 Welcome to Stan Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from retirement. I used to be from HCAT, now I'm just from retirement. Coming to you live and direct from the Big Island, we're at Blue Planet Research here in Pugobava. It's about halfway between Kona and Waimea for those of you who are geographically handicapped. It's a beautiful, beautiful place, about 2,600 feet above sea level, nice and cool and really, really pretty. Getting a little bit more rain than usual. First of all, I'd like to thank everybody that came to my retirement party last Wednesday. That was a really good, good fun time. And I really appreciate all the support that I had when I was at HCAT and all the folks that showed up. It was really great. But today's show is really special. I've been asking Paul if we could do a show from Pugobava here and Blue Planet Research because it's a beautiful lab. He's an architect. He designed it. And we could also call him Pastor Paul because he's the pastor of the church of the first element. So their motto is, God's a gas. And it's all about hydrogen, of course. So anyway, Paul, welcome to the show. Thanks for being with us. It's a pleasure as always. Thanks for having me. We had a really cool background setup. We're actually in front of the lunar mission control setup that Blue Planet uses to control the habitat that they have on Montelua to train not only NASA astronauts but international astronauts on lunar habitat. And the habitat is actually a little microcosm of the system that they have set up here on the ranch, which has been off the grid for, I think about five, maybe going on six years now. Almost seven now. Almost seven years. So it's a really outstanding example of how would you sustainable energy and how to use hydrogen in the mix for your long-term storage. And it's the place that I always love to bring people to show them. And Paul's a great host. So Paul, give us a little bit of your background and how you got to work here at Blue Planet. Yeah, so my background, as you mentioned earlier, is architecture. And I met Hank Rogers in the realm of architecture, came over to do some projects for him on the big island. We got into energy at some point. And I felt like energy was more interesting at the time. It fit into architecture as well. So I kind of did a transition from doing just architecture into doing more renewable energy. So I like to tell people that I'm a recovering architect and now doing a lot more electrical engineering. And as Stan, I'm a devotee of hydrogen and want to promote hydrogen infrastructure, not only in Hawaii, but for the whole world. So Paul's, one of Paul's projects recently with Blue Planet Research is to build a, they call it a power cube. And it's an eight foot by eight foot by eight foot connex, a small connex, the smallest they make. Military uses that a lot, that size module for a lot of their equipment. But what makes this thing interesting is it's built to be like a emergency power pack in a box. So I'll let Paul describe today. He's got some images. He's got all the details, facts and figures on it, but they just deployed it to the mainland to a little event that he might have heard of called Burning Man. And apparently it was a pretty big hit over there. So take it away, Paul. So just as a side note, in Blue Planet Research, we have kind of a little subgroup, kind of like a skunkworks, but since we're in Hawaii, it's more of a mongooseworks. So we have a small group of people who work on special projects. And the cube was one of those projects that came up in discussion. And we thought, well, if we could knock out a prototype really quickly, we could take it to Burning Man to 2019 and test it in probably the harshest conditions known to man. So besides the very alkaline dust that's 10 times finer than talcum powder, they have complete whiteouts with dust storms, high temperatures, and all kinds of crazy loads. So we're going to look at some pictures of it actually performing at Burning Man. This is before it left the ranch. And basically, as you said earlier, it's a complete system in a box. All of the solar panels, all of the support structure, all of the batteries, the PCS electronics, everything fits inside of this eight foot cube. And the intent is to be able to deliver this to a disaster site fully charged. You can hit the ground, power things up within minutes, and within two hours have all of the solar panels deployed and doing its charging. So it was truly a solution for emergency disasters. And if we'd had this when Puerto Rico first got hit, and now the Bahamas, this would have made a significant difference. So let's put that image back up, Robert. And I wanted to show how Paul grew actually just some of the components in there on the left side. What's that stuff on the left? So on the left side, we have our inverters on the wall at the top. Also, the electronics cabinet, which contains all of the control system or SCADA, which is all powered by a program called EMC. EMC is a type of supervisory control and data acquisition. It's what we use at the Mars habitat and the lunar habitat to run off systems there. It also runs the ranch here at Pugava Blue Planet Research. And on the bottom are the battery banks. So there's 50 kilowatt hours worth of energy storage and batteries. And of course, this is lithium ferrous phosphate. We don't do cobalt. Cobalt has too many thermal management issues. And since this is in a small container deployed in very hot places, we want to mitigate or reduce our thermal loads as much as possible so that we have less to mitigate. In addition to that, the container is painted with a product called Supertherm, which is a four-part ceramic coating and actually reflects four different wavelengths of light. So we get almost zero ambient heat gain from the sun. You know, the right-hand side with the panels and they're 30. Yeah, there's 32 panels on the right side on the bottom and on top of those are containers that have all the accessory parts to put it together. And right on top of the panels, you can see those tubes. Those are the support structure in the legs. So this is everything that you need in an 8 by 8 by 8 connex that can drop in and we have some examples of what it powers a little bit later. But this is a really interesting setup because those 32 panels are put together on a framework that would best be described as an easy corner. If you've done an easy corner tent before or awning where you've got poles and then you have the brackets that just screw in or tighten down with wing nuts. And you can just assemble it and how quickly can you put it together from the container to up and running? So it was designed for two men or two people to be able to deploy it in under two hours. So from the time it hits the ground within two hours, everything is plug-and-play. There's an assembly procedure that's extremely simple and it goes up really quickly. And the reason we chose, as you pointed out, it's actually EMT tubing and the fittings is because it's stuff that's available just about anywhere. We're basically system integrators, so we don't like recreating the wheel if we don't have to. So we look for things that are easy to deploy, easy to use for other applications, and just put them into a different scenario. Let's take a look at the next thing that you have of the thing actually being put out there to work. So you can see the easy corner is similar to a setup there with a cube in the middle. Yeah, so that's at Burning Man for 2019, and in the background is an art installation called the Folly. We have a picture coming up that'll show what it's actually powering at night time. So there's a tremendous amount of lighting, huge sound system, all kinds of electrical loads that are all being powered by the power cube. So let's give the viewers an idea of how much power compared to like an electric vehicle, Tesla or something. How many amp hours of battery would a Tesla have versus this? Well, the Tesla Model S and the Model X comes with either a 75 or 90 kilowatt hour battery system. We've got a Model X here at the ranch with a 90 kilowatt hour battery. The power cube has a 50 kilowatt hour battery inside. So it's almost as large as the Model S with the 75. It's actually about the same amount of power because it's lithium ferrous phosphate. We can discharge it all the way down to zero. So we can use the very bottom of that charge whereas typically you wouldn't go that deep with a cobalt chemistry of lithium. And so like for example, I use an average house here in Hawaii with a lot of electrical appliances would take about 30 kilowatt hours of power a day. So this one cube could easily run two houses for a whole day without ever having to recharge a battery. So you could run two or three full full on houses. I'm talking houses with electric water heaters and everything would be about 30 kilowatt hours. So a pretty heavy draw two houses all day long just on the battery power. And of course this is set up so they can charge the batteries and give you that power day and night. So do you want to give you a quick set of specs on the system? It comes with two configurations at the moment. So we have 50 kilowatt hours of energy storage. We have either eight or 12 kilowatts of inverted power. There are 15 or 18 kilowatts of solar panels. So it can power quite a bit of equipment and the intent going forward is to create accessory modules in other eight foot containers. That will allow us to pair different applications with the power cube such as water purification, refrigeration, sanitation. These are all the things that are the first things to disappear in a disaster site. And without sanitation and refrigeration, medication, spoil, bacteria becomes a big issue. So it's a very versatile system and we'll be thinking of other uses as we go along with different applications. And of course the real super advantage to this is after the first couple of hours, you're not searching for diesel fuel. And you know, having to sprout fuel from someplace or compete with other needs like hospitals or wastewater treatment plants that need diesel power to back up their system. So this system just uses solar power and you could probably even take some small wind turbines and couple them with this type system and augment the power from the solar panels and use the energy storage in these lithium ferrous phosphate batteries and really have some self sustaining emergency power where you're not competing with anybody else for the energy. You're using the available renewable resources on site for an indefinite period. So this is really a game changer for the emergency management folks. Another significant component to this and you'll see it in one of the pictures is communication. When crews arrive like from FEMA when teams arrive on a disaster site, communication is absolutely critical and it's one of the things that goes down first. So you lose power, you lose communication. You can add a satellite link and it can come configured with a satellite link so that you can immediately have communication for all the teams to be coordinated as well as provide a wireless mesh for internet types of communication and data transfer. So we're going to take a quick break now and we'll be back in 60 seconds and show you some more images of the power cube in action at Burning Man. Oh I'm moving out of it. 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. And great for us in the past. We need it today and especially going forward. That's Tourism 101 on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Aloha. My name is Victoria and I'm a host at The Adventures in Small Business. This is a collaboration between U.S. Small Business Administration, Hawaii District Office, and its partners where we showcase the stories of local entrepreneurs in small businesses, talk about how to start a business, talk about great tips for small business owners. Please join us every Thursday 11 a.m. at Think Tech Hawaii. Can you say Mahalo? Hey welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here on my new time slot Tuesday at 3 and we're one of my favorite places in the world. In fact I think God actually made this the Garden of Eden but didn't want to tell anybody but this is really a beautiful beautiful place. And if you can ever get over here to visit Paul you really should try and do that. But you know we looked at this power cube and the technical side of it. But you know a couple months ago I had a gentleman, Professor Hogan's, Nate Hogan's from Minnesota I believe, and he introduced me to a concept called energy blindness. And I think that people have really kind of lost track how much energy things use, whether it's their cars or electric cars or gasoline cars or their houses. And that's why I use that 30 kilowatt hour analogy to talk about the batteries. But it's really hard to get the concept of how much power is put out by this cube if you don't have a good picture of what energy really costs and you're not energy blind. So that's why I asked Paul to go into a little bit more detail on that. So we've got some images coming up that really kind of bring that home. So I'll turn it back over to Paul. Yeah, so we have a slides at night time, a couple slides at night time, showing what was actually being powered by the cube. So this is the art installation called the folly. I don't have the exact number of lights, but it has a tremendous amount of lighting as well as sound system sound equipment. They even have a large windmill that is powered by an electric motor. And it kind of looks like a Dutch windmill, just as a piece of mobile art. And you can see right there that this is all being powered all night long. And they go all night until the sun comes back up. So the cube was taken care of all of this. I think there's another slide. Well, this is showing the reverse engineering of alien technology. Actually, it doesn't take alien to actually operate this. It's extremely simple. In fact, it's pretty much automated completely, but it has all the controls built in to be able to control the system, log it, troubleshoot, do anything you need to, and even recover it from a black start very easily. And only in Burning Man when you get an alien with a NASA flight suit on. So I think there was another image, Robert, that showed the cube in the desert during a dust storm or a sand storm, which is, you know, that's the kind of environment that you'd have a hard time generating power in an emergency. So what we found was that just like at the Mars hub, which is sometimes in the clouds, as long as the sun is actually shining, you get a lot of ambient scattered light and reflection off the particles. Now the powder at Black Rock is 10 times finer than talc. This is actually just the beginning or very moderate dust storm. There are many times when disability drops to within a few feet and you literally can't go anywhere. You have to stay still or be moving at a very slow pace so you don't walk into something. But even with the panels being covered up by this kind of dust, they were still able to actually charge fully. And the wind loading conditions were one of the things we really wanted to test because it gets very windy. There were gusts of up to 60 miles an hour at times out there. Because the panels are flat, they're feathered into the wind and none of the panels even moved. It really, really worked well with flying colors. So that's just shy of hurricane speed winds. So hurricane speed winds started 75 miles an hour. So that's pretty impressive. And Paul, the lithium iron phosphate batteries are super. I've really admired them here, especially the fact that they don't have any thermal issues like lithium and cobalt. But our favorite topic is hydrogen. And could you pair this system to use any basically curtailed power from your solar to make hydrogen for long term storage? Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the accessory applications I forgot to mention earlier. But one module or one cubed accessory could be an electrolyzer that could be producing fuel for either running equipment through fuel cells or actually using it as a cooking fuel for cooking or sterilizing instruments and water. So there's definitely an application to use hydrogen in conjunction with this power source. Yeah, so even if you maxed out the batteries and they're fully charged and you still got daylight producing electricity from the solar panels, you could couple this with an electrolyzer to make hydrogen and use that stored hydrogen, like Paul says, for cooking, sterilization vehicles. If you have vehicles around hydrogen fuel cells, all kind of applications. And really, we're trying to encourage the grid here in Hawaii. We've got a goal of being off fossil fuels with our utility grid by 2045. And the reality is that by 2045, you can't just store all that energy and batteries. I mean, we have to realize that fossil fuels are very energy dense and we have millions of gallons of fuel stored up in tanks. And to replace all that stored energy with hydrogen, it's going to take battery power even. You couldn't even do it with batteries. So we're looking at hydrogen to potentially store all that long term and high power energy. And Paul, could you talk a little bit about the logic in that? Sure. This is one of the issues that seems to always be in discussion. And it tends to relate around the fact that hydrogen is less efficient round trip than batteries, which is actually true. However, you have to look at the big picture and what the actual application is. And if you're looking at storing energy for backup, and I'll give you an example with the military, the military has a mandate to achieve 14 days of autonomy. It means they need to be able to run for two weeks on their own stored power. Could they do it with batteries? Absolutely. You could store all that energy in batteries, but it would be actually ridiculous because of the cost. You'd be warehousing electrons for weeks or months at a time and not using them at a very expensive price. Hydrogen could do the same thing for literally half the cost, if not less, and four times the amount of energy in the same footprint as a battery. So it makes sense. And we have kind of a corny saying that goes, there's no silver bullet, but there's silver buckshot. And it means we have to use everything available and use it where its application makes the most sense. So hydrogen and batteries, especially with them, phosphate batteries actually are the best pairing that you can come up with, I think. So the charts that I've seen from the National Labs usually goes into the tens of megawatts of power or maybe a couple days of storage. You start to hit the max limit for battery storage. And after that, if you need to store energy for more than a couple days, or if you need to have power available for more than maybe 15 or 20 or 30 megawatts, you need to start looking at hydrogen energy storage. That's kind of the break-even point or the switchover point. But the real trick for all these things, just like in the Burning Man application, is really balancing the storage you have, the battery power, the charging power, and what it's going to be used for. And that's what I think is really remarkable about this cube, is that they packed a whole lot of power in a really small space. And it's really just at that right spot where it's for logistics people. It's in the right size container that can move quickly on container ships. It can be airdropped. It can be lifted in by helicopters. It can be put in there easily. And it produces a lot of power for the footprint. So I just think it's an amazing piece of equipment. And I hope that it finds a good use in the emergency response area. Yeah, one of the other things that I didn't mention was when the panels are all deployed, it's possible to weatherproof those so that they actually become a rain shield. And underneath those panels, you could actually close in the walls with tenting materials or other fabrics and be able to have a triage center or an emergency operating room, or you name it. It's got so many varied applications and uses that we haven't even thought of one tenth of them at this point. So for example, this ranch here that Paul says has been off the grid for over six years is another example of that cube, except it expanded out to a much larger scale. And they haven't had to use any of their backup diesel unless they're working on equipment and they have to take something out of service. But it's pretty much been running the entire ranch here, which is how many buildings again, Paul? We have the equivalent of about 10 homes. If you looked at an average size house, we're powering loads for about 10 homes. So it's proven technology, including the hydrogen piece. They store hydrogen and low pressure over here. And they're actually all set up for their next hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. They're just waiting for it to show up on the big island so they can fill it full of hydrogen and get it running around. So that way Hank Rogers will have something to drive besides his Tesla and keep it green. But Blue Planet does a lot of great research. Like I mentioned at the start of the show, we're actually sitting in the mission control for a lunar habitat that's run on Manila, the slopes of Manila, one of the big mountains here on the big island. And it was set up originally as a Mars habitat for NASA. And Blue Planet was under contract with NASA for several years and had long term folks living in that habitat again with the same kind of lithium iron phosphate storage, energy storage and solar panels that simulated life on Mars for months at a time. In fact, I think the longest mission was a whole year. And that's the same kind of engineering that goes into what developed eventually into the cube, that kind of experience. So this isn't something they just kind of thought up over the weekend and went to Napa to get a bunch of battery parts and throw it together. It's a really sophisticated piece of equipment, but very reliable and very useful and very deployable. So, what's next on your project list? What are you going to work on next? Well, we have a large list that's prioritized in terms of importance. Sometimes a list gets shuffled around, but one of the projects that's been on the list for a while, and we're going to step it up and focus on it in the near future, is to create a hydrogen stove that can be deployed in third world countries, developing countries, where primarily they use wood or done for cooking indoors. And they estimate about 2 million people die every year from cooking indoors with wood or done. And not only do they pose health risk and health hazards, especially to the children, it also wipes out the resources. They basically take all the wood that they can find just for cooking. So, it denudes the forest and creates all kinds of environmental issues. So, we can create a stove that can run off of a single solar panel, store that energy, create hydrogen with oxygen on demand. That would replace the need for cooking with wood and it would be 100% healthy and safe and completely renewable. They'd only need a source of water at that point. So, support Blue Planet, especially Blue Planet research here and the work that they do and we're looking forward. We'll have to come back here and visit Paul when they finally get that project underway and see what they can do with that. I know that Hank Rogers talked about it several times with, we were visiting with him and it's really exciting stuff. So, I want to thank Paul and the folks here at Blue Planet research and beautiful pooh-bah-bah on the big island and we look forward to coming back and visiting him again. And until next week, my new time Tuesday at 3pm. I'd like to thank Paul and thank you guys for watching and we'll see you next week Tuesday. Aloha.