 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, welcome to Aloha Friday and stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters and it's Friday the 13th. Not that I'm superstitious or anything, nothing could possibly go wrong today at all. Right? No. Nothing's going to go wrong today. Anyway, it's going to be a little bit of a different show. I decided to take big risks today and actually shoot some video in our shop and show you some of the cool stuff that we have on hand because I don't know, you probably haven't really seen all the new stuff up close. I know we've talked about our light carts and our generators but I've got all of it up close and personal. So without further ado, let's hit the first video and we'll talk about the Millennium Rain Unit that we have to dispense hydrogen to all of our gear. So this is HCAT's Millennium Rain Unit, open everything up here so you can see it all. This is a hydrogen station on a pallet. It retails for a little bit under $100,000 and it comes with two kilograms of hydrogen storage in the tanks there that you see but we actually opted to purchase extra storage so we have six extra tanks giving us a total of eight kilograms of storage at 5,000 psi. So as you can see it's a pretty compact unit and it does everything that you need it to do. This is the main production side. At the bottom is a fuel cell or excuse me, a cell stack that is the heart of the electrolysis process. Inside that stack, basically distilled water, deionized water mixed with a little bit of sodium hydroxide is always present along with some DC current and when the DC current supplied it separates water into hydrogen and oxygen. So inside the main component here are, over here we have a logic unit that gives instructions to people when they want to dispense fuel. We have the two storage tanks. We have our electrical panel with all the logic behind it. We have the cell stack down below. We have a plumbing manifold panel in here and I'm not going to open them up because it might be proprietary with Millennium Rain. On the top we have actual compressor unit and compressor controls, really small compressors. Over here are the water towers that actually cool the water that goes into the electrolyzer because, again, when you do electrolysis, just like when you do a fuel cell, you have three products. When you're doing electrolysis, you have the oxygen, hydrogen gases being separated and you have electricity going in and you have heat coming up being generated as well. When you put the hydrogen into a fuel cell, what you get is heat, electricity and water as output. So here we're breaking the water down into hydrogen, oxygen and that's it. We're storing the hydrogen and we're letting the oxygen go. So these two towers provide a cooling system for the cell stack but also percolate the gases. You can see on the right is oxygen and left is hydrogen and what it will do is as the pressure builds up, the hydrogen is compressed and stored in the tanks and the oxygen pressure will just keep building up, correct? So every once in a while the logic and the system will vent the oxygen off into the air and we help Mother Nature get more oxygen in the air. When there is more water needed, it comes from back here, from inside our building and it goes into the system. In the back here we have the scrubber units to make sure that we get the purity. The electrolyzer stack actually gives you virtually 99% pure hydrogen off the stack. The two contaminants that may be in there are A, water and B, a little bit of oxygen. You don't want oxygen, especially with your hydrogen, so even in small amounts. So what happens in this scrubber unit is any oxygen that happens to be present with hydrogen is run across a membrane that reacts to the oxygen and hydrogen together and turns it into water instantly and generates some heat. That water is then dropped out the bottom of the unit and then the two larger cylinders here are actually desiccants. So these units dehumidify any of the hydrogen gas that's going into the compressors. It takes the rest of the water contamination out of it. So virtually by the time it finishes coming through these two scrubbers, the hydrogen is 99.999% pure and of a good enough standard to go in vehicles. Coming back around this way, the last piece of the equipment that is pretty standard for anybody that does fueling is the refueling receptacle J2601 standard. This one's built in Germany, but it's pretty standard. This is a low pressure. You'll notice that the low pressure has this kind of nozzle on it, and the high pressure looks more like a regular gasoline dispensing unit. So one of the things I like to show people is that when I'm demonstrating this thing we have folks that say, oh, well, hydrogen gas doesn't have any odor. If it's on fire, you can't see the flame, which is true in pure daylight. It's pretty hard to see. But I just turned on the refueling system, and I'm going to put a little bit of pressure into the hose here. I've got about 400 psi in the system now. And this system is designed so that when you're finished refueling, instead of leaving all that pressure in the hose and causing stresses on the hose, you can actually vent it off. But the reason I do this is to actually demonstrate another concept which people forget about when they read on Wikipedia that hydrogen is odorless, colorless, and the flame is invisible, and people think they're going to walk into a room where there's a big hydrogen leak, and then they're going to walk into an invisible flame and get burned to death. Well, listen to what a hydrogen leak sounds like. That's only a couple hundred psi. This is 2,300 psi. You're not going to walk into a hydrogen leak and not hear it. That was still only a fraction of what a leak in a vehicle would sound like, or a vehicle with an almost empty tank would sound like. But certainly you're going to hear a hydrogen leak coming out of a pressurized cylinder. You're not going to walk into a flame or a burning room that's full of hydrogen because, number one, the hydrogen immediately goes up in the air at 45 miles an hour, which is basically 60 feet per second or six stories in one second. You're not going to just have hydrogen hanging around waiting for a fire to start. It has to be, if it's going to catch on fire, like I said, we have here is pure, so it won't burn unless you have an oxidizer with it. But if it does, if you do have an oxidizer, you do mix your hydrogen with oxygen that does happen to catch on fire at the right ratios, then what you'll have is a flame that goes straight up at 60 miles an hour, or 45 miles an hour, 60 feet per second. So I show this little demonstration here to say, you've got to use all your senses. You don't just count on your sense of sight or your sense of smell to let you know there's a leak. There's also your sense of hearing, being able to get an auditory signal from anything that's leaking. So this is our millennium rain. We do use it. We fill our gem vehicle and our light carts and our generators with this one. And U.S. hybrid uses our hydrogen here sometimes to purge tanks and to check their equipment rather than going all the way out to hit them and filling up a tank and bringing it back here. So this is millennium rain. So that was our millennium rain unit. And what I'd like to add to that is, you know, I've been working with a lot more hydrogen, especially lately. We've actually got a couple of cooking girls and I'll do some video with them cooking some food and demonstrate that for you. The more I use the hydrogen gas in the more conventional role like burning it to cook with, you start to notice the unique characteristics of the hydrogen flame and realize that if you ever had a hydrogen leak where it mingled with a lot of air and you had a mixture that was flammable, when it ignites, it's going to ignite. I mean, it's just going to do a flash. If you have a stream of hydrogen coming out of a tank, it's going to be coming out in like a blowtorch. So you'd actually see more of a blowtorch type flame. So anyway, I've gotten more and more comfortable working with the hydrogen, but that's when you've got to be more and more careful because that's when you don't want to get complacent. So our next video is a really cool project we did with a bunch of kids converting a electric off-the-road type vehicle, but it's actually a low-speed vehicle. It's actually roadworthy. This kind of vehicle can be purchased locally at any one of your dealers, but we got ours from Montgomery Power Sports and it's a Jim, Polaris Jim electric vehicle. So it'll rotate. So this is our Polaris Jim. It's a street legal vehicle, as you can tell by the license plate. It has 300 watts of solar panels on the roof, flexible solar panels, and it has a hydrogen fuel cell range extender on the back end of it. It's pretty simple. Like I say, this street legal. It has a horn. It has windshield wipers and a windshield. It has turn signals. It has headlights. Really easy and fun to drive. This is not a typical golf cart. It's more like a quad that you have on your farm, except it is 100% electric drive. So what I wanted to do was show you a little bit about how simple this fuel cell is to work. So I'm going to come up here. I'm going to turn on the hydrogen. Open the tank up so there's some hydrogen flowing. I've got a regulator set up. I just hit the start button. The system counts down. It gives you a chance to check the, to program it the way you want. And then it starts the system up. It doesn't make a whole lot of noise. The system is starting. And what it's going to do is it's going to check the voltage on the batteries. And I've got it set to charge at about 52 volts. So once the system does go through itself check, it'll start looking at the batteries and check the state of their charge. The batteries are actually pretty full, but it still should charge a little bit. And the system will kick in and start charging. And give me the amperage and the voltage as the fuel cell starts to send out, send out electricity. As you can see, the gauge will build up pressure as the hydrogen goes from the tank into their small regulator. And then you'll hear occasional discharge when the fuel cell discharges. So right now we're set up. The batteries have 50.6 volts on it. And then I was doing this yesterday too. It's checking itself. It said, hey, there's a mid-failure. I think it's because I'm letting the pressure drop on the tank. I have the regulator set so low. But it's charging the batteries at 6.6 amps. And I have 50.9 volts. See, the pressure's dropping to zero on this thing. I might just open it up a little bit and keep the pressure higher. And it should be okay now. So it's hanging around 7 amps and 51 volts charging away. So ideally what we would do is we would just drive with it in this mode. And it'll keep charging the batteries while we're driving. And then when I park it, I just leave it on. And while it's parked, the fuel cell continues to charge the batteries as does the PV array. So this is really a neat little vehicle. I'll move the camera up high so you can see it's a flexible PV array. It's a flex panel. So they actually bounce around and it doesn't bother them any. They can still function. And it's a really cool little vehicle. It gets some great mileage. We can go about 100, 140 miles with this thing. When it charges up with the fuel cell, it just keeps on going. And the photo will take. So if we leave it out in the sun, it takes a while to charge everything up. But it charges up. So it's a nice little vehicle. We did this project with four students from Center for Tomorrow's leaders. And they're actually going to come out here and drive this thing. So again, the bottom is the fuel cell. And this is the control unit. And I'm going to move the gem and we'll go inside and we'll look at some of our other equipment. Hey, so that's our gem. We really like it. It's actually a lot of fun to drive around. I like riding my bike too, but the gem is a lot better when you got a haul cargo. So anyway, the building that thing was a lot of fun. Driving, it's a lot of fun. I'm thinking when I retire, I'm going to have one in Kailua and replace one of my cars with it because it can go anywhere where there's a 35 mile an hour speed limit. You can drive it on the streets. It gets safety checked. It gets registered like a regular car. And we'll probably drive it through some of the Christmas parades this Christmas season or holiday season and get it out there in the public. So we're going to take a quick break now and be right back with the rest of the tour of our shop. All the better to see you with my dear. What are you doing? Okay, cool. Research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development. And you're doing that now? This is the starting line. Posh, this is over. You're dead. Read aloud 15 minutes, every child, every parent, every day. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran, seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veteran's advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty, and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour stand, Energyman here on a tour of our shop, one of the most exciting places in the state of Hawaii, I'm telling you. Hey, it must be Friday the 13th. Look at those GMO trees behind me. They're really big in Waikiki now. There must be something going on. Anyway, back inside our shop, we have some more great stuff in there. We bought two different models of equipment from a company called Luxford GTM. They generally used to specialize in making high pressure fuel tanks for the hydrogen, but they've branched out into actually making commercial off-the-shelf equipment that can be used mostly in the industrial world doing construction site things and emergency lighting and emergency power. So we've got two of their pieces of equipment, and we've got some videos showing you how they work. First off is a 5 kilowatt generator, rolled heat. So here we have two of our generators. These generators are made by Luxford GTM. They're 5 kilowatts. They have 415 volt outlets that are rated at 15 amps each. So this generator with all of its storage can go out in the field and probably run, you know, some stuff that's drawing 4 or 5, 6 amps, probably a day or two without being refilled. So this side, I have the doors open, shows the six tanks. They're fairly large tanks. I would say, well, they store at 5,000 psi, and they look like they're about two to two and a half kilogram tanks. I don't remember the exact specifications on it. And then down the center line, you see the inverter on the rack, and there's actually a battery down underneath the plate there. When we come around to this side, you see the controls for the tanks, the plumbing, and then in the center, you see the control unit on the top and the fuel cell stack on the bottom. And again, just like the Gen vehicle, extremely quiet. You basically open up all the valves. You start the fuel cell running, and then you connect the inverter. Once you've got the fuel cell stabilized and running, you connect the inverter, and it gives you nice clean signal on your power, and it also gives you very quiet power. So we're hoping that the TV industry folks and the movie industry folks will get to look at this and really enjoy it. For all the qualities it has in terms of clean power and quiet. The only thing that I've found that I've probably not particularly fond of with this is it is fairly heavy. I wouldn't necessarily take it as an all-terrain thing, where you could just kind of drive it anywhere. We put some drainage down before we deploy the outriggers, because one of the most important things you do with all of this kind of equipment is you have to stabilize it, make sure it's fairly level, just so that everything works. Although these fuel cells can work at angles other than perfectly level, but it's better to have them perfectly level, and that's our goal. I'm also not particularly fond of the two and five sixteenths towing ball that they selected, but or towing hitch that they selected, but that's a personal choice. Also, the outrigger legs are a little bit long, so they're pretty much where they need to be when the thing needs to be leveled, and the problem there is when you start to have uneven terrain, or you have to go over curbs and things, and you're trying to maneuver a truck. With a real short wheelbase like this, these things are really hard to maneuver, and with real uneven terrain, you can't swing the legs down very easily, so that's some of the changes I would make if I was going to manufacture these. So it comes with a spare tire, and again, just like other vehicles, that's how you fill it. You open up the valve, you pull off the dust cover, connect to the little millennium rain station or our station at Hickam, and fill it up, and that tells you how much pressure you have on your tanks. And you can select the tanks, you can open all the tanks at once, you can cascade them, you can do however you like. So it's got a lot of options on it. And that's your zero-set Luxford GTM five-kilowatt generator. I like this kind of format. I'm just sitting here in the studio doing nothing but watching videos, so this is easy. I'm going to do this more often. Anyway, those generators, they're pretty slick. I think they're going to work out well. I made a couple of critiques on the actual structures of the trailers, but I'm telling you, driving something, driving a trailer that short was a big learning curve for me. I have a boat that's 30 feet long, and I can drive that trailer pretty easy, but backing up these little short things, man, you got to be on top of it. Those short trailers are tough to maneuver. So the last piece of equipment that I want to show you before we talk about fuel cells is our light carts. And to me, these things are awesome. They perform so well, and they're so great. And even the trailers design nicely. So let's roll tape and I'll show you the light carts. So what I'd like to show you now is actually my favorite piece of equipment. So I'm going to actually start it up for you and show you how it works. This is also a Luxford GTM product. This is called zero-set also part of their series. And this is our portable light cart. And we used it a couple of weeks ago at a Eat the Streets event here in Honolulu. And these two light carts provided all of the light to light up an area about three-fourths the size of a football field for two nights straight, averaging four to five hours a night with zero problems and really good light. And the funny thing was we had people putting their beer and their food on top of these things like it was a table and not even thinking about the fact that if it was a generator, they'd be having a bunch of smelly diesel fumes and a lot of heat and a lot of vibration and not be able to come near the thing. But they were using this thing for like a picnic table because it was so quiet and so clean. I also really like this little cart here. I bought that to help move these pieces of equipment around. They really come in handy rather than trying to maneuver this with a short wheelbase. These vehicles are really tough to maneuver. But let me show you how simple this is to operate. This is the system. So what we do is we turn the master switch on and open up the hydrogen. This is also where you fuel the hydrogen right there. And then we start up the system itself. It warms up for a few seconds. You can hear it running. And then I want to show you too that the mast actually goes up and I have it up now. I'm going to bring it down. It actually goes up quite a bit. And that's one of the main reasons you have to level it really well is when it's running and it's out in the weather and the wind, you want the base to be nice and stable and level with the outriggers out so that it doesn't tip over. But when you want to turn on the lights, just push a button. Lights come on. You can see it produces quite a bit of light. And the people were really happy that we had this out there. It was just amazing. So I also noticed that it has places for the forklift to lift it up or a single point. It's already balanced on the center so that you've got it balanced out. If you need to charge the batteries up, you can actually charge the batteries in this unit to make sure you have a good little bit of battery charging available. And again, this is an electric system so the fuel cell charges batteries. Batteries run the lights. These are very efficient LED lights and they're really just pretty much maintenance free. Yeah, if you want to call GTM Lux for or go online, there you go. There's their contact information. Great piece of equipment. Love it to death. It's real simple. It's real reliable. The instructions that come with it are super basic. And we've driven this thing on roadways and all kinds of places and you can hear the fuel cell kicking in now and you hear how noisy it gets when it really ramps up the decibels. There you go. That's as noisy as it gets. So when I close the door, you can't even hardly hear that. People are standing around eating their dinner and having beers with their stuff resting on top here. And they thought it was pretty slick. So anyway, this is what it looks like up close. Then we'll step back a little bit and show you how bright the lights can be. We've got two of the lights facing forward and two of them facing backwards. And here's our two light carts together. And love them. They're a really great piece of equipment. One thing I'm really proud of is serial number 001 and serial number 002. These are the first two on the planet. And they've been working exceptionally well. So that's our GTM, our Luxford GTM light carts. I'm going to leave this one running because we're supposed to run it for a few minutes every day. And then I'm going to take you over and show you some of the other equipment that we have in the shop. So that was our light cart. I really like those things. They're really slick. And they did get a lot of attention at the Eat The Street event. At the Oktoberfest, we had a kakako waterfront park. Literally, when I went into the middle of the beer garden there, there were people having their dinner on top of that light cart and not even thinking about how quiet it was and how environmentally friendly it was to be sitting there using it like a picnic table. And it was actually generating all the light for half of the event. And the other light cart was generating the light for the other half of the event. And that's all it took. The second night, only our two light carts were out there. The first night, they had a diesel set for backup. And the second night, they didn't even use it. Just our two light carts and it did a great job. The last video is a little clip that I just wanted to show people what a fuel cell looked like that goes in our vehicles. And really, the emphasis here is on the size and the weight. So we can roll tape three or tape five. But I wanted to make a point that most people wouldn't relate to until you take a piece of equipment and look at it. This is a 30 kilowatt fuel cell made by hydrogenics. You can tell by the logo and everything on top. It's their HYPM HD 30. 30 kilowatts. So 30,000 watts of power come out of this unit. 30,000 watts. Now your typical house probably doesn't need more than 3,000 watts to run most things. And your typical house probably does 20 to 30 kilowatt hours a day. So this equipment right here could produce enough power. Certainly to run your house, probably to run a small building, probably to run several houses. But it's the size of like an electric typewriter. But you can get an idea just from the two buses that come off the back that these are not wimpy little connections. There's a lot of power coming out of this thing and the power is generated by hydrogen and oxygen combining to make water and giving you two byproducts, electricity and heat. So it gives you electricity on that side and on this side are cooling inlets and outlets for cooling that are run by electric pumps and electric fans that keep all the electronics cool. But I just wanted to be really clear this piece of equipment gives you an awful lot of power compared to a V8 engine or something on the line of a diesel engine or a whole lot of batteries. This is 30 kilowatts of power. So you combine this with a couple of the hydrogen tanks that we showed you on the generator sets, the portable gen sets when I had the doors open. And you look at how much weight you can save instead of having big heavy batteries in your vehicle. You have this and a couple small batteries and a couple lightweight tanks and you're off and running. So I tell people that when it comes to transportation the reason hydrogen makes more sense than batteries for one reason is because it's lighter. The equipment overall is lighter and in most transportation scenarios you want to reduce weight especially in aircraft and especially in vehicles. That's why Ford went with aluminum bodies on their F-150s. It wasn't to make them cool it was to make them light so that they could get better mileage to meet the new federal standards. Well this is why Toyota and Honda and Hyundai and GM and Ford and Mercedes and BMW are all starting to transition to hydrogen fuel cells because they know that the federal fuel emission standards are going to get so strict in the near future that they're going to be driven to technologies that don't pollute and batteries are great. There's plenty of room for batteries on our vehicles with our hydrogen fuel cells. We got to have them but the way you generate most of your power right here with a good fuel cell. So that's a tour of Hcat we did this morning and hey Friday the 13th and nothing broke in the shop. I'm really impressed. Anyway that brings us to the end to stand the energy man. Next week it'll be Rachel James and Ryan Woobins to give you the low down and dirty on micro grids and how to make things all work in your locality. So until next week, au revoir.