 Hey, aloha and welcome to stand energy man here in think tech Hawaii Stan, awesome It means you live in direct from Honolulu Hawaii, I think I look which is in the county of Honolulu Hawaii and I've been on the road a whole lot in July a lot of traveling some to the mainland a bunch to the big island and That's given me a lot of time to think about things and a lot of time to observe things going on I think when I got home from my last Trip I made maybe it was a tactical error actually looked at the news for a while and That really makes you start to wonder about society right now. It's just you know, I Kind of want to think people are getting stupid, but maybe they're just getting laid. I'm not sure But it's really it's really kind of annoying to me because I've done a bunch of shows that I've where I talked about experts and How we can't be listening to experts all the time We have to literally sit down and get our hands dirty or get our fingers into things and start doing things and researching Personally and investing a little more time We talked about critical analysis Where you really have to go into second third order of facts when you start to make a decision on technology and Really really think I mean, that's what we have brains for is to think I've also pounded the table on good design for starting, you know a project if you're gonna build something or if you're going to design something new You need to really think about the function of the materials Where the materials come from? What happens it end the life on the materials all that cradle-to-grave stuff that I've talked about also But maybe it's just that most people lack perspective and real appreciation for expending time and expending energy What I mean is that's kind of gets back to my lazy comment Maybe it's not that we have forgotten how to do all those critical analysis and cradle-to-grave analysis and critical thinking and You know, maybe it's just that we've kind of forgotten how hard it is to really do work and this is an energy show and the whole idea of expending energy is to get work done The reason that we have a society that focuses on energy right now is because we use computers We use machine we use technology to make our work faster and better When computers first came out computers were the Justification for every person or every family or every household having a computer was It would make us so much more efficient that we would have more free time To relax and enjoy our family and do Tell me that's that what the computers have done in our world today We've got phones that could design the space shuttle They take pictures they can communicate voice they can take video they can communicate via tech They can stream images in They can stream messages out They can tell you where you're at flat long down to the probably a square meter They follow you they gather data on you. They sell the data to other people. That's just your phone Just in the last few years. I think we've forgotten How hard it is to really work So I was thinking in a personal sense Maybe this is the problem today The generations that have grown up in the 80s and 90s or at least the 90s in the 2000s really just don't understand the concept of Energy and work and time the way us older generation Thinks about them. For example Imagine you're in college now because I got my master's early late in life I was in my 50s and I was totally shocked when I saw all the tools available to a college student When they actually had to do their term papers and things When I did my term papers in bat for my bachelor's degree I Had a typewriter and I was lucky I had an electric typewriter But the problem was your professors wanted no typos on your paper so you could sit there and type a whole page of paperwork and You make a spelling error and you can't use white out and you can't use correcting tape and can't use You have to pull the paper out and start typing that whole page all over again. I Think if students had to do that today They would probably all revolt and and just refuse to do any any work because it's too hard Maybe that's why people in my generation Appreciate the technology we have and the kind of time savings and energy savings that these Beautiful machines and technology Get us, you know to do So can you imagine, you know what it's like if that stuff goes away I Can because when I go to the big I live in a cabin out in the woods with no electricity no water no toilets and I get by amazing All the lonely electricity I use is generally a little bit of battery power from my truck And I just recharge my battery when I'm driving But anyway What really kind of got me started on this this whole topic of people just don't understand You know really thinking hard about stuff and and the whole energy concept was I had a really great meeting last week with with one of our political leaders and we were discussing Energy efficient vehicles and clean transportation and During the conversation one of my colleagues mentioned that he had forwarded an article on Electric buses and wanted to know if the rest of the group on the zoom meeting and received the article And everybody said oh, yeah, we got it and then one of the gentlemen on the meeting said yeah But you know that really ticked me off and and all of us just kind of it Well, it was it was really a good informational article. He goes I Don't want to be talking about batteries and hydrogen and competing and having a war between batteries and hydrogen and Transportation we need all these technologies to work together to give us the solutions we need and We all agreed with that We've said that several times that apparently he mistook the article as a criticism of batteries But it wasn't a criticism of batteries It was a criticism of Design it was a criticism of failure to do critical thinking It was a criticism because the people making that technology Failed to do cradle-to-grave analysis. It was a criticism of making bad choices Because somebody who is more like a lobbyist or a sales jerk was pushing technology to different municipalities and Then they realized that their their process there their product wasn't meeting customer expectations So instead of going back to the drawing board and redesigning use happened to be electric buses They just threw a bunch more batteries on the electric buses And if you have any engineering background at all or any common sense you know that you can't just go and throw a couple tons of weight on a Vehicle that hits potholes and bumps and Bulls lateral G's and stuff like that without causing structural issues so The big picture in the story was that there's there are certain companies that are trying to get out ahead of everybody else and Get out there and get their product known and and their face out there they're branding on the on the streets and hit all of these Companies or or municipalities or cities and have rapid transit systems and get their bus on the market on the line first and They BS some of them. They just push it really hard. They You might call this corruption, but they take a whole lot of municipal bus heads of departments and stuff out to dinner and schmooze them and Next thing, you know these counties and cities and municipalities are buying these buses and Committed to big contract and then all of a sudden a couple cities say hey We've got 20 of these buses and 18 of them are down for hard-broke chassis because the batteries practice chassis so When I'm trying to say when I titled this should it go It's about make energy not war we have to e-couple the marketing and the corporate, you know obnoxiousness is the best way I can describe it That we we push sometimes especially when we push it to politicians and Say hey, we've got a technology and we spend a lot of time researching it and we've done our homework And this is what it can really do They can't do that You need to be up front about it need to be honest about it If you need to improve your product or change your product or put limits on your product You need to do that because if you don't you have things like we have an aloo Where you have a three billion dollar rail project and it suddenly ballooned to about 12 billion dollars Well billion dollars is an entire squadron of B2 bombers And the Congress wouldn't even fund more than a couple squadrons of B2s because they were too freaking expensive Well the County of Honolulu certainly can't afford a Project that has gone three six nine twelve four times over budget and Still growing and late to need as well But that's the kind of decision-making we see a lot of times by government local state and federal When it comes to latching on to project and it all goes back to failure to do good design failure to apply critical analysis failure to do cradle to grave analysis and just Being in a big hurry You know being in a big hurry is that ringing the bells with some of you with a green new deal and Ten years if we're not all cleaned up carbon-wise. We're all gonna die You know, it's a big threat Everybody's jumping in this bandwagon and pushing stuff left and right pushing technology faster than should go I can tell you there's one business law That an economic law that never ever failed is almost as good as supply and demand and that is if you want it fast You're gonna pay a premium for it. If you need it in a hurry, you're gonna pay way too much you need to sit down and Put this thing in perspective Time it the way you need to to buy it in the right time frame When the technology is developed right when the the economies of scale have gotten caught up When the scale of the whole project is where it needs to be and if you have to start slow and build up So be it but if you rush Guarantee you're gonna pay too much and it turns out today that paying too much not just talking about paying Dollars for a product of making big mistakes that cost huge dollars in the long run And unfortunately when governments make big mistakes, it's taxpayer dollars It gets spent because the government doesn't other than the federal government print money And when the government the federal government prints money you can almost guarantee its inflation It's gonna catch everybody and like a tax at some point so we I keep I keep harping on this critical analysis and Cradle-to-grave analysis and really thinking Because I think we've gotten too lazy with computers with with iPhones with iPads with cell phones We've just gotten too lazy to do the real noug work that it takes to really get through a project So when we have this meeting this government meeting We got it back on track and and I explained to the gentleman in probably much nicer terms than I did just now That the real issue with the article wasn't our hydrogen buses better than electric buses because they're both electric buses It's just that that company did a poor job of Getting their product out too soon before it was properly designed and marketed And that what we need to do is we need to find the right tool for the right job So to focus in a little bit on the energy war I was talking about When I'm a hydrogen person. I really support hydrogen fuel cell technology. I think it's the right answer I know it's not perfect, but it's really in my view a lot more perfect than almost any other solution I've ever seen and Furthermore as it develops as we develop new technology most of the developments that we have are going to actually help hydrogen. I Don't dislike batteries, but there are certain aspects of batteries that aren't compatible with transportation One of them is weight There is no way that batteries can ever compete with hydrogen or weight as a energy storage solution But that's not the only reason you choose Maybe batteries are cheaper in some respect and you can get more energy into energy out so Maybe battery buses that travel relatively little terrain And travel only certain routes and have a time to recharge and stuff where you can stop them and Plug them in for six hours or whatever to get a charge without having to expend a lot of money on rapid charging technology Maybe those battery buses fill the bill in certain areas And maybe hydrogen buses fill the bill when you have a lot of terrain or you have long distances or you have you have Challenges with the technology that hydrogen overcome So hydrogen isn't as efficient as batteries But it's much better at long-range transportation and climbing hills and things like that and battery technologies Because the batteries way too much But battery and hydrogen people what i've noticed is battery people Almost hate hydrogen. They as soon as anybody criticizes the battery vehicle They immediately come back and say well hydrogen's, you know Elon Musk hates it and it's inefficient and it costs too much and infrastructure is not there And it's like just hold on. Hold on. We need both. We need battery plug-ins We need hybrids and we need plug-in. We need fuel cell electric vehicles all of them We need to get all those technologies rolling and do them well And get them out there safely, efficiently, effectively So that we can solve the issues that face our society now, which is we're trying to reduce fossil fuel use And we should be saving that fossil fuel those organic Oil and things like that that are available for future generations to make durable goods with instead of arguing over whether coal and oil and natural gas You know should be eliminated today Or maybe we should find some ways to use that to back down off of natural gas and the coal and oil In a nice steady Programmed direction that keeps the price of prices from going volatile and solves things so I'd like to propose that we really look hard When we're discussing technology and energy At finding what solutions work best and picking technologies and companies that really work hard at Critical analysis and cradle to grade so You know, there's so many things I did a paper for the Air Force one time where I sat down and listed I think it was like 11 different considerations for energy And I was comparing batteries to Hydrogen and in some cases and natural gas by the way in some cases batteries one In some cases hydrogen one in some cases natural gas one in terms of like safety weight availability price Different technologies and ways of using them um It was it was a really I thought a very broad look at The pluses and minuses of those technologies And what I did was I said, okay Well hydrogen one here and batteries one there and natural gas one there and when you added up the scores For this particular use which happened to be in support equipment for the Air Force The hydrogen came out way ahead It wasn't the winner in every category But when you took all of the cradle to grave discussion and lined it up And said okay, which one works best because of safety which one has the least amount of Rare earth metals involved or materials we have to purchase from other countries that are become a national security issue You know when you add all those things in And and put the scores out you can pick the best technologies I just don't think that a whole lot of people are using that kind of technique that kind of analysis When it comes to picking the right things As we try and eliminate fossil fuels from our daily life Which is a good goal Whether you're a climate change person or not I mean like I said before I'm going to show As people actually give me heat for it If you wouldn't want to wrap your lips around the exhaust pipe of your car and breathe it Then we shouldn't be doing that technology You know, it's like just common sense. I wasn't meant to shock anybody but You know, if it's not good enough to breathe it yourself, then why are we letting out into the air? That's a problem. We're solving climate change or no climate change. That's a problem. We have to pick so as we as we look at Developing new technology and whether we sell them to the private sector or to governments I think one of the most important things we have to also consider is whether it makes economic sense on its own merit um, one of the things that I've seen over the last two decades Is things like cap and trade Where you basically give people you pay people To use less carbon and people that that that put out a lot of carbon CO2 and stuff You basically tax them and you can trade these credits back and forth and things like that tax breaks for certain technologies subsidies for certain technologies grants for certain technologies And this is all government money that gets injected into the private sector to help incentivize good decision And to a certain degree I'm all for the carrot and the stick approach and that's what governments use They see they either reward you or they spank you either tax you or they where they reward you to give you a tax break or certain things that you do And to a degree I guess that's okay But I think it's kind of gotten out of control and my point is If a company can't make a profit on its product in the competitive You know space economic space they're in Um, then it's probably not the right time for that product and if it is Maybe it just needs a little incentive That incentive should if it's a government tax break or something should be there for a limited time and stop For the example, I'll give you of a bad example is california And i'm a hydrogen guy. I love hydrogen in california They've have subsidized hydrogen stations to the tune of 50 percent of the cost of the station And they've been doing that for a decade Which is great except they still haven't made met their first hundred station goal They just haven't done it So the taxpayers are are paying and paying and paying and they're not meeting the goal and I just saw an article a little while ago where They want to build more stations and the peeps the companies that want to build more stations Well, where's the next round of money coming from for the government to incentivize us to build this in other words These companies are depending on the government to subsidize them just to keep their profits, you know, they're their profit margins up I think that's a bad place to end up when we're talking about government spending So you can translate that into energy issues. You can translate it into Uh, military industrial complex spending, you know, you've you've heard the ten thousand dollar toilets and things that they see in in doD spending Those kind of things are just a little out of control Well, not to be a Worry work um, I did read a really great article in specific business news this week and I wanted to Read it to you. It's not a real long article. It's a good news thing And it's a good news thing because here in Hawaii We have Hawaiian electric that runs the public electric utilities virtually on all islands except for one island island of kawaii and kawaii has the uh distinction of having own utility cooperative, it's called kawaii island utility utility cooperative k i u c for short And they just received an award and I like to brag about companies that receive awards for doing the right thing and these guys do and And I'm telling you this even though I've talked to them about using hydrogen and they've said we're not going to use hydrogen And here's why and the reason was we don't feel like the the industry is ready for taking that kind of risk So we're intentionally not looking at hydrogen for energy storage. Not that we won't in the future but our current Corporate philosophy is we won't take risk in energy storage right now And and I went wow So anyway, they won an award. So this article is written by mr. Brian McKinnis From pacific business news. He's a reporter at pacific business news And it says the kawaii island utility cooperative received a national recognition recently from the smart electric power align or sifa A mainland based non-profit affiliated with more than 700 utility companies Deepa named k i u c one of the eight power players of the year an electric cooperative of the year The non-profit said In its announcement that k i u c is unique in the world in achieving 100 renewable or nearly On nearly a daily basis k i u c's Transition to renewables has resulted in more stable lower rates As members are increasingly buffered from financial impacts of volatile oil pricing And benefit from a majority of their power being supplied via long term power purchase agreement That are competitively or lower priced compared to fossil fuel It was the first such award for k u c having been selected over fellow finalists Cobb electric membership corporation of georgia and southern maryland electric cooperative in its category for electric cooperative In the video compilation of the winners k i u c president the ceo david vissle talked about k i u c's eight utility-scale photovoltaic systems and 5500 5500 customer installed systems He said three of the utility scale projects have battery systems that can store the project's full capacity at four to five hours at a time And the most recent of those is a 14 megawatt system operating at eight e s specific missile range, which is a navy Navy facility parking staff with microgrid storage capability k i u c has entered international recognition Has earned international recognition by moving at small island grid assertively forward Towards a hundred percent clean power generation in just 10 years This will told pacific news in an email by achieving 67 percent renewable in 2020 Operating at a hundred percent renewal on almost daily basis for a cumulative total of thousands of hours since 2019 They're leading the state in reliable Reliability last year and providing great stability for members the k i u c demonstrating clean energy future is within reach And I picked the story because it's it's exactly what I was talking about k i u c Didn't try and convert their system in one year or two years And they're not a big utility by by state standards or certainly by national standards But they're not a simple utility either. They have some pretty isolated communities. They have They have limited space to put these photovoltaic arrays They have a lot of tourism so they they don't want to be spoiling their natural beauty by Putting in wind turbines and and and other things like that And they've managed to do it and they've managed to do it in a thoughtful way that uses cradle and grave analysis critical thinking and I just think that it was great to see uh, k i u c Get recognized for for doing doing what we've been talking about and not fighting a war over energy But just fighting to make clean energy That's going to do it for stand the energy man this week and I look forward to talking to you Next week until then