 Okay, well, it's Wednesday afternoon over the hump time. Aloha and welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm really pleased. We're gonna have a high tech show for you today. And it's so high tech. We decided to do it in two parts. So this will be part one. I'm very pleased to welcome Jeff Pickles, my friend Jeff Pickles. And he's the executive vice president and co-founder of GreenGrid Inc. And they're doing amazing things with software, and particularly with hydrogen, the name of our show or topic for our show today is Renewable Hydrogen Energy Services, one of my favorite topics. So without further ado, because we have a lot of ground to cover, I'm going to introduce Jeff Jeff. Aloha. Aloha Mitch. Thanks for having me. I hear you just bought that bridge. Yeah, I got a really good deal on it. It was on sale. Okay. So tell us a little bit about yourself and about GreenGrid Inc. Yeah, thanks. So in 2008-2009 timeframe, after almost a career of working on renewable energy and hydrogen, my friend Chen Boyan and I, we decided we're going to start our own company to really help drive these technologies to real commercial applications. And we've been very pleased with what we've been able to do so far. And what we wanted to talk about today was kind of an introduction to renewable hydrogen, because while we've been working on this in detail for many years, it could be new to some people. And so we thought it'd be good to do, as you suggest, a multi part series to talk about renewable hydrogen and kind of break it down a little bit so we can look at some of the fundamental pieces of it and then pull it all together for the big picture on how utilities, transit and transportation can use hydrogen to solve their targets. Well, we have a great need for this kind of thing in Hawaii, as you know. So we're all listening. So you have some slides. So as you walk through it, just you can signal to bring your slides up. So first your great logo. So why don't we have that up? It's just our introduction page. We can go to the next one. Okay. And so just this is going to be our part one, where we're just going to go over kind of this introduction to renewable hydrogen energy. So we can go to the next slide. So this is just a quick summary of our company, Climate Focus Company. We've been providing professional services to energy and transportation in the utility sectors. We founded in 2011 and grown organically located in San Ramon, California, since the Golden Gate Bridge is for our background today. Lots of experience, decades of experience in residential, commercial and utility scale solar and wind, hydrogen, battery, biomass, power to gas, and really helping people understand codes and standards, how to get their technology selected to go through permitting and get into operations. So we're a small team, highly nimble team of experienced engineers and scientists, project managers, and we'll be kind of going over a little bit more of an introduction today on renewable hydrogen. Go to the next slide, please. So part of our general capabilities that we have that we have found that are really helpful to a lot of companies that are getting involved with this type of technology rollout is really kind of from the beginning to the end. In some cases, there are new programs that really need to be outlined so we can help in that area a lot where now we have a lot of utilities and transit that have greenhouse gas reduction plans, but now we really need to flush those out of how we're going to accomplish that and what type of technologies to choose. And one of the main questions that we get asked is what's the cost? And so we spent a lot of time working on a technical and economic modeling that we do where we can calculate the levelized cost of energy and all of the technical performance for various case studies. So that's one of the areas that we specialize in. And of course, a lot of our history comes from remote sensing, using GIS and LiDAR tools. So a lot of the analysis we can do is not just project technology specific, but also geolocational analysis that we can do that involves a lot of the energy resources, solar and wind, as well as the transmission distribution infrastructure, as well as loads. So there's a lot of different modeling that we can do to help folks meet their targets for greenhouse gas emissions reductions. And of course, we get involved with operations and maintenance quite a bit and even staff training. So we kind of go from the beginning to end to try to help companies and utilities implement these new types of technologies. So with that, let's jump into some Hawaii specific information about what we have found in our first review. So we're on slide five. Perfect. So Mitch, you're familiar with these two figures from the Hawaii State Energy Office and Hawaii greenhouse gas emissions report from 2016. So just in a snapshot, this top figure, what that's really showing us is we have a big dependence on petroleum. That's the biggest piece of the pie for the energy sources is the top figure. And then the lower figure are the greenhouse gas emissions are really pretty evenly split between the stationary combustion, which is a lot of that's electrical generation and the transportation. So for Hawaii, both of these areas are equally important. Replacing fossil fuels is a key. Replacing that petroleum is a key area that we gotta address. So it's a big problem. So it's probably a lot harder for transportation than it is for stationary combustion, mainly because you have so many players in transportation and a lot of them like their cars, you know, the way they are. Of course. Yeah, car culture is a really important part of life. Everyone around the world, but especially in the United States. Whereas stationary, you got a much smaller subset of people that are operating stationary like IE, utility companies. So yeah. And they're really they're different. They're different problems to solve really. And so you kind of need to think about a little bit differently. And so what this is telling us, the way I interpret this, and this is a great discussion to have is, you know, I see this as there's a need for base load and transportation both. So we need to replace these large base load petroleum generation sources as well as transportation. And I feel that hydrogen is a good tool to do that. And so when you start scaling up hydrogen, you can have long duration storage and you can use it for transportation fuel. So the hydrogen toolkit works for both these areas really well. Let's try the next slide. This one can be a little bit hard to read, but this is from the United States. EIA. This is the group that pulls all the different data together of how we use energy in the United States. So it's not just for Hawaii. This is total US. The red circle there on the bottom right, that's transportation. All the inputs are on the left, all the supplies on the left, all the demand is on the right, all the loads. That transportation key there, that's a that's a big number in there. And so when you start trying to say we're going to put that back into, you know, other energy sources, it's a big number. And so that's just a way to kind of visualize how big it is. And, you know, storing renewable energy is the key to being able to do that. And we have to store a lot of it. And then we have to make it available at the right time and the right place to be used for transportation. That's that we can move on to slide seven. So this is the famous duck curve. Everybody's got one. That's the joke. Everybody's got a hundred. Some are worse than others. Right. So there's really two problems that we're trying to solve, in my opinion. There's the middle of the duck curve. And this is brought on by having a lot of solar generation on a particular network, because the solar comes on the middle of the day and there's this big production. And there isn't necessarily the demand at that time. And then later in the day, the demand peaks up as the sun is going down. So there's this offset. That's about a four hour offset. But there's the other issue, which we already identified tonight, was that we need to replace baseload, which is maybe 24 hours or longer of storage that we would need to start replacing baseload sites. Green grid ink proposes that hydrogen is a flexible tool to be able to do both. And the other thing that makes me interested in having a lot of storage is like what we're experiencing today with pandemics, or in California with a wildfire and global warming for everybody can all have really big impacts on the energy demand time and location. And so having more storage gives us more tools to be able to adjust to the changing world. Yeah, I think with this pandemic, we're going through the the belly of that duck is probably exasperated, because the load has gone down, especially during the day when everybody's at home. So there's less and less of that renewable energy being used. But they still have to have spinning reserve, they still have to have some baseload. And of course, they have to wind it down. So it's not operating at its most efficient way. So A is more expensive, it's hard on the equipment. And you probably give off more emissions, because you're not operating at your most efficient level. Yeah, maybe the head isn't quite as high now, because everybody's home. So not all coming home at once and turning everything on. So it'd be interesting to see what the duck curve looks like one with what we're going through right now. But nevertheless, I think you've elucidated or highlighted the two main points. So Okay, that's good. Yeah, hopefully we'll be back to normal and we won't have years of data that shows what it will be like to do this, showing new trends that the world may be changing in ways faster than we predicted the change would come. Let's look at the next slide. So this is a overall figure that tries to give us the big picture of water, energy and hydrogen, and how people can conceptualize how this can work. So there are a lot of ways to do any technical problem. But what I want to address today is what I feel is a really important thing for consideration for people is the liquid hydrogen pathway. And so this image goes top left to bottom right effectively, where we have water, rain and snow, wind and sun, those are our sources. The electrical energy can go right across the top right to the grid as we normally do with renewable energy, but some of it needs to be stored. And that's the two arrows that go through the electrolyzer that produce gaseous hydrogen GH2. And then we put it into a liquefier, which uses more renewable energy and produces liquid hydrogen, which is stored in a cryogenic vessel. Then that hydrogen that is stored can be used with hydrogen fuel cell to put energy back on the grid at a later time. Or it can be transported by truck or ship to be used for transportation fuel. When the energy is consumed, again, either through the fuel cell or in the transportation, then the water is the water cycle is completed. And there is no lost water in the cycle. Okay, so I noticed you've introduced liquid hydrogen, which I know we don't have any here in Hawaii. But what's the benefit of liquid hydrogen? It's a good question. The primary benefit is the density. So as the gas gets cold, it becomes more dense, and you can store more of it in a smaller space. As we know, hydrogen is the lightest element. And unless it's pressurized, then the storage of a large amount of it can be quite costly and require a lot of equipment. So liquid hydrogen has been used commercially for a long time for storing and transporting hydrogen. And the main method that's used for hydrogen sales today, even before fuel cell cars or any of this topic has come up for hydrogen sales, people produce liquid at a big plant, truck the liquid all across the country, and then fill gaseous tube trailers and sell it to their customers or put the liquid trailer right on the customer site and deliver liquid to them, which is the model that a lot of hydrogen fueling stations are using today. So this is just kind of expanding on what we already know how to do. So let's talk about you. I know you're going to talk about the tanks and later slide, but I just want to jump a little bit. It's like, if you're going to start as gaseous, it has to be very high pressure. And that's much more expensive, I think, than a liquid hydrogen tank. And the tanks don't last as long. I mean, they have a finite, the high pressure tanks have a finite life because the code authorities limit the life, you know, to 50, normally 15 years, and then you have to replace the tank. Now, that's an important topic. And I think there's room for improvement there. People that do have high pressure type two, three or four hydrogen cylinders that reach the end of life, those should be sent out for analysis, non-destructive and destructive analysis. And there's groups of people available that we can connect them with to do that. Some of the national labs are interested to do that type of work. And then more data can be obtained to try to understand those pressure vessel life cycle better. But today, the largest way and the lowest cost way to store hydrogen is with the liquid hydrogen. And it's interesting, there are safety benefits to using liquid hydrogen. Because the flammability aspect is same, but actually pressure is a safety issue as well. So liquid hydrogen is low pressure. So it's actually has a lot of safety benefits with liquid hydrogen. Right. And we can ship it from the big island if we want to the other islands, particularly Oahu, as a liquid, of course. Yeah, you can even export it to different countries and have energy exports if you had enough. Right. Okay. Let's try the next slide. So, you know, one of the things this was one of the founding principles of Green Grid Inc. was we wanted this is before any of these, you know, new programs that have come out to reach 100% carbon free energy. But that was always our vision and how to do that. Well, our vision always was one of the easiest things to do that we should do. And we will need to do to reach these goals is every building should have solar. It just makes sense. But how do we plan for that? How do utilities have organized programs to reach that goal without creating any disturbances or reliability problems? And particularly, how would we store the energy? We should be planned. And so we created some software tools, where we can automatically design rooftop solar panel layouts with the exact solar panel dimension, portrait or landscape for entire cities. Wow, we do automatically with a computer. So what this image shows is how we can pick at the point on every solar panel. And for every five minutes of the year, we do a shading model. So we start with the 3d data of the whole city. And for every five minutes of the year, we can determine if it's shaded due to vegetation or other structures or the terrain. And then we automatically lay out the panels, anything that's below the threshold where you wouldn't want to put a panel, we don't put one. And then as you see on our website, we have an example where we did most of San Luis Obispo County in Central California. And then we calculated the kilowatts for every array with every panel. As you zoom in, you'll see the kilowatt numbers start popping up there. And the color of the panel indicates the category of the quality of the solar resource that's hitting that panel. And some can be shaded due to HDAC equipment on roof or, as I said, vegetation or other structures. So this is a good tool that we can use to look at. And because it's GIS data, we overlay the transmission and distribution data substations, and we can do power flow modeling, which is another image that we see on this slide, that we can look at the different circuits and look for the bottlenecks in the distribution and transmission system. And so that is a good planning tool that we can say, okay, what if we put solar on every roof? How much storage do we need? And where should we put it? And how big should it be? And could we do it in a logical fashion that makes sense? So this is the kind of the tools that we've been developing for many years that we would like to be able to bring to the market more and have people use them so that we can, you know, get a jump on it. Because we're in 2020 now, 2030 is around the corner. 2045 is going to be here before we know it. And these things take a lot of time once you leave and decide what to do. And even executing can take a long time too. So what kind of computing horsepower do you need to kind of run to your program? Do you need a supercomputer or? Well, we developed this over a long period of time bootstrapping as a startup. So we started running it on a little laptop we quickly found that there is trouble brewing when you do that. So we ended up over the years, we have built up a very nice computer lab in our office in San Ramon. And then this was before the pandemic, we developed it to be all able to be operated remotely. And it can be run while the technicians are anywhere in the world. And so we have a very powerful system there that can process this data unattended and operate for, you know, say for something like all of Honolulu, we could probably run it in three, four days running over Wow. So the client doesn't have to go out and build his own computer system. He just gives you a geographic area and says, Hey, let's do an analysis of this. See how it interfaces with everything and hit a few buttons, draw a circle around an area and your computer software program takes over. Yeah. And of course, we always like to bring in as much data for as we can, you know, parcel data, any other GIS data that electric utilities usually have a lot of those different layers are all good to bring in. And of course, if we know some particular parcels of land that are interesting, it doesn't have to just be rooftops. We can do parcels of land as well and look at the shading and have terrain thresholds. If the hill is too steep, we don't want to try to drive trucks up there for the installation or you know, various problems like that. Right. Excellent. It's a good tool in the toolbox. Let's try the next slide. This one's a good same thing for the wind. We do a lot of wind analysis. So we have a lot of different tools for wind analysis and wind resource modeling. This case was a case study we did for Northern California in your Sacramento. So Sacramento is kind of inside the red polygon there. And the wind resource is the lower left of the area right or red area is a better wind resource down by the Sacramento River where the wind really grips in on the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge because of running up the Sacramento River there. And those green dots are some existing wind plants down there. So I'm going to ask about those. Yeah. So the question is now how do you get that energy back to Sacramento? Right. And how do you do it? So, you know, right now it's working to use the electric transmission lines. But as you look at, you know, wanting to reach the similar type of goals for Sacramento to be 100% renewable and is a carbon free and to really scale up and have a lot more wind. And we want to use it for transportation. So then it's the same type of analysis. How do we store all that energy and divide it use part of it for the grid at a later time and use part of it for transportation at a later place in time. Right. So that's a good tool. So let's go to the next slide. We've been talking a lot about hydrogen. And I feel like a lot of people have never seen a hydrogen tank. And so I thought it would be helpful to put three, four pictures up here of a hydrogen tank. And we can talk about these a little bit. So some of these are really famous. You've probably seen the picture of the one on the left, even if they have not paid close attention to what it was. But that's the big liquid hydrogen tank in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, who was built in 1962, I believe. So it's like pushing 70 years old. No, no. I think the insulation had to be replaced at one point in time. But now we use different types of insulation that work even better. So this is a robust technology. This tank holds about 800,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen. So into perspective. If we were to use a hydrogen fuel cell to extract that energy, it's about 3.5 gigawatt hours of electrical energy that we could take out of that. Right. And that that number of the 3.5 gigawatt hours is based on the conversion efficiency of the fuel cell of taking the hydrogen and making electricity out of it's about 50%, maybe slightly more now. There are fuel cells, US hybrid has a fuel cell, they can produce or else they're 67% efficiency. Fuel cell efficiency is an interesting topic just to take a quick segue. Everyone wanted fuel cells to be really small to fit in cars, but high power density. And then you take a hit on efficiency. But if your driver is efficiency, and you have a big footprint, then you can make them bigger. And around that lower current densities, when there's less waste heat, the efficiency goes up. Same trade off for electricizers too. When you make all those electrochemical stacks really small, the efficiency can go down because there's more heat generation. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So talk about some of these other tanks. I didn't want to distract you. The medium tank is one of my babies. I love the liquid hydrogen tank at AC Transit in Oakland, California. It's a beautiful site if anybody ever has a chance to visit. It's great to take a tour there. It's all designed and marked well with signage for tours. But and they have now I believe they're going on 23 hydrogen buses there. Right. And it's supplied by delivered liquid hydrogen. And they have recently upgraded their fueling infrastructure to have two simultaneous fueling hook points. And this tank holds 9000 gallons. And it's not used for electrical generation today. But if it were, and we connected a fuel cell to it, this would be about 40 megawatt hours of electrical energy that we can take out of that tank. And how many buses with that support? Yeah, well, this right now they're going to be doing 30 or so buses getting to that point. And you know, each of their buses is used, some of the buses are getting larger. They started with 20 kilogram tanks. Now some of the buses are getting close to having 30 or 40 kilogram tanks. So it just kind of depends on the routes. But these buses run up and down the hills of Oakland and Berkeley all day every day. No problem. Been breaking records with the number of hours on these fuel cell stacks. Yeah, they're over 30,000 hours now. And those are that's older technology. I mean, it takes a lot of years to generate 30,000 hours of use. Yeah, they're probably gonna go for 50 or more. Who knows how long, maybe 80 or 100. Let's keep it going. And then near and dear to my heart, the tank on the right is the West Sacramento Liquid Hydrogen Fueling Station. So that was one of the first, if not the first open retail hydrogen fueling station in the state of California. I personally played a hand in getting that thing put together and opening it. And that tank is one of the smallest liquid hydrogen tanks in the market that you can get. It's really easy to order one of those and have it set down on almost any site you want. And it holds 3000 gallons. So what's the ballpark cost, rough order of magnitude cost of that smaller tank? Just rough? Very rough, because oftentimes they're leased from the hydrogen supply company. It's just rolled into your dollar per kilogram. Most people don't want to buy it because when you buy it, you're responsible for painting it or doing maintenance or changing a valve or understanding it. But oftentimes it's leased. I think a really, really rough number because I don't get involved with these a lot. Something like 100k or something like that. Very rough number. And again, these things last a long time. So if you're asking to buy one from an existing company, it might be already 20 years old and they can give you a really good deal on it. So it's like ordering a brand new one is probably that number that I gave you buying an old used one is probably much less. And then part of our vision, the little propane tank on the bottom, that's not actually a hydrogen tank just to be clear with everyone. That's our envisioned future in our hydrogen economy, as we will also be able to use delivered liquid hydrogen for other applications too, including residential, commercial and industrial backup power and even primary power. And that would be in the 10 to 300 gallon range, which will be 12 to 350 kilowatt hours. So there's a lot of potential applications there. And those are a three great example, liquid hydrogen tanks. And all three of them are available to be viewed by the public and visited. So you can come see them whenever you'd like. I'd be happy to meet anybody there and take a tour. So one final question, because we're almost out of time. Yeah, told you it would go fast. It does. People talk a lot about boil off from hydrogen, liquid hydrogen tanks. I think we have technology now that real limits that can you just comment on boil off and how we address that? No, NASA has been working on that for a long time. So if you know, it's not a large amount of heat that you need to or energy, I should say that you need to remove from the tank, to compensate for the energy that's going in from the sun and the atmosphere gradually warming the tank, right, you can actively cool the tank with a small amount of energy to prevent boil off. But the and that's being implemented down the new tanks for NASA. What is the best way to prevent boil off is just use the fuel. Yeah, we always run a small fuel cell and charge a battery if it's electricity, right? Yeah, or put it on a net metering interconnection and run some auxiliary power at your side. Or just fill up cars. You know, we always used to say at West Sacramento, if we have even as few as one car a day, it won't boil off. Okay, even in the summertime, one car a day, it won't boil off. That's a very ballpark number, but that gets you the idea of it. Perfect. Well, we're rocketing up to the last slide. Well, I really appreciate your time today and getting to hang out. I always enjoy talking with the image. I always look forward to it. You know, there's our contact information for chin line myself. I'm Jeff Pickles, ring greetings, our company. This is what we do been doing it a long time and look forward to being involved to continue to do it in the future. And any programs that Hawaii has that we can help, we will do anything we can do to help you guys. Well, we have another chance to talk about this because we have part two coming up, which we could do in a couple weeks time. Yeah, whenever you like. And what I'd like to do in part two is do the cost analysis. So we do a lot of financial modeling. We've had a good introduction. Let's get into the cost analysis and look at some of the results of our case study where we've been looking at a 50 megawatt renewable hydrogen plant. And so it's really interesting results there we can get into next time. I have somebody for next week, which is very unusual for me because it's always last minute Charlie here. But maybe the week after we can have you back because we don't want to have too big a gap because I'm pure debt. And you know, you've raised a lot of interest, I'm sure once this gets out. And people that's the next question they always have. Well, how much does this all cost? Yeah, that's always the question. It's getting better and better. It's getting better and better. Okay. Well, Jeff, I'd like to thank you very much. And oh, one old plug. Jeff's son has been a has been accepted at UH. Oh, yeah. He's he's coming up from the mainland and he's going to our business school here at the University of Hawaii. So Oh, well, that's exciting. You mentioned that he's really excited to go. He's planning it all out. And I can't wait to get there. And I'm sure he'll be really interested to be involved with any of these kind of things are going on and watch and learn as he's going to school how these new energy solutions can really start taking shape. Okay, I'm going to, we're all going to sign off. Jeff, once again, thank you very much in Aloha. And to our audience out there, be back and see us next week where we have a show on solar energy. Thanks a lot.