 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Hey, welcome to Stand on the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. I'm Stan Osserman, your highly paid host here on Think Tech Hawaii. And can you believe it's already the middle of December and there's only like one more weekend before we have to start unwrapping Christmas presents and stuff. This year has just blasted by. It's been a busy, busy year for everybody. An exciting year, kind of a troubling year in some cases for some people, but just a lot going on, especially in my world in energy and hydrogen. Well, a lot of good things have been going on in Hawaii. So what I wanted to do was start today's program office, but just talking a little bit about what's been happening in Hawaii. And one of the good news things to report is last week I got to spend some time with Servco out in Mapuna Puna and they broke ground on their hydrogen station a couple months ago, probably early September. And I'm happy to report that the construction trailer is in place and there's a bunch of trenching being done and it's a real construction site. They're often working. They're hoping, Servco doesn't have complete control over the timelines, but they're hoping to have that station up and running around April of next year, which is really good news. That will be the first commercial station on the island of Oahu in the state of Hawaii available for hydrogen. So everybody's watching that pretty closely and we're really excited about it and hats off to Servco and Toyota for what I say bringing the chicken and the egg when it comes to hydrogen vehicles here in Hawaii. So thanks a lot to Servco and Toyota for doing that. We appreciate it. Another thing was our mayors all got together and they decided that it would be really cool to kind of, they're not creating a law. They're not creating more of a policy guidance thing with all four mayors for the major islands getting together and saying we're going to have clean transportation by 2045. So they've all agreed to pool together and start working with their fleet vehicles and kind of driving as best they can towards the 2045, fossil fuel-free fleet of vehicles and cars on the streets in Honolulu and all the other islands. And they think that's pretty ambitious and I'll give you an article on today's specific business or this week's specific business news. Written by, let me see here. It's the editor-in-chief's notebook. I saw the guy's name here. Anyway, it was kind of an interesting take because he points out some of the things that I've pointed out before which is we're a customer. We're not an OEM or a manufacturer. And so it's nice to say we're going to have all these cars but we don't make cars. We have to buy them from someplace and the guys that make them have to supply them. And we don't have control over that. So it's kind of tough to say we're going to have that many electric cars of hydrogen or regular plug-in electric cars by that point. But he does point out something that I think a lot of people miss. I'm going to read it. It says, and come to think of it, 1.2 million electric cars means an awful lot of dead, giant electric car batteries in Hawaii at some point. So what are we going to do with those? Are we going to recycle them, wear, how? The batteries at Nissan Leaf weigh 660 pounds and those of a Tesla weigh 1,200 pounds. So let's split the difference and say that there's 930 pounds per car. That means that in the future there's going to be 1.2 million electric vehicles containing 1.1 billion pounds of materials like nickel, aluminum, cobalt, lithium, silicon graphite, lithium salts, and copper. What environmental impact will that have on Hawaii? And even furthermore, what about the impact of mining all that stuff in the first place? And that's just Hawaii, assuming that the rest of the main one isn't also building up their electric vehicle fleet. So to think that we're just going to jump into electric vehicles and be all cleaned up in a hurry, I think it's probably a little overambitious unless we start cutting our fleets down to using car sharing, things like that. And thankfully there's things like that going on, but it's pretty ambitious. And there's some other things to talk about too with batteries. And we've had some of this discussion before, but thanks to this article and another article I read this week, we're up to about number five or maybe number six large 18-wheeler truck companies that are coming out with large vehicles that run on electric drivetrains. Two of them that I know of are strictly battery. One kind of goes between battery and hydrogen and two are strictly hydrogen with small batteries. We call them battery dominant or fuel cell dominant. So we've got about two fuel cell dominant, two battery dominant, one smack in the middle. And the interesting thing is, as you start to look at how much the battery powered only, the plug-in charging ones are, how much they weigh, that's where you really start to see things. Using the batteries that we use in our vehicles now, I come out with about 25 pounds per kilowatt hour of energy in a battery when it comes to vehicles. So for every kilowatt hour you need to drive that vehicle, you're putting 25 more pounds on the vehicle. And so when they say that a vehicle could go like 400 miles on their batteries, I work the math out on that and it comes out to around 42,000 pounds of batteries in a truck to get it to go 400 miles. That's a lot of weight in batteries. Your typical Tesla has 1,200 pounds of batteries and your typical Leaf has 660 pounds of batteries. So you can start to really see the scale, as I pointed out in the Pacific Businesses article, that the amount of batteries you're using is huge and the resources to make those batteries are still finite. So when we talk about energy security, we're buying our fossil fuels from a few limited places here, but when it comes to making all those batteries, you're also limited to where you're going to get those elements, particularly lithium, which is mostly South America and mostly controlled by China right now. So we're going to have a talk with our guests today about some of that, but some of the other things going on in the world. Proton Onsite, which is a company that makes literally all the electrolyzers that we use here in the state that I'm aware of, has just been awarded a $1.8 million contract to assume the lead role in a U.S. government project to actually test the benchmark, the splitting of water into hydrogen oxygen and get it as cheap as you can. Find the technologies that get it as cheap as you can to use electrolyzers to make hydrogen. And then it says, one of the other articles here, and this is from Gas World, so it's a commercial industrial publication called Gas World, and they say GM to ditch gas and diesel-powered cars, and it goes on to talk about how they've also committed to electric drive trains. So, bottom line is the world's looking at electric drive trains to at least take over a pretty good portion of the market in commercial trucks and in passenger cars, and it's going to make a pretty profound change in our nation and our state. And there's a lot of things we have to get ready for and look at, and that's what we'll be talking about today with our guests. But before we go to our guests, we're going to run a little video here that we just had produced by HCAP and just wanted to show it to all of you so you can get an idea about hydrogen fuel cells. Hydrogen, the simplest element, and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe, so it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure. And they're limited. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero-emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat, and electricity, which is easily transported. Hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead-acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. Hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released, and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles, and can last for decades. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean, and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. So thanks to the folks of Hyperspective for putting together that video. We think it's a really good, concise way to talk about fuel cells and how they play a role, not only in the transportation sector, but also in the grid. So thanks to Todd and all the folks at Hyperspective for helping us put that together. So today, on my show, as every Friday on my show, is my favorite electrical engineer. He may not be the tallest electrical engineer or the oldest electrical engineer, but he's my favorite electrical engineer. We're at Burns and McDonald's, Mr. Ryan Womans. So Ryan, thanks for being on the show today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Dan. I try and hold that title near and dear, and then spend off as many other aspiring double eases. It's not an easy... It's tough to impress me, so, you know, you should hold that one real dear, near and dear. But let's keep on talking a little bit about transportation and hydrogen and things like that, and impress a little bit further, because you've been doing a little bit of work studying on this stuff, and what are your thoughts on hydrogen and electric vehicles? There's a run that I play in as the electrical engineer, a little more grid-oriented and playing with the electrons, and as we use them in our houses and the malls and such, where we're not moving around as transportation takes energy, and we're very mobile with that. So the place where we come together would be something like an electric vehicle that you're plugging in at night to recharge. Really what you're doing when you make that transition is, as you're an electric vehicle with the battery, you're asking the grid to provide that energy. So while you may have stopped pumping gasoline into your car, and that's great for your own initiatives against reducing carbon emission fuels, you kind of just shoved it off to the next person over, and then the grid right now... Well, we're not at 2045 yet, so if you have an electric vehicle, last year Hawaii, or at least the Tri-State Hawaii for HIKO, was 25% renewable. So that electric vehicle is, sorry to say, but it's really only 25% renewable and 75% carbon emission. And that's the hard truth for some people. So unless you have solar on your house and you're dedicating on solar to charging your vehicle, that's really three-quarters gas burner. But solar would be a good way to charge that. It's not possible for some people, and solar is still powering up your house. So where hydrogen comes into play is really nice being a highly energy-dense, transportable fuel. Similar to where oil is right now, it's a very energy-dense. It's very available to us right now. We still moved around with tankers and barges, large chunks of fuel. When you look at a tanker, that's from a kilowatt-hour standpoint, and that's massive. You're not going to see a lithium-ion barge floating across, because it's going to just be so big and heavy, whereas filling that up with hydrogen would be a ton of energy that we could actually... Yeah, and people forget that because when you really look at business cases and business efficiency, when you look at transportation, it's considered a non-value-added cost. In other words, to move your product from point A to point B, you're spending fuel, but it doesn't really add value to your product. It just gets it where it needs to be to sell. So if you can make hydrogen on site versus taking a tanker truck and moving a fuel from point A to point B, and of course, in between there's a pipeline. If you have a pipeline, that's probably not as expensive as a truck, but more expensive than making it on site. That also reduces your transportation costs and to move the fuel, let alone burning the fuel in your vehicle. Absolutely. The neat part about that as well is compared to diesel or gasoline, you don't have a refinery in your backyard or at the gas station that's brought in, as hydrogen absolutely can be made from water. Okay. Well, Ryan, we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds and talk a little bit more about transportation, clean transportation in Hawaii. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. Hi, guys. It's RB Kelly. I'm your host of Ad in the Comfort Zone where I find cool people with cool solutions to problems that all of us face. Now, the thing is, we're really cool and I only invite really cool people, but the thing is I think you're kind of cool too, so I think you should come and watch. That Thursdays at 11 a.m. here on OC16 Television with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm RB Kelly, host of Ad in the Comfort Zone and I will see you next Thursday. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour, as usual. So we're not taking away from anything. The weather's getting cold. I should have worn my long-sleeved loha shirt. I was actually pretty chilly this morning. Anyway, back with Ryan Wubbins, my guest for today's show, talking about transportation and maybe some of the things you're not thinking about when it comes to clean transportation in the big picture. So we talked a little bit about, you know, how when you plug into the grid, you're not necessarily being clean and green. You're only about at this point in time, three quarters fossil fuel and one quarter clean and green. So what are some of the other things that we're thinking about here? When we talk about transportation and cleaning it up, what are some of the other factors that we're looking at to make Hawaii clean and green and maybe even lower just our fossil fuel usage? Sure. One thing to think about, and I hope I don't lead you too straight here on this point, but when we start removing the fossil fuel, let's look at oil exclusively in this sense. Easier one to look at. When we start removing, let's say the utilities use of that oil, when you stack a barrel up and you start refining it into different uses, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, there's a lot of different products that come out of that. Even asphalt is made with the petroleum. So when we take out one chunk of that from the companies that are importing that oil, they are being very efficient with the whole amount of strings that they can. They're using the whole thing. They're using the whole thing, absolutely. When we, as a utility or as a gasoline user, we start to take away that completely. We don't look at this holistically. All the other users of that petroleum are likely to bear an additional cost because that piece that didn't get used, it's got to go somewhere. Shipping it back out would be very inefficient or we're having to ship in only the parts that we need, which is also very inefficient. So this energy model, it's very big and complex from that perspective. So you want to take hydrogen vehicles and electric vehicles together and you can completely wipe out that gasoline charge. Maybe the jet fuel, that gets made, becomes more expensive or the asphalt gets more expensive. So once we solve one problem, we've got to be ready for that next piece because it'll come back. And we don't necessarily recover any of those ancillary products with biodiesel or you may not get the same byproducts out of there like NAPTA or whatever to really supply to the other industries. So that's an interesting, interesting thing people haven't really thought through all the way. And just like the tax piece, the more renewables we put in our vehicles and the less gasoline we sell at the pump, the less revenues the state of Hawaii gets to fix roads and things like that. So how are we going to start taxing vehicles and users for the road? If it's not a gas tax, what are we going to do? Are we going to have a tire tax? Are we going to have just a flat weight tax on your car that's a lot higher than it is now because the heavier the vehicle the more wear on the tires gives you an indication of who's beaten up the roads the most and start taxing that way too. Yeah, absolutely. I think taxes in big time will have to switch on how we feel about taxing against energy usage. Everything's going to get smarter with time too. So I would assume I'm just throwing out there that the cars maybe would get taxed on a mileage usage and be classified to that type of use. Start taxing people that are using that commodity. But I'm not sure. I'm going to leave that one up to some smarter people. Okay. I'm going to segue a little bit away from the energy for cars now and talk about something else that happened recently this month. And the governor started talking autonomous vehicles and literally wrote some policy letting the world know that Hawaii's open for business to test autonomous vehicles and I was an electric engineer and I'm hitting you cold with this thing. So I apologize. But from that perspective and what you know about autonomous vehicles, how do you see that impacting our transportation sector now in terms of maybe reducing number of vehicles or making it more efficient to run those vehicles? And if we're going to do that, should we also be investing in like 5G networks instead of 4G networks and things like that? Yeah, so from the engineering perspective, I'm a fan of the autonomous vehicles because in theory, when it's all working properly, it would be quite a concert or an orchestra of transportation and a really engineering feat once everything starts working together. So I get really interested in it. You absolutely would be more efficient on your roads. Once the sensors on the cars reach a certain capability, what's that capability that we say certain? What would make you comfortable to have an autonomous vehicle to drive on the road? Some people say, well, it never can hit a person or do anything like that. Well, I'm going to argue a little bit lower of a point. What if every autonomous car was better than any human driver? What if that's the line? That line is a lot lower, but it's still much more achievable as a lot of us are terrible drivers. So as more autonomous vehicles comes onto our road system here, we have a very advantageous control over the road system in Hawaii because we don't have to deal with interstate traffic. So I think there's some opportunities of leverage of that different than the mainland. But in the end, you're going to be more efficient, see less vehicles, which will put us more efficient on the fuel side, too. That's where I kind of see it working. Big scale. Would we need to maybe improve the qualities of our roadways? Do you see us needing wider roadways or at least filling our potholes better and making the surfaces better? Because these vehicles, although they'll stop before the impact on their vehicle, and they're looking sideways and kind of 360 view, they're not looking for holes in the road. And let's face it, if there was a big divot in the highway and you dropped into that, that's not good either. And if you were a driver, you'd try and go around it. What would happen with the cars? Your margins for error actually gets smaller. So we would need less shoulder on the roads to have the autonomous cars work together because the sensors are going to allow you, and the algorithms will allow you to drive closer at them with possibly increased safety as well. The pothole part, you do need your car roll as capable as the infrastructure it's driving on. The autonomous cars are not making better driving cars. That's always progressing, whether it's diesel or gasoline or battery, or autonomous not. But your cars now are getting smarter from a system standpoint that potholes could immediately be detected by the cars and reported back to the agencies that are responsible for fixing them. So the repair could be faster. Cars could know that a pothole is being fixed in a certain spot and maybe to avoid the road during that time. Everything is getting much smarter at a pace I think a lot faster than people are ready for. So let's try and just brainstorm some of the things that are a little different, just like if you decrease the amount of oil coming into the state, how it would have an insular effect on other industries about repairing roads. Do you put guys out there and put cones in the road and things like that? How will these autonomous vehicles know that there's those things out there besides onboard sensors? Will it be something like you said in a vehicle and say, hey, there's a pothole here, automatically report it to the repair people and then the repair people broadcast out to all the cars. If you come to this location, you're going to have to come to these lanes. Is that something that they're looking at too, do you think? Yeah, so each manufacturer, there's a lot out there, a lot of startups that handle all of those questions differently. I'll start with one manufacturer that many people are aware of. And this is their take on it, that if I just were to drive a car by camera, that's how you and I drive right now, just visually. We do have an audible sensor that we're detecting as well. A little bit on the grip on the steering wheel, it's going to give us some feedback. For the most part, we can be safe to assume that we're driving with our eyes. That's in one direction, and then we have to look at the mirror, look at the next mirror, look at the next mirror. So the argument from that company is if I were to add a camera in all directions, I'm already super human. I'm already better than what you are if I can add in the computing software behind that sensor. Other sensors are a type of radar to go out and actually sense what's out and around. The next part that's really tough is trying to predict what's going to happen with the information you receive. If you see someone on a bicycle, you and I both know, well, they might fall over, they might turn left, or I know that people on bikes like to go to that store over there and constantly turn left. It's much harder for the software to detect that and they make the assumption that that bike, that's a bike, they might fall over or they could move really fast. Or maybe it's a bike stand and there's a bike sitting there. The car stopped because it created a bike pulling over the bike stand. That's the hard part for manufacturers right now. So the cones in the road, it's going to really be an AI that's operating just like you to detect those are people, those are cones I need to stop. Okay. So now, and I've told people too that if you're in an airplane and it makes a really, really good landing, it wasn't a pilot. The computers can actually land the airplane, especially in bad weather, better than the pilots usually. So it's, I have a lot of faith in that equipment. Although I don't think I'd want to be in an airplane with no pilots up front. So I want to know if somebody is going to save their own, but before mine goes piling into the ground because they're up front. But the technology's there. The technology can do this stuff. So we're going to wrap up here pretty quick, but how does the autonomous driving impact things like car sharing or car pooling? I mean, because you could technically, if you kind of match Uber with a car and put it on the road 24 hours and it could drive itself around. In other words, once it dropped you off at work, it could go pick somebody else up and go do things. With that, what's the possibility of lumping those technologies together? Yeah, the system changes are massive and because we're short on time, one thing to think about is my car right now, if it was a smart vehicle that could drive around on its own and be the Uber-like or taxi-like service, when I come and park at work in town, I work in a higher-rise building that has 10 stories of parking garage at the bottom and then another 10 stories of working levels. That car doesn't need to be in there. And if everybody else is on the same platform that I am, all those cars don't need me. They can switch 10 stories of parking garage that can switch to something else. All the roads and infrastructure in downtown would be higher utilized. I could easily foresee a switching half of them to bike lanes and be a lot like Fort Street Mall. I see that as a whole other show by itself, so we'll probably have to do some more and work on that. Well, thanks for being with Stound Energy Man and Ryan Wolbins today from Burtonson, McDonnell here on Think Tech, Hawaii. We'll see you next Friday, right before Christmas. Aloha.