 Aloha everybody, here we are another Wednesday, Hawaii, the state of clean energy. This is sponsored by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm really pleased to have Don Probstel here today, good friend. And also he's the CEO of Natural Power Concepts. And he's going to be talking to us about microgrids for energy systems resilience, which is the resilience is the big buzzword out there now. It's actually more than a buzzword, it's something we have to have. And the tagline is conceived in Hawaii solutions for the world because truly NPC develops fascinating technology which are actually solutions for the world. And Don's going to tell us a little bit about how they're, what some of these solutions are and how they're projecting them out to the world. So Don, welcome on board, glad to have you. Thank you, Mitch. I appreciate it. I want to break the ice a little bit and just ask you to give a quick little, some of your background where you came from and. Sure, sure I can do that. I've been in Hawaii now for seven years. I started my relationship with this company that I'm now the CEO of Natural Power Concepts 12 years ago when the company was founded by John Petrie. And I've known John Petrie in case the viewers aren't aware, John I believe has been on the show several times, but he's he's a very famous international artist and inventor. And he's has a kind of a long track record in successful inventions from the exercise arena in light sport aircraft. And now he's been focused on renewable energy for about the last dozen years or so, at least. And I knew John, I knew John many, many years ago and I helped advise, advise him as he was starting his company. And as you were an advisor in the early, in the early days. And eventually I decided it was, it was time for me to just come to Hawaii, step in full time. And it's been a it's been an interesting adventure over the last over the last seven years here full time. And we've made some interesting progress. So just a little bit of background on natural power concepts. It's a renewable energy technology developer. So John has he has invented several unique innovative technologies across a broad array of of different technology arenas or resource arenas. But they're all focused on areas that are not being addressed right now by either big wind or solar. Most of the renewable energy industry right now focuses on those two arenas. Probably a 90% of what's happening in renewables right now has to do with solar energy and big wind energy. So the NPC focus has been on areas that are not being tapped into. And if you look at the spectrum of renewable energy resources, it's very, very diverse. There's there's energy from the sun. Yes, there's energy from winds. Yes, but there's ocean energy. There's hydro energy. There's many different spectrum. Geothermal is another great resource that one of my favorites, one of your favorite I know that's not being tapped into very extensively. So that's been the focus of natural power concepts is to go into into those areas, come up with ideas, creative ideas and develop prototypes and hopefully find manufacturing partners to take them to the next level. So speaking about getting the technology out into the world, you used to work for an organization in Washington called OPIC, which has a broad reach throughout the world. You want to say a few words about that? It's great for your background as a CEO. Yeah, sure. So my background is pretty diverse. I have a PhD in conservation biology, but I also have a pretty high level of expertise in international development projects from the environmental and sustainability aspects. So I had a I had a stint in Washington at the Overseas Private Investment Corp, OPIC. Some people confuse with OPIC, which is a completely different animal. But OPIC is the US government agency that is analogous to the World Bank, to the International Finance Corporation, IFC. OPIC's mission is to invest in projects around the world. And interestingly, I believe, at least it was when I worked there, it's the only US government agency that's been in the black. So it was a great experience. And I think it opened my eyes a lot to what happens to come up with funding, international development bank funding for big projects around the world. And I tap into that resource a lot as we move along into how do we how do we move our small little company with big ideas out of this island setting, which is very isolated. How do we how do we migrate and populate the rest of of the world, which really needs clean energy solution. Yeah, so Hawaii is really grateful for having somebody with your talents and experience here to help us get it out of the out of the lab and out to the world. So great background. So we have some slides. You brought some slides. It's not death by PowerPoint. So let's start talking to some of the slides because it shows some of the technology that we're talking about. So can we have the first slide up, please? So the first we're going to talk a little bit about John's technologies, mainly wind turbines. And we're going to talk about wave. Yeah, we certainly can. We certainly can. So as I mentioned, John is he's not focused on one or two inventions. He has kind of a broad, diverse spectrum. The main focuses are OSI that we're on right now are distributed wind energy, which is small wind turbines. It's a it's virtually an untapped market around the world right now. And hydro energy, which we have some very unique devices that don't require dams to create hydro energy. And then additionally, the third arena is wave energy. And John has a brilliant invention that takes it basically puts buoys in a grid. So the one mooring, and as you know with your work at the Wetz facility out there in Kaneohe that one of the greatest expenses with these with these wave energy converters is the is the mooring component. So the concept with this wave energy technology invention device is to be able to create energy from multiple buoys with one single mooring. Yeah, so we've just experienced a great expense of several million dollars to put in one of our mooring. So exactly the point you made is like if you can you know, leverage that mooring and have hundreds of buoys attached to it. Right. And that's that's really good. I've seen John's conceptual art and some of his videos. He produces awesome videos which demonstrate the technology, which is really good for selling it out there in the world marketplace, which you can see on our website, naturalpowerconcepts.com. If you if you want to if the viewers want to take a little spin on on that website, you can see some of these images and videos and the technology. So let's talk a little bit about the Marine Corps base. So we were out there at a workshop. They had about three weeks ago. It seems like it was more recent, but I believe it's been about three weeks. Yeah, that was an interesting workshop. We had we had participants, a lot of a lot of Marine Corps people, but also people from the Navy, from the Air Force. And the theme of it of the conference was how do we how do we make our base and bases resilient to what they called a punch, whether it's a natural disaster or some, you know, some manmade disaster, maybe an attack, maybe maybe a cyber attack. So the theme was how do we how do we structure the basis? So we are raised for those punches and how do we number two, stay standing through that event and probably more importantly from the military aspect is how do we punch or how they the military, how do they punch back has to be a Marine program. You know, take the punch, work your way through it, then punch back. I mean, it's awesome stuff. It was a great conference. I mean, I attended as well. It was over three days. And we also had quite a lot of industry there because you were there. So, you know, we had input from industry and we were looking for solutions. And what they want to be resilient for their critical loads for like 14 days. And if you go on the back of an envelope and say, say it's six megawatts and you multiply that by 24 hours by 14 days. Wow, that's a lot of megawatt hours of energy required to keep that place going. And that's only for their critical loads. And then they have all the other non critical loads. And I think they were very attracted to the NPC technology. And what we're trying to provide right now with our we're in negotiations with Caterpillar, I can say that much that we are in the process of developing modular, rapidly deployable energy microgrid, energy microgrids, basically, that can be containerized. They can be rapidly deployed. They can be dropped in by air if they need to be. But what were the great example was the Camp Camp Lejeune commander that was at the at the conference. I mean, they're still trying to recover. It's over a year now and they're trying to recover still, you know, get back up to speed. And what was what really struck me was their their instantaneous need or just enough power to keep the food from going bad to keep this communications open, they didn't have that vehicle. Well, that's what we're focused on. We're focused on putting that modular vehicle together. And fortunately, we've been able to attract the attention of Caterpillar and I guess I can I can say that we had and this is for our wind turbines. We had a project supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory, AFRAL, that enabled us to build two prototypes. We tested at Pearl Harbor Hickam and it was it was a lot of work and we had some ups and downs and, you know, some learning curves and some things to overcome, which we did. But at the end of the day, we had an opportunity to demonstrate there was a conference going on here and Stan Osserman. I know the general general general Osserman. Everybody stand the energy man. Everybody knows Stan the energy man. Stan called me up one morning and at that at that point, our project was over. The turbines were shut down and Stode called me up one morning. He says, Hey, we've got a group of people coming out today. You want to come give a demonstration? And I said, Sure, Stan, I'll be right there. So I hopped in my car and went down, set up both of these turbines by myself in about an hour. Well, and by the time the 50 people came walking by that we're all attending this this energy conference here. One guy in particular stuck out to me because he had that Caterpillar triangle on his shirt. And he goes, Man, I want to talk to you about this thing. I've seen it I've seen it somewhere before where where it was there was a prototype developed by Oshkosh. And I saw it at some some trade shows. And I think this should be a cat product. And I said, Well, you just made my year. Yeah, right. And that opened the door to some negotiations which have been going on for a long, long time. It's a big company. It's taken a lot of talk and a lot of navigating. But we're very close and we can't make a big public announcement yet. But we're hoping in the in the very short term, we're going to have not only some some good news, but also some great products that can bring a real viable solution to a big need for disaster relief for places that are located in areas that are prone to high winds to hurricanes, island energy requirements, places that don't have energy now, like a lot of Africa, for example. So that's kind of where it all evolved. And it all started with a call from Stan. And hey, Don, can you come down and pop those turbines up? And luckily they go up and down very quickly as they were designed to. And there was some wind. And there was some wind, yeah, yeah. And asked for better luck than that. Exactly. So I like to run through some of our slide deck because we've been doing a lot of talking, but you have some awesome pictures. We do. We might have to flip through some of them pretty fast because we got a little bit off track. But can we start running some of our slides, please? Thank you. So we can go to the next one. So this is, we've talked about this is just our profile. We're a technology developer. We're focused on unique untapped niches. But I would emphasize the elegant practical approaches. That's because our founder, John Petrie, is a world-famous artist. Look to the next slide, please. What are we after? We're looking for missing pieces of the energy puzzle. And I think there's a few really critical components that are missing, and especially for resiliency, which is the target for a lot of the military and disaster relief. And Hawaii needs resilience. Absolutely. So for example, on my hydrogen buses, I'm putting in export power units because they're essentially electric buses. I can provide backup power for 30 hours or 32 hours. And then I can come back and recharge that bus with more hydrogen, i.e. more energy, in about 15 to 20 minutes. So your whole bus fleet becomes a mobile resilient energy asset that you can deploy anywhere you need these assets like your local drug store whose power is down. He's got a fridge full of medicine that's going to spoil unless he gets cooked up to a power source. Drive that bus up there, plug it in, and give him energy. I'm with you. And I heard another one today from the big island energy guy, their energy coordinator saying, when they had all those trees blew down, the absilient trees, is it called? You're a biologist. So it took them like three weeks to clear all those trees. And if we had had these export power units, they could have had electrically powered chainsaws because your gas station's all shut down. You can't pump gas, so we're going to get the gas. Plug and play. If you have that mobile unit, you can put it in. Could we throw a couple more slides up? I can give you an idea of what these look like. And yeah, next slide. Let's scroll through these kind of quickly. There we go. So here we are at Pearl Harbor Hickam. We have on the upper left, we have what we call the folding blade wind turbine. We're really happy with that. That's the one that Caterpillar is super excited about right at the moment. And standing next to it, we have a spoke wheel wind turbine. Both of these mechanically protect themselves from high storm events. And on the bottom end, we've negotiated a license with sprung structures that will put another kind of turbine, a ductic column turbine. And I guess the critical point, at least for the military, is every barrel of fuel that they save is an enormous value proposition because those barrels have the highest cost, not only in terms of dollars, but also in terms of casualties. Exactly. Yeah, most of the highest number of casualties in the last two wars that the US has been in Iraq and Afghanistan have been associated with transporting fuel. So every electron that you're able to save and produce where you need it, it's very important. Next slide, please. We can punch through that one. Nobody wants to get that business. Big market, $1.9 trillion over the next 10 years. And this is from a very reputable market research group, Navigant Research, who I also happened to work with. I did a couple of reports for Navigant many years ago. One, this guy was hydrogen. Actually, one was renewable energy in the military arena, big report for these guys. The other was renewable energy in the mining arena. Next slide, please. Yeah, another depiction of the turbines. But the one on the bottom right shows you what we're talking about, this renewable energy module. It has solar panels that pop out. It has a wind turbine that pops up. And it becomes a plug and play recovery unit. And you can throw in water purification and cell communication into that. And you have essentially exactly what everybody in Puerto Rico wanted to have and exactly what they wanted at Camp Lejeune and exactly what they're going to want next year when the next round of hurricanes comes. So on the bottom right, you see that the turbine is folded over in the yellow drawing. It's folded over onto a platform. And you see that the sides of it are your solar panels. Right, exactly. And that's what Caterpillar is going to be building. That's what we're working on, right, as we speak. And actually, Caterpillar has its own microgrid solutions division that they've just come online with in the next few years. So we're integrating this NPC device into that entity. Next slide, please. So the unique things about these turbines that are important, they're storm proof. But more importantly, for the military, there is no radar interference. So we can put these close to airports. Excuse me. Next slide. This is a nice depiction of what this would look like at a forward operating base. So these units roll in either by aircraft or in the standard HEMET trucks they deploy. And you can power a remote location. And it's not only about the wind turbine. The wind turbine is a component. And I've always told people that the storage component of this is a box. It can be lithium battery. It can be hydrogen. It can be a lot of different components. So once you throw the storage in here, you enable these to become very, very efficient. Next slide. Next slide. We're going to talk a little bit about this one. Because this shows the whole solution. Yeah. This gives you an idea of what Caterpillar has right now is their MicroGrid Solutions Business Unit. And it utilizes the backbone of the Caterpillar Genset, which is, I'll say it's the best in the industry. They have the largest market share for Gensets. So they've used that as the backbone. But they've integrated solar and now we're integrating wind. And they have the control components, which is the really tricky part, is managing all these different sources. And at this moment, they have five different options for batteries. So they're very, it's an evolving, this is an evolving entity right now. And I expect this to make some big waves around the world in the near term. Yeah. Next slide, please. That's it. OK. So we have some contact information. This will be available online when they publish this episode. So Don, you now have some partners, a really interesting guy. I do. He's one of your original shareholders. So why don't you talk about Mark Victor Hanson. Sure. And his wife. So Mark Victor Hanson was a founding investor in natural power concepts. Many years ago, he started off with delivering a check to the pocket of John Petrie and made the founding investment to get the company started. Mark Victor is famous for his book series, Chicken Soup for the Soul, which has sold more copies than any other book in history, including He Claims, which I believe the Bible. Oh, really? Yeah. Excellent. So he's an interesting character. He started another company that is focused on delivering clean energy solutions to the world. So what Mark and his wife, Crystal Hanson, are attempting to do right now is to take not only NPC technologies, but a lot of NPC technologies, and take new innovations and fast track them into development projects that can actually end up with these things in people's hands that need them the most. Yeah. The thing I really like about it, I like a lot of things about Mark Victor Hanson. But the fact is that he stepped up to the plate and stroked a check for a large sum. It was a large sum. Just like that, without a whole lot of proposals and. There was actually no paperwork. And I don't believe there was a receipt. I think what happened was the check got signed and deposited into Petrie's pocket. And that's what got. It started the whole thing rolling. And now we're finally getting to a dozen years later a lot of hard work by a lot of good people. And we're coming to where we can have some nice things come out of Hawaii and be delivered to the world. So we have about two minutes left. So let's have some closing thoughts. I'd like them to come from you and not from me, because you're the guest. So why don't you talk to us a little bit more about going forward, what the challenges are, and where you're going? Yeah, well, the challenges are always coming up with the hard resources to develop great ideas into hardware. And at this point, I'm optimistic, because we're going to get one of our babies out of the cradle and one of our birds out of the nest and on its way. But I'm excited about the other opportunities that are also there, the wave energy devices, especially. There's probably some long time investment into the wave energy in particular. But we're really optimistic and we're grateful that we've had support by all our members and all our volunteers like you have over the years, Mitch, that helped us push along. I know without your support, we wouldn't have had our opportunity with the Air Force to get that contract in place. And it's really about partnerships and teaming and people working together. And I think we're all in agreement that climate change is a big issue. We've all got to step up and deal with this now. And it's not hoping for solutions. It's everybody stepping in and pushing together and making it happen. So we absolutely welcome people to help. I'd like to give one other shout out. And that's to Hcat, Stan Osserman, and D-Bed, who really managed that program with the Air Force. And obviously, the Air Force itself for investing the money and getting you your prototypes that were G-Wiz and prototypes that then, in the end, got you your relationship developing with Cat. Absolutely. You couldn't have done it without the support of our military and without the support of D-Bed and Hcat. I couldn't agree more. And in a shout out to General Osserman for all the great things he's done and continues to do. That's his he's walking the talk for sure. He really does. He does. So that's it for our show today. So, Don, thank you so much. My pleasure, man. Really appreciate you doing a great job. Keep it up. Good for Hawaii and good for the world. So thank you very much. Yeah, my pleasure. Aloha. Aloha.