 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. And welcome to this week's Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Stan Osserman, your humble servant and all around hydrogen junkie. And we've got a great show for you today that we're calling No Man Can Be a Hydrogen Profit in His Own Land. My guests for today is Mr. Toby Kincaid, hydrogen profit from the great Pacific Northwest country of Oro Washington, land of high tech, misty rain, tall trees, and all the tree-huggers that come with the tall trees. But there's a problem. The good people of that locale just don't get the hydrogen technology yet. Yes, as amazing as it may sound, the inhabitants of the north end of Silicon Valley, makers of Boeing jets, and the first state to take President Trump to court, still can't get their head around the benefits of hydrogen technology. So our guest is migrated west in search of the land that is ready to hear the good news about electric transportation and the wisdom of hydrogen. So welcome to Toby. Welcome into our land of hydrogen sanctuary and kingdom of Hawaii. We're all smart enough to understand the value of hydrogen and the technology, but we need credible people from the mainland to come here and tell us because people born and raised here are never quite seem to be good enough to make a solid case, even in the event of the most obvious science on the planet. So Toby's here today. Welcome Toby. Good to be back. I know you've been here before. And we're going to jump right into things because we've already heard about your background and how you kind of grew up doing all this stuff, but we've got you in a new venue now. You're doing artwork, which still could use a little bit of polish. But we've got a couple drawings that you worked on and I like to jump right into them. Ray can bring up the first drawing there. This is a little sketch you did to talk about the energy density of fuels. So why don't you describe exactly what you meant here with your artwork? Well, thank you. All of fossil fuels are hydrocarbons. And hydro doesn't mean water in this case. It means hydrogen. So when we look at fossil fuels, and here I put a little chart together, if we look at coal, it has the lowest energy density, but it's mostly carbon and a little bit of hydrogen. So as we go across the chart, the next energy would be oil, and we have even less carbon, a little more hydrogen, and it has a higher energy density. So when we go to natural gas, you have less carbon, even more hydrogen, and the energy density is still going up until we actually get all hydrogen, where there is no carbon. So we see that carbon actually goes down when we get to the higher density fuels. So really, you don't need the carbon. The carbon actually is only the matrix that we happen to dig up. So why are we wasting all that carbon? We could be making carbon fiber. We could be making, you know, more pencils. Exactly. You know, the Shah of Iran said something. He goes, oil is far too valuable to burn, because you could make all these other things out of it. So it's incredibly important. Hey, let me even throw in another quote. I brought this one, and I got to credit you with putting it in front of me. And this is from Jules Verne, so for those of you young folks that don't know who Jules Verne is, he was a writer from back in the 1800s. He was born in the mid-1800s, early-1800s, and he did such great things as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in the 80 days, those kind of things. So he was one of the first real, what you'd call, science fiction writers, and really well known. Anyway, this quote from him from 150 years ago, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel. By that, hydrogen and oxygen, which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of which coal is not capable. So I put that with Tony's first picture there and say, this is from 150 years ago from a guy who spent half his life in the library doing research so he could write these great science fiction things. And he got it. Right, Tony? He got it. He got it. And this, what's so amazing, we all ask, what is the greatest fuel, the best fuel? For the future, it's got to be the best. What is it? And here we see that water is the feedstock for this fuel. And if we list all of the fuels, the methane, propane, butane, ethanol, methanol, kerosene, gasoline, list them all. What has the highest energy content? More kilocalories per mole or more megajoules per kilogram? Hydrogen. So then we list all of them and say, okay, what are the combustion products, the different pollution values that we have for each fuel? And then when we list them all again, what's the least toxic? Hydrogen. Hydrogen. Because when we burn hydrogen, we get water back. So you put this all together and it's really, you kind of wonder, why are we debating this? And when I was in eighth grade, we had a great science lab and we did electrolysis and you have eighth grade students turning water into hydrogen fuel and it was impressive. And so really we're kind of taking this whole circle that actually if we just ask these basic questions, we get the straight answer. And even from the time, we can go back even farther than Jules Verne. We can go back to the Greeks who named hydrogen as a water maker. That's where it comes from in Greek. And it's like they got it way back then. They got it. And we're still working on it. What's the next graphic that we have from Toby from this thing there? This is actually kind of interesting. You're going to talk a little bit about the power density and this has to do with, you know, if you're going to pick a power source, what makes the most sense? So why don't you explain this for us? Sure. You know, and when I first put this chart together, it kind of kicks you in the gut a little bit because it's really unforgiving. You know, we use energy in our world in a very dense form. But when we look at renewables, it tends to be somewhat dilute. And when we actually put the numbers together from an area-related basis, 24-7, we see that the numbers are fairly small. So we have to be pretty smart in how we deploy it. As you can see, that biofuels only produce on an area basis half a watt per square meter. So in the Big Island, if you're going to have a large biofuels plant, it really has a larger footprint than some of the other things we can do. So when we ask, okay, you know, we have to, you know, you're on an island, it's 25 miles on the side, roughly, you know, almost 600 square miles, but it's still not very much land. We have to be smart. So what this kind of shows us is that solar PV has the highest density of all the renewables, and if we're going to get to industrial scale, we should really focus on that. So the slide before talked about the chemical fuel, where hydrogen is the ultimate battery. And now we have what will drive the hydrogen electrolysis, which should be PV from just a footprint standpoint. And I think you've got, I don't think we're going to show this slide, but, you know, most of us here that work in this area understand that even if you took all of the available rooftop that we have and tried to put into PV, we'd probably still fall a little bit short just on solar. So we probably do need some wind, and we do need all the solar we can get. But down on the bottom of that drawing, you show a shade with solar on top and a car. Now, that's one area where we really haven't talked much about, you know, where we could put solar. And that is over paving or over roadways or, you know, places that we traditionally haven't thought of it. So why don't you talk a little bit about that? Exactly. And, you know, normally when we think about power plants, they were really designed over 100 years ago, where you had a remote power plant, and then you draw lines and transmission all the way to your consumer then step it down and be able to distribute to them. But this concept is kind of interesting because we're going to take existing land so we don't really have any land use because in a parking lot you have all of this wealth falling on it from solar energy and a parking lot that has maybe a hundred spaces has something on the order of two to three thousand dollars a month of sunlight falling on it. Why not grab it? That's a good point. So what we've got is a technology here that actually just lowers and drops down into a parking space and you're able to take this wonderful four kilowatt solar array and it takes that solar energy and puts it into a battery bank so that you can charge your car directly or at night 24-7. And each of these stations, since it installs directly in a parking spot, doesn't have actually any footprint because you're still able to use that parking spot. And this gives you an ability, this station will produce about a hundred and fifty clean vehicle miles per day. So that's the equivalent of what, about seven gallons of gas? So instead of going through all the trouble to create the gas, you can just create the energy right where you're parking. You really have kind of changed the whole game a little bit. You don't need to go to a gas station or deviate, you just charge where you park. Let's throw the next image up there and see what that one looks like because we've got a couple here that talk to hydrogen as well. And this is the first one, the water engine principle. This one talks about the full cycle of hydrogen. Yes, you know, when we talk about how we source hydrogen, and we all have used fossil fuels, which is the traditional source of hydrogen, water is actually the remarkable source because the earth is covered mostly with water. The human body is mostly made of water. It was surrounded by water. It was surrounded, especially by light. So water is really, in this diagram, I almost want to explain it like a spring. If you had a metal spring in your hand and it's not hurting anybody, it's not doing anything, it's not emitting anything, it's just a stable spring. But if I grab each end and I stretch that spring and then hook each side, I've now charged that spring. And when I want the power, I just unhook one side of it and zoom, it snaps back together. I get most of that energy and I get the spring back. So here we're going to do the same thing with water. We're going to take stable, absolutely benign and peaceful water. We're going to add energy to it. That's the endothermic side. And we push the water through an electrolyzer and that separates it into hydrogen and oxygen, as you routinely do. And that energy is stored. You can actually vent the oxygen, just hold the hydrogen. And we're going to store it as the ultimate battery. It's the oxidation potential. So add hydrogen is stable and safe and comfortable. It could last centuries just sitting there. But it wants to get together with oxygen and get back to water. So when you bring the oxygen and hydrogen together again when you want it through a fuel cell, you get most of that energy and you get the water back. What an amazing water cycle. So like in one diagram you had making biofuel from cane grass or whatever is not a very efficient way to harvest energy because you're getting such a low energy return for all the sunlight put in and all the square miles of territory you've got to use. But you also have to use a lot of water to make that fuel to get the grass to grow. As opposed to people often ask me, so how much water does it take to make a kilogram of fuel? And I go, it's less than two gallons. You can do the math. You can do the atomic weight of hydrogen and oxygen and just do the math. It's not a whole lot of water. And then you get the water back in the end. So even when you do use it, you're getting water back as a function. Absolutely. So we're not going to consume it. It's just cycled. I mean ethanol, which is, you know, we grow corn in the Midwest for it, takes 3,000 gallons of water to actually get to one gallon of ethanol. So that's just not a sustainable approach. And worldwide, water's becoming a pretty scarce resource. Absolutely. Especially fresh water. So in this hydrogen system, which you've been advocating at your group at HCAT, is that we get the water back. We're not actually depleting anything. We're just borrowing it and then giving it back after we use it. It's the perfect and ultimate feedstock. Perfect. Now the fossil fuel companies may not like to hear that. Well, that's another test. Well, we're going to take a quick break now and we'll be back with Tobi in about 60 seconds. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. We have this crazy thing going on today. I was just walking by and all these DJs and producers are set up all around the city. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. We have a lunch hour stand energy man here with Tobi Kincaid from the great Pacific Northwest. Kind of relocated here a little bit anyway. So Tobi, let's look at one more of your drawings here and see what we've got on this one. What are we talking about on this one? This is actually one example that I use a lot and I think it's really powerful. So why don't you go ahead and go through what your image is here? Well, it's nice to draw an image because when you wave your arms and talk about all the details, you're actually looking at it. Now on the right hand of the picture, we have all of the infrastructure that we use around the world. The world runs on fossil fuels and you have all of this infrastructure. You have the oil wells and the pipelines and the fuel depots and the railroads and the tanker trucks, the super tankers and all of that is just to push it into a refinery so we can cook it down into some distillates that we then put in another truck and take it to a dispensary that we then sell. But the problem with all of this, of course, is 75% of the energy is wasted out of the tailpipe. So how does it make any sense to go to all this trouble, simply to have a fuel that you're then going to waste? And then on top of that, one gallon of gas when you burn it creates about 20 pounds of pollution. So that's an enormous amount of legacy just to move ourselves to go to work or shopping or wherever we need to go or want to go. We have such a price tag and it's amazing to me that we can replace all of this with the little sun station on the left. Now, of course, we'd have a fleet of sun stations and there's many, many parking lots. In fact, there's an enormous amount of land area that's only used to store a car, to park a car, which for 95% of the time it is parked. So in this scenario we can put these sun stations in the parking lots and then people can just drive in and you're driving on sunshine. Walking on sunshine was a song that I won't sing to you but in this case you can drive on sunshine and the fact that we can get 4,500 miles per month out of a single parking spot to me just makes a stark contrast to here on the right here's what we do now but on the left here's what the future will do because it's just effective. We've got this drawing that if you're a business type person and you follow Covey and all the folks who do business efficiency models you understand that the idea of transportation is what they call non-value added or something that really doesn't contribute to the end profit or in the end state of what you're trying to do. So on the right hand side number one you're drilling for or fracking or whenever for your oil one of the most efficient ways to move which is a pipeline. So that doesn't take a whole lot of energy but if you put it on a train or you put it in a truck or you put it in a big ship now you're burning fuel to move it and you're taking time which means you have employees that are running the trains so that's taken away from and adding to the cost of the end state fuel and then you're putting it in refineries or transportation links in this chain that you have that's more fuel wasted just to get to a point where you're still throwing 75% out of the tailpipe of the car in heat and exhaust. So it's really even more energy intensive than the first look first view of this graph. Okay Ray do we have anymore or we got pictures after this? So let's roll into some of the photos we talked about the sun station thing and really that's what Toby's kind of here to try and look at in Hawaii the potential to do some of these mobile things so the little sketches are his depiction of what it looks like but really there is a real sun station so if we can throw up some of the photos that we have there we'll talk about the sun station and okay alright we're pulling those out now but basically it's basically just like the drawings it can in fact just describe it how does the system work Toby? Right well we start with a solar canopy and we put a little tracker on it it gives us just a little bit more energy through the day so it has kind of a beautiful aesthetic look when you have a fleet of them because they all kind of tilt towards the sun as the sun goes across and we put a sealed battery bank and a ballast mount so once we put the whole system together we don't have to actually put in a foundation or penetrate the land or change any of that but that turns out to be a big advantage from a permitting standpoint because normally we have to if you want to connect to the grid exclusively you have to figure out if you have transformer capacity and then how far we have to trench the wires and all of that can become involved so if we could simply just pre-assemble in a staging area and then actually just drop the station in that gives us a deployment in one or two hours it's mobile we can move it if you like and it's perfectly available to start charging cars and they're just begging for a power station well the thing I find remarkable and by the way I apologize we lost our photos here they fell out of the computer probably my fault but you know that's the way it is I'm an analog brain in the digital world so forgive me but the neat thing about this is we have a lot of parking structured or parking complexes that are required by law to have an electric charger in there and for vehicles and they don't have it and we don't really enforce that law as well as we should and there's no incentive then for people to actually install those things and they're expensive if you come to the grid you have to get permits and like you say trenching permits and all this other stuff so the neat thing about the system the neat thing about the system is that you can actually drop it in place it's not I mean a permanent building or anything it's a temporary piece of equipment so your permitting issues are greatly reduced I would say that there's a truck pulling it before it's dropped in place and what you can do is put it in place and guess what employers that want to have a perk for their folks that drive electric cars and they're trying to help encourage good transportation can put these in their company parking lots for perks for their employees where does HECO not want to have to deal with solar it's in the middle of the day because they can't use all the solar so now here's a standalone thing not connected to the grid not impacting online electric that people can park their car charge their car up and it can be a perk by a company that wants to give their employees a benefit absolutely and here you're talking about changing an adding value to people's transportation experience and that's what's so remarkable is that you have everything you need here on this island to do whatever you want as long as you want to do it and not have to pay anyone else the balance of payments that go out for all the fuel costs that all just disappears so self-sufficiency is a true core American value and you have it here on the islands because you have all this wealth and coming from Oregon we share something with Hawaiians in that the environment is not some thing that has to be dealt with it is us it is our world so we are the environment so if we want our future to be clean and valuable and productive we get our energy power supply into that stream then that's going to be the thing that propels us into a truly dignified society I agree so when you look at that system it's pretty basic some of the features I think are important we're not a solar expert but we've used some solar out at Hickam and I can tell you that the tracking piece is good but it's also bad if the tracker doesn't work you can actually have worse production than a regular monocrystalline but the tracking when it does work and when it's put together properly it actually can boost your production quite substantially and that's what gives this system the opportunity to do what it does and that gives us the energy profile to actually push into a car because as you know when you're charging a battery it's kind of a brute force experience you've got to have a higher voltage and push that energy in as quickly as we can so having that little extra energy very useful we're quickly approaching the end of our show here I wanted to ask you one question though before we go to our last video that I want to show and if you're able to talk about it maybe you're not but I know you've thought about the financing model for this thing and I wanted to just give you an opportunity if you're able to talk about it so that people have an idea of well how much does this thing cost and how do I do it am I going to go poor putting this thing out Well you've hit on the key because this is the biggest problem with solar is the upfront cost typically in any kind of installation but the cost of something depends on how you buy for it or how you pay for it so when you go into a car dealership and we have a basic underwriting equipment lease financing we can use an underwriter to actually come up with the money up front and then with the modest fees for charging or if we could aggregate have a charge club where everyone can put into a general fund that we could lower everyone's cost at the moment it comes out to a levelized cost of about 25 cents a mile which is much well it's comparable to gasoline on the islands and probably a little bit less so by doing this kind of group purchase and doing the whole fleet in one package then we have a really way to push the cost down so we just eliminate that high cost upfront completely and people can just use it for less than what they would normally pay in a gas station so this would actually be a good model especially for a company that maybe wants to do like we have the bike share program here so a vehicle share program or as we move into autonomous vehicles an autonomous vehicle share program that's coming along is perfect for something that's the future you've just described where it will go because when we combine the charging station with the autonomous vehicles or even rent by the hour vehicles the ride share kind of program now everyone everywhere can access any vehicle they like you don't really need to commit to buying anything you just can use it on an hourly basis very convenient and completely clean which your governor has said this is what we want to do and we're grateful for that you have to know what the direction is that you want to go and then how can we identify how to get there now and just so I don't get fried by my constituency out there you actually have a hydrogen version of this yes that's the future and that's where we go we start with the normal batteries and then we're going to upgrade into that water system what I want to do today in closing because we've gone through a lot of stuff with Tobi here and it's really great there's Toyota and Nikola One and US Hybrid have all come out with large 18-wheeler sized tractor trailer and we've had Nikola One on we've had US Hybrid on the show but Toyota announced their they called it a Dreadstruck or it's not an overnight camper type truck but just the big 18-wheeler and they came out with a video that just like we said one image speaks thousands and thousands of words so we've got a short video and if you go on the website you probably will pull down the link for this for the show but I'd like to go to that video and we'll just talk through it but like I said Toyota came out with a heavy truck and it's a prototype but this is a drag race between two fully loaded semi tractor trailers and I want to just visualize the torque and horsepower that comes out of a fuel cell vehicle versus a traditional vehicle that runs on diesel and it has a transmission that you shift in gears through look at that that difference in it's like six seconds difference on that screenshot and for me that just says everything that's like huge that's amazing and that says it all about hydrogen it's renewable, it's clean it's there, it's powerful it gives you everything you need for the military, it's quiet it's silent, it has a low heat signature I mean there's so many benefits to it and it's all natural so that one I wanted to close with and show you a really dramatic picture of what I think hydrogen means for the future so thanks Toby for being a prophet and coming back to Hawaii I'm hoping that maybe we can get some of our other hosts to pick you up on their energy shows and you can tell us a little bit more about your program and what you're looking for for Hawaii so thanks for being here and thanks for being with Stan the Energy Man this week on Think Tech Hawaii and we'll see you next week