 Welcome to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm Mitch Ewan, normally at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. And we're over the hump day. We're Wednesday already. I can't believe how fast these Wednesdays turn over. I'm delighted to have a general, a Brigadier General retired, Stan Osserman, who's actually retiring again today. Number three. Number three. After how many years at HCAT? Six. Was it actually six years? Wow, did that ever go by fast? So Stan was the Executive Director at the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology, basically focused on hydrogen. So we have two hydrogen nuts, or enthusiasts here today. And we're going to be talking to you about hydrogen. So first of all, though, Stan produced this awesome set of videos, two videos, they're about two and a half minutes long each. And just to set the scene, I want to show first the first animation, which will tell you all about hydrogen and why it's so great. So roll the first video, please. Hydrogen. The simplest element. And also the most abundant. Hydrogen makes up roughly 75% of all mass in the universe. Hydrogen also powers most of the stars in our universe. So it's only fitting that it has come to be recognized as a viable alternative energy source. And we need alternatives because fossil fuels are problematic. They're messy, dirty, expensive to obtain and not secure. And they're limited. Hydrogen, on the other hand, is everywhere. Hydrogen can be produced from a wide variety of sources, including water itself, using other renewable energies. That means it's clean. Really clean. As a zero emission fuel source, the only byproducts are water, heat and electricity. Easily transported. Hydrogen can be stored and distributed on a large scale as either gas or liquid. As a fuel, hydrogen itself is very light. In fact, hydrogen is 472 times more efficient by weight than lead acid batteries. And it isn't just for transportation. Hydrogen can also effectively produce and store energy for power grids. Hydrogen gas is transformed into energy within a fuel cell. As hydrogen passes through a fuel cell, electrons are released and an electrical current is produced and captured for use. Electric vehicle motors powered by hydrogen fuel cells are twice as efficient as gas or diesel engines. They can travel farther distances than lithium batteries, especially in heavy vehicles and can last for decades. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells are scalable to buses and commercial fleets such as trucks, trains, ships and aircraft. Fuel cells allow for fast, easy refueling. And hydrogen can be easily adapted to current refueling stations, making it a convenient fuel source for everyone. It is a proven, safe, clean and efficient energy source currently in use worldwide. Hydrogen is everywhere, including our clean energy future. Okay, now wasn't that an awesome animation? I mean, well done Stan and to the team up at Manoa Innovation Center that did that. It won an award, didn't it? Yeah, that was actually done by a company called Hyperspective. And it won a Pele Award here for animation. They actually did three videos for us. They did this one. They did another one I think you're going to show, which is on MicroRids. And then a third one, which we don't generally show, but it covers our project that we're doing for the Air Force called Perl. And the reason we don't show it is the Air Force wanted their logo on the end. We sent it forward to get permission to put their logo on the end. And then the folks who made the video for us said, but our policy changed so we want to take all this stuff out. And they said, are you going to give it approval or not? And they said, well, it depends. Like, well, I'm not paying more money to re-edit the stupid video. And then you have me do it again and again. And I run out of money editing videos. So we don't show that one to anybody. It's also a really good video. I'd love to see it sometime. I haven't seen it, but I heard somebody who did see it say it was really great. Well done. So anyway, that was everything you need to know about hydrogen in two and a half minutes. So that tells the whole story of why it's so great and why we need to be implementing this in Hawaii. And it's also, in my opinion, the key to solving climate change. Because when you use hydrogen, you make it from water. Just like I said in the video, you do something with it and then it turns back into water. It's just the perfect cycle. And why we haven't made on after it faster and more aggressively is beyond me. But that's what we're going to talk about doing this show. But I want to run the second video that Stan talked about, which is about microgrids, which is another great technology which is very amenable to hydrogen. Well, the transportation world is going to turn electric. Exactly. It's all going to be one big grid and one big electric system. So this microgrid stuff is important too. Yeah, we're all going to be electric and hydrogen. More efficient. Let's roll the other second video. There are over 300 million people in our country and the vast majority rely on large scale centralized power grids for their energy. But the infrastructure is aging and it is vulnerable. Natural disasters, cyber attacks and other threats can leave large swaths of the country without power. Fortunately, there is an alternative. A renewable energy microgrid represents a different path for the future. Renewable microgrids generate power from sources like solar, wind, hydrogen, waste to energy and geothermal. That power can be stored within the localized system using technologies such as advanced batteries, hydrogen, flywheels, pumped hydro and others. These microgrids can provide reliable and efficient energy transmission, especially to critical facilities like hospitals, airports and military bases. Unlike our current large scale systems, microgrids eliminate single points of failure and are therefore more resilient to disasters, threats and power outages. Our current energy infrastructure loses a lot of money. Grid outages cost up to $33 billion annually. They are expensive to build, expand and maintain. And they're inefficient, losing more than half of the initial energy to factors such as line loss, spending reserves and theft. Microgrids solve these issues and greatly reduce transmission loss and maximize efficiency. They also reduce carbon emissions and eliminate imported fuel costs, keeping money within our local economy and even create new local industries and jobs based on clean renewable energy. Our energy grid was built over 100 years ago when energy needs were simple with the increased complexities of energy demands, power sources and transportation. Now our old grid struggled to keep up. We required new ways to generate, store and deliver energy. Renewable energy microgrids are a potential long term solution that will provide safe, clean, reliable and efficient energy for generations to come. Back so now everybody is educated on both hydrogen and on microgrids which are the two evolving technologies here in the world and particularly in Hawaii. Yeah, and Hawaii is going to lead the way. It's going to lead the way because we have a mandate to be off of fossil fuels by 2045 for our grid and we have high pressure to get off of fossil fuels in the transportation sector by about the same time. So we've got to do this stuff or we're not going to make it. It's the law, there's a law in the books in Hawaii that we will evolve to a hydrogen economy. In 1996-10, Hawaii Revised Statute. There you go. So look it up and read it. It's in the law so we've got to start following the law. Speaking of that, so Stan, where are we with Hawaii and hydrogen? So what's our current status? Actually there's a lot going on in it. This year we were pretty successful in the legislature. We had hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are now considered electric vehicles in statute. So they're eligible for a lot of the benefits other electric vehicles have in terms of tax breaks and HOV lane and parking and things like that. Which makes it really attractive for people to want to get into the vehicles. First last year surf goes to sit up their station and brought in their MRI. So we actually have hydrogen fuel cell vehicles available to the public. And it's a heck of a deal. Yeah, it's a great lease. It's a really great lease. I would have taken advantage of it but as you know I'm moving to the big island. And the lenders who put together the lease package wouldn't let me take the vehicle off island so I had to turn it down. But it is a really good deal. Did you get your fuel for three years and all your maintenance paid for? All included in the lease. It was a pretty decent lease too. I was impressed. But there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes that most people aren't hearing about or it's not making the press, it's not big headlines. But a lot going on on the big island where hydrogen makes a ton of sense because the distances for transportation just make sense of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. It can go those long ranges without having to recharge. And the potential for renewable energies on the big island to produce high volumes of hydrogen. And if you can store that hydrogen in tanks or ammonia or liquid hydrogen then you can transport it to Oahu and help Oahu get renewable faster. And get us off fossil fuels quicker. And I think people underestimate the impact of the economic impact of coming off fossil fuels. Think of all the money that we send out of our state just to pay for gasoline and diesel fuel and electricity. When all the sunlight and wind is falling down out of the sky and blowing past us. And we could be making so much energy with it and not having to spend all our money and sending it outside. That means jobs in Hawaii. That means a stronger economy. That means so much more tax revenue for the legislature to do good things. It's something we all ought to be really looking at. I looked at the economic multiplier effect. We export six billion dollars right now to pay for fossil fuels. And if you apply the economic multiplier, that's like how many times the money swishes around in the community. By the time you blend it out it's worth about 12 billion dollars worth of economic activity here in the state. Which we're just blowing away every year. And 30% of that just goes out of tailpipe somewhere in the form of heat so it's nuts. In fact you asked about where we're at and it's funny because if we were all running hydrogen vehicles and doing hydrogen technology now and somebody came along and said, hey Mitch, I got this great idea. We're going to drill wells and we're going to find oil. Really cheap. We're going to pull it out of the ground and we're going to put it in pipelines and we're going to ship it halfway across Alaska. We're going to put it in ships and we're going to sail the ships to California and put the oil in a refinery and make gasoline from it and diesel fuel. And then you can drive your cars on that. We look at them like they're from outer space and go, are you kidding me? Why the heck would we do that? But right now all the infrastructure for that equipment, that whole industry is already so huge to replace it as just monumental. And that's what we're living with and that's why it's so hard to change. We've got so much invested in fossil fuel and fossil fuel technology including the automobile company. So a lot of money for them to change and get rid of their engines and go to electric drivetrains. They're all starting to change now. I mean we've got Toyota, Honda, Hyundai. I'll have hydrogen vehicles that they're now leasing. And they just announced a month ago BMW is going to have their hydrogen car out in 2020 or 2021. We're almost there. You can bet GM and Ford are right there. They're not talking much about it. But we already know GM has built several Army fuel cell vehicles on the tactical side and they've got more work going on. Ford just launched an electric 150 pickup truck. They're the most famous or popular pickup truck. And they even pulled it out pulling a train that's over a million pounds. They're pulling this train. And you can bet that fuel cells are right behind that electric truck. It'll be out there. You can put money on it. Well we had the 15 Equinox GM Equinox vehicles here, the hydrogen vehicles. They were really popular. Yeah, really popular. Really successful. Great drive. Great pickup. The whole nine yards. And we were able to refuel them in under five minutes. Continuously. So we have a station over at the Marine Corps base and you had a station to take them. And then there's another station up at Schofield. So we had three stations all on military bases unfortunately. But it was just the same experience as anybody would get going into the 7-11 and pumping their own gas. You know, all automated. You just touch the screen to say start. And then the computer would take over and end the fill when they're ready to go. And like I said, there was no fill that went over five minutes. Yeah. So it was really awesome. You know what the problem was with those Equinox? They were supposed to be brought in and spread around the senior leadership so they could all get exposed to it. But the guys who would get it would like it so much. They wouldn't let it go. We could move it to the other. So all these admirals and generals that were trying to expose this technology, they loved it so much they'd tell their driver, let's keep this car. The driver's like, you know, he didn't have any choice. He didn't have any choice. But they did. They kept them. And so a lot of the exposure we hoped to get out of it never happened because there were such good vehicles that they didn't want to go home. They were great. Well, we're coming up to our first break. I can't believe we've blown through the first 15 minutes already. So we're going to go on break down. We'll be right back in one minute's time. See you in a few seconds. Aloha. I'm Keisha King, host of At the Crossroads, where we have conversations that are real and relevant. We have spoken with community leaders from right here locally in Hawaii and all around the world. Won't you join us on thinktechhawaii.com or on YouTube on the Think Tech Hawaii channel. Our conversations are real, relevant, and lots of fun. I'll see you at the Crossroads. Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years, and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my book, which is also titled Beyond the Lines, and it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success, and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person, and want to improve your life, and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go Beyond the Lines on thinktechhawaii. Aloha. So we're back, we're live, and we're talking about our favorite subject, hydrogen, of course. And I've got a guru of hydrogen here, Stan Osserman, who is... We're going to talk about what are the next steps. We've given everybody a bit of background. You know what hydrogen's all about now, more than we know. And so we've said how great it is. So what do we need to do to pick up the ball and run with it and get it over the goal line? So I've asked Stan to comment on what do we need to do this year and next year? What are your thoughts on that, Stan? Well, we actually already started a little bit earlier. This year, like I said, in the legislature, we finally got some momentum and we got some good traction with some of the folks in the legislature. And in particular, the representative from the Big Island, Mark Nakashima, who's now the deputy speaker of the house, he decided that he wanted to really see the Big Island step out in hydrogen. So he called together a bunch of folks up to Blue Planet on the Big Island who kind of hosted us and had a meeting. And they asked us for all kinds of input. What should we do? What can we do? And we gave them some really good suggestions, some things to think about, where to get resourced within the state and where to get funding on the private side, how we could get these things going. So that's, first of all, that's a huge win right there. We have a lot more backing from the legislature, both House and Senate than we've ever had in the past. Next, they reorganized the state energy office and they're really focusing a piece of it, more of it on action versus statistics and policy stuff. And so they want to see the energy office actually make things happen within the state. And they hire a good friend, Maria, from the PUC to go in there and work in the energy office to help get that started in transportation. And then we've got a lot of private sector people that they just, you know, they call me, I get calls at least once or twice a week where people say, hey, you know, I've heard about this hydrogen stuff and I got some questions and I run a warehouse 24 hours a day doing handling food and stuff. Are there hydrogen forklifts? And so I tell them, yeah, they're commercially available, plug power, 20,000 out in the field across the US. You know, people call about taking their house off the grid or taking their industry off the grid. They have a manufacturing plant here in Hawaii and they want to take it off the grid. And you do that, or can you at least have a grid tide thing where you can offset most of your electric bill? Yes, you can do that. And it's building more and more. And I'd say I've never seen in the last six years, in fact, I was doing energy stuff for a few years before that while I was still in uniform, I've never seen the momentum for hydrogen the way it is now. At the local level and at the international level and at the federal level across the US. So I know last week, Dave Mulliner from our office, for the very first time took the folks from Department of Energy Hydrogen, including Sunita Satyapal, you know her really well, to occur to the Secretary of the Air Force level meeting to talk to the Air Force about hydrogen. And I can tell you without any hesitation that the Army is deep in the hydrogen now. They're sold and running down the road. The Navy and the Air Force are starting to figure out this is pretty good stuff, and they're just starting to really get serious about it, but they are getting serious about it. And I see those as huge things, just like the internet. When the military takes off and starts showing people how cool it is, that's when you really get the people to understand. So there's 330 million people in the United States and although ThinkTech's a great platform, we don't reach 330 million people regularly. So it's hard for you and I to really push that noodle and get it out to the rest of the world. So all your people out there that are seeing us, please send this show to all your friends, and then ask them that you have emails for, that we can go viral, and then have them send it to all their friends. So it's like a nuclear reaction, and we get this stuff out there. So that's the best thing you could possibly do. And you've got two great videos that explain the whole thing. And then you have the hydrogen guru here and explaining some of these things. So please get this out there. After you get the stage of clean energy out there, then Hawaii, Stan, the energy man, get that one out there too. We'll do all of them. We'll double team this whole thing. Stan has his own show. It's a great show. He's been doing it about five years, six years. You have a zillion episodes, and he talks a lot about hydrogen. It's very entertaining, and it's really good information, actually. Yeah, we try to make it really interesting. I sit there and take notes when I watch it. The guy from Nikolai Motors telling us how much a battery charger costs. Everybody says, hydrogen bus is so much more expensive than a diesel bus. But when you buy that, or a battery electric bus, you also have to factor in the fact you're buying a battery charger. It can be up to half a million dollars if you want to recharge that bus in like two hours, or in a fast charge. And if you have a fleet of buses, you have to pay for the transformers and substations, because there's usually not enough power going to a building to add all those chargers. Exactly. You even got chargers. You've got costs outside of your actual chargers. And those show up over time. You commit yourself to 20 or 30 buses, and all of a sudden you realize you've got an unseen bill behind the scenes for a whole lot more money. In fact, I think the Nikolai Motors said, it was like almost the cost of the vehicle for the infrastructure. You're literally doubling the cost of the bus. Whereas the hydrogen, once you get the tanks going and you get some kind of source of hydrogen, it scales up really well, and the price drops off and drops off. The more vehicles you get, the cheaper it gets to run. And also you can contract out the supply of hydrogen. Anybody with a field with 300 or 400 acres that wants to make hydrogen, you put up a PV array, make hydrogen, and you get an off take agreement from the bus company or some other outfit that's running a fleet of hydrogen vehicles. You can do a firm fixed price contract for the transportation energy. And those companies would buy it in a heartbeat because the one thing that scares them to death is the fluctuation of fossil fuels. As soon as there's a crisis anywhere in the world, boom, price of oil goes up or drops. You can't tell when to even buy futures or what to do because it's so unpredictable. But hydrogen, everybody owns hydrogen. Every country in the world, we might even not have any more wars. You and I are both military guys. Maybe we won't have any more wars because what do you fight over if it's not energy? Everybody has hydrogen. Exactly. And how many soldiers wouldn't get killed if you didn't have to protect a fuel convoy? Exactly. Factor that in. We pitched that really hard to the military. Other things that we pitched hard to the military are, in fact, our friend a boss, I asked him when I first started working here, I said, what is it about your technology that the military really wants? He goes, oh, it's clean and green. I go, they don't care. The military blows things up. They don't care. And it's expensive, by the way, so it's not clean and green. That's not the big selling point. The selling point is it's quiet. It doesn't make any noise. Can you imagine if Honolulu's traffic is 40% or 50% more quiet? Because you don't have engines running and loud mufflers and stuff. It's also not as much heat. So we wouldn't be heating up our cities and things like that. In the military, heat means thermal imaging. It means at night, they can't see where you are. And then you can use this equipment inside enclosed places like freezers or hangers. And you're not killing everybody inside with carbon monoxide. You're just making water. Or low particulates that go right in the bottom of your lungs. And then you're treating your veterans after the fact for blown out eardrums from the noise on a flight line and contaminants from the fuel they're breathing. So there's a lot of benefits to this technology. Exactly. I want to talk about the Big Island initiative they took this year in the legislature for transportation services contract. Why don't we talk a little bit about that? It's a new funding mechanism that's really awesome and they showed a lot of initiative in getting that through. Why don't we talk about that? In the grid industry, there's a thing called a power purchase agreement where a company could go in, like a solar company can go in, install your solar, install maybe some battery backup, and then instead of the customer paying for it all, the customer just pays for their electricity like they do with the electric company and they pay off the solar. And so it's called a power purchase agreement and it even happens on a large scale. The electric company can buy solar energy from a big solar farm if a private company owns it. What the legislature did was they applied that same model to government purchased vehicles and infrastructure using renewable energy. So what this allows county and state government to do is to start putting their fleet vehicles out there and getting the infrastructure paid for to build the infrastructure, the PV, the hydrogen production and things like that and battery charges for charged plug-in electric vehicles. They can pay for that using this power purchase agreement model and a private investor and private company can come in and do it and then just basically charge the state or the county for leasing and renting the equipment or buying the energy from it. And it's actually really good. It's a great way to get public-private partnerships going in the state and that's what's been missing. We can't count on the government to pay for everything and when there's a financial motive there for the private sector to make some funding, money off of it and create jobs, why aren't we doing it that way? Exactly. And it means that we can replace our infrastructure, our vehicle infrastructure faster because you've got a bigger pot of money that's funding this whole thing rather than the government, they have so many competing demands on the treasury. It's hard to meter it out but if the actual vehicle is paid for by private industry and you're paying just like a service charge, then that makes it a much easier proposition to do it. So that way we can accelerate the conversion over to our hydrogen technology. And then everything else grows on that because if you have a big fleet of buses, for example, they use a lot of hydrogen. So they're going to be wanting to buy hydrogen and so then somebody who has a solar farm is going to be able to have a customer and he's going to put in a solar farm. Not only that, this program would potentially allow him to use the solar farm as a part of that transportation services because it includes infrastructure. If you have to build a big garage, a maintenance facility, if you have to train your people, workforce development, I'm not sure about that part but you pay for a lot of their stuff. I think the definitions are pretty flexible but really hats off to you and HNEI for the work that you guys did with the Helion bus over there. The one bus and then fortunately you were able to capture the two volcano buses for Helion also. So that's a head start. The county over there can now start to replace some of their really old, really I want to say decrepit systems and build a at least partially public-private partnership fleet that can take better care of the folks over there that have to commute from Hilo to Kona for work and have it hydrogen fuel cell. So in one field swoop, the big island could be a beautiful demonstration for the technology on an international scale and also help the county get much better service for their citizens. And help our citizens, especially our low income citizens who absolutely rely on public transportation to get to their job. Some of them have to walk miles just to get to a bus route and not only just replace the existing buses but make that service so good that your first choice you'll make is I'm going to take the bus because you've got enough buses you can count on the feeder system, the whole line of yards. Marry up bicycle, parking and things like that. Believe it or not, we've blown through all our time, 30 minutes already. I believe it. We're going to bring you back out of retirement. You'll never retire. And I will do this again. We've got a whole list of other subjects that we haven't even touched on yet. Stan, thanks so much and congratulations and enjoy your retirement because we're going to enjoy your retirement because you're not going to be quite as nailed down by the bureaucracy although I never saw that stop you. I always find a way to work around it. Thanks for having me on this show and thanks for all you do for the state in hydrogen. So, signing off. We'll see you next Wednesday for another show. It might be hydrogen, you never know. Aloha.