 Welcome to Stan Energy Man here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. Before we get started with today's guests, I'd like to thank the crew here at ThinkTech and Christine from my office for helping me with my first live show from a remote location. It's tough living with an analog brain in a digital world, so thanks to Zuri and Christine for all their help last Friday as we streamed the broadcast from the US hybrid fuel cell plant in Windsor, Connecticut. Today we're live from downtown Honolulu to talk about Hawaiian-grown high technology with Duke-Hartman VP of business development from Mackay Ocean Engineering Incorporated. Here in Hawaii we're blessed with so many renewable energy sources and the folks that live here are very familiar with the power of the ocean around us, but few people really think about how we turn that vast resource into energy we need in an eco-friendly and sustainable way. And here to let us in and let the rest of the world in on Hawaii Secrets is one of the men making it happen. So Duke, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Stan. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you around and we're just talking a little bit about surfing North Shore and stuff and so I know you're a man of the ocean so tell us you know how you got started and you know growing up here and what got you into doing what you're doing with Mackay. Sure, well I mean I was born and raised here on the North Shore, went to Kukuku High School and just obviously fell in love with the ocean. That's the main thing out there. I was surfing all through high school and everything so obviously I had a love for the ocean early on but then sort of through high school developed an interest in technology and science and math and decided to go to UH realized that I had a really good mechanical engineering program so got my degree there and all through my undergrad degree I realized there's this company in Hawaii doing really incredible stuff Mackay and throughout I was applying applying applying and then finally after I graduated I was about to leave I got a job offer on the mainland like most you know local kids here they got a good fortune yeah fortunately there's a brain drain so I was about to take an offer and then I got a call that Mackay was hiring for an OTEP project. Great. So right out of school started with Mackay working on OTEP systems as an engineer and gradually you know went into project management that sort of thing and then now I'm on sort of the business development side. I just love it because I mean there's no one else in the world doing the kind of work that Mackay is doing right now on on these particular technologies they're very niche technologies granted but but Mackay really is the world leader in a couple of these. So did Dr. Kroc and the UH were they really the kind of the founders of the OTEP technology? Yeah I mean like like he said I did watch this interview as well and he said it was invented back in 1881 so it's not a new technology necessarily but there have been a lot of demonstrations tests experiments over the years and especially when he started at the University of Hawaii. Well taking it from the drawing board to practical is a big leap so the work that he's doing is awesome. Yeah exactly yet everyone we need the PhDs we're coming up with new ideas of how to do this and then engineers obviously are sort of hybrid scientists and construction worker you know taking the science and making it work turning into a real system. Well you shared a really great video that we're going to put on here that really talks about in a great way the technology and well I think it's a good way to introduce it to the audience and so well we'll hit the video now and let everybody take a look at that. In the oceans we have warm surface water and we have cold water in the deep ocean. That temperature differential and with the gigantic thermal mass that's available in the ocean you can generate huge huge quantities of electricity. The potential is immense. Mackay is wonderful because we've got a core group of really passionate engineers who are interested in tackling the tough challenges in energy especially to benefit mankind. Being able to provide more than 100% the total energy needs of the planet and be able to do it with no carbon imprint is a worthwhile goal. Our relationship with HNEI has been magnificent. They share our dream and our goal. They understand the engineering challenges and the practical difficulties of moving forward and the fact that it's a long road so it's been a good partnership and excellent one. You purchase most of the equipment on day one and then the the energy is free. Otec energy is just sunlight. About 70% of the sunlight coming into the earth lands on the ocean. Most of that is captured in the surface layers of the ocean water in the form of heat. That's beautiful because we can extract that energy 24-7 and use that power anytime we want it totally eliminating the need for an energy storage system and the beauty about that type of energy base load power is that you can actually start to replace conventional power plants. Our focus in this project originally was not to produce power it was actually designed and built so that we could study one critical component in the system which is the heat exchangers. So from this point we can see the Nelha pumping station this is where we receive water from the deep ocean. Water is pumped both cold and warm water along these two pipelines and the warm surface water comes right here goes up to the top and this is where we split it into all three different heat exchangers where water pours down through the heat exchangers. Heat exchangers are really the key components to Otec and we've got three different slots for heat exchangers here and the reason for that is this is a research facility we need the flexibility to be able to transfer heat exchangers in and out to be able to swap them out easily and test different versions of the same unit because ultimately what we're looking for is a high performance low-cost and long-lasting heat exchanger. Heat exchanger is a fancy name but really all it's doing is separating two different fluids from mixing separating the ammonia from the seawater. So now we're at the top of the heat exchangers that are called evaporators. What's coming out is high-pressure ammonia vapor. So the warm seawater has gone into the heat exchanger and heated up that ammonia it's boiled it so now it becomes really high-pressure steam. How do you boil a fluid with warm seawater? It's at room temperature so how does it boil anything? And the answer to that is you pick a fluid that has a low boiling point. So in our case we use our refrigerant and it can actually boil and become very high pressure at room temperature. You take a low temperature heat source creates a high pressure that propels through a pipe and comes into the turbine case right here. It spins the turbine and that rotational motion is ultimately what powers the plant. That turbine is connected to a generator over here and that's where we get the power. This is what's connected to the grid. After the vapor leaves the turbine we need to convert it back into a liquid and so we do that in the condenser. Vapor comes down through this pipe inside this chamber where there's hundreds of little tubes inside this big tube and the cold seawater passes through these little tubes and on the outside of them the ammonia senses the cold and then it's converted into a liquid and drips down to the bottom where it continues the cycle. The waters around Hawaii are very stable in terms of temperature and that allows us to extract a very steady source of power year-round. It's utility grade electricity so it doesn't need an inverter it doesn't need to be filtered in any way. It's very high quality power. The fuel is free and in fact our price of electricity for Otec is going to go down as our technology improves. That's a great video and I think it really gives everybody a good perspective on the technology and the specific project you know. I mean when I was talking to Dr. Kroc, he was talking about the ocean base, the big big gigantic on the concrete floating concrete island basically from Quadrillion and that would be amazing and I think once you scale up to that size you really get the efficiency out of the system like that. Sure yeah the bottom line is Otec exhibits really strong economies of scale so the bigger you go the better you're going to be in terms of cost for a megawatt. So right now it's a demonstration project obviously it's a hundred kilowatt capacity and the main purpose as I think was illustrated in that video is the heat exchangers because if we can develop some new heat exchangers that are low cost, corrosion resistant and compact, really efficient then we're going to be a lot better when we build one of those large plants offshore because you build a large plant about a third of the cost believe it or not is in just heat exchangers even if you have that big platform structure you got your morning. So if you do tiny improvements in efficiency or cost you're gonna say millions of dollars. What are some of the materials you've tried in the heat exchangers so far? Aluminum has been one of the main materials we've been researching because it's lower cost than titanium. Titanium is kind of standard for seawater service. It's pretty indestructible. Basically but also very expensive. So if you're building huge heat exchangers out of titanium that becomes pricey. So we're working with that we're working with thinner titanium structures so that you cut down on material sort of advanced manufacturing techniques. We actually just finished a manufacturing facility at Nelha have a small prototyping and R&D facility in Nelha to build heat exchangers right there. Does he try and do combinations like coatings and stuff so you can use a material that's relatively cheap but it has a real good surface on it that won't corrode? Yeah so we're trying all different combinations especially you know using titanium to sort of shield against against the seawater and other materials and new manufacturing methods as well that haven't really been tried. We've been talking to you know welding institutes and that sort of thing and they've told us we're really on the cutting edge of what's possible of these different materials and different welding and manufacturing techniques. Is there much interest out there in the rest of the Pacific or around the world maybe North Sea in the Europe or whatever for this kind of technology are they kind of counting on when to be? Well it doesn't unfortunately it only works in the tropical or on the equator. Yeah regions so it's not going to work for the North Sea and that's unfortunately probably one of the reasons it hasn't happened as well because Hawaii and maybe Florida are the two places in the US states the United States there's obviously Guam and Puerto Rico and other army bases like Quajolin and other Navy bases as well Guam. Maybe Lake? Yeah yeah there's all the tropical islands in general will have the resource but the real industrial Europe it's not going to work there it's not going to work in the West Coast unfortunately the water on the surface is cool. The surface is too cool yeah that's right. Yeah so the big nice thing about OTEC and why it's still interesting to Hawaii especially is that it's I think Dr. Kroc mentioned this too it's baseload consistent power because I saw an article yesterday Hiko saying okay we're ahead of our renewable energy targets right now that's great and he compared the guy in the Hiko spokesman compared to a marathon and we're in the first quarter of the marathon and we're ahead the last quarter of the marathon is the hardest part we've done the easy part we've got intermittent renewables that go up and down but not very many stable base load renewables available. Energy storage is going to help us but that's really expensive right now and every component you add to the system gets more expensive so if you can use I mean the biggest energy storage system in the world is the ocean yes it's a big solar collector out there just absorbing all this heat during the daytime. Dr. Kroc mentioned too that actually this technology helps with climate change if you're you're watching climate change and the acidity of the ocean of things because it actually helps cool the surface ocean as at the large scale when you go to the large scale production. Yeah it would be huge large very large scale it's not going to be the first few plants that have an impact really significant impact on that but yeah just flying back from the mainland and you're falling six hours over water you just get a feel for the magnitude of the moat that's around Hawaiian islands and yeah you know it's just phenomenal that there's not much energy out there that we could be tapping into. Yeah it's crazy I mean 12 of these commercial scale offshore plants can probably power all of Hawaii you know just 12 in a very small area could literally provide all that we need. But how big would they be? 100 to 200 megawatts they can each each plant could be so the first one would probably the first commercial scale would probably be a hundred megawatts you could scale up as large as 200 megawatts. Two football fields one football field yeah it's it's about like what Dr. Crock describes sort of like two football fields side by side potentially there's other designs that are sort of more streamlined and more like a spar buoy or a big cylinder that's most of the plant is actually underwater so but no one's no one's gone that far yet. The big reason why everyone asks Odex been around for 40 plus years in Hawaii at least why why isn't it really happen why isn't it commercial and the reason goes back to bigger is better right. And it takes a big investment. Exactly so the big scale 100 megawatts you're gonna make money you're gonna be competitive with the rates we're paying now but smaller scale five or ten megawatts it's still a big investment but it's not gonna have the return on investment that the big one does so someone has to be forward thinking enough to say I want to make money on that big one let's invest in the intermediate stuff. Well we're gonna take a quick break here and come back with Duke in a few seconds and talk a little bit more about not only ocean thermal technology but some cool stuff like seawater air conditioning and underwater cables. Hey everybody that's Ian social media manager here I think Tech Hawaii thanks for tuning in I'm sorry to break into your show if you're listening on the podcast thanks for listening watching on YouTube we appreciate the subscription etc. If you are a longtime listener viewer of think Tech Hawaii you would know that we are on every day five to six hours a day basically streaming stuff that's happening here in Hawaii that matters to everybody worldwide basically. There's a lot of stuff that we got going on and we're excited about many of them 2017 is gonna be really cool but right now I can tell you that we are on iTunes where you can listen to all of this stuff now really really excited about how that's going and we have just started a on the street feature where we take a camera out to the street and stream live to you guys out there and getting what people in the local community out what they want or are thinking about and sharing that with you and we're really excited about all that stuff we're really excited about you guys watching and following us on all the social media sort of things Instagram Facebook Twitter all that good stuff look for us think Tech H I watch us on a lullo thank you so much everybody here appreciates it. Hey welcome back to my lunch hour Stan energy man here with dude Cartman from Makai Ocean Engineering talking about the power of the ocean around us and how much energy it could produce if we can make the investment. So we started talking about OTEC and okay so you got two football fields worth of OTEC off of a kahi power plant area say off of why and I because it's real deep out there pretty close to shore yeah and you got this thing running how do you get the power back on shore is that a real technical challenge or we met most of those challenges. It used to be but no longer is it so you've got offshore oil and you've got offshore wind who both both industries have really paved the way for subsea power cables high voltage dynamic deep water subsea power cables and so that's no longer a technical challenge it's a cost obviously so one one way you could actually get around that is if you're on a platform where they're already consuming the energy so something like you know an offshore oil platform or even an LNG carrier you could actually use the power right there because in a lot of cases believe it or not even an oil platform they can't burn their own oil to make energy so they pay you know 60 cents a kilowatt hour for diesel to ship it in so that's one way that OTEC might actually happen sort of an unlikely marriage you know OTEC and offshore oil but but you could do that and then you wouldn't need a subsea power cable but in the case where you're off kahi point you would you would definitely need a subsea power cable hook right in to the electrical infrastructure on shore. You said that 12 basically roughly 12 of these would take up the whole state or supply enough power but most of the neighbor islands they pretty much got the intermittent renewable stuff down and maybe have some hydroelectric going on on the big island and geothermal things like that so for Oahu though we're the big energy hog in the state so but how much how many of these around Oahu would give us a good base load for HECO. I mean right now from what I've latest stuff that I've seen our peak load is in the ballpark of 1200 megawatts something like that and our average is somewhere around 900 to 1000 so you know if you can supply 1200 of base load it won't be used all the time full you know 100% but then you could pretty much 12 100 megawatt plants like I said they could be 100 to 200 megawatts so and and like I think Dr. Kroc mentioned too when you're not say it's you're using it at a base load you can also use it as dispatchable power so in other words hey you got a big solar farm somewhere and a cloud goes over and you lose tens maybe even hundreds of megawatts and in a minute or a couple seconds you could crank the Otec plant up to sort of counterbalance for that loss. How quick can it respond? Really quickly and that's what we found in our test is that I mean it's a low inertia turbine you can crank that up in seconds. So it's just matter of opening the valve a little bit more letting more steam through. Yeah and like Dr. Kroc alluded to when you're not going into the grid you could be producing some energy carrier like hydrogen or something like that. I like that. Yeah I thought you might. I like the hydrogen part. Okay well let's talk a little bit about another project that you're working on which is the sea water air conditioning and and I think that's gotten a little bit of press over the last year and I know you're working on that here in Oahu but I don't think a lot of people really understand kind of how elegant that solution is. Sure. So why don't you give us an idea of how that looks and how it works. Sure I don't know if we have the graphic video but if not yeah we don't have that one. That's okay it's really simple you don't even need a graphic to visualize it you just lay a deep seawater pipe down the seabed you know off the coast bring up deep cold seawater you run it through a heat exchanger which is basically just a metal plate like a radiator yeah it's a radiator so the metal plate separating the seawater from fresh water so you're cooling down that fresh water pump that fresh water into a building through a fan coil you blow air across it and then the cold air comes out in the building yeah it's not even high-tech it's pretty low tech it's a plumbing project yeah it's it's really low tech but then the innovation is that it's using a renewable resource that sits right off the coast this massive you know energy efficiency it literally would be the biggest energy efficiency project in Hawaii's history. So what is the temperature differential of the water going back out so you're not really doing a shock thing to like you're not really warm you're not gonna warm the ocean but no no I mean in a very the thing that people don't realize is that we're warming the air right now with the chillers upstairs yeah we are sending huge amounts of heat into the air so instead of that we're sending it into the water with a much more efficient process we're actually generating less heat overall that's that's the bottom line and then you know the heat capacity of seawater you don't need to raise it very many degrees to get a lot of cooling energy out of that cold water so right now how how deep are you planning to put the intake on this 3000 feet or I don't I don't have the exact number in my head but it's it's in the ballpark of I think it's like 1800 in case quarter mile yeah quarter mile about me a little bit more and the temperature would be like 40 degrees 38 it's a little bit more than that it's in the it's in the mid to high 40s okay because you're the unfortunate thing about the South Shore of Oahu is it's sort of yeah exactly it's not like the west side where it drops off really quickly and unfortunately that's where Honolulu is yeah on the south side all the load is right here okay all right is there I mean I guess we could do that something similar maybe over near Kahala for a lot of the houses over there the the thing with SWAC sort of like OTEC is that it does scale yeah it needs scale to really work you could do it say in a Coalina for example that's that's a potential project there wiki key same thing it's you know far enough a way that it makes sense to have its own system there there is a team starting to work on that but especially on the west side that like you you said it drops off really fast there so your pipeline is shorter you can have colder water well unlike OTEC this is something that any seaside community keys for air conditioning oh yeah yeah and those are our customers is hotel resort owners other cities in the South Pacific Maldives and Indian Ocean or even in the northern you know latitudes because you know you're not worried there about the differential in temperature giving you the ability to run your engine yeah you're just taking cold water and turning it in air conditioning so exactly a nice hot summer Texas you know California Southern California could actually a lot of the big cities there could be doing the same thing yeah and we had looked with UCSD at a system there we designed and built a system at Cornell University in upstate New York Toronto has a system we designed the pipes for that that cools all of downtown Toronto there's Sweden uses it there's a bunch of other places that are looking at it and as energy becomes you know scarcer even if it's low cost right now it's not gonna stay that way people are gonna reach out and start you making better use of their natural resources okay that's a no-brainer especially for Hawaii yeah so right now it's like maybe a three and a half four foot pipe coming in from a quarter mile deep and landing somewhere near Kakaako yeah so it'd be I think be slightly larger than that it'd be about a five-foot pipe okay landing about Kakaako and and it would come onshore to a cooling station where it cools down a freshwater loop and then that freshwater loop is it's sort of like utility you're setting up utility you're selling chilled water to these customers and you've got a network a branch of cold water pipes under the streets that then you know go in in the building and cool the air conditioning system and so you actually already have a project going in Honolulu I mean it's yeah I mean this is a real project's been going on for you know more than eight years now and Mackay is not leading this project that's Honolulu to see what our air conditioning separate company we're a subcontractor we did early design studies and now we're doing the offshore design engineer but what they're waiting for right now the big deal and say the one takeaway for your audience that I would like to put out there is that the state of Hawaii is a huge customer in downtown sure and H SWAC the company is waiting for them to sign on the dotted line so if there's anyone out there who's thinking about that please it's the biggest energy efficiency project in the state's history it saved the state money it would it would just move us towards a hundred percent renewable and energy goals so there's no reason not to do it well I was talking to some folks from the foreign trade zone yesterday about hydrogen in their warehouse and using it for material handling and they said that they really are short funding for they've got a leaky roof they've got an air conditioning system that's going down and I went air conditioning I know a little bit about what you could do and they're a state agency so maybe we can bend David's kikinks here and see if we can get get this technology to cool his facilities down because they'd be right on that line right down Alamona Boulevard essentially yeah I mean everybody who's been thinking about it I would just urge them to just just think seriously about it and it's gonna be a long-term system that's gonna reduce our dependency on oil that's the exactly what we're all working towards so it's I think it's a no-brainer yeah I mean I work a lot with the hydrogen folks on the mainland and we're trying to figure a way to to get across to people what we're really doing and and I think I came up with the answer this morning if you had a $20 bill or a $50 bill $100 bill would you rather set it on fire and watch it just go up and smoke and put pollution in the air or would you rather go buy you know a new stereo or a new computer or a new set of heads up headsets or you know or buy something that's gonna last and the answer is you'd be crazy to burn that money yeah but that's essentially what we're doing we're taking oil out of the ground that has value because you can make durable goods plastics and other stuff out of that we could be making something out of that that that fossil fuel instead of burning it because we're essentially just burning the money yeah we're burning a lot of money yeah we're as we could be spending not as much exactly keeping in state hiring people to build the things that we want exactly yeah no brainer well Duke believe it or not we come up on a half hour and it goes by fast thanks for being on the show today and thanks for giving us a clue on what the ocean around us can do for us for air conditioning and for electricity and then we'll have to have you back a little bit later when we get some more interesting projects to talk about maybe an update on the air conditioning piece absolutely thanks for you thanks that's fun thank you join us next week stand the energy man a lot from think tech away