 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Well, and welcome to Stand Energy Man. Stan Osserman here, not with a whole lot of energy today. It's been a heck of a week. It's been a heck of a year. Can you believe it is already November? I mean, I was walking over here to the studio and they're putting out Christmas decorations already and I'm blown away. But today's show is really kind of interesting. I had a busy, busy week this week and we're going to start off talking about some of the events that happened earlier in the week. And my guest for this week actually crumped out on me at last minute. So I was looking at some of the homeless folks downstairs and grabbed one of them and brought them up. So I have a curious observer here with me and he's going to start off the show. So this curious observer, me look familiar to some of you, Jay Fidel, who's, of course, the big heavy hitter here at Think Tech and thanks, Jay, for being on the show with me. Thank you, Stan. I appreciate it. Earlier this week, there was an interesting event at the University of Hawaii East West Center, Jefferson Hall. And it was a compilation of six companies from Germany organized by the local Consul General from Germany and the German Chamber of Commerce. It was their second annual German Hawaii Energy Symposium and it was a really great event, well done, especially considering how quickly they had to get all the moving pieces together. And in spite of all the rain that came down that day, Tuesday we had some like two inches of rain an hour kind of rain and they pulled it off and it was really great. They had great speakers, great panels and it was a great event. So Jay was there for some of it and what we wanted to do is kind of share a little bit about that day. So thanks, Jay, for being here. That symposium, I was really impressed with the companies that they brought over. Some of them were energy companies. Some of them were sustainability architecture type companies. Some of the panels talked about sustainable architecture, including panelists from UH School of Architecture and some local architecture firms that contributed to the whole thing. So it was a really great event and I know you had a little bit of time. What was your impression of the event as you saw it? Well, I was hit the one last year, which was more tech than sustainability. And I think it's emblematic the fact that this program has evolved further into sustainability. I was also, I talked to some of the German representatives the other day and I must say that I was very impressed with them. They're global thinkers. They know Hawaii very well. They know about our local energy systems and they want to participate. They're not here to sell. They're here to make partnerships. And I really liked them, as I did last year. I agree. The companies that came over were looking to be part of Hawaii. They weren't looking to just sell stuff. They wanted to be part of the culture here, contribute to the culture here. And I think the things that stood out for me were the fact that they all recognized that Hawaii is leaning forward on clean, sustainable energy and they were really impressed. So bringing them here was easy because that's the goal. And I do a lot of work with European hydrogen companies in particular and some of the concepts are using on the European continent are really directly applicable to Hawaii. I showed a couple of weeks ago, I showed a Norwegian example of how they're taking a coal plant off of an island in Norway, but it's a fairly large population and they're going to replace it with fuel cells and they're going to use liquid hydrogen coming off of North Sea curtailed power and make liquid hydrogen, put it in a ship and we had a photo of the ship that they've already designed to carry liquid hydrogen to this island and supply the hydrogen for the community. And so things like that are things that are directly applicable to Hawaii. We're an island, we have a great need for baseload power in Oahu, but we have the resources on the neighbor islands to produce things like if we use geothermal for liquid hydrogen, we could easily transport hydrogen to Oahu and use it for baseload power. And that would solve a lot of our clean energy issues. So there were some great companies there. One company that was kind of, I don't want to say the odd company, but interesting was a container company that takes huge shipping containers. Container work and maximum million sites. That was awesome. And they take these containers, they clean them up, they insulate them first and then they make really nice, really nice interiors in them and put windows and doors and stuff in them. Affordable housing. Yeah, it's like 320 square feet per container. The two containers, you've got a studio apartment or one bedroom apartment and that's a good solution for affordable housing. And you can stack them too. You can stack them, you can modularize them together and put them in arrangements around common areas and the quality of the work in there was really beautiful. So it got a lot of people's attention. And maximum million sites, we had an interview with him later on, which we'll play in our OC16 movie, is actually stationed in New York. They're doing business on the mainland. So it's very interesting how the Germans are adding not only their energy technology, but their sustainability technology and their aesthetic technology, if you will, to the whole mixture. I really appreciated that. I mean, let me say also that the Germans, in this case, the second year, reach out to us. They want to be here. You helped organize this program, I know. They want to be here. They want to come and touch us and be part of the Hawaii scene. But nobody else from Europe is doing that. It's just the German fact. Even the Chinese aren't really doing that when they come here and try to have a conference like this and build relationships. So I'm very impressed with those guys. I think they're doing great work. And I think we cannot—we, Hawaii, cannot be insular. We have to look across the oceans. We have to find out what's going on everywhere in the world. As you do, you reach out. We need to be connected because we need the benefit of their innovations, their creative thinking. And when you have a conference like the one earlier this week, we get the benefit of their creative thinking. Yeah, you're exactly right on that mark, because I live in a house that I grew up in. And when my wife asked me to remodel it, I go, I can't. I can only see it this way. We here in Hawaii tend to look at our energy systems and things like we can only see it the way it is. And when you bring somebody from the outside that has a different way of doing things to begin with or different innovative and new technologies, they can bring us ideas that we just can't conceive of because we're used to doing it one way. And they're not incompatible. Their concepts are sustainable, just like ancient Hawaiian culture was sustainable with fishing and agriculture. So they kind of bring in a complementary look. And you're right. They want to be here. They want to be part of the community. They want to do the best they can do to help Hawaii be Hawaii. I'm so glad you set that up. So Stan, you spoke at this. David Lassner, president of UH, spoke a number of people from Germany and from UH and the community, the energy community here spoke, but you spoke. Can you tell us what you talked about? Yeah, I was on a panel with Paul Ponteo from BluePenet Research, Mitch Ewen from University, HNEI. We had one of the gentlemen that was from actually worked with Dr. Croc from University of Hawaii on the OTEC. Hans Croc, engineer. Yeah, a long time ago, went to Germany, went back to school, got his PhD and everything, and then came back to talk. But he was totally immersed in Hydrogen World. A young lady, Chinese young lady from one of the companies was also on the panel, trying to think who else was on the panel. And it was moderated by Rick Rochello from HNEI. Yeah, great. But my talk was focused on doing everything in the Hydrogen World, everything from residential, for people that can afford a residential system where they could use their photovoltaics on the roof and maybe a small electrolyzer to make Hydrogen and store it for long-term energy storage and some batteries in their house to kind of do the power smoothing and the power surge controls. And then they would have a car that runs on Hydrogen, Toyota or Hyundai or Honda, they're all in production now, take one of those cars and never have to buy fuel for the car or electricity for the house, but set up their system so it could do everything. So that could be a one end of the scale. And the other end of the scale could be Hawaii doing liquid hydrogen off of geothermal on the big island and exporting that power to the world, including Oahu, but exporting. Can you imagine the economic impact of Hawaii going from an energy importing economy to an energy exporting economy? We've got to do that. And the market is already there. The mainland wants liquid hydrogen. The military wants liquid hydrogen. Asia wants liquid hydrogen. If we can step out and do that and it doesn't have to be funded by the state, the state can do public private partnerships with large companies like Air Lequid, Air Gas that do those systems and big companies that do modern geothermal. Not that Pune geothermal is ancient, but it is fairly old technology and there's much cleaner, safer new technology that can take the electricity from geothermal and some heat and turn it into liquid hydrogen and then have that for an export. HECO also needs a really good baseload renewable source on Oahu to make their goal 2045 and liquid hydrogen would be a great one. So we have both ends of the scale there. The individuals with solar on their house can use any curtail power or power they're not using to make hydrogen and use it in their car and on their house and to be their backup reserve power for their own home. Then you have a large scale and everything in between, Michiu and Pitch, and I agree with them that if the public is going to put money into this like the government, then you ought to be doing buses and transportation that's public transportation. And so he and the young Chinese girl from one of the companies were pitching to do fleets. I also said that in the middle there, there's forklifts. Toyota makes forklifts. There's at least four or five companies that make material handling equipment that's perfect for warehouses that are enclosed like refrigerated warehouses where you can't have carbon monoxide being emitted. And instead of just using battery power, which in cold climates deteriorates the battery a little bit. But also if you run 24 hours a day, a hydrogen forklift, you just go over and squirt some hydrogen in and it's back on the floor doing work. Instead of having to stop and recharge it for hours. So we just talked about the full spectrum of infrastructure and equipment and vehicles that we can use. And we didn't even get into ships and boats and aircraft on hydrogen. So you were on the panel that Rick Roscholo moderated and that was about batteries as an asset on development of grid. So what I get out of that is that hydrogen and batteries, they're all assets on developing grid. Exactly, in fact, I started off my talk saying, I like batteries. Because most people think hydrogen people don't like batteries. But I pointed out that you have dry cell batteries, like alkaline batteries and nickel cadmium batteries. And then you have wet cell batteries, like your 12 volt in your car. You have lithium iron phosphate batteries, like the ones that Blue Planet sells. And then you have fuel cell batteries, which have an anode, a cathode, just like any other battery, except you push hydrogen and air in. And it makes electricity from hydrogen and air. It's a self-charging battery. So include it, include fuel cells in your battery category. And we need the traditional batteries to go with the fuel cells to complement the way you structure your power. And Paul Ponteo pointed that out in his talk. But I point that out because if you just strictly think batteries the way he goes doing now, or a lot of people are doing, even the Air Force is doing now, much to my chagrin, they forget that batteries just because you're used to them aren't the solution, aren't the total solution. Because by weight, they're too heavy. If you wanted to ship energy from the big island geothermal to Oahu with batteries, your barge wouldn't be floating very well. I mean, the batteries would be so huge and take up so much, be so heavy, you couldn't move them. They're all so expensive. They're also inefficient when you use them in mass because most batteries don't, you want to cycle them, but if you're using them just to cover peak loads and stuff and store energy for a long time, they're not very efficient. So the idea is to use the full range of technologies in the batteries world to complement each other and take the hydrogen and make it your long term storage or your high power storage and use the full spectrum. And the key to export is with the hydrogen because you can export it anywhere in the world. You don't have any deterioration and it can be used anywhere in the world. It's fungible. Exactly. So let me ask you this. I'm sure after your talk, you spoke to some Germans there and I'm really wondering what their reaction is and whether the Germans are interested in what you're talking about. Hydrogen, you know, balanced with batteries and whether they're doing work in the same area. Yeah, actually, I talked to some of them before the conference and the one German gentleman on our panel, he gave my briefing. In fact, I didn't even use, I used one slide from one of the companies that came there, but his talk covered everything that I was going to talk about, Derek. So we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back with Concerned Citizen Jay that I found homeless downstairs in a few minutes. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, the host of Hawaiian Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy a response from the public. But join us here, Hawaiian Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha. I am Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Cold Green for Think Tech Hawaii. I appear every other Monday at three. And I have really, really exciting guests on the exciting topic of energy efficiency. Hope to see you there. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man. On my lunch hour, as usual, we're Community Matters. And we're here with Jay Fidel talking about what happened earlier this week at the German Hawaii Energy Symposium up at the University of Hawaii. And we're talking about some of the interfaces that we had. So there was one young gentleman, I told you, who was a student of Hans Kroc, who was the inventor, basically a low-tech or ocean thermal power. And he moved back to Germany, did a lot of work, and then came back. And he was on our panel, along with Aaron Kirk from Hawaii Gas. And his briefing was just, it covered everything that I would have put in my briefing. And so it's like they're on the same wavelength that I am over here. And it's probably, like you say, I try and cover and look at what everybody else is doing, because I look at what can work here. And I find so much that can work here. And we're really excited about trying to make some of that happen. So it was a great event. The German Council General, Dennis Salih, he did a great job with his team. And I'm looking forward to next year. I think it's going to be really exciting. Great success. And we got one panel there, the one on sustainable buildings, architects sustainability panel shared by Martin de Spang, who is one of our hosts here at ThinkTech and who hosts a show on Tuesdays for a long time called Humane Architecture. And then a smaller panel with the Maximilian sites that you mentioned about those container homes. And that was very interesting. And we got some great pictures of them. So bottom line is there was a lot to offer in that program. It was a one-day program, but it was shock-a-block. It was jam-packed. There was a lot of stuff in there. But that's not the only stuff that happened last week. So we're going to throw up one of the other pictures that we took this week. And I'll talk a little bit about it. This is actually, we call it SPOD. And you notice it's got some Air Force stuff on the side. It's actually just a real simple, like a FedEx-type van. But that van, as plain as it looks, is a hydrogen fuel cell van with a 30 kilowatt fuel cell and 100 kilowatt hours of battery power in it. And it can export power. It can export pretty much any kind of power you want. So what we did was we told the manufacturer when he built the van that it had to cover from 110 to 440 volt AC. And it had to cover one phase and three phase. And it had to cover DC from 12 volt to 48 volt. So he built this system to basically do whatever the Air Force needed to do on a flight line. Because that's the kind of vehicle they use on a flight line to take mechanics and the equipment out to the airplanes and fix the airplanes. So they delivered that van several months ago and the Air Force was out here this week. And we had the company configure it to do basically its thing. And it blew everybody away because it did more stuff than I even thought it would do. Not only would it export the power in AC and DC, but it could import solar power from a solar to charge its own battery. So you could sit there in the back with a little laptop computer and go take the power from the battery, turn it into three phase 240 volt and send it out through these two outlets here. Or you could say, no, we don't want three phase 240. We want 110 volt and send it 20 amp circuits this way. Or no, we're going to charge this other electric vehicle. So we want single phase DC going there. And you could just literally at the computer set it up and do it. So this does suggest some really interesting possibilities. One possibility to that last point you made is, so I'm down and out. I have an electric car. I don't have any power left. I'm empty. The old road concern becomes real. Range concern becomes real. So I call a vehicle like this and the vehicle comes to me and charges me up and I can do a number of charges like that and it's totally mobile. And I as an investor, an entrepreneur, I can buy a vehicle like this and make some money charging people up when they run out of electric power. Or charging portable power stations. A lot of times when you have to put power into a building to do charging stations for EVs. But if you had standalone systems that maybe had hydrogen, solar and batteries in, but it was getting really used a lot, you need to kind of boost it up. Take one of these vehicles, plug it in, boost the batteries up, get it caught up on its power and let it keep charging vehicles. So that then you don't have to be attached to the grid. But this vehicle has a lot of other good uses the military is looking at. And we actually demonstrated a couple of weeks ago with the National Guard. During emergencies, this vehicle can go over to a building and plug into a building and run a building. A small building for like maybe a day and the size of a bigger than a house but smaller than a condominium and provide the power that you need for a command post or emergency response place for a day or a gas station or a water treatment plant or a residence. And you can do the same thing in those commercial buses that we're talking about with Mithuan, that those vehicles can then be used by the city or the county to be portable rolling power supplies to go plug in and give power at a hospital or whatever if you need it. So that technology is important and we demonstrated with one of our five kilowatt fuel cells about two weeks ago. We worked with the Hawaii National Guard and their SERF-P, which is a chemical response team and the Indonesian military in an event out of Kuala Lumpur, where we provided power for those tents to operate their equipment. And they were blown away with the hydrogen, it was actually more reliable and smoother power than the diesel generators. And lighter weight because you can put more of it on a vehicle. Exactly. That's one of those things I pushed to the Air Force, that if they are going to go with a lot of batteries, they're going to be increasing the weight of what they ship. And if you use hydrogen, you're decreasing the weight and you don't have to ship fuel because the fuel you get from the local solar panels or whatever you have downrange. So a lot lighter shipping and better mileage. God, it boggles the mind how many possibilities when you have effectively an electrical charging device that can move around and give you large charges for large buildings and medium-sized buildings, incredible flexibility. Now the next images we have coming up, these are kind of fun because if any of you that know David Rolf, he's the head of the White Auto Dealers Association, when he talks about vehicles or he talks about America in general, he says Americans only understand two things, cars and pizza. So the next thing coming up on the screen, I was blown away this week when a friend of mine sent me pictures of a Toyota Tundra with a hydrogen fuel cell drive train and in the back end of it is a pizza hut, actually a pizza hut oven and everything and they've shown this in several auto shows but it's hydrogen fuel cell and so I sent it to Dave Rolf and said now you got to change what you talk about because obviously Toyota Tacomas and Toyota Tundras are sold more here than anywhere, any other vehicle on the planet so now you got to change it to people only know to pick up trucks and pizza and here's why we're going to do with hydrogen. So that one's for Dave Rolf and I really love seeing that one. So how do they, does the truck heat the pizza? Oh, it cooks it. There's some kind of special arrangement there. It makes it, it cooks it and then it cuts it up, it does everything. It's all automated, it's pretty impressive. Automated pizza, electric pizza if you will. On demand. Hydrogen electric pizza. On demand. So what about the Mariah, how's the Mariah doing? I just actually got a call from Servco this morning and they're getting ready to actually get the leases finalized for folks and they wanted to know if I was still on the list. And I had to tell them that I just bought a Subaru from Servco. So I may not be personally on the list, but I'm still considering it. But for sure, our office would like to probably set up a lease and have it available to do more demonstration things within the state government and within the community. And because right now we have two light carts, we have two generators. We have a small electric vehicle and if we had the Mariah, when we do events to support the community, we would take all those out to demonstrate them to support hydrogen. How does that lease work? Are there special benefits attached? They, it's a three-year lease. They didn't give me numbers on it, but it's a three-year lease and they provide hydrogen for the three years up to $15,000 worth of hydrogen. Wow, they provide the fuel, wow. Yeah, so when you look at the cost of the vehicle and everybody goes, wow, that's kind of high. But when you're getting $15,000 worth of fuel with the vehicle, that drops the price down to, I think, a really reasonable price. Is that enough to, do we know whether that's enough to carry the vehicle for the three years? It, depending on your personal driving habits, but what's interesting is the folks at Toyota have been driving those vehicles because their station's been up and running for several months. But the leadership and some of the folks have been driving the vehicles and they're reporting about 10% more mileage, better mileage than they expected out of the vehicles. So they're expecting just over 300 miles per fill-up and they're getting more like 340, 350 and even a little higher. So, you know, depending on how much driving you do and your driving habits and whether you live up, you know, have to drive uphill and downhill all the time, it'll, it'll vary for your vehicle. But depending on the lease price, that could be very attractive. Yeah. What I'd like to do to wrap up the show today is show one last video again because I'm kind of a hydrogen junkie and Jane knows this, so he's going to go with it. But we produced a really good video that I'd like to show that, that talks about hydrogen, how it works. So folks can understand hydrogen. So Robert, if we can roll that video, I'd appreciate it. Hydrogen, the simplest element and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% 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. That's going to wrap it up for Stanley Energy Man this first week in November of 2018. And I'd like to thank Jay Fidel for filling in my vacancy here. Thank you so much, Jay. Thank you, Stan. It's been great, always good having you on because I got my start here with you on Monday afternoons or Wednesday afternoons. We'll see you next week on Stanley Energy Man. Aloha.