 And welcome to Stan the Energy Man, Stan Osterman here from Iger Shark Energy Consulting, Hawaii. Me too. My new company. Anyway, I must not be doing good. I haven't been paid for anything yet. So that's okay. I mean, they just want to keep hydrogen going. So today's show is a little bit different. I wanted to sit back and answer a question that has been gnawing at a lot of people for a long time. And that is, when is hydrogen really going to make it to the mainstream? And I've got good news for you. Hydrogen is making it to the mainstream. I see it happening. It's happening pretty quietly, but it's happening around the world. And I just kind of wanted to bring everybody up to speed on that so people know what I know about where hydrogen is right now and why I'm so bullish on hydrogen and hydrogen energy storage and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen energy storage on the grid and hydrogen with renewables. Anyway, a lot's been going on. When I first started doing hydrogen, man, over 10 or 12 years ago, the first time I saw a hydrogen demonstration was at a conference in Nevada. And it was at a military conference. And there were two guys with a small laptop computer and a box. It was like three feet by three feet by three feet. And the computer was plugged into the box. So I asked them, oh, is that like a battery pack? And they said, no, it's hydrogen. It's a hydrogen fuel cell. And you can take it and drop it anywhere. And this box will keep on giving you electricity for about a week. And it was quiet, didn't make any noise. I thought it was really impressive. It kind of got my attention. My next run in with hydrogen happened when I started working up at the headquarters of Hawaii Air National Guard. I became the commander up there. And I was getting briefed by some folks from a place called HCAT. They were federally funded with Air Force funding to do demonstrations of alternative fuel vehicles out at Hickam. And they were briefing me because some of the vehicles were being driven by Hawaii Air National Guardsmen at Hickam that were under my command. And so I learned from them that there was a lot of Air Force hydrogen R&D being done in Hawaii. Well, a few years later, I ended up retiring. And the folks that were running HCAT were looking for a director. And it just so happened that because of my hydrogen experience, my energy experience with the lingual administration, and some things that I'd learned on my own and working with congressional delegation in the state legislature, I was suited for it. I wasn't looking for a job, but when I heard that they lost their funding and that they were having a hard time filling the management position, the director, I agreed to do it starting part-time and then going full-time. And so I did. And I got really heavily into hydrogen then. And one of the first things that I was hit in the face with was, hey, hydrogen, H2, the fuel of the future, and it always will be. In other words, people were always enamored with hydrogen as a replacement fuel for vehicles or energy storage for the grid. But it never, ever seemed to catch on, which is kind of ironic because here in Hawaii, we had a congressional member back in the 60s and 70s, Spark Matsunaga, who introduced Hawaii to hydrogen and had a vision for Hawaii getting off of fossil fuels mostly for economic reasons and going into hydrogen. And he was kind of ushering it in. And in fact, the Bush administration, I think Bush 1 and Bush 2, both started pushing hydrogen at the national level. In fact, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the governor of California, he established the hydrogen highway in California. And here in Hawaii in 2006, the legislature actually passed a law. This is in current law in the state of Hawaii. Hawaii Revised Statute 196-10. 196-10 establishes the Hawaii hydrogen infrastructure and the Hawaii hydrogen economy. And everybody thought, well, good, we're tracking the right way and we're on a good pace because the technology is ancient. The technology's been around since before the Civil War. In fact, people understood hydrogen back in the days of Greece and Rome. So it finally looked like hydrogen was taking off around 2006-2008. But when President Obama came in, he picked a really sharp guy to be the head of the Department of Energy. The same was Dr. Chu. Dr. Chu, for whatever reason, just didn't seem to like hydrogen. He felt that it was still kind of off in the future. Didn't want to put a whole lot of effort into it. He was more into the battery track. And so he cut a lot of the funding for Department of Energy hydrogen and hydrogen just kind of languished on the federal side for eight years. So from 2008 till, well, the 2015 and 16, there wasn't a whole lot of money being put into hydrogen by the federal government. But the state of California, I don't know, Schwarzenegger, even when he was out of office, they kept on going and they started building stations and they started doing carbon taxes in a system that we call the Zev state, zero-emission vehicle state. So a group of states got together and they started doing carbon taxes on car companies that brought in high-end gas-guzzler vehicles and if they brought in really good fuel-efficient vehicles, they got a credit. So some of the companies to bring in their fuel-efficient vehicles and get credit so they could bring in their big gas-guzzler vehicles that made them a lot of money. So a lot of those states, as Zev states, started doing a good cap and trade to boost the money that the state could put into the hydrogen vehicles and California never stopped. Everybody else in the whole US, including Hawaii, pretty much stopped. Even here at the University of Hawaii, there's Dr. Rick Rochela, who was the guy that was pointed out to me when I first started working at HGAT as the hydrogen guy in the state of Hawaii. He just said hydrogen doesn't pencil out, Stan, it's great stuff. It just doesn't pencil out. And almost everybody knows Elon Musk and his great Teslas and the Tesla battery and the Tesla wall. He calls hydrogen fuel cells instead of fuel cells, fuel cells. So there's just a lot of stuff from 2008 up to a few years ago where hydrogen was kind of dead on arrival because things weren't happening. But things are happening now. And I know they're happening. And so what I did was I developed for today's show the 10 reasons that I know that tell me hydrogen is finally really, really here. And the first reason is that there's companies out there around the world that have invested almost two decades doing the research in the vehicles and the money. They've spent hundreds of millions of dollars and have dozens and dozens of patents on hydrogen technology in their cars. Toyota being one, Hyundai being another, and Honda being the third. The Toyota Mirai is in production. And here in Hawaii, CERFCO Hawaii and Toyota got together, brought some vehicles over and CERFCO completed what we call the chicken and the egg because nobody will build the stations unless the cars are there and nobody will bring the cars unless the stations are there. Well, Toyota brought the cars and CERFCO, who was a big distributor of Toyota products here in Oahu, they brought the station. They spent millions of dollars putting in the very first commercial station here in Hawaii to get things going. But people are still, to my surprise, are surprised that Hyundai has two, not one, but two production hydrogen vehicles and Honda has the clarity of production hydrogen vehicle. Mercedes has production hydrogen vehicle. BMW, Ford, GM have all put prototypes together in hydrogen vehicles and they plan to put out hydrogen vehicles in the next three or four years. They're not in production yet, but they're pre-production. That means they're tooling up and they're already committed to it. They just haven't brought them out yet. The reason number one that I'm bullish on hydrogen making it out right now is follow the money. When you have big companies like Toyota and Hyundai and Honda that are very savvy with marketing and making good long-term investments, remember Toyota made the Prius. Everybody thought it was going to be a dud and the Prius is the premier hybrid technology out there for battery electric and for hybrid generation electric drive vehicles. They're not silly. When they make those kind of investments, it sends a huge signal. The number two reason I know that we're really headed towards hydrogen for the current dance, not just down the road, is a company called Nicola Motors. Nicola Motors is a truck company and it just so happens that when you put hydrogen technology with large-scale 18-wheeler trucks, you really hit the sweet spot of where hydrogen makes a huge difference. Because in any kind of transportation, weight is everything. And on a big truck, if you had battery-powered trucks that could go a thousand miles, you'd be hauling so many batteries, you'd have to not haul cargo. And who's going to not haul cargo if your business is hauling cargo? The Nicola Motors not only made a truck that ran off hydrogen, they made a truck that literally is built for purpose to do long-haul trucking, 24-7. It's almost a pony-express-style truck and they don't sell them. They lease the trucks and they don't lease the trucks just by themselves. They lease the trucks with the fuel and they're building the infrastructure across the U.S. The trucks can go a thousand miles or more on one fill-up of hydrogen. The driver sits right in the middle of the cab in the front and so there's no two seats. It's one seat in the middle and it's like an airplane cockpit. Behind them is a sleeper and a refrigerator and a microwave and you can literally camp out in the thing. And his idea is to lease these vehicles and let people, pony-express them across the country in a system. And that system is actually cheaper than driving a diesel truck. In today's basically model economy that they have that makes the most money for diesel truck drivers. The cabin is comfortable. It's got cameras all around the vehicle so you can see all the way around no blind spots. And that's just one company. Another company that I've had the CEO on our show several times, Millennium Rain, they're doing the same thing. They're building a network across the United States and they're even here in Hawaii trying to build a network here in the state of Hawaii that gets hydrogen highways going across the whole U.S. and they're doing it with their own funding. They're not waiting for the government to come in. And Millennium Rain, the thing with them is they put in a hydrogen station that scales up and the lower end of the scale there are appliances like a refrigerator. You don't need permits. You just need a 50 amp 220 circuit and water and you're making hydrogen for 4 to 10 cars a day. And then you can scale it up. And their equipment on those small sizes is just over $100,000 and their bigger ones get up around a half a million dollars. But that's number two, reason number two. Some really innovative companies here in the U.S. that are doing incredible transportation stuff. Reason number three that I know that we're getting there with hydrogen is the military. A few years ago, I was invited to speak at a military conference here in Paycom and I talked about what we were doing for the Air Force here at Hickam and what it meant to have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hydrogen equipment in the military. And some of it must have stuck because the Army latched onto it right away. The Navy really loved the vehicles we already had out here that were driving. They were the ones that kept the fuel cell vehicles running out here. The VIPs that drove around in them, they loved them so much they didn't want to get rid of them. The Marines are right there with the Army. There's so much that we can do and of course we were working with the Air Force. But here's some things that we really, that were really a surprise. Number one, the Navy, they already have electrolyzers in their submarines to make oxygen. They're throwing away the hydrogen, but when you have to certify a piece of equipment to get it on a Navy submarine, especially a nuclear submarine, it has to go through an ungodly amount of testing before they'll let that equipment go on a ship because of the safety that they, the threshold of safety that they require. The Navy has electrolyzers on their ships to make oxygen. So it's great, it's already there. But when I first started at HCAT, our prime contractor, a Basquilar's from US Hybrid, I asked them, what is the military, what do they care about your equipment? Why do they want to buy it? He said, oh, because it's clean and green. I said, the military doesn't care about clean and green. They'll do it if they have to, if they're forced to. That's not why they buy equipment. What is it, why should they spend all this money on your equipment? You know, it's expensive. And what do they get for it besides clean and green? And he couldn't answer me. But I put my military hat and I said, a boss, your stuff is silent. It doesn't make noise. It has a very low heat signature. You can't see it with infrared imaging at night. That's huge for the military. It's also lightweight. The equipment is so much lighter than battery stuff. When you have to ship tons of fuel for vehicles or tons of batteries with your equipment, that's stuff that's taken away from shipping food or shipping weapons or shipping ammunition across the seas on ships or in aircraft. The lighter you can make it, the better it is. And that's where fuel cells come in. So we're going to take a quick break here. I'm going to come back with number four and we'll zip through the last six of them. We'll take 60 seconds here and look at some of the other shows here on Take That. Aloha. My name is Becky Sampson and I'm the host of It's About Time. On the Think Tech Hawaii, a digital nonprofit organization that's raising public awareness. Join us on Wednesday at 2 p.m. where we talk about real issues. Some of the topics will include entrepreneurship, health, life skills and growing your business. So once again, this is Becky Sampson on It's About Time. On Wednesday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. And welcome back to Stand the Energy Man. We're counting down the 10 reasons why I know it's really Hydrogen's prime time and in the year 2020 you're going to see Hydrogen taking off and going. Reason number four is Boeing aircraft. You know, it's a big defense contractor, they're tied to number three, the military but they have already built what we call an ISR platform, basically a high-flying airplane that is meant to stay in the air not just a couple hours but a couple days and they have a plane called Eagle Eye which goes up and can stay three days straight and by three of these airplanes they can cover any one particular spot in the world with persistent surveillance and communications constantly with just three airplanes which is a lot cheaper than a satellite and try to move a classified satellite for the military but that's not where the story ends. They're using Hydrogen for their engines but they're going to start using electric engines run by fuel cells and that three days will go to 10 days. These airplanes will be able to stay up at 60,000 feet for 10 days straight and that's a lot cheaper than satellites and we could put them up there and cover disaster areas or combat zones non-stop without having to put satellites where we need them. Number five, the intermittent renewables that we're all counting on especially here in Hawaii meet our renewable energy goals. The intermittent renewables drive large-scale energy storage. Batteries cannot do it all. They're very important in the mix but they can't do it all. You can't scale batteries up to the gigawatt storage scale or even the hundreds of megawatt storage scale. Even here in Hawaii we have a private consortium, an energy co-op on the island of Kauai and a couple weeks ago they had a couple really cloudy days and their batteries were not holding up. They weren't storing enough energy and they were starting to have brownouts on that island which surprised them because they thought they had plenty of storage but when you are counting completely on renewables especially intermittent renewables which are wind and solar you've got to have massive amounts of energy storage. The fuel that we use now in our electric grid to drive our turbines is very dense energy fuel and if you plan to replace that fuel and the number of days you can exist on that fuel with all renewables that are intermittent, solar and wind you've got to be able to store a lot of energy and that's where hydrogen really comes in strong. The cost of batteries at that scale are $600 a kilowatt hour and the hydrogen equivalent is between $30 and $100 a kilowatt hour. The price is just dramatic and then the hydrogen technology is so much more simple than the battery technology to maintain and take care of. Reason number six, the Hydrogen Council. In 2017, the Department of Energy and a bunch of European players got together and stood up a hydrogen council whose main goal was to scale hydrogen large scale for the industries. Europe has experienced what we call power-to-gas infrastructure where they take natural gas pipelines to move hydrogen all over the continent and the hydrogen is made with curtailed power from North Sea wind turbines. So when they have extra North Sea wind electricity instead of wasting it or just curtailing it they make hydrogen, they put it in gas pipelines they move it all over the continent of Europe and guess what, there's at least two companies I know of. GE is one and there's a Japanese company that doesn't want to be named yet that are making natural gas turbines that make electricity but they're making them so they can run off hydrogen. What this means is you can actually convert to natural gas now which is much cleaner than all your other fossil fuels when you burn it and eventually you can just convert that equipment with very little bit of change to the equipment itself to run off pure hydrogen and that's a real game changer and that's happening right now. Reason number seven, liquid hydrogen production. Not too many people keep up on liquid hydrogen production or know where it comes from but most of the hydrogen that NASA uses is made in Canada and has been shipped for decades down the East Coast and tanker rail cars and trucks from Canada to Cape Canaveral in liquid form. The safety protocols are all there, everything's there but there's only about two liquid hydrogen plants currently in the United States and they both make around 20 tons a day of hydrogen almost all of it goes to NASA for liquid fuel rocket. Just since the end of last year, from the end of 2018 until the summer of this year, 2019 four, count them, four liquid hydrogen production facilities have been designed and are in the process of being built in the United States of America or several in California, at least one in Texas and the size is between 20 and 30 tons a day so they have basically quadrupled the production of hydrogen, liquid hydrogen in the United States and guess where it's all going to go? It's all marked for transportation. There's a whole lot of people investing in liquid hydrogen to move hydrogen around the U.S. for transportation but it's also used in industry to make steel and other things. There's a huge movement on the industrial side for liquid hydrogen. Also helium is becoming very scarce as a natural product that companies need and many of the things that helium is used for hydrogen can also be used for and is much more available. Reason number eight, wrapping it up here look for the next set of Olympic games in Asia. The 2020 summer games are going to feature hydrogen fuel cell buses hydrogen taxi cabs, hydrogen is going to be all over the Olympics in Asia for the summer games, for the winter games which I believe are going to be in Korea and you're just going to see China, South Korea and Japan going absolutely completely full throttle on hydrogen. Look for that on TV as it comes up. The number nine reason that I know hydrogen is here and for real this time, the United States Department of Energy is now funding more hydrogen projects. They're trying to fund projects where you can synthesize hydrogen directly from sunlight instead of making electricity and they usually have electricity to make hydrogen. I just talked to a company on the Big Island that has figured out one of the local fish here that only eats algae and seaweed. The digestive system makes hydrogen and so they're going to study the digestive system of this fish and they're going to try and replicate it so that we can take any kind of algae seaweed that grows in the ocean and boom turn it instantly into hydrogen in a synthetic digester that mimics this fish. The number ten reason why Stan the Energy Man says it's going to happen is I'm going to quote my dad. My dad had this famous quote when I was growing up for me and my sister that he always used when we doubted his wisdom. I may not always be right but I'm never wrong. The number ten, Stan the Energy Man says hydrogen is here and it's happening. I deal with people every day of the week, former head of the PUC, people in big business, people that run big companies making this equipment on the mainland that are just rolling and gearing up companies that are for the first time in decades making a profit doing hydrogen equipment. The military is gearing up in hydrogen. One of the military vehicles that was built recently was a GM from the Army. They took it and they demonstrated it across the United States including here in Hawaii. And one of the things they did was they took that vehicle and at night they saw how close they could get to a building without being detected and they made it through inside a hundred meters without being detected sound or heat. They tried doing that with a Humvee the same night, same building, same people trying to catch them and the Humvee was detected outside of a quarter mile. So the hydrogen technology for the military is just, it's happening, it's what the military wants and they can make it on the spot. If they have solar panels, wind or electricity from a grid locally and water, they don't need to ship fuel. They don't need to have convoys that put people at risk and get killed with IEDs as they just make the fuel where it's at. When you disperse that hydrogen all over the base there's no single target and the equipment that uses the hydrogen to operate at night now doesn't put out much of a thermal image. So people trying to target the base at night they don't know where to look. Everything just kind of looks the same homogenous color. They can't pick any hotspots where they know there's activity going on and same with sound, it's just quiet. So trust me, there's just so much going on in Hawaii, a lot going on in the Big Island. Mitch Ewan has got three buses getting ready to go into service with the Helion Bus Company over in Kona. He has a hydrogen station built over there. HCAT is continuing to work with the Air Force here at Hickam Air Force Base, joint base Pearl Harbor Hickam and they're getting ready to put in a renewable energy grid with Burns and McDonald's doing all the design work and building it and it's going to be a game changer where the Air Force can literally run a base without any kind of outside electric power and keep doing it indefinitely with no fossil fuel, not even diesel generators for backup. They won't even need them and we want to show that. So here we are in 2020, coming up on 2020 and I guarantee you, you're going to start seeing hydrogen pop up in the news. This isn't like we're talking impeachment and all this other crap. We'll see hydrogen showing up in the news regularly. We'll be looking forward to that until at least next Tuesday. This is Stan the Energy Man signing off. Have a great Thanksgiving and Aloha from everyone here at Think Tech.