 Well, and welcome to Stan the Energy Man here, broadcasting live from Honolulu, from the ThinkTech studios in the Pioneer Plaza building. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and we do everything on this show that talks about energy. But one thing we don't talk much about is the subject of maritime and around the ports kind of energy. So our guest this week specializes in that, and I want to emphasize that, you know, when we look in Hawaii at what causes most of our pollution, we don't really get to see much of it because the trade winds normally blow it out to sea and we just don't see it. But if Hawaii had mostly southerly winds pushing the pollution back into our city, we'd really notice it a lot. We get trapped up against the mountains and we'd really notice all the pollution that comes from ships and what we call dredge trucks or the day trucks that move containers around our city and around the ports. In Los Angeles, in Long Beach, their ports are huge and they move millions of containers a year and they have a serious pollution problem and have over the years. And some of the folks just decided that it was time to do something about it and one of those folks is Mr. Victor LaRosa who established a company or works at a company called Total Transportation Services Incorporated and he's our guest today and he's going to talk to us about how he and his company are helping reduce that high end pollution problem in and around the ports because not only do the ships pollute a lot because of the huge amount of energy they need to move through the water, in Honolulu, they actually still run their engines to create their own electricity. But those trucks that run around the ports and in Honolulu, the trucks that run around town deliver containers, they are actually operating in the stop and go mode which is the least efficient range for any of those engines, those gas or diesel engines to run in. They're the least efficient, they're the most polluting. So, Vic, welcome to the show today. I really appreciate you being on and taking the time to share with us some of your experience. Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your company and how you got started and what you're doing? Sure, thanks for having me on. I've been in the trucking business my entire life. I actually was recruited out of college by a trucking company. I've been in Los Angeles for about 37 years. We found that the company that we are currently running back in the late 80s, early 90s, and we specialize in transporting ocean containers for large importers and retailers. People like Target, Amazon, Ralph Lauren, J Crew, people of that nature, very, very large importers. We started to address this pollution issue back in 2006-2007 when the ports began examining just how much pollution were caused by the ships and the trucks. And in Southern California, we have a little bit of a unique situation because we are in a valley and our pollution tends to stay in that valley and then the sun has a multiplying effect on those pollutants. So, back in 2007, we got very active in environmental groups and we got very active with state agencies and we started to study the problem and we made a commitment back then that we were going to go to a zero emission fleet. The issue was back in 2007, there was no technology to support that fleet. So, over the last 10 years, we have been working very closely with integrators, with developers, with truck manufacturers and experimenting with all different forms of technology from natural gas to battery to fuel cell. And we are currently starting to make the first significant changes in the fleet to get to near zero emission and then eventually the zero emission when the technology is ready for prime time. I know that one of the drawbacks of being a first adopter, as you talked about getting into this business around 2006, that's when Hawaii really started to seriously look at alternative fuel vehicles and looked at hydrogen and plug-in vehicles. But one of the serious problems with this when you're an early adopter, a lot of the equipment and the fuel is expensive. How has your company, how has it been handling that challenge and do you see that as just the price you've got to pay to do clean or is it an economy of scale thing where you foresee the price of the equipment dropping down as more and more people adopt it? A truer statement couldn't be made. We have made significant investments in failed technologies. The initial natural gas engines were underpowered and we had made a significant investment in those engines and we did not do well financially with that. But we did not give up. We met with the agencies and we told them, listen, we want to support our goals to get there, but you have to help us. You have to give us the ability to test the technology before we go full bore and implementing it. And for the last 10 years, we have tested 50% of all the new technology that's come into the market. We've been heavily helped subsidized by the agencies and most of the subsidies go to the developers and the integrators. We will then take the equipment, test it, and generally our hydrogen fuel is subsidized. Our natural gas is not subsidized. Our electricity is not subsidized, but that's not an overbearing factor. The overbearing factors is going out and buying new equipment that doesn't work. What's your sense of the state of technology now, particularly with hydrogen fuel cells and natural gas? We have several communities that are working hard with electric buses and things like that. But what's your sense for the hydrogen and natural gas? We are on the fifth generation of natural gas engines. And we have finally arrived at an engine that we've been testing for the last three years, the 12-liter, near-zero-knot Cummins Westport engine. And that engine is bulletproof. We've just ordered 40 of those vehicles. And we're going to probably be ordering another 40 of those vehicles. The test and Cummins work very, very closely with us in day-to-day and making sure that those trucks had no mechanical or performance issues. That's why we went out and made the investment. And what was the big breakthrough on the CNG Genesis as they moved to this current state of the art? What was the big jump in technology that got them to where you can really appreciate them? They upped the power in the engines. When they first introduced the first generation, it was an 8.9-liter engine. It was really spec to handle about a 66,000-pound gross vehicle weight. The 12-liters now can handle the 80,000 pounds. What was happening with the 8.9-liter engine is that we were sharing those engines. They were underpowered, and we were filling them from a productivity standpoint. Okay. So did they do it with turbocharging and increasing the cylinder bore? Yes. They increased the performance of the engine. Okay. Okay. How about hydrogen? What are some of the breakthroughs in hydrogen that you noticed over the last few years? Back in about 2008, we got involved with a integrator that was just raising some funds and starting up with proof of concept. Unfortunately, the integrator could make a run of it financially. So we've been kind of quiet on the hydrogen front until the last two or three years. And now we have a couple of manufacturers step up. You're familiar with US Hybrid. I don't know if you're familiar with Transpower. You're familiar with Hydrogenics. They're a manufacturer of fuel cells. You're familiar with Kenworth. You're familiar with Toyota. They are all now jumping into the fuel cell arena. We have the first fuel cell manufactured by Kenwood, the first truck for the fuel cell. And we've been experimenting with that truck for the last two to three months. And we're finding it to be very, very promising. I just read this morning in one of my newsletters that, and I believe it was Cummins. It might be someone else, but it was a big diesel company that just bought out Hydrogenics. So that kind of sends a signal to me. Yeah. I'll forward that to you when I get back to my office. But I was really surprised to see that. I sent it to a boss at US Hybrid, but I just see a lot of activity in Hydrogen going on right now. On the battery electric side, I know a lot of folks have been using the battery vehicles and they seem to be a good choice for the short runs and the not too hilly terrain. Have you been finding them satisfactory or are there infrastructure or charging drawbacks that lead you to kind of go to more conventional fueling like natural gas or hydrogen? The battery truck, battery, I drive a bull, my sun drive, my sun's drive bull. The battery technology and vehicles is great. I mean, we're there. The battery technology and buses are great because you know the, your route and you know how many hours you're going to be on that route. In our environment, battery technology is a little tough. Think about having to move, let's say, 250 containers today. I don't know where the next container is going. I don't know if it's going to be a 15 mile run or a 60 mile run. So it's very difficult for me to incorporate that battery technology into our fleet. Although we are experimenting with the batteries and we're using them in an isolated area, try to use them in an isolated area with shuttle type of work, but they're just not ready for the Class 8 crime time activity. But the combination of fuel cell and battery, we feel are going to be the winner in the long run. We don't think any one technology is going to win, but we think that that combination is going to get us over range anxiety on the battery. Now don't forget, Stan, we have to run those trucks 18 to 20 hours every day. It's not, it's not like any of the port in the country. We run two shifts. So we have to, you know, we usually, we can, the battery technology work with, we can only get one shift out of it. Right. And then we have to park the truck. Yeah, I was going to say, I noticed in your literature that you run a long two shifts. They're not just two shifts, but a long two shifts in the military. We used to run two or three shifts, but they were all eight hour shifts. Yours looked a lot longer than that. And that's why I was curious about the charging cycle on your trucks, because, you know, like you say, when you have the range you've got to worry about, then you've got the time that the vehicle is going to be down for charging. And then if you have all rapid chargers, then you've got high infrastructure costs by putting in new transformers and things like that. So I think in some conditions, like you say, where it's real predictable, the battery works great, the technology is great. Are you familiar with Nicola Motors and their concept and how they're going to try and operate trucks? Are you familiar at all with Trevor Milton and what he's trying to do? We have an order in for 100 of those trucks. We've been, we've been invited over to Phoenix, and we've been truck testing, driving the truck. And, you know, just, it's in a very, very preliminary stage of development, but we're very active. They are now coming out to our facilities and looking at what we do in the ports. And we think that there's going to be some potential, not only use the word partnership, but some potential cooperative programs that we can work on together. Great. Well, Vic, we're going to take a quick break here and let some of our other shows advertise their program. We'll come back and talk a little bit more about Nicola Motors and some of the things we can look forward to in the future. Perfect. Hi, Mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power, Hawaii. With Think Tech, Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, Maraming, Salamatpo, Mabuhay, and Aloha. I'm Jay Fidel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco, and me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays, every two weeks on Think Tech. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand in the Energy Man. I'm on my lunch hour, of course, and I decided to wear my glasses today because I wanted to kind of look intellectual. I'm talking to Vic LaRosa there in California. He's a pretty sharp guy and knows a lot about trucking, for sure. We want to capitalize off of that. In Hawaii, we don't have the big 18-wheelers that run long distances like you do on the mainland there, Vic. But we do have a lot of drage trucks and that class of trucks, no sleeper cab, just hauling stuff around. Because the farthest you can go on this island is about 30 miles before you run into the water again. But we move a lot of containers around our town. So let's get back to Nicola Motors. That's a pretty novel concept with leasing the vehicles and the fuels included in the vehicles. What are some of the things you like and one of the things you'd like to see them improve on in their model that you think with all your background would make it a great model, not just for the mainland, but for islands like Hawaii? The current model that Nicola has developed is really built for the long haul operation. We have finally gotten through to them and said, look, we don't need these fancy bells and whistles for a short haul or for a drainage operation, which generally runs within 60 miles. And in your case, 35 miles. So we're asking them to come out and work with us and kind of scale. We don't want to scale the technology down, but we want to scale the bells and whistles down to make it a much more comfortable truck for the shorter haul operation and for our drivers. And we think that they are very, very enthusiastic about it. We think that it shows a lot of promise. We do like the model with the fuel included because infrastructure, which you touched on earlier is very difficult, both from the battery side and from the hydrogen side. That's why ports are great feature dishes for testing because we don't have those long haul run. We can get the truck back to a terminal generally every night and we can generally store or house fuel at those locations in order to conduct business the next day. It's not like we're sending the truck 1500 miles down the road. Great. I'm glad that you're working on them. I'm happy to hear that you're on order for 100 of their trucks because I think he's got a great model and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he'll be able to make it all happen and keep all the finances straight and the production straight. I mean, he's biting off a big chunk of a mission there that hats off to him. That's a lot of work that he's pulling together with a lot of companies and a lot of investors and a lot of potential customers. I'm excited to see him get going and I'd like to get some more feedback from you later on how his equipment works in a couple of years. What's your view of the future in terms of transportation, electric transportation, especially on the trucking side? Do you see a particular niche for battery plug-in only or long haul only or, I mean, kind of paint us a picture of a Vicks world in the next 15 years on electric truck transportation? Or CNG? I'm sorry, Stan. Or CNG. I didn't mean to boot them off. Right now CNG is really inexpensive on the mainland. It's got to be a good fit if you've got the trucks at work right too. Sometimes CNG gets sold a little short because we're starting to use a tremendous amount of renewable natural gas coming from landfills, coming from biodigesters. And the nice thing about that renewable is that it does not add any additional carbon to the atmosphere because it's already just being broken down and we're just reusing in a different form. And we have an abundance of that. I've heard statistics that we have 100 years of supply in our landfills and our garbage dumps. So we don't discount natural gas. We may have made a significant investment in it. We're using it as our bridge because we really don't believe that within the next five years that we will have a very, very stable battery or hydrogen model for the eight trucks, not for the most transportation, just for the class eight. So that's why we're staying very close. We're making our investments in CNG for the next five years in order to continue our business. And then as we see breakthroughs for winners in the hydrogen and battery technology, we will begin to invest in that as well. But we don't think that there's going to be one winner. We think that it's going to be a combination of technologies. We're even starting to experiment with CNG fuel cells trucks. So we think that there's all types of possibilities out there that are going to help us get to where we want to go. Yeah. A lot of people don't realize that you have solid oxide fuel cells and other fuel cells that use methane, pure methane, which is natural gas to run instead of a hydrogen fuel cell using a methane for your fuel. So you're right. That's another technology that we haven't really looked into a whole lot for transportation. I know they're using it a lot in fixed stationary transportation for like cell phone towers and things like that for backup. But yeah, that's another great possibility. You have any insight on the shipping side? I know you're a truck guy, but on the shipping side, you hang around the ports and you work with all the folks like the air quality folks in California. What's happening on the shipping side to make those folks either use shore power or improve the big ships propulsion systems and power system? That's also in a very, very experimental stage. We're starting to see some of the shore hull carriers, especially from Jones Act carriers, people that run to Hawaii and to put recon places like that, starting to invest in LNG and CNG engines on their ships. And that's a very, very positive step. This year, the IMO is requiring that whole of shipping lines throughout the world go to low diesel, low sulfur diesel fuel, which is going to significantly drive up the price of diesel because it's more expensive to produce low sulfur diesel. So those steam ship lines are starting to make the investment and starting to make the breakthroughs on the environmental front. In California, cold ironing, which is when we plug the ship in, we have many unbelievable strides. Most of our terminals and most of our berths plug those ships in when they come in. Now there are some technologies like scrubbers that they put over the stack of the ship and we hear good things and bad things about that technology. Once you take that pollution, what do you do with it? Does it end up back in the ocean or how do you actually scrub it? So we don't know yet what the outcome is going to be there, but we do see a significant amount of investment and we see a significant amount of attention given to the issue. The ships, do they use like turbine technology or are they using internal combustion engines like the big diesel trucks, except on a bigger scale? Both. Both. We heard of a company, I was brought to the attention of a company, I think it's called Climon. It's out of Sweden and they have a box that's like two meters cubed and it uses waste heat from internal combustion or turbine engines and they're saying that they're actually doing work with some of the ships and if they just take their waste heat from those kind of engines they can provide 20% of electricity for a cruise ship just from the waste heat off those engines so you know that's something else I know that they're looking into as well that gives me some hope that those ships will be a lot cleaner coming into our ports here in Hawaii. Yeah, definitely. Well how about for the rest of the on the trucking side, do you have any of those your same philosophy in California with the alternative fuel vehicles, are you doing that in any of your other operations on the east coast? We're moving, we just made an acquisition in Seattle, we're going to be moving our concept up there as well because as you know the west coast seems to be a little bit more progressive when it comes to clean air technology and our plan is to introduce it into all the ports that we work in so we will be over the next five to seven years we will be moving the newer technology into all of their operations. Okay great well let's wrap up we got a couple minutes left here you know kind of give us a picture of where your company is going in the future you've got some of those nickel and motor trucks lined up your kind of use and cng is your bridge are there any other things that you'd like to talk about in terms of near term on your company that that are really exciting for you? Near term you know our biggest or one of our major concentrations now is safety and we're bringing in the technology that automatically breaks the trucks we're bringing in side cameras we're bringing in introducing technology for the driver when the driver starts to become fatigued in the truck so we're short term we're trying to make this driver experience as good as possible and as safe as possible so safety is a major concern for us because we believe one day we're going to transition to autonomous vehicles we don't see a driver coming out of the vehicle anytime soon but we think that the truck is going to be pretty sophisticated almost like an airplane where it's going to be able to kind of manage itself but you're still going to need someone in there in case of an emergency so we are gearing our company and we're working with some developers of the technology to try to get there to get to the next step again combining air quality safety and autonomous operation of the truck yeah the the artificial intelligence AI and the 5g stuff that's coming down the road is going to help in that area a lot as well as maintenance have you have you found any real advantages on the maintenance side to any of these technologies do you find the electric drive trains to be easier to take care of or less maintenance we're trying yeah I'm yes absolutely the electric trucks are way less maintenance even the even fuel cells a little bit different because the technology is so no so tricky and the thing we like about cng too is that we we don't have to use the the def fluids in the you have to use in a diesel engine and we're seeing less maintenance cost and less filtration cost in that technology as well and the fuel and the natural gas drives generally is generally a little bit less expensive than diesel great well Vic we've run through our 30 minutes here but it's been awesome talking to you and I feel like I've filled up my clue bag as we used to say in the military I really appreciate you spending some time with us and I hope the viewers out there find some of what you talked about really important especially like I say here in Hawaii we don't see the pollution as much but it's still there in fact unfortunately it's probably mostly going right into the ocean and that's making us ignore the problem and kick it down the road and we really shouldn't be doing it we should be following your lead and taking all of our ports and making them as clean as possible so thanks for joining us today Vic and I'll be talking to you again especially I'd love to hear when you eat your first nickel of truck in a couple years I'd love to come back and talk to you then and get your impression of how those things are working and when you're in California please come and visit us so we can show you and give you a ride in some of this technology that'd be awesome thanks Vic and thanks all the viewers today for watching uh Stanley Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii and we'll see you again next Friday aloha