 Welcome to another Think Tech Hawaii show on Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. This show is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So I'm really, really pleased to have our guest today, Dave Molinaro from HCAT, which stands for the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. So Dave, welcome aboard. Good to be back, Mitch. How are you? And Dave's a retired Air Force Colonel, full Colonel, sir. I'm only a measly retired commander, which is like a three-striped guy. So anyway, welcome aboard. So Dave, tell me, what are you doing at HCAT now? What's the hot topic that you personally are working on? There's a lot of hot topics at HCAT, but I was hired as a project manager. And as you know, HCAT has been involved with hydrogen fuel cell demonstrations forever, a long time. But I was hired back a couple of years ago to start off a project that we are just getting our teeth into right now, which is a Renewable Energy Microgrid. And it's been dubbed Pearl, the Pacific Energy Assurance Renewables Lab. So a whole host of different renewable energies on a microgrid that we use to do a bunch of different things for the Hawaiian National Guard and ultimately the DOD in the state of Hawaii. So I understand we have some slides that will help us walk us through this, because it's a simple concept, but the actual project itself has got a lot of hooks in it. So we need to help with the slides to make sure we get through it. Absolutely. So we have the first slide up, please. So again, Pearl, it's got the Pacific ring to it, but the Pacific Energy Assurance Renewables Lab. The vision of Pearl is really as the slides identified. It's about providing mission assurance through energy assurance. And one of the former secretaries of the Air Force coined that phrase, and it's really stuck, but that is what Pearl Ultimate will do. It will allow the Hawaiian National Guard to conduct its missions through energy assurance. So what's assurance mean? That's kind of like a little military buzzword. We have a lot of civilians watching. Well, it's assurance means we can do any operation anytime, anywhere, and under any circumstance. And in this case, if there's problems with the electric grid or the utility, we'll still be able to conduct operations in that portion of the campus. This particular area we're talking about encompasses the F-22 fleet with the 154th one. So what's an F-22? F-22 is something that flies above the water. I know Mitch, you're used to stuff that goes below the water. It flies really fast. It flies really fast and does a lot of cool things. But it's an important airplane. And the vision for Pearl really came about by providing, we really wanted to provide the ability for the wing to do its job, not only the active duty mission, but also state response to maybe a hurricane or a tsunami as well too. Okay, very good. So let's back to the slide. So really the objectives that we laid out, and we've already touched on one, is energy assurance and resiliency for the hang. There you go. Hawaii Air National Guard. Yep, sorry, we've got a lot of civilians out there. But the Hawaii Air Guard is a benefactor of this primarily. So it's a pretty big organization, isn't it? How many members are there in the Hawaii Air National Guard? It's been a couple of years since I retired back then. It was close to 2,500. That's a lot. Yep, and it's the biggest guard wing in the country. We've got the F-22. We also fly the C-17, KC-135. There's also an Intel Squadron and Air Operations Group, which has done some remarkable work with responding to disaster response throughout the world. So it's a really neat organization. Overall, how many aircraft are we talking about? A lot. Several hundred? Not several hundred, but there's full squadrons. There's a, I believe it's up to 20 F-22s right now. I believe eight KC-135s. What is a KC-135? That is the air refueling aircraft. It's Boeing 707 airframe that's been around forever, but it's a great airplane, but it provides a pivotal role with the ability to extend forces throughout the Pacific. It's an air refueling plane. It's a flying gas station. Awesome. Okay, back to the slide. So you really can't get into what a microgrid is until you understand what it is. And of course, you're military, so there's a definition for everything. Well, this happens to come from the Department of Energy, but microgrid really is an interconnected group of loads, distributed energy generation sources that can act as a single entity. And in this case, what's really important about microgrids is they can connect and disconnect from a utility. So in this case, with microgrids in general, if there are problems with stability or maybe there's a cyber attack, I'd forbid, we should be able to disconnect directly from that grid and operate independently. So that's what a microgrid does. All on its own, totally organic to itself. Totally organic to itself. And what we're doing with the Pearl Microgrid is we're going to do this with renewable energy, which is really different. Hawaii is a perfect state for it. The Hawaii Air Guard, and I'll talk a little bit more about it in later slides, but we want to get into some additional renewable energy resources like hydrogen for storage and production and energy generation, so what kind of primary energy sources? By primary, I mean the core energy producer that we have at the Hickam Air Force Base. So when the F-22s were bedded down in the wing, there was a couple hundred million dollars worth of construction. At that time, there was a vision in the National Guard to say, let's use renewable energy. So there's a lot of PB out there. There was a facility that is lead platinum certified. Another building is gold, and the rest are silver. So there's about at least a megawatt of renewable energy capability out there. Was it basically all solar? I know you guys had a project with natural power concepts. We did. Or small wind turbines. Obviously, you don't want huge wind turbines at an air base because pilots would probably fly into them. But little tiny ones sprinkled around. Is that also an option? That is a source that we're looking at. We'd love to demonstrate that further. But as you mentioned, natural power concepts developed a couple of really unique small wind turbines that were easily deployable. They could fit on a military installation. Didn't interfere with the radar signatures of anything. And it was a great test. Could that be part of our adaptation of renewable energy? Yes. Definitely. We are doing that. But for right now, it's PV. Okay. PV is the one. Yeah. Okay. And we all know PV is getting a lot cheaper. I read an article today. They're projecting PV in the next X years, 10 years. Get down to one and a half cents a kilowatt hour. Awesome. That makes hydrogen like a total world killer. Absolutely. Now it's down to, I think, HECO and their latest power purchase agreements are talking like 8 to 10 cents a kilowatt hour. So that's like the selling price, not the actual production price. Production price, sure. Obviously there's a profit margin built in for the supplier there. So it's really, really getting aggressive. I've heard like in Mexico, they're down to about two and a half to three cents a kilowatt hour. So pretty awe-inspiring. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? And it's encouraging to see that it is getting cheaper and cheaper. Yeah. Let's go back to the slide. So a quick overview. Again, I came on board a couple of years ago, but there was a lot of support from our codels. That's right. What's a codel? Congressional delegates. In particular, Senator Schatz, for his support of what was then, was the Energy Resiliency Demonstration Project. That's what we, our formal name and our cooperative agreement. Our main partner is the Air Force Research Lab that we share a cooperative agreement with. And by the way, all the funding for this, for HCAT comes from federal congressional ad money. So it's a really unique program. And just to clarify, HCAT, even though it's like a subagency of HTDC gets zero state funding. That's correct. You guys are pretty awesome here. A heck of a resource, a heck of a value proposition for the state. We are. And again, the genesis of HCAT was back in the early 90s with Senator Inouye who, so I had the vision of seeing electric vehicles, like battery. And back then it was internal combustion hydrogen engines. And he saw the value of that and wanted to be able to facilitate getting funding into the state. So we've been around for a long time. And we do have several hydrogen fuel cell demonstration projects that are play line support vehicles, buses. We've got a weapons loader, a tug, some other stuff. And you're real familiar with that as well too. Yeah, it's really a front end technology. In fact, I've leveraged your bus design for three buses that were deploying on the Big Island. So, you know, there's something called non-recurring engineering. In other words, you do the initial design. You don't have to repeat it for every bus. So what we did at HNAI is we leveraged the HCAT investment in the first bus. That has a value of about $750,000. That's what I understand. And so we saved a ton of money, a ton of time, even though we still haven't deployed the bus yet. By being able to leverage the resources of HCAT. And your primary fuel cell partner is who? It's US hybrid. Really? I think an important fuel cell partner with your efforts as well too. Yeah, exactly. And how long have they been in Hawaii? US hybrid's been here for quite some time. I know they want to build a bigger presence. I can't get into the details of what they want to do, but they definitely want to get a bigger presence and get some more mainstream production going with some of their vehicles. But we're really impressed. I know you're happy with the Boscadas and his company and his team of professionals that have put some really remarkable capabilities together. They really have. And they're very responsive. And, you know, it's not like you have to wait for the government to make a decision. Like, as a private company, a boss, Gazzari, their founder and president and owner, I mean, he can make a decision in about 5.2 microseconds. He's very proactive. And then the rest of us have to catch up to him and try to keep ahead of him. We'll never be able to keep ahead of him. That's definitely a boss. I can't say enough good things about him. He's a great guy. And he's actually, on our buses, he's actually cost-shared. So he's actually, you know, putting his own skin in the game. For example, I have a brand-new fuel cell that we upgraded one of our buses with, with one of his fuel cells. And he actually covered 50% of the cost. Yeah, that's a boss. And his passion for what he does, it really is a catalyst for what we are trying to accomplish in the military and in the government to see his efforts. And I know you're really excited about testing out that new fuel cell. Oh, God, I go hard to wait. Yeah. So back to the slides and to your project. So let's go over some of these other stakeholders. So you, like, raising a kid requires a village. I think that's probably a bad analogy. But there are a lot of key stakeholders in what this project is. And the primary for us, again, we've got great support out of Senator Schatz and his staff. But Secretary of the Air Force for installations and energy has been the prime driver in moving forward with energy assurance, mission assurance. And pop that slide back up. I'd appreciate that. Yep. Our portable brain here. Our partners with the Air Force Research Lab, Burns and McDonald's are primary A&E. So who are they? Burns and McDonald's. What's A&E mean? Architects and engineers. They have been involved with the Spiders Project. As you know, that is the microgrid that's up at Camp Smith. So they are probably the best in the world. The National Guard Bureau, Navy Facilities Command and the Air Force Center for Engineering is these are all key stakeholders that are actively involved in what we're doing with the project. And what's the reaction to the project so far? There's a lot of support from private sector loves what we're doing. Working with the government has got its own set of challenges. There's a lot of caution involved. I think, you know, being spending your time in the military, there's some reluctance in adapting new technologies. And, you know, rightfully so, I think applying something as dramatic as even going into a hybrid system or into a battery electric takes a lot of muscle movements because you've got systems that are entrenched in, you know, basically fossil fuels. And our main objective is to defend the country right now and making a major change in something like renewable energy technology for energy generation or transportation is a big, big challenge. But we do have a lot of support from the secretary level on down through our chain of command, our chain of command, our facilitators with the Air Force Readsler and the Guard Bureau. So we're excited about it and we have great support out of the state as well, too. Based on that excitement, we're going to take a one or two-minute break for a quick commercial. So we'll see you in about one or two minutes. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines on Think Tech, Hawaii. My show is based on my book, also titled Beyond the Lines. And it's about creating a superior culture of excellence, leadership, and finding greatness. I interview guests who are successful in business, sports, and life, which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness. Join me every Monday as we go Beyond the Lines at 11 a.m. Aloha. Aloha. I'm Gwen Harris, the host here at Think Tech, Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of the supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to thinktechhawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. We're back. We're alive. It's Wednesday afternoon. Over the hump day. Over the hump day, almost. I've got my good friend here, Dave Mullenero from HCAT. He's a project manager, program manager, all sorts of manager. I mean, you're pretty well a one-man band, aren't you? Now, I've got a small team, but we do a lot. But I appreciate that. And working with Stan Osterman and Rachel, Rachel James is awesome. We've got Christina and Susan running administrative and contract stuff. We're small but dynamic. And I kind of, it's analogous to, I think, the Wright Brothers Bicycle Factor. I love the fact that we are really agile and can get a lot of stuff done without a lot of bureaucracy, too. So that's, I think, a lot of the fun of what we're doing because we are with this micro-rid really moving forward with some ideas and concepts that just aren't real common sense to people. And it's time that we do stuff like that. So let's pull up the next slide. So what you've got there on the left is a pictorial description of what the micro-rid looks like. And that's pretty much the F-22 campus on the left. Where we are right now is micro-rid zero, which is not depicted on there, but it basically encompasses the whole campus. And that will give us the ability to provide cybersecurity. We'll be able to island ourselves from the rest of the map. What do you mean by island? Thanks for catching me, Mitch. Island, the ability to disconnect from utility and operate independently from the Hawaii Electric or Navy Facilities Command Grid on Hickam, so. Some of the key goals that we're trying to achieve is really, again, you're going to see this over and over. Again, assurance, resilience, and cybersecurity to the F-22. And let me talk a little bit about cybersecurity. You really don't associate micro-rids at least on the public level right now with cybersecurity in the military. It's very, very important. Cybersecurity is a big issue, as you know. What does cybersecurity mean? Basically, to defend ourselves from attacks from a hostile. By infiltrating you through the internet or? Through the internet, through acts of internal sabotage. Somebody downloads a malicious virus or malware or something, but it's that type of protection. The Air Force and the military is very specific in spending a lot of time and effort on providing cybersecurity. In this case, with the micro-grid, it's not a computer service so much as it is a SCADA system or a system of controls for controlling generators, switches, controllers, and gears like that as well, too. But there's a level of security that we have to provide, and that's a very complex, very difficult process to go through, but that is one of the goals to be able to do that. Nobody's done this before for a micro-grid to provide cybersecurity, so again, we're kind of reaching through the boundaries of what hasn't been done before. This will be a model for the rest of not just the Air Force, but hopefully the other services will leverage your non-recurring engineering here. Absolutely. That is a goal. Thanks for pointing that out, Mitch. There are micro-grids out there, I think, that are small from a really deployed standpoint. Nothing to the utility scale that we're doing right now. And it is a... What we look at for Pearl, and it's mentioned in some other slides, too, is we really want to be able to use this as a model or a prototype for other micro-grids throughout the DOD. I'm also looking at... We also look at the micro-grid as something a stake can utilize as well, too. As we move through that 2045 mandate for renewable energy and production, micro-grids are going to be the answer, and renewable energy isn't going to be done solely by PV or batteries. We're going to have to be able to micro-grid. We're also going to have to provide something that we are really... It's near and dear to both of us, is hydrogen. And hydrogen is an energy storage production capability, so... Okay. Yeah? So when you say you're at micro-grid zero, what does that mean zero? Does that mean it doesn't have any renewable energy in it? This one is... We're at PV, and we're trying to... There's some tricks of the trade that's, I think, very proprietary with our A&E firm to really increase the renewable PV penetration well into the 70, possibly 80% or higher. So that's... There's unique control capabilities and some of the technology and design work that they're going to put into it will allow us to really capitalize also, there's a battery energy storage system out there that we're going to apply. Talk to us about that. Well, it's a battery that's going to provide some redundancy if the system goes down. Tied into the battery, I need to full disclosure on this. This micro-grid, when we first designed it, we gave the commitment to the wing commander that we will do no harm and make sure that he has got the capability to conduct missions, so the actuality to do that is to provide some diesel generation. When this grid is completely built out it will be completely islanded completely off the grid using renewable energies that are in existence right now through battery, through hydrogen some other technologies that we'd like to develop and put on the micro-grid. So, but as you ask micro-grid zero really is what I call the serial bowl for the rest of the micro-grids and it provides that barrier, if you will, that we can apply. It's the test ground when we apply some different renewable energy technologies into some of the different micro-grids that we've got developed. Talk a little bit about the timeframe. One of these things is going to be coming online and projected. I never carve my timelines in stone because I haven't met one yet. That's interesting. What's your best guess of how long you're going to test it? Great question. The plan is for 14 months for the first micro-grid in that time from now. Actually we're very close to signing the contract. We're shooting for a one-may start date and between long lead purchase additional design work we've got to do and getting everything in the ground we're looking at about 14 months for that first grid and then there'll be some operations and testing that we'll have to do as well too and I think we're probably going to cover that in the next slide. That's what we've got too. Let's go to the next slide then. There we are. Where we now is basically again as I mentioned we're very close to signing the contract. We're excited about that. 14 month construction design. I have a question. What kind of equipment are you having to buy? This is not just existing equipment we have. A lot of this is commercial off the self technology to a point that's designed specifically for what we're trying to do. The battery company but there's a power distribution center associated with it. Again, we've got to buy a generator to again provide that emergency backup support until the battery can kick in and so there is some unique capabilities to it. Where it gets challenging is the programming and the controllers and the switch gears as well too. There's some operations and training that we'll have to go through and what I've said all along is we have some very smart people that are working the technology. To me the biggest challenge is the implementation of the policy and what do you mean by policy? Well, this is again untested and again we're dealing with the military environment. How do you adapt this? How do you what rules and requirements and regulations are going to have to be adapted? How is this going to get paid for? Obviously there's a pretty substantial infrastructure that's going to have to be maintained. People have to be trained on it. The cybersecurity aspect of it has to be monitored and maintained on a regular basis. The military is really not there yet so that's what this prototype is there for. Not only from a design perspective but also from implementation and adaptation. As you mentioned earlier we'll have military adapt this and move forward. That's the plan. We'd like to see this move forward. Maybe not the exact design but the concept of it. I've got to focus on the operations and maintenance. Particularly the maintenance part. We're in a very aggressive salt air environment. I have my hydrogen station at the Marine Corps base and the people from Toyota came and looked at it and they couldn't believe the level of corrosion and everything else that was going on. I work on that full time. All the time. Painting, chipping, greasing, the whole nine yards. PV panels don't just sit there in our benign. If we don't get it right they're going to start rotting. They're going to start getting fires and all that kind of stuff. Talk a little bit about the maintenance side. Absolutely no maintenance at all. Just repair by replacement. There is a lot of corrosion out there and that's a good point and again that's something we have to figure out how we're going to maintain and manage a system like that. This is an R&D project. We just don't know. You try to mitigate that by designing switch gear that can be submerged under water if there's a flood. How do you reinforce some of the PV panels? I'll give you a good example of PV that's out at Hickam right now. It's very heavily and deeply ensconced into the concrete. I think category three is hurricane. They're designed to take a big blast but there is an element of we don't know how things are going to react in an environment like that. This technology is not that all new but how we're applying it in a military environment is what's different. The Toyota guys made a big shout out or comment that most cities are near an ocean. We look at the world map and they all have some degree of salt water corrosion. The hotter you are the more it is. The colder you are it's a little bit more benign. What you're doing here is setting a standard for the rest of the military the Department of Defense and the mainland. Like I said the state of Hawaii for example we want to be resilient. We're going to have to invest in it. That takes money. You can't just talk the talk. At some point you've got to put in the dollars and walk the talk. I've seen, I can't tell you the number of reports that I've read or talked to people that are in the private sector government sector and they're saying the same thing we have got to deploy this. As you know Mitch, hydrogen fuel cell technology microids generations which is you name it this isn't again really novel but it's how we're applying it but get it out in the military environment because military has got some stringent requirements we've got to be able to deploy and operate it in basically no-notice operations. It's got to work the first time. It's got to work the first time. The cost of it failing could be mission failure. We have one slide I think left. Let's talk hydrogen. The hydrogen slide my favorite one. I think that might be towards the back. I think it's the next one right there. Why hydrogen? There is a great, we love hydrogen and in fact Hcat has been involved with hydrogen demonstration projects as you know see what HNEI and how your systems are going to operate and we know they're going to be flawless but from the military standpoint we think hydrogen is a great energy storage system more so than what we think with traditional battery energy storage systems quite in particular in a military installation we're very susceptible to power outages. We're not connected to inner island we're not connected to the mainland we're basically on our own. In fact there was a base in Europe that was a military air force base that was shut down because they decided to cut out power so they build it in microgrid and have power capability is important. We see hydrogen as a safe renewable energy hydrogen is ubiquitous it's everywhere it's got so many sources it's literally so many sources everywhere and nobody controls it there's no strategic metals or resources that are tied to it unlike batteries that we see where you've got strategic resources strategic metals that we may not have control over and are limited in quantity so and you can store energy at the gigawatt at the gigawatt it's like a monster hydrodam people don't quite visualize that but they're going to get the buzz pretty soon and that's where we're excited about being able to do that our vision for pearl is to have a deployed like system that we can actually use to generate a base load energy source so when we look at hydrogen as a plus to do that it reduces greenhouse gases there's again the safety factor involved there's certainly a cost if you can generate power from a facility or near your deployed operating base you're not spending billions of dollars by the way the DOD spends more money on energy than any other branch of the government I think combined if we can generate hydrogen in a location instead of having it shipped in by barrel or flown in or transported in there's an economic savings to that and look at all the soldiers that get killed trying to protect fueling convoys I mean it's crazy that is absolutely that is a very personal issue with me on having sent troops and deployed into environment where they were transporting you know literally bomb loads full of fuel and transporting them on the desert we should be doing hydrogen because we can and let's get out in front of this get out in front of this train now well guess what we're out of time we have to carry on with this conversation in a future one David thanks so much thanks Mitch thanks for having me on the show great having you here so that's it for today and we'll be seeing you next Wednesday so thank you from Hawaii the state of clean energy Aloha