 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here at Think Tech Hawaii. Dan Osterman coming to you live and direct from Kailua with my new webcam. I had to shave so I didn't look so scraggly because this camera shows everything. And I'm amazed that anybody's actually watching in real time today because we're just talking to my guest and realized that the presidential, first presidential debate for this year is happening as we speak. It just started and so I don't expect too many people are going to be watching this show live. But if you are, God bless you. Anyway, my guest today is Mr. Sidney Higa. And he's a local gentleman who actually was in the military with me together for a while. And he does sustainability and let him talk a little bit about his efforts and his work. And he actually sent me a really a bunch of great questions and these questions were so good. I asked him to come on the show and share them with everybody. So Sid, why don't you introduce yourself just quickly and we'll get into the question. Sure. Sidney Higa, aka Sustainable Sid with Vivio Sustainable Solutions. We are a company that wants to have Hawaii be sustainable with water, energy, and most importantly food. So our efforts are to towards making us have clean water, great energy, and great tasting food. And we have a five pound approach right now for COVID because of the situation where we have a detection. We have sanitization and antimicrobial protection, air purification, water purification. And we have a way to put safe handles onto your buildings using an antimicrobial coating, physical coating. Basically that's a little bit of a lead in there. Hey Sid, I appreciate that. I'm going to quickly kind of go over some of the questions we had last time. The first one I'm just going to paraphrase the questions you were talking about. Why do we measure hydrogen and kilograms and gasoline and gallons? And the short answer to that was that normally we measure gases in by weight, so pounds or kilograms. And we measure liquids in gallons or liters. Well, hydrogen is a gas. So we normally measure it by weight and we somehow probably because it was all scientific research dealing with hydrogen, not so much commercial use. They chose kilograms instead of pounds for the weight measurement. And if we wanted to measure hydrogen as the liquid, liquid hydrogen is minus 252 degrees centigrade. So most people don't deal with liquid hydrogen except for rocket fuel and things like that. So it's just not convenient to keep them the same weight. But we do have some good formulas to compare them between each other. The next question was about hydrogen and using electrolysis to make hydrogen about how much electricity does it take. The reason you want to use electricity and electrolysis to make hydrogen is to keep it clean because you can actually make hydrogen a lot of different ways. You can steam reform methane. You can pull hydrogen out of all kinds of stuff because hydrogen is actually the most common element in the entire universe. But the one thing it does is it likes to stick to other elements. It sticks to oxygen and makes water. It sticks to nitrogen and makes ammonia. So you hardly ever find pure hydrogen just kind of hanging around by itself. So you have to split it away from whatever it's connected to. And splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen is actually really easy. I have a demonstration with a little nine volt battery and a paper clip, two paper clips, and a little bit of water. And you can make it right on your desk. But the actual conversion, it takes about 65 kilowatt hours of power to make one kilogram of hydrogen. That gives you an idea of how much it takes to do that process. And then let me see. Oh, why is hydrogen not used kind of like a gas like propane or something in an internal combustion engine? Why don't we just do that instead of doing electrolysis to hydrogen and hydrogen to a fuel cell and the fuel cell into a powertrain? And you actually can. There is a gentleman who developed a really great system for modifying diesel high compression engines to run on hydrogen. But it requires changing the glow plug to a injector slash igniter and changing the timing on the engine and stuff like that. So it doesn't work as easily as you think, but it's possible. Most of the engines that run on hydrogen that are at a fairly low pressure don't have much power because you need high pressure hydrogen pushed into the cylinder to get enough of a combustion to give you the same kind of performance as gasoline. But interestingly enough, hydrogen is really useful for cooking and heating and stuff. One of these days I'll show a picture of some of the flames that you get from hydrogen for cooking because it's a really, really great source of cooking heat because it doesn't radiate heat sideways. It only radiates, it only pushes heat directly where the flame is. So for example, if you have like a food truck, it wouldn't have all the extra heat hanging around in the food truck. It's just putting it right where you cook. So the guys who are in food trucks like to try and use that because it's very directional. That's a quick recap of the first show we did a couple of weeks ago. So why don't you hit me with some of those other questions you had, Sid? Okay, so as we move more into hydrogen economy and stuff, vehicles will become more and more prevalent. So Hyundai and Nikola are building commercial trucks for hauling containers. And Nikola recently announced they signed a contract for 2,500 hydrogen garbage trucks. What would it take for Hawaii to start to support and move to commercial hydrogen powered trucks? That would be wonderful. In fact, we've been trying for at least 10 years to get the state to at least start producing some hydrogen for fleet vehicles just to get it started. In fact, the first thing we did was, I don't know if people know where the foreign trade zone is. It's Pier 2 in downtown Honolulu. And they have five acres of warehouse roof. And right now 2.5 acres has already got PV on it and they can't put any more on because it overtaxes the Hawaiian electric circuitry in that area. They can't get an interconnect agreement. So what we're trying to do is tell them, well, don't connect to Hiko's grid. What you need to do is just put PV on the roof and then turn all that electricity into hydrogen and store it and run your forklifts and any state vehicles that happen to be hydrogen will just fuel them at foreign trade zone right downtown. So that's what we tried to do. And so far, we haven't been successful getting that project going. So it was even willing to give them 65 kilogram a day electrolyzer that we had a spare one we had at Hickam that the military said we could give to the state and we still couldn't get the money to bring that into into service. But what it would actually take is quite a bit. And your question sounds fairly fairly benign, but 2,500 garbage trucks would require just to give you a picture would require about as much electricity as Hawaiian electric can make for the island of Oahu in an hour. So at full for the whole the whole island, they can do just under a gigawatt of power at any given time. And so I did the math on how much hydrogen would take to run those 2,500 trucks, you know, constantly all day long. And it was basically three quarters of a gigawatt of electricity to make that much hydrogen. It was like 700 750 megawatt hours of electricity. So it was quite a bit of power so to run a fleet that big is actually a pretty immense challenge and that brings up an important point. So if you wanted to have like a really clean clean economy. Your electric cars should charge off your PV at home, or if you have a hydrogen vehicle you would want to make that hydrogen at home off of your PV, not off of the fossil fuel that he goes burning right now. And right, they don't have a solution for getting off of that in the next couple years. So if you want to make an immediate impact you'd want to do it all off of solar or something like that. You'd have to almost, I want to say more than double whatever PV you have on your roof to make a really enough hydrogen to run your car or cars for an average week. It's not a whole lot, but people just don't realize how much energy transportation take. And that's why this 100% renewable portfolio standard that Hawaii has by 2045 is is a really good goal. The transportation part is even harder, because it takes more energy than the grid does at this point. And if you have to, if you can stretch your mind a little bit, you have to realize that as we, if we really want to move into clean transportation, we're going to have to move into all electric transportation and all electric transportation means battery plug-in vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and hybrid electric vehicles, all three. You know, that's, that's important because it is a significant amount of energy. And right now I don't think our electric grid is up to providing the amount of electricity we need to solve the transportation issue all by itself. So, in that light, about how much electricity would our grid have to be producing to support an all electric and economy, including transportation. To try and just use round numbers so that they're easy to follow. Like I like I mentioned, Hawaii Electric here on a Wahoo can can produce a gigawatt of power an hour with all their turbines going and having their their spinning reserves and things like that. And so they basically are making a gigawatt of close to a gigawatt of power they're capable of it. And estimating that by the time you have all of Hawaii's transportation in electric and the grid, you know, all working off of renewables and the rail project up and running. You're probably going to need to be doing closer to four gigawatts of power constantly. So, four times what we're using now. And that's because transportation is going to take up at least double what just the grid takes by itself. You're going to have to keep some in storage so you're going to constantly be making hydrogen. And you were also going to have an increased requirement for hydrogen for things like the rail project. And we, as a society, we tend to be more and more energy hungry, especially if Hawaii is going to try and get an economy that's, that's running off of a sustainable economy like you mentioned, that we're, we're not importing a bunch of fossil fuel and things like that. And food and things being shipped in to Hawaii. So, for example, if you take a container ship and ship one container ship of stuff in Hawaii, that's an incredibly huge amount of energy used to move that ship from California to Hawaii. And that doesn't even talk to the rail and the trucking that gets everything to the ship on the mainland, the food and agricultural products and things like that. So, as we try and meet your company's goal of being sustainable here in Hawaii, that actually reduces all those energy costs, but that means that we're going to have to be running more tractors and things like that on the farm. We're going to have to be using more energy locally to be doing some of the industrial processes that we're eliminating by not importing things from the mainland. Very good. So, well, in that light Europe is investing heavily in hydrogen infrastructure to support vehicles. So what adaptations to our infrastructure can be made to keep the conversion price modest. I tell you what, we're going to take a quick break before they answer that question. So I'm just looked at the clock and it's about that time. But I'll get to that question in about 60 seconds. Okay, sounds good. I'll come back to stand the energy man around think tech Hawaii with the Sydney Higa calm sustainable said, and his question was basically Europe and I would add Asia are heavily leaning into hydrogen technology. And they're going full blast into it where United States is kind of hanging back and I'd say that's probably has a lot to do with politics right now. And the COVID situation it's like we just we're not focusing on it. But I can tell you that what the European track is to go into hydrogen in a big way. And so is Australia for, for example, the Australian science chief scientist presented to the US Department of Energy two years ago, made a presentation and right now Australia and Germany both have, or European Union both have hydrogen plans that are very detailed and how they want to move into hydrogen technology over the next 10 or 15 years with long term goals of converting to all fossil fuels to hydrogen. And the difference and what we need to do in Hawaii and actually think Hawaii has an advantage over the mainland US in that, as a grid, we're already just Hawaiian electric and quite utility. We've got it's own co op. But basically we have a fairly self contained grid system. So we could actually we have a lot of ability to manipulate that grid in ways that would make it easy to transition to hydrogen and renewable energy systems, compared to like Los Angeles that probably has 10 or 15 or 20 major power producers pushing electricity from Hoover Dam and every place else into their system. And they've got to make all that work together while they're trying to integrate more renewables and things like that. So what I would say is what I would envision for Hawaii is that we start off with the renewables that we're using right now. And we start to look at ways to divide up Hawaiian electric grid into what would be interconnected micro grids. So we would keep our overall grid infrastructure the power lines and everything for now. So we would start developing the ability for certain communities like maybe Mililani town, North Shore, Kaniwi, Kahulu, Kailua, Hawaii Kai, to be able to what we call island themselves, and have their own little community where we could put in more hydrogen energy storage with batteries and and wind power and maybe even hydroelectric to try and get us so our grids designed to be more sustainable, more survivable after hurricanes and cut out be able to at some point down the road cut out these big long transmission lines that go over the mountains and and and through the wide open planes that we have fires in and interrupt power from time to time and get us to the point where he can focus their grid system on downtown Honolulu, and that the majority of the rest of the island can literally be more self sustaining. One of the things I hope we look at is hydro hydroelectric, because we did have a great irrigation system in the state when we have pine upon sugarcane. And I know you look into that said with sustainable agriculture. Every time you move water downhill, you have the opportunity to put turbines in those pipes and generate electricity. All the way, you know, down the hill down the mountain from however high up you're starting, every couple hundred feet you could actually be pulling electricity off of that water flowing right down the hill. That's free electricity, or you know it's and it's all clean it's all renewable. So we need to be doing something like that. And I think Hawaii has to also come to grips with the fact that geothermal could actually provide all the power that the state needs. Completely, and probably could even export power. It's that much power that if we could get into geothermal which is also clean and renewable and sustainable that Hawaii could literally never have to get fossil fuel or bring energy in from any place. We could actually turn into an energy exporting state. If we use high geothermal to augment solar wind and whatever hydroelectric we could make from the ag system. Cool. Yeah, so are there calculations that compare the range of say a hydrogen vehicle to an electric power vehicle. Pretty much like on an apples apples basis. Yeah, it's really we use something called gallons of gas equivalent GGE. So, like I mentioned in the first show that we did together, a gallon of gasoline has about the same amount of energy in it as a kilogram of hydrogen. If you use it in a fuel cell in an electric vehicle will drive the car a little over twice as far as the gallon of gasoline. So if you had a particular vehicle you wanted to compare and you knew that it got just to make the math easy. 10 miles per gallon. That means that the fuel cell car would get at least 20 miles per kilogram, maybe a little bit more so call it maybe 20, 22 miles per kilogram. So you can if you have if you know what your mileage is for your car. So if you look at it like a Toyota Mirai, and say that for every kilogram of fuel in that Toyota Mirai, you're going to go to like 2.2 times the range of that gasoline powered car. And that's as close as you can get in there. And the reason it's hard to do apples to apples and you don't see it very often is because vehicles are designed to do different things. And vehicles are designed to go really fast, really quickly like zero to 63 seconds, and other vehicles are designed for really good fuel economy. They can go, they can go, you know, much further, but it takes them a long time to accelerate to that. They have a hard time going up a really steep hill because they don't have the torque and the power. Until you have two vehicles, you know, pretty much identical in most characteristics. It's kind of tough to do apples to apples directly. But that gallon of gas equivalent of 70 miles per kilogram versus whatever mileage you get on gasoline is about as close as you can get. Well, I would imagine that the hydrogen powered car would weigh a little bit less because of the weight of the gasoline versus a weight of hydrogen. Right. So a kilogram being what 2.2 pounds roughly. Right. So a kilogram of hydrogen weighs 2.2 pounds. There's five kilograms in a Mariah. So that's like 11 pounds of fuel. No, that's not a whole lot of fuel. And, you know, what's really interesting to compare is, and that that Mariah will go over 300 miles on that on that hydrogen. But a Tesla to go the 300 miles has literally 2,000 pounds of batteries. So instead of 11 pounds of hydrogen fuel and probably a tank that weighs 100 pounds because actually the tank to hold the hydrogen is pretty heavy. You're much a much bigger weight savings, right, using hydrogen for your energy storage. Well, that kind of leads into my next question, which was, you know, how long did it take to fill a hydrogen tank for a car versus an electric charge like you mentioned there, the Tesla? Well, first of all, the thing that most people are excited about is a hydrogen vehicle is just like refueling a regular car. You pull into the station, you open up the port, you stick the nozzle on, lock it on, and five minutes later you're full, and you put it back on the rack and you drive off. And you can fill your car up. Whereas an electric charger, depending on whether it's a rapid charger or just a simple charger, can take anywhere from a rapid charger can be like two hours, a regular charger can be like six hours. And so that's fine if you only drive between your home and work and you can charge at night when you're not going to use the car anyway. But that's one of the big pluses for hydrogen is the quick fill. So in other words, you're able to get off of a five minute fill 300 miles versus on a Tesla to about 300 miles, you're looking at eight hours to charge it or something. Yeah, six hours or eight hours to charge it, right? Big difference. Huge difference. So one thing I wanted to mention too was, you know, and it kind of goes back to your question on what Hawaii can do. And, you know, a friend of mine, Mike Stritsky from New Jersey says people have to vote with their wallet. You know, if people really want to get Hawaii to a cleaner energy state and more sustainable. One of the things that I'm really an advocate of and I really don't talk enough about it and I should is to use hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicles are actually pretty popular and a hybrid vehicle kind of gets you halfway there. A hybrid vehicle is an electric vehicle just like a plug-in vehicle or just like a hydrogen vehicle. All electric drivetrains and electric drivetrains are much more efficient using electrical power to torque. The nice thing about the hybrid vehicle is you could still put gasoline in it to give you electricity. Because what what you do in a hybrid vehicle is instead of having 100 horsepower motor, you put in a 30 horsepower motor that runs a generator. And you only run the motor at its perfect most efficient, you know, RPM and everything. So a vehicle that would normally get maybe 20 or 23 miles a gallon is going to get closer to 40 miles a gallon. And that starts to cut back on fossil fuel and it also gets you to electric drivetrain. And so it's much easier to convert a hybrid electric vehicle to a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle or a hybrid electric vehicle to a battery plug-in vehicle. So if you found a hybrid vehicle that you really, really like and you want to convert, just take that vehicle and, you know, find somebody can convert it to a battery or find somebody to convert to hydrogen. And that vehicle could probably go another 20 years using that electric drivetrain. So that's that's one of the things that I really I should be pushing more is hybrid hybrid vehicles. Well, that makes perfect sense. And then you're also easing your way into the next round of technology as well. Right, we already have the fuel system set up to dispense gasoline. You just be using a lot less of it. So it's really a good option. Well, believe it or not, Sid, we blasted through 30 minutes with your questions and I know you still have you still have some more. So we're going to have to do round three on this one. So be ready for an email in a couple of weeks and we'll get you back on. Sounds good. Great talking with you. Thanks for all the excellent answers. You know, a lot of questions on my mind that you're answering right now. No, thank you, Sid. They're great questions. That's why I wanted to have you on the show. I don't think I could have thought of such good questions. So thanks for your hard work on that. We'll have you back in a couple of weeks and for everybody, let's go watch the debate on our TVs and see who's winning. We're a half hour behind already. All right. Dan Austerman signing off until next Tuesday. Aloha.