 suit come up first. Hey Aloha and welcome to Stan the energy man this week. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and we're here today to talk to a gentleman who's actually just got into town from the West Coast with some some great ideas and great thoughts on maybe how we can help our electric electrification of our transportation grid and get more charging stations out there for electric vehicles and maybe even get some charging stations out there for hydrogen vehicles which of course we know that's my favorite. So we'll be talking to a gentleman named Toby. Toby Kincaid from Oregon and he's gonna tell us all about what he's got in store for the rest of the world. Toby welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much. So let the audience know kind of how you got into doing what you're doing because you haven't been doing it for a couple weeks you've been doing it for a long time. No as long as I've been breathing it seems but well when I was a little kid I remember the Vietnam War and it was disturbing as a little kid all of this violence and so forth but at that time my brothers helped me build a little mini bike and in the field nearby I could run in the mud and I had a 35 cent allowance for my chores so I could fill my tank for 25 cents 10 cents for candy happy kid. The oil embargo hit so it's 1972 suddenly I couldn't fill my tank I was like hey this is a serious matter energy really matters. So that with the kind of war going on really kind of made me very introspective as you know probably any kid is at that time I remember walking to school it's 7th grade and it's cold Oregon morning and freezing and I'm like well how do you do it how are you gonna power this world and at that moment the clouds parted just slightly and the Sun went bing and I went oh yeah the Sun it powers the natural world why not the industrial. That's actually that's actually a really great analogy because you know here we are burn and fossil fuels to make electricity in Hawaii in particular and in reality we have buckets of sunshine falling down on us all the time. Oh I think it's the best kept industrial secret you know not all gold is buried that's right in a one square mile of sunlight you know what's that worth in a year well at 10 cents a kilowatt hour do the math it comes out about 130 million dollars a year so if I went to someone had a square mile and said you know I'm gonna mine 130 million dollars a year of gold out of your land you might say well I can tell you there's no gold on that land and I would have to say you know not all gold is buried. That's true. So it's a tremendous resource and it's worth an amazing amount of money and a value because we can use it directly. So you have the epiphany by the Sun hitting you in the forehead but how did you get from you know being a kid and going I really care about this stuff and I care about energy to doing what you're doing now well I when I got into school in the college I wanted to study physics and minored in history and I went through a few years got to my senior year and did a couple of conferences I had a solar powered laser satellite I called SoulSat and it was from the literature a little yellow dye you could pump with the certain wavelengths of light and in a in a laser you get this tremendous output so I went around the country trying to get some support for this and Martin Marietta liked it and they go well that's interesting where did you do your doctorate I'm like well actually I'm a sophomore they're like okay go back to school get your masters and you know get your doctorate and then come work for us I thought you know I I'm not sure if that's the right path for me so at that moment when I should have kept continuing to graduate I thought no I'm gonna start my own company so I started solar dying at that time and how long ago was that well that was in the mid-80s so it goes way way back at that point and then once I started to form the company I thought well I'm gonna work on the technology and so I thought well solar energy is optical why not use optical systems to concentrate it use the sunlight as a raw material and then optically process it and see if you can get a better result and I'd run all around and and and try and get some support for this but it was a little controversial because photovoltaics was going more for a thin film and they were going for exotic materials and and the electrical engineers I met just maybe we're not trained so much in optics and and so it wasn't very popular so I kept with it and kept on it and and built what I called the Mariposa which was this kind of linear concentrators and boosted the output about three times so it was very interesting but it was when I I kind of went to move to Cambridge in Massachusetts I thought okay I'm gonna figure out what's the ideal fuel and so I went to the MIT library the big marker engineering library wonderful library and I started to I thought what I want to do is list all of the fuels methane propane butane ethanol kerosene gasoline everything and list all of the exothermic energy you could get in all of the different characteristics and so I was finally ready after a month of typing this into Lotus one two three there we go that dates me a little bit so I was ready I'm gonna say now what's the best fuel so I thought well the best fuel would have to be powerful so let's sort everything in terms of the exothermic energy and combustion and from from least to most and hit sort boom top hydrogen hmm oh that's interesting hydrogen I thought hmm well that's why they use it in the space shuttle in the external tank I don't know that's interesting next question what would be an ideal fuel well it would have to be clean so list all of the combustion products from toxic to least hit sort don't do the top listen hydrogen what oh hydrogen okay oh clean I get it when you burn hydrogen you get hydrogen oxide which is H2O and I thought well that's pretty clean so I thought that's interesting we got two hits on that you know two for two two for two so then I thought okay what's the next thing well it has to be available so I thought okay I've listed all of the available feedstocks yeah that hit sort three for three hydrogen I went okay wait a second this you make it from water yeah and the water is everywhere you know covers the planet you know we're mostly made of it so it was just tremendous and it was at that moment I thought okay there is no debate about what is the best fuel everyone was saying should we do this we do this no no no no if physics matters the answer is very clear it's water-based hydrogen did you do another sort that said by weight well at that point I didn't get to that point I thought there it is because those were the three big ones and of course you can add many many more but it's just an incredible amount of power in in this material the simplest material in the universe is really one of the most incredibly useful so for me it was like oh my goodness that's an epiphany yeah so I wanted to go forward with that you know we were talking the other day I told you that I had some visitors and one of them asked me a question about the the amount of energy and hydrogen compared to other bad they were talking batteries yes and so I went back into one of my references and I looked and and it broke it down by amp hours per kilogram mm-hmm and when you look at amp hours per kilogram lead at acid batteries were 55 and there were a bunch of them in there in the hundreds and five hundreds and six hundreds and then you got to hydrazine fuel cell was like two thousand and something mm-hmm hydrogen was 26,000 amp hours per kilogram so I mean it was it blew every other energy storage source away absolutely that's your weight component that's your weight to energy component so it would even work well on airplanes we just oh absolutely yeah and it's at your point is wonderful it's not a little better it's completely better yeah and that makes it I think a done deal so now you see why I'm such a hydrogen I do people keep asking me questions when I find the answers I'm even more impressed with hydrogen so and you've had the same experience absolutely and it's amazing that the the world doesn't seem to want to yet embrace it but we have to kind of push the movement now the battery as you know is is really an important thing it's the key to renewables it's the key to everything we're doing with the grid work and with the EVs and so forth and we look at the physics of a battery there's all kinds of batteries there's gravimetric batteries there's there's mechanical batteries there's inertial batteries there's cryogenic batteries there's magnetic batteries and of course there's chemical batteries mm-hmm so everyone's looking for what's the best you know anode cathode and electrode and it was Michael Faraday who actually invented those terms because he was doing all this stoichiometric work and that's really going to be the key to it is this tremendous power that you can do so when Faraday was working in his lab in 1839 and with Grove who on his deathbed said actually it was Faraday who invented the fuel cell a lot of people say it was Grove but actually it was Faraday he's the master it was it's an amazing history that at that moment they begin to realize people in the world who were still concerned with fossil fuel back then because they didn't have it mm-hmm Germany didn't have any oil for example so when they did electrolysis and discovered hydrogen through that means what did they call it in German what do we call this they said Vosser stuff water stuff not very creative but certainly described so we've had this knowledge for a long time and as we've gone through history the great French and veteran mass show who did these beautiful concentrators he was very excited about hydrogen and he would use his concentrators and at in 1872 they didn't have solar cells so he took sebeck's little thermal pile concentrated sunlight on it made current and voltage and then electrolyzed water and here's this guy in 1872 in France making rocket fuel from water and sunlight and we think we're high-tech and we think we're high-tening well before we get to an amour with hydrogen which is very much you got me going now let's talk a little bit about what you've actually developed here so you've you've developed some smaller scale solar-based charging units both electric for quick charging cars and hydrogen fuel cell or see me hydrogen electrolyzers for charging up hydrogen vehicles exactly why don't you tell us a little bit about especially how somebody from Oregon where I don't think there's so much sunlight is here that's why we love it I've been there before how you ended up coming up with that that formula and and give us a description or talk about how how your system works certainly now when we do fast charge it's all about voltage if you ever you just plug into a single line it's 120 volts you go up to 220 that's more of a faster charge we mentioned we call it a quick charge or level 2 but it's fast charge when you get to 440 and 480 volts okay so the big issue now with EV is normally people plug it into the grid and that's fine in Oregon that's very easy to do we have a substantial grid but here in Hawaii you have an island you have a small area very remote very difficult to get these fuels so when I was working in Oregon as it applies to here I realized that even though we don't have a lot of sunlight it is so valuable we can put that sunlight to work mm-hmm so we've been working on the battery issues and normally when we do fast charge stations I work with a great engineering firm EV4 the chief designer chief engineer Hans Vandermeer he's excellent he designed these beautiful structures that we see that can hold these canopies and he's been working on DC to DC fast charge using lithium ion batteries okay but here's the thing about lithium you know there are many chemistries but if we look at the energy density of lithium if you hold a kilogram 2.2 pounds how much energy can we really store well about a quarter of one kilowatt hour then you take two pounds of hydrogen and we can get over 30 kilowatt hours so there's 120 times difference mm-hmm now as everyone moves into lithium ion of course we have all the smartphones and laptops but maybe it's not so simple to say hey to power the grid we just need more of those so that's what really pushed towards the hydrogen so now what we can do instead of creating hydrogen from natural gas or plugging into the grid and taking that and creating kind of a lot of stress on the grid the idea here is a standalone solar platform about the size of a house system but it all comes down into a fast rapid charge and the idea is let's put the charger where people go which is the parking lot okay so you charge where you park and that's the concept we're developing okay and and how many kilowatts is that on PV array right we use four kilowatts okay so during the day one little station if you only had that small size we have different flavors that go up and up but if you did that we can create a small amount of hydrogen that we use as the storage battery okay so we're kind of using a water battery mm-hmm and what that really comes from is you know back in the 1800s what we're let's do the 1700s what was the big engine technology well steam engine right and that's an external combustion engine okay in the next century the the 19th century what was the big technology well an internal combustion engine and then in the 20th century I would say it's the jet engine because it was lovely lovely turbines and and but all of those are still heat engines mm-hmm so what's going to be the breakthrough in the 21st century and so that led me to developing the notion of a water battery but it's really an electron engine so we're going to convert variable electron inputs solar wind or peddling a bike but it's variable but if you got lemons we're going to make lemonade so we take that we start with water we use electrolyzer the water will break the the electrolyzer will break it into gases the oxygen we vent the hydrogen we store then on the other side we have a fuel cell stack so that when the hydrogen goes in you blow the air into it you get most of the energy and the water will come back into that central tank so we've got this kind of water cycle where we've had a lot of work with electrolyzers and a lot of work with fuel cells we've been trying to put it down into one little package so that you have a wonderful battery that you never need to replace will last for decades and you get a tremendous potency so the idea in the charging station is just to put them into the parking lots I mean I really feel parking lots are going to save the world sure we have like 13,000 square miles of parking lot so if we can put these fast chargers on site whether they connect to the grid is optional you could connect them to the grid and then take renewable at night and run that electrolyzer or not do it and just place them where as you pointed out that there's grids have issues when you have a mismatch between production and demand so this would allow us to kind of plug-and-play and very quickly put these all around the island and that would alleviate that kind of range the range anxiety that people have okay we're gonna take a quick break here and we'll come back in 60 seconds to talk more with Toby about what he's got going in the parking lot okay so I'm Crystal if you haven't seen it before you better do it because you're all the information we talk about sex we talk about everything and nothing so we've got two gentlemen here gonna validate that right great kinkley and Roy what we've been looking at is the fuel some stacks are variable which is between 90 and 280 and then we step that ass yeah yeah yeah absolutely we just as a DC DC converter and then we go before 40 10 second something in Yiddish I think hey welcome back to my lunch hour stand the energy man talking to Toby Kincaid from all the way from Oregon and he's all excited I'm all excited we're talking hydrogen and you can't get me more excited and talk to somebody about hydrogen I'm just sorry so anyway Toby we're talking a little bit about you got a 4 kilowatt PV array on top of a single structure right and you've got a hydrogen electrolyzer down there breaking apart water and making a hydrogen and let an oxygen go and then you got a fuel cell that turns that back into power and you can actually bump that power up to those high voltages you talked about for a good quick charge exactly so so that's kind of the whole in a nutshell how your system works now here in Hawaii we've got some challenges with fast chargers because we have a lot of infrastructure that's old and a lot of people that are want to buy electric vehicles but like the condominium where they live only has two charging stations or they don't have any and the association doesn't want to pay for a new transformer in the building and you know that would only give them two more stations or you know and and then they and they want to spread the cost that when everybody lives there that's not popular if you had a hundred tenants and only 15 of them have cars but everybody else is paying for their charging stations right so sounds like your your kind of technology would fit really well especially when we get a majority of our people working during the daytime and they're in parking lots during the daytime and I'm just doing the math here you know if they're in parking lots in your systems designed for parking lots and we can get employers to say hey I'll incentivize my employees to go clean by putting these stations in and they can charge at work does that make sense absolutely a great point okay and that's where it goes to the economics you know normally we think of cars as the kind of the second largest investment but they're parked 95% of the time so as you point out why not charge where you're actually going to park the car anyway and so with this kind of pre-engineered system we can drop it in without touching the grid so that we don't have that demand charge or even overburdened on the transformers so this would allow as you said for the employer in the parking lot owner to kind of monetize or incentivize people using EV cars in their in their workforce or hopefully their guests so when if you want to go to a restaurant or a shopping mall or something wouldn't be nice if they said hey come to our mall and you get a discount or free charging and that's and that's very nice and also the fast charge is quick it can do an eight-hour charge in about 15 minutes well and that really allows people to just not modify their behavior or have to deviate to even go to a gas station and similar to what you do in your micro grids is you actually replace all of the infrastructure of mining and welding piping you know transporting railroading refining again so the whole notion of using liquid fuels from thousands of miles away becomes obsolete you've replaced it with the hardware and the gear that you have right on site where it's needed and that goes to that distributed model which goes to your point that you could put them in everywhere where people would go and make it easy for the owners of the property to actually finance this because they won't we will and then we'll allow them some monetization a small charge or something to help capitalize it so what we're going to do you know that the cost of something depends on how you pay for it so instead of having the burden upfront for the property owners to buy these either upgrading as you point out the transformers or even where you put the the trenching to take it from the grid if you're relieved of that you can just drop them in like you plant trees and a lot of you know property owners they don't want to be come fuel salesmen either right so you know you put the system and you manage it you run it then you know they they get payback on you know on their side a little bit and you cover the capital costs and and get payback on there and exactly so I'm a little bit I'm thinking about how much hydrogen you can actually make in a day with a four kilowatt yeah not very much so let me let me say there's a big sister here okay and the big sister goes up to 50 kilowatts a solar now we can put that in several arrays and then bring them into one base that is the electrolyser in the fuel cell in the 50 kilowatt version we can produce about six kilograms per day and that equates to about four to five hundred miles of vehicle range now if you have many of these stations even the one station can't fill up many many cars you can have so many available that actually it's convenient to just we'll have a green light and a yellow light and a red light and the green light says hey come get it and the yellow light says we'll give you a partial charge but when you have dozens or many of these stations the actual amount of electricity that are vehicle miles that we can create is enormous well could you also maybe put more storage and deliver hydrogen from a central location yeah absolutely in fact we would work hand and glove with that and I should say that we may create six kilograms per station but we'll have a storage capacity of say 20 kilograms so if someone didn't use that station that particular day no worries it'll be building up for the next one and then when we when the Marais and the beautiful hydrogen cars really penetrate the market then you just add a dispenser to make it a hydrogen station see here you guys talking about hydrogen again that's right well they're together you know they compliment but hey I just love the hydrogen I agree well what what makes it neat is you're using the hydrogen electrolyzer and fuel cell as your energy storage and energy production size instead of the grid right and that and that allows you not only to take care of hydrogen vehicles but plug in electric vehicles as well they're compliment each other and in reality that's what my office tries to do with everyone is and make them understand that transportation is going electric yeah and electric doesn't just mean plug-in vehicles it means hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as well and they do compliment each other and your system actually shows that well because you're using the hydrogen to produce the electricity when you need it so you making the hydrogen in the daytime you can charge at night using the the fuel cell to put the power absolutely and if we're good connected we can take renewable energy from night and run those electrolyzers and further increase the output right so this infrastructure that you're talking about the only way we could really get the numbers to work economically was actually to combine three separate industries into one piece of hardware so we combine primary power production right there on site the fast charge for the transportation network or hydrogen vehicle with the right dispenser and then I'm actually integrating as well the communication network so we can run hotspots the whole thing coordinated by smartphone app there you go so it's really this integration of all these formerly different areas now in the 21st century we have all these incredible technologies it's really almost as much as packaging it and putting it into a universal platform I just see cars or their smartphones chasing for the one station it's available well now there's a bit of that problem because they're checking you know is it available there's not too many charging stations but you're right it's gonna we might even monetize that part of it but they could bid why don't you tell us a little bit about where folks can get your books here then I want to leave a few seconds left for you to read your poems oh thank you well fast charge this is kind of the story of ev4 and these lovely structures and so forth and that's available on amazon.com and then the other book is the water battery where we kind of go through the history of energy and empire you know the ancient Greeks that defoliated the ancient Greece and even Plato wrote poems about how only the skeletons remain of the land he was his dear Attica you know only the bees can survive so the this idea of deforestation and energy crisis has been over and over again through through the civilization so right okay well this one's for you Dave Rolf wherever you are I've got a poet now that can give you some competition so hit a Toby Kincaid with your poem well you know truth is like poetry nobody wants to hear it but in this case I'm gonna have you and this is kind of called how we roll how do we move ourselves with axle and wheel we power our engines with unbridled zeal we pierce the dear earth for rock oils and coal we run off with ancient sunlight drilling like there isn't a toll and burn what we find no care for results just spew it all out like a snake when it molts we burn oils after siphoning off with no care to effluent at emissions we scoff no matter that only a few have the holes no matter what costs or tragic loss of souls to control holes in the ground is reward vast enough so what is this protest to all of this stuff yes the mercury will kill all the fish but it wasn't your first choice wasn't beef your best dish for centuries now we've turned to combustion to power our cylinders with vigor and gumption we've lowered the world to what have you got no matter the consequences just set off your shot but a funny thing happened on the way to our glory we used up the place and that's been our story we siphon the earth with wells like great straws sucking it dry with ever deeper draws that tomorrow it doesn't matter let's use it this way let's use it all up to our last breathing day now don't get me wrong I'm not looking to blame I'm not independent of this sad toxic game for I am a prisoner held to this bank to get to work every day I need a full tank so what are my choices do I continue to burn and justify my selfishness with each of us in turn blinded by the interest who sell you a fish and say you'll never learn no matter your wish well this is no good burning rocks to survive we'll burn ourselves out till nothing's left alive we're building a time bomb of overwhelming toxicity and told all the while just hold your complicity well the world's in trouble as we continue freefall the reality is terrible and can barely forestall that industry tells you what a beautiful suit forget all your woes well from an energy perspective the emperor has no clothes so do what is needed do what must come do what is obvious and use the great Sun decompose water into elements it comes from hold the dear hydrogen and vent the oxygen some and when you need energy upon your desire or command bring these gases together as fast as you can recombined in a fuel cell great power is found you get the electricity and the water back sound so use an electrolyzer and a fuel cell stack you get most of the energy and the water comes back thanks so much I love to be pulled and that was awesome and so Dave Rolf eat your heart out wherever you are because now you got some competition in Hawaii with Toby Kincaid so thanks Toby for being here and being on our show today and sharing great poem and some great books and a good discussion on hydrogen and plug-in solutions for the state of Hawaii which I think are actually really viable and I hope we start seeing more of them out there bless your heart thank you okay so thanks for being us here with us the stand energy man and we'll have to Toby back again I think we'll give him a couple weeks off and bring him back to to talk more about hydrogen and transportation so until next week standard energy man signing off nice job oh hope I didn't me and or too much I tried to answer your questions I found myself kind of drifting oh answer his question did you like the phone well that was fun and you're right that went fast right just why I'm astounded that you warned me saying so no look this is you know a quick don't don't worry about it and I'm like oh it's gonna take I don't know