 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the White Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. Hope you guys had a safe 4th of July weekend. We certainly did. We had a great time. I got a special guest today. I mean, he flew all the way in from the Big Island just to be on this show. So I'm really honored. We've got Paul Ponteo from Blue Planet Research, one of my favorite places to visit over in Puvava on the Big Island. And we're going to talk to Paul about what's going on on the Big Island. But first of all, Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks, Stan. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about your background? Because you had a pretty interesting background on how you ended up in Hawaii and your upbringings in Louisiana and all that stuff. I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. And my background started off as doing construction work from building houses to building roads. Then I became a machinist and did engineering work for the offshore industry and safety products. From there, I got into architecture and ended up coming to Hawaii to do architecture. I spent about 20 years doing architecture here in Hawaii. And then eventually moved to the Big Island after I met Hank Rogers and went over there to do some architectural projects. And eventually, we got into energy and went full-time working on energy projects, renewable energy. So that's where I'm at now. And a fine job you're doing, by the way. Thank you. I appreciate all your support. I think some of the best tours you can get when you want to see a really sustainable environment, a microgrid, if you will. The ranch is really a great place to go. So thanks for your support when we send folks over there to look at that. It's the old saying, seeing is believing. When you really see it in action, it makes a great impression. Access education is so important, especially for subjects like hydrogen. There's very little public knowledge about hydrogen. And being able to show people the reality of it, the safety and the efficiency makes a big difference. Well, we're bringing Paul over here for a couple of things. Not just to be on the show, but later on this month, Rachel James, my sidekick down at HCAP, and some kids from the Center for Tomorrow's Leaders are going to be converting a gem electric low-speed vehicle. We're going to put a hydrogen fuel extender on it. So Paul came over to help us do our first dry run, putting it together, so we're ready for the students. So Robert, if you can bring that gem picture up, I'll show folks what the vehicle looks like. And there it is. It's a great little vehicle. All electric, has a speed governor on it at 25 miles an hour, but it's actually street legal to go anywhere in the state. 35 mile an hour zone or less. And so we use it to zip around town when we have meetings at the Capitol or downtown at D-bed or anything. And it's a great little vehicle, but we're going to take up some of that bed in the back there to put a hydrogen fuel cell in. And Paul came over to help us look at that. What do you think? Do you think it's going to be pretty easy? Yeah, I think it's a pretty straightforward conversion. It's nice about electric vehicles like that. They're all at 48 volts. It matches most fuel cells really, really well. Well, let's talk about the big one a little bit. We've got a picture of some of the PV that you put on the lab that you designed. As an architect, you've designed the whole lab and I've been there. The PV is really just a close-up of the PV, but the building itself is a great design. And I've always wanted to compliment you on that. It's a good form follows function for what you guys do. It's a nice, cool design. It takes advantage of the south-facing roof to get the PV max exposure. It's a good passive design going back to the old ways of designing buildings, especially in Hawaii. And then for working hydrogen inside, it's kind of self-venting. So hydrogen zooms out of there when you need it to. Yeah, we feel safer because of that. So tell us a little bit about the building itself. What were you thinking about when you put it together? What are some of the things you were thinking? Well, when we built the building, the idea was to put solar on the roof. So that's why it's on a shed pitch of 20 degrees. But originally, we were going to do a grid tie to be utility. And that turned into a more difficult process than we thought at first. And that was kind of the impetus for us to go off grid completely. And it was kind of a blessing in disguise because doing that, we learned so much about batteries, about storage technologies, and the electrical systems that we became pretty adept at it. And now that's pretty much what we do full-time. We design renewable energy systems, microgrids, and storage products. And you've had some pretty high-powered people come out and visit you, too. I think we've got a couple pictures coming up of some of the folks that visited. Like, there's this governor that we happen to know to get keen interest in seeing what you do in your lab. Yeah, so that's where they were showing the hydrogen-watt burner conversion. And basically what he's doing is feeling the moisture in the heat right now, the humidity in the flame. Hydrogen, when it burns, creates water vapor with the oxygen in the air, and you get a nice, moist heat out of it. Very hot, but still some water vapor. And part of the demonstration that the governor saw, you also go right down next to the flame laterally, and you don't feel the heat. Why is that? Yeah, that's because of the lack of carbon and hydrogen fuel. It's one element hydrogen. Without the carbon, it doesn't radiate heat. The heat goes straight up. So you can literally put your finger about one-eighth of an inch from a flame on the side without burning. Yeah, and I've done it. It's very hot. It's pretty impressive. People don't believe it's really true until you do it yourself. Yeah, so we invite people to actually do it, bring their hand there, and warn them not to go over just on the side. The governor did that, right? He did it. Yeah. So if any of you visiting the governor, you can talk to the governor about his experience up there. I think the next shot we have is kind of rolls us into the hydrogen piece a little further. You have a unit there that's a dispenser made by a millenium rain, and it's actually, the unit looks a lot like our dispenser on Cook Street, but this one is strictly just the storage and dispensing, correct? Yes. So the reason we have hydrogen is to take advantage of the excess energy, just like with the utility company when they have the curtail power, because the demand is not great enough. We have the same issue at the ranch with our large PV array. We have more energy than we can use, especially in the early mornings when it's very sunny. So hydrogen makes really good sense at that point to take the excess energy and store it in the form of hydrogen. And then we can use that later for cooking. We can use it to turn back into electricity with fuel cells, for mobility with fuel cell vehicles, and even internal combustion engine vehicles. One of the critiques that I always get back when I have a discussion, especially with somebody who's kind of battery centric only, they just say the round-trip efficiency for hydrogen, this isn't there, so why bother? Yeah, well, if people realize that the internal combustion engines on the cars are only about 20 to 25% efficient, then a 50% efficient fuel cell or anything else sounds really good, but true, batteries are more efficient. We have batteries that are 97% efficient. But again, you're looking at the range issues of batteries where hydrogen eliminates that. Yeah, so I tell folks that when you're dealing with anything in transportation, weight's a big factor, whether it's airplanes or cars or trucks or even ships other than ballast, which they have to have. But weight makes a big difference, and that's where the hydrogen has to get a balance over batteries is in weight. Yeah, even with lithium batteries, they're much heavier than a fuel cell and the storage for the hydrogen. And storing the hydrogen, how complicated is that? And like a battery discharges, whether you have it plugged into anything or not, but the hydrogen, you know, tell us. Yeah, well, hydrogen has no self-discharge properties. The energy stays there literally forever unless it leaks out. It's always going to be there. So you can store it for years and it's going to have the same amount of energy as the day you filled it. And the embrittlement sometimes brought up too in the discussions. Is there really any significant degradation to like metal tanks because of embrittlement? I think the industry has identified what metals can really be safely used for long term. There aren't many embrittlement issues anymore. But what's funny is our friend Ryan McAllister has a cylinder that's used for hydrogen that actually came from World War II, or actually World War I. And it still passes the hydrostatic test. Yes, I think it's 1917 as the date stepped on it. It's not embrittled yet. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So another shot, we're talking about vehicle transportation, but this is actually the internal workings of a hydrogen forklift power pack that you've taken all the ballast off of so we could just see the fuel cell and the tank itself and all the control mechanisms. Can you tell us a little bit about this work that you did here? Yeah, this was actually a plug powered gen drive that's used for forklifts. So to replace the lead acid batteries in the forklift, you've got to match the weight of the lead acid for ballast. So this normally comes in case than about 3,000 pounds of cast iron. So what we did was take the cast iron off and mount the components on an aluminum frame. So it became kind of like an invisible or the thin man kind of display where you can see all the components inside. It's a portable generator at that point. And how powerful is that generator? That's an 11 kilowatt fuel cell stack. Okay, so to put it in perspective, my house is 21 kilowatt hours a day. So that one generator there that fits on a little trolley is enough to power my house, you know, for two days at about four of your neighbors. Yeah, so it's way more powerful than I need for my house. Yeah, with a full tank, you could run about 30 to 35 kilowatt hours of energy off that. Yeah, so that's way more than I need for my house. What would be the deal with like spikes in your microgrid when you have kind of like a battery buffer system in your microgrid with a fuel cell? So can you kind of tell us how the relationship is between the batteries and the fuel cells? The fuel cells need some type of buffer storage between them and the load that they're supplying. In the case of the plug power gen drive there, these ultracapacitors. So that takes the place of batteries. But lithium batteries or any type of battery would do the same thing. But lithium has much better performance for spikes and handling load changes quickly. Yeah, lithium is really kind of popular right now. And you told me one time that car batteries will just kind of slowly die off, but the lithium battery holds a pretty steady state till it's almost discharged. Anybody who has power tools, they run until they stop. Yeah, but then they just stop. Yeah, they charge pretty quickly. What are some of the drawbacks safety-wise with lithium batteries that you're aware of? Well, most lithium batteries contain cobalt as one of the chemical components of the battery. And that has the advantage of being fairly energy-gents and lightweight. And the drawbacks are on the safety side. So for a power tool, a computer, even a car, it's not such a big issue. But when you start putting stationary storage inside of buildings or houses, then it becomes more of an issue. They have a tendency to go into thermal runaway if something goes wrong. So consequently, they normally need liquid cooling kind of like a radiator system on a car. The chemistry that we use is lithium ferrous phosphate made from olivine. And it doesn't have the thermal management issues that the cobalt has. They literally can't catch on fire unless you actually put them in a fire. And then the components and the casing will burn as well as some of the organic solvent that batteries are made with. Well, we're going to take a quick break and talk about some of the other things going on at Think Tech here. Then we'll be back with Paul Pontiou in about 60 seconds. A show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic. We identify those areas where we do have problems in the state, but also the show is dedicated to trying to find solutions, not just detail our problems. So join me every other Tuesday on Moving Hawaii Forward. I'm Tim Apachella. Thank you. You're watching Think Tech Hawaii. 25 talk shows by 25 dedicated hosts every week, helping us to explore and understand the issues and events in and affecting our state. Great content for Hawaii from Think Tech. Aloha. My name is Steven Phillip Katz. I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist, and I'm the host of Shrink Rap Hawaii where I talk to other shrinks. Did you ever want to get your head shrunk? Well, this is the best place to come to pick one. I've been doing this. We must have 60 shows with a whole bunch of shrinks that you can look at. I'm here on Tuesdays at 3 o'clock every other Tuesday. I hope you are too. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. Stan Hendryman here with Paul Pontiou from Blue Planet Research over on Poovaba on the Big Island. And we were talking about batteries and fuel cells. And one of the things that we talked about was that for transportation, the hydrogen fuel cell makes a big difference because you don't have a lot of weight to deal with. And that's good in stationary applications. The batteries make a lot more sense because they're a lot more efficient. You don't have to worry about the weight. It's just sitting there. But there are some other safety issues that you do have to think about. And there's some great new technology come out that Paul's actually working with on the Big Island. But let's talk about the nail test that you looked at as you got into your new technology and the batteries with the cobalt versus the olivine. Our blue line batteries are actually made with Sony components. And Sony uses the lithium ferrous phosphate chemistry. They actually do an industry standard nail test which simulates damage to the battery. And they literally drive a nail through one of the cells and shorts out the battery internally. And with the LFP, the ferrous phosphate, you look at it and you watch it and nothing happens. And then all of a sudden you see a little bit of a drip coming out of the end. That's the organic solvent starting to boil off internally. And then that's it. It discharges and nothing else happens. And anybody who's seen videos on YouTube of lithium batteries and guys doing really dumb things with them, they explode violently under the same condition. And that's because lithium cobalt can release all of its energy very quickly. The ferrous phosphate can't, which is why it's not the best choice for cars. Tesla likes to have a ludicrous mode where you can accelerate to like 60 in 3.2 seconds. Ferrous phosphate wouldn't be able to do that. But for stationary storage, you really don't want your battery to discharge that quickly anyway. So it's an ideal chemistry for that. The issue is it's a little bit more expensive than cobalt. And not because of the chemistry, the ingredients are actually cheaper. The chemicals used are cheaper than the cobalt. But it's not manufactured to the scale of the cobalt. Okay. Well, I think we have an image coming up of one of those Sony batteries assemblies anyway. You can't really see the batteries because they're inside the container. But this is a fairly new development that you're working on on the ranch. Can you explain what the project's all about? Yeah, this is our Blue Lion M-Series battery. It's a utility class 1 megawatt-hour battery. So this installation right here is powering the community water system. To the left of the battery, kind of out of the frame, is the actual water well. The community's water is pumped up from 2,500 feet deep. And it takes a lot of energy to do that. So we've been planning this project now for quite a while. It took a long time to get the lease from the state for the land. But this summer, by the end of the summer, we'll start construction on a field of PV array that will power the well and actually charge the battery. So this will become somewhat of an off-grid battery. We're actually working with the local utility at Helco to grid tie it and do what we call more of a UPS system where the battery could take over even if the utility wasn't there. But we'll also shift the load so that when the battery's charged, we can run the pump at night off of the battery. And save some money for the customers. When you pump from 2,500 feet, the utility bill is pretty high. And it's basically the customers of the water system are watering their lawns with bottled water. It's that expensive. So this will save some money for the customers. And it's actually a fixed price for the next 20 years. So it sounds encouraging that Helco's kind of leaning in and saying they'd like to see how this works. Well, with the governor's mandate and the utility stepping up to try to meet the renewable mandate, they're going to need storage. So it's important for them to start getting data and information about different storage technologies, different chemistries. So that's what we're planning on doing is sharing the data that we collect on the batteries. We have our own control system that does all the monitoring and control. It's called EMC. And that data will be logged historically and we'll be able to go back and look at all the performance parameters under different conditions. Okay. Share that. As I kind of challenged over here on Oahu with trying to implement more hydrogen into our infrastructure, and I keep running into the conflict of, well, batteries are more efficient round-trip energy-wise, but hydrogen is what I need for transportation. It's more efficient on wheels. You know, we're trying to get the whole electric over here to understand that even on the megawatt scale, hydrogen can be good energy storage when you have curtailed power. And it helps the transportation sector. So I'm trying to convince people that we really no longer have two separate grid and a transportation energy thing. It's all becoming one thing. On your ranch, that's essentially what you've done. You've merged the transportation hydrogen piece with stationary energy storage with batteries and hydrogen and running your grid. I know you've had it up for what, three years now? Going on for almost four years. How's it working? It's working great. And like you said, the marriage of hydrogen and batteries is actually the perfect marriage. Scale-wise, we run into this all the time talking about the efficiencies of different technologies and chemistries. That container holds one megawatt hour of electrical battery storage. In that same space, you could put almost five megawatt hours of hydrogen stored. But you still need both. You need the quick response and performance of the battery. And just like the vehicles, the hydrogen is more of a range extender. So it makes the battery last longer at a more economical price after a while. But we need to have the cost of fuel cells come down, which will happen over time because like everything else, it's a scale issue. So as that becomes less expensive, it'll make more sense to start building hybrid batteries that are components of hydrogen and lithium batteries. It's something I learned talking to some folks at Verge a couple of weeks ago at a conference that was here. The automotive industry, I think Toyota specifically, has gotten the amount of platinum used in their fuel cells down to basically the equivalent amount of platinum used in a catalytic converter on an internal combustion engine. So like you said, the price keeps coming down as we find improvements on how to basically get the surface thinner and thinner and thinner with the precious metals so that you get the reaction but you have a lot more surface area. And you don't have just stacks of metals saying they're not reacting with stuff. And that's where nanotechnology is going to really play an important role. And that's going to change everything from batteries to fuel cells to things that we touch every day in our normal lives. And the nanoscale is something that people aren't really used. We're not really equipped to deal with with our brains. And the best example I give usually on the tours is if you took a cubic centimeter of carbon nanotube, which is roughly the size of a small shooter cube, if you could measure the surface area of all the tubes, there's over 9,000 square meters of surface area in something this big. Wow. So that's nanoscale. And what's keeping us from really reaching that plateau and getting batteries and fuel cells? I mean, to really be able to use that technology, is it just... Well, we kind of started late. And now with the attention and the focus being on battery storage for both vehicles and for stationary storage for homes, the industries have been pumping more and more money into R&D. So it's an exponential type of growth. So I would say that in the next five years, what we're talking about right now will be completely different than what we're seeing now. So it's going to change the industries quite a bit. And it'll bring it into a price point that everybody's going to be looking for. I always joke and say, when you see them at Costco on the shelf, you'll know they're there. But you'll have to buy two. You'll have to buy twice as many as you need to get two of them. So what was I going to say? We have, with the carbon, basically those nanofibers are carbon layers. They're one atom thick carbon, right? Yeah. And you mentioned Roy before. And he's got the, and still has a dream of the injectors and metron and those kind of things for transportation. How do you see that concept of a liquid fuel that sequesters carbon on the way into the engine using exhaust heat to sequester the carbon and use that carbon as basically a commodity that you can then sell to make nanotechnology and then hydrogen going into the engines? Is that starting to pan out? Is Roy doing much more work on that? He's moving on it. You know, carbon kind of has a bad reputation because of CO2 and everybody. It's a household word now, carbon this, carbon that. But carbon is actually one of the most valuable things that we could be utilizing to make durable goods. And the internal combustion engine kind of gets a bad rap because of its history and because of pollution. But when you run an engine on hydrogen, it not only doesn't pollute like a fuel cell or electric vehicle, but it has the added advantage of being able to clean the air as it drives through. So this is significant because, first of all, the 1.3 billion, soon to be 2 billion internal combustion engines aren't going to go away anytime soon. No matter what any car company predicts, they're going to be around for quite a long time, certainly more than our lifetime. And they're going to continue to pollute. So if those can be converted, for example, cities like Beijing could be cleaning their environment with the same things that are polluting. So there's a reason to go after both. You know, we have to do the internal combustion, we need to do the fuel cells, we need to do the pure EVs. The other thing about carbon, we talk about doing electric motors to take over everything. Well, there's a limit to supply of copper on the planet. So we need new conductors, and that's where carbon plays an important role. It's a better conductor than copper. It's lighter than aluminum, stronger than steel. Yeah, and I think you told me that three or four years ago, and I didn't believe you. So I went down to fiberglass Hawaii and I bought some carbon fiber cloth for like glassing surfboards and stuff. And I pulled a couple of strands out, and I hooked wires to them. And I could pull carbon through the thing. I'm reading it on my hand here. Yeah, and it was pretty amazing. And it didn't have any loss, really. I mean, it was very efficient, which impressed me even more. That's why graphene is so important, because at one atom thick or just a few atoms, the resistance is almost insignificant. It's not there, so things move very quickly. Why do you think we help Roy get his technology on the road then? Well, it takes money. It takes money. Money is the lubricant that makes it all work. We need to demonstrate the feasibility of it and show people. It's just like when people come to the ranch, they see that the technology is available now, that we're actually doing it. We live it every single day. And the biggest comment we get is, why aren't we all doing this? Yeah. Well, believe it or not, Paul, we're right through 30 minutes of showtime. So I want to thank you again for coming over and spending some time on us and helping me with the conversion. That's really going to help me be more confident when we have the kids in there. I hate embarrassing myself in front of high school kids, so I appreciate you coming over to help me get that over. I'm looking forward to that. I'd be happy to bring over one of my best technicians to come help us. Great. We'll work on that. Well, thanks for being with us today. And thanks to our broadcast engineer, Robert McLean, and our stage and our floor manager, Cindy Manufakai. I got it right this time, right? Thanks for being with us. Join us next week for Stanley Energy Man. Until then, Allah.