 We're all back to our broadcasting live from our Biclimatic Paradise here in Honolulu, Hawaii. And the show that looks at the equilibrium between the brilliance of the Biclimatic natural environment and the built environment. And today is going to be the last show of this year. So we're going to look at this nature of that beast in a little bit more literal way than already anyways. And so we have a very, very soothing guest who is Professor Emeritus Hans Krock. Hi, Hans. Hi, how are you? I'm good, especially since you're here. And we're going to have a great time to talk about the, what I call, tropic hearing. And maybe we can bring up the first slide here. And so I should have introduced myself and saying, I'm your host, a diplom engineer, architect, Martin Despingh, because I have one of these old degrees before we adopted the bachelor and master that recognizes the engineering in the architectural education. And at the very beginning of my career, we had the chance with our firm to work together with over Arab, who is quoted here in the back that actually good design is both, right, at the same time. And while over is actually from where we are originally from, half around the world and Northern Europe, and you always saying you're a nomad for all your life, right, have been, probably will always be. But we should probably have you speak a little bit of Polish, because that's your most origin, right. So why did you say a sentence in Polish? Jeszcze Polska nie zginiewa. All right. And when I now continue to talk German, when I hear Deutsch, we are here, then you can understand me as well because you spend there you go. So a man of many languages and a man of many other skills as we will see here. So the sort of the Hawaiian over is a gentleman that you had been a partner with for many years. And if we could get up the next slide here, we've been running across him here in some recent shows with Ronald Lindgren and DeSoto Brown. This one is a project on Seaside Avenue was a Seaside Hotel that actually this gentleman teamed up with the architect at Killingsworth and they were partners in crime developing this project. And next slide is actually the more the most known, the most famous, I guess, project, these architect Killingsworth and the engineer collaborated on that's the Kahala Hilton Hotel. And at the very bottom, I picked this picture from the website of that gentleman. Unfortunately, that website is not around anymore. So but I took the picture on the left when I had a chance to meet that gentleman once only unfortunately you go to the next slide. And this is a picture of his pictures on the wall in his office. And this is that gentleman. And please tell us who that your friend and business partner of yours was. He was in fact your friend and a business partner. His name is Alfred Yi. He was, in my view, the most prominent engineer that Hawaii has ever produced. And he's responsible for a lot of innovations. And we became partners in in designing and presenting the design of OTEC floating platforms. And he was responsible for the platform portion. And I was responsible for the OTEC Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion. And let's be and that's one of the projects up on the wall. But let's just before that walk quickly through some architectural engineering projects that he did. And on the top right is he gave a talk story at DoCo Momo. In 2013, I wasn't able to be there. So I had a chance to meet him actually in 16 a year before he passed away in 17. So next slide here is Vladimir Asipov's IBM building that we all know from the early 60s, 1962. Next slide. And he also has significant impact and fame within the innovation of concrete technology. Here his screen in his office back then and him giving me a slideshow. These two gentlemen here have been collaborating with him. This is Les and Adam Camper is out from Great Specific Rocky Mountain Precast. And so they have been partnering in next slide. This is just one example. There is this splice sleeve that L invented that allows the concrete prefab to be way more efficient and effective. And here he is on the right, he's sharing, Les is sharing it with the students with the emerging generation that and to the left is Les Camper's and L. And the next slide is that I also had a chance to go there with the project of ours. And it was very nervous him being the master as you correctly called him. And he basically said Martin structurally, we figure this out. No, no brainer. But I want to talk about this building because it seems to be alive and it lives and reminds me of next slide. The project he has done here again early 60s, 64 queen Emma gardens. And then four years later next slide, 1315 Alamoana Boulevard was basically constructed. So next slide. This is the Alamoana Hotel built in 70. And I think you guys met in the early 70s, right? Is that correct? Yes. So around that time, we allowed ourselves to position our building proposal primitive on next to the Alamoana Hotel for the proletarians and the people working in the mall. And this hotel was actually for quite a while, the tallest concrete structure in the United States. Next slide. Later in the 70s here, the Frank Fawzi building also we suggested to put a primitive tower next to that whole big donut hole in the parking. So these are the architectural projects and many more we show a few more. But now we want to jump to your guys collaboration. And we want to pick off with a fairly well, while talking to Jay and before the show, it's been dragging along that it's in the cooking for a while, but it has been in the news fairly recently. So to speak next picture, please explain us quickly what that is. Well, this is an auditorium. This is an idea that Al and I had. And that is to restore the swimmable with clean water this time, an auditorium. And the key element is that we would involve the incoming waves to push the water through the auditorium basin so that it would not linger there and become turbid. And would use alleys, especially in concrete design, so that it would last a long time and stand up to the waves and the salt water. So that's still to be built. It should be as we were talking. And for the audience who are not familiar at the top left, I found a historic picture. I mean, this has been around when that area hadn't even been developed, right? So this is an original. And then if you want to know more in detail, there's a show that we reference at the top right that you did with Jay. So you guys, please go back and find out all the whistles and bells of once again, a very kind of genius project. And the next slide is going to be while the previous projects were with quite some famous architects, actually, Quinn Emma Gardens in 1350 with the Yamazaki, the World Trade Tower, Twin Tower architects, among many other things. And the hotel, Alamona Hotel, was with John Graham, who built the Space Needle for the World Fair in Seattle. And here is an equally famous architect, I.M. Pei, who had just been passing away not that long ago in the age of in the early in the hundreds. And this project they've been working on in the early 60s. And that's actually where we first met. And next slide is going to be at the bottom left, you see me taking a picture of you from the back of you where you were in the audience. And this was the German Hawaii Clean Energy Symposium, actually the second one. And I have to moderate a panel. And then you are raising your arm and saying something about OTEC. And I've literally and figuratively speaking saw this wave going through the audience. It seems more like a tsunami because it seemed to like challenge some people who seem to be stuck on other renewable things. So I found this very interesting. So let's jump basically into the gist of that and go to the next slide and explain to us on this sort of geographic diagram here sort of the, yeah, the broad idea of OTEC. Yeah. OTEC is an old idea. It was first thought of in 1881, which is by a Frenchman. But in its current evaluation, it would encompass the entire tropical zone and has the possibility of being able to supply all of humankind's energy in perpetuity, which is something very big to say. Absolutely. And at the same time, it has the capability of reversing global warming. Wow, we need that too. And, you know, with us of all the problems that are associated with fossil fuel, social problems included fighting wars over limited resource and all the pollution in the air and also with respect to oil spills and all kinds of other dangers that are associated with it. But OTEC is an area that has been developed largely in Hawaii. Other people are involved, of course, the Japanese and the Europeans and the Chinese even who they invited me one time to make a presentation in China to their special people. So it's a global solution to a global problem. And Hawaii is the leader in that. And that's why Hawaii is here on the map. And the map pretty much shows the, as you explained to me, the equatorial belt where the differential in temperature between the very cold water very down there and the very top water is extreme enough. So it's more, most efficient and effective. And it says here we have sort of 21 degrees in Hawaii at the, and then there's a place that's even better that has 24 degrees. And that's the Marshall Islands. And tell us a little bit about how far you got there, very far. The Marshall Islands are a set of atolls, of course, and they are very low. And recently we've had stories of sea level rise causing overwash of some of the inhabited islands. And they've had lots of problems in the past, of course, with atomic testing and other things. And we had a project together with the Marshall Islands to build the first commercial scale Otec facility there. And we went all the way to being on the verge of signing a power purchase agreement and having a finalized design with approval from the Pentagon. It was going to be something that the U.S. Army would buy the electricity. And we would also supply fresh water and hydrogen from the same facility. And we had participation of the Japanese and the Europeans and various other companies, both in the U.S. and all over the world. And so we were quite far along in that. Unfortunately, the leader passed away, so did L. And so we're happy to have you around and all pressures on you now and some of your partners. And I'm crumbling under the pressure. Let's go to the next slide. And this again, a picture I took of the picture on L's wall, because besides all the more architectural, this is architectural too, but in the ocean. So tell us again what that is, what floats there and what it does. This is taking advantage of alleys, expertise in concrete structures. And this is 125 megawatt size OTEC facility. It's modular, and there are four modules in there, each one of them 25 megawatts. Actually, there are five modules, one of them is spare. And it was designed and evaluated up to 60 feet waves and was able to withstand that kind of facility. And it is a design that's similar. The last project that Al participated in was a floating dry dock that was built in Indonesia. And that's located now in the Barbers Point Harbor. And talking in the harbor, let's go to the next slide, because Al had already made himself a name a decade before that with this project here, with the floating uses Arizona Memorial. And he did this together. This is a very popular project, obviously many tourists who come here see it. There's also these handsome gentlemen, my youngest son, Lenny up there, and Elvis here who is fundraising for it. And so that is floating. And Alfred Price has actually shares kind of a tragic background with you having been pushed around quite a lot over there in the old world, unfortunately, because of us Germans. So maybe you want to share that a little bit. Well, yeah, that was an interesting story. A discussion I had with Alfred Price was he told me the story of when he first came from Austria to the US, and he ended up for reasons I don't quite understand. He ended up here in Hawaii. And one of the first things that happened to him after December 7th was that he was taken prisoner because he came from Austria and he spoke German. And he actually had a Jewish background. And so they put him in a camp in the Sand Island. And so he said it wasn't too bad, though, because a lot of the other prisoners were German chefs from Waikiki, so they were able to make do with what they had. Like rats. Yeah, they did cook up some rats. Oh, nice. That's quite a funny story. So let's go to the next slide, because and if you know we have to apologize to people who have never heard of OTEC, it's Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, right? That's correct. And as you mentioned, it's a simple heat engine, which takes the surface water which is heated by the Sun and uses the cold deep water to run a simple engine, which anybody who's taken thermodynamics 101 sees on page one. So it's not a big mystery as how it works. But and it's worked every time the first installation was actually in the 1920s at Cuba. And so it's not a esoteric kind of technology. And so the main deal is that it's big because difference in temperature is not very big. And so you have to pump a lot of water to heat exchanges. That's primarily talking big is also that some people actually, you know, general public and probably because the terminology is oddly too close. But there's also OPEC, which is the organization of petroleum exporting countries, which is completely opposite. Exactly. That's the irony of it. And L actually had made himself a name already within them and proven that he's not just a weird nuts guy that he actually is very, you know, profitable for them. And this is happens around this project. Can you explain this to us? Yes. And this is this is Al's design for a oil exploration platform, which was built in Japan by a specialty mix concrete that Al developed. And using technology that he developed a honeycomb structure, which is the strongest design using the least amount of material. So he was able to do this. And it was built in four months in Japan by Shimizu, and then towed up to Alaska and used to explore for the US all of the areas there to see how much oil was available offshore. But now it made it above it beyond the US. And it's virtue is that it is extremely durable. It didn't crack or spoil like a lot of concrete does, and was able to withstand all of the pressure from the ice as shown in this picture, and has lasted for more than 30 years without having to be dry docked or having any kind of damage whatsoever. Currently, it's been used by the Russians. It is in fact Putin's most productive platform and is still in use. And so it's that same design that we would use for an OTEC platform. So we consider this technology well proven. Yeah, absolutely. And again, next slide, which is a compilation of a couple shows. You've done one with Stan, The Energy Man, and then Ethan Allen. And then you did several other ones, which are referred down here. So go to the next slide. DeSoto Brown has pitched that there is a tradition of innovations on the island, and he's talking basically post contact. And so he sees yourself in line with that tradition right in line with that. And we're saying almost no other place is basically better prepared to be. And of course, you within your work in the academia and the fellow academia have been heavily involved in that at the university and been working on grants, right? But there's also an irony to that when at a certain point that wasn't cutting it anymore, right? Yeah, well, we, this was the reason that the natural energy laboratory in Kona was developed was to explore OTEC. And it did a very good job. So much so that at the end of the 1980s, excuse me, the report was presented as to what the results were. And the Department of Energy said, hallelujah, you've solved all the problems. And this is ready for commercial development. And so no more research money is going to be needed for this. And so all the research money stopped. And then all of the people that were working on this, Lockheed and all kinds of other companies, and even the University of Hawaii, except, yeah, they dropped out, they quit because there wasn't any more research money. And there was only one professor and one engineer outside here. We know that one. Me and Al Yee that stuck around and then continued the development. And that's where we came up with these improvements. There were indeed improvements over what we had at that time. Absolutely. And so there and then we presented proposals for Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean, and then also more recently for Quajolin in the Marshall Islands. And if the camera could go back to studio for one second here, this is this impressive compendium here. That is 176 pages thick. And that it's all comprised, it has everything. It has obviously the technological viability, but it also has the economical viability, right? The challenge was to beat the present cost of the diesel generators in Quajolin. And we did that handily. And we're on the verge of signing a power purchase agreement. And with that, we had several funding agencies that were willing to go in for this. And then several things happened. One of which is that we had a change in administration in residency, who no longer believed in such things as global warming. Let's go to the next slide here. And this is reflected also in some environmental impact statements here. Over coffee talk, I played the devil's advocate and asked you these things as what they say, you know, it puts out nutrients and the water has a different temperature. And you were able to basically prove at least to me and in this compendium here to everyone else that, you know, these are not problems. This is all, it's pretty much a really good package and a really good deal. So let's jump to the next slide here because we're getting closer to the end of the story. And there's a gentleman here at the orange podium here, who is, because you're obviously now eager, I mean, you have impacted many, many of the future generation to take this over in strategic positions in countries all over the world. And one of them, luckily, is in my home country. And that's Dominic Halle here. So hi, Dominic. And so Dominic is basically looking at Heidi Klum here. And I made him do that because he wasn't really looking at her. I did this graphically. But I wanted to share that, you know, when you said certain things happened, and this is pretty much this makes so much sense. And you said, you know, if we could only reverse this tragic era in history, not that long ago, that Gottfried Daimler had pretty much invented more or less an electric car, but then Ford and Rockefeller took over and we're going for oil, right? And now is the point to reverse that. And I think we want to basically make a pitch here to do this, and not just by logic, but also by sexiness. And I create this term for myself when I'm building off the great buildings back in Germany. I created the term, the Heidi Klumization of Birkenstocky texture. And we have to say here, obviously, it would be the poly Jesusization of something, right? But we're saying we need to get this more exciting. And there's also two cars there. One is a car of my oldest son, Joey here, with a Peugeot 306 cc. I think it was called in the 2009. It was already a nitrogen car. You know, and when I was talking to Dominic and on the phone and you were talking, there's there's Oh, yeah, sorry. And there's there's way more actually synergy also between architecture, the built environment and the energy production. Maybe you chipped us in as well as far as with concrete production and stuff. Yes. One of the proposals we've already made here was to build these 125 megawatt platforms here in Hawaii. We've run that by former governor and talk to the local unions and everything. And what we would do was build a dry dock area in the Bobbers Point Harbor area and and use the ash from the local power plant, the coal power plant and do the actual concrete mix that is so beneficial that Ali put together and have permanent jobs for 600 people and be the source of energy, export energy here, but be self-sufficient. This no longer need, for instance, the Red Hill tanks. Be able to do transportation fuel using hydrogen, which we already have. You can go out and buy a Toyota, you know. So we were talking buying Toyota's next slide. We need to wrap up here. This would be the projects that would come out of that inspired and new and refreshing. Next slide is basically we said the oil industry is the technicians you said are open, but the business people not. So I think we need to reach out to maybe more philanthropic people who know the islands well, Bruno Mars, the Rock, Warren Buffett, we hear has a place up at the Gold Coast or former President Barack Obama. And then last slide here is then to do environments like that. I'm going to run a studio about the rejuvenation of Waikiki and I look much forward to have you there to share with the emerging generation. There are actually many more ideas you have around that. That was just an appetizer and we agreed to do many more shows together. So that being said, we look forward to that. Thank you, Hans, for the appetizer. That was super yummy and so see you all actually then next year because this is the last human architecture this year. And so happy holidays. And until then, please stay as Da Vinci tropical hearing as Hans. Bye-bye.