 It's five o'clock on a given Wednesday. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech, the handsome young man on the screen on the right side is Mitch Ewing. He's my co-host here on Energy 808, the cutting edge, and the very handsome young man on the left side is Richard Ah. Hi, Richard. formerly a farmer and now a kind of altruist, an altruist renewable energy person on the Big Island and more. A man with vision, right, Richard? I kind of like to describe it as coming sense actually. Maybe there's no difference. So, Mitch, you have a handle on what we're going to do here today. Can you give us a scope of the show, maybe your thoughts about who Richard Ha really is? Yeah, well, we're going to talk about geothermal power, which is both my favorite and Richard's favorite topic, and more than just the power part, but all the other things that we can use that resource for. Richard is an entrepreneur and a real champion of renewable energy, and he's the go-to guy when people want to start big projects. He's a big project guy and doesn't matter what it is, whether they're growing pot legally or running your farm and educating us all on energy and why we have to get off oil as he was enlightened. I mean, that's why you're not farming anymore, right, Richard? It's because the cost of energy was going up and up and you projected that, and you were proactive and shut your business down in an orderly way so that your employees could all have a gentle landing and go to other jobs, which is the kind of guy Richard is. He's a really kind-hearted, but great businessman who takes action when it has to be taken. Wow, Richard. Any rebuttal on that? Yeah, I'm going to start here. You know, I'm just right. We shut the farm down mainly because we had to decide whether or not to reinvest because, you know, the facilities will last about 20 years, so we did the numbers and we wouldn't come off. So just about that time, some of the folks down on the coast, the Armaco coast, asked me if I would be willing to work with them about a new project they had which was canvas, legal, you know, medicinal canvas. And I said, yeah, sure. I'm interested, but I got to go talk to my workers first. And then, so I did and I asked the workers and I asked them if anybody would be interested in working for a canvas company. And everybody was great, raised their hand. Me, what a surprise. That's why they had a gentle landing. They just didn't even know they landed yet. You know, and you were kind of lucky because at that time, the economy was doing really well. You know, I mean, like we're talking about 2% unemployment rates, something like that. So people had an option to do whatever they wanted to do because the economic climate was good. But for the folks that came to ask me whether I would participate, I told them only for four years because after giving them four years, they couldn't get up and running and then I could go back to doing the stuff I like to do. And in three years, they were able to get it done. But what I told them the conditions were was, number one, my workers would have first shot at the jobs. Number two, the folks that live in the community would have to feel better. In other words, we'd have to put in cameras to watch the rooms, etc. And then the third one was, someone might have to have a real job and not just be a high-tuned caricature on a stick. So they said, yeah, I'm okay. So that's what happened. And then now they're on their way. And here we are. Yeah, well, it's a good thing. You have a real job, right? I don't know. You know, I'm just going to be losing. This is the farm, actually. I know that. And I admire you very greatly for Richard. So geothermal, you got involved in geothermal. Can you talk about why and how and what your view of it is right now these days? Yeah, you know, when geothermal started back in the original, I wasn't paying attention because we were farming bananas there. Only recently I started to pay attention. But, and the attention really, really focused during this last eruption. And so, and I know Don Thomas, the geologist pretty well, so I asked him a bunch of questions. As it turns out, you know, before the eruption started, they were on the high ground. After the eruption, you know, finished up and now the level lifted so high that they're no longer on the real high ground. The next time an eruption comes around, you could threaten them pretty badly. So that's why we were thinking of looking at alternative locations on this island. You know, I mean, there's geothermal possibility. We got high volcanoes on this island. And what we should do is evaluate them all. We should have all the data, letting us know how much and where and stuff like that. Well, let's take a moment and talk about that. Certainly the location you look at or to have geothermal underneath, that's that's got to be, you know, consideration number one. And it sounds like, you know, not to be in a rift zone or in a zone where it could be inundated, you know, otherwise you, you know, you would not have achieved any benefit from learning about PTV. But what else? So what else, what other characteristics would you be looking for if you're looking for a location to build a second geothermal facility on a big island? Well, I think pretty sure you don't really want to be close, very close to a population. And then after that, you start to look at other things like how far are you from the main power line? How much would it cost to look up there? What's the chances of how fast will the, let's say you're on a monologue, how fast will it come down the slope? And how much time do you have? And can you mitigate that? And then different places, you know, like Kuala Lumpur, Kuala Mountain, there are different places we have to test here. We've done a lot of tests around the slopes of Mauna Kea. And officially, Don Thomas thinks that there's as much heat under Mauna Kea as the entire east wind. So there's a lot, a lot of geothermal heat. And we went to the Philippines, though. And during, we visited a geothermal plant that last erupted on the mountain 100,000 years ago. And Mauna Kea erupted last 4,000 years ago. So it's coming since here to ask, hey, what about Mauna Kea? Do you have thermal underneath there or what? And as it turns out, that's what Don folks have found here. He's a great guy. Shout out to Don Thomas. So you also went to Reykjavik, no, in Iceland? Yeah. Yeah. What'd you learn there? The first thing I learned was, if you don't pay attention, you freeze to death. It's a very important lesson. It is. You must be looking at it differently than we do. We're over here with Lahala Hat and stuff like that. They're over there looking all around and trying to figure out how to make this thing work to their best advantage. That's why they have that little group where people just go, so many people go up there and take advantage of it and they get money back into the economy. They jump in the hot water, huh? Oh, yeah. Really nice. And you know what I found out? So the third time I went in the water, I went, oh, it's not that really deep. I'm kind of short, so I have to crouch down. Because when you crouch down, only above your ears get cold. Really cold. There's a key lesson that you obviously failed to learn, Richard, which is, oh, in the summer, not when all that white stuff is on the ground. You don't want to do that. And plus, it's the land of the midnight sun almost. I mean, the sun hardly ever comes up in the winter. But of course, in the summer, it hardly ever sets. So it really throws your body clock off. I used to work in Scotland just north of Glasgow. And like in August, it's like at 11 o'clock at night, it looks like four o'clock in the afternoon anywhere else. And it's like, gee, how do you ever get to sleep? The bars are still open and it's like, wow, really tough. But in the winter, it's miserable, because it's like you get about two hours of sun. Yeah, that's Reykjavik, all right. So Richard, how do you mediate against what happened in the eruption? I mean, other lessons that PGV or we in general have learned because of what happened in the eruption? I'm not so sure. Well, it was devastating for PGV. And ideally, what you would do is build a kind of modular facility where if it erupts again, you just lift it up and carry it down the road and put it somewhere else and you don't lose a whole lot of equipment and investment in the process. Is that possible on some scale? And I'm not so sure what more they could do, because they set it up so that they could just fill it up with the cinder and the lava covered it. They just wait until it parted and come back and clean it up, pull the cinder out and get back in business. So they were already predicting some kind of eruption going forward and it didn't come to them as a surprise. Yeah. No, I mean, they engineered that beautifully. I mean, one of the tours I had that, you know, the wellheads were buried like 20 feet under in these big concrete encasements and they had these big steel plates that they could put over top of it. They just connect all the top level plumbing off of the top side, I think they call it. And then they just put the plate over and they know exactly what the coordinates are from GPS. And that's exactly the way it works. It's like, you know, and they built most of their equipment on the hill. And so it filled in and they went out to cool. Like Richard said, they just went in to the spot and drilled down and found it. And they got up going pretty fast, actually. Well, these guys are really pros. I mean, Ormatt, it's an American company. It was originally an Israeli company. The guy was an Israeli engineer. I remember I met him once. And now that I think they're in Nevada, and they have facilities, okay, they have facilities all over the world. Wherever there's geothermal, there's Ormatt. They're one of the biggest geothermal companies in the world. And so they have an engineering background, as you say, and the engineering is what counts on this. Right. Yeah, they haven't all figured out pretty very well, actually. So in your minds, I, Richard, if we have a second location or a third location, whatever, let's assume for this discussion, it's on Hawaii Island, would it be Ormatt? Or is there some other company that could or should do it? You know, it would be open to anybody. Let's say Eco issued an RFP. Anybody who's interested, any geothermal company could participate. So we're indifferent as to who will do it. Although I got to say about Ormatt and what I've seen, they're very flexible. They're willing to do build and own it, build and sell it back to you. There's all kinds of different possibilities. You just got to see what it is you want to do. And they're probably willing to do it. Well, let's talk about the, you know, the challenges. One challenge, of course, is the possibility of another eruption. And it's not so much the loss of the capital investment I'm talking about. It's the fact that it's going to be offline for a while while they fix it up. That's one thing. The other thing is, you know, you have an historic cultural, what do you want to call it, concern about geothermal and big on, which I don't think that's scientifically based at all. But there are people who would oppose it on that basis alone. And so you don't have that with solar. You don't have that with wind. How do you get around that? How do you answer the fellow who says, why don't we just do solar and pave the big island with solar? Yeah, you know, the way that sustainable energy in Hawaii looks at it is we look at the situation like we're somebody's ancestor. And then we ask the question, what can we do for future generation 1500 years from now? And that's our focus. When you discuss it like that, anybody who has a discussion or who wants to discuss or argue, we can bring up that point of view and ask them, well, where do you think we should be? And what should we do? And then all of a sudden, we all want the same things. What should the kit bag have? You know, what should the portfolio for the big big island is different, right? It's different, it's unique. It has more potential energy resources than any other place in the state. What kind of inventory would kind of a portfolio should have knowing what we know? If you take it from a common sense point of view, you just kind of look around and ask yourself, what have we got? Where do we want to go? So you look around at the energy sources, of course, you have wind and solar and hydro and stuff like that. But we have 1% of the world working enough to have geothermal. So we have that. Now, what's going on in the world? If you look around, you see there are a whole bunch of countries moving toward hydrogen. And if you think about hydrogen, you ask yourself, okay, what's the situation with hydrogen? Well, on the mainland, it's 90 something percent of the hydrogen that's produced. It's produced with natural gas. Active gas is a finite resource. Finite resource means that it'll deplete sooner or later. We don't know exactly. Also, it means the price will go up. On the other hand, geothermal, we won't have to pay a penny for the heat. I mentioned that we don't have to go and look for a rare first minerals in foreign countries and plant water all the way through Hawaii. And then 20 years later, take it all down and try to figure out what you can do with the rubbish. Then do it all over again. You don't have to do any of that. You have to do the basic minimum. It just comes in. Let me ask you to add one more thing. Now, there's only so much that we can bring online for the island because there are so many people using the electricity. Well, we want to prepare for the climate hydrogen from cardboard. So what we really need to do is we need to start to explore so that we're ready when people are using our RFP. We're not ready now. We haven't done any real research yet. The Hawaii groundwater resource, geothermal resource center, is a vastly underused organization there at UH Manoa. It's all Mitch can do to stop from jumping in on this. This is his bailiwick. I mean, he was there trying to make hydrogen out of Puna a long time ago. Can you talk about it, Mitch? Oh, yeah. So our first site was going to be at the Puna geothermal plant, and they very kindly welcomed us in. We went through the full environmental assessment process, and it took us five years to go through all the, you know, jump through all the hoops that we had to go to get permitting in place. But the thing I love about geothermal is that it's 24-7. You know, it's just nonstop. And like Richard tells us, it's good for the next half a million years, at least. And so the best economy of using your electrolyzers, if it can work 24-7, 24 hours a day, seven days a week as opposed to wind and solar, wind, solar is only good for five and a half hours. So what do you do with the rest, you know, the 20, the 19 and a half hours that you're not using your electrolyzer, just sits there, and you're still shelling out money to the banks who loan you the money to pay for it. And the same with wind. I mean, a really good wind resource is like 35% utility factor, meaning that wind blows 35% of the time, but it's not blowing full blast all the time either. It's going up and down. And so once again, you're not using the best, you're not using what they call capital utilization of your asset. It's sitting there dormant when the wind's not blowing or the sun's not shining. Whereas with the geothermal plant, it's steady state nonstop all the time. And the geothermal plant likes electrolyzers because electrolyzers like to run steady state. You don't have to ramp the geothermal plant up and down, which is basically a steam engine. And steam engines don't like to be wrapped up and down because of thermal stresses and all that kind of stuff. So it's the perfect marriage between the resource and making your hydrogen. And then there's all sorts of things we can do with the hydrogen. I mean, what I would like to do is liquefy it on the site. They make liquid hydrogen as opposed to keeping it as a gas. And that way we can export it. And we can export it to Oahu because Oahu needs the energy, but they don't have the land mass or the resources to make enough to be self sustaining. They're always going to have to import energy. I don't care what anybody says. I mean, you know, I think they've maxed out the number of wind turbines they can put up because everybody sees how huge they are and they hate them and they're right in top of the community. So that's not going to work. And, you know, there's only so much flat land to put your PV panels down. So it makes a lot more sense in my opinion to export liquid hydrogen from the big island over to Oahu, which is basically exporting energy. And if you look at hydrogen, it's like 10 times more energy than on a transmission line, an electrical transmission line. So you're exporting a lot of energy and that's what we're trying to do. But that's how I feel about and you're right about diversifying the supply. We need to get out there and drill and prospect for new sites so that if one, we have one eruption on one side of the island, the other side is still being able to produce. That's common sense, as Richard says. Well, I've been thinking about these tanks that I guess it was Stan Awesome and showed me these tanks in HKAT. They're about eight feet long. They're about 18 inches in diameter. They have a head on one end where you can put the gas or I suppose the liquid hydrogen in there and you can put it on a boat. You can put it on a boat and you can deliver that from Puna to Oahu. Okay, so we've had a way to create the hydrogen out of the geothermal for a long time. I mean, the current iteration of ORMAT at Puna has been since the late 90s and that technology with the tanks has existed all that time. And my question to you guys is why hasn't this happened already? You know, it's a rigorous situation because of people, for example, they, when they're ready, they'll just announce that they're ready to accept more geothermal. But you know, we need to have this conversation with the Hawaiian community because they're sensitive for various different reasons. And that's what's going on, that's what we're doing right now. And I'm pretty optimistic that we actually see things the same way. Take, for example, Kumulipu. You know, if you think about the Kumulipu like me, I didn't have any idea of what was going on until about, you know, four or four months ago, or something like that. I was more focused on what was taking place on the mainland with the New Indians and Johnny Holland, those folks, and they showed how energy is everything. And I just focused there. And when I came back and I started looking at what empty pool I just see, it dawned on me one day that we're talking the Hawaiians were successful a thousand years with a physical science ecology kind of economic system. And then, of course, they had the culture to make sure that it worked under the system, under that system. It lasted for a thousand years and didn't very successful. And basically, you know, I'm going to this class a lot over here, taught by Kekui Kanahili. And basically what it is is they're teaching us how to look at living things, you know, like the ecology of a man and living things in motion. So when you teach people to appreciate your surrounding, you don't end up with externalities because you're very careful about making sure that everything is in balance. And that is a really huge thing that, and then with that occurred to me, I went back and said, holy smokes, my talk with the Indians and maybe even just very well aware of what the Hawaiians bring to this discussion. It's the thousand years we're talking about how to survive for a thousand years. And yeah, it's a lot to do with it. Your mental point of view has a lot to do with how you approach. And the reason this is important is because you know, like Aleppo Bayan, he was a master navigator at the University of Hawai'i Hilo. When I look at him, I see a thousand years of Hawai'i history in him because he's a master navigator. But because he was so of focus on science, I look at him as the next thousand years in the future. So how much of a supporter of Aleppo, of this vision? Well, suppose you were able to negotiate a complete acceptance of the notion of geothermal with the native Hawaiian community on the big island. That would be quite something. But if I tell you the truth, Richard, you could do that. I believe you could do that. So let's assume you do it. What are the steps to follow? A, get the Puna operating at maybe a higher level. I think it was limited to like 38 megawatts up till now. 50 or 100 maybe even. Because as you say, it's got plenty of energy in there, energy to last for thousands of years. We could go much higher. It could take a larger burden of whatever the demand is on the big island. And secondly, what would you do? What would you have to do to meet the bureaucratic challenge, the regulatory challenge, and get it started? What's the pathway? Well, the first thing we got to do is have a story that we can tell to the roller-slipper folks. But they don't really care what I could say is this. They are under so much pressure. They cannot take too much more. So we have got to show them that what we're doing is going to increase and improve the quality of life of them and not more so than them, the future generation. So if you can visualize what 30 years will look like, well, I can tell you this. 50 years from now, also fuel, it is going to be real expensive. And if we didn't have it, we are at the end of the supply chain, we'd be in big trouble. So if we have geothermal, and if you do something like a culture center above the cloud, and then if you are curious, that are looking at that, looking into the heavens, they're going to be willing to pay a lot more. And that translates into value for what local people produce. It translates into a better economy, less unemployment, more and more, taking care of your health and that kind of thing. So generally, that's how you do it. You just need to have some ideas and we're going to start to bring that out and see if we can pull people together. But you're going to have early stages in trying to figure out something, but that's pretty much what I think we got to. Well, what about the interests, Mitch, in hydrogen? In other words, what I'm thinking of is one of the possibilities here is to have ORMAT, whoever develops a hydrogen facility, either the existing one or a second one or a third one, what have you, that company would enter into some kind of partnership on the connection between geothermal and hydrogen, so that they were both in it somehow and they were both making a buck off, putting it in those tanks and exporting it, using those things or exporting it to Oahu or elsewhere. In other words, it would be a partnership kind of arrangement. Wouldn't that be a way to raise the capital, raise the interest, raise the political will? Yeah, there's several ways you could do that, but yeah, I exactly understand what I would say. Because the last thing we want to have happen is have foreign investors come in and they extract all the value and take it off your, that's what's going to happen. But it's basically a financial or business arrangement with them. I mean, from Puna Geothermal from ORMAT's point of view, they produce electrons and hydrogen people produce molecules and we need to have inexpensive electrons to produce inexpensive hydrogen, so it's a very good, it's a natural fit. And they don't necessarily want to make the hydrogen themselves. I mean, their expertise is in making the electrons. And then we just have to make sure that it's a Hawaii, like Richard said, it's a Hawaii company that comes in to make the hydrogen. So we keep the money in the local economy. That's very important. It's like what I'm trying to do with the buses is instead of exporting our capital and buying the bus already made on the mainland is to bring over a kit and assemble it here so that the local workforce can have a job and use our capital more to our own advantage rather than a company sitting on the mainland. And we do the same thing with hydrogen and all the other things that fall out of it. So that's how we do it. And we build all the infrastructure that we need to export the hydrogen to the, for example, you know, various transportation methods. Make sure we try to make everything here as much as we can. And I wanted to add one more thing. And that is you know, when we look at the people and see how they fit in this picture, they do fit very, you know, it depends on how they proceed into the future. But I'm not discounting the fact that they could be running the grid and everything in an economical way and still benefit all of us. That's possible. I'm not saying that we just have to invent something else and put them out of it. What makes the most sense? What are the pluses and minuses? I want to add one other thought, see what you think about it. One of the issues on the Big Island, and I've had discussions with Helco about this, that's why I'm aware of it, is that when you put a cable down from a remote power source to a community that's using, you know, the demand community, if you will, it's expensive. It's a lot of mileage, and it's expensive to cross that mileage. And I don't know where the interconnect points are on the Big Island, but it strikes me that if you want to cable this power from PGV to Kohala or something, it's a long way. So if just assume for a moment with me that the people at HNEI or otherwise can develop a real good system for generating the electricity with the electrolyser at a geothermal plant, and then putting it in a tank like that as hydrogen, and then putting it on a truck, a tank, say a liquid as a liquid, which you get more on the truck that way. That's right. And you send that truck to Kohala, and you put it, you know, in the backyard behind some utility facility that takes the hydrogen and generates electricity out of it, you're probably saving money because you don't have any degradation over that long line. You don't have to worry about the long building or maintaining the long line. And I would imagine that to take the hydrogen out of the tank and turn it into electricity right now, dispatchable electricity in a remote location is most efficient if you just take the tank. And this would be the technology, these best practices developed for say exporting it from Kohala to Oahu, use the same best practices and export it anywhere, anywhere in the islands at least. Wouldn't that be better than trying to build cables? You know, one thing that to consider is electrolysis, all you need is water and electricity. And the way it's set up right now, you know, when we sustained energy, Hawaii entered the docket of the PGV power purchase agreement, that docket, this year ago, January, we asked them to look into a competitive hydrogen rate, and we suggested since a kilowatt hour at the nozzle, which means it needs to be a little bit less, but nevertheless, so we set that up as a thought. And the reason why is because if you could do something like that, every house could have an electrolyser if the technology was developed to do it. I don't know if the economics work everywhere, but it gives us Hawaii Island people an opportunity to participate in hydrogen, the new economy, right down to the house scale. Well, not only that, but hydrogen can be used for cooking. We saw a demonstration of that on Stan's show this week with Paul Pontium, where he had some kind of device he built himself to use hydrogen for cooking, believe it or not. Anyway, we're out of time. I am sorry. Maybe this is a conversation that needs to happen again. So, Mitch, can you summarize and give Richard a big thank you and close for me, please? Sure. So, we've been delighted to have Richard Hoff from the Big Island, a geothermal supporter extraordinaire who's been giving us his thoughts on geothermal power as well as just living life and planning for the future, taking a long-term view rather than the short-term view. So, it's been an interesting conversation and we've looked at several ideas. And so, thank you, Richard, for stimulating our imagination and supporting all the support you give for people like us and your friends to support these kinds of ideas and thinking. Yeah, it's not that complicated. Yeah, it's kind of common sense here. Yeah, common sense, but it does take a little vision on top of the common sense, Richard, which is why we like to talk to you. Thank you very much for coming around.