 Welcome to Stanley Energyman here on Think Tech Hawaii on another absolutely gorgeous June day here in Hawaii. You've got to love it. Nice trade ones blowing, keeping everything cool. I'd like to start off the show by thanking the folks over on Maui that put together the Hawaii State County Association event at the Wailea Resort. Awesome conference. Their theme was sustainability and they truly stayed focused on it and had some great speakers, great panels, great presenters, and a preview of even one of the films at the Maui Film Festival which is going on right now. So if you're lucky enough to be over on Maui Nokooi, check out the film festival as well, some great stuff going on. But thanks again to Kelly King and Bob King and all the folks from Maui who put that on. It was a really outstanding first class conference. Our guest today comes to us from the Pacific Northwest, home of the Totem Poles and Northern Coacutal Indians as it were. And he's been to Hawaii several times, been on the show several times, been on the Wednesday energy show with Jay once or twice. He's got some great ideas. He's a poet. He's an artist. He's a piano player. He's a man about town and a traveling fool. And just tried pizza baking for a while, too. But Toby Kincaid is coming to us live from the Big Big Island over in Washington State, I think. Washington and Oregon, Toby. Where are you at? Oregon. Portland. Okay. Portland. Sorry, I get all those Northwestern cities screwed up because- We call it Cascadia. Okay, Cascadia. It's a whole region. She's at Cascadia. But anyway, thanks for being on the show today, Toby. And I know we've got a lot to catch up on. Why don't you start off by letting the audience know who you are, because they may not have seen our earlier shows. Well, thank you so much for having me on. It's an honor. And if I may, I'd like to take a moment. I understand you're retiring soon. And I would like to say publicly, thank you so much for your tenure at HCAT. You have been a bright light in advocating where many people don't want to go. And that is asking the real questions. How do we actually become clean? And I admire you greatly. And you've been a tremendous inspiration to me. And I know to others. So thank you for all your great work and many more to come. Bless your heart. Thanks, Toby, for the kind words. Yeah, I'm often referred to as the fecal matter in the punch bowl by being brutally honest. So thanks for actually laying a couple of flowers on me there. And I appreciate the compliment. Well, I'm happy to join you in that in that punch bowl. But, you know, I go way back in clean energy and that gives me a perspective to appreciate what you do. And I started as an optics lab. And we were looking at solar energy and the different parts you have infrared and visible and ultraviolet. But we normally think of sunlight as one thing, sunlight. But actually Newton showed us that sunlight is really 17 different things. It depends on the frequency and the wavelength. And so my early work was in trying to leverage solar cells optically. And that led me on a long path of doing projects really all over the world. I've been in 17 countries. And it's just amazing to see solar energy really work for people and change their lives. So we're kind of all living under a lie that we have to burn carbon. It's just not true. We don't need carbon at all. And as you have know and have been advocating that the energy is actually in the hydrogen, not in the carbon that it's stuck to. So it's kind of led me on this path. The last five or six years, I've been doing a lot of work in the EV charging space. So assisting in designing the site plans, the layouts, the regulatory affairs, doing all the permitting to actually put in the infrastructure to do fast charge. And it's a big ambition, of course, to convert away from the piston engines of 1882 and kind of enter the 21st century and realize that fuel cells and electrolyzers and hydrogen as the working fluid, as the energy carrier is absolutely superior. And I intend to make that case as we apply it to actually EV charging stations and infrastructure for getting us decarbonized. I think there's two issues that we recognize locally that are kind of holding back EV charging stations. Well, three things, actually. Number one is cost. Number two is you're still connected to a fossil fuel grid. So in many cases, even though you're charging your clean powered car, you're charging it off of a fossil fuel burning grid. And the last thing is just the permitting issues that are connected with connecting to the grid. When you connect to a public utility, you have all kind of permitting requirements by the utility, by the PUC, by the county, and sometimes by the state to get things done. So I think some of your ideas and your plans are just, they're great because they take away some of that complexity by using pure renewable energy to make clean electricity and then charge vehicles from that. And it actually is a much faster, more efficient, much cleaner process. Absolutely. And it is the future. And it's the only way that our children's children are going to survive. And we have to take this seriously. A few days ago, it was 55 degrees here. In the last couple of days, it's been 97. When you dump 30 billion metric tons of carbon in the atmosphere, year after year, decade after decade, we're going to see these expressions. So the stakes couldn't be higher. We're literally talking about the future of humanity and being able to operate with so many people and have something decent as a lifestyle. So it's vital what you're doing and it's an honor to play some little part, if I can. If I may, maybe we could jump into the slides and I'll give you a little bit of an update of what's going on in the charging station space. Great, we'll throw up the first image and we'll get going with that one. Okay, during our last episode, I was telling you about a patent I filed for a multimodal charging station. And so when you write a patent and then you file a patent, the next thing is to build some hardware so you can justify why you went to the trouble to write it. Here's the benefit. So you can see this is a little test we did. I put together my arrays and wired them in through my controller and I have an e-bike there and I put a little rig together. Just this is not the commercial product. This is just to throw something up and let's do a test. Let's find out how far can we go charging e-bikes. With solar energy. And when I first put it together, I had a full charge on my e-bike and I wired up my plugs. I checked it about eight times and I thought, you know, when I plug this in, if I'm wrong, it's going to blow up in my face. So I kind of cringed to put my glasses on it. Oh, great, nothing happened, worked. So the next day we did the test. So I put out the e-bike the day before, I ran it down to zero. And these e-bikes are really fun. It doesn't have a throttle like a motorcycle. You just pedal forward and it senses that and then boosts you. And you can choose mode one, which is very little boost to mode five, which is maximum boost. I chose mode five and I rode down. It took me three hours to get the battery down to zero for my test, but I finally got it down to zero. So the next day I plugged it in, let it charge all day. And then the next morning unplugged it and then everything settled down, jumped on the bike, set the odometer and the trip meter and took off. And the question was, how far can I go? Well, when I got to around eight miles, I thought, well, if I get to 10, that's a C. When I got to 10, I said, well, if I can get to 13, then maybe that's a B. I'm more happy with that past 13. I said, okay, if I get to 15, that's an A. Well, we went 21 miles. Wow. And it's amazing. You don't want kind of a girthy guy to get on a bike and to haul me up those hills. I was very impressed. So the idea of actually hooking solar panels up to e-bikes, I couldn't find any data. So using the controller I designed and the wiring, it worked. So it was pretty cool about that. So that's a step. You know, over at the Maui conference, it just came from, they had a couple guys talking about e-bikes. And they actually have a company over there that rents e-bikes to tourists. And they're very active in opening up bike paths and making them available to the bicyclists. But everybody that talked about e-bikes, you know, they asked the question, how many of you folks have ridden an e-bike, not a regular bike, but an e-bike? And not very many people stuck their hands up and they said, you got to try this. It's actually a game changer. If we had e-bikes in a lot of the cities, people probably wouldn't bother with their cars. Because they're really, you know, you can drive to work and not be all sweaty. You can, you know, you can be a lady in a decently dressed up and not be a peddling like crazy and having your makeup smearing everything. You can actually get to and from work and are all around town with an e-bike. And it's actually a lot of fun. They really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to jumping on an e-bike here soon. Oh, it'll surprise you. I mean, when you go up the hill, just as you said, you normally get all sweaty and you don't want to go to work when you're sweaty. Often there's no showers. But if you have an e-bike, you can just kind of pedal up the hill and it takes you right up there. And I thought, oh, this is really good. So the idea that I'm trying to develop is to merge the station with the e-bike. So now we have a package. And actually, if you want to jump to the next slide, I'll show you the next iteration. The station I had before had kind of a vertical axis. And that was fine for a test. But when you're in the tropics, really we're going to swing that panel up. So you can see kind of the rig. I've got a little solar canopy and a little mounting hardware. And then you have your e-bike there. And it has the little plug-in and a little latch so that when you slide it in, it locks in and it aligns the charging plug. And there you go. So with your smartphone, you just go up like we have here in Portland with the kick scooters. Just scan the QR code and it unlocks the bike and you're ready to go. And I would like to put these stations really at almost every bus stop. So now we can reimagine what a bus stop is which hasn't changed in 100 years it's just a pole with a plaque on it. Now we can add these charging stations and then people have these options. Do you want to take the scooter? Do you want to take an e-bike? Or you can still take the bus. So that's how I see the future is a distributed network of these charging stations. And it's 100% clean energy today. And you know, we've had a couple of experiences here with the scooters that you can just pick up and zoom around with and then lay them down and somebody can pick them up. And then we have like hoverboards, the little monowheel things where people are driving around. And quite frankly, they're a little scary for me because bicycles have a pretty set protocol with, you know, they drive in the same lane in the same direction as traffic. And there's bike lanes that are pretty well understood and they follow the same traffic signals as the cars. But I tell you, when you have some of these guys on electric skateboards or electric scooters, they come zooming down sidewalks and I fear for some of the pedestrians. And I see some of these guys try and make the crosswalk before the light changes and they don't make it. And I'm afraid one of these days the car's going to take off and not see them coming and pull out right in front of one of these guys or smack into them because they're that size vehicle and they're going too fast. And they usually don't have predictive head gear on or anything. And you know, people don't realize you go much more than 10 miles an hour. You're actually speeding. A human being doesn't run 10 miles an hour. At least not guys like you and me for sure. But even premier athletes, they don't press those kinds of speeds. And you can get badly hurt, you know, stop and go to a dead stop at 15 miles an hour, 10 miles an hour. And these people on these skateboards and stuff, they don't realize how badly they can get beat up. And they're mixing in with pedestrians during rush hour and people try to get home. But the e-bikes, they fit in really well. I really like the way they fit. Well, I very much agree. You know, the little kick scooters, they have very small wheels. And if you hit a pothole, they can turn on you and you're, you know, end over tea kettle. So it is dangerous. In Portland, you're supposed to wear a helmet and you're supposed to not be on the sidewalk. But many people don't really follow the rules. And then the idea of this dockless idea where you drop the bike anywhere you want. I just see that as really very disorganized. Also the ADA, the American Disability Act, doesn't really allow you to drop things in the sidewalk if it can block a wheelchair access. So there's a lot of issues with just this dockless Wild West. Use the bike, throw it where you want, or the little scooter. So I completely agree with you. That's from a safety standpoint, the e-bikes have the big, normal bike tires and you can really go through pretty rough rides and not be tipped over. So absolutely, the e-bike I think is a better way to go. Mine is a multimodal charging station so we can charge both the scooters and e-bikes, but I'm with you. I think the e-bike is a more comfortable, safer, faster way to move people out of cars. Okay, so we're going to take a quick break here and then we're going to come back and let you zoom through the rest of your slides. And we'll see you in 60 seconds. Hi, I'm Rusty Komori, 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 Yukari Kunisue, the host of Konnichiwa, Hawaii, Japanese talk show on Think Tech, Hawaii. Konnichiwa, Hawaii is all Japanese broadcast show and is streamed live on Think Tech at 2 p.m. every other Monday. Thank you so much for watching our show. We look forward to seeing you then. I'm Yukari Kunisue. Mahalo. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man, Sonoserman here on my lunch hour, as usual. Talking to Toby Kincaid over in Portland, and we're talking about a really neat concept of plug-in chargers for e-bikes that use solar power. So, Toby, let's get back to you and jump into some more of your images there. No, wonderful. The next image, if you bring it up, is a charging station that we do. This is a DC fast charge station. This just opened in Hillsborough, Oregon. This photo is, I think, is still under construction when this was taken. But you can see the pedestals here. This was designed and built by Evie Global, Hans Vandermeer, probably the most brilliant engineer I know. He's incredible. He knows everything about fast charging cars. He designed and built this station. And I wanted to show you the little pedestals. How kind of lovely they are. They're very slender and nice. Now, these are fast charge. So, each one is 50 kilowatts. And that's quite a bit of power. It's about equal to 10 homes, if you think of a five kilowatt house. So, each dispenser is 50 kilowatts, and we use four of those. We add a couple of level two chargers. But, really, it's four fast charge stations that are kind of the focus. And that requires, because there's four at 50 kilowatts, a 200 kilowatt transformer. Now, this is all state-of-the-art. And in the last picture, you can see where the power conditioning equipment is in the cabinets. You can't really connect a dispenser to the grid at this level, because the grid comes into a parking lot, usually through a primary, and you locate where that is, and then you can trench or bore the power into the transformer, then into the power conditioning equipment, and then out to the dispensers. So, these are lovely stations. I would very much like to install fast charge stations in Hawaii. But, as you point out, there are a few challenges. So, if we go to the next slide, I can go into that. So, when I look at Oahu, and forgive my artwork there, there's a circle that says Oahu in it, you have nearly, the best information I have, nearly a million cars on Oahu, a million cars and trucks. Now, these are all piston engines. The EV part that you have, the best numbers I could get are about 5,500. So, that's about half of 1% of your fleet today. You have existing on the island about 350 level 2 chargers. Level 2 is slower than fast charge. It takes about six hours to charge your car at that level. But, if you're parking, and this is destination charging, so you don't go to a gas station, you park where you're going to the parking lot, and that's where you're going to charge. So, you've got 350 of those. You've got about six fast charge stations that I could find. Those are public stations, I think owned and operated by HECO. I'm not going to speak to Tesla. I think they have their own private network. They run at 140 kilowatts. So, it's kind of a supercharger. But, most of the state of the art at fast charge is 50 kilowatts. And so, when we look at that last graphic, we can see that there are some serious challenges. So, if I use, in planning the charging stations, if I use the ratio of, if we look at 1% for example, of your coming fleet, that's 10,000 EVs. Now, there's 16 EVs per charging station. So, we need 625 charging stations to service 1% of your fleet. So, and how many of those will be fast charge? Well, here's where the rubber meets the road. I put a little, a one fast charge station, 20 and then 200. The issue is, when you plug in a DC fast charge dispenser to the grid, we're going to draw 50 kW per dispenser. So, we're going to draw 200 kilowatts at any time, any one time if everyone is using the charger. Now, there is, the way that electricity is charged nowadays in utilities is they charge you in two ways. They charge you for the electricity that you use, the usage, the kilowatt hours. But they also charge you for the delivery called the demand charge. And under the schedule in Hawaii, if you're a large electricity consumer, you pay about 15 cents for the kilowatt hour. But under schedule P, you're going to pay $26 a kilowatt. So, every month they're going to measure what is the maximum power you drew for a 15 minute period. And that's going to be your demand charge. Well, now I'm starting to run into some trouble here because if I connect fast charge to the grid, I'm going to have a 200 kilowatt demand. And I do the math, that's about $5,200 a month. So, if I were going to do 200 stations, I would have a demand charge of a little over a million dollars every four weeks. That's difficult to, when I run through scenarios and I look at how many charges we can do, what's the cost of energy, what's the cost of my hardware. I really run into a wall here. So, it's very clear now. And even if we look at renewable energy and clean energy in general, we're reaching the point where the utilities at certain times of the day have too much solar for a particular area. And now they're asking people to turn it off. In fact, if you put a solar system in, you need a disconnect switch by the utility so they can curtail you and turn you off because the grid is instantaneous. The demand has to equal the supply and the supply has to equal the demand. Demand goes up, supply goes up. Demand goes down, supply goes down. So, if I plug in 200 kilowatts of fast charge, I'm drawing 200 kilowatts. I've got a $5,000 demand charge. And if I do 200 stations, it's a million bucks a month. And before, I paid for the station or the energy. So, this was really a stymied me for a while. But the answer is clear. We need a battery. And most energy experts who talk about grid balancing and the ability to balance the load to the supply and peaker stations, it's very complicated. But everyone agrees we need a battery so we can separate and divorce the load. So, let's look at my station. I have 450 kilowatt dispensers. I need 200 kilowatts. And I need to do that for five hours because between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m., that's the peak of your utility. I don't want to charge during the peak, but I certainly don't want to tell a customer, hey, you mind charging earlier in the day or after? No, no, no. People charge the car when they want to charge the car. So, I've got to separate it. And so the key is the battery. Well, sounds fine. Why don't I just get a battery and everybody's happy? Well, batteries are expensive. The cost has come down. In 2011, the cost of the kilowatt hour for a lithium-ion battery was about $1,000. Now, they've pushed that down to $300. That's great, but the rest of the pushing it further is going to be a little more difficult because they're kind of reaching the max of what they can get. So, when I look at doing my battery, I can calculate what I need. I need 200 kilowatts for five hours. That's 1,000 kilowatt hours. So, what's that going to cost? And how are we going to do it with a battery? Well, if I look for a lithium-ion battery at $300 a kilowatt hour, now I'm looking at $300,000 per site for the battery. Well, I look at that and I run the projections, I run the numbers, and there's no way I can do it. So, on one end, I can't buy the energy directly because of my demand charge. The other end, I can't afford the battery so I can separate the demand charge. So, I looked at that and started to remember what you have been talking about for many years and look back again at hydrogen and went, wait a second, let's look at the physics here. One kilogram, 2.2 pounds of lithium-ion, that will store about 300 watt hours of energy. Fine. Hydrogen of the same mass, one kilogram, will store 40,000 watt hours. So, I look at that and went, wait a second here, let's, and we can go to the next picture. Let's take a look. What would a hydrogen-fueling station look like? First, not just actually selling the hydrogen, I'm using the hydrogen internally as a battery because it's an ideal energy carrier. In fact, it's the best energy carrier known to science. So, when I do the layout, you can see I'm looking for where to put my gear in a parking lot. I see a little landscaped area, measure it out, okay, I can put it there. I'm not showing where the energy comes in from the vault, but I have a blue line from the water main. I can bring the water in, bring it to the electrolyzer and make hydrogen and then use the hydrogen when I'm off the peak time or when I'm during peak time and use that to actually energize the 50 kilowatt fast charge dispensers. So, at the moment I'm not dispensing hydrogen, I'm just using it internally. And what's amazing is to get to 1,000 kilowatt hours, I only need 25 kilograms, maybe 30 of hydrogen. That's very manageable. So, if I look at the size of a 1,000 kilowatt hour lithium pack, that's like 10 cars stacked side by side because each car is about 100 kilowatt hours. How am I going to put that in a parking lot? I can't. But when I look at the hydrogen footprint, I can't believe it. It is incredibly competitive. In fact, so now I can use an electrolyzer and only draw 50 kilowatts, store the energy on board, and then when I want to run 200 kilowatts, I just run that through the fuel cell. I have a 200 kilowatt stack of 450 kilowatt fuel cells. The energy comes out and charges and then I get a lot of water, which I then recycle, which will go into the next slide, which is how do I design the system? And so here's what I've come up with. This is actually every component is known, every component is commercial. I can buy every part of this. I just can't buy this. So I looked at this and it kind of went, my goodness. We have electrolyzers. We have fuel cells. So why not combine it all into a whole system? So now instead of drawing 200kW, I only draw 50. I draw it from nine o'clock at night all the way to four in the afternoon, so I don't touch the peak. And most importantly, I can take the most valuable resource that you have. And that is all of the clean energy you're turning off. Curtailed energy is a huge problem that the oversupply and there's nothing to do with it. They got to do something with it. So the only thing they can do is turn it off because if you have too much energy in a circuit, it's going to try and find a way to ground and that's dangerous. It's called an arc flash. So it is very important for the safety of everyone that we keep the grid in balance. And so now by studying what we could do with all of this equipment and knowing exactly the battery that I need, it kind of was a, oh my goodness moment. It just jumped out of the page. If you slapped me with a wet towel, it would have been a tickle. I was like, oh, I found a particular application. Well, Toby, now that we got your attention with hydrogen and you figured out how valuable it really is, I'm looking for the next set of patents you come out with. But believe it or not, we blasted through 30 minutes talking to you. Oh no, we don't want to, oh. And so we're going to have you come back. I have so many other charts I want to show you. No, unless you got to write at least one more poem before I let you back on the show so you can read it out loud. But you mentioned I'll be retiring. I'll be retiring end of July, but I still plan to do some think tech shows. So I don't know if we're going to be counseling Stan the energy man anytime soon. So we'll have more opportunities to have you back on. But thanks for joining us today, Toby. And we'll bring you back on the show later. And thanks to everybody for watching today. Till next Friday, Stan the energy man signing off.