 Well, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here in Think Tech, Hawaii. Work community does matter, especially in an election here. It really matters a lot, so pay attention, especially to all those other programs. I'm just the energy guy. What I'd like to do today, before we get with our guests, is talk a little bit about what my organization, HCAT, is, where it is, what it does, just so you can get a feel for as we go into this discussion with our guests, where I'm coming from in terms of micro grids and things. HCAT is actually a small program. Only five of us in the office. We're down to four right now. We're looking for a secretary, if anybody's interested, but only five of us. And we manage contracts for the Air Force Research Lab, and we do a lot of demonstration projects for the Air Force in not only hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, but also micro grids. And right now, it's kind of confuses people. We're part of D-bed. We're part of Department of Business, Economic Development, and Tourism for the state, and we're a program, but we're totally federally funded. We don't take any tax revenues from the state at all, and we're federally funded 100% by the Air Force to do our projects. But the good news is, all the cool stuff I learn working with the Air Force on hydrogen vehicles and micro grids, I get to bring back to the state of Hawaii and share it with HECO and share it with Hawaii Gas and share with other people, community developers, local business development councils, Chamber of Commerce, Hawaii Blue Planet Hawaii, Blue Planet Research, University of Hawaii. We all share it together to try and make Hawaii a better place in terms of renewable energy. And it's amazing how much synergy we get in that group with non-for-profits and other folks, commercial folks on where we're trying to get to in Hawaii with clean energy. So our micro grid out at HECOM is kind of unique in that it's focused on one part of HECOM Air Force Base or Joint Base Pearl Harbor HECOM with the Hawaii Air National Guard. They have what we call a fighter campus with fifth generation F-22 fighters top of the line Air Force fighters, but it's in a small area and it just is perfectly located along their grid where we actually have two redundant lines so we can actually pull that campus off the main grid and put it back on fairly easily. And we're developing a series of micro grids out there that will show the Air Force they can take all renewable energy and provide energy to their military mission, even if their commercial power goes down. And at first we can cover all the power requirements in that campus, but over a week or two weeks or three weeks or a month or two months or six months, all of a sudden if you don't have enough power there, you're kind of hurting. And we're going to show that even when you get to a real austere time like cloudy days and rainy days and not much sunlight to get your power in, we can keep the critical missions on that base going no matter what indefinitely. 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 a year. That's what we're showing to the Air Force. He goes kind of watching us, other utilities are watching us, other services are watching us, but that's what we're trying to show for the state of Hawaii and the Air Force that it can be done. Why is that important? If you get more than 20 percent ish of intermittent renewables on any grid, the utility has a really, really hard time balancing all that load. So all the things that we've learned about what a utility can absorb, what it can absorb, how much has to be base power, base load power and what can be intermittent. It's really important and a lot of people I've talked to say, oh, the electric companies just make it a big story about how hard it is. And I go, no, it's really, really hard to balance a grid when you have that much intermittent renewable on it. But there's solutions and we're trying to help everybody see those solutions in Hawaii and outside Hawaii. We work with Europe and Asia and everybody else. Now the state energy office, they're also in D-bed, but they're policy people. They help the governor do policy things. We actually have our hands in the in the cake, so to speak, and we actually build things and help design things or put the contracts out to design things that have to do with grids and hydrogen. So a little bit of background there. And to that, my guest today is Michael Markridge from Granite Power, and he's here to talk with me a little bit about some of the things that we've talked about offline and in other forums about what Hawaii could be doing with grid power and with hydrogen and what the future looks like. So Michael, thanks for being on the show. My pleasure. Thank you for asking me. Glad you're here today. And we do have a lot of conversations at lunch and stuff about this. And so tell folks a little bit about yourself and what you do with Granite Power and what you do in the community with like Green New Rebuild, Hawaii. So by training, I'm an economist. And for the last 10 years or so, I've been working in different aspects of renewable energy. And one of my companies that I've been working with is Granite Power, which is an Australian based company. And they do have a organic rank and cycle engine, which is a 19th century way of describing a way to use low energy heat to make power. And the purpose of this is that whenever you have an engine that's producing power, there's always waste heat. Right. And a lot of waste heat. And for the most part, we live with that waste heat as our... We throw it away. We throw it away. And what they did was they developed a system and said, well, let's use this waste heat. And off a typical diesel engine, they could get another 10 percent. So why not use that 10 percent? And then on a big, let's say, a big 10 megawatt system, you get a megawatt, which maybe that's 200 homes. That's you could be powering. And that's all paid for. So we've been... They have a project in the Republic of Samoa right now and using waste heat and several other projects in Australia. And then we've been talking to different people and different clients in Hawaii about doing projects here. There's a lot of opportunities here. And this is like when now everybody's really into cooking and using every part of the cow, every part of the pig, and using all the vegetables we used to throw away. But why throw away energy? Why not use every bit of energy? Right. And we have our changing light bulbs and these other things we're doing. And this is another way. This is saying, look, heat, heat's around us. Why don't we use that heat and make more power out of it? Yeah, the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is neither made nor lost, it just changes form. So it's either heat or it's radiant energy or it's electricity or it's potential energy. You know, wave action energy. I mean, you can have kinetic energy. It just changes from one to another. So heat's just another form of energy that could be turned maybe into electricity if you do it right. And that's what granite power apparently does. That's right, exactly. And they also do geothermal down in Australia because that whole area of the Pacific is on that ring of fire. They're very interested in geothermal. The reason they haven't been doing it in Australia is because in Australia you have to go down very deep to get to geothermal, although it's there. So New Zealand next door might have you. Yeah, and Hawaii is very attractive for geothermal. A lot of people around the world look to Hawaii as a leader of geothermal. Even though right now our geothermal biggest plan is not working, but for the last 22 years, Hawaii's been a world leader in geothermal. In the past 22 years, though, technology's changed quite a bit. And so the geothermal that we have on the big one at Pune Geothermal is not what you'd call cutting-edge technology in the geothermal world. And I think that's actually a good topic for discussion today. A lot of I know in the hydrogen world, technology's changed rapidly and really advanced. And I've actually seen some geothermal companies that have very small footprints, very safe systems, and potentially could be doing some work here without the fear factor that seems to pop up whenever Pune Geothermal's name comes up in the media or something where people are concerned about safety issues and things in their area. So along those lines, the reason Pune Geothermal is down right now is because of the active volcano. The lava's right in their backyard, literally. In fact, it's kind of funny that the lava creeped right up to their boundary line a little over and then stopped. I don't know if it's still moving that way, but it's like somebody sending a message. I mean, like, is Madam Pele upset with everybody else, but she's OK with Pune Geothermal? I don't know. Maybe that's an indicator. But certainly, the amount of energy coming out of that lava is an exceptionally huge amount of energy that maybe we should be tapping into. And maybe we could be using on the Big Island. Have you done any research to see, like on the Big Island particularly, where there's some other hot spots in the area? Well, actually, there's a number of different places. And the closer you are to where the lava is flowing, that's the better. That's the internet. That's what it is there. That's what you want to be. So there are more opportunities. The question is, is it something that the public there wants to accept and wants to embrace? The alternative to not embracing that is, of course, for base power, you still need fossil fuels. So in some ways, these are all, to certain people, these are all bad choices. Fossil fuels is a bad choice, because it overheats our atmosphere. Maybe our religious or cultural reason is geothermal is bad. But you're always having to weigh, in this modern world, what is your best alternative? Right. Yeah, and my understanding is that Pune Geothermal actually provides between 20% and 30% of the Big Island's energy. How big is 31%? 31% up until, how was that? Until they shut down. And the shutdown is precautionary. They might be able to still operate, but I know that they don't want to be in a risky situation, so they're just shut down now. But 31% is a lot, because that's baseload power. That's not intermittent renewable. So the electric company looks at that as stable power that they can use, that they know how much is coming and all the time they can count on it 24 hours a day, they're shut down, interrupted, and they can count on that. So when you have that kind of base power, along with the Big Island, also has rivers and waterfalls, a lot of them, and they have a lot of hydroelectric power, which the other islands, we really don't capture that as much. I don't know how much we could capture, but when you look at the state's electricity requirements, the neighbor islands are already well ahead of this island, Oahu, on renewable energy, because they have access to more wind power, more solar power, and those baseload powers like geothermal and hydroelectric. So even though Hawaiian Electric here on Oahu is struggling with 20%, 25% intermittent renewables, the neighbor islands have that 20%, 25%, and 50% of other renewables that aren't intermittent. So they're over 50% for the most part. And when it comes to meeting that deadline to be 100% renewable by 2045 that we have here in the state, the neighbor islands are going to be there in a hurry. It's just how are you going to get Oahu up to that level? We don't have enough room for all the solar. We don't have enough room or desire to put windmills. I mean, I had Senator Rivieri on the show here a few months ago, and his constituents are like, you know, we thought the wind power wouldn't be bad, but right now they're pretty much up to their ears and like we're done with wind. It's not really what we expected. And I think it'd be a hard sell to put as much wind up there as we really need to bring power to Oahu. So it's almost like we have to look at the neighbor islands to help with the energy on this island. And how do we do it with a cultural piece and everything else? Because it's not just are we going to upset Madam Pelle. It's why am I making energy for you? What am I getting out of it? Why is the big island going to put up with a big geothermal plant? Or is Maui going to put up with a bunch more windmills and kind of have that in their backyard just so the power can come to Oahu? And that's the kind of things we need to address in the state and make sure that you're right. It's like, has everybody weighing it out? Is it weighing our options and making the right choice? So do you have any insight on maybe how we should be looking at that? Well, I look at, say, what happened in Japan when all of a sudden we had this terrible tragedy with Fukushima. And then Japanese, they shut down those plants, of course. The nuclear power plants. So then they turned actually to geothermal, which was at Tohoku. And so the lesson there is that I think when it needs to be flexible, one needs to look at these different costs and benefits and opportunities. And you look at, for example, Iceland, which uses geothermal. And there are a bunch of times in the military. Yeah, and they've been able to make peace with geothermal. I think geothermal here grew out of kind of a very kind of wild west kind of thing. People were experimenting and trying new things. And you know, there was a public cost to that. And they're kind of in a residential area almost. It's a populated area. And that's where we're all in place to do this kind of. Almost experimental work. We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be right back to talk more with Mr. Markridge on big island, hydrogen, geothermal power, all those good things. Aloha and Richard Concepcion, the host of Hispanic Hawaii. You can watch my show every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. We will bring you entertainment, educational, and also we tell you what is happening right here within our community. Think Tech, Hawaii. Aloha. 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 and welcome back to Stand Energy Man with Michael Markridge from Granite Power on my lunch hour, if I hadn't mentioned that before. Thanks for being here with us. We're talking about the big island and we're talking about some of the energy on the big island, particularly geothermal, which is a hot topic, no pun intended right now, because it is, with new technology, a really safe option as you just mentioned in Japan, they had a lot of nuclear power, and it turns out in, and it was March 11th of 2011 that they had the earthquake and tsunami. I remember that because that's my birthday. And I remember really clearly sitting there watching TV and seeing a tsunami roll in on the news and even the media didn't know what was happening and I go, that's a tsunami. And but it was just a big surge of water moving into a harbor and they didn't get it. But that disaster really woke people up as safe as you think nuclear power is and as cheap as it can be. There's still a big cost to it when things don't go right. And like you mentioned earlier, in Hawaii, if we're gonna make choices, let's make the right choices. So I personally look at the big island and if we do hydrogen and geothermal properly, get buy-in from the community, hopefully make some great, not just jobs, but great careers and maybe great communities as part of the project, it actually could be a really good choice on the big island. What do you think? I wish there was a way that we could communicate with people in Iceland who have this very similar conditions and invite people from Iceland to come to Hawaii and perhaps send people from the big island to visit Iceland just to get that other perspective. And this is again being sensitive to the cultural piece of this, the cultural sensitivities, just to think, okay, well, where are we going to be in 20 years? Where is the world going to be in 30 years? What are our children going to experience? What are our grandchildren going to experience as the world keeps heating up and it keeps heating up because of fossil fuels, because we still do need, for base power at this point, significant amounts of fossil fuels. And what if we could use less fossil fuels? What if we had other options? What if we had, for example, hydrogen, which we could make from... And store energy. That's right, geothermal. And so I think that we need to look at the fact that we're all interconnected now. And Iceland is far, far away from here, but actually it's not that far. It's the old butterfly in China flapping his wings is connected to the tornado in Kansas routine. We are connected and people don't appreciate it. I'm fortunate that I've actually been to Iceland probably five or six times as part of my military life. And you're right, it's really incredible. And talk about excess heat energy to use. They've got more heat than they know what to do with. And the whole island, and they're up near, I mean, part of Iceland is in Arctic Circle. They use all the heat for heating all their buildings and making all their electricity and making the power for all their transportation, their public transportation. And you're right, it's pretty remarkable that they have a very small fossil fuel footprint. And most of that's confined to fishing boats and things where they have to, that hasn't been perfected yet, electric transportation on the boats. But you're right, it's a great example, but... And what did they do with that money? Like what they did was they developed high tech industries. They had a kind of a disastrous experience with banking, but other industries came and they developed tourism. There were so many different things that they did. Well, as an economist, and I've asked this of several big economists here, including our own in D-Bed, what would be the implications of taking Hawaii from an energy-importing state to either an energy-neutral state, or, oh my gosh, an energy-exporting state if we could make liquid hydrogen off of the geothermal on the Big Island, supply all the needs in the whole state, and the Big Island could actually export to the mainland, or to Korea, or Japan, or China, or and be selling energy out to another country. What would the implications be economically to our state? So I'd like to go back in time and say that Hawaii already has been a huge energy exporter through the sugar industry, because what is sugar, but... And will, for that matter. Right, right, that's right. And we were the world's leader in sugar for 50 years. You know, maybe, and people thought sugar would last forever, and sugar brought so much wealth into Hawaii, and sugar was maybe the reason that of all the United States territories, Hawaii became most developed, Hawaii was the one of all the territories that was, and Alaska became a state, but it was because of this enormous wealth that came from sugar that made Hawaii so valuable. So if you think, okay, well, if we have something else that we can export that is extremely valuable, yes, I think that you're right. Hawaii would then become, once again, a very wealthy state, and right now we're a wealth of state in the standpoint of we have tourism, we don't think, but the problem is that all of its activity is concentrated in fairly a small percent of the land area in the population, and as a result of this, we have great degree of income inequality that people suffer from in Hawaii, and we become very crowded, and life inexpensive, and for many people, I think life has become less pleasant here than it was. People who can remember even 20 years ago how, that life was very different. But what if we were to say, okay, well, maybe there's a different way of doing this, and if you look at Hawaii's history and you see like every 50 years, there's been a dramatic change, you know, at first, you know, it was provisioning ships, and then it was the whales, and then it was sugar, and then it was tourism, and each time people thought, oh, this is just gonna last forever, right? But then it didn't, something else came along, and maybe the next thing is ready to come along. Yeah, so here's my vision that I see if I could wave my magic hydrogen wand is that we find the right place on the big island to do geothermal safely and properly with all the cultural considerations, all of the buying from the community, give them their piece of the pie up front, their halau, their canoe hale, their community, their housing, their jobs, as the equipment's going in to be built in a safe, clean, good environment, and then we start at scale producing liquid hydrogen, using it to balance the grid throughout the state, maybe even on Maui, when instead of them putting more windmills up, help export some hydrogen power over to Maui and put it in their system with electrolysis on big island, making clean hydrogen from renewable geothermal, exporting that liquid hydrogen to Maui and Oahu, and maybe even Kauai if they need it, to run their grids, and their transportation sector, by the way, because hydrogen, we've already gotten the Toyota Mirai here and their circle open their station. Hydrogen transportation is electric transportation. It's just a different kind of battery and we're trying to electrify our transportation sector. And oh, by the way, if it makes sense and if the community can take it, go up to exporting hydrogen to the mainland or Asia, and maybe even start looking at space travel, because as you and I have talked before, the state is looking at a spaceport on the big island because of the geographic location of Hawaii close to the equator. There's a natural tendency to do that. The lunar astronauts trained in Haleakala, there's a Mars habitat on the big island right now. Blue Planet Research supports that operation under contract from NASA. The big island is poised to be that future looking outer space exploring part of the US that probably no other place can be. And the hydrogen is right there to support liquid rockets and things like that. You know, I think that's really, really interesting because if you look, what are the demands for space travel right now? It's because the pharmaceutical companies want to do research in space because the costs are so much lower. I think the number one most profitable industry in the United States is the pharmaceutical industry. So people don't realize that how many experiments are now being done in space on new drugs because you can hold things out of solution, there's less gravity, there's all the kinds of advantages, it's much less expensive. Even with all of the expensive sending rockets into space with your experiment. The risk, yeah. And it's less expensive. The other is that the enormous and unsatisfied yet demand for high speed data transmission, right? That's also, I mean, that's a tremendous need. And so that's another thing that, if Hawaii was having, I had a space launch program on the big island and we had the hydrogen there to power the rockets, we could start sending rockets into space commercially and satisfying that market. It can employ hundreds of people, maybe thousands of people, and it could be the new industry for Hawaii. Yeah. Well, right now it's you and me dreaming, buddy, but I think we can get there. And I think there's a lot of support from the community, and not just the Oahu community, but neighboring communities. I think there's actually a fair amount of support from the legislature. Talked to a fair number of them and they're really supportive. They're looking for, they know that Hawaii's economy is at a tipping point right now and ready for that every 50 year transition. And they've got to do something to help boost our economy. We're only a penstroke away from losing all the army at Schofield or the military will always have a footprint here. I'm convinced, but just losing a bunch of troops at Schofield could have a devastating effect on our economy overall, or losing any of the ships in the shipyard or losing the shipyard, the losing ships in Pearl Harbor, that could happen at the stroke of a pen from the DOD. And then our tourism industry, although we think it's pretty stable, just the volcanic activity misunderstood by people, they stopped coming. Even when 9-11 happened, a lot of tourists didn't want to come because they felt it was imposing during a crushing time for our country and tourism took a big hit then. Yeah, that's true. And I was gonna say that, getting back to space, and we say, okay, well, people, this is a big dream, but I mean, people with lots and lots of resources, more resources than you and I, Amazon. Elon Musk. Elon Musk, they're all developing space capabilities. They wouldn't be doing this if they didn't think there was a market there. And I was reading about New Mexico, for example, now has a space office because they want to start luring companies to do space research and space launching from New Mexico. So that's another competitive of ours. So people are already thinking in those terms. So we should be too. Well, we'll have you back on the show so we can talk about the space force that President Trump talked about and see when that happens, because I know that would have an impact on, hopefully, if we get into space over here, the potential for doing those operations or some of them out of here, at least monitoring those things. So we'll have to get you back on and update that. Well, we're about out of time on Standard Energy Man this week, and Michael, I'd like to thank you again for being on the show. Oh, thank you. I have to have you back to talk more space stuff. But, yeah, everybody out there, if you have any comments or concerns about the topic today, hey, we'd really like to hear from you. So send a tweet or a message to the studio here, and they'll pass it on to me. I was gonna just say one thing. I think the space industry now is $280 billion, and people are saying that it's gonna be soon a $30 trillion industry. Wow. Okay, well, there you go, right from the economist's mouth. There's a lot of potential there. So give us your thoughts and the Standard Energy Man signing off until next week, Friday. Aloha.