 Aloha and welcome to Stand Energy Man here. Coming to you live and direct from Honolulu, Hawaii, the lovely Pioneer Plaza building and Think Tech Studios on the eighth floor. That's the Directions to Terrorists. Just telling you that's where we're at. But thanks for joining us today and actually I'd like to throw out some thanks to some folks on the Big Island. Last Saturday I was part of a meeting put together by Mark Nakashima from the Heloside and also in attendance was Representative Nicole Lohan who's the head of the House Energy Committee and some other folks from the Big Island County Council and some business folks and some retired government officials as well. We were talking all things energy but a lot about hydrogen and what they'd like to see on the Big Island to get that economy going and headed towards hydrogen for transportation and possibly even for the grid. It was a great meeting, great setup. Thanks to Rep Nakashima for putting that together and Paul Ponteo and Hank Rogers on Blue Planet Research for hosting the event or giving us a venue to meet. It was a great, great time together and I think a lot of people learned a lot of great stuff about hydrogen and got to share some good thoughts on where the Big Island could go to be more energy independent and maybe even lower the energy bill for all the folks over there and I know that's never a bad thing when you can lower the energy bill. So thanks again for the folks that helped us with that. We've been learning a lot lately about, how come hydrogen isn't really there yet? I get that question quite often and there's an old saying that hydrogen is fuel of the future and it always will be kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing saying that yeah, hydrogen's been around and we know about the technology, we've known about the capabilities and the advantages of hydrogen for not only years but centuries. The word hydrogen itself comes from the Greek word for water maker. It's even the Greeks understood that hydrogen has some really unique attributes to it but why is it that has taken us this long and it's still not commonplace? I mean, if you go to the average person on the street today in Honolulu or any city and ask them what they know about hydrogen it'd be almost in the negatives except for bad stuff like the Hindenburg and H-bombs and that's not the kind of stuff that really helps get a new technology or an emerging technology into the commercial marketplace. But things are happening and I'll summarize a couple of them. Number one, and to me one of the biggest things that's happened is that the price of making hydrogen off of renewable energy has dropped dramatically along with the price of solar panels and wind turbine power. So the price of actually making hydrogen is now virtually competitive with gasoline in terms of manufacturing costs considering there's no subsidies for hydrogen and we're not really at scale doing it yet with infrastructure, that says a lot. That means it's getting ready to hit the market. Number two, there's a group that stood up called the Hydrogen Council and back when Governor E. gave first started here in the state of Hawaii as governor I was having a discussion with his chief of staff and one of his department heads. The department head told me, Stan, you need to have a consortium here in Hawaii. You really get things moving on hydrogen. And I said, well, you're looking at consortium, it's me. I've got a couple of friends at UH and Blue Planet and a couple of constituents out there in the world that can even spell hydrogen and that's all we got. We don't have any money, we don't have any businesses to promote making stuff to make money off of hydrogen so there's no revenue stream. I said, that's it. Well, on the international stage, there is a consortium now. It started in 2017 in January and now with a year and a half under its belt, they've made huge strides in making hydrogen. The industry internationally understood the finance people, they get it, the market people, they get it. The big corporations that deal with energy, energy storage, they get it. Hydrogen is getting ready to take off and it's not just a dream this time. It's really moving. You've got things happening like Cummins Diesel bought out hydrogenics up in Canada. You have plug power, which for years is making great strides in material handling equipment. They started turning a profit for the first time in their history a couple of years ago. Things are happening. Toyota, Honda, Hyundai all have commercial off the shelf vehicles, plug power, commercial off the shelf material handling equipment. There's dozens of companies that make backup stationary fuel cells for emergency backup power for communications nodes, for data centers, for computer network, Walmart and Home Depot and Lowe's all have hydrogen fuel cell material handling in their warehouses that go 24-7. It's happening. It's happening in a quiet revolution. And with that revolution, the price dropped, the more that these companies put out the equipment, the price goes down, the more maintenance is available, the more infrastructure is available and the good thing is it's the kind of stuff that makes for good sustainable growth. Renewable energy fits well on the grid and in transportation. And you're gonna start seeing great things happen. So I'm very bullish on hydrogen. That should be no news to anybody watching the show. But I'm convinced after working intensely for six years and even four years before that just being familiar with the technology, I've tried to poke holes in hydrogen every which way I can and everything is turning up. You can't beat this. It's the way to go. So I'm getting the first slide up there, Robert. Stand energy man, where the news is free, but the commentary is right. Take that to the bank, start looking at the companies that are publicly owned and start looking at your energy portfolio. You might wanna start looking into hydrogen. It's about that time. So I'm not part of your liability insurance for your investments, but it's free energy, it's free advice. You got it from me first. And next slide. I'm gonna talk a little bit about what we do at HCAT here because I talk to a lot of different guests on the show about things that they're doing, but I look back and I go, I haven't talked about what we actually do here in Hawaii for almost three years now. So what you got on the screen now is a picture of one of our original aerial pictures of our hydrogen refueling station at Hickam Air Force Base, now joint base Pearl Harbor Hickam. This is a hydrogen station in its first generation. It was designated to be a mobile hydrogen station which can be packed up on what we call 463L pallets, which are standard logistics pallets that go in airplanes. The equipment can be packed up, shipped to a remote location and stood up to dispense hydrogen at a mobile base overseas somewhere if the Air Force wanted to go there. It was a proof of concept. It worked out really well, but we matured the dispensing equipment to a little bit larger scale and switched to a PEM electrolyzer from an alkaline electrolyzer. And we're now in a larger scale mode. So that station that you see on the screen hasn't changed footprint-wise a whole lot in the last 10 or 15 years. However, that 146 kilowatt PV array is also part of our station. And now with that array, we can make about 12 kilograms of hydrogen a day off of our PEM electrolyzer and dispense it up to 700 bar, which is 10,000 PSI into vehicles. So we have this capability at Hickam Air Force Base. I believe it's the longest running hydrogen station in the US. It's been in operation pretty much constantly since 2007, I believe, 2007 or 2008. I know they started working on it in 2006, but I don't remember the exact commissioning date. And I should, because I was there. The next slide I got coming up is a great shot of our most popular vehicle. So not only did we put the first station up out there for the military, but we started building specialized vehicles for them. This is a 25 passenger bus. And it's built on a Ford F-550 chassis. So it's pretty heavy duty. It can carry 25 passengers. It has about 130 mile range with the fuel cell. It carries 10 kilograms of hydrogen and it's got a 28 kilowatt hour pair of batteries, 214 kilowatt hour batteries. Just on the batteries alone, and you can charge this thing like you do a regular electric vehicle, by the way, it can go 30 miles. So in your head, you can do the math, 28 kilowatt hours of battery and 30 miles of range. That's about a mile, a kilowatt hour. So if you're into not being energy ignorant or energy blind, as Dr. Hagen says, keep those numbers in mind that this bus carries 25 people and it can go about one mile on one kilowatt hour of power. But when you add 10 kilograms of hydrogen, you add another 100 miles. So each kilogram of hydrogen gives you 10 more miles to add to that one kilowatt hour of battery. So for every mile you can travel on battery, you can do 10 miles with one kilogram of hydrogen. So this bus is a really popular vehicle on Hickam. It's by far the most used vehicle that we have. We try and focus it on distinguished visitors and taking them around so they can have the experience. But it was really designed to take aircrew back and forth between Hickam and the hotels in Waikiki where they're usually billeted so that the crews could learn about hydrogen. There's actually a video screen inside and we can show informational videos on hydrogen fuel cell technology as part of an informational campaign for military officers utilizing this vehicle. The next vehicle we have coming up is another one that we built for the Air Force. So next slide there. Oh, this is kind of a transition. That's our bus and in the background you see another vehicle, the U-30. And this one is not only the only one like it in the world because there's actually a couple of those buses now that have been made off of our design. But this vehicle you're looking at right now is the only one on the planet that's a hydrogen fuel cell powered vehicle. It's built by a company called Tug. It's designed to push back 747s, big Airbus aircraft, the biggest aircraft that you can fly. This vehicle is what pushes it back from the gate or moves it around on the military base when they have to put it in the wash rack or take it to a special hangar or something under a tow power. So this vehicle weighs around 70,000 pounds even though it's not very big. It actually carries a ton of ballast in it to make it heavy enough to keep traction on the ground so the tires don't just spin when you're trying to pull or push a big airplane around. The really amazing thing is we have this vehicle built and delivered last year and we haven't been able to actually test it on an airplane because we've been trying to get the regulations and the test parameters and everything approved. Well, yesterday on the 18th of July we used this vehicle for the very first time and we pretty much are convinced that it's a Guinness Book of World Records event. We took this Tug, connected it to a KC-135 strato tanker that weighed around 180,000 pounds and we moved the vehicle and the aircraft around about a three-quarter of a mile track to a wash rack to be serviced. And that was the first time the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle has moved anything that heavy in the history of mankind. So you're looking at a vehicle that's not only unique but purports the future of the flight line of the future as we call it for the Air Force. And we're really proud to be part of that with the Air Force and the Hawaii Air National Guard. The next vehicle we got coming up is another really unique vehicle. This is a specialty piece of equipment that's made for the Air Force to load weapons on fighters. That's why it's so low and built close to the ground. The Navy uses similar equipment but this is a piece of equipment that's strictly military. You can't go and buy this commercially off the shelf. There are only 12 of these that actually are run by electricity only. This is the only one of the 12 electric ones that has got a hydrogen fuel cell powering it. So this is the only one of its kind again on the planet. The next vehicle we have coming up is what we call Spod. And the Spod, and you can see our photovoltaic area in the background, it's just a regular bread van, like a UPS delivery truck or FedEx or just a color bread van basically on the flight line. It's designed, the truck is designed to move maintenance people and their equipment back and forth out to the flight line and back to the shop so they can expedite fixing the aircraft. The interesting thing about this vehicle, it's one of a kind also, is that it has exportable power. We can export DC power up to, I believe it's 48 volts or higher and we can go up to 400 something volts of AC power and export it also, single phase or three phase. This vehicle can be a rolling generator. So you can actually, if your building was wired to take auxiliary power, this vehicle can run up to your building and run a small command post or at least something the size of about three or four houses worth of electricity draw and can run that for several hours then unplug, go back to the station, put my hydrogen in and come back out and run the building for another five or six hours. So it's a great piece of equipment, something that the Air Force is looking to capitalize on. And by the way, some of the buses like the first one I showed you have that same export capability and we're looking at using them in municipal buses so that in a disaster, those buses can become emergency generators for the city and for the county. We're gonna take a quick break here before I come back and talk about some stuff that isn't one-off and it isn't special, it's commercially available now. We'll be back in 60 seconds. Aloha, I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world. Won't you join us on thinktechhawaii.com or on YouTube on the Think Tech Hawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championship. This show is based on my book which is also titled Beyond the Lines and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on thinktechhawaii. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Stan Osserman here on my lunch hour again. We were talking a little bit about some of our unique projects. We've got a couple more and then I'm gonna get into some commercial off the shelves. The next project that we have a slide on is one of our wind turbines with the actually inventor, creator and designer of this wind turbine. He's a local artist and inventor named John Petrie and that's how he dresses all the time unless he's surfing, in which case he's wearing board shorts and a rash guard. But he gets out surfing whenever the south shore's up and he does great work. In fact, we have two wind turbines and the next slide is actually both wind turbines on the flight line. The one he's standing in front of is the one that's on the right there. We call that the folding fan or folding blade turbine. And that is actually a scaled down version of the turbine that fits in a 40 foot container. It is designed for military use so the military can ship these conics containers to a theater and then drop them down with the sides fold down. They have PV on the side panel so you get photovoltaic electricity generated. And then the wind turbine goes up and it's designed to operate in a wide range of wind regimes but also when the wind gets too strong, it can fold up and then deploy itself into its container and protect itself in case there's a hurricane or a big storm and then redeploy. The turbine on the left there is called a spoke wheel. That's my favorite one. It's really designed for simplicity and minimum maintenance. So those turbines on the left side, the spoke wheel, you can stick it out in a field with 15 or 20 other ones. They work in a low level wind regime. They don't impact approach radars at the airport. And you can literally put those out in an array. They don't need any maintenance or any fine taking care of or maintenance at all by a man. If the wind gets too strong, the thing is actually designed to self feather. It literally goes from a vertical position down to a horizontal position, the stronger the wind gets. And then as the wind backs off, it'll slowly position itself back vertical and it even produces electricity when it's in that horizontal position. Both great designs by a company called Natural Power Concept and John Petrie, a local designer. The next project we have coming up is one that we did with some high school students. This is a Polaris Gem electric vehicle. It's a low speed vehicle. It's designed to actually ride on streets under 35 miles an hour. It's street legal. And the next slide shows what we did to it. We put on, that's a propane tank that holds a little bit of, not very much hydrogen, but we converted it to hold hydrogen at low pressure. And underneath it is a fuel cell, a one kilowatt fuel cell, and the control equipment for it. And I made a wooden rack to mount it in the back of the gem. The next picture is a completed vehicle with photovoltaics on top, fuel cell and a little bit of hydrogen in the tank and the vehicle itself. Now this little vehicle accelerates actually pretty quickly up to 25 miles an hour, but then the governor kicks in and won't let you go any faster. I'd love to take the governor off this thing and get it up to speed. I'm sure it would really haul. It's a pretty powerful vehicle. In fact, some of this equipment that I'm coming up on the next couple of slides, I've actually towed with this vehicle. It's powerful enough to do a small trailer. So this product though was done with four students from local high schools. They were part of a project that Rachel James, one of my coworkers helped initiate with the Center for Tomorrow's Leaders. But the next equipment, we're starting to move into what's commercially available, commercial off the shelf. This is a product from a company called GTM Luxver. They're out of California and this is a hydrogen fuel cell light cart. The kind of light cart you'd have available at a construction site or when you're doing road work or something like that where you need to have emergency power in a big field or something. And it's a pretty simple looking but it's got a tank of hydrogen in there that fits inside that little tiny compartment and it'll give you enough power to run those lights for actually several days nonstop. It's an amazing piece of equipment that's commercially available. The next slide shows it in action. We actually did an event in Kakaako Waterfront Park at the Oktoberfest a couple of years ago and it lit up the whole park almost the size of a football field with two light carts and that's the two of them working right there. And the amazing thing is they were so quiet and so clean that people were putting their meals and their beer and beverages down on top of this thing and using it like a table and sitting around and talking because it doesn't make any noise. Just absolutely phenomenal equipment and it's commercially available right now which is one of those signals that hydrogen's on the way. These things are not just for experiments anymore. They're actually being produced for commercial purchase. The next slide is a twofer. What you see in the foreground is a five kilowatt hydrogen fuel cell again by GTM Luxver that provides four kilowatts of power. It gives you four circuits, four 20 amp circuits with 110 volts and it can provide a pretty large amount of power to an outdoor event. This particular outdoor event was great because it was the Hawaii Gas groundbreaking or actually a dedication of their Hanoi Uli Uli natural gas reclamation project where they're taking natural gas off of the wastewater treatment plant at Hanoi Uli Uli and putting it into their gas pipeline to service customers rather than buying propane or making a propane. They're actually using landfill gas or wastewater gas to make energy for their customers. Again, a great sustainability story by Hawaii Gas. The next slide is my last slide and it shows a piece of equipment that is available commercial off the shelf, not this particular model. This particular one was actually handmade. I think they took the basic model of a propane grill and Paul Pontio from Blue Planet Research on the Big Island and Chris McWinnie from Millennium Rain used some specialized equipment to make the burner out of it. A lot of people say, so how do you convert a propane stove to runoff hydrogen? And it's really fairly simple. The burner itself, one thing you don't wanna do is you don't wanna mix the oxygen with the hydrogen like you do in a gas grill. Usually there's an inlet for air to come in right after the gas goes as it heads into the stove. You don't have that input. The hydrogen mixes with air at the burner outside and that's a safety thing for hydrogen and it's the best way to do it. So number one, you can still have a flash suppressor in your line, that's a good thing to have. You don't have any kind of flashback from the hydrogen. Number two, you don't need to mix air and number three is the holes for the gas to come out have to be smaller. I would say almost 50 or 60% smaller than the propane gas nozzles. But it burns clean, it burns hot, and it burns humid, believe it or not, because when you burn hydrogen, you get water. Other cool thing about this thing is when you have a flame going, if you flip that grill up, you can put your hand within a quarter inch of the side of the flame and you barely feel any heat. If you rotated your hand a foot above the flame, you'd be cooking your hand. But if you have your hand right next to the flame on the side, hydrogen doesn't radiate any heat. So when you have a hydrogen fire, you don't have the heat going sideways and catching other things on fire. The heat goes straight up at 45 miles an hour and it's a great thing. So hydrogen's not just great for cars, vehicles, trucks, buses, they're extremely, it's extremely good in the large class eight vehicle range, but you can cook with it. When you make hydrogen off of electrolysis, you get pure oxygen as a byproduct that you can sell to medical institutions for medical grade oxygen, and you can also sell it to the welding community that use it for oxyacetylene welding and other things. So you got great byproducts when you're making hydrogen for other folks. We're gonna wrap it up with one of the videos that we put together at HCAP that talks about hydrogen called a wrap. Hydrogen, the simplest element, and also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe. So it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure. And they're limited. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean, really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat, and electricity. Easily transported, hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors, powered by hydrogen fuel cells, are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles, and can last for decades. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean, and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. That video says it all. Just be looking for those cars. Toyota, Hyundai, Honda, they're all making fuel cell cars now. You got trucks coming online. You got boats coming online. You got military and civilian looking at hydrogen, even an aircraft. They're there in fuel cell forklifts, all kinds of stuff that's commercially available now. So it's coming. So mark my words. By 2025, you're gonna be wondering why we are still burning valuable oil and wasting it and putting carbon in our atmosphere when we could be using hydrogen technology. So that's gonna wrap it up for today's Stand the Energy Man. We'll see you next Friday. Here on Think Tech, Aloha.