 I'm Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies on my lunch hour, as always, and my guest is on his lunch hour, too, so his company doesn't try and dock him for pay. And we're going to be talking transportation today. But before I get into that, I have a couple of things I want to talk about. Number one, just give kudos to Blue Planet Foundation for last Sunday's student energy group that they had at the Hawaii Convention Center. It was an outstanding event. Rachel James and I went down and talked hydrogen to about 140 high school seniors that came from across the state. And their project was to simulate that they had the challenge of Apollo 13, and they had to somehow save their spacecraft. And we were the ones talking about hydrogen, hydrogen and fuel cells, and hydrogen for energy storage. It was a great opportunity to talk to the kids. And the best takeaway for me was I asked each group what the Hindenburg was, and almost nobody ever heard of the Hindenburg. I was so happy, because usually when I say hydrogen, all the old people go Hindenburg and it's explosive and it's going to kill you and stuff. These kids, clean slate, open mind, and they were great to work with, especially the kids from Lanai. Thanks to the kids from Lanai who really latched onto the hydrogen piece, and they're ready to get their whole island set up on a microgrid that runs off of hydrogen energy storage. So it was a great event. So thanks to Blue Planet for putting that on. Other big news for this week is CERF-Co-Hawai, our local Oahu Toyota distributors, are finally releasing their Toyota Mirai, their fuel cell vehicle, for lease. And it's a really, really good deal in terms of, I've looked at the leases in California, compared to the ones that CERF-Co is doing, and CERF-Co is doing an absolutely great lease on that vehicle. And I hope you're on the list. If you're not on the list, they're going through the original list of people who wanted it. And they've got nine vehicles on island that they're putting out there for lease, and they're going to be bringing more in. So we're really excited because these are the first privately owned and operated hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the state. So it's a real milestone for the state of Hawaii. Another thing, last week, we had, as a guest, Mike Stritski from New Jersey. But he's also doing some projects in California. And just before we went on the air, he told us his house in Malibu that he was converting into a hydrogen house had just burned to the ground. So we're looking at them talking about the wildfires a little bit. And since then, it's been, there's been several lawsuits filed, at least in the Northern California fires, against the utility, because the utility may have actually started some of those fires. And, of course, they're already doubled the number of fatalities of the worst fire ever in California, worst wildfire. So it's another good reason to look at your utility grids and maybe think of a different way that we could be pushing utility electricity instead of through wires across wilderness areas and things like that. We're here to talk about transportation today, mostly. So I've got Ryan Wubbins from Birdson McDonald, my favorite electrical engineer. And we're going to talk a little bit about hydrogen in transportation. And to start off, I want to show a little video on what hydrogen is all about in case you haven't seen it. I tried to show this one once in a while, and hope you get something out of it. 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. What is a proven, safe, clean, and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide? Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. I really like that video, and we try and show it often because it really kind of captures the whole essence of hydrogen and what it can do for us, in transportation and in a grid. And we'd like to use it as part of our outreach and education. We're going to focus a little bit, though, more on transportation. Now, Ryan Wubbins, our guest today, he works a microgrid project for us with the Air Force out at Hickam. It's one of his main projects. But he's got a pretty broad background in energy, electrical energy, and transportation. He's done a lot of studying on hydrogen and electric transportation since he's been working with us on our projects. And so, Ryan, welcome to the show. Good to have you back. Yeah. Thanks for having me. The third week of every month, we have Ryan on to be the expert and poke holes through everybody's stories. But the first thing we do with any project, whether it's a microgrid or transportation, is go for efficiencies. So some of the things that big city planners do with efficiency is they look for putting their buildings and their entire infrastructure around places that people can walk, ride bikes, ride skateboards, ride scooters, basically use that last mile transportation solution so that we don't have as many cars. And focus on getting rid of parking stalls and making a lot more pedestrian ways and things like that. So we always look at those at the big level because, number one, they're not as expensive as trying to do mass transit. But they're a good solution. They're clean. Everybody takes their own responsibility and that responsibility is spread down to the individual level and you just use your own energy to get you where you need to go. That's what we start off with. But the next level up is kind of an area that a lot of people don't understand. And that's public transportation. And I've pointed out before that in public transportation, the idea isn't to save money, not for the government anyway. Public transportation is actually a money loser at just about every place it's at. And, you know, but it's important because if you make that great community where you can walk and skateboard to where you're going to work, your housing is always kind of expensive in those areas. And so a lot of the people have to commute from out farther in the suburbs or the farm lands or whatever in some cases. And that transportation gets expensive. And that's where mass transit comes in, where you kind of express buses coming in from remote areas where people can afford to get to work. But the burden of the cost is provided by the government so that those people can actually help commerce keep going. So what are some of the costs, Ryan, with public transportation that most of us don't see? Some of the cost of, the capital cost is a big one, absolutely, right off the bat. If you're going to start taking hundreds and hundreds of people out of their vehicles and move them into something else, the cost is relatable between all of those vehicles now just being within the actual transportation device. The public side. So you already have to have that capital investment, which is huge. That in itself has to have its own return on investment as what makes the world go around. So definitely the capital cost and then maintenance just on top, just like we have on our own vehicles, the maintenance and upkeep. Part of that maintenance and upkeep would be the fuel and whatever you're using to run that. Operating costs for the engineers that maintain things and the operators who run the trains if it's trains or drive the buses if it's buses. Yep. Yeah, you have all those costs as well. So and the transportation costs can be pretty significant. You know, here in Hawaii, we're on Oahu, we're struggling with a rail project, which is, you know, I think everybody's going to like it when it's in. But I've watched the cost estimates go from $3 billion, which is a lot of money. This morning on the news, it's over $9 billion now. And it's not even going the full distance that we wanted to, that we planned for in the initial part. So it is very expensive, especially that initial investment in infrastructure. So but it's necessary. We have to take care of people that can't afford to live in the urban core and come from the suburbs and out in the outer reaches of the island to get to work. Yeah, absolutely. The nice thing about something like the rail to what you talked about earlier is it's it is a highly efficient use of space. It's it's very efficient in its own, you could say, fuel transportation. That one being electrically driven, right? Right. Consuming. So it's very efficient from those standpoints. So in the long term, a system like that is great. Well, it is expensive to run over time. You do reach those those really low marginal costs to keep it right. So if we had a diesel train computer, electric train, electric train would be much more efficient in terms of using energy, correct? Is that correct statement? Yeah, it can be absolutely converting electrical power to mechanical power is it is a pretty efficient use of of energy. Diesel in that sense is very volatile, as we can see in the global market. So that's price wise, price wise. So it makes it very tough to prove some of those long term figures. Without knowing the long term use of and that's an important point to most of the business folks that I've talked to, including some of the tour bus companies, there they would love to have a firm fixed price fuel contract for like 10 years or 15 years. If they could have that, they could predict so much better. They could plan so much better. They could make capital investments so much better if they could predict the stable fuel costs. So, you know, that's one of the things that we talk about hydrogen. If we can get it to scale and get that stable cost down and projected out where we can provide contracts for hydrogen for energy for a rail project or buses that we can actually start to stabilize those costs for private sector and let them capitalize off it as well as the government sector where they're running public transportation. So we were talking a little bit about batteries and versus hydrogen for electric vehicles and the video showed how hydrogen fuel cell makes electricity. But when it comes to costs and stuff, a lot of people don't really think about the full life cycle cost of batteries versus hydrogen. But you've done a lot of homework on that. What are some of the factors that maybe people aren't thinking about? So some of the life cycle costs that you've got to be aware of is that when you're exercising and going through the cycles of a battery, the way you are adjusting the chemical makeup that's within there is in a way deteriorating the performance of that battery. While all equipment is in a way deteriorating, our vehicles start to wear down over time. Anyways, the batteries are something that I would consider in an engineering world they're a little bit shorter. I mean, we're talking if even if we want to say 10, 15, 20 years there are very few design standards that I designed to that are of that length. The only time I do is for batteries and we're getting ready to switch them out. When you start talking about hydrogen, the material and the makeup that you're dealing with, we can start talking more on the side of 50 plus years. That is a design standard more from a utility scale or a public service. That's what we're designing to. I mean, the rail is not going to go away in 10 years. And that's designed likely well past the 50 year mark. So the cost of ownership just by the lifetime of what you're getting is probably one of the biggest ones. The constant cost of ownership, if we want to just compare the two, there's a there's a capital cost that's a little bit harder to speak to. But the energy storage one is really neat. The best battery manufacturer in the United States is really good. And they're trying to get to somewhere around a hundred dollars per kilowatt hour. That from a car standpoint gets them on the on the price point of an internal combustion engine performance, which is great for them. When we talk energy storage for things like an electrical grid or for some greater use, and we look at a cost per kilowatt hour of storage for hydrogen, it's somewhere like ten dollars. Or it could probably even get cut in half when you start scaling and providing engineering effort on on that type of technology. You look at a battery that's been there really squeezing out what they can by by massive production at 100, that's 10 times more than that of hydrogen. So you're talking about a tenfold increase in price to store energy in a battery long term compared to storing it in a hydrogen system. Yeah, absolutely. Ten times. And that's that's just the storage piece. We can't say that hydrogen is ten times cheaper. That's not what I'm trying to say. But but yeah, from a storage perspective, what you how you have to store the energy, how you have to store, which is why you see something like a bus or a semi leaning more towards hydrogen for many reasons, but one being that really high energy density, that storage that you want to have. OK, we're going to take a quick break and we'll come back and talk to Ryan about that energy storage piece, especially in big vehicles. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music in Hawaii, Anna, all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, again, on my lunch hour here at Think Tech Hawaii. And we got Ryan Wubbins from Burns and McDonald Electrical Engineering that's kind of getting into the finer technical points of transportation and energy, energy storage in transportation. We finished off the last thing about pointing out that when it comes to just the storage piece, like how you store the energy in a vehicle, that your best, best batteries on the market today, your lithium cobalt batteries that are used in your best electric cars are 10 times more expensive than similar technology to store the same kind of energy in batteries, I mean in hydrogen, because hydrogen, when you when you look at how it's stored, it's stored in the cylinders that don't have a whole lot of components in there that degrade, the cylinders last, they're designed to last, you know, decades, not just years. And they're fairly reasonably cost, priced out. So you can make hydrogen storage fairly cheaply and it lasts a long time. Whereas if you have to replace batteries, you've got a couple problems. Number one is the cost of the batteries. But also at the end of the life of the battery, you've got hazmat issues. You don't want to put them in landfills. You've got all kinds of chemicals in there you don't want in landfills. They tell you right when you buy lithium batteries right now for any of your small devices, don't just don't throw them in a fire and don't dispose them in a landfill. But you know, that's where a lot of them go and it's not good. If that stuff leaches into the water system, now you've got problems in your water system as well. So, Brian, what are some of the other things to consider? You know, as we go into the transportation mode and we just we talked about starting with the last mile and doing mode shifting and we talked about public transportation. Let's talk a little bit about moving energy. You know, I mean, one of the things I point out to people that come to our station and Hickam is it's the size of a regular gas station in a footprint. But in that footprint of maybe 10 or 12,000 square feet, it's the same as you're having your oil field, your oil pipeline, your oil tanker, your oil refinery. And then the gas truck that drives the gasoline to your station from the oil refinery all in a 20 foot container or two behind the wall. In other words, you lose that entire transportation cost of your product. So right now, if you just took a if you're a covey person or any kind of person that studies business efficiency, they say that transportation is a non value added aspect of your product. It doesn't make your product better or worse. It just gets it to where the market is, but it adds no value. Well, think of how much money is spent by an oil company to pull the oil out of the ground, push it through a pipeline, put it in a tanker, take the tanker and move it. Hopefully you don't spill any along the way. Get it to a refinery. Use the energy to refine that that oil into a more refined fuel that you can use and then take that fuel and put in a truck and take it to your gas station to put in your car. All those transportation pieces are added to the process. And with hydrogen, you can basically make it right on site. Yeah, comparing the two is very interesting. We've spoken earlier. I don't know how many shows ago it was about the return on energy investments you get from going out and grabbing oil. It used to be really easy. You just stick a straw on the ground and it's just like oil popped up if you're in the right spot. That return was something in the fold. I think it was a hundred to one or something like that, which was great when it was really easy to get. And we were selling at a still relatively high price point for oil. That from a financial standpoint makes a lot of sense. Even from an energy standpoint, we're spending less. But over time, it's getting harder to go after and find those resources. The time you spend on all the places you miss, you've got to add all that up from an energy. It cost something to drill a hole, even a stride. Yep. And when you add all of that up, that a hundred to one is decreasing over time. That's probably not going to surprise anybody unless we found a big bucket of free oil just sitting somewhere we could tap off of. Hydrogen, when you compare that, we could set up that number today. And now I'm going to look it up now because I don't know what it is. But to produce hydrogen on site from water, water being a really known source that we can get locally, almost anywhere that we actually are residing anyways. And the return on that energy investment can be for what? Just simply from solar to hydrogen. And we can find that number and that's set. That number will actually get better over time as engineering efficiencies come from the electrolyzers, the fuel cells, the solar, the electrical components in between. So while the return on energy investment for something like hydrogen will go up, the return on energy investment for something like oil and diesel will go down. Down, right. So a lot of times when I explain to people what a fuel cell does, I tell them it's a self-charging battery. So you put hydrogen and air in and it creates an electrical current rather than having to just store the energy inside the battery where you have metal plates and electrolyte, things like that. You're basically using the fuel cell. In fact, I'll tell people there's dry cells, there's wet cells, and there's fuel cells. I mean, it's just another kind of battery. So what we're doing is we're taking chemical energy and pushing it into this fuel cell and letting it generate some electricity on board a vehicle. And that makes it really efficient, especially when you get to big vehicles. So we talked a little bit before we came on the air Nicola Motors, the folks doing the big trucks. And what impresses you the most about that guy's concept of what he's trying to do in that large class 8 truck line that makes sense with hydrogen? Yeah, what's interesting about them and what's interesting about the car manufacturer, Tesla, I'll kind of lump them into the same idea is that they're both, they're producing their own vehicles. They are producing a new vehicle to go after an existing market segment of a combustion-driven engine. So when they produce more, every one of their investment dollars now is going towards something that's renewable. If a traditional car manufacturer, I think we said today the Volkswagen decided to invest something like $50 billion in the next five years on electric-driven vehicles, all of those dollars spent are actually eating away on their current revenues that they're getting because they're gonna take some of their combustion engine and replace those sales with electric. So that is a tough decision for a company like that to make. When a company that large makes it, that means a lot to the renewable energy transportation world. What you can see and the reason those companies are doing is the success that these other car manufacturers are having and the impact they're having on the market. So when I look at the hydrogen-based trucking, that is incredible that the decision is being made while they do offer both. They're putting, that I know of, they're putting primary focus on hydrogen, is that correct? So they're doing the calculations. They have the most invested technology, like from a company standpoint, that's their baby right there. They gotta take care of that. And if they're making this, the play on hydrogen, when that scales, look out for the cost of hydrogen just to change across the world because the transportation industry is very heavy on shipping. So once the shipping side makes a decision, everybody else is going to, there will be market pressures for everyone else to follow. There will always be competing technologies between batteries and hydrogen because there is different applications when one is better than the other. But when one has such a bigger market presence, that will have an effect. Just the renewable transportation energy market as a whole. So those of you that aren't familiar with Nicola Motors, you should go check them out online. But they basically have a Class 8 18-wheeler tractor trailer with a sleeper cab in. They have one without a sleeper cab, but it's a really sharp design vehicle with all the bells and whistles you see on a high-end car. Lane departure warnings, automatic braking, regenerative braking like you see on all electric vehicles that helps generate power back into batteries. And even hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have batteries in them. But the bottom line is they can get this vehicle to go over 1,000 miles or advertising 1,000 to 1,200 miles of range on one fill up of hydrogen in their tanks, which you're saying is going to be 100 kilograms. They're going to carry 100 kilograms of hydrogen and be able to go virtually halfway across the U.S. So they know they can put a few stations out there or localize some stations, get a market going that transports goods and exactly kick off that economic boost that you were talking about. The interesting thing though is the companies that are really leaning forward on this, including Toyota, have started to realize that they have a role to play in the infrastructure side as well because they're bringing the chicken and the egg or at least parts of the egg to go with the chicken because if they don't, things won't get started. And so Nicola Motors is doing the same thing, they're bringing stations. But the interesting thing is on electric transportation, the more electric vehicles you have that are battery reliant, the higher the infrastructure costs go. The more vehicles you have that are hydrogen reliant, the smaller your infrastructure costs are because you get economies of scale by producing large volumes of hydrogen and a plant, distributing it via pipelines or things that you don't have to have rolling stock on and get it out there for the vehicles to use or create it right on site with electrolysis. And so you can get those economies of scale. Yeah, transporting energy is an interesting market because unless it's stored, it has to happen instantly. Transmission lines are always, and they are very efficient from the extremely high 90s at transferring energy, but it has to happen instantly. So if you're transporting an amount of energy and it's hydrogen, you're just gonna put it in its tank and you're gonna go move it just like you do diesel fuel today. If you're gonna go transport batteries, you're expending that energy while you're moving it. To move batteries. To move batteries. And so you're gonna get somewhere it could be de-energized at that time. So that's when you're talking about the infrastructure costs being higher because on the other side of the model, you're gonna say, oh, well, let me put the battery in the end location in the transmission line. And now I have a very high-efficient use. Well, that costs a lot of money. If I could just truck a tank over there, well, that might be a much cheaper, a much quicker ROI than the other one. So yeah, there's an infrastructure difference because all relating back to the cost per kilowatt hour stored. And that cost keeps dropping for hydrogen. The better technology gets, the better the systems get. And batteries will improve when I think nanotechnology finally gets real. The scientific sector gets that, but so will fuel cells. Everything that helps a battery is gonna help a fuel cell get cheaper and better and more efficient. Yeah, absolutely, very related technologies. Well, that's gonna wrap it up for Staten Energy Man this week. And thanks to Ryan Wubbins again for being out here. Thanks to Susan for coming in the studio to make sure I didn't say anything rude. And to Robert and Cindy here in the studio for making all the magic happen. And hope you join us next week, Friday, on Staten Energy Man. Aloha.