 Hey welcome to my lunch hour stand the energy man here we're gonna be talking hydrogen one of my favorite subjects and in the background my guests and I have bicycled all the way out to Makapu point and we got the lighthouse in the background unfortunately the surf is in freeze mode so yeah sorry we can't do much about that but it's a beautiful day at Makapu and I hope you get out there and enjoy some of the surf getting generated by that big easterly hurricane we got churning out there but speaking of energy I just took some folks from the legislature and from deep and out to our Hickam installation and looked at our hydrogen station out there and talked about the future of hydrogen and the Air Force and really that's what I get to do for a living I get to do hydrogen projects for the Air Force and then share everything that I learned doing that with the folks here that are interested in hydrogen at Blue Planet at Energy Accelerator and State Energy Office and in the private sector so there's a lot of great exciting things happening this year in hydrogen some of them are not at liberty to expose just yet because it's private sector stuff going on but there's a lot of great things going on and one of those great things is my guest today Chris McWinnie from Millennium Rain he's in the heart of what we would call hydrogen fuel cell country in Ohio and Dayton Ohio there if you've never been to that part of the world I think everything fuel cell and hydrogen originates and date in or about Dayton Ohio and University of Ohio and all the folks over there so Chris welcome to the show thank you thanks for traveling all the way over here to Hawaii to be on the show with us thanks for having us and I know you you like to come over here and work and we've got a couple projects on the big island that you're involved in but tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into doing what you do and start in your own company yeah with Millennium Rain well we started in in 2003 I submitted a patent called residential hydrogen power plant and started developing it in the garage and main component was going to be a an electrolyzer which takes water and electricity and splits the water into hydrogen and oxygen and capture the oxygen to capture the hydrogen and relieve the oxygen into the atmosphere and we developed several different models over a period of time in the garage and until we finally got to where we found one that was really rather efficient at using less electricity than normal to split the oxygen and hydrogen out of the water and then after we found a stack that was good we started to build the other balance of plan around it to be able to capture the hydrogen and purify the hydrogen and compress it and store it and dispense it and basically our business strategy started out to be able to develop a system that would be able to allow for a person to store or bottle the wind in the sun for later when there is no wind and sun and be able to be completely energy independent and off the grid by using hydrogen as a storage medium for renewable energy and since hydrogen replaces and can't replace gasoline diesel fuel propane natural gas and can store electricity it is literally a medium that you can use to replace everything that we're doing in energy now was something that's sustainable green and and renewable so because of that you know that took us down the road of developing a product set where now we have 21 different products that we have that are commercially ready to go to market with and to provide scalable hydrogen fueling systems and scalable storage hydrogen storage systems from as little as one kilogram a day production all the way up to 500 kilograms a day production I was gonna ask if you've kind of expanded to the high end of production then I know you talked about residential is where you started and and that's really been one of my pushes not only here but when I when I visit with people on the mainland and Department of Energy it's like everybody's focusing on megawatt scale production but really there's a I think there's a huge market for residential scale and rather than just focusing on one maybe we ought to focus on both and so your equipment fits really well and scales really well to the residential community could you give us a hypothetical model of how your system would fit into a household single-family house yeah well we like to say that the the starting point is you must have an origin of energy if you want to be off-grid and energy independent so you have to have either wind or solar or geothermal or or hydroelectric of some type of generating a renewable source of ongoing sustainable electricity once you have that in place then you need to have a set of good quality batteries so that you can have a storage medium that has very quick amperage that can handle the loads of a big freezer turning on and off or you know the oven turning on and off or the heavy loads of a home or small business and but then you don't want to do it all you don't want to do all your storage and batteries because the batteries fill up really quickly you know in a couple hours or batteries are recharged every day but you had to size your renewable energy system so that you could take care of the loads during the day and charge the batteries so once the batteries are charged the electricity that was being generated by the renewable energy system has no place to go so that's where the hydrogen yeah and it just sits there and and so that's where the hydrogen generator creates a load bank and then you can actually store that excess energy now and you now have a backup to your battery system and the storage for hydrogen is much cheaper than storage for batteries you bring us a really important points here I'm constantly bombarded by people that say but batteries are more efficient but I think they only look at energy and in energy out right and they don't really take into account the cost of the storage the long-term effect of environmental issues with battery production correct and actually making them yeah the actual limitation lithium is a limited resource right and we don't produce hardly any of it in this country so we import all the lithium so why would we go from importing fossil fuel to importing lithium as a solution right I mean there's a whole lot of pieces there and people don't put in the formula yeah but batteries play an important role important role got to have them got to have them and if and you know and on the other side of the question a lot of the battery folks you know they they they they're not positive on hydrogen right hydrogen people are positive on batteries because we see the whole picture and how it works and and how it's they're all needed so it's it's important to have it all yeah okay so let's throw up some of the pictures of things that we've done with you and been with you this is actually in Dayton Ohio at Chris's facilities he actually has a huge facility there that used to be an auto dealership and is perfectly suited for his research and his production of his equipment and in the background are some of the folks that I work with from the Air Force Research Lab going on a tour of Chris's facility so what's that equipment on the left there Chris that is our 330 triple twin model it is a model that we actually designed for a blue planet on the big island here in Hawaii and that unit there was slated to go to Aruba and so it's now been sent to Aruba okay what's the next photo we got coming up here so this is Chris with another unit and what is this unit well in 2000 and we'll see a bit of 2012 about October we built the world's first hydrogen fueling station that's all in one in a box in a box so on a seven foot wide by four foot wide seven foot by four platform seven foot tall we've got your hydrogen generator which is the green square thing down there and then we've got the your controls cabinet your hydrogen purification system above my arm there is is the compressor and then to the right is a door that opens that is a dispenser so everything that you need to have fuel for a vehicle is all in one package here and it was the first first of its kind anywhere in the world so this is essentially a miniature like homeowner version of a hydrogen station if you happen to be independently wealthy and could afford to spend 50 or 60 or 70 or 100 grand right on a piece of equipment right but this was the first one of the first then yep this was the first okay ever yeah all right so this is kind of where you cut your teeth on on scalability right what's the next photo we have coming up okay so this is this looks very similar to what we just looked at yeah is this is on the big island yep this is blue planet in Poova on the big island and Paul Pontio up there has been on the show several times this is his unit and if you see the little handle on the right that's what Chris says you open up and it's got the hydrogen dispenser so this is really kind of like your oil field your oil pipeline your ship to move the energy your refinery and everything and the and the tanker truck that brings your fuel to your gas station in a box that fits on a 7 by 4 foot pallet that's it and so how elegant of a solution can you have like I explained to my my guests at Hickam today when you're in the production and manufacturing mode every time you have to move something it's wasted energy and it's added cost for no value if you can make the product where you use it absolutely save a huge amount so when you start doing a business model you have to take that into account to you're actually using this equipment to make the energy store it and dispense it to your vehicles in one spot right transportation right okay what's the next photo we got there Zuri this is also on the big island is that that same equipment that we saw in your factory yeah that was that was the same model it's a different electrolyzer but you know we made them we make them the same way every time but yeah this was the first one that they got so in Blue Planet got the very first 330 triple twin model we are make this is six stacks it makes 12 kilograms a day of hydrogen production those gray things to the left of the screen there are actually purifiers as an early model of a purification system that we have had back then so this was installed in 2000 and 13 the summer of 2013 and we've since it ran there for two years and it was still running great when we replaced it but we made 63 improvements over that model from 2013 so we sent them a new the newest upgraded model and they now have a newer later model now yes so Hawaii's actually been a really great testbed for your absolutely I mean I tell you what the people of Hawaii have been so open to this and and and so great at helping us you know it's so important for a company like ours to have good feedback from people because you know we don't profess to be perfect you know we know that things are gonna we don't know what we don't know and it really any company that does that you know a new pioneering thing has no choice but to put it out there once you get to a certain level and but just explain openly to people hey you know we need you to tell us if you don't like this or you want it to do this instead of that and it'd be great if it did this someday and we need those ideas and that feedback and Boy Blue Planet has just really been excellent opportunity for us it was a real blessing yeah it's funny to look back at that picture number on the guy on the right is Richard Ha farmer on the big end with a good-looking legs looking at the rest of the tour but in that space if you went to Blue Planet right now you'd see all the blue lithium yeah it's all different batteries all been changed everything's and the electrolyzers now outside yeah it's out another building now and all that happened in like three short yeah real short time yeah so this for me this is a flashback to to where we've come from three years ago yeah and how much progress hydrogen is made here in Hawaii yeah there is there is so much going on and just so much exciting stuff happening and I'm glad that you're you're a big part of it with the planet yeah we feel excited we feel real blessed to be with people like you guys and and Paul and we've just met so many really good people here you know the spirit is right here and in all of the state of Hawaii and the people really need this type of technology in a big way because it is truly one of the ways one of the for sure ways that the whole state can become energy independent and rely on itself only for its energy needs yeah the folks in Hawaii culturally this is a big deal for them they have a great respect for the land the water the air and the traditions that that they don't want spoiled right and this is a great answer right well speaking of which we've got some more exciting things happening right after the break so don't go away join us back with Chris McWinnie in a few seconds hi I'm Ethan Allen host of likeable science here on think tech Hawaii calm I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science hi I'm Ray Starling and I am co-host for Hawaii's Wednesday afternoon state of clean energy and with me today is Leslie Cole Brooks and she's gonna tell you what's happening this month with our shows hi everybody I'm Leslie Cole Brooks the executive director of the Distributed Energy Resources Council and this month is the focus is on distributed energy resources we just had a great show on smart grid technologies and the rest of the month we're going to discuss storage different strategies micro grids and then we're gonna have live man and woman on the street from verge so it's really exciting very informative lively and just worth doing so see you next Wednesday hi hey welcome back to stand the energy man with Chris McWinnie from Millennium Rain and I don't care how many times I type in my computer I have to look at his business card because I cannot spell Millennium or rain it's not REI and it's REIG something anyway my spell checker goes over time with me on Millennium Rain but thanks for being here again Chris and what are some of the other projects that you're doing out in the world maybe we can bring some of the photos up that you that you pulled up for sure yeah talk about what's going on and where we're doing things in other parts of the world well right here was a pretty wild expedition for us we installed a one of our 330 triple twins with twin compressors on it this unit does 12 kilograms a day and compresses it at 6000 psi and then here it is being unloaded in Dubai at you can see the little sign back there on the on the trolley depot says the Dubai trolley and so I think in the next picture it actually shows a picture of the station and the trolley car that there's a picture of the station in the background there you can see the tallest building in the world that's the Burj Khalifa and there's our station sitting right in front of it and that was a real triumph for us to be able to do that and so they have 18 kilograms of storage and that hydrogen generator that you saw us unloading there that actually went down in the basement of that building and we had to lower that through a pit a hole to lower it down in it was quite an extraordinary installation it was 104 degrees it didn't have their air conditioning going and it was really something but and we just recently got back from there a couple weeks ago and so the next I don't know what's next on the thing although this is a trolley this is a trolley that it actually runs that runs on hydrogen so they have a fuel cell in the in there and they have a set of lithium ion batteries that run that's the trolley and they use the fuel cell as a range extender so that they can run this thing for 16 hours and there's about a four or five mile track that goes from the Burj Khalifa over around to the tallest to the to the largest mall in the world and people can get off and different sites along the way and and there's actually going to be two cars so this is a vintage we have a partnership with a company in in California called tig modern street railways and they manufacture these cars right there and we also have a system going to aruba to do the same thing so they're kind of a retro design but they're yeah a new technology yeah he's actually got a real sleek looking brand new one that looks like a really fast bullet train and that one's going in cutter and so yeah he's got he can make him any way how big of a fuel cell do they have in there do you know yeah it's a it's a 17 kilowatt fuel cell team that's that's not really huge mm-hmm we have 30 watts in our trucks and stuff that mm-hmm and then US hybrid just rolled out a hundred fifty kilowatts that they could use in a train oh really well I'm trying to see if the city wants to venture into hydrogen fuel so yeah the light rail were to put in here yeah so this this picture here was we see our fueling station they're all in one fueling station we shipped it to New Jersey for the grand opening of the world's first commercially produced solar hydrogen home and this there's a solar field off off camera here that you can't see but this lady purchased this and one of our partners Mike Strisky who you've had on your show before he has he he he built this home and Toyota brought out their Mariah and we brought our station and as far as I can tell this is the first time ever in the history of the planet that all of the things for a hydrogen world were at one place at one time you had your home that was hydrogen solar hydrogen you had your car that ran on hydrogen you had your fueling station that made the hydrogen and dispensed it all there at one place at one time and so and it all came off of sunlight so all photo attacks yep yep that's why they call it solar hydrogen that's right clean no carbon no carbon footprint in this property all because when you make your hydrogen from electricity using electrolysis it's zero carbon if you make your electricity off of sunlight or other renewables like wind there's zero carbon when you burn it in the fuel cell you're actually not burning it when you when you combine it in the fuel cell you make water only and it's zero carbon so when you start dealing with hydrogen as a system it's can be done completely clean right it's zero carbon all the way from beginning to end all your all your kicking out the exhaust in that car is water vapor that's it and you can even put a small fuel cell in your house yep if your car's not there right and some batteries yep and you're off the grid yep so you're pretty familiar with with blue planets done on the big one let's talk about their they're off the well that's exactly what they've got they've got they've got a ranch that's now on 32 or 35 acres and they've got the equivalent of 10 homes in between buildings different buildings and and they they clipped the cord from the power company completely and for three years now they've never been without power and they're all they're a point of war the origin of energy is an 85 kilowatt solar array and they're able to collect enough energy and divert it to either batteries or hydrogen and and then they've built their own logic platform to monitor and and and to turn things on and off at the right time to balance that energy and provide the energy that it needs for that entire ranch and they're completely off grid and energy independent and their solar hydrogen and batteries working together and they're not actually in an ideal place for solar I don't know they're in a microclimate they have they're right up against a big poo and and they only get three to four hours a day of really good sun I mean by 1 30 usually two o'clock every day at the ranch it's starting to get overcast yeah so they're they're able with that 85 kilowatts to charge the batteries that they spent overnight because they do have the lithium iron batteries they recharge those by late morning maybe even by 10 o'clock or so if it's been real setting and after that it's all extra hydrogen so they make I mean all extra electricity so they make hydrogen yep and stored at low pressure low pressure yeah and high pressure they've got a combination but they're able to use propane tanks to store at low volume you know high volume low pressure and then then they can compress from those up to where they could fuel a vehicle or forklift or anything like that that has a fuel cell in it okay I have 26 kilograms total of fuel of storage on site yeah and what else we have for photos there's very well this is this is blue speaking of blue planet this is their upgraded system so the other ones that had the green cells in it and then this has the new purification system there to the left so this is their new and this is our injection molded cells and what we've been working on now once we got the stacks working then it was time to try to see what we what could we do to get the cost down and so we spent about $130,000 on building an injection mold and we're now still trying to figure out the right chemistries but this is our first injection molded cell stack set of six stacks and it's now been running for a little over a year now and so this is that blue planet this replaced the first one that you saw earlier so as a rule of thumb we kind of use 65 kilowatt hours for a kilogram of hydrogen as you know our wag of how much electricity it costs to make a kilogram so with your system what's what's the normal for well if you're talking about from the beginning of making it all the way through to compressing it and purifying it and storing it and dispensing it the entire package on ours runs about 60 kilowatt hours per kilogram okay so it's really close how about cost of actually manufacturing the equipment well our cost is you know I haven't you know I've had a lot of people send me other people's you know this is what they're saying they're charging us and and was typically come in between one third and fifty percent of the cost of any other provider out there there's multiple reasons for that you know we we have no debt as a company we own our facility that we produce the stuff out of debt-free as well we have we were in Dayton Ohio you can buy $135,000 for $135,000 you can buy a three-bedroom two-bathroom ranch style house so it's you know standard of living is very cost-effective there so people don't have to make a lot of money per hour so labor costs are low but we're not but we're treating our people right you know at the same time and and then you take the fact that you know the six or eight million dollars that we spent over the last you know 13 years developing this product that was research and development we're not asking for that money back we're saying that's in the past forget about it so we're a lot of companies try to you know incorporate their research and development costs into their cost of goods sold so that they can get a recovery on that we're not doing that so all of these things and then on our cost of our product we're using a alkaline based electrolyzer and that is costing it to be much much cheaper than a company that's using a proton exchange that use platinum on the screen right now is our latest system in Sonoma California this is a two enclosure system and it's got the hydrogen generator in the side of the first one and then the little enclosure over to the right is the we're a 24 kilogram storage system that also has a dispenser in it yeah and we have one more photo I think yeah there you go this is one of our smaller models for somebody's home and it's a hydrogen generator only this is just a one kilogram a day unit okay so where do you see the market going I mean do you really see a good market for the home system I do but I think that the cars and the material handling and the energy independent island nations and the things like the street cars and buses and and telecom to use hydrogen to make for telecoms those those will create a volume where the costs can come down through economies of scale and that'll eventually everyone will be able to afford to have their own hydrogen system and be off the grid and energy independent and then the power is fed back to the grid the excess power and so we're diversifying our grid and it really helps us from a security standpoint as a nation great yeah so when you know we in Hawaii I have a relatively easy challenge of providing transportation infrastructure with hydrogen because if I put four or five stations in downtown Honolulu area proper we're good for a few more maybe ten years I mean by the time the market catches up but on the mainland you know there's some serious challenges California spends a lot of money government money subsidizing new stations but if you're the only state that's doing it yeah how do you connect to Nevada and well we have a plan for that and we're talking to some very very well-known companies about putting a thousand stations across the United States 20 in every state the next five years and building a hydrogen fueling network starting with small stations and then being able to have scalable stations that you take that one output in the next size as more cars come in and then the next size as more cars come in and then actually being able to end up backfilling those stations with hydrogen made from large-scale megawatt scale wind and solar fields and and truck it into those locations but was as the as those things develop those plans develop we'll want to have you back and let you okay more but I wanted to save a few seconds to throw up the last photo we have and it's really the reason you're here in Hawaii today and that's to to help us put in our our first outside the military fence line in Honolulu the very first hydrogen station we're gonna have in Honolulu so this is what Chris is here for it was delivered yesterday we pulled it out of the container so I got to live that dropping the equipment down with a hundred foot shaft in Dubai experience trying to get this equipment out of a container with one inch of space on either side and Chris and Chris and I are actually wiring it up and hooking it up today and we hope to be making some hydrogen by the end of the day right in downtown Honolulu and the equipment primarily is going to help my my team service the and do maintenance on vehicles that we're working on but I'm hoping that maybe we can have some folks drive by and maybe pick up some hydrogen with that H cap so Chris yeah thanks for coming out and thanks especially for delivering that station and you're welcome to help us set it up and we're gonna be excited to hear from from you in another couple months when more things can be let out of the bag as we say and yeah and you can talk about some more things that are happening in the industry yeah well thank you so much for having trust and faith in us and you know we'll do our best to maintain one of those pieces of equipment's going out the hiccups right we got another one to do next right okay well thanks Chris thank you we'll have you back in a couple months all right thanks for joining us here and stand energy man at think tech Hawaii and we'll see you on my lunch hour next Friday