 Welcome to Staten Energy Man here, Staten Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, coming to you at the tail end of a coffin cold. So if I start coughing in the middle of this thing, I'm going to ask for your forgiveness and help it. But it's been pretty good for the last half hour, so I should be able to get through the rest of the show. Anyway, we have a guest today, Chris McWinnie. He started a company called Millennial Rain several years ago, and he has, I think, a brilliant plan for bringing hydrogen to the life of as many people that want to get involved in it. He scales his equipment more towards a small end, and hydrogen equipment scales, whether you're making hydrogen or whether you're making electricity from hydrogen fuel cells. It scales up and down really, really well, from real tiny desktop scale and educational models all the way up to megawatt scale production equipment. So anyway, he's chosen to kind of stay on the lower end, the homeowner end, and a small company and industry end, and he can go pretty large, but he's got some great equipment. We haven't talked to him for a while, but one of the shows we featured his equipment on is actually one of the best showing videos we have on YouTube in our series. So anyway, Chris, welcome to the show. I'm glad to have you on again. It's coming in live from Ohio. Thank you, Stan. Appreciate the opportunity to share with the folks what we're doing. And I appreciate the good judgment you have of putting one of your wife's artwork behind you because she's done some great stuff, and I'm glad to see you kind of brought her in there suddenly. And so first of all, before we get into business, how was your vacation? I know you just came back from vacation. Oh man, we just spent some time in Turks and Caicos and Turquoise water just goes from the horizon. As far as you can see, it's unbelievable. So yeah, we had a great time. Yeah, I jump all over you, but I know you spend plenty of time in Hawaii, so you're just trying to spread the wealth a little bit. Yeah, I've been there 28 times since I met you guys in 2013. All right, well, you're always welcome on here. So tell us what's new with Millennium Rain and what's going on in your world in Ohio. Well, most recent news that we have is that we just recently received a certificate of attestation from CSA group, which is a third party nationally recognized testing laboratory on five of our scalable hydrogen fueling appliances and six of our electrolyzers. So in both instances, we're the first company in the world to have accomplished that to an interim requirement 3-18 on the scalable hydrogen fueling appliances and interim requirement 4-14 on the electrolyzer. So that's a big deal. It allows us to get this equipment to people in an easy fashion where the authorities having jurisdiction would notice that CSA's stamp is on the product and therefore it has been vetted and tested and meets all the codes and standards necessary for safe operation. So it's a big deal. And Millennium Rain focuses on alkaline electrolyzers. So splitting clean water into hydrogen and oxygen, that's the oxygen you owe, keeps the hydrogen and stores it up under pressure. Right now, most of your equipment is 5000 psi pressure and then it's available for putting in vehicles, putting in forklifts, putting in cooking with and even cook with it and stuff like that. So you're kind of on the hydrogen production side, correct? Right. Hydrogen production, there's five things that you need to build hydrogen fueling infrastructure and you first have to make the hydrogen and you have to purify it, you have to compress it, you have to store it, and you have to be able to dispense it. And we do all of those things and package them into a single product that is plug and play and ready to go. Yeah, we've been fortunate out here. We have two of Chris's units in HGAT. Right now, they're actually, one of them is an operation out of the Pickham Air Force base. We had it in our Cook Street station before we moved to Richard Street, but it's actually back online, Chris, and we've actually been running it from time to time. The other one that we're waiting to install with the Hawaii Air National Guard with one of our weapons loaders out there that runs off hydrogen. But kind of give everybody an idea of where your equipment fits in the big scheme of things of making hydrogen more of a common quantity in the energy world. Well, first of all, hydrogen is a great way to store energy from renewable energy like wind and sun. And when the wind and sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing, hydrogen is a great form to store the energy in. It's actually less costly than batteries. It really scales well in a megawatt scale and utility scale. Now, it will not replace batteries because you still need to have a battery in the system, but you don't need as many batteries. The cost per kilowatt hour is dramatically lower when you do the math on hydrogen storage than it is battery. What is the largest system you guys plan to be manufacturing? How big do you plan to go right now? Well, currently, we have a system that is scheduled to build for four megawatts. And so that system would produce 2,000 kilograms a day. But yeah, so big. You're covering everything from like one or two kilograms a day up to what did you say four megawatts will do? 1,000 kilograms a day? Yeah, 2,000 kilograms a day. So yeah, the building blocks are 1 kilogram, 2 kilogram, 4 kilogram, and then 12 kilogram, 16 kilogram, 32 kilogram, and then 160 kilogram building blocks. And you can build from take any of those and add them together and get to any percent, you know, any level per day you need. Okay. And what kind of customer do you have out there? I know you have them around the world. So why don't you tell us about some of the customers that you have right now? And we have, we started along the furthest away when we did was in Dubai and that was for a hydrogen street car. Then we have one and we've got one there, Hickam Air Force Base, and you've got another one there. And then we have one on the Big Island at Blue Planet. We also have another small electrolyzer on the Big Island at a gentleman's house. We have one in Southern California. We have one in Northern California at a winery. We've got one at the Navy and in Washington DC at the Naval Research Laboratory. And we've got one at Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research. Okay. Were you involved in the Costa Rica bus project with the US hybrid? Well, we're still, that's still under works. We were contacted and sent them a quote. And do you partner with any particular companies on the fuel cell side? Do you, like, have any vehicle companies or anybody that you're kind of partnering up with and doing work with? Well, I sit on codes and standards committees on the Society of Automotive Engineers, which is SAE, also on CSA, Canadian standards. And then also, I'm not on the committee, but I've actually been to the meetings for NFPA2 for hydrogen codes and standards. So I interact with a lot of the big gas companies and the OEMs, car companies, and are very familiar with them and deal with them on a regular basis and in those atmospheres. Okay. Well, right now, a lot of the companies, when they ask me, you know, what does it cost to build a station, I have to give them the unfortunate answer of it depends. It depends on whether you're going to have liquid hydrogen provided from steam reform natural gas. It depends on if you're doing production on site from solar. It depends on if you're going to do high pressure and 5,000 psi. So it depends on how you're going to do it, but, excuse me, I knew this was going to happen. You've got a plan, though, to do a little different model. Why don't you start talking about that model you want? Yeah, so this would be a good time to bring up my first slide there and I'll go through that and before we get to the break and then we'll finish it off after the break. So Millennium Rain Energy, we believe, is the future when it comes to changing the world's hydrogen from wind and solar. And what we're trying, what we're going to announce is that we're going to build the world's first transcontinental hydrogen highway from Los Angeles to New York. So go ahead and turn the slide there and we're going to talk about how we're going to do that. Build global hydrogen fueling infrastructure. Currently, it's important to understand that a lot of countries are doing this. Vehicles range that they're putting into semi-tractors and buses and forklifts and boats and drones and light duty vehicles and cars and SUVs and pickup trucks are all out on the market and being fueled. As a matter of fact, we fuel most of them. Of the stations that fuel light duty, certain forces, mainly the OEMs, have guided those stations to be able to dispense hydrogen at 70 MPa or 10,000 PSI and be able to complete the full fill in three to five minutes. And this results in a driving range of then 300 miles for most offering. This makes the station cost extremely high due to the lack of components existing in scale like fitting, storage tanks, compressors, nozzle sensors and chillers that are all required to dispense hydrogen at such high pressure and at such high speed. Go ahead and change the slide please. The current model for station deployment in California is generously paying for up to 80% of the cost of the station and so the stations have now been erected using a pool of funds and some also coming from Toyota to help subsidize these stations. The stations are mostly all 200 kg a day dispensing and usually are placed where there are not enough cars in the beginning to sell all the gas that they make. So the stations are very expensive, averaging $3 million for the total cost. Enough data has been collected by a company that has gotten a lot of this funds from California and they've determined and announced to everyone at a meeting I was at a couple of years ago that they were going to need to be able to dispense 500 kg a day in order to make money and when you bump up from the 200 kg a day to the 500 kg a day now the station costs $4 million instead of $3 million. And it would take about 1,000 cars in a five mile radius to have enough demand to dispense at full weekly capacity, 142 cars a day filling once a week and so the 80% subsidy that is masking the fact that the financial model does not work to support long-term deployment of new hydrogen fueling infrastructure as they're trying to do it now. So and how do you justify building stations to open a new territory at this cost and what will we do with the pool of funds that California and other countries are putting up so generously and they're providing and what happens when that stops. So a new way must be found to grow infrastructure organically without government money that will provide profit at every level, level, consumer, the station owner and the station manufacturer. Next slide please. So the new approach to existing challenges, the fittings, the storage tanks, compressors, nozzles, sensors, all that are required to build 35 MPa or 5000 PSI have all been available for years at scale and are already available at a third of the cost of the 10,000 PSI equipment. MRE's built patented trademarked and received a certificate of attestation to IR3-18 on 10 different scalable hydrogen fueling appliance. This means that these products are ready to go to market and have been verified by an internationally recognized third-party laboratory as meeting all the necessary codes and standards as a factory manufactured product. These stations differ greatly from the stations that are being built around the world today in that they only fill the cars 5000 PSI and they will fill a little slower because they don't have pre-chillers to cool the hydrogen down prior to dispensing it into cars. So this makes the fill time about 8 minutes versus 5 minutes and so that's a little give up and the car travels about 150 to 160 miles instead of 320 miles. So that's a little give up. You'd have to fill up more often but even though these smaller less sophisticated stations that we're applying seem to have a marketing disadvantage, their overall cost is such that they can be deployed while making a great business case for all other parties involved. These stations... Let me let me interrupt there and say that just for example you were talking three and four million dollars for a station under the traditional model. The unit that we have that was two kilograms a day and had eight kilograms of storage was only it only costs us a hundred twenty thousand dollars so we're talking huge savings and when you start to again as I said early on hydrogen scales really well from real tiny to huge so if you go with this up this challenge with the equipment that you're designing that's so much more affordable you can put it in and scale with the market as it grows and then when you want to get to that bigger scale and go with 10,000 psi pressure you can but you know in Hawaii 150 miles that's no range anxiety on this island that's for sure. You can go around the island about four times so it's perfect. It would only take five stations over the whole big island. We're going to take a quick break here Chris and we'll be back in 60 seconds and we'll talk some more about your highway plan. Thanks. Hello I'm Dave Stevens host of the Cyber Underground this is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that's just kind of scare you out of your mind so come join us every week here on thinktecawaii.com 1 p.m. on Friday afternoons and then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube just look up the cyber underground on YouTube all our shows will show up and please follow us we're always giving you current relevant information to protect you keeping you safe. Aloha. Aloha I'm Yukari Kunisue the host of Konnichiwa Hawaii Japanese talk show on thinktecawaii. Konnichiwa Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and is streamed live on thinktec at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show we look forward to seeing you then I'm Yukari Kunisue mahalo. Hey welcome back to stand the energy man on lunch hour with Chris McWinnie calling in from Ohio of all places a little town though he just came back from the Caribbean vacationing a little bit eating being some sun someplace besides Hawaii so we won't hold that against me please spend plenty of time in Hawaii so Chris we're talking about the magic of this this using your equipment which yeah it has some limitations you're not going up to the high pressures but I can tell you as much as I've gotten into hydrogen and loving it and studying it the one thing that continues to plague us is the cost of high compression to go to 10,000 psi to store it to compress just through the compression itself it's it's really energy intensive so we're taking a lot of energy to squish the hydrogen into a tank and we're not getting a whole lot back out of it so going to 5,000 psi to cover basically would be the same as a battery plug in market with a different kind of electric vehicle using hydrogen to make electricity instead of batteries to store electricity it covers the same and a little bit more probably a little bit more range than some of the battery plug-ins but it does it at the right the right scale cost-wise well let's get back into your charts okay and it's faster to fill I mean you can fill up in eight minutes rather than eight hours right so yeah what I was saying was is that we've installed these all around the world and so we have these stations and products can be used in other applications like forklifts buses semis drones cell phone towers micro grids and islands wanting to achieve energy independence and they're perfectly suited in these markets even though it's at 5,000 psi because they already have those type of tanks in them so there's many markets that besides the car market that they actually fit perfectly in and so MRE has installed these around the world and it fueled the Toyota the Honda the GM the fueled street cars like cars drone buses forklifts fuel cell systems we even fueled some fuel for Super Bowl 50 to run a fuel cell for the Super Bowl city NASA uses it at the Mars habitat on the big island and Helco power company even use some of our hydrogen from blue planet you're a while back to restock their hydrogen that they use to cool the generator that was right before Hurricane Lane was supposed to hit here and yeah all of our barge shipping stops so the Hawaiian Electric Light Company on the big island couldn't get hydrogen to cool their turbines and they needed some from Oahu so they got some from their unit up at Blue Planet Research that's right so besides the tanks there's also the J2601 a lot of people don't realize even though we're talking about only filling at 5,000 psi those same filling nozzles can connect to the high pressure but they only fill to 5,000 psi so even though you know it's not a standard for that car like the 10,000 psi the nozzle will still fit on a Mariah it'll still fit on a Honda and a Hyundai and everything correct that's right yes that's right so there's no restriction there it won't go the other way you can't take a 10,000 psi and put on a 5,000 because it won't fit but it will fit in the opposite direction for safety reasons okay so see the next slide so here's a product that we've got that we believe is a breakthrough in H2 fueling infrastructure and this is a three-way winning performer in financials this one actually does 10,000 psi and but it has no pre-chill so it's fueling is a little slower and it has IRD communications with the car as it's filling in this case the manufacturer can make enough money grow organically and continue to produce this breakthrough product fueling station owner can make about 9.35 return on their investment and increase by increasing the cost of the hydrogen to the nozzle of eight dollars and 38 cents kilogram by just two dollars a kilogram and that two dollars a kilogram spread on the profit gives them that 9.35 return and then they can sell the hydrogen owner to the hydrogen to the car owners at basically 10 dollars and 38 cents a kilogram the current price in california is 16 dollars a kilogram you can see such a big difference there at that 10 dollars and 38 cents a kilogram you'll sell the vehicle owners actually paying about three dollars and 71 cents per gallon of gas equivalent less than the current gasoline prices in california and hawaii though for the very first time ever you have a product that all three can make money and you can sell hydrogen cheaper than gasoline so every possible objection about why you know changing the hydrogen it has disappeared and this is only within the last four months when we figured out how to do this so go to the next slide so this new approach will give you a comparison if you look on the left you've got the way they currently do it that one big dot represents one big station that would cover a five mile circle territory and you'd need 142 cars a day being able to fill up there which means you need over a thousand cars in that area because they only need to fill up once a week so um uh and that would dispense 500 kilograms a day uh and the station would cost four million dollars so that same four million dollars you can put eight of the previous stations that you saw at a half million dollars a piece in that same territory now you have eight nozzles one of the things that they're running into in california is they got the station up and the ones that are actually busy they have a line of you know 15 20 cars sometimes waiting to get fuel so that five minute fuel time they're trying to get goes like 25 minutes when you got a wait in line to get get the fuel because they don't have enough nozzle so so this this this new concept and this then these are actually 10 000 psi stations too um so the fueling is going to take about 18 minutes instead of uh instead of five minutes but um you know all we have to do is add a little bit of pre chilling to that and we can get that down to about 10 minutes so um so anyways next slide and when you say pre chilling you don't have to get it super super cold but like these they make some liquid oxygen um cryo coolers that are really small scale and that would chill your hydrogen down plenty um to get it to where that you can give that uh to the high pressures and keep the temperature controlled right yeah so uh basically what you need to do is that as you're filling the tank that's the hydrogen that's going into the tank uh through a joules tomson effect it heats up the tank and the tank's not allowed to exceed 85c uh or um that's bad for the tank so um uh you have to pray by pre chilling the hydrogen down to minus 20c to minus 40c you can get uh the speed up and not get the heat up so that's why they do it so they feed up the time but you can still fill with ambient hydrogen it just takes a little bit longer okay but then you don't have the pre chiller to buy and the cost goes down and the operations and maintenance are much less so let's go to the next slide um so what we're going to do with this is we're going to build the transcontinental hydrogen highway and this year historians are celebrating something that had a large enough impact on the growth of the united states of america that 150 years later it's still worthy of remembrance that event was the completion of the transcontinental railroad first transcontinental railroad was a 1912 mile continuous rail line constructed between 1863 and 1869 that connected the existing eastern us rail network from Omaha and council bluffs Iowa with the pacific coast at oakland longworth and san francisco bay the new transcontinental hydrogen highway will be from los angeles california to new york and will be built in one year after it's publicly announced uh which this is a slide i i wrote about a month ago we've actually advanced the announcement up um to since i'm talking about it now i guess you could say it's today but we're really going to do a big big hoopla about it on earth day and again on may 3rd i'm speaking in washington dc and we're going to be that's going to be a live broadcast uh and at an environmental meeting and um so we're going to be really saying it's announced then but um the transcontinental highway is a contiguous network of hydrogen fueling stations on an interstate highway system across a continental landmass and uh fueling stations at different oceans um or continental borders the first route will mostly follow interstate 70 and the trip from los angeles california uh las angeles california to new york would include a fuel cell vehicles from all three manufacturers in any new releases since then and it'll be a huge media event when that opens and we're going to have a race so cars will leave and they'll have a time posted on and they're not allowed to exceed a certain speed limit and they'll go across the united states and and then we're also going to have some electric cars in there too some all-electors like the tesla and others and that's going to really demonstrate to everyone how much quicker it is and more convenient it is to have hydrogen than batter electric because they'll you know take so much longer to stop and charge for the electric than it would the hydrogen and so we think this is going to be a monumental and historical event and um it's going to cost about five million dollars to build that in contrast um it would take 60 million dollars to build it the way they're currently building it and um so there's going to be a glut of used fuel cell cars piling up in california because they're saying they're going to put 50 000 more cars on the road by 2022 uh toyota and other manufacturers are and so they've got such great incentives on buying the new cars in zev states that you really wouldn't want to buy a used car so um we're going to create a dealership network that's going to import these used cars into the non zev states and create the market for the hydrogen that we build these um uh this network of hydrogen stations around so go ahead and change the slide please yeah we're coming up on 30 minutes sir chris so we're gonna have to wrap it up shortly but this is really exciting news so here you can see the blue line on the us uh the travel is that it will travel go ahead to the next one and this is our certificate of attest station that shows that we got from csa on these stations that we're going to be putting out there showing that they meet all the codes and standards next slide and this is the first station that'll go out it's our model 200 it does four kilograms a day and it's a small plug-and-play system it can be installed in an hour and be up and running go the next slide and when people get enough cars coming to that one that it's over running it then we put in this next one here this is an example of one we have in sonoma california stone edge farms micro grid and it's a winery and that one does 12 kilograms a day and there you can see a toyota mirai uh that they've been fueling up there for three years go to the next slide and then finally you come in with a mega four ta 70 which this will do 64 kilograms a day and this is the one that has the really good numbers on it all of them make money right out of the gate but it's a real small in the beginning for the littler ones but they but when you get to this level it makes a really nice investment to go to the next slide and this is the last slide so first you build a phase one of the transcontinental highway then you import used cars from california new york into the network of the transcontinental station cities to create a demand for hydrogen then from those first cities you branch out with strategic placements of hundreds and then thousands of small-scale hydrogen fueling infrastructure units and then you continue to expand those locations that are growing in hydrogen demand and relocate those units that are in low locations with low demand and then it's really nice because you can pick these up and move them real quick if it's not work and you can just relocate it um you collect data and tracking information and continue to refine and improve the technology and customer experience and then we're going to expand all sites with high demand to maximum on site production levels that could be just 128 kilograms a day and as that continues to climb we're then also going to build megawatt scale utility scale hydrogen systems called hydrogen harvesters and these hydrogen harvesters then will be able to truck hydrogen into those existing stations that we've built through this scalable hydrogen infrastructure network opportunity and then we're going to be able to actually drive trucks that actually run on hydrogen that they're carrying while they're delivering it these this extra hydrogen made from wind and solar directly and backfill those stations that are in high demand so next slide and that's it thank you very much all right hey chris well thanks for being on the show today and uh and explaining your groundbreaking project and we're really looking forward to this thing taking uh taking uh hold and and growing in fact you know just the fact that you can come close to breaking even even at the smallest scale um i think there's going to be people adopting this just to get the hydrogen out there they're not interested in making a fortune on this they just want to see the hydrogen in place so i see them happening even in here in hawaii so thanks again for being on the show today and and we'll have you back again um right after kickoff maybe and we'll talk more about the project as it goes forward so thanks everyone for joining us today and uh being with chris McWinnie here on think tech hawaii thanks to robert and cindy in the studio making things happen we'll see you next week aloha aloha