 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii, where community matters. Stan Alserman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation and Technology. And I'm coming to you live and direct from Kukai O Ranch on the Big Island, nice pasture land behind me, nice sunny day. And it's appropriate, because the presentation I have for you today, I don't have a guest. I'm going to just provide you a briefing that I gave a group last week, talking about the group was a Renew, Rebuild Hawaii, and it's a brief I think I talked about last week on our show. But I'd like to give that briefing today or at least talk to you about it today. It's a proposal that I've put together to help solve Hawaii's clean energy grid issues, because for those of you that aren't familiar with putting a lot of renewable energy, especially intermittent renewable like solar and wind into a grid, it's pretty doable when you only have 15 or 20% of your power being generated by intermittent. But when you get much above 20 to 25%, the utility, the public utility has a little bit more of a challenge to pull all that stuff in and still balance their grid. By the time you exceed 35%, the public utility is really struggling to incorporate all that into their grid and keep the quality of their power to the standard that the Public Utilities Commission really requires and that we demand as customers. And to go anything above 35% and into 50% renewable energy, you're talking territory that's never been done before by a major utility anywhere in the U.S. So what I've done is I've put together a program to just talk about how maybe Hawaii could address solving that challenge, especially here on the island of Oahu, which is the major island where Hualulu is and most of the military operations are in our big airport, our big international airport, and most of the center of commerce for the state of Hawaii. And I'd like to present that to you as an audience and maybe archive it there on YouTube so that people can go back and look at it and determine whether it's the right thing for Hawaii to do. But it's just my take on how you could solve some issues, meet some challenges using hydrogen as part of the solution. So without further ado, we're going to throw that first slide up. I picked this graphic when I gave the briefing for a particular reason and that's the big wave. Hawaii has a lot of clean energy. We have a lot of solar, a lot of wind. We have ocean thermal, geothermal wave motion. We have renewable energy resources in terms of a little bit of methane that we get off our landfills and our wastewater treatment plants that we can use. And it's not as clean as some of the other renewables, but it's still stuff that we would otherwise be just burning or wasting. So that wave represents for me the hydrogen piece, because of course one of the ways, not necessarily the cheapest way, but one of the ways the cleanest way to get hydrogen is to just use electrolysis or electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. And then use the hydrogen for generating electricity or storing to cook with and using the oxygen for medical purposes, for welding purposes and things like that. So we'll get into explaining all that stuff here. Next slide. The demand grows so will the challenges. As I explained, it's going to be tough to meet Hawaii's demand for 100% clean renewables by 2045. And Hawaiian Electric has already kind of, I put in here, hit the wall, but they're at that challenge point where Hawaii is exceeding 20% of renewable energy, intermittent renewable energy on our grid here in Oahu. And it's actually a challenge where you used to be able to just get a permit, interconnect permit with Hawaiian Electric and a solar company without even asking upfront. You could just, it was assumed you're going to get it. Nowadays, the Hawaiian Electric actually has to look at your location and do an assessment almost as to whether or not you're actually in a good place to get an interconnect right away. And they're a little more critical on giving you that interconnect, unless they have some control over your system, over your inverter or some other system. Also, the current grid is vulnerable. As we noticed with some of the hurricanes that you've had in the east coast, particularly Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, we're a much more sophisticated, much more robust grid than Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. But still, we're vulnerable. And as I explained to the group as a former National Guard Officer, I'm very familiar with natural disasters and what they could mean to Hawaii. And a Category 4 or 5 hurricane roaring up the Waianae coast would pretty much decimate all of downtown Waikiki, downtown Waikiki area, Diamond Head, Hawaii Kai, Kahala, and even the Western Plains, where we have a lot of residential subdivisions. And by the way, where HIKO generates a lot of their power from using their power plants. So we are vulnerable. Fortunately, at this presentation, we had Scott Sue from Hawaiian Electric do a great job of explaining what HIKO is doing to prepare for that kind of a disaster and what they would do. And they've actually done quite a bit of great work on that. But you do have vulnerabilities, especially when you have one big mega grid. And so part of what I try to propose is going to disperse power and dispatchable power, which means if you have a lot of solar in one community and you can island that community and make it a little bit more self-sustaining, it's one less community that you have to recover after disaster. You can let that community take care of itself while your electric utility is trying to bring up the greater grid. And if you can eventually get to a point where you have several of these micro grids out there or dispatchable and islanded communities, you can essentially keep the island, bring the island back up to full operation faster and be more survivable. So we talk about resiliency being the ability to bounce back from a disaster and redundancy being the ability to survive the disaster to begin with. In other words, the ability to keep on going while a disaster is happening. The next slide we have up there that's coming up is where I get into what we need here on Oahu. We have a very dense population on Oahu and in truth, I mean, if you really think about it, unless we want to have PV and wind turbines all over our island, we'd have a hard time meeting the needs that we have right now, not just because of the population and the amount of industry we have here, but the fact that in the future our transportation sector is going to require a lot more electricity. And we have a light rail project coming on board that's going to require a lot more electricity. So not only do we already have the dense population and a challenge, we have future demand that's going to drive the requirements even higher. Also, the military here is a huge user of electricity in the state, especially on Oahu. It's HIKO's largest customer around this island and they require the power to be there when they're trying to do their mission. So they have a requirement for what we call Blinkless or they just need to have the power. If they don't have it, all they can do is run their own critical facilities off diesel generators. And again, being on an island, the amount of diesel fuel will start to get to a rationing point after several weeks or even several months if an outage is really bad. But Oahu in particular, their base load options, in other words, the ability for an electric company or the power utilities to have a more stable grid comes from having base load power, meaning not the solar and wind that's intermittent, but something that gives you a constant power like a generator or a big waste energy plant. So what are the options here on Oahu or here in Hawaii? Well, one is ocean thermal, Otec, and geothermal. We have geothermal on the big island on Maui and on Oahu and those could be tapped into. We have hydro, believe it or not, several of our islands actually do hydroelectric power plants in the neighbor island because the water coming down from the mountains is so constant. We don't need to really down up a bunch of valleys. We have enough hydro that we can put a power generation system in with very little backup water behind it because the rainwater is so consistent. We also have waste energy options. We have what we call an incinerator plant, H-Power here on Oahu that provides about 2,000 tons a day of waste goes into that plant to generate electricity. The plant actually can do 3,000 tons a day, but with a good renewable program that we have here in Hawaii, we actually don't generate enough rubbish to really optimize that plant the way we should. We have great potential for biofuels because we do want to improve our biodiversity in the state and that'll create opportunities to use the waste products from bio like the stocks of corn stocks and things like that and leftovers from processing fruits and vegetables and use that in digesters to create methane and then have fuels or maybe refine it into biodiesels and things like that. And then one of my favorites is if you store energy in batteries or hydrogen or anything, when you generate from stored energy, you also have a good base load power and that's what we're looking for. Unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to generate a big base load here on Oahu because we don't have all the resources here to do it other than fossil fuels right now. So where do we go from here? Our next slide comes up. It talks a little bit about what kind of systems you'd want to store energy in to have good base load requirements or to fill base load requirements. Most people are familiar with all the different kind of batteries we have, but probably not as familiar with some of the things in the upper right hand quadrant. But let me explain the slide to you. When you have energy storage challenge, you have two components to it primarily. Number one is the time component on the left side where it goes. The bottom is seconds, then minutes, hours, days, and weeks going to bottom to top. And then going to the right is the amount of power you need. And so that goes from just a kilowatt up to gigawatt. Oahu's right now in the neighborhood of the gigawatt probably will grow to almost double that over the next 20 years. So we have to be able to provide storage, energy storage on a fairly large scale on Oahu to provide base load power from energy storage because we're not going to be able to do just renewables and be able to sustain a stable grid. So when you look on that chart, the red oval at the bottom is what we call super capacitors. If you only need power, a lot of power, but you only need it for a few seconds, super capacitors and ultra capacitors will give it to you right away. Right next to it is flywheels. Most people don't think about it, but in reality, the electroengineers I work with, when they look at flywheels, they say that's the ultimate spinning reserve. I mean literally, it's a spinning disk that has some weight to it and mass. When you have power, you power the thing up and get it spinning faster and faster. You use magnetic or frictionless bearings to keep it going so there's no resistance on it. And then when you need power, you apply that spinning wheel to a generator and it generates power instantly and can do so for several minutes to maybe even up to an hour, depending on the design of the system. Above that in that kind of orange oval, you have batteries, regular metal batteries like nickel metal, nickel cadmium and lithium and things like that. Those batteries are really good. If you're kind of in the below 10 megawatts or in that, in that range and up to a couple hours worth of storage, they make sense because they can give you good power. The energy in to energy out is a good 95% maybe and the batteries should last if they're used properly, maybe seven years, 10 years, even some of the newer technologies up to 15 or so years. So you get some good use out of them. Above that in that gray area are called flow batteries. Now those are more sophisticated batteries that have some great characteristics, but in reality, I've looked at several of those and I haven't been made and convinced that they're really viable on a system. They just haven't been tested enough to really be proven like some of the other metal batteries like lithium and some of the other wet cell batteries like lead acid. Now when you look at the upper right hand corner, that's a part of the chart that most people aren't really familiar with and that's when you get into needing high energy for long duration where you're going to need to keep a grid going for maybe several days or weeks or maybe even months and you need to be able to absorb and store a lot of that renewable energy or some kind of energy and then put it back on the grid. So when you see that upper component, there's several things in there. Compressed air is one, that little beige oval. Compressed air is something that's used on the mainland where you happen to have geological places that you can store in big caverns like store compressed air and then at night you take that compressed air and push it back through turbines to generate electricity. You know, you have pumped hydro where you take water and when you have power, intermittent power, you pump the water up a hill, store it in a reservoir and at night let the water run down the hill through turbines and give you electricity. You can go a long duration with things like that. Then you have methane, natural gas and hydrogen. Now the methane and natural gas are not clean. They have carbon in them. They're still fossil fuels, but you can store quite a bit of it and go to those long durations. You could even include liquid fuels in here like diesel and gasoline, but we're trying to limit it to the cleanest of the options that we have. Now you notice that I have a green line that separates kind of the two areas of the chart, the long duration and high power. That's where those all on the top right hand fit. So what about hydrogen? Well, hydrogen is interesting in that you can make hydrogen a bunch of different ways, but if you make it using electrolysis, the clean way, where you need electricity and water, well if you have a lot of intermittent renewables, you have electricity and an electrolyzer doesn't care whether you turn it on a little or turn it on a lot. It'll produce however much electricity and water you put into it is how much you're going to get out in terms of hydrogen and oxygen. So it's really flexible. If you have renewables that are producing hydrogen for storage, you just take whatever it'll give you and store the hydrogen. I'm going to talk about one more thing in a little bit more detail after we have this break, and it's what to do in Hawaii with the compressed air component that maybe some good entrepreneur out there can think of. So we'll be back in 60 seconds and I'll tell you about that. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I am the proud host of Code Green, a program on Think Tech Hawaii. We show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday. My guests are specialists both from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and you're generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Welcome to Sister Power. I'm your host Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, where we motivate, educate and empower and inspire all women. We are live here every other Thursday at 4 p.m. and we welcome you to join us here at Sister Power. Aloha and thank you. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hour. As I was talking about on the last chart, there's one little area called compressed air storage that I think is worth exploring, especially if you're an entrepreneur out here in Hawaii. As I mentioned, normally compressed air uses big caverns to store compressed air at maybe 50 psi or some fairly low pressure, but that's because the only people who do compressed air storage have salt caverns available to them and they're on the mainland. But just think about how much pressure would be put on a bladder, a basketball if you will, a giant basketball. If you pushed it down 50 or 60 feet underwater, there would be so much pressure on that basketball that if you could pump air or anything else into that ball, it would be under huge pressure, even with a fairly small volume, just using the weight of the water to compress that space down to such a small area. And you could actually do compressed air storage here in Hawaii, just putting large bladders under the water and then use, when you have energy, use it to drive a pump to fill it up with air. And then at the end of the day, when you don't have any solar or maybe the winds dropped off, you take that compressed air under pressure from the ocean and run it back through turbines. Just something for you entrepreneurs to think about is a future way to generate electricity. But the next slide starts to get into the meat of the matter. Why is hydrogen the answer? And of course, I understand the energy man, the hydrogen guru and geek here in Hawaii, the hydrogen coordinator. So that's my answer. And why? And it's because Hawaii has plenty of clean renewable energy. But our current grid needs to change to accommodate the future requirements. Like I said, to do a little bit more islanding and dispatchable power. But how can hydrogen play a part? It can do a couple things. Number one, if you put hydrogen generation out in those dispatchable areas, it can actually be a load. That electrolyzer can actually take power when there's too much solar being generated and turn it into hydrogen. And then when there's not enough solar or wind power being generated, it can give you back base load electricity like at night. And then also, hydrogen is abundant. It's all around us. That's why I put the wave in these slides. Every wave contains tons and tons of water and each ton of water contains, you know, thousands of pounds of hydrogen. And that's nothing. When you fly from here to the mainland or like I did, I flew to Australia, you're looking out the window for seven, eight hours and all you see is ocean. And that's just the surface. You've got tons of water out there that could be used to help make the hydrogen. And by the way, when you use hydrogen back and put it into an electrical system, it gives you back water. So you're not even wasting the water. You're actually getting some of that water back in the form of clean distilled water. So the last bullet on that slide, I think, talks about some of the ways forward. We can use hydrogen. It's abundant. It's also safe. A lot of people don't really appreciate the safety of hydrogen because the only image in their mind from school is a Hindenburg or a talk about H-bombs from World War II. And reality, hydrogen is actually as safe if not safer. Some people will say safer than gasoline or other fuels that we have today. I know we train a lot of firefighters here in Hawaii because we run hydrogen vehicles at Hickam and on the public streets of Oahu. And the firefighters we trained on responding to hydrogen vehicle fires and hydrogen vehicle accidents. By the time the training was over, they felt that the hydrogen was safer than gasoline. They would prefer it. In fact, at the end, there's nothing to even clean up. And if you remember from my show two weeks ago when I showed that video of the hydrogen tank tube trailer on fire, you know, was it really a disaster? No. In fact, out of the 20 tanks in there, basically burned off about six tanks worth of the hydrogen and the rest of it wasn't even touched. And the trailer or the tractor that was pulling the trailer never caught on fire and the pavement underneath never even burned anything. So hydrogen really is a lot safer than most people appreciate. It's transportable. You can move hydrogen. You can move it as a gas. You can move it as a liquid. You can even move it packed in what we call metal hydride storage, which a lot of folks are using on things like mopeds or cell phones when it comes to using fuel cell technology. It's also affordable. And it's a storage. It can be used statewide. It can eliminate our importing of oil and gas. Like who I right now imports an awful lot in the billions of gallons of oil every year that we're spending money, sending the money out of the state rather than using all the energy that's falling from the sky in the form of sunlight or wind blowing passes from the trade winds. We could be turning all that energy into stuff that we use instead of sending our money outside of the state and the U.S. to buy all that oil. So there's a great deal around us that we can use. So our next slide coming up starts to talk about how do we make it happen? Well, being that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the whole universe, not just on the planet, but in our whole universe, and I've talked about how big the ocean is. When you burn hydrogen, you get three things. You get heat, water and no carbon, and you can get electricity out of it as well. If you extract hydrogen from other fuels, you can do that with steam. It's a lot cheaper, but that means like if you take methane, you can steam reform hydrogen. And it's a lot cheaper than the electrolysis program I talked about, but it requires that you have a methane-type fuel to begin with, and you still have to deal with the carbon piece. But when you split water using DC electricity, it's very clean. It takes that electricity, but it can be your waste electricity that when you're producing too much from solar, you can just use. And then it also produces pure oxygen that you can use for your medical field or you can use for welding or other industrial processes. And the electricity, it can be expensive, but if you dedicate the solar panels to just making hydrogen, you pay off your solar panels in maybe seven years here in Hawaii, maybe eight. And then after that, you're getting clean, pretty much free energy, and you can store it using your hydrogen. So when you put hydrogen into the air and air into a fuel cell, you get heat, electricity and water, zero carbon. So if we start with clean, renewable solar and wind or geothermal or ocean thermal or hydropower, and we run it through, and you make, run it through an electrolyzer and make hydrogen, and then take the hydrogen and turn around and make it into electricity, zero carbon, zero carbon from start to finish. You don't worry about sequestering it. You don't worry about bearing it. You don't worry about it going up to CO2. You don't worry about greenhouse gases at all when you use that process to develop your power. That's why I'm sold on hydrogen. So how would you really do it to continue on? And the next slide starts to get into it. I say we ought to consider if everybody feels it's in their interest to take and make hydrogen, say on the big island. We could actually do it on the big island or Maui or even Oahu if we wanted to. But the big island has the most potential and probably the least impact culturally and geographically. But take that electricity that comes from all that heat and make liquid hydrogen at mass. I mean, not just a little, have a regular plant just like we have on the mainland to make liquid hydrogen. Because if we can take that liquid hydrogen, we can export it to Oahu, that means Hawaii Electric has a much simpler problem solving the grid problem because they can just bring in a high volume of hydrogen on a barge or a purpose-built ship and then pull it ashore and let it go into gaseous form as they pull it ashore just like you would with LNG and start generating electricity as a base load all the time. Day and night as part of their base load generation. All clean, all carbon free. That's the beauty of it. So there's another point. If you did this power generation, hydrogen liquid generation on the big island, we're also three years into applying for a spaceport permit to be able to launch spacecraft from the big island. Well, most of the space vehicles that we use now are rockets. Most of those use liquid hydrogen as part of their fueling. They take liquid hydrogen and either hydrogen peroxide and they mix a oxidized hydrogen fuel which gives extreme amounts of power. When I talk about storing hydrogen for energy, let me just give you an example of the difference between batteries and hydrogen for storage. If you have a lead acid battery, it can give you about 52 amp hours for every kilogram of battery that you have. If you go with a liquid, I mean excuse me, a lithium battery, you can get in between 400 and 600 amp hours per kilogram. For those of you that are familiar with hydrazine like an F-16 emergency power systems, they can give you about 2,000 amp hours per kilogram. But they're also hazardous, very hazmat intensive. If you use hydrogen in a fuel cell for your energy storage, you get 26,000 amp hours per kilogram. Just orders of magnitude above every other storage out there. Plus it's clean, it's non-toxic. If it escapes, it goes into the air and makes clouds. So that's my pitch. Maybe we ought to look at the big island, look at where we could put hydrogen. And the main thing is we need to make it a win-win for everybody. If the people on the big island or the companies that are involved in building a large liquid hydrogen plant, if it's not a win for everybody, then we just don't do it. But if we can make it work, if we can get everybody on board to understand the technology and understand the benefits, this could be a real solution for Hawaii's energy problems. We may even be in our goals well before 2045. So it's just something I'd like to put out there for everybody to think about. And maybe by next week Friday on Standard Energy Man, you can call me up here at ThinkTech and tell me what you think or send some social media to us and tell me what you think if you think that project would go well on the big island. Anyway, we're about out of time. So I'd like to say thank you for tuning in to us and watch us on YouTube. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the studio for putting it all together. And we'll see you next week Friday on Standard Energy Man. Allahum.