 Welcome to Stan Energy Man, Stan Osterman here, coming to you live and direct from North Kona on the Big Island at Hank Rogers Ranch, Blue Planet Research in Pulvava, beautiful place. I wish I was outside doing this video, but it's a little windy and noisy, so I'm going to just stay inside. But today's show is a little bit different as my shows have been since the coronavirus hit by way of I can't find guests that want to come on even review remote. I don't know how you catch a virus on the internet, but apparently some people are worried about that. Anyway, but today's video addresses an issue that kind of revolves around some of the topics I've talked about lately, like critical thinking and risk analysis and such. One of the dichotomies in my personal life is that most people when they look at what I've done or look at my resume or kind of look at my career in spectrum, they assume that I'm an engineer or they assume that I'm some kind of technical expert. And I think last time I said I don't like the word expert for some reasons. If you go back and watch last week's show, you'll understand why. But in reality, my bachelor's degree is in fine arts. And that's because I started off in architecture, which is fine arts. But I ended up transitioning to design when I found out that the School of Architecture at the University I was at was lost its accreditation. And it was going to take me six years to get a pre-architecture degree. And I said, that's not happening. So I just went with design because all my credits transferred over and I could just finish in like four years like I was supposed to. Anyway, as serendipitous as it goes sometimes in life, it was probably one of the most interesting things that ever happened to me and one of the best things because what I found was how important design is in pretty much everything we do. Although my major focus mostly on advertising art and design for advertising, the concept of design is critical. A lot of people think design and fashion are the same like you have people that are fashion designers and such. For me, fashion design is an oxymoron because fashion is the exact opposite of design. Design is something that is deliberate and timeless where fashion changes every season. So fashion designer is a conflict in terms to me. So let me explain why that is and why it's so strange in my career and in the energy world to have design such a critical part of how I think about things. First of all, when you study design, you quickly learn that the artist thinks differently than the engineer approaches problems differently than the engineer but has to have the same level of complexity and understanding and in fact probably even more so than the engineer when you're addressing certain problems. And my primary instructor, his name was Clemente Lugundamal. He is a second generation Filipino who spent most of his time in San Francisco working for pre-high powered advertising agencies on the West Coast but came back to Hawaii to teach design and he was really a brilliant, brilliant man. Him and Ron Kowalki was also one of my professors and Kingsley who was also a very steeped in design tradition. Anyway, between the three of them, they instilled upon me the fact that design is a very deliberate process and it's summarized in the German word gestalt. And so you might want to Google that one and look it up and try and figure out what it means to you but the way it was described to me by my professors was when you do design work, you have to make it appealing visually, of course, but it has to work. The concept has to work, whether it's a visual concept or a description in a written description of something, whether it's a physical, mechanical relationship, things have to work and work together. Otherwise, you have nothing. So the bottom line is for an artist anyway that's doing it visually, the gestalt is doing a piece of art where when you finish the product, when you finish the artwork, you can add nothing to it without throwing something and it's not needed and you can't take anything away from it without losing the meaning of the work. And one of the perfect examples of this is a work by Pablo Picasso, which is a bicycle seat facing down and a set of handlebars facing up. As soon as you see it, you go, that's a bull, it's a bull, it's not a deer, it's not a cow, it's a bull and if you do anything to change the way they're arranged or the materials are made of or their colors, you lose something. So that's kind of a picture of what I'm talking about. So why is that important in the world of energy and what we're doing, especially what we're doing here in Hawaii with hydrogen energy storage and things like that. Well, when you start working with complex processes, you actually have to make sure that all the pieces balance it together. If you're going to use a battery in your system, you know, which battery do you use? Batteries that there's tons of different kinds of batteries, you have lead acid batteries, you have lithium cobalt technology, you have alkaline batteries, you have sodium, I mean, you have ferrous phosphate, lithium ferrous phosphate technology, you have tons of different things you can do with just the batteries, you have flow batteries, you have all kinds of things, you got to pick the right one for the right reason and you got to match it up with the other technologies, the solar panels have to match up and your inverters have to match up and your control system needs to match up and the controller for the batteries needs to all match up and that's where you have to take each piece piece by piece and figure out whether it contributes to the picture to the whole or whether it over complicates it or it totally makes it fail and the reason this is important is because a lot of people don't do that. They go, battery, I need a controller, here's a controller, put it together, now it controls the battery, now I need solar panels, what solar panels work, monocrysland, polycrystalline, okay, okay, I got solar panels, okay, now put them in there. I've been to so many projects where there was not a designer involved, there was just somebody who engineered solar panel systems and basically put a residential solar panel setup on a commercial agricultural greenhouse system and it worked fine when it was small but then the guy who owned the nursery, he had to grow, he needed to expand his system but because of the way it was set up, because it wasn't designed properly, he couldn't do it without spending a ton of money and literally throwing out a whole bunch of stuff he'd already paid for that should last for 15 or 20 years and start all over again. So what he was, he was stuck with the wrong size and he was also stuck in the evening when the sun went down, he literally had to go and turn off his solar panels and connect to the grid and buy electricity from the electric company and if you're familiar with different utility rate scales and stuff, there's things called demand charges and stuff, those kind of things can eat your lunch if you're not ready for them. So the idea of design is to take all the components that make up your project and make sure they fit right, they fit together right before you say now I have something that's complete and that will work. Now engineers are good at solving problems, designers are good at showing the engineers that they may have a disconnect and they may need to work harder to solve the problem properly. So the best of both worlds is to have good engineering matched up with good design. That's really the perfect combination because if you just give it to an engineer or just give it to a designer, you're probably not going to come up with the right answer and that's where my definition of diversity is that you take all the different different people that would come together for a project and let them all speak. And I learned that way back in the 80s when total quality management was kind of in vogue and we had everybody doing all of the TQM stuff and process management teams and all that Covey stuff and I was of course involved in it but before Covey there was a gentleman who did a great series of videos and he did one that really captured my attention. What he did actually evolved into what we now call regenerative braking in electric vehicles and it started off with it was actually a sociology experiment I believe where they were trying to solve a problem and they gave the problem to a bunch of engineers and they gave the same problem to a bunch of artists and they told them to solve the problem separately and so they did they worked on it and they both came up with solutions and the solutions worked but they were kind of clunky. If you've ever seen engineers do a Rube Goldberg machine where you know the ball rolls down the hill and hits a paddle and the paddle kicks off something and the rabbit jumps out of the cage and goes over and starts to eat some food and that's a that's a Rube Goldberg machine. Well that's what the engineer solution looked like and the artist one looked like it might work but you couldn't really tell because nobody's ever built anything you know looked like what they came up with. So then what they did was they took the engineers and they took the artist and they put them in the same room together with the same problem and they had to work on it for actually a couple weeks. What they came up with was pretty amazing. Engineers would have never thought of it on their own and the artists would never have been able to make it work on their own and here's what they did. They took a vehicle and they put a spring on the back axle. Now when you hit the brakes instead of it being friction brakes like we have on our cars now the spring would engage in the wheel and as the vehicle went forward the spring would get tighter and tighter and tighter and the vehicle would slow down and slow down and slow down but it stored up all that energy in the spring and then when they wanted to go they released the spring and and engaged the spring in the other direction to make the vehicle accelerate and how they worked that out that was the engineering piece. The engineers figure out how to basically switch gears and make the spring give you energy in the opposite direction but that's what they did and so all the energy that was built up by stopping that heavy vehicle was turned around and giving back and acceleration when the vehicle started up again and it was it was brilliant and it was amazing and they and it was something that was never done before and it would have never come up unless they put the right frames and the left frames together and had them collaborate and come up with a well designed solution. Now that that solution nowadays is used in virtually every electric vehicle that's on the road whether it's a hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle or a battery electric vehicle whether it's a tesla or a leaf it doesn't matter even a lot of the hybrids have this built in but they don't use the spring what they've done is they've said an electric motor is also a generator so if you have a vehicle stopping and you take the motor and let the vehicle deceleration run the motor instead of the motor running the the drivetrain you actually start generating electricity and you can charge the batteries as you decelerate so that's why if you have an electric car when you take your foot off the accelerator what happens is you actually start charging the battery as you slow down or if you're going downhill you're charging the battery because gravity is taking that potential energy and kinetic energy and turning it back into electricity and charging your batteries up so for example we had some buses that were made for the volcanoes national park and most of the time that the bus was just going to run back and forth between the visitor center and one of the the remote sites where they didn't have enough parking but occasionally that bus would run six miles all the way downhill to the coastline and so we told the the people that were driving the park rangers that when they did that run they needed to not use the fuel cell and use all the hydrogen to keep the batteries charged up if they knew they were going to go down that hill they needed to let the batteries discharge and save the fuel cell and the hydrogen and then when they went down the hill kick the battery back in and let it charge going all the way down that six mile hill that way they got to the bottom of the hill and they hadn't used any hydrogen and they had full batteries so that's the design part of how you get these systems to work properly so what I'm trying to encourage you to do is to you know think about the different people that you engage in projects because they think differently and practical example for you is that I I try and do a lot with with the wine electric company and other utilities and I can talk to their engineers and they understand what I'm saying when I explain hydrogen energy storage and things like that but they're so uncomfortable with something that they don't use that they refuse to put it in their system you can show them the cost of benefit analysis you can show them the safety issues you can talk to them about the social issues of where the materials come from for batteries versus fuel cells and and electrolyzers you can tell them about how they're going to need to use hydrogen with intermittent renewables you can give them everything you want but they can't see that big picture because they've never seen it before and until they see it happening they have a hard time grasping it so that's one of the reason why I do a lot of my shows here from Blue Planet is because that's what Blue Planet does Blue Planet is a microgrid that uses solar energy and they even had wind power for a while but it just it's not a good wind region they have solar energy they have lithium ferrous phosphate batteries and they have hydrogen electrolyzer so what happens is the solar gives power to the entire community an entire microgrid all day long and then it also in the morning between sunrise and about 11 in the morning charges up the batteries that were just that were discharged overnight and when it's the batteries are fully charged and there's still not enough load being drawn on the solar panels they turn around and make hydrogen with it and they store the hydrogen and the hydrogens for days when the sun doesn't come out for maybe a week they have heavy rain for four or five six days in a row and the batteries aren't being charged by the solar panels anymore and they're discharging well before they get too low they take the hydrogen running through a fuel cell and recharge all the batteries up so that they can keep going until the solar panels kick back in and start making things work so I'd encourage you to all think about design as a part of anything that you do um it a designer by training number one you you got to be thick-skinned because when you when you go to design school and people critique your artwork or your work it's brutal so if you're a sensitive kind of uh you know have problem problem self-esteem trust me don't be a fine arts major and don't go to art school because your your peers critique your work and it's brutal every time and you know unless you're one of the top students in the class that does everything perfect it's it's really tough but you get really thick skin number one and number two you become a perfectionist when it comes to really focusing on getting a project right from the beginning that's the design part and that's the main message that I wanted to to bring to everybody today so one of the examples of a really good piece of design work is a video it's one of three videos we did an hcat when I was working there and we're going to show that video but let me set the stage for it um early on in hcat we used to have um newspaper writers or um correspondents come in and visit hcat and the first thing they say is well I want to talk to one of the guys that works on these fuel cells and and have them explain to us you know what the stuff is and I'd say sure and I'd introduce them to one of the technicians or the engineers working on the projects converting vehicles or whatever and um I'd say okay here he is here's rusty go ahead and ask him whatever questions you like or here's you know so-and-so and so the correspondent the the writer would ask these questions and the technician would give him a very technical answer right back and the correspondent would look at me and go what did he just say and then I would have to explain it in terms that a layperson could understand because you know I'm familiar with the technology and I but but I would literally paint a picture I would paint a picture in words that they could relate to where the engineer of the technician was giving them a pure definition or a pure explanation of what the system was he was working on and what it did and it didn't translate it it didn't come across I saw that happen time and time again at Hcat you need to have the the right brain person there that understands the technology and can explain it and these videos were a result of some work that Dave Malinero and the folks at Hcat did to basically paint the picture for folks so I'd like to run that video now and show you what Hcat and the folks at Hyperspective is the company that did the videos and they actually won an award for this video so your Eric go ahead and please roll a video hydrogen the simplest element and also the most abundant hydrogen makes up roughly 75 percent of all mass in the universe hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source and we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic they're messy dirty expensive to obtain and not secure and they're limited hydrogen on the other hand is everywhere hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources including water itself using other renewable energies that means it's clean really clean as a zero emission fuel source the only byproducts are water heat and electricity easily transported hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid as a fuel hydrogen itself is very light in fact hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries and it isn't just for transportation hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell as hydrogen passes through a fuel cell electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines they can travel farther distances than lithium batteries especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades hydrogen powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks trains ships and aircraft fuel cells allow for fast easy refueling and hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations making it a convenient fuel source for everyone it is a proven safe clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide hydrogen is everywhere including our clean energy future so there's a video that in less than four minutes i think it's three minutes and something or not even three minutes literally gives you a complete picture of hydrogen and how it can work in vehicles in all kinds of transportation or in micro grids and how it's clean and produces only water and here's another example it's it's in the video too but um when I first started working with folks on hydrogen technology the hydrogen fuel cell confused almost everybody it confused the people that were writing stories about hydrogen they would they would call the fuel cell where you stored the hydrogen and they had no concept of what a fuel cell was and I myself had a hard time reconciling the term fuel cell with something that made electricity from hydrogen it's like why don't you call it the hydrogen engine why don't you call the hydrogen energy generator why are you calling it a fuel cell who invented this stupid fuel cell word and one day I was working with some folks on battery stuff and it clicked in in my designer mind that the reason they call it a fuel cell is essentially it's just another kind of battery and what what clicked was I was working on a car that had a 12-volt battery system and it's a wet cell battery and then you have nickel cadmium batteries and they're dry cell batteries and I started thinking well all batteries are called cells and the hydrogen fuel cell is just another battery it has a cathode it has an anode and it makes electricity that's why they call it a hydrogen fuel cell and the light bulb came on and then it made it easy for me to explain to people that the reason they call it a fuel cell is because it's just another way to generate electricity like a battery does except instead of storing energy internally you can pump hydrogen and air into the fuel cell and it generates electricity it's a self-charging battery so again having the art side and the science side put together the engineering side a lot of times you can come up with explaining things to folks that aren't familiar with the terms and don't quite know how to make heads or tails of the technology the other thing that I that strikes me living in Hawaii and it probably wouldn't be too obvious for folks living in Arizona or New Mexico or Montana or North Dakota or something is unless you live near the Great Lakes the ocean is huge and if you wanted to take salt water and make hydrogen through electrolysis what you get is hydrogen oxygen and chlorine because in fact if you just take some salt water and you take a simple battery and two electrodes and stick it in there and start using that for electrolysis use your using salt water for an electrolyte you can actually smell the chlorine coming out of the salt water any chemist can tell you why that is I'm not a chemist I can tell you that's what happened so when I see an ocean full of salt water I know you can get hydrogen out of it and when I get in an airplane and fly for 14 hours from Hawaii to Thailand and all I see is ocean under my airplane left and right for as far as you can see for 14 hours that's an awful lot of water to make hydrogen with hydrogen is the answer hydrogen is that design solution hydrogen is the gestalt of energy hydrogen is going to be what saves us from co2 greenhouse gas effect it's going to save us from polluting our planet with a bunch of batteries so we're going to throw away their hazmat it's going to do so much for us and that's happening it's happening now there's companies in the stock market that are public companies publicly traded and they're starting to to really break ground and start making money and become popular with this COVID-19 there's a lot of disruption in the economy but investors are looking for places to put their money and a lot of them are figuring out that hydrogen is the future all the science is telling them that all the practical reasons are telling them that all the investing folks are telling them that and they're putting their money in hydrogen so and hydrogen used to be called the fuel of the future and it always will be meaning it'll never really come about it's always going to be somewhere in the future that's changing people are beginning to see that if you really want to make a change in this planet you may have to pay a little bit more initially to get it going but in the long run it'll be cheaper it'll be better it'll be the right thing to do Europe's doing it Japan's doing it Korea is doing it even the knuckleheads in China are doing it they figured it out they've got pollution that they can't even control and they figured out hydrogen's the way to get that pollution under control so don't think artists are just for making fancy paintings or naked lady drawings or sculptures and stuff there's an art there's a reason for art in everything and just because science is on one side and engineering's on the same side they're not mutually exclusive when you put them together and they can do miraculous things so anyway that's going to do it for this week's down the energy man I appreciate you taking the time to listen to visit with us if you like the shows that you see on think tech including stand energy man hey we could really use some funding the hosts don't get paid but it does take money to run think tech and put things out there so please don't forget the summer to go to think tech and you make a quick donation to them they'd really appreciate it so until next week Tuesday this is stand energy man stand on some and signing off Allah