 And first of all, my apologies for not being able to do a show last week. About 30 seconds before we went live on air, my internet connection dropped. And I scrambled for the next 15 minutes trying to get my hotspot to work and pick up my Zoom link and everything else. We couldn't pull it off, so my apologies for not having to stand the energy man last week. But hopefully we're covering the same topic this week, so hopefully we'll make up for it. Anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about, and it's really kind of a frustrating point for me. When I hear everybody screaming and crying about climate change and how we need to get off fossil fuels and everything. You would think that everybody was really, really animated would be really, really animated about doing that on the government level and at the utility companies and things like that. And unfortunately my personal experiences. It's really frustrating working with the city with the state with wine electric, because it ain't easy. And, and it's a big change that I don't think most people appreciate the change and the magnitude of the change. So it's kind of frustrating that in spite of everybody worrying about, you know, climate change just destroying the planet in the next few years. You just can't change that quickly with something as complicated and as big as a grid. And I get that, but there are ways that we should be looking at it at doing it and I'm hoping that we can. What's frustrating for me though is I have been working with a bunch of great professionals around the world for the last 10 to 15 years. And focusing on hydrogen as one of the energy storage options and emergency power generation and things like that. And up until probably last year, it was just pure frustration and, and even here in Hawaii, it still is frustrating that the state and the utilities just can't get their head around hydrogen as an option for the grid. But what is happening worldwide is everybody else is just going gangbusters and if you actually saw all of the emails and the news with letters that I see. And I talk about it on my show all the time. You just be amazed. I got an email this morning from a friend. And he, if the email was basically a link to a big aircraft manufacturer, in fact, it's Boeing airplane's biggest competitor in Airbus. They're a European conglomerate that makes many of the aircraft that you fly in commercially around the world, including their biggest airplane. It's a double-decker airplane that if you fly international, I think the thing has around 500 seats on it. Well, that company announced today or this week that it's building, it's designing three hydrogen-powered aircraft. One is a local commuter prop plane. One is a small, 1,000-mile range, 200-seat traditional airliner. And then another one, which is what we call a blended wing design, which is a more spacecraft-looking. They all run on hydrogen. In fact, they all store their hydrogen in liquid form as part of their design. And they claim that these airplanes will be out and available by 2037. So when you, if you don't really think hydrogen is happening, I'm here to tell you it's happening all over the place. And if we weren't distracted by this year's elections and COVID-19 and everything, you'd be seeing some incredible stuff happening with hydrogen. I encourage you to look at that. But, you know, getting back to the grid piece, one of the first things that I mentioned when we are looking at energy systems is efficiency. And I don't think most people realize the efficiency of things that we use all the time for transportation or for power generation. So three of my colleagues and I have been working on a hydrogen backup generation system for a 100-megawatt wind farm on the mainland. And as a result, we've had to learn a whole lot about gas turbines because, as I mentioned, the world is taking notice of hydrogen. And one of the industries that's really taking notice of hydrogen are the companies that make natural gas turbines that make electricity. And the reason that's important is because those gas turbines currently can only use natural gas with about maybe a 15% mix of hydrogen in it. But they're all claiming that within the next couple of years, they'll have production models that can use 100% hydrogen. So you can make clean hydrogen and then put it in these turbines, burn it to make electricity. And because we already have so many of these turbines out in the world, around the world, including Hawaii, to make electricity, it'd be really easy to transition to a natural gas turbine using pure hydrogen. And even in Hawaii, we could do that. But what we learned as we got into figuring out whether this was practical or not was that the gas turbines, number one, used 20,000 liters of water an hour for a 10-megawatt turbine. And the efficiency of the turbine was only in the low 30%. Where if you used a fuel cell, you'd be making water, actually, when you're actually using it in the fuel cell. And your efficiency is more in the 70% range in terms of generating electricity. And you're not throwing away a bunch of heat like you are with the turbine. So we learned a whole lot about turbine efficiency, especially when we started getting the formulation going and talking to the turbine companies about how efficient they were at altitude because our project on the mainland was up at over a mile high, like Denver is. And it does impact the efficiency of your fuel cell and your turbine and internal combustion engines for that matter. So it starts to drop the efficiency. So anyway, people don't realize that their coal plants and the oil plants that we have, they're not really very efficient. And as I mentioned in one of my early earliest shows, the way you can tell if something's efficient is how much heat are you throwing away, compared to how much energy are you getting output at a mechanical output of the shaft, like for a drive train for a vehicle or a shaft that's turning a generator. You know, if you're not getting a lot of heat from that system, waste heat, that's wasted energy. And almost all of the systems that we have now burn fossil fuel to make mechanical energy to turn a generator or to turn a drive train on a vehicle, and they're all extremely inefficient. The turbine's actually really good in the low 30% because a lot of the other diesel generators and things like that. They're in the 20 to 25% range, just like your car. And that's if you're using them at their most efficient operation. So it all, when you start to think about it, you know, not only do you want to eliminate fossil fuels if you can, but you certainly would like to minimize the pollution and be as efficient as you can so that if you're going to burn fossil fuels, you burn less of it to get the same amount or more power. And, you know, that becomes a problem because to make fossil fuels more efficient is pretty much, they've already maxed out, they've already done all the science they can to make them efficient and clean. And now what we're doing is we're just trying to improve the after exhaust cleanup, which is why if you remember a few years ago Volkswagen got hammered for cheating on the, on the emissions test. It's because all these companies, whether they're auto companies or diesel companies, they've already made the vehicles as clean and efficient as they can. And the next step is just adding a whole lot more cost to the vehicle and not improving anything but cleaning up exhaust. And it's adding weight to the vehicles and it's adding cost to the vehicles. And it just doesn't work. So that's another reason why I look at hydrogen and go, you know, if you can start from scratch. I think the real focus of this, this particular show is, if you could start from scratch all over again. Most people wouldn't even think of doing it the way we do it. Generate electricity now, we would be using, you know, renewable sources like wind and solar and geothermal and hydroelectric. And we would be using hydrogen to store up any extra energy we have for using later. And batteries would be in there along with ultra capacitors and things to give us, you know, some shock absorbing capability. Flywheels would be in there. The problem is, we're not starting from scratch. You know, and we had the opportunity, believe it or not, two years ago, when I was still working for the state. Puerto Rico had the unfortunate. Luck of having two hurricanes, basically spank it right back to back. And I had a friend that was actually in the National Guard in the Virgin Islands. And he just would tell us that the devastation was just unbelievable and Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. So I suggested to our congressional delegation that we should use the microgrid we designed for Hickam and use it as the model to rebuild the grid in Puerto Rico. Because, you know, if you have to start from scratch, and you can do the improvements from scratch at the same cost it would take to rebuild your grid. Man, you'd be so much farther ahead because you could build in all these efficiencies that we've just come to accept because fossil fuel comes with lower efficiency than the newer technologies that we have. Unfortunately, believe it or not, there's a lot of rules that said, no, we got to build the grid. You can only get the money if you build the grid back the way it was, et cetera, et cetera. And so there are some small pockets where Tesla and some of the other folks took in some batteries and did some good microgrid stuff. But unfortunately, even though we had that opportunity to build a complete small utility from scratch, we didn't. And we wasted two years putting in brand new stuff that was just a replacement for the old stuff, and we lost an opportunity. And I'm almost afraid to say that until we start having those kind of unfortunate opportunities, it's going to be really hard to get the utilities to move off dead center and to do some really innovative things with the production of electricity, distribution of electricity. So what I'd like to do is show a really quick video right now before we go on break. And you've seen this video before, but I want to show it again because the rest of my discussion is going to focus on that model that we did build for Hickam Air Force Base, which was an integrated microgrid system that is survivable, efficient, and clean. And it's really what I think we should be doing in the future, and we should be starting it right now. There are over 300 million people in our country, and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy. But the infrastructure is aging, and it is vulnerable. Natural disasters, cyber attacks, and other threats can leave large swathes of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy, and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro, and others. Microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission, especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports, and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats, and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand, and maintain. And they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves, and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy, and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago. When energy needs were simple, with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources, and transportation, now our old grid struggled to keep up. We required new ways to generate, store, and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable, and efficient energy for generations to come. I really like that video. That's why I keep showing it. But the key point in there is there are so many advantages, just endless advantages to doing a system of microgrids versus the traditional grid that we have right now. And we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, I'm going to go through a lot of those advantages and explain them. So that I hope that if you have any interface with your utility company or with the government, you can encourage them to start doing it. Because there is a way to start that I think would be a great model to follow in Hawaii and would get us going the right direction, being that we have the goal set out in law already. So we'll take a quick break and I'll be back in 60 seconds to talk about those. Come back to stand any energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii. And that video, I like it because it actually packs a whole lot of great information into a fairly short, only two plus minute timeframe. And I hope you caught the pieces where we talked about efficiency and how much we lose on a traditional grid. The traditional grid is set up to generate power in a couple of main stations or sources and push it through lines over fairly long distances at high voltage. And then into substations that start to manage the power a little bit more specifically and change the voltage in transformers and stuff before it's delivered to your houses and to your businesses. And that's the traditional model and we've been building and adding to that model for decades and really over a century. And if we had to do all over again, I'm convinced that most people would say, that's not right. You know, we have hurricanes and storms here in Hawaii and we lose power. Nine times out of 10, it's because the trees or the wind itself just shorted out two lines that are going over the mountains or across a long distance on a high power transmission cable. And it just shorts out the system and it takes a long time to get it back up or trees actually pull the lines down sometimes in remote locations. Other instances are when you have car accidents where a vehicle hits a utility pole and takes out a utility pole with a transformer on it and a thousand customers or more lose their power for a few hours till the utility company can fix it. So one of the biggest vulnerabilities in terms of survivability or resiliency is those big long transmission lines. But that's not the only thing. For every inch that you push electrons through a big power cable, you lose from resistance, you lose energy. So if you're pushing, especially in places like the big island or on the mainland where you're pushing high voltage, 100, 150 miles, 200 miles from a big dam into a big city like Las Vegas, you're losing an awful lot of energy just because you're pushing it through long wires. If you have micro grids that either generate the power right there or like with solar or wind or something like that and can actually take care of some of your communities, then you don't have that line lost. You also have theft. I mean, most people don't think about it. Most people are smart enough not to climb a utility pole. I've been to other countries where I've actually seen people who literally shinny up in a utility pole and put some jumper cables on the stupid utility and start powering their house. And it takes a while for the utility company to catch up. It's crazy, but it happened. And then you have something called spinning reserves. And most people don't even think about that, but the utility has to make sure that your power is delivered at a constant frequency and a constant rate. And that becomes a challenge, especially with intermittent renewables. But it's just a challenge on a regular grid, because, you know, if somebody short something out on a big transmission line, it could actually pull a whole lot of power instantly and the grid needs to be able to react to that so that it doesn't start to shut down. And those spinning reserves are generally attended to by a generator, which is inefficient to begin with. And it's being run at its least efficient rate, just to keep spinning so that if they need it, it's automatically online and can react to a big surge requirement on the grid. That spinning reserve could be replaced by something like a flywheel. It could be replaced by ultra capacitors, but on a big grid, that's almost impossible to do because those searches can be really big and require a whole generator. But if you have multiple microgrids, it's well within the capacity of some ultra capacitors or batteries to take up that shock load with a flywheel or batteries or capacitors on a microgrid. So, right now, we know that our microgrid is a really susceptible to being hurt in a disaster, whether it's a hurricane, a tsunami, an earthquake. We've had wildfires here in Hawaii that caused island wide outages because they started a ripple effect through the system that caused substations to shut down, which overloaded the next substation and it shut down. And over the period of a couple minutes to a couple hours, the whole island would lose power because slowly overloaded itself. And once you've got what we call a complete blackout and you have to do what they call a black start, that's multiple hours to multiple days to get the grid back online. Because you have to bring on a little bit of it at a time and stabilize it and then bring on some more and stabilize it, bring on some more and stabilize it until you can get the whole thing back up. So having a single grid is a weak link in your energy chain. So having multiple microgrids out there that can talk to each other can even push each other power if they're close to each other is a great way to do it. But it's hard to change that system when your original grid is built the way it is. So that's a challenge. But what can we possibly be doing? My suggestion is that we start with critical infrastructure, stuff that we know we're going to need in an emergency or public buildings that we know we can keep the Hawaiian Electric Power grid engaged and then add on solar wind. And there's all different kinds of wind. When I say wind, I'm not just talking about the big turbines you see on the North Shore or Maui. I'm talking about turbines that actually are built into buildings that can give you steady power day and night, even when the sun's not up where your solar panels don't work, but can give you a certain amount of power to keep batteries charged and keep your night operations going with different smaller scale wind turbines. Same with hydroelectric. We have a lot of old sugarcane and pineapple irrigation that if it was maintained and up to date, we could put what we call in stream generators and use those things to generate electricity, where you need it out in Oahu, out in West Oahu on the windward side. But if we focused on critical infrastructure, like hospitals, like wastewater treatment plants, which by the way can use the methane to generate power from landfill gases or from wastewater gases, those things should be what the government can work on right now to develop these micro grids to take care of our wastewater system. Our border water supply pumping systems, our hospitals, our schools. You know, we should have every rooftop of every schoolhouse covered with flotable tech, because number one it provides shade. We just spent I don't know how many millions of dollars putting air conditioning in classrooms. Well, I went to public school here in Hawaii back in the 60s and 70s. And nobody in my generation ever had air conditioning in their public school classrooms. So, you know, we're doing that. Well, why aren't we putting solar panels on all the roofs to help shade those buildings and produce electricity. And just save the, at least save the air conditioning from conditioners from using so much power. But like I say, hospitals, schools, firehouses, police department, substations, any place where you have a couple thousand square feet of roof or or parking lot that you can put overhead panel solar panels up to give shaded parking, which would be a premium for people who are parking to have nice shaded parking spaces while you're generating electricity. The government should start doing those facilities so that we can start building these micro grids that are survivable after a hurricane after a tsunami after an earthquake, so that we're not completely dependent on electric grid to come back. As we do that in our critical facilities, we can also start developing housing suburbs and subdivisions that are planned like the right now Mililani I think was our first planned community where you have wider streets and you have more green space and you have just better integrated sidewalks and shopping areas and it's it's planned out it's well designed as a community. If we take the next step and design the energy grid for that community, so that maybe 10 or 15 or 20 acre parcels of that community can actually provide their own power at any given time and build in backup storage using hydrogen and batteries and capacitors and things and flywheels for that spinning reserve. We could we could make micro grids in housing developments and then save the really tough stuff that urban area where it's going to be awful hard to come off of the existing grid in an urban area and save that challenge for the for the end. So I'll just wrap it up by saying that if you can if you can envision a micro grid that uses batteries and capacitors for your your instant surge coverage uses hydrogen production to help you use energy that's being overproduced by your solar panels store energy for when you need it like at night. That same system can provide you cooking gas, it can provide you oxygen for your hospitals and your welders, and it can even give you some hydrogen for transportation. We already have fuel cell cars being produced by at least three major manufacturers Toyota Honda and Hyundai, but I know that for GM and many European companies are already gearing up for production vehicles. So start to think about how we could make our grids improved by making them integrated micro grids and starting with critical infrastructure help encourage our government representatives to start funding those kind of projects. And our government planners to start looking at how they could lead the way in getting us ready for a more resilient and a more efficient grid system. I'm just going to do it for today. Stand the energy man and I've been looking forward to seeing you next Tuesday here at 3pm on think tech Hawaii along.