 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome, Stan Osterman, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and it's been a really exciting summer into fall now. Can you believe it's already Halloween month? And you're probably wondering why I'm wearing my favorite hat today. And it's in honor of next week Monday, which is not Columbus Day, it's Hydrogen Day. So you know at each cat we celebrate Hydrogen Day in a big way. So wearing hat today on Hydrogen Day for Hydrogen Day because my show is not on Monday. Anyway, after being on the show for three years, my office used to watch the show faithfully every single Friday afternoon and I get critiqued right afterwards every time I came back in the office. Nowadays, they find other more useful things to do like eat their lunch. So the only way I get people involved now in my show is to invite them on to be a guest on my show. So today I have Rachel James from Hcat here in the studio with me with her favorite hat on and we're going to talk Hydrogen and show you some cool videos and stuff that some of you haven't seen before. Maybe some of you haven't. Some talk about some things that are going on in the Hydrogen World to celebrate Hydrogen Day. So first of all, I don't know how many of you are on HTDC's social media feeds but you should be getting Hydrogen Day media from HTDC if you're linked in to them. So we've got stuff going on there. We've got Department of Energy is doing Hydrogen Day events. The Army and the Department of Energy are signing a memorandum of understanding on Monday to do more cooperative things in Hydrogen. We just went out to Hickam and visited our Hydrogen station out there. It's still doing great. We visited all our vehicles. They're all doing great. We visited our light carts and our generators. They're all doing great. And we're just still bullish on Hydrogen and know that it's going to be a solution. We've just got to convince about 300 million other people and then we'll be all set. So Rachel, welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Thanks so much for having me. How's school going, by the way? It's great. It's my last year. So it's pretty exciting. Wow. Rachel's trying to get her lot. Not trying. She's getting her law degree. She's like cum laude or something. I don't know what that means. I can't spell it, but she's really, really good. But we're hoping that she'll be one of the environmental lawyers extraordinaire by the time she finishes up next year. And so what are some of the things you've been working on at HKAT over the last couple of weeks that have to do with Hydrogen? You're the Hydrogen program. Hydrogen gal. Some of the things most interesting to me are really trying to see how the state can move forward in hydrogen infrastructure, just because that's always a big burden. We have that conversation about the chicken and the egg and which comes first. And at some point, somebody's got to dig in there and figure out what incremental things we can do if nobody's willing to kind of make that big leap. So in the recent past, just trying to understand the different industries that would be necessary to have a hydrogen infrastructure be successful here. So understanding some of the operation and maintenance support for the vehicles, understanding what technicians might be needed. And just really understanding how Hawaii can adopt hydrogen technology, potentially as a large economic driver for the state. Well there was a program that was kicked off probably three or four years ago called GEM. And it had a lot of potential and it kind of fell flat for a while. But it's under new leadership now. And you and I met with Gwen and she's been on the show before and talked a little bit. And some of the things that she's looking at that you remember we can talk about. I know some of the things she's still wanted to keep under wraps and not say anything. But even the GEM program itself is really kind of morphed into something much more functional. And that really leads us to trying to get more infrastructure built by making more funding available to companies that want to step out and do hydrogen work. So did we finally get to the point where GEM on the energy storage side where we can maybe start using the GEM program for hydrogen? So we're still pretty tied to PV. It's interesting about the GEM's program. The things or the projects that go through do have to go through the Public Utilities Commission. But under Gwen's leadership we really have a great opportunity to partner and to craft projects that can then be proposed for approval for the PUC. So I feel like that door remains open. Again, continued conversations. But at present right now we're still hooked up to PV. That's also great for us because we're still looking at curtailed energy and seeing how we can really capture that and make it a viable opportunity for another business in hydrogen. Was it just me or did you walk away from that meeting with a better feeling for public-private partnerships? I definitely walked away feeling like we could do something pretty amazing. Yeah. So how about forklifts? What's going on in the forklift world with hydrogen? Forklifts are doing great things. So plug power, their partnership with Walmart and Amazon has been, as I understand it, going gangbusters. And their project is unique because it brings both the chicken and the egg. So they provide the fueling station as well as the forklifts. And then it's a contract basis to provide both of those things for the warehouses for large places that have a ton of stuff to move around. The really cool thing about them is that, or well cool thing about fuel cell forklifts is that you can use it inside. And you can have round-the-clock operations. So for places especially like Amazon and Walmart that are doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week businesses that are huge warehouses, full of items, moving stuff around, largely indoors. It's really important that this partnership really showcases how amazing hydrogen can be and how much safer it is for individuals. Right, yeah, because even with electric forklifts, which also don't produce any kind of not just fumes and things, but you have to stop and charge them for a couple hours. So that means you have to buy more than you need because some of them are always charging. Yes. So obviously you have to actually invest more in inventory where the hydrogen forklifts probably two or three minutes to refuel them and then you're back on the floor moving things around. Yeah, it's really interesting that plug power specifically. So I'm a Hawaii public radio member and this week has been our ongoing funds drive and volunteering with the station early in the morning. One of the people that was there on the ship with me, I was talking about hydrogen and he's like, hey, I heard about that plug power thing and he's actually telling me about plug power. So I was like, oh, it's so neat to hear people that aren't necessarily in the energy space, no hydrogen and understand the benefits. And because it feels very commonplace to us and it feels common sense, but it's nice to hear people who are outside of the industry have that same take away. Yeah, plug power advertises that they've got 20,000 units, hydrogen material handling units out in the field at places like Amazon and Walmart. And I think they work with some other big companies who like Lowe's and Home Depot and some of the other big box companies that have big warehouses, like you said, do 24 seven ops, you know, they're out there and they make sense. Yes. And the safety piece is good. You know, not perfect, but just like anything else, you have to build the safety end and there's plenty of history to back up the safety that's in place for those units. And if you go and look for, literally look for hydrogen incidents with forklifts, they're very, very few. They're pretty rare. There's a more forklift accidents that have to do with just dumb driving. Yeah. People, yeah. Where the whole rack of shelves come falling down on their head than with actual problems with the forklift. But what's some of the advantages of a fuel cell over just a regular battery motor? I really like to think of fuel cells and batteries as compliments, but certainly, you know, we talk a lot about the difference of on-island operations here on Oahu as opposed to operations on the Big Island. And so when you need range and flexibility and you need kind of quick response or something to operate very much like how a gas internal combustion engine will operate, fuel cells are by and large. Like they just, they really hit the bang for the buck because you don't have to stop. You don't have that downtime for charging. And you also don't have the challenge in like, in how a battery cycles and then degrades in its efficiency. Having like how you call it the self-recharging battery quality in a fuel cell and just having to rely on that fuel to cycle to create the electricity really creates an opportunity to have your equipment last a lot longer without as much downtime. So I think from a business perspective or from like a practical, you know, time is money perspective, hydrogen really makes a lot of sense because it's an infrastructure that you can scale and you can really kind of piecemeal it to meet your needs. So some of the projects that we're associated with, they're not our projects, the Volcano National Park buses and the Metro Bus and the Big Island that H&EI admits you and are putting together. You know, they're being demonstrated on the Big Island, but you kind of talked about it. Do you see the Big Island as kind of leading the way in hydrogen for any specific reasons, especially in transportation? Well, I think they've got hydrogen over there already. So I think Hank Rogers and just the research institute and the people that he's had out there and the information that he's been able to put out through a variety of medium have really been helpful. But the Big Island, by virtue of the landscape as well as the size, yeah, it's not a straight drive. So even just space alone, that would be one thing, but they've got space and they've got very terrain. And so you really need to have, if you're going to do electric, you need an electric vehicle that cannot leave you stranded between your point A to point B commute. So I think the Big Island has a really big opportunity. And I don't live on the Big Island, so I'm not trying to say that like people on the Big Island, but like they get it because it's their day-to-day life. Like they understand the need to have things that are not only practical, but that are scalable and that allow them to traverse the island because so many people in that just the morning commute to get to work, it's a substantial commute for just an electric plug-in vehicle. And so I feel like the Big Island's moving ahead, obviously, Nelha and H&Is, yeah, they're stationed there. And then they've just got big advocates and good opportunities to showcase really just how flexible a hydrogen can be. Yeah, the Big Island is the only private owner of a hydrogen station. And the Nelha station is semi-public. It's set up for Vulcan International Park and the Helion Bus. But I think there's options coming up where they can actually be available for the public to be out there. So speaking of infrastructure, what could Hawaii learn from California or what should Hawaii avoid from California on infrastructure? Because the state of California puts a lot of money into these environmentally friendly projects, including hydrogen. And they put a lot of money into hydrogen infrastructure. But is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, not only from taxpayer perspective, but one of my things that I notice in California is when you start giving big breaks and subsidies, everybody wants them to keep coming. It's like they can't break away from that. And what's your thoughts on that? I think, I don't know that it's good or bad so much as government investing in infrastructure I think is a reasonable thing. But I mean, we speak often about the challenging business climate in Hawaii. And so I think if it's just, if there's a governmental push, if it's subsidies that are committing to the infrastructure, but there's not a similar push to make business more, I don't wanna say accommodating, but to make it a more friendly business climate here in Hawaii, I think that to your point of having longevity and having things that are able to cut off at some point and have people still be successful thereafter, that would be a challenge. So I think it's more than just committing to the infrastructure and really looking at hydrogen as an opportunity to grow an industry and seeing how you can build around that idea. Help the private sector do that. Well, we've got a quick video now before we go on break and we're gonna show it, and it showcases some of what's going on in California at Cal State and LA. Hello, and welcome to the Cal State LA Hydrogen Station. Opened in 2014, this station is the first station in the world to provide hydrogen to retail customers. A brainchild of Dr. James Ataro, this station was built to educate and encourage new strategies for alternative power sources. Thanks to the donors at California Air Resources Board and other donors, the hydrogen station is at an advantageous location close to downtown Los Angeles on the 710 and 10 Highways. At the Cal State LA Hydrogen Station, we produce our own hydrogen. The process of creating hydrogen starts with city water, which is demineralized and sent to the electrolyzer. At the electrolyzer, the purified water mixes with an electrolyte. Then electricity is run through the solution to separate hydrogen and oxygen from H2O. The hydrogen is kept and stored for fueling and the oxygen is released into the atmosphere. The hydrogen is then sent to a low-pressure compressor, which increases the pressure of the hydrogen from the initial pressure of 150 psi, meaning pounds per square inch to 6,200 psi. For reference, the pressure in a car tire is around 32 psi. For conversions, one bar is equal to 14.5 psi, which is equal to 0.1 megapascals. After hydrogen is compressed, it is sent to the storage tanks to be stored for later use. There are three storage tanks which hold 20 kilograms in each tank. So in total, 60 kilograms of hydrogen can be stored on site. Once these tanks are full, the electrolyzer shuts off and waits for a fueling event. A typical hydrogen vehicle stores hydrogen at 10,000 psi, which is a higher pressure than the hydrogen in the storage tanks. Hydrogen at higher pressures allows consumers to fuel more in their tank. Therefore, a second set of compressors are required, which are called hydropaths, which increase hydrogen pressure from 6,200 psi to roughly 10,000 psi. After the hydrogen gas is compressed, it heats up, so hydrogen goes through a chelate in order to cool down, which also allows the hydrogen to be fueled at a faster rate without overheating the car tanks. A hydrogen dispenser is designed to be similar to CNG fueling and easier for the consumers. The dispenser nozzle is equipped with infrared technology, which communicates information such as the vehicle tank temperatures and pressures, which allow the system to monitor a fine fueling rate or stop fueling if there are any problems. Other precautions such as leak sensors, flame detectors, and leak tests are taken during fueling, making fueling completely safe. We hope that after this virtual tour of the station, you have learned a little more about the Cal State LA hydrogen station and that we will see you soon. If you'd like to learn more about the station, please visit our website. Hey, well, thanks to Dr. Bleckman for letting us show that video from Cal State. I got a couple more from them and I think we'll show it later on. But that just gives you an idea of what a station looks like, a public station. They showed $15 a kilogram, which, you know, when you break that down, we've actually done a lot of work on figuring out how much the hydrogen really costs and the breakdown on that. And it leads into a great discussion that we'll hold till after the break, but it talks about how much does it cost to build a station and how much should hydrogen really cost. So after the break, we'll give that one a talk. 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 and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hello and welcome to Out of the Comfort Zone. I am your villainous host, RB Kelly. Today we are playing Two Truths and a Lie and I will tell you Two Truths and you will tell me which one is the lie. Truth number one, this is a real mustache. Truth number two, I want you to watch my show on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. So tune in and let me know which is the truth and which is the lie. I'm RB Kelly with Out of the Comfort Zone and show up next Tuesday to see my mustache live. Hey, welcome back to Standard Energy Man with Rachel and Stan from D-Beds Hcat on our lunch hour. I just want to make that clear. We're both on our lunch hour right now so we're not costing anybody any money out of taxpayers' pockets. But we're talking hydrogen and Monday's hydrogen day. So get out there and breathe some hydrogen, drink some H2O with hydrogen in it, cook with some methane or something or propane. It's got hydrogen in it. And we don't necessarily think you should drive your car with all those hydrocarbons in it but figure out a way to lose the hydro, the carbons and just use the hydrogen and that's what our whole goal is. Anyway, we're talking about hydrogen stations and there's different kind of hydrogen stations. I'm always asked how much does it cost to build a hydrogen station? And really it's like, I hate to say it, it depends because you can have hydrogen stations that make really clean hydrogen electrolyzing water like the last station showed you. All you need is water and electricity and the hydrogen station costs maybe two and a half to $3 million to build which is expensive but you got to realize that's your oil field, your oil refinery, your oil tanker, everything all in a 20 foot container or basically the size of a 20 foot container and it's avoiding all the chances of oil spills and pollution and everything else. So it may sound a little bit high for building a gas station but it's actually not a bad price but the cost of making hydrogen depends on how you're making it. Most of the hydrogen in California, in fact, roughly 70% of it is made from steam reform methane. So natural gas is really cheap on the mainland right now. They got pipelines going all over the place delivering natural gas. So the big companies in the LA area like Air Lequid and Air Gas, they make hydrogen by steam reforming methane and that makes the hydrogen actually really cheap, about $2 a kilogram or less. So about $15 a kilogram you saw, you go, how can you make it for $2 a kilogram and have to sell it for 15? Well, some of the stations, they don't use electrolysis. They take the hydrogen, put it in trailers and then trail it from the production plant to the station and then connect the tube trailer up to the station and take away the empty trailer and put a new one in there and they have to do that a couple times a day. Well, all that trucking costs money and even though the station's a little cheaper to build, the transportation costs are actually really high. So between the transportation costs and also besides manufacturing the hydrogen with electrolysis, you notice in that video they had compression, they had low compression first and then they compressed it and chilled it before they put it in the car. Two stages of compression, that compression costs a lot more electricity that not a lot, maybe 40 or 50% more electricity than to even make the hydrogen with electrolysis. So it starts to really start to get the price up there and then you have to pay for that station that you built. So there's always a price in there for paying for the infrastructure and then the people that run it and the people that operate it. So the cost gets up there. But we're seeing right now that the production of hydrogen is getting cheaper and cheaper with new technology and with scaling up. Anytime you scale up with something that's a common atom like hydrogen, you know that you don't have too many limits. The price will just keep dropping as technology gets better and as you scale up. So I have a really strong hunch that if we really look at hydrogen into the future, the price will be going down. And the other thing is, because hydrogen is not tied to any particular like natural gas or oil or any other commodity, you can get hydrogen from water, salt water, fresh water, brackish water, gray water. You can get it pretty much anywhere. And when you run through a fuel cell, you get some of the water back. You know, you won't have any of this getting held over a barrel, no pun intended, for the price of oil or the price of the commodity you're making hydrogen from. So that makes the prices more stable. And if you're a businessman, you know that price stability in your suppliers and your shippers and things like that is really important to your business because you want your customers to always be comfortable with the prices. If you start jacking your prices around, customers get really skittish and you may lose them. So it's a complicated discussion on hydrogen stations, but it's actually one worth having because people need to understand the differences. Here in Hawaii, we've kind of committed at least on the state side to using electrolysis for the hydrogen. But as all of you that live in Hawaii know and those that don't live here, here's the news. We pay between 20 and 32 cents a kilowatt hour for residential electricity. And a lot of places on the mainland pay four to seven cents a kilowatt hour. And that's a huge difference. So here in Hawaii, we're looking to solar and wind and other renewables, especially when the utility curtailes the power. We're looking to those curtailed power moments to use electrolyzer to make hydrogen. So you got anything to add to that discussion, Rachel? I was just going to tell you that the answer to the question was probably the answer to how many licks it takes to get to the center of a titsy roll pop. But that's all I have to add. That's pretty deep. That's deep. It's Friday after all. You must have a kid. But that's true. It is really a tough thing to get your head around. But hydrogen's the future. We just know it. We in HCAP know that hydrogen is going to be the fuel that takes us farther down the road and gets us cleaned up. Here in Hawaii, we have a really, really ambitious goal to get to 100% renewable on the grid by 2045. And for those of you that aren't familiar with grids, they have what's called a duck curve. And you should all learn about duck curves. Where if you have a demand that's high, you have to ramp up your generation. And when your demand is low, you have to ramp down your generation. Well, when you overlay the sunlight on solar panels with a duck curve, what you find out is you're getting all the power when you really don't need it and you need power when you really don't have it from solar panels. And sometimes the wind blows. Sometimes the wind doesn't blow. So the key, anytime you have at least intermittent renewables, is to be able to store the energy. And storing energy in hydrogen and putting it back in fuel cells is a very efficient and effective way to help balance your grid because your electrolyzer becomes a load when you don't need the electricity for your grid. And it helps you keep a lot of the workload off the electric company from having to ramp up and ramp down generators just to follow the demand out in their grid. So there's big advantages. And of course, if you can visualize that the cars are going to become more electric, whether they're plug-in electric or hydrogen, then you see the merge between transportation and the grid all becoming electric and all being part of one system. So you have to kind of look at that whole concept together, grid electricity and transportation sector to really make all the dots connect, right? I agree. I think one of the interesting things that we just learned was from our good buddy Mitch, that he took away from the Zero Mission bus conference in California recently. And that was just that with the adoption of electric, like purely electric plug-in vehicle. Especially the buses, right? Yes. That the cost to maintain those buses goes up exponentially over time. As you get more buses? Yes. And then that the exact opposite is true as you develop a hydrogen fleet. So you end up paying a large amount upfront, but the cost to maintain and acquire additional buses decreases over time, whereas the opposite is true with electric plug-ins. And so it was an interesting, it clearly was a standout takeaway for him. But I also think as a visual representation for people, kind of just need a quick understanding of what's going on. Really understanding that a compliment would be best as opposed to going hard over on one. But if you were to go hard over on one, you should go hard over on hydrogen. Yeah, because, and I mentioned this yesterday when I was at this autonomous vehicle symposium, that you really have to do that cradle-to-grave analysis. You can't just look at the front end and say, wow, this is really good. Look how cheap it is. When you start to ramp up with multiple vehicles or scale, now all of a sudden the cost impact really goes, whoa, whoa, it'll cause you pause to think about what you're really doing. And then the hydrogen, if you only look it up front and say, look how expensive that is, but you don't see how it tapers off with this economy of scale on things, it's really easy to get the wrong picture. I agree. Well, there's a lot of other stuff going on. We're gonna show a couple quick pictures of some of the cool stuff. You know, we live on an island where the most isolated landmass in the world, sitting here in the middle of the Pacific, and we're all about boats. So I showed some of these pictures last week, but we're showing again, the first video, the first shot is a really neat one. This is actually going to be built. I believe they've already commissioned the boat yard to start building it. This is in San Francisco. That's the cool Golden Gate Bridge in the background. And it's a ferry boat that they're gonna put into commission and into operations in San Francisco as a commuter ferry. And it'll run off hydrogen. The next photo that we've got shows one of my, this is really a mind blower for me. I'm really big on liquid hydrogen as a bulk energy carrying, energy importing and exporting vehicle. And this ship right here has been designed. Norway actually commissioned the designing of it to help them solve some problems. And I'm so excited to see the design of a boat that will someday be on the seven seas that moves liquid hydrogen, purpose built just for liquid hydrogen. The next show at the slide we have is a slide. I'll let Rachel talk about this one because we will sit in on the teleconference. Yeah, it's actually a research vessel, which I thought, it struck home for me particularly, having been on one of the research vessels here in Hawaii with UH Manoa's SOEST program. That it was super exciting for the team one to commission the vessel, but also they were really amazed at the capability and how in comparison to the vessels that they're using currently, how well it worked. And I think in particular, they were looking at range as a thing that they needed to be able to better understand, but they were talking about the ease of transition in the crew learning how to operate and kind of maintain the vessel on the water. So we're all excited about maritime operations with hydrogen where we're looking forward to moving just from cars and trucks and buses to doing some boats out here, especially me. So that's gonna wrap us up for Stand Energy Man today. And again, Monday, don't forget to pop the cork, light the candles on the birthday cake or whatever, and give Hydrogen a big thumbs up for Hydrogen Day. And I'd like to thank Robert and Cindy here in the studios and especially my very special guest from HCOT. Never get to see her except Monday through Friday all day long. But Rachel James for being in the studio to help me out because Jay flaked out on me and I'll forgive him someday. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Aloha.