 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mithuan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm very pleased to welcome our guest today, Toby Kincaid, who I've known for what, 30 years. Toby, at least. I think it has been, yes. Yeah, so Toby's a pioneer in the solar industry, and most recently, he's an electric vehicle charging systems visionary. We're going to be talking a lot during this session about EV charging. So we're actually going to talk about a story about a million miles of electric vehicle mobility, and how do we get there a million miles? That sounds like a huge number, but we're going to also, the tagline is driving on sunshine. So, Toby, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Aloha, Commander. Thanks for having me. You're going to unravel all the mysteries of how do we get to a million miles of EV running off of solar power from a parking lot? Yes, absolutely. You wouldn't think solar energy could push a car, but it sure can. And as we all know, we're in really big trouble. Our world is burning up, and we've got to move fast. And the concern is, what can we do to move this all along? How do we change 300 years of fossil fuels and 120 years of petrol into clean energy, water-based fuels, clean electricity? That's the question. How are we actually going to do it? So let's look at our options we have right now for electric vehicle charging. Excellent. What I did is I put together five solutions, five options. And the first one is kind of what everyone has been doing, and that is level two charging. So the idea is you take solar, you put it onto the grid, which we'll talk about. That's a little problematic, but we put it on the grid and then we can bring it to the parking lot and run a level two charger. Level two is about seven kilowatts. OK, that's my question. I was going to say, what does level two need? Right. So there's three levels, one, two, and three. Three is called DC fast charge, and they're all different power rating. Level one is residential, and that's where you plug in your 120-volt wall socket to charge your car. It takes a while. Level two is faster. You get to seven kilowatts or nowadays up to 19, but typically it's around seven. And that'll give you about 25 miles per hour as a charging rate. And then there's the DC fast charge. And DC fast charge uses a lot of power to push as much power into the battery to charge it as fast as possible. Now, that's a human idea. Batteries don't like to be pushed, but we don't really care about batteries. They work for us, right? So we push them hard. So are there any degradation issues when you're fast charging like that? Absolutely. It's the least efficient way to do it. And in fact, some of the cars, if the battery is too cold, it won't accept the DC fast charge. So you have to yo-yo, which is they accelerate and decelerate, accelerate and decelerate to kind of warm the battery up. So batteries are very finicky. And when you wanna run large loads, well, you get into kind of a kettle of fish, but we can work with it. And normally in our discussions, we talk about transportation. We talk about aviation and different sectors, the marine and all the ground transport that we need to do. But today, I thought perhaps we could just focus on the light duty vehicles, which would be cars and light pickup trucks. And in that regard, batteries are very popular. Elon Musk in the last 10 years has kind of driven people this direction. Well, but we'll talk a little bit about some of the challenges that are actually involved, but basically to do clean energy for transportation as far as cars and light trucks and others, but there's five basic solutions. So if you throw those up, we kind of go through, you have option number one. And option number one's been around a long time. It uses the grid and you're gonna deliver electricity to the parking lot where you have your level two dispensers. Okay, that's fine. Because level two isn't a lot of power, there's really no grid upgrades required typically. So this has been the case for 10 years. But now we look at section two, the second choice, which is kind of an extension of one. This time instead of level two, everyone wants to do DC fast charge, which is a huge amount of power. A house is about five kilowatts. So level two at seven, a little more than everything turned on in a house, not bad. But when you get to DC fast charge, you're talking about now it's popular as 150 kilowatts. So that's- Really? Yeah, that's 30 houses of material. Wow. Of power capacity that you need. And now they're pushing for the 350 kilowatts. So we're talking about 70 houses of capacity to charge one vehicle. This is getting a little bit tough. What the real rub is that everything we talked about, this first solution with level two and the second solution with DC fast charge is all in real time. So if you want to use the grid, the grid has to power it, and you've got to pull from the grid whenever time you want to do it. This becomes a problem because grid upgrades, when you really scale up, if you're talking about a car, nobody really has any mind of how hard it is to charge. But if you talk about a thousand cars or a million cars or 10 million cars, oh, the numbers go right out the roof. So for example, in California, they're anticipating 12 million new battery cars on the road by 2030. And they estimate they're gonna have to spend $50 billion on just the grid upgrade. So that means before a station and before electricity, you're gonna put out 50,000 million just to get the grid ready. So this kind of highlights a little bit of a problem. The grid was never intended for transportation loads. It was never designed for that. So now we're gonna go back and we're gonna kind of fiddle with it and add a lot of capacity hodgepodge. Very, very expensive, very, very fast. So when we talk about loads, if you did 150 kilowatt DC fast charge and you had 10 of them, because you wanna charge 10 vehicles at once, now you're dealing about 1 1⁄2 megawatts of load and 1 1⁄2 megawatts, you're probably gonna need a grid upgrade to get that to a parking lot. Well, that's not really a quick for that. So option one and option two, this is the way the world is going now. But my concern is you're just in for a lot of trouble if that's the only way you wanna do it. So now let's consider the stuff you do. Let's think about real solutions that we actually can scale. And so the third option is what you do on the big island, which I admire very much because what you have is a direct, clean hydrogen fueling system. So you're converting sunlight and water into public transit, that's pretty good. And what I love about what you're doing is you could pick your station up, you could take it to anywhere in the Pacific Rim, you could drop it in the Guam or Fiji or the Marshalls, you could drop it anywhere and provide clean transportation for these big heavy vehicles, which batteries are really ill-suited to do. Another thing I like about number three, your system, is we could also pick it up and put it down on any farm in the United States. And you would deal with the biggest cost of agriculture, which is fuel. The second cost is fertilizer, which if you had green hydrogen, you could actually, there are technologies where you could farmers could actually make their own fertilizer. We'll get to that later. And then there's a feed and all the other costs that come in the farming. But the issue is fuel and how you're gonna get it. And right now, the entire world is really still based on fossil fuel. And we use more now than we used ever before. So we're not really going the right direction. And so the IPCC says, hey, look guys, we're a little late in telling you, but you got six and a half years to have your carbon emissions or you won't be able to do anything about what's gonna hit you. Now six and a half years to change a couple of centuries of behavior is gonna take, I think, some intention and urgency. So your option number three, wonderful. And then we go back to that list. If you look at number four, another way you can do it, and by the way, I should say that the grid is optional in your number three because you could use renewables that you put directly. But I love the fact that you designed it as a grid tie as well because it's a teaching power plant. Now you could use other people's excess renewable energy to make clean hydrogen. So number three, brilliant, really ought to do it. Now, option four, option four is being developed by EV4 in Oregon, Hans Vandermeer. And what he's doing is he's putting a fuel cell stack into a hydrogen station. And the idea here is now you can use your clean hydrogen to run the fuel cell stack to power a DC fast charge. So instead of that 350 kilowatts being pulled directly from the grid in real time, which we'll get to, which is a problem, now you have it continuously. So you can make the power yourself in using number four and fuel any kind of vehicle. So I think the foundation you made on three and then the hydrogen and DC fast charge in bodyment in four, wonderful. But in all of that, there's another option. And this option has been known for a long time or been known for a while. There have been people developing it. And that is a solar charger in a parking lot. At first glance, you'd say, oh, come on, what does that mean? And it reminds me of an old joke that they interviewed Dillinger and they said, why do you rob banks? He goes, well, that's where the money is. You know, why would you put a solar charger in a parking lot? Well, that's where the cars are. So in California, everybody's going DC fast charge because they're running around, everyone's late and they wanna mimic what a gasoline car can do. But it occurs to me that there is a use case for people who just park, you're going to the dentist or the doctors or you're gonna teach a class or take a class, you park. And in the parking lot, if we had solar chargers there, when I ran the numbers, I was actually astonished at how productive this would be. So you're gonna tell us how we can get to this million miles because it sounds like such a huge number. How could that possibly be true? Exactly, I mean, imagine that. So, but before I tell you, let me set the scene. So if you pull the next slide. Now, these are the challenges. Now, this is a list of what's difficult about charging batteries in cars. And this is a list I would dare that Elon Musk perhaps does not talk about it parties. In fact, a lot of people don't wanna talk about this because it's kind of the rub. It's kind of the tough part. And let's start with the beginning. If we want, we have to decarbonize. And I love the fact that you've made this point many times that the battle isn't between batteries and fuel cells, the battle is between what we're gonna do to not use gasoline and carbon because we're clearly killing the world. I mean, that's clear now. So we've got to be able to do this in very quick order. So how are we gonna do that? Now, these problems are big. The first one is materials. You know, we just don't have six Earths. So the fact that Cobalt and lithium and these up manganese and all of these materials are not really readily available for the enormous amount of batteries you would need to just do cars. There's a billion and a half cars in the world. And we're making a few million electric cars and everyone's kind of being a little bit pacified like, oh, that's an answer. Well, no, maybe in 50 years you could get there but we have six. So the first one, we don't have materials. The second big one we've touched on and that is if you wanna fast charge these cars, these batteries, you need a lot of power. It's a brute force business. So to push that power in, well, you're talking about a lot of grid upgrades like California is looking at 50 billion. And we're all spending a lot of money. A lot of money for clean energy is actually going to the utilities because everyone in this model says, well, you've got to expand the capability but it's gonna be a challenge when you're talking about a lot of cars. Then you get to the kind of the third issue and that is it's real time. So it's unscheduled. So with unscheduled loads, you're asking the grid operator and I mean, we're talking about loads, 70 houses for a one vehicle. And when you get to the pick to the large freight liner trucks talking about one and a half megawatts. Wow. That's 300 houses in capacity to charge one vehicle. That's like a whole subdivision. It literally is. And that's not cheap, especially when you wanna do two million freight lining trucks. And that's just one truck. That's one truck. So to do two million, it's just not gonna happen. In my concern, people wanna do battery cars. Do whatever you can, but let's just be clear on what it is and what it isn't. So we get to now the next problem. And that is the battery car is only as clean as the charging source. So if you have toxic sources of electricity on the grid, you haven't done as much as we want. And what would you do? The life cycle analysis of battery car after you do the whole life is maybe a third better than just burning fossil fuels directly. So it's a marginal improvement, not going to save the world. Let's find out how we can do that. So the next issue on that list of seven big problems is then how do you scale it? The grid is, we're already seeing brownouts in California with 2% of the cars being electric. You get the train. Or don't run your air conditioning for the next three days. Yeah, it's gonna be tough under these. We are in the advisory right here now. And you walk out my door and you'll smell smoke in the air. We're literally burning up here folks. So the idea that you're going to, well, we want to move very quickly to do this, but let's just go back to these other problems. And these are now mounting up. The next one is capacity mismatch. Now capacity mismatch is a big deal because nobody in batteries ever talks about it. But if you want to solar power a car, it has to be connected. It's a simple thing. The capacity factor is really just how available is a resource in 24 hours. Well, the sun is up, but it goes down at night. So it's not 24 hours, but we want 24 hours. So this kind of capacity factor mismatch is really a big deal. Everyone assumes, oh, we can just power cars with solar through the grid, done, easy, what's to it? Devils in the details, gotta be connected and cars are usually connected about 15% of the time. So now the grid operator has to figure out, okay, with sex and solar, what do I do with it? So it's really a quagmire. And then number seven, which is long fueling time. For a car, it's four or five minutes. For a hydrogen, it's four or five minutes. But if you're going with the battery and you're gonna do the level two, which I would argue is okay if you're parking for a while, no problem. But if a lot of people wanna do the DC fast charge, wow, you're talking about really huge loads, like three times our grid, where are we gonna, maybe this might not be the best way to do all of transportation. So maybe we should focus on what it's really pretty good at, which would be level two charging for cars would be fine. And that's near. So what do we got next? What's the next one? 100%. Now we can answer your question. How would we do this? Let's say in Hawaii, on Oahu, there's 900,000 registered cars. And I mentioned that to you and you said, well, most of the part of those are rental cars, which is a good point because they're not gonna have as quite as many miles as a commuter using every day. So I couldn't really find how many miles are driven on Oahu, but I did do a calculation that 900,000 cars is four and a half square miles of space. So there's that. Now, I looked up on Oahu and about 85% of the energy drawn for the whole state is in Oahu. Lots going on in Oahu, the joint base, lots of responsibility, lots of logistics. You're the only real land for 2,300 miles, any direction. It's a hub, it's vital. So everyone has to move around. And when you look at Oahu through Google Maps, and if you could do a time lapse, you'd see all the cars moving all around all day, and billions of miles are driven every year on Oahu. So that gives us a sense that to do the world, it's not just sunshine and rainbows. We have to really roll up our sleeves and decide how are we really gonna do this and get it done. So what I was amazed at is when I ran the numbers on this, and by the way, the sketch I'm doing is inspired by EV4, they have this design for solar canopies, just beautiful, very robust. In fact, I'd say those are the four R's. You need robust, resilience, reliability, and it has to be ready. So when we look at what this would mean, let me get to now the numbers that would justify my enthusiasm. What we did is we, you take a five kilowatt array, a solar array, just five kilowatts. And the numbers I'm gonna show you are in Portland. For solar, it's actually for the resource, you kind of define the peak hours for any location, and that tells you how much sunlight you're gonna get. In Portland, it's about four hours or less in the tropics. I think it's five and a half hours of peak sun. So with that, we can calculate how much energy we can create. So five kilowatts times four hours, 20 kilowatt hours. If we can deliver into the batteries, level two charging, so it's not fast, this is a parking lot, plug it in, just plug and charge, easy to use, you're gonna put in over the course of the day, 20 kilowatt hours of energy. Well, a small vehicle can get up to four miles per kilowatt hour. So in effect, one machine in one parking lot that by the way has a footprint of two armfuls of dirt, not a big space, you have this beautiful canopy, and then you have the battery storage so that if you're not plugged in, it's still gonna collect the energy. That's the, that capacity factor solution. And here you have 80 miles a day of mobility, 100% clean, not in 2050, not in 2045, not in 2030, today, now, well, as soon as you put it in. And so what's amazing for using this technology is that you can put these in parking lots and at 80 miles a day, what astounding is that the productivity of this little machine can be 2,400 miles a month. That's 80 times 30, day in, day out. These things, the solar photo takes work for 30 years. The device is 30 years. This is an extraordinary capability. So here you have 2,400 miles from a charger standalone, it's not connected to anything, and you can put it on any forgotten parking lot anywhere. But here's the magic, it's in aggregate. If you put 400 of these out without, you wouldn't, it wouldn't even notice it. They'll be in the parking lots, there's no new land. You would produce a million miles a month of 100% clean mobility. And that's staggering because what would it cost to do a million dollars a month in any other method? A lot, that can tell you the solar charges will be less. So it's an extraordinary capability. So can we go back to your 100% slide and look at the advantages here? Yes, okay. So here's Hawaii, you're in the middle of the ocean, gasoline has to be made somewhere and produced and brought to you and then you burn it. But if you have these, if you have these when you have no fuel costs, that's good. There's zero emissions. So there's no impact of soil, water, air or biology. There's no grid costs. There's no electric bill, you're not touching the grid. There's no grid surveys or interconnection agreements you have to negotiate. All of these things, see, whenever you touch a grid or take power from a grid, it's actually really involved. There's a lot of fees, a lot of expense, big equipment. And so for these little chargers, if you just don't do that, you get tremendous advantages. They're very easy to use. There's no new land. You know, often when people talk about Hawaii, they say, well, it's so small, you're not gonna really put in very much photovoltaics on the island. I kind of say, have you really looked? Because if you look at the area of the parking lots or the building tops, you don't need any new land. You just need to better use the land you're using. So the thing about a parking lot is it's all paved. It's easy to install. Yeah, I can drive the trucks in. It's, you know, you're not going through a field to put up an array somewhere out in the bush. No, it's right there. And that's where the cars are coming. So it's really kind of wonderful. And this is a machine that has no moving parts. It's solid state. There's no, there's nothing moving in the whole thing. So it's just electrons moving back and forth and charging batteries and going into your car. So it's remarkable. It's silent running. There's no sound. That's kind of nice. It's high as a higher efficiency in terms of the actual charging compared to DC fast charge because it's slow and gentle, which is what batteries like. And if you're parked for an hour or two, why not? Why not take the charge? And then I also looked up, I'm sorry, I'm just rattling on and on. That's okay, so far so good. Okay, I looked up what's the average commute on Oahu. And the only number I could really get was 6.6 miles. And I wasn't sure if that was one way or round trip. But if you go six miles and you go to the dentist for an hour and then when you're done, you come back, you put in more than it took you to get there. So it's a really practical way where people, just average people, not in a rush that they have to have DC fast charge because they've got to get there. You know, you're on a beautiful island. If you plan a little bit, just use the parking lot where you're going. And level two, which is 96% of the ports in Hawaii now are all level two, because DC fast charge is so difficult and expensive that it's really hard to expand it. So instead of putting a few stations in per year or a dozen per year, you're never gonna get there. So this is a method that just astonishes me on how practical, how direct, and how beautiful. You know, when we drive by them, there are a few around here and I always smile when I see them because they just look nice. Let alone how productive they are. And I think people should be emboldened and encouraged to say, hey, beautiful architecture, beautiful structure, I'm getting charged from the sun. The sun was just gonna fall in the parking lot and heat up this asphalt anyway. And then I have these more energy to run the AC because it's heat islanding. So this is all very straightforward. And the thing that is most important to me is it's something that we could do now pretty fast. There's really no supply chain issue for solar. There's plenty of solar panels and the materials to make these arches and things and pretty straightforward. Also on the batteries, we don't have to use cobalt, which has of course all those terrible child abuse and Congo and slavery issues. And we're all guilty because we have them in our smartphone. But if we could get away from that, what's really nice is you guys and why I could say, you know, we're gonna use lithium ion phosphate or some other type of battery, which doesn't have the materials that are causing these such social issues. So, so many problems. So when I ran these numbers, I was just astounded that we're talking about for just 400 machines, which in parking lots you wouldn't notice, maybe three or four in each one. I mean, you'd notice them because they're beautiful, but you wouldn't have to compete with them and they would shade you from the sun or the rain. That's not bad. So there's really no downside to the whole thing. And I thought, oh, this is really good. How do we get to a million miles? Well, all you need is 400 stations of these in the parking lot and each is doing 2400, which will be more in Hawaii because you have much more sun. So that gets you to a million. Now, here's the thing that astounds me. Okay, no, no, let's go to that picture, the new one, the old and the new, great. Right. Okay, so let's look at the old. The old is what we've been doing for 120 years and it spills, it's mess, you rack, you well, you pump, you pipeline, you depot, you refine, you super tanker, you truck, and then you put into fueling stations which leak. And then on top of all of that, 70% of the energy goes out the tailpipe. No, this is not an intelligent system. Folks, come on, we can't do this anymore. It's ridiculous times two. Now, look at the bottom of that picture. Here's a solar charger in a parking lot, charging up. Now, 400 of these on Oahu, now this is what really wins, delivers that million miles. So if you had a car that's 35 miles an hour or 35 miles per gallon, say, divide the million by 35 and you'll get something like 28,500 gallons of gas. Each month doesn't need to be made or brought to Hawaii. And the big deal is or burn in your local space. Because remember, and this is what's so hard, one gallon of gas produces 18 pounds of air pollution. Now, air pollution is a gas mostly, some particulates, it's mostly gas. Gas is the way very much. So if you do 18 pounds per gallon, hey, that's a lot of junk. So 28,500 gallons, that's 513,000 pounds, half a million pounds of pollution per month. Not there anymore. Just on that, you ought to do this. So I've been in Honolulu and not since the pandemic, but you got some parking lots outside of downtown on Cook Street, these, towards the water, there's some big parking lots. Usually parking lots in Hawaii are kind of small because we're a little place, but you have some big parking lots too. And in those parking lots, they're just bathed in sunlight and it's just baking in the sun. I'm just like, oh, come on, yeah. So there is good news here. We can be practical, we can be self-reliant. And more importantly, what it really does is shows us there's a common denominator that all of the world isn't so different. We all need electricity and we all need fuel. So that's what I really admire about your system is that it recognizes that and says, hey, with the same fueling station you have on the big island, you can run buses, you can run dump trucks, garbage trucks, combines, tractors, anything medium and heavy duty, piece of cake for you. Hydrogen can do that. And you make it in a way that's clean. It's just like the rest of the world has to kind of, come on, there's eight billion souls on board Spaceship Earth. Eight billion souls aboard. That means if we want to feed people, they need three meals a day. Eight times three, that's 24 billion meals a day, which is what, a billion meals an hour? That's what we expect the earth to do for now on. Well, we want to cut them back the two meals a day. Well, we'll have to do something because we're losing a million trees an hour. That's astounding. Wow, are you kidding? Yeah, I looked it up. Yeah, there's a trillion trees on earth, but we are losing net net. That's after we plant trees, but net net, we're losing a million trees an hour. Now, eight billion people, million trees an hour. Oh, folks, alarm bells are ringing. So instead of, I want everyone here today, I'd love for you to take this away, is next time you see a parking lot, start saying, oh, I could put a solar charger there, and I could put one over there, and there, oh, I could put four there. And then you start realizing, oh my goodness, these charges so effective, if you have a house or a cabin somewhere and you don't want to string wires to it, put one of these next to it. You don't have to touch the roof. You don't have to see. The beauty is you don't have to go through all of the problems that occur. So we're going to wrap it up right now. I had a feeling we were close to the line. Yeah, we're pretty close, but I always love having you on board because we never run out of things to say. Oh, we can do it, folks. We can do it, but we've got to be a little aggressive here. And we've got to, with the supply chains, we're talking about years it takes to put complex systems together. This is something we can move, move, move, that, that, that. And the install crews will love it because they don't have to do any grid connection. No water, nothing. They just need a space that go into the site prep through the foundation work next group comes, sets it up. Yeah, two or three days, you're good. And then you've got 30 years, 30 years from that one device. So bravo. That's what I think. Exactly. Well, okay guys, we're going to have to leave it there. You've been watching Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I don't think that Hawaii. Today we've been talking story with Toby Kincaid about driving a million miles by harvesting merely parking lot sunshine. So thanks very much, Toby, for elucidating this and bringing us up to speed and what our options could be if we got a little bit smarter about what we do. Well, thank you for having us. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Wonderful. I love your sketches too, by the way. Yeah, you're generous. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. I'm Mitch Ewan. We'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Aloha everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.