 Hey Aloha and welcome to Stand Energy Man here broadcasting live from the ThinkTech studios on the 8th floor of Pioneer Plaza in Honolulu, Hawaii, beautiful downtown Honolulu, Hawaii on a beautiful day and it's even more beautiful because I have one more week of work left and then I get to actually retire for the third time but I'll still keep coming back and bugging Jay here at ThinkTech to see if he'll let me stay on the TV once again. Anyway earlier this summer I had the honor of addressing attendees at the United States Department of Defense or Energy's annual Hydrogen Merit Review in Washington D.C. The Merit Review is a gathering of people from all over the world that have one thing in common. They are curious about hydrogen technology, you have PhDs, you have corporate technology officers, you have military scientists, you have legislators, you have sales representatives and you have folks here that just have a passion to learn more and there's about 1500 folks that attend this conference. One of my presentations, I usually have a few folks that come to me and ask a few questions, ask for a business card and you know that's how the presentation, this presentation was really no different. I had some folks come out and talk to me and one of the folks that came up was a great young lady that came up and had several questions and as I was answering them they came by and said hey you know we got you but you got to get out of here, there's next speakers are coming up. So I agreed to answer questions by email and I did so. I actually asked her, it occurred to me that there were a lot of folks out there with a passion about clean energy and sustainable technology with a lot of questions. I asked this young lady to be on my show but instead of me asking the questions of my guest I wanted her to ask me the questions so that she could ask the questions that I don't normally think of talking about. So my guest today is not Rachel James, my normal stunt double here on ThinkTech Mary Frost, someone I just just as passionate about as Rachel with a ton of hydrogen questions. So Mary, Mary Frost take it away, thanks for being the host here on Stand Energy Man today. Hello, Stan, thank you for letting me ask you questions today. I first became interested in hydrogen when I read about it long ago that anything could be stored as hydrogen. So my first question is about safety. My engineer friends tell me hydrogen is dangerous, it's flammable, even explosive. What's the rest of the story about hydrogen safety, Stan? Well, actually when we're talking energy, anytime you store energy, you have the potential for danger. That's the definition of energy. If you had a spring that was all compressed down really tight and what was holding it in place gave loose and all that energy let loose. You could really get hurt. If you were inflating a tire with air and the tire got passed its capacity to hold that pressure and let loose, it's actually killed people. So whenever you store energy, you always have a potential for, you know, fire, kinetic event, something where something runs into another thing, two cars colliding, it's energy, meaning energy. So you always have the potential for some kind of catastrophic event when you're dealing with energy. So why is hydrogen different than other energy storage mediums like gasoline or oil or propane, things like that? And that's where it's really interesting because I've been working specifically with hydrogen for over 10 years. And I've come to respect hydrogen as an energy storage medium, but I've also come to learn that there's so many myths about hydrogen. It's really hard to kind of dispel them because the first thing I hear when I mention hydrogen to somebody, I tell them I do hydrogen vehicles, they go, oh, like the Hindenburg and the H-bomb. And you know, and right there, it just kind of drags me into a dull place where I don't want to be. And I go, look, what do you really know about hydrogen as energy storage? Let's talk a couple of things about hydrogen energy storage. You know, when you have hydrogen, you have a source that's 14 times lighter than air. It goes straight up at 45 miles an hour. So in one second, that energy is six stories above you. And the only way you get hydrogen to burn, like most other lammables, is to mix it with an oxidizer, mix it with air. So when you have a gas that's moving at 45 miles an hour straight up, it's really hard to get it to mix with an oxidizer, air, oxygen, unless you contain it. If you put air and hydrogen together in a container, it has a pretty broad range of flammability and it will ignite. And if you contain it with the right mixture, it will actually explode. But so will an empty can of gasoline with a bunch of fumes in it. And so will a propane tank if it's leaking in the house. And not too many months ago, there was a story out of, I think it was Boston, where somebody connected a high pressure propane line to a low pressure distribution system in a neighborhood and like 20 houses detonated and blew up. Well, that doesn't sound really safe either. Gasoline, same thing. We have tons of fires at gas stations when people are filling their cars and the car's static electricity discharges and the car catches on fire or filling, filling tanks in the back of a pickup truck. Same thing. So there's, there's always an element of danger with hydrogen, but the Hindenburg one is always really gets to me, because if you really look at the images and understand what happened there in New Jersey on that night in the early 1900s, the zeppelins that had been flying for decades and moving passengers between Europe and America's Europe and South America have been doing so safely for many, many trips. And that night, this the Hindenburg pulls in during a thunderstorm and it's just getting ready to ground out on the ground that the lines are down and some kind of spark sets off the surface of the of the Hindenburg near the top. Maybe there was a slight hydrogen leak there as well. But the skin of the Hindenburg, just like other airplanes and airships at the time, was made of a very flammable substance coating material. And it was a town amount to thermite, which is an explosive. And it was coating that that material so it would be able to resist sunlight deterioration and be more more durable. They called it dope, airplane dope, is very flammable. So you have a flame that starts in the top of the Hindenburg. And once the flame starts going and the hydrogen starts leaking out, now the flame is spreading along with the thermite burning on top of the Hindenburg. And you have a pretty big fire. But remember, you said your engineer friends told you hydrogen is explosive. Then why didn't the Hindenburg immediately explode into a million pieces and cover half a New Jersey with with parts? It didn't. It burned. It burned along with the thermite and the coating on the air on the blimp. But what else happened? Hydrogen doesn't have any carbon in it, so it doesn't radiate any heat. The heat goes straight up at 45 miles an hour. The people that died in the Hindenburg jumped out of the gondola and and fell to their death. The people that stayed in the gondola till the Hindenburg got close to the ground basically jumped out and ran away. Most of them survived with just scratches or broken limbs or whatever. But they stayed close to the Hindenburg. I mean, close to the the state in the gondola till they're close to the ground. And so, wow, how can they do that? Well, the flame and the heat was all going up. It wasn't radiating down and down into the ground and into the cabin where the people were. So it's it's really kind of interesting. I have a really short video. I kind of knew you would lead in with this because people always hit me with the Hindenburg right off the bat. So let's show a short video on what Paul Ponteo and the big on Blue Planet Research demonstrates when he's talking hydrogen safety. Sounds good. The spell some of the myths about hydrogen because most people are afraid of hydrogen. Most people think it's the most explosive thing on the planet and that if you have a small leak in the hydrogen system, then it's just destined to explode and burn down building it. Well, the reality is, is that since it's the lightest element in the universe, it's 14 times lighter than air. It goes up at 45 miles an hour when it's let loose. That's 66 feet a second. So think about it going 1001 and it's six stories away. It's gone because of that. It's very difficult to get a concentration that's flammable at the source of a leak unless you're right at the leak source. And what we do in the classroom is we do it by showing this. So you got a really audible major leak of hydrogen. It's blowing up right now like crazy. And most people would think it's in the spark. It's going to blow up. Well, it'll blow the flame up if I get close enough to it right now. It won't ignite until I get down closer to where it's concentrated enough. But as it's leaking out, it's hitting the ceiling of this building and it's going out there. So before I lit it, the hydrogen that had leaked out had already left the building. It's gone. It's moving really, really fast. So the other cool thing about hydrogen is that since there's no carbon in it, it's just purely hydrogen. It's a little windy in here. But there's no radiant heat. And because of that, you can put your finger about an eighth inch from the flame and there's no heat. It won't burn. But above right here, it's 500 degrees plus. It's very hot. And if you come here, you can actually put your hands over it and you can feel the humidity in the flame because it's making water vapor with the oxygen in the air. The other thing is the other big myth or misunderstanding, it's not a myth, is that hydrogen is invisible when it burns. Well, it is outside. So if we took this in the sunlight, you wouldn't see the flame. But indoors in subdued light, it burns orange. And nighttime, it burns bright orange. You can get really, really close. And this tubing will actually, it's actually colder than room temperature right here. It's hot by the jet, but it's pulling the heat out of the air and cooling down. So that one, I think that video is really cool. The other thing about the Hindenburg is, like Paul says, most people, if you read Wikipedia, say that the hydrogen flame is invisible. Well, if it's invisible and the Hindenburg was on fire, then what was all that fire that we saw if it wasn't hydrogen, it would be invisible. If it was hydrogen, most of that flame was actually parts of the Hindenburg that were burning other than the hydrogen. Hydrogen definitely was fueling that fire though. And it was a hot fire all going straight up. I hope that kind of gives people a feel for the safety. I'll only add that we trained a lot of firefighters here in Hawaii because we did have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles on the military bases. When the federal firefighters finished training almost to a person, they said we'd much rather deal with hydrogen than gasoline or propane in vehicle fires. What else you got for me? All right then. So if it's safe, what exactly is a hydrogen fuel cell and how does it work? Okay, a fuel cell is really a cool piece of equipment. And it's a confusing name because when I first started talking to people about fuel cells, they said, is that where you store the hydrogen inside of a fuel cell? And I go, no, I wonder why they gave it such a stupid name. Well, it finally occurred to me that when you have a battery, like the battery in your car, a 12 volt battery, it's actually called a wet cell battery. And when you have a nickel cadmium battery, it's a metal battery. You have dry cell batteries, you have wet cell batteries, you have fuel cell batteries. So a fuel cell is really a self-charging battery. And last week on my show, I showed a video last week that had a really great animation of how a fuel cell works. But basically, a fuel cell is an anode and a cathode, just like a battery has. And on the anode side, you have hydrogen being pushed in. On the cathode side, you have air being pushed in with oxygen. And there's a membrane in between the two, the anode and the cathode. Now, the air atom is too big to go through the membrane. And the hydrogen atom is too big to go through the membrane. But they want to get together and make water. So what happens is the hydrogen atom actually sheds its electrons. And the proton on the hydrogen atom goes through the membrane and goes to the other side. And the electron from the hydrogen atom, the electrons, go around and create a circuit. When you have a circuit, you're making electricity. So what you're doing with a fuel cell is you're running a self-charging battery that takes hydrogen on one side, air into the other side to make water, heat, and electricity. And that's a fuel cell. It's really basic. It's really fundamental. It's really, really cool technology. And there's zero pollution. The water that comes out of a fuel cell, you can just drink it. The vehicles that they make nowadays that use fuel cells either put out evaporated, evaporation, a little bit of water in a mist or they actually collect the water into a little reservoir that you can drink or you can just dump it. Water your garden. So is there anything else about fuel cells that you had a question on? No. Shall we go on to the next question? What are the advantages of hydrogen compared to other fuels? Specifically for energy storage. Okay. I brought a book with me today. Again, this is one of my reference books. You can get it at most hardware stores. But what amazed me was one day I was looking through it looking for something else. And they have a chart in here called Battery Characteristics. It has a whole bunch of data on batteries. And in the list, I was surprised to see fuel cells. I wonder how they compare. I wonder how batteries compare side by side to each other and to fuel cells. So I looked in there and I go, I've never heard of an ammonia battery, but it can store 1,400 amps, amp hours per kilogram. So for every kilogram of storage you have, you can get 1,400 amp hours of energy out of it. Let me see. They've got nickel cadmium batteries. They're 165 amp hours per kilogram. That's pretty good. Lithium batteries. Lithium batteries are 865 amp hours per kilogram. That's really good. I always wondered why we used hydrazine in F-16s for energy storage. And under the fuel cells it has hydrazine is 2,100 amp hours per kilogram. That's pretty good compared to the two batteries I just talked about. Lead acid batteries are about 55 amp hours per kilogram. Would you like to hazard a guess what hydrogen is? In a hydrogen fuel cell system. Oh, did you have a guess? No, no, go ahead. 26,000 amp hours per kilogram. By weight, hydrogen is the most energy density storage medium you can get. So when you have a kilogram of hydrogen, you have about two and a half pounds of hydrogen. Think of that. Think of that compared to batteries where for every, in a lead acid battery, every kilogram has 55 amp hours of storage and you want to get to 26,000 amp hours. That's how much, by weight, how much more heavy it is. I try to encourage the Air Force to look at hydrogen because in aviation everything's about weight. We're going to take a quick break here for 60 seconds and we'll be back with Mary. She can hit me with a couple more questions. Thank you. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. My program airs every other Monday at one o'clock on Think Tech Hawaii. Most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience. Recently I interviewed Alex Jampel, who I have known for over 30 years, about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from Tokyo to Hawaii. Those are the type of stories that I like to bring and like to talk about. Human stories about law and life. Aloha. Aloha everybody. My name is Walter Kauai. I'm your host for a monthly live streaming video entitled Ukulele Songs of Hawaii, where I bring on guests who we enjoy talking story about the music industry here in Hawaii, sometimes going back 50 decades if possible and always having some good fun talking with entertainers. We're here located at Think Tech Hawaii, downtown Honolulu at the Pioneer Plaza building and in their studios. So join me next month for Ukulele Songs of Hawaii. Welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, where I am getting grilled today on my knowledge of hydrogen by Mary Frost from Ohio. When I met at a department of energy conference who was really interested in hydrogen. So Mary, thanks for being with us and I thought of one thing while we're on break. Let's throw up that diagram that I have. Here's another really important fact on hydrogen. I do a lot of hydrogen and transportation, but we are using a lot more renewables on the grid now. And when you really get to large-scale storage, this graph here is really important. I actually made this graph, but I did it because I've seen graphs from the national labs, from reports the national lab has put out, and the commercial sector that have the same kind of information. And I didn't want to do a copyright violation, so I just basically redrew this. But it's really to give you the idea of where all these energy sources tie in. So across the bottom of the graph is your power from kilowatts to gigawatts. And then the vertical axis are seconds to weeks. So when you're trying to store energy, the two biggest factors of whether it's affordable and viable are how much energy you're going to need and for how long you're going to need to store it. So in the lower left side, you see supercapacitors and things like that, the red oval. That gives you kind of the range where supercapacitors work. They work great for a few seconds and even up into the megawatt range. Above that, you have your flywheels, which are really an amazing energy storage. It's kinetic energy storage. You just, when you have energy, you spin it up and it can react instantly to fairly high power outputs and it doesn't even have any kind of thing except a spinning flywheel made of steel that's really well balanced on zero friction bearings. My engineers go nuts when they see the flywheel piece. Then there's metal batteries. All your lead batteries, your lithium batteries and everything else, they can run really well, they react really quickly in up to a megawatt or so range, maybe even to tens of megawatts for a few minutes to a few hours. Above that are flow batteries. Now, I worked with four different flow battery technologies and I'll just be really frank with you. They're not ready for prime time. They have some great capabilities but they don't work well. We haven't had one that really stayed online for more than a year. So I kind of discount those. Then you kind of see a green arc in there and it goes long duration and high power. When you get into that regime of this graph where you're storing either high megawatts of energy or weeks and weeks of energy or days of energy you have a couple components there. You can either have compressed air like if you have a big salt cavern under your city and you can compress air in there and at night run it back through turbines to make electricity, pump hydro where you pump water uphill when you have extra energy and then you let it flow back through turbines to make up power when you need it. Methane and natural gas if you want to have solid oxide fuel cells and hydrogen fuel cells. They take that regime. When the grid starts to use energy, talk about energy storage. If they're not talking about hydrogen and methane they're not looking in the right regime. If they're looking to batteries for the solution they need to go look at some of the national lab studies to see that they're just not viable. Sounds reasonable. Now Stan, I drive an electric car so it has lithium ion batteries so I kind of understand what you're saying about the battery issue and has hydrogen been proven in the transportation industry? Actually hydrogen is actually, this is a surprise to most people on the planet because unless you live in California and visit California a lot, California actually has about 6,000 hydrogen fuel cell commercial production vehicles on the road and they do because they have the stations to fuel them. Almost no other state in the United States has hydrogen fueling stations for vehicles. We have one in Hawaii put together by the CERFCO, the local Toyota dealership so we do have one commercial hydrogen station that's made just for Toyotas but the big vehicle manufacturers are all focused on hydrogen or transportation and it goes back to that weight to energy thing. If you have batteries in vehicles and you really wanted to go 300 miles like a Tesla you literally have a ton of batteries in the car. Your leaf doesn't have a ton of batteries and it can probably get you 100 miles, 75 miles and as time goes on those batteries kind of weaken until they can't be used anymore and you have to go buy a new set of batteries. Hydrogen storage tanks are relatively cheap. They're storage tanks, I mean they're expensive because they're high pressure but compared to a life cycle cost they're totally recyclable, they're totally usable even if your fuel cell died your storage is going to be good for 100 years probably. So in your car it is proven and they're in production. In production they're not prototypes they're being bought at least by people in California and driven. I've got a couple slides here of vehicles that we've made. I just brought these as examples. The place that hydrogen really shines the most and this is really appealing to cities is in their bus system. These buses are hydrogen buses that were used in California and they have several hundred thousand miles on this fleet and the neat thing they found out about it was number one their maintenance time-between failure and the bus drivetrain was greatly reduced using electric drivetrains with hydrogen fuel cells. The weight of the bus was light enough that the tires didn't wear out as fast and they all have regenerative braking like other electric vehicles like your Leaf. So when you're going downhill and you take your foot off of the accelerator you're making energy and charging your batteries again. So they're very efficient, the brakes don't wear out very fast the tires last longer and they're great transportation. The next slide I have is another real heavy vehicle this is a super heavyweight vehicle this vehicle we think is the largest or highest capacity vehicle in terms of what it can move for a hydrogen fuel cell. Just last week we pulled a 200,000 pound military Boeing 707 a KC-135 we pulled it for almost a half a mile using this vehicle and it runs on a 30 kilowatt fuel cell it has a drivetrain that can move a 10 ton airplane or more. We actually we're going to be testing it up to about 30 tons of pull and that's what this vehicle can do it's proven, it's proven technology in vehicles, it's proven technology in passenger cars buses, trucks, the whole spectrum and it really shines in these heavy class 8 vehicles and bigger. Alright, Sam we've got just a couple of minutes left so I have a couple more important questions. Can you make hydrogen from solar and wind? That's actually really an important question. Right now in Hawaii we have a mandate to be to completely renewable energy by 2045. So we actually have per capita more solar than pretty much any other state in the US and we have quite a bit of wind as well. The problem is on a utility grid is the grid's responsible to provide stable reliable power and when you have solar and wind they're called intermittent renewables the wind doesn't always blow the sun doesn't always shine at night there's no sun you know so those things sometimes have a lot of power, sometimes they have nothing and on the grid the electric companies when they get to about 25% of intermittent renewable on their grid they start to come up with problems like stability where they'll come up with over production in solar and they don't have anything to do with that energy so they tell you you got to curtail it what you do is you take all that curtailed power from wind or solar and whenever it's not needed you put it into hydrogen and store it and then you turn around and use it on your grid or use it for your vehicles so all that energy that's being wasted and by the way as we get closer to that 100% we're going to be curtailing a lot of energy because we need to store it and use it for nighttime on a much larger scale and as transportation becomes more electrified which it will you're going to need even more energy storage and again that's where hydrogen shines very impressive thank you anything else how would hydrogen energy storage be well you already spoke about the grid and that it would be advantageous so that was my last question I think there's another great part about the grid that I forgot to mention so thanks for reminding me but when you have that stability issue on the grid when you make the hydrogen it can actually be a load so right now when a utility company is operating they have what's called a spinning reserve they'll actually run a generator all the time just in case they need the energy what I'm trying to do on our microgrid project is get our engineers to agree that a flywheel can do that more efficiently than a generator and hydrogen can do it as well by becoming a load where instead of trying to ramp up generation you can take that solar and you can turn it into a production of hydrogen and basically level your distribution of energy using the electrolyzer as a load instead of using it just to generate hydrogen it can actually be something to help the grid stabilize itself so there you go and you know what I know that you probably have some more questions somewhere and I'm going to give you some more time and we're going to have you back on another show sometime and we're going to keep doing this because I really had a good time and I appreciate your passion and I appreciate you taking the time to spend some time with me today and I'm going to leave you the last minute or so to say whatever you like and call it a wrap for today so thanks for being on the show thank you very much for letting me ask you my questions as a financial accountant though I think if I come back on again I may have to actually grill you next time okay I better bring my economic advisor I'll bring my economic advisor with me so I can do that because yeah that's also another question I get asked a lot how much does a hydrogen station cost to build how much is the infrastructure to return on investment those kind of things that's actually a fairly complex field and a lot of it has to do with the economy of scale and things but those are some great questions we'll hit next time so promise me you'll come on and grill me again oh I would enjoy that thank you very much for having me Mayor Frosch thanks for being on the show today and I really appreciate it for my last show as a state employee where I won't have to do this on my lunch hour anymore Aloha from Stan Energy Man we'll see you when I'm a civilian next Friday okay Mahalo, thank you Stan