 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. Hey Aloha and welcome to Stand the Energy Man on this great Aloha Friday. We got volcanoes happening on the Big Island with plenty of energy in them that we'd like to tap into someday. And thunderstorms all around us which have a lot of energy in them so we're just full of energy here in Hawaii this week. But some of the most exciting news that's come out came out yesterday and it came out nationally, in fact internationally. I recall last week Friday I had Trevor Milton from Nikola Motors over on the mainland. He talked about his 18-wheeler hydrogen powered trucks that'll do between 600 and 1200 miles on one fill-up of hydrogen. It's about 100 kilograms of hydrogen on board. They announced yesterday that they've signed their first contract for a complete fleet change-out. And the company they're going to be changing out is all the fleet trucks for Budweiser and Hauser-Busch. So they're going to be providing 800 of these hydrogen fuel cell trucks to Hauser-Busch and I gotta say that's pretty bold and it's an exciting move for the hydrogen community and we're looking forward to those trucks hitting the roads on the mainland. And hopefully even sending some out here it's not like we don't drink any beer out here. So we could probably use a couple of those trucks out here and we'll have a station up to run them up. But it's been an exciting week in the hydrogen world, that's for sure. And today we've got an interesting discussion. We have Mark Ware from Ohm Energy Technologies. They're over on Maui right now but they're actually a big company that started on the mainland. I'll let Mark talk about all that. And we'll talk about an interesting thing. As you all know the first step that you do when you're trying to go to clean energy is you go for efficiency. And that means you try and reduce your energy costs and your energy requirements to the minimum then switch to the clean technology rather than just build to the dirty technology loads. And so what Mark does and what his technology does is helps especially with large companies and companies that have a lot of motors or big surge capacities on their systems to save energy and he'll explain how that works. So Mark welcome to the show and I really appreciate you being on and talking to me this week about your technology. It's been an amazing learning curve for me. Hello Mark. Thank you for having me here today. Tell us a little bit about how you got into doing what you're doing and then let's talk a little bit about your company. If you really want to go back to the beginning maybe three or four years ago my wife decided that we wanted to move our family and we had a small farm just outside of Boise, Idaho and we were vacationing here at one particular time and so we were contacting a company that was interested in some representatives and some people to help develop something that really was a novel idea and I didn't realize the emboldment with a major player General Electric and so we took a trip to Nashville, Tennessee literally the next weekend and it was April of 2014 and we took a tour of the factory met with the inventor and kind of a crash course on what this actually does and how it is utilized in large facilities and at that time General Electric had already been involved 12 years doing all the early studies and along with other agencies that conducted their own laboratory studies of the powerhouse and that's what it's called and what the powerhouse does it boost levels of 18 voltage across all phases no matter the load and for a facility that has to keep everything keep all their motors and induction equipment happy they have to keep the voltage boosted and elevated and otherwise you're going to be using a lot of current that's going to burn out and so anyway this technology really intrigued me and so then we got more involved with it and in the four years we've seen a real evolution a lot of people were working together to really develop it to what it is today I have a team in Southern California and on the east coast that have developed another side of our technology so that whatever the powerhouse does to a facility you can remotely access and evaluate exactly what's going on at any given facility without having to go to the panel you could be around the world and still know what's going on at the facility I mean this is all technology that is just mind boggling today we're the first to have at least the monitoring part of the technology and it's really been an exciting time for us and so what gave you the background to go I mean what kind of education do you have that kind of brings you into this world originally I wanted to be a concert pianist so I studied piano from a young age and when I was a teenager I went to the Jury Art School of Music for pre-college but my grandfather who was a real influence in my life was a noted faculty physics professor at Oregon State University and so I spent summers over there visiting them and watching my grandfather do all of his experiments and he actually went to Tesla from the 1920s to his death in 1943 and was interested and I didn't realize it at the time of course I was 8 to 10 years old but all that stuff really intrigued me and I remember him telling me things that I didn't appreciate as much then as I do now just how valuable of a man that Tesla was and so a lot of times he would teach on that line of education with his students and carry that legacy and so that carried with me to University of Oregon where I studied physics as well as piano performance but the physics end of it carried on today and I always learn and I always kind of go back to my roots and just always have an open mind to things and with education and reading then you become a little more versed in some of these new technologies that come out. It's always amazing to me when you start getting to know somebody and talk to them about the diverse backgrounds that they have and how their paths through life take twists and turns and the fact that your grandfather actually worked with Nikola Tesla is a huge thing. I don't know for sure if he actually worked with him but they were colleagues especially when Tesla was working with the US government and my grandfather was in the barrel of minds as well and so he was one of my grandfather was one of the world's leading authorities on Nikola Cobalt and Platinum and with lecture all over the world so he got to know a lot of people in the so-called industry and Tesla was one of them. That's amazing. Well let's talk a little bit about your powerhouse and we'll pull that first graphic up to kind of show and once you describe to us what it is that the powerhouse does I know you talked about trying to boost voltage and maybe you can start off with an analogy of why the Europeans and other countries tend to use 220 versus 110 volt for their main distribution in the residential and commercial buildings. Sure on the mainland and on the island in the US the US has their own standards on voltage and it happened to be 208 and 480 here and as well as 60 hertz and so in order to work with that there are some technologies that utilize more DC than AC DC having the characteristics that you can manipulate the power more easily and that's why they can work on some technologies can work on less power and that's where variable frequency drives come into play because it's basically an AC DC converter and because DC is used as the inductance current for any motor you can adjust and manipulate the amount of power and if you do it right you can reduce the power in motors even by half but that creates problems and so what the powerhouse does is number one other than boost level and maintain the voltage lower the amps since volts and amps are a reciprocal relationship to each other so if you raise the volts amps will lower and conversely if you lose volts then the amps come up and amps is heat and so anytime you throw more heat at some things you're going to burn out that equipment or component so that's why it's very important to just make sure you have the voltage which is pressure and then you have amps which is the full date to let all the electrons in and so but secondly what the powerhouse does it there's an amount of power that's in the neutral whenever you have motors you have to have a certain amount of power to keep the magnetic fields going that is called reactive power and it's totally necessary it's not equalized in that EW which is what you're built for in the work the motor does reactive and it goes through the neutral but what our patent does we collect that power in the neutral utilize it to secondary power source recycle and return it for use within the facility otherwise it goes to ground or it even bounces back to the utility distribution line to go somewhere else and as you know island power is not designed for power to bounce back into the system it creates pickups and interruptions and that's something that you don't want to do so you're actually helping out the utility as well by kind of helping smooth some of their power out and not getting that bounce back especially by going to the larger consumer of power for instance we did one mean plaza which is the federal building and it's a six-story structure and it houses the water department and IRS and a few other agencies and so it's one of the largest power users in the area so if you make things really nice as far as volts and to take care of whatever wine surges and sags that could come about from starting motors and engines within the facility then we're making the neighbors happy because that facility is not creating a disturbance and I assume from this you talked to Miko and Hawaiian Electric and they're familiar with what you're doing or is it kind of new to them and kind of exciting to them because they don't have anybody doing this regularly out here a couple of weeks ago I had a meeting with Sharon Tzuzuki, Mike Ryder, and Ellen Bovellon and Sharon is the president of Miko and the idea of that meeting was not to have a utility company endorse us because they can't I mean we're in military bases and we had the DOE and DOG come out from Washington D.C. and even government agencies can't endorse us as a product and so the whole idea for the meeting with Miko was to let them know that the technology exists, that we're here on the island and that we're here to stay and if they hear about us then they know exactly what we're doing I'll tell you what Mark, we're about halfway through the show here and we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with Mark in about 60 seconds Aloha, I'm Marcia Joyner inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000 year Odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us and stay with us as we explore all the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us Aloha. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart and at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going underwater talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart and see you then. Hey welcome back to my lunch hour, Stan the Energyman here with Mark Ware from Ohm Energy Technologies over on Maui but they're not just on Maui, they've got units all over the place now I've got two questions for you right off the bat and they're both number questions about how much is the average savings that a big user like the federal building there on Maui what's the average savings that those folks get from your unit and how many units do you have out there nationwide? Nationwide we have over 700 units and last Labor Day weekend we installed at manufacturing their aluminum parts planted in Missouri we're in Procter & Gamble, Labor Brothers our biggest client right now is John Q. Hammons which is MBC Sweets Resorts and a lot of that the resorts is spilling over to the Isles I currently have data loggers at a couple of large resorts right now with more going in so we'll make an impact on that basis and the other question that I could you repeat that? Yeah, but what's the average savings for when you install this for a large customer what kind of energy savings are they looking at? conservatively I say 10 to 20% and that's usually the range that we see at one main plaza we've reduced and I'm looking at between 9 to 12 12,000 KWH per month and so that's pretty significant and we've seen we did one in Florida at a big injection molding company and we reduced the KWH by 84,000 KWH per month and at Toyota it's in 100 to 1000 KWH per month for reducing the bill. Yeah and here locally that's quite a bit of money considering we're kind of hovering around the 30 cents a kilowatt hour price you take that 9,000 or whatever and now you're talking $2,000 a month on your electric bill for a company well, 3 grand, 3 to 4,000 a month. Right so it's pretty impressive. That's big. It's one of the resorts that we are hopefully going to get into it's going to dork that significantly. Alright so the other piece of your technology that's like part B of your powerhouse is the monitoring piece and other than being able to real time look at your data from any location in the world, what are some of the other advantages? I know that you've had interruptions at certain facilities you know it's a mystery like gee why did this piece of equipment fail but your monitoring actually helps do some slew thing to figure that out. Well the main thing is generally when they need to get to the panel and see what's going on you have to open it up and hire electricians and all that well everything's in place to where you know I can go on any locations that we have installed I can see what's going on at the facility I can see what improvements we need to make if we need to add other capacitor banks. I mean for instance even though we're at 98% efficiency at one main plaza we're going to install another capacitor bank and we're going to hard wire it into the powerhouse so it's on 24-7 but we're going to get it up to 99.5% at all time and you know that's unreal we blow engineers away when we're able to do that pretty readily. Okay we're going to throw up that second image and look inside the cabinet there. So right now we have the image up where we've got the panels open and we're looking at the blue units around the side can you kind of give us an idea of what's going on there? Okay well those the blue is the MOBs and the middle oxide barristers and the goal of the middle oxide barristers is to transport the electrons either to storage capabilities like to the capacitors or distributed within the facility and so it's always a two-way street and that's all they do and where by themselves it doesn't sound like they do much but the amount of current that they're able to handle each of those blue MOBs can handle up to 100,000 amps and it's huge and so wired in parallel you know of course you accumulate the amps when you wire in parallel you have 600,000 amps per phase so it'll handle any size facility any amount of power that it can take and we've had a couple of instances in fact one of them here on Maui where the line was hit by lightning and our powerhouse did everything it was supposed to do and protected the building from some major damage and they had just purchased a couple of new chillers this was that Stopwatch foreign grill and this was two three years ago that this happened and all it did was knock out two of the MOBs and GED sent them out we put them back in and they've been up and going for about four years now. Wow so it actually helps protect equipment too besides smoothing the power and giving real-time feedback on what's going on in the system it actually helps protect the equipment from outside surges as well as manage inside surges and again you say technology is particularly advantageous when you have a lot of things like big compressor motors or chillers or things that have big surge rushes on your power system is that correct? Yeah and the other thing it does is it prevents wine surges and sex to occur as the power is being distributed by the utility company. Now I have to say having said this that at the meeting with Niko one of the first things that came out of my mouth was how impressed I was in particular with Maui how nice of a system we have here for power distribution and I know by the look on their faces they weren't expecting me to say that but I did preface it by saying for island power and it's pretty amazing that we can be 100 miles from a big piece of land and still have the power distribution and really something that's pretty efficient but what our equipment does it just makes it so much better so that we can enjoy the same efficiency just like on the mainland and the mainland they have their own problems too so we're not the only place in the world with power problems I'm sure the Niko folks when they talked to you were surprised because I had this experience about two weeks ago we provided the power for an outdoor event using hydrogen fuel cell generators and I went up to each person that was plugging stuff in asking them what their equipment required for power and I got the deer and the headlights looked because they had no idea they're just so used to plugging stuff into the wall and to have somebody that really understands the power requirements out there like you do probably got their attention pretty quick. Well the fact that they have two huge generators that they procured in the 1980s from Langley, Virginia from the CIA facility there and those bad boys are some of the best generators you can get and we have two of them here on Maui and I do know that Wahoo has some pretty nice generators there as well they were surprised with me coming out and praising the system that they have it's just that we're here to make it better. I'm going to give you some time on your own but because you mentioned the word hydrogen before we went on air I'm going to ask you to talk a little bit about your view of what hydrogen's role is in the future for transportation and for grid power just because I know you've done a little bit of that work and then I want to leave the rest of the time to you to just wrap up whatever you'd like to for ohm. Oh sure, thank you and hydrogen since it's so easy to produce you know I was working with that a few years ago working on a system for homes and cars and then when this opportunity came up you know it just kind of took a backseat to that but hydrogen you know it's totally clean there's no emissions it's just water and the only thing that we have to be careful of is making sure that the electrolyte in that is safe to use you don't want to use a lot of light and if there's other materials that will not impact the environment especially on an island we have to keep everything contained here and we don't want to contain anything that's going to harm the atmosphere or the land and so we have to really respect this area so it produced cleanly hydrogen is the way to go well the new PEM electrolyzers don't use any kind of caustic electrolyte in them and the new alkaline electrolyzers like you said they use lye use a very very low concentration that's not even you can get it on your skin and go walk over and wash it off and you won't get any kind of issues from it but we got about a minute left and I'd like to leave the last minute up to you to just talk about you know what it is about your technology you think we should be looking at here on the islands well I think like you mentioned hydrogen is the way to go you have to remember that every technology that we have we're still going to be grid type the grid is not going to go away it's just the vehicle and the resources to be able to provide that orderly and capillary action to facilities and homes and all that we have to work together the powerhouse works with all technologies wind, solar, VFB's anything like that it just has to be grid type and so any new technology that comes about the powerhouse can be a part of that plan. Well Mark I really thank you for being on the show today and talking to us a little bit about your technology it was an eye-opener for me I learned a lot talking to you this week getting ready for the show and I'm actually pretty excited to get this thing on YouTube because you know I think for some people looking at the powerhouses like a dog watching TV if you're not an engineer especially an electrical engineer but I can tell you my electrical engineering friends are going to watch this show and it's going to blow their socks off so I really appreciate you explaining it and even explaining it to the point where I can understand it because I'm not an engineer and I think you did a great job and I'm looking forward to seeing that energy savings kick in and all the other qualities that your equipment does for folks and I hope you got some meetings over here with Hawaiian Electric on Oahu and you can do a lot more of the big issues over here because we got a lot more heavy pulling loads over here on Oahu than they do on Maui so get over here and start squaring these guys away. I have done a project on Oahu at the Pacifica building on Kapiolani Boulevard and one of our systems is in there. In fact the picture you have I believe is from the Pacifica Okay Mark, well thanks a lot for being with us this week and we'll have to have you back on the show maybe next time you're over here on Oahu but we'll get you on in person and we'll have to bring you in via technology but thanks for being on the show today and explaining everything and thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studio for making all the magic happen. This is Stan Osserman for Think Tech Hawaii and we'll see you next week Friday. Aloha.