 Well, and welcome back to Stand Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii, where community matters. Hey, it's been two weeks since I've been on the air. First Hurricane Lane interrupted everything out here and had us a good practice run for a potentially pretty nasty hurricane coming right into Hawaii, right up the chain into Oahu. When I look back at my old hurricane tracking days in the National Guard, it looked like one that could have potentially been pretty, pretty bad by hitting us with that front-right quadrant coming right up the chain. So we dodged a bullet there, made it through that week, and then this past week, we just moved our HCAT offices where we'd been for over 25 years, and we shut everything down and moved into some new office space. It's amazing how much stuff you accumulate in 25 years, but that's what kept me off the air last weekend, last week. Anyway, I've got a great show for you today with a gentleman named Chris McWinnie. Not his first rodeo for us. We're going to have a little fireside chat with Chris from Ohio, and he makes some outstanding equipment that's great for the scale that, I mean, he'll grow bigger, but he specializes in units that are more small-scale friendly. Let's just put it that way. He'll take exception to that, I think, but it's a great equipment. Our units that we have out here, we have two of them, are two kilograms of hydrogen a day, and we use them for our in-shop testing work and also out at the Air National Guard for our weapons loader. So Chris, welcome to the show. Good to have you on board, and I'm glad you could make it in. I hear you got a hurricane coming your way, or at least the remnants of one blowing into Ohio now. Yeah, thanks, Dan, for having me today. The one that came up from Florida just made it here about 30 minutes ago, so got a little windy and a little rain. Okay. All right. Well, I don't know if people remember much about your intro from last time. Give us a quick rundown on your background and how you got Millennium Rain started, and then let's look at some of your equipment and some of the things you've been doing over the last year or two. Tell me something on his desk one evening, and I asked him what that was. It looked really weird. It was about the size of a little pill bottle or something, and he said it was an electrolyzer, and I said, what's an electrolyzer? And he said, well, it's they make a hydrogen and oxygen out of electricity and water. And I said, hmm, what good hydrogen? He said, well, space shuttle runs on it. And I was like, dang, we can make that kind of power out of water and electricity. Why aren't we doing that instead of gasoline now? That was like 27 or 28 years ago. And when he said that, and so my mind started working on it and trying to figure out the two reasons he said that nobody was doing it was because gasoline was still like 75 cents a gallon and the electrolyzers and the equipment to make the hydrogen cost a lot of money and it just wasn't economically feasible and it also took a lot of electricity. And so I thought, well, you know, I was really naive and I thought, surely I could make it cheaper than what anybody else was making it and didn't even know how one was worked, how one worked. And then I thought that we could use wind and solar possibly to drive the electrolysis and could spread the time, the money for that capital expenditure over a period of time. And so, you know, Dave and I had a conversation. Dave, my partner, Dave Herbal, we had a conversation for six hours in a car on the way home from a meeting in North Carolina for another business we ran together and played devil's advocate for six hours and thought we came up with a way to make something like that work. And then two weeks later, Dave quit the business we ran and I didn't see him again for 13 years and consequently I didn't do anything with the idea. And then in 2001, when 9-11 happened and the business I was in was a financial services business and, you know, it rocked the world and stock market crashed and I was looking for something else, you know, to try to do to make up the income I'd lost and started looking and really discovered more about hydrogen and started developing it and started developing a patent. And then the day I sent the patent, I ran into Dave again after 13 years and not seeing him and it was like a meant to be thing. So we started working in my garage in 2004 on the product and by 2013, we moved out of my little garage and into a big old Cadillac dealership with 40,000 square feet. Now we own that clear and free and we've got 25 products commercialized and we're ready to start going out to the world with products that can really revolutionize the energy industry. And so in all that time, you know, that you were developing this technology and learning about it, you know, because, you know, you got to understand it before you can go into business with it. You know, if you're like me, I just the more I learned about the hydrogen, the more excited I got. And and it's like I'm a kind of a pessimist up front. So I try and shoot holes and everything. And I just couldn't find a whole lot of downside to the hydrogen piece. Is that the same with you? Yeah, it definitely is the thing that keeps me motivated. I mean, the obstacles and the mountains that we're climbing and moving and and jumping over walls and and things are just, you know, monumental and the fact that it's so obvious that the world needs to go to this for a multitude of reasons is what keeps me motivated because the world needs this big time. Well, let's look at some of the stuff that you've been working on over the past couple of years. We'll bring up some some graphics. And the first one is a bus that you've got refueling at one of your hydrogen stations. Can you tell us a little bit about that one? Yeah, so this is that Ohio State University Center for Automotive Research. It's a 12 kilogram a day production facility with compression and and a production, compression and purification in a build in an enclosure that's off to the right of the picture there that you can't see. And then the the enclosure that you can see there, that's a 24 kilogram storage system with 6,000 PSI. And that front door opens and that's the nozzle to fuel that bus. And that bus falls kids around campus and it's on loan from a company in Canton, Ohio, Cleveland area that has 12 fuel cell buses that they're putting out and and running up there for SARDA. And so we've been fueling that for over a year now and learning a lot from from from that process. And the 12 kilograms a day is enough to keep that bus going around the campus. It has 50 kilograms of storage in the white part of the roof up there with a big tank and so it's only 24 kilograms. So we can only get it about half full all the time. And and so it our system had to run 24 seven around the clock. Seven days a week to keep up with it. So it could just have enough fuel to run five days a week. And then we have to catch up with it running over the weekend. So we had to do that one over again. We we have to put in twice as size of system. And does it run off wind or solar or they've got a touch of the grid right now? No, it's just running off the grid there. OK. All right. The next image we got coming up is it looks real familiar. It looks like a place we just moved out of down on Cook Street in Honolulu. And that's an MJ1E jammer. We call it a jammer. It's a weapons loader that US hybrid built for the Air Force. And behind it is the Millennium Rain Unit that we purchased from you that we used to to actually fill that vehicle and some of our other vehicles who were doing our testing and maintenance at our facility. So what's different about the unit that you see there in the background and the ones that you make now? This unit in the background was like our third generation of this. And we're on our you'll see in the picture coming up. This is actually classified as a model 100 where it does two kilograms a day. And this one had two kilograms of storage on it. And then you can see there's some some cylinders in the back of it that gives it an extra six eight altogether. And so the the new one just got a lot of advancements that we've actually learned part in part from you running it and and out there and running into things that maybe we needed to tweak a little better or fix a little better and that kind of thing. And people like that have been extremely helpful for so over the period of time. And and so and so the next one that you're going to see in the next picture, I think it shows the the much improved version. Right. And it's two kilograms a day also. Yeah, the next one you're going to see is two kilograms a day. Yeah, we actually had it up for a little while. Now we've got the image of that unit in the truck. And this one's going to wear. OK, all right. Can we back up one over? Yeah, OK. Are you back? Yeah, so this one here was commissioned by the Navy and there is a research lab is running some is testing filling drones. They discovered a lot of people have actually discovered that flying drones can fly three to six times further on hydrogen than the gallon batteries. And so that's a really important thing when you're trying to get flight time out of something so you don't have to come back and fuel get a lot more distance. And so this is this is the new model 100 that replaces the one that you've got. And so what we've done now is we have four different models that fit in the same package. A model 100, a model 102, a model 104 and a 200. And if you look at them on the outside, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart until you open the door. When you open that front door, there's either a two kilogram stack a day or four kilogram stack a day in there from four kilograms standard of storage grams at a time. So a 100 has two kilograms a day production with four kilograms store in a 200 is four kilograms a day of production with eight kilograms of store loading in the truck. It gives you kind of an idea of the scale of it. We're getting ready to go off to deliver the unit. All right. And that one for the Navy, like you say, they're using it for drones, which for me is that's an easy thing to make because, you know, when I tell everybody I'm the hydrogen versus, so to say, batteries when you're trying to run electric motors is the weight. You know, how do you beat hydrogen for energy density by weight? You just can't. There's no battery in the world that can beat the energy density of hydrogen by weight. And so when you when you sit there and think, if you put a fuel cell and put solar panels on the wing of an airplane, you can actually take the wastewater that's coming off the fuel cell and put a small electrolyzer in there and turn it back into hydrogen and even make the airplane fly longer by using the wastewater or the expelled water or vapor that comes off the fuel cell and you could extend that life. So I know that Boeing is working on a large scale platform that right now it goes up and stays airborne for three days. And their goal is to get it to stay airborne 10 days. And that's what you can do with hydrogen. You can't do with batteries. Yeah, incredible. OK, the next image coming up is one of it looks like the campus again. Yeah, we're back at Ohio State University. It's there for automotive research in Columbus, Ohio. And that is a little gem that they had. They have two fuel cells on there that are little 1500 watt fuel cells and batteries, and we worked out a deal and traded that. So we have that in our shop now, but this shows the entire model 300 at OSU with the building or the enclosure that was off camera when the bus picture was up a little bit ago. So you can see that one as it comes in color schemes. So you can get painted and in the next picture, I think is a type of model 300, but that was all stainless steel. Right. Yeah, we have that image up now. Yeah, this one's at Sonoma in Sonoma, California at the Stone Edge Farms micro grid. And this is a winery, a 14 acre farm working farm. And they have a Honda Clarities with this station. You can see the the the vehicle lined up to fuel up there at the station. Now, this one has been, I got to say something about these guys because they're like you guys and Blue Planet. They have helped us out so much. We learned how to really collect data on the fueling protocols for that the tank is filling at the right speed and doesn't overheat and helping us prove to the rest of the industry that we have a less expensive way to fuel vehicles. And we're really making some big weeks and bounds in the coast and standards arenas with this with this with because of the information we've collected from them. So we owe those guys a big debt of gratitude. Yeah, we're going to spend a little bit more time. We're going to take a quick break right now and we come back. We're going to talk a little bit more in detail about those standards and some of the challenges that you've had getting the industry at large to accept the technology and some of the standards and codes that that you've gotten real familiar with and you've had to adapt to. So we'll be back in about 60 seconds 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 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, Hawaiian Uniform, Fridays, 11 a.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha. Aloha. I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday. Aloha. Welcome back to Stand Energy Man and Chris McWinnie, live direct from Ohio, where it's raining because they're getting their own aftermaths of a hurricane right now. And we're talking a little bit about a project that Chris has been working on for several years out in a winery in California. And as most of you that follow Hydrogen know, California has kind of been the state that's been leading the charge on hydrogen with infrastructure and with vehicles. So if you want to buy a Hyundai, production Hyundai fuel cell vehicle or Toyota, Marai or Honda Clarity, California is the place to go. In fact, most of the people that even have them on the East Coast go to California to buy them and drive them back to the East Coast. But it comes with some challenges when you're the first. And Chris's system is a little bit different. He works mostly on the low pressure side right now. And the cars go to 10,000 PSI. His systems go to 5,000 PSI, which is good in a lot of ways. It makes things simpler and easier for the user. But it creates some challenges. And Chris, why don't you talk a little bit about just getting a company like Toyota to accept a system that's a little bit different that they're not used to. You've got solutions that address their issues, but how hard it is to talk to a big company and say, I've got answers to your questions. Here's my answers. Why can't you accept them? So to give you can talk a little bit about that. OK. So yeah, a pool of money to put out fueling stations. And they've got programs that can reimburse or like grant or take up some of the slack on what it costs to fund these stations. That's up to 75 to 85%. And so for stations that can do 100 to 200 kilograms a day at 10,000 PSI and be J2601 standardized fueling protocols. And so those are the companies that can do that are the only ones that are getting that money. And it's been a very successful program. They've got 32, I think, now stations out. They've got 5,000 cars running around California and they're really running up against it from a standpoint of not having enough hydrogen or hydrogen stations. And I was just sitting with one of the leaders of one of the companies that's got more stations out than anybody. And they said they've got cars lined up three to 10 deep almost every day at the stations they got. So there's a huge demand as this infrastructure has really taken off. And what Millennium Rain Energy is trying to do is say, look, you know, what if we can build something a little less costly? That station you're looking at on the picture right there, we can install that for 325,000. The big stations that they're building now are between three million and others, depending on how much their output is, you have to think strategically. If you're going to put out $3 million or run the station and there's only four cars in the area and it's making them, you know, it can pump out 100 kilograms a day and, you know, the four cars need, you know, two, you got way more than you need and there's no way you can ever make a payoff hydrogen fueling infrastructure to work. You have to be able to make it three levels. You have to be able to make it feasible so that the car owner can actually save money by buying hydrogen where it's cheaper than a gallon of gas equivalent. The station owner can buy the station and put it on and make money selling hydrogen and the manufacturer can make money so things can work and you don't need the government subsidies and you can actually create a business that is capable on its own. So what you need to have is something that's a less costly approach and that's why we are at 6,000 PSI in the station and it dispenses at 5,000 PSI into the car and yes they get half a bill and they go maybe 160 miles instead of 320 miles but that's one and you can still fuel with our system in eight minutes. Pre-chillers, we don't have to compress it up that high on site, purified on site, compressed on site. What you've done is that you've made the city meet the demand and so then you take this station out and you put in this great big thing out there and duplicate all the gas stations that we have in the world and if you think back in time what originally the engines came out they basically had a 200 gallon tank up on stilts and a gravity filter car right now what they're trying to do with those infrastructures are trying to jump way out in the future and build them and make them look like they are right then and not there so now because we're taking this approach which sounds right when you say it like that it's caused some challenges for us in fueling because we had to create a fueling protocol on our own that didn't require pre-chilling it would still fill the car in a reasonable amount of time and when the codes first came out in 2010 they had this chart it was chart D for a 35 MPH fill which is 5,000 PSI and if you followed that chart it would take you an hour and a half to fill up your car in 2013 actually in 2011 we filled a General Motors fuel cell vehicle and they brought their computer down and tested our system and showed that we were actually doing it correctly and we started to the world like these other car companies because I'm part of these codes and standards committees and we started sharing the data that we had and they didn't believe it they thought we were some kind of born to them because of the every old work they did said it took an hour and a half and we were doing it in eight minutes how we could do that in some years three or four years we've been continuing to collect data we've had this information in front of them and Toyota headquarters and SAE meetings and Honda headquarters in Detroit which I'm going there next week for another meeting and maybe there is an alternative to the codes okay yeah I want to just go back and point out some really important points you just made number one when you started your company it was all about putting the price point at the right spot to fill a demand and make it all work when you said the stations are three to four million dollars a lot of those stations even at the low end aren't producing hydrogen they're just dispensing stations with big tube trailers behind them so the cheap production that they're getting off of steam reform methane and stuff like that they're producing the hydrogen as cheaply as they can and they're driving it in trucks and delivering it someplace and it's not even really clean hydrogen number two you know you talked about compression there's a couple things that happen with those 10,000 PSI cars that you have to pre-chill because what people don't understand is when you're evacuating the hydrogen out of your tanks those tanks get cool but when you're pushing it into the car that car's tank gets hot and they're trying to and not so much that that's dangerous but what it is is it messes with the calculation of exactly how much fuel you're getting in the cars so it's not so much a safety issue as keeping the volume standard issue between the dispenser and the car and yours is a mechanical control where theirs is a physics they're dropping the temperature and they're pushing it in and they're monitoring the temperature of the tank real time where you really don't have to do that and so I think your system is spot on and it fills a very special place in the marketplace that's really important right now and I think that's really critical that's why we like working with your system and dealing with it because it fills a very special place let's quickly throw up some of the last pictures I'll let you go through them really quick because we're coming up on the end of our time here but there's your trolley in Dubai why don't you talk about that a little bit so it put a fuel cell on it so it could get a range extender on it and it went around the track in downtown Dubai so that was pretty interesting to go to an international country and install that go ahead with that this one is a 3D rendering of our new 10,000 PSI station so we are doing 10,000 PSI and so go to the next picture we're going to be taking it on up to 13,000 PSI and those red tanks and there's two banks there it'll cascade and it'll actually hook up to our Model 300 we're going to be taking it from 6,000 to 10,000 with just one plug and play unit so when you get ready and you've got enough cars there and you've got the volume to afford it you can just take this small little unit and then bump yourself right up to a 70MPA station really economically we're going to be able to sell that unit for less than 150,000 or around 150,000 I think I'd like to point out though this station as you can see where the forklift fits inside it's basically a piece of equipment it's not a building, it's not a structure you basically put this in place connect up the water, connect up the electricity and you're off and running and when you need to build a bigger station you build the big station and you put this someplace where you need it that doesn't require the volume right, same week we had CSA for the 11th day CSA is a nationally recognized third party laboratory like getting something UL certified CSA stands for Canadian Standards Association and we actually developed a code and standard that they have adopted in getting it public and we just passed all the tests for our fueling protocols of our hydrogen that's produced by our machines just like rain tests and shake tests and by mid-October we should be the first of CSA certified to fuel when you go to install these stations out there in the world from a standpoint of the authority having jurisdiction giving you a permit Alright Chris, well we've actually banged up against the end of our time and we went a little bit over but it's been great talking to you again and we're going to have you back again in a couple of weeks or so and we'll spend a little bit more time talking about the certifications in standard but thanks again for being on the show this week and until next week Friday standard gym and signing off