 The State of Clean Energy. The show was sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum with funding from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. Today, we're delighted to welcome our two guests, Shannon Tanganan from Hawaiian Electric Company and Jeff Pickles, co-founder and executive vice president of Green Grid Inc. So Shannon is gonna talk to us about the latest developments with the HECO resilience program. So Shannon, what's going on with resilience? Well, because of COVID-19, we were delaying a lot of our projects because we didn't want to, you know, change out polls and do a lot of the work that we normally do ahead of hurricane season because it would have required customer outages. So now that, you know, economies opening up again, we wanna just allow people, or allow our folks to work again, you know, to get out and do the resilience work that normally is done before hurricane season. So changing out, you know, of polls that are older and, you know, in sister care, removing temporary jumpers, you know, overhead lines. So we really need to do this type of work so that we can get, you know, everything prepared before hurricane season, you know, get our grid to be stronger. So we just wanted to let people know that they might get notifications, either in the mail or delivered to them, letting them know about outages that might be coming. So I just like to report that they just changed a couple of polls right on my driveway this week. And the guys did a great job. Oh, good, good. Yeah, they were very protective of the flower gardens and everything else like that. I couldn't believe it. They were actually willing to move their trucks and they had all these poles lying in the road and one of our, one of the workers that was working, he had to move his car. So like, they had to move all their trucks, move the telephone poles and everything else like that. And they couldn't have been nicer about it. It wasn't like, oh my God, they were like so willing and friendly and gracious. And us kind of just- Oh good, I'm glad to hear that. Yeah, and then the work they did was really great. The workmanship was fine. They put in a couple of new transformers. Yeah. You could tell that they did a really good job on it. And they picked up after themselves or no nails or broken wires or things left lying around. So very, very nice job. Good, I'm glad you enjoy the experience. Yeah, did you have to take an outage? Yeah, for about four or five minutes. It was no big deal. Oh, okay. Yeah, totally no big deal. And the guy came down, knocked on the door and told us he was about ready to cut the power for a few minutes and no problem at all. Yeah. I had a big backup power system for my computer so I could actually run right through it. Yeah, so anyone who will be affected by these outages will get notification. So we just wanted to let people know that this kind of work is going to start up again because we are really sensitive to people staying at home and working from home during the stay at home orders. And now that it's loosening up a little, we're just trying to get some of this work done, catch up. Right. Well, thank you so much, Shannon. And we're going to break off now and I'm going to introduce our second guest, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you, Paul. You're welcome. And thank you, Hawaiian Electric, for keeping the lights on and letting us all be productive. So, Jeff, you're going to talk to us about the economics of hydrogen services and the grid for both the grid and transportation. So, but first of all, you're going to start us off. This is part two. You were here like two weeks ago. So you have a little video that you're going to show us. And so if the staff could crank up the video, we'll check out the latest. Hi, I'm Scott Herb, I'm the fueling station. I'm operations manager for Iwitani Corporate of America. Hi, I'm Paul Wilkins, Director of Operations for Iwitani Corporation of America. And we're going to give you a quick tour of our hydrogen refueling station in San Ramon, California today. We here at Iwitani Corporation of America own and operate four hydrogen fueling stations in the state of California. We are actively looking at expanding that fleet within the state of California and are looking for opportunities outside of California as well. Our parent company Iwitani based in Japan has the largest market share of stations and production plants in the country of Japan. Hi, this is our liquid hydrogen storage tank, 7,000 gallons of liquid on site. And from there, we go into our compression system. We have a five-stage compressor that takes the hydrogen to 10,000 PSI-G. And this is the end of the process, the dispenser is compliant with J2601. And it's as easy as filling your tank with gasoline. So about five minutes from the fill and we're good to go. Thanks, that was perfect. Last time when we talked about our introduction to hydrogen energy, we talked about the opportunities to go on a tour of any of the facilities here in California as difficult as that is in this day and age. I wanted to give everybody a quick virtual tour and we could see how simple the liquid hydrogen tank system can be and it's one of the standard pieces of equipment that's in place in a lot of the hydrogen filling stations here. So I just wanted to kick off today's discussion with a little example of a virtual tour. So thanks for that. And that was Iwitani, they're really great in hydrogen filling or as you could hear from that, they're interested to do more projects. So that's definitely an important resource for everybody. So quick second introduction for myself, I'm Jeff Pickles, founder and vice president, Green Grid Inc. We're a technology and services company. We're based in San Ramon, California and we're dedicated to the sustainable solutions of energy for utilities and transportation sectors. So we have a lot of different programs going on, including remote sensing for utilities and as well as for artificial intelligence and machine learning for developing different automated solutions and digitization of operations and maintenance. But today what we want to talk about in more detail is hydrogen energy. And so with that, let's go to the next. We'll start at go to the next one. So we had our great virtual tour. The next three things that we want to be able to cover today is a cost breakdown of hydrogen energy storage and what the major components are. And we can talk a little bit about how we do our modeling, which is one of the services that Green Grid Inc. has been working. We're going to look at a case study that we've been doing for a 50 megawatt hydrogen storage project. And we want to talk last about some of the benefits of hydrogen as it relates to electric grid, transit for buses, and also for transportation for light duty. We'll go to the next. So what were the drivers for our cost analysis? That's fundamental to talk about some of the assumptions mentioned. Last time, we talked a lot about how energy storages can be used for about a four hour shift for duct curve, but there's also a need to really replace the base load, which comes from petroleum, and also to replace petroleum for transportation. And that's when the storage duration needs to be a lot longer, so we have a driver of 24 hours or longer storage. Another really great point, Mitch, that you drove home for me is that in Hawaii, the store energy has to be transportable between islands. That's a really important factor. Including those two, that translates into gigawatt hours of storage. It's something we need big solutions. We also need them to be fast responding to be able to perform demand response, peak shaving, voltage stabilization, and be able to be managed and part of the reactive power component of the grid. Next. So this is a screenshot. Apologize for the resolution. We're going to have another slide that looks at the detailed results here. This is just a screenshot of Green Grinning's renewable energy techno-economic analysis model. We can go to the next slide. That's what it looks like for the first seven years of the project and it runs out for the entire life of the program. So we developed this model in 2009, primarily used it for solar and wind project development, and it's evolved for hydrogen energy projects to this day. So what we do in this model is we take all the components technical performance from all the data sheets and all the information from the vendors or field experience. And then we also put on all the cost of all the equipment, including the labor, tax credits, all the incentives. And we calculate the performance of the plant every 15 minutes of the year if it's a solar plant. And we look at all of the energy generation, the cash flow, the internal rate of return, net present value, return on investment, CO2 balance, water savings, the dollar per kilowatt hour of energy going in and out and the dollar per kilogram of hydrogen. So those are all the things that we model and measure for different case studies. Next. So this is a graphical representation of the results of our 50 megawatt case study. So it kind of starts top left and goes down into the right. The three big parts of production is we need to have renewable energy to be solar or wind. In this case, we chose four cents per kilowatt hour as the value of that energy. Electrolyzer, in this case, we have a 50 kilowatt hour per kilogram electrolyzer performance spec. And these are round numbers for this case, for this presentation to make it really easy to go through quickly. That translates into about a $3 per kilogram fuel price. It could be distributed right there to the right through pipeline or trailer for about $3.50 per kilogram. But for larger systems, we can keep going. You got something, Mitch? Yeah, I forgot to undo my mute. Yeah, so when we talk about dollars per kilogram, we also want to kind of let the audience know how that equates to gasoline. So it's basically a gasoline gallon equivalent because if you use it in a fuel cell, it's twice as efficient about as an internal combustion engine. So that's like $1.50, $1.60 a gallon gasoline, correct? Correct, that's correct. Great point. So then after we have gas, we're going to put it into a liquefier. And this is a machine that compresses and expands and cools the gas until it becomes a liquid at minus 252 degrees C. Going through that process, which would use more renewable energy, the value of the hydrogen and the price of the hydrogen goes up to our estimate is about $4.40 per kilogram. Then it can be stored in a cryogenic liquid tank as we recently have seen on TV, thanks to SpaceX performing a fabulous launch from Florida worked perfectly and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen tanks were in full view during the preparation for that launch. And there's a picture of it there. That tank can hold about 4.4 usable gigawatt hours of electric energy storage. So that's a significant amount of storage. What is that? What is 4.4 gigawatt hours? That's 180 megawatt hours for 24 hours or 26 megawatts for seven days. 180 megawatts for 24 hours, that's significant. That's like an entire windpark for 24 hours. That's a significant amount of energy. A big windpark. Yeah, so then it can be distributed there on the arrow to the right to produce renewable electrical energy on demand. Our estimate there is about 25 cents per kilowatt hour. And that for me is a really interesting number. That's where solar was about 10 years ago. Maybe a little more plus or minus. So we feel like we've got a great trajectory here for the price for on-demand renewable energy through hydrogen storage to follow that same trajectory that solar did. Next. So this is another graphical representation of some of the results of our routine model really quickly. Some of the specs that came out of this was the 58-ton liquid storage tank. Again, as we spoke for a sense per kilowatt hour renewable energy, 470 was the delivered hydrogen cost. That's CAPEX, the equipment cost plus the operations costs. And that's without any incentive. So in California and Oregon, British Columbia, hopefully in more areas, we have the low-carbon fuel standard system that's coming out that will help provide an incentive for low-carbon fuels. And renewable hydrogen will be the lowest-carbon fuel in that make-up and receive the highest credit. So the big cost driver in there, looking at the graph, I love this graph, is the liquefier. So is there any technology developments that'll bring the cost of that liquefier down that you're aware of yet? We believe that in general, this market has been underserved for many decades. And now we're seeing the demand really start to come on and we're under the impression that many vendors through economies of scale, without any invention, just through economies of scale can get big cost reductions in the electrolyzer and liquefier, both. Yeah. Well, I'm already seeing the electrolyzer. I mean, now it's talking about 40% savings when they go to volume production. So I'm not sure if that's reflected in your electrolyzer component yet. Because I don't think it's finished. Yeah, these are cost estimates that we got within the last 12 to 18 months of work, of research and working with various suppliers. These don't reflect any optimistic projections yet. So the actual storage itself is relatively low cost. If you look at that little green band. That's right. It doesn't inject a lot of the cost. It's not a significant component of your cost. It's the liquefier and the electrolyzer that are the two midis. That's right. So we can get a good breakdown on that on the next slide too. So there's the red circle around that little green sliver for the storage component on the right hand image. So what we did here is we just wanted to get a sense of where we are with this result. So the National Renewable Energy Lab is really fantastic at publishing these studies of the cost of various energy technologies. And this is a publication on the left for battery system cost from NREL from, I believe, 2018. So fairly up to date. And this was for a 60 megawatt system with, you can see there a half hour, one hour, two hour or four hours of storage is the lowest cost as they had their four hours of storage. And these are not quite apples to apples. They include installed labor and they break out inverter and things like that targeting to have a really high resolution cost breakdown, whereas our model does not include some of those parameters. But we feel as though it's showing a good trend. So we have more work to do on our modeling effort for sure, but this is a fantastic trend that shows that for larger scale systems, the installed price, the capital equipment cost, a dollar per kilowatt hour of storage for hydrogen can be competitive with battery, could even beat it. And the primary reason for that is just to have so many more hours of storage and to have the storage component be a small part of the price. So it's kind of opposite from battery really. Next slide. So continuing with some of the results of our case study for our storage lifetime, the lifetime cost is really important to think about. So sometimes people talk about installed cost and that can be different from lifetime cost. We want these assets to work and be valuable and profitable for their owner and operator and provide value to the customer for a long period of time. So in this case, what we were looking at is this four hour battery could be $400 per kilowatt hour, up to 900. Our 24 hour hydrogen system came in at 239. And there is more work to do there to really compare the lifetime cost. So hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers typically have a very long lifetime without a lot of degradation. Many years ago, a lot of work was put in to having the fuel cell degradation be less than half a percent per year. And that kind of thing continued with solar panels were to target really low degradation so projects could have a long lifetime. And that was really important to be able to finance and have investors participate with renewable energy projects. So batteries can have a limited cycle life. And sometimes within that cycle life, there can even be a very significant degradation of 25% or even 30% or more. It will just depend on how you use the battery and really what the warranty terms are with your supplier. So that's just something to keep in mind. So another thing that is really important to talk about when we're talking about storage equipment, cost of safety and batteries as we know can suffer from thermal runaway. So that is a challenge. It is manageable, but it's always out there as something that's a potential where hydrogen storage tanks don't suffer from a chemical runaway process like that. They can have a leak and they can be vented safely and there are many documented instances in the industry over a long period of time that that can happen safely. So that's something that's important to consider too. All right, let's go to the next slide. So what I wanted to do really quickly too I wanted to talk about some of the state of hydrogen energy and why it's important to think about hydrogen energy for transit, utilities and for transportation. So within transit, you guys are really leading the nation right now. You were the first ones to commit to the zero emission and carbon neutrality 2045. So everybody should applaud Hawaii for leading the way to get that going. And then California came on right after with California assembly bill 44 it's titled ditching dirty diesel. And this is where we are going to outlaw diesel for public transit by 2045. And so there needs to be a big program in place to produce hydrogen and hydrogen infrastructure to be able to do that. Another really key factor when you're thinking about zero emissions for transit whether it be battery or hydrogen, both of those solutions can remove the emissions near people. So diesel emissions near people is not a good thing. It's a has carcinogens and particularly that socks NOx COCO2 all right in very close proximity to people. So it has a really high health impact compared to event stack located at a remote utility location far away where the wind can take the emissions away quickly. So scale, hydrogen can scale very quickly and fast filling is really important for transit to be able to fill up to full range in eight to 15 minutes is a really high value that keeps the wheels rolling. That's what I like to say. I love that expression keep the wheels rolling. If the bus is sitting, we're not moving people we're not providing the service. Also resiliency is really important to consider for hydrogen in California we don't talk about if anymore we talk about when there'll be a power shutdown because of wildfire considerations. So now we want to make sure all of our transit has fuel storage so they can operate in the event of extended power outage particularly if an evacuation were needed and we wanted to use public transit for evacuation. I'm a big believer. Not only that my big hobby horse is using your fuel cell electric buses for alternate power remote, you know mobile power backup power units for resilience. Of course. That's a great one of us for like 30 hours to provide backup power and then you can refill it in 10 to 15 minutes and you got another load another 30 hours of operation available. So I think Hawaii is also famous for funding programs to develop micro grids which is something the green grid anchor really supports and we have some really great micro grid projects we're involved with here in California that involve integrating hydrogen energy storage with HVAC, communications, all of the above to provide an entire energy hub that can be portable using the, in this case a bus as the supply. So those are all fantastic concepts and should all be evaluated and pursued where they fit. Another great thing to consider about for hydrogen energy for transit is it's the existing business model of delivered liquid fuel and you can establish long-term supply contracts with fuel suppliers and of course power fuel cell buses have a lot of power we can design the bus to be able to climb a hill and carry heavy loads as necessary and have a very long range for the routes that need the long range. And they do that a lot and the hills of Oakland and Berkeley where AC transit uses its buses very hilly crossing all the bridges every day which have big elevation changes on the bridges. So we in California have a lot of fuel cell buses that have a lot of elevation gain on their routes works very well. And of course the safety as we spoke about earlier hydrogen can vent down safely in the worst case emergency without any chemical runaway or hard to control situations. So let's just transit in a nutshell let's go to the next really quick and see how we can do. Perfect. So utilities can also use hydrogen energy. What we're seeing a lot now is that utilities are coming out with really thorough integrated resource plans. And this is their roadmap to achieving low carbon or zero carbon energy by their particular date whether it be 2040, 2045. And a lot of times these integrated resource plans have a lot of work put into identifying how much energy storage will be needed but the gap now is what technologies are we gonna use to do that? And that's an area where green greening can really help out to perform some analysis and case studies to try to understand what part of the solution hydrogen energy can to meet the target. And what's great about it is once you have that hydrogen solution then you have dispatchable renewable energy in a much more robust larger system that has been available to date. So it'd be a great resource for utilities to operate their network. This can avoid new transmission and distribution because you construct liquid fuel or ship liquid fuel on barges. It has the resiliency that we want of having stored liquid fuel which is something that we've come to rely on. I'm sure the state of Hawaii in each island has many, many days of stored petroleum reserves. So that's something that we count on having that there. It also can give utilities new customers. So a lot of times today people think about they buy electricity from their utility or maybe natural gas, but now they can buy if a utility would so choose to sell hydrogen. And that hydrogen can support customers that are looking for steam generation, zero carbon steam production, recycling, brazing, all kinds of manufacturing, recycling, steel and concrete class and many more. So there's a lot of great ways to make thermal processes zero emission when you can deliver renewable liquid hydrogen to the customer. And then of course backup power and blending into natural gas pipelines are also two really fantastic services. So if a utility is thinking that there are any commercial or residential or industrial customers that need more backup power, maybe something a little bit bigger than a traditional batteries used for or in California, now we have the power safety power shut off, planned outages for safety due to wildfire. That could also be due to earthquake or even tsunami. Those kinds of cases is where you have large storage, zero emission generation is a great solution. Next slide. Kind of try to wrap it up for you guys. Oil and gas and hydrogen energy are a really good fit. So for all you oil and gas customer companies out there that sell gasoline today or sell liquid natural gas for transportation, your customers are seeking zero emission fuels and it's gonna come more and more. So you can have a renewable liquid hydrogen business just as easily as having an oil business. They're just a little bit different, but there's a lot of similarities. So the same processes, still have truck drivers, pipelines, whatever. So you have a lot of corporate knowledge and how to distribute these kinds of fuels. Like you have hydrogen. So a lot of regulations are gonna be coming forward. That's gonna make that important. And another thing that people keep talking about is the paradigm shifts in transportation with self-driving, more transportation services like Uber and Lyft are coming in and a lot of delivery. And now with the pandemic, delivery became a whole new level of emphasis. And it's similar as transit. The wheels should be rolling. Otherwise you're not providing these services. The asset is not making money doing its mobility task. So of course, logistics, trucking and scale, hydrogen scales very well. And what we spoke about earlier, the dollar per kilogram equivalent to gasoline equivalent is in range according to our estimates today and it's only gonna get better. So those are all important considerations and we're happy to help anybody in Hawaii or anywhere else try to understand these better, perform more work in these areas to research how a solution can be developed to meet your particular needs. So that's what we have today. The last slide is just a summary of green-grinning services where we provide project management support, design review, technical, economic modeling, coordination with vendors and other agencies, construction management, operations and maintenance support, staff training or any specialized requirements or investigations along these areas. We're happy to get involved and it's a passion of ours to help utilities and energy companies become sustainable and offer sustainable products, especially for the green-grinning transportation and Mitch is always fantastic to be on and love to be able to discuss these topics with you more and we're happy to help you in any way we can. Well, Jeff, thank you so much. This is a great set of slides, great. I mean, really good information, which I will certainly be using and I'm sure as many of our listeners will be able to use it in their businesses. And so reach out to green grid if you have questions about what we're talking about today. I think a lot of the things you covered aren't well known, they're not out there yet. And I think we need to inject them into the discussion and into the systems we have going here in Hawaii. So with that, Jeff, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Any time, Mitch. And this is Mitch Ewan saying aloha from Hawaii, the state of clean energy.