 Hey, welcome to Stan the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. It's right here, H-Cat. And I'm wearing my orange shirt today because I could have sworn it was Thursday today. So I got up a wore green shirt. And if you remember my leprechaun day, St. Patrick's Day story, green does not show up well on the background. So I disappear on you. So I'm wearing my orange H-Cat shirt, which I grabbed as I ran out the door just so I'd have the right color shirt. Anyway, today's show is just a little bit different. In my office, I'm fortunate because I grew up doing operational stuff in the military and having all kind of cool jobs and stuff. And I always admired academics who had a lot of time to sit down and read cool things and study and do experiments. And now I'm retired and I'm in a job where I get to sit down and read a lot of articles and study and do cool experiments in my shop with people and talk to people who are PhDs and engineers with lots of experience and lots of patents in their portfolio. And I'm just enjoying all that I can learn about hydrogen and the industry that's out there. So today what I'm going to do is share with you some of the articles that I pull up. And I literally give this to everybody in our office, including the secretary and the contracts maintenance person that we have. So everybody in the office understands the technology that we're working with. So I've screened through a couple of articles today and I'm going to go through a few of them. And I'm going to try and get the links up there for you, but I'm going to read them just so we give proper credit to the folks who wrote the articles and such. I'm going to start off with a little bit of a military slap. And this is from a website called defense.com. And the title of the article is military value of the Defense Department's energy efforts by John Conger. And it's really kind of a good starting point because it starts off with looking at the new election. And this article is from, I believe, March of this year. So it's only a couple weeks old. And it starts off by identifying kind of the comments made by the new president, the new administration, and how they're really kind of not focused so much on energy. And he's not necessarily a big climate change believer. And so what's that mean for all of us that are doing energy work? And people are understandably a little bit nervous about it. I'm pretty fortunate in that our funding comes from the Department of Defense. So some of the articles I'm going to go through with you will emphasize why the Department of Defense is really still focusing on energy issues. Because I think it's important. It's not just important for the DOD, but it's important for everyone else who's thinking about energy. And I would say if you're focused just on climate change and reducing greenhouse gases, you're missing a whole lot of the real logic that you really want to look at to save, to reduce greenhouse gases. And that is the practical reasons for switching to renewable resources. And a lot of them are economic, a lot of them are in the military, actually tactical and operational reasons you want to do it. And just saving, saving energy and saving fuel because you're not having to ship it, things like that. So anyway, this article is pretty good because it focuses on how when you look at President Trump's statements, he may give you the impression that he's just not really supporting energy and renewable energy. And he's kind of looking at coal and natural gas and things, which are still fossil fuels. So are we ever going to really start looking at really renewable energy? And the answer is from my perspective, especially in the Department of Defense in this article reflects it. Yes, we are going to keep focusing on the renewable energy. The key in this article focuses on one sentence by the author by Mr. Conger says, there's three questions that you have to ask when the Department of Defense looks at a technology. And that is, does it increase the warfighters effectiveness? So when you start talking about energy efficiency, or, you know, anything to do with this new technology, does it increase the warfighters capability to do what he does to go out and prosecute his operations? The second thing is, does it reduce risk to our forces today, or in the future? In other words, does it enhance our survivability? Does it give us an edge in surviving by giving us and keeping us at a distance or protecting us electronically or protecting us physically? So that's the second question. And the third question is, and doesn't improve the duties bottom line. In other words, how much can you buy of this technology or this to get the best bang for the buck? And those three questions are important. And as long as we, you know, they have nothing to do with climate change, they have nothing to do with greenhouse gases, they have all to do with bottom line and mission capability. And really, when we start to look at our whole infrastructure across the country, maybe those are the things we all want to be focusing on. Does it really help society? Does it really give us a long term impact? Does it give us a long term economic benefit? And so this article goes in a little bit more. And it says, it says now that the Defense Secretary James Mattis, who was a general Marine General before, and a really rather famous one from what I know, who emerged from his service in Iraq, convinced the military that it must be unleashed from the tether of fuel. Forward bases depend on fuel to run their generators. The vulnerable convoys that brought it were being attacked, requiring more forces to protect them. The fielding of solar energy systems to forward bases substantially reduced logistics requirements and saved lives. When you get to the bottom line in the DoD, those are the things that matter. And it's nice to see that we have a secretary defense that's focused on the important things. And you notice that a lot of what he talked about was logistics. You can save a lot if you don't have to bring fuel into a field, into a combat zone. Most of people think that, well, it costs four or five bucks a gallon for diesel fuel. It doesn't cost four or five bucks a gallon in the middle of a combat zone. It's more like four or $500 a gallon, because you're flying it in on C17s that are like $20,000 a flying hour, and you're flying it, you know, or you bring it on ships in bulk and having to transfer it and drive convoys where people get killed. So it's not cheap. There is a bottom line dollar and sense reason for looking at renewables that can either be made on site using solar or wind power or other, you know, waste energy and even a number of things. This next article, excuse me, comes from National Defense Magazine, September 2016 issue. And it's called, the title of it is ONR, which is Office Enable Research Chief. Inefficiency in tech development is a concern. Now, this is a little different. This kind of points a finger at our whole industry, my whole industry that does R&D and development and demonstration of high tech. He points out that a lot of the services are doing the same things in their own silos. So we're duplicating and spending a lot of money in the DOD to do the same things in the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, and we need to consolidate and do them better. But he points out the same kind of things. He points out that, that maybe we need to have a single, a single office coordinating. But he says the organization has fostered relationships with companies that typically do not work with the Pentagon. Such partners help the government crack some of its toughest technological nuts. And he's referring to not only the Office Enable Research, but working with some of the organizations inside the Navy. ONR does not invest in new weapons because they are cool, but rather because they enable warfighters to complete their missions safely. And that again goes back to the same point the first article made. The next article is Navy and Marines pursuing energy savings projects also on a National Defense Magazine from June 2016. This one quotes Secretary Dennis McGinn, who is good friends with the Pacific Fleet Commander out here, Admiral Swift. And the two of them I know, because I've talked to both of them, have expressed a great interest in the kind of work that HCAP is doing out to take a matter for space with micro grids, because they understand, just like in the previous articles, that if you can make fuel where you're at, make your energy where you're at, not have to import it, you save lives, you save money. There's an economic and the life's value to doing the work that that we're doing. And the warfighters are recognizing us and they place a great value on it. So Secretary McGinn says, using more and more efficiency allows us to go where we need to, when we need to, where needed, stay longer and deliver more firepower when necessary. And that's really the bottom line. Improving our efficiency and diversifying our energy sources also saves lives. During the height of operation in Afghanistan, one marine was killed or wounded for every 50 convoys transporting fuel into theater. Reducing demand on the tip of the spear through energy efficiency, behavior change, and new technologies takes fuel trucks off the road. Solar power into unmanned aerial vehicles is another way, and the marines are working to harvest alternative energy sources like kinetic. That's something we don't think about, but remember the watches that used to wind themselves, and we still have them. I think my dad had, I even had one. Every time you move, a little thing swings around, starts winding, gives you energy. It's kinetic energy. Just like I said in an earlier show, I look at all energy. Heat, visible spectrum, kinetic, potential. There's tons of ways to resource energy. So if marines are humping around all day with their packs and everything, they're constantly moving. If you can capture that motion, the kinetic energy to recharge batteries, that's one less thing you have to worry about importing. The Navy will be installing hybrid electric drives on destroyers. That's the same technology we're putting in Priuses and cars on the road. Hybrid electric drives is to the state straight diesel or turbine drives. They're much more efficient. While the services are working on projects to improve resiliency and powder outages, bases due to causes like terrorism and adverse weather and mechanical failure. So the bases are also getting into the act and having resiliency built. That's a perfect example of what our grid does out of the Hickam, our Pearl laboratory that demonstrates military resiliency on the grid. The next article is called All Electric Hybrid Aircraft Engine Research Taking Off. And it's also from National Defense Magazine, November of 2016. I don't know if this is going to come up on the camera. I don't know if Zuri can zoom in but you can see the photo right there under my hand. The photo there is kind of cosmic looking. It's it's got canards in the front and it's got actually really small turbines along the top of the wing. So I'll describe what some of this is about. Most of the quotes in here from well first of all the author is Stu Magnuson and like I said National Defense November 2016. But he quotes Richard Anderson, a professor of aerospace engineering and director of Eagle Flight Research Center at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. He says there's a desire to move towards lower direct operating costs less dependence on fossil fuel and lower noise. So there's another point lower noise electric motors aren't as noisy as internal combustion engines. Even with mufflers you're still going to have vibrations and noise with internal combustion engines because they're moving. So you even have vibrations you have to worry about where motors you can eliminate a lot of the vibrations and keep the overall noise down. In a tactical environment noise is critical. You may not be able to pick up an airplane on radar but if it's making noise you can put a sensor out there that'll pick it up. So even if you can't see it on radar because it's stealthy you could still pick up the sound. Those are things that the military thinks about when they've taken into account. So historically we've been putting big very efficient high bypass turbine engines, fan engines on things like C-17s and C-5s. They're very very efficient. They're giving you great thrust just incredible amount of thrust compared to the old turbojet engines but they're still big they're still noisy and they're not as aerodynamic. So what they've discovered is that every aircraft has a boundary layer on the top. The low pressure side of the wing is gives you what we call a boundary layer. It's an area of dead air above the wing that builds up and creates drag as the plane flies. By placing several small fans along the aircraft's boundary layer the air is ingested and this almost disappears and that boundary layer drag almost disappears making the aircraft faster and more energy efficient. Engineers look at this in one of two ways. Either making the engine fans more efficient or creating less drag on the wing but both are actually in play. This is the principle behind DARPA's lightning strike vertical takeoff and landing x-plane. That's that's the picture on the front here with all the things. The 26 hybrid electric propulsion fans distribute the power all the way across the wings of the airplane. So literally the top surface of all the wing the wings are thrusters they're drivers. Now they point out in the article that these technologies are great in that they're more efficient but you would never see a fighter that looks like that because they haven't quite gotten the thrust to weight issues down. But the article goes on to say that those in the science community that are looking at battery power they see that as a kind of a limb fact because when you design airplanes weight is everything. The more weight you can take off the airplane the stronger materials you can use for a lighter weight it's since the beginning of time when they've been designing airplanes they always use in the old days spruce for aircraft spars and things on the old world war one spads and vokers and stuff because spruce has very few knots in it it's a very clean wood and for strength to weight it's the highest strength to weight ratio that you can get in a tree. That's why you always see spruce like the spruce goose that Howard Hughes built that's why they pick spruce. So nowadays if you can use carbon fiber if you can use carbon nanotechnology and batteries everything you can do to light an airplane helps get you to a more efficient platform. So we're going to take a quick break now and we'll be coming back in 60 seconds and I'll talk a little bit more about this amazing airplane. My name is Calvin Griffin host of military in Hawaii which airs here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 11 a.m. Please join us we'll be talking about issues concerning our military veterans community and other related issues that concern all of us. Hi I'm Cheryl Crozier Garcia the host of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. Join us every other Tuesday from 4 p.m. to 4 30 when we discuss the impact of change on employees employers and the economy. Hi everyone Ted Rawlson here host of our Think Tech show where the drone leads and a lot of you get into the airplane and show you want to start off with that one. 4 o'clock on Friday so that you can make sure you see our show it's not changed it's not going to be at noon on Thursdays noon on Thursdays new standard time for where the drone leads and where the drone leads is two systems like this capabilities that we're using here in Hawaii these days and we need you to pay attention to this like that of it to see you at noon on Thursdays. So we're talking a little bit about some of the aviation applications for these new hybrid fan engines and things that we use that we should be using in aircraft. The one thing that kind of confuses me though is I read a lot of these articles and they still focus on batteries I mean this whole article is talking about weight and talking about getting more range and more duration out of aviation vehicles and yet they're not talking hydrogen fuel cells and the whole reason that we use hydrogen fuel cells in cars is because you can't put enough batteries in a car to give it the range that you can with a lightweight fuel cell that's why Toyota and a lot of the car manufacturers now are going with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is because of the weight you can take all the weight of the batteries out of the car and give it long range by putting lightweight hydrogen storage in and a lightweight fuel cell inside so to give you an idea of of the scale of what you can do with a hydrogen fuel cell. US hybrid makes a 150 kilowatt fuel cell that's about maybe 38 or 40 inches by three feet by one foot and that's equivalent to 13 or 15 10,000 watt generators like the kind you would buy at Costco the big yellow things that would provide enough power for your house if you had a power outage that's a 10kw generator that one fuel cell that would fit on the top of this desk here is 100 I mean 150 kilowatts not 10 kilowatts 150 kilowatts it's giving you a huge amount of power enough to drive a really big bus or a train even a small train just think what you could do with that in an airplane and you don't need that big of a power plant you could shrink it down to maybe 15 to 30 kilowatts per engine and get plenty of power for your aircraft and a lot less weight the hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe you know why not use that for energy storage so there's one other airplane we have here and I have a photo of it it's um it's um a uh airplane called the Airbus that Airbus is designing the private sector is actually investing in this one and Airbus has built the airplane it's actually flying they flown it across the english channel it's called the e-fan and it's a hybrid electric powered aircraft that Airbus wants to bring into the market and this is more on the commuter size aircraft but Airbus is using it to evolve the electric propulsion systems that are possible as an alternative to fossil fuel so there's hundreds of millions of dollars in private money going into aviation and one article I couldn't find I was looking for this morning I think would be really interesting to everybody is that Boeing is making a what we call an ISR platform an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance platform and it's it looks like a big football with long wings and a boom tail and it can stay airborne at fairly high altitude for three days and it uses two forward ranger internal combustion engines that run off hydrogen now here's an interesting concept I don't know if too many people in the aviation will have thought about but if you have an reconnaissance aircraft like that that you had a big hydrogen tank in and you took it to high altitude and had solar panels on top of the wings and you either have an internal combustion engines or fuel cells running your propulsion you could take the exhaust which is basically water vapor you could use the cold temperature from the atmosphere outside you could basically use it as a heat exchanger and pull the water back in a liquid form out of the exhaust and then recycle the water back into a fuel cell and make electricity again so you could extend the range of those aviation vehicles by making the hydrogen energy while you're airborne with your exhaust vapors and solar electric now you couldn't stay up forever because of the laws of thermodynamics you're always losing some energy in that process but you could certainly extend the range and duration of those vehicles quite a bit if you would capture the water run it through an electrolyzer put it back into the internal combustion engine or the fuel cell and that's the kind of thinking I think we need to do in the future aviation there's another great article here this one is how I designed a practical aircraft electric plane for NASA and I found this article to be really interesting and it's written by the gentleman who actually designed the airplane his name is John the illustrations by John McNeill it's Tom Newman and it's a beautiful airplane if I put it this way so you can everybody see it like this there we go okay like that maybe okay that's a beautiful airplane and so the specifications by NASA were a four-seat airplane that could do around a hundred miles an hour and could be used as a small commuter airplane and he in the article he actually gets right into the design basics and what he had to do to calculate it but anyway this was a design for a four seat or all electric aircraft capable of entering service by 2020 and he decided to do this design and compete he is an engineer he's an aeronautical engineer I believe and he really went into it he did a lot of homework he did a lot of study and he met the the criteria but he does use fuel cells and I just encourage you to read the article there's too much to go through here but again here's another picture with some more of the schematics on it and some of the details but this guy just did a phenomenal job and you know designing an airplane is not an easy feat and he's actually designed this I think they built a prototype it would be really amazing to see this thing fly if it works in the CAD systems and computer aided design systems it'll probably fly but it needs a little bit more testing but it certainly looks viable and certainly looks strong enough now will it be a super fast airplane nope but a hundred miles an hour is a hundred miles an hour that's not bad for a small airplane running on electric power this article I have here is my second to my last article it's called oil firms automakers form a council to promote hydrogen my favorite thing and it's a really short article and it comes from the motorauthority.com news agency so if you go to the Http colon double back slash it'll give you the article and it's by this guy's name is going to kill me viknesh vjmthran sorry if I killed your name buddy but anyway he talks about how during the one of the big meetings in Europe the some of the auto industry and oil executives got together to really try and come up with a strategic plan global strategic plan for promoting the use of hydrogen so I'm just going to read one paragraph of it here says the fuel cell proponents have joined forces to form a hydrogen council a global initiative that aims to position hydrogen among the key solutions for an alternative carbon-based fuels forming the initiatives are 13 major companies air lequid alstom angle american bmw group damler ng Honda Hyundai Kawasaki oil Dutch shell and the lin group total and Toyota those are fuel and car companies so again companies no surprise these companies in the initiative they aren't all automakers some of them are oil companies so you go well why would they be interested well a majority of the hydrogen being produced today for the transportation and market doesn't come from electrolysis it comes from steam reforming natural gas so these oil companies are looking to use the natural gas to help bring us into the hydrogen world and then and and use the natural gas that we have to make the hydrogen as a way to bridge us away from fossil fuels and if the if the oil companies are really smart and they took the long lead look at this they would start to get into electricity and grid as well and that would be their future because most people have failed to make this connection as well but the grid and the transportation sector are going to merge they're going to merge about 20 years down the road because more the solution to transportation in fossil fuel free transportation is electric vehicles hydrogen fuel cell vehicles battery vehicles etc but that means everything's electric your house is electric your car is electric all that's electric so if we're going to be doing that we need to make sure that we are focused on electric production not fossil fuel and by the way like like I've said before we have much more valuable uses for carbon and carbon technology than burning it in the air and throwing it in the air we need to make more carbon fiber for those high-tech airplanes and things like that so the first meeting of this hydrogen council took place actually in January I believe of this year and it was during a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland it's an annual event where the politicians and other leaders of business and ultra-wealthy get together to discuss what's best for the world sounds kind of a progressive system but the council said it plans to work with and provide the stakeholders and politicians with the information they need to make good decisions the last article I have I'm not going to go into a lot of detail but it's my favorite article so I'm going to flip it this way so you can see the article and and if Zuri can swing in on it the bigger energy problem it's not electrical it's transportation and this is a local article in Hawaii that's written by Dennis Hawyer he's a senior writer for Hawaii Business Magazine and I really, really love this article sincerely not because he quotes me a lot in it which he does but he took all of my thoughts and he put them together in such a logical format that if you go through this article from beginning to end I think you get a really, really solid picture of what the folks at HCAD are focusing on what we're trying to get the Air Force to focus on and how we would like to get the state to focus on not only transportation but grid energy as a symbiotic relationship that'll get us off of fossil fuels and if we're off of fossil fuels in Hawaii our economy will pick up our technology sector will grow and we'll be off and running and we won't be just dependent on tourism and the military to keep us going so that's going to wrap it up for this week thanks for being with Stan Energy Man in his orange shirt I'll try and do better next week and not wear my green shirt again for the third time and keep the producers here happy so until my lunch hour next Friday Allah haf