 Welcome to Stand on Energy Man. I'm coming to you live from Kailua. I'm Stan Osterman, here on Think Tech Hawaii, talking everything energy, especially hydrogen. And today for my guests, it's kind of a, not a repeat, but a continuation of last week's show with Toby Kincaid from Oregon. I call him Dr. Kincaid because he looks good in a lab coat and he's really, really smart. So I just call him a doctor. But anyway, he started off with some really good points last week. We're going to recap those and then roll into some slides we didn't get into. So Toby, thanks for joining us again this week and finishing up what we started last week. Thank you, General, it was an honor to be with you. All right, so, you know, my favorite slide last week was, I think it was number two, the one you were talking about, all of the comparisons of hydrogen to all the other energy sources and battery storage and, you know, all the energy storage sources. Did you kind of recap that one? Oh, happily. You know, when in the big picture, you know, what are we looking for? We're looking for an energy solution. Whenever you turn on the switch, the light goes on. That's what we want. And so the question becomes, what's the best way to do that? Now, I've often heard through the years many energy experts come on and say, you know, this is a complex problem. And of course, there are no silver bullets. Well, that kind of always rubbed my fur the wrong way because how do you know? I mean, we never get answers better than the questions we ask. You have to ask the right question to get to the right answer. So I wanted to figure out, is there a silver bullet? And I defined it as, if I can solve 85% of your problem doing one thing, that's a silver bullet. So the way I kind of thought to approach this is, well, let's first make a filter. Let's make a list of everything that we want our ideal energy to do. And it's a tough list. It's everything we want. It's got to be non-toxic. We don't want to pollute the air or the soil or the water. We don't want volatile organic compounds including our DNA and biology. We don't want knocks and socks and mercury and particulates and radiation. And beyond all that, it has to be safe. It has to be resilient. It has to be available to all people. It has to be something that can work for every forgotten corner of the earth as well as the incredible industrial appetite that a 21st century life requires. So with 7 billion people, we really need to get to the point of it. What is there a silver bullet? And if there is, what is it exactly? So I made this list. If you throw that up, I can kind of go through it. So we made our list in the beginning in the middle. That's our filter. And so let's take every possible known technology and throw it at this barrier and see does anything get through. So I would throw, of course, coal, oil, natural gas. They didn't get very far because of the toxicity and other issues. And then we could take nuclear energy. Let's throw that at it. Well, it's very high cost. It's one of the most expensive energy options we have. So that's not really gonna work. And then we can throw every combination. And especially with a lot of work, lately a lot of press on lithium ion, is that really a solution for the enormous energy appetites we have? Well, it didn't make it either. So what was interesting to me and what floored me is the only thing that really got through, if you want everything to happen here, everything on that list to be manifest, the only thing that got through was renewable hydrogen. Now, a lot of people will hear hydrogen and they immediately recoil. There's an emotional response that has been built up out of propaganda by the oil industry for 120 years. Their message is don't pay attention to the man behind the curtain. You need to buy our oil or you're gonna live in a cave. I can't tell you, even to this day, I see energy experts come in and say, well, we're always gonna burn coal, you see. Without coal, everyone would live, like we did thousands of years ago. No, no, no, no, no. So we make this list, what gets through renewable hydrogen? And that is using renewable energy, solar, wind, anaerobic digesters, which only work in the moment. They go up and down, they're variable. And we're gonna put that through a machine called an electrolyser. We're gonna make hydrogen fuel from water. Now, the great thing about that is when you use the fuel, you get most of the energy out and most of the water back. And water is completely compatible with our world. It's compatible with every species. We're mostly made of water. The earth is mostly covered with water. How extraordinary that water is the result of the most exothermic chemistry we know. So there's something really special here. And so it brings me back to, boy, about a quarter of a century ago, I was doing a summer study at the Barker Engineering Library at MIT, at Big Dome, beautiful library. And I said to myself, I said, oh, hey, I'm going to figure out what is the best fuel? So to figure it out, I thought, okay, I'm gonna make a big spreadsheet. This is with Lotus 123 to give you an idea of how far back this goes. And I listed every fuel option, methane, propane, butane, ethanol, methanol, kerosene, gasoline, hydrogen, just everything. And then I would list the data. What are the combustion products? How many deaths per 100,000 people per annum did the industry report? What's the resource availability of the feedstock? And what are the combustion products? All of these things I listed. And so when I was finally ready, I rubbed my hands together and I sat down at my spreadsheet and I said, okay, here we go. Now I can ask the questions. Well, if we're gonna look for the perfect energy in the 21st century, it has to be potent. So let's look at exothermic energy, kilocalories per mole, okay, sort. What's the least powerful fuel to the most powerful fuel? Boom, top at the list, hydrogen. And I went, oh, that makes sense. That's why it's in the external tank of the space shuttle when we had space shuttles because you get more bang for the buck per unit mass than anything we know of. So I wrote that down in my notebook. I said, okay, hydrogen. Now the ideal fuel would have to be safe. So let's list all of the industry deaths for this death per 100,000 members per annum and give me the safest fuel at top. Sort. Do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do. Think, top of the list, hydrogen. Oh, that's very, oh, I understand. It's lighter than air. So if you had a breach or you had a problem, it goes straight up as fast as you can shoot an arrow. So it leaves, it escapes, it evaporates. If you were to have a breach of a propane tank or a natural gas tank and that found a spark because it's heavier than air, you're gonna have a huge explosion. Hydrogen doesn't work that way. When it's put into a tank at high pressure, it's been filtered. So only thing in that tank is hydrogen. So there is really in no way in chemistry you can have a spontaneous explosion. And if you were to breach it, if you went over and whacked the top of it off, all of that hydrogen is gonna go straight up. So now we hit the top two, the most powerful and the safest. How about the most available? Well, when I did sort, ding, the availability at the top of the list, hydrogen. Why? Because we can make it from water and water covers most of the earth in some form or another, but we can get to water. Well, now we have three out of four. And so I thought, okay, the coup de gras is, of course it has to be the least toxic. So list everything by toxicity, least toxic on top. Sort, ding, top of the list, hydrogen. So at this point, because of course, when you burn hydrogen, you get hydrogen oxide, which has a formula H2O. So that's your waste product, little bit of heat, lots of energy and water. Hey, that's not bad. So when I saw the four top results were the same, I sat back in my chair and I remember going, what is everyone debating? It's clear if physics matters, the ideal fuel is hydrogen. And specifically renewable hydrogen, because we can make it from water with using all of our renewables. You're my hero, Toby. That's exactly, you know, it's funny. You know, when the Air Force was looking at hydrogen and the contractors were working with us, and I told them, hey, what is it you think the Air Force wants out of your fuel cell vehicles? And the contractor said, oh, it's clean and green and no pollution. I go, the Air Force doesn't care about cleaning green. I mean, if they have to, they'll pay for it, but your technology is expensive. So tell me what the military is gonna get out of your product that would make them want your product. And he couldn't answer the question. Like you say, the question is really important. So I answered the question for him. I said hydrogen is, the operation is nearly silent. Fuel cells don't make any noise and electric motors don't make much noise. So there's no noise. And in combat, not making noise is a virtue in a lot of cases. I said, and thermal, there's not much heat. An internal combustion engine puts off a lot of heat to this wasting energy, but hydrogen fuel cells and motors don't put off that much heat. And so there's no thermal imaging at night when they can pick you up just by your heat source and tell where the activity is. You know, it's easy to mask that heat source. I said, and it's non-toxic when you burn it or use it in a fuel cell, it only gives you water. So you can have it in the hanger and be running all your fuel cell, you know, weapons loaders and everything inside a closed hanger and nobody's gonna get asphyxiated breathing a mist from the fuel cells. So then they started paying attention. And right now I'm happy to say that all the services in the U.S. are really seriously looking at hydrogen. Oh, I believe it, by virtue of what its virtue is, by its characteristics. I mean, it's the only potent energy fuel that we could use that is compatible with life. So if compatibility with life is important, I would suspect it is, then there is no debate. We are very clear about what is the direction to go. And you wanna hear a funny story about the military side? Please. We're having a conference and the Navy SEALs got up and said, you know, we do have a problem maybe you guys can help us with. We can't take lithium batteries on our submarines. And of course we need batteries to run all of our communications and all of our special gear. And so I went up to them afterwards and said, you know what? Guess what you have on your submarine? Every submarine has that you gotta use to make oxygen for your crew. I go, there's an electrolyzer on your submarine. I know the companies that make them. And guess what you throw away from that electrolyzer? You throw away the hydrogen. If you save the hydrogen and put it in metal hydride storage containers, they're just like batteries. You could turn around and run your equipment off little mini fuel cells with metal hydride storage. And it took them about two years, but guess what they're doing? They're looking at hydrogen for the submarines because you can't take lithium batteries on an airplane for a good reason. You know, they're flammable. You get briefed every time you go to the airport. You know, if you have to take your hand carry baggage and put it in down in the cargo compartment, they say, take your lithium batteries out of there. We don't want any lithium batteries in the cargo compartment. You can't store lithium batteries. You can't ship lithium batteries. Here in Hawaii, it's hard as heck to get new cell phone batteries because they don't want to bring in lithium. There's only a couple of places. Even the cell phone companies don't bring in batteries for their cell phones because they're so hard to ship. So metal hydride fuel cells and hydrogen, they'll the bill, FAA doesn't care, safest can be. Well, let's give it back to you. I kind of sidetracked you there, but let's give the rest of your slides. Well, let's sit on the next one then, which is, or we could still talk about a bit about, well, let me go to the slide. Okay, so, you know, when we talk about renewable hydrogen, what it's kind of like that I mentioned last time that old commercial one guy walks around with a chocolate bar and the other guy walks around with peanut butter and they run into each other and hey, you've got peanut butter on my chocolate. You've got chocolate on my peanut butter. I had the same epiphany and realized, hey, why don't we combine the electrolyzer and the fuel cell into one machine since they're each both half of the cycle? And now we have in essence a perfect battery or a good battery anyway, a great battery in fact. So when we look at the idea of storing energy, lithium ion has a lot of problems. It's only, it's very energy or very energy, not dense, but less dense. It's only 300 watt hours per kilogram. Well, hydrogen is 40,000 watt hours per kilogram. So if you were gonna store one megawatt hour, which is a thousand kilowatt hours, that's the utility unit, a megawatt hour of lithium would require three and a half tons of lithium ion. That's not very practical. In Hawaii, you use over 5,000 gigawatt hours. So that's five million megawatt hours. And one is three and a half tons of lithium ion. And you can imagine how lightweight lithium is, how much battery that would be. Now we can store one megawatt hour in hydrogen with about 30 kilograms. So we're talking about 70, 80 pounds at most compared to three and a half tons. So what we have is some disinformation in the world. When we look at the Elon Musk's who are building sports cars and they wanna go all battery, oh, I guess that's fine for a sports car. Anything under a hundred kilowatt hours, you wanna use lithium, knock yourself out. But if you wanna talk about loads that are larger than 100 kilowatt hours, like trucks, SUVs, freight liner trucks, let alone aviation or construction equipment or farm equipment, then the idea of using lithium ion really is nonsensical. And of course the grid. It doesn't scale. And of course the grid. If you wanna use it on the grid with dispatchable power, you can have a little bit of batteries, but you better do the bulkier storage and hydrogen or you're gonna go broke and you're gonna have to have a lot of real estate and a lot of good firefighting equipment. That's right. Everything has danger, but it's how we mitigate and engineer the exposure so that we minimize that. But if you don't control lithium ion batteries very carefully, you can have a runaway event and you're not gonna put that fire out. It'll have to burn itself out. It's very difficult. Hydrogen really never even stays around. If it breaches, it's gone. It's up like a pencil up to the stratosphere. It doesn't even spread out. It goes straight up. This is enormously, this is a great advantage in safety compared to, for example, a tin can of gasoline under your car. That's really not smart. And thousands of people can attest to that through accidents and terrible fires. Hydrogen doesn't work that way. The fact that it's lighter than air is an extraordinary feature. Every battery and every engine in the world, actually from a physics standpoint, does three things. You have an input, you have storage, and then the output. With a gasoline engine, the input is all the infrastructure to make the gas. The storage is how much gas you have in your tank and then the output is finally the engine to give you some work. Well, this is completely something consistent with all engines and batteries. So if we look at hydrogen and using the electrolyzer to separate hydrogen into the gases where we can snap them back together in a fuel cell, releasing that energy that we use and getting most of the water back, now we have those three things. But the battery is the hydrogen itself. You know, it's almost an arrogance in humans that we have to invent something better and better and better, fine, that's a great instinct. But we also have to have the realization that sometimes you should just say yes. Hydrogen is already done, nature gave it to us. We can cycle hydrogen between gases and water infinite number of times. You're never gonna run out of it. You're never really even consuming it all. You're getting most of it back. There's always some little inefficiencies but that's the world we live in. Nothing is perfect, but what's best? And so when we put these things together, now we have a real solution. When I don't know why anyone would build any kind of any other kind of power plant. Why build a hydro plant? Why build a peaking plant? Why build a coal plant? If you just use electrolyzers and fuel cells, you can take any variable clean energy, make fuel from water, store it safely. It's dried and filtered. It is so stable that you can keep hydrogen decades in the same tank. It's so inert, it just sits there. It'll sit there for eons if you want it to. Compare that to lithium ion where they say, well, we hope you use it within six hours because after six hours, it starts to self discharge. Yeah. So hydrogen has every characteristic we would want. It's almost as if the earth is saying, look, you guys can have as much energy as you want, but if you do it the right way, you're not gonna hurt anybody. And that's what's so important. Toby, we're gonna take a quick break here and when we come back, we're gonna talk about the storage capacity aspect and using renewable energy to make hydrogen out of what we call curtailed power and saving and using that power when you would otherwise be paying a premium for electricity. So we'll be back in 60 seconds and talk about that and one of your ideas. Aloha, my name is Duration. I'm the host of Finding Our Future here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm here every other Tuesday from one to 1.30 p.m. Here on this show, I cover issues around sustainability, global issues that matter for young people for future generations and other social justice issues. So please join us. It's live streamed on Think Tech Hawaii and also updated on YouTube. Hey, welcome back to Stan the Energyman here. Stan Osserman and Toby Kincaid coming to live and direct from Portland, Oregon. And we're talking hydrogen, hydrogen storage and why it makes so much sense. And Toby, let's go back to you and get back to your slides. Sure, let's look at the next one, which goes to your point about how we use solar energy. You know, in Hawaii, you had a great net metering program, but if you have too much solar on any particular network, it becomes dangerous because the grid becomes over energized and that energy seeks a path to ground and that could be dangerous. So I believe what happened is net metering is no longer happening in Hawaii for that reason. Well, we have a total solution here. Again, using renewable hydrogen, we can, I say build out your solar as much as you want. We're not gonna waste any of it anymore. If you look at this slide, what we're gonna do is take your normally curtailed or turned off energy. We're gonna absorb every bit of it and run it into electrolyzers, making hydrogen fuel from water. And then we could use that to run your public bus system with fuel cell cars, excuse me, fuel cell buses. And this is kind of a big debate as to, for municipalities, whether you wanna go with an all battery bus or do you wanna go with a fuel cell bus? I would point out that the all battery buses have a lot of problems in terms of the charging that needs to require. And let me give an example with just a car. You know, a house in America, if you turn everything on is about five kilowatts. A level two charger for electric vehicles is about seven kilowatts. If you went to fast charge, the minimum is 50 kilowatts. So in Hawaii, if you have, I believe, about a million cars on Oahu, just about, it seems extraordinary, but that seems to be the number. Now, if we take 10% of that fleet, that's 100,000 electric vehicles and we wanted them to be electric. If you add 100,000 vehicles on Oahu, plug in at, it's just level two, seven kilowatts, that's a 700 megawatt demand. Now, I'm trying to get the numbers and how big the grid is on Oahu. And I think it's a little over a gigawatt to a gigawatt and a half, but that we're talking about half of your grid. So if you ever got to 10% as electric vehicles, if we just use old thinking and just plug it into the grid directly, oh, I don't see how that pencils out. Now you're right, and not only that, but we have one of the oldest grids on this island in the world. I mean, it was one of the first electric grids put into place back when Hawaii had a monarchy. That's right. And the interesting thing is, if you have a condominium or a big high-rise that has maybe 100 apartments in it, and there's 10 people with electric cars and there's only two charging units, and everybody goes, hey, we need more electric chargers. Well, as soon as the homeowners association figures out that it's gonna cost $700,000 to put new transformers in the building and all the other residents have to pay the half million dollar bill to upgrade the power going to that condo, all of a sudden you see the problem with what you just described, how much power it takes to do those chargers, you actually have to upgrade almost every building in the state of Hawaii that's more than 10 years old doesn't have enough power coming to it to put in very many chargers. So the infrastructure costs, they're skyrocketing and everybody's wondering why there's not enough chargers around the town to charge cars and it's because it's expensive. And they keep trying to get the government to pay for them, get the government to pay for them because California is, but like you say, what's working so hard to make the square pig fit in the round hole? Let's start working with the round hole, which is hydrogen. Yes, exactly. And this is what the wonderful freedom for Hawaii. And another challenge I'll point out with electric vehicle charging on Oahu is that every utility has kind of a monopoly in their service area, same in Oahu, it's the Hawaiian electric company. And that's regulated by the PUC, the Public Utility Commission. Well, when utilities these days, when they sell you electricity, they actually charge you in two different ways. They charge you for the electricity in kilowatt hours and then there's a sneaky demand charge. And they're saying, well, it's the high mark of what your total load, what the peak demand was during the month. For some 15 minute period, whatever the high mark is, that's what they're gonna charge you some tariff. Well, for the commercial schedule, I think it's schedule G in Oahu, last I looked, it was $24 a kilowatt. Well, that's tough because yeah, if I'm gonna commercially put in a fast charge station, that's 50 kilowatts, 50 times 24, that's 1,000 a month. And we usually put in four. So that would be 1,000 a week. It'll cost $4,000 to just to have four charging stalls. It'll cost $4,000 a month just for the demand charge. That's then you buy for the electricity and then you pay for the station. So I've been knocking myself out trying to find a build a business model where I can go to contractors and go to the vendors and say, here, well, let's put these in and we can make the income from the revenue, we'll pay your bills. But it's very tough when the starting nut is $4,000 a month per install just for demand charge. Now, this becomes really difficult for large electricity consumers, very challenging. I think the second largest electric bill on the island is with the University of Hawaii, Manoa. And you just imagine, everyone comes in, they do their work, they go out to lunch. And then when they come back at one o'clock from my research, that's actually the peak at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. As everyone goes back, turns on the machine. So at one o'clock in the afternoon for an hour or so is the peak of the university. And I'd like to point out that that last megawatt, just one megawatt hour, that little peak is about $160 worth of electricity. But you have a $24,000 demand charge. So if you try and put, now no one has put lithium ion batteries there to soften that peak because they couldn't afford to do that. It's not practical to do that, but it's very practical to use hydrogen in this way. So when that peak comes, then we use the hydrogen to run the fuel cells, the fuel cells provide the electricity and they buffer that demand, that peak load. And $24,000 for one megawatt, that's every month now, just that one that's peaking out. So shaving these loads can have a tremendous economic benefit for the citizens of Hawaii. So renewable hydrogen again, comes to the rescue. No, you're exactly right. And it's the larger organizations that get those, get that peak demand charge. We've actually had one company that I know actually was converting over to renewable energy. So they were not using much electricity, but then every so often, they'd have to really turn on their stuff and crank it up. And they weren't buying much electricity, but those demand charges were so heavy that it actually cost them more per month, even though they were not running off the grid most of the month because of the demand charges. So people have to really understand, especially the small companies and the bigger companies that have a lot of energy usage. But he told me, believe it or not, we've like blasted through a half hour. We didn't get to the coal power plant yet. We didn't get to the coal power plant, but I tell you what, I'm gonna have you come back next month and we'll just do that project and talk about that one, okay? Love to. I'll leave the last minute to you to make any closing comments you want and then we'll wrap it up. Wonderful. Here we are, and in the last four, six weeks, the earth has really changed. In Venice, they say they can see the fish. In Honami Bay and on Oahu, there's all kinds of fish coming. It's because the humans, we've only reduced our pollution by a third, but for these four weeks, we get a glimpse of what the future could be. But instead of saying, no, we have to all just live in like cavemen. No, if we do it right, if we use renewable hydrogen, where we take renewable energy, we make fuel from water, we use the fuel, you get most of the energy out into the water back, this is the only solution that's compatible with our environment and it would allow people to use renewables anywhere in the world and produce wealth, store that wealth as hydrogen and then use that energy in any way that they want and knowing that there's no toxicity. You're not going to hurt anybody. And I think this is an industrial revolution which we need to come to grips with and see your leadership in the last, well, your show's been on I think five years and you've been talking about this for five years. Look, we've got to keep pushing towards a real solution. Reality is a wonderful thing. And I really appreciate the fact that you've been championing this for quite a while and thank you for that. And let's keep it up and see if we can get people to do the right thing. Hey, you bet. And I appreciate your encouragement, Toby and we'll have you back on in about four weeks and have you talk about the coal plant thing because Hawaii has one coal plant. Most people don't even realize that. And you've already worked out a solution from Oregon on how we could maybe fix that up and get past the burning coal. So that'll wrap us up for this week. Thanks again, Toby for being with us and stay warm over there. I guess it's springtime, stay dry then and we'll see you in a couple of weeks. And until then, stand the energy man signing off till next Tuesday, aloha.