 And welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. My name is Mitch Hewan. My day job, I'm the hydrogen systems program manager at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So today, first of all, I'd like to introduce our two guests, Shannon Tanganon from Hawaii Electric and John Petrie from Natural Power Concepts, where he's the president and inventor in chief. So welcome to the show. Shannon, I understand you have some really great news out of Hawaiian Electric for our audience. So why don't you tell us all what's going on at Hawaiian Electric? Thank you for having us. We're really excited about a new program that we have going. It started on October 22nd. It's called NEM Plus, and it's Net Energy Metering Plus. So this is focused on roughly about 71,000 customers that have private rooftop solar under the Net Energy Metering Program. So basically what they can do now is add non-export technology to their systems, whereas before they weren't able to manipulate their systems without jeopardizing their place in the program. So what does non-export technology mean? Well, it means that you aren't exporting power to the grid. So you're not going to be earning any more extra credit towards your bill. This is just technology that will basically supply your home. So you can add a battery to your system? Yes, you can add battery storage. So is Hawaiian Electric going to be providing the batteries, or is that up to the individual? No, they would have to go back to their contractors and work with them on an application, and we would definitely review the application and see whether it meets our technical standards. So there are technical standards that have to be met? Yes, definitely. Okay, do you have any favored battery technology, or is it just as long as it meets your technical standards? I think that has a lot to do with the different contractors, what they like to work with. Okay, very good. So that's very helpful to people. Very helpful, yes. So do you have anything else coming down the pike that you can tell us about right now? Well, we're excited about, we're in the last stages of, you know, I guess talks with different developers for grid scale solar projects with storage. So we'll have more on that. I think we'll have maybe Peter Razinkum and talk a little bit more about those. So when you talk about grid scale, what are we talking about? Is that like megawatts? Yes, very large system. Utility scale, okay. Three on Oahu, two on Maui, and two on Hawaii Island. Very good. Awesome. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks for having us. You're welcome. Can we have a short break now? Hey, Stan Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii. And they won't let me do political commentary, so I'm stuck doing energy stuff, but I really like energy stuff. So I'm going to keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energy Man at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're going to definitely be talking about it. We'll talk about how we can make Hawaii cleaner, how we can make the world a better place, just basically save the planet. Even Miss America can't even talk about stuff like that anymore. We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on Friday at noon with Stan Energy Man. Aloha. Aloha again. Here we are after our break, and now I'd like to talk more with John Petrie, our special guest. So let me just read quickly off of John's really quick resume. John's a world-famous artist. He's a really, really good helicopter because he uses a check-off list. He's an inventor extraordinaire, and he's an entrepreneur, and he's also the president and inventor-in-chief at a company in Hawaii called Natural Power Concepts. So John, how about giving us a quick overview of your previous life before you got into the energy game? Let's start off with your history as an artist. Well, my first, well, it wasn't my first profession. I was a commercial diver back in the days when diving with scuba tanks was a very, very risky and edgy kind of a thing, but I made money in my late teens, early 20s doing that, and that allowed me, with my parents' help, to go to art school for a little bit, and then I became an artist, and I was very lucky being an artist, that people liked what I did and bought it. So I was able to support myself quite well throughout the majority of my life through the arts, which is very, I appreciated that very much, and it also gave me the ability to be able to portray anything I had in my mind and tell people about it by doing a drawing, say I had an idea for a machine or some kind of a technology or whatever it was. I could draw it up in intricate detail and show it to you and see if you thought it was a good idea or not, and you know, do that type of thing. So one of your first great ideas was a buoy. It was a buoy, yes. It was way ahead of its time. Tell us just a little bit about that. Well, my father was an avid fisherman, and he had fishing boats in the northeast, and he would take myself and my brother out to see whether we wanted to go or not very often in very rough conditions, and I was exposed to the wind, the waves, the currents, and all of that, and very early started to see that there was a huge amount of energy in it. So in my probably about late 20s, with my own money, I built a wave energy machine and put it off of Malibu Beach Pier, California, and it worked. And wow, that's incredible. The world's going to love this. I was only about 35 years too early in the energy, because oil was very cheap back then. It was like, oh my god, you could fill your whole car up for seven to ten dollars, and so everybody thought it was cool, and they patted me on the back. I even got a write-up in popular science and all of that type of thing. Investment, forget about it. That did not happen, but it's about to happen big time. Yeah. And some of your original concepts are we're now seeing appear. We had Pat Cross from H&I a few weeks ago, and some of the boys are basically kind of derivatives or same kind of principle, I think, as what your initial buoy was. Yes. It's basically a flexible grid. It sits on the surface of the sea, and it's joined with shock absorber type devices, and when they compress and expand, they pull magnets across coils back and forth and get plenty of electricity back and forth. And because it's a very flexible system, it's a shock absorbing system, it can take the rigors and beating up the open sea just beautifully. So I think you brought one of your awesome animations here for us to enjoy, and I think part of that animation actually shows some renderings who are in action because they're motion. But let's have a look at John's first video. Yeah. Natural power concepts is one of the world's premier alternative energy concept innovators for truly transformative energy solutions to advance the common good. For non-invasive hydro, economically practical ocean buoys to produce electricity and clean drinking water, out of service ocean tankers to capture wind and ocean currents, stormproof wind systems, portable plug and play power plants in 40 foot shipping containers, energy capture systems for great ocean currents, ocean piers and platforms to produce electricity and clean drinking water, architectural wind in final stages of engineering. So John, great animation, great video. Natural power concepts does really cool stuff. So why don't you talk a little bit about some of your current projects and where you're at on them? What I do, we do in natural power concepts is address the areas where there's a huge amount of energy that big wind and solar are not addressing today. There's spectacular amounts of power in the great ocean currents, waves obviously. I mean the ocean is bouncing around all over the whole globe and in some areas to an extreme degree and there's rivers everywhere. They're moving, they're always moving and the ability to put dams in these rivers is more and more difficult every year due to the cost of the real estate, the cost of the installation of the dams is astounding, it's staggering. It's just a new one that's proposed for Canada now is nine billion dollars. That's just huge and 10 years in development once they start. But the water's flowing anyway. It's going tens of thousands or millions of miles on the planet. There's always a stream, a river, a flow of water somewhere and to capture it passively without messing up the environment and killing all the fish and that type of thing and displacing people, it works very well and so we've done that one. So I saw that big boat in the river with all these, you know, a tube running, what was that? Tell us more about that. The one with the spiral? The auger turbine I think you call it. Yes, it's very early on I realized that there were problems putting propellers, a wind turbine type devices in the water is because there's a lot of debris in water. There's fish in there too, you know, you don't want to kill all those nice little fish, we like them, you know. And in the regular propellers get fouled up real easy. There's one type of a device that's still powerful and can take any kind of debris, you can hit it with blocks of ice and coconuts and whatever a tree falls into it, it's going to bore its way through and that's a screw. Just like the same screw you put in your screw gun and you put it in the wall somewhere, hang a shelf or whatever and I'm suing the guy that invented that. His name is Archimedes, he did it about 3,000 years ago and of course it's not my idea, but it works beautifully and it's very powerful and it's debris resistant and it can be deployed anywhere. So I understand that prototype is here in Hawaii, you've currently got it. Yeah, it's, we built it in Oregon in the Pacific Northwest, they have wonderful and fantastic wave regime, I mean rivers, not in the rivers sorry, the water flow regimes there, the rivers flow very, very nicely. So we built it there, we tested it there, we proved that it works really very, very well and then transported it out here for kind of show and tell to show people, you know, from the Orient and Asia and places like that, how well it worked and how we showed that it worked here because we don't have flowing rivers like that, is we would pull it with a boat at the same speed that the water would flow in Oregon and it's a wow. It generates a lot of electricity, they see the needles go up, but we turn giant lights on or we put heating coils in the water, they could see the water boil around them and all of that type of thing, you know, so it would work good. So I think we're coming up through a break now, so do you want to... Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30, Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, the possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Well, here we are back from our break and John, I think you brought a couple of other videos, animations that you'd like to describe, you know, and talk to that this a different type of technology. Yeah, it's there's been some occurrences in the world recently that most of us become very aware of. That's the shortage of water and a lot of parts of the world. Right. And I'm going to create a tale by spreading some things together. I did some traveling over to India and Singapore and places like that. And I saw huge numbers of out-of-service tankers just sitting at anchor waiting to be scrapped. The big oil companies don't want to sell them to their competitors. And I said, my God, these ships are beautiful. They're ready to go. They're in great shape. Let's find a use for them. And so I came up with the concept to utilize those ships because you're going to buy them very, very inexpensively compared to what a new ship is and just outfit it with modern turbines, wind turbines, and some wave energy devices generate a huge amount of power and desalinate seawater right there on location. And all you do is run a pipe ashore and you do it. It's just like all these cruise ships that you see here, they have their own desalinization systems on board. And boy, they use a lot of water on those things. It's just so can you tell us a little bit about these wind turbines that we see on this animation? This one here are the new standard Vestus wind turbines. They're really huge. They're making them now up to over eight megawatts each. Really? Yes. The ones you see here are about four and a half to five megawatts. But that adds up to 10 megawatts of wind power. And the wind in the open sea is steady, consistent, flows constantly. It's not interrupted by mountains and land masses and that type of thing. And there's also waves wherever there's a windy regime. There's lots of waves. There's plenty of power in those waves. And so to combine those wind turbines with wave energy devices, you could get 15, 20, 25 megawatts of power off of and mounted on a standard out-of-service oil tanker that's ready to be scrapped. And it's an interesting way to go. Exactly. So what other new ideas that you're allowed to talk about do you have? Yeah. Well, for a long time I've been a big proponent of putting a power plant in a box. Okay. Power plant in a box. One of the most common big boxes on this earth is a shipping container. They're everywhere. The 40-foot shipping containers. If you go down the highway, those big semi-trucks are usually pulling those. That's what's on the back of them. They come off of the ships. They're in all of our ports. They're cheap. You can buy a brand new shipping container for 12,000 bucks because they make them by the millions. And so I devised a wind turbine with pop-out solar panels that actually comes up out of a shipping container. You can move it anywhere, put it anywhere and have a power plant in a box and works real good. We could even do something that would be dear to your heart, Mitch, and actually take the power from that wind turbine and those solar panels and make hydrogen. We could make hydrogen. And then you could put that hydrogen in a car. This is the man who knows more about hydrogen than anybody I know, but there is a possibility of doing that, a real possibility. So you call that your folding flower, I think? Yes. Or storm rider or what? So talk about a little bit about the feature of the fact that these blades kind of fold in off on themselves. Yeah. Wind turbines have a huge liability in that many areas of this world experience severe storms, called hurricanes and typhoons. So that eliminates the potential for a wind turbine in about one-third of the earth's surface. That's a pretty big chunk out of the action there. So early on, I thought about it and came up with a way that the turbine blades could fold up in the very high winds or fold up when you wanted them to fold up. What if you wanted to move it? And so I designed a method of doing that, patented it and got world patents on it. My God, how did that happen? They're expensive, by the way. So it got that and it looks like it's going to go into production now. Really? Yes. Awesome. And I can't tell you the name of the company, but it's a Fortune 100 company, not 500 company, and they are planning to make it soon. Oh, awesome. It only took about four years to put that deal together, but tenacity. Mitch knows all about tenacity. He's been hanging in there so long with his projects. They're actually starting to happen. Aren't they? Isn't that something? Well, now the world is waking up to the requirement that we really do have to start looking at seriously renewable energy. I mean, in Hawaii, we have a mandate to be 100% renewable by 2045. And we need to start now. Well, Mother Nature is doing us a huge favor on our behalf, and it's whooping everybody with these hurricanes and setting fire to California. And there's droughts all over the place, and everybody leaves that country and goes someplace else then. And that type of thing. So thanks, Mother Nature, for doing that. Oh, sorry, we messed you up in the first place. But we've got the message now. Everybody's slowly getting the message. A lot of the people in science and technology like us saw it ten years ago. But we had to wait ten years till everybody else got the picture and said, maybe we should invest in this. Yeah, you should have invested ten years ago. So you had another interesting, that big white turbine with all the spokes in it. Yeah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that one? That one, that device we came about from traveling about, and I would go through the Midwest, and I'd see lots and lots of turbines standing in open fields with a lot of blades on them. There must be 100,000 of them out there. And what they are is they're water pumps for irrigation. And the old farmers of the last couple of few hundred years figured out if you put a lot of blades inside a rim to turbine, even the moderate low speed winds, there would be enough energy to pump the water up for irrigation for the cattle and the farms and the plants and everything else. So my theory was 100,000 farmers can't be wrong. So let's build one to generate electricity rather than pump water in very slow to moderate and turbulent and changing winds. And so we built one. And the Air Force said, well, that looks kind of cool. Let's wheel it out on the air base out there and test it for about a year and see if it really works. And they went, at the end of the year, yeah, it does work. It's really nice. So you're working with Stan, the energy man? Yes. That was Stan's project. That was Stan's project. And he still likes that spoke wheel wind turbine. It's pretty. It's beautiful. It's like a work of art. Yeah, more than just a work of art. It actually generates electricity. So what happens when a gust of wind hits that? There's some, I understand there's some technology there as well. That's always an issue because no matter where you are, there's going to, a day is going to come along where it pops up to 40, 50 miles an hour. And that's pretty severe. Because when wind doubles its speed, its forces go up by eight times. Wow. It just doesn't double. It goes up by eight times. Eight times the force is brutal. Imagine if it goes up to 120. Oh my God, everything falls over. So the wind turbine is, like in Hawaii, you say, pow, it's gone. It's done. It's good. It's in somebody else's backyard. Unless it can lay flat, or it can tip sideways, where it puts its profile into the wind. So this one that we built with all of those blades, like the old farm wind turbines, tips forward according to the velocity of the wind. The wind gets real, real strong. It just lays itself out flat. The wind flies, goes around it. It stops operating. The winds get slight. Gravity pulls it right back down and goes back into action. So we only have about a minute or so left. So very quickly, you have a turbine system that sits on the roof of one of these sprung shelters. Oh yeah. It's a fiber tension. It's a big, long roll, just quickly in like 30 seconds. Tell us about that. Okay. What that one is, is that's designed to take advantage of the wind that hits a building. When the wind hits a building, a building is like a giant sail on a boat. It accelerates the wind. The wind builds up in front of the building, then races over the top. So we put these long horizontal turbines that catch that wind. Nobody can see them. Nobody can complain about them. They're silent and they do a great job. Excellent. Well, I'd like to thank our audience for participating and taking their time to see our show. And I'd also really like to thank our guest, John Petrie. John, thank you so much. Mitch, my old buddy. You're doing great stuff. You're an entrepreneur. You're taking a lot of risk and really walking the talk. So congratulations and thank God we have people like you in Hawaii and in the world trying to make it a better place. And you, Mitch, you're doing the same thing. Fantastic. Thank you. So thank you very, very much, everyone. And that's it for our show for this week. So aloha.