 Wednesday again on Hawaii the state of clean energy so welcome everybody out there in our viewer audience and before I forget it happy thanksgiving to everybody which is like tomorrow so anyway I'm very pleased to have my good friend Toby Kincaid beaming in by sound today from Portland Oregon and the topic of our conversation today is going to be Hawaii's path to a hundred percent clean energy and is there a silver bullet and the thing I love about Toby is he really thinks out of the box he's a very deep thinker but he can also talk to you know general public and it's not like overly scientific I'm not saying that in a negative way because he is quite scientific actually with several patents and ideas behind his name but basically he can talk to the you know the working person out there on the street and you can actually understand what he's talking about so Toby let's start off by just giving a 30-second background on who you are and what you do and then we'll launch into our show well thank you Mitch Aloha from Portland and happy thanksgiving I go way back I started as an optic lab and we were looking at how to take the optical resources solar energy and break it into components you know the infrared which is great for thermal you have the visible which is great for photovoltaics and then you have the ultraviolet which is great for photochemistry so I started in optics I became very early in my life a true believer when I saw what solar energy to do to allow people to live any way they wanted to without any damage without any carbon without any footprint without any toxicity and that kind of got me rolling and I remember when we first met it was in almost 30 years ago in DC oh my goodness and I remember you so well because when I first met you I thought you know look at this guy he's putting in high high-power hydrogen fuel cell stacks into racecars and when I thought you do that much I thought oh hey this is a good guy so thank you for having me on yeah I'm really pleased to have you on too so we've been in the hydrogen game for a long time you and I and so I think our audience would really like to know about you know this the subject matter or the thoughts behind the title of our show today Hawaii's path to 100% clean energy and so talking to us about is there a silver bullet so I'll let you launch off and if you want to see one of your slides we I know we have a slide deck it's not death by PowerPoint just tell me when you want it I know you can't see it on your end but we want the audience to be able to see what you're talking about so I'm gonna let you cue the slides up okay you betcha put the first one up that'd be great that's just kind of the question okay so let's put the first slide up hang on okay here you go you you bet so you know in the many years I've listened to many experts from academia and from business and from government and it always kind of bugged me that you often hear someone say well you know this is a very complex problem and of course there is no silver bullet and that kind of made me cringe a little bit I mean how do you know if you're for a silver bullet how do you know if it exists or not right so I set my shit the cells out to kind of answer that question one is there a silver bullet and if there is what does it actually look like right so I thought now how can we do this so she popped to the second slide right I realized what I'll do is I'll make a list of everything we want we want it to be non-toxic we don't want soil or air or water pollution we don't want biological pollution we don't want volatile organic compounds or partially consumed hydrogen hydrocarbons we don't want mercury or particulates or or NOx or SOx or acid rain we don't want radiation we want it to be safe hoping it has to scale up to the industrial level and that's really the tough part has to be available to everyone we want it to be peaceful we want an inherently low cost so that's a minimum of rare earth elements of possible we want no fuel costs and it has to be robust and resilient and provide power at industrial scale everywhere and just get it on here okay I just wanted to make sure they had the slide back on because I think we went off that too soon so go ahead the slide is now back up great that's slide number two now the silver bullet so what I did is list everything that you want and if you're picky it's not tricky I like that expression so what I did on the left is okay let's take every combination of everything we know every technology and let's throw it at this barrier and let's see if anything gets through so you know the world runs on fossil fuels and yet here we are in 2019 solar panels when you and I were starting out solar panels were you know $16 a lot now there's 30 cents right but it's come way down you know we've seen these in tremendous changes so why don't we have a clean energy world so for me on the silver bullet I listed this whole thing in an algorithm and then through everything added I could let me just let me just stop let me just stop you right there can you put the slide back up please guys thanks and listen we'll let you know when we don't want it up anymore so carry on yeah watch it out so I you look at fossil fuels that's running the world and we throw it into our barrier and oops it doesn't make it it's soil pollution air pollution you know and we frack and dig and scrape and drill for carbon fuels to which the hydrogen is stuck to it so it's not even the carbon that we want right you we have railroads and pipelines and refineries and depots and we're moving all of this material around and it's all based on holes in the ground surrounded by men with guns it just doesn't make any sense right so here we so here we are we have all these experts saying well you know it's gonna be a diversity of things it's gonna be a mix of things but I don't really buy into that to me it's a horse race and you can't ride three horses at the same time you got to pick a horse and ride it to the end so for me it's what's our best horse so you can see we threw fossil fuels it didn't make it through our barrier you take nuclear energy and try that and that doesn't go it's expensive it's radiation danger and Fukushima you know spewing 40 tons of polluted water a radioactive water into the ocean every day really bad news what about the new or hang on a minute so I want to not challenge you but just bring out this topic a little bit more so what about the newer you know nuclear technologies that are coming out like breeder reactors and thorium reactors and all that which people claim are now a lot safer than the ones we've had so today well even if we managed to make it safe the materials are expensive and it's still just the heat engine you're still running a steam engine basically and that has limited efficiency right we'll get to the fuel cells but they're much more efficient than a steam engine so the world has to not live in the 1800s and more we live in the 21st century and so the point of this kind of trying to find the silver bullet was to throw all of these things and see what goes through okay now on my list you'll see a lithium-ion battery well there's a problem there's problem with lithium-ion when you talk about the industrial scale you know just in the physics the amount of energy you can store in a lithium-ion battery is about 300 watts per kilogram what hours per kilogram right well all right with the same amount of material in hydrogen for example we can store 40,000 right so as far as the amount of material you have hydrogen really shines because you know it's just one well one kilowatt hour on your bill thousand of those is called a megawatt hour and that's what usually wholesale energy is sold in and if you did that with lithium-ion you would need three and a half tons of lithium-ion to do one megawatt hour wow and in reality imagine your imagine your smartphone yeah it's crazy you take out your little lithium-ion battery in your smartphone imagine throwing that into a bucket and how many would you have to throw in so you've got the three and a half times a lot the amount of them a lot it's not really very practical when when you need you know 5,000 megawatt hours in a day of storage and that'll just do a third of your of your total load you can see that my goodness we it's we're talking about 5,000 times three and a half tons right on your little island of 27 miles from the side what about the cost how much were that three times cost well there you go one kilowatt hour in lithium is about six hundred dollars right so if you had a thousand that would be six hundred thousand dollars of capital expense to give you what sells in the California energy markets for about you know 28 bucks right really hard to pencil that out to have any any idea that's gonna work and then what happens to the lithium when in the batteries like dead like itself discharges only has so many charge cycles so what about the lithium itself what do we do with it well there's a good point I mean we can recondition some of it but look at the capital expense and once you put in these batteries after five years ten years whatever it is gonna replace the whole thing right it's not gonna fly okay so when we look at that the economic standpoint and then the idea of industrial use of energy so when we look at all of these things and we throw them through our silver bullet filter I'm amazed that only one thing really gets through and that is renewable hydrogen and this is what you've been doing for so long you've demonstrated that renewable hydrogen is different than hydrogen in general hydrogen usually is formed from methane and that's 95% of the world so what's particular about renewable hydrogen is that we're making it from renewables at the front end and we're going to produce it from water so we don't need fossil fuels forget the methane forget any carbon at all and just go directly to water and so that's what's really kind of driving this is that through my filter the only thing that got through was I'm using renewables to make hydrogen and that's where we have the electrolyzers and fuel cells awesome and and I'd like to kind of go into what that really means I mean that a lot of people aren't familiar with electrolyzers fuel cells so what we've got is if you for example if you took a metal spring and you stretched it with solar panels that you're putting energy in you're gonna stretch that spring out you're gonna hook both ends and then when you need energy you unhook it and it swings back if it goes back as a spring releases that energy and you're left with the spring very nice no chemistry no radiation it's just right so now we're going to do the same thing with water okay you're gonna have water you're gonna stretch it with the electrolyzer it's gonna separate the gases and hold them apart you can let the oxygen go into the air and it'll be just fine there you can bring it back through the air when you run it through the fuel cell and this is what the fuel cell does it's the other side of it it takes those gases and snaps them back like our spring through the fuel cell releasing the energy that you used originally most of it and returning most of the material back to water right so since you're mostly made of water and the earth is mostly covered with water and it's extraordinary that the answer to sustainable industrial civilization is based on water so should we be on the next slide Toby yeah let's grab the next one and I'll kind of fill out what that looks so before you do that we have to stop for a break right now but I just want to remind the audience I told you that you could appeal to you know the non-academic community with his really interesting way of describing these phenomena like the spring idea of how it snaps back and you know releases the energy that you stored up by stretching the spring we're going to carry on in about a minute's time and after this break short break hello hi everyone I'm Christine lenders and this is think tech Hawaii my show is movement matters and this is a show brought to you to talk about how to get rid of things like your low back pain scoliosis TMJ dysfunction ankle sprains pretty much anything that you can do with your body or hurt your body I am here to bring to you the cutting-edge strategies that you can do right now easily on your own to help get out of pain and get back to doing what you love life is better when you listen to your physical therapist tune in Tuesdays at 11 a.m. every other week for movement matters aloha aloha my name is duration you are watching think tech Hawaii I will be hosting a show here every other Wednesday at 1 p.m. and we'll be talking to a lot of experts and guests around sustainability social justice the future here in Hawaii progressive politics and a whole lot more so please tune in and thank you for watching think tech Hawaii okay we're back from our short break and I've got Toby Kincaid all the way with the magic of today's communications from Portland Oregon what's the weather there like Toby I hope it's miserable and darn yeah I love when you talk about that I won't tell you it's like 78 here a nice breezy winds and awesome like like the picture you're seeing anyway let's carry on and let's look at the slide that we had up there there that's someone the electron engine so want to walk us through that again and reinforce what you're talking about before absolutely so here I made a picture of it and I call it an electron engine and I do that because you know what is a steam engine run on steam steam what is a gasoline engine run on gasoline gas you're doing great so now what is an electron engine well an electron engine has an input and an output it runs on electrons that come in the left that's the left side of your of your graph right so we have renewable energy it doesn't matter if it's variable or intermittent if you got lemons we're going to make lemonade right goes into this electrolyzer so what we can do with the grid is take all the renewable energy that's now being turned off because you're over energizing your grid right I say build out all the salt or you want any renewable that you want to get all come you have square miles of parking lot you have many commercial rooftops and of course many residential I should go for it we take every drop of that we run it into the electrolyzer and that we explain takes water and separates it into the gases right let the oxygen go for the moment we'll store the hydrogen and they just dry it filter it and then pump it into a tank and the hydrogen because it's lighter than air is the ultimate in safety because if you ever had a breach it goes straight up and go on how fast does it go on any time how quickly does it escape yeah it's fast about faster you could shoot an arrow it's about six stories a second yeah and so it's just naturally if you just like release it out of your hand it goes up that fast but if you have it under any kind of pressure it's just gonna shotgun up there right absolutely and in fact they found with the pressure tanks they're so safe they tried to crush them they tried to shoot them with handguns they finally used a long rifle to penetrate one of these new composite tanks and the pressure blew the hydrogen out so fast it's actually faster than the combustion wave front right so if it ever was lit it would blow itself out and go up and out and it's gone and those illustration of the safety is if you have a tank of propane over here a tank of hydrogen if you lit a cigarette next to that propane tank I'd say put that light out because if you ever had a breach it's heavier than air that propane is going to mix in and looking for a light it's gonna you know come bloomy right now if you were smoking a cigarette next to a hydrogen tank I'd say hey you shouldn't smoke it's not good for you but I would never worry about safety because I know in the physics that hydrogen can never go two feet to the side to reach your cigarette it goes straight up so fast right okay so back to our power block so we make the hydrogen from the electrolyzer we store it and then you can see to the right you can just pipe it over to a hydrogen dispenser and you could fill the fuel cell buses the fuel cell cars oh wait no we're not on that what I forgot which diagram we're on the first one we're on the electron engine electron engine yeah all right wait let me sorry I got that hit on myself okay so but the end of cycle just as we talked about we put energy in one side that's the electrolyzer separates into the gases and then for the hydrogen when you need energy you just bring them back together you snap back together through the fuel cell and that's the other side of the cookie right that gives you now a whole cookie you have a battery now essentially all right and and if you go actually go ahead to the next slide and this slide we're gonna actually use our electron engine in a real case you've got the grid you build out all your solar you absorb it you deliver it to our power block as much as you can much as you have the electrolyzer then breaks into hydrogen oxygen the oxygen you let go hydrogen we're gonna store and then hydrogen you can pipe over to the sensors so you can fill your buses your cars your trucks farming equipment construction equipment this is where hydrogen really just shines right there's so much energy there you could actually do physical work which is what we need so now here's the fun twist now if you look at our power block I'm adding the fuel cell not only in the vehicles but I'm putting it in the power block as well and the reason is now we can take that hydrogen goes to the fuel cell makes electricity that we can send over to the fast charge stations for your electric cars and in this way it never touches the grid so someone wants to charge their car at peak time no problem they can go directly from the hydrogen and we energize those sensors and then the really neat part is as well is if the system operator who runs the grid says hey it's seven o'clock and everyone's cooking right now we need more energy then the electrolyzer could actually make electricity and push it back on to the grid so now we have a total grid balance solution we have hydrogen fuels for the big engines and for transportation and and for with the fuel cells we can run the electric vehicle charging and so we have now a complete unit that we could apply to almost any situation you can scale this up and down and that was so important about the silver bullet it has you know what works on a bench top or in a laptop or a cell phone is not that doesn't mean it'll work in in a bus when you talk about big energy demand it's hydrogen that wins exactly okay so for example if I were the emperor of Hawaii one of the first things I'd say is okay we're gonna take your dirtiest energy your coal power plants you just a couple of them and we're gonna convert that to renewable hydrogen and the great thing about that is you in that case you don't even need the fuel cells necessarily you could just make the hydrogen modify your burners burn the hydrogen it's just back to water it's your only waste product and now you can run the equipment so you don't strand the asset a lot of the people concerned about getting off of carbon and fossil fuels are worried well we've got trillions of dollars into these assets and they're all gonna be stranded and not really you can use some of it so what do you say so let me just so I understand what you're saying you're saying basically you substitute hydrogen for the coal and the coal plant because you still want to use their steam turbines correct is that what you're saying exactly exactly so you could do that you don't have to tear the whole thing apart and the footprint you know what I did I did a survey of how much is there enough solar energy to run a walkie right and the fact is there is a solar energy if you collect 10% of it convert it to electricity in one square mile for just have a scale here yeah one square mile in one year if the energy is 15 cents you export per kilowatt hour that's worth 77 million dollars a year so in 10 years one square mile of sunlight in Hawaii has a value of at least 777 million dollars that's not bad so I tried to I tried to do a calculation how many how much parking lot space do you have now a walk who is not a big island but there's a million cars it looks to me I couldn't get the exact number but you're well over two or three square miles of parking lot so you literally have tens of millions of dollars of wealth falling down on your parking lot that are wasted and so when I run through these numbers I realize that in fact you can be completely energy independent and it's so important that you achieve what you've been working for for the islands that you all pull together and do this because if we save Hawaii we save the world if you're the cutting edge you're the tip of the spear if in fact you're the bleeding edge you're way out in front and I'm listing everyone up to what you were demonstrating it's very easy to realize that we just don't need to burn fossil fuels anymore and holes in the ground surrounded by men with guns no longer is a paradigm that is sustainable for our world and so it's amazing that we're in their work is so important that you're pointing out this is reality this is not a fantasy it doesn't require R&D we know we have electrolyzers we know we have fuel cells fuel cells have come down in price because they're used a lot now for the material handling vehicles in the Amazon and FedEx and UPS all of those little trucks running around those are hydrogen and the reason is they can fill them up in one minute right if it were batteries it would take any many hours and it would slow down their their throughput and similarly with buses because I'm a I'm a very big advocate of using hydrogen initially as we're using taxpayers dollars to kind of prime the pump here and get these systems out there is like your buses can be refueled in a matter of you know six or seven minutes maybe ten minutes at the max just like a diesel bus it's the same experience it's the same driver experience he comes up to a dispenser he plugs the hose in in this case it's a gas tight fit and it hits the little start button the computer takes over fills the bus like eight or nine minutes later this connects the hose and then off he goes and so it's a perfect it's a perfect thing as opposed to like battery chargers which you know everybody talks about the cost of the bus like oh it's like oh much more expensive than a diesel bus but do they factor in the cost of the battery charger that goes with it depending on how fast you want to charge that bus a battery charger can range from a couple hundred thousand dollars to four hundred thousand dollars and then you got a power that that charger so pretty soon the car start mounting up and then you have to look at your infrastructure can my grid support this kind of power level and cutting through with hydrogen and that's the other reason that I put power export units on our buses here because like in an emergency like if the hurricane comes in and flattens the grid we can use our buses as mobile power units and then go and plug in a critical like communications or shelters hospitals drugstores to keep our drugs cold and gas stations so they can actually pump gasoline and everybody says well we're gonna get the electricity to pump the gasoline well the bus can plug into the dispenser and pump its own so very big the civil defense people really like this idea and I think it's you know we have to look at the total value proposition it's not just comparing the cost of a diesel bus to the cost of a hydrogen bus and right now we don't even have economies of scale kicking in for our buses and once they start being mass produced the prices are gonna fall dramatically oh sorry I don't mean to hog your show there no it's a brilliant point because emergencies are happening all the time and your use of that deployable power supply is brilliant and people when they are really going to need it they're going to really appreciate that I also like your point about the charging cycle and this is a lot of it's a very important point you're saying when you're here in Portland we have a transit authority called Trimett and Trimett has a big fleet there's like 660 bus now if you did a battery electric bus called a BEB a battery electric means all battery it's just as you said not only are you gonna have a couple hours at least if you could fast charge that bus but the charging infrastructure to do that for one bus is very expensive it's also a very high draw on the order for the buses of 350 kilowatts now on Hawaii and Hawaii your commercial demand charge for scheduled cheese I remember correctly is $24 per kilowatt now this isn't the energy this is the power peak power that you use well $24 times 350 that's quite a bit for one bus now would you try and add many of them it becomes really problematic so when you talk when you talk about refueling in five seven minutes that is not a small point that is really critical to the controller who's going to actually try to figure out how I can charge 660 buses every day and that happy note we need to wind up so like give me 10 seconds of closing comment and then we've got to wind it down because we already blew through our 30 minutes oh my goodness well the bottom line is the entire world runs on fossil fuels and there's a lot of toxicity there's a lot of violence there's a lot of inequity what the world really needs is to do what you have been showing us is that with renewable energy making hydrogen then you can store the energy when you need it and you have total freedom total power total ability to run any lifestyle you want and not hurt anyone so I say bravo bravo to your work and to the people and citizens of Hawaii thank you very much Toby we're gonna have you back because I know you have a lot more to say and so this is Mitch Ewan from Hawaii it's state of clean energy signing off and we'll see you next Wednesday and enjoy your Thanksgiving aloha