 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Bands Transportation Technologies. I'm part of the State of Hawaii's Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. And yes, I am a state employee and yes, today is a state holiday. So many of you are probably wondering, why am I working, right? Fortunately here at Think Tech Hawaii, the hosts get paid double on state holidays and federal holidays. So I'm really here just for the money. So today's show takes a form of a new show update. Again, I did one a couple of weeks ago and I got some great feedback and I didn't get through all my articles. So I wanted to kind of continue today and pick up where I left off last time with some aviation advancements. And I'd like to start off the show with a little bit of aviation trivia that's really not so trivial. It should be able to help you understand why saving energy is so important, even in the transportation and aviation sector. So I'm going to start off with some flying hour costs for some of the Air Force's aircraft. Now these costs are not just fuel costs, they do include costs of maintenance and other critical costs. But you can bet that a good chunk of the costs, particularly for the non-stealth aircraft, is mostly fuel. The reason the stealth aircraft are a little bit higher is because they have significantly higher maintenance costs to keep them stealthy. So here's an idea of what some of the costs are for flying airplanes. One of the real bargains in the group is the A-10 Warthog. It's an attack airplane. It's only $17,000 an hour. So every time you drive it for an hour, you spend $17,000 for fuel and maintenance and things. One of our great bombers, the B-1 bomber, it's a long range, swing wing airplane. That's $58,400 flying hour. The real daddy rabbit of this whole thing is the B-2 stealth bomber. And like I said, stealth airplanes are a little bit more costly because of their keeping their coatings and everything up to speed so they're stealthy. It's $128,805 of flying hour. Now to give you an idea, those airplanes do a round-trip mission from the continental U.S. into the combat zone and drop their ordnance and then back to the continental U.S. without stopping. And they're supported along the way with air-refueling aircraft that have to fly up. Probably fly several hundred miles from their base and deliver fuel to that B-2 bomber on the way. So just the B-2 bomber's cost per flying hour to do that one 34-35 hour mission is over $4 million. Now you add to the cost the KC-135 or KC-10 refueling aircraft and you're talking probably close to $5 million for one mission in one of those airplanes. So that's really where you get to see why aviation fuel savings is important to the military, especially the Air Force when they fly these long-range high priority missions. The Air Force flies also a lot of cargo around the world and the cargo aircraft are pretty pricey. The next airplane down the list is the B-52 bomber. It's a basic in 1950s vintage aircraft and quite frankly the engines haven't even been updated to current high-bypass fan engines. And that airplane is $67,000 a flying hour. You get down to some of the smaller fighter jets that are in the $20,000, $27,000 range. The F-22 that we fly out here with Hawaii Air Guard is around $60,000 a flying hour. A little bit pricey, the F-35, $42,000. It's a single engine so a little bit more efficient. The refueling airplanes, whether it's the KC-10 or the KC-135, they're around $20,000 a flying hour. So when you start to add up all the flying hours that the Air Force flies, you can see why reducing aviation fuel costs would be really important, especially if aviation fuel prices doubled. Can you just imagine the bill the Air Force has to pay? So some of the ways you can reduce those costs is don't fly as much and you do that with logistics. And one of the stories I have today is actually focus is right on that point. Let me see here. It would have to be one of the last ones on my list. Anyway, it talks about how Amazon is finding there's a great use for fuel cells. It says, there's victims of tech hype that should be a bit wary of Elon Musk's dismissal of hydrogen fuel cells as fuel cells. A figure as iconic as Mr. Musk in the industry has found some competition with Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, who appears to disagree with Mr. Musk. Amazon has acquired the rights to 23% of a company called Plug Power, which up until recently was basically a penny stock and Plug Power makes fuel cells, particularly fuel cells for material handling equipment and smaller vehicles. It was basically a penny stock until Amazon bought it and then their stock skyrocketed to the point where they're actually starting to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange. So what makes this point connected to the aviation flight cost is Amazon is an obsessive cost cutter when it comes to logistics. So when it comes to moving a lot of freight or a lot of products along distance, transportation is always seen as a non-value added cost that you want to reduce as much as you can. So if a company like Amazon is looking at fuel cells in their material handling department, you know, it has to do with reducing costs. Now this article, and I should have said this upfront, is from the April 6, 2017 Bloomberg, and it's by Leonoid Bershendisky. It's a great article because it kind of focuses a little bit too much on just the time savings. He sits there and says, well, Elon Musk looks at the energy piece from efficiency only, and he says Elon Musk likes batteries because the energy in and the energy out are very close. You get more return on that energy investment when you have a battery. But what Elon fails to recognize in this is what we call in the logistics world the full cradle to grave or fully burdened costs of that technology. For example, did you take into account where your lithium comes from? What's the world reserves of lithium? If you increase the amount of batteries you make with lithium, are you going to find economies of scale, or are you going to have supply and demand drive your price higher and higher and higher as you make more and more and more instead of lower and lower? Some of those things are not taken into account as well as hazardous materials and what do you do with the thing at the end of life? Elon Musk has the cars that run on the great batteries and when they start to wear out, he takes those worn out batteries and puts them in something that you put in your house. What does he do with the batteries when they don't work in your house battery anymore? What does he do at end of life with these batteries? They're hazardous material. You got to get rid of them somehow. Those are all part of a sustainability model that you have to build into the cost. And when you start to look at that piece of cradle to grave, fully burdened costs, batteries aren't necessarily such a great deal. They are good in the energy, energy out, energy in, energy out, but not overall such a great deal. The thing that this article points out though is the advantage to, in material handling, is that a battery plug-in forklift for example or a pallet lifter in a warehouse, it has to be plugged in for a few hours. Even Elon Musk to drop the batteries and change the batteries is more than just four or five minutes. It takes a lot longer than that to do his battery swap in his cars, which he touts as being the fastest way to get your car back on the road. When you're into logistics, time really is money. And if you have to take an asset out of the work environment, plug it in and let it charge for four or five, six hours, that's wasted time. And so you have to buy more forklifts so that the ones that are charging can be set on the side while everybody else is fully engaged, doing max performance with the rest of the forklifts. Or you have to have something that lets you work 24-7 around the clock with no time lost. And that's where the hydrogen comes in and that's what the article points out. When you can take a material handling piece of equipment, plug it in, squirt some hydrogen in it and bang, it's back out there moving material. It's much more efficient. The dollar amount that they said is Amazon is buying the fuel cell powered forklifts at some of its vast warehouses which creates $70 million of extra revenue for the company this year. It only made $56 million in 2016. Now Amazon uses battery powered forklifts so they're switching to the fuel cells because they actually feel they're going to increase by almost $20 million their revenues by just switching to the forklifts. And you look for those savings throughout your logistics train, that's how you save money. And I would propose that that's how the Air Force should look at their use of aviation is if they can figure out how to reduce the loads that they have to move, prioritize them better and make it more efficient, they stay on the chance to use a great deal of savings in their logistics. One of the other articles that I came across this week, it says hydrogen powered train emits only water. This was actually given to me by a local landfill owner Steve Joseph and it's from, let me see, it's from FuelHawaii.com and it looks like it's by Eric Eppling. And it says, imagine nearly silent train that glides along its tracks emitting nothing more than more toxic than water. In Germany has concluded successful tests of the world's first hydro rail, a hydrogen powered zero emission train. It speeds and possibly the possibility to transport passengers match the performance of all their diesel trains and the only sound it gives off comes from the wheels on the track and the air resistance. There are five federal states in Germany that have signed a letter of intent to purchase these trains and they're going to get 60 of the trains from a French firm. Each two car train set requires a fuel cell that weighs 207 pounds, 207 pounds worth of, I don't think you could put 207 pounds for the energy in battery form on a train and get very far, but the 270 pound hydrogen tank supplied will, with oxygen supplied from the air, gives the train up to a 500 mile per day range on that single tank of hydrogen and they carry 300 passengers at a time. The first operational trains will roll out not by 2020 or 2030, but in 2018, that's only next year and they're going to provide Europe with a great green alternative to diesel trains. According to the EU, about 20% of Europe's current rail traffic runs on diesel. Most of the rest of it actually runs on electric and the electric is in either third rails or overhead tracks in a lot of the local areas, but there's about 20% of the rail that's not electrified. So what they'd like to do is take that 20% that's not electrified, take the diesel trains off and put the hydrogen fuel cell electric trains on those legs until they get them electrified, then go straight to electric and that's kind of in parallel with what Ian Elon Musk says, is why charge or why make hydrogen and put it in this fuel cell if you can take electricity right off the tracks and put it into the engine. So that's where they'd like to get eventually, but the hydrogen has a role here and in this case, it's a bridging role for the trains, but in other cases, like for large transport trucks, hydrogen is actually the end state. It's the way you get to that because you have to be able to transport your own energy when you're doing 18-wheeler trucks and stuff and you can't carry enough batteries to give an 18-wheeler much range. You're much better off using hydrogen for that energy carrier. Another article we came across, there's actually a couple here that came out of the local media, out of local biz journal and they come from the Maui Energy Conference. We had a Maui Energy Conference several weeks ago and there were a couple of great articles that came out right afterwards and one is every major island except Oahu could reach 100% clean energy by 2040, the PUC chair says and he's absolutely right. In fact, you'd be amazed if you look at how efficient the outer islands are doing energy, they're surpassing Oahu in big time and they could be 100% energy efficient in just a few more years because they have infrastructure there, they have the land available and the natural resources available to give them that energy and they don't have as big a load. All you have to do is fly into Honolulu and look out the window and see how dense the population is from Cocoa Head all the way to West Oahu and you understand why we can't make enough renewable energy here it would seem to supply the grid. I think it's not really that bad in terms of Hawaiian Electric and some of the other folks would make you think that you're going to have to use biofuels or something else that burns to give you that clean power. There's some studies done in the 70s by the University of Hawaii and some mainland research institutes that have actually shown geothermal is available on Oahu in several locations and those locations include Bellows airfield on the windward side Diamondhead crater on South Shore around Pearl Harbor, Pearl City inside Pearl Harbor and out in Waianae. There's actually geothermal potential on Oahu right here so we wouldn't have to necessarily move power from neighbor islands to here to provide the vast majority of the population lives on this island so maybe it's time we go back and look at some of those studies and really decide whether geothermal could help this island instead of trying to think of ways to run the undersea cable from one of the other islands and put the burden on those islands to produce all of Oahu's electricity. I know that's always been a big factor here that neighbor islands say why should we make it an all electricity for Oahu and what are we getting back for? We got our mountains full of windmills and we got PV all over the place but it doesn't do anything for us. We're not getting a real benefit from it. I agree, neighbor islands are way ahead of us now and they're going to keep stepping out ahead of us but there's no reason why we couldn't explore more intermittent renewables here on Oahu and even geothermal is a great constant base load for HECO to supply itself with. We're going to take a quick break here and look at some of the other think tech shows and why we'll be back with Standard Energy Man in about 60 seconds. Hello, I'm Dean Nelson, host of Planet of the Courageous. From a Tibetan point of view, we chose to be on this planet because we enrolled in a sort of graduate school for courage. Just that we may have chosen this adventure is a leap of logic. The question is how do we spend and make sense of this precious human life? We are as a species extraordinarily successful, dominating the planet and now with planetary-sized problems that our existence itself has created. It takes courage to face not only the uncertainty of life but also the challenge of sustaining this gift of life for future generations. Join us every Monday at 3 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to not only my lunch hour, my day off, standoff sermon here again for Standard Energy Man. Another article that came out in Biz Journals here locally highlighted some of the great work the military is doing on our local installations. This is by no means something that's only happening in Hawaii. It's happening across the entire DOD where the DOD is actually one of our better partners in looking at renewable energy and helping the communities get to the point where the bases can actually supply their own power rather than depend on the public utility and let the public utility take care of the commercial side and the civilian side in an emergency and let the military take care of themselves. And then when the emergency's over a storm or whatever and everything's back to normal, the military becomes a good customer and can maybe even help during a crisis by putting power into the public grid and helping the civilian side recover faster. One of those projects is happening in Central Oahu with Hawaiian Electric and the Army Guard where they're putting in a power plant, $167 million power plant being built in Central Oahu at Schofield Barracks. Again, looking to be built by this fall, first quarter of 2018, which in the fiscal books is September to December of this year. Scott Tsu, Vice President of Public Affairs for the state's largest utility said that the 50 megawatt project will run on biofuel and will operate as a microgrid during emergencies. In other words, they're counting on biofuel for this 50 megawatt power plant, which is great, biofuel's a great source of renewable energy. It's still basically a carbon-based fuel and you have to take up quite a bit of ag land to make enough biofuel for a 50 megawatt power plant running 24-7. So, there are other options. I mean, they see this as fairly cutting edge. Compared to what I think we're doing with HKAT out at Hickam with our microgrids, it doesn't seem very cutting edge to me, but it's certainly a good-sized chunk of power for Central Oahu, and they do tout it as being the most survivable power plant on the island, which is true because if you can get a tsunami to go all the way up to Schofield Barracks, you've probably got bigger problems than losing your power grid. So they definitely have a survivable system up there that can help Central Oahu come bounce back after a natural disaster and help them with their power. So the military is leaning forward doing this stuff, but quite frankly, I think that all of the big utilities are missing a whole lot of opportunities. The words behind me, transportation, it's electric. I'm going to keep them up there, and they'll flash back from time to time in different shows because one of the things that we talk about in our office, when we kind of mull through our message and what we really need to do to get people to think about hydrogen is we realize that people have not made the connection that the transportation sector is going to have to become more electrified, whether it's batteries, hydrogen fuel cell, or on rails or something, but electricity is the way we're going because it's much more efficient. If we don't get that picture, you kind of lose the fact that the rail project that we're counting on is going to be electric. We haven't calculated how much power that's going to increase HECO's demand for. We haven't talked about, when we convert the transportation sector to battery-powered vehicles and such, how much more power the grid's going to have to supply to top off those batteries and give you the battery power to drive your electric cars on the road. So bottom line is people need to understand that what we're using in electricity right now, becoming more and more efficient or we're trying to. What we've got to do is be able to produce more electricity and if Hawaiian Electric is having a problem now with renewable energy coming on the grid, the problem's only going to get tougher and tougher as we electrify transportation on the rail and also on our highways with electric vehicles. So we need to start being more creative with our electric power. This is a great article and it talks to that efficiency piece. For those of you that aren't familiar with Hawaii Energy and this is also from Hawaii Biz Journals, Hawaii Energy is funded by the Public Utilities Commission and it's basically a public awareness slash public outreach that's focused on energy efficiency. They're the folks that have given you rebates for turning in non-efficient appliances and buying energy star appliances and doing all kinds of things like that. Well, I think the most important thing to recognize and this article points it out is they said Hawaii Energy is accounted for more than $325 million in lifetime savings for its customers over the past year. Now, that's not to say that they saved their customers $325 million last year, but the efforts that they put out which were really pretty small in dollar amounts from the PUC, probably several million dollars by getting out to their customers and showing them how to reduce their electric bill, they literally did reduce people's electric bill enough that over the lifetime of owning a house or a typical lifetime that statisticians use that those people are going to save $325 million in electric. And that's the first thing we always do. Whenever you're building a micro grid or building a car or doing anything, you always go for efficiency first. You try and get the most efficient systems in place before you put in your PV or A, before you put in your wind power, before you try and electrify through renewable resources, you always go for efficiency first, and that's what Hawaii Energy does. So, I know they have a great website, you probably ought to check it out. They've got great tips on saving energy and Ray Starling on some, I think, tech-wise programs as a host, he's a good buddy of mine and he ran that operation for several years, he does it now, but he'll tell you all about how important getting more efficient with energy is even when you go renewables. Another neat thing, this is one of my favorite areas. There's an article that came out on the web with NBC News by a lady named Kate Bagley, and it says, the next solar energy revolution is hiding in plain sight. And I'm not going to go through the whole article in detail, but it talks about how technology has gotten so much better that pretty soon you won't put solar panels on your roof, you'll put roofing tiles on that are solar panels, and the roofing tiles will look just like beautiful tiles that you buy for your roof now, except they also make the electricity. By the same token, there's already glass that goes into high-rise buildings. That is basically photovoltaic, and you can put all kinds of other features in it, you can put films behind it that will help the photovoltaics produce electricity not only what hits the front, but what reflects off the back film and gets energy from both sides of the piece of glass to give you more energy. There's things like that. There's things like the seawater air conditioning that we talked about on several shows ago. There's so many ways that we can reduce our energy requirements and take the technology right now, we have this kind of, I would equate it to just like the clunky old cell phone that we used to have that was this big and had a big antenna, and now you have a little phone, and a little phone is not just your little phone, it's your camera, your video camera, your note-taker, your TV, it does everything. Pretty soon you're going to see this kind of technology, this renewable energy technology become more valuable because it does more things. It's not just solar panels on your roof, it's the roof itself that protects your house and keeps it from wind damage and rain and all kind of foreign objects from coming into your private space. So let's look at that. The one thing that really caught my attention in here and the people that work with me know this is one of my pet peeves is solar paving because I work around airplanes and I look at an airfield where for the most part there's a whole bunch of paving out there that's absorbing a ton of heat and a ton of light all day long. It's acres and acres and acres and it's just sitting there and we could be using it as a solar collector for heat to heat hot water for residential or commercial use. We could use that waste heat for running other things, air conditioning and other things. We could use that heat for storing energy. We can use the sunlight that hits those tiles and that same square footage to produce electricity. So in this article it even talks about solar paving and there's a company out there I think they go by the name of Solar Freaking Roadways and if you look them up it's a very entertaining video and it's very high tech but also if you really dig deeper you'll find that those guys have a lot of detractors that say this is totally unrealistic and unaffordable and unbelievable and I'm kind of in that camp. These things are so complicated and so expensive you couldn't pave much more than your driveway without going broke and it does things like walking across the road that lights up the road so you can see the animal. It has lane markings on there that you can change around so you can reconfigure parking lots or reconfigure roadways or put messages on the roadway. That was so technical and I think so out of reach of what we could do technologically right now. Maybe that'll work 20 or 30 or 40 years down the road but right now we would be great if we could just get some solar paving that we could fit into a system that could collect heat and the solar energy that we get raining down on us all day long here in Hawaii and use that to produce the power that we need to run our island. But it's a good article and if you can look it up on NBC News I think it'd be worth a look at. This last article is I'm not sure we're forward-leaving one forward in the dust is Chase's new tech-focused missions. This one's kind of interesting and it comes from again from Biz Journal so it was I think republished from a Ford Motor Company publication and it's from October of last year but in essence this article talks a lot about how the car companies are not just looking at fuel-efficient vehicles and fuel-efficient technology they're literally making investments in things like public transportation things like car pooling companies or companies that are set up to have their own like luxurious shuttle buses so instead of taking public transportation you sign up for a service that takes you to work every day and picks you up like when you were a kid and you were on your school bus these folks would come around through a neighborhood with a 25-30 passenger bus pick up a bunch of folks your nice luxury seats maybe they got coffee and stuff on board and they take you to your destination and you take a bunch of cars off the road because you've got a bunch of people all in one vehicle ongoing they're talking about bike share projects they're talking about basically what we would look at in Hawaii as how to reduce the vehicle miles traveled overall in the state so that you have more people being moved but less vehicle miles traveled therefore less fuel less roadway deterioration less resources overall you take a bunch of cars off the road and use this kind of stuff you think that's going to be good well what's interesting though it's not some other private tech company that's doing this this is a motor company that makes cars that's building vehicles for these other small companies and is buying stock in them to make sure they succeed so they're looking at literally changing their big industrial complex model not just to make internal combustion engines but to make those vehicles more fuel efficient and cleaner and then to roll and get the vehicle miles traveled savings capture in the sub business of their own model pretty good thinking, pretty advanced thinking from some of these car companies so I think that's the kind of thing we really need to look forward to well believe it or not that pretty much gets us through we always have a great Easter weekend hope it's nice and quiet you have some good family time I'll try and be more of a good Easter bunny and spend some time with my family this weekend but thank you for joining me with Stan Energyman and when I find some more good articles we'll have another show like this and I'll share it with you, aloha