 Energy 808, the cutting edge, given Monday every two weeks with Marco Mangelstorp, and we have him back. We got him back. He is back in the islands. He is in Hilo at Provision Solar, and he's going to talk to us about the trip he took for a month, give or take, in Southeast Asia. And I think most interestingly is how he got back, because getting back, trying to fly around these days is not like it was. Welcome back, and so nice to have you back among us, Marco. Well, my dear friend Jay, thank you so much for that. And I was actually traveling for two months in Southeast Asia, and as Dorothy explained to Antium at the end of Wizard of Oz, oh Antium, there's no place like home. So after, by the time I left, from the time I left my place in Taipei all of yesterday morning, 21 hours later, I arrived home here in Hilo, which was, the house was still standing. Everything was in good order, and it's very, very good to be home again. Oh, it must be, it must be after all that. So among other things, you went and looked at energy over there. Can you talk about the principal lessons you learned about the Mekong and about energy in Southeast Asia, and dams, for example, in Cambodia and Laos? I'd like to hear about that. Oh boy, if we had three hours, I don't think we'd be able to cover even half of it. But I'll do my best to give the cliff notes, Marco notes version. My main takeaways, incredibly dynamic area, 245 million people amongst the five lower Mekong countries, the big ones being Vietnam and Thailand. And they have what I'll call a rather voracious appetite, a growing appetite for energy, depending on the country. There will be a need for twice as much energy within a period of years of four, five, six, 10 years, but again, again, on the country. And the big question is, where is all this energy going to come from? So each government, whether it's at Hanoi or Vientiane or or Bangkok, Yangon, actually the capital of Myanmar is not Yangon. It's Napida, which was moved by the military number of years ago. And then Phnom Penh, each of these national governments and the various ministries and private business have these big questions to answer as far as where is all the energy going to come from? At what cost? What are the best bets? And most approximately the fact that there is a very painful, very dry drought at the risk of being redundant across the region, one of these one in 100 year droughts that happens every two or three years these days, it seems, that when you have rivers like the Nam Khan near Luang Prabang or the Mekong and other many tributaries which feed into the Mekong, the question is, do you double down on hydro as the Lao government has been doing over the years and Cambodia also has got some big hydro plans? Or do you do course corrections? The Vietnamese, for example, are majorly affected by less and less water coming on the Mekong and emptying into the Mekong Delta there to the south, southeast of Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon. Is that because of the Chinese? Well, the Chinese are somewhat convenient targets of criticism because there are a number of upper mainstream dams in China that the Chinese have corrected or constructed over the over the years. So there are complaints targeted to the Chinese from the lower Mekong countries saying, hey, you're holding back too much water. We're dying out down here in terms of reduced fisheries, increased salinity across the Mekong Delta and so forth. And the Chinese have said, we hear you. We're going to be releasing more water. But I mean, the reality, Jay, as I see it is that there just is not enough water to go around. And there's going to be conceivably another dry monsoon season, which starts typically in June, last for several months. Last year's monsoon season was a pipsqueak in terms of the vastly reduced water that is so important to the region during those three months of usually heavy rain. So I came away after my two months with more fear and trepidation that Mother Nature is going to be doing her thing with little input or control from us puny little human beings. And these countries and the people along the Mekong and other tributaries who rely on these rivers for their sustenance, for their protein intake, for their way of lives over the past generations and centuries, there are very, very serious threats. And, you know, on the positive side, there is a lot more interest in solar PV. I commend the Vietnamese for going from pretty much zero several years ago to having installed and made operational five gigawatts, which is 5,000 megawatts in a fairly short period of time. That's very impressive. And it shows as an example or shines as an example for what Cambodia can do because I'll share with you, I was in a meeting with a number of energy people several weeks ago in Phnom Penh. And here I was talking about the potential for outages, which Phnom Penh experienced last year as well. And the Prime Minister, long-standing Prime Minister Hoon Sen was quoted last year as saying there will be no power shortages in Phnom Penh in 2020. And lo and behold, I'm talking to a bunch of energy folks and the lights dim. There's a brown out and then they go out completely. Oh, my God. That's like Bill Gates, you know, where the program crashes as he's rolling it out. Yeah, or Elon Musk, you know, trying to show that his new cybertruck is impervious. Right, same thing. The likes of bullets, you know, and the glass shatters. Oh, my God. Yeah, he got to feel bad for him. Anyway, yeah, so what about wind? You know, we have an issue right now. I think this was happening before you actually got back with City Council in Honolulu is moving a bill forward that would prohibit, you know, wind turbines within five miles of any community or something like that and effectively would terminate the possibility of new wind turbines in Oahu. It's just really, really sad and I think it's just an activist maneuver, but there you have it and it seems to be moving ahead. I don't know if you've heard about that, but in any event. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I'm keeping up with the Hawaii news. So the thing with wind in Southeast Asia as wind everywhere, typically it's more that the wind resources is more when we resources are more limited than solar. So if you look at wind maps for the lower Mekong countries, the wind resources are considerably less than solar. There are some areas of Vietnam that could have wind farms, but it seems from what I can see that wind is a much less desirable and sought after renewable energy source than solar and hydro. Because? Because the wind resources are much more limited in scope in terms of where you can find them. But it's not a NIMBY thing. It's just trying to find the wind because that's always in play trying to find the wind. Yeah, I think millions of dollars on a wind turbine when there's no wind. Of course. And I think, you know, you mentioned the NIMBY thing and I believe that that's more kind of an affluent country affectation. You see it less from what I can tell in the developing countries. I mean, not to say it doesn't exist, but the priorities are elsewhere in terms of we need power. Otherwise, you know, the lights go dark. Otherwise, we can't power factories and so forth. So I'm not saying that's good. I'm not saying it's bad. But it's not as visible or prevalent as you might find as we find in more developed countries. Yeah, but that, you know, that same dichotomy would seem to me to exist for solar. In other words, in Southeast Asia, I would expect that the solar facilities are going to be, you know, on the rooftops of people who have the money and the people who don't have the money, they're not going to have solar on their rooftops. Am I right? Rooftop solar across Southeast Asia in terms of grid-tied solar is infinitesimally minuscule. There's still a fair amount of off-grid because especially in parts of Myanmar and Cambodia, which are the two poorer countries on a per capita basis, there are still sizable chunks of people who are living off the grid. The grid extensions haven't reached to where these communities are. So off-grid solar, micro-grid solar is definitely prevalent in these areas. So the focus when you talk about solar PV across Southeast Asia is a bunch more on the megawatt and gigawatt scale in terms of solar farms. Correct. And who's putting them up? Well, the Vietnamese are. I just read recently that the Laos government is moving forward with a multi-megawatt project to add to their solar or their renewable portfolio, which is so heavily hydro, large-scale hydro. There has been a lot of very positive movement in the past year. So in Cambodia, where it's projected that energy consumption there will double within five years by approximately 2025, they'll need twice as much as they are using now. So there has been a number, there have been a number of very positive developments just over the time when I was there in terms of multi-megawatt solar farms. And interestingly, Cambodia is an interesting example because 70% or so of all the electricity in that country is consumed in the mega big city of Phnom Penh, which is about 2 million or so people. So it's just interesting that you have the capital that's using a good majority of all the electricity for the whole, for the whole darn country. But keep in mind, Jay, that there are still big chunks of people who do not have power in certain parts of Southeast Asia. And these people are relying on burning stuff for cooking, burning stuff for light, using fossil fuels for lanterns. So not good for the air. No, it's not good for the air. And that kind of is an excellent segue to one of the, I'd say, the biggest, and I guess I shouldn't have been too surprised, but it was certainly disappointing. I mean, the two months I was there, the air quality across the region, whether it was up in Luang Prabang, where I was there most of the time, or Hanoi, or Phnom Penh, or Yangon, the Ntien, Bangkok, and Chiang Mai is the air quality was from bad to very, very bad every single day. And the Swiss have come up with an app called Air Visual, which you can type in pretty much any city in the world and you can see in real time what the air quality is like. So I looked at that pretty much daily. And the bottom line is, is that they just burn too much stuff there. They burn too much in terms of power generation, whether it's coal, whether it's because of vehicular traffic, but also there's a traditional burning of the rice husks after harvest. And rice, of course, is a big, big staple food there, both for internal consumption and export. And you know, you do the harvest, then you have all this waste and what are you going to do with it? So traditionally, for generations, they've been burning this stuff. And a friend of mine who was there for the first five months of last year in Luang Prabang, he said he woke up one morning, went outside and there were, it was almost as if it was snowing, except it was, these were not snowflakes made of water. They were flakes made of ash from the nearby riced burning, so, you know, and people are breathing this stuff day in, day out when I, where I stayed in Luang Prabang every morning, one of my local neighbors there was stoking the fire with wood, not gas, but wood for the day's cooking, you know, and it certainly wasn't me to say, hey, you know, you can switch to gas. I mean, that's not my part, not my place to do, but I just, you know, thought, gosh, you have all these millions and millions of people who are breathing, breathing from bad to really, really bad quality air. And of course, it's not just Southeast Asia, you know, the 21 worst cities in terms of air pollution now, according to a recent report, are no longer in China, they're in, in India, India, in Iran, where, you know, places like Delhi, it's, you know, it's, it's not just very bad. It's off the charts, very, very bad. So. Well, you know, I mean, it points up an interesting picture because on the one hand, you want to see progress. You want, you want to see them, you know, take hydro power from the Mekong, you want to see them do renewables like solar. You want to see them take the sand out of the bottom of the Mekong and make buildings with it and, and become a 21st century, you know, area. And, and there's a push to do that. But at the same time, you know, you know, there's only so much water in the Mekong, there's only so much environment to spoil this, you know, and there's too many people, too little environment and, and climate change all the while, climate change, eating them. And so what you get, you know, is this bad air. And by the way, same process happens in Nepal, which is what it must be a thousand kilometers away. But, you know, the, the, the temperature inversion in a valley, burning wood and the air is terrible in, in an undeveloped country that used to be rural, remote in every way and natural. And now you have these, you know, corruptions to the environment happening all over the world and accelerating. And that has to be one of the takeaways from your trip, eh? Absolutely, Jay, you know, and I have a particular fondness in my heart and my spirit for, for Laos. It's a country of about seven million. And that's where I spent the most time. And, and I came away with a more nuanced, uh, view of, of Laos in terms of they've been maniacs when it comes to, to hydropower development, uh, you know, to, to, with certain benefits, of course, in terms of electrification, benefits in terms of being a major source of, of revenue, selling power to the ties, selling power to the Chinese, uh, and yet at significant costs and, and again, this is a very, it's a poor country. It's a developing country and their ability to, to bring in foreign investment and as well as sell what they produce, whether it's cassava, whether it's bananas, rubber, uh, other agricultural products, whether it's power, they're, they're in a squeeze because they need the money. They need the, the resources to continue to care for the people. And if you say, oh, bad, bad, bad, Laos government, don't, don't do so much dam, dam, dams and, and, and block these rivers because it's just bad news. Well, then it's incumbent upon those people wagging their fingers at them to come up with other, other solutions and other strategy, which is going to allow them to continue to develop and to continue to, to reduce poverty and to continue to take, do a better job of promoting the health and welfare of their people. So there ain't no easy answers here, Jay. It's, it's really, it's, it's a big challenge on so many levels. And, uh, you know, I'm, I'm not smart enough or wise enough, uh, to, to have all the answers by any means. So I came away kind of chasing, you know, that as much as, uh, I can be somewhat critical of, of the neighbors to the north, the Chinese for their rather rapacious activity across Southeast Asia, where they're about road initiative and their rail lines and their, and their, uh, they're growing the indebtedness that they are, are contributing to for these smaller countries, uh, you know, the, it's, it's, it's, it's a tough slog to use from Rumsfeldian terminology. It's, it's a tough slog to figure out the way forward that has more benefits than costs. And, uh, it's, uh, it's not just the loud as the, uh, it's the other folks in the region as well. So, uh, I, I came away chasing Jay. I really did, uh, you know, drinking from a fire hose, uh, and the time I was there where my glass was full and stuff was still more pouring in. So I'm still absolutely committed to putting together, uh, finishing my course, uh, curriculum to teach my course at some point, but I, I came away with more questions than answers, more questions coming out day by day that the answers just could not keep up. And more changes. So, I mean, uh, you know, if you spend a couple of months doing that, you're going to catch the changes while you're there, but now that you're away, you still have to look back and catch the changes that are taking place after it. And one of the big changes in the past 60 days, certainly, that would be December, January. Whoops, make, make that January, February. Um, those, those changes involve public health and they involved the threat of coronavirus and, and then the actual, the reality of coronavirus and then the reaction of all these countries to coronavirus. It's, you were right in the, in the center of the, the perfect storm, I think. Um, and then you, you said one day, I think I have to come home now. My, my schedule was to go home. Can you talk about the issues and challenges of getting home? Yeah, yeah, I can share with you that my anxiety level was certainly higher over the last month or so as I, because I was continuing to be a voracious consumer of, of news, both local news and the Washington post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN. And my original plan back in January was to spend a week in Shanghai prior to coming back to Hawaii, and within a number of weeks after arriving in mid January, I had to essentially, uh, jettison that plan because of what was going on in China said, okay, that's, that's okay. I can go get back to China some other time, no problem. And I switched to returning from Seoul, South Korea, which there's regular service on a number of carriers. I think we certainly made the right decision, but I like to footnote that with a, a piece I saw, uh, I guess it was on the internet. It was on the internet, not on commercial TV or cable. And it was a story, uh, a documentary story by a Russian fellow who decided he had to go into the center of this. And he did within the last week, 10 days. And he made a movie of it. I think the movie was originally in Russian, but they translated it into a, you know, English. What he did was, uh, he went to Shanghai and he took pictures in Shanghai with his cell phone, and he managed to get around even though the rules were, would have stopped him, he managed to get around anyway. And, um, and Shanghai was dead as a doornail. I mean, huge thoroughfares, nobody. And then he went further. He went into Wuhan, into the eye of the hurricane, so to speak. And he went to see people, talk to people, took pictures. The police and, uh, various, um, you know, citizen groups like neighborhood watch groups stopped him over and over again. At one point they confiscated all his things, including his, you know, cell phones and his, his, uh, his, uh, his, his footage. But he got it back, came back and made this, made this movie. And it was really, it is really a very unhappy story, but it's, it's a story of courage too. They went right into the eye of it and, and explored it and reported back on it. I would, I think this guy is going to be very famous for what he did, even though he's not, not American, but Russian. So, I mean, your, your trip was, uh, it had a certain amount of courage too, Marco. Well, yeah, I thank you, Jay, for saying that I, when I left, of course, back in early January, the COVID-19 business was nothing, nothing remotely compared, comparable to what we're experiencing now. And I gave a couple of fleeting thoughts to, I mean, halfway into it, thinking maybe I should just go home. But, uh, you know, through my duration there in Laos, I did not have one single reported case of COVID. So I made the decision that I was going to stick it out. But that said, after my plan to get back from Seoul collapsed, because I was not going to go to South Korea after things exploded there, you know, my, my plan C, so to speak, was to fly back from Taipei. I'd never been to Taipei. So I thought, well, I'm going to go to Taipei and then I'll get back through, through Tokyo. Uh, but my, my anxiety was definitely high up until, you know, I actually got on the plane in Tokyo back to Honolulu a couple of days ago, because there have been greater restrictions, placed on, uh, on travel to Japan as well. So if I, if I could not get back on United from Narita, Tokyo Narita to Honolulu, my plan D was going to be to get back on one of the two twice a week non-stops from Taipei to Honolulu. And if that fell through, uh, then maybe plan E to go down to Sydney, which is kind of a schlep from Taipei and get back from there. Or if that fell through, you know, fly west to, to Europe, uh, and try to get back from Switzerland. So yeah, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff goes through your mind when you're, you're, you're away and you're trying to get home. Really? Oh my goodness, great. Well, we, you have some pictures. Can we show the pictures? I'm interested. Yeah, that one is the Taipei airport. What was going on? That's, that's the, the check-in lobby there at Taipei and needless to say, you know, I got there. You, you want to get to the airport fairly early for international flights. And I got there, you know, with plenty of time to spend. There was no line of the checking counter there. You look around, you do a 360 and you see people, you know, a few people shuffling around. And then you go to the, check out the departure screen and that's kind of sobering, you know, seeing that most of the flights have been canceled. Unfortunately, you know, mine was not. And then getting on the plane from, uh, from Taipei to Narita, you know, I was one of two people there in business class flying back, which had kind of a, an empty feeling where the, the flight attendants are doting on you. And then, you know, you've probably been in Narita airport as well, the business airport in Tokyo. You know, walking the, the halls there and seeing a small fraction of the people that you would usually see there. So, and I was asked at least half a dozen times en route to have you been to China in the past 14 days. Have you been to Iran in the past 14 days? And I actually have a, I have a 10 year business, 10 year Chinese business fees in my passport that I thought they were going to look at, you know, and thumb through the pages of my passport looking for a Chinese immigration stamp. Unfortunately, I could answer, honestly, no, no, I have not been to China. And then they, they let me through. So, well, you inspected for, for a temperature, where, you know, what kind of testing did they do on you, if anything? Well, they have thermal scanners set up at strategic choke points in airports where you've got a couple of people who are looking at the screen, looking for elevated temperatures. And, you know, I've had a bit of a cough over the past couple of weeks and, you know, there's that fear that, oh gosh, what if I get feverish, you know, on the day I'm supposed to fly back and they yank you off and put you, you know, do a test and put you in quarantine, you know, these kind of nightmare stories of people on cruise liners, whether it's off Yokohama in Japan or whether it's off the coast of California, you know, where people signed up for a, for a 20 day cruise or 14 day cruise. And it turns out to be two or three X of that. And they, you know, they end up being quarantined. So they answered your question. Yeah, there are people with scanners. And when I went into the lounge there, at Tokyo Norita, you walk in and they put one of those temperature readers right to my forehead and, you know, deemed I was okay to enter. So, yeah, different worlds. Different worlds. And, you know, changing and every day the numbers are higher and doesn't seem to be any control on what's going on. And we are living, living in and through the most remarkable process in our lifetimes. In terms of public health, nothing compares. And good for you that you came through it and you're back home. And I'm so happy to be able to talk to you in your home in Hilo. Anyway, Marco, so let's plan another discussion two weeks hence and you'll get your feet on the ground then you feel better, get some rest and wash your hands. Yeah, I'm going to be going to the grocery store this afternoon, Jay. And I'm a little bit anxious about whether there are going to be any toilet paper rolls on the shelves because that's kind of become a truly a global phenomenon where, you know, go figure somehow people got in their head that I need to have a two-year stock of toilet paper now. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to happen with supply, toilet paper, whatever, and any other kind of supply in the grocery store. You know what's going to happen with the stock market, the economy or any part of it. The only thing that we can be confident about, Marco, is that two weeks from now we'll have another discussion on Hawaii 808, the cutting edge. Energy 808. Thank you so much. I knew you were going to say that, Jay, so well done. Thanks so much for having me back on. It was great to be back with you. Welcome back. Thank you.