 Hey, hello and welcome to another exciting, exciting edition of Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii. And I really do have a long overdue guest this time. I spend a whole lot of time at his research facility on the Big Island and get to see him passing by in the quad once in a while when they're doing some filming or something. But I have yet to have him on the show and it really is long overdue. My guest today is Mr. Hank Rogers, the head of Blue Planet Foundation and also Blue Planet Research. And he's got other famous attributes too that I'll let him talk about itself a little bit. But Hank, welcome to the show today. And I really appreciate it. I know that you do an awful lot of traveling around the world, but why don't you give the viewers, just if they haven't met you before, just a little bit of your background. All right, first of all, thanks for having me on the show, Stan. I really appreciate it. I was on Think Tech with Jay Fidel like years and years and years ago. This was probably, yeah, when I was at the Manoa Innovation been a long time ago. Anyway, background, I'm originally from the Netherlands, 11 years in the Netherlands, eight years in New York, four years in Hawaii, went to UH, went to surf, chased the drill, started a computer game company, wrote the first role playing game in Japan, ended up licensing the rights to a little game called Tetris. I went after the rights. I went to the Soviet Union and befriended the guy who actually made the game. He's my partner till today. Made another company, making mobile phone game companies, sorry, mobile phone games in Honolulu. Sold that company for a bunch of money, bought a ranch, had a heart attack, found my missions in life, started a foundation working to end the use of carbon-based fuel. I got three other missions and wore a make-a-back-book life by going to the moon in Mars and beyond and figure out how the universe ends and do something about it. Oh no, I don't have to buy the book now. Yeah, I've had your whole life in like two minutes. That's awesome. That's right. I think that's the quickest life story I've ever done. That is. That was pretty impressive. But I really appreciate you being on today and I really have to say I admire the work that Paul and the guys are doing up there on the Big Island and your efforts around the world globally to work on cleaning up our environment, making it a better place and hopefully just making the world a better place. I know that you're more of a doer than a talker, as evidenced by your little monologue there. You'd rather do it than talk about it. And I have to say, I did see the History Channel story on your trip to Russia, or Soviet Union actually, because it was still Soviet Union back then. And your exploits and how you met your partner got the license detectress out. And as a backstory, I understand you actually brought him to the United States after the fall of the Soviet Union. Could you just talk about that for a second? Yeah, sure. I mean, he needed to get out of the Soviet Union. He wasn't getting anything for Tetris, even though he created the game. It all went to the people. And so, you know, I basically, I got him out to live in Seattle. He worked for me for a while, then he worked for Microsoft for a while. And now he's just collecting royalties. Did he become an American citizen? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Outstanding. Become an American citizen. And I tried to convince him to vote, but he doesn't believe in politics or politics. He says they're all liars. I have to tend to agree with him on that one. Hardly. But hey, again, traveling, you've been doing a bunch of traveling. And is it Bhutan that you go to quite a bit? Okay. So I've been to over 60, I don't know, 65 countries and counting. I used to travel around before COVID. I was going around the world at least four times a year. I mean, around the world, trip tickets. I had been to Bhutan three times. Yes. It's a wonderful place. I'm friends with the ex prime minister of Bhutan and the king of Bhutan, my Facebook friend. All right. But you've actually tried to take some innovation, particularly the third, I don't want to call them third world countries, underdeveloped countries. And trying to get them to stop deforestation, maybe using hydrogen or methane from farm waste products to cook with instead of deforestation. Hang on. Hang on. So you're, I don't know, that's not my life story. It's someone else's story. So what I did, what I did do is I talked to both the prime minister and the king about bringing hydrogen to Bhutan. Why? They have all the, how can I say, water hydropower that you could ever want. In Timpu, the capital, electricity costs two cents per kilowatt hour. If you're outside, Timpu, electricity is free. Wow. Okay. All right. So that's the good news. Where they make their, besides the tourism, where they make their foreign currency, they sell electrons to India. So that's where the money, that's where they get their money. Now, where does the money go? Their money goes back to India when they buy gasoline and diesel, which has to be trucked into Bhutan. And that's an uphill battle because Bhutan is on the way to Tibet from India. They're talking about bringing stuff uphill. So it's got to be fancy. So I said, you know, you should be doing electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles for your inside of your town or your city. And you should be using hydrogen vehicles for your trucks and buses. You can make the hydrogen out of the run of the river electricity. Your electricity is so cheap. And actually, the king who was at Oxford grad said, you know, the hydrogen trucks and buses, they're too expensive. Everything is still too expensive. And I said, okay, I will figure it out on the big island of Hawaii. And when we have the solution, the trucks and buses and the stations, then I'll come back and I'll bring that solution for Bhutan. So that's the actual story. Okay. That's a long time ago. It's 10 years in, you know, even talking about, so you say I act, but I'm, and I don't talk, but actually this hydrogen conversation has been going on for far too long. I agree. I agree. Ages ago and we're still waiting. I agree. But you're right on the money. If they have hydroelectric power cheap, man, there's no reason why they couldn't be using hydrogen for cooking, hydrogen for their transportation. And as it turns out nowadays, even air buses looking at hydrogen for aviation, big shipping companies are looking at hydrogen for container ship transit, you know, changing out their propulsion systems. And, you know, you think about a container ship, how much fossil fuel it pros, you know, carbon into the atmosphere on a round trip between LA and Hawaii. And it's, it's tons and tons and tons that you can mitigate if you use hydrogen instead. So you're right, it's not happening fast enough. But, you know, around the world, there is a lot going on in hydrogen and Europe and Asia especially are doing a lot in hydrogen. Can you tell us if you're, you know, running into that same feeling that you see it increasing or at least it's becoming more popular around the world? Well, absolutely. Japan has dedicated, has said they're going to switch to a hydrogen economy. I mean, they import fossil fuel that runs, I mean, besides the nukes that they have, they don't actually have a source of energy, right, inside of the fans, so they import everything. And, you know, God bless their little hearts, they were going to run the Olympics off hydrogen. And it's a story and everybody's buying it. And so the people are kind of mentally ready for it. In this country, it still feels like people say, oh, it's dangerous, the hydrogen bomb and it's like, hey, the flow, when's the last time you actually looked into this? Fossil fuels are way more dangerous than hydrogen will ever be. And you drive your fossil fuel car, you keep your propane tanks inside your house and you do it on your barbecue, you put them in the trunk of your car. Now that's dangerous. So I was on a talk show in Singapore, I arrived in Singapore the next morning, I'm on a talk show. They asked me, what can we do? We don't have rooms for solar, we don't have wind, you know, how can we go renewable? And I said, well, I really know nothing about Singapore, but I'm going to guess, I want to guess that you're importing fossil fuel and that's how you get your electricity from some place. You know, there's Indonesia, there's a whole bunch of sources nearby. If you want to get off of that addiction, what I think you should do is you should go and build a wind farm or a solar farm somewhere in Australia. There's so much outback out there with so much wind and so much solar in places where there are no people. All you need to do is you could build your own infrastructure, make the hydrogen, bring it to Singapore and you would be a clean economy. How hard can that be? Well, you know, it's funny, just in the short time, and having you describe Bhutan and Singapore, and Singapore is population dense just like Oahu is, and Bhutan is kind of rural, kind of like the outer islands, neighbor islands are in Honolulu. And we have the same energy conundrum where we need the power on Oahu, but the renewable sources are probably more available on the neighbor islands. So in Hawaii, I personally, when I look at the numbers, I go, there's no way on Oahu we can put enough solar panels, and probably don't want to put a bunch of big wind turbines all over the island, you know, to make enough renewable. But we do have renewables within the state, both hydroelectric. On the big island, I think hydroelectric is under underappreciated. And I think even on Oahu, we used to have sugar cane flumes and pineapple flumes all over the island that you could put in stream hydro in at several elevations and be generating maybe enough electricity for 100 or 200 houses at a time. And it adds up. But at any rate, here in Hawaii, if you put geothermal into the mix, and you put hydrogen in as the energy storage piece, doesn't that seem like the ideal way to get off fossil fuels in the state? I've had I've been giving this speech for like years and years and years. There's enough there's enough geothermal energy under the big island to power Hawaii for the rest of time. And it's better than that. I bet we could export hydrogen to Japan. We were the we could be the mecca of hydrogen. You know, geothermal is such a huge power source. It's such a huge power source. And if we managed to I don't know how many gigawatts we can get out of it, it wouldn't make a difference to the mountain. It wouldn't make a difference. In fact, it might cool it down a little bit. But, you know, there is so much energy down there, it's it's hard to fathom. Right. And so, you know, I don't think that even if we did our best effort that we would actually scratch maybe 1% off of that geothermal power source on the big island. I'm sorry that you know that that it's such a controversial issue with when it comes to, I don't know, culture or religion or all those things that get in the way. But at some point, we're going to have to like, work with it, because what we're doing now is we're living with something which is destroying the island. You know, we're we're we're living with oil. We import $5 billion a year of oil. We're living with coal. I mean, that's going to go away pretty soon. We did a pretty good job. But I mean, we live with that. And it's destroying our coral. It's it's creating hurricanes. Mark, my words are going to get hit by one of those hurricanes. One of these days, just like in Niki, you know, you roll the dice. Each time a hurricane comes at Hawaii, you roll the dice that it's not going to cause major damage. But look at what happened to Puerto Rico. I went to Puerto Rico, but that place is a mess. And it's because all the electricity is being moved around on these long ass cables. And they go down in hurricanes. And we are not like right around the corner next to Florida, where we can get equipment from Florida to help us out. We are far away. And it's going to take a long time for us to recover. So we should start thinking about how to be resilient now. Now, moving the hydro moving electricity from from the big island to Oahu, I think once we start thinking about exporting hydrogen, we can export it to Oahu, keep it all inside the state. We don't need to go anywhere else. We're on the same wavelength, my friend. I agree 110 percent, because it makes more sense in an undersea cable. It, you know, we've even talked to MITU and over at HNEI about doing a derogable that could move hydrogen between the islands and also move cargo at the same time. So I think that'd be an awesome, awesome project to to really look at that. I know, you know, Richard Ha, I knew you have a lot of visitors. Yeah, he's actually trying to work with the Hawaiian community to get them more accepting of geothermal. If as long as it's safe and clean and, you know, not necessarily a carbon copy of what we had, that's 20 or 30 year old technology so far that could use some improving. But there's a lot of ways. I was in Iceland visiting their geothermal facilities and it looks like our convention center. Big glass front with a coffee shop and a museum about the history of geothermal and how it changed Reykjavík, which used to have a cloud of cold, cold dust over it all the time. Now they get all of their food, their hot water from geothermal. And so they asked me, where are you from? And I said, oh, I'm from Hawaii. And he said, oh, we've had a visitor from Hawaii. And they looked it up. It was Richard Ha. Yeah, he's I've been actually I've been to Iceland probably four or five times myself with the military. We used to do alert over there with and we were part of an air defense system and we would do alert over there. But it's a beautiful place. The joke was there's a beautiful woman behind every tree. But there's just no trees. There are there are some pretty ladies that I have to admit. But back on the energy side, let's let's actually that's a good spot to take a break. I'm getting pimped by the think tech folks that I need to take a little break here. So we'll be back in 60 seconds with Hank Rogers from Blue Planet and talk some more hydrogen, some more energy. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man here. Having a great talk with Mr. Hank Rogers. Actually, we didn't prep for this thing. So we're kind of all over the place. But it's a cool conversation. A lot of surprises in here. But Hank has been traveling a lot around the world. And one of the things that he did here locally, like I say, he's more action than talk is he decided that he wanted to have his property on the big island off the grid. And so Hank, can you just talk a little bit about how that happened and some of the serendipitous things that occurred out of that? Yes. So, you know, it all stemmed from, you know, having foundation, we passed this legislation that helped the solar industry in Hawaii. And so solar energy industry boomed at some at the peak, we had like 200 solar installers in, you know, in Hawaii. And then the electric company said, whoa, we can't handle that much on the grid. And they, and they started saying, we're not going to allow you to grid talk. That's what happened to me in Honolulu. And I'm thinking, what the hell, you know, I went to all the trouble to create this business for the solar industry and now they're stuck. And so I said, well, how can we get around that? I started thinking about it. And the answer for me, which I also think is the answer for the future for everyone, is to go off grid. You know, what the idea is that you make your own electricity wherever you live. And how do you do that? I mean, solar or wind, and how do you get through the night? Or how do you get through periods when there is no wind? And the answer is you have to store that energy. So then we started looking into batteries. And the, you know, we, we first, we got into vanadium redox low batteries, and they were horrible. It's a horrible chemical. And there's still horrible chemicals sitting at my ranch somewhere, waiting for a disaster to happen. And I said, you know, after that year of vanadium redox, I said to my guys, listen, the next batteries, because the company was that that brought us this stuff was bought by the Chinese and we never heard from them again. I said, okay, the next battery is going to be we're going to buy it from the company that's still going to be around 20 years from now. That's the first thing. The second thing is it's going to be benign chemistry. In other words, I don't want to, I don't want to have another set of, like, terrible garbage sitting at my ranch sometime in the future. So we have to find a benign chemistry. And we did our homework and we ended up with Sony. Sony turned out to be the first company that made lithium-ion batteries in the first place in 1991. And then they came out with a new chemistry in 2009, lithium-iron phosphate. Now the difference between the other lithium-ion batteries, which are in my phone, in my laptop, in my Tesla, is they're mostly lithium nickel cobalt manganese. Cobalt comes from a war zone and is mined by kids. And manganese, they're talking about scraping the bottom of the ocean to get manganese nodules, which is another ridiculous thing. Lithium and iron and phosphate, however, are all benign chemicals. And so we chose the Sony batteries. They don't get hot. It's like, oh my gosh, you know, if you look at anything that's using the NMCs and nickel cobalt manganese, you will find all kinds of stuff to keep them from overheating. And then still they get it wrong, like that Samsung Galaxy thing that caught on fire or those little toys that you ride around on, like segways. And every once in a while, one of those cars actually does catch on fire. And why is that? It's because it's basically an unstable chemistry. If you puncture it, if you overheat it, overcharge it, it will spontaneously combust. And that combustion is not something you can put out with a fire extinguisher or water. It's like fireworks. The instruction to firefighters to stand back and wait till it's over. Now, there's nothing you can do to lithium ferrous phosphate that will make that happen. And so it's the safest battery. They run full. There's no parts in there that have no cooling system or nothing. And it works from here at the ranch. And I also took my house in Honolulu off grid because the electric company said, sorry, you're in a neighborhood that has too much solar already and you can't have solar on your roof. I said, well, I hate to say this, but I'm going to do it anyway. And so we started doing it for other people, you know, friends and family, that kind of thing. And we ended up with a company. So we have a new company called, well, it's not that new anymore. It's already four or five years old now. It's called Blue Planet Energy. And we do exclusively lithium iron phosphate battery systems. We went from servicing the Hawaiian, basically the Hawaiian market. And the reason I thought Hawaii is because Hawaii's got the most expensive electricity. So and it's got all this solar and all this wind. So it should be the perfect place. And it kind of is. But it turns out there are a lot of people on the mainland who also want to get off grid or stay off grid. They're just not near. It's more expensive to take a line out to your property out in the boonies than it is for you to build your own energy system. And there's a lot of people living in those boonies. And when you have a hurricane or something, what's the first thing that fails? It's all those long lines that are taken. In California now, even if there's a like any noise that's going to be wind, the electric company will turn it off just in case. They can't afford to have what happened. They got blamed for a bunch of forest fires. You know, a couple of, I don't know how long ago it was, but now everybody realizes that. And you've got critical infrastructure. You've got medicine, pharmacy, pharmacy. You've got hospitals. You've got, I don't know, police fire stations and all these water pumping facilities, wastewater treatment facilities. These are all things that need to keep on going, despite the fact that the grid has given up. And so we have over 200 dealers across the country. And our biggest deal to date has been to retrofit 120 schools in Puerto Rico to work as emergency shelters because they all failed after Maria. And so what we did is we put batteries in every school and the local solar installers, put solar on all the routes. We worked with the Red Cross. The Red Cross funded this whole project. And now, this last time they had an earthquake, the shelters all worked. And the price of this chemistry is going to come down. When you think about it, iron and phosphate are common elements as opposed to cobalt and manganese. And so it's just a matter of time where we get the volume going. And that's, that is starting to happen. So eventually I would predict that our batteries will be cheaper. And so how many years has your ranch and your home on Oahu been off the grid? So we took the ranch like a little over seven years. And my home in Honolulu, we have a party every 4th of July. And the first one was when we disconnected from the grid. I had my granddaughter push a button just like I think of Princess Kairulani turned on this switch for the Elani Palace. I had my granddaughter do the same push a button and we were off grid. We've been off grid ever since. So we have a party every year celebrating Energy Independence Day. Great. And no regrets, I assume, basically on how exciting you are. No regrets. I mean, like our load has gotten bigger over time. And I bought electric cars. And so what we built there is not enough. We've got to add more panels and add more batteries. But that's a natural progression. So yeah, I mean, when you have an electric car, it's like having another house. Yeah, I try and I do that with folks, I say, how much power does your house draw? And they go, well, my electric bills, X, X, X. And I go, well, how much power does your house draw every day? And most of them don't have any idea. And I said, well, if you look at your electric bill, it'll tell you your average, my house is 20 kilowatt hours a day, which is really pretty low on average. But I go, if I had a car, it'd probably be like 25 kilowatt hours a day. So I'd have to put twice as much solar on my roof to just run my car and my house at the same time. So I try and make those kind of analogies, but it's definitely makes you think about energy, makes you very conscious about your energy. Yeah, so the solution to the EV problem is that you should be charging your EV at work. Because that's the time when the grid has extra, extra electricity. And so if you parked in a garage somewhere and not charging your car during peak solar generation hours, you're wasting all that, we are wasting all that electricity. So it's just the management. Yeah, yeah, you could be helping eco balance out their load if you used up all that electricity from the solar panels that are in the buildings around you. Well, it's, you know, any solar field. So if you're going to take an island off grid, it's similar to what to my situation at the range, you have to over build the solar because it's got to work on a cloudy day. So on a cloudy day, we kind of break even. But on a sunny day, we have all kinds of extra energy. And what the PPA is that the electric company has with all of their solar providers is when we say enough, you throw away the rest of the electricity that you're generating, that is part of your tail. In a state where we spend $5 billion a year on oil, and 40% of that goes to making electricity. How dare we throw away electricity? I agree with you. That is just, I think that's a crime. And so we need to use that electricity at that time to power electric vehicles and to make hydrogen. And hydrogen is the backup fuel for my wrench. We make hydrogen here when it's a sunny day. We make hydrogen, restore it. And then on a cloudy day, when sometimes when we don't have enough energy, then we basically get it back by sending the hydrogen into a fuel cell and it charges our batteries. That's the way the world should work. And it's environmentally benign, all of it. And contrary to popular opinion, hydrogen is the safest gas that you can possibly work with. If there's a hydrogen leak, it's like 14 times lighter than air. It escapes the room immediately. If you were in a hydrogen fire in a car, the hydrogen would be gone. And here's another goofy thing about hydrogen. I don't exactly know why this is, but if you have a hydrogen fire, you can put your hand right next to the hydrogen fire. You won't even feel the heat. There's no radiated heat. So that means it's a pretty crummy, how can I say, campfire. But it's great if you're in someplace where there's a hydrogen fire. And it's really hard to set it on fire, by the way, because it's moving so fast. You have to slow it down. So I think it's going to be hydrogen cooking. I think it's going to be the way to go. Yep, because that flame where it does go is really hot. But it only goes right where you direct it. It goes where you direct it, and it's a wet flame. It doesn't create carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide. It creates H2O. So it's keeping your vegetables in your, whatever, from drying out while you cook. Yeah, one of the first things I learned when I started working at Hcat was that the word hydrogen is actually ancient grease for a water maker. Wow. So they even understood that 3,000 years ago. Well, maybe. Maybe. But they didn't have electrolysis. They didn't have electrolysis. You know what, I, we're completely blasted through 30 minutes on the show already. And I think I'm going to have to have you back on. And we need to really have a better conversation about some of the other things you've got in mind. I know they're going to put a spaceport on the big island at some point. I'm sure there's a place for hydrogen there that we could talk about. So I want to thank you very much, Hank Rogers. And accept my apologies for not having you on sooner because we're way overdue for this show. But thanks for being on. And I hope you come back sometime in the not too distant future. We'll keep talking, especially about hydrogen. Better late than never. The goal, the goal is a world in which humanity and nature live in harmony. That's the ultimate goal for all of us. That's the perfect way to close the show, sir. And I thank you very much for your time. And to all the viewers, I'll see you next week, Tuesday on Stand Energy Man Aloha.