 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii, Stan Osserman coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii. And, you know, I have a super special guest today. And I mean, of all my guests, he's in the top two. And he's supposed to be talking to us from New York today, but he's in London. So it's like one in the morning for him. So we got to really cut him some slack if he starts mumbling or whatever. But he's so special, I actually shaved and took a shower before the show. And I never do that for the show now that we're on Zoom. So he is super special. His name is Andy Marsh and he's the CEO of Plug Power. He used to be a small hydrogen company. Now it's a global hydrogen power. So Andy, welcome to the show. Again, this is your annual pilgrimage to my show and I appreciate it. Well, it's always a pleasure to be here, Stan. I always enjoy our conversation. I really, really do value your time and your participation on the show here. So let's get going. And, you know, last time we talked, we talked a little bit about aviation and hydrogen and aviation. And I know that there's been a lot going on. United signed some contracts for some commuter fuel cell things that are gonna be put on a hundred airplanes and air buses doing stuff. And there's a lot of people working in UAVs and small commuter type vehicles that run on fuel cells. What's going on with fuel cells and air aviation? That you're aware of. You know, Stan, we're involved in almost everything you mentioned. So as you know, Airbus actually is looking at plans to turn all their future airplanes post 2035 into hydrogen airplanes. And part of that activity, they're looking at establishing hydrogen hubs across the world. And in the United States, we're looking at location for a hydrogen hub for Airbus that will meet their needs. You know, I think they're probably looking at places where we built green high, looking to build green hydrogen plants like in outside Dallas. You mentioned regional aircraft. We actually shipped our first fuel cells at the end of the fourth quarter to universal hydrogen who's actually looking to do flights, test flights in early 2024 of regional aircrafts. They're essentially converting old regional aircrafts into hydrogen base. And finally, we have a deal with Heaven Drone, which is a drone company in Israel that's working on drone technology. And you know, fuel cells have an advantage of being lighter in weight and can run about three times longer than running on lithium battery. So all that's pretty exciting work that's going on in that space. Outstanding. Well, as you guys in the big world start thinking about those hydrogen hubs, you know, remember Hawaii's been a serious place for refueling cargo ships and airplanes for decades and decades. I mean, ever since we had whaling ships running on steam, we used to do coal and we still do oil for, you know, bunker fuel for big ships going in and out. So don't forget Hawaii. Don't forget Hawaii. We're right here. I won't forget Hawaii, Stan. Okay. But you mentioned the hydrogen hubs. There's so much going on. We have a special team that's working along with many folks. You know, for example, in New York, we're working with people like NYSERDA, which is the New York state energy research development organization and many of the utilities in the state. I probably spend a little time every day on hydrogen hubs. So if you're folks in Hawaii, if you're interested in plug working with you on a hydrogen hub, just send me an email. Yeah, we got your email address. So, you know, when you give me an offer like that, I'll start pumping on the politicians and start bending their ear and, you know, because, you know, Hawaii, unlike a lot of places on the mainland, or actually like several states, we've been importing our energy and we don't have any natural fossil fuel energy, but we have tons of natural energy. We have, believe it or not, we have hydroelectric from all of our old sugar and pineapple fields, the irrigation, the rainwater that lands in the mountains comes downhill and runs into the ocean. And when you add all those little, you know, 50, 60 kilowatt streams up or put a couple in a stream, you've got a megawatt, and then you got 20 megawatts and then you got 50 megawatts just in hydroelectric, you know, and that starts to get to be a significant amount. And people also forget that we have geothermal. Most people think on the big islands, only place we have geothermal, but we actually have geothermal on Maui and Oahu that we could be taking advantage of, especially with new horizontal drilling and things. So that's all clean and firm power, 24 hours a day. So that would be great, but we also need hydrogen for the electric transportation side of the equation. And that's hydrogen you have to store along with solar power and wind power hydrogen. I mean, electricity you have to store and hydrogen is the way to store it. So we're looking at turning over into big time hydrogen folks here. I should mention, Dan, we are working with your US Senator, one of your US Senators in Washington and discussing hydrogen hubs. So your team, your state team is working with us and trying to encourage us to engage in Hawaii. Okay, well, I brief both of our Senators when I was working for the state in hydrogen and one of our congressmen who actually represents all the neighbor islands and a windward Oahu, he was an F C-17 pilot, no Air National Guard. And I was his commander. So, I love talking to him. And even Tulsi Gabbard was in the Army Guard and I was in the Air Guard. So I've had a run of three congressmen in Hawaii, Mark and Kai Tulsi Gabbard and Kai Kahelei all, we're in the Guard with me and gives me a good opportunity to talk to him. And, you know, Schultz, Schatz rather, Brian Schatz is probably the guy that would work on the hydrogen stuff. Maisie Hirono kind of does softer things. She's in the education of things like that. So, I'll go rattle his cage a little bit. Yeah, go put a good word in for us. Yeah, he was actually critical with getting funding for H-Cat for us. So, I'll get back and talk with him a bit. So what else has been going on besides the hydrogen hubs and aviation with plug power? I keep seeing you in the media all over the world from Korea to Europe and everywhere in between. Yes, that's a loaded question, Stan. So, I think since we've spoken last, we formed a joint venture with Renault for vehicles in Europe. You know, Europe expects to have 500,000 late commercial vehicles on the road, which are fuel cell by 2030. And we believe we can get 30% of the market together. The JV's named Hivea, which is the hydrogen way. And, you know, that group, we already have three vehicles, two people movers, one people mover and two to move goods. So that's really exciting. I'm here in Europe, but if I start going to the east and stop in Egypt, our electrolyzer business, actually we're building a hundred ton plant. We're making green ammonia in Egypt with a Roscombe, the largest fertilizer manufacturer in the world. And we're looking to have that plan up and running for COP 27, which is really exciting. As I run further east in Korea, we have a joint venture with SK, the second or third largest conglomerate in the world in Korea. And we're looking to do both stationary power at large scale up to, you know, our first project, big project will be 200 megawatts of fuel cells to put power on the grid. If I head south to Australia, we're building a factory in Australia with Fortescue, one of the largest mining companies to make green ammonia, as well as hydrogen for fuel cells in their mining operations. And then continuing eastward, I'm in the United States and it's been a pretty exciting year for plug power. You know, we doubled our revenue. We bought a number of companies. We're now have over 2,400 people worldwide. We're building the biggest giga factory to make fuel cells and electrolyzers in the world in Rochester, New York. We're constructing two green hydrogen plants, one the largest Penn green hydrogen plant in the world, in Alabama, New York, and as well as one in Georgia. And we have plants that have over 500 tons of green hydrogen across the state. And I forget, I forgot in Europe, we also formed a JV with Axiona, which is the largest provider of retail renewable power, renewable power in the Iberia Peninsula. So a lot going on Stan. When it comes to ammonia, you know, that's one of the things you brought up a couple of times in your last statements. There's two pieces of ammonia that are intriguing to me. Number one, a lot of people probably don't realize that unless they've been to the garden center to buy fertilizer, but right now there's a worldwide shortage of fertilizer. And a big piece of that is ammonia. And another part is that ammonia is a great way to ship hydrogen at room temperature and basically static pressure because it's liquid. And we're used to dealing, it's not exactly a friendly chemical in terms of it can be a caustic chemical, but at least we have the protocol set for shipping and handling and stuff. And they have a regular, a really good track record of safety so far. So in your world, in the hydrogen world, in the electrolyzer world, is ammonia a big piece of moving hydrogen? I think you're going to see ammonia being a big piece. You know, you take a look at the work we're doing with Fortescue and Australia stand. And they're really looking to ship green ammonia to both Japan and Korea. You know, a place like Australia looks at the world and say, they've been a great provider of natural resources. And one of the natural resources they have is the sun and how to leverage the sun to create jobs for people. They believe that they can become a net exporter of green ammonia. Lots of people are looking to burn green ammonia, especially in the shipping industry. Moving the density of green ammonia from an energy point of view is really very attractive. And so I think that you'll see a good deal of, we're dealing with a good deal of people who are looking at green ammonia as well as a green methanol, combining green hydrogen with carbon that was captured or in the future, direct carbon capture. And you can use that directly in the same vehicles you have today. So there's a lot of attractiveness to that you see going on. So when you say burning ammonia in the energy side, are you talking about in turbines or internal combustion engines or? Yeah, it actually both stand. You see both activities going on. All right. And so you would still have NOx, but you would have very little carbon. Yeah. So there they go. And when you look at the NOx, what they tell me, I'm not an expert in this one, that a lot of folks will tell you, I was with a company that runs lots of peaker plants in the US for electricity. And they felt it would be easy to scrub out the NOx with their equipment they have. So that's how they think about the NOx. Okay, good. Yeah, because when it comes to moving ammonia around, if I had to compare liquid hydrogen with ammonia, I think I'd pick the ammonia because liquid hydrogen, the doers are expensive, the energy it takes to get it that cold is expensive. And then if you spill any, whatever you spill it on is frostbitten or destroyed instantly. So I think ammonia is a really attractive way to do it. And you're kind of giving me the picture that ammonia is gonna be a big, big player in the hydrogen world. And for those chemists out there or people who remember their high school chemistry, that's NH3. It's three hydrogen atoms and one nitrogen atom makes ammonia. So it's a real basic chemical. Yeah, I think ammonia is interesting for international shipping. I think for local storage and local transportation, like within the United States, I think the liquid hydrogen is probably superior. And I think you'll see both. Okay. I think the other challenge, if you use NH3 directly stand, so you have a process where you have to make NH3, then you're gonna have to crack NH3 for pure hydrogen. So I think that you'll see folks shipping green ammonia and it'll be cost effective for international shipping, as you mentioned before, as well as burning in many applications. Well, I think you'll see liquid hydrogen be the primary means for storage and delivering large quantities of hydrogen. You know, it's stand until there's hydrogen pipelines everywhere. And there's lots of work going on in hydrogen pipeline. You know, I'm here in Europe today and we've had long discussions today about potential hydrogen pipelines for using natural gas pipelines in Denmark into Northern Germany, so that you be able to leverage wind power in Denmark, create hydrogen, put it into a pipeline just like you do natural gas today and be able to deliver that into central Europe. Well, that concept is definitely an exciting concept. What kind of strikes me though, is what holds back using pipelines for hydrogen is embrittlement and the fact that the pipelines that are existing have a variety of metals in them that they're not sure because they were put in 50 years ago or 80 years ago, what's there? What about the concept of using fiber-reinforced tubing and sliding it into the pipelines? Those, that fiber-reinforced tubing can be pressurized to over 2,000 PSI. So it's really a great option. Are they looking at that option? We are, Sam, but I should mention that when you, it depends where you are in the world. If you talk to people like SNAM, which runs pipelines from Northern Africa into Europe, they'll tell you the soft metal that they use for pipelines in Europe, 91% of them you could transport hydrogen in. In the US, it's a little bit different. But when you talk to people like Williams, who runs lots of pipelines in the States, they'll tell you that they're always repairing and replacing pipelines and that there really is an opportunity for hydrogen. I do think your idea makes sense with the slaving. And certainly we're looking at all options, because eventually we really do believe that it's so much more economically economical to move hydrogen via pipelines. Hopefully, coupled with soft caverns for storage. And then you really have a dynamic solution, not to go too deep in the detail. So there's been lots of work done at UC Irvine, looking at generating hydrogen, using hydrogen storage with the caverns in California. And it's really probably the only way California can have a true renewable network if you have hydrogen as part of it, hydrogen storage, just because of the long seasonal time frames where the wind's not blowing and you need electricity. So you look at the usage profile in California, hydrogen really could be a big answer. I agree, because you're avoiding all the transportation costs of trucking or trains or however you're moving it. And the other nice thing about, no matter whether you're using the existing pipelines or whether you modify them to carry stuff, you have the easements. And when it comes to the easements, that's a legal battle you don't have to fight, which is a huge deal when you try to move stuff. If you already have the easements on a pipeline, that makes things a whole lot easier to start going. Couldn't agree with you more, Stan. Okay, so is plug doing anything on grid scale with grid storage? And my big frustration here in Hawaii is Hawaiian Electric, and even we have one co-op on the island of Kauai. And they don't really look at hydrogen as an energy storage medium seriously. And I think once they price out the batteries, they're gonna need at the gigawatt scale to do, gigawatt hours of energy storage, they're gonna finally realize that storing oil was cheap. Storing energy and batteries is not cheap. And hydrogen is a lot more like oil to store energy than batteries. Is plug working in that area as well? Absolutely, Stan. I should change my background. I can show you the stationary plant. We built a test facility at our facility in New York, but our work with SK is really focused on that. By 2024, we expect to have a 200 megawatt plant operating, which will be fed through a hydrogen from a chloralkali plant. Where the waste stream will be cleaned up and the hydrogen will be turned to electricity and put directly on the grid. When I outlined our objectives for the year at during our update call last week, I talked about the fact that plug power is really looking closely at the soft caverns that we are looking to develop a strategy for long-term storage. The really coupled with their stationary products, which are not only there for the grid, but also looking at places like distribution centers where we are today for long-term backup, as well as data centers, which is a real hot topic. I was gonna ask you about data centers next. That seems to be a real critical thing, especially, I don't know if people catch this in the news, but part and parcel to the Bitcoin revolution that's going on worldwide is that the mining that they have to do with computers to track all that data requires super reliable energy and it requires a lot of it. So you can't afford, I mean, if we're gonna sit there and move a substantial amount of our economic trading, quote unquote, currency in Bitcoin, those data centers become critical. Yeah, does that make sense to you, Stan, that we should be using our energy to make Bitcoin? No, I mean, the concept is interesting because it pretty much is inflation-proof and it's secure, I don't have a problem with the security, but as an energy guy, if something happens like an EMP, electromagnetic pulse, whether it's from space or whether it's a deliberate attack, what happens when all that data dumps or disappears? What do you, how do you back up your investment of your life savings if it's all in Bitcoin and it was all digital and it just disappears? That's the thing that scares me. You know, I think they're actually looking, you know, and I'm not an expert at this either, but I think they're looking at different methodologies for creating coins, you know, with bidding systems and auctions and I'm sure there's many in your audience who understand that better than me, but it just seems preposterous to me that we would be wasting so much energy, especially in a future renewable world where we need more and more renewables, putting it into Bitcoin the way it's mined today, I think it's rather challenging. I think, you know, I read about other methodologies that I think a lot of these crypto currencies are working on to reduce energy. I think they make a lot of sense to me, but you know, we can't be wasting one or 2% of the world energy creating currency. So I think we can do a lot. I do think I like the concept. I think it's just, I think the different methodology they're using at the, or looking at using, I think we'll make a lot of sense. Okay. You know, on your call last week, you also talked about policy making and a lot of people don't realize how important that is, especially when you go global. I mean, here in the US, we deal with local policy at the county level or city level and then state policy at the state level and then federal policies that the federal government takes. But when you go global, now you're in a whole different ballgame. Can you talk a little bit about the policy challenges that a company that's global like yours faces? Well, I think I heard a lot, you know, I'm in Europe today and I was looking at projects in the Nordic regions and looking at projects in France and looking at projects in Germany. And every, you know, and they are, you know, there is in Germany, there is in Europe a strong commitment to hydrogen. So they want to be able to have over 40 gigawatts of electricity dedicated to hydrogen by 2030 with another 40 gigawatts in Northern Africa, big numbers. But, you know, you go into the permit, you know, if you just go where we work a lot at the EU level in Brussels, you know, where rules are set, you know, they use often a contract of differences which essentially, you know, let the user make up the cost difference between the older technology and the newer technology for a period. But, you know, you have a, you know, you have to just like the United States, you have to address the EU level and you have to address, you know, each of the nations have different permitting rules and different regulations, you know, it can take, you know, years in Germany to get permitting while some places in Europe you can do the same thing in weeks. And so you really have to be in depth and work with people who are in depth. I mean, PLUG works with, you know, folks who actually are ex-EU ambassadors to help us in European policy. At the local region, we have many partners to help us, but you really need to engage. I mean, you know, you plug is global. I mean, I have over 300 people in Europe at the moment. So it's, you know, we have a fairly large size operation here and we continue to grow. U.S. policy, pretty exciting at the moment. I know that there's been lots of disappointments with the Biden Build Back Better plan, but the climate plans we believe will be passed. Most are people think in April timeframe and that would provide a $3 tax credit for producing green hydrogen. That would be a big deal. It would make hydrogen competitive across the board with gray hydrogen tomorrow. I look forward to that. Those kind of policy changes here. Yeah, and, you know, the U.S. is, you know, if we do that the U.S. will remain the leader in this technology. You know, we have great companies in this technology and we've made great progress. And look, to be successful, you need global collaboration, but the policy climate the country establishes will really determine how many jobs in the next generation industries we create here in our own country. Okay, we got about a minute left. And last week when I was listening to you talk to everybody, you said the big thing in your playbook is you got to actually build stuff. And that was a big statement that you made and you repeated it a couple of times. So why don't you talk about actually building stuff and how important that is. Okay, really important because you got to learn, building, we'll have two green hydrogen plants online this year, the New York facility and the Georgia facility we've done producing 70 tons of green hydrogen. We're building a 300,000 square feet fuel cell factory in Bethlehem, New York. We have a new facility in Germany. We're building a factory with Fortescue in Australia. And by the way, we'll ship an awful lot of fuel cells this year, last year. I think the numbers, almost 10, 11,000 units were shipped last year. We built the almost 50 hydrogen stations and that's how you build out this hydrogen economy, Sam. One building at a time, but you got to build stuff. Well, plug power is definitely going big and not going home soon. They're definitely on the road and doing great things. So my hat's off to you for your leadership in the hydrogen industry and what you're doing with plug power and taking the leading role around the world in promoting hydrogen and getting people to understand that it really is the future. And I think you can speak to that better than just about anybody. So I appreciate you staying up late tonight over there in London and I'll let you get some sleep now but I'll give you the last word. Yeah, I guess, Stan, wait till you hear what I got to tell you when 2023, when we speak at the end of this year. Okay, that's a guarantee. I'll be giving you a guine teal and email and we'll get you set up next January or maybe December this year. Sounds great, Stan. Okay, thank you. Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. And Aloha and from Hawaii, Stan the Energy Man, signing off till next Tuesday from Tink Tech, Hawaii. Aloha.