 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Well, and welcome to Stanley Energy Man this week on Friday the 13th, but I'm not nervous. What could possibly go wrong? I've got a great guest this week, and I'll introduce him in a second, but before I do, my guests and I both attended a great event on Wednesday. We are hosted by CERVCO Pacific out at their Mapuna Puna grand opening of the very first publicly available hydrogen and fueling station in the state of Hawaii, and that is a true game changer for the state of Hawaii. It's the very first one CERVCO and Toyota brought in the vehicles. So we have Toyota fuel cell vehicles on Island. We have a commercial station on Island, and there's a whole lot of other hydrogen stuff going on in the state of Hawaii that we're going to talk about today. And the reason we're going to talk about hydrogen today, besides it's one of my favorite subjects, is it's also one of my guest's favorite subjects. And so I'm glad to invite to have as a guest today, Representative Markinakashima from the Big Island, from Hilo, who's also the vice chair of the state legislature, the House of Representatives, and my speaker of the House in Hawaii in the state legislature. And he's a big hydrogen fan, just like I am. And in fact, the first time I met him, he started talking hydrogen before I even knew what hydrogen was. And he's really, really a great advocate for renewable energy, clean energy, sustainable energy, and especially for the Big Island. So welcome, Rep. And it's great to have you on. And I know we have plenty to talk about. So why don't you start off by talking about maybe some of the legislation that you've seen lately that you think is going to be coming up in the next session that we ought to be looking for. Well, Stan, I think that hydrogen has been something that, for me, has been really an important issue. Living on the Big Island, we see all of the different renewable energy opportunities and vehicles that are coming before us. And with the plug-in electrics and the hybrids. My concern there was that the range on those vehicles really weren't up to the Big Island standards in terms of the distances that we need to cover. If I get into my car, I know I'm going to do at least 100 miles that day. And because of that, I was looking for something that could accomplish that on the Big Island. And when I learned about the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, that really excited me. And I think for the 10 years I've been in office, that is something that I've really been pushing for and trying to see move ahead. I think that the technology is finally catching up with us. That we're able to kind of realize some of those dreams. And so I'm really excited about looking forward and the opportunities that this first hydrogen station that's open to the public here on Oahu. The availability of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles to the consumers locally is really exciting. And I think that in order to support those kinds of things, we are continuing to look at our investment as a state into the hydrogen infrastructure, into changing some of the laws that will be much more inclusive of the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle in our procurement and our purchasing plans. And also looking at ways to help meet our energy goals, not only for electricity, but also now that the mayors have put it out there for motor vehicles as well, that we have lots of things that we can look forward to working on this year and in the coming years. Great. Yeah, we don't call it the Big Island for nothing, right? Yeah, that's right. And not only do we have the distances, but you also saw some mountains decline. Even if you go on the saddle road, you're going up a couple thousand feet and then down the other side, it's a challenge for any electric vehicle, including a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. It takes more energy to go up hills with electric vehicles. So it's good to have the range. Yeah, and my district's unique in that I can go from sea level to 13,000 feet in a matter of an hour and 15 minutes. So there's nowhere else in the world where you can make that kind of elevation. And that's short period of time. And so those two present challenges to any motor vehicle. And I think that hydrogen is one of the vehicles that are going to be up to snuff to be able to do that. Well, the Big Island is slated to get three vehicles right now, two for the National Park Service and one for the Alley on Bus that are being done by the University of Hawaii, H&E I, Mitch Ewen and his folks. Right. And they're getting ready to be delivered. And Mitch's station, as I understand it, is nearing completion and probably should be up and running within the next 30 days, I would say, based on what I've seen of his timelines. And I know we're all excited about that because the Big Island has always been anticipating these things. But the bad news is we've got the volcano kicking off and closing down the volcano National Park. So we may have to push those vehicles into the Alley on Bus system too and get all three of them running in that system. I think regardless of where they end up, that they will end up on the Big Island, I think it's kind of key to beginning that realization of the dream that we will have this alternative energy source on Island. I think for years, we were waiting for other hosts for this Hydro-Fueling Station, which really delayed seer after year. And it has been 10 years in the making, as we were waiting for this to finally happen. And ground breaking had occurred. The buildings are up. The electrolyzer is in place. And so now it's a matter of just going through the final phases of testing to make sure that everything's connected up correctly. And then all we need there are the buses to be brought on over so we can start running them. It's kind of ironic too that Mitch works so hard for that electrolyzer to be built at Pune Geothermal. And if it had been, we'd have been at a stopping point again, it was built there. But it's being built out at Nelha over on the Kona side, which meant the Alley on Bus route changed a little bit. But it'll at least be running out there because the Hydrogen Center protected area, it's going to be good to go. Yeah, and I think that I'm glad that that decision was finally made to put it up at Nelha in West Hawaii. Although it's not ideal, it is in the ground. We are ready to go on that. And I'm hoping that as we move forward on that project and expand that project a little bit more then other dreams of having an airport shuttle service provided by hydrogen fuel cell vehicles running in the Kona airport. Also, you're making available, at some point, hydrogen fuel cell rental vehicles for the driving public to kind of get used to and familiar with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and realize that it's just like driving a very gas-suming car. And that's a great way to pitch it to the rental car companies because a lot of people, even local people, will go to the rental car and rent a car they're thinking about buying. You know what I mean? So if you're curious about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, one of the best places to go and check it out and not just drive it down the street in a dealer, but really put it through its paces is to go rent it for a weekend on the big island and go drive around and see what it's like going up the hills and everything. So it's a great way to check out a vehicle like that. Definitely. I think that if you're given that opportunity to test drive it, especially on the big island with all of the different conditions that you can face, it will provide you with a very good idea about the capabilities of the vehicle R and the fact that it can meet and exceed many of the exceptions or the expectations that you may have for a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. Well, I think you're lucky too that on the big island you've got a lot of high-speed cheerleaders for hydrogen already built in between Blue Planet being there. Chauncey and the guys at DOT, airports in Kona are probably the biggest hydrogen fans in all of state DOT that I've ever found anyway. And they would love to see. They've already got roads designated where the vehicles are going to go. I mean, they're leaning so far forward that Ford had to pull them back a couple of years ago to say not right yet. But there's a lot of enthusiasm for hydrogen on the big island. So we're looking forward to seeing some of these projects pick up. But if you could paint a picture of the big island like 10 years from now, what would it look like with hydrogen? I think if I could paint a picture very early on, we looked at what the needs really would be for the big island. And I think that what we came up with was an idea that if we had five stations strategically placed around the island, then you could easily make it around the island to any point that you wanted to and not have to worry about whether or not you were going to run out of gas, so to speak. And I think ideally, if we could see those five stations realized around the island, I think we saw one in West Tawai, one in East Tawai, one in the Kamuela area, Ben Kona, one down in Ka'u, and something in between to allow for it getting around the island, that would more than meet the feeling needs of a person who wanted to go anywhere around the island. You're with the projected range of about 312 miles. There's nowhere on the island you couldn't go. We don't have four-wheel drive who sell vehicles yet, but that's something that we'll be hoping for one day. But in the meanwhile, as far as highway driving is going, I think if we had five stations around the island, then you could more than satisfy the driving public. If you want to look at a really cool four-wheel drive tactical type vehicle, there's a company called Nicola Motors. And they are specializing in 18-wheeler trucks, but they also have a quad. And the folks who own that company, the patriarch, has a place on Maui, and they're going to bring that vehicle over to Hawaii sometime, and we'll make sure you get a look at that thing. It's got a lot of horsepower, and it would be just awesome off-road. But I was thinking that when I went to Servco this week with you at that opening ceremony, one thing that really impressed me and surprised me was their advertising that that Mariah will get 300 to 312 miles on a fill-up of hydrogen. But some of the folks there, now that their station has been up and they've been actually driving the cars and using the hydrogen at the station, they've been tracking the mileage. And they're predicting that they're going to get closer to 350, maybe even 400 miles on a fill-up. So it's actually getting better mileage than they anticipated, which is not uncommon, because a lot of times when the engineers predict what the ranges are going to be, they use real conservative numbers. So I'm really excited that the cars are actually getting better range than they initially predicted. And I think that's going to, if it keeps consistently doing that, it's going to be a real selling point for those vehicles, I'm sure. Well, I think the upside for most people, especially given a lot of the freeway traffic that you get here on Oahu is that when your gas is off the accelerator, you're not burning anything. So there's not even an idling of gas being wasted. So I think that the fuel cell offers all of those great options. Your exhaust is water, so you're not adding to any pollution. Right now, if we electrolyze that water using solar energy, then it's a totally carbon-free process. And so that, I think, is really what is exciting. The fact that we can make, that we have all of the resources locally to make our own hydrogen here is also, to me, a really big game changer because of the fact that I think our biggest import from Hawaii is money. The money that we use to pay for fossil fuels that we're bringing in. And so if we can make our own energy source here, that money stays right here in our economy. That's the whole point. And I've said this many, many times from day one. People really don't understand the impact of spending money to buy fossil fuels. The impact to our local economy is gigantic. And I've tried to get Mr. Brubaker, one of our state's economists, or Eugene from D-Bed, our economist there, to help me articulate it the right way in numbers. And I can't quite get them there. But it's just got to be phenomenal. If all that money stayed in the state and went into producing our own hydrogen and making jobs here and then people are paying taxes and buying houses and buying goods, now it's like turbo charging your economy to go from an energy importing economy to an energy neutral or maybe even energy exporting. I mean, truly, we have a lot more energy available to us than we can use. The problem is here in Oahu, we have more use than production. But we're the bad boys on the market. Maui and the Big Island, they can produce a lot more energy than they need big time by multiples. And they could even be exporting energy to Honolulu or exporting it to California to Asia if they really wanted to. So there's an opportunity for that. We're going to take a quick break here, a little bit early maybe, and get back with Rep Nakashima and maybe talk a little bit about how hydrogen can be used on the grid on the Big Island. And Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, the host of Hawaii Uniform. And every Friday at 11 o'clock here on Think Tech Hawaii, we bring in the latest in what's happening within the military community. And we also invite all of your response to things that's happening here. For those of you who haven't seen the program before, again, we invite your participation. We're here to give information, not disinformation. And we always enjoy a response from the public. But join us here, Hawaii Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m., here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. My name is Andrea Gabrieli. I'm the host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science, to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m., only on Think Tech Hawaii. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour here at Think Tech Hawaii on Friday the 13th. And Rep Nakashima, great to have you on board here. We've been talking hydrogen for at least five years. You've been talking a lot longer than me, but that's when I started talking to you about it. But let's talk a little bit about what Helco might look at. Because you do produce an awful lot of your energy already off of renewals, including geothermal. When it's up and running, I think you put out about 20% of the power when it's running. About 30%. 30%. And then you also have hydroelectric, which is also renewable. So you have two forms of renewable energy there that aren't intermittent renewable. They're not solar and wind. So they're much better for your utility to have to work with in terms of stabilizing your grid. So it's much more of their traditional power generation that they're used to dealing with. So you have the luxury of being renewable without being intermittent renewable and can go much further than Hawaiian Electric here on Oahu can with renewable energy because you have the geothermal and you have hydroelectric, too. I remember going to visit Richard Haas' farm with you a long time ago, and he had his own little hydroelectric plant right off on his farm. Then I forget how much it put out, but he could probably provide a whole neighborhood power just off of that little hydroelectric thing. And he didn't even need to get a special permit because he was using the old sugar flumes, right? I think the only permit he had to get was to discharge the same water he just took out back into the stream and that was it. And that's the kind of stuff that you're, that's available to you on the big island. But in terms of energy storage, last week and I think a couple of weeks ago, I showed a graph and I do whenever I brief this stuff that battery storage on the grid starts to hit a wall when you get to a real high kilowatts or you get to a long generation. And so we do talk about hydrogen for energy storage on the grid. Have you been talking to Helco about that possibility on the big island? I have not spoken to Helco per se about the use of hydrogen fuel cells or the storage of hydrogen. However, a couple of years ago, and I did make an effort as I was trying to kickstart this hydrogen economy to go to different alternative energy folks on the big island. I went to the folks that have the windmills up in Narkohala. I went to the folks that were doing the hydroelectric and talked to them about the possibility of making hydrogen using the electrolysis 24-7 whenever they had the power, storing that hydrogen and then using that as your fuel source to provide the electricity back into the grid. And then you convert this intermittent power to a base power because now you have a source of your energy, which is the hydrogen. You control it, it's not dependent on whether the wind is blowing or whether the sun is up and you burn it when you want to. So it becomes a good source of base power. You turn solar energy and wind energy into a base power, base load power in that way. And I think the fluctuations in the price of gas you have kind of really determined whether or not that becomes something economically feasible or not. And so when we were in 2009, 2010 and the price of gasoline was headed toward four dollars, everybody was going to go nuts. And they were looking for many alternatives. When the price went down, that pressure kind of went away but I think that it's already back at four dollars again now. So next time it's going to go to six dollars and then we'll be spurred again to look at these alternatives. I think that we should do that now before it gets to six dollars because once you get there, it's already too late. Yeah, one of my theories in life is you don't want to be looking for a lawyer or a doctor when you need one. You want to do that ahead of time so that when you need one, you already know who you're going to go to. Exactly. And I think it's the same with hydrogen. We shouldn't be sitting in here putting that off, putting it off and then waiting until gas is at six, 50 a gallon or $7 a gallon and screaming and then saying, well, we could have built the infrastructure and had hydrogen available but we didn't want to do it back when gas was $4 a gallon. So we need to be working on that now. I agree with you wholeheartedly. And I think that's a good challenge for this legislature. What are some of the things we think we can do this legislative session coming up? We have time now to maybe help modify some of the old statutes or maybe introduce some of the statutes. What are some of the things you think we should be working on this session? Well, I think that one of the things that we do need to look at is to look at our procurement laws. Right now the procurement law treats hydrogen fuel cell vehicles differently from other electric vehicles. And so one of the things that I think is important is that we erase that distinction and say you realize that a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is an electric vehicle. And kind of move forward from there. Other things I think we need to look at is again going back to our state needs and the state infrastructure. The hydrogen fuel cell platform really is much more practical when you use it on large vehicles like buses. And so if we can turn some of our bus fleet not only at the municipal level but at the state level, you're at the airports and if we can turn our bus fleets into hydrogen fuel cell vehicles then that's a much very practical use of the hydrogen fuel cell technology to promote it to make people realize that it's here around us and that it does work. Well, you know, I mean, I know you know that Ford Fujigami moved up from DOT director up to the governor's office as a special advisor. But he started a test program out at the airport with the airport shuttles, the rental car shuttles. And this September, Hawaiian Electric, Kauai Gas and HCAT in partnership with US Hybrid are bringing out alternative fuel vehicles to run in that program. So Hawaiian Electric is going to run electric vehicle, Hawaii Gas is going to run a natural gas vehicle and HCAT, US Hybrid are going to run a fuel cell vehicle. And we're in the final stages of meeting that contract to vehicles start arriving in the middle of next month and getting all their wraps on and their safety checks and their PUC certifications and all that stuff and get the driver training in and one September, those vehicles are supposed to start rolling. So hats off to Ford for his efforts. And I know for a fact, after talking to the governor on Wednesday, cause he was at that ceremony too, he's excited and he's also a pretty good hydrogen cheerleader, I think. He always smiles when he sees me and amazes me. He remembers my name cause he meets so many people. I don't see him very often, but he still knows who I am. Oh yeah, the governor is very much a techie. And I think that the times that I've seen him most excited is when he's talking about the advances in technology and opportunities that are offered to the state of Hawaii when we look at the different types of technology. And so I think that the fact that we're having this demonstration at the airport is key as we look forward to what platforms are available to us, how they work out in the real world and then how we might employ them into the future. Yeah, and I think it's all of those things, the governor's excitement, the standing up of the station by CERVCO, the initiatives that you've made, push forward and the laws that Hawaii has brought on board to push hydrogen into the forefront. It's starting to pay off because on the average, once a week, I ended up talking to some international company or some mainland company that has hydrogen equipment or fuel, I mean, and these are little companies. One of them was Show Oil, that was about three weeks ago, and Hitachi who's doing some innovative work with hydrogen from aerobic digesters with, I mean you think Hitachi, they're working with industrial waste products from wastewater treatment plants to make energy. These companies call us and say, can you put me in contact with some folks out in Hawaii because we're interested in becoming involved in this? Even Department of Energy has listed us as one of the top 10 states in the US to work with hydrogen. In fact, when I talked to them personally, they say right behind California, we're number two. It's nice to see Hawaii in the top two, especially in hydrogen, so I know a lot of that credit has to go to you, you've been pushing that bubble a lot longer than I have and I appreciate it. But we've got about 30 seconds left, do you have any great last words for the folks here? Well, I think that the opportunity that, the opportunity has been a long time coming and one of the things I wanna do is make sure that we don't squander this opportunity, that we make use of the fact that Hawaii's gonna be one of the first markets that has a hydrogen fuel so vehicle available. And I'm looking forward to hopefully being one of the first owners of a fuel cell vehicle once the Marae becomes available. Available, available, not only on the big island, but the first sales actually happened here on Oahu. I'd be looking forward to all of that and I think that all of those things are very exciting and I hope that this is just the beginning of good things to come. I agree. Well, thanks for joining us again today, Rip. And now that you've moved up the food chain and the legislature, we're looking for even more horsepower up there. Thanks everyone for joining us this week and thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the studios for making all the magic happen. We'll see you next week, Friday on the Stand the Energy Man, Allah.