 Okay, our flagship show on Energy on Wednesday at 4. I want you to state of clean energy. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Stink Tech, and I'm joined by my co-host, Mitch Ewen. And we also have our principal guest, is Howard Hall. I'm going to talk about converting farms with hydrogen, right? We're exciting. And we have Melissa Miyashiro now. And she's going to talk about an article that she wrote most recently in Civil Beat, dealing with statutory incentives and encouragements for electric vehicles, which I thought was a pretty interesting discussion and not necessarily a happy one. So what was your article about, Melissa? Yeah, thanks, Jay. I was interviewed by Civil Beat to talk about the recent EV benefits that sunsetted at the end of June. So folks that have been following this issue know that the only incentive that we had as a state for electric vehicles ended up expiring on June 30. So those were benefits that allowed EV owners and drivers to park free at the airport and also needered and county and city lots and also HOV lane access. But those HOV lane access perks sound like they're going to stick around, but we were sad to see the EV parking benefits completely evaporate this legislative session. We certainly have not been faithful to the original plan to incentivize electric vehicles. We gave them for a time. We gave them a significant tax break and the federal tax break and the state tax break were really an incentive for sure. Now it went away. And I wonder how you feel, I mean, on an editorial basis about the gradual loss of the incentives we used to have for electric vehicles? Yeah, we're definitely concerned about the trajectory, especially considering that we're on track to increase our emissions in the ground transportation sector. So although the COVID pandemic, we know that gasoline sales are down, but we expect when things get back up and running that people are going to continue to get in those gasoline powered vehicles, especially with oil prices dipping so substantially. So this is really probably the worst time to be cunning incentives for electric vehicles. Well, did the legislature say anything about why it was taking a pan on renewing this statute? Or they just dropped it? Yeah, it's not really clear what happened, to be honest. What's interesting, probably the most controversial piece of the free parking was the free parking at the airport. So EVs were allowed to park at the airport up to 30 days, free of charge. And there was wide consensus among stakeholders that that needed to be tweaked. And there was actually a great version of the bill that passed out of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection that took out the airport parking park. So we thought we were in pretty good shape, but then even that version of the bill didn't move forward. So we're not really sure what happened. Well, I hope the COVID passes quickly and we're able to get back to our regular priorities, including clean energy. Let me introduce you to Mitch Ewan. Mitch Ewan cares deeply about hydrogen. He's probably going to ask you about hydrogen and the change in the law, making hydrogen cars into electric cars, at least for legal purposes. Am I right, Mitch? Certainly we fought for six years, at least, to have a hydrogen electric vehicle designated as an electric vehicle and get all the same benefits that a battery electric vehicle had. And then just as we got it, they ripped the rug out from under our feet. I think we only have about maybe 10 hydrogen electric vehicles in Hawaii. And we're working hard to get more. And Howard is going to be helping us in that way. But it's pretty disappointing that we set these great goals. So by 2035, we're going to be energy-free. But then we have a brief effort, lots of enthusiasm, and then it just dies, because we just don't have the sting power. We don't have the political will. Basically, we wimped out. I think we ought to give them a memory course. Maybe they got pills to remember things, so you don't forget two years after you started. So Melissa, what message would you like to leave with people? I mean, Melissa's chief of staff of Blue Planet, that is something. And I'm sure that it's something you're going to continue to work on. But what is your message to people? What should they think of when this issue comes up? I think we really have to look at the overall policy package and the signal that we're sending as a state on electric vehicles. So not just looking at the parking benefits and isolation, but what is our overall plan to decarbonize our ground transportation sector, at least from Blue Planet standpoint, that plan really isn't in place. Another piece of legislation that passed last year actually places a $50 surcharge on electric vehicles at the time of registration renewal. So when you look at all of this together, the $50 surcharge, the parking benefits expiring, that's really sending the wrong signal about where we want to go on clean transportation. So we really want people to look at this holistically. Yeah, that was in your article. And that was really kind of a big irritance. On the one hand, the legislature is not continuing the incentives or thinking of new incentives or visiting the question or revisiting the question of tax credit. On the other hand, it's taxing owners of electric vehicles by adding the surcharge on. So I would say it's a mixed message at best, and more likely it's a negative message. What it's saying is government doesn't care. It might have cared before, but it can't remember. Well, there's always next session. So we'll be back ready to renew these conversations and push for changes. OK, I hope you come back and talk to us about it. Anytime. Thank you. Thank you, Melissa. Melissa Miyashiro, thanks for coming down. Aloha. Aloha. So I'd like to introduce Howard Hall, my friend from the Big Island. Howard lives in Waimea. Retired from the Hawaii Prep Academy in HPA, where he did a variety of jobs, including you were the head of the math department and you were the deputy dean. You had a whole career at HPA. And Howard owns a small farm. And he's decided to jump on the future. He's a futurist and convert his small farm over to hydrogen. So Howard, welcome to the show. Thank you. Tell us how you actually discovered hydrogen. Well, actually it was through you. I was introduced to you by our mutual friend, David. And I listened to you talk there. And that was back in 2018, as I recall, early. But this time of year, in fact. But this time of year. And I listened to you talk about what you were doing and the work you did with Nelha there. And basically, your hydrogen station. And that got me kind of tweaked. But I was OK with that. And then another item. What happened is, the whole thing is very serendipitous. It's lots of little things that come along all of a sudden, bam, bam, bam, bam. And the second thing that happened was at the end of that summer of 2018, the Hawaii Preparatory Academy called me because I'd been retired from there. I'd worked there for 40 years. And they called me and wanted to know if I would be willing to participate in a sort of a, they call it a sustainable sustainability plan. And they were going to do some brainstorming. And they wanted to know if I would participate in this brainstorming session. And I said, sure, I'd like to. At that point, I was not quite sure where they were going with their sustainability. And as I was getting into that, I was talking more and more with you. And I was beginning to think, there's something here that maybe we can do at HPA. Because as I got into the sustainability plan process, I found out that HPA, we have a state-of-the-art energy lab. We already have photovoltaic on the campus sufficient to, during the day, push back against Helco and virtually our energy-free green, that's for that way, with photovoltaic. And so I started thinking, well, this is getting really interesting. Maybe hydrogen could play a part in the school situation. Then, near the end of 2018, there was a conference down in Kona. And you were a presenter at that conference. And so I opted to attend the conference, a two-day conference, went down there. And that was my aha moment, listening not only to you and then touring your station there behind you and listening to the other issues that were going on with energy in this state, as well as nationally, because these guys were all over the country that came to this conference. And what I learned was the old paradigm of you generate power, you push it down some wires called the grid, and the consumer uses it the other end was dead. The consumer is now doing a pushback. The consumer is shoving back at you. And the utilities are absolutely flabbergasted what to do about this. And so it became, the conference became, and I think the title of it was, energy storage trends. And so we looked at all kinds of storage ideas, batteries, and so on and so forth. But then what became clear in that conference and through your presentation and everything else is that hydrogen, you can store a tremendous amount of energy in the form of hydrogen and it's portable. For that same energy to be in a form of a battery and you try to move it, that's just ridiculous. But you can put it into gashes form and compress it and you can move it around. So you have a portable, very powerful energy storage system. So then I began to think, OK, this is what I want to propose to HPA. So as we got into the early part of 2019, I was involved in the final drafting of their plan. And I was able to at least, because there were lots of other people pushing a lot of other ideas. And my plan was, OK, HPA, you're going to basically take your excess electricity, push it into batteries so you can get through the night and then start making hydrogen. And that hydrogen can be used to run some cooking in the kitchen, because our kitchen has to serve 400 people three times a day. And we can also then begin to convert the school vehicles into buses and maintenance and so forth into hydrogen-powered vehicles. And so that's where I was going with that. Well, then we get into the later part of 2019. We start getting into 2019. And I had that point left. The whole process now was in the hands of the board of governors. So I was left with the idea of, OK, this is exciting stuff. This is really cool. And thinking that, OK, I kept telling the school, this is really easy. Let's just do this. Let's just do it. As a part of all that process, we had gone up and visited the Blue Planet Research. And Paul Ponteu gave it. He's just been fabulous in showing what can be done, although that's on a big scale. But I kept thinking, OK, maybe why can do something similar to that? And so my wife and I decided, all right, we will try to do a mini system on our farm. So that's how we got there, was through the school, through meeting you, through this aha moment of recognizing that many grids are really what is needed in the utility world so that you take Google campus, you take Apple campus, you can take facilities that are factories and whatever. They can set themselves up as a mini grid, mini hour, with fuel cells. But they're running their fuel cells with converting the natural gas. What we want to be is really, truly 100% on our farm, 100% green energy. So we want to basically set up our farm where we're going to have the photovoltaic power. We'll have enough of that to begin to then look at making hydrogen. And then we will then move on into how we use that hydrogen. And I'd like to at this point probably bring up your schematic that you had made for us. What happened here was that in that letter part of 2018, we came up with, I started laying out what I would call the plan and the plan of what we could do on our farm. And as we look at your schematic that you then took my plan and did a beautiful job of laying it out, as of this year 2020, basically, we've gotten the whole upper left-hand side of that done. We have the Blue Iron battery system. We have the inverter system. We have our load center all set up and feeding the current loads of the farm. And we have basically gotten all of that set up. So we can come back to this drawing in just a minute, but I'd like to then go to the second picture we had, which is of the panels on the roof. Maybe do the panels on the roof first. Yeah. So here's the roof of the barn. And we have right now in the vicinity with all the panels and the old system, which you can't see. It's even more to the right of that photo. But I've got about 10,000 kilowatts on the roof right now with room for another 3,800 up there. So as we get into the designing of just what I need to make the hydrogen, I have at least the power. And then we've got the Blue Iron. Now switch to the Blue Iron photo. That is the coolest little beast in the world. And so we've got 16 kilowatt hours there of storage and our outback distribution converting into our AC loads down the line. So that's all now in place. So when we've got to that point, that's phase one, I call it, of the plan. And phase one could be standalone because I needed additional power. The power I had installed originally was minimal. It got us by with lights and our tools in the shop. It didn't really cut it as far as anything more than that. So this now gives me the ability to add some other tools in the shop. But then once we stabilize that and take a look at what's going on, we'll decide whether to add the additional panels now or add panels at a later date. But we'll now move into phase two. Phase two is the hydrogen side. And so let's throw up the schematic. There you go. There you go. I didn't hear you. What? No, we just put up the schematic so you can talk. Oh, OK. So yeah, switch back to the schematic. Thank you. So basically, we want to now work on that left right hand side. And it's actually in two parts in my mind. Part one is the electrolyzer and producing the hydrogen and storing it and having it ready for the farm operation, which is really what this whole discussion here is really about, is that David, our mutual friend, has probably developed the finest coffee in the state, if not nationally or worldwide. But truly, from my tasting of it, it's the best coffee anywhere. And what his goal is, and I fully support it, is he would like to be able to say that his coffee is manufactured and handled totally green, 100% green. In other words, all of the machinery that we would be putting into a future coffee processing facility would be run by electricity generated by hydrogen or supported by hydrogen generated through PV. And that the roasting will be done by hydrogen as well. So that's the downstream side. And that doesn't require high pressure. We can store the hydrogen in a fairly low-pressure systems similar to what they do up at Puvava Ranch that Paul does. The third phase would be then the Toyo Marai, or it might be a Nicola Badger, who knows what's coming down the pike right now. There are cars out there, and manufacturers out there talking about producing hydrogen-based cars. In your earlier discussion, I don't know if I'm off base, but as far as I'm concerned, a hydrogen car is an electric vehicle because it does run with the battery. So all the fuel cell is doing is charging it. Instead of like my Prius, I have a gas engine that charges it. Well, here you just would have the hydrogen doing the charging. But it's still an EV. I mean, in my mind, anyhow. So the third phase would be that I would then decide to buy a Marai, a Badger, or something. And then we need to move into the high pressure and come up with high pressure. So I got to talking with Chris McWinnie, who I think has been on your show before, and a neat guy, really super guy. And he walked me through what you might call the five steps to hydrogen. You got to make it, then you got to purify it, and you got to store it, and then you got to compress it, and then you have to have some dispensing medium. Now, in between there, at some point, you can store it at low pressure, as I said, and roasting. But so far, from his point of view, because he's building systems, his millennium rain systems, he's building those for almost certainly operations like mine. I mean, he's building them almost for residential situations. And so let's say you're in some part of the country where you have hydroelectric. It's totally cheap electricity. It might be feasible to actually make your hydrogen in one of his systems and use that. But if you're in Hawaii, where you're getting your power out of, you know, helco, which is all diesel, that's a different paradigm. So what we do is we look at PV or geothermal. You've talked about all this stuff before, and I'm totally sold, totally sold. So if I can get my little farm to operate, then it's a proof of concept. It's a proof of concept that I can take back to HPA, and I can say, OK, you've said that you will buy into my idea of energy independence, and you've put a date on it of 2030. I'd like to speed that up, Ted. That's what I'd like to do. And so if I can show them the steps and the stuff and the people, you know, the people, like you and you and Paul and Chris, and if I can show them that, because I did take a lot of board members up to, not to put them on our ranch, and they came back, 100% of them came back enthusiastic. OK. And it was very comforting for me to see that, all right? But again, the board has got a different ball game now. We had a new headmaster come on at the end of 2019. So he comes on, and what happens now? Bam, COVID-19. And the whole issue of HPA, and it's a boarding school. What do you do about kids next year? They have a lot of other stuff on their plate that they're going to have to deal with right now. And so I isolated out here on my farm, so why not? I can sit down and do this. And that's the plan, is to basically do the coffee, all right, 100% green produced. No fossil fuel, except for maybe my diesel tractors. But once it's in the ground, my diesels are out of the way. And it's all 100% coffee. Even the electric cart, the club car, will be charged from the blue ion. So everything that is touching or dealing with his coffee will be 100% green and hydrogen-based. Does that make sense? Holy Howard, so what kind of an investment of this? I mean, this is a pretty major decision for you to make. And you obviously had to have buy-in from your wife, Pat. The boss right here. I'll talk a little bit about that. OK, so that's a really fair question, a really good one. An awful lot of decisions you make in any business or any situation is, I return on investment. You're all right. Looking at, OK, I mean, I had a son-in-law who was in the drywall business. And he would often come back with an attitude of, hey, I need this new spray rig, because it'll pay for itself on the first job. Well, if it didn't pay for itself on the first job, there's a good chance it probably would pay for itself on the second or third job. But the idea was, it was going to pay for itself. So you're always looking for, even when I put the PV on this house above me. And I got the NIEM agreement with Helco. At that time, Helco was saying, we're not sure we can give you that contract. And finally, I was able to get it, because it's not a matter that we're just denying it. They just weren't prepared for the pushback, which I learned from that conference. That was the aha. I now understood why Helco was saying the things that you're saying. At any rate, when I put that on the roof, I was able to easily show that in a matter of about four or five years, I'd have paid off that investment when I was writing on somebody else's dime, like putting in a quarter in a jute and a slot machine in Las Vegas. You pay on the other guys money. But in this situation, the way I see it, and the way my wife and I see it actually, is that it's more like your boat, if you want to buy a boat, or if you want to go play golf and really get into the game and travel around and play golf. Or maybe at my age of 81, you know, might be out there taking cruises and seeing the sights around the world. Honestly, I'd rather take that expense and put it into this, because this is worth doing. It's important. And it's something I think I can do. And I think that's why I'm trying to do it, is that it's not something that requires either a big investment, like Hank does up there, and it's not something that requires even the infrastructure that we're trying to get in place of, you know, like California is doing with hydrogen fuel stations up and down the state. And that's what Chris McMinnie wants to do. He wants to get several hydrogen stations on this island. That would be super. How are you the first one? Well, not really. I mean, if you think about Mitch, he's got his down in Elhaw. I'm talking about a farm. Oh, farm? As far as I know, there's Guava Ranch, and I'm the third. As far as I know, I'm the third. So... Are you connected to the grid? Are you connected to the grid? At the farm? No. I'm 100%, and that's another good point, Jay. In the initial cost at the farm, it's not just that it's a cool thing to do and it's really exciting, but there was the whole idea of energy out at the farm was also avoided costs. I was at such a distance from Helco Lions in the farm lots that the cost of putting power poles, besides being unsightly, the power poles down and across my property, all right? Or the digging of a trench and putting in conduits according to, you know, specs, all of that was so expensive when I had them give me quotes, I said, I'm better off with putting in tons of PV, all right, at that cost. So it was avoided costs and that's how I justified it. So when you look at this in terms of what it would cost you, what it has cost you to do this project, as opposed to what you would be paying, bring the power out and to pay the electric bill every month. And by the way, what did I see this morning, the average cost of a kilowatt hour on a big island is like 34.7 cents, that's six in my brain. That's really high. And so if you had to pay monthly, you know, over the same amount of energy, plus the cost of bringing it on your land, am I right, this isn't really just a hobby. This would be, the hydrogen would be over time anyway, the cheapest way to go relative to using Helco. At this point, Jay, it's up to the blue iron battery. Okay, clearly I could add a bunch more blue iron batteries actually and more panels on the roof. And I still am under those costs. Where it gets into the world of the golf game and those other deferred expenses is when I started looking at buying a Mariah. That doesn't have a lot to do with making coffee or growing my limes. You don't really need that. I mean, that's nice, but... The Nicola truck, I might be able to have some fun. I'd probably try, you know, farm truck, but I do Tahitian limes and no, the Mariah and the cost of the high pressure system, that cost, once I get to that point, we're prepared to do that based on mostly that it's just cool thing to do. And that would be the cruises, the golf game, the yacht and the harbor type of expense instead. Forget about cruises for now, Howard. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I'm with you. Totally, yeah. So what about the notion of financing? In other words, the difference between doing the deal with getting on the grid and paying electric bill every month and all that and installing all this hydrogen stuff off the chart that we looked at, the map that we looked at, is that when you install it off the map, it costs you upfront. So did you finance it? Is there a way to finance it? Do you recommend financing it? There is a way to recommend it. There is a way to find an answer that has been recommended to me. I have seen the process by which you go through to do this, but what I decided is that, well, a couple of things happened, but one was that the process required that you had some already perfectly well drawn out plan. Like what Mitch had to do to build the system that's in there behind him, his nailhouse system. That had to be to the Nats eyebrow laid out already. I'm doing a proof of concept. I'm doing almost like an experimental aircraft. As I'm moving along, I'm running into problems. I solve the problem, I tweak it. And these processes by which you can get it financed require a more detailed plan, business plan, then I'm able to actually produce for what I'm trying to do. When I get to the final, the big ticket items, which would be the compressor and the Mariah. At that point, I facetiously tell my children, I instead of leaving you with anything in the way of cash, I'm going to leave you an idea and a concept. I'm taking your inheritance and I'm going to tell you. I know they will understand. You mentioned Howard that, you know, this is a coffee farm talking about or what? Well, it's a Detesian lime farm right now. It's been also a pumpkin and truck crops. And now recently, the last few years, if we're building out a, actually, David is building out a coffee farm. He may be a future speaker here on your show and go into more detail about what he's doing, but he's done an amazing job. And I totally support it. And I really feel that this would be a great way, because if he does what he's planning to do, there's going to be a tremendous amount of processing going on. And I need to have the power to do that. And that power would be best served by the use of hydrogen. Yeah, that was my point. So you're developing a kind of system here with the notion, I'm sure you would cooperate. Is the people that helped you, advised you, consulted with you, mentioned the others. You would talk to other farmers or possible farmers and help them. And so the question is, how much different would this system be for a sort of more classical farm where you need a lot of water and you have to pump the water out there, where you need different energy requirements? How would you tweak the system for a different kind of farm, different kind of crops? That's an excellent question. I can tell you that, as I said, I think I'm going to be the third if I can get this ahead of, I have another friend of mine who is wanting to do, he's now seen what I'm trying to do. And he says, I want to do this on my ranch. And he's cattle, he's a cattle operation. And so that's a very good question, but he already has wind, all right? So he has a source of, and he's got a great location for photovoltaic. And so he's in a great position to build out the collection of excess electricity and then go into the hydrogen. And again, it would be what, like in our case, it would be machinery that's processing coffee, all right? That would be usually electricity and the roasting. In a cattle operation, it might be a hard sell, but he's on board just because of the same reasons I love it. It's just the right thing to do. It is so now, it has to happen, all right? And so he's more interested in the show and tell, I think side of it. And maybe because they have trucks and they have so forth. And of course they are talking about electric trucks and you know, Elon is out there doing his thing. And so we might see an electric cattle hauling truck up there that is either supported by hydrogen backup or as hydrogen fuel cell augmented. And so that would be ways of selling it. But right now, at least in his case, it's that way. Now you take the other, I'm treasurer of our La Lomelo Farm Lots Association and most of the farmers out there are hardworking guys who are producing, you know, cabbage and so forth. And again, the only thing out there really is their diesel tractor, all right? And which has probably been there for, you know, quite a few years, they get a lot of mileage out of their tractors and their farm truck delivery. Now that truck could be converted to hydrogen, but then they'll have to get it somewhere. So I'm not wanting to set myself up like I was pitching to the school, to HPA. I was pitching that their process would eventually get to the point where they could, because they have land right on the highway, they could easily set up a fuel station that not only fill all of the school vehicles, but the teacher school vehicles, as well as parent school vehicles, as well as maybe the county Helion buses, which will be hydrogen. They do agriculture also? The school? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we have a school garden. Yeah. Okay, I mean, F-Row, we have to become self-sustaining. Oh, yeah. At some point, sooner the better. One other thing I wanted to ask you before we get a summary from Mitch about all this, because it's a great place to summarize. Did you consider wind? Were there any obstacles that prevented you from doing wind? Yes. Wind, I like wind, and as we have traveled across the country, I haven't been in every state of the union, and we've seen wind everywhere. And I love the fact that wind can be so compatible with agriculture, because you can still farm under it, you can graze cattle under it. You know, it doesn't, it really, and it makes no noise. And contrary to a lot of people who think it does. And so basically, wind was something, but my farm is in a little bit of a hollow. And so I, to get a good wind regime onto that blade, I'd have to be pretty tall, you know, and that would be a pretty big thing in our neighborhood. And I didn't want that sticking out like a huge sore thumb. We've got some wind generators. You mean a NIMBY sore thumb? Yeah. Well, the ones at the public point became contentious. Was that right? I'm familiar with those. Yeah. They became contentious, and I was involved a little bit in trying to come up with a way to mitigate that and you don't hear too much more about it. But the issue is, oh, we love it, but not in my backyard. To me, I think wind generators are cool. But the only thing I can, and I tried when I have, I don't feel that photo that I had of the barn, you'll see an air motor, well, no, not air motor. That's one that's still in the box. But I have some classic wind generators, but they're not up. I've got a Jacob, original Jacob, and 1932 Jacob. And when I meant Jacob, when I met Jacob in person here on the big island, I said, oh, you know, I got one of your original ones. It went to South, you know, South Pole. He says, oh, that was a good wind, spruce blades. We got to talking about that. So I really like wind. I totally like wind, but I'm in a hollow and it just didn't seem practical in order to get the wind regime, I'm gonna need, I'd have to. One thought for you is when you help other people, other farmers, build their systems, build their hydrogen systems, and they're not in a holler, they're in a flat plane and there's not a lot of neighbors around. You know, that needs something to consider. Okay, we're out of time, Mitch, can you, I know you're gonna be well able to do this. Can you summarize this for our viewers? Yeah, I'll very quickly summarize it. We're really fortunate to have Howard Hall, a true pioneer with a pioneering spirit who's willing to put his money where his mouth is or he coined the phrase. Through a step up. That's where my heart is. And demonstrate that this can be done. And providing a really good resource, one thing we didn't talk about was the fact that you can leverage this and show the rest of the community how to do it. And other types of people that we need in this game to spread the word. So thank you very much, Howard. And tell us how to do it. Thank you. Thank you, Howard. Love to come around with a camera and do a little study of what you've got. That would be valuable for a win, win, win. Right, well, I would love to get to my next stage. I'm at that point where we're working on the tankage and the electrolyzer, sorry, there we go. The electrolyzer and all that. Once I get that in place or ready to go, then I'd be ready to say, okay, you're sorry, you're doing it right now. Just waiting, okay. Thank you, Howard. Howard Hall. I admit you and thank you very much, you guys. This was a great discussion. Really an eye opener. Good for you. Aloha, everybody. Take care.