 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Cynthia Sinclair. And I'm Keisha King. In our show this time, we'll take a look at clean energy in Hawaii and the shows we do that deal with that subject. In fact, we produce five live talk shows on the subject. Energy 808, Code Green, Energy in America, Hawaii, the state of clean energy, and Stand the Energy Man. Think Tech has covered energy from our very beginning and has done a great many shows on the subject. We've also done a number of panel programs and OC16 shows on the subject. We've been associated with and supported by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum as one of our underwriters for the past several years. After all, like the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, when we say our mission covers tech, energy, business diversification, and global awareness, we are also saying that energy is one of our middle names. Let's take a look at some recent samples from our lineup of energy shows so you can see what we mean. First in the weekly schedule, there's Energy 808, The Cutting Edge. It plays at noon on Alternate Mondays. We've been doing that show with Marco Magelstorff of Provision Solar in Hilo for some years. And we do cover the Cutting Edge on energy and energy news and policy in Hawaii. This often include the PUC commissioners and other VIPs and leaders in the energy community. Energy 808, The Cutting Edge. And wow, do we have a guest this morning? We'd love to have you on the show, Jay Griffin. He's the chair of the PUC. So nice to have you here. Glad to be here again. Thanks, Jay. Thanks, Marco. Marco, why don't you make introduction, okay, on Jay? And remember, this is only a 28-minute show. Yes, I'll try to keep my abusiveness under control here. Well, first of all, fantastic to be back with Jay and Jay, my blood brothers from different mothers. And yeah, it's always such a treat to get you, Jay and Jenny, and hopefully Leo sometime into the studio as well, to come and talk Turkey and Tofu with us here. And yes, Dr. James Griffin, known to his friends as Jay, has been with the commission now for about two years by my rec collection and became chair in the past months, and the GOV couldn't have made a better choice. So again, I'm just so pleased to have you on the show, Jay, and thank you so much for joining us. As the chair, perhaps you look further down the road. Perhaps you have to have a larger picture. You have to be more of a planning years ahead kind of, am I right about that? Absolutely. And then two ways, got to think about how is organization, I mean, how are we going to be successful during my term? But in some sense, even more importantly, how are we setting up our successors to be successful also? And so I think that, you know, that got to think about that and a lot of, particularly a lot of our internal decision making management of the organization, but, you know, as well as our regulatory decisions. How does a regulatory body, in this case, the Hawaii PUC, or any regulatory body for that matter, how does a regulatory body operationalize these values as they were stated by our Supreme Court? How do they operationalize these values into the decision making process which you and your fellow commissioners will be engaged in? Well, I think a couple of things. So as you know now, as you know, the decision was formally remanded, I believe it was last week. The decision came down a few weeks ago. It was unanimous. So I think the, and so our prior order has been vacated and remanded back to the commission for further proceedings, consistent with, and I think the fundamental key, and I'm going to misquote the statute, but there's a section of our statute saying the commission needs to explicitly consider quantitatively or qualitatively. It gives, and it gives a number of different factors, but one of them is greenhouse gas emission. Then there's Code Green, hosted by Howard Wiig, an old pro who specializes in energy efficiency provisions in Hawaii's legislative framework and county building codes. Code Green plays at 2 p.m. on alternate Mondays. His guests are from all over the map on planning, construction, engineering, and design for energy efficiency in homes and offices. Code Green. Here we are at the 3 o'clock block on a given Monday, and guess what? I'm the guest host, and Howard Wiig is the host guest. Welcome to your show, Howard. It's a great pleasure. Thanks for having me. Light emitting diode. Light emitting diode. What could that mean in English? That could mean that instead of having your standard light bulb, the incandescent just had filaments in it, tungsten filaments, and you poured so much electricity in there, it created a lot of heat, and the light you were seeing was not much different from a fireplace light. You were just seeing tungsten elements glowing with heat. LEDs today, I wanted to distinguish them from LEDs in the past. LEDs today, you can dim and increase the brightness of it, and you can dim and increase the Kelvin temperature of it. So, when you walked into an old-fashioned LED lit room, you said, ugh, glary. Ugh, I don't like this light too bright. And what you meant was that there was too much blue in the light. The more we have RBG, which is not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, it's red, blue, green. Those are the three primary colors that our human eye sees with, and all other colors are just a mix of RBG. And the old-fashioned LEDs were way over on the blue end of the spectrum, which we perceive as white light, very glary. Outside light. High temperature blue is outside, right? No, because the sunlight, this is something different now, in degrees Kelvin is about 6,500, and the LEDs you had in this studio previously were about 6,500, the old ones. So, you can mix and match anything you want now, but in the early pioneering days of LEDs, you had too much blue, which, number one, glary, number two, washed out our flesh tones. Regardless of what color skin we have, there's a lot of red in there, and it would wash out the red, and our skin would look pretty gosh darn gray. Let's look at each other, Howard. Okay, so is your skin tone washed out in any way? Yeah, it is. What is the LED doing to your skin tone right now? Right now, it's pretty good. If we took it, these are 3,200 degrees Kelvin, we took that down to 2,700, which is the old incandescent light degrees. I would look more glowing with health, but on the other hand, due to your very strict regime, health regime, you just look glowing anyway. We have Energy in America, featuring Lou Pugliarisi and others from EPRINC, an energy research think tank in Washington, D.C. It plays at 3 p.m. on Alternate Wednesdays. Energy in America covers directions and sea changes in energy and energy sources and technology in this country, as well as global trends in energy from around the world. Every couple of weeks, we have a show with EPRINC, Energy Policy Research Organization in Washington, a think tank that does energy globally. And today, we have Max Pesier. He's an energy research market analyst at EPRINC. So we want to talk today about the effect of the U.S.-Iran tensions on world prices in oil and other energy resources. Well, on any given day, about 20% of crude oil that's used in the world that's produced moves through the Straits of Hormuz. Straits of Hormuz are down... Countries of Oman and Iran are the two critical countries that come closest to the Straits. If this was the 1970s and these geopolitical tensions that have been escalating between the Trump administration and Iran, you would have panic all over the world. That's what you were having back in the 1970s. For clear reasons these days, despite all the political tensions that we have, the geopolitical conflicts, not only Iran, but also in Venezuela, in Libya, those things are muted by other factors that are taking place in the world. Despite these bullish indicators for crude oil prices, we in the United States, since 2008, have had a surge in production, and that has offset considerably the threats, the potential threats that we have from places like what's taking place in Iraq, what's taking place in Venezuela, what's taking place in one other country. Libya, thank you. These technological innovations that we've had put in place over the last 10 years here in the United States have effectively offset the threats that could arise and that have proven to a risen in the past, that could arise if we haven't had the surge in production in the last 10, 15 years. Have we taken a fraction steps to avoid an effect of these crises? The geopolitical ramifications of US surging crude oil productions, I don't think they were clearly factored in by any major policy maker. Certain people did take note of it. They realized that this control that exists in the Middle East countries, the oil producing countries in the Middle East, that that control has dissipated, has been muted. But no major policy maker, I think has really come out and said that the geopolitical threat in particular has been, I wouldn't say extinguished, but pulled back considerably. Next, we have Hawaii, the state of clean energy, hosted by Mitch Ewan and Maria Tomei, who are both in the energy field and have been active in the energy policy forum. The state of clean energy plays at 4 p.m. every Wednesday and is our flagship show for the energy policy forum. Mitch Ewan, I'm here with my co-host. Jeff Udall, and it's Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And today we have a special treat for everyone, a really long-term friend of mine, I think I've known Toby for about 28 years. Toby Kincaid beaming in from the West Coast of the United States. We're going to talk about his latest book. It's called Why the Green New Deal is Good for America. And we'll see his unique take on this. The Green New Deal came up, you know, three or four months ago, and there was so much disinformation putting out in the world that I thought, you know, I'm going to write a book about this and try and set the record straight. How energy is the cornerstone to everything that we've done, everything that we're going to do. And if we get energy right, everything can be very good. But if energy is wrong and you don't have access to energy, then we're all in big trouble. So the premise of this book was to look at how can we decarbonize the world? How can we actually evolve away from burning things, which is causing so much disruption and so much problems with toxicity? How can we get away from that paradigm and enter something that's truly sustainable and approaches the biggest question that we have, not only the preservation of our earth and other species, but how we can actually obsolete human poverty. You know, there's no law of nature that says that people have to be impoverished. And I've seen it in my own career where you take a small solar panel or sterilizer unit and the water is potable. Your kids don't need to die in front of you. I think this is the cornerstone of how important energy is and how we can use it to move forward for a 21st century, which is stable and affluent for everyone. There's more than enough energy. And so that's what this book is focusing on, is if you have energy independence, you have a greater chance at political independence. Excellent. You know, Toby, though, what about the money? What about the economics? I mean, we can do all that stuff, but people are going to resist spending their last farthing on it. Yes, now that's a great point because that's part of the propaganda. You've probably heard, this will cost a trillion dollars. I've heard that. But if you only say half of it, what about the other half of the question? Not just how much does it cost, but how much does it make? Finally, we have Stan the Energy Man, featuring host Stan Osserman, leader of the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology and also the hydrogen coordinator of the state. It plays at noon every Friday and is a very popular and informative show, particularly about the benefits of hydrogen as a renewable fuel, and it often involves remote guests and experts talking to us from faraway places. We do everything on this show that talks about energy, but one thing we don't talk much about is the subject of maritime and around the ports kind of energy. Our guest this week specializes in that and I want to emphasize that, you know, when we look in Hawaii at what causes most of our pollution, we don't really get to see much of it because the trade winds normally blow it out to sea and we just don't see it. But if Hawaii had mostly southerly winds pushing the pollution back into our city, we'd really notice it a lot. We get trapped up against the mountains and we'd really notice all the pollution that comes from ships and what we call dredged trucks or the day trucks that move containers around our city and around the ports. Mr. Victor LaRosa, a company called Total Transportation Services Incorporated, and he's our guest today and he's going to talk to us about how he and his company are helping reduce that high-end pollution problem in and around the ports. I've been in the trucking business my entire life. I actually was recruited out of college by a trucking company. I've been in Los Angeles for about 37 years. We found that the company that we are currently running back in the late 80s, early 90s, and we specialize in transporting ocean containers for large importers and retailers. We started to address this the pollution issue back in 2006-2007 when the ports began examining just how much pollution were caused by the ships and the trucks. And in Southern California, a little bit of a unique situation because we are somewhere in a valley and our pollution tends to stay in that valley and then the sun has a multiplying effect on those pollutants. The issue was back in 2007, there was no technology to support that fleet. So over the last 10 years, we have been working very closely with integrators, with developers, with truck manufacturers, and experimenting with all different forms of technology from natural gas to battery to fuel cell. And we are currently starting to make the first significant changes in the fleet to get to near zero emission and then eventually zero emission when the technology is ready for prime time. For the last 10 years, 50% of all the new technology that's come into the market, we've been heavily helped subsidize by the agencies and most of the subsidies go to the developers and the integrators. We will then take the equipment, test it, and generally our hydrogen fuel is subsidized, our natural gas is not subsidized, our electricity is not subsidized, but that's that's not an overbearing factor. The overbearing factors is going out and buying new equipment that doesn't work. We are on the fifth generation of natural gas engines and we have finally arrived at an engine that we've been testing for the last three years, the 12 liter near zero knock come into Westport engine. That engine is bulletproof. We've just ordered 40 of those vehicles and we're going to probably be ordering another 40 of those vehicles. The tests and comments working very, very closely with us in day to day and making sure that those trucks had no mechanical or performance issues. That's why we went out and made the investment. Wow, what a lineup. These five shows form a substantial percentage of our talk show offerings. The energy subjects they cover are very important to our mission and the future of the state. That's why we're always looking for new and exciting guests, hosts and shows on all aspects of energy. These shows are only a small sampling of the enormous number of shows we have done on energy subjects over the years. There are hundreds more. You can take a look at them on our YouTube channel. Each of them has a playlist there and you can look up the playlist or host and binge on any of them or perhaps all of them to get current and stay current on energy in Hawaii. Yes, we should all be up to date on what's happened, what's happening and what will happen in energy in Hawaii. Checking out the offerings on Think Tech is a good way to do that. Want to know more about our energy shows? Check out thinktechawaii.com or youtube.com for more of these shows and for the panel programs and OC16 energy shows we have done over the years or check out the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum where many of these shows are uploaded on their site. And now, let's check out our Think Tech schedule of events going forward. Think Tech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11am to 5pm on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows they're all archived on demand on thinktechawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream go to thinktechawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktechawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. Or better yet, sign up on our email list for our daily email advisories. Think Tech has a high tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience or if you want to participate in our shows contact shows at thinktechawaii.com If you want to pose a question or make a comment about a show call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on Think Tech. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a Tweet to thinktech.hti We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of Think Tech. But first we want to thank our underwriters. Thanks to our Think Tech underwriters and grand tours. The Atherton Family Foundation. Carol Mon Lee and the Friends of Think Tech. The Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education Collateral Analytics The Cook Foundation Duane Kurisu The Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners Hawaii Energy The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum Hawaiian Electric Company Integrated Security Technologies Galen Ho of BAE Systems Kamehameha Schools MW Group Limited The Schuyler Family Foundation The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust VOLO Foundation Yuriko J. Sugimura Thanks so much to you all. Okay, Keisha, that wraps up this week's edition of Think Tech. Thank you so much. Keisha, that wraps up this week's edition of Think Tech. Remember, you can watch Think Tech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like Keisha does. For additional times, check out OC16.TV. For lots more Think Tech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on Think Tech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com Be a guest or host a producer or an intern and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our Think Tech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii. And of course, the ongoing search for innovation and renewable energy wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important Think Tech episode. I'm Cynthia Sinclair. I'm Keisha King. Aloha everyone.