 Hey, Aloha, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Stan Osterman, and when I learn something that I can make better in my life better, or keep me from making mistakes in the future, I try to explore deeper and apply with that new knowledge, if it makes sense, apply it to my life. That means doing a good investigating up front into the details and asking a lot of questions. So today's show is a twofer. It's Stand the Energy Man's Realm. We're going to talk about Tesla and the electric car, Tesla as in the motor company, and the electric car company that we're going to take a fast, paced look at Mr. Elon Musk's and Keith Malone's newsletter later on in the show. He's from the California Fuel Cell Partnerships, and he puts out a great newsletter that I've actually tried getting through in my show in the past, the whole thing, and it's impossible. So I've decided to try a little bit different. I'm going to go through all of his headlines and quickly get through each one of the stories he's talking about, but I really encourage you to go look at his website for the California Fuel Cell Partnership and pull up his newsletter. It's got some great info on it. Let's start off with the company that's arguably manufacturing the world's most beautiful, well-designed, well-built electric cars to ever exist on this planet, the Tesla. The head of Tesla, Mr. Elon Musk, is legendary for his work in many, many, many fields, not just in electric cars, but even private space travel. He's well respected around the world, and he is without a doubt one of the smartest, most talented, and most passionate communicators and entrepreneurs of all time. But in spite of his broad and deep pool of talent, the glitter may be falling off of his stardom. I must restate here that for the record, even though I am a died-in-the-wall hydrogen fuel cell fanatic and supporter, and Mr. Elon Musk is pretty much anti-hydrogen, I know that the future of all transportation in the world is going to be electric, both battery, plug-in, and hydrogen, and even some other technologies that maybe we have yet to be fully aware of. I don't relish the struggle of any company that is trying to further clean transportation, but I'm also a realist, and it's in the spirit of improvements to processes and products that I bring to this point. Mr. Musk has certainly put electric cars on the world stage in a very big way, but he's not perfect, and he may be on the brink of a long fall off a steep cliff, and here's why. You'll notice, if you've been watching the news lately, that Elon Musk on the financial side has been having some struggles. My first clue on this really didn't come on the brink of any news stories. It came when I was talking to two young men at a job fair, and this job fair was really kind of a, it was a job for putting my HTDC over in Minoa, and it was a really well attended event. And these two young men, I happen to know them from other circles I move in in the world, and they're twins, and they were both at the job fair looking for work, and I asked them why, because I thought both of them already had work. In fact, one of them I knew had work. And they said, the one brother said that he was looking for something that challenged him a little bit more, and the other brother said he'd actually just left a company, and he still had one job, and the other job is a full time job. He just left the company, and he was looking for something else. So I asked him, because I knew him a little bit better, I said, so what company did you leave? And he said, Tesla. I worked for Tesla here in Hawaii. And I said, really? What happened? He goes, well, the company laid off a bunch of people, but they did it in a really weird way. They didn't lay off all the junior people like a seniority system would do. They laid off all the senior people. And I was kind of in the middle. I was not real senior and not brand new. And so I was not laid off. But as we started moving forward from that layoff, we realized that all of the corporate memory and all of the problem solving talent in the company had just left. And the middle managers, folks like me, were struggling. We're trying to deal with problems and things that we just didn't have solutions for because we didn't have the background to solve them. So the people under us were getting frustrated and the customers were getting frustrated. And he said, I just didn't want to be there anymore because it was just too much stress. That was back in December. And that's all I knew about any kind of stress from Tesla. But this past week, I saw three articles in one of our local trade publications and all three of them came at the same issue from the financial side. And these three articles were not by the same people. They were actually from three totally separate entities. They related to it, each other. But they were from financial analysts and business analysts who were looking at the bond market, the stock market and financial business dealings overall. And it was related a little bit to the kind of wild gyrations that the stock market's been going through the last week or so. But they pointed to Tesla and they pointed out that for me, no matter how good you are in technology, no matter how good you are at promoting, no matter how good you are at selling your product and inspiring people to see the future, and no matter how good your intentions are and what you're doing for the nation and the world, you still, if you're going to go big in the business world, you have to listen to some good business advice. So Tesla, if you're not aware, not only makes cars, and Mr. Elon Musk not only does cars and space stuff, he launched a Tesla into space a couple weeks ago, which I mean, that's pretty cool. But he's growing a business and the one thing that I know from being in business before and watching businesses grow, is that if you're going to grow a business, you have to watch a few things, cash flow, debt, things like that. Because if you try and grow true fast, it can really cause you some problems. Now, Mr. Musk's adventures have definitely grown at a fast pace, just trying to keep up with technology. But he's also done some really big, big things, like one of the biggest structures ever built in the United States is Elon Musk and Tesla's battery factory being built in, I believe it's in Nevada. And it's not completed yet, but it's huge. And the Tesla, new model that's come out, where everything was supposed to hang on this new production model, the Model 3, it's the model that every man could afford. It wasn't one of his high-end models, but it was a good-looking, good-performing, solid vehicle. He was supposed to be making like 20,000 a month by the end of 2017. And he made 2,500 or so a month, and he got behind on orders. Well, on top of that, he's got a lot of bonds that he got out, put out there early on to build this company and build it as big as it is. And those bonds are coming due, they're coming due in a few months. And right now, the bottom line is he's got not enough cash to pay off those bonds and keep his employees paid, and keep the bills paid to build his things that he has going on. And you just kind of wonder, how did he miss this? How can you get so focused on the good work you're doing and the great things you're doing for the world, and kind of just not pay attention to the bottom line business practices that you need to? So I'm hoping, I'm really hoping that Mr. Musk finds some good funding and keeps from going off that cliff because even though he doesn't particularly like hydrogen and I'm a big hydrogen fan, I don't like seeing any businessman, especially when as talented as him, hit the financial skids. And I don't want the people that own Teslas or the people that believe in Tesla to stop believing in electric transportation. It's critical, it's important. I hope he doesn't fall off that cliff. But I hope that people learn from this and understand that growing is great, getting big is great, being flashy is always audacious and entertaining, but you can put yourself right into a big hole. And in this hole will not just fall Mr. Elon Musk, but a lot of his employees, a lot of his vendors, a lot of his backers, a lot of people who are wanting to invest in his company out into the future. And even the confidence of the industry and the customers themselves are going to take an impact and that'll impact all of us. It's not good, so I'm hoping that he can pull through on this, but it's a tough uphill climb. It's really, really hard to run a business and it's really, really, really hard to run one the size that Tesla has become. Now, in another industry that's actually similar to what Mr. Musk is going through right now, and I've had the gentleman that runs the company on, and I'll have him on probably next month again, is a company called Nicola One, a trucking company. Now, they're going to things in a really, really big way as well, and it scares me because these guys are hydrogen guys and we already know that if the battery plug-in cars are looking at this cliff that Mr. Musk has kind of perched himself on, I don't want to see a fuel cell truck company hit the same cliff for three or four years from now. So Nicola One, and coincidentally, Nicola is the first name of Nicola Tesla, and of course Tesla being the car company and Nicola being the truck company is not just the coincidence, they're both focused on one of the greatest, or at least purportedly greatest electricians or electrical engineers or electrical wizards or physicists or whatever you want to call them. Even Einstein is said to have complimented Nicola Tesla on his abilities to understand things that other scientists and physicists couldn't understand in the universe. But Nicola One truck company is building a truck that has a very long range, 1,200 miles, has a very good performance capacity, it out accelerates diesel trucks incredibly like, they're twice as quick off the stop and I've seen videos of a Toyota fuel cell truck competing with a diesel and it's eye watering. So this Nicola truck company is just starting out and they've got two products on the line, they've got a truck and they've got a little off road vehicle that is also incredibly well performing and I'm watching that company and like I say I'm gonna have them on next month and I'm hoping that he'll give us some good news about things that are moving ahead and I'm hoping and praying that he's gonna keep an eye on the business model and keep an eye on his shareholders and keep an eye on the folks that are investing in him and helping his company along and making sure that he doesn't fail any of them along the way and he makes sure that he has the cash flow and everything he needs to get his company through what we call the valley of death when it comes to building a new company. And I sure hope he does because the industry needs it, our economy needs it and certainly our environment needs to have clean transportation and we can't afford to have either of these companies drop off the radar. So that's just a little lead in to what I've seen this week that's been on my mind and kind of bothering me and I wanted to put it out there with all of you folks and just highlight the fact that I know that Mr. Elon Musk is pretty flamboyant and maybe his comments on hydrogen were meant to be more of just a poke in the technology direction and not necessarily a slam on the technology itself and maybe a little bit of grandstanding but I hope that everybody understands that the future of clean transportation not only in the U.S. and in Hawaii but around the world is gonna be electric and that's gonna cause some fundamental changes that we all need to start making and we need to start making them every day. So keep that in mind, watch those technologies and we're gonna take a little bit of a break and when we come back, I'm gonna talk about some of the things that are happening in the industry that I think you should keep your eye on. There's a lot going on and we'll look at Mr. Keith Malone's California Fuel Self-Partnership Newsletter and give you some updates there. Hi everyone, I'm Andrea Gabrieli. The host for Young Talent's Making Way here on Think Tech, Hawaii. We talk every Tuesday at 11 a.m. about things that matter to tech, matter to science to the people of Hawaii with some extraordinary guests, the students of our schools who are participating in science fair. So Young Talent's Making Way every Tuesday at 11 a.m. only on Think Tech, Hawaii. Mahalo. Aloha, I'm Kili Ikeena and I'm here every other week on Mondays at 2 o'clock p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii's Hawaii Together. In Hawaii Together, we talk with some of the most fascinating people in the islands about working together, working together for a better economy, government and society. So I invite you into our conversation every other Monday at 2 p.m. on Think Tech, Hawaii Broadcast Network. Join us for Hawaii Together. I'm Kili Ikeena. Aloha. Hey, Aloha, and welcome back to Stand the Energy Man here on Think Tech, Hawaii. Not only on my lunch hour, but on my day off. That's why I'm wearing slippers today, but you can't see that because I have this cool table in front of me. Anyway, I hate to have such a downer kind of message up front, but I'll try and come back into this section with a little bit more encouragement. And today is Good Friday and it commemorates a time in history, actually several events in history over time that have made a huge difference in the world, but Good Friday being related to Easter in a kind of a somber way. But it highlights the effect that one human being or one man or one woman can have on society, not just in their own time, but usually into the future from their time. And when you think about the events of Easter and all that it means to people, you just gotta say holy mackerel, one person can make a huge, huge impact on the world. And that's not reserved for religious leaders or religious icons or folks like Elon Musk running his Tesla car company or generals or public leaders, politicians, actors and actresses. It could be just you. And a lot of people don't feel like they really have the capacity to make a change in the world. And I'm here to tell you that I've seen it time and time again people that were just plain folks like me all of a sudden ended up at the top of the world. I watch the news nowadays and I see generals in three and four star generals on TV and politicians on TV that I talk to all the time. And it's like they're real people to me. They're special because they're up there, but they started off just like the rest of us coming from a regular school and a regular family and getting a college degree or whatever and then working their way to the top. So for those people that are kind of adventuresome and entrepreneurial and lean out there and don't think you can make it, hey, there's setbacks in everything. There's always challenges. If it was easy, nobody would be taking the hard route. They'd be going the easier route. Being successful is not easy. It's always a challenge. And this weekend is an actual example of that when you talk about Passover, Good Friday and Easter as events in history. So anyway, a little bit of a sidebar too. Yesterday, I wanna thank some folks for our event we did yesterday, speaking of just little folks and talking to big folks. We had Senator Maisie Harono and a bunch of folks from our DC staff out at Hickam Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam visiting not only our facilities, but the Hawaii International Guard and the microgrid that we're putting in out there with them and the National Guard Bureau. And it was great to spend some time with Senator Harono and her staff. They don't get regular briefings on what we do, but we try and keep Joe McGarvey and Nikki Kade on her staff in DC up to speed at least once a year on how we're doing. But it was great to have her out. She asked a lot of questions. She was really interested and her staff had a lot of good questions and showed they were very interested. The bottom line is we need our politicians to understand how important it is for them to actually take part in bringing hydrogen and hydrogen technology to the forefront and pushing it forward. One of the comments I made to the senator yesterday when she asked, so a stand of hydrogen is so great. Why are we not all driving hydrogen cars right away? And I said, well, every time somebody asks me when we're building a station, it gets down to money. And then when they say, well, why don't you get the money? And I say, well, when I ask for people to fund it, they go, well, how does it pencil out compared to gasoline? And then when I say, well, it's a little more expensive than gasoline, all the luster goes off of it. But when you look at it too, it's like, are we gonna sit there and talk about climate change or are we gonna actually put some money against it, even if it's gonna cost us a little bit more upfront to finally solve that problem? She was really open to that and I really appreciate the staff and everybody coming in from DC to do that. And we weren't the only ones she visited. She was up at Paycom. She's visited a lot of folks here in Hawaii on her break and we appreciate the time she spent with us. So thanks and we look forward to seeing the rest of those folks back in DC sometime on our next trip. But for here's the latest news from Mr. Keith Malone and the California Fuel Cell Partnership. In British Columbia, they're kicking off a new renewable hydrogen study. And this is really good because they're gonna be talking about the sustainability piece, the renewable piece of hydrogen, how you can make it different ways, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, what assets you need. So that study is being done in British Columbia and it should help larger companies make some great decisions. Major automakers and state partners have united to help change by driving electric. And what they're saying in this story, and again, I want you to go to look at Keith's website, California Fuel Cell Partnership website to really look at these whole articles. I'm just giving you the highlights and the titles from them. But the automakers and the states are partnering up where counties and cities are trying to get their fleets into electric equipment and setting the example. And our mayors here in Hawaii have done the same thing and I believe our governor has long been on the train that he'd like his fleet vehicles to be electric and hydrogen. And I think we're headed that way. So I wanna just keep encouraging people to read about what the different government agencies are doing and support them. Write your legislators, write your city councilmen and tell them this is important to you. Hydrogen cars aren't the Hindenburg and other marketing hurdles for Toyota's Marai. I can tell you for a fact that that statement is bigger than you could possibly believe. I don't know what it is about the Hindenburg. It wasn't the biggest disaster in the world. In fact, there were a lot of people that survived for some very good reasons because that ship was filled with hydrogen rather than some other fuel and some other fire burning. Most of the people that died in the Hindenburg jumped out from a height where they got killed by jumping out of the Hindenburg. Most of the people that stayed with the Hindenburg when it settled on the ground, they just got out and ran away and the fire being a hydrogen fire, all the heat went up with the hydrogen and it doesn't have carbon in it so it doesn't radiate down or sideways. So the people on the ground didn't get burned even though the fire was right above them. But the graphics, the stories that all people know about the Hindenburg is it was hydrogen and it blew up and it caught on fire. What that challenge is monumental in everything that I do and I can see why Toyota has a real challenge ahead of them. So you can read that article and see what things they're doing to take care of that. 2019 Hyundai Nexo, which is the next generation Hyundai fuel cell vehicle had a quick spin review and a better hydrogen fuel cell crossover rating than a lot of the folks expected. This vehicle was at several auto shows and they've been out there and they're getting great reviews from the people that are driving them and I hope that you get a chance to look at the Hyundai fuel cell lineup because their Hyundai and Toyota are really out in front on the hydrogen fuel cell vehicles but you'll see Honda and several other major car companies including GM and Ford jumping in here over the next two years. The folks that aren't already in production like Toyota and Hyundai and Honda they're already gearing up for production. I talked a little bit about Nicola Motors, they tweeted out and they've got some new publicly released stuff going on and you can catch those links on this website too and on the newsletter. There's an opinion, renewables plus hydrogen equals industry reimagined. This is an article that's really great. It talks about something that we don't generally assume in the general population. When we talk about hydrogen, a lot of times we're talking about it in terms of fuel for vehicles but there's a huge connection back to industry and what it means for like grid, providing base load power for a grid, providing energy storage for a grid. There's huge, huge things happening across the country and across the world in new ways to use hydrogen in industry and hydrogen is a sustainable renewable resource. So great article that you can look at. And this article leads off with Shell. Yes, that Shell, the oil company just outlined a radical scenario for what it would take to halt climate change on oil company. You gotta check that one out. The coming of electrophuels. This is an interesting article, not just for a hydrogen person but they talk about the electrical characteristics of several different fuels and maybe even using different fuels such as natural gas to help you get to cleaner fuels but using or emitting less carbon as you get there. Another Toyota story. Toyota launches a production model, Sora, fuel cell bus. A lot of you aren't aware that if you watch the Olympics, the Winter Olympics as they just finished up, there were several Toyota commercials where they talked about fuel cells and I can tell you that in South Korea, in China for the next Olympics that they host and in Japan, they're gonna be heavily focused on fuel cell buses to move people around the different venues at the Olympics. So you can look forward to that and Toyota is definitely online making some buses. Plug Power, I've had Mr. Andy Marsh on my show of Plug Power, continues to expand the hydrogen economy with hybrid fueling stations solutions. We talked about that when he was on the show and he just keeps on going and I love what he's doing. He's a tough businessman. I think Elon Musk gotta talk to Andy Marsh a little bit and quit poo-pooing hydrogen fuel cells and maybe take some lessons from Mr. Marsh on running a company. Hydrogen power transport is key to climate targets says shell. Again, an oil company, an oil company. Hydrogen power transport is key to climate targets says an oil company. Great article. Mercedes fuel cell vehicle headed to technological, dead end, question mark. It's actually a really enlightening article about how Mercedes is looking at the technology, the hydrogen technology and electrical vehicles and doing the analysis to see if it's really gonna be the long-term solution. And I won't be a spoiler and tell you the end of that story. Going first Ben in the quote, unquote, badass Chevrolet Colorado ZH2. This is the Army's tactical vehicle that runs on hydrogen and has a hydrogen, we call power takeoff capability. They can actually act like a generator and power equipment and power buildings and power tools and stuff like that. It is a badass vehicle and I'm really thrilled that GM and the Army are working on this. In fact, Chris Colquitt, who used to be in Hawaii working with us on hydrogen, runs a portion of that program and he and I have talked about it and I'm just thrilled with them doing that. Proven fuel cell design boosts durability and performance, another great story. Chinese automaker joins Hydrogen Technology Council. The hydrogen council that I went to in September was a huge deal and they've been growing by leaps and bounds with companies joining them and China, I'm telling you, is on a big roll with hydrogen. The world's first hydrogen sweeper hits Aberdeen. Well, I'm not sure it's really the first sweeper, I saw some in New York, but it's gotta be one of the first. Auto executives secretly believe that battery electric cars aren't the future and that's a big controversy because most of us believe they are, but they're still seeing fossil fuels for a long time. How Nissan plans to go all-in on electric vehicles is another good story. Seasonal storage for homes. German firm is selling residential batteries tied to fuel cells. Japan to be first country to reach outer hydrogen fueling stations this year. NEXO early orders are surging for Hyundai. Take a look inside of Amazon's filament center in Livonia and I'm gonna put up a graphic that was also in there that this is a really important graphic. I've seen it produced by a couple of different national labs and also commercial centers and if you guys can take this and maybe put it on freeze on YouTube when you wanna really look at it with some time, the left vertical column is time from milliseconds to years and the line across going horizontally to the right is energy storage capacity from one kilowatt to gigawatts and to terawatts and when you look at that graphic and it's really nice because not only the ovals but the colors, it tells you what range the different technologies of energy storage play a role and what you see on the far right and upper right which is your long range high power. It's ammonia, methane, hydrogen, pumped hydro and compressed air. Those are your big, big, big what we call heavy load carriers when it comes to transportation or the grid. So this is the thing to watch and this graph is really important so it's one to save if you're an energy watcher. So that's gonna wrap it up for Stan the Energy Man this week and we'll be back next week with a guest this time. March was kinda tough but thanks to Cindy here in the studio and Robert in the control room and this is Stan the Energy Man signing off until next Friday, aloha.