 Welcome to Stand on the Energy Man here on Tink-Tek-Kaua'i, St. Austerman, reporting to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii. Another beautiful winter day, clear and crisp and cool. Great day for the beach. Got to come over here and be a tourist for a little while. Take off some time from your hectic, snow-filled weekend. Anyway, for today's show, I wanted to talk a little bit about the grid and specifically the grid and how it interfaces with transportation. Because I think most people don't realize that, you know, if we're going to go all-electric with transportation, which is probably every expert you can talk to is telling you, we're going to go all-electric to go green on transportation, but that requires an awful lot of upgrades to the utilities. And people don't think about that. When I say an awful lot of upgrade, I'm talking that the generation will have to nearly double in most places. And that means also more high-tension lines, more substations, more transformers, and all that sort of thing. So if we think about it, there are more than one kind of electric vehicle. Most people don't realize that. They're familiar with Tesla and all the other plug-in electric vehicles, Leafs, maybe some Leafs, and all the plug-in electrics that are out there. But there's also hydrogen fuel cells. And hydrogen fuel cells suffer from one thing, lack of infrastructure that puts together and produces the hydrogen cleanly from clean energy so that we can power our vehicles with clean power. Because after all, if you're making your electricity from a coal-fired power plant or an oil-fired power plant with a big turbine, you're not being clean. You're charging your electric car with dirty energy. So if you're going to be clean, the point is to be clean in your production of your electricity and then clean in the technology used to store your energy for your electric vehicle. And one of the things that people don't realize when we do talk about electric transportation and charging infrastructure on electric vehicles that run on batteries versus infrastructure to make hydrogen is you can make that infrastructure that makes hydrogen. You can run that off of your house. You could be making your own hydrogen for your car right in your carport if you buy small-scaled equipment. And you can also put large-scale equipment right where the renewable energy is and not have to run power lines and transformers and all the other grid stuff that you need when you run your electric hydrogen vehicle off of hydrogen made from clean energy from solar, wind, or even hydroelectric. But you can make the hydrogen right next door. Anyway, today's guest is Chris McWinnie. And he's one of the first guys I ever really got together with to talk about electrolyzers and making hydrogen, making clean hydrogen, green hydrogen. And in fact, I was one of his first customers as well. And we still have the equipment that we bought and still operating out of Hickam Air Force Base. But Chris, welcome to the show. And thanks for joining us. But I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about some of the pluses of using your scalability of going, you're able to make fairly small-scale hydrogen stations compact on a pallet. They're self-contained and they're scalable. So instead of spending four or $5 million to put in a big hydrogen station, you can put in a small station for, shoot, under $300,000. And it'll take care of a couple of cars in your neighborhood. And then you can grow. You can double the size of the station. You can move that one station to another neighborhood and buy a bigger station if all your neighbors end up having five or 10 or 20 cars in your neighborhood. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your equipment and how that system works? Yeah, well, thanks for having me today, Stan. Appreciate it. Yeah, we envisioned a long time ago that being scalable and starting small and growing big would be a best, better way to build hydrogen-fueling infrastructure. So we started out in the beginning designing stacks for electrolyzers and our own fueling protocol and our own purification system and help design the compressors to get them to do what they needed to do with our particular system and finding some that were low enough profile that they could be packaged together as one and put all of that plus storage into one package that's small enough that you could pick it up and move it around with a pallet jack to start with. And then come on after that with three other sizes that you can grow to as the demand picks up. And our key phrase that we use is dynamically matching supply with demand. So our products, they give us the opportunity to do that by, for instance, our Model 200 with some extra storage can handle two cars a day in a 24-hour day. So conservatively it could handle five cars a week and then you have, when you get to the point where that is going to get overrun because there's a demand, then you can take that station and be able to move it someplace else without having to have an additional capital acquisition cost just the cost of de-installing it and reinstalling it, which the Model 200 takes less than an hour to uninstall it and less than an hour to reinstall it someplace else. And then that way you can open up new territories quicker and find those hotspots where it's going to be in demand that you have hydrogen fueling infrastructure and then replace the one that you took out and moved someplace else with the next larger unit that can then handle six cars a day or 20 a week or something like that. And then we have another model that we come on after that with that can handle, you know, make 64 kilograms a day. So it could handle up to 20 cars a day and, you know, and so it's, you know, every step of the way we have a station to grow with and then once we get all of the stations put out there then the ultimate goal is to have large-scale renewable hydrogen from large utility scale wind farms and solar farms that we would put our large electrolyzer on our megawatt scale and then we would truck hydrogen using hydrogen fuel cell semi-trucks to haul that to all of our existing stations and that's how we intend on building the transcontinental hydrogen high line. Okay, the image you have behind you there, that's Dubai, correct? Yep, that was one of our wild and crazy ventures to the Middle East and that was fueling that probably behind it has a plug power fuel cell in it and it was a range extender for the trolley. Okay, so the other thing that is an advantage with your equipment is your smaller scale units and by smaller scale, I mean probably up to one that can handle 15 or 20 cars a week are considered appliances, correct? And like the refrigerator I'm trying to install at my house today, it's a 220 volt outlet and a water line from a reverse osmosis, you know, water purifier and that's when you talk about install and deinstall and move it, it's basically disconnect the power, connect the water, get a forklift and move the unit to another site, connect the electricity and connect the water again. In fact, I'll tell you right now, installing your unit at the station on Cook Street was a lot easier than installing my refrigerator today so it isn't all that hard to install Chris's equipment and I'm not a master plumber or anything so it's actually pretty convenient so it's nothing cosmic and he put all the work into the cosmic work into making his stations, they're basically a station on a pallet and you know when you think about it, that one pallet replaces the oil field, the oil pipeline, the oil tanker that shipped it, the oil refinery that makes your gasoline and the truck that ships it to your station and it's all right there on a pallet and all you need is water and electricity and you have fuel for your vehicle and I think that's an amazing clean way to go and I think Chris's equipment is great, great to get you there. Can you tell us a little bit about your hydrogen highway plans? Yeah, so we plan on putting 27 stations in 27 cities from Los Angeles, California to New York, New York City, New York and we're just going to start, we've already started that, we've got three of those stations up and we first built a what we call the Ohio hydrogen triangle and it goes from Dayton, Ohio to Columbus, Ohio and down to Portsmouth, Ohio and back up to Dayton and we've had that active now for about six to eight months and we're running cars on them and just trying to gather data and information and we're currently in the process of upgrading our manufacturing facilities and we bought new lasers and press brakes and injection mold machines and CNC machines and all kinds of crazy stuff. I don't know how to run, we have to hire people to figure that out and we are gearing up for 250 units per year in manufacturing capacity and we are first ones are running through that. Right now we've got five model 200s, two model 342s and model two of our 10,000 PSI stations that we're putting through that whole assembly process right now and then when that's going to refine our production capacity and then we're going to put that 27 order through plus all kinds of other stuff that we've got going on and then that those 27 stations then the first ones to branch out from Dayton will be an Indianapolis unit and an upgrade in our Columbus unit and then we'll start going east and west but the ones that we're going to put at Dayton, we're going to put three or four at Dayton before that step and that's where we're going to figure out how our phone app is going to work because one of the things that we've done in trying to figure out how to distribute a fuel, hydrogen fuel to people without running into log jams and not having enough product is we're putting together a phone app and you will become a member of a new company that we're developing called Emerald H2 and Emerald H2 will give you the GPS coordinates for where a station is located and make sure that it has the fuel you need and that will allow you to reserve the gas until you get there so no one pulls in and you might say yeah this station over here the end of the road's got fuel right now but if I don't get there in 45 minutes somebody else might pull in and get it that can't happen to you in this because you can reserve it until you can get there and for a limited time you know we'll give you so much time to get there but that will allow us to service more people and provide them with hydrogen and not have to have as much hydrogen in store so it saves on storage costs which is a pretty big expense in the hydrogen business so you got a kind of network out from Ohio east and west eventually once you start getting your stations going right but we want to gather off of these Dayton local stations where we can be joining on the spot and fix things and hammer out any other details that we need to know and make sure that customer experience is as good as it can possibly be and that the phone app's working right and it's given us the correct data and our data acquisition systems are you know and storage of that data is is is proper so that that'll that'll inform us as we put these stations 100 miles apart across the country that's going to inform us of you know what station needs to go where how much production it needs to do per day how much storage it needs to have all that kind of stuff and are you working with car dealers so the supply and the demand kind of match up as you start expanding your network right we have a car dealer that has one of our stations right now and part of our new website that we'll be launching soon with mlh2 and our phone app is all about allowing people to tell us hey i see you're in denver colorado now with one of your stations i'm here south of town you're north when you get a station down here we'll buy a car so we we'll know ahead of time who to get the cars to in order to make the demand happen and be able to curtail and and and and you know dovetail that demand into supply and and and like i said earlier dynamically match the supply and the demand right now a lot of the dealerships that like the Toyota dealerships and the Hyundai dealerships that are making fuel cell production models they're leasing their vehicles for like three years with fuel so do you think that if they keep doing that that kind of gives you the lead time to pick up used vehicles and get them integrated using your system and then eventually integrating the the brand new vehicles into your system as you build and build and build yeah that's the that's the idea and to be able to we'll also be offering free fuel with our with the with the offerings that we provide so the idea is to you know create the demand by having the chicken and the egg at the same time so we believe that the chicken is the car and and the egg is the station and the car moves around so that's why it's a state the chicken and the station is a stationary never moves that's why it's the egg so if you can get the chicken in the egg in the same basket you can have more chickens and that's what we're trying to accomplish okay so um as you start building this network there the cars and so far we've got some experience in California with how these cars perform how do they seem to hold up over the first five or so five or ten years compared to internal combustion engine vehicles are they less maintenance are they they hold that pretty well that they need a lot of care and feeding like uh like some fancy cars do well i'm in contact with four of them on a weekly basis that i have and then i have five others at other stations around the country um that we're in contact with and they're all 2016 2017 with somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 miles on and everybody that i'm talking to is absolutely amazed at the mileage they get and there's actually been some tests performed um with both a battery car and the hydrogen car going down the road at exactly the same time saying the same distance from each other and then seeing how they perform and the hydrogen fuel cell cars are outperforming the batteries and especially in some graded terrain um and uh we're really amazed at how many miles per kilogram we're getting um and uh you know you can take off and leave a place and say you have 100 miles of fuel left and you drive 20 miles but you only used up 15 miles worth of your fuel that it said you had and it it almost always ends up using less than what it says it was going to take to get there so the performance is outstanding yeah i noticed um looking at the weather over in Ohio there it's uh definitely winter time in fact you probably got a little bit of snow out there maybe a couple feet in fact um how are the vehicles performing in that in the real cold weather this winter i don't see any difference it growls a little bit when it's cold till it warms up you get a little um sound i think it's coming from the blower um that you know and it's warming up um that blows oxygen and air into the one side of the fuel cell um can't confirm that don't know for sure but i haven't actually gotten out and looked but you could definitely hear something when it's when it's colder out but then that quickly goes away within less than a minute and then there's no difference in performance have you gotten any feedback from battery electric vehicle folks on how those vehicles perform in cold weather uh yeah i have um you know everybody knows batteries don't like it when it's cold out so uh they they de uh they deplete much faster when it's cold than they do um when it's not and of course the fuel cell it doesn't know any difference it uses the same amount of hydrogen either way yeah i tell people you know i had a discussion with some Air Force guys one day and they were saying oh but in cold weather the hydrogen fuel cell makes water and the water will freeze up and then it won't work and i said well i don't know i've i've been in alaska and and so and north dakota in the middle of winter and i don't think batteries work all that well but did you realize that when a fuel cell makes that water it's an exothermic reaction it actually heats itself up so once you start using it once it's going it actually has it gives off heat and warms itself up um just almost like an internal combustion engine car except it's uh doesn't doesn't make that much heat doesn't doesn't waste as much heat as uh internal combustion engine does but it does heat up enough to keep itself warm yeah it's it's it's warm it's warm water and um actually when you're going down the road if you follow a fuel cell car and you can see every so often it'll dump the water and it's got blowers and so uh it sits there and runs for a good while i've got one or two in my showroom um and we start them up once a week and roll the tires so the tires don't get you know while we're saving these for buyers and um and you know when you shut them off they immediately purge all the water out of the system and then there's a big fan that forces water out so that nothing can get in there and freeze so they they the car companies have done a really good job of testing that out all out and i'll see that as being a problem at all okay so what are some of the other projects you're working on at millennium rain um i know you've got your electrolyzers really uh going to town i know you're working with the navy on some projects and the army on some projects uh and then with some of the other hydrogen companies that have fuel cells and you're providing in the equipment to supply the hydrogen to their fuel cells what are some of the interesting things going on with millennium rain yeah tomorrow we're going down to plug power to train them on a new 342 that they put in for other maintenance center and decommissioning center that just happens to be 20 minutes from from our headquarters it's a huge place and it's amazing the work that they're doing there and so that's a new system that we just put in basically it's a model 300 without the external shell um and then we've got the army units been up and running for a good while and we're just waiting on them to get back from covid and that kind of thing so we've got it it's an amazing piece of equipment or which is our m64 produces 64 kilograms a day and it's in a 10 foot container so 10 foot by eight foot by eight and a half foot tall so it's a nice packaged system and we we have a lot of demand for that particular product and then we're working on our megawatt scale system getting just lots of calls and have done ridiculous millions of dollars worth of quotes from potential megawatt utility scale electrolyzer systems that's going to be a huge market and people are really figuring out that you can store hydrogen for utilities solar and wind at a much less cost comparable to batteries that we actually have done a study through a department of energy study that was done in 2017 on golden colorado on batteries and they're saying that if you have a 300 is $380 a kilowatt hour per storage if you can buy 60 megawatt hours worth of batteries so that's a lot I mean put a megawatt of hour of storage in a battery in a 20 foot container said be 20 60 foot containers to get that much and at that level we can do it for $99 a kilowatt hour so about 73% less than what batteries are but that doesn't eliminate batteries from the equation you still need to have batteries to do the load leveling and to handle the big loads and to to make the grid stable from a standpoint of the hurt cycles so but once you get enough batteries then you can really get a big savings by going to hydrogen and the world's catching on to that in a big way right now I think what's what's finally they're catching on to is the fact that you could go with all battery plug-in vehicles and do 10% of the transportation or you can go with hydrogen fuel cell battery vehicles and go to 80 or 90% of the transportation because you know they keep saying that there's economies of scale as we start producing more and more batteries and that's true right up to the point where supply and demand says you don't have enough lithium or you don't have enough cobalt or you don't have enough of the the raw materials and then all of a sudden your batteries start getting really expensive so we can't be dumping all the batteries into vehicles that run on just batteries we need to share those batteries with hydrogen fuel cell to make the batteries go further and the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles do need a battery I know in the Mariah there's a traction battery and there's also a 12 volt battery so they have two batteries and I'm going to do two different things but the fuel cell lets you use your natural resources wisely and extends them out to make your electric transportation market more viable and come along quicker than trying to just make battery plug-in vehicles all over the place that's on top of the grid transmission the grid and transmission generation and transmission issues that you have if you just convert to just plug-in electric vehicles we have to put charging stations all over the place instead of a couple of hydrogen stations centrally located near where you're making your power right exactly right well we've got about two minutes left what what are some of the really exciting things you're looking forward to in the next couple months well I think the market is growing like crazy I mean I saw some reports were some very large electrolyzer companies in Europe are saying that they are sold out to 2026 and even as far out as 2030 one of them said they have as many as 800 deals in the in the pipeline and so you know we are seeing the same thing happen we do very little sales as a matter of fact I do zero sales it just keeps coming our way literally off of word of mouth from folks like you and and blue planet and all our customers and that we've had over the years and we just are very thankful for that and but we will be having a sales force and we're ready to go and I think that we've learned from all of our customers that we have about 18 different units in the field working all the time that the feedback that we get is people really love them and they seem to always work so you know as as as an inventor and founder of the company that was my biggest concern and I think we're ready to get more aggressive and go out and really start letting people know that millennium rain energy is ready to roll and hopefully this show will help a little bit more Chris and we'll have you on again in a few more months to get an update and until then hey keep making what you're making because it is good equipment I've used it I've worked on it I've maintained it I've operated with it and I've dispensed hydrogen from it and it does what it says it's going to do and it's like a timex watch it just keeps on ticking so we appreciate the quality work that you're putting out and until next Tuesday aloha chris and stand the energy man signing off from think tecawai