 Well, and welcome to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii. And we dodged another hurricane, just got a bunch of rain, especially Maui. But all in all, haven't been hit really hard, like the poor folks on the East Coast who are getting belted right now. But lots going on in the world, in the hydrogen world particularly. And I just got an email right before I came over to the studio talking about how the Hydrogen Council, which is a huge council. It's grown in the last year and a half from 13 or 14 members to a total of 53 members of large corporations like Toyota, and Honda, and Hyundai, and Shell Oil, Total Oil, Air Lequid, you know, just huge companies that have to deal with energy. And they're committed to scaling hydrogen up to industrial large scale and helping it replace fossil fuels. They made an announcement this morning that they plan to make the entire transportation sector around the world carbon free by 2045. That's their goal. And you may be wondering how they do that and how hydrogen plays a role in that. Well we have a video coming up that talks a little bit about some of the hydrogen. But basically, a hydrogen fuel cell takes hydrogen and air, or more specifically the oxygen in our air, air is made up of about only 16 to 20% oxygen. The rest is nitrogen and other gases. But it takes the oxygen in the air and the hydrogen, puts it in an application called a fuel cell. And that fuel cell lets the hydrogen and the oxygen make water again and gives you heat and electricity as byproducts. That electricity can drive motors, charge batteries, basically run transportation at zero carbon. So if you make renewable hydrogen off of geothermal or hydroelectric or solar or wind, and then you put that hydrogen into a fuel cell, totally carbon free from beginning to end. And this council made a commitment to the world that they're committed to getting hydrogen to that level by 2045, vehicles, infrastructure, everything. And that's a huge, huge step. That's something that's never happened in the history of our planet before. And it's the industry's way of saying, we want the government's help, but we're committed to making this happen by 2045. And that's huge. So today we have a hydrogen center show, as would be appropriate. And our guest today is Alex Oceto from Gensel, a company out of Atlanta, I believe, Georgia. And not out of there, they're actually an international company. And he's going to explain a little bit about his role and what he does at Gensel. So Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for being on with us. And I know you're driving right now, so if you get in this situation, you have to kind of quiet up. We'll understand. But welcome. And can you tell our audience just a little bit about yourself and Gensel? Yes. Thank you for how you appreciate the opportunity to explain a little bit more about what Gensel does and our mission in terms of providing clean energy for the masses. So my role with Gensel as Director of Sales is to look at new opportunities to where we can eliminate applications that are typically using fossil fuels as part of their power generation. We have two solutions, primarily one for backup power, as well as one for primary power. So what we're going to be talking about today is some of these types of applications, the way the technology works and the possible today, not in the future. Great. So you gave us a little bit of a video to kick things off with, so I want to kind of explain how our title weaves into our discussion. Basically the first law of thermodynamics is energy is neither created nor destroyed, but just changes form. So when we start driving our cars with fossil fuel, we're basically taking an energy storage medium that was created by decaying dinosaurs and trees, put underground for millions of years, put under pressure, turned into oil, oils pumped to the surface, it's processed, it's refined, it's shipped all over the place, goes into our car, we burn it and it puts a bunch of carbon and other knock stuff into the atmosphere, which isn't good for us. So basically it's one of the most inefficient ways of making energy available from one source of energy to the other. People ask me, well, if hydrogen and those other things are so good, why are we using gasoline? And the reality is that the first cars that were built were electric and they were great except that the battery technology could let them go very far and hydrogen technology wasn't much better. So fossil fuel and the internal combustion engine kind of took the lead and has grown massively under the industrial revolution and into the 21st century as the primary source of fuel, but it's not very efficient. It's not very efficient in terms of thermodynamics and it's certainly not very clean. So we're going to start off with a video by Jensel that Alex sent me and it'll kind of give us a lead into what this company does. Have you heard about the new sustainable energy technology called fuel cells? In fact, they're really not that new. Fuel cells were invented in 1839 by William Grove and were developed by Pratt and Whitney and other companies in the 1950s. Safe and dependable, they were used by NASA and the Russian space program to power spacecrafts. Today, leading global companies like Apple, Verizon and Coca-Cola use fuel cells to generate clean power. Honda, Toyota and other car companies use them to power their new generation of pollution-free cars. So how do fuel cells work? Fuel cells use hydrogen and oxygen in a chemical process to produce electricity and heat. The only byproduct, pure clean water. A fuel cell has two electrodes, an anode and a cathode, and between them an electrolyte. The catalyst on the electrode breaks the H2 hydrogen molecules to allow them to combine with hydroxide OH negative ions to create water and release electricity. But unlike batteries, fuel cells don't store power for a limited amount of time. They generate it for as long as you have hydrogen. As a source of backup power, fuel cells are much better than diesel generators. They aren't smelly or noisy, and they don't produce harmful exhaust. Fuel cells can be used anywhere you need backup power, mobile phone towers, electrical substations, manufacturing, and much, much more. Other green power solutions harness the sun or wind. But if you're caught up in a cloudy day or on days where the air stands still, these solutions can leave you without enough power when you actually need it. That's why you need GenCell, a proven green power solution that keeps you running no matter what. To learn more, go to www.gencellenergy.com. All right, so that's a really great video. I particularly like the graphics on how the fuel cell worked. It's really basic, and it tells the story right there. So Alex, you want to make some comments about the fuel cell technology and how it's catching on. Go ahead and hit us with your thoughts on that. The comment that you made about, are they not more prevalent? And actually, that is a great question. And it's something that I get asked on a regular basis. Every time I meet with a customer, that's always the number one question I always receive. And really the simple answer is the fuel, as far as hydrogen, is always the number one issue or barrier that any type of fuel cell application will always have. Well, until now, obviously. But having a necessary fuel for the fuel cell has always been the primary issue. Where GenCell has looked at that type of scenario, and we have actually come to a realization that if we're going to expand the use of fuel cells now and also into the future, we have to remove this barrier. So what we did is we took ammonia, which is a highly rich source of energy. And we basically are able to split the molecule of ammonia. Ammonia is made up of 75% hydrogen with 1% or I'm sorry, 25% hydrogen. So the ability to extract out hydrogen from a source of material that is readily available in every single country. The supply chain is already there. The distribution is there. The safety protocols are there. If your country is not utilizing, I mean, if your country is not manufacturing it, you're importing it. But nonetheless, every single country in the world has hydrogen or ammonia. So it gives us the ability to now eliminate the barrier to be able to have a clean source of energy rich in hydrogen to be able to support a hydrogen solution. So that's just one of the key things that I wanted to bring up to you, your viewers, is that hydrogen is no longer a barrier that most people have perception about in terms of why we can't use more hydrogen. Now that we have eliminated this barrier, you will see applications for fuel cell applications much more than we have in the past. Right, and to add to that, the other barrier that we have or that we see, especially here in Hawaii, which is a really remote set of islands in the middle of the Pacific is transportation. Transporting hydrogen, it's either gonna be liquid hydrogen, which is a really, really cold, complex element to be moving around. You need special carriers and equipment to do it, or high-pressure gaseous hydrogen, which requires a compressor to compress the hydrogen to 10,000 PSI or whatever. And that also has an impact on how available it is because the infrastructure to do either of those is expensive and doesn't pencil out, as they say, until you get to fairly large scale. So your company has kind of taken that slant that there's more than one way to skin a hydrogen cat, and that is to look at ammonia, which is NH3, like you mentioned. It's mostly a hydrogen, a little bit of nitrogen. It's available every place, and it can be transported just like any other liquid gas, water, or whatever in a tank, and then literally what we would call reformed, if for lack of a better term, near the fuel cell, and then the hydrogen goes into the fuel cell to do its work, great option. So we're gonna bring up some slides and let you talk to them, Alex. So the first slide coming up is basically your boilerplate slide about operational readiness. How well are you prepared? And that's really applicable around hurricane season here in Hawaii. The next slide is coming up on there. So those tools are the trade with the G5 backup power solution. So why don't you talk about the G5 system just a little bit? My solution is our solution specifically designed for backup power. So if you think of a UPS that has a very definable amount of energy stored in batteries, will only give you a certain amount of runtime for all your equipment based on that battery storage. So the more batteries you have, obviously the more runtime you're gonna be able to get. The problem with that is that it's a stored energy device. It's not a generation of energy device. So when you're talking about a long duration application where you'd need a lot more runtime than typically maybe 45 minutes to an hour, that's where it becomes a big problem because once that energy is consumed, there's no way else to replace it unless you hook up some other device that will actually generate the energy to recharge those batteries. So this is where Gentile came up with a hybrid solution where we take a fuel cell being the generator, we take the energy bridge, which is the box to your right, and that is basically your UPS. So the same application, the same functionality to some degree that you're getting from a traditional UPS is what we're using for a fuel cell solution called the G5. So when you ever have some equipment like servers, cell powers, or anything that requires immediate need when the utility power goes offline, this will give you the ability to have that instant flux of energy, but at the same time, when the energy starts to get in, the state of charge of the battery starts to degrade or lower, the fuel cell will automatically kick in and recharge those batteries on the fly. So in essence, you will always have a 100% charge on your batteries to ensure that as long as you have fuel, you will be able to keep operation only readiness of your facility. Right, and it's one of the biggest demands that we have with this type of technology. Yeah, that's why we focus on the term energy storage for hydrogen, because batteries do energy storage as well, but when you need to recharge them, it takes hours and the actual storage of energy and batteries, when you get to large scale, is very, very expensive and very inefficient. So what we look at is, a battery is good for, like you say, minutes to hours, but when you start to hit maybe a day, your battery energy storage becomes almost unaffordable and if you exceed a day, it's definitely unaffordable. Whereas hydrogen can be stored at many pressures in many ways with ammonia, and like you said, as a liquid or in pressured vessels that are relatively cheap, have a long shelf life. In fact, our friends in Arizona have hydrogen tanks that were used in 1917 and have been used every year since then and certified pressure checked since 1917. So 100 years, these tanks have been used. They've been paid for long ago. So that's a great point, Alex. I tell you what, we got another slide coming up and we're gonna take a quick break here and get you in with this next slide because, boy, time flies fast when you're having fun. 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. Hello, I'm Yukari Kunisue. I'm your host of New Japanese Language Show on Think Tech Hawaii called Konnichiwa Hawaii, broadcasting live every other Monday at 2 p.m. Please join us, where we discuss important and useful information for the Japanese language community in Hawaii. The show will be all in Japanese. Hope you can join us every other Monday at 2 p.m. aloha. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour, as usual here on Friday in Think Tech. It's now your turn to talk to Alex Solcido from GenCell about fuel cells, but a different variety of fuel cells, one that we haven't really seen on the market until his company started to bring him along. So let's go back to that first slide, Robert, and talk a little bit. That's the G5 backup power solution. He had a couple more comments to say about that, Alex. I did think things that I wanna highlight, just that when we're talking about fuel cell technology is that this type of fuel cells in particular, based on the alkaline type of technology, was actually used on the space shuttle, both on the Russian and US program. So, and the reason for that is because there's almost zero moving components inside of this fuel cell. It's all chemical reaction between, as you mentioned earlier, hydrogen and oxygen. But one of the biggest advantages when you're looking at a technology that's not only very resilient and robust and making sure that when you actually need the backup power, you actually are gonna get it on like some other technologies, like renewable technology, solar panels or wind, where you're highly dependent on mother nature providing the resources to be able to provide that resource to generate electrical energy, which they're unreliable. You get a cloudy day, you don't get it, or you're not able to generate as much energy. If the wind stops, all production ceases to exist. So, this type of technology really gives you the ability to generate hydra or energy on demand whenever you need it, and that's one of the biggest advantages. The second thing also is on the maintenance, considering that there is a very minimal amount of moving components or mechanical components, is that maintenance is typically done either once every year or once every six months depending on air quality and how often we would have to replace those air filters. The other thing too is that when we're looking at the application, as you mentioned earlier, stand that there is no emissions, there is no combustion, is whisper quiet operation. In a lot of applications, those are key features that you would want to have in any type of power generation application, because once you start adding the smoke, the noise and all the dirtiness associated with diesel power or natural gas or any of those mechanical power generators can become a real problem in certain urban areas. So, this kind of gives you a good alternative to that. Yeah, and back to our theme. Well, I tell people one of the ways you measure wasted energy is by heat. When you have an internal combustion engine of any kind running a generator, you're exhausting so much heat, that's all wasted energy. And so that's just, if you compare a fuel cell compared to an internal combustion engine running a generator, you're wasting an awful lot of energy. It's coming out as heat, not electricity. So we have your next slide is the G5RX. So why don't you explain the difference between that and the G5? It's another version of the G5. The G5RX is a solution specifically time for substation applications where basically a substation typically has a battery bank of batteries to provide backup power for systems within the utility substation. And the idea behind this is that, batteries are typically are designed at least in this particular application to provide enough power for approximately eight hours. Again, after eight hour period, the problem is that basically the whole system shuts down and the utility is not able to remotely turn these systems back on. And the biggest challenge that they have is that a lot of these substations are typically in very remote locations. So it could take anywhere between a couple of hours to five, six, seven hours at a time just to travel to these substations and either bring a generator, bring some more batteries or what have you. And it becomes a big problem, especially if you've got multiple facilities shutting down simultaneously. So what this system does is that we created this solution in order to extend the range of those batteries. So you still may have those same battery banks that you have there for eight hours, 12 hours, whatever it may be. But then we also attach a charger that then our fuel cell converts energy to supply to the charger which then the charger charges the batteries. Or we can eliminate the charger directly and we'll just charge batteries. But the idea is that this will really extend the range of the ability for that substation to be able to have the power necessary to restore power to the substation so that the transmission lines can provide the power to the end user. And so this design was actually designed specifically with the support and guidance of some of one of the largest companies out west that help us develop a specific solution for what you're looking for in this type of application. Yeah, and in this application also, I noticed that it's also got seismic resistance. So it's really great for disaster applications as backup power because it's earthquake resistant which is directly related back to your limited number of moving parts and mechanical pieces that go together. They're very basic components that work together. Now you have another version, is it the A5 or the, yeah, the A5 equipment, is that the next slide? Yeah, A5 off the grid power solution. So what's the difference between the R5 and the A5? Great question. So the G5, the G5RX are typically utilized in emergency backup power, right? And the reason for that is because we typically store the hydrogen in either steel or composite cylinders. And obviously depending on how many cylinders we have in place will ultimately determine how much runtime you actually get. So we have to bring in the hydrogen in that respect. When we're talking about continuous power and what I mentioned earlier in terms of the biggest barrier why sometimes fuel starts are not more prevalent in the industry is because again, hydrogen is something that has to be brought in. It's not something that you can typically go to your neighborhood gas station and acquire that energy source. This is something that you have to contract out an industrial gas company to bring it in. And depending on what application you're doing they'll either bring it in in liquid form for large volumes or they'll bring it in already in gaseous form. But as you mentioned earlier, it requires high compression. So there's a lot of equipment involved. It's not something that the normal end user is always, is ever going to have at their facility. So it's something that you have to bring in on a regular basis. But if you're using it for backup, that's not an issue because you're only using it when it's absolutely necessary it's a backup application. So it's almost like having a diesel generator that you're going to have 30 gallons worth of fuel but at some point in time that 30 gallons is going to be consumed and you still have to bring somebody in to refill that tank. So give us some application with it. Some of the applications you've talked about too they're fairly small, maybe five or 10 kilowatts but this technology also scales really well. You can put multiple units in there to scale up to fairly large scale production including grid scale. Could you give us an example of how much hydrogen you could store like a 40 foot container and how long that would last before you'd have to go refill it if you brought in a 40 foot container of ammonia to run one of these systems? Merrily and tonnage, right? Okay. Because we're talking about a pretty fair amount of application here. So a one ton tank of ammonia will yield you approximately 24 hours a day, seven days a week for 30 days per time. Yeah, at five kilowatts. I'm sorry to say that again. At how many kilowatts? About four to four and a half kilowatts worth of energy. Okay. So that's like a huge run time is what I'm telling you. Or using a 24 hours a week for 30 days. Yeah. So really the idea behind this was to bring in a large amount of fuel so that you basically could run continuously without having to worry about where you're gonna get the next tank of ammonia. The idea behind this also is that if you were to scale this up because it is scalable, so if you were to take a larger tank, say a six ton tank, well you're basically getting six months worth of full power for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. These applications that we're referring to, things like a telecom application where you got a cell tower in the middle of nowhere. So whether you're using a diesel generator where you still have to bring in fuel on a regular basis because the consumption rate of diesel fuel is much higher on a diesel generator than it would ever be on our fuel cell. So the refueling process would have to occur more frequently with our technology as you can bring it in one time every six months. And that'll give you continuous power constantly with very low issues with maintenance, reliability issues. But more importantly, it gives you the fuel source that you need to make sure that your systems are operationally ready all the time. Yeah, that's really critical. And another point that we talked about earlier was with your hydrogen system versus the ammonia system, you don't have to use that same purity of hydrogen that the cars need. The vehicles need that five nines ultra pure hydrogen. But your hydrogen systems don't even require that high grade of hydrogen. What do they normally use? As you mentioned, a lot of the technology that's out there today is using the PEM, which is the proton exchange membrane, which is basically where all the magic happens in terms of over splitting up the proton electrons. Type of solutions, which is basically your car vehicles, forklift applications, some types of other types of stationary power, those all require ultra high purity levels, which is clinical grade basically, which is more than five nines. So in our technology, as we knew that that was also a barrier to use this more for the masses, and the cost of ultra high purity level hydrogen can also potentially be a barrier because of the cost. So what we did is we designed a solution that actually uses industrial grade, which is more prevalent out in the marketplace and the cost is significantly lower than it would be for clinical grade, which also when you're looking at your OPEX, makes more financial sense long term when you're looking at the total cost of ownership to make sure that you're using the most cost effective fuel source. That's really important. Well, believe it or not, Alex, we've bumped up against our 30 minutes here, and I wanna thank you again for calling in all the way from being on the road for a week and calling in from your car while you're driving home from the airport and spending some time with us here in Hawaii on ThinkTech. And we really appreciate it. We have about 10 more slides to go through with you, so you're gonna definitely have to come back and we'll talk a little bit more. So maybe in a couple of weeks we can get together and have you back on the show to spend a little bit more time talking about gen cell, especially if things start picking up and we start really seeing hydrogen move. So thanks again for being with us. Thank you very much. Okay, and for everyone out there in video land, thanks to you for watching. Thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studio for making all the magic happen with the slides and the videos and everything that I can't make happen. And we look forward to seeing you in two weeks. Next week, Dave Mullen Erwin will be in with Ryan Wubbins to fill in for this spot so you can learn all about, I think they're gonna talk about girling and barbecuing so it may be something different than hydrogen and energy. So anyway, we'll see you in two weeks while I'm off in Detroit looking at things over there. Aloha.