 and welcome to another exciting episode of Stand the Energy Man. Today's show is all about irony and the role of government in energy and those issues surrounding energy. I've come to this point in my life having served in the government at all levels, from county all the way up to federal, and in all kinds of jobs. And I can appreciate the critical role that the government plays in our lives. But what I find interesting, particularly today, as the world is in the throes of the corona pandemic, is how totally dysfunctional government can be and how totally irrational the typical human being can be when making any sort of decision under stress. I'm not certain that it's all government's fault that we find ourselves this week in the midst of not only one crisis, that being the viral pandemic, but a second crisis completely man-made and potentially more devastating than the coronavirus, and that's the economic crisis. This week is proven that in spite of the best efforts of government to manage a pandemic, that media, all media, social, print, radio, and television can push government and business and their average citizen into a panic mode when there's really no need to panic at all. For the life of me, I have yet to figure out how connection between upper respiratory virus and the psychotic rage to acquire all the toilet paper one can get their hands on, it's just beyond me. I find it troubling that with over 34,000 people a year dying from the flu in the US, a pandemic with a fairly low mortality rate but a highly contagious profile could cause so many people to become so irrational. So this is where we're starting our discussion today. What about the hydrogen pandemic? Actually, I would love to see a hydrogen pandemic. For almost a century, scientists and scholars, inventors and entrepreneurs have been highlighting the advantages of hydrogen over fossil fuels in our country and around the world in the energy sector. But because there's no crisis, because oil was there to solve everyone's energy problems, we've ignored hydrogen for many, many decades. Fast forward to the last part of the 20th century where the world became aware of natural ecosystems and the negative impact of burning carbon base fuels and dumping of pollution into our streams and rivers and oceans. Now, we have a pollution problem that's multiplied by our fossil fuel use. Even though many of these processes weren't tied directly to petroleum and selfish business decisions, few people consider the hydrogen solution even though it was always there. Even though it had been available and apparent for over a century. Hydrogen, it's that simple is the answer. It appears that the eco disasters of the industrial age don't warrant the panic that the coronavirus managed to generate in just a few weeks. It appears that despite the global outcry against greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions that we react to a fossil fuels completely devoid of any sense of urgency that we mindlessly exhibit when we're faced with a fairly benign virus like the coronavirus. So the question of the day is if pollution and climate change can't capture the imagination of the inhabitants of this planet in the way that a second rate virus can, will we ever see hydrogen as a solution to our pollution greenhouse gas energy challenges? My inclination is to think that there is little interest in dethroning carbon-based fuels for clean electric solutions over the existing fossil fuel monopoly. After all, government is set up to take care of big industry and to take care of auto manufacturers and to maintain a growing economy and to disrupt such a system with a hydrogen pandemic strikes our current political elite as dangerous and threatening. But there's a strange irony emerging from the current coronavirus pandemic. And that is that the government isn't always the best solution. And if you involve the true innovators and the visionaries of big business, we could solve many of our planet's ills and even be prepared for future crisis that would make our current coronavirus pandemic look like a child's game. Just like the private sector pulled the CDC's collective rear out of a crack when the coronavirus testing situation arose. So as a military officer and senior national guard leader, I'm familiar with our nation's preparations for large-scale disasters. I'm formally trained in the incident command system utilizing all, utilized by all first responders around the world. And I was one of the first military generals designated and trained to serve as what we called a dual status commander. Without getting into all the legal details, the dual status commander has the legal authority to command title 10, which are active duty and reserve troops and airmen under one command, as well as national guard members across state lines. And in the bigger sense, this means that I wouldn't be able to control over four or five states. All of the active duty, reserves guard and even work very closely with all first responders as an overall incident commander. This may seem totally relevant to the average citizen, but what I'm trying to tell you is, I understand major disasters at a level that few people have ever formally been trained to manage. And the coronavirus is not a major disaster. The seismic and volcanic eruption of Yellowstone would be a major disaster. An earthquake along the rift zone between the Mississippi River and Allegheny Mountains would be a major disaster. Or a flu virus similar to the Spanish flu of the early part of the 20th century, coupled with today's highly mobile society, would be a major disaster. But quite frankly, the one that few people talk about is what we call the EMP or electromagnetic pulse attack. An EMP attack would essentially render everything that's not specifically shielded from an electromagnetic pulse useless. What that means is no cars, except for the ancient ones that didn't have computers in them, no laptops, no cell phones, no computers, no banking, no electric grid, and no manufacturing or business of any kind, including farming, if you have to depend on GPS and things like that for farming. An EMP attack would quickly thrust hundreds of square miles of geography back into the pre-industrial age. Most rural communities could survive at a basic level in spite of the hardships, but most urban and suburban communities would be suddenly thrust into absolute chaos of the worst kind. The good news is that most man-made EMPs are held in check by the fact that our government is prepared to retaliate in a similar manner if we're attacked by someone using EMP. The naturally occurring EMPs from solar flares and even tactical level attacks perpetuated by terrorists which tend to impact much smaller areas will be much more survivable, but still potentially more disruptive than our current coronavirus scenario. So not being one to incite fear without solution, I propose that it's time to start the hydrogen pandemic and build our community, state, and national resiliency against the EMP attacks by designing and building interconnected microgrids that include shielding of critical components from EMP. These microgrids would use hydrogen production and storage to keep our highly dependent energy-based society functioning even under a more robust threat than the one we have facing us today where people are scurrying to stock up on toilet paper. So what I'm gonna do is show you two videos that you may have seen on the show before, but I wanna show you what the systems look like. The first video talks about hydrogen and the reason it has made so much sense over the last century. The second video is based on work that I did with the state of Hawaii and the US Air Force regarding renewable energy microgrids. I hope that these two videos can give you a clear picture of how our country can evolve to survive and even thrive after a significant disruption of our now vital electric energy system. So we're gonna break, show you a couple of videos and then I'm gonna come back with some late-breaking news from the world of hydrogen. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute and I'm the host of Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We're on every Wednesday at four o'clock and we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV to windmills to hydrogen, close to my heart, electric buses and electric vehicles. So please dial in every Wednesday at four o'clock on Hawaii, the state of clean energy, aloha. So the first video is just a little refresher on hydrogen and the systems that we, that have been involved in it for a long time that we're really familiar with, but it's a really good visual reinforcement. If you already know a little bit about hydrogen and it gets you into enough detail that you can understand how we play a role in what we're doing. After that, we'll come up with a second video and I'll talk a little bit about that one before it starts. Hydrogen, the simplest element and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe, so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure and they're limited. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat and electricity. Easily transported, hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades. Hydrogen powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. So that gives you a little idea of hydrogen in its basic form, but it's important to recognize that it's not just for transportation. It is also a really critical way that we need to start looking at to store energy on a large scale. And that's for a couple of reasons. The first reason is that if you wanted to store energy at the gigawatt scale, like you will need to do for the electric grid. And Hawaii has, relative to other states, a fairly small electric grid. We're under one gigawatt hour of storage here at any given time right now. But as electric transportation starts to come along as our rail system for the county starts to start running off electricity, that energy requirement will go much, much higher. And other states and other cities like Los Angeles and New York, they're already well past several gigawatts of energy requirements every day. And so when you get to much more than maybe a hundred megawatts of energy storage, you just got to start employing batteries. I mean, hydrogen instead of batteries because batteries are just too expensive. They have to be replaced too often. The technology itself is very expensive and to use batteries for longterm high capacity storage is actually very inefficient because most of the time the batteries are sitting there not doing anything but storing energy that you won't use for a long time. Hydrogen storage is a fraction, minute fraction of what it would cost for a battery storage. So that's your first big reason. And the second one is the transportation side. Can you imagine that if electricity was what ran all of your transportation sector and you could be making your own hydrogen at home off your own solar panels and fueling your vehicles at home with your own electricity and your own hydrogen instead of having to plug into the grid or go to the gas station. And the big side is that the industry itself, the hydrogen industry could start growing and incrementally start replacing fossil fuel industries over time because fossil fuels are gonna be with us for many years to come but we could start making that transition. So the second video gets into more of the grid side of it and gives you that reassurance that we talked about to withstand electromagnetic pulse attacks and it's the model that we think the US should go to starting now and some utilities are actually already doing this. We're trying to get Hawaiian Electric locally to do this as well. So let's look at that second video. 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 eliminated ported 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. So much thanks to the State of Hawaii HCAD and the Air Force for producing those two videos. We did that several years ago. Dave Malonero came up with the idea of doing the videos and a local company actually made three videos for us and won one of our local advertising agency awards for their animation. So they're outstanding videos and we've been asked by federal agencies and others if they can use them. And of course we've shared them with them. Some late-breaking news in the hydrogen world though some good news. Last year I talked a little bit about the North Sea wind and how the Scandinavian countries are using North Sea wind, turning it into hydrogen and then moving the hydrogen around the continent in their natural gas pipelines. But I also talked about another really important step forward that has never been done before and Norway is taking the lead on it. And it really relates back here to Hawaii because here on Hawaii we have most of our energy requirements on this island of Oahu but we have most of our renewable energy resources available on the neighbor islands. And the problem is getting that energy from the neighbor islands to Oahu. We've looked at undersea pipelines, we've looked at our cables, we've looked at all kinds of ways and it's not an easy solution. But one easy solution that Norway's figured out is use all that curtail and all that North Sea wind power to make hydrogen, turn it into liquid hydrogen and then ship the liquid hydrogen to where you need it. So what's happening now is around the world places like Japan and even the US Navy have a high demand for liquid hydrogen and we can actually start producing it. Well, guess what? Now we can start moving it in ships. The very first hydrogen, liquid hydrogen ship which I talked about a year ago as being just on the design table has now been built. It's ready, the hull is actually assembled and built. They're gonna be finishing it up this summer and they're gonna start outfitting with all of the cryo cooling equipment, the super cold equipment that they need to keep the hydrogen and liquid state. And what Norway is gonna do is take this ship that's been built by Kawasaki and they're gonna use it to move liquid hydrogen between the mainland of Norway and some of their outlying islands to take those islands off of coal energy production, coal electric production. They're gonna shut down all their coal burning plants. They're gonna use liquid hydrogen and fuel cells to produce all the power they need and they'll do it all with renewable energy, mostly North Sea wind. So that's huge news. Some other really big news that I was just made aware of this week is I've had a guest on my show twice, gentleman by the name of Trevor Milton. He's the CEO and founder of Nicola Motors and they have a fantastic long-haul 18-wheeler truck that runs on hydrogen. Actually have several products. If you go on their website, Nicola Motors, you can see all the stuff they've made but they have a truck design to do long-haul cross-the-continent type trucking. And this is really critical because what's different about them is they didn't just design a truck and try and sell it. They designed the truck. They designed the network of fueling stations across the country and they decided to build all of it, to build the refueling stations and the trucks and to lease them. And even at today's diesel prices, his system can save most trucking companies $5,000 a month by using his hydrogen system and leasing his trucks instead of using diesel trucks. They're much more accommodating for like a pony express type of things where you put two drivers in a truck, let them switch off and go all the way across country nonstop. And the hydrogen that they use is all gonna be made or most of it's gonna be made from solar and other renewables including hydroelectric and they'll be trying to do this on a massive scale. And everybody goes, that's great Stan but how do you afford it? Well, they've raised so much capital that they've had a venture capital company match their capital. And I believe it was around $500 million that they raised it might be even be more than that that then they've had initial orders where they were getting so much cash coming in on the deposits that they quit taking deposits. They have an order for it's between five and 800 of these trucks from Budweiser. They have similar orders from other large companies. And they said that pretty soon they're gonna be announcing more orders that exceed the Budweiser order by another magnitude and they've got the funding to go along with expanding their system. So these guys are on a hot track. They're being interviewed. I can't get them on my show anymore because they're being interviewed by Fox Business News and Bloomberg and all the big business companies that have them on talking about their company going public. And it's an amazing, amazing truck and amazing system. So look on the website for Nikola Motors and check it out and listen to them talk Trevor Milton often just does a discussion. He knows his product inside and out. His dad was in the railroad business and he used to be fascinated by big trains and big trucks. And this was his dream and he's making it come true. That's important because the two big movers in the US that keep us on the industrial cutting edge are large trains and long haul trucking. And Trevor has both of those systems wired in his head. It wouldn't surprise me if Trevor Milton started building locomotives that run on hydrogen pretty soon once he gets his truck stuff rolling and has people taking care of that so he can expand his operations. So that's gonna do it this week for Stanley Energy Man and All Things Hydrogen and All Things Energy. Don't get too silly over the coronavirus. You can still drink Corona beer safely. I guarantee you and in fact, I'll probably go have one just to celebrate. And think about stuff, be safe, be cautious, use the guidelines that are being issued by the government. But for heaven's sakes, you don't need 15 dozen rolls of paper towels and toilet paper to last you or like, we talked about in the studio here, 20 gallons of milk that's gonna spoil before you can drink it. Let's be reasonable, no hoarding, no silliness. Just use the social distancing and keep your head on your shoulders. Don't wipe your face with your hands after you've been handling all kinds of stuff touched by other people. And get better, stay safe, and we'll see you next Tuesday from the Big Islands, from Stanley Energy Man. So until then, aloha.