 Wednesday in Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm on the beautiful shores of Caniwai Bay, but that's not Caniwai Bay behind me. That's a canned video from Zoom, but it's a neat-your-heart-out picture for all my friends up in Canada. And that noise you hear, I'm beside the Marine Corps base and I'm being overflowing by some heavy aircraft, which will happen occasionally during the show. So this show is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, of which I am a member, and I'm very pleased to welcome Paul Panthio from Blue Planet Research, where he's the director and CTO, and he's a really brilliant guy. Don't let that go to your head. And he's gonna talk to us about all the amazing projects that he's working on, which just goes to show that we can do great things here in Hawaii. And so we have a lot of pictures on this show, and I'm gonna turn it over to you, Paul. And let's shoot off with the first picture, then you can talk to these. All right. Thanks, Mitch. It's a pleasure to be here. So can we get that first picture on the screens? What are we seeing here? Okay, there you go. Okay. So this is what we call the cube, or the emergency power cube. And what it is, it's a remote or emergency power supply that's all self-contained in an 8 foot container. So it's a standard ISO 8 foot container. And what you're looking at is it when it's completely packed, ready to ship. It contains all of the solar panels, all of the batteries, all of the accessory components needed to put it together, and the inverters on the left side up there. And that's it. It all fits into this small container. So it's really portable and easy to ship anywhere. Is that an ISO container, Paul? Is that like a standardized ISO container or does it fit inside one? It actually, these fit inside of a 20 foot container or a 40 foot container. So they're slightly smaller on the exterior dimensions. Right. So they can ship them inside of another container. And that's the way we prefer to do it. But the military is looking at swinging three of these together with a Chenure helicopter and being able to airlift these and drop them anywhere they need. Cool. Very cool. So next slide, please. There you go. So here it is all opened up. So you want to talk about that, Paul? Yeah. Oh, okay. I see it. Yeah. So this is, this is actually where these, this is our testing ground, which was Burning Man 2019. What a perfect test site. It is a real, we want it the most extreme environment we could put it in. So this is at Burning Man. And in the background, you can see the largest art display at Burning Man that year was a camp. It's an Irish camp called a folly. And you can see the dust storms in the background. That's pretty much the typical environment that it's in from day to day. We had some, some winds that clocked in at over 50 miles an hour. And it didn't move. So there should be another slide with it. So it didn't take off? No, it didn't take off. In fact, they got hit by a dust storm before they even put the anchors down and did there. And that's because the panels are feathered into the wind. So there's very little lift that it's generating. Okay. So I think we have a next shot. And this is what it powered. This is the folly at nighttime with all the lighting, the sound system. And there's actually a motorized windmill at the very top on the left that it powered. And it generated it pretty much at full capacity what the cube is capable of putting out all day long and all night long. And how much is that, Paul, just to remind me again? What's the power capacity? Oh, so it comes either configured with eight or 16 kilowatts of AC power. It has 50 kilowatt hours of battery storage. And it has 14, roughly 14 and a half kilowatts of PV. Yeah. So that's that's actually quite a lot of power. I mean, if you look at a standard house in Hawaii, I mean, it's like a small house would be what about two kilowatts, three kilowatts, and maybe a larger house would be five. So, you know, the smaller version of this could power up four or five houses here in Hawaii. And you saw, you know, on the screen, I mean, that artwork must have used up a lot of power. It did. And by the way, they burned it at the end. But it had nothing to do with our batteries. Like you said, it could power several homes. So far as an emergency power supply in a disaster scenario with FEMA or the Red Cross or civil defense, it's enough power to handle all the communications. And it also has a satellite communication system. Really? Right. Burning man, there's no internet, generally. So it had to use a satellite connection to do all the communications. So what kind of bandwidth do you get with SATCOM in that kind of a scenario? Is it adequate to do what you have to do? It's adequate for most situations. The limit is the amount of gigabytes you can download at one time. So once you reach a limit, the satellite is pretty much useless at that point. And unfortunately, they don't offer any plans that allow you to do it. So it's very similar to a satellite phone. You use it for emergency use. And that's it. So I think the next slide shows a close up of the control panel. So this is another interested party. One of the guys that was operating the cube there had an alien suit that he put on. I think I see him in the background just over your left shoulder. He visited from that dimension out there. Yeah. Okay. Next slide, please. Well, this is this is Blue Planet Research's energy lab on the Big Island in Kona. We're located up at Tuvalva, Cindercone. It's the remnants of the old Tuvalva Ranch. So we have a 32-acre microgrid. That building has most of the PV. We have 85 kilowatts of PV on the roof. We just added another 50 on another building. So it's kind of like the utility for the for the ranch microgrid. So you're the architect of record for this facility, are you not? Yeah, that was actually the first project I did when I met Hank and came over here to work with him. It's beautiful, beautiful building, Paul. So really well done. I mean, the floors, you can not quite eat off them, but now, but when you first launched it, you could have. And it's very passive. Talk about some of the design characteristics you incorporated in that. Yeah, you know, this is the way architects used to design. This is how we used to build buildings. So it's all passively controlled. We use thermal mass as one of the elements. So it has a very thick eight inch slab supporting the building. The walls of the building are eight inches thick with insulation. And there's a continual vent at the very top of the high peak that allows any heat buildup to follow the ceiling and flow out of events passively. It's like a chimney. It's just a chimney effect. In fact, so on the north side of the building, we have most of the windows, the largest windows to let in without heat gain. And on the southern side, there's huge overhangs that protect the sun from actually hitting the walls and generating the heat buildup. So it's the hottest part of the ranch at the bottom, but it's actually the most comfortable building. Doesn't it pretty well supply most of the power for the ranch as well? I mean, it did now. I mean, maybe you're adding more, more load. And that's why you had the, you know, the additional PV. But when you first did it, it supplied all the power for the ranch. Yeah, it pretty much kept up with everything for the first five years. And then Hank being a Tesla car fan added another Tesla to the ranch. The Tesla had almost the same sized battery as what was running the ranch at nighttime. So, you know, we get this even at our Mars habitat, you get mission creep and load creep, and gotta be able to adjust for it. And the system that we built is very flexible and allows us to add on more power, more PV and more storage. So I'll talk to us about energy storage for that building. Okay, so we started looking into this is actually our primary objective was energy storage. So what I mean by that is anything that can store energy, whether it's batteries, flywheels or hydrogen and steel cells. We pretty much incorporate all of that into the mix. Our primary storage is battery. And in particular, we use a special chemistry of battery called lithium ferrous phosphate or lithium iron phosphate. It was made by Sony originally comes out of Hydro Quebec. They were the creators of the chemistry they licensed it to Sony. Sony recently, well, two years ago sold their entire battery division to another Japanese company called Marata. So we started working with Sony. God, it's been six over six years now. We originally put in a vanadium redox flow battery, which was the first in the state of Hawaii. It was a new or to us a new exotic technology. We're not thrilled with it. It didn't live up to its height, so to speak. It failed after about 18 months. And at that time, we actually found Sony. We were working with Tesla first. We didn't like Tesla's chemistry. We love the company and the car, but the battery chemistry being a NMC cobalt type of chemistry has a lot of issues with it in particular thermal management. So it has a habit of going in the thermal runaway if you don't cool it. The nice thing about lithium ferrous phosphate is it doesn't really need any cooling. It's almost impossible for it to go in the thermal monitor. So that adds a huge safety margin to the whole picture. And that's what we liked. And we agreed with Sony that that was the way to go. So is this battery met your expectations? Oh, absolutely. So we've got lithium ferrous phosphate, the Sony batteries here and several projects all over all over Puerto Rico right now. I think Blue Planet Energy, which is another blue planet company that we founded after we started working with Sony to do the sales. Well, they've since I guess since the hurricane hit, or after that, they've converted over 100. I believe it's close to about 120 schools to actually qualify as emergency shelters before they couldn't because they had no power. They had no facilities to be able to even turn the lights on. So once the grid went down, they were dark. Now they are all qualified with solar and batteries to be emergency shelters. So this is an example. If I could characterize it as a blue planet research acting like a technology accelerator, we have all these accelerators in Hawaii, and you actually transitioned it from your research phase into an actual product is now a company that's employing people here in Hawaii, and is helping the rest of the world, you know, manage in times of disaster and humanitarian assistance. So it's a perfect example of how these accelerators should work. And I mean, you did it you're the you're the brains and behind that whole thing. So well, one of the brains that we had a lot of and you know, Alex, you're the leader, you're the leader. Yeah, it's worked out really well. Blue Planet Energy has has done really well. In a short amount of time, they've grown significantly. And more and more companies and more and more people around the world are tuning in to the fact that lithium ferrous phosphate is a much better way to go. I mean, in addition to the safety features, it has about a 40% longer life. And when you buy a battery, that's what you're paying for. How many kilowatt hours over the life of the battery can it store? What is that life? I mean, I know it depends, you know, the answer, engineering answer, it depends. But generally, what kind of lifetime do you expect to get out of your batteries for example? If the battery is treated fairly, and I don't mean it has to be coddled and put in an air condition. But if it's treated fairly, you should see a close to a 20 year life out of this bet. Wow, that's excellent. Sony actually tested it to 14,000 cycles. And a cycle is a full charge discharge cycle. And after 14,000 cycles, and by the way, if you could do that every day, that's about 38 years, right? It had almost 70% capacity still. After that. Yeah, that's what do you do with the excess power? I'm waiting for this answer because of my favorite topic. Right. So here's the thing, when you go when you go off grid, of course, a couple of things happen. For one, you've got to produce your power every single day, you don't have an option of pulling some from the grid. So it has to work. So you have to oversize your system slightly on the generation side. So in our case, we have PV, that's our only real energy resource here. So in the morning, we have a we have a micro climate where we live. And in the morning, it's typically like your background over there, it's blue skies and sunny every day, at least 300 days out of the year, that's what the morning's like. And by 11 or 12 noon, it's overcast. And I mean, it can be raining overcast, four times a week, at least. So in the morning, we have too much power. In the evenings, we've got just enough. So in the morning, instead of throwing that power away, and that's what typically happens with an off grid system, if you don't have a place for the power to go, it's wasted. So instead of throwing that power away, we use hydrogen electrolyzer to make hydrogen split water, and store that in large tanks for a backup power supply. Because that's the other the other key when you're off grid, you need a backup to your batteries and your solar because the weather isn't always nice. You could use a diesel generator, which is normal, the normal case. What we do instead is we split hydric split water into hydrogen store it and we use hydrogen fuel cells to turn it back into electricity. Instead of firing up a diesel generator. And you pump that electricity into your batteries and then the battery DC bus. And as far as the grid, our micro grid knows, it doesn't know the difference. It could be a battery, a solar panel or fuel cell. Well, let's see some of this hardware. Let's flash up a couple more of these slides. So now this is a beautiful battery that you built. Let's talk about this one, Paul. This must be the megawatt. Yes, so this is a one megawatt hour battery. It's a 20 foot container, which is a little unusual because because it's LFP, we don't have the heat or thermal management issues, we can pack the batteries in very tightly. So we were able to fit a full megawatt hour 1000 kilowatt hours in that 20 foot container. Now that is not for the ranchers use that's for a community project. And just so happens that the community water well is on our ranch land. So the battery is right next to the well, it supplies 165 customers throughout the community here. And the other component to it is a solar array. And I think we have a picture of that that's being built right now. There is. So that is actually about 300 kilowatts of PV. I believe it's 840 panels going in there. That is going to supply the power to run the well pump. And by the way, our well is a half mile deep. So through a big straw to the surface. So that will power the pump during the day and charge the battery. And then at nighttime, the battery will take over and continue the pump. Right. And this point is to save the customers in the community. About half of the cost of what the electricity was before from the utility. And it's pretty significant too. That's a big cost dollars and cents. What are we talking about? All part for my bill used to run between 12 and 15,000 a month. And I say our bill because I was on the board of directors for the water company for 10 years. This took where we were paying at times 44 cents a kilowatt hour through helco. We now have a fixed PPA for 25 years at 20 cents. Wow. Never escalate and change. Yeah, excellent. So let's throw up some of these other pictures in the background here. So that's an inside shot. It's an inside shot of the battery. So it's actually tuned 500 kilowatt banks of batteries so we can shut down one side if we need to for maintenance. They have plenty to power the well pump. Right. It's it's got a couple and this is this is the original battery system that ran the ranch. It's 100 kilowatt hours. So it's one tenth the size of the container. And the first generation of battery modules that Sony made. And we've since increased that by about another 70 kilowatt hours. So just a quick plug for the paint job on that 20 foot container. That was really great. Really cool. Yeah, so the so the battery actually has an air conditioning system inside to control humidity mostly. And then you always have to deal with thermal gain from outside from the sun. So the battery container is coded with a product called super therm. And what it is is a four part ceramic coating that reflects four different wavelengths of light. So in essence, the sun and the thermal energy from the sun never even hits the steel. It's reflected right off. And literally you can put your hand on the container at the hottest part of the day when the sun is hitting the sides of that thing and it's cold to the touch. It's really unbelievable. Well, it works. Yeah, I just coated my container with that thanks to you. And we dropped our temperature 15 to 20 degrees. So you know, it's really, really good stuff. Especially where you're at. You're right on the water. Yeah, right on the water. So we'll see how it holds up under the salt, saltier environment. Let's have a look at the next picture and see where we're at. I think we have to move a little faster. Wow, it looks like you're out of space again there, Paul. So that's our Mars Habitat High Seas project up on Montalola. And it's actually now a lunar analog. It was a Mars analog for six years. It's now been transitioned to be a lunar analog. And what that means is the missions are shorter duration. So instead of four, eight months and 12 month missions on Mars, these are 28 day missions going to the moon. Right. And it's powered by the same system we have at the ranch, solar batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. Yeah, really good. So I think you're you have contracts now from NASA to support this. I think this is another example of demonstrating a technology that has now led to basically an ongoing project that's funded externally. Yeah, and it's it's the impetus for an even larger project that we'd like to put in the future. And that is a international moon base alliance. We're looking at lands and talking with the army to secure about 1000 acre parcel that would cause a technology park, a testing area and then analog isolation area for habitats. And that will generate more jobs and click Hawaii for more than tourism and other things. So it's a great accelerator. So well done on that. So let's look at the next picture. Ah, there's the hydrogen machine. So so that is our millennium rain electrolyzer. It's capable of making about 12 kilograms of hydrogen in a 24 hour period. We use ours only during our solar period in the morning or during the day. So we can typically make anywhere from one to four, maybe even five kilograms of hydrogen. But it adds up very quickly. You do a little bit every day. And we store that in low pressure tanks for the fuel cells. All right, next slide. And that is the other component to it. That is the fueling station. So that is capable of doing 350 bar or 4500 psi refills for fleet vehicles, forklifts, trucks, even cars. Okay, so you're one of the original customers of millennium rain, as I understand it. And I think you work hand in glove with millennium rain to develop develop their product to the point now where it's now been approved as an appliance and anybody can buy one and you don't have to go through all the horrendous permitting because it's an appliance. It's like buying an electric toaster. Just buy it, set it down a lot and plug it in and you're ready to go, right? Exactly. And as you saw earlier today, I mean, Chris has come, Chris McWinnie, they've come a long way from when that first machine was built. That machine was designed exclusively for us in the beginning. Exactly. So once again, you're accelerating. Well done. Thanks slide. Okay, I think this is a screenshot of your EMCC. Yeah, so that's EMCC, the control system and telemetry system that monitors not only the ranch here and all the subsystems, but that's at the Mars here. And that's showing the camera page. So those are actually, they were live shots of the exterior and interior of the Mars habitat. So when I'm going to cruise in there doing a mission, we're monitoring them 24 hours a day for safety and for evaluation purposes. They're on camera all the time. Next slide. That's just another page. That's the site page for the habitat. And it's just showing all the critical systems and values that are being read out. So that somebody in mission control can catch something if it starts to go off. If an alarm goes off, they can help the crew solve it. That's the electrolyzer page of EMC. So that's actually controlling the electrolyzer automatically. What it does is it looks for the time of day. What's the weather conditions? Is there actually excess energy being generated at that moment? So don't throw it away and make hydrogen. So we have about two slides to go. So and about two minutes to go. So let's have the next slide up there. Yeah, that's the that's our Tesla page. So that's monitoring the Tesla here at the ranch, which is another load bank. If we're not making hydrogen, we can be charging electric vehicles. We actually have an electric mower that mows the entire acreage of the ranch here on lithium batteries. And we have yet to be able to discharge it completely. That is the the water company, monitoring the tank levels and all of the tank systems. So I just want to give you a chance to get a plug in because I have about 30 seconds to go. So EMCC is now you're productizing in this so that you can you can actually sell this or use this and other other systems to make it available to other people, correct? Correct. Right. So it stands for environment monitoring and control center. Right. And this is the play on ENC squared. So it's it's powering the rent or monitoring the ranch here as well as a bunch of other properties and systems. And it's actually used at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Well, Paul, we've come to the end of our time. Oh, that was fast. Yeah, it went by really quickly. Wonderful slides. You're doing wonderful work. And it just goes to show that the kind of investment that Hank's making and giving you the facilities and support financial support to do all this stuff is coming back in spades for the for the state of Hawaii making jobs and for mankind making technologies that really matter as opposed to some silly little thing that nobody cares about. This affects everybody. So I just like to congratulate you on all you do and you have people coming in there all the time and a lot of outreach and converting more people over to hydrogen and and you know, renewable energy and decarbonization of our energy system. So well done. Yeah, we're looking forward for this COVID thing to be over so we can continue tours and Hank deserves an amazing amount of credit for letting us do what we do. Why is this would have never happened? None of us. Exactly. Well, that's our show for today. Thanks very much, Paul. And I really appreciate you coming in the last moment to support our show. And this is Mitch Ewan from Hawaii, the state of clean energy and I'm signing off and we'll see you next Wednesday.