 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. And welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies here under the state of Hawaii and business economic development, particularly. And welcome to our show today. This is one of our shows where we have a repeat guest that comes in and talks about some of the more technical aspects of energy and grids and things like that. And we're going to get into that. But before we get into that, I want to make up for some lacking I had last week when CERFCO Hawaii opened up their very first hydrogen station available to the public to refuel vehicles here in Hawaii using hydrogen. And so they had a great ceremony. It was out in Mapunapuna, which for those of you that aren't familiar with the island, is right below Tripler Army Medical Center and between the airport and downtown Honolulu. They had taiko drums. The gentleman on the image right now is Mr. Tanaka. And he led the team that actually designed the Toyota Mirai. I got to spend about 20 minutes with him talking about his design work and what his design team went through and giving him a good pat on the back for a really beautifully done piece of work. Anyway, the station is up there now. It's up and running. Governor Ige was the keynote speaker. So he was and he was really excited. In fact, I talked to some of the folks from the state legislature. And when the governor gets a chance to, I would call it geek out in honor of our show title today, but he gets a chance to be an engineer and talk about technology. He gets all excited like a young kid at Christmas time talking about things like this. And he's he's really excited about hydrogen technology that's available now in Hawaii. What you see on the screen right now is actually the station itself. The two dispensers you see one is labeled H35 and the other one is labeled H70. H35 means 350 bar pressure or low pressure hydrogen. And H70 means 700 bar pressure, which is high pressure hydrogen. And that's because some of the vehicles like industrial vehicles normally use the lower pressure because they don't care how big the tanks are. And then the vehicles need higher pressure because they put smaller tanks that hold higher pressure inside. And as you can see, we had a Kahu there to do the blessing and he walked around the entire facility doing a Hawaiian blessing. And with the governor and the key folks at store and I believe Mark in the picture from CERVCO who helped put all this stuff together. And then the last images of them filling up the car symbolically for the first time. But what I found was they've actually been driving these vehicles. The folks at CERVCO that work there have been able to drive these vehicles around. And the one neat thing that I heard from them was they expected range of this vehicle supposed to be around 300 to 320 miles on a Philip. And what they've actually been experiencing is closer to 400 and around 400, 380 to 400 miles between Phillips. So even more impressive technology than they anticipated. So again, kudos to CERVCO for bringing the chicken and the egg to Hawaii. That being the vehicles and the station. To me, that's a big, huge tipping point for hydrogen in the state of Hawaii. And we really appreciate the effort to CERVCO and the Toyota folks have made to bring a clean, sustainable transportation model to Hawaii and put it on the road. So now we get into our real topic today, which is I'm telling you geeks with superpowers. That's what I got on here today. We got Ryan, women's thanks again, Ryan, for coming. That's 10 for a third Friday of every month. We got Ryan here from Burns and McDonald to talk on the more technical side of energy. And today we're going to kind of continue on that sustainability track. And we left off last time talking about energy storage and the grid and and different things like that. And we're we're kind of going to focus in a little bit today on one of the lesser known and actually not fully developed, but has a lot of potential and ways of storing energy. And that is compressed. And we're going to talk a little bit about compressed air, which normally on the mainland, that would be a salt caverns or some big void in the geography that a city or a state has that they can pump air into it and build pressure up in there. And then at night when they don't have solar or when the wind stops, the air pressure can be released back through turbines to generate electricity. And that system is being proven has been proven already is actually in at least some limited use in some big cities. But we don't have a whole lot of salt caverns in Hawaii. So a kind of a sister technology is putting balloons or at least pressure vessels underwater and using those to store a compressed gas because underwater you have automatically water pressure for anything that's under the water. So so Ryan, maybe you can give us just kind of a picture overall of how these systems might work and why they work. Sure. I'm going to go back one step and explain why we're talking energy storage. OK. A few weeks, a few shows ago, we talked about just going 100 percent renewable and there are some countries out there that are 100 percent renewable, but those countries are basing themselves either on geothermal or hydropower, which from an energy storage standpoint, they have a lot of energy behind them. Whether it's hydro, you're always getting water pushing down on the dam or geothermal, you're always creating that heat. So they've already got their energy storage built in. We don't have that ability necessarily geothermal. There is some but a big baseload here in Hawaii. So in fact, if you look at just the big island to make your point, you look at the big island by itself, it's already exceeded the renewable energy thresholds that HECO has. They're looking at HECO maybe is 18 to 25 percent renewables and they're getting saturated already. But on the big island, they have geothermal and they have hydroelectric on top of their other renewables. But those are firm baseload renewables. So they don't have to store that stuff. It gives you that power automatically on demand and you can run it or not use it as you see fit, but it's always there. And that allows them the neighbor islands in many cases to exceed that threshold of intermittent renewable because they have these other more stable renewables to use. That's right. So you get that big source of energy behind it. And when we say energy storage, it doesn't mean that it's already converted to power to electricity and then stored in some fashion lithium, lithium ion or hydrogen. We're talking a diesel tank sitting underneath the generator. That is it. That is energy storage. And the reason we need that is so that we can fluctuate how much energy we're producing at any time. When we go to 100 percent renewable and we start talking and bringing in a lot of solar, we don't have that throttle. We don't have that tank that we can fill up and empty at will. You know, diesel tanks, if if there's a big hurricane and we couldn't get new barges into offload, we'd be using up that energy storage while we're waiting for new energy to come in. So energy storage is important. We have it today in the sense of fuel tanks. When we go renewable, there's a more there's a larger need for massive scale energy storage when you start when you start putting in what I would call massive amounts of solar, because they need to balance each other out. Simple lithium ion battery is just not going to provide you days, weeks, months of energy storage like fuel tanks do right now. Which is why we start talking about hydrogen. So much more energy dense. But where are you going to store massive scale hydrogen? And then you and I were talking a little bit. I said, well, you got compressed air systems on the mainland that deal with salt caverns. But then there is a company or companies looking at underwater storage. These would just a balloon that you're going to fill up underwater. And the pressure on the water around it is what's providing the pressure acting back on the hydrogen. Whereas above ground, you're creating the bigger tanks, thicker walls so that you can compress the hydrogen or the air into those tanks at a very high pressure so you can decrease this footprint that you have. You move it underwater. It's just a just a balloon and you're using the water to act on the hydrogen instead of really thick walls. So no one is doing this hydrogen underwater storage. It's it's just something I think you and I just kind of throw out the technology on in that respect is pretty much brand new. And I've only seen a couple of companies or a couple universities that are actually testing at the summit in Canada. I think a couple in the UK, but not a whole lot has really been proven. And as we know, living here in Hawaii, you've got to respect the ocean for a lot of reasons. I mean, number one, the currents are powerful. Number two, the salt corrosion. If it's if it's got any corrosion factors at all, whether it's aluminum or steel or whatever, it's going to corrode. And and then you have creatures, boring creatures, you know, mollusks, barnacles, things that grow on anything that doesn't move in the ocean after a while starts collecting this unless you have some way of mitigating it. So we haven't even seen anything that's been put in saltwater for any length of time to decide whether or not it's going to survive. So it's got to be pretty durable, too. And so there's there's still quite a bit on the technology side. It's got to be overcome with these technologies. But they're they're there. And, you know, maybe it's time to start looking at those, especially if we're really looking at 2045 in Hawaii as a goal. Maybe this is another alternative for Hawaii Electric to use to store power, store energy. I think so. I think there's the technologies are available to apply towards this concept. It's just a concept at this point in time that we're talking about over lunch. But that that being storing hydrogen and using that compressed air storage is a is a known technology that's been used for for some time under water, compressed air storage is a little bit different. But yeah, when we apply if we have the drive to apply the engineering, it's theoretically very possible to to to store massive amounts of hydrogen in which which case we could use as energy reserves for the grid. Energy reserves to fuel cars. I don't know if planes and ships will be hydrogen fuel that someday. But when you talk that amount of of hydrogen or energy stored, you'd rather have you got to pick, I don't want to say pick your poison, but you got to choose one or the other. There's some type of compromise. Do you want a mountain filled with a bunch of diesel or do you just want a big balloon of air under water? You're probably going to choose just a big ball of air under water. I mean, the problem that would that could happen there is. The air comes out. Yeah. And then it's back in the air. Yeah, if the air comes out, then you got more air. But if the diesel comes out, you got a big problem. Yeah. And, you know, along those lines, you kind of talked about energy storage and zeroed in on what our topic is today. But the problem or the issue that I have with energy storage is right now people are really comfortable with batteries. I mean, we've had them for years and years, whether it's alkaline batteries for flashlights and stuff for little lithium batteries for cell phones and all of our appliances. And now we have lead acid batteries in our car and big lithium batteries for bigger cars and for the Elon Musk's wall and things like that. People are really comfortable with batteries. And the fact is for energy and energy out, batteries are very efficient. They're very highly efficient. But everybody kind of forgets that that's not the only part of the equation. There's what does it really cost to make that battery in terms of are we exploiting another country's labor and paying them 50 cents a week for labor and putting them in hazardous mines just so we can have cheap batteries? Are we talking about a country that owns most of the lithium that now becomes our master because we depend on batteries and we have to go to them exclusively for this raw material? Does that put tension in terms of conflict or war between us and another country when they up the prices so high that we can't stand it like what happened in the oil crisis? And at the end of life, we're going to have these batteries and they aren't necessarily earth-friendly at the end of life. So what do you do to recycle the materials? There's some batteries that you can recycle almost everything. Lithium batteries go into a different category. They're a little bit more tricky on the environmental side. So it's that fully burdened cost that I keep pointing to for energy storage. But you look at these energy storage for hydrogen or for air, a lot of those costs are gone. They're just not there. The safety issues are reduced. The safety concerns are reduced. And if you have a leak, your environmental issues are pretty much not there. They definitely have their different pros and cons. We are very, very comfortable with batteries, but that's a battery is not going to give us that. It could give us that massive energy. At a cost. At a cost. And that cost is going to be a square footage cost and it's going to have a lifetime that it's just not as big. It's not as long as some other technologies that we could have available. I don't know how much energy storage is on this island when you add up all the fuel that we have and the daily shipments of crude and diesel that are being produced out of the refineries. But if you add that up, it's going to be a really large number. And just simply converting that number into a bunch of batteries. Lithium, iron, lead acid, what have you. You're talking a lot of batteries. And they're going to degrade over time. That battery needs to be maintained. They do lose some of that life over time. And that energy storage we need to realize is important for us in the case of, we can go into like a hurricane or some natural disaster that happens. The energy is absolutely critical. You can't just, we can get really far with putting in solar and batteries right now. It's really high bang for the buck right now. But that's, we're talking a lot of high trip, high round trip efficiency with the battery. Yeah, I'm going to produce the solar today. I'm going to use it tonight and I'm going to produce more solar tomorrow. I'm talking a week of clouds. Maybe it's 40 days storm or something like that where you really don't have a lot of sun but your load is still being required. Is your battery going to be sized up for that? Maybe. Is the whole island going to be sized up for that? Probably not. That's where the scale is massive and while we're comfortable with batteries it might not be the best fit for that. Okay. Well, we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be back in 60 seconds to hammer through some of the details here and how we could make it work. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here of Think Tech Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30 Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think, we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. 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 Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand on Energy Man on my lunch hour, of course. And today we've got Ryan Wubbins, my super geek electrical friend. In fact, a funny story when I went to the mainland and talked to a bunch of hydrogen people, most of them are engineers and they're all CEOs of big companies. And I told them our governor was an engineer. The one guy screamed out, you can't spell geek without a double E and the whole council broke out laughing because they thought that was hilarious. But it's true. Our engineers are a precious resource and we like to tease them and call them geeks, but hey, if you don't have electrical engineers, you're not gonna get much done around the state of Hawaii or around the world because we need more energy than you can imagine. And we take it for granted. We take it for granted that HECO just has the power there. We can flip the switch on and write them a check at the end of the month, but it ain't that easy. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some of those challenges. But one of the things is, you know, when it comes to compressing gases and even the way we do it now with our hydrogen, pushing it into tanks, we generate heat and it takes energy to compress. So that's one of the things that makes hydrogen energy storage not as efficient as batteries is we have to take that hydrogen at ambient pressure and squish it into containers, which takes energy. And we can measure that energy a lot of times by how much electricity it takes to run the pumps, but also by how much heat we generate when we push it into tanks. But when we use this underwater model, even as opposed to some cavern models, if we were gonna say store hydrogen in these pressure vessels underwater or these balloons underwater, wouldn't that also cool the hydrogen and reduce that element and make it actually more efficient to store the hydrogen underwater? Yeah, it absolutely would become more efficient in handling with the heat. When we produce hydrogen, via electrolysis or really any form, we're gonna create energy in the sense that it's gonna be stored hydrogen. And then the heat that we just generated, we have to deal with that heat somehow. We can't just let it off to the atmosphere. Sometimes the equipment can't even handle the heat and that's how we deal with it right there at the equipment to cool and not break the equipment that was just producing the hydrogen. So when you get into the water, deep water cooling is already even used here. And I think Big Island may have some deep water cooling as well. You come down and use that really that thermal bank that sits there in the ocean, which is incredibly huge and it's thermal power that it has to help cool that equipment. Now when we use the ocean water, we can say, okay, that's how we're dealing with our heat. That's an especially very efficient use to deal with it. Another way to deal with it is to actually consume it. Now in Hawaii, we don't have a lot of needs to consume heat. We're always the other way around who's trying to get rid of it. But other island nations, if you're more North, I mean, and you have the need for heat, maybe there's Alaska, maybe New Zealand, it's rather cold, Japan. They use it for heating houses and things like that. Exactly. So you're gonna use that heat when you use that heat, your efficiency goes up because you're displacing another form of energy that was being used to create it. So dealing with that ocean water is theoretically, I mean, because we're still in that, we're just kind of talking about it right now. But yeah, we could do that to help deal with the heat or maybe even I would propose, I think we talked to you about putting the equipment in the water. And that's where it resides. Because I mean, you look at the ways we deal with heat right now in engines. Like in your car, you have a radiator, which pumps fluid through your radiator where air is cooling that fluid down and going back into your engine and absorbing the heat and then running it back through the radiator. On your lawn mower, your small engines, you have fins on the outside of the cylinder wall that when the metal heats up, it goes out in those fins and the air cools and that's how you keep those engines cool. But cogeneration, we call it using the heat and the hydrogen, the energy generated by hydrogen is one of the things that make hydrogen efficient when you really apply it. But we're gonna have a whole show where you're gonna talk about air conditioning and how heat can be used in air conditioning. And it's a little bit outside your place in the electric area, but I know you know this stuff, so we'll talk about it some more. Even small scale co-gen is something we can talk about even on the silent that's being used in some spaces. Small commercial can use it. Absolutely. The heat can be good. Okay. We can. Well, let's expand, theoretically take this method of storing whether it's compressed air or hydrogen or whatever. And let's say that it works and we've got it over in Kahi power plant instead of having a big diesel fire power plant offshore, maybe a quarter mile, half mile in 40 degree water, we have a bunch of this stuff and we're able to pull hydrogen ashore. Let's say that's already there. What would be the way, what would HECO's grid look like? What would it change into? If we're gonna try and employ that technology, what would have to change on HECO's grid to be able to efficiently use that technology? That's a good question. The nice part is when you're talking about, yeah, replacing the power plant, if we do actually put that equipment there and it's almost a one for one, instead of producing it via diesel engine, we're producing it via a fuel cell, at that location of the same scale, the implementation is actually rather easy because that power plant is already, the grid is already designed around, it's strategically designed around the power plants that we have on Island right now. So when you do a one for one, we're done. The power plants are made to help back feet and blackstart power each other in the form of outages, but it's not gonna be a one for one in most cases unless you're sitting there right by the water. We won't always be that lucky. In that case, the grid gets, we call it a modernized or it really just gets transformed into allowing more of the distributed generation. When we say distributed generation, it takes from that larger big, big generator model to everybody else having their smaller generation units scattered throughout the grid. It creates a lot of technical difficulties for electrical engineers to deal with that distributed generation because the way we're used to powering up with big units going out and powering large chunks of consumers at once, it's not as easy now. We have to group a bunch of smaller distributed generation units together before we go after bigger chunks of consumers. If everybody's got their own hydrogen station or maybe even hydrogen fueling stations right now that get installed, they could even be made to back feed back into the grid in times of outage. They don't need to be made just to just buy fuel for vehicles. We start to section off chunks of the grid and now we get into a little bit more of a micro grid talk where chunks are even neighborhoods, full cities are able to section themselves off and power themselves via their own distributed generation. That, you can't do that today. We don't have the equipment for the grid to just do that. There's not the switches, there's not the smarts. When we say modernization, it really is bringing in some of the latest technologies and putting them in the right spot so that we can become a micro grid, become self-sufficient, power ourselves back up and then reach out to the next neighborhoods and reform the grid as a whole. But if you could do that, wouldn't that speed up the ability to recover after like an incident or to recover, say that one ear power sources went down and all the other ones are up? If you can produce enough power, you can actually even pick up that one drop load but at the very least, the rest of your system's up and you're only dealing with one distributed area that's down. So let's say for example, instead of using a Kahi power plant as the input for the energy, let's look at, and I've seen Hiko's grid layout basically, let's take the North Shore. So maybe from Hali Eva out to Kuhuku or just past Kuhuku around that. There's relatively few customers in terms of downtown Honolulu and the potential for a lot of renewable energy to be generated, whether it's wind turbines or solar on people's roofs or commercial grade solar, industrial grade solar where they have big solar farms. So let's say we islanded that community and then have the switches available where they could either be tied into the grid or if the grid was faltering, they could disconnect from the grid and be islanded themselves and produce all their own power. Is that feasible? Is that realistic? Yeah, yeah, it is. If you were to continue come down Kuhuku, if we were to wrap down, I live in Ka'ava, so if we were to loop all the way down into there, there's one main line that comes around that side of the island. You, we just brought in Turtle Bay, BYU, and the PC, the Polynesian Cultural Center. Those would be your big loads there, they're hanging out there. The bigger loads are what cause a little bit more of the technical difficulties, but we have these, if we turn that into its own microgrid and these places and the communities have installed their renewable generation, they, when we talk about getting back online quicker, they almost become dependent upon their own resources first. So they will be, they will come online quicker because they already have that distributed generation. We're not worried, we're not using power plants up in Scofields pretty close to to get the power back over to the North Shore. So everybody becomes a little bit more independent on bringing themselves back online first and then going out and helping the rest of their communities around them. So in theory, when you do the calculations on power outage time, everybody would have, it'd be less, you'd have less, no power less often. That's a tough way to explain it, but to answer the question, yes, everybody would power up sooner. So now we have two more shows to do, one on air conditioning from heat, and the other one I'd like to do is maybe notionally, maybe you and I can sit down and graph out what HECO's grid might look like if we were, if you and I were gonna redesign it for HECO. Sure. Not that I'm an electrical engineer or anything. No, they haven't asked me yet, but maybe one day. You can help me do it, I'm sure you could. Well, that's gonna do it for us this week here at Stand Energy Man. Thanks to Ryan Wubbins again from Burns and McDonald. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the control room for all their geekiness, because they're actually closet geeks too. And thanks for their help putting the show together and we'll see you next Friday. Aloha.