy production. Last but not least, the country of Australia has announced their strategic plan for moving to a hydrogen economy. So just in the last week, those are just some of the highlights of what's been going on in the world. So lots going on in hydrogen, lots going on in clean energy. And today we have with us a young man who's heralds from the Pacific Northwest. In fact, he's kind of shivering right now because it's a little cold over there. But Toby Kincaid has been on the show before. He's an inventor, holds a bunch of patents on some cool stuff. He'd like to bring some solar charging units out here that drop right into parking stalls, and we're trying to get him to bring those out. But he's here to talk to us about what he's been doing in the last couple of months while he's getting ready to come back to Hawaii. So Toby, welcome to the show. Good to have you on board, and you look kind of cold over there. Thank you so much, Aloha. I am a little cold. The Japanese would say, so we! So, yes, in Portland, we've had some rain as usual, but nothing like last year, last year it rained almost every day. Even as a Portlander, we were kind of going, hmm, but it was the summers that really got us. Incredibly hot. A lot of wildfire smoke came through Oregon and kind of settled in the Willamette Valley. And as the Oregonians, we were shocked. We never have bad air. We have air coming from the Gulf of Alaska. So, we've seen a lot of... I don't even want to call it climate change. I think we should call it climate disruption. That's what's going on in toxicity, which is right up your alley because of all your great work in hydrogen. It's really important. It's not just a whim of yours. There's science behind why you are saying we really need to go this direction. And toxicity, the fact that hydrogen is non-toxic but the solar front-end, I think it's just wonderful. Yeah. Well, you've been doing a lot of work with solar and solar charging units on the car side and even producing hydrogen with some solar drop-in-place solar units so that we can charge up some hydrogen vehicles. But lately, I guess you've been looking since the weather was a little bit calmer, drier, and not as rainy as last year, a lot more of the what we call last-mile transportation out there. And for folks that maybe aren't familiar with the term last-mile transportation, there's a lot of different ways you can save energy and one of them is to just not drive as much and use public transportation. But a lot of times, that's not real convenient for people who maybe are a mile or more away from the bus station and have a hard time getting to and from a bus or where they can catch a train or some kind of public transportation. So there's all kinds of neat, new electric transportation units coming out that cover that last mile. Everything from skateboards and scooters to hoverboards and mopeds and all kinds of things, bicycles. So Toby, talk to us about what you're envisioning as the next generation of last-mile vehicles and how they had worked. Wonderful. It's a whole new world now. We have the emergence of personal mobility devices. So now we have e-scooters, e-bikes, wheelchairs, e-mopeds, e-golf carts. And this has kind of changed the landscape of transportation. There's really kind of about five, in my view, five revolutions happening simultaneously in transportation. One is the EV. So we're seeing now a move. They're starting to get market share. We're moving away from internal combustion, the piston engines we've been using since 1880. Next is hydrogen. We're getting kind of a critical mass together. And now congratulations on your first charging station, your first hydrogen station in life. Wonderful. A third kind of revolution and factor is this rideshare. And I'm sure you have, of course, the Lyft and Uber. And now autonomous vehicles are starting to creep into the mix. But there's two other revolutions that are really extraordinary. One is this personal mobility device, which allows people many multimodal options. So you can take your e-bike or your e-scooter or anything you like. But it's the last bit, the last revolution, which is the infrastructure to charge those vehicles that I find incredibly exciting. You know, for five years, six years, I've been working in EV charging stations for cars. And you know, when you put in 40 or 50 kilowatt hours, you need a lot of juice. And when you put solar canopies up there to help and assist, at the end of the day, wonderful but a little bit expensive, which is the traditional issue with solar on the front end. So I moved in the last few years to downsize and scale down the technology we use in cars to try and do a charging station for kind of the E-moped level or even an E-motor cycle level. But it was interesting. I got hit with an epiphany earlier about a year ago and I started writing a patent on it because I realized that if you keep reducing down now to the vehicles that are e-scooters and e-bikes, that the actual amount of energy they need is dramatically reduced compared to any other kind of vehicle, therefore perfect for solar. But I realized that the techniques and the apparatus that we can use are not just the scaled-down car charger, but there's actually a new method and apparatus that we can apply and therefore I went forward and wrote and filed this patent on multimodal charging stations. Okay, well let's bring up your first graphic that you have and it's the one that says fossil fuels are toxic. Solar H2 is non-toxic. And you already kind of mentioned that. You want to kind of talk about anything that's on there and explain it in detail? Sure, just really brief. I know we have a few more exhibits to go through, but let's just look at it. That'd be great. Okay, so in the next... Oh, go ahead. You've got it on your screen? Yep, it's up. Wonderful. Well, you know, we're in trouble. Some people think that we're heading for a cliff. I say we're not heading for a cliff. We are off the cliff. The wind in your hair is as we hurl to the rocks below. We really need to do something about the toxicity of our energy and transportation systems. So I just made a little list here with air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, mercury pollution, particulates, acid rain, species loss, greenhouse gases, climate disruption, ocean acidification, the bioaccumulation of toxins in our organs and flesh, the NOx and SOx, the thermal pollution, the endocrine disruptors, the partially consumed hydrocarbons, the volatile organic compounds. All of this is going to have biological expression and not good. So I admire so much your advocacy because you are pointing out that the reason we're going to hydrogen, there's five reasons, but one of the most significant to me is that it's non-cox. It's something our children and grandchildren, future generations and other species can live with. So I want to remind everyone what you've been saying is that we have to address our toxic footprint. And so solar and hydrogen is the answer for that. It's non-toxic, it's powerful, it's safe, it's available everywhere in the world if you source it from water. It's really the way to go. And most important as well, hydrogen, as you pointed out many times, scales. You can run farm equipment, you can run construction equipment, you can run large trucks, small trucks, and of course cars. So I just applaud your effort and your work in pointing out that there really is an important meaning to why we talk about and why you advocate hydrogen. Thanks Toby, I really appreciate that support. And the next image you got coming up, actually get some more into your epiphany on the smaller vehicles. That's that image coming up now. And the multimodal infrastructure that you did a sketch of. So talk about that one a little bit. Okay, humans, we can move around. We have lots of choices and it has lots of impact. On the left you can see we can walk, we can run, we can ride a bike. But now we have this personal mobility devices that have come on. The e-scooters, the kick scooters, the e-bikes, the e-wheelchairs, the e-golf carts, all of these are vehicles that we can charge with an infrastructure. So the challenge was, okay, what would that infrastructure actually look like? And so I have a little sketch on the bottom you'll notice. And this kind of segues into other topics. But if you look at what the e-scooter companies have done recently, they basically call it dockless and they just drop them everywhere. And someone uses it and then they drop it wherever they want. Well, that's very disorganized. It's kind of a problem. So I'm putting together the station. You can see it's multimodal, meaning we can charge one device or another device at different voltages, the scooters and the e-bikes. And we're going to put them between the sidewalk and the curb. It's called a parking strip. But if we put these little stations here, now we can put them not only anywhere in an urban environment, or most anywhere, you do need some solar access. But they're ideal for parking lots and for venues and for ultimately, later in the discussion, we'll get to the real prize, which is putting them in every bus stop so that we expand this whole notion. So this multimodal transportation infrastructure is beginning to emerge. And I was at the right place at the right time and kind of connect the dots and go, oh my goodness, there's a way that we can be 100% clean and do it now. Build it into the infrastructure. Great, Toby. We're going to take a quick break here. And when we come back, we're going to rapid fire through some of your next slides because they do kind of build upon what you've kind of explained here. We'll be back in 60 seconds to see what Toby's got in mind. Aloha and Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power, Hawaii. With Think Tech, Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch. For our mission of empowerment, we aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, Maraming, Salamat Po, Mabuhay, and Aloha. Hi, I'm Lisa Kimura. I'm the host of Family Affairs on Think Tech, Hawaii. Join us every Tuesday at 11 a.m. to talk about the issues that really matter. Everything from policies that need to be changed in Hawaii to the fact that we need better gender equality so that we can all have a better shot. Again, join us every Tuesday at 11 on Think Tech, Hawaii for Family Affairs. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Standard Energy Man on my lunch hour. Toby Kincaid from the cold frozen Northwest Tundra of the North American continent, Portland, Oregon, where he's talking to us about, you know, kind of scaling down. You know, it's all about scaling, but we're trying to get less fuel used and a lot of people around Honolulu are using the Bikie bikes and also using all kind of different modes of electric skateboards and scooters and everything. But Toby's kind of hit on something rather novel. For those of you that can recall recently, some of the rideshare, not skateboards, but scooters that were around Honolulu, they ran afoul of the city and county and they basically had to take them all out and it was because they were so disorganized. But like Tony mentioned just before the break, you know, part of it is organizing those kind of efforts and I think he's kind of hit on something. So Tony, we're going to have slide number three come up here and you can talk about where you're headed with this technology. Marvelous. I wanted to give you a couple of mechanical drawings so people can get a sense of it. You can see in this drawing that the solar panel is vertical and that's really appropriate for an Oregon kind of location because we're halfway between the equator and the North Pole. And so biasing the sun angles for the winter is really nice. I have another diagram later. I'll show you for the tropics for Hawaii. We have that solar panel kind of more horizontal and higher and this gives you a better response there. So I just want to say that this is kind of a technical drawing as such, but there's a lot of variation in the aesthetics of how you'd like to actually orient the station. Is this also like tracking PV like your car ones or is this stationary PV? This is stationary. So no moving parts. The entire assembly is solid state. Okay. You know, in a way it's the world's first solar energy vending machine. All right. I sell electrons and someone would say, well, okay, how do you generate electrons? Well, solar energy impinges on the solar panel and a portion of those I can turn into electrons. I store them on onboard battery. Then I reformat them and then export them or dispatch them on demand. So we've been able to go from solar all the way into formatting for the proper voltage and format for any particular vehicle. So that's what's kind of fun about this. Let's jump to the next slide number four. Yeah. You've mentioned that whenever we do, well, the e-scooter paradigm now is called Dockless. So they kind of just throw them around and recently Portland did a four month study. They allowed them to come in. Three companies were allowed Lyme, Bird and Skip. And they gave it four months. Interestingly, it had great success. They were reported over 700,000 trips, which is really extraordinary. And it was a very successful thing. However, there were a few complaints. And as you can see on the diagram, I just tried to kind of group them together. You have clutter and blocking. As you point out, it's just kind of a disorganized Wild Wild West approach of just throwing these things out there. Some people would throw them away. In California, they were letting, you know, setting them on fire. That didn't happen here, so let's say that. But there's a lot of just willy-milly people trying everything around. Also, when you drop off a bike and then you go to the app, the app is how we all access this. You know, where are they? Well, you can find them, but maybe it's not necessarily near where you happen to be. So let's hit the next slide. Okay. Then there's other issues. And these are the issues that I focused on, which is the charging issues. Now, what happens is they have rangers and other names for people at night. Like, forgive me, the unholy army of the night that comes out, picks up the scooter, takes it home and charges it up and then brings it back in the morning and drops it off. Well, you know, there's 20 pounds of air pollution for every gallon of gas. So it kind of, in my mind, defeats the purpose. That we're trying to go for clean energy and yet you're running around picking up these little scooters. There's some conflicts sometimes because people are, they want to have it or another person to get that $5 charge fee. And then of course, at night, there's no services at all. Okay, next slide. So the next slide. So it's very problematic in this dockless idea. So I would like to suggest that we move to a docking paradigm exactly like the bike share does, a BT does this. You can set the bikes in. But what's neat about this next little picture is the sunny station. We all know the gas station is. So I put sun in front of it, sunny station. And sunny scooter, that'll be my ride share program. But this is just to give you an idea of kind of how the solar panels can be more aesthetic. It's certainly in the tropics. You can let them lie back a little bit. And you can see that there's little parking spaces that I put around the structure and will include one or two vehicles, the e-bike and the e-scooter. But we build into the infrastructure more parking capacity than vehicles because as people run around and move around, you're going to have places where there's going to be more traffic. So let's go to the next one. Next slide. In this one, I just wanted to point out that what's really amazing is that we can put this entire station into a fixture and then the fixture is pole mounted. That being pole mounted means it's very easy to install. It's only just a little bit more robust than a pole you see for a traffic sign. And so we can put these poles everywhere. Every parking lot should have several of these. So when you drive into Honolulu downtown, you can park near Cook Street. There's some very large parking spaces. And then grab a little scooter and take it to the office or shopping or whatever you're doing. So it's what you mentioned. It's that last mile and the first mile as well in terms of how do we get to public transportation and then how can we not take away from public transportation but rather feed into it? How can we make them work together? So that was kind of nice. Next slide. So what we have now, it's not just a single little station, but we have a whole network of stations. We put them everywhere. And because they're very small and unobtrusive, this really doesn't require any new land. We're just going to repurpose some of the land that we have near parking lots and near office buildings where there is appropriate space to put them in. But you can see in this, this is a whole network that is multimodal. In this picture I have some ballast mounts. So you don't have to actually put a pole in the ground. There's a ballast if you had an event and you wanted to put a lot of scooters around. You could bring them in. But in essence, there's only three parts to this. There's an app, a sunny station and an e-bike or e-scooter, an e-mobility device. So with those three, you can then plan. You can reserve. You can know where the scooters are and access them and get in and out. All of these things, the station and the e-bikes, have a little QR scan code. So you just scan it with your smartphone, gets you into the app, and then you can unlock the bike or e-scooter and you're on your way. And then there'll be a charging station near where you're going. You just dock it back up. You're done. You're not charged for any more time. And then we can keep going. All right. So let's look at the next one. Okay. Next slide. So then another epiphany kind of hit me, not just as an infrastructure, but I want to re-examine what a bus stop is. You know, we have a great public transit authority here. You do as well, the bus. And bus stops haven't really changed in about 200 years. We've been using buses for a century and trains much further. And then carriage is before that. But a bus stop now is essentially just a pole with a plaque on it, you know, bus 17. And maybe they put a little bench and maybe they put a little enclosure for the bench. But usually it's just a pole. So what I want to do is take those poles out, put in a new pole, which is our sunny station. And you can see from that drawing that there you have the vehicle. It doesn't take very much room as a footprint. A pole is only one square foot just for the pole itself. But you have a little bit of surface area around it for parking. You leave room so people can access the bus. But this changes the whole idea of public transportation because now you can take a scooter if you're only going a few miles. You can take an e-bike if you want to commute in. Or you can still take the bus. So you've got everything that you need to kind of in a 21st century solar powered, clean energy, absolutely useful. But what's interesting to me is I put a little calculation on the bottom. I'll just do it quickly. Each station, as you see there, produces conservatively 30 miles of transportation. So in a month, that's 900 miles, 900 passenger vehicle miles with just a little bit of solar energy. And a yearly basis, almost 11,000 miles of travel can be produced from one station. I just think that's amazing. And then when we look at how that relates to the personal choices we make for transportation and what the toxicity of that choice is, at 20 pounds of pollution per gallon, and if we choose a car average, maybe 20 miles per gallon, comes out to about a pound of pollution per mile. So if we went with the e-scooters and charged in this manner, you would be able to abate almost 11,000 pounds of carbon each little station. So 5.4 tons. So when I ran those numbers, I thought, oh my goodness, you put fleets of these out and you really can make a big dent, as well as having a lot of fun. That sounds really good, Toby. I'm really excited about your progress here and you've got patents in the works for all this stuff, so I'm kind of waiting for you to tell me that I'll seal it up and stuff. And I can imagine some great applications out here in Hawaii, where we have some parking areas that are relatively inexpensive parking, but they're not right downtown where people want to be. And hey, on those days where we got beautiful weather like today, and you want to park at the cheap parking or maybe get monthly parking that's farther away and get on one of these e-scooters or whatever to cover that last five or six blocks or half mile or whatever, it'd be perfect. So I think your technology is great and I really appreciate you kind of going through your slides today and talking to us about them. Believe it or not, we're up against our 30 minutes already and I want to thank you for being on, especially for the folks out in viewer land. He came on pretty short notice. I think we did this on three days notice where he was kind of hoping for a date later out in the year, but we talked to him into coming on short notice and he did. So thanks for your flexibility, Toby. Thanks for showing us all your stuff and we're going to have you on again, probably in person next time. Next time you're out here in Hawaii. Oh, I'd love that. Thank you so much. Great pleasure to be with you. Mahalo and aloha. Aloha, Toby. And next time, get in a law shirt, okay? Yes. That's the goal. Okay. Okay, for all those folks out there in Think Tech Land, we'll see you next week Friday with Standard Energy Man signing off. Aloha.