 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii, where community matters. I'm Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And we're going to pick up this year's show where we left off last year. And that's with the discussion on the role of hydrogen and the one that will play in Hawaii and across the United States, maybe even around the world. Maybe even more importantly, we'll be answering the question, why hydrogen? Last Friday, I had as my special guest Mr. Andy Marsh, the president and CEO of a company called Plug Power. And Plug Power is arguably one of the most successful hydrogen fuel cell companies in the United States. And last week, Andy and I discussed why Plug Power was so successful. And it turns out that the key to Plug Power's success is that Mr. Marsh took the technology available and applied it in a way that made a good business case for several large companies to take advantage of. And then some people would say he was just lucky. But others would even accuse him of selling his product at a loss just to make an impression. But the reality is he did find a market and he did have success pushing forward hydrogen technology on its own economic strengths and in spite of criticism from overwhelming proportion of overwhelming proportion. And that's where we'll start today. When you get right down to what Mr. Marsh did, is it so amazing? Has he applied something that we find lacking in a great number of government and business managers today? And that is sound leadership, critical analysis and character. These may all sound rather esoteric, but it's really relevant at the time when the media and the politicians clamor for a crisis as a catalyst for their brilliant ideas or new proposals. Mr. Marsh didn't manufacture a crisis. He took advantage of vision and the needs for industries around him. And the core competencies of the company had just moved into. And most importantly, he applied his ability to lead and his dependency on hard work, honesty in conducting his business and good leadership. In many ways, that's what's lacking today in many areas of business management and governance. One of the things I've heard most often when I try to promote hydrogen technologies is that it just doesn't pencil out. But reality, in your reality, it can pencil out if you just look to the right circumstances. Understand the many dimensions of the technology well enough and apply good leadership. As a former military officer, I can count over emphasize the importance of sound leadership. Sound strong leadership is a cornerstone of any good military operation because without it, even the largest, most powerful military will fail. But with good leadership, oftentimes an inferior army can experience great victory against great odds. And why is this? It's simply because we all understand that there are strength in numbers, but there's also greater strength in truth, honesty, doing what's right. So I'll take a moment here to explain the title of our show today and the connection between the state of Hawaii's motto, Ua Maokea Okaena Ikopono and hydrogen. The Hawaiian words in our state motto were first spoken almost 200 years ago when Queen Victoria of England recognized the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawaii. And those spoken words were spoken by King Kamehame III. In his address to the Hawaiian people, announcing Europe's recognition of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The motto has been translated and debated many times over the centuries, but the origin of those words have been attributed to, and the origin of those words have been attributed to earlier monarchs for different reasons. But the current and accepted interpretation of the words and their meaning are as follows. The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Think about that. The very essence and foundation of life, and of a sovereign island nation, can only go forward when a government is based, when a government is based on doing everything that is right and righteous. That's a powerful statement, and I think it's what makes Hawaii's state motto so timeless and so relevant. Not only across entries, but across all the endeavors that are based on sound leadership. Because no matter what you plan to undertake, if you depend on marketing and spin to convince people that you have a good plan, or base your efforts on deception, coercion, or other dishonorable motives, eventually your leadership fails. But when it's clear that your motives are in the best interest of those you lead, the land you live on, the ocean around you that provides your sustenance, and the rain and the streams that provide your life giving water, your leadership is on solid ground, and in your success is more likely. Everyone likes to think that they're doing what's right and noble. But when you have to spin and leave out facts or use slick marketing, you have to go back and look at their real motives. Are they noble and righteous or are they self-serving? Today it seems that everyone is trying to get ahead or move their agenda, and as an angle, a market and a spin. They do everything they can to convince people that their particular direction is the only way and the best way to go. And if they're not getting enough attention, they develop a crisis or take advantage of a crisis to emphasize their points and drive forward regardless of the penalties to others, or the land, or the water, or nature around them. But in contrast, Mr. Marsh took the company, invested in new proven clean technology. He faced overwhelming economic and market disadvantages, but he applied solid leadership and righteous principles to move the company forward. And that's his example that I think we can lead this entire effort to take Hawai'i to make hydrogen a critical solution to many of today's energy challenges. That is to say that if we are honest about the challenges we face and we apply the same leadership principles that Andy Marsh did, hydrogen will become the obvious choice for our state and our nation and the world when it comes to storing energy and cleaning our environment. I'm often asked if I think that President Trump's apparent views on climate change will impact the U.S. Department of Defense and its efforts to move forward in clean energy. And people are surprised when I tell them that the military isn't so much focused on clean energy as it is energy security. And those aspects, those are the aspects that we're working on at HCaT. You see many folks in the industry are pushing hydrogen as a solution strictly based on its carbon-free nature, whereas the military sees hydrogen as a promising technology because it represents energy security. And energy security adds to a critical problem. And that problem is where do we get our energy when the traditional sources can't be purchased? How do I carry on my mission when the electric utility isn't there? And when my operations are 10,000 miles away from the continental United States, do I ship my energy with me or can I make it where I'm at? So at HCaT we feel secure that our focus on hydrogen is the real solution to the military's problems and not merely a cleaning and greening to solve climate change and reduce carbon footprints, but to solve real logistics and energy security challenges for our military. Businesses face these same challenges as well, and hydrogen can provide the same solutions for businesses. Interestingly, one of the things that Andy mentioned last week was that hydrogen was the fact that the source of hydrogen he was using was literally extracted from an industrial waste product coming from plastic manufacturers. In other words, part of his challenge was met by solving other companies' problems of getting rid of a waste product. After the break, I'll be going through some of those current news stories related to hydrogen, and one of them is how the military is looking at urine as a source of military hydrogen in the field, as crazy as that may sound. It's a way to generate electricity, and there's another article about making carbon fiber as a byproduct of harvesting hydrogen for other industries. For those of you that aren't aware, carbon fiber is a very expensive component and is used in many high-tech industries today because it's lightweight, stronger than steel, and can be used in an endless number of applications to make components for modern needs. So right there are two examples similar to what Andy Marsh applied, where a waste disposal need from one industry becomes a resource for another. And those of us who work with hydrogen see these symbiotic relationships repeated over and over again across different business sectors and specialties and in science and industry because hydrogen is used and needed across so many industrial processes, but it's also a byproduct of a number of industrial processes. Many people here in Hawaii probably are unaware that Hawaii gas, our very own publicly regulated natural gas distributor, manufactures huge amounts of hydrogen from the byproducts of our oil refineries and then turns around and sells the hydrogen back to the refineries so they can make gasoline for cars. So the key is that if we continue to look for these symbiotic industrial relationships for hydrogen here in Hawaii, and we take these examples that I just mentioned regarding carbon fiber, we could be looking at a byproduct of hydrogen and I've even proposed at one time or another that the light industries of Hawaii could be expanded and we could be leaders in carbon fiber shipbuilding. So if we engage in the process of making carbon fiber as we produced our hydrogen, we could even be creating an industry in shipbuilding while we also meet our needs for clean transportation with hydrogen. Currently, no one I know of is thinking about that, but why not? Hawaii has a long tradition of ocean voyaging and Pearl Harbor is the home to one of the largest U.S. military shipyards. So if you entrepreneurs want to do some homework and see what you can make happen out here at Kalailoa, please be my guest and start looking at hydrogen and carbon fiber in shipbuilding. So my ask for the audience today with you leaders of government or industry or every community or just leaders of yourself is to think about what's best for Hawaii and what the world and the world and apply that first as we solve Hawaii's future energy problems. The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Make that your personal motto. I'm big on hydrogen because it's clean, plentiful, safe, good for our islands, and it solves problems that will not only grow if we don't have solutions, but they'll be better if we apply hydrogen. I'm not in the hydrogen business. I'm in the state's economic development business and I know that that's a great solution. I know a great solution when I see one and hydrogen is a great solution. So we're gonna take a quick break here a little bit early and when we come back, I'll run through some news stories that are courtesy of Keith Malone from the California's fuel cell partnership. And we'll be back in 60 seconds to talk about some of the other things that are happening in hydrogen around the US and around the world. Hi guys, it's RB Kelly. I'm your host of Out of the Comfort Zone where I find cool people with cool solutions to problems that all of us face. Now the thing is we're really cool and I only invite really cool people, but the thing is I think you're kind of cool too. So I think you should come and watch. That Thursdays at 11 a.m. here on OC 16 television with Think Tech Hawaii. I'm RB Kelly, host of Out of the Comfort Zone and I will see you next Thursday. It's a crazy world, so far up in the confusion. Nothing is making sense. So welcome back to Stand on the Energy Man on my lunch hour as usual. Before I get to some of the news from Keith Malone's newsletter, I'd like to just wrap up the discussion from a little bit earlier. I have the luxury of working with hydrogen just about every day. I mean, we literally make it in our shop. We run a hydrogen station at Hickam. I look at articles all day long on how hydrogen's being used around the world to solve problems, how hydrogen's being made in different ways to solve problems, safety of hydrogen, transportation of hydrogen, so many things that I'm fortunate. I get to do it all and just focus on it. Not too many people have that luxury. So I'm really, it may seem like I'm very, very bullish on hydrogen, and it's because I am. I'm a fairly pessimistic person and when somebody presents a new idea to me, like when I first started working with hydrogen about 10 years ago, I was a little skeptical, a little intrigued, but I'm a pessimist. I was always going, I don't trust that. Why does that work? How about this? What about that? Does it freeze? Does it do this? How does it do in cold weather? How does it do in a desert? What about the byproducts? Is it poisonous? Can it explode? All the things that a good pessimist would address any topic with. The interesting thing with hydrogen is I can't find too many things that I don't like about it. The biggest challenges I've found is it takes a lot of energy to compress it to put in cars, but there's people working on that with liquid storage of hydrogen, including liquid storage at room temperature, which is very intriguing, and metal hydride storage. But I keep coming back to hydrogen because it makes so much sense. It's so plentiful. It's so safe. It only produces water. It's not polluting. It's sustainable. It's just the answer. Every time I come back to that answer. So I think as I look at our state model and say the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness, I try and drill holes through hydrogen to say what's wrong with it? And I can't find anything wrong with it. Anything seriously wrong with it. And so I think it is a big solution to Hawaii's energy storage issues and could probably spin into some other industrial things like helping to make fertilizers without importing fertilizers and things like that for our own agriculture community. Make an oxygen for our medical facilities. Make an oxygen for our welding and our industrial partners. There's so many things that can be done with hydrogen that I think we need to really, really focus on as a community and as strategic thinkers, our leadership, including not just our elected officials. I have to confess, I've had great support from Hawaii's elected officials from the congressional delegation through the governor all the way to the legislature. My biggest challenge is always with the bureaucrats under the executive branch that are running departments that have budgets to meet that have personnel issues to deal with that just can't ever seem to get enough traction on solving problems that we really have. And that's where I think we need to really focus our attention. So here's a little news from around the world and we'll just give you some of the titles of the articles and some teasers because I really encourage you to go to the California Fuel Cell Partnerships website and look at some of Keith's newsletter and some of the things that are coming up. The first story that pops up is Japan aims to slash the price of hydrogen fuel and this article talks about how the government in Japan is looking to reduce the cost of hydrogen by 80% by the year 2050. Another good article in there is the California SoCal Gasworks is working to develop technology that makes carbon fiber, this is what I talked about earlier during the hydrogen production process. And this article that I mentioned earlier could be making, we could be making carbon fiber here in Hawaii and that would be a huge boom. If you've ever gone to a place like fiberglass Hawaii and bought carbon fiber, you know what I'm talking about, it ain't cheap. It's probably four times as expensive as fiberglass cloth but it's super strong, it conducts electricity, it's got some great principles and it's one of those things that if we could actually be making that here in Hawaii, we could be exporting it instead of importing stuff. We could start a specialized boat building industry like I mentioned earlier that Hawaii could be particularly well suited for and bring in many great jobs into our state. Can you imagine a 3D printer that could print 24 and 30 and 40 and maybe even 100 foot boats sending out in Kailua or Campbell Industrial Park? That would be an awesome industry for Hawaii to have. It would bring in some great jobs. The next few articles actually focus on zero emission vessels. And one of the first one talks about Sandia National Labs, a lab that actually does a lot of work out here in Hawaii, developing practical application limits for fuel cells and batteries in zero emission vessels. And that's important because, you know, when you take an electric component out in the ocean, as many of us do here for fishermen, you get a really quick lesson on salt corrosion and the impacts of vibration and pounding from the ocean on electrical components and how they work. So this is a really important piece of work that Sandia is doing. There's also some other articles on ocean and ship going vessels. And one of the articles is who's gonna pay for shipping's green transformation? Who's gonna pay for that? Because if they do have to buy new equipment, who's gonna foot that bill? The shipbuilders or the folks operating the ships. So there's some good studies being done over there. There's also a separate story that focuses on the electric future of passenger ships. And I mentioned to Robert in the control room earlier, I'm gonna be going on a cruise later this month. And I'm thinking of doing one of the shows from the ship and maybe talking to the ship's captain or engineer and talk to them about their electrical systems and the things that they deal with on board their ships. And we'll try and Skype that thing back into the studio. There are also several articles coming out of China, specifically Wuhan, China, regarding mass production of hydrogen fuel cell buses and ferries. And there are also a couple of stories that are interesting to talk about, the challenges we face as owners of electric cars. One of the titles of one of the articles is electric car drivers are too smart to buy electric cars. And it points out that a lot of the electric car drivers would rather lease their vehicles than own them. And we find that here locally, the Nissan Leaf, people would rather lease them than buy them because the resale value can be pretty bad. But battery powered vehicles are right in that list where we're going to use them in Hawaii. And this article says that when there's new technology coming out and it's coming out as rapidly and improving as constantly, as typically people won't want to buy the vehicle, they want to lease it. And that quote comes from Steve's Center, the Vice President for American Honda Motor Corporation. You can see why Toyota and some of the other car companies, when they first bring their models out, they tend to lease them just to get a good feel for customer feedback on the quality of the product and not be concerned about the economics of owning that particular kind of technology. The next story they have in there is centers around a new California bill that seeks to ban fossil fuel vehicles by 2040. This one looks to me like California is trying to up one up Hawaii on getting rid of their fossil fuels and transportation before we do. And I'm pretty sure our legislature and Blue Planet and some of the folks here are going to try and one up California and make it 2035 for getting rid of fossil fuels in our buses and our cars. But that's coming out of California. There's also some other articles being published out there that talk about developing fuel cell buses in California. Toyota plans to have a giant hydrogen generation plant for its truck products. And if you're not familiar with Toyota, it actually spent expanding on its production from passenger vehicles. It's got a huge 18-millimeter truck version coming out. And there's other hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles that are coming out with equipment from Toyota that are going to be really, really impressive. Another article is on how Toyota wants to achieve cleaner world with its production passenger vehicle, the Mirai. It's really focusing on the clean nature and the culture-changing potential for their Mirai. When they started production of that vehicle several years ago, they really focused on the clean and green and they're really focusing on that aspect to market their vehicles. Another article I mentioned earlier says that combat vehicles in the military could possibly be using urine to make the fuel that they run their vehicles on. Now, it talks about how they're looking to maximize hydrogen and make it using soldier's urine in the field. What does that mean? Well, you're taking something you already have and you don't have to import 55-gallon drums of fuel if you already have a component in the field that is readily available to extract hydrogen from. Another article says the next Japanese car manufacturers talk about Honda's Civic Type R and their Clarity fuel cell powertrains and how they're awarded the 2018 awards 10 Best Engines, the Kudos to Honda and Kudos to Keith for including articles that even challenge hydrogen. It's always nice to see someone put out a newsletter that doesn't just always champion hydrogen but this is up to some of the challenges that we have with hydrogen. So being fair to other California Nevada-based companies, he talks a little bit about Tesla's future and competing with hydrogen fuel cells and doing analysis of whether hydrogen fuel cells are stacking up against Tesla and his wall and his vehicles which are all focused on battery plug-in technology. For the record, most of us who actually are jumping up and down the sport of hydrogen also believe that battery power is important. We just believe that hydrogen fuel cells make batteries better and give a longer range to batteries. So we know that fuel cell vehicles will always have batteries and they're gonna have them of some kind and we're cheerleading for improvement in batteries because hydrogen just complements batteries. The next article says that fuel cells in 2017 or in 2017 are where solar was in 2002 and that's really interesting. I think we're a little bit farther along than that but it shows that it's just a matter of time and fuel cells proved it out. Fuel cells, I mean solar panels have just gone gangbusters and they've gotten cheaper, better and more reliable and they're starting to produce power all around the world. Another story out of China, another story out of Wuhan China as a matter of fact is that China's first hydrogen industrial park is being developed in Wuhan China and focuses on developing hydrogen fuel cells. Mercedes-Benz sees the value in electric cars but also disputes that we will be there by 2030. So California, watch out, maybe their 2040 estimate is pretty close but Mercedes-Benz says, hey, 2030 is gonna be too soon to really see a lot of electric cars. They think all electric cars by 2030 is not really a viable goal and Hawaii's been debating that aggressive electrical vehicle goal for years. Another company that's been spotlighted here on stand energy man is Proton on site and they've been awarded over $2.3 million in contracts to produce US and United Kingdom Navy electrolyzer stacks. For those of you think hydrogen is a brand new technology and electrolyzers have just come on the scene, they've been used to make hydrogen and oxygen from water in the US military on their submarines for decades and Proton on site is one of the companies based out of Connecticut has been making those electrolyzers to meet Navy strict standards, safety standards for many, many years. So there's another article in the newsletter that explains that the auto industry has spent $24 billion to meet zero emission vehicle mandates. For your information, only about 13 states in the United States are called ZEV states or zero emission vehicle states. The rest of the states in the US haven't adopted those strict standards. But this article points out that it's time for the government to start providing some incentives to offset the investments already made by the industry to meet those tough ZEV standards. And it's probably a good argument. So we ought to look at that a little bit closer. When the government officials should probably look into maybe if it's not subsidizing or hoping electric vehicles directly, maybe it's trying to make fossil fuel vehicles more competitive by taking away some of the brakes that they already get. Another Toyota story here says that they plan to roll out 10 all electric vehicles and that includes fuel cells by the year 2020. That's right around the corner. That means if they're rolling them out by 2020, they're already tooling up their factories for it today as we speak. To start with, they're gonna look at China as part of a broader plan to catch up because China's behind and they need to catch up. And to Keith Malone's credit, he even includes a story called Scaling Up is Hard to Do. And it talks about the challenges of standing up hydrogen stations in California and the different standards set by different companies and the challenges of keeping new stations available when there's different ways of producing hydrogen at the stations or delivering in tube trailers and the tube trailers may block the refuelings by the customers for hours at a time. So not everything is roses when it comes to the hydrogen infrastructure in California. They're getting there, they're making more stations but Alicia has an article in there that talks about the challenges of putting up stations in California. So that gets us to right about the end of his articles. And I'd like to stop here and thank everybody for watching today. And we're up about the end of our time. And thank Robert and Cindy here in the studio for putting up with me and helping me get along with the teleprompter and everything else and putting on another show for Stand Energy Man. I hope you found it informative, hopefully inspiring and we'll see you next week with Mr. Dave Rolf from the Hawaii Auto Needlers Association to talk a little bit about battery plug-in vehicles and where we're gonna be going in the future with electric vehicles in Hawaii. So aloha, aloha, until next week, Stand Energy Man signing off.