 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stanley Energy Man on Think Tech Kauai, where community matters and where your opinion counts, so you ought to be talking to us, especially if you have questions about what we're talking about in Stanley Energy Man. It's been a busy week. I was just telling my guest, Ryan, that I'm really tired this week because we spent the whole week at the Hilton with the Verge Energy Conference, which was a really great conference. It's getting better and better every year. A lot more folks coming, a lot more great topics, and much to my pleasure, Hydrogen. We only had one panel session with Hydrogen, which I was involved in, but Hydrogen kept coming up on the main stage and several of the breakouts, which tells me people are starting to finally wake up to Hydrogen, and that's good because I think it plays a critical role in Hawaii's future, and we'll talk more about that with Ryan when we get into our discussion on sustainability today. But I'd also like to talk about another thing that is also becoming more and more common in the lexicon of clean energy, and that's the word sustainable or sustainability. And it's funny because just like microgrids, it seems like everybody has a definition of microgrids, and they're all just a little bit different, but one of the best definitions of sustainability that I've come across was actually presented at Earth Day Texas about two years ago, maybe three years ago, by Robert Kennedy Jr., who's Bobby Kennedy's son, who's an environmental lawyer. He's actually been on TV a couple of times in the last week or two, and his definition of sustainability was, if it doesn't make economic sense from the time you produce the object or technology or product until the time you finish its life, that means it goes to the landfill or it gets recycled or whatever it is. You have to have a plan and a financing plan for that whole spectrum, or it's not sustainable. And I think that's really a critical element that we're missing, because the first thing that I get hit with when people talk to me about how is hydrogen in terms of affordability, how much does it cost, how much does the kilogram of hydrogen cost, they get stuck on the here and now and today, what it costs now. And we have to look at what it costs when we're doing it at scale, and the investment it's going to take to meet the investment that we already have in fossil fuels. It's going to take the discussion of, well, where does your raw material come from? Are you harvesting oil from the ground like we are now, where you didn't make the oil, mother nature made the oil, you're just pulling out of the ground. And the contrast of that to hydrogen, which is an atom that changes from water to hydrogen and oxygen back to water, and I mean you don't lose it, it's just energy and motion. So we need to look at the full spectrum, including, especially on things like batteries and solar panels, the end of life, you know, at the end of the useful life of these technologies. What do you do with them? What should we do? And my guest today and I will talk a little bit about that, because it's all part of being sustainable. And so before we get started, I want to show a video, again, this is because I'm trying to indoctrinate all of you thoroughly in hydrogen. It's a video we produce locally, and it's really short, but I like to run it for a second, so roll tape, Robert. Hydrogen, the simplest element, and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe, so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives, because fossil fuels are problematic, they're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure, and they're limited. Hydrogen on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat, and electricity. Easily transported, hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation, hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades. Hydrogen powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean, and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. So thanks for watching that video again with me, but you're going to see it more. I'm going to keep showing it from time to time because when it comes to being sustainable, I'm pretty well convinced that hydrogen is going to be one of your best ways to store energy in a sustainable manner. Most of the components that you use to build tanks for hydrogen use in fuel cells to produce electricity from the hydrogen. And even the end product of water that comes out, the tailpipes of vehicles, when you run the fuel cell or stationary fuel cells, if you're using it on land, is water. It's sustainable. You're basically taking a hydrogen atom and running it through a cycle where it goes from water back to water and that's what nature does with it anyway. If you have a leak and it goes in the air, it makes clouds. So you can't get a whole lot more sustainable than that. So I'm really bullish on hydrogen and I'd like to keep showing that video to you folks from time to time just to remind you about that aspect of hydrogen. So welcome, Ryan. Thanks for being here again on the third Friday of every month to help us wheel through the complexities of electrical engineering and the technical side of some of the stuff that we're dealing with. And we started last month talking sustainable, you know, what Hawaii's going to look like in 2045 when we're supposedly all green on the grid. And hopefully a lot of our transportation is all green. And for most of us, that means that whatever transportation remains on the highways, whether they be fleet buses or fleet vehicles or personal transportation, you know, privately owned vehicles, that they're not going to be internal combustion engines. We may have some remnants of hybrid vehicles left, but primarily they're all going to be some kind of electric vehicle, hydrogen fuel cell, battery plug-in, you know, something like that. And so we're going to be putting a pretty big demand on the grid. And that's one of the things I'd like to kind of focus on today. And maybe we could even start off with looking at what we use today for transportation like oil. And in this line of sustainability and that cost of sustainability, you know, how oil's kind of evolved from the time we first started pulling it out of the ground when it's pretty plentiful to what technologies we have to use today to get it and what's the return on investment with some of our oil. So I think you've done a little bit of research on that. What's it like? What does it look like? Sure. So we got a couple of questions there lined up, converting the existing transportation energy use and moving it to the grid is a natural progression that we're doing right now. That amount of energy consumption is relatively high compared to what we currently use. So that's one thing we'll need to think about and talk about maybe in the second half of the show today. The first part is about where we are today and about sustainability, the transportation use and let's just say energy use in general. So oil, from a sustainability point or from an economic return, let's consider an energy and energy out conversation. If you're going to go out, you want to heat your house, maybe you're going to go out and get some firewood. You've got to go out, find a tree, maybe you're chopping it down, chopping it up into smaller pieces, bringing it to your house, putting it in, and then you even have a little more energy expended to start the fire. All of that sum of energy that you spent going out there getting that wood, let's total that up and then compare that against the amount of heat that the firewood puts into your house. That's what I mean by energy and energy out. Early on, you put a little pipe in the ground, a bunch of oil comes out, that was really easy. Not a lot of energy going in, a lot of energy coming out. That was something on the order of 100 to 1. It makes sense on why we as a civilization gravitated towards that really quickly because it was really cheap. It was just cheap. There's a lot of energy for a little bit of effort. That has since come down for a multiple two to reasons. One, it's either harder to find or we're having to invest more energy into finding where the pockets for drilling may be, or a lot more drilling that doesn't turn out to give us any oil would go against that energy and energy out. Yeah, it comes against you. You've got to find it first. You've got to find it. So that'll take a hit and then our environmental concerns on what we're doing to treat the whole process, the drilling, what we're going to do when we get it out, how we're treating and refining it and how we're burning it, all of that environmental cleansing that we do on the product is taking a hit on our efficiency. Including containing spills and things like that. Absolutely. So I think now we're somewhere between 50 and 60 or 50, 70 energy and energy out ratio, natural gas maybe a little bit higher, coal sits around 50, and then you start to compare that to our renewable technologies being solar and wind. Just from energy and energy out standpoint, solar is somewhere around 10 to one and wind at about 20 to one. These are rather rough numbers, but it does show that there is a hit that you take on energy just to be sustainable. But now you're in that sustainability, you're in that renewable place where over time the marginal cost of energy should continue to drive down because you're going to keep on getting it. And the sun's going to take a long time before it burns out compared to whatever we're consuming from the earth. Getting that into transportation now, if we want to get off of oil or carbon based burning vehicles we will take a little bit of a hit. But the energy consumed is still the same. The vehicle still needs from my standpoint X amount of KW to move, whether that was burned by a few gasoline or... Over there it's electricity coming out of the battery. Exactly. We can separate those equations relatively quickly and add up the amount of energy we're consuming on the transportation side right now and then start planning that this is going to shift into the electric grid because it is a very efficient place to move and store energy sustainably. It is a natural progression of where that's going to happen. And then I forgot exactly the next step that I'm going to go to. So you're going to have to remind me where we're headed on that one. You're asking the old guy? Yeah. So we've got that piece of it and the time component is also really important because when you take that barrel of oil out of the ground and it used to be pretty cheap to do now it's getting a little more pricey as we go into fracking and shale oil and things like that and oil, sand oil and you're having to work a lot harder to pull it out. But then there's the time component. You put PV on your roof or you invest in a wind turbine, a big wind turbine to provide electricity and it has an operating cost. Operating cost of wind turbine is kind of high relatively speaking to solar. And then how long do they last gives you a duration that your return on investment which is the other piece of the dollars and cents, the solar starts to make sense. It may cost you a lot more to make a solar panel and put it on your roof but then it gives back for a lot longer time. And then at the end of life are there any major issues with solar in terms of like when solar panels are done most people never handle actually the solar cell itself very fragile it's like an eggshell and it just crumbles if you just push on a little bit it just cracks into pieces. Are there any end of life issues with solar panels that we have an overcom or can we recycle the silicon? Can we remake the new solar cells out of the old ones? That's a good question. I'm not that familiar with the recycling or the end of life handling of solar right now. I'm going to look into that maybe we can dive into that a little bit next time. There is a lifespan though I mean solar it's just not going to last forever. Most things man produces does not so it is something to consider and then I'm going to answer that next time if possible. Okay well in the meantime we're going to take a quick break here and we're going to look at some of the other ThinkTech shows around this weekend. We'll be back with Ryan in 60 seconds. Hi I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark and every Monday at one o'clock I'm the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's research in Monart and at that program we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the earth from space, going under water, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes and other things which have a direct relevance not only to Hawaii but also to our economy. So please try and join me one o'clock on a Monday afternoon for ThinkTech Hawaii's research in Monart and see you then. I'm Jay Fiedel, ThinkTech. ThinkTech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and me which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangelsdorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on ThinkTech. Aloha. Hey we'll come back to my lunch hour again. It's not Energy Man here on ThinkTech Hawaii with my recurring guest, my favorite electrical engineer in the state of Hawaii, Ryan Willbins from Burns and McDonald. And one of the reasons he's my favorite is because he really gets down and dirty with grids and microgrids. I mean that's kind of like his core function at Burns and Mack is really understanding the relationships and trying to help folks design the best system they can, whether it's grid tied or whether it's grid independent and taking all the different variables into account and that's important. We've talked about it before where not all batteries are the same. There's, I mean just in liquid battery and in what's so batteries there's like deep cycle batteries if you have a boat and it's going to be on your electrical system or heavy cranking battery if you're in a vehicle and you need to crank a starter motor up. Two different technologies and if you don't use them the right way you just wear the battery out a lot faster and have to replace it that much sooner. So you have to match the right technologies even within these microgrids and on the big grid to help complement and make sure you have the right mix to handle your issues. Some systems have a heavy surge requirement. Some systems have very little surge requirement and you can use different technologies to cover those, cover your spinning reserve and things like that. So one of the technologies that came up in Verge this year, a little bit more than normal which is good and I'm glad we had Aberkinetics on last Friday to talk about it was flywheels. So you know where's the place for flywheels and sustainable energy storage from your perspective Ryan? That's a good question and it's, no one likes the engineer ever saying it depends. So I won't say it. That's your first answer. Flywheels can fit a few different functions. They're not a one size fits all by any means but the best place for a flywheel is when you need an immediate inrush of a lot of energy in a short amount of duration. That is a great place for most flywheels. There are other applications where maybe we need a longer duration and a slower output. You kind of balance that curve and sacrifice one for the other. That all has to deal with the amount of mass that we're going to put into the flywheel and then the amount of energy we're going to put by rotating it. So all of those variables start to play into one to point you into the certain directions. Generally it's going to be those peak currents because it's already spinning. It already has that momentum that our current grid sometimes demands. So it's ready there to give it to you and that can be very efficient. I think somewhere in that 97, 98% efficient so you're going to sacrifice the 3% hit on that energy just to make sure that it's always there and ready. That can be built in parallel with a battery system that's built to go against that. A battery that's built for a really long slow output duration is manufactured a certain way. Maybe we manufacture that battery without the high-end rush current aspect. We can do that. There are some data centers now that do that on a small 48-volt, 12-volt system basis right now to increase the lifespan of the battery. We can do that on the grid scale too. Not as common but it is being explored with what kind of advantages will that give you on a flywheel. Flywheel is also very good at regulating frequency at the same time. So it can give you some other benefits that are harder to quantify financially until we have those mechanisms there too. The flywheels lend themselves pretty well to scaling up. You have a flywheel that does so much capacity but needing more capacity so you put 2 or 3 or 5 or 10 or 15 or 20. You can put them in an arrays. You can maybe even sequence them so that they can have a longer duration, things like that. Is that feasible? Yep, absolutely. Flywheels very much like batteries are scalable in that sense. We do have to be careful when we start scaling up. Planning for that scaling now does actually impact the design we do today for when we're going to have a complete installation. If I plan on putting just a couple of flywheels for some smaller needs, that creates what's called a short circuit contribution. That spinning device will keep spinning just a little bit when there's a fault somewhere else. Same thing with the battery. It's going to provide a little bit of energy when there's a fault somewhere else. Before we have time to clear breakers and open up that fault to minimize the energy that's being put in the wrong direction to ground, which generally starts fires. When we start scaling up these components, as with any type of generation and storage, generally that's going to increase the amount of short circuit contribution that we have. Flywheels, depending on how they're built, can produce a lot of that, which is good in some aspects. We actually want to keep that, whereas solar and some batteries are reducing our short circuit contribution. You can use it in that sense where stacking a whole bunch of flywheels probably doesn't have a lot of applications, but stacking up a few to give you that short circuit contribution. Absolutely would have some value to it. Would there be an advantage to applying flywheels in a distributed generation system versus having them, say, as a spinning reserve at a big power plant like Kahi? Yeah, it can happen in both. Should I say it depends? Yeah. Feel free. Use it. Hopefully they could work in both aspects. It is, quite literally and figuratively, spinning reserve. That is, in essence, the flywheel. We start spinning it. A battery can synthetically produce a spinning reserve, but the physics are not the same. That spinning reserve, if it's at a power plant, it could serve the purpose of providing it out back into the grid, but it's going to come from that centralized power plant. It also could produce its own reserves for itself if something were to come down and provide enough backup time to bring another unit up. When you start locating it out, distributed generation-wise, it serves as the same function, maybe a cloud sitting and you want to fill in that gap. Maybe we have our own, I'm just talking kind of pie-in-the-sky sense, but the data centers where I said that have a battery with the flywheel attached to it to extend the lifespan of that battery, that could be at our house, too, just to extend the life of our own battery that's installed at our house, which is when I'm seeing an inrush at my house because maybe my dryer started or my washing machine started or a cloud hit and variations of all that. Maybe my miniature flywheel is providing me that little inrush I need, and that would be the distributed generation aspect. It'll work both ways. So let's push that into the sustainability realm now, and I know you haven't done a whole bunch of research because we just started talking about it here while we're on the air, but when you think about a flywheel, it's made of a whole bunch of steel or iron, probably some magnetic bearings that will levitate it so there's zero friction. A motor slash generator that gives you either power to turn the flywheel or gives you back power when it goes into generation mode, and a containment system. So in terms of material costs and recyclability at the end of life, where do you think flywheels are in that spectrum of sustainability? Flywheels have a very long lifespan compared to their counterparts, and the reusability of the parts that are built for them is very high. It is still a moving piece of equipment, which brings some people to get some concern. They like sometimes people like their static piece of equipment that's not moving but providing its own function. About a battery, a conventional car battery, it is stationary. There's a lot of chemistry, a lot of physics going on on the inside of that battery. There's movement going on. A lot of activity at the molecular level. Absolutely. So what's good about a flywheel in that sense is that it's something that we're used to dealing with. It's just a rotating piece of steel, some bearings, oil. There's a lot more to it. I probably oversimplified some and undersimplified some of the materials. But from the raw material I expect it's pretty much 100% recyclable. Yeah, from a raw material standpoint, we're very used to handling those materials. Depending on how you're building your flywheel, maybe you're greasing the bearings, which is something we're used to dealing with right now. And in that original definition you gave, maybe that grease that we were using isn't what we should be using now, and we should start looking at a sustainable... Lithium grease. There we go. Lithium grease. I bet there's something I'm not as much of a gearhead as I probably should be, but maybe that's already out there too, some type of corn, corn oil, something like that. Okay. Yeah, I remember just looking up Lithium to see what the World Reserves were and stuff and what we use Lithium for. Applications I remember were Lithium grease, which actually is a really good lubricant. Oh, I thought that was a really good joke. No, no, it's serious. Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm familiar with that from firearms, from the military. All right. We use Lithium grease a lot of times in high-capacity firearms. Anyway, that and ceramics and glass, for some reason, processing ceramics and glass, we use a lot of Lithium in that too. So yeah, it's like where do you get your materials from, how much do they cost, and how much you can go back and recycle them and other things. So it seemed like flywheels are a pretty good deal. And then Elizabeth Dunn from last week said, their first major overhaul, operational maintenance overhaul is 10 years and it's for the bearings. So you go full 10 years and it's just for the, that's your first one and it's for the bearings. So another good example of maybe options of sustainable, sustainable options that we need to explore. You know, we're coming up on the end of our show here, but you actually introduced me to another concept that next time you're on, let's focus on talking about. And that is, during my verge discussion on hydrogen, I also brought up compressed air. And I said that in most contemporary instances, compressed air is done in salt caverns or big geological voids that maybe a continental city might have nearby, that Hawaii doesn't. But we have something even better, we have the ocean. And if you have a bladder of some kind that's a pretty rugged bladder and you just pump air into that, I mean, 33 feet down is one atmosphere, you got a lot of pressure. I mean, tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds of water pushing it from all sides to contain it and keep the pressure up. So let's talk about compressed air next time for some other sustainable options. Can't wait. Okay. All right. Well, that's going to wrap it up for Stan Energyman this week. And thanks to Ryan Wubbins from Burns & McDonald for helping us solve some of the mysteries of sustainable energy out in the future for Hawaii. And we'll be back next week with more energy news for you. Aloha for now. See you next week.