 Welcome to another exceedingly exciting Stand the Energy Man. And I apologize for not being on last week and having to do a rerun. I actually got stuck on Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam. I was doing a little bit of maintenance on my Honda, I mean, my Toyota, Mirai, dual-style electric vehicle. And they shut the base down for security reasons. And I was locked on the base for three hours. You couldn't get out to do my show. So I'm doing the show I wanted to do last week. I'm doing this week. And to set the stage, you know, one of the things I've learned growing up in Hawaii is how powerful the ocean is and what a formidable place it is to, if you're out in it and don't respect it. And truly, if you wanted to test any kind of anything and you really wanted to put it through its paces, put it on a boat, put it on a ship and put it on the ocean, any sailor will tell you that. The ocean is a really, really just a tenacious place to do any kind of testing, the salt air, the wind, the pounding. It really gives things a test. And I'm sure that's what got, that was the inspiration for the Polynesian Voyaging Society here in Hawaii when they decided to start building replica Hawaiian canoes and show that they could actually do the long-range voyaging and navigation that the ancient Polynesians needed to do to explore and colonize new places around the Pacific. But today our show is about a vessel called the Energy Observer. And it is like the Hokulea, it's a twin hull, it's a catamaran, but it was made in France and it was originally a racing boat and it actually I think holds a couple records, international records for speed and for endurance. But this boat was purchased and specially modified to become a seagoing laboratory and not a seagoing laboratory for typical marine things but for clean renewable energy, carbon-free energy study. So this ocean observer has been modified and actually weighs three times what its original weight was and they've changed equipment on it and done things to it to test out things like photovoltaic cells, wind turbines, different kinds of motors, different kinds of propulsion, batteries, things like that. And they have just, they're about two thirds of the way through a voyage that took them all around Europe and then down through the Atlantic into the Caribbean through the Panama Canal over to the coastline of Ecuador and to Hawaii, their next stop is in Japan. So I think they've racked up close to 40,000 kilometers traveling across Atlantic and here to Hawaii. They actually stopped in California in San Francisco for a little while and did some, a little bit of maintenance and a little bit of resupply, but that is truly gonna test whatever, whatever they're testing in their lab, it's gonna give it a good test. So the first photo I've got is just a quick one. I wish I had the video because I did take some video but the first photo I have is a photo of the top of the Energy Observer just to give you an idea how much of the deck is covered in photovoltaic panels. I believe the captain told me that there were 200 square meters, excuse me, square meters of photovoltaic panels. I did some rough math and figured that was about three weeks' worth of electricity for my house. It's quite a bit. Also in this photo is, you can see it's the black thing in the middle with the mask sticking out of it. Instead of having stales, and this boat at one time had a huge sail on it and spinnaker, but instead it now has wings. These are really high tech, exceptionally strong wings that can be repositioned and sized up or down depending on how strong the wind is to propel the ship forward. And it's one of the ways they propel the ship but it also can do other things like as it's propelling the ship, if there's enough wind to move the ship around at about six knots, they'll actually put the propellers, engage the propellers to drive electric motors. So what it's doing is acting kind of like a fuel cell or electric vehicle where it's got regenerative braking. Electric vehicles, when you take your foot off the accelerator, it actually makes electricity and sends it to charge the battery. Well, this sailing vessel, when it's got those wing foils up and it's really moving along, it makes so much speed that they can actually take the propellers and put some pitch to them and get them to run the motors and generate electricity to charge the batteries on board or other thing they do with the power is make hydrogen and store hydrogen for long-term energy storage. So the tour that was given was, this was two weeks ago actually, was the captain who was on this trip is Jerry Herron. And he's a super, well, number one, he's a young guy compared to me, I guess everybody's younger compared to me, but Jerry just did a fantastic job. It's obvious to me that he is really in charge of that crew and the boat itself is in immaculate shape. Everything is, and I don't wanna be right, but ship shape. I mean, if it belongs there, it's there. If it doesn't belong there, it's stowed someplace. The ship is clean. It is organized and it's a purpose built for everything. So the second photo I have coming up is actually his state room. And this just gives you an idea. So the ship interior of the vessel is really, really nice. It would be comfortable as a sailing yacht for sure. So this is the captain's quarters. You can see it's not huge. That may be a little bit bigger than a double-sized bed. Maybe almost a queen. And he's got some storage lockers and that's about it. And he's got the best quarters on the ship. But it's really, really well taken care of, well maintained. So I didn't wanna stick around too long and bother him because they offered tours for about two hours in the morning. And then the rest of the day, they're literally working on the ship, cleaning it, repairing things, fixing whatever might be broken and preparing for their next set of voyages. So they left Kanioa Bay on Island of Oahu last week and they are currently on the Big Island in Kona and visiting some folks over there and looking at renewable energy projects on the Big Island. But today I believe they're visiting Blue Planet Research up in Puva Vaan, the Big Island and taking a look at what they do up there. Mostly because that's one of the few places in Hawaii that really does extensive hydrogen research, at least on the private sector. Blue Planet Foundation and Blue Planet Research really do look a lot of hydrogen where here on Oahu, HNEI, the University of Hawaii and HCAP were the only two government organizations that really did a whole lot of hydrogen work along with CERVCO who built a hydrogen station for vehicles. The next photo I've got shows the captain, Captain Jerry. Given us a tour, mostly he's talking about the control systems on the ship because as I mentioned, the wind can push the vessel along, the motors can push the vessel along and he was explaining that his main, the crew's main function there is to balance out the energy on this vessel so that they're maximizing their speed but they're also conserving as much energy as they can. So when they can use their sails, they do. If they have extra wind, it's gonna give them extra thrust. They try and keep the speed fairly constant and they use the extra thrust to, like I say, generate electricity through the motors and push it back into the batteries or make hydrogen. They keep about a little over eight kilograms of hydrogen or excuse me, 80 kilograms of hydrogen on the vessel and they store it at 350 bar pressure which is 5,000 pounds per square inch. So about twice the pressure you have in a scuba tank. But they store enough hydrogen to actually give them quite a bit of power if the wind dies off for four or five days, it could probably keep them going with their electric motors for quite a while. They, the whole cabin is so efficient. I pointed out to the folks on the tour that the cabin lights are little tiny LEDs that run off the batteries and hardly use any energy. They're, I mean, literally these are button lights. They're as big as a nickel and they give off enough light spaced about three feet apart in the ceiling to light up the whole cabin completely where you could read or do any kind of work you needed to do at night. So you saw in that picture too, if we could bring that photo up again, photo number three, you notice that overhead, it looks like a skylight. Well, those are actually photovoltaic panels on a plastic or Lexan substructure. So it lets light in, but it also is generating electricity. The photovoltaic panels on that vessel stretch all over the whole thing. It's an incredibly, and it's not just one kind of panel. They're almost all of them are flexible sheet that are either laminated to the deck or they're suspended like over the trampolines underneath when the trampolines are what you usually find on the catamaran or net that the crew walks on to keep them from going in the water, but it gives them a chance to move around between the outriggers and the main cabin. But they'll have photovoltaic panels like that over the top of these trampolines and every solid surface on the top side of that boat had photovoltaic panels laminated right to the surface. And Jerry said that they changed them from time to time. They go with different companies, different technologies, and they're always testing these things to see which ones hold up the best, last the longest, give the best power and help determine and promote for the manufacturers the quality of their products. So even though they're on this nice voyage all the way to Japan, they're changing out some of their components along the way. The large part of this effort is to promote hydrogen and other clean technology. And particularly in this really, really tough marine environment. If you haven't lived around the ocean, particularly if you haven't been on small boats out in the Hawaiian waters, you really don't have a concept of how challenging it is to run a boat or any kind of vessel on the open seas. Here in Hawaii, we have water that drops off to 1,000 fathoms in just a mile or so offshore. And by the time you get six or eight or 10 miles offshore, you're in 2,000, 3,000 fathoms of water. A fathom is six feet, so do the math. You have winds, trade winds, like right now the trade winds are blowing at about 20 knots. And 20 knots is, you know, decent. It's enough to push a good sized sailboat around, but we get 30 knots, 35 knots, 40 knots. In the wintertime, if you watch surfing at all, you know the North Shore gets 20 foot, 25 foot, 30 foot waves. Those are all out there. And that's the environment that they're testing this technology in. You can't have a better place to test some of the products that companies are putting out. And one of the coolest, and I don't have photos, but we put the website up a couple of times and you need to copy it down and check out an energyobserver.org website because they have some videos in there that are just awesome. One of the most awesome ones in there shows the fuel cell, the hydrogen fuel cell that they have on board. The hydrogen fuel cell was actually built by Toyota. It's the same fuel cell system that they have in their Toyota Mirai, hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle, except they reconfigured it to fit. Basically, it looks like it's in about the same size case as about a 10,000 watt generator you'd put in your house or a little portable generator. And it's in a frame and they literally work lifted it into the side of the vessel, connected it all up and have it there. Well, the Toyota Hyundai fuel cell is 114 kilowatts. That's a pretty substantial fuel cell. It provides plenty of power to charge the batteries and to run the motors if it needs to. And Toyota was a full partner in developing the marine variant of this hydrogen fuel cell and it's really amazing. So check out the website and look at the video on that Toyota fuel cell. The next photo we have is, I think it's a close-up of the screen that there is, yeah, there it is. It's basically two computer screens and it's the operating system or the management system for all of the electrical. So a lot of the time that Jerry was talking about what the vessel could do, he was pointing to the different commands on the screen and the different images that he can bring up the tables, the real-time feedback he's getting from all of his sensors and things, temperatures, voltages and things like that. The vessel itself is a 400 or 440 volt DC system. And they had, he said, and I hope I get these numbers right. They don't really list a whole lot of them on their website probably because they don't, they change them enough that they don't wanna say one thing and then two months later, they're using a different system but if I remember right, the battery storage was about 100 kilowatt hours of storage. You have 100 kilowatt hours of battery storage. You have a hydrogen fuel cell that can do 114 kilowatts of energy with 82 kilograms of hydrogen, which is, it's a pretty substantial amount of hydrogen. I'll try and dig up the numbers again but it didn't keep that boat moving at six knots for several days and still runs all of their electrical components. But he basically described the crew's job in the whole process is just watching these two LCDs and managing the system and balancing out how much the battery charge is holding, how much power they need to generate from the motors or how much power they need to put into the motors to get them moving faster if there's not enough wind and things and it's a really, really well-designed system. I think the most amazing thing about it was just how everything was integrated. I talked about the automated wings. They could, they not only change, camber and direction to help pick up the most, I wanna call it lift because in an airplane it would be lift but it would be to give you the most thrust off of those wings to move the vessel forward. But those wings, those sailing wings are highly automated. They can go up and down so the sail can generate more sail area or less sail area depending on if the wind is too strong you don't wanna tear the sails apart or put too much stress on the hull so you can actually adjust how much sail area or wing area you have and the computers will actually hold it or adjust it automatically and give you the right amount of energy out of your sails and match up with the rest of your system. The TV panels, for the number of panels up there, I did the math and it was like basically 60 kilowatts of rated power. Now we say rated power because depending on how much cloud cover there is and stuff, the panels actually vary in how much they output but if the panels are rated and these collectively would be rated about 60 kilowatt that means that if the sun is out there in full force you're getting 60 kilowatts from those panels and if a cloud comes over maybe you're getting 50 and if it's late in the afternoon maybe you're getting 40 or early in the morning you might only be getting 30 but it averages out in Hawaii near the equator here we use about five and a half to six hours of rated power from our PV panels if you don't have mountains or anything else blocking it being that they're on the ocean they don't have a whole lot blocking it except maybe those foils that's another advantage to those foils they don't block very much of the PV panels like a big sail would if you happen to be sailing a certain direction and the boom and the big sail was in full deployment it could actually be blocking a whole lot of the sun from those PV panels these panels are designed not just to take solar from the top but a lot of the reflection of the sunlight off the water and off the hull it's the bottom of the PV panels and generates electricity from the bottom as well so if they were rated at 60 kilowatts of rated power they're averaging 300 kilowatt hours a day of power to charge the batteries and run the motors plus operate all the equipment and make hydrogen and actually that's about two weeks of power that my house can run off of so if these PV panels were on my house number one I don't have a room on my roof to put all those panels I could run my house for two weeks with just one day's worth of sunshine that these panels generate so it really is a pretty impressive system when you talk about balancing all the power from those solar panels and what you can do with it on a vessel like this and I didn't mention it earlier on but this is a racing vessel and if you're familiar with boat design it's a it is a displacement hull so it's not a planing hull it's not like a speedboat you get stuck on a on a plane and start skimming across the top of the water it's a displacement hull but the hulls are very long very narrow and and super designed for lack of of drag and the boat can really really make every bit of power go towards motion and that's one of the beautiful things about this this design the next photo I have actually shows how rough it is and this is actually a close-up of the first shot I gave and if you look very closely it's a it's a close-up of several of the panels that are actually suspended between the outrigger and the main hull and you'll notice that one panel is completely missing it was blown out and we asked the captain how that happened he said leaving San Francisco they rented some pretty rough weather and some pretty big waves and a five meter so five that's like about a 20 foot wave broke over the the bow of this energy observer and it damaged four of those panels it blew one panel completely out and it crushed three of the other panels and broke some of the cells in some of the other panels because of all the weight of the water crashing down so that's the kind of environment these guys are pushing the limits of the technology through to really shake them down and and tell the manufacturers and the scientists who want to study these you know the uses for these technologies what it could what it really has to endure and whether it's going to make it or not and so far they've they really they really run out some of these technologies pretty darn well hydrogen like you know this show kind of focuses on hydrogen and that that truly was one of the things that really really got impressed by with the Toyota fuel cell and and their system generating hydrogen it's kind of the the key to this whole best one if you look on the website they focus a lot of their discussions on the hydrogen aspect of it and that's because worldwide the general public hasn't quite seen this yet it's going to be news to people for the next year but on the industrial side the scientific side the energy conservation side and clean energy side companies businesses and investors are waking up to why hydrogen makes so much sense and when you go on this vessel it really demonstrates it it shows it the hydrogen gives this vessel a way to store every bit of energy those solar panels can make no matter how much or how little if it's extra it makes hydrogen it stores it batteries can only hold so much and you know and you can only put so much weight on a boat and those batteries that they have the 100 kilowatt hours of batteries that they have in there that's quite a bit of weight and that's why this feed sailing boat no longer can be racing because it's three times the weight a lot of that weight is batteries the rest of it is all the other equipment including the hydrogen components that have been added but when it comes to energy in transportation it's all about weight whether you're building an airplane a boat a truck a car a rocket ship if your propulsion system all your systems and all your fuel weighs a lot you better be getting the max performance and the max energy out of that system because the more weight you have the more energy it takes to move it whether it's horizontally or vertically and energy out of a hydrogen system this can't be beat there's a couple of quotes that I got from the website and I'd like to read a couple of them this one is from Jeremy Laguerre he's a general director of the energy observer development boat he says the use of hydrogen is an energy vector and an energy storage solution coupled with other renewables is the key element of a realistic and efficient energy transition hydrogen is the keystone of the energy model and we are targeting it because it solves the problems of nuclear power the intermittency of solar and wind energy the limitations of hybrid diesel and of all battery technologies is the limiting factor that's why they're focusing on hydrogen yeah this is another quote from their website says the benefits compared to an all electric scheme is to reduce the need for a large number of batteries whose sustainability and recycling possibilities are questionable that's an important part that a lot of people don't think about at end of life lithium cobalt technology is really hazmat and it's hard to recycle so when you think about using extensive battery technology you end up also generating extensive hazmat issues at end of life he says the recycling possibilities are questionable while allowing a substantial weight gain for more or less the same volume in other words if you don't have batteries and you replace the battery technology with hydrogen technology you make room for a lot more weight to carry cargo or passengers or whatever on your vessel because those systems are so much lighter than battery he goes on to say it's also a deeper solution in terms of acquisition price purchasing the actual equipment and operating cost in addition it's up to up to the they call it the REC H2 it's that hydrogen fuel cell can be combined so as to bring the power of this system from 80 to 800 kilowatts in other words right now they have one of these Toyota fuel cells on their vessel but they could put 10 on there for the weight of the batteries and increase their power production from 80 kilowatts to 800 kilowatts for the same weight of the batteries that they have in there because the hydrogen fueling can be completely green in other words zero carbon when you use electrolysis whereas the batteries usually recharge via the grid and the energy is not always clean off the grid so again I would say visit the website if you can to check out the energy observer it's on its way to Japan after it leaves Hawaii I think when it comes back through they're going to actually head down to South Pacific so they may be going to French Polynesia and kind of this is some of the same places the Hokulea visited the Hokulea visited Japan as well and I think by the time this vessel finishes its voyage it's going to really prove that hydrogen technology and renewable energy technologies are ready for prime time and it's proven because it's proven in the toughest laboratory in the world which is the open seas so that's going to do it for this week's Stand the Energy Man thank you for joining me and hope that now that COVID is settling down you'll come out to visit Hawaii and help our economy and spend some time with us here on Think Tech Hawaii we've got some great shows until next week Tuesday Aloha