 Hey, welcome to Stand on the Energy Man on Friday on my lunch hour, Stan Osterman here. And I'd like to start the show off by saying thanks to the Hawaii Air National Guard folks at Headquarters Hang for hosting me and my wife back at the headquarters for a drill weekend Sunday afternoon and making it a real special afternoon for us. That was great, so thanks a lot. And congratulations to Woody Woodrow and Mongo Sakai for the great change of command earlier in the morning. And some good speeches. I thought I was really impressed. Mongo went long as usual, but it was a really great speech, Mongo, so good job. I'm wearing my shirt, my patriotic shirt, just to commemorate my weekend. I had a great patriotic weekend with my guard buddies, so thanks a lot. Today's show's a little bit different. We're going to talk about hydrogen, surprise, surprise, my favorite subject. And we're going to talk a little bit about safety and start off by talking a little bit about hydrogen's characteristics, because I keep running into people that, the first words out of their mouth when I say hydrogen is they say Hindenburg, or they say H-bomb, and we start off on that discussion. And it's people from all walks of life, and I'm not just saying that they're like silly people, but I mean some senior military people. That's the first thing they say is, well, hydrogen's not safe. It's explosive and things like that. And those things are true, but so is gasoline, and so is dynamite, so is a lot of things. When you're dealing with high energy storage items, whether they're batteries or whether they're gasoline or whether there are any other kind of fuel, you've got to treat them with respect, put them in the right kind of containers and handle them safely, and hydrogen is no different. But when we trained the fire department here at the city and county, and also the federal firefighters, because we had to, with the vehicles we were driving around city streets and on the bases, when we trained them about hydrogen, they were really comfortable with it, because basically if you have a vehicle fire in a hydrogen vehicle, you're either going to have a fire or not have a fire, in which case, even though it's a very hard flame to see in the daylight, it shows up easily on a thermal imager, so you put a thermal imager and aim it at the car and say, okay, it's on fire or it's not. If it's on fire, you let it burn. If it's not on fire, you let the gas go. When you're all done, there's nothing even to hose down, because the hydrogen goes into the air and eventually turns back into clouds and rain, because it's a natural element. So hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. It's like 74% of all the atoms in the entire universe, and that goes past our planet, by the way, our hydrogen atoms, and they are almost always found connected to some other atom to make a compound or a molecule. So the most common one that we have here in Hawaii is water. We have a lot of water around us, and people say, well, how much water does it take to make hydrogen? And we're going to talk a little bit about the equipment we just installed at our station downtown on Cook Street, and we've been making hydrogen all week long, and we've gone through five gallons of water. So we're making quite a bit of hydrogen, and it doesn't take a whole lot of water. And when we're done putting it back in a fuel cell, it turns back into water. But what are some of the other characteristics about hydrogen that people have kind of misnomer is about? Number one, it is very hard to see in daylight, but when you're inside in an indoor scenario, it shows up as a blue flame, much like propane. People say, if you can't see it, you could walk into the flame accidentally or something or the fire department could run into a burning car. Well, we have a lot of hydrogen experience, and venting hydrogen is very noisy. So you have more than one sense. You have more than just your sense of sight. You have the sense of sound, and you also have heat waves that would come off if it was burning, and you would see those even if you didn't see a flame. People say hydrogen is very explosive. If you mix it with an oxidizer, it is. Just like anything else, if you mix gasoline in air or jet fuel in air and you ignite it, it's going to light, and it can do that. And hydrogen has a very wide range. It's 4% to 74% by volume with air, and it can ignite. But the reality is it's very hard to ignite because when hydrogen is being released, it's also going straight up at 45 miles an hour. And it doesn't have much chance to mix with air unless you contain it and give it a chance to start mixing with the ambient air. So really to get a volatile mixture is kind of difficult. You have to kind of confine it into a space and then have an ignition source. So again, when we train the firefighters, by the time they're finished, they're actually more comfortable with hydrogen than they are gasoline. So just a little bit about hydrogen and hydrogen safety. You want to not contain it. If you have tanks and storage, you have to have them outside. You don't want to have hydrogen around any kind of chlorine because it will also spontaneously ignite, and you don't want to have that happen so you don't go mixing chlorine or having chlorine out where you have hydrogen. And you also want to make sure you limit your ignition sources just like you would around a gas station. You don't want to have an open flame and things like that. You don't want to have electromagnetic things or anything that can set off a spark. So you just handle it safely and you're good to go. What I'd like to do now is take you through a little tour of our new station that we're just standing up in downtown Kaka'ako and make it a little bit of hydrogen. And this is the Millennium Rain Unit that was basically, this is fresh off the truck we just unloaded at the day before, and it's basically the size of a large pallet. It's forkliftable. It weighs just under 3,000 pounds for the front unit. And then I ordered extra storage. So normally the unit there on the right, the main stainless steel unit, comes with 2 kilograms of storage at 5,000 PSI. I ordered 6 extra 1 kilogram containers. So we can actually store 8 kilograms of hydrogen at 5,000 PSI and dispense it. Now what does that mean in practical terms? That's about four half car fills for a new Toyota Mirai because we only dispense at 5,000 PSI. And most of the passenger cars, they like to have 10,000 PSI. So because we're dealing with a gas, unlike a liquid, we can only give a Mirai a half a tank of gas when we fill it up because we can only go to 5,000 PSI, which is half the pressure of their system. So here's another view of the Millennium Rain. It's very sleek, very self-contained, but inside there, to put it in really, really frank terms, this is your oil field, your oil pipeline, your oil tanker, your oil refinery, and your gasoline truck that comes to your station and drops everything off, all of those functions go on right in this machine before you put the hydrogen into a fuel cell car or truck and let it go. So when you think about the business principles of what pencils out and what doesn't, if you eliminated all that transportation that's associated with taking oil from a field and bringing it to a refinery and then refining it and then taking that refined material and shipping it to a point to dispense, even if you just eliminated that, you're getting rid of a whole lot of costs that are not necessary. Most hydrogen can be produced right on site with water and electricity. Now, electricity in Hawaii is pretty expensive, but what are we having problems with in Hawaii? Well, we've got people with photovoltaics and they love to use all the electricity they can, but they usually have extra during the day that the eco can't take back. It's called curtail power. If you take that curtail power and make your hydrogen, at least you're making something rather than throwing away electricity. So that's kind of the way we're looking at it. And I'd like to say right now too, if any of you want to call in, we have a call in number here, 415-871-2474. And you can call in and ask some questions. If you have any questions, we'll be glad to talk to you. What we've done here is on this photo is we open up the cabinet. And this is the main part of the whole Millennium Rain Unit. That white looking box on the bottom is actually the cell stack that makes the hydrogen. And what's done is we bring AC, 240 volt AC power into this box, the gray box above. And it has an inverter that takes it to DC power. And it sends it to that unit, the white unit down below, as a positive terminal on one side, a negative terminal on the other side. And basically starts applying that to all the cell stacks inside. And it starts splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. If you notice in the equipment there, one of the safety things that we use as a standard is, you notice that the hydrogen tanks are all painted red. And if you look to the left and you look carefully, you'll see some red lines. The red lines are hydrogen lines. The green lines are oxygen lines. So we know which lines have what in them because they're red or green. And those are low pressure lines, so they're usually going to vents. The high pressure lines are all stainless steel with very sophisticated fittings that literally you have to get certified to do the plumbing on. The gray box above the white box is the main power unit, has a battery inside, has the PLC, the computer control on top. The number 30.9 there is telling you that's how many amps it's drawing at 240 volts. That's telling you how many amps that the stack is using. The number 144 there in that one gauge is telling you what the temperature is in the stack. And normally if the temperature goes up, the amperage goes up and you're making more hydrogen. And then we have what we call Hobbes meter on an airplane. Basically, the gauge on the right tells us how many hours we have on the stack there, so we can track the hours and how long the stack's been running continually. So the next photo we've got coming up, again, looks at above that main unit is the compressor unit where the two white gauges are up on top in that white panel. And that's how we tell how much pressure is coming out of the electrolyzer and how much pressure is going into those red tanks. So what will happen is the hydrogen, electrolyzer will make hydrogen, we'll send it over to that gray box that was on the left of the cabinet and that gray box shifts it over to the next section and I'll talk about that section where it's basically cooled down and also starts to be purified, goes into the red tanks and then dispensed. This section of the equipment right here is the section that does the cooling of the hydrogen and also gets it ready for purification. This is where the gas comes up, obviously you've got oxygen on the right with the safety label there and hydrogen on the left and we have some sight glasses in the middle and there's actually cooling coils that run down the middle of these tanks and a cooling system that helps keep the hydrogen, the water in the electrolyzer cool so we can get more production out of the electrolyzer. It likes to operate right around 140 or 150 degrees is kind of the sweet spot for the electrolyzer to operate and this helps keep the temperature right in that area. The gauge up there on the left is, it looks like it just flipped there, the gauge on the left there is the pressure gauge of what the system is putting out and it's showing about 80 pounds per square inch so we get about 80 pounds of pressure right off of the electrolyzer and then that pressure pushes it through some cleaning equipment that'll come up in the back there and I'll talk about that right after the break but that scrubbing equipment helps take any more, any of the contaminants out of the hydrogen that are still left in there after the electrolysis. So we're coming up on a quick break here, I'm gonna take a short one and get you, get you some more information on ThinkTech and then we'll come back and talk about the backside of the system. Hi, my name is Aaron Wills, you are watching ThinkTechHawaii.com. I am the host of the show Rehabilitation Coming Soon. You can catch us live on ThinkTechHawaii.com at 11 a.m. on Tuesdays. I will see you there. Hi, I'm Ray Starling and I am co-host for Hawaii's Wednesday afternoon. State of clean energy and with me today is Leslie Cole Brooks and she's gonna tell you what's happening this month with our shows. Hi everybody, I'm Leslie Cole Brooks, the executive director of the Distributed Energy Resources Council and this month is the focus on Distributed Energy Resources. We just had a great show on smart grid technologies and the rest of the month we're going to discuss storage, different strategies, micro grids and then we're gonna have live man and woman on the street from Verge. So it's really exciting, very informative, lively and just worth doing. So see you next Wednesday. Hi. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here, Stan Osterman on my lunch hour. And we were talking about my Millennium Rain Unit that just got delivered to HCAT over on Cook Street and starting to make some hydrogen for us and talking about how neat a little system it is. You know, a lot of times we focus on the industrial scale production of hydrogen, a large scale and really we're trying to get the transportation sector to grow. But we also understand that there's a lot of interest at home with people who have their own solar and who have, you know, and want to either be off the grid or have some kind of solution where they can have that choice to be off the grid. And so we also talk to them about combining hydrogen as part of their energy storage with their battery system for a longer term, survivability or operations. If there's solar is down for a couple days or a couple weeks, having hydrogen is a backup energy source to store energy with. And that's really cool, especially if you have a hydrogen fuel cell car, which are gonna start coming and you'll start seeing more and more of on the road as we move into the next decade here. So let's get back to my unit and I'll show you the magic that happens. I'd almost like to tell you a whole lot of details about this scrubber unit because it's really slick, but I'm afraid I'd get into some proprietary stuff that Chris McQuinney probably wouldn't be happy with me describing. But what this is is the two bigger canisters and their purpose built, those have a desiccant inside that is made to absorb any kind of moisture that comes through the system. Now, I mentioned earlier that what we store is pure hydrogen. What the industry demands on the car side for their fuel cell vehicles is 99.999% pure hydrogen. So that's extremely pure hydrogen. In fact, it's so pure, it's really hard to measure. So what the system does in the back of the unit, we call it the scrubber. It actually has two chambers, the two small cylinders that run down the middle there that you see. And those things actually start to take the hydrogen and run it through some electrical systems that will take any oxygen that was not separated out in the first stage where we separate the gases and takes any oxygen and recombines it with any of the hydrogen moving through the system to make water and then eject the water out. So we have two chambers there. They're linked in series with two different technologies that basically take all the hydrogen that at this point is over 93 or 95% pure. And it takes that hydrogen and any oxygen that's still left in there, it'll react and turn into water and then it gets ejected out the bottom. Now, after it comes out of those two cylinders, it goes into one of the desiccant tubes and goes through a drying process. And then it goes from that desiccant tube to the second desiccant tube and so it goes through a double drying process. So by the time the hydrogen comes out of the system, it's virtually 99.99% pure. It's virtually pure hydrogen. It's pretty amazing. So right there what you see is the extra storage I bought, the extra tanks. And also you see the water jug in the bottom. Right now we haven't set up our reverse osmosis supply yet. So we're using distilled water to run into our system. And what you see there is a three gallon jug that by the end of the day, it'll go from full down to about one gallon left in there and we'll top it back off the next day and run it down. So it's taken in about two gallons a day and turning the two gallons into hydrogen. And then you see the stack there. And another safety piece, we haven't adopted a safety standard in Hawaii yet, but we're trying to work with the legislature to adopt what we call NFPA2 or fire protection standards too that deals specifically with hydrogen. And what it would do on those tanks is we're actually going to have to secure those tanks to the pad below using some brackets and bolts and rebar, not rebar, i-bar or i-beams to hold it down for any kind of seismic protection so they don't tip over. We have to also do some similar things, isolate the electrical and things like that. We have to make sure we have the right setback from buildings. On this shot here it just gives you an idea of the quality of the kind of work that you need to do with the hydrogen system. That's a real close-up of the, the Swedgelock is the commercial brand of the fittings, but that shows you how precise the fittings have to be and how it fits in the tanks. So literally we can manually open and close all the tanks and use all of them or just use some of them and you'd say, well, why would you do that? Well, when you're dealing with a gas instead of a liquid, if I had a car that came in and I wanted to give it the most pressure I could, what I would do is I would only open one tank and put as much of that as I could in the vehicle and then the vehicle would have like 2,500 pounds of pressure in it. Then I would open a second tank and that would get me up to about 3,000 or 3,200 pounds of pressure. Then I would open a third tank and it would get me to 4,000 or 4,200 pounds of pressure. By the time I got to the fourth or fifth tank, I'd be at 5,000 psi and I'd still have two tanks left with 5,000 psi in it. Whereas if I just opened all the tanks at one time, I would fill the car up to about maybe 4,800 or 4,700 pounds per square inch and my whole system would only have 4,700 pounds per square inch. So we call it a cascade fill or a way to fill the vehicle up and get it to the max pressure by stepping it through the tanks and only filling, you know, emptying one tank and then using the next tank to get it higher and higher and higher. And with our system, we could get all the way to 5,000 psi. So that's just a little bit about how we run the system, how it looks in the back. When you're the user, when you're coming up to fill at our station, if you had a vehicle, this is the part you would see and it's pretty self-explanatory. When you put the key in the fueling key start key slot and turn it, it unlocks the door on the right hand side of the unit and it opens it up so that you can dispense to your car and then there's a little screen that tells you what to do. When you open the right hand side, this is what you see. You see two of the tanks that are inside and you see the hose and the nozzle and you see a pressure gauge. That pressure gauge reads how much pressure there is on the system. It's a little harder to see but below that gauge is a gold colored filter, a filtration system that takes out any particulates that aren't oxygen or water. So dust particles or things like that that may contaminate the vehicle. And there's also two little, one is red and one is white. It's really hard to see on the photo but there are actually little fill gauges and relief gauges or switches. And what this system is kind of nice, unlike other refueling systems that we have on our big stations, you can actually depressurize the hose when you're done refueling. So what we do is before we would use this to fuel a vehicle, we would push the switch on the left side and what it'll do is it'll pressurize the hose to 5,000 psi and then we connect to the car and dispense into the car. And when we're all done, we put the dust cap back on the dispenser, hang it up inside and push the right switch and the right switch depressurizes our hose. So we're trying to not stress our hose out and take the pressure off the hose so that it only has 100 psi in it or so and it lasts longer. Another thing is the reason there's a door over it, it's not just safety and security, but also so that the UV light doesn't deteriorate the hoses. Unlike the stations outside that we've seen, a lot of them have the hoses hanging outside and the UV is gonna eventually start to wear those down. So this unit is kind of nice because it actually protects the equipment too and helps things last longer. So it's a nice safe piece of equipment, it has hydrogen sensors in the top, it's designed so that if you have a leak inside, the leak will not go into any electrical components. There's fans and stuff that are positive pressure that keep hydrogen from ever going into an electrical component. And then there's sensors in the top of the unit that will shut the whole system down if it senses a hydrogen leak. There's temperature sensors and things that if you over temp the unit, it'll shut itself down and shutting it down, you've got an emergency, you saw in the last picture where the key went in, you also saw an emergency stop, you can hit that thing right there if something doesn't sound right and it'll shut the whole unit down and it would be like if you had, if all of a sudden you heard a leak coming from somewhere from inside the station or if you heard a bang or something that you didn't expect, you could hit that and it would just shut everything down and call one of us to come out, we could reset the system and check and see what went wrong. But there's a lot of great safety features built into that system. And really the neat thing is that whole system, as you saw it right there with the extra storage and everything was about $120,000, which is not chicken feed, it's not something you'd put in your carport. But when you talk about an entire hydrogen production dispensing station, that's really pretty reasonable. Just the dispensing nozzle, that little silver nozzle at the end of the hose there on the hose, you're probably talking $5,000 or $6,000 just for that piece by itself. So it's really pretty reasonably priced considering what you're getting out of it. And how long will it last? Well, I tell most people that most of the hydrogen equipment that we work with, other than compressors, compressors need a lot of maintenance. They're probably the Achilles heel of any of this equipment. But most of the electrolyzers and most of the fuel cells in the vehicles, they're probably gonna last 10 or 15 years because they have very few moving parts. And as long as they're just kept maintained properly and not abused, they just keep on ticking. They're like the old Timex watch. It just takes a licking and keeps on ticking. And most of the equipment that we've had out here has just lasted really long time. In fact, it usually becomes obsolete before it'll, it'll break down. And we have a lot of old equipment sitting in the shop that is really quite usable, but it's just outdated. The next photo we have is coming up is kind of fun, I think. I asked our staff if they would like to have custom plates. So our whole staff has custom plates. I think Christine is the only one that doesn't. So here's some of our custom plates that we have. High on H2, H2 Energy, and there's mine, H2 Guru. And we think that's kind of fun and we take our hydrogen seriously. We take our hydrogen safety seriously. And we really look forward to Hawaii moving forward in renewable fuels and the transportation side. And we think hydrogen's a good way to do that. We also think that hydrogen's a great way to help balance the grid out and help the transportation folks move ahead by giving the grid folks a way to store energy over and above battery storage. So we're really high on hydrogen and we like what we're able to do with it. We're looking at promoting the safety and we're looking at better ways to store. Like I say, compression and storage are probably the weak points that I see in the hydrogen system now. But there's other ways to store. I was talking to Ian before the show today that nanofibers and nanocarbon, when you start to put hydrogen into those kind of technologies, you get more hydrogen density than even liquid hydrogen, which is very hard to work with because it's so cold. So the storage and the compression issues, those technologies are coming along pretty rapidly with hydride storage and nanofibers, nanocarbon, tubes and things like that. So I'm really bullish on hydrogen. Toyota's definitely bullish on hydrogen. They've already got cars in the market, so does Hyundai. All the major manufacturers are going into production. Ford and GM tell me they're gonna be out in 2020 with production vehicles. And in the meantime, I would encourage folks to really consider hybrid vehicles. Hybrid vehicle is an electric vehicle, but it also has a gasoline generator and a gasoline driven generator in it. And it's a great way to start moving towards a cleaner transportation sector because your fuel economy will go way up. You'll get in this average passenger vehicle 40 to 45 miles per gallon instead of 20 or 25 miles per gallon. And that's really awesome. So I would say, while you're waiting for hydrogen vehicles to roll in and the first ones are probably gonna be expensive just like everything else, hey, start looking at those hybrid vehicles. They're a good way to go and help Hawaii get a lot cleaner on their transportation side. So the more we can do and improve our grades so the blue planet doesn't give us a D minus anymore in transportation, the more you can do the better off we all are. So there's a little primer on hydrogen and what it's like a little bit more safety. You can always get in contact with us at Hawaii Center for Rans Transportation Technologies, HCAT down on Cook Street if you have questions about hydrogen. And next week, I'm hoping to have State Senator Kai Kaheli on the show and we'll talk about what's going on in the Big Island and what he sees happening in energy on the Big Island, especially transportation energy. So until next week, aloha, and we'll see you with the standard energy man, aloha.