 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Here in Honolulu, and we're going over the water, all the way to the big island to Nelha to speak to Greg Barber, the Executive Director of the Natural Energy Laboratory, Hawaii Authority, commonly known as Nelha, and his Chief Marketing Officer, Laurence Sombardier, the French Connection. And we're going to be talking about all the great things that Greg and Laurence are doing over at Nelha, the crown jewel of D-bed, they're part of D-bed, but you can explain all that, but from my own personal experience, because Greg and Laurence are my landlords, because I have a project over there, great to work with, and they have great projects that I'm sure everybody is going to be really interested in seeing. So instead of me just talking here, I'm going to launch over to you, Greg, and I want you to tell us about Nelha and all the great things you're doing over there. Well, thank you, Mitch, and a long time viewer of your program, we really appreciate it, and I want to thank you so much for having us on. It's a real honor and a pleasure to be on your program. Let me start by just giving you and maybe some of the viewers are not familiar with our energy lab and what we do, and then we'll talk about some of the new energy project that we have to give you and your viewers a flavor for what we're doing. Perfect. First of all, Nelha is over 40 years old, actually started after the first oil shock in 1974, got running in 1976, so I guess that makes us a little over 40 years old, and we have 900 acres on shore, and if you look at slide one that I sent you, it shows our location here in Kona on the western side of the Big Island. It shows us very close to the Kona International Airport. We actually surround it on the western side and on the southern side. We also have a research corridor offshore in the water of about 3,000 acres, and we're here for two main reasons. One is the Natural Energy Lab had two main missions when it started 40 years ago. One was to do the pre-feasibility and commercialization work for geothermal, and that work was done at our site in Kona, and we worked with actually with the University of Hawaii to do the original feasibility studies, and once it was deemed to be commercially feasible, we got out of that business and now Kona Geothermal Venture does that operation. The other natural energy that we're named after is ocean thermal energy conversion, and that is the use of warm seawater from the surface, and the use of cold seawater. We have pipelines that go down 3,000 feet, so the difference in the temperature is about, I think it's about 30 degrees Fahrenheit, is that right, Lawrence? About 30 degrees Fahrenheit, 35, and so that warm water, if you run it through a heat exchanger with ammonia in the heat exchanger, the warm water will evaporate the ammonia and the cold water in another heat exchanger will convince the ammonia, and so it creates a loop of ammonia gas, and that is run through a turbine and that generates power. It's very attractive because it's baseload power, it's carbon neutral, and it's unlimited. It really uses the ocean surface as the solar collectors, and we have been a test site for that technology for the past 40 years. One of the key companies working here is Makai Ocean Engineering. They have a large test tower here, and it's still a ways off. It has some more work to do, but probably in a similar vein as hydrogen, you probably won't see the hydrogen economy really strong for probably another 10 to 20 years, and so O-Tech is very similar to that, and it's a technology that needs a little bit more work before it can become commercial. So that's why we were started. So we have this massive array of deep seawater pipelines and surface seawater pipelines. We can pump large volumes of water. We currently pump about 25,000 gallons a minute of both warm and cold water. We can pump probably four times that amount, and so we have an ability to expand. Most of the businesses here use it for aquaculture. We're a large aquaculture operation test bed. One thing it's important to notice, note that we are a state agency, part of the state of Hawaii, part of D-Bed, Department of Business and Economic Development, but we are a self-sufficient agency. We generate all of our own revenue. We generate approximately $5 million a year. We've been self-sufficient for the past 10 years. We're very proud of that, so we still do get money from the state for building public goods like roads and buildings that the community will use as well, but in terms of operation, we're self-sufficient. We have about, we generate our revenue from number one, the sale of seawater. We charge about 20 cents per thousand gallons, which is a very reasonable amount. You probably pay around $4 a thousand gallons at home for your drinking water. We sell about $2.5 million worth of seawater a year. We run the seawater system on a break-even basis that's a benefit for the clients in the park, so whatever it costs us to pump that water is what we charge for the water. We also generate revenue from the leasing of land and buildings. We have several buildings, office space that we lease, like we lease to Umich in our new incubator building. We generate the other $2.5 million from that leasing operations. We have about 50 clients in the park, various sizes, some of the big companies here, Sinotech is here, they are the ones that grow biolastin. They're probably the largest. They're probably our anchor tenant. We have the water bottling companies that desalinate the deep-sea water and bottle that for sale, both in the United States and overseas. A lot of aquaculture companies that we have and then we have several renewable energy projects here and that's really an overview of what we do, but I wanted to just kind of give the viewers a flavor of what we do and before we kind of jump into some of the renewable energy projects that we're working on. And for that, I kind of wanted to turn it over to Laurence. She could talk about one of our key initiatives right now is our microgrid initiative and let me turn it over to Laurence. Hi Laurence. Aloha. And Aloha viewers. So if we could go to the next slide, which is an overview of our park and I want to talk a little bit about our facility and the fact that we're in the desertic area and the really high insulation. In fact, we have about a day last insulation over a year time frame than Phoenix, Arizona. Could you say what insulation means? Because to me it means or many people would think it's just insulating your house rather than sunlight. So you mean like the definition of insulation? Yeah. Basically the sunlight hitting, you know, hitting the surface area down here at Nelhun. We have one of those perfect bell-shaped curves, although we do get a few clouds at the end of the day, but really it's a bell-shaped curve which maximizes the amount of sun that you can collect on a given area. We also have very low rainfall here as well. And so we're a perfect place for solar and in fact we have, if you look on the map, is a collection of facilities that have a cumulative of three megawatts worth of storage in the park. Although about 200 kilowatts of that is actually Nelha PV installation where it's currently still in right now 170 kilowatts in our research campus. But we have also in this area, we have two circuit lines that are coming out of the substation which is right at the highway at the Queen Coffey Minow Highway and a variety of users that range from industrial uses, industrial loads to office, more office type of loads. And so we're also perfect not just for solar demonstrations, but also perfect for microgrid demonstrations. And so we have three efforts that we are currently looking at right now. One of them, the first one I'll talk about is a cooperative effort with the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning or KETEF. And the idea there is to mutually benefit from cooperation and coordination so that we can pool resources and develop a microgrid in the research campus and what we call the farm compound down here at the end of the road at Nelha. So this involves leading institutions in South Korea, companies like LG, Encore, Field National University and Hawaii's own H&EI and Nelha. The Korea has the H&EI for which is currently associated with. So the KETEF organization is awarded two million dollars towards this project and it's in our minds right now because they were just visiting yesterday and today and advancing on the design. So we're in a design phase at this point and the plan is to have about an additional 700 kilowatt of PV as well as a 250 kilowatt, 500 kilowatt hour energy storage system here. And on the research side of things the idea is to develop and field test an AI algorithm to run this microgrid. And this is somewhat unique and we hope to be one of the first where such an algorithm will be tested. That's one of our one of our efforts. Another effort is to develop a long range plan. Again we hope to continue working with H&EI to make plan and make sure that all of our separate efforts and energy initiatives come together to a cohesive plan for the future. And thirdly in order to do that we're also seeking funds from the DOE Department of Energy to build and expand upon the Korean project microgrid and expand to a larger microgrid to benefit all of our pump stations. So the Korean project will be benefiting the one of our pump stations one of our main pump stations down here at the research campus. The broader microgrid will benefit the other pump stations as well. So before you go to the your next slide which I think you're getting ready to do we're going to cut for a short break and we'll be back in about one minute. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. Hey Stan Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii and they won't let me do political commentary so I'm stuck doing energy stuff but I really like energy stuff so I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energy Man at lunchtime at noon on my lunch hour we're going to talk about everything energy especially if it begins with the word hydrogen we're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner how we can make the world a better place just basically save the planet even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here so we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energy Man. So we're back with Greg Barber and Laurence Sombardier from Nelha over on the Big Island through the magic of zoom and our newest you know communications technology so great there's a great flight over there it took me 30 seconds so you're on Laurence. All right we'll just add a little bit to the the description on on our Marcos grid initiative and to do that I'm just going to go to this next slide which is an overview of our research campus where the first phase of our micro gridding will be happening and just describe really briefly the assets that we have there we have a one megawatt backup diesel gen set as well as an energy storage test bed which includes 36 kilowatt TV and which we have been using in conjunction and working with Sandia National Laboratory to demonstrate various energy storage systems so we've had a couple of projects there the most recent one is an occult project which is a lead acid battery that we're demonstrating there for a year but other assets in the facility which can contribute and and to a micro grid are well of course the hydrogen station which Mitch will be talking about a little bit later and that can serve as a system which can basically take up excess power when needed in the middle of the day and of course is the Otec tower demonstration facility you've also in here this is an R&D facility so not really something that runs 24-7 but it is another asset and different type of generation that can be included on our micro grid so I don't want to take too much time on the micro grid so I think we'll hand this back to Greg to talk about a few other projects that we have here. Thanks LaRoss. Yeah thank you LaRoss I wanted to talk the next slide was a picture of the our solar desalination project and this is a project that some people may see and be familiar with it was originally developed by SOPUG as a concentrated solar power project the CSP project it's about four acres of mirrors that are on a single axis tracker and SOPUG went out of business about three or four years ago and so we've been looking for a way to use that equipment for renewable energy demonstration and so we were fortunate enough to write a grant application to the U.S. Department of Energy using those mirrors for a solar desalination project and one of our key staff here Dr. Alex Leonard was in charge of that project and he did exceptionally well he partnered with a company in California in Petaluma called Trevi Systems and it's demonstrating their technology using forward osmosis and to see if we can produce large amounts of desalinated water from those mirrors the concept is that using forward osmosis if you heat the water up to a high enough temperature then the special membranes that Trevi uses and it's developed if you need much less energy to push that water the salt water through the membrane and so the amount of energy needed to desalinate water goes down dramatically the benefits of that are number one the lower cost of course but you can also use this desalination technique in areas that are not connected to the grid where there's a high amount of power generation so you can use it in much more remote locations because you need much much less power our project is getting started we have a preliminary approval from the Department of Energy and we hope to get started in the next several months and we hope the goal of this project is to produce a hundred and thirty two thousand gallons of desalinated water a day that's quite a bit of water and we're pretty excited about it because in Kona as a lot of people know you know there's it's a dry area compared to Oahu and in the windward side of this island the heloside so the need for fresh water is pretty high and believe it or not and so we hope that this technology will have a lot of benefit we are going to demonstrate it here in the park we're going to use the desalinated water to supplant fresh water that's currently used for aquaculture purposes and and there's a lot of other areas where agriculture uses fresh water that this this technology could be very beneficial and so I think it has a lot of potential for the future so I'd just like to point out why we're changing slides this is a great example of the type of projects you're doing and that DBEDD is sponsoring to help all of Hawaii it's particularly companies like you have at the at Nelha that rely on fresh water for some of their operations so that's a really good thing so we should be proud of that but well done I have the next slide there that the it's a picture of Makai Ocean Engineering's OTEC testing tower and there you can see there this is a demonstration tower like the Laurent said it it was built to test the technologies needed for ocean thermal energy conversion it it can produce power but it's not built to produce power it's built really to test heat exchangers and you can see on the slide there on the left hand side the two large white pipes in between those two pipes in the middle is a heat exchanger those are built from titanium they're very expensive because there's seawater in them and they have to be built from titanium so they don't corrode and so their goal is to try to reduce the cost of that heat exchanger I think they've had a lot of success over the last couple of years and I think I think they're they're doing a fantastic job especially for a local company and I think they have a huge potential to make some game-changing advancement in heat exchangers heat exchanger technology which will really really change the economics of ocean thermal energy conversion or OTEC project so my understanding Greg is they actually manufacture those heat exchangers on site using machine vision systems and I mean really high-tech laser welding it's really really fantastic I used to run a company that specialized in laser vision systems it's a fascinating technology and for any young guys out there looking for an interesting career you might want to look at laser vision systems it's all robotics it's like total state of the art so it is it is and you know they are they're doing some amazing things and it's made possible they just received funding from the high technology development corporation and they were able to add some new laser guided equipment for for the manufacture of these heat exchangers out of titanium and I think they're making some huge advancements in terms of cost savings so we should hopefully see those you know come into the private sector for commercialization in a few years if not if not earlier we have the pipes available to produce large amounts of power from ocean thermal energy conversion and so we have a request out for proposals for a next size demonstration project where we would actually purchase the power between 100 and 300 kW kilowatts and that you know the like the advantage of base OTEC is that it's base load it's not intermittent and that's really important for us so we're a large energy user as Lawn said we pump a lot of seawater it uses a lot of power and we have a boat I think around 700 to one megawatt which is fairly consistent around the clock and so also I'd like to put a plug in for hydrogen it's perfect for hydrogen so to have base load power running those electrolyzers I love that part yeah all right so my point is that if we do get this next project a demonstration project we'll have a large amounts of seawater available and you know we're looking at a seawater cooling district much like is being proposed for downtown Honolulu and I'll turn it over to Laurence for that last slide before we wrap up okay Laurence go you've got three minutes I will make this short I think most of your viewers are familiar with the Hawaii goal of 100 clean energy by 2045 what most folks tend to sometimes forget is that a significant amount of that is actually going to be due or attained through efficiency progress and this next project which would be a regional seawater air conditioning district for Kona falls under that category and now how currently has at least as much capacity as not exceeding the capacity of what is currently being designed for the Honolulu seawater air conditioning so this project is really going to be determining the conditions under which a seawater district cooling district might make sense here to benefit or currently most of the companies here have seawater conditioning and some most of them report that it's a tenfold improvement on their cost so the idea is that people can benefit other areas and the community at large with such a district so this is something that we're going to be hiring a firm for and we're currently in the process of selecting that that firm at this moment so I can't really disclose who that's going to be at the moment but I think I will stop there and Greg might have a few additional remarks but Mitch thank you Laurence you know Mitch that's kind of a quick summary a walkthrough of the project that we're working on here to give your viewers an idea of some of the work that we're doing and in some of the business our clients are doing here it's pretty exciting did you want to have our key projects is that HNEI Mitch is doing a hydrogen production storage project probably do we have a couple of a minute there yeah we have we can talk about that bitch absolutely that would be the last slide we have there you go so I can talk to that slide a little bit if you want Greg since it's my project so you know what what this is is a massive concrete slab upon which we have a raid a variety of equipment like staring you and the objective of this is to produce hydrogen which we will be using to fuel a helion county of hawaii bus and you can see the rendering of the bus which is actually on oahu right now just completing its commissioning the station itself houses in that 40-foot shipping container you see houses an electrolyzer and a compressor and then at the top of the picture you'll see two tube trailers that's where we store the hydrogen we supply hydrogen from one of the trailers to the dispenser you see at the back left hand side of the bus the little blue thing it looks like a regular gas station dispenser and then the trailers also give us flexibility to deliver hydrogen to other places on the big island to run other projects pilot projects to demonstrate the technology I think I'm going to leave it at that we're still finishing commissioning of the system but it gives us another chance to come back later and show some actual equipment so so I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you and laurance very much for appearing on the show today it was great and uh I hope you enjoyed it I told you the time would go by quickly as it always does because you have good things to say thank you thanks for having us yeah thank you okay I'll see you uh next week aloha