 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hello and welcome to Stand Energy Man, I'm Stan Osserman, your guest host of Stand Energy Man every Friday here at 12 o'clock on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. It's been a heck of a year, I mean how can it already be Thanksgiving and today's Black Friday which means all the businesses finally go in the black after staying in the red all year long and they finally get to sell Christmas stuff starting today. But I'm willing to bet that Cyber Monday is going to take over Black Friday anytime now because they're already encroaching. I see it happening on my computer every time I turn it on. Anyway, today's show is a solo show but I promised everyone we'd catch up on some of the things that I experienced two weeks ago in California at the Fuel South Seminar Energy Exposition and it was a great event. We got to do a lot of great things. I'd like to start off with the first day of the fuel cell and energy expo was actually run by the Department of Energy for an effort they call H2 at scale. And I'm also going to talk a little bit about the Hydrogen Council because they were an integral, I think they're an integral part of what the Department of Energy is trying to do. So the US Department of Energy is embarked on a push to get hydrogen up to scale to compete with fossil fuels in all sectors. And the entire afternoon of the first day was dedicated to presentations and discussions hosted by the Department of Energy. The focal presentation was given by Mr. Brian Pivalvar or Pivalvar from the National Renewable Energy Lab, also known as NREL. He talked about the work being done by all of the national labs that make up the steering committee and seven subcommittees, almost 100 people focused on moving hydrogen from the fuel of the future to the energy storage that is fully ready for primetime now. These folks are looking at hydrogen from every perspective and from the biggest part of the puzzle is actually focusing on what it costs to make clean hydrogen, which has always been the it doesn't pencil out story that I kept hearing over and over again. These folks have finally gotten to the point where they're saying it's going to pencil out, it's already started. So H2 at scale is a congressionally funded effort that started in 2016 as part of the Department of Energy's Big Idea Summit in April of 2016. And I'm proud to say that Hawaii and HCAT in particular had input into this foundational effort. So one of the illustrations that Mr. Pivalvar starts with is a side-by-side comparison of two photos of downtown Denver. On the left is a beautiful December day and on the right is a smog bank shot of the exact same city the very next day. And the reason this caught my attention is that we in Hawaii often fail to see the pollution we generate because we have trade winds that sweep our skies clear most of the time. And when we do have Vogue, we blame it on the volcano. But if you do a dawn patrol surfing thing like I try and do in the summertime you can often see Hawaiian smog hanging to the south over the horizon on any early summer morning. We're not as clean as we think we are. And it's time to take responsibility and clean up our act. And that picture of Denver really brought that home. It's like that in every city. Sometimes the weather cooperates, sometimes it lets you see what you're really doing. In Hawaii we're often fooled to think that we have really clean air and we don't. We have air that's polluted and pushed out to sea. And that's not right. The first graph on this slide deck shows a comparison between nuclear, coal, natural gas, wind and solar. And it shows that the cost of the power for each of those technologies currently based on the fully burdened and unsubsidized cost and it shows clearly that nuclear and coal are hovering around between 9 and 10 kilowatt hours per dollar. Natural gas is next up at around 15 kilowatt hours per dollar and solar is clocking in at 18 kilowatt hours per dollar. Wind is coming in at the top of the best value at about 22 kilowatt hours per dollar. And that puts wind at about four to four and a half cents per kilowatt hour. As a rule of thumb, we say that seven cents a kilowatt hour is a break-even point for electrolysis to compete with gasoline and diesel. So if you use those numbers I just quoted, you can see that both solar and wind are already beating that seven cents a kilowatt hour production cost. And if you can factor in some other things like transportation costs, compression costs and things like that and you can get those costs down, we're going to not only already be a good competition with gasoline and other fossil fuels, we could start beating it. The next major point of his study is that the grid, as the grid adopts more and more intermittent renewable, the power that's needed to store it gets to be above 25%. That storage challenge is usually looked at as traditional battery storage and it becomes much harder. And above 54% intermittent renewables, the challenge of storing energy becomes extremely difficult. Here in Hawaii we're at about 18 to 20% storage of intermittent renewables and you can tell that Hawaii Electric is already struggling by how many interconnect agreements they'll sign off on and how many of our solar companies are struggling right now. So these folks on this committee looked at all the advantages of manufacturing, storing hydrogen as a multifaceted solution to several energy challenges including using the natural gas grid to move hydrogen for energy. It also stores hydrogen for energy and using electrolyzers as a load to help stabilize and balance the grid is also another technique that they looked at as being really a pivotal role for hydrogen as we start to absorb more and more renewable energies. Not only is the hydrogen important for that but using hydrogen to advance electric vehicles and making synthetic fuels, upgrading oil and biomass energy density. A lot of the biomass and biodiesels and things that we use just don't carry quite the energy density or the amount of energy they need but you can actually boost their energy carrying capacity by injecting hydrogen. Manufacturers of fertilizers is another area where hydrogen could help lower carbon emissions in the manufacture of fertilizers. Metals refining like steel and glass and other ceramic industries use hydrogen and there's a wide range of industrial processes that are filled by hydrogen currently at smaller scales but when you put them all together it's a huge market. In addition, hydrogen can be used to modify grids that utilize distributed generation to produce power at the point of demand and eliminating the long-haul grid lines that stretch between cities and some of the sub-urban and rural areas that they service. In summary, the US Department of Energy sees hydrogen as an economically viable way to help a variety of sectors as we focus on cleaner power generation. Considering the fact that hydrogen is so plentiful and that the technology is so well understood, it's only a matter of time before hydrogen takes over as the dominant energy storage technology bringing stable prices and overall lower prices to our society and actually around the world. The fuel cell seminar and energy exhibition that I went to on day two so that what I just talked about was what the Department of Energy ran on the first day, the first afternoon, morning was registration, afternoon was H2 at scale run by the Department of Energy. The rest of the next two days were run by the folks running the fuel cell seminar and energy exposition and what I'm going to do is just run through some photos and talk about what we looked at there. The first one is a really poor shot of Queen Mary but I wanted to throw it in there because we kind of forget that not only is Long Beach a great place to visit as a vacation thing and has some great sights and places to tour like the Queen Mary but for those of you from Hawaii as you walk along that waterfront there there's a historical montage of all of the what they call the trans-pack races, the sailboat races that occur between the mainland and Hawaii and have been going on since early 1900s if not earlier. The names and faces that you see on those photos along that boardwalk are just amazing and to think how many years Hawaii's had a connection right there to Long Beach it's pretty cool. We held our event at the convention center there and it's just like our convention center is a pretty impressive new structure. It can host quite a number of people but it was a great place to meet and good places to have breakouts. The next shot is the audiences at the plenary session and this will give you an idea of how many folks showed up now. The conference this year had between seven and eight hundred attendees and this picture here is typical of not only the plenary session and the session that DOE ran with the hydrogen and scale but this was a well attended event the sponsors and the event organizers were really happy with the turnout and I can tell you that usually by day two people start tapering off and the room gets empty this room was full every single day and this was one of the plenary sessions the first one in fact I think the speaker up there looks like it's one of the panels we can look at the next photo the panels that happened were concise, they had great industry and government folks showing up as well as some investors that talked about the different aspects of hydrogen and what the role it's going to play in the future and next shot is one of my favorite presenters he's a guy from California his name is Tyson, Eric Lee has been a guest on my show once or twice and he is actually directly under Governor Brown in California as doing the coordination for hydrogen infrastructure in particularly hydrogen stations so I almost see him as my big brother although he's a lot younger than me over in California doing hydrogen infrastructure like I'm trying to get done in Hawaii here the next shot we have is some of the vendor displays there weren't a ton of vendors down there when I'm used to, usually I'm used to seeing hundreds of vendors there were probably about 50 or so vendors downstairs but as you can see Honda was there Toyota was there there were a lot of vendors other than just hydrogen vendors there were folks that do compression folks that make the components for the hydrogen electrolyzers and dispensers and things like that there was a good turnout and I was really happy I got to talk to some folks and learn quite a bit talking to some of these vendors the next shot shows from another perspective you can see that it wasn't cramped packed over there but this is not during a real busy time during the receptions and stuff this place was actually packed with people but Toyota you can see the sign off there on the right they had a Mariah there and Honda had a clarity with a brand new clarity and you got to take a good look up close to those and I have a picture of at least the Toyota coming up next we had some folks these are some of my favorite folks because the gentleman in the center there Abaskadarzi is one of the contractors that we actually use a lot out here with the Air Force to do our vehicle conversions and run our hydrogen station and to his right is I want to say Mike his name right off the top of my head but he's the head engineer at the fuel cell division of US Hybrid over in Connecticut and what you see in the front left there is an 80 kilowatt fuel cell that's designed to go into buses and trains and big vehicles now when I talk about fuel cells with people that come into our shop I try and get them to focus on the scale 80 kilowatts is 80,000 watts of power just shy of 100 kilowatts that's a lot of power the average house only needs like 2 kilowatts of power between 2 and 3 kilowatts of power maybe 4 if you have a really big house to run on that one box right there gives you 80 kilowatts of power and they can pack that all into a bus and it gives you an idea of why fuel cells are so advantageous in the transportation sector because that's the weight and the size of equipment makes a huge difference in transportation and that 80 kilowatt fuel cell is big enough to run a good size truck I think right now they're putting two of them in big city buses and on some smaller trains to run the trains so that just gives you an idea of the technology that was on display in the back is some of the other control equipment that Abbas actually produces in California he has an office here in Hawaii and has 5 employees here in Hawaii which is nice for our state and he just bought out a fuel cell production company over in Connecticut and they're starting to crank out these fuel cells including 150 kilowatt fuel cell so we're going to take a quick break now and go to talk a little bit about some of the other shows here on Think Tech and maybe even hopefully talk about raising some funds for Think Tech Hawaii we'll be back in 60 seconds This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness Aloha I'm Kay Lee Ikeena and I volunteer at Think Tech Hawaii as a host of the program Hawaii Together Why? Because Think Tech Hawaii is doing a very important job in making sure that there is a conversation ongoing between people of all backgrounds and all views that's what civil discourse is all about and Think Tech is an important part of our discussions for a better Hawaii for the first time Think Tech Hawaii is participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000 It's called Give Thanks to Think Tech and it will run only during the month of November and you can help Please donate what you can so that Think Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine Please send your tax-deductible contribution by going to this website on the screen www.thanksforthinktech.causevox.com On behalf of the community enriched by Think Tech Hawaii's 30-plus weekly shows Thank you Mahalo for your generosity Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on Black Friday We got a colorful background so it doesn't feel really black here in Hawaii In fact, it's really mellow All the small stores are shut down and all the big stores are going crazy So it's actually really mellow in Honolulu today in beautiful weather So come on by, a little windy, but who cares Anyway, back to Long Beach One of the other things that was great to see was some of the other vendors that were there The one that I really spent a lot of time out was the fuel cell store It's a great, great place and we've actually done business one of those little kits that you see in the front standing up on the table It's actually a school demonstration kit that they sell they sell to teachers and it's a great, great kit for demonstrating to young folks and people who don't understand the technology of how a fuel cell works It's great because it gives you a way to actually physically demonstrate it All the components are all clear plastic so you can see the bubbles going the hydrogen going one place the oxygen going another place It's a great place to buy teaching aids They had a great display there and I found out that they also make some of the components They sell a lot of a kit Those kits aren't made by them but they sell them and some of the things that they make go into other components and kits and things that people make and sell on the market and for industry and hydrogen The whole thing the whole show wasn't just about hydrogen for those of you that don't know solid oxide fuel cells are also a big part of energy production and such They work at a higher temperature and they generally use natural gas or methane or sometimes gases off of wastewater treatment plants and things So they're not always talked about as much as hydrogen fuel cells especially in my circles but they are another component that is part of this fuel cell conference and some of the folks that do the solid oxide fuel cells have their stuff there One of my favorites is the next one coming up It's a Electrochemical H2 Compressor This thing was really really got my attention The technology is not too cosmic but it took them probably a total of 20 to 30 minutes to convince me of the technology work The most impressive thing for me was when you deal with clean electrolysis and making hydrogen using electricity the one thing that creeps into your production cost that is really hard to control is compression and that's one of the things that kind of always push the transportation clean transportation hydrogen over the top and competing with gasoline was having to compress to 10,000 psi Well this equipment it works very much on the same principles as an electrolyzer or a a fuel cell does in terms of using a PEM membrane to separate the hydrogen atoms after you disassociate the oxygen from water and so the bottom line is that this technology is about 30% cheaper than mechanical compression and 30% when you start to scale up to a large production that's quite a bit of savings I was excited to learn about this technology and to get to see how it works and additionally it's quiet it takes up very little space and it's pretty cost effective so I was happy to see this the next couple of shots were some equipment that they had out there that I really liked first we have the Toyota Mirai I didn't take a picture of the Honda Clarity it's a beautiful car but what I thought really was intriguing was how the Toyota folks put literally the visible system right on top of the car so you can see where all the components are actually if you look at the bottom of the driver's door that's the fuel cell 114 kilowatt fuel cell that drives this vehicle when you look to the back that yellow thing is one of the hydrogen tanks and actually near the back wheel is another hydrogen tank and then some of the other components are shown there where they actually are on the car now what comes out of the tailpipe of course is basically water like a Toyota Mirai illustrated and I thought it was really neat so the next shot though was another one that really gets a lot of attention this is a big 18 wheeler it's kind of hard and probably on your screen to see it but the big white components are the hydrogen storage and the fuel cell that drives the electric motor on this vehicle and the front is the cab and the hood is open so the hood kind of doesn't make it look like a truck when it's open but you can actually see the fuel cell in there and the next couple of shots are just different ones so that's from the back looking at the fuel cell and where the hydrogen storage is and the next shot is looking at the cab so you can see the hood open there looks more like a truck from this perspective and then one more shot I think we have is up close looking at the fuel cell now the reason that this is kind of in my mind is that several companies now have come out with hydrogen driven trucks but at the same time Elon Musk the maker of the Tesla has also come out with a battery plug-in truck and what I think you're going to find as these two technologies start coming out and actually competing and I don't necessarily like to see batteries and hydrogen compete because I see them both as part of a solution electric transportation solution but when you look at what's going to happen when you compete battery 18-wheelers against hydrogen 18-wheelers I think it's going to become really really clear that the 18-wheelers that run off batteries are going to be A, too expensive B, not as ecologically friendly as people would think they would be including when you have to recharge them you're using a lot of grid power that's fossil fuel generated not clean but when you go to hydrogen you're probably going to be starting off with maybe some hydrogen that's produced using steam methane reforming not as clean as electrolyzer but when you get to H2 at scale like the department of energy is trying to do you're going to see clean hydrogen running these long range vehicles and I have a story coming up later if I have time to get to it and talk about why that's important so one of the other things that they have there that tends to get overlooked is mostly academics called the poster session and I have a photo of what the poster session looks like what you have here are scientific projects and demonstrations that a lot of the PhDs in the field have done or some companies have done and they put it on display and then the author of these these documents and these projects they're there for one of the evenings and they're right by their poster and explaining how their technology works and it's a really really good way to come up to speed on some cutting-edge technology so that was one of the other great things about this conference the next couple slides I got are Dave Malinero works in my shop that's the Honda Clarity right there the brand new version of it Dave was waiting in line to try and get to drive the Honda Clarity because that was his favorite looking vehicle show he never got to drive it because we had to run off to another meeting but he did get to drive the next one the Hyundai Tucson which he got to zoom around the block I actually drove the Tucson two years ago and it's a great little car and Hyundai is supposed to be coming out with new technology that's even better than than this one and I was really happy with the Tucson I'd say if I had to rank in terms of my favorite that the first but it's because I'm kind of a truck person anyway and it's an SUV but right there right next to it is the the Mirai I really like the Toyota it's a really first class ride real quiet a lot of power and the Honda Clarity is right there too I've driven the Mercedes and some of the other ones and I actually think that the two Japanese made cars and the Korean made Hyundai are really good pieces of equipment and you're going to see them become real popular once people start getting the chance to drive them but overall it was an information packed week and it was very inspirational what I would like to do now is turn to some hydrogen news that I have I'm going to stick my glasses on so I can read this stuff and there's a gentleman I've mentioned his name before Maury Markowitz from the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association and he's he's done quite a bit of work putting together a great newsletter and I'm just going to go with you some of the some of the headlines in his newsletter and talk a little bit about him Hydrogen Council releases a study at United Nations Climate Conference that Hydrogen Council is the one I mentioned at the beginning of the show where it's an international consortium that's actually pulling a lot of big heavy duty investors and some big hydrogen companies into scaling up hydrogen internationally and they've published this work which is pretty comprehensive and talks about all the advantages to hydrogen and it's out there now so if you go to Marty's webpage and look at the links and the webpage is for the Fuel Cell Hydrogen Energy Association they have a link to their newsletter and you can look at all these articles Plug Power announces fuel cell deal with Norwegian Grocer and Toyota subsidiary NEL to provide renewable hydrogen for their facility so this is one of the stories that they got out there and it's showing that we're really hitting the market with a lot of hydrogen and the big names are there, Toyota, NEL and Plug Power are three of the biggest names in hydrogen fuel cells at this point Connecticut Town receives a Ducan fuel cell for a wastewater treatment plant some of the stationary fuel cell markets are really opening up as backup power for computer storage, backup power for phone communications and cell towers and also in Europe there's a lot of stationary fuel cell energy going into backing up large facilities another story the California Energy Commission is funding five additional stations in California NEL again announces exclusive partnership with Nicola awarded a purchase for two demo hydrogen stations Nicola is one of those other companies that I mentioned along with Toyota that are building 18-wheeler trucks and that are helping to show that hydrogen really is the way I had the founder of Nicola Motors on my show a few months ago and as I recall his truck is supposed to go 1200 miles on 100 kilograms of hydrogen and he's planning on building stations across the U.S. so think about it, this truck can go 1200 miles and the U.S. is about 3000 miles across so if he puts one station in the middle he can service the trucks going across the U.S. if he puts four or five of them scattered kind of throughout the central U.S. and one on each coast or two on each coast he's pretty much got it covered for the next 10 or so years once that operation takes off and he goes to scale he's going to build 300 stations around the U.S. and that's going to really really open people's eyes on the utility of hydrogen there's actually quite a few more studies stories here in this newsletter and I really encourage you to go to the site for the fuel cell hydrogen energy association and check them out it's a great newsletter about that and I really think you'd enjoy looking at it so balloon or not that gets us to the end of 30 minutes of standard energy man for the 24th of November 2017 Black Friday and I hope you got something out of it and I hope to see you back here next week, aloha