 Aloha and welcome to Stan Energy Man, Stan Osserman here on Think Tech Hawaii and bringing you another great show. This time I'm at least in Zoomland on my lanai in my cabin in Hamakua, so I'm kind of relaxed today. I'm feeling really comfortable. I have a fan going to simulate the cool temperatures in Hamakua rather than sweltering heat in Kailua, but today's show is a little bit different. I have a great guest who's been on before, but to set the stage, one of my previous shows, in fact, I did it over two years ago, and I did a rerun by request a couple of weeks ago, and it's on what the guest I had at the time, Dr. Nate Hagen said, is energy blindness. I think one of the big challenges we have right now overall across all of our communities is that we really don't understand the cost of our energy in real terms. If you ask a typical homeowner how much electricity they use, they would say, well, my bill's about X number of dollars, and you go, no, how many kilowatt hours of electricity you'd use every day, and they probably can't answer you, because they don't relate anything except the cost of the electricity to how much they use, so if their bill gets too high, they tell people to turn off the lights and don't leave the lights on and don't run this if you don't need to, but the reality is if you're really trying to solve a challenge like HIKO is of going 100% renewable by 2045 or changing all your transportation into electric transportation, you really have to understand the kilowatt hours, how much energy are you really talking about? How much energy do you have to generate every second of the day in Honolulu or in the whole state? Where are you going to get that electricity from? And if it's from solar and wind, the sun isn't out at night, and the wind doesn't always blow, so are you going to store multiple gigawatts of electricity so that Honolulu and the state of Hawaii have power all the time uninterrupted? Because we take for granted that all that oil that's in oil tankers and big storage tanks for Hawaii Electric to use for fuel, that's a lot of energy stored in oil. So just to give you an idea, I did a quick calculation based on some numbers I got and the basic formula was a barrel of oil is about 1750 kilowatt hours of electricity. Now of course you got oil and you got electricity, so it doesn't exactly, you can't just plug your house into a barrel of oil, but to convert that oil into electricity, cost some money, it probably is not perfectly efficient, so I lose a lot of heat and things like that. But if you took the raw cost, say a barrel of oil costs $50 as just an average dollar amount, that barrel of oil using my real average kilowatt hours per day could run my house for 79 days. So theoretically $50 worth of oil could run my house for almost three months. So why does it cost over $500 for me to run my house for almost three months when the barrel of oil only costs 50 bucks? And the answer is because nobody understands everything that goes into storing, moving, converting, generating, transporting, changing the voltage to higher voltage to push it through long lines and then back down through transformers to get it back to where you can use it in your house. All those things add cost to making your electricity. And so we go to try and solve our problems in Hawaii of how we're going to be renewable on the grid or how we're going to go with clean transportation, which is even more of a polluter or greenhouse gas issue than electricity. How are we going to do that if we don't really have a true respect and a true understanding of how much energy we're really talking about? And we're going to have to account for, just like an accountant does for all the numbers in your bank account, every penny to make sure we can do it reliably and people can have reliable energy. So to help me kind of go through some of this discussion today, I have a good friend, Sid Higa, who's got a great background of some F-22s flying over the beautiful skies of Hawaii because we both have an Air Force kinship back in the day, so to speak. And Sid is into sustainability and renewable energy and has been on the show before. So Sid, welcome to the show and why don't you take a couple seconds to tell the viewers a little bit about yourself and how you got into being interested in sustainability. Thank you, Stan, for having me on the show. Yes, so my background is I had 24 years of military service with the active duty Air Force, Hawaii Air National Guard and Air Force preserves. I've been in technology pretty much all that time from crypto tech to a computer systems development officer to running data centers and developing communication systems for the intelligence community, etc. So I've been interested in technology for a very long time and how I'm kind of interested in the sustainability part is because Hawaii is on an island 2500 miles away from the mainland, we are pretty much dependent upon ourselves, hopefully, for energy, clean water, as well as food. And so my efforts here lately have been towards clean water and sustainable energy so that we can support farmers and farming and hopefully become sustainable in our food production here. So looking at those two areas on how we can support farmers has led me to looking into alternative methods of delivering and creating energy to support those methods. So as we, and I promote this too, you know, when you think about the ancient Hawaiians, their population wasn't a whole lot different than what we have in the state today, it's probably within a couple hundred thousand. And yet they could sustain themselves with agriculture, with fishing. And it was because the systems that they had to make sure that they didn't deplete resources, they didn't deplete fish stocks or, or OP or, or, or anything else, and they could always feed themselves and that they took care of their water resources and maximize their agricultural practices. So as we look at what we face today in Hawaii, do we be looking for synergies between the production of electricity and agriculture? And as an example, I know on the big island, I know of it, at least two in-stream hydroelectrics. And I just talked to a gentleman last month who's helping actually put in a hydroelectric in-stream project for the, for KIUC, the utility on Kauai. And that's something that's always intrigued me because we've got water that was originally moved around the islands to support sugarcane and pineapple. And those aqueducts and those, those tunnels and things are still around. They may be fallen into disrepair in some places, but they still basically take rainwater and move it downhill so that we can use it for drinking water and things like that. So while it's running downhill, it could be producing electricity on the way downhill. And that's a synergy we should be taking advantage of. Do you, do you have any kind of, you know, are there things like that that you think about when you look at agriculture and water and the kind of ways we could be doing stuff a little bit more sustainably? Yeah. So from our standpoint, we're looking at it as far as what can we help the support the farmers with in their energy needs because they need to run their tractors. They need to be able to run their, their trucks and plows and be able to get their product to market. So they're going to need a sustainable method to provide that energy. And of course they need the energy to provide the water. So whether it's bringing it up from wells, bringing it and diverting it through the rainwater or in some cases, severe cases that go around to a drought, bring in and doing desalination for water so that we can use it for farming to make sure that we're sustainable in all aspects of creating our own food. And one of the things that you had mentioned there about the barrel of oil being able to produce enough electricity to run your household for nearly three months is power density. And I think what we're kind of missing here in some of this conversation is the power density. So I know that Kale Loa AES is a 180 megawatt electric generating plant. They sit on 28 acres of land and there's some solar developments that are familiar with one called Kapehao, solar on Oahu, and they create or they're mapped out to create 60 megawatts with 240 megawatts of storage. And it sits on 200 acres. So in other words, the power density from AES and Kale Loa compared to the solar project, you're actually almost 10 times, taking up 10 times a space of what Kale Loa is doing. And I know it's cold burning and it is considered a dirty method of producing electricity. However, on that 28 acres, they have the capacity to store roughly two months worth of coal to produce power at 180 megawatts per day. So power density is something that we're really not looking at. Yeah, and that's basically what I was trying to point out with the oil. People don't realize how much energy a barrel of oil can store and how convenient and cheap and cheap being the operative word. And that kind of ties into the theme I had in mind for today's show, which is if we plan to go green and we plan to do it quickly, like if we listen to Alexandria or Ocasio-Cortez, if we're not green in the next nine years, we're all going to die. If we can't do that in nine years, we're hosed, but how much will it cost? How much is it going to cost to replace all that energy density with totally new technology across the entire planet? And can we do it in 10 years? And I think the answer is no. And we have to be realistic and say, okay, but how do we do it as quickly and as efficiently and effectively as we can without causing more collateral problems or more issues? And I think there's ways we can do it. We just have to be smart about it. So you know that one of my favorite things is hydrogen. And the one nice thing about hydrogen is it actually has really good energy density when it comes to storing it. There's a lot of energy in hydrogen. If you don't think so, ask yourself what kind of liquid fuels they put in rockets to get it into orbit. And it's liquid hydrogen and probably hydrogen peroxide mixed together to make rocket fuel and put it, you know, it's a lot of energy. And the formula that I keep in my head is like a lead acid battery is 20, about 20 to 40 amp hours or amps per kilowatt kilogram, amp hours per kilogram. And hydrogen is 26,000 amp hours per kilogram. And your typical lithium ion battery is between four and 600 amp hours per kilogram, depending on exact chemistry. So nothing can come close to hydrogen's energy density. And if you've got to store a lot of energy, hydrogen is one of the best ways to do it. And in the sustainability side, if you're making hydrogen, like by splitting water with electricity, one of your byproducts is pure medical grade oxygen. And medical grade oxygen is actually really good for hydroponic and for raising aquaculture for fish. Because if you farm fish, and you put oxygen into their water, instead of just, you know, how they usually have something paddling the water or something to put air into the water, if you actually put oxygen into the water, the fish grow at a much more rapid rate because they can, they can digest the food and turn it into flesh faster if they're in an oxygen rich environment. So, you know, it's like we need to start looking at energy density and how we can get those synergies between agriculture and energy production and energy storage. Are there any things that you see on the horizon that would help us along those lines? Well, definitely. I think, like you said, there was an article that came out, I think it was yesterday, it was published that the Public Utilities Commission has approved microgrids. And I think hydrogen fuel cells or hydrogen powered within those microgrids would be a great method of distributing power and generation. But also from a sustainable sustainability standpoint, what people don't realize is the CO2 that we're trying to get rid of, we need to capture that because there's a lot of need for CO2. And the farmers, especially if they're doing greenhouse farming, if they're able to capture that CO2, take that captured CO2 and then apply it to the greenhouses, the plants grow a lot faster and they grow bigger. So it's the whole sustainability thing is just the big circle where we can use what we were capturing as well as utilize other methods to create the energy that we need. That's true. That's something we don't normally think about. We think about CO2 as the greenhouse gas that's bad for the planet. But in reality, that's what plants use to make oxygen. The O in CO2 gets released for us to breathe. To go back to the we have 10 years or 12 years or 15 years before we're all dead, I don't think people really think about the discussion in great detail. But if you want to realize how much natural CO2 there is in the air, because air is not a single gas. It's a homogenous gas of nitrogen primarily over 74% nitrogen, about 16 to 20% oxygen roughly. And then the rest are just a mix of gases. And if I ask the average person on the street, how much CO2 is normally found in the air? There's what percentage of if all the air is 100% and nitrogen 75 and oxygen 20, that leaves 95. In the last 5%, how much of that 5% is CO2? I guess a lot of people would say 5%, 4% would be wrong. 3%, 2%, they're still wrong. 1%, they're still wrong. It's 0.3%, not even 1% full. It's not even a half a percent. It's 0.3 is the natural average CO2. And when we talk about the state of where we're at now, it can approach 0.4%. So we're talking about a shift from 0.3 to 0.4 is about where we're at right now in terms of CO2 and in the air for greenhouse gas. But plants need it. And so maybe in agriculture, we need to focus it. We need to take that excess CO2, like you say out of a combustion system, because CO2 comes out of gas engines because it's not completely combusted in the burning process. And so you could take that CO2, you can this is something quite frankly, I just learned a couple of weeks ago. If you have pure CO2, it'll burn. I had no idea. And a guy showed me, you can go on Google it. I saw a picture of a flame of CO2 burning. And it's because unless you have the right mixture and even a pure form, and ignite it and have the right kind of jets and stuff, it's hard to get it to burn. So it's not a complete combustion in an engine, or when you burn like rubbish. But if you put it in the gasifier, like a lot of the waste energy systems are, a gasifier will pull a lot of the stuff out of there, including the bad stuff, and drop the carbon out and give you hydrogen, release the oxygen and give you a lot of good stuff that we probably ought to be looking into. So I guess what I'm trying to say here is a lot of people hang a big negative on CO2 and think our objective ought to be to get rid of as much CO2 as humanly possible. But that's not the right answer. The right answer is to look at it for what it's good for and balance it out. Like you say with, maybe we could help our crops grow better. If we had CO2 and had a way to get it to the plants in the right proportions to help them grow better. And I think that's the approach we have to take to solving our big energy problems, is to look through a different lens and see how we can take what we think of as negatives and turn it into positive. Absolutely. And those in the food and beverage industry would really have bits if we got rid of all the CO2, because that's where you get the bubblies in your soft drinks and stuff. Yes. My background wouldn't let you see that was my Wendy's cup. But yeah, I had ginger ale with my lunch today. So you're right. That's all CO2. And I just think we need to start looking at those kind of things. We need to let the real scientists, the real technology people, the real inventors, the real innovators, start to help us to solve these problems. In some ways, I think looking at the electric company to the electric company for all the answers is a mistake. And it's not because they're not good people. And it's not because they're not smart. They're really smart. They're dealing with a really complex grid that they have to keep going. But when you look at the electric world through their lens, they only see certain solutions. Otherwise, it costs them too much money or it's going to require massive changes to their infrastructure and things like that. But sometimes that's what it takes. It takes somebody from the outside who's not from the electric company to help the electric company solve them. So I was really happy when you told me about this PUC decision about the microgrids because that's one of the solutions that I think we really ought to be looking at. If you took a typical housing development like the one I live in here in Kailua that has about maybe 150, 200 houses in it, and if every house had solar on it, and if every house had some batteries, and maybe even some capacitors, and every house had a little tiny electrolyzer that could break down any electricity that was left over and turn it into hydrogen for storage, my whole housing development could be a microgrid. And even if one of my neighbors was running a little short on power, I could loan him power, or they could loan me back power, or somebody's house had solar panels that were going bad or were damaged by weather or wind. We could share electricity and have it all in one community. And what that does for you besides making it cheaper is that we have also the capability of surviving a storm. Because if all of us are contributing to the power for this one microgrid and there's no big power lines stringing all over the mountains where the winds and stuff just tear them apart during a big storm, we can survive the storm because our little community may get some damage, but we'll still be able to function. The one thing that's cool about solar panels is you can damage them and whichever solar panels aren't damaged in the array and still generate electricity. So you're more survivable as a microgrid. And I think it would solve a lot of problems with right now the electric company, no matter whether it's here or the mainland, they have to move the power. And in Honolulu, it's pretty short distances from Kahi power plant to Kailai Loa and that area of Kunia, not too far. The Pearl City power plant stuff, they can move it to Central Oahu over the mountains to the windward side. But on the big island, you get hundreds and hundreds of miles. And maybe at the end of the line, you only have 150, 200 houses. Does it make sense to run a high-voltage power line for 100 miles just to a couple hundred houses? It just doesn't make sense to me. It makes more sense to have a community on a microgrid that Hawaiian Electric runs and helps maintain those solar panels and helps maintain the batteries on the houses. And be the place that takes the old batteries and recycles them. Because batteries have an end-of-life issue that we need to also take into account. So I see Hawaiian Electric as needing to kind of change their vision of how their grid looks and be able to support microgrids and the people that contribute to microgrids as one of their services and take some of their linemen and have the linemen helping people in that community with their solar panels and with their batteries and with their capacitors and with their electrolyzers to work on their hydrogen, to store their hydrogen. And then as we move into fuel cell electric vehicles and plug-in electric vehicles, the folks that have hydrogen fuel cell cars, they could probably even be driving their car off of hydrogen they make off of their solar panel. And now they don't have an electric bill and they don't have a gas bill for their car. And those are the kind of things I hope that we're looking at. Are there any more that you can think of, Sid? Well, you had mentioned, you know, the amount of electricity a barrel of oil could run your household on. But I wonder if anybody's really measured the capacity of the electricity that gets used to charge their vehicle into how many miles it's running and the cost of all that as well. I don't think anybody's really measured that cost. I think the average person certainly has it. I don't know the exact equation, but I can tell you this. We built buses for the Air Force and the same design is going to be used for a helion bus for the hydrogen vehicles that come to the big island. And we had 14 kilowatt hour batteries, two of them in the bus. So each bus had 28 kilowatt hours of just battery storage, plus all the hydrogen that could be turned into electricity. If we didn't have the hydrogen on the bus, the bus could go about 30 miles on that 28 kilowatt hours of battery storage. That's almost a one-to-one ratio in terms of one mile per kilowatt hour. So if your house, like my house is 20, between 20 and 22 kilowatt hours of electricity used every day, if I drove 22 miles or 44 miles every day, I probably use half the energy a bus does. And I could have enough solar panels to provide my house with my 22 kilowatt hours. And my vehicles with 22 kilowatt hours or 22 kilowatt hours to move my small car instead of a bus, that's 44 kilowatt hours of power need to be generated by my solar panel. And we have five hours of what we call rated generation from solar panels here in our latitude and stuff. So that's what each panel is about 300. It's like about 40 panels. Your typical house has 40, 45 panels on it. It could run your house in your car. So that's the kind of thing where I think that's within reason. I mean, it'd be expensive investment right now. It's expensive to put solar on your house. But to double the solar, you could probably also run your car. A lot of us in Hawaii are retirees or self employed or don't drive cars quite as much as the truck driver. So maybe we could even do better than that. But those are the kind of things I think we need to look at. We have about a minute left. I'm going to leave it to you to just kind of wrap us up here. Yeah, well, maybe for another show, we could delve into those people that can't put solar up like those that live in condominiums and stuff. Because what we're talking about here is being able to generate your own electricity and stuff and then powering your own vehicles, whether it be through hydrogen or electricity. But those that live in condominiums, which there are about 3,000, I think condominiums within the islands. We need to help them solve this problem as well. I know the legislature is trying to tackle that one already. And I think it's getting some traction where if you live in a condominium or a townhouse or maybe you're renting. And so when you're renting, you don't own the building or you don't even own your lanai technically speaking. But you can actually invest in utility scale solar and get solar tax credits and maybe get credit for electricity because you've made an investment in a utility scale solar field where you own half a percent of the solar panels that are out there. And you share that with a bunch of other condominium owners. And I think that model would work out pretty well. So yeah, let's plan and have another show and we'll dig into some of the legislation and try and see if that's getting any traction. Great. Well, thank you very much for having me on the show today. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Sid. I got a steal of your background there from my Zoom meeting. So I'm jealous right now. That's a cool picture. I'll send you the image. Okay. Okay. Well, that's going to do it for Stan the Energy Man this weekend. We'll see everybody next week here on Think Tech Hawaii. Until then, aloha.