 One, it's Wednesday and we know what day that is. It's Hawaii, the state of clean energy, brought to you by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm your host today, Mitchy Hoan. I'm very pleased to have a very long-term friend of mine. I've known him for like over almost a year now. Toby Kincaid, he's an author and an inventor. He also used to be an entrepreneur, but we'll let that ride. So this is going to be the fourth part of a series we've had called The Magic of Hydrogen, the great decarbonator, decarbonizer. And I think after four times I get that right, but decarbonizer is what we're all about. And that's what hydrogen is all about. So we're calling this The Magic of Hydrogen, the decarbonizer. So Toby, I'm going to stop talking and let's go through, we have a few slides, but I want you to talk about your latest set of slides and how hydrogen is the great decarbonizer. So Aloha and welcome to the show, Toby. Thank you, Aloha, Commander. Good to see you. Good to be with you. And I always love your shows because the state of clean energy, that's what it's all about. For 300 years, we have been using carbon fuels, coal, oil, natural gas. And for 300 years, we've been burning these toxic fuels. And one of the scariest words in the English language is bioaccumulation. So these toxins tend to build up in our environment. And that's what is really a big problem and why the decarbonizer is really front and center. It's possibly the most important topic we could have because if you have energy right, everything can go right. But if you don't have energy right, if it's wrong, then you're gonna have a tough time. Just like with the tree, the root of the tree, of the economic tree is energy. So if your root is strong and healthy, hey, you could be defoliated and come back. But if your root is diseased and not very stable and iffy and toxic, well, what's the prognosis? Not good. So now we're at a moment in history. We all live at this moment and this time where we really are at the crossroads. And so let's pull up your slide and we'll go into what's so important about this. And what you have there in the center is the sun. And the sun is the root of all energy. We have a solar powered world and the solar power goes to the plant kingdom through a photosynthesis. And the plant kingdom gives us all the oxygen and all the nutrition that we have. So if we don't do the plant kingdom right, there could be the devil to pay. So what you have in here is an alternative. In fact, not an alternative, it's superior because we're going back to the enormous amount of energy that we have available to us naturally. So you take sunlight and what we're gonna do is we're gonna add that energy to water. So solar energy comes to a solar panel converting photons into electrons. We take those electrons directly into a device called an electrolyzer and that adds energy to the water molecule and disassociates it into the gases. Now you can see you let the oxygen go because we don't even need to hold it. You couldn't hold it if you wanted to if you were a welder or a fish farmer or a hospital. It's perfectly medical grade oxygen. I wanted to make a comment. Yeah, please, please. So during this COVID crisis we've been having, I was contacted actually by the agriculture community at Nell Hall where I have my hydrogen station wanting to see if I could give them my oxygen because the hospitals were using up so much oxygen. There were no spare supplies to be able to bubble into the fishpans. So unfortunately, I'm not actually money my electrolyzer now. And so I didn't have the oxygen, but it's amazing that the whole state of Hawaii has a very limited capability or capacity of generating oxygen. I think this is something that was identified. And of course, having a large fleet of electrolyzers in the state would be ideal. So it's kind of really leveraging it and it's really valuable if you look at, from the point of view of saving lives and an industry like the agriculture industry that can use that to grow protein for us. So anyway, my little side, so carry on. Well, that speaks to how valuable water is. When we put energy into it and we separate it, we get hydrogen and oxygen. The oxygen we let go, we obviously know how important that is. When you're operational, you could produce so much oxygen that you'd never have any lack of it in the state for all medical uses, for welding, for fish farms. Oxygen's very useful. So we have water. Water is the key to the whole thing. And what you're showing in your slide is a water cycle. So by through solar energy with photovoltaics making electricity directly from photons, there's no middleman, does it in a solid state, no moving parts kind of fashion. And you can imagine going back in time to an old 300 years ago with an old steam power plant and you're gonna say, in 300 years from now, we're gonna have solid state power plants. And you would say, what do you mean? No, you have to have boilers and you have to have condensers. That's how a steam engine, that's power. Well, we live in a new age. We live in a different century. So what's wonderful about your slide is that once you put energy into the water and you've let the oxygen go, you store the hydrogen. It goes through a desiccant, so they dry it. They put it through a filter. So the only thing going into the tank is pure hydrogen. And pure hydrogen is absolutely inert. It's completely stable. You could hold it for a day, a month, a year, decades, possibly even centuries. So that's an extraordinary thing. Just as an aside, when you compare that to a lithium ion battery, well, they really say within four hours, you better start using that energy because if you don't, it'll just slowly degrade and discharge internally. Now that's not the case with hydrogen. Once you get energy into hydrogen, you have nature's perfect battery. And that is really the big question that's facing us industrially. But back to your slide. So once you have the hydrogen, you see at the bottom of the slide, you have a vehicle and that vehicle has a fuel cell. So you can fill up a tank in five minutes. So it's very much better than kind of the long time it takes for an all battery approach in my view. So you just have a normal pull in, fill up in five minutes and you're good to go. 400 mile range. And so the fuel cell is recombining those gases, oxygen from the air, hydrogen that we stored, and releases an enormous amount of energy. And the best part is you get most of the water back. So you can just do it again. It's a water cycle. And it's a very pure water. Yes. So you can actually drink it, but it's so pure it kind of sucks the metal out of your mouth if you have a mouth full of filling. It's soft water, there's no minerals. But it's real water and it's pure water. Now imagine a vehicle with a waste product of potable water, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. But we live in a world that doesn't do this. We live in a world where we have been, as we'll talk about later and have in the past, 300 years ago it was coal and then 200 years ago we went into oil and then 100 years ago we're going into natural gas. But now in the 21st century, we have completely different needs. We have 70 to 80. Let's pull up the next slide. I'm not sure if that slide is up. I think you have one of your beautiful pieces of artwork. All right. There you go. Okay, well, this is a courtesy of Toby who is also an artist. Yeah, it's a legend. Yeah, I've got kind of a hard-fired style but hopefully it comes through. And here I'm just trying to go through the history that every century we tend to move to a new fuel and that fuel has more specific energy density than the fuel before. So for most of humanity, up to 300 years ago, everything was really muscle power for the most part, human or animal. We used wind for wave and for some great little windmills that were built as far back as the Neolithic. So we've been using natural energy for a long time. But as far as the power of combustion, we could only really get 12 to 15 megajoules per kilogram. And when we go to coal, it goes up to 30. So we're doubling the amount of energy density and that makes a lot of sense. So for the people out there, the megajoules tells you how much energy. Oh yeah, I just want to give some unit to the number but 30 compared to 15 is the key point. So when we look at your graph or back at this drawing, we can see that the energy density goes up. If you look at coal in the 18th century, you've got about 30, that megajoules per kilogram, but 30 is the key number. Now when we went to oil, that's a liquid fuel and it had more density and that went up to 40, 44, depending on the type of oil you want to look at. And then as we go in the next century, the 20th century, we reached natural gas and as well as distillates that we could make from the oil, aviation fuel and things like that. And that gets you about 55. So we see that we've been moving up. But now if we just continue this logic and look at how our history has been evolving, we can see that in our century, the 21st century, we need a fuel that is potent. And it's kind of interesting that a lot of the money in renewable energy research is going towards biomass and biofuels, but they have a notoriously low energy density. When we look at other renewables, particularly solar is the best in terms of the energy density we can get out of it, there is the real power supply. We can put it everywhere, distribute it. And in the case of Oahu, you have lots of commercial building roofs. You have lots of even residential roofs that still can be used. And my favorite is you have lots of parking lots, which is already zoned. I can bring the crew in. It's just ready to put up a canopy. And so this is a tremendous resource. And where we're going with all of this is that Hawaii is a very interesting case study. You're isolating. I want to interrupt you. No, please. One comment is that when you look at the increase of energy density in all these different fuels, it's really also parallels the amount of hydrogen that's actually in that fuel. So with coal, it doesn't have that much hydrogen. Oil had more hydrogen. Natural gas has a lot of hydrogen in it because it has four hydrogen atoms and one carbon atom. And of course, then neat hydrogen is the ultimate. And you can see how high it is, 140 megajoules. I mean, that's incredible. That's like four or five times, almost five times more, but certainly four times more than natural gas. Yes. And it's that. Three times more than natural gas. I have to get my pocket calculator on. That's right. And so that's very, very important. The world evolves in machines. We'll see in a later slide. We talk about the engine technology that's evolved. And as we go through time, we get better and better. But now we've reached a crossroads. We have put so much toxic byproducts from our combustion of fossil fuels into the environment, into this thin little membrane of life that surrounds this incredible rock that we live on. Let's flash up the next slide while we're talking. Sure. There you go. OK, so this is kind of a view of how the old utility has been designed. I mean, our electric utilities were designed 100 years ago. So if we look at the top, if you can get through my chicken scratches there, it all starts with solar energy. And millions of years ago, solar energy with photosynthesis grew biomass. And a small part of that biomass gets buried. And then there's millions of years of heat and pressure. And it kind of gets all the little impurities get kind of leached out. And you're left with the carbon, which the hydrogen is stuck to. That's the point you're making is vital, is that we've all been kind of drummed in the idea that, oh, if you want energy, it's carbon. It's a carbon fossil fuel energy. Well, that's not really chemically accurate. The energy is in the hydrogen that's stuck to the carbon. So we see the lowest energy density with coal, because that has the most carbon and the least hydrogen. And then as we go to oil, as you point out, you have less carbon, but more hydrogen. So the energy density goes up. And then natural gas even further. You have just a little bit of carbon and mostly hydrogen, well, in terms of the amount of elements there. Then we go all the way and compare it just to hydrogen with no carbon at all. And we see we have the highest energy density. The point you're making is critical that everyone has to get their arms around this. The energy is not in the carbon, it's in the hydrogen. Always has, always will be. And as you said, why do we call the fossil fuel industry a carbon industry? It's actually a hydrogen industry disguised because we're talking about the carbon that it's stuck to. And what do we do in our world as we move carbon all over the planet? Super tankers, railroads, pipelines, all of this we will see really is unnecessary. So back to that slide, if we look at the old utility, I have the mountain there shown underneath that. And we take trucks and we scrape the mountains off, maybe in West Virginia, and they throw the tailings into the valleys where the streams are destroying the ecosystem. They put it on trucks, it's filling everywhere. Then they take it to a railroad depot and they take it all the way down to Florida, for example, and then they have a coal power plant that needs lots of water to cool down the condenser. And they put it next to where the ocean is so the offshore flow takes all of the emissions away. And that's the key about the old utility design is you need a big power plant, but it was dirty and all the smoke coming out. They said, okay, well, let's just put it 30 miles away, 40 miles away, and then we'll use transmission lines to bring in the power, no one gets to see it out of sight, out of mind. No, that's been kind of the way of the world. But if we look back at that chart, then we have these transmission lines and eventually it's stepped down to a consumer. So that is a 19th century idea. But now when we go to the bottom of the slide, if we were to do this all over and if we could design our grid from scratch, this is how we would do it. We only need about five things. You need the primary converter, that's the solar and wind. And it doesn't matter if it's variable or not, just take what you've got, use it. And if you have any excess, then make hydrogen, bubble hydrogen through the electrolyzer and store the fuel. And when you need the electricity, you just put it through that fuel through a fuel cell and that produces the electricity and you get the water back to be recycled. So it's an completely water-based system, completely non-toxic. And I think that message is so important. The work you're doing in Hawaii is critical that everyone understand that the fossil fuel industry is just feeding you a story. It's all just to sell you something. It has nothing to do with what's efficient or what's not efficient or what's available. It has nothing to do with it. It's all about me selling you something. And then when you're done using the oil, you need more to get to buy it again. Yeah, so I want to throw in another point here about the hydrogen, the anti-hydrogen crowd are always talking about round-trip efficiency whereas I prefer to look at what's the ultimate cost of it. So I had a guy call me last week and I was really astounded. And you used to be in the PV industry. He was telling me that in Arizona, they can buy PV panels for 90 cents a watt and that they are producing electricity at one to two cents a kilowatt hour. Well, excuse me, if you apply that to making hydrogen, I mean, it takes like 60 kilowatt hours to make a gasoline gallon equivalent of energy storage. You know, you're talking like $1.20 per kilogram, which is like 60 cents a gallon. Now that doesn't include taxes and all the other stuff people hold on to this stuff. But the point is, is that we're there now as far as the economics are gonna work. Yes, it's all about scale. The more you make of anything, the less expensive it becomes. And there are no rare earth element limits to the fuel cells or the electrolyzers. So this is important. If we compare that with a battery made of lithium ion, where are you gonna get all the nickel, all the lithium and all the cobalt? You would need six earths to be able to scale that up just for transportation, let alone utility uses and all the other industrial needs of storing power. And that's the missing link to a clean energy future. And everyone kind of dances around it, but what we really need and what we don't have is a clean, inexpensive industrial battery. And this is where your technology comes in. Using the electrolyzer and the fuel cell, now you have in effect a perfect battery and a battery that has far more energy density than any lithium ion could. So you're really serious about actually becoming a clean energy economy because if we are serious, and I know you are, you've identified what is the missing link. And so even now, even within the last few weeks, you hear the oil lobbies kind of saying, hey, we have a 30 year plan, we're gonna get back to normal, we're gonna get back to burning all this fossil fuel and won't that be great? Well, no, it's not great. The toxicity is going to really get more exacerbated by this bioaccumulation. And last time we spoke, you know, we're in the wildfires and that was terrible. I mean, it was apocalyptic. These forests took centuries to grow and lost in 30 minutes. So you know that- Let's go to the next slide. Please. We're moving right along. Okay, so when we talk about decarbonizing, we're really kind of talking about two things generally. We're talking about the grid for electricity. And then we're also talking about transportation. But when we talk about electric vehicles, it kind of involves the grid to some extent. So we have to talk about both. And I'm gonna say it kind of crudely. One of the big problems with an electric vehicle that's all battery, remember there's two types, the all battery type like a Tesla, and then there's the fuel cell electric vehicle which you're working with. And if you compare the two, the fuel cell is far, far better. And let's say, let's explore why. You know, when you have an all battery electric vehicle, whenever you plug it in, it's in real time. As soon as you plug it into charge, it's gonna start drawing from the grid. The grid was never designed to take on these kinds of loads. It's designed for electrical loads that we normally use, heating, air conditioning, lights, that sort of thing. Obviously that we run our devices. But when we get to trying to do this with fossil fuels, excuse me, let me get back to the all battery. When we plug this in, it's a real time deal. Now that becomes a problem because the grid has to instantly respond. And in so doing, you have to ramp up all these auxiliary generators. And if we go back to the slide, we'll kind of put it in a frame. So really, I would argue there's actually two grids. You know, just like a coin is one coin and it has two faces, it's one grid, but there's really two grids. One is during peak time and the other is during off peak. And during peak time, the grid is at peak. It means it can't really take on a lot of new load. So if we're going to actually scale up with electric vehicles plugging into the grid for real time charging, you know, one or 2%, okay, sure. But when you start getting 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% of the fleet, now we have some issues. So for example, on Oahu, you import every year about 500 million gallons for transportation, for ground transportation. If we assume you can get about 20 miles per gallon, do the math and that's 10 billion miles on Oahu. Now, no wonder your traffic is so tough. You know, a lot of people driving around. So I kind of checked those numbers out and on the state energy website, it reported that it's about just a little under 10,000 miles per vehicle, which if you have a million vehicles, million times 10,000 is 10 billion. So now we have 10 billion miles we have to deal with to be 100%. So we have to ask the question, okay, if we're going to do all battery, how does that work? So you can go about four miles on a kilowatt hour. So to go that 20 miles that you had the gasoline for, you would need five kilowatt hours. So if you're going 10 billion miles, that means you need five, 50 billion kilowatt hours to do this. Now these are big numbers, but I wanna give some perspective to this. Right now, the electric grid on Oahu produces about five million kilowatt hours. No, excuse me, five million megawatt hours. So when we do the math now for that 50 billion kilowatt hours and convert it to megawatt hours, sorry, you get about 50 million megawatt hours. Now what that means is you need 10 grids. You have one grid, you would need 10 of those if everybody was all battery. That's right. Now that's not practical. Now, so how are we gonna do this? So now we look back at that two grid diagram. When you look at off peak, you have a big advantage because, well, let's just compare it to peak. When you're on peak, everything is filled up and if you add new cars, it becomes a problem when you're charging during peak. Most of the clean energy is already being used so that you would have to use other generators and that becomes kind of problematic. But if you look at off peak, now if we're gonna use fuel cell vehicles, we can make the hydrogen fuel during the off peak. And that actually helps the grid because it provides a load when you have an overabundance of renewable energy. That energy has to go somewhere. Either it goes somewhere, you turn it off because leave a grid over energized, it'll have arc flash and it's dangerous. It'll try and find a path to ground. So the management of the grid is really critical when we add renewables. And what's missing are your electrolyzers because your electrolyzers are gonna save the day by providing that load during the off peak time that helps stabilize the grid. And now you can use that energy during the peak times when you need it. So we're kind of divorcing the electric vehicle from the grid if you could do it with fuel cells. So, and now that leads up to another thing that we could talk about in a bit. And that is where you can get this hydrogen. You can make a lot of it, of course, on a Wahoo. We're going through the numbers. You need about six square miles of solar panels but that's only, you have 600 square miles on the island. So that's about 1%. So to add to calculate for round trip and any other things you wanna add to be conservative, let's call it 12 miles. Well, sounds like a lot, but when you distribute 12 square miles out, it's actually can fit on your parking lots and your commercial buildings without any new land. You've paved over more than that. So there's a tremendous, it's a real option for the state of Hawaii to make hydrogen and as you'll go to later in your slides, making that on the big island where you have a lot of renewables and then you can export that to a Wahoo. And instead of the $5 billion a year that Hawaiians spend on a Wahoo alone, by the way, I think it's six billion, but a billion is for aviation fuels. We've got five billion for electricity. That five billion now is going off island. It's gone. It goes somewhere else. It's not in your pocket. But if you made clean hydrogen on the big island, you could export that to an offshore buoy off of a Wahoo and use underwater tanks, which are just basically big bladders, but you're using the weight of the water to kind of store a lot of hydrogen safely and off island. If you ever had a breach and it would just escape, it's non-toxic. There's no, as you point out, there's no oil, oil skims or, you know, problems, you know, spill. No, you just lost the hydrogen, it goes away. It just keeps going up all the way to the stratosphere and beyond. It's gone, you can't get it back, but you're not gonna hurt anything. Okay, so talking about transportation, let's go to your engines through the ages. Oh, yeah, please. We only have about three or four minutes left. Oh, I'm sorry, go so fast. Well, here is kind of the issue like we saw in the previous slide. Engine technology also increases. Every century, we get a better engine. The steam engine in the 18th century, that was an external combustion engine. So the combustion was outside the working cylinder. And then we went to internal combustion. So now the explosions are in the cylinder. Then we went to the jet engine in the last century. And the jet engine is just an extraordinarily a wonderful device. We don't have much time, so I won't dwell on it. But you can see now the next engine in our century is the fuel cell. Correct. And that's what you're advocating and that's what you're using. And that is the future for fleets and public transportation and then eventually the entire market. Next slide. Okay, so this is kind of a comparison between thinking we can go all battery as lithium ion that's really impractical. You know, imagine a big semi truck, you're gonna charge that with a megawatt charger. So if you did a thousand trucks on a Wahoo, you've just taken the whole grid. There's a thousand megawatts as a gigawatt and that's about the size of your grid. So the idea of a semi truck using all batteries in my view is absolutely impractical. And besides when you're running down the road and you're half charged, you know, you've discharged half your battery, you're just carrying all those thousands of pounds as dead weight. Yeah, exactly. When we look at it on that slide, it was like 3.7 tons of lithium ion compared to about 70 pounds of hydrogen. And that would be about the equivalent energy. So you can see when it comes to power to mass ratios, when we talk about vehicles, it's all about how much power you can get out of the power plant versus how much it weighs. This is really critical. And so with the fuel cell hands down by two orders of magnitude, is much, much, much lighter and allows you to have more weight available to actually do the work. And more space. And more space, absolutely. It's a win-win all the way. So let's shoot through to the Big Island slide. We only have about a minute and a half, so I just want to talk. I'm going to talk a little bit now. Yes, please, please. So I just wanted to show you what, how we're applying all this on the Big Island with our Big Island hydrogen plant and bus system. So we actually have three fuel cell electric buses that are going to be deployed on the Big Island. We have a hydrogen station, which produces the hydrogen and dispenses it at the Nellah site, as you can see on this little diagram. And then we also have transportation trailers, hydrogen transport trailers, tube trailers to carry hydrogen from the cone aside over to Hilo, where they have their main bus facility. So that's the plan, we'll be hauling it over. And that's the whole concept and applies all the things that Toby was talking about. Making the hydrogen at the moment, it's a combo of, you know, when I say gray electrons, that's the normal electrons that we have, plus green electrons from wind and solar and geothermal. So during the day, about 83% of the energy is green. So therefore 83% of my hydrogen is green. And then at night it drops down to 50%. So anyway, we're making progress there. And the more green electrons we add on the Big Island, the greener our hydrogen will become. So let's shoot over to the next slide, which it'll be our last slide, I think. Yeah, this is a beauty shot. And I just wanted to show you what this bus looks like. So this is the first one, 29 passenger fuel cell electric bus, which is an electric vehicle. So it's just not a battery electric vehicle. It does have batteries in it, it does have the fuel cell. And it's a beautiful bus. And we're really looking forward to getting it up and running by the end of this year. Like I'm saying that, and we just continue to have a little glitch as you can see on my hydrogen station over my left right shoulder over there. The mirror image kind of blows us. So that's the last slide. So I'm gonna let you finish off Toby with any comments you might have to make about this. Well, we're at the crossroads and we have a whole lobby that is used to selling you fossil fuels and wants to continue to convince you to do it. But to me that's like someone climbing up a tall building, getting to the roof and jumping off. And then around the 70th floor, we open a window and we call out, hey, how's it going? And the answer comes back, so far so good. You know, that's the situation here. So what you are doing is so critical because what we do or fail to do in the next 10 years is gonna set the course for the next hundred. So I applaud your work. I'm a great admirer of yours. And I thank you so much. And the people, the citizens of Hawaii who support your work because it is the future. We need someone to demonstrate it at scale and you guys are stepping up. So bravo. Thank you. And mahalo. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Toby. And it's great having you again and I'm gonna look forward to having you more and more. And in future shows, the carbonizer five. Let me get there. So this is Mitch Ewen from Hawaii in the state of clean energy signing off until next Wednesday. So everybody aloha.