 Welcome to Stan Energy Man, welcome to my show. We got a special show today that I'm trying to make as confusing as humanly possible for all of you watching, but it's focused on the teachers. The teachers out there that wanna teach hydrogen safety and hydrogen technology to their students from intermediate all the way through high school. So what I've done is I've brought in some equipment that we use during the World Conservation Congress this past Sunday to show the audiences there, the technology that's available nowadays using hydrogen. And you might say, well, you know, what is hydrogen compared to any other fuel? Well, hydrogen's really an energy carrier more than a fuel. So what we do is we try to emphasize you can use hydrogen for storing energy and in certain circumstances, like you need a lot of power for a long time. Hydrogen's actually one of the more efficient ways to store energy as opposed to a battery. For comparison, because batteries on a large scale or for a long duration like days or weeks, they're super expensive. So what I've got with me today is a little kit that's available online that you can buy from the hydrogen fuel cell or the fuel cell store. And they've got a whole bunch of different ones, but we picked two of them. This kit here is kind of nice because it shows you how you can take renewable wind power. This is actually meant to go outside and the wind, when the wind blows it, it generates electricity, just like the big wind turbines out at Hawaiian Electric. And then PV, a photovoltaics, just like on the roof of your house, little photovoltaic cell. Instead of using that today, I'm using a little battery pack and cheating because I don't have any sunlight in here and I don't have any wind. So we won't be using these today, but we will be making some hydrogen using electricity and water. And so all this stuff is in this kit along with a couple of extra blades. So if you really want to teach wind power, these blades rotate and change pitch. And they also have three different style blades in there so you can experiment with different pitches and different blade shapes to show the students how the wind velocity and stuff changes, how much electricity you produce. It has a little electrolyzer kit. That's what this is. It's a PEM electrolyzer, a propane, excuse me, proton membrane, exchange membrane electrolyzer, PEM. And then a small fuel cell. So what we're gonna do today is we're actually gonna take some water. We're gonna put water in these two containers, distilled water, just plain water. And we're gonna make some hydrogen by splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Then we're gonna take the hydrogen and we're gonna feed it into this fuel cell over here and I'm gonna show you how it'll take air that comes in through this little part here and the hydrogen and makes electricity and we'll actually run that propeller. So what we'll do first is we've got some distilled water here from our local Safeway store or wherever grocery store you wanna go to. We'll fill these up about halfway. There's actually graduated marks on the containers there so the teacher can look and fill it exactly where it needs to be. I'm gonna end up probably injecting a little bit more. There's two little notches on the bottom here and I'm gonna try and push this in here and I'm gonna release this so that it actually lets the, lets it fill up with water because that's what you want it to do. You want it to actually fill with water and not sit there and have a big air pocket underneath. But once it goes in there, it actually locks into the bottom and likewise this one will pull this off so that it can actually fill up inside here. There we go. I'm gonna make it sit in there tight too so it doesn't bounce around. There we go. And we'll put it in here and I'll explain to you how all this stuff is hooked up. The instructions are pretty good but I'm gonna kind of emphasize some really important points. The first important point is whenever you're working with the DC power and this is all direct current, DC power, red is always your positive, black is always your negative, red is also the side that the oxygen is gonna come out and black is the side that the hydrogen is gonna come out. So when you look on these cylinders in your kit, you'll see that all the lettering on this one is red for oxygen and all the lettering on this one is black and it helps you when you're wiring everything up the teacher won't be confused because all the places you plug the black wire into are black and all the places you plug the red wire into are red. So what we're gonna do here is we've got this, all this thing does here is shuts off the hydrogen so it won't leak out after I've made it. But we'll turn on some electricity and what you'll see is you'll see bubbles if you can see this through the camera, you'll see the bubbles start moving through the line there. We're actually making hydrogen and oxygen and as these things work, it'll take maybe three minutes for this thing to fill up but you'll see approximately twice as much hydrogen being made as oxygen and why is that? Well you've got H2O so you've got two hydrogen atoms for every oxygen atom in a molecule of water. So for every, when you start to break it apart you'll see more hydrogen and you will see oxygen initially. So all I've done here is there's two AA batteries in here and it's set up to run like that and you use this in place of the photovoltaics or the wind power but if you did this experiment outside you could just as easily take the PV array instead of the battery or the windmill instead of the battery to generate the electricity you need to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. So after a couple of minutes we'll have a nice stock of hydrogen and we'll have some oxygen in there and what I'll do is I'll shut the hydrogen off, I'll cap it off so it doesn't leak out and I'll connect it to this piece over here. This is actually a fuel cell just like what's in the Toyota Mirai or any other vehicle that we build with down at Hcat for the Air Force and what it does is it takes the hydrogen and it takes the oxygen from the air and turns it back into electricity. So as soon as the hydrogen and the oxygen start hitting this fuel cell membrane it'll turn it back into electricity and so what we'll do is we use this to run first the propeller and I'll show it running the propeller and then we'll plug it into these lights and show you that it'll run lights it'll run motors, it can be used for anything. So in a car, in our cars, our vehicles we use this fuel cell but it's much bigger of course it's a 30 kilowatt fuel cell in the vehicles and it can actually drive a really powerful motor and that's why Toyota in their cars and Hyundai and all the folks doing fuel cells, Honda they've refined this technology to a point where they can do a high performance car using hydrogen and people ask, okay what about the safety of hydrogen stand? You know you hear about the Hindenburg you hear about eight atom bombs or hydrogen bombs and stuff and you say, you know, is it really safe? Well, you'll notice that when we're making the hydrogen we keep these two gases separated in these containers we have oxygen separated from the hydrogen and that's for a reason as long as you have pure hydrogen in the hydrogen container it's not going to be flammable it doesn't burn, it doesn't explode it doesn't ignite as soon as you put an oxidizer with the hydrogen in the right proportions and the proportions are pretty broad anywhere from four to about 74% by volume you can actually have a highly flammable mixture so a lot of times around the internet you see people making hydrogen with metals and acids and what they're really doing is they're making both gases at the same time and mixing them and that is very dangerous you don't want to do that you want to keep the gases separate so as you notice on the hydrogen side now we're getting quite a bit of hydrogen built up in here you can see that bubble's kind of extending down further and further and the oxygen side of the bubble is still a little bit high, it's up here so we'll let this go for another couple of minutes and see how much hydrogen we can produce when we're at the convention center we actually had it pretty much down here near the base and it ran both of these units for a pretty good amount of time but for you teachers this is actually a great way to show students what they could do at their home in terms of powering their own house because in your house you could have a small wind turbine or several wind turbines around your house there's different styles they have some wind turbines that go along the ridge of your house with the wind blowing and will produce electricity that way instead of having a big propeller spinning around and then of course people are really familiar with the photovoltaic cells and there's different kinds of photovoltaic cells this is a monocrystalline photovoltaic cell and it's about 17 to 20% efficient it's pretty efficient it's one of the more efficient cells that you can buy and we probably could do a show on just how a photovoltaic cell works but actually what's interesting is if you get the reading material that comes with these kits and go through it it'll actually tell you how a PV cell works how the wind turbine generation works so you can actually use this to teach your students not just about the hydrogen and the electrolyzer and the fuel cell but how we actually can make electricity using sunlight so we got a pretty good amount of hydrogen built in there so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn off my power on my little battery pack here and I'm gonna shut off my hydrogen I'm gonna disconnect the hydrogen from the electrolyzer and I'm gonna come over here to my fuel cell and I have a little place to connect my hydrogen to my fuel cell now normally this thing would just start running right away but I've only got hydrogen going in one side but if I let some air in it should, oops, but oh, I gotta loose this first it should actually start, there you go, make electricity so what we have now is a pure hydrogen coming out of the hydrogen tank going into the negative side, the black wire side of my fuel cell and I have oxygen coming in through this little vent here through just the air from the oxygen or oxygen from the air that's creating an electric charge as the hydrogen and air turn the hydrogen and oxygen and air back into water so it ran out of oxygen so I let a little bit more in and it starts running again and so as long as you are using a mix of oxygen with the hydrogen you can produce electricity so before I run completely out we can also take this and show you you can even do lighting you can put lights into your house and run lights off of it, not just motors but you can also make electricity for your house using stored hydrogen and a little fuel cell so for example, if you had a lot of PV on your roof and all day long you didn't need all the electricity from your PV they'd call that curtailed power if it was on the grid but if you had a lot of electricity being made that you weren't using you could have a little electrolyzer like this at home that would store hydrogen in some low pressure containers maybe 150 to 200 pounds per square inch containers and just store it up and then at night when you came home you could take your Toyota Mirai or your Honda Clarity or your Hyundai SUV with this fuel cell in there and run your hydrogen that you collected all day long into your car, start filling the car up with hydrogen and also giving power back to your house at night using the hydrogen that you made all day long and that way you would be using your electricity that you're generating from your PV and your wind power not only to power your house but to fill up your car so all night long you could have a small compressor small volume, high pressure compressor putting hydrogen back into your car all night long and charging it up so the next day you'd have hydrogen in your car and all night long you had hydrogen running into your house, your electricity in your house and you can see we're just making little tiny bubbles of hydrogen basically but if you use LED lights, low draw lights and motors, you can actually get quite a bit of performance out of even a small amount of hydrogen so as the technology gets better and more efficient you just get better and better products that are more efficient and you can do more and more at home and be more and more versatile other piece too is, like I say, using LEDs and being efficient at home and trying to save as much energy as you can is the first step you make just ask my friend Ray Starling he'll tell you, you always go for the efficiencies first so what I'll do now is I'm gonna take a quick break here and I'm gonna set up for another kit that we got about the same time we didn't get to demonstrate it at the convention center but it's got a more advanced technology than this instead of using the two different devices to generate electricity Hi and thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii my name is Justine Espiritu and I host the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series my co-host Matthew Johnson is a new version of a fuel cell called a reversible fuel cell it actually can meet the hydrogen and then it can take the hydrogen and make it back into electricity so we're gonna take a quick short break here and I'll be back in about a minute and we'll have the other kits set up for you Hi and thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii my name is Justine Espiritu and I host the Hawaii Food and Farmer Series with my co-host Matthew Johnson of A Waku Fresh every week we bring on farmers as well as all the other individuals and organizations that help support a thriving sustainable food system in fact it's interesting to learn what others are doing so you don't have to be a Hawaii resident or producing food on Hawaii to be featured on the show like today's guest Wyatt Bryson of Jewels of the Forest and Michael Lab Solutions Aloha thank you it's been a pleasure being on the show I love seeing what you guys do and I really support your mission and it's really nice being back in Hawaii and thank you again it's an honor so you can see guests like Wyatt's every Thursday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii thank you for a very healthy summer watch Viva Hawaii we are here live on Mondays at 3 p.m. and we bring guests like our best health coach Elena Maganto eat well and follow her tips Viva la comida saludable Aloha I'm Chantel Seville the host of the Savvy Chick Show which you can watch every Wednesday at 11 a.m. on ThinkTechHawaii.com on the Savvy Chick Show we are all about inspiring and empowering women and girls to be the best they can be by having amazing guests from all around the world so we hope you'll join us every Wednesday at 11 a.m. Aloha hey welcome back to my lunch hour stand the energy man here at the special show for teachers that want to teach hydrogen to their students and a couple kits that are available online the last one I had was kind of a general purpose renewable energy with PV and also wind power that you can make your hydrogen from that electricity that DC current this kit that I've got out here now is really kind of slick it's the model is T107 tutorial high runner what it is is it's a scaled down basic version of a fuel cell car but what's neat about this fuel cell car even cooler than the cars even cooler than the cars that are that are out there right now in production or the fact that this one this fuel cell in here is reversible so this is a reversible fuel cell and again just like in the other one I'll turn it this way so you can see when you have your connection set up you have an oxygen side that's red and a hydrogen side that's black and what I've done is I've already filled up the the hydrogen side with water and I'm going to fill up the oxygen side over here which is the hardest part is just filling this dog on thing up because I've got to connect that and I've got this part disconnected so that as I fill it it actually has to go in far enough to start running out of this side so I've got water all the way in the system till it comes out there it's popping out you can see it running out there I keep some once you got this thing full though it's actually got a vacuum for the most part I must have a leak in there and I keep some napkins around just in case it doesn't leak too much it's got little caps on there to finish fill it off I'm going to unplug these now because these are actually set up to run and again just like in the last segment I have this battery pack here that I'm going to use another nice thing to do is whenever you have these battery packs you don't want these things shorting out they have a switch and on off switch but as a backup you don't want the positive and negative hitting each other so I put a little cap on the positive side and you always want to try and do that to the positive side because that's your hot side so if you have any other shorts if you cap off the positive side it's safer okay so what I've got now is got power coming to my fuel cell and what you'll see is you'll start to see water fill up in the top part of the container as the hydrogen starts to fill and the oxygen start to fill in and displace the water in the bottom part of the container so while it's doing its work I'm going to clean up my water mess here that I spilled all over the place but this is making the hydrogen just like in the other kit you have the hydrogen making being made by its own electrolyzer in this kit like I say the electrolyzer is also your fuel cell it also makes the electricity after the fact so let me get this back in the middle here put my paper towels away so we've got hydrogen being made on this side oxygen being made on that side and we'll give it a little bit of time to do all that stuff and then what you'll see is the magic in this fuel cell is as soon as I as soon as I start plugging it around it'll actually start I can turn the car on and start driving it or IT so so this kit again is available online at the fuel cell store and they have lots of cool stuff on that site if you're a teacher there's lots of things you can you can do over there and lots of different models they have you can actually run this one two different ways you can either run it using the oxygen from the oxygen side or you can run it using air so for those of you that that aren't basically scientists air is mostly nitrogen and about 15 to 20 percent oxygen depending on what altitude and where you're at and other minor gases CO2, argon, whatever else is hanging around in your vicinity but primarily it's nitrogen and oxygen but pure oxygen of course is highly flammable really dangerous to handle and those of you that don't know if you take pure oxygen and you have an oily rag or oil on your hands and you get near pure oxygen you can actually have a spontaneous combustion and start a fire with no match or anything just with oxygen and oil okay so we've given this thing a little bit of time here I'm going to turn the electricity off and I'm going to unplug the power that I made the hydrogen with and through the magic of this this reversible fuel cell I'm going to plug the motor into the reversible fuel cell I'm going to lift the back end off the ground but I'll let it go this thing actually starts driving and it'll go for quite a while off the hydrogen that's in there and what you'll see is if you look at the different water levels in here you'll notice on the hydrogen side the water level is pretty high and the oxygen level is really low again it's H2O you got twice as many hydrogen atoms as you have oxygen atoms in a molecule of water so you have about twice as much hydrogen as you do oxygen in your fuel cell but this thing will run for actually quite a bit of time it'll probably run at least a good five minutes off of the hydrogen that we've made with a little bit of electricity so if your teachers are really creative you could actually take both of these kits and you could make your hydrogen on this kit with the same wind power or solar or photovoltaic as you did from the other kit and teach the students not only the different technologies that are out there and how they can be used in a grid or in your house but also a little bit of safety and the biggest safety issue I can tell you on hydrogen is that you really really really have to make sure that you don't mix the hydrogen and the oxygen in a container that's probably the biggest safety factor involved with hydrogen as long as it's pure hydrogen it's relatively safe to handle follow the procedures that it has in your kit that it'll tell you about and safe to use safe to work with hydrogen is not toxic but if you were in a completely hydrogen environment you'd suffocate because there's no oxygen but it's not toxic to you you could actually breathe hydrogen gas and it's not going to hurt you the Greek the word hydrogen comes from Greek and it means water maker and it's because as we run this fuel cell in here and turn it into electricity the byproduct is heat and water and so in our in our vehicles the only thing coming out the exhaust pipe is water so that's the beauty of this technology and people say is so Stan why should we use hydrogen instead of batteries or hydrogen what's so good about it and what I tell them is if we actually had hydrogen cars right now and we were driving hydrogen vehicles all the time and I explained to you what it would take to make a gasoline-powered vehicle and how efficient it was you would just shake your head and go why would we ever be using a gasoline-powered vehicle they're about half as efficient in terms of the energy that they give you back for the energy you put in they're dirty they have pollutants they have carbon dioxide carbon monoxide and particulates that come out of the engines nowadays all the diesel vehicles have to meet higher emission standards the like we had Dave Ralph on the show a couple weeks ago the new cafe standards the the vehicle standards for for reduced pollutants are all kicking in hydrogen fuel cell all that kicks out of the tailpipe is water pure water vapor and if you start with photovoltaics and renewables there is zero carbon zero carbon in the whole process so you're not going to be doing anything except making the climate better by keeping the carbon down to zero and and giving yourself all of the energy needs that that you need filled whether they be for transportation or at home when you're not making electricity at night with your PV you can use the hydrogen to make some electricity for you at home so these technologies are really amazing and people go well this is great Stan why aren't we already doing it and the reality is that there's been trillions and trillions of dollars invested in oil tankers and oil refineries and internal combustion engines and we're not going to see those things go away in a month or a year or two years but what you will see is these technologies like hydrogen fuel cell vehicles the technology is a hundred years old it's well understood the safety factors are well understood and the vehicles will start coming online they've already started with Toyota and Hyundai and Honda you'll start to see Mercedes GM and Ford bringing vehicles out by 2020 and we already have commercial off-the-shelf forklifts and and material handling equipment you'll see buses there's buses in California they're a runoff hydrogen right now and that's the way we're heading and one of the great quotes that actually came from a Middle Eastern chic who who ran an oil economy for his country said we're not gonna we didn't move out of the stone age because we ran out of stones and we're not going to move out of the oil age because we ran out of oil we need to actually get this technology developed and get it ready so that rather than running out of oil and figuring out what are we going to do now we already have the technology in place we have a replacement for oil when it starts getting scarce and we take that oil and use it for things that we really need that petroleum for and when it comes to energy we have technologies like this that we use to make the energy that we need so hydrogen's a great a great great energy source it's powerful I mean I can stop this thing but you can see it's it's got plenty of torque it's got plenty of plenty get up and go and we use it in the real vehicles and it works great so I'm hoping that some of you teachers out there will start to get some of this this this technology in your classroom and this unit is kind of neat when I first got it and I went well how do we keep all this stuff together and keep the water from tipping over all of these pieces have little magnets on the bottom so it actually sticks sticks to the chassis by magnet and that gives you some idea of the versatility of these units too the magnetism doesn't bother the electrolysis at all and you can be making hydrogen even with magnets around and it's just water electricity giving you hydrogen and oxygen it's so basic it's so cool and that's why we get fired up at HKAT about the hydrogen technology because it is the future and we've always heard hydrogens the future the fuel of the future and always will be but I hate to tell you this guys that are pessimists it's today the vehicles are coming out the technology is proven and we're ready to rock and roll so that's a little picture of what what the teachers can do we're always available for our Q&A at HKAT where you can send them right in here to ThinkTech maybe next week when I'm on you can call in the show here 415-871-2474 and you can ask questions you can you can call in anytime that I'm on and we'll try and answer your questions next week I'm trying to get actually one of our great electrical engineers that's doing some great great workforce out of the base to talk a little bit about how this kind of technology can help why electrics solve their grid problems and he's an electrical engineer that's got a whole lot of time on microgrids and on hydrogen technology and he's going to help us prove this at Hickam Air Force Base so that the Air Force can take advantage of these technologies in the future so that's about all I really have for today's show and I'm looking forward to any questions that you have again you can get these things online from the fuel cell store and I encourage you to order them and bring them in if you're a teacher especially if you have funds I know you poor teachers end up buying a lot of this stuff on your own pocket and that's that's too bad I hope you're taking a tax break for it talk to your accountant and do that because you should be able to but this technology is really cool in the classroom really easy to work with if the instructions seem kind of confusing the main thing to tell you again is is black keep the black wires on the same side with the black and black is hydrogen and keep the red wires with the red and the red is oxygen on your fuel cell and on your electrolyzer and it's about that simple so DC current is real easy to work with it's really safe and it's the main thing you do with fuel cells in your house you would actually take an inverter that would convert your DC power into AC power to run your vacuum cleaner and your microwave and your TV but what you'll find is a lot of the current that you use at home is actually DC power anyway you can have DC power lights that are really efficient fluorescent lights you can have DC your computers use DC power even when you plug them into an AC outlet it's converting it to DC to charge your batteries so you'll find that if you actually design the house to run off of DC there's not too many things besides motors that you need the AC power for so for this week I'd like to thank you for being on Stand the Energy Man and we'll see you next week same time my lunch hour 12 o'clock on Aloha Friday