 Welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, and joining me today in the Think Tech studio is another Think Tech show host, Stan Osterman. Stan the energy man. Welcome, Stan. Nice to see you. Good to be here. Good to have you here. As you might guess, we're going to be talking about energy today because that's a likeable topic relevant to everyone's lives. It's going to be making a tremendous difference in our lives as time goes on here. And Stan heads up the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, so I've got that right. Perfect. Yeah. And so in particular today, we're going to focus on one sort of one of their aspects, which is hydrogen, right? My favorite. Yes, indeed. Yeah. It's probably big on hydrogen. And so why don't you tell us sort of people don't understand, right? Hydrogen, they think of it as something you blow up a dirigible with or blow up a bomb with. In fact, I have a really funny story. We were, Rachel James and I from our office were helping Blue Planet with a function with a bunch of seniors, high school students a couple of weekends ago. And the first question I asked all the students was, when you hear the word hydrogen, how many of you know what the Hindenburg is? And I only saw like four, an average of four hands per group. And I went, wow, we've made progress. Now Hindenburg isn't the first thing everybody thinks about when you say hydrogen. But hydrogen has actually been around and in use for many, many things for well over 100 years. In fact, the word hydrogen is actually Greek for the water maker is what it really means. And hydrogen was used back in the Civil War to inflate observation balloons. And the reason they liked it was because you could make hydrogen, if you dig acids and metals and put them together, you get hydrogen. You take water and split it with an electrolysis, you can make hydrogen. You take methane and reform it, you can make hydrogen. So back in Civil War days, they could instead of hauling or trying to haul canisters of gas with them, compressed gas, they would just take acids and metals and let them combine and make hydrogen and blow their balloons up that way. But hydrogen is, even the current use of hydrogen in fuel cells is not new technology. It's been around almost 100 years. And some of the technology that we use to make oxygen like nuclear submarines is the same technology we use to make hydrogen for the industrial market, which is electrolysis. And if the Navy is going to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in a submarine, it's got to be safe enough to use in the public sector. And of course, all of our spaceships that we send into space use liquid hydrogen for fuel and also use electrolyzers to make oxygen for spacecraft and power their spacecraft with fuel cells, because it's a really safe, stable fuel. People are scared because they see images like the Hindenburg. What they're actually seeing is hydrogen mixing with oxygen, which is really flammable. But when we make our hydrogen, we keep it really pure and use it in fuel cells. And it's a much more stable fuel. Excellent, excellent. That's important to know is everyone wants our technologies to be relatively foolproof. Safety's big. Right. It's not everything, but it's pretty important. Right. You can't have things blowing up on you. Right. But I suspect a lot of people don't really understand how sort of how hydrogen works as a fuel and how a fuel cell works. I think you said you have a video? Yeah. Got a really good video. So why don't we roll out a video now and show everybody how hydrogen works. And it's a good video that we put together with a local company here, and they did an excellent job. In fact, for this video, they won a local advertising award. Excellent, excellent. 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. What is a proven, safe, clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide? Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. Well, excellent. That's very informative and well done. I can see what they won an award for it. Yeah, it's a great video. Yeah, but it's nice. It really explains the broad usefulness of hydrogen and a lot of its advantages. And particularly in this day and age when we are very concerned about our carbon footprints, it seems like there's a really, that's a real good solution to some of the problems, at least. Well, and really it highlighted two important things that are kind of, nowadays we think of a separate, but in the future are going to become one, and that is transportation and grid electricity. Because the transportation sector is starting to move towards electric drive. All your hybrid vehicles are electric vehicles that are either plug-in or they have a small gasoline or diesel generator that gives them electricity to an electric drive system. So hydrogen fuel cells do the same thing. They're hybrid vehicles. They use, instead of an electric generator generating electricity by gasoline or diesel spinning generators, they generate electricity to that fuel cell and give you a current to run those same motors and charge your batteries. So there's a symbiotic relationship between making hydrogen off of electrolysis using that water splitting technology. What we have with our grid is a problem with too much solar in the middle of the day when you don't need all the solar. And then at night when you have no sun out and you need energy, you don't have enough solar panels to put the energy in like at dinnertime when everybody goes home and starts cooking and watching TV and doing their homework and running their computers and doing the internet stuff. So what you can do with hydrogen is connect it to a system of solar panels and when there's too much electricity, the electricity that normally Hawaiian Electric would throw away would call it curtailed power. It would throw it away and just make hydrogen. And then at night when you need electricity, you take that hydrogen and turn it back into electricity. So not only are you making hydrogen that helps the grid use the energy from the sun more efficiently, but it also gives you energy for your vehicles as we start to transition into electric vehicles. Excellent. It sounds like it's well set to synergize nicely with an existing and emerging technologies. Exactly. Yeah. Beautiful. Beautiful. So what is HCAP doing really to sort of move this whole process ahead then? Well, HCAP is a state program that's under business economic development tourism and then we get all of our funding from the Air Force, from the Air Force Power Technology Office and the Air Force Research Lab specifically. And so we focus on making vehicles for the Air Force using hydrogen technology and also making a microgrid for the Air Force that includes hydrogen technology to basically demonstrate what I just explained to you about how the symbiotic relationship between hydrogen is good for the grid and the transportation. So I have some pictures if you want to show some of the vehicles that we made that are kind of unique. The first one is called the MJ1E Jammer. We call it a jammer for short, but it's basically a weapons loader for fighter aircraft. So this vehicle was especially made. It's the only one like it on the planet. There's only 12 electric jammers in the entire military system right now, but these are used across the country, across the world for loading ordnance on Navy and Air Force aircraft. Most of them are. Virtually all of them are diesel and they're noisy and they're dirty. But the 12 that are electric are really quiet. The only thing you hear is the hydraulic motors because they run some hydraulics. And then this is the only fuel cell operated one. So it's a little bit longer than the other electric ones. But it's made just to load ordnance on fighter. So it's a very specific purpose built vehicle that we built just for the Air Force. And the next one we have is, this is called the U30 Tug and it's really heavy, empty. It's like 70,000 pounds and then we have to load a bunch more ballast on it that gets it up really heavy. And the reason it has to be heavy is because it's pulling 747 C-17 size airplanes and they have to keep enough traction on all those big wheels and tires to be able to pull the airplane without just spinning the tires on the tow vehicle. So the vehicle itself is extremely heavy and we looked at this as kind of like the extreme demonstration of the technology. So this vehicle has a hydrogen fuel cell inside and 10 kilograms of hydrogen storage and it really doesn't go very far. I think if we had it all full of fuel and running around it could probably go maybe five or six miles. That's it. But it's geared and it's set up just to move airplanes around a ramp so they only probably go a quarter mile or a half mile at a time. And we did this basically to demonstrate that you could take the technology and incorporate the hydrogen hybrid technology into it and it would do the work and it does. Excellent, excellent. Our next vehicle is actually our most popular one. This is our 25 passenger, the Air Force calls it a Surrey. We call it a crew bus or a passenger bus. It's 25 passengers and there's some room in the back for suitcases and things like that. You see these a lot used by handy vans or by tour bus companies to shuttle tourists around. And the amazing thing about this thing is you can put full load of passengers in there and then accelerate on a freeway on a really short ramp freeway and get it up to speed fully loaded and it won't hesitate at all. There's plenty of torque, plenty of horsepower. And I use this vehicle a lot to make correlations about energy overall. So for example, this vehicle has two batteries inside that are 14 kilowatt hour batteries. So the 28 kilowatt hours worth of power that this vehicle has is just about the same as what it takes to run my house. I use about 21 to 22 kilowatt hours per day in my house and this vehicle does 28 kilowatt hours. If you took all the stored energy from just the batteries in this vehicle, you could run my house for a day. That same stored energy will take this bus about 30 miles. So if all we had was the batteries on this bus, it could go 30 miles. When you add the hydrogen, 10 kilograms of hydrogen to the bus, we can go 130 miles. So we add 100 miles to the range on this bus with just 10 kilograms, which is 25 pounds or so of hydrogen. So when you think about the weight of the batteries versus the weight of the stored hydrogen, you begin to appreciate how in transportation, where in most transportation modes, weight is important. Right. Whether you're talking cars or whether you're talking boats or whether you're talking airplanes in particular or spaceships, weight is everything, especially in aviation. Right. Batteries are heavy. They're very heavy. So when you start looking at like even Ford, when they came up with their new pickup truck, they made the body out of aluminum because they're trying to take weight off the vehicle. Whenever you design an airplane, if you add any weight to it, you have to change the wings, you have to change the power plant to compensate for every pound that you put on the airplane. So weight's important. Right. So the next image that we have, this is our newest one, although it looks kind of clunky. Right. We call it the Spod. It doesn't have any fancy graphics on it, but it's actually one of the most remarkable vehicles that we have. It's a rolling generator. You can take this vehicle and just with the energy that it has stored on board for driving itself around, you can run a small command post for a full day. So you can literally run an important military building for a whole day just off of this power. Not only that, but you can configure the power any way you want. You can configure it with 110 volt typical household current or 220 volt typical household current, single phase, three phase. You can charge other cars, other vehicles, batteries from this thing. You can export DC power. You can import DC power or you can import AC power and charge the batteries on the vehicle. So you can literally go up to 440 volts, AC or DC, and you can make it however you want. So it's probably got at least 40 or 50 different configurations for input and output to demonstrate for the Air Force. Now, I wouldn't call it a complaint, but the only concern that the Air Force had was, this is too much for an individual to have to learn to how to program to get the right power. So our next step with that vehicle is to actually make it where we pre-configure it for certain uses that are common to either working on the flight line or working with civil engineers and will make it so they can just go on the computer and go, I need 240 volt AC, three phase, boom, make it happen, and the computer takes care of it for them. Excellent. We'll have to take a quick break at this point, but we'll be right back. I'm Ethan Allen, your host on likable science here. Stay on the energy man here is with me, and we're talking hydrogen and Hawaii's hydrogen. We'll be back in one minute. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Aloha. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with Think Tech Hawaii. We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhai, and aloha. And you're back here on likable science with me, your host Ethan Allen here on Think Tech Hawaii. Down with Stan Osterman, another Think Tech host, and we're talking about Stan's other hat, though, that he wears as the Hawaii... Center for that. Center for Transparency Technology, HKAP. Got it right the first time. Yeah, you did. I was impressed. And we were going over some of the amazing vehicles, the sort of prototype vehicles that you've been putting together to... And I hadn't realized that HKAP has done all this for the Air Force. Right. And you demonstrate in the Air Force how useful hydrogen technology can be both in vehicles, but also you're saying for microgrids, right? Right. And what's really neat is that the Air Force is paying for all this. We're doing the work in Hawaii. We're using some local-based contractors and some mainland-based contractors that have permanently assigned people here to do the work. And everything we learn, whether it's microgrid or vehicles, we turn around and share it with Hawaiian Electric. We turn around and share it with the State Energy Office, local auto dealers' association. We try and encourage the use of hydrogen in our local infrastructure as well. Great. So as an example, the pictures that we had coming up are some of the things that we've taken out in the community that you can actually buy commercially. You can go out to some of these companies and buy this equipment. So right there, the guy on the left is sitting down on his sound equipment for an event that was held at McKinley High School. And that white box behind him that's on the trailer is actually a 5 kilowatt generator, a 5,000 watt generator that makes all of its electricity off of hydrogen. So it's absolutely silent. So you have that generator right behind the sound machine, the sound-making stuff. And the event tent is just to the right of the screen. So literally the generator is within 30 feet of the event. And it makes no noise, so you don't hear anything from that generator. It's not emitting fumes or anything. Right. No fumes. No sound. Not even much heat. Excellent. And we did that on purpose with this group. We provided the power for their sound equipment and a bunch of the lighting there on purpose to show how clean the power is, clean in terms of signal, because you don't have spinning generators generating the power. It's all being generated off of the fuel cell and just pure electric current. So very clean signal on the power for the sound guys. The next slide shows another piece of equipment. We like a lot. This is a light cart that you see around construction sites a lot of times. And this is the same event at McKinley where they said, you know, we don't have enough light over by the building where the bathrooms are. So can you light up that area so people don't trip over the tree roots and the sidewalk edges and things like that? So this is one light cart. This one light cart can actually light up almost half a football field. And it's, again, dead silent, and there's hardly any noise at all. You can sit right next to it, and all you hear is a little bit of humming and some a little bit of pumps going on for cooling once in a while. And that's it. But it generates quite a bit of light, and it can operate for literally two or three days straight with onboard hydrogen that it has. It's really, really great. So these are commercial pieces of equipment that we asked the Air Force to buy so we could demonstrate it to other military organizations and the local community here. Wonderful. And the next image that we have coming up is what I think kind of fun. Two weeks ago, Toyota announced that they were going to make the Tundra pickup truck with a hydrogen fuel cell. And this is amazing because we've been bugging all of the automobile manufacturers to somebody make a dog-on pickup truck with a fuel cell in it. Because if you don't know the statistic, most of the vehicles sold in the state of Hawaii, the most common vehicle sold is a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck. Really? It is sold more than all the other individual cars by any manufacturer or anybody else. So you, and it shouldn't surprise you, you can't throw a swing a dead cat without hitting a Tacoma pickup truck in the state of Hawaii. And to have Toyota come out with a bigger truck, the Tundra, and have a fuel cell in it was a real landmark. And GM has done the same thing with their Colorado and their Silverado. They just announced this past week their Silverado pickup truck is going to come with a fuel cell, too. Excellent. So they're starting to go into... So this is Roy Starr's demonstration of that. Yeah. And in the back of that Toyota was also their pizza, automated pizza machine. So our friend Dave Raul used to say, Americans only know two things, automobiles and pizzas. So I say, well, now they have to know pickup trucks and pizzas, too. There we go. But we at least have the pizza as a common denominator. All right. That's excellent. That's excellent. But yeah, the play that we get to, the bounce we get from doing all the work for the Air Force and being able to bring it all into Hawaii to help make our economy cleaner and better, our climate and our economy cleaner and better. You know, a lot of people underestimate the impact to our economy of importing fossil fuels. Oh, that's terrible. And we already have the Clean Energy Initiative on our grid to be 100% renewable by 2045. But most of our fossil fuel is used in the transportation sector. Right. And we're trying to make people understand not only is hydrogen good in the transportation sector, but it has a role to play in the grid as well. And so there's some other things that we can do. But what about people are going to say, where do you get hydrogen? Where do you get the fuel for it? I mean, there aren't hydrogen stations all along our roads here, right? Not yet. They're getting there. Actually, Toyota, Serpico, Hawaii and Toyota have the first commercially available station out in Mapunapuna, right by the airport, not far from the airport. And it's commercially available. And Serpico just started leasing the commercially production Toyota Marai just this past month. So you're going to start seeing the Toyota Marais on the road in the next month or so. And they have a station. They're servicing all their own vehicles and providing the hydrogen. And one of the things that I'm trying to do in my spare time is get the state legislature to help us stand up some more stations around the state, working with private companies to help build some more stations around the state so that we can bring more and more hydrogen fuel cell vehicles into complement the plug-in electrics and the other hybrid vehicles. And I think you said there are still some other commercial products, right, that are coming out now. Yeah, well, one of the cool things about hydrogen is not only is it great in fuel cells or in balloons, but you can actually cook with it just like gas. So Hawaii gas is actually stepping up. And this is one of two grills that we have that we actually take out from time to time. And we have a little propane tank with hydrogen in it instead of propane. And we'll actually cook with the hydrogen. It's not exactly like a propane grill. You have to change the orifices and the setup a little bit. There's a different flashback protector in it. But this image and the next image, this is actually, that one is a commercial off the shelf. You can go buy it. But this one was custom made by Paul Ponteo from Blue Planet for us. He made it for us to demonstrate over here. And it literally takes hydrogen. And you can cook steaks. You can cook food. And what's neat about hydrogen is because it has no carbon in it. It doesn't degrade the equipment as fast. And the heat is very controllable. And it goes straight up. And it's moist. It's actually, like I said, hydrogen is Greek for water maker. So if you burn hydrogen in a flame and you put your hand above it, you can actually feel the moisture in the flame. You don't want to have it down low where you get burned. But if you put your hand about two or three feet above the flame, you'll actually feel the moisture. And so when it comes to cooking, a lot of the professional chefs are starting to use hydrogen for cooking because it actually keeps a lot more moisture in the food and doesn't dry it out. Wonderful. And so some of the culinary schools are actually focusing on hydrogen for their cooking fuel. And we've talked before about Polynesian islands or island nations that they need to do water desalination and the different technologies that are coming out with distilling water. Well, if you use electrolysis to make your hydrogen, which is like solar electricity, DC electricity and water to make your hydrogen, you're making the hydrogen you can also use for cooking. You're making oxygen you can use for your medical facilities. And again, it's part of that whole sustainable ecosystem you're trying to do. And speaking of sustainability, you have a very interesting graph there at the very end here, right? Yeah, this is something that actually a fairly new piece of data that we got from University of Hawaii. They attended a conference two weeks ago. And it was talking about battery versus hydrogen in buses because we're noticing a trend even here in Honolulu where everybody's real comfortable with batteries and battery technology. So they kind of latch on to batteries because on the front end, if you only have one or two buses, the infrastructure is pretty reasonable. It's pretty inexpensive. But what people don't realize is when you start to get into fleet size buses, that the cost for your infrastructure starts to rapidly rise to very high levels. I asked a gentleman on my show who makes electric trucks and hydrogen trucks why he focuses on hydrogen trucks. And he says, because electric trucks, when you go to the class eight size trucks like buses and big 18-wheelers, the cost for electric infrastructure gets to be more expensive than the vehicle. So you're paying half a million dollars for a vehicle and half a million dollars per vehicle for the infrastructure. A graph shows that hydrogen is the opposite. And hydrogen is the exact opposite. The problem we're having with hydrogen is to get one vehicle on the road, you have to have a full station bill. So you may have to put a $5 million station up for one vehicle. But then it's going to service the next 20 vehicles. And then the more vehicles you get, you can scale that same station bigger and bigger or make a couple more stations. And the cost of the infrastructure drops, tapers off, and becomes very affordable. So that graph is kind of just to get people's attention that you shouldn't just think of batteries as energy and energy out there more efficient and stop there. You have to think about the safety aspect. You have to think about the end of life. You have to think about repurchasing new batteries when your batteries were out, where hydrogen tanks just don't wear out. They last forever. Wonderful. Well, this has been an education for me as any of my talk with you it is. So I feel like I've learned a lot. I know you've helped our viewers understand this hydrogen economy better here. And I want to thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure here. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for making science likable. There we go. I hope you'll come back and join us on likable science next week.