 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Welcome to my lunch hour stand, energy man here, Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Bands Transportation Technologies on Think Tech Hawaii. Thanks for joining us this Friday and it's been a really, really busy week for all of us. And I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about groundbreaking that happened on Wednesday with CERFCO Pacific. It's the first hydrogen station commercially available to the public is going to be built in the next six or eight months in an area we call Mapuna Puna which is down near the airport and it's going to be servicing the Marais that Toyota and CERFCO bring in. CERFCO is the Toyota dealership on the island of Oahu, a very large Toyota dealership and that will bring Hawaii into the Marais and hydrogen market for sure and we're looking at it as the start of the future of hydrogen and hydrogen economy and hydrogen civilization in Hawaii. So we're really excited, it was a great ceremony, the governor had a few great words to say. We got a little bit of press and we're really happy. What I'd also like to do is last week we broadcast a Skype show and the sound was a little bit bad. Robert did as good a job as he could to clean up the Skype but I hope it came across okay. We've got some pictures here of the vehicle and some of the stuff that we did with the kids so Robert will get the first image up. This is the kids that's Giorgio and Julia, Kylie and Leo and I'm showing them all the parts to the kit that helped us convert the vehicle. Next photo and there's what it looked like all put together. I made the rack out of some maple and it's been installed in the back of the vehicle there. The bottom is the fuel cell, on the top is the control unit, on the very top is a not painted yet propane tank we'll be putting hydrogen in, it's really low pressure and then a regulator attached to the outside of the frame there. The next photo, we've got the team, we're missing, looks like Leo, I think he had a plate tennis that day but that's the team with Rachel and I on top that we put this whole thing together with our guest today, we'll introduce in a few minutes the next photo. This is what the finished product looked like. We've got 300 watts of PV on top and our fuel cell and tank and everything right in the back and one more photo shows it kind of from the other direction. This is an interesting photo because I originally planned to have that unit facing straight backwards and the kids said no why don't we face it sideways then we can have direct access to the control panel from the side and it also let us keep the brake light and our slow vehicle placard there in view without having to move it around so we're really excited we've been driving the vehicle around and right now it's out in the sunshine charging up with the solar panel and that leads me into my guest today. I have as a guest Mike Strisky from New Jersey who was good enough to help provide us with the conversion unit and help set it all up and make it easy for us by labeling all the connections and putting it together so Mike welcome to the show and thanks for being on again it's been an exciting week for us I know it's been an exciting couple of months for you. Yeah welcome, thanks a lot to Pan for having me on the show. Yeah that's a lot of projects going on. Are you able to hear me okay? Yep we got you. Okay so the vehicle itself that the kit that we shipped you guys was basically pretty much the same thing that we use on the hydrogen vehicles around my house here. We've used them for a long time to plow snow with and use them as a emergency APUs. Now that you have a vehicle that has a fuel cell and you've got stored energy above the battery or you've got a moving power plant right now this will this also ties into my toolbox device which will also be very useful and you know emergency situations or any type of off-grid patient. Well I'm not exactly a survivalist or what they call as preppers but I come really close for a Hawaiian guy I've got enough guns and ammo to get me through a pretty good amount of chaos and I'm really looking forward to maybe doing my house and one of my vehicles with one of these conversion kits too because I know that the same kind of unit can be used to make a pretty decent uninterruptible power supply in the house correct? Yeah currently we went public a couple of months ago doing hydrogen home using fuel cell technology, ultra capacitors, grid tie inverters, battery, the whole combination. You know you have more than one power source so you're able to store your energy well and above the small battery that's in the unit. You know the big nuclear ball comes up in the sky every single day and if you can store that energy both seasonally and on a daily basis you know you're ensuring your own local grid indefinitely. I've been through many hurricanes here at the hydrogen house we've had a terrible winter nor Easter and we had one a couple weeks ago where we had a microburst that took power out of the neighborhood for almost four days and the beauty of it is after about day six around here everybody's generators are undead and they're all ending up in my house running that cup of coffee charging their cell phone or looking for a hot meal so they were laughing at me at the beginning but nobody's laughing at me. I know how that is I've been called Noah in my neighborhood because I built a big boat out of him in my garage in my driveway and then when I started bringing home fish they quit laughing at me and I started giving people fish but I hear what you're saying and that's how I feel about the whole hydrogen thing. You know I look at how we've kind of divested ourselves of our own responsibility for our own energy and we've let the electric company basically just take it over and we just pay the bill. Maybe that's because by nature we're a little bit lazy but since I've been doing more detailed work with folks like you and Paul from the Big Island and Chris McWinnie from Dayton and Mitch Ewen from up at the University and all the folks up there I've just come to get a different appreciation for energy overall and how really it's kind of fun to be able to make your own power and store your own energy and not have to depend on other folks for it. I know that's the life you live. So you know one of the interesting things that I'm seeing in the energy world I'm pretty in tune with it as I do a lot of my work in California where a lot of the place is that we're now in the process of turning over to the next evolution. Started out with horse and buggy now we had a fossil fuel age and now over to the hydrogen. But now you have all these oil companies looking where in the eyes of change and if they don't adapt they're going to end up like the dinosaurs that they pull out of the ground. So you know right now the oil companies are blockbuster in the Netflix world so they're going to have to learn to adapt you know where they're going to be left behind. And right now you know there's the cost benefits of doing this are so much greater than that of oil. You're looking at something that you know you can store renewable energy indefinitely there's no shelf life there's no wheels well. You have all the advantages of not putting anything into the environment 100% recyclable. You don't have to protect this coming over the Somali pirates and you don't get the huge line losses you know transporting it over the wires. So there's a lot of reasons that this is making a lot more economic sense. You know the automakers Toyota on there are all scrambling right now you know to get their piece of this new economy as well as people building the equipment. You don't need a trillion dollar infrastructure to put in hydrogen stations. Exactly that's what I'm saying about it is the hydrogen stations you're never going to have an oil spill leak you know the DEP or EPA aren't going to come knocking on the door. Yeah I did a couple things when we first started our station I told the guy that was running the station I said I think I'm going to talk to the newspaper and say we had this massive hydrogen leak at Hickam and nothing happened you know because if you had a leak at any other kind of gas station it would be a disaster but hydrogen is just going to go straight up and help you make some more clouds or something. Another thing too like you say is I show people the footprint of our gas station at Hickam or hydrogen station and the production storage dispensing and everything is in the footprint of a gas station a regular gas station but that's your oil field your oil pipeline your oil tanker their oil refinery and the tanker truck that brings the fuel to your station is all in a 20 foot container behind the wall and it's like how elegant can you get. Yeah the if anybody wants to see hydrogen refueling for the new Mariah I have it on my website there are a number of links it's hydrogenhouseproject.org and you know these vehicles refuel in you know three to five minutes unlike a Tesla that takes you hours you know the other good thing about hydrogen vehicles is that they don't generate 4,000 pounds of battery waste that can't be recycled at the end of life so lithium ion battery the Teslas are lasting about five years they create scorched earth when you start by mining up the lithium they create scorched earth when you stop by having to dispose of a 4,000 pound anchor that you can't recycle hydrogen has neither of those problems. I should probably know this but what's the cost of a set of Tesla batteries if you have to swap them out. They're about 50 grand. 50 grand. That's the cost of the Mariah. Yeah well speaking of the Mariah I hear you just got one so how do you like it? I love it it's an awesome vehicle I mean the fact that I can travel 330 miles on the equivalent of four gallons of gasoline is pretty amazing even though they're charging $16 a kilogram it's still equivalent with gasoline because of the efficiency of the fuel cell engine and then you know I get a real kick out of you know pushing the button in the car and putting my cup under and getting a drink of water yeah they call that the P demonstration and yeah yeah you know it beats wrapping your lips around that big fat tailpipe. Exactly. So people don't realize as long as you have a full tank of hydrogen in the car you can get out about nine gallons of water so if you're in the desert that's a pretty good deal. I tell you what you know who's really interested in that kind of thing is we had a conference here about two weeks ago called Verge and it was put on by the US Pacific Command so we had a lot of military folks here and you know when it comes to that kind of concept where you you're storing energy and hydrogen using it in your equipment but guess what you get to collect some of that water back and that's a precious resource when you're deployed overseas especially in the desert but in almost any environment in the military you know unless you have to carry around with you the better and so if you're making your own water you know at your base cap that's a that's a big plus that's one of the big pluses we sell to the military. Yeah I mean it's in a lot of things now that General Motors has replaced the Hummer with the Colorado fuel cell pickup you know it doubles as an APU unit where they can go out and they use it as a power plant in addition to that there's no heat signature so you know you're not going to have that heat-seeking missile going down looking for tailpipe because it won't find one. Yeah no heat signature and very little noise so even when you're trying to sneak around the vehicles dead quiet. This is the shape of things to come I mean all of the signs are putting in this direction I mean if you look at what Wall Street is doing Amazon just bought 25% of plug power you know that's a big thumbs up you know despite what Aeon Musk calls fuel cells but we also see large companies like Heister which is the largest material handling company in the world just bought Newvera fuel cell to start to get into this game so a lot of the players are all consolidating now the forklift business is going to kick this thing off as far as the refueling station go and you know the automakers are going to be right behind you know and I'm doing the house in so you now have fuel cells for homes for forklifts, production equipment, things like that and you know vehicles. Toyota is now doing 100% participating in the 100% electric port over at Long Beach where they're debuting their hydrogen fuel cell trucks so you're looking at three of the same units that are in the Mariah in a truck they're doing a full-size bus that they're doing with two of those units and then obviously one in the right so the big news coming up why this is all going to happen is because over the last couple of weeks there have been some announcements from General Motors and from Honda that they've cracked the code and using non-precious metals in fuel cells now how big is that well that's really big because most of the cost in the fuel cell is the rare earth metals so if you're going to metals like cobalt and adium you know these these are a lot cheaper nickel or a lot cheaper catalyst than you would have normally if you were using platinum now even though in the catalysts are not as effective the substrates have gotten a lot better so little known invention called graphene basically you can coat large cross-sectional areas that are very strong that you know are only atoms thick so now you could make a fuel cell a 10 kilowatt fuel cell the size of a of a let's say call it a lunchbox yeah well that's the that's the whole thing there Mike it's all about surface area when you get down to one atom thickness on your surface area you can make a lot of surface area that's the key in nature too for photosynthesis and everything we're coming up on our break here we're gonna take a 60-second break and we'll be back with Mike Stritsky shortly what are you doing okay research says reading from birth accelerates the baby's brain development and you're doing that now oh yeah this is the starting line this is over read aloud 15 minutes every child every parent every day hello everyone I'm DeSoto Brown the co-host of human humane architecture which is seen on think tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. and with the show's host Martin Desbang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for human humane architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on think tech Hawaii hey welcome back to my lunch hours down the energy man here with Mike Stritsky all the way from New Jersey via Skype and we were just talking about the hydrogen revolution that's really just starting to kick off and you know most of you aren't seeing it yet because you're not looking for it but Mike and I live it and we see it happening every day all around us and it's it's starting to pick up like a snowball and start rolling down that hill and you're gonna see hydrogen happening and so Mike welcome back and why don't you tell us a little bit about some of your plans and what you're working on I know you've got other plans besides driving that Mariah around can you talk at all about that yeah I mean you know right now Toyota has one of the most inexpensive fuel cells on the market you know so that means that we're going to be able to utilize a lot of these fuel cells now for power application that are going to be much less expensive than you can buy conventional so I see a lot of these vehicle to grid projects which are going to make a huge difference you know in adding utility to the vehicle so you'll be able to drive up to a you know a traffic signal intersection a construction site a wedding or a cabin in the woods and you'll be able to power what your vehicle so you know these are some of the things we're looking at you know everything since hydrogen is 80 percent of every molecule in the universe you know the sources of fuel are unlimited and people don't realize that one of the biggest sources you know obviously being water but is sewage you have the Japanese right now extracting hydrogen from sewage so that is enormous so you're able to power half a million cars you know on sewage right now currently they're using a technology where they're doing anaerobic digestion and then steam reformation to get the hydrogen but you know we figured out a way to do it where we can leave the the carbon in the paste and we generate no methane so that's one of the top secret projects that we're working on it's no longer top secret right army it's no longer just between me you and your listeners well six of my listeners will be yes but a lot of the projects I'm involving right now you either have something to do with water or hydrogen which is the essence of all life you know we have in front of us right now the greatest you know technology ever presented to man and all we have to do is you know open up the keys to the cage and let ourselves out of it what's happening now is you know we have units like these small fuel cells here once you put them in the hands of the consumer they're going to start to demand it that's what's happening now it's like the cell phones they're not going to be able to stop this technology because the technology is going to be demanded by the consumer and capitalism is going to flood in from everywhere you know the originally AT&T and horizon and all these people who own the land lines didn't want to see cell phones all right so they did whatever they could to stop them then you know they started becoming so popular they couldn't ignore it anymore so what's the old saying if you can't beat them join them so so all of this is all is all starting to snowball right now no one's laughing at hydrogen anymore except for maybe on musk but a lot of people now know that this is this is real it's the way to go and it's safer than any fuel we already know so if we're you know think about it my energy system here at the hydrogen home creates only pure oxygen only pure water a little bit of heat and electricity and you know people seem to think that I consume water I don't consume water all I do is convert it it starts as water it ends as water power the Sun does the conversion there's no wheels to well you know that and it's delivered free to my house every day so this it really is the ultimate power source you know we lose about up to 80% of the energy over the electric lines just because you've got to go through all those all those capacitors and lines and the switching stations and everything else that no one takes that into account I know in Hawaii right now the reason for adopting technologies like we're generating today is because you know the utility company now is we're not going to be friendly to solar anymore we we did away with all the grid tie so that means if I give the grid a kilowatt hour they don't give it back to me so you're all you know all these people that had solar systems now you know can now have to pay for electricity and they're giving it to the utility for free thank you very much so you know you talk about that that that be free or die mentality this technology you know keeps you from the mask and gun you know if you truly want to be free you've got to generate your own power your own water you got to take care of your own communications and food then you truly are independent and this you know I've got two of the four so the technology there you know will set you free you know yeah it's expensive now but so were big screen TVs so were laptops and so were cell phones in the beginning but the technology is going to get a lot cheaper it's going to get a lot more useful and it's going to be in every part of life I mean I started out with these small fuel cells making basically batteries for the for the military so instead of leaving a ton of batteries you screw three cylinders in a helmet you know and you power the whole hard drive on that on the helmet so tell us talk to us a little bit about that because that technology with those in that little unit that you show the small fuel cell those are metal hydrogen storage containers correct yeah right here you can see them yeah these are aircraft legal you can't take bottled water on an airplane but I can take a hydrogen fuel cell with 14 liters of hydrogen and a little tank that has 400 pounds in it okay so this is safer than bottled water in the eyes of the FAA and I take these all around the world so most people take the battery powered chargers and I take a hydrogen fuel cell they have to go look for a plug when theirs is dead I just reach into my bag I grab another cylinder I screw it in and I'm done and this thing will run a LED flashlight for two weeks so all this stuff can be miniaturized it can be scaled up or scaled down and it's all happening right now more and more people are going to get into this business as it starts to grow and when you look at the restrictions on lithium batteries even and you know everybody's familiar with the was the iPhone 7 or whatever they've got that they won't let you take on the airplane yeah the Samsung but even if you were a construction worker and you're taking your tools like we do here in the to the neighbor islands if you have spare lithium batteries in your check baggage they don't want those in there either and I've got some through one time because I convinced the ticket agent that I have the safety caps on lithium batteries but man if they find out you've got lithium batteries in your check baggage they'll boot those things off in a heartbeat too well they had all those hoverboard sketch fire as well those are all banned as well well these are high energy sources and a lot of things can go wrong well it's one of those things where the good news about lithium is it's it's got so much you know power and stuff in it and it it does so well but you it comes at a price and the price of safety and once you have a lithium fire started good luck trying to put it out because you throw water on it it makes it burn better so it's not a good thing I think the other thing from a security standpoint is we own nothing none of the lithium it's owned by South America and China exactly and I'm sure China owns most of the stuff that's in South America because they probably already bought it because they look at all these kind of things yeah you're right so we talk we talk about energy security you know we talk about where do you get your fuel from hydrogen is the answer because it's it's all the way around I mean nobody controls like you say that that big hydrogen ball in the sky and the sunlight knows no boundaries on any country that I know of except maybe Antarctica and the Arctic a couple months out of the year so as long as you got sun shining and wind blowing you know you've got free energy you know right here in your backyard you should be taking advantage of it yeah I mean the the nice thing is is this stuff is durable indefinitely you know it's as good today as it will be for a hundred million years from now so you know this the cycle of the hydrogen house here is I make all my energy in the spring when I have no heater air condition loads so my 27 kilowatts goes into my electrolyzer that fills my 12 1000 gallon storage tanks each one of those storage tank holds the equivalent of about six gallons of propane or about five gallons of gasoline but when all of those to get all those 12 tanks together that's enough to power my house for 90 days so I've got a lot of storage here and that includes cooking gas heating gas and fuel for the car so that's the total energy picture being able to store that energy seasonally means whenever it's available I can store it in Hawaii you're blowing out 12 gigawatts worth of power from wind that you'll never see again in California right now they're taking that there they're actually done too good a job with renewables and now they are paying Arizona to take their power I basically turn this all into hydrogen and power the whole infrastructure you know I'll drag my trailer out to the desert you know set up an electrolyzer fill it up drive it back and you know power some forklifts or some Marais well one of the things that Hawaii has over most of the other states is that we figured out real early because we have a high penetration of renewable energy and solar in our state as you mentioned the electric company doesn't even want to help you anymore that we figured out that storing energy is a big part of this equation and batteries especially in a large scale aren't the best way to store that energy so we're breaking the code early out here that if if you really want to go down this road hydrogen is a great way to store energy and no better example than the hydrogen house over there in New Jersey so well just to let you know we're going to be doing a hydrogen house in Hilo so that'll be one of the next ones we're doing great we'll got about five scheduled we're building around the country okay well keep us posted on that and we'll go over and do a Skype show from Hilo back here to the studio and show everybody how that looks and believe it or not Mike we're up against our hard stop half hour and I'd like to thank you for being on again and we'll have you on again soon probably before you do the Hilo project but if not at least by then so thanks for being on with us Mike and look forward to talking to you again yeah you have to get out here and see the place sometime okay we'll do well everybody for watching this today I thank you for tuning in to think take Hawaii and make sure if you have any comments you send them in thanks to Cindy Monofukai and for to Robert McGlean for putting the show together for us here in the studio and I'm Stan Inners-Man we'll see you next week Friday hello