 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man live from Kuala Lumpur, on the island of Kauai. Beautiful background there. I took that picture a little while ago, but it's a beautiful, beautiful place. If you're going to visit Hawaii, go to Kuala Lumpur. If you're going to go to Kauai, that's the wettest place on earth, so check that out, too. Kind of applies to today's show. We're talking a little bit about weather today and a little bit about water, mostly water. This is one of the magical properties of water. Right before the show, we're actually talking to Jay Fidel, who runs Think Take Here, and we were talking about how people just really underestimate the value of water, not just in a biological sense of what we need for our bodies, but the amazing things that water represents on our planet, the reality that nothing could exist on this planet without water. That's why when we go to a Mars in a place like that, we always look for signs of water as a good sign of maybe that's a place we can make things happen. So anyway, today's guest is Dr. Ethan Allen, and he's also a host here on Think Take Hawaii, and we kind of get to visit each other's shows from time to time, and I thought it would be neat to talk a little bit more about water than just hydrogen, because that's all I talk about. That's only half of it. That's only two atoms out of the water. We've got to talk about the other atoms once in a while, and then the whole molecule together. So welcome, Doc. Appreciate having you here. Oh, great to be here. Yeah, one of the things I noticed was that when I was in the military, we really had a lot to do with water. We didn't fly if the ocean was too rough because it would be too hard to rescue us. We had to learn to survive in deserts if there wasn't any water. We had to learn how to swim and, you know, survive and get through the surf and get back to shore, and all those aspects of water are pretty challenging, but there's a lot of really cool things about water and cool things you can learn. And once you talked a little bit about what you talked about in your show, it has to do with water and the science side of water. Well, yeah, you're quite right. I mean, there's a thousand different ways you can talk about water. But in relation to energy, one of the things I think that people will sort of miss and don't widely understand is how water is so critical for moving all the solar energy on this planet around, basically distributing that energy in a relatively uniform way across the planet. That is, the solar energy strikes very powerfully really in the equatorial tropics, much of which is ocean, right? It heats up that water a good deal. And that water then basically circulates north and south and carries that heat through the temperate zones into actually the polar zones and just sort of dumping out that heat all along the process and really helps make this planet much more uniform. So would that be what we consider currents? Right, exactly. So as opposed to tides, those are the currents. So the Gulf Stream is the classic one that those of us who grew up on the East Coast know about, right, it's picking up nutrients and heat basically in the Gulf of Mexico and swinging around and dumping that heat out over Europe, which is why places like France and England are actually as warm as they are, considering they're actually very far north. North, north, right. But they're getting that heat that's essentially, heat that was brought in by tropics and moved by water up to their region. So people appreciate, yeah, that you can die from thirst. All life forms need water, but it's less well understood that water is really moving all the energy around on Earth and really keeping us cool here by pulling the heat away. Right. And that same principle stabilizes temperatures on shore in places like Anchorage and Alaska because it's near the ocean. It kind of stays real stable temperature wise. Whereas you move inland where there's not as much water, it gets really, really, really cold like Fairbanks. Right. It gets super cold down in the minus 40s and minus 60s where Anchorage will always stay, you know, zero, maybe minus 10 or minus 15. Right. Again, it's related to water's great heat capacity. You can see it really vividly in a flood demonstration that I sometimes have done, which is that you take a simple balloon, a plastic balloon, built halfway with water, and you can then set that down on a flame and literally have the flame burning against the balloon. It won't burn the balloon. No, it won't. You sort of sit there and it's so counter-intuitive that it's very, they're almost disturbing to see it because if you do it with an air balloon, of course, the balloon pops immediately. But with the water, you can sit there and you can literally blacken the surface of the balloon from the carbon deposits on it. But the water just keeps moving the heat away, moving the heat away fast enough that the balloon skin never heats up to a melting point. And so those currents that keep moving the ocean around do a lot of things in terms of climate, in terms of stabilizing temperatures and distributing heat energy around the earth. Exactly. And then with those movements also come the nutrients that are in the ocean move around, the deep water nutrients come up, the fish eat off of that. So it starts to drive fish cycles, fish life cycles. The fish like to hang out in certain temperature zones. You know, all fishermen look at those satellite maps to find out where they're going to catch their tuna or where they're going to catch their swordfish or whatever. Exactly. It makes us afresh in the salt water. How about some of the vertical movement? Because you also have the same principle that goes not just horizontally in the oceans but vertically. Right. So indeed on small islands that becomes very important because salt water is actually heavier denser than fresh water. And so if you, you know, in a big open ocean they'll tend to mix pretty well. But basically, you know, if it's at all constrained, fresh water will tend to float on top of salt water. And so on small porous atoll islands basically what you have is a freshwater lens that sits above the salt water that's infused under the whole island. And that's that freshwater lens often that is critical for, well it's critical for the plants, the grove area, and for people. You can tap into that in a survival situation. Right. I learned something there. I mean, it makes sense that it's not disturbed, it's stabilized in the layers. Right. Of course nowadays you're getting, as the oceans sea levels rising and you get more and more wash over that freshwater lens sometimes gets salinated a bit. In fact, I just read something this week that was on the internet that talked about why are the ocean salty and the lakes aren't. And the whole idea was the salt minerals that make the ocean salty start with fresh water moving towards the ocean and depositing, but it doesn't go the other way. Exactly. The water doesn't flow uphill. Right. So it brings the salts from the minerals in the earth into the ocean whereas the rain that falls on the earth originally has no salt in it and it does absorb the minerals until it starts moving. Exactly. Yeah, that gets us back in the whole water cycle thing. Again, it's not always widely appreciated that essentially the water that's around here now is water that's basically been on this planet forever in a day. They're not really making more water on the planet. We're just recycling the water and it evaporates out of the ocean, but of course when it evaporates it's only the water molecules that evaporate and they leave the salt behind, which is why the salt gradually has increased over eons and eons in the ocean and then it recondenses, falls somewhere else, eventually gets back into the ground, into a stream, into a river and comes back to the ocean again. Well, when it comes to how much moisture, how much water is actually in the air, how does that relate to clouds and things like that and temperature? Different temperature ranges will have certain effects on how much moisture is in there. Can you kind of explain a little bit of that? Right. So in general, warmer air can hold more moisture. It can be more humid. That's why in pretty contemporary climates, you notice in the winter the air gets very, very dry. The cold air just can't hold the moisture and it falls out and then you breathe it and you get a little raspy and all. But then, of course, as air rises and gets up to a certain level, it starts getting cool and therefore the water typically condenses back out of it at some point, often in the form of clouds, right? If there's any particulates for the water, the individual water molecules to start condensing around and that's weird. So here in Hawaii, we kind of have trade winds, hopefully most of the year anyway, from the high pressure in the north. And you have clouds, usually around 2,500 feet, maybe 4,000 feet in that range. And we have mountains here that are 4,000 feet-ish. Right. Least on Kauai, Oahu and even Toler in the big island is 1,400, 1,400 feet. So as those clouds get pushed along and they hit the landmass and start going up the hill, that explains why you have windward showers more often than leeward showers. Exactly. It's cool that the water has to fall out of the air, basically. Because it's getting pushed into colder air. Right, yeah. And so it's actually, we're very fortunate here that we have just sort of the right height so we can get a little of that moisture. It does come over the tops of the mountains and gets onto this side of the island and we're not totally dry here. We're not in a desert, right? This is the big island a little bit earlier this year and went to one of the schools, the charter schools that kind of specializes in doing hands-on projects. And one thing that I never thought about, and it amazed me, this charter school is over at Nelha, so West Hawaii. National Energy Laboratory. It's at Nelha, the National Energy Lab there. And the kids had a strawberry patch and they had a couple of experiments going on. Number one, they used the cool ocean water to cool the soil, which changed the growing cycle of the plant itself. And then what amazed me was that same cold water, they ran it through a smaller black tube in spirals and the outside moisture was condensing on the cold tube and watering the strawberries. So they didn't have to water the strawberries. They literally had cold ocean water, salt water being run through a tube and exchanging heat, bringing the moisture out of the atmosphere and dripping the water on the strawberries and kept them watered in. I was just blown away. They had to get the cold water out of the ocean and bring it up to the school, but it was literally taking cold salt water and turning it into fresh clean water for the strawberries and that kind of started getting my head going. That's a beautiful discussion. It's a very nice way to pull the water out of the air just by a temperature difference there, right? Right. And for places like Hawaii, and like you say around the equator, you probably have a lot more humidity, generally speaking, available to you to do things like that, where again, using either ocean cool temperatures or just temperature differentials, you know, from night to day, get moisture out of the air. There was another thing that I heard, this was back when I was in college a couple, a few years ago, where they were talking about collecting dew from the needles and leaves of trees, because at night it gets colder and colder and the clouds moving over, depositing the moisture on the trees. And then if you could collect that, you could actually also gather a whole bunch of water. Right. There are even in some places in Chile, for instance, they actually set up what they call dew fences, which are actually set up purposely to collect the dew and drain it down to a single source. So even in a fairly dry area, like mountains in a certain section of Chile, they can actually collect the water out of the air and it's a valuable source. And it's been estimated, yeah, that the condensation on plants and all is a real major contributor to the soil moisture and essentially replenishing the aquifers here in Hawaii. So that's a really critical aspect again. Are there any other really, I'm kind of trying to think of some of the other aspects of how water carries energy? I mean, other than getting into another discussion on hydrogen, which would call me hijacking the show, because I could go on with that forever, but what are some of the other ways that we maybe don't appreciate water? Well, I mean, again, water at water is, really does have these amazing different phenomena. It's truly a very special substance in its properties and it's one of the few which does not consistently shrink as it gets colder, right? It does shrink down to about four degrees centigrade and then it begins to actually expand again as it gets locked into these patterns where the hydrogen bonds actually push the molecules a little further apart. And that's why ice, of course, floats. Ice didn't float. Again, this planet would be just a radically different place. The ice would typically sink in a traditional mindset and then the oceans would freeze from the bottom up and you would end up with a thin layer of cold water on the planet. Yeah, and we here in Hawaii, I grew up in Hawaii, so I kind of missed out on some of the things in the mainland, but coming back to the time I did spend on the mainland, there's some pretty cool stuff that happens at really cool temperatures of water too. Like, for example, we're kind of spoiled here with our roads. On the mainland, you get water into your road system and it starts to get frozen at night. The road gets slick and it also can crack the roads. And if I'm not mistaken, many cultures that live in a real cold climate would actually take advantage of that by cutting grooves into rocks or drilling holes into rocks with mandrels and things, filling them with water knowing it would freeze and the frozen water would actually crack apart huge boulders into things they could turn around and use for houses or walls and things like that. I'd heard that. And again, that's, again, energy. Taking that first law of thermodynamics, which is energy is neither created or destroyed, it just changes form. And using water as the tool to help it change form. Yeah, exactly. But then you also get all kinds of other applications. Now they're doing solar distillation and they're doing an increasingly important technology that's coming of age now. I mean, the principles of solar distillation are very simple, right? And people use them for eons. And again, it's the water cycle, small, right, instead of evaporating out of the ocean and going up in the air. You put all this in a bottle, basically. And you just have to evaporate and get recondensed. And no matter what your source of water is, it comes off as pure and clean. Great. Well, we're going to take a quick break and we'll be back with Dr. Ethan Allen and talk a little bit about distillation. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, a host of Hawaiian Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring you the latest on what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all of your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy response from the public. But join us here, Hawaiian Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m., here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to come visit with us on Cannabis Chronicles, a 10,000-year odyssey where we explore and examine the plant that the muse has given us. And stay with us as we explore all the facets of this planet on Wednesdays at noon. Please join us. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. On my lunch hour, as all good city employees would never use their company time to have a show like this. So I take this opportunity on my Friday lunch hour to talk energy, which is one of my favorite things. And I've got one of my other hosts here on Think Tech Hawaii who's also into energy, much smarter than me, much more technically capable than me, to talk a little bit about water. And we've been talking about some of the principles of how water is such a great medium for moving energy or letting it be the mover of energy around the planet in many forms, whether it's currents or whether it's evaporation going up and making clouds, turning it into rain, and how important water is for us. But it's also, he brought some slides along to talk about a process that we've known for thousands and thousands of years called distillation. And most of us know that you can boil water and make it into steam and get it to still water, but that's not the only way distillation works. And you can do it on a fairly small scale. So I'll let you be in the professional at this point so I don't screw it up. Sure. So the first slide just shows actually on top is another interesting property of getting back to your energy idea, the fact that basically if you need to clean your water, all you have to do is put it in a bottle and lay it out in the sun. And a day of good hot sunlight will basically kill everything in your bottle and will really clean up. Good survival tool to know. But in the bottom half of that is a classic sort of emergency solar still that you can build. You dig a hole in the ground, put a sheet of plastic over it, drop a stone in the middle to make a point over a capture bucket or a jar or whatever, and the moisture in the ground or you can add leaves or whatever will then evaporate, condense on the plastic on the sheet, run to the center and drip down in the middle. And again, it's not going to give you a ton of water, but it may be different life and death if you're stuck in a place with it. But the temperature doesn't get that high in that solar water still. So can you explain why you don't have to actually be boiling water to get that? Well, because water always evaporates. You know, even if it's very, very cold and ice actually, it's called a sublimation now. The water model is actually vaporized off the surface of the ice. Because water, each water molecule contains a certain amount of energy. If it gets any extra energy in it, it's basically able to leave whatever it's reservoir. The solid form of the liquid form. And so water seeping out from the soil there or in the leaves will be constantly evaporating. And that's all you really want is for it to evaporate and then you set up a temperature. So that makes sense because you got water, which is a molecule, and it has a boiling point and has a freezing point. And as a point where it turns into a gas. So whether you got water, which is the liquid, or ice, which is a solid form, it's just a matter of changing the temperature to get it to convert into the gaseous. Individual molecules. It's at the molecular level. So you don't have to boil a whole thing of water to get evaporation. I mean evaporation is happening all the time, right? That's why our skin is actually cooler than inside our body. We're sort of sweating, putting out a little bit of water that's evaporating and keeping us cool. Yeah, we had an electrical engineer from Burns and McDonald. We have him on the third Friday of every month on the show. And we talked about air conditioning one time. And both of us were woefully lacking in the technical ability to talk about how you can have heat exchanged and get, like if you use ammonia for a refrigerant, get temperature to get colder using an air conditioning type cycle. But it's an amazing process. I used to work in a little metal hut for a while that they basically set up hoses on the top of it. And when it was hot out, they would just run the hoses. The water would run down over the surface of the metal roof and basically would be evaporating and keeping the insides of the building cooler. It wasn't terribly efficient. Wasted a lot of water. If you have extra water, it's probably going to have plenty of water. But to get back to the solar distillation, I mean the problem has always been solar stills are inherently, well not inherently, but solar stills have been typically fairly inefficient, only 30% or 40% efficient. The next slide I think shows the basics of one kind of solar still. These are some kids actually in Majro are building this. So that will eventually have an outer plastic cover on it. You'll put salt water in those black plastic bins and it will then condense on the outer plastic, clear plastic cover and run down and collect in the bottom. On the sides. Right. But as with most still designs, what's happening there is you're heating up a lot of water. You're leaving a body of salt water in the sun and so there's a lot of energy going into just heating that water. And again, as we talked about earlier, water has tremendous heat capacity so it's wasting a lot of that energy. Some folks recently have sort of trickly overcome that step and the next slide I think will show. This is a group from a group called Sunny Clean Water and this still which is about a one square yard footprint there about six feet high, five feet high floats in the water which is great because you're not having to haul water to your still. The still is actually floating in it. But because that black section in the middle is basically a black absorptive cloth over styrofoam blocks basically, the only thing that's being heated up there is the water that's actually being sucked up or brought up by capillary action I should say on that cloth. So this still actually runs very close to 100% efficiency. So a little one square yard still like that can produce 5 to 10 gallons of fresh water per day even in a place like Buffalo, New York where they're developing this. So in terms of design, that thing has literally a porous black cloth in the middle, that's what's in the middle. So potentially you can have salt water underneath and because the capillary action of the cloth absorbing the water, salt water but the evaporation is only fresh water, hits the top and then collects on the side in little channels. Right. Or you can again, you can float it in a sewage pond or whatever and be generating fresh clean water out there. It's still water. You know, yeah. The issues and actually they're just testing this and we're going to try to get a unit here in Hawaii and also put one up in Majuro is they haven't really done a lot of testing in salt water yet with it and they don't know how fast salt will accumulate on that. Yeah, until you have to change the cloth. You may have to change the cloth. Yeah, at some point. Okay. But it's, again, a nice intriguing technology that people are working on. What are some of the potential, like you're doing it in Majuro for a reason, obviously, what's the potential value for a small island nation like that, especially a dry island, a low island, to have a technology like that. Do they import a lot of water? Do they have to run this water desalination plant? Yeah, I mean, that's, it's the classic issue now on Atoll Islands is, and they do in some places try to run big reversal osmosis plants and things, but those are fairly technically complex operations that you don't just know and require well-trained people to maintain them and all that. A passive solar steel, by contrast, runs itself and doesn't really require any real technical expertise. I didn't see a whole lot of moving parts in that. Right. They actually do have a little solar panel and a little pump. So you can pump the water off. So that's pretty efficient. But the problem with big RO systems is they're very hard to maintain, although there's a group now called Sustainable Ocean Systems who are working on a ship-based RO system that you can go and park it. Yeah, park it off a disaster area or whatever, be sucking up deep ocean water and producing, you know, a million gallons a day of fresh water for an emergency situation. Perfect. Yeah. Are there a lot of big companies working on those kind of things? There are more and more because there's a bunch of interesting technologies that are all sort of coming together right now. The filters have always been a big issue in the RO systems, right? To make a filter that's thin enough but strong enough and has the right size pours to let just water through and nothing else. And now with substances like graphene, you know, you can make... Adam-thick kind of... Yeah, yeah, exactly. Filters that are only, yeah, a few atoms thick and then you need much lower pressure to move the water through them. And so the system becomes much more energy efficient. And then the other thing sort of on an even weirder line is this stuff called radiative photonics or there are substances which basically reflect, they take in energy, solar energy from a broadband, collapse into a narrow band which the atmosphere is transparent and radiate it back out and sort of dump it out into space. And therefore the substance actually cools in the sunlight. So it sort of seems like it's breaking off a lot of physics. But you actually measure the temperature of these things and there are several degrees cooler than the surrounding air. So it has great potential for just direct cooling but you can also, envision using it to make water then condense using it sort of what you were talking about earlier with the sort of dew fence. So yeah, all kinds of interesting stuff. I know that in the hydrogen world you knew I was going to eventually hydrate this. Absolutely. But there's some stuff going on now that they're trying to do basically photosynthesis directly from sunlight into breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen. And that's kind of intriguing. Do you kind of have a feel for how that process would work? That's been a dream for probably a century or two now of scientists. It's how can we do what every green plant on this planet does and the plants don't do it very efficiently, right? They're only 5% or 10% efficient but that's plenty to get. Enough of them. Yeah, right. And yeah, now they've had some interesting breakthroughs in the past few years and they're now developing artificial photosynthesis systems that are going to probably in the next few years begin to be really interesting in terms of their efficiencies and their abilities to actually produce usable hydrogen and oxygen out of water. So it seems like we're learning from mother nature how to be more sustainable by mimicking her processes. Yes. Biomimicry has been actually a very hot topic among the material scientists for the past few decades. If more and more realize that nature has solved a lot of very complex problems in very ingenious ways and so in everything from looking at, how is it that muscles and other bivalves stick to rocks on the shore? They heat up, they dry out, they get immersed in water, they get pounded by waves. What kind of adhesive are they using, you know? Wouldn't that be great to have a can of that when your boat starts leaking you know? So they do that and the muscle shells and the cells are amazing instructions incredibly tough, incredibly strong, self-healing, all kinds of interesting properties to them. Well, it seems to me like the key to humanity is to keep on learning and keep on going and that's, you know, meeting those challenges, challenging ourselves, challenging our science, challenging our scientists and our professors to keep us open to new ideas and how to look at things and how to make things happen. It's going to help us probably learn more about what we already should know from nature. Exactly. The better understanding and if we use a little bit of wisdom and common sense and apply it well we can do well. All right. Well, there's our challenge. We got to keep going and let's keep learning and keep doing. All right. Thanks Dr. Allen for being on the show today and thanks to everyone for joining us here on Think Tech Hawaii and Stanley Energy Man and we'll be back next Friday. Aloha.