 Welcome to Stand Energy Mountain. Stan Osterman here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we're gonna do a little combination of things today. And number one, I wanted to talk about Hawaii and hydrogen and some of the, not only the history of Hawaii and what it's been doing in the hydrogen world that's impacted the whole hydrogen industry worldwide, but also focused on some of the people here in Hawaii that have actually worked with me and worked with the federal government to make hydrogen a reality. So to start with, Hawaii's really a super unique place. I grew up here, moved here in 1959, was witness to Hawaii becoming a state in 1959. And my dad was a military officer so we weren't expecting to live here our whole lives, but it turns out I pretty much did. I had to move away for a couple of years, but came back in this school, high school and college and everything here and lived here ever since. But Hawaii's a really special place. It's a special place culturally. It's a special place climate-wise. It's a special place geographically. And I'd even say politically. It's probably a very conservative state with very liberal politics. So it's really kind of a dichotomy in a lot of ways. The one thing I have noticed is that Hawaii is the origin of a lot of really great ideas, whether it's Asian martial arts movies or whether it's Chinese medicine, whether it's fusion cooking, go down the list. So many things that probably would have stayed where they originated became an international phenomenon because of Hawaii. And we had our own batch of, I would call them inventions or things that impacted the world, the most notable being surfing, the sport of kings in Hawaii that do Kanamoku introduced to the rest of the world. And it started off in California and the West Coast and turned into a lifestyle in the 60s, 50s and 60s. By the 70s was pretty much nationwide, even on the East Coast. And then not long after that, even in Europe where people were wearing super web suits and still trying to surf. And now surfing is found around the world, whether it's Portugal or Brazil, Japan, Indonesia, you name it. In fact, surfing is gonna be in the Olympics this coming summer in Japan. It's finally made it to the Olympic stage. And of course, some of the competitors, the chief competitors and champions will be from Hawaii. But the term wiki that you hear in Wikipedia or WikiLeaks, the term wiki or the word wiki in Hawaiian means quick. And so it's on purpose that when you look at Wikipedia it's the quick way to find things. It's a quick way to look something up. So we have the word liki, liki or wiki, wiki, wiki which means quick or fast. So that has kind of been tapped on it. You're surfing the net. You talk about the internet, surfing the net is a term that the word surfing came from Hawaii and now it's even applied to high-tech internet stuff. The word big, the phrase big kahuna. Obviously it's used more in the joking way of whoever's in charge, but that's an old Hawaiian thing. Magnum PI, Hawaii 50, those shows were loved. And even before that, there was an old Hawaiian, before the first Hawaiian, Hawaii 50, there was an old 60s show that was done in Hawaii. I don't even remember the name of it. It was the groundbreaking idea for a Hawaii 50 show that was based on law enforcement. So we have some great things that go on here, but a lot of people don't realize that some of the high technology and innovative things in the world center in Hawaii, we have tremendous telescopes on the island of Maui and the big island here in Hawaii. But because of their location near the equator and their high altitude, they get incredible views of the universe that up until the Hubble telescope were just not obtainable. So Hawaii's been in the observation, the space observation world for a long time. One of my guests on the show here, Hans, oh shoot, invented ocean thermal. Or actually did the design work for ocean thermal, which is being tested and refined at the natural energy laboratory down in Kona at Nelha. So a lot of things have grown up in Hawaii, even high tech stuff. One of the few states that has an application in to be a spaceport, we have high speed boats on our lanes that the army runs a high speed trimaran. A lot of the Navy's undersea research was done in Hawaii. A lot of the classified work done during World War II was actually done on the island of Nihau here in Hawaii because it's so remote and has no access from outside people. You can't get there unless you go by helicopter or boat. And if you can surveil the shoreline, you're not getting in there. So the military had an agreement with the inhabitants of the island of Nihau during World War II and after to develop classified things because it was such a perfect and isolated location in the middle of a US state or territory, in the middle of a big ocean, which was hard to hide anything coming in or going out. So what I wanted to focus on of course, because my favorite, something's hydrogen. And a lot of people don't think about this, even in our state don't realize that Hawaii has a pretty rich history in hydrogen going back into the 1970s. We had a congressman then senator named Spark Matsunaga, who was actually in Congress before our more famous senator, Senator Daniel Inouye. And he introduced hydrogen, hydrogen technology and the concept of a hydrogen economy to the state of Hawaii back probably in the 70s or 80s. And he really kind of planted the seed here. So later on, folks like Senator Inouye, who when he became more powerful in Congress and Senator Akaka, they really helped bring some of the more innovative projects that related to hydrogen into being here in Hawaii. And one of them was a program called HCAT, Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, which Senator Inouye brought in probably, I don't remember exactly when it came in, it's probably around 2000, right around the year 2000. And that program is one that I was involved with for six years and has done some serious work, not just in hydrogen, but in electric vehicles overall. And the work that HCAT did way back in the early 2000s tested all kinds of battery technologies. We even had a 20 foot container that was literally a freezer that we could take down into many degrees below zero to test battery performance way below zero. And we also transitioned the battery electric program from HCAT into our state energy office and they began to handle the battery plug-in program. But at HCAT, we continued on with electric vehicles, but moved into the less known, but amazing technology known as hydrogen fuel cells and hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicle technology. So we had some pretty visionary leaders in the state of Hawaii, Governor Linda Lingle was one of them. She was in office from 2002 to 2010. And she and Senator Akaka were at Tickham Air Force Base when HCAT and the Air Force built the first hydrogen station on a military base in the world. And it was pouring down rain that day and there's some great video of the Senator and the governor getting literally soaked because they had a nice awning over their head except the 15 to 20 mile an hour wind blew all the rain right past the awning and onto the VIP stage. So most of the people in the audience were nice and dry but the four folks, the VIPs on the stage were getting soaked. And of course, they were all dressed in suits and suit, women's suits, business suits and they were getting dumped on. But there was such a commitment here to support that research that the governor and Senator Akaka and Senator Inouye were big supporters of hydrogen carrying on Spark Matsunaga's vision for the state of Hawaii to eventually move into a hydrogen economy. In the mid-2000s and 2006, 2007, 2008, well, Governor Lingo was in the seat of government as a governor. She actually and the legislature, they worked together to formulate how hydrogen could develop Hawaii's economy. Hawaii's always had an economy that was based on sugarcane and pineapple, tourism and the military. Those were like the three legs of our economic stool here in Hawaii. As most of you don't realize, pineapple and sugarcane are all but non-existent in Hawaii. Dole still has a pineapple plantation in central Oahu that visitors can come and see what it was like on the old Hawaiian plantations but it's really not a big cash drop in Hawaii like it once was the exported pineapples worldwide. And sugarcane is long gone and sugarcane, believe it or not, was actually one of our earliest renewable resources to make electricity. On all islands, they would take the sugarcane bagasse which was the remnants after they squeezed all of the juice out of the sugarcane and they would use some of it for cattle feed but they also would use a lot of it to burn or power. Of course, it's still a carbon-based fuel so it pretty much went by the wayside with a lot of the other carbon burning technologies unless they were cleaned up but it was one of our, not only agricultural product we exported but gave us some energy independence as well. But we moved into the hydrogen piece in the mid-2000s, 2005, six, seven, eight and actually had some funding set up called the Hydrogen Fund which was $10 million to start doing hydrogen and build a hydrogen economy so that Hawaii could become less dependent on fossil fuel technology. And it never quite got off the ground. The original $10 million was allocated and when it was sent into the executive branch of the government, there were problems with executing the, they brought in mainland investors and mainland consultants to help get things going and some of them had checkered paths and checkered motivations and it ended up turning into more of a scandal than anything else. And I think that one piece of point in history in hydrogen pretty much killed the appetite for hydrogen especially after Governor Lingle stepped away from office and most of the Democratic Party was pretty much fed up with anything having to do with hydrogen. And to this very day, it's still hard to get the political folks in Hawaii to really look at hydrogen the way they should seriously based on its merits and its technology without thinking about some of the shenanigans that went on with some of the early funding. But that's getting us up into the time we're at now in the 2010 and beyond. Hawaii's done a lot of great work with hydrogen research and we're going to be right back. Thank you. Hey, welcome back to stand the energy manager on think tech Hawaii, Stan Osterman. And we're just talking about hydrogen history in Hawaii and I got you up through the 2008 to 2010 timeframe. And that's actually where I kind of jumped into the picture in my own career and focused on hydrogen although I'd been involved in clean energy for several years about that time in my career like around 2008, 2006 is when I started working with the state of Hawaii as a military officer on the National Guard side and working clean energy projects with US Pacific Command and the state of Hawaii. I was senior enough in the National Guard to be considered a point of contact for US Pacific Command and I worked a lot with the J8, Dr. Kailiwai and some of the folks at US Pacific Command on energy and clean technology. We talked about undersea cables. We talked about wind turbines. We talked about trying to get all of the military bases ahead on clean energy and by the way they are here in Hawaii. You can't go in a military base and not see a whole lot of photo attack and even some wind. At Kanyui Marine Base, they even have ocean-based power generation, wind generation and wave generation experiments going on from time to time offshore of the marine base. But a lot went on, a lot was unnoticed or not really, most people weren't aware of it. A lot was going on. The Army put in a 65 kilogram of hydrogen station up at Schofield and we had one, HCAT had one installed at Hickam Air Force Base, again a 65 kilogram of a station. After that, the University of Hawaii's HNEI and Mitch Ewan put in a station at the Marine Base at Kanyui. A little bit smaller, I think there's a 12 kilogram today. But the military was actually testing quite a few vehicles in Hawaii that use hydrogen fuel cell technology. We basically gave the military their first picture of what hydrogen vehicles could do in the DOD. To this day, we're kind of known as the seed for the Department of Defense in the United States to really bring recognition to the military of the hydrogen, advantages the hydrogen technology in the military. So we got those things started, we made vehicles, we made flight line vehicles for the Air Force, we designed a microgrid for Hickam, they used hydrogen for energy storage and resiliency and redundancy and did a lot of great things. Being that this past week was Thanksgiving, I thought it might be really kind of neat to highlight some of the folks and talk a little bit about what they did in Hawaii to facilitate some of these great projects in Hawaii. One is a lady who's actually on the show with Jay Fidel from Time to Time, a Mina Merida who was an early hydrogen promoter, I think a frustrated hydrogen promoter back in the mid 2000 to 2008 time frame and she's one of the folks that worked with in the Lingo administration and at the PUC, they helped get hydrogen started in the state and so she did a great bit of work. I think she just kind of got burned out on hydrogen because no pun intended. She worked really hard at it and got beat up pretty bad for it. I mentioned MITCHU and HNEI, he actually has a background in developing hydrogen fuel cell transportation. Some of the very first vehicles in the United States ever built with hydrogen fuel cell technology were built by MITCH and he continues to work at the University of Hawaii supporting that station on the marine base, supporting another station he just basically built from scratch on the big island to help support what were initially buses being made for the National Park Service, but also one being made for the county of Hawaii and will be hopefully turned into the starting transition for that whole bus service on the big island to go to hydrogen technology. Another big island supporter that's still really active in helping move things along with the big island is Paul Panthiel from Blue Planet Research. He's a wizard and has a whole team of really, really smart folks who are internationally known for their work in hydrogen fuel cell technology and lithium ferrous phosphate batteries which I think are far superior to lithium cobalt technology and he really has done a lot to support hydrogen and really good clean solid battery technologies around the world that's Blue Planet Research. Blue Planet Foundation is kind of the sister to Blue Planet Research. Both are headed by Hank Rogers, Mr. Hank Rogers who's basically has the license to the video game Tetris and has used a lot of his resources to promote clean technology, hydrogen, clean batteries and even help support NASA and international space missions with a space habitat on Montelua where astronauts come to train for long duration space days by training on the lava fields of the volcano Montelua in southern big island. My predecessor at HCAP, Mr. Tom Quinn, he kind of led the charge, initial charge on air forces for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicles at HCAP and I did some great work there. The gentleman that took my place after I left a moment arrow continues along that line and continues to work with the microgrid project which really quite frankly he named it Pearl and it was his whole creativity that brought that acronym into place. Another HCAP hero is Rachel James who came to HCAP to have a decent schedule because she was actually working in one of our congressional offices for Tulsi Gabbard and we stole her away from Tulsi Gabbard's office even though she was doing great work over there but her schedule was so intense and she wanted to get her law degree so we gave her a little bit more flexibility. She got her law degree and worked at HCAP for probably four and a half, five years and now is a lawyer at the public utilities commission so she will continue in the future to help hydrogen move forward in state government whether it's at the PUC or whatever the next career is as a lawyer going forward. We just call her the governor because she's such a sharp young lady we figured she's going to be governor sooner or later. We have great support from our parent corporation the used to be called high tech development corporation but it's a white tech development corporation now and Lynn and Wayne and all the folks over at over in Manoa and now they're actually down near the university medical school in a new facility that they put together. They've been a great support for HCAP the biggest support they gave us was they stayed out of our way and kind of let us do what we needed to do with the Air Force but when it came to legislative support education and support services like accounting and stuff they were always great they always included us in their career days and things like that so people could learn about hydrogen. Some of the companies that actually helped out a lot the first company was CERVCO and spearheading that was Thor Toma who he actually approached us to learn a little bit more about hydrogen but then he also he and the whole leadership team at CERVCO CERVCO is a big multi dimensional company here in Hawaii they don't just do cars but they happen to have one of the biggest dealerships here in Hawaii that deals directly with Toyota Japan and so CERVCO brought in not only the first Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to lease commercially here in the state but they also used their own funding to build the first hydrogen station that was available outside of Hickam and Schofield in the marine base to provide fuel for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles so Thor and the folks at CERVCO they really gave the commercial side a big boost here in the hydrogen fuel cell world. Another player was Hawaii Gas Rich Nugarmo was my personal go to guy at Hawaii Gas he provided a lot of continuity over the years and listened to me as I tried to preach to him that Hawaii Gas ought to be looking at hydrogen as their future follow-on carbon free fuel here in the islands he took that to heart and I think because of him a lot of the leadership that Hawaii Gas understands hydrogen pretty well now and I think there's a great future in Hawaii Gas's world for hydrogen. One of the folks that really helped us out with the Air Force was a lady named Miranda Ballantyne not really well known in Hawaii but she was known in the Pentagon because she was the deputy director for insulation, energy and infrastructure I don't know what her exact title was there but she ran all the programs at the Air Force Research Lab and Air Force Power Technology Office that we dealt with and she was a huge supporter especially of our transition to the flight line of the future and the microgrid project at Hickam. She was an incredible inspiration and she really got the Air Force thinking serious about hydrogen like I mentioned Afro and Apto as two of the agencies over there. They were a little bit of struggle from time to time depending on who the personalities were but overall they were really big helps in getting us moving. There are other federal agencies that helped us out a lot too the Department of Energy. A nice lady named Sunita Sachapal who's a PhD and runs basically all of the hydrogen projects under the Department of Energy in Washington DC. She and her whole team have always been great supporters of what we're doing in Hawaii and literally made sure that we were involved and engaged in large forums in Washington DC that they were involved in. Many of us Mitch myself made presentations at those forums. At one time I was even invited to represent not only the Department of Energy but the Department of Defense at the federal level at a large meeting because she wanted the people that were meeting with to understand that Hawaii was so serious about hydrogen that I was the guy that pushed hydrogen in Hawaii and helped the Department of Energy and the US Department of Defense and hydrogen. Some of the other players here Dave Rolfe ahead of the Hawaii Auto Dealers Association made sure that we got the first Toyota Mirai outside the continental United States delivered into the United States and really promoted Hawaii hydrogen and the technology with Servco. Kind of a tough position to be in. He tried to be fair and be good with everybody but he really really took care of hydrogen as a topic. Some of the legislative folks are really helpful. A good friend of mine he was actually in the state legislature before being elected to Congress Mark Takai who unfortunately passed away a few years ago but he when he was in the legislature he actually helped us out a lot promoting hydrogen within the state legislature and then of course going to Congress he was also very instrumental in helping to make sure that Congress understood the benefits of hydrogen. Some of our local legislators Mark Nakashima from the Big Island and Chris Lee from Oahu were also very receptive to learning about hydrogen and Rep Nakashima has now moved up in the world in the House of Representatives and hopefully will even have a bigger voice supporting hydrogen. Some of the companies that helped us out locally were one of them was called Millennium Rain Energy and Chris McWinnie. He actually provided Blue Planet Research on the Big Island with some of their equipment. We saw it. We liked it. We ordered some for the Air Force. The Air Force saw it. They liked it. Navy came and visited us and so did the Army. They saw Chris's equipment. They liked it. So we had a symbiotic relationship with Millennium Rain. We saw good things in their equipment and through us a lot of the DOD and other private sector folks also saw their equipment at Blue Planet Research or at HCAP and have made Millennium Rain a really successful company with a hopefully very bright future in hydrogen. Another company, local company that we really like and you've actually seen some of their work here on ThinkTech is a company called Hyperspective. They did the three videos that we show to them a lot and they're great, great videos and we'll continue to show them. I get kudos all the time for US for my hyperspective. US Hybrid is the company that all of our transitions from for all of our vehicles to hydrogen. So Abbas Guadarzi, the president of the company, Todd, Martin, Rusty Hughes, Chris and even Rolando who don't work there anymore did great work and really got things going. Getting near the end of the list here, Greg Barber over at Nelha. He runs the facilities where Mitcha Station is. He's always been a great supporter and when he's had a sustainable energy forums on the Big Island, he always makes sure that hydrogen is part of the agenda and we really thank him for that work. And last but not least, thanks to Jay Fidel, the folks here at ThinkTech who have really helped keep hydrogen on the front burner so to speak and keeping us going. Jay asked me to start doing the show over five years ago and so every week I've been an energy man for the last five years and a handful of months. So thanks to Jay, all the folks in the production side and all the folks that put us together and put us on YouTube and Mimeo. Thank you so much and really after Thanksgiving and being locked down for Thanksgiving. I think that's that's fitting that that's been spent some time acknowledging some people who are really instrumental and of course I know I miss some but the key ones I tried to get that really made hydrogen a big deal in Hawaii and in turn I think Hawaii is going to make hydrogen a big deal in the world. So thanks for joining Staten Energy Man this week and till next Tuesday, Allah.