 Welcome to Stan Energy Man, coming to you live indirect through the think tech studios from beautiful downtown metropolis of Kailua Hawaii on the windward side of Oahu, beautiful place to live, great place to grow up, good place to raise chickens by the way, as long as you keep out of the neighbor's yard. Anyway, Stan Osterman here with Stan Energy Man and I don't have a guest today. I just want to talk a little bit about energy in general, and I think it's because most people just really don't appreciate energy. I mean, they use it all the time, they use it in their house, they use it in their cars, they use it to run their computers and their cell phones and, but not too many people actually think about energy. So if I told you to describe energy, how would you describe it as a boulder sitting on top of a mountain getting a roll down hill energy, is a stream running towards a waterfall coming down that same mountain, is that energy? How about a spring that's been compressed really, really tight or stretched really far and it's being held there, is that energy? What about just the sound of my voice coming to your speakers over your computer or through your earbuds or your headset, is that energy? As you ponder these things, I hope it becomes clear to you that energy takes many forms and it's all around us. Even the smallest atoms that make up all the molecules surrounding us, they're full of energy. In fact, I had, I read a book and it described the atoms, it was actually an electronics book and it described a typical atom structure as the center of the atom being the protons and neutrons being about the size of a pea sitting on the 50 yard line of a football field and the electrons whizzing around in the upper seats of a 50,000 seat stadium and all the rest of the space was empty, but that was a typical atom and it's all energy. So what kind of examples would you give me for energy? Would you give me like gasoline or nuclear power, maybe coal, natural gas, kerosene, jet fuel? Yeah, those are all types of energy, but as a friend of mine, Dr. Nate Hogan's professor over in I think it was Minnesota, described in my show on time, most of us are actually energy blind. We really don't think about energy and appreciate it for what it is. And one of the common examples I use for people is how many kilowatt hours a day does your house use? Most people can tell you how much a month their bill is, but when it comes to actually how much energy they use, they have no idea. They have no idea at all how many kilowatt hours a day their house averages. Mine averages between 19 and 21 kilowatt hours a day. So that's roughly 20 kilowatt hours per day on average, unless my son and his fiance are visiting us for the weekend, in which case I'm probably going to have to add another five kilowatt hours per day because they use a lot more appliances than my wife and I do. But energy awareness and getting rid of that energy blindness is critical. And it's critical because if you really care about the environment, if you really care about some folks are really into climate change, if you really care for reducing climate change in CO2 and greenhouse gases, you need to care about energy and where it comes from. So what's the more things that may influence energy is gravity energy, our magnets energy. I mean magnets are a big part of every motor that runs, every electric motor. There are huge parts of everything we do with electricity. And where does energy come from? I mean it comes from a lot of different places. You have heat energy coming from the center of the earth and it radiates out. You have solar energy, whether it's light waves or whether it's heat coming from the sun to keep us nice and warm here in the tropics or the solar energy going to your solar photovoltaic panels. Even the wind is generated by changes in temperature mostly because of the sun and because of the Arctic temperatures around the Great North. And the seasons that change where days are longer and shorter depending on how the earth is spinning on its axis. But what's the difference between energy and power? Most people don't think about that. Energy is the pure source. It's the raw potential or the raw, it's hard to use the definition without using the word, the raw source of the ability to do work. So power is actually the ability to do work. So things like horsepower, that's a defined quantity of how much work you could do with how much energy you're putting into a system. So things like horsepower, kilowatt hours, things like that are power. That's the use of energy to make some work happen. So let's think about that for a while. If you were going to have a perfect world where the environment was considered and you wanted clean air, clean transportation, clean water, clean soil, you didn't want to pollute your soil with byproducts from fracking or things like that, are there enough sources around of energy where we don't have to really worry about polluting our earth? And the answer is yes. Someone once told me that if you took solar energy hitting what we call the four corner states in the Southwest down near Arizona and New Mexico, if you took the solar energy just seeing those four states in the United States for a couple of days, it would power the entire United States for a year. So we don't have to blanket the United States with solar panels. We just have to use some of that energy that's hitting our planet, our earth. So about how much would that be? Well, like I say in my house, if you don't know what your energy cost is in your house and I do, it's about 20 kilowatt hours a day. You can translate that, you can translate that into how many solar panels do I need on my roof? Well, if I want to make sure I generate 20 kilowatt hours a day, I'd probably want between 20 and 25 solar panels on my house here in Kailua, Hawaii, because I get about five hours of production and 20 panels would give me about five kilowatts hours per panel or per my display. So over a five hour period, which is what we consider the rated output of the solar panels out here in Hawaii, that would give me 20 to 25 kilowatt hours every day. So if I had a way to store some of that energy from my house, from the solar panels, I could run my house 24 hours a day just on a couple solar panels, 20 solar panels, 20 to 25 solar panels. So how much room does that take? Well, they average about 15 square feet per panel. So 15 square feet times the 20 that I have on there, that's about 400, 500 square feet, 600 square feet total on my roof, on my house is 1500 square feet. And if I only took the south facing slope of my roof, that would be about half of that. So 700. So I still have some room for extra solar panels on the southern exposure of my house. And it'll give me all the energy I need for my, all my electricity for an entire day. So I know I can generate the power, I probably just need to store the power. So how do I do that? Well, I can either stay connected to the grid and let the electric company take my extra power and then buy it back from them at night, or I could just have battery storage in which case if the electric company goes out for some reason, not only do I have my solar panels when I have the sun out, but I can even power myself at night when the electric company is offline for whatever reason. And I don't have my solar panels immediately available. So you can, you can actually pretty much calculate just knowing that the square footage on your roof gives you plenty of energy to run your house. So one of the things that people say is, well, then can we run out of energy? Well, the answer to that question is, if you understand the first law of thermodynamics, it says energy can either be created nor destroyed. It just changes form. And that was the rule before humans ever populated the earth. I mean, it's been the rule since the universe existed. And it'll be the rule even after we're long gone as humans on this planet. The idea that we could ever run out of energy is ridiculous. Could we run out of gasoline? Yes. Could we run out of coal? Yes. Could we run out of oil and diesel fuel? Yes, you can. Can we run out of sunlight? If we run out of sunlight, we have a lot more problems than you can think of. So the bottom line is, if you really understand energy, where it's coming from, and what tools we have to use that energy right now, you don't have to worry about running out of energy. It's there. It's going to be there. And it's always going to be there. And if it's not there, we got bigger problems than how to power your charger cell phone or power your computer. So what are some of the other considerations we have? We use wind power. Wind power works great, especially in places like New Mexico, Kansas, Texas, where you have a lot of wide open spaces, things like big farm fields and stuff where you're not really worried about the view. And you can generate power over acres and acres of cornfields or shorghum fields or wheat fields, and not really impact anybody's livelihood like here in Hawaii. We have tourism and having a bunch of wind turbines all over our mountains would not be good for tourism and not really be pleasing to the folks that live here who kind of take offense to putting things like that up in front of our mountains. In fact, most people don't realize that here in Hawaii, you'll never see a billboard and even the signs that we have on our commercial buildings have to be approved by the outdoor circle and the state before you can put them up. You have to get a permit for them because we have a law that says no billboards in Hawaii just to protect the view. So you can imagine how popular wind turbines are, but wind turbines are another great source of energy. I mean, here in Hawaii, the Northeast trade winds are generated by a high pressure system that most of the year just sits four to 800 miles northeast of Oahu and generate 15 to 20 knots of wind constantly, changes a little bit at night, goes a little bit soft at night and comes back up in the daytime. But that gives you power all day long and all night long. So here in Hawaii, needless to say, we don't need to be on an oil and coal energy economy. We could be using just wind and just solar to generate everything that we need. But there's more. We also have geothermal and geothermal is a virtually unlimited amount of energy. And I think few people realize that the state of Hawaii can have an economic boom if we would just quit importing oil and coal for our power and start producing our own energy from solar, wind and geothermal. But there's a problem, not so much with geothermal. It's not real popular here, but I think it's gaining some popularity. But when you talk about wind and solar, there's an issue. You have to be able to store that energy. Most people don't really think about energy like we started off on the show talking about. They don't appreciate where their energy comes from or how it has to be managed in a logistic sense. The sun and the wind, sometimes they produce energy. Sometimes they don't. And at night, the sun doesn't come out and the wind doesn't always blow. Sometimes don't have much wind here. So you have to be able to store energy. Even the electric company now stores an awful lot of energy in oil. The oil that's in the tankers on the way here, the oil that's in huge tanks being stored for energy specifically at the power plant. Those are many, many, many hours, actually days and even a week or more, worth of energy constantly available. Well, if you don't have the gigawatt hours of storage available to store the power from solar and wind, then you really don't have more than a day or so of energy available to you. Because if you store energy at that scale and you try and do it in batteries, you go broke really quick. Typical lithium cobalt technology that we have now costs about anywhere from $300 to $600 a kilowatt hour of storage to buy the batteries. Whereas if you use something like hydrogen and produce hydrogen with any surplus power you didn't need right away, you could probably reduce that cost down to under $100 a kilowatt hour. So as we start moving towards that totally renewable goal of 2045 being 100% off the grid and we keep thinking of batteries, batteries, batteries, we're missing a couple of theoretical points. We're missing the fact that these batteries are made from materials that we don't control. And if the coronavirus hasn't taught anybody anything, it's like if you don't control the resources, you're back in, do I have to go to war to get it? Can somebody jack the price up on it like we had with the oil crisis over the years? You know where OPEC jacks up the prices or drops the prices really low to run American companies into bankruptcy and then as soon as they're all bankrupt they rack the prices back up again. I mean we're getting kind of tired from the national security perspective depending on other countries for the raw materials that we need to run our country. And if you had to buy lithium and cobalt from China all the time, which by the way they're smart enough that they've already bought up a great number of the rare, what we call rare earths or rare materials that you need for industrial uses, they've already bought up companies around the world on every continent to make sure that they control these things. And if you think lithium batteries are going to be cheaper the more you make because this is the economy of scale, I'd say the economy of scale is going to run into the law of supply and demand and pretty soon you won't be able to afford lithium batteries because they'll be too expensive because you can't get the materials to make them and whenever you have a lack of supply and a high demand you have super high prices. So let's be conscious of that and also the current lithium cobalt technology is very unstable. If it wasn't, you'd be able to take those things on an airplane with you, but you all know if you haven't obviously haven't traveled the last couple of months because of the virus, but if you've been on an airplane in the past year or two, you know that there's a big caution about taking lithium batteries, stuffing them in your suitcase and putting it in the cargo compartment, just can't do it. So we need to be careful, not just from a cost perspective on lithium cobalt technology, but on a safety perspective and on a national security perspective. So we're going to take a quick break now and we'll come back in 60 seconds and talk a little bit more about energy where it comes from and what's the future. Aloha everyone, I am Libby Hill, your Miss Earth USA. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch Think Tech. This station is incredible because they are advocates for the environment and also for science. So I appreciate you tuning in and make sure that you keep up to date. Welcome back to Stand Energy Man, Stan Osterman here talking about the big picture on energy and where we're headed. So just to quickly recap, we have a lot of energy all around us, all over the earth. So why is it that we picked oil and coal and things like that to provide energy for everything from sailing ships to our internal combustion engines that we have today? And I would say the reason for that is as a society, we generally, if we haven't issued a problem to solve, as soon as we can solve it in a cost effective manner, we jump on it. And pretty soon that solution gets a life of its own. So what do I mean by that? Back in the olden days, believe it or not, the first electric, the first cars that were made were not internal combustion engine cars. They were electric cars. The very first car that Porsche designed was an electric car. I have a picture of it in my files, I have it on one of my earlier shows. But a Porsche, the first Porsche was an electric car, the old horse and buggy days during the transition. Even then, the engineers realized that electric vehicles are much more efficient than most of the other power sources that were available, steam and things like that. But what was the problem with steam? Well, you had to carry a bunch of coal with you. You had a big boiler in the front. The boiler could blow up. You had all kinds of issues with the boiler. And somebody came up with the internal combustion engine. And at the same time, people struck oil in Pennsylvania and places around there where it was literally turning millionaires, farmers into millionaires overnight. If you remember the show Beverly Hillbillies, you know, well, Jed Clampett shoots a musk in the backyard, hits oil and pretty cities living in Beverly Hills with his family. That really isn't too far from the truth. We got a solution to our problem, which was we need an energy source for our internal combustion engines. That's it. We latched onto it, made gasoline, made diesel fuel. And pretty soon, every car manufacturer was using diesel fuel and oils to run their cars and the market grows and the companies grow and they lobby more and they control Congress and they control the president. Pretty soon, you're stuck with diesel and you're stuck with oil and you're stuck with gasoline. And that's how things happen. We need to be able to break that cycle because the reality is there are clean solutions now, electric vehicles now that we have clean solutions for. We just have to pick the right technologies that let us take the energy out of some sources that we need and give us back either a different form of energy or a product that we started with. So, for example, if you take electricity, you have extra solar electricity from your solar panels, you can actually electrolyze water, just regular old tap water. And you can get hydrogen and oxygen out of it. You can sell oxygen to a hospital or to a welder or to somebody else that uses industrial oxygen and you can take the hydrogen and store it up and save it and use it in a fuel cell. A fuel cell is actually a self-charging battery that gives you electricity as soon as you put hydrogen on one side and air on the other side or pure oxygen on the other side. That whole cycle perfectly describes what I'm talking about. How would you like to have a technology where you take water and use energy to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen and then when you use the oxygen and hydrogen to make electricity again, it gives you back most of your water. You lose some of the energy and heat, but it gives you back the same thing you started with. There's no solution, no carbon, and actually gives you back purified water at the end of the cycle. That's the kind of system and sustainability that I've been trying to get across the people with hydrogen. Why would you strap yourself with a technology like coal and internal combustion engines and oil when you had a solution that literally you start with water, you end with water and in the middle you're exchanging the energy from electricity to hydrogen back to water, back to hydrogen, back to water. It's just an elegant, what we call an elegant design solution. No pollution, no carbon, and it's a cycle that you can sustain forever and ever and ever and ever. So that's what we're trying to get to, not the quick solution, not the solution that solves our problem and gives us a good battery storage that we have in cars now and say that's it. That's all we need. No, we do need some batteries, but actually when it comes to transportation, it's all about weight and hydrogen is so much lighter than batteries, even when you compress it and compress it and compress it, it's still way lighter than batteries. Most people would be really surprised to learn how many aviation solutions are being developed with hydrogen as the fuel in airplanes. They're already being developed for drones, for long duration, what the military calls ISR platforms, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance platforms, platforms that have to stay airborne at 60,000 feet for a week run on hydrogen. And why is that? It's because hydrogen is very, very energy dense. So for pound, pound for pound, it's kind of like Kevlar. Pound for pound, Kevlar is stronger than steel. Well, pound for pound, hydrogen has more energy than any other fuel on the planet. And the best example I can give you is if you had a lithium cobalt battery, it can store about four to 600 amp hours per kilogram, depending on the design of the battery. Hydrogen is 26,000 amp hours per kilogram. That's why they use hydrogen as rocket fuel with an oxidizer and big rockets to give you the maximum amount of energy for the least amount of weight. So hydrogen is going to be around in vehicles and transportation, but it's also a great way to store massive amounts of energy for the grid. So being that we're going to be converting a lot of our cars to run on hydrogen and a lot of our grid solutions are based on hydrogen. The best long-term solution for both the grid and for transportation, wrap around hydrogen. Now you can look online or look at some of my past shows to see how a fuel cell runs and what an electrolyzer does. But actually over this coronavirus thing standing at home, I made an electrolyzer in my shop and it cost me about under $15 to make this electrolyzer, not including the, I bought a small battery for 40 bucks at Costco just so I had a small 12-volt battery to haul around with it. And I'm going to bring that and bring it on the air and show you folks how easy it is to make hydrogen at home with $15 worth of plumbing stuff. And it's just amazingly simple. And that hydrogen can be used not just to generate electricity in a fuel cell and not just on the grid to help you store energy, but you can use it to cook with. You can use it just like propane and cook with it. And so people go, well, Stan, but it doesn't have a capsin in it, it doesn't have any way to, if it's leaking, you would never know and you'd blow your house up. You know how many houses blow up because propane leaks and stuff cause them to explode if there's a leak in the house and there's an ignition source? Well, the difference is hydrogen is so buoyant that if it ever leaks out of your system, it escapes out of every place it can in your house so quickly that in one second, it's six stories above you. It's amazingly fast. It moves at 45 miles an hour. So people have to understand that hydrogen as an element has some incredible features to it that negate some of the old wives tales and myths that surround hydrogen already. So I know we're getting close to the end of our time here, but I wanted to close to the fact that, you know, we seem to be concerned a lot about climate change. But I have a saying that, you know, I mean, I'm not sold on climate change as a real crisis for our country or for the world right now. Like a lot of my good friends are really sold on it. But here's how I look at what we're trying to accomplish here and why I'm such an advocate for clean energy. I've often said that even if you don't believe in climate change, would you wrap your lips around the tailpipe of a running car engine and start breathing that stuff? And if you have to think about that for a little bit, you're part of the problem. Because it should be pretty obvious to everybody that if you don't want it coming out the ass into your car and going into our atmosphere, you certainly wouldn't want to be breathing it. So why are we doing this stuff? And all of our politicians and stuff were panning, you know, President Trump for getting us out of the Paris climate talks. But he was right. Those people were just having a cocktail party on America's dime so they can wring their hands and talk about climate change while they fly their jets there and go and big limousines there and stay in five star hotels there and then come home and do absolutely nothing except get ready for their next climate conference where they can wring their hands and talk about what has to be done to save the world. I'm all for putting that money into saving the world and putting that money into using the energy that we have on our planet that's abundant, that should be used properly and should be used as renewable and sustainable energy and not get sucked back into the politically correct big business, big money solutions that we've been wedded to for the last hundred years. That's going to about do it for this week's Stand the Energy Manor. I thank you for joining me and putting up with my rant in and raving, but I'm definitely committed to clean energy, clean transportation and I hope that you will be too. So until next week Tuesday, Stand the Energy Man signing off. Aloha.