 and welcome to Stan Energyman. Stan Osserman here, and I have a new company now, so Tiger Shark Energy Consulting Hawaii, each two is my new company, so I'll send business cards to all of you, just send me a note. Anyway, today's show is a really special one. We've had Mike Stritsky on the show before, and he's talked about his hydrogen house, but a lot's been going on in the world of hydrogen. And one of the things that I found really interesting was the last time we did this show with Mike, he was calling in from California during all the wildfires, and sure enough, we got another spate of wildfires in California now. And it just so happens that PG&E, Pacific Gas and Electric, was actually the cause of several of the major wildfires in California. So this year they decided to shut off power when conditions were especially too windy to keep their lines from arcing and starting more wildfires. And what that did was it caused a whole bunch of folks in California to go without power. When I say a whole bunch of folks, I'm talking hundreds of thousands of people are without power. And Mike has a hydrogen house plan or startup in California, and the folks in California have contacted him a little bit about what they can do to exit the grid and be totally off the grid using hydrogen. So Mike, welcome to the show, and if you could just kind of give the folks a brief recap of how you got started with hydrogen house and we'll get into talking about your off the grid system. Yeah, I've been doing hydrogen for the last 30 years. When I worked for the Department of Transportation, I built two hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. This was before anybody even knew what they were and they were just fresh out of NASA. Two companies went public, Millennium Cell, and H Power, which they are now is put there. So I have a lot of history in the fuel cell industry. I knew this with the solution 30 years ago, and that's why I've pursued it ever since. The hydrogen house project was started in 2006 and we've been off grid now for 16 years. So cooking gas, heating gas, fuel for the vehicle is all done from solar hydrogen that we make three months of the year. So there's no shelf life with hydrogen that's made from water and sunlight. 80% of all matter in the universe is hydrogen, so right now the world's waking up that batteries are not going to make it. So there isn't enough lithium in the world to supply less than 1% of the cars are now going to fuel cells. So the world's becoming a first and second place very quickly. And as we can see climate change for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and the reactions all over the world. Exactly. So did you ever get the California Hydrogen House up and running or was the fire last time a game changer that you have to recover from yet? Well, we had lost the, there was damage to the buildings there, but we're still in the midst of putting the hydrogen house Malibu together. We did have a container home that we had run on solar hydrogen that survived the fire. So all of the, this was an immobile trailer park. Everything in the whole park burned. There was nothing left except for the hydrogen jewel box and the container home. So that's a tribute to it. There were a lot of more lives that were purchased and running around Malibu. Last year and now there were no incidences with those when these cars completely burned up. Hydrogen vented and that was the end of it. No explosions, no, nothing more than in fact, a lot less than having a gasoline car. So that's just a testament to the safety of these vehicles. That's outstanding. Cause I know that the movie you sent me and can we say the name of the movie? That's not classified or anything, right? Yeah, it's called, yeah, it's that war with the dinosaurs and the movie will release to the public within the next two months. Yeah, I got to see a trailer and watch the whole movie in advance thanks to Mike and it's an outstanding film. And I really like your quote in there that you basically said at the end that you're the only person that said it's even on the trailer about hydrogen being free and that's part of the problem. It looks like when Tesla and Thomas Edison were working on electricity, Tesla's view of electricity was everybody should have it for free. And that became problematic. We just buy and sell equipment. Yeah, and that became problematic for his technology because the big boys wanted to make money and they wanted to control stuff. So they wanted to have something that they controlled all the aspects of and Tesla philosophically was looking for free energy for the masses. I think that's part of one of the problems with hydrogen. It's like, it's free. Like you said at the start, it's the most common element in the universe and we can get it from water, we can get it from methane, we can get it from all kinds of places. And that's actually probably one of the reasons why it didn't take off in that movie at war with the dinosaurs. Talked a lot about that and some of the other stumbling blocks that have kept hydrogen from taking its rightful place. But the real good is- Well, what the problem is is the hydrogen is to cure for the disease not the treatment. So there's a cancer company like Anjan and basically you don't want to cure cancer, you want to cure diabetes, you don't want to cure anything, you want to treat it forever and you want to be tied to people's pharmaceutical and medical court through your insurance till the day you die and then they bury their mistakes. So this is, you know, they don't want to cure anything and if we don't cure this, there won't be any place to spend the money. You broken the code and all that stuff, you're exactly right. And it's kind of the greedy side of capitalism and I'm a big capitalist supporter and small business supporter, but you know, when people get greedy and forget the big picture, which is a better humanity and better society, they lose sight of that fact and we're all in big trouble. Because like you say, we've been fighting cancer for probably 50 years or more and I know we're making heavy... You haven't cured your diseases all ago. Yeah, so it's pretty tough to break up those big monopolies and I think that's one of the things that our government needs to start doing is taking apart some of these big monopolies including some of the technology companies like Amazon's or Facebook, Twitter, Google. So if we drop dead here, it's because they're catching the bad mouth of them giving them, but those big companies control so much that we need to get some security and our country's built on personal freedom and personal accountability and we're kind of losing that personal control. Anyway, we're getting a little far off the subject. Yeah, we've stopped becoming the entrepreneurs that we're used to be. I mean, basically if we fail to keep evolving, we're gonna end up extinct like the dinosaurs were pulling out of the grass. You know, we have to evolve or we're gonna end up like blockbuster or Kodak. They created the technology, refused to adopt it. Look what happened to the species. We have to evolve with the technology, the linking that creates wealth. So we've got to do the right thing, not the political thing. And if we don't do it for any other reason, do it for your kids and your grandkids. Exactly. Leave a legacy behind, not just the balance sheet. Well, I know you also picked up recently a used Toyota Mirai. And you were telling me about those actually starting to show up on the East Coast. Can you tell us a little bit about that for the audience? Yeah, I mean, a lot of these Toyota Mirais are coming off at least now. So they've got about 30,000 miles on them. I purchased one that was non Toyota certifiable, which means that it's had more damage on more than two body panels. But that car, I picked up for $12,000. Shipped it out here and we're converting it to a generator. So these cars are available out on the market now. So the nice thing about it is as Toyotas decided to extend their research program call with the Mirai where they're gonna give people another three years free warranty and another $15,000 free fuel if you pick up the Toyota certified vehicle. So a friend of mine just bought a vehicle in Malibu, he paid $17,000 with $15,000 worth of free fuel and three year bumper to bumper. So how the heck are you gonna beat that deal? Yeah, that's tough to beat. That's really awesome. And you know, I just saw on the internet today that they had the highlights from the Tokyo Auto Show. And I looked through all the electric vehicles and I didn't see any fuel cells, but the Toyota Mirai was actually listed as one of the top picks of all the vehicles. I mean, electric and hybrid and internal combustion. It was like right up there and they said it's a runaway bio-hydrogen fuel cell. The Toyota Mirai has 114 kilowatt fuel cells. Is that correct? And it makes 12 gallons of drinking water every tank wall. So if you get thirsty along the ride, you drink the same thing the astronauts do. They call it Godwater. Yeah, it collects it. And the hydrogen and the oxygen. It collects it, right? It collects it and you can actually dispense it. It collects about a half a gallon. Yeah. But it could capture all of it. That'd be great. So, you know, you've got your Mirai and you say you're gonna adapt it so you can plug your house into the Mirai and run your house off the Mirai, is that correct? Yes. I mean, right now with all these crises going on, you know, we have a lot of energy in these battery powered fuel cell hybrid vehicles that we can't utilize. I mean, the most you can get is a small car inverter for your 12 volt outlet. You know, we wanna be able to utilize the whole power of the vehicle. I mean, if you think about it, these generators, you know, even on a hybrid vehicle are 4% efficient on a regular, you know, one that powers your house because they have to maintain RPM. With a solid state system, you basically only consume the amount of fuel for what you're using. You know, so your efficiency quadruples. You know, in addition to that, you have a backup to the backup. You know, these engines are allowed, you know, run long periods of time. These generators all last very long. And especially now, where California is shutting the power off for three days to three weeks at a time, you know, people are really screwed. It's one thing to do without power for a couple hours, but when you start to go into a couple of day mode, you know, and then there is, you know, you can't get out to get fuel. You're really in trouble. So, you know, these things are gonna get worse. Like I said, you know, last year we had the terrible fires, you know, in Malibu and the campfire up North and these things are devastating. Utilities are, you know, they shut down the power this time to over a million customers and over a million people were evacuated. So you're looking at, you know, these are large numbers and this is gonna, they said this is gonna become a yearly event because, you know, that the path of the fire takes a different route every time, depending on the way the Santa Ana winds are blown. So you didn't get it last year, but you may get it the next. Right. And then that grows back up again and you get it again. So, you know, the aging grid in these remote places, you know, it's gonna continue to fail because they put their money in their pocket and not into the infrastructure. And now the chickens are coming home to roost. You know, they replaced all these telephone poles in Malibu with what, steel poles? No, that makes too much sense. Let's put, you know, is Rio Soda poles back in. Yeah. You know, they don't do, you know, so basically you're putting in matchsticks in a fire. Yeah. Well, it's cheaper. So that's why they're doing it. Yeah, we found out how cheaper works out, huh? Yeah. In fact, we like to use the term fully burdened costs when you're trying to do real analysis because cheaper doesn't work in the fully burdened cost model. Well, we have to go back to do things, right? We have to go back to building things ourselves. We have to have to pride in our work and we have to have quality, again, the demand quality. You know, we've got to get out of the throwaway world where we build things rather than throw them in the landfill. Yeah. You know, it's really funny. I remember seeing a documentary one time and they talked about the term close enough for government work. And at one time, that actually meant very, very high standards. It was like, if you were going to do government work, you had to meet the highest standards in the industry or the government wouldn't accept it. Now we look at it as if it's just close enough for government work, it's probably the minimum standard. Unfortunately, that's what a lot of manufacturers and companies have adopted is. It's good enough, minimum, we'll wear data, it's only good for a couple of years, it wears out, we'll replace it, we'll throw it away, get a new one. And that's really not a very good model. You're right, we have to go back to the old ways. See what, Mike, we're going to take a quick break here for 60 seconds and we'll be right back and we'll talk some more about, especially about the California fires and maybe some more about your hydrogen house concept. Okay. Aloha, I'm Marcia Joyner and we are navigating the journey every Wednesday at 11 a.m., Think Tech, Hawaii. Please join us, Aloha. Hello, I'm Mufi Hanuman. I want to tell you about a great show that appears on Think Tech, Hawaii. It's all about tourism. In fact, we call it Tourism 101, where we talk about the issues and challenges that faces our number one industry throughout the state. We'll have some interesting guests, very informative dialogue and allow you an opportunity to maybe learn a little bit more about why this industry is so important for our state. It's been great for us in the past, we need it today and especially going forward. That's Tourism 101 on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, and welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Stan Osserman here. With Mike Stritski all the way from, it's almost his bedtime now, all the way from New Jersey. And we're talking a little bit about the wildfires in California, but I want to get back to two things. Number one is his Toyota Mirai that he just bought used for like 12,000 bucks if I got the price right. You know, if you went to buy a brand new 100 kilowatt fuel cell, which is the same size or actually a little smaller than what's in the Mirai, how much would that cost, Mike? About $600,000 if you're buying a valid fuel cell. So you bought a car used for under $15,000 and in it is a 114 kilowatt fuel cell with probably 15 or 20 years more use out of it and you paid 12,000 bucks for it and to buy one commercial on the market. Yeah, to buy a commercial one from a professional company, just the fuel cell alone would cost 600, half a million, over half a million dollars. Right, and that's not counting the tanks and the help that are in the car. So the state would, you know, people used to ask me, Dan, where's your business case for hydrogen? And I'd said Toyota. Toyota is my business case for hydrogen because they've already taken most of the platinum out of the fuel cell which was a big cost piece. They've made it more efficient. They made it lighter. They made it smaller. They've done everything over 20 years to get the fuel cell as perfect as they could get it. And not only... They made it mass-producible and what they did that no one else has done was only to sell these things were to capture a market. Yeah. So basically, if you're a company like Ballard, if you're trying to make the maximum amount of money and all of your R&D on a very limited number of units. Toyota says, look, we're gonna sell them like we sell them in mass production and that's what they did with the Toyota Prius. And they become the largest automaker in the world. So Toyota truly is betting the farm on this technology which is why they've released 5,500 patents free to the world as open source. So, you know, they're all in. You know, they're making, they're turning sewage into fuel for these vehicles in Japan. Yeah. You know, so they're putting their money where their mouth is, you know, in order to capture this economically and we're sitting on our hands. You know, the U.S. automakers aren't doing anything with fuel cells. No, the U.S. is... Yeah, they're waiting to see. The U.S. has lost their edge in this industry to virtually everybody, including China. And if I understood right, the 2020 Olympics, Summer Olympics in Japan are gonna be pretty much run on hydrogen. And I just... That's pretty much it, yeah. I hope that gets the attention of the folks in this country and they realize that hydrogen is what's gonna get us to that clean energy future and that carbon-free future and we need to take it seriously. Well, I think the problem is is there's just too many entrenched interests that are in the U.S., you know, that are making money off the status quo. You know, they don't wanna change anything, you know, because they're making money on it. The problem is, is like I said, there isn't gonna be a planet to spend it on. You know, there's gonna be no future for our grandchildren and, you know, we're destroying this planet. What happens when you destroy your home? Yeah. Yeah, they're finding that out within California with all these homes that they're losing. Well, I think... Only people have nowhere to go. I think you broke the code though, because, you know, like you say, who was selling fuel cells before Toyota put them in cars and put them out there? All the companies that sell fuel cells and hydrogen electrolyzers and stuff, they were following that model that you said where, hey, they gotta make all their money back, all their R&D, all their capital costs up front. So the equipment's been way too expensive. Now you got Toyota that's, you know, said we're gonna take a loss for a couple years and eventually we're gonna own the market. And sure enough, they are. Toyota owns every piece of that car. They own technology, the tanks, they own the fuel cell, they own all the electronics, they own all the software. And by basically owning this, they're not paying markup for many of these other companies that, you know, normal industry act, I too. Yeah, exactly. So if you own everything, you know, you can control the, you know, what gets spent on the vehicle. You're not paying, you know, 100X on these things. I mean, a perfect example are these hoses for the cars. You're looking at $7,000 for a hose. All right, there's no competition and there's literally only two companies in the world to make them. Yeah. So we've got to get out of that mode. And, you know, we can't make the regulation so overburdened for no reason just to protect the gas companies. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We've got to make it simple, stupid, you know? Well, let's talk a little bit about the Hydrogen House project itself. I know that we've highlighted on some previous program for the audience today. Just give a quick rundown on how much PV and how you store your hydrogen and what's the cycle, you know? You charge batteries and then make hydrogen or what? Yeah, so what I do is fairly simple here. I've been doing this now for 16 years. I've perfected the system here to a point where, you know, I travel a lot and everything runs by itself. It needs very little maintenance. So first of all, we start with 27 kilowatts of solar and that provides all my cooking gas, heating gas, fuel for the vehicle, all my energy needs. So during the springtime, when I have long solar days and I should say longer than normal anyway, they're getting longer and I have basically no heat or air conditioning load. So that 27 kilowatts goes through my electrolyzer and it fills 12 1000-gallon grouping tanks full of hydrogen to 200 pounds, which is about 90 kilograms or 90 gallons of gasoline. So once that's done, I'm done for the year. I've got the electrolyzer off and all during the summer months, so from the end of June to the last week in September, I'm back feeding the grid and I'm making money. During the fall, I'm neutral till about December. So from the last week in September to about the first week in December, I have enough just between solar and batteries to be just fine, have enough energy for all my loads. During the winter months, December, January, February, March and part of April, I don't have enough energy. So the fuel cell runs at night anywhere from four to six hours to run my geothermal, which is my largest load in the hydrogen house. So that's about 78 kilowatt hours or 75 kilowatt hours a day I use for heat and air conditioning, where I use less than five in the summertime and I have the most amount of energy. So essentially my system bottles sunlight and I can use it wherever I want, weeks, months, years from now. I use the hydrogen during the winter and then we go back to the spring and the whole cycle starts all over again. So as long as a big nuclear ball and the sky shows up for work, I've got all the energy I need. And this system is reproducible. We went public with a company called H-cell Energy back in 2015 doing hydrogen homes for people. And that's what we're doing today. Right now the need is getting greater than ever and the cost of the equipment is getting to be less than half of what it was five years ago. So as increases in technology happen, as mass production happens and the codes are adopting all of the new fuel. So the hydrogen, we're now seeing that this is gonna become an industry and we're looking at this worldwide, not just America. There are 270,000 hydrogen homes powered off natural gas in Japan. I think I built the only five in the US. So we're really behind the stake here. Yeah, so taxes with all this excess wind and solar needs to be going out of the fossil fuel business and going into the renewable business. Their shareholders don't give a crap where their revenue comes from long as it shows up. Yeah, I want to point out to the audience you something about your house and you talked about your HVAC system, your heating and cooling system and how much energy it used. But I want to point out to folks that your heating and cooling system is actually more like a heat pump. You've got a heat exchange system buried underground and that same temperature of, it's maintained around around 70 degrees or so is your air conditioning in the summertime and you're heating in the wintertime when it's really cold because underground, the temperature maintains a constant and you have an exchanger down there that pumps 70 degree air into your house wintertime for heating and summertime for cooling as part of your efficiency in your house, is that correct? Yeah, so the geothermal system has a mile of thick wall copper tube buried underground eight feet. So I extract the 56 degree ground temperature which is virtually the same almost nationwide and during the summertime, I'm only moving the cold from the ground to the house so I'm not making anything up. I'm taking 56 degrees and making the house 70. That's why it uses no energy and for the air conditioning cycle. During the heating cycle, I've got to make up the 12 degree differential. So I'm bringing 56 degrees in and the heat pump does what heat pumps does. It makes the cold colder and the hot hotter and that's what heats the house. But I have used more electricity because I have to make up that differential in the winter. Yeah, that explains the difference. Yeah, it's far more efficient than your traditional heating system because you're extracting the energy from the ground. Right. So geothermal is used all over the country, you know, pumps, pump and dump wells, all kinds of things to extract ground temperature to offset heat and air conditioning loads which are the largest loads of almost any you know, home around the world. Well, I tell you, that's really a great model, Mike. And I know you only got a handful of houses out there to date, but I'm hoping for your company and for you that people start to wise up and start following the model and you get out there and build a bunch of houses that use your model. Well, what has to happen, Stan, is pretty simple. We have to start voting with our checkbooks. If you want to see change, you've got to vote for change. And the only vote that really matters is the one where you're spending your dollar because there'll be no force in industry will stop the trend where people are buying things. Okay, so if you want a chain, you can't sit there and talk about it, you've got to sit there and you've got to buy it. You know, you've got to vote for solar and wind and LEDs and energy efficiency and less waste. You know, you've got to vote for what you want and you've got to vote with your checkbook. That's good advice, Mike. And I think that really kind of sums it all up. You know, we're faced with choices every day and the choice for clean energy is not necessarily the cheapest but if it's a future you're worried about, you know, you need to step up and make the choice yourself. And I'm telling you, though, the price of solar's going down, the price of the vehicles is dropping, the quality is still there and then getting better. So the choice is getting easier and easier to make. So, you know, believe it or not, we really... I mean, the only reason that we have battery electrics right now is because they're going to give oil another 10 years. It's a known failure. No matter how many times I run the math, there's just no way that, you know, there's enough lithium on the planet that we're going to build the grid nine times bigger and we're still powering off some coal. We've got batteries that end up in the environment that you drink, you know, they're non-recyclable and these things catch fire. And, you know, all of these grid storage plants, the ones in Hawaii, you probably know better than anybody, you know, have caught fire. And the companies have gone out of business. They just had a fatal fire recently, but remember, fully burdened costs. That's, if I can drive that one home, you've got to think about what everything costs, where it's mined, what it costs to manufacture it in terms of environmental impacts, end of life disposal, everything. Well, Mike, believe it or not, we blasted through 30 minutes already, and I know it's almost your bedtime, so I'm going to let you go. And I want to thank you for sharing information with me and sharing the movie with me, because I'm looking forward for it to come out, because it was a well-done documentary, and I'm looking forward to it. We'll see if we can get it to the Maui Film Festival in this summer coming up in 2020. But have a great evening. Okay, I, yeah, I'll tell you another AOL video we did last week. I think you'll find it interesting if you want to post it up on your website, you'll find it. Okay, thanks a lot, Mike. Until next week. All right, have a good one, Stan. Thanks, Aloha, Mike. Until next week, Stan the Energyman signing off, Aloha.