 and welcome to Stand Energy Man here in Tingtec, Hawaii, Stand Officer Man. Coming to you, not what my background is. The background's on the Big Island, but I'm actually back at my house in Kailua now. So it was a great trip to the Big Island. I just finished and actually we're going to throw up the first picture. I had a great trip to the Big Island. What we did was we picked up the very first Toyota Mirai to be landed on the Big Island. So the Big Island of Hawaii has its first hydrogen fuel cell car. That's Paul Panthio refueling at our Millennium Rain Filling Station that they have at Uwava in North Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii. And you can see on the refueling picture that it was all salt covered. The car is still full of salt spray from coming over on the barge from Oahu. So thanks to Paul for helping get that vehicle up there and putting some fuel in it. And now we have a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle to show off to the folks on the Big Island. We're really excited to have it there. So thanks again Paul and all the folks that got it there and the folks down at Young Brothers did a great job. Today's show is really kind of a flashback. In the state of Hawaii or in Hawaii, we look at the culture of Hawaii and the thousands of years that it developed in the middle of the ocean isolated from most other places. And the only connection they had was probably with other Polynesian islands with occasional sailing canoes. But no real trade. It was totally sustainable. Hawaii was always sustainable. And the population was not much different than it is today, quite frankly. Distributed maybe a little bit differently with more people spread out across the state instead of mostly focused on Oahu, but sustainable. They took care of themselves. They had rules. They call them kapus to make sure that people didn't over fish and to they had their own planting cycles with lunar calendars and things. And they did just great. So today's guest is Richard Ha from the Big Island, one of my good friends over there, who really sits down and talks to the other folks here in Hawaii that come to Kupuna that have the stories and know the history of violence here and the traditions that we have. And we're going to tie that together with energy and how that culture, that attitude is still pervasive today in sustainability. Richard, thanks for being with us. And I know you're still really active in the local community. And you're a big supporter of sustainable agriculture in particular, but sustainable activities in Hawaii. So welcome, just give us a little bit of background on where you see, especially the Big Island today and our efforts to move towards a sustainable economy here in the state of Hawaii. Oh, okay. Thanks a lot. Yeah. Well, that was pretty exciting looking at that, Merai. Paul and I were excited. Even the lady down at Young Brothers that was clearing us to take the car off the lot there was really excited when Paul told her that was that we're making history yesterday. I'm going to hold you to what I ask you if I could get a ride in that. You can drive it. Richard, you can drive it. All right. Yeah. Let me give you a little bit of background on who I am and stuff like that. My background is I actually am Hawaiian, Korean, and Okinawan Japanese. And I have a lot of stuff I didn't really realize that came down through our family, I guess. We came from somewhere, knowledge, and just basically thinking about stuff. But I was just like a lot of folks in my generation. We never learned how to speak Hawaiian, and we kind of fit in and adjusted to things as they came along. But some of the stuff that I think about came from somewhere, and I think it came down through our three generations. To give you an idea, so our family had family land down at Maku on the big island. That's between Hawaiian Paradise Park and Hawaiian beaches and on the ocean. That's where our family land was. So they had a very sustainable situation there. They planted kalo, they fished, and they were pretty much self-sufficient. So I just had a sense of what that was like. So what happened to me was I ended up going to, well, let me describe what the house there looked like. It had a green out colored wall and a red roof. And the foundation on which the piers were set up on were beach rocks on down a beach. And they built a whole thing like that. And then there were piles of maybe five lahala mats to live, sleep on. And rolls of lahala for weaving. And so they had a redwood water tank. And the redwood water tank had a filter. And the filter was bouldering bags. You know what bouldering bags are? I'm pretty sure you are. Yeah, from tobacco. Great, exactly. So that's how things were. Yeah, then that was normal. And the person that influenced me the most was my great grandma. Because back then, when we were little kids 10 years old like that, she was the most welcoming person I have ever met in my whole life. When kids came around, she couldn't speak English. And we'd hang with her all day long down the beach and stuff like that. And it never even occurred to us that was the case. But we understood each other very well. But anyway, that's kind of my background. And what happened to me was I started growing bananas. And then I actually, I guess I should say, I got drafted upon better school, I got drafted, I went to the army, went to Vietnam, stayed for seven years, decided I couldn't make a career of it, because you needed a college degree after. So I decided to come back home. And that's when I decided to major in accounting. And it wasn't very complicated, because I just wanted to keep score. That was the whole thing about accounting. So then I came back, and then I started feeding myself into the culture here. And then we, you know, as we were going along, we started looking at growing bananas. And at that time, it was being imported from Central America. And there seemed to be a good good opening for us, because we actually grew bananas, we know a little bit about it. So we started doing that. And so that was my background. And then after we spent several years growing bananas, back in 2007, we noticed our cost of supply is going up. And then after we looked at it really carefully, we realized it was due to byproduct of fossil fuel. And at that point, I said, oh, boy, I better learn about this to kind of figure out how to position our business. So I went to the first of five associations for the study of people. And that's where I started to pick up what this all this meant. So, okay, so I come back, mining my own business. And then after I went to the second and third, I started to realize holy smoke, this is serious information. And, you know, I didn't choose it. If you know, the kind of information I picked up became like Juliano, not not not because I wanted it. It was because I was the only person from Hawaii there most of the time. And I look around holy smokes now, what is my responsibility here? And it was to bring back the best knowledge I could share with Hawaii people. But I'm not a scientist or or an engineer. But what I could do was look around and try to determine who was credible and who who wasn't. You know, some people would be trying to sell you stocks and stuff like that. So we just kind of figured out who who the credible people were. And one of the persons I realized early on was very credible was this guy Nate Higgins. And you talk to him, you know, Nate, yeah. Yes, he's awesome. Yeah, so so I loop all around up and down, even which way. And I decided, you know what, this guy is credible. And then another guy I'd like that was Charlie Hall. So I came back with that knowledge. And but I, you know, and the knowledge was oil and fossil fuel have had a definite life. It's not going to last forever. So so knowing that and trying to spread and share that knowledge with people is kind of difficult because you don't want to really be saying the sky is falling. So so I was trying to do the best I could all the way up into this pandemic. And then all of a sudden the pandemic hit, and everybody started focusing on it. And and climate change. But I already knew and I was always scared of what would happen to us about the fossil fuel. And so that's that's how I come to this whole discussion. Yeah. And so so here I am with that knowledge. And, you know, as I started to, I was invited to give a presentation, five minute presentation to the celebration of the Hawaiian Kingdom. That was back in April. And I was just asked to give a sustainability for five minutes. So I did that and it actually went across pretty well. And gave me an opportunity to start to meet people in in the Kumulipo and that kind of thinking. And and I started to look at it and say, wait a minute, the Hawaiians lasted for 1000 years. We're worrying about if we're going to make it 100 years, 200 years. Yeah. So so so maybe we can learn from them. So because I gave that talk, I was able to connect with some of the folks, you know, like Kekui, Kelly, Kanako Oli. So so I was fortunate enough to participate in our class. And there I started to learn what was it that they were teaching. And it just blew me away, because they were teaching that basically man is part of the environment. You know, so you got to live in harmony with the environment. And when you think about it that way, you say no wonder they were able to survive. They had guardrails, you know. You know, when I took a look at it, it was basically a physical science, ecology kind of economic system with a culture that was developed to make that economic system work. And it worked for 1000 years. So right after that, I thought holy smokes, maybe we should kind of think about what is it about that that we could learn from. So anyway, that's that's how I got this. So Richard, a quick question for you is, you know, for the audience, you actually did more than just banana farming on a small scale. You actually had a lot of large operation with refrigerated containers for food safety. And you raised tomatoes as well. I mean, when we're talking about growing bananas, we're not talking about, you know, half an acre of, you know, banana patch. You were on several hundred acres of land, and a bunch of that was in bananas. And it was a full process of, you know, exporting them to the neighbor islands and things like that. It wasn't just for local consumption. But you have a unique perspective of growing up from on a subsistence, you know, family plot and watching how fossil fuel and importing of goods has raised the prices and how that is all connected, like you said, back to fossil fuels. A lot of people don't see like when I was small, I grew up here in Hawaii too. I remember buying gasoline when I go cut grass for like, you know, maybe 30 cents a gallon, something like that. And, you know, people couldn't even fathom that today. But fossil fuel lets us do a lot of work with machinery, whereas before it was more manpower intensive and individuals working together collectively as a community to raise food and things like that. Can you just talk a little bit about that dynamic of being, using more human power or more, you know, more involvement by the community in raising your own food and sustaining yourself? Yeah. So that is the, let me explain a little bit about our farm. Yeah, we had, we still have 500 of these simple acres. And the reason that happened was because bananas take a lot of land. So we had to get that many acres to be able to produce the amount we produced. And we were producing like 6 million pounds annually of bananas. And then we shifted into tomatoes, you know, at the same time. We had both going. And the reason we did that was because tomatoes was more focused. It was more higher end commodity versus bananas, which is low cost their maximum volume. So we did that. And we were producing about a million pounds of tomatoes annually. And I went to the University of Arizona control environment courses to learn about that. So we were actually, and you know, how we decided to, within tomatoes. And we were basically coming since people, yeah, it's not rocket science we're talking about. So when we decided that we were going into tomatoes, we started to look around and see where should we go to look. And one of the places was England, because England is kind of a dreary. Yeah, you're like, you know, so we went over there. And then we looked at how they set up their houses and stuff like that. And it was very clever, because they put the plastic over the frame, and they tie it down with rope. And then if, you know, if the wind blew unexpectedly really, really quickly, all you got to do is no, no forget where you put your knife and run out and cut all your strings, I mean, all the ropes. And then the plastic flies, but the infrastructure stays. So that's, you know, just come and send stuff here. But anyway, that's the background of how we got into doing what we're doing. So like you said, we have all the experience in dealing with making sure that all the regulations were followed and stuff like that. But the bottom line is this is real simple. The pluses got to exceed the minuses, or it's not sustainable. And it's not eligible, because I got out being eligible in high school. No wonder I like you so much. We must be brothers. But yeah, so, so that's, that's how I come at this thing. So I do have some experience in practical larger size operations. And I've always been concerned about how, how would, you know, small farmers are managed in the today's world, because it's way tougher today than it was when I started. It was actually pretty easy when I started. So that's what I'm really concerned about. And that's what we're facing. And the thing that I have come to the conclusion of, you know, that Charlie Hall and Nate Higgins will talk about is physical science ecology as the basis for economic system. And then it's all sense and world, because if you're looking at natural science, you got to, you know, science is so that you don't end up fooling yourself. Yeah. So, so anyway, that's how my background is and why. Yeah, the big island has, I want to try and quote Paul, he says out of the 10 or 11 known environment or ecologies there are on the planet, the big island has like eight of them. You get everything from snowcapped mountains to rainforest to desert. In your opinion, as a farmer and as an economist, how likely is it to be able to use that diverse climate on the big island to raise pretty much all of the kind of agriculture we need, even including cattle and maybe lamb and sheep and things like that. How viable is it for us to really be producing a lot more of those kind of things than bringing them in from the mainland? Yeah. And the key is energy. And that's what Nadine and Charlie all talks about. It's all about energy, because anything does work. It's that simple. And it's based on a fire. It's in your car, what's in your car, and everything you can think of originates at some place where there's a fire. And so how's that fire come about? Right now we've been relying on fossil fuel to get that fire. Now we're finding out that the world probably hit the peak of world oil production, fossil fuel production in 2018. So the question then becomes how much time do we have before we start to decline on the backside of the supply curve? And Charlie Hall guys feel like between 10 and 20 years. Now if you think about 10 and 20 years, that's like, let's say 20 years, that's one generation. So a child born today, 25 years from now will be 2046. It's one year after we're supposed to be all on renewables. But the fact is what that's going to look like if you're depending on it to be solar. So let's say a solar farm is made the same day that child is born. So let's say it's 100 acres. That solar project will last for about 25 years, that's what we noticed. And then you've got to go out and get whatever it takes to make another one like that. And they talk about rare earth minerals. Now just think how many people trying to go to electric cars and how much are wanting to get batteries to accomplish that. So rare earth minerals in 25 years is probably going to cost more than it costs today. And what will that child be looking at 25 years from now? So at that point the cost of the electricity would probably be more expensive. And then it's going to be a tough existence for that child from there. I think you're right, Richard. And I think we're going to be using a lot more electricity than we do now because I tell people that my house, thanks to Nate telling me about energy blindness, my house uses about 21 kilowatt hours of electricity a day. And with the kind of traveling I do, I calculated that I would use between 25 and 30 kilowatt hours in my car or my truck driving around to go shopping and to go to work and things like that. So that means I'd have to have probably a total production of at least 45 or 50 kilowatt hours of production over a five-hour day because I get pretty decent sunlight here. So maybe 10 kilowatts of power on my house just to sustain myself. And I think that if we tried to calculate that into everybody, and some people don't have houses, they live in apartments, they rent, they don't have that capacity to just put it on their roof, that means an awful lot of solar panels, like you said, have a limited life expectancy. But Hawaii has more than just sunshine and wind. We have geothermal as well. And I think that one of the challenges that we find is that there's kind of a resistance to some of the new technology that's out there, for example, nuclear power. I can't imagine nuclear power being here in Hawaii just because of the pushback that the community would give. But geothermal is one of those ones that we actually have a real potential for as long as we can have it mesh with the culture and our historic background on sustainability. How do you think that could work in Hawaii? I think it would be excellent. I think this is our solution. And this will set us apart from the U.S. mainland and everything. Imagine it like this. The geothermal will last for 500,000 million years, practically forever. And the cost of the heat that we need to get to generate electricity will not change. So in other words, all we got to do is wait. And we'll have the advantage over the U.S. mainland. And here's why. Because everybody is worried about fossil fuels, so they're converting. One of the big places they want to convert is to hydrogen. But 90-something percent of the hydrogen they make is based on natural gas. Natural gas is a finite resource. In other words, the price is going to go up. I just saw in the last week the price went up quite a bit. Yet at the same time, you don't have to go out and bid for the solar panels with the geothermal, and you don't have to worry about getting rid of the rubbish. The end of life, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if we had all of the heat power of monopoly of geothermal, we could be making hydrogen, maybe even converting it to ammonia or liquid hydrogen, and even exporting energy. Where Hawaii right now is totally dependent on external energy coming in in either oil or even up for the next couple of months anyway. Coal. A lot of people don't realize we actually have one coal burning power plant here on Oahu. And in the old days, we used, on Maui, they used to burn the leftover sugarcane. They call it bagasse, and they would make electricity from bagasse. But we have the potential with geothermal and with solar and wind to produce a lot more energy than Hawaii needs for its own electrical generation and transportation even. So do you think that's viable to really, like you say, use hydrogen to ship energy to Oahu, say, which has a bigger population center and less ability to produce its own renewable solar and wind? Would that be a viable thing? I think so. But I am more focused specifically on geothermal, and I'm looking specifically at the big island to make sure that we're focused on it. We got to have a strong electric grid. Because having been in this, I am president of the Hawaii Island Energy Corp. And we also were involved in trying to buy EGI out many years ago. And from the experience of that, people were asking us, oh, what about us? What about us here on the island? You guys are all thinking about cables, this and that and everything. And you know, when I think about it, I think they're right. I think the best thing we can do is make sure we got it, and we get it going, and we start doing what we need to do. And if it comes about that they need the power on Oahu, then let's have a discussion with the whole community, everybody, okay? You guys want, okay, let's talk about it. Because it makes sense, when I look at Oahu, I'm sure they're going to need it sometime. But I don't know in what form or anything. Our job is to make sure we have it solid. And so how does that look? Well, we've been asking the Hawaii Groundwater Geothermal Resource Center, you know, Nicole Lopsey upon Don Thomas. And, you know, we asked, what would it take to evaluate the geothermal resource on Hawaii Island for our five volcanoes? And, you know, he gave me an estimate of something around 22 million. And for that, you would be able to do an assessment, ground assessment of where the heat is and stuff like that. Then you can determine if it's close to the population or all the other issues. And then you start to determine, okay, these are the different possibilities. But we've got to do that ahead of time, not when the utility asks, oh, we're going to open up a geothermal RFP request for proposals. Because it's too late, you know, the risk is all up front. If you drill a hole, cost you several million, then you get nothing. So that's a good point, Richard, especially right now with the funding that's becoming available because of COVID and infrastructure improvement. Is anybody talking to Senator Schatz and Senator Hirono about trying to capture some of that for geothermal? You know, before, it's like, you know, hey, we need it today, but we need to start five years ago to put it together. Yeah, you know, and I think, you know, a key person will be Senator, Representative Cahili. Because, yeah, because he's a native Hawaiian, the only native Hawaiian and our energy, no, I'm sorry, the Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, is Native American, you know, so she's more apt to listen to what Kai has to say. So he is very important in this whole discussion. And because we're working with understanding, you know, what anti-poor folks are teaching, we are trying to be very respectful of how we do this so that we have, you know, community buy-in and we got to do it for the right reasons. It's not just for the big money, because that's not what we're talking about. I think you hit the nail on the head and it's a good point to close because we're up against our time now, but, you know, doing it for the right reasons is what it's all about. We call it being Pono in Hawaiian. It's doing the right thing for the right reason. And I think you're right. Kai Cahili, his dad was a state senator. He was one of the pilots in the Air National Guard. When I was in the Air National Guard and he still flies, but he's focusing on his congressional work. He's probably the right guy to go to. So Richard, thanks so much for being on the show today. And I'll have to have you back in a little bit after you have your drive in Marae. And we'll get a report back from you on that. So until next week. Okay. Thanks, Richard. Until next week, energy man signing off. Aloha.