 Welcome to Stand to Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii, where we spare no expenses in bringing you the very best in energy programming right here with me, Stand to Energy Man, Stand Osserman. Thanks for joining us. So I've actually had some recent meetings with developers looking for ways to include sustainable options when designing and building modern communities using 100% renewable energy and specifically, photovoltaics. So what I'd like to do today is go over what a typical house would look like in one of these communities and talk about some of the advantages to this new concept over the existing model and the existing utility grid as well. I call this model the Sustainable Renewable Development and it includes zero carbon, 100% renewable energy, it's resilient in response to disasters, requires zero dependence on outside energy, including imported oil, or fuels and probably most importantly, at least here in Hawaii, is compatible with Hawaii's culture and values and is available even to lower income households. First of all, you have to understand that not all energy is the same, but it is convertible and storable. Making these models a reality will require bold thinking and action by the developer and by the county regulators, but the need is real and the timing is right because currently Hawaii imports over 87% of its energy, mostly in the form of coal and oil. Our transportation sector is mostly powered by gasoline and diesel and for that matter even aviation fuel, but we'll save that for a later show, which leaves Hawaii highly dependent on importing a great deal of petroleum based fossil fuel, even for our electric grid. Electric energy is very efficient, but infrastructure for delivering that energy is what I would call Jurassic, really old. It requires high voltage lines strung hundreds of miles over mountains, many of those lines with their vulnerable to trees falling or branches falling on them during a storm. These long transmission lines require boosting of voltage and reduction of voltage along the way, depending on where they're at, whether they're coming into a community or being pushed a long distance. And that requires transformers and substations containing equipment that would best be described as hazardous, not only to work on, but containing hazardous materials. On the transportation side of the equation, electric vehicles are powerful and efficient, but energy storage is and always has been a challenge. In addition, high percentage of our electric vehicles are being recharged off Hawaii's grid, which is predominantly fossil fuel generation. So in reality, a great number of electric vehicles on our roads today are essentially very inefficient gas guzzlers because they use electricity made from burning oil or coal. Our goal should be not only to use electric transportation, but to make sure that however the electricity is generated, it's generated cleanly. This is a role for hydrogen in transportation as well. And we'll talk about that later. Natural gas is already in use in a great number of Hawaii's homes and businesses. And although it is a carbon base fuel, as a fossil fuel, it's much cleaner than oil or coal when you burn it. Also natural gas is a byproduct of waste treatment. So natural gas is produced at wastewater treatment facilities and also builds up underground at landfills. And the experts tell me that if all of our wastewater systems and landfills could be put into service, it would provide about 12% of the required cooking gas needed in our state. So using our own natural gas from these waste products and processes is important because natural gas or methane in its raw state is supposed to be much more dangerous, 14 times I've been told, more dangerous than greenhouse gases and the carbon dioxide produced when you burn it. So the idea with natural gas is to use the natural gas that we produce in our landfills and our wastewater treatment plants by burning it in systems rather than letting it go into the air. So hydrogen fits dramatically into not only the grid and vehicle transportation, but also into that transition and to make in our natural gas even cleaner and more viable. We'll discuss this as we press ahead. I'd like to begin with some numbers to give you an idea of where you could start in calculating your own ideal little microgrid or community and this would work for a single family home or for even a community of folks who want to get together. These numbers are general and can be refined, but they represent typical values here in the state and give you a starting point. We have a mild climate here and it's all year long. Other geographical advantages not found in places farther north of the equator. We have frost lines and heavy snowfalls and short days in the wintertime. But you could take these numbers and adjust them for your own local region. For starters, the average single family home in Hawaii uses between 20 and 30 kilowatt hours of electricity per day. Also the typical day would give us about five hours of sunlight for a typical photovoltaic panel. In other words, a typical 300 watt panel on the south facing roof would produce about 300 watts for five hours out of a 24 hour day. It may produce a little more or a little less depending on how much shading is happening being provided by mountains or trees or just clouds going by. A typical photovoltaic panel of about 300 watts of power covers about 15 square feet of area. So for planning purposes, you need to be practical about how many panels you can actually put on a typical single family roof and how much power is realistic from a home size or multi-home development. Another handy number that we use in Hawaii is the average driver commutes about 40 miles a day, and that gives us a number to work with for transportation calculations. When it comes to making hydrogen, we use this formula that we use this formula of 60 kilowatt hours of electricity to make one kilogram of clean hydrogen using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This is important because a lot of times when you buy hydrogen, it's actually steam reform methane, which is good if you're getting rid of natural methane, but not good if you're just using natural gas and turning it into hydrogen. Typically, when electrolyzers are used, the oxygen is just released into the atmosphere, but that oxygen can very easily be captured for industrial use like welding or even medical use in hospitals because oxygen comes off the proton exchange membrane electrolyzer is medical grade. Hydrogen can also be produced from methane, but it's not as clean as hydrogen that comes from an electrolyzer and splitting water. But remember that we have that 12% methane we need to turn into clean fuel, and this could be an option to make steam-reformed hydrogen. Another thing to consider with natural gas is that hydrogen can be mixed in natural gas to boost the energy available for the customers. It's also worth noting that natural gas industry is looking into hydrogen as a potential follow-on to methane and propane to become a fossil fuel-free gas provider. The reason the gas industry is working at the incremental pace towards 100% hydrogen is due to several factors. First, and foremost, there's an abundance of natural gas already, ensuring that the price of natural gas will stay low for several years and possibly even a decade or two. On the engineering side, there are other considerations. The use of pure hydrogen in high pressure and high temperature equipment, including pipelines, can cause embrittlement to components that contain a lot of iron in their metallurgy, like in existing pipelines. So currently, the gas industry limits its pressurized pipelines, and most of the equipment that runs off of its natural gas to 15% hydrogen mixed in with its natural gas. But scientists and engineers are working to determine how best to convert existing infrastructure to be able to handle higher and higher gas percentages of hydrogen mixed into natural gas. So if we take the numbers I just talked about and try to turn them into a practical example, we can say that it takes approximately 20 photovoltaic panels and 300 square feet of roof space to make 30 kilowatts of electricity every day for the typical single family home. When you're actually driver on our neighborhoods, I notice that the actual number of photovoltaic panels range between 12 and 25. I can only assume that houses with 25 or more panels probably have charging electric vehicles they have to account for, which requires an awful lot of energy. Cars and transportation require a lot of energy. So if you're thinking about doing it on your house, you have to take that into account if you're planning on an electric vehicle in your future. But they may also have central air conditioning or other appliances in the house that have a heavy electricity draw. So let's say we're making 30 kilowatt hours of electricity every day with our 20 photovoltaic panels and hopefully just a little bit more so we can make some hydrogen at the end of the day when we're done charging our batteries. But just like other electric cars, hydrogen fuel cell cars require quite a bit of energy to run. The typical electrolyzer needs 60 kilowatt hours of energy to make one kilogram of hydrogen. And this one kilogram will literally take several days of surplus energy to come up with with our existing model. That one kilogram could add, if you wanted to make more than one kilogram a day extra, you could add more panels to ensure that you get more hydrogen, just like the folks who have more panels to charge their electric cars or take care of other appliances. So as I said, the typical car we use to travel here about 40 to 50 miles a day and the typical electric car would probably require 40 kilowatt hours, 50 kilowatt hours to go that distance. Maybe a little bit further and hydrogen cars require 60 kilowatt hours to make a kilogram of hydrogen that will take them 50 or 60 miles. So you can see by adding more PV panels to your roof and possibly even doubling it or tripling it, you could be making enough electricity to meet not only your household requirements, but all of your transportation requirements for plug-in vehicles or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. So if your robust electrical panels are calculated into thousands of dollars and given a 20-year lifespan, then you can calculate your electric bill per month and your gasoline bill per month for your car and your natural gas bill if you have gas appliances and do the math and easily figure out whether you're better off on or off the grid. Just don't forget that prices of electricity and utility prices and almost all other commodities are going up over time, but your investment up front is a known amount and even if it's expensive, you can take out a loan at probably less than four or five percent right now and pay for it over time instead of paying those current gas bills and electric bills which are bound to go up. By the way, I haven't included tax breaks or other incentives, which are also available a lot of cases for electric vehicles and I feel very comfortable betting that the price of fossil fuel and electricity will start to go much higher than it is today as demand increases for electricity and supply decreases of fossil fuels. We're going to take a quick break here and be back in 60 seconds and we'll continue to talk a little bit more specifically about this model. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of Crossroads in Learning on Think Tech Hawaii. On Crossroads in Learning, our guests and I discuss all aspects of education here in Hawaii and throughout the country. You can join us for stimulating conversations to enrich, enliven and educate. We are streamed live on Think Tech bi-weekly at 4 p.m. on Mondays. Thanks so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. Aloha. So welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Stan Osterman here and we're talking about how the perfect, I'd say perfect house would be like in the future, maybe in perfect community if we took hydrogen and flywheels and other things that can incorporate them into our everyday house. So how does this system look in a real house? First of all, your solar panels make DC power and the DC power would go directly to the batteries or to inverter which converts your DC power into AC power that your house requires for most of its appliances and even in your lighting. But oftentimes DC power goes strictly to the batteries and the batteries provide power to the inverter giving your house the AC power that it needs. It's worth stopping to consider though that some other alternatives are available at this point. For example, lighting with conventional incandescent light bulbs wastes a lot of electricity and produces a lot of heat. And the current LED lighting technology is much more efficient but utilizes the same DC power that's already stored in your batteries. So rather than converting it, you could just use it straight off the batteries. So the photovoltaic panels produce the DC power and it's available right directly from there or through your batteries. So what's the advantages of taking the DC power and running it through an inverter and then converting it back into DC power for your lights? Not much. Why not just separate the systems in your new house so that all of your lighting stays DC? This uses actually thinner wires through your house because you're not carrying as much of a load through it and produces less heat and uses less energy. It's also safer. There's already a large industry producing DC lighting suitable for residential and commercial use, sometimes at 12 volt and sometimes as high as 48 volt. So you might want to consider a dual electric system in this new future home. So as you make your system in your house more efficient, you can take any surplus power from your photovoltaic system and instead of sending it to your batteries if they're already charged, hopefully, you can take that and send the extra electricity to an electrolyzer and make and store hydrogen. This hydrogen can be stored on site at your house at low pressure or could be collected at a community centralized location or could even be collected by maybe the gas company and then redistributed later to you and your neighbors. We'll talk a little bit more about that option later. So if you've been planning ahead in your house and making extra electricity that you're turning it to hydrogen and storing it at your house and you purchased a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle from Toyota or Honda or Hyundai or any of the manufacturers that are currently in production besides them or coming out of vehicles, you can even be making the fuel for your vehicle. And oh by the way, even making the fuel to replace your propane or your natural gas for cooking, water heating, clothes drying, and this brings us to an interesting discussion. If you're designing a community, there are benefits to consolidating and storing energy such as hydrogen. Or might there be better ways to store the hydrogen at low pressure at each residence and still have a small compressor to store the kilogram or so of extra hydrogen they make per day and use it for cooking fuel or clothes drying or maybe even enough for your car as well. It may be more cost effective, particularly when the hydrogen industry is going through so many changes that will ultimately decrease the cost of equipment to build larger centralized storage systems where the residents could buy back the hydrogen from say the gas company or some other power provider and make the electricity from the power that's capable of making and storing at a large scale rather than individually at each house. But both options are possible. The option also brings with it the advantage of co-mixing hydrogen with natural gas in the transition time for natural gas. It's also worth pointing out that currently natural gas backup generators are available for your house today. And they're quite affordable for individual homes. So between the independence of having your photovoltaic cells, the reliability of modern batteries and the flexibility of hydrogen and natural gas to store your energy, there are multiple options to remain independent from outside power. You could actually store the hydrogen or natural gas and use it to fuel generators or fuel cells and recharge all your batteries if the solar panels aren't getting out of sunlight or a summer damage in a storm. This independence should not only lower the cost of your overall energy consumption, but bring resiliency to your community. After natural disaster, a storm. As I've stated before, unless a disaster is truly catastrophic, there will be pockets of resilient power available, providing electricity and hydrogen after typical disasters if you follow this model, to make sure that other hard to hit communities still have ice and electricity for those communities. I'm going to put up a diagram that at first glance looks a little bit complex and confusing, but it's really pretty easy to follow and logical. And I'll explain it as I go into it. In fact, I even left some of the things off because it would make it look even more complicated. So throughout the graphic, keep in mind a few formulas we talked about, like the number of PV panels and how much fuel you'd use in your car or how much fuel you use in a gas dryer and things like that to make sense of today for us to plan for communities of the future. So we'll bring up the diagram and let me talk a little bit about it. In the center of the diagram is your typical house and that grid looking thing on top are your photovoltaic panels. So you'll notice there's two blue arrows, one kind of going off to the left and one going off to the right. The one going off to the left goes directly to batteries. The one to the right goes to an electrolyzer. So what happens that DC power goes to your batteries and that's where you store your immediate energy you need right away to help your house handle its smooth out its own load the way the electric company smooths out its load to your house now on their big grid. Your battery management and your control systems in your inverters will do that for you if you buy decent quality equipment. So DC power goes to your batteries and then if you need AC power you send DC power to the inverters and they send AC power to your house. On the right hand side, if you send DC power to an electrolyzer you notice you also have water being input into that picture from the bottom right. You can be making hydrogen and a little note up in the upper right hand of that pentagon shows you can release oxygen either for sale or just release it back into the air and make your hydrogen and store it. So once it's stored you can send the hydrogen over to a stationary fuel cell so you can actually charge your batteries when the solar panels are working from the stationary fuel cell can charge your batteries or you can take that hydrogen and instead of sending it up and over to the left you send it down and over to the center where you have the option to take a generator that runs off of natural gas or hydrogen to make AC power to power your house and use the same AC power to run a battery charger to charge your batteries up again. So you can see how there's a great redundancy here on different ways you can manage the energy that you have in your system whether it's through a DC system only through hydrogen and stored energy through natural gas of stored energy or through produced by the solar power and everything is all self-contained. You don't require anything from the outside except possibly some water. So what you've got there is a really really good example just a quick example of what it can look like and I hope this gives you a little better picture of how all this could work together and I hope it encourages you to look a little bit closer about how you can gain independence and survivability in a world where energy demand is growing rapidly and fossil fuels are heading towards limited and expensive days ahead. It's really a pretty simple model and I didn't want to go into things like the central storage and things like that which requires you know an intermediate utility or a power provider to manage the hydrogen or manage the natural gas in a big community but right now it may be a better option to use a central storage system while the components for hydrogen are still a little expensive and once the unit cost for household scale hydrogen electrolyzers and fuel cells drops down but things are happening fast in the hydrogen world so this model may work great on an individual household scale in just the next couple of years. To give an example the Toyota Mirai that people are driving now in here in Honolulu and in California those vehicles have a 114 kilowatt fuel cell in them and a 114 kilowatt fuel cell with five kilograms of hydrogen would run your house for three or four days maybe even longer and it can drive your car 300 miles and that fuel cell over the last 20 years has gotten 95 lighter 95 cheaper and much more productive than they were 20 years ago when Toyota started looking at hydrogen so the efficiencies are building up quickly and the products that are coming out of the hydrogen industry now are getting more and more cost effective so you just need to keep looking at it but their options are there if a big community wanted to pull all of their curtailed power together and sell that electricity back to a central management entity that runs that runs a community storage system for the hydrogen and maybe runs a community pool for the natural gas I think you'd have a winning combination of 100 renewable energy all the way around and I think that's where we ought to be aiming in fact that's a stated goal of our state here is to be off fossil fuels in our grid by 2045 and I can tell you that's going to be tough to do without a plan using a model like this and I think the transportation sector is underestimated when it comes to thinking about how our grid's going to be in the next 20 to 30 years with all those vehicles those plug-in electric vehicles on the road that's an increase in grid power that we're going to need to account for as we're also trying to downscale into all renewable energy going into the grid I don't think I don't think people realize how much energy is stored in the tankers and the and the pipelines that our electric company uses right now to keep hawaii going day to day with all the power it needs it's an incredibly huge amount of energy storage and I can see our power requirements almost doubling in the next 30 years with transportation requiring more electricity and we're going to have to find solutions that include a lot more hydrogen and possibly even some natural gas in the in the middle to get us to 2050 and be totally clean and totally independent so I hope you enjoyed looking at today's example and getting some of those rules of thumb numbers to apply in your own life and they're they're pretty basic and if you have a good basic understanding of electricity and you work with a professional contractor on your solar installation plus batteries you're well on your way to some really good energy independence and go look for those natural gas and propane generators that can be used with gas appliances and maybe just between your gas appliances and your solar plus batteries you might be able to just pull yourself off the grid now anyway that's it for stand energy man this week I thank you for joining me here in hawaii and we'd like to talk to you again join us next week Tuesday at 3 p.m hawaii standard time or catch us on youtube standard energy man signing off aloha