 Welcome to another exciting, exciting Stan Energy Man here, Stan Osserman, coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii. And this time I actually have a guest, if you listened to my or watched my last show last week Tuesday, I was talking about a book he wrote. Lo and behold, he sent me an email and said he'd be glad to be on the show. I call him Dr. Toby Kincaid because he's a regular rocket scientist, but he's not a real PhD, but I still call him Dr. Toby Kincaid because he's so freaking smart. And we're going to talk to him a little bit today, a little bit about some of his ideas for Hawaii, and just get you caught up on some of the thinking that's going on in the folks, the folks that are thinking about energy, energy storage, and how to press forward with renewable, sustainable energy around the world. We got some examples I think we'll talk about just about Hawaii. So Toby, welcome to the show. I'm glad you can join us. Thank you. Aloha, General. Good to be with you. Good to be with you too, Dr. I'm not a real doctor, but I play one on TV. Okay. You stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night? Yeah, that's it. Okay. All right. So tell us a little bit about your background. And I know that you've got a couple images to show us too, but why don't you give us some background. I know you've been on the show before, but not everybody watches every show. So give us some background on it. Well, thank you. I go back in the solar industry about 35 years, which is kind of astounding to admit. And I've seen a lot of changes. I got into energy very early when I was 11 years old. I had a little mini bike that my brothers helped me put together and I earned 35 cents a week for allowance and I could fill my tank on the weekends and I was a happy kid. Well, the oil embargo came in 1972 and suddenly I couldn't fill my tank. So as a little kid, I began to really understand, hey, energy is really important. And if you have energy right, you can do anything. But if you have energy wrong, you can't do anything. Right. So that kind of got me started and coming from Oregon, you know, the sun is precious to us. So it seemed natural for me. But I was pretty obsessed with solar energy. And in the beginning, I realized that sunlight is an optical resource. And, you know, Isaac Newton, being a big hero of mine, of course, you know, in the 1600s, he put a prism in the sun and realized, hey, sunlight isn't one thing, it's seven things. It's red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. And about 100 years later, a great mathematician in France, Fresnel, he was working on lighthouses and he realized instead of a big thick convex lens, he could make a flat lens that's flat on one side and little facets of prisms on the other. And he could make the lens work. So I looked at that and kind of went, hey, that's great. You have a point source in the lighthouse, the light spreading out, it hits the Fresnel lens and then becomes parallel. And I really said what a great idea for working it backwards. And there's a little slide. Let's start with that one. And so what I did is you look on the upper left, you'll see a kind of a round figure, that's the sun. And when I designed this Fresnel lens, the idea of the old Fresnel lens was to mix up all the wavelengths onto the target and to not get any hotspots. But I kind of thought I'm going to go the other way and I'm going to adjust the turning angles and see if I can resolve the different wavelengths of light on a target and group them. So what you see is a photon of a different wavelength from some spot on the sun, that's at the upper left. It strikes my lens, that's the square to the right of that. And then underneath are the targets. It's one target, but in two photos. And you can see that I've kind of sifted out the high energy photons, the blues and so forth in the center of the target. And I can get the visibles around that center. And then even the long red and infrared around the edge. And that was important to me. I took it to Sandia National Labs and Dr. James took and ran that in fact I was able to separate out the wavelengths. Now back in the day, this is 30 years ago, solar cells were incredibly expensive. So if we could use lenses to put more light of the right wavelength onto those cells, we could get a great increase in the amps coming out. So that was kind of the rationale going into it. But once I started in solar, I was hooked. It just was such a, it's an energy that's already distributed throughout the world. So all we need to do is tap into it. And that eventually led me to the pursuit of trying to find what's the ultimate clean fuel. And I did a little summer study at MIT at the Barker Engineering Library. And I listed every fuel, methane, propane, butane, ethanol, methanol, kerosene, gasoline, everything, and all the characteristics. And I finally got to sort. Okay, what's what we need to feel to be powerful? What's the most powerful fuel? Sort top of list hydrogen. Oh, that's interesting. Well, we need to be safe. So and I put the coefficients in terms of accidents and so forth. So when I sorted that top of the list hydrogen, it's the only thing we know that's lighter than air. It's the only fuel or battery material. And that lighter than air turns out to be really important because if you had a problem, it just flies away straight up. So that was great. And then I thought, well, we need a fuel that's available everywhere in the world. And of course, yep, top of the list hydrogen as you can make it from water. You know, we're mostly made of water. The earth is mostly covered with water. Oh, hey, this is the way to go. Yeah, I was going to figure out why I have you on my show now. Well, you know, energy is a big deal. It's really the most important thing because in the in the economic tree of life, energy is the root. And if your roots are strong, you can handle all kinds of forest fires or deforestation, and you could recover. If your tree and the root is diseased or vulnerable or damaged. Well, your prognosis is not very good. So for me, energy was at the root of it, literally. And that's why I appreciate so much your broadcast because you're getting to this big question in every show you're pointing it out here. You're knocking on the screen and saying, hey, look at this, the physics have something to say. So I really appreciate your your work in that regard. Absolutely. Well, thanks for the background there and I have a question for you about your your for no lens. So, apparently you're focusing so would this have to be a tracking system that if you're going to use that in conjunction with solar panels, you basically have to track the sun to make sure you kept those angles right. That's exactly right. Yeah, in fact, a very tight track about a half a degree. Yeah, so you had to be right on it. But in the day we had trackers we still do. But the industry moved on at the price of electricity rather photovoltaic cells have gone down so much that I moved on from that because really the industry was moving to flat plate and the cost had gone down from, you know, $20 a watt down to now around 40 cents. So a tremendous progress in solar. But tracking PV is always amazed me because it's so much more you get so much more efficiency so much more energy out of it but the one flaw it has is if your tracker doesn't work like you said it's got to be with a half a degree. Yeah, that tracker isn't right on your efficiency goes down to about two or 3% right up near 40 or 30 or 40%. That's right. And an average the typical solar panels now are like 1514 1516% and you know, and that's good enough, you know, like you say the price is right. And it does the job and they're low maintenance and they don't have any moving parts so it works really well. Yeah, very much so when you got the slides for us. So why don't you talk to the slides. Please. Absolutely. Well the first one is dealing with this idea of a silver bullet. I mean, have you ever heard an expert in energy. Come on and say well this is a complex problem. And of course there are no silver bullets. I've had so many times I kind of wondered now wait a second how do you know. I mean if you won't even ask the question how do we know there's not a silver bullet, because if there is a silver bullet and I define that as if I can solve 85% of your problem doing one thing. That's a silver bullet. What I did, if you would throw that slide up the first one there we go. I asked, you know, how would you figure out if there is a silver bullet. And so what I did is I made a list of everything we want. We want an energy system that has no toxicity, no air pollution, no soil pollution, no water pollution, no biological pollution, no endocrine disrupters no organic compounds, no knocks and socks and particulates, no mercury poisoning, no radiation. All of these things we want. And we want it to scale. We want it to be inexpensive. We don't want a lot of rare earth elements. And we want it to be available for all economies to tap into. So when I made this list I kind of thought okay well how are we going to how what are we going to do okay we're going to throw every technology at that list and see what gets through. And of course all the fossil fuels they don't make it because they're toxic. When you when we burn carbon we get all kinds of partially consumed products and hydrocarbons and these very chemically active animals so that didn't work. Nuclear energy doesn't get through it's expensive you have a radiation issue. It's best for centralized large installations and we see the world, just like with computers becoming distributed. In the old days remember the big mainframes it was like a centralized computer system, but the world has gone to decentralized distributed computing. And so when we see that with a power generation that's also the trend. So I took everything we could and the one thing that if I can have a sidebar, the one thing that the world doesn't have and that we need, especially and most of all, is what the world does not have is a standardized industrial battery. The battery is the key here. It's what's going to allow us to go from solar energy and wind energy and other renewables to whenever you want to energy you turn it on on demand and it's there. So the batteries that is the tough question. Now there's a lot of people that that believe that lithium ion is the answer. But there's problems with that it doesn't get through the filter it's very difficult to scale the energy density the specific energy density of lithium ion is about 300 watt hours per kilogram. Well hydrogen is 40,000 watt hours per kilogram. So it to do one megawatt hour, which is 1000 kilowatt hours that's what you see on the bill is the electric bills usually in kilowatt hours. But in the utility scale they work in megawatt hours one megawatt hour of lithium ion would require about 3.6 tons. So that is really a lot of gear a lot of kit just to deal with one megawatt hour in Hawaii you use I believe each year 5,700 gigawatt hours of energy. So you're talking about an enormous amount. 500,000 megawatt hours. It's really a lot of material we need. So it's not going to work with lithium ion. So by doing the silver bullet kind of analysis, it's easy to identify by asking for everything you've got to want it all. If you want a real solution, then that is the standard and the thing that does get through is renewable hydrogen. Now, you know, most hydrogen in the world 95% of this big industry is made by steam reforming methane, which is a fossil fuel. But renewable hydrogen is a different animal. It says specifically we use renewable energy. And then we're going to run an electrolyzer to make hydrogen fuel from water. And the great thing about that is when you use the hydrogen, you get most of the energy out and most of the water back. So there's no toxicity. There's none of the issues that we see when you deal with fossil fuels. So Toby, just to make it really clear to the audience, you're talking about hydrogen as a battery. Yes. So, you know, like right now I can tell you Hawaiian Electric is totally enamored with lithium cobalt technology. And it's like, I'm sure there's, there's a place for some batteries, but you know, lithium cobalt or lithium iron phosphate batteries in the system. But you're talking for the scale that we're really looking at for utility and transportation. There's nothing that comes even close to hydrogen. And, you know, if we if we look at an electric car, there's two types. There's the all battery type, which is what Tesla is pursuing. And then you have the fuel cell vehicles, which are electric vehicles. They use hydrogen as a fuel. The fuel cell takes that hydrogen combines it with oxygen from the air. You get a lot of energy out and water as a waste product. So this is a, this is an approach to the industrial, as you say, the industrial loads. If you have an energy demand that's under 100 kilowatt hours, hey, batteries are just fine. But that's just a small thing for sports cars and that sort of thing. But if you want to get to buses or, you know, trucks and large freight liners and these sort of things, construction equipment, farm equipment, and all battery approach won't even come close. So with a fuel cell, we can do 99% of the energy required to the fuel cell and only 1% a little battery on board that just helps with transitions and so forth. And then you get the best of both worlds. Right. So how about that next slide? Let's let's throw that one out. Okay, so what got through this filter was basically a water cycle. And remember the old commercial when, you know, a guy would round the corner eating a chocolate bar and the other guy'd go the other way around the corner eating peanut butter from a jar. And they run into each other and one guy says, Hey, you got peanut butter in my chocolate. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. And then they take a taste like, Oh, wait, that's not bad. So what I'm going to show now is kind of how we can put these two halves together. So you've got an electrolyzer in my fuel cell and a fuel cell in my electrolyzer. But normally these two guys, these two groups and industries are separate. The car companies are making fuel cells. The electrolyzer companies are making hydrogen stations, making the hydrogen from water. But when you bring them together, something magical happens because they're each one half of the cycle. And how this works is imagine in front of me, I have a metal spring and I want to charge this. It's just a metal spring and I want to charge it up. So I grab one side and I grab the other and I stretch it, I stretch it, I stretch it, I hook one end and I cook the other end and very carefully let go. Now I've charged my spring. Now whenever I need energy, what do I do? I reach over and hook one side and what happens? The spring comes back, releases all that energy and I'm left with the spring. So now this is what we do with water. We're going to do the same thing. So with water, we're going to add energy through an electrolyzer. It's going to stretch it and separate the hydrogen and oxygen. You vent the oxygen, the hydrogen, you'll dry it and filter it and compress it and push it into a tank. And then whenever you need energy, you bring them back together through a fuel cell, they snap back together, they release that energy and we get the water back. And what could be more wonderful than that? So it's a water cycle, it's potent, it's available and everyone can use as much energy as you want and you're not going to hurt anybody. You're not going to hurt any species, you're not going to hurt the environment, you're not going to hurt other humans. So this is the call of our age. This is the big transition that has to come when we finally say goodbye to fossil fuels and go directly into using hydrogen. Because after all, that's where the energy is. You know when you look at fossil fuels, you look at coal. Coal is mostly carbon with some hydrogen stuck to it. Hydrocarbon is hydrogen and carbon. Well, coal has the lowest energy density, it's about 30 megajoules per kilogram. Now when you go to petroleum, the ratio of carbon is going down and the hydrogen is going up and what happens? We get a higher energy density, we get 40 megajoules per kilogram. And then when we look at natural gas, which has the least carbon and the most hydrogen by weight, we have a higher energy density of 55 megajoules per kilogram. And then when you go directly to hydrogen alone, you're at 140 megajoules per kilogram. So the physics is clear. The energy is in the hydrogen. It always has been and always will be. Alright. Hey Toby, we're going to take a quick break here and then we'll come back to slide three and you can keep on your roll because I love what you're saying. You're speaking my language. Aloha, I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man. Talking to Toby Kincaid, I call him Dr. Kincaid, because he's just such a smart guy. Anyway, he had a critique and I hope that the folks at Think Tech think about this. He liked my old Stand the Energy Man leading with all the lightning bolts and all the flashes on the screen because it was a lot more in line with the energy stuff. So it just got to my attention because as we came back from the break, it has the new lead-in for Stand the Energy Man and it does have lightning bolts. So I go, yeah, I kind of like the old one better too, Toby. So back to you. Let's keep on rolling with the hydrogen water battery. Wonderful. Let's grab the next screen, the next slide, and we could kind of look at what this kind of battery looks like. Now all engines and all batteries share three distinct functions. You have an input, you have a storage, and you have an output. You know, with a gasoline engine, the input is all the infrastructure to put gas to bring it to you. And then the storage is how much gas is in your tank and then the output device is the engine itself. Well, so in this next slide, what I'm doing is now we're going to combine the electrolyser and the fuel cell into one system. And on the left, we take in energy from the grid. It's going to go with water to the electrolyzer. We separate into hydrogen and oxygen. Oxygen, you let it go. The hydrogen we dry, filter and store. And then what I'm going to do now is add a fuel cell stack to the power plant, to this pad. And that would allow us to then use the fuel cells to take that hydrogen and energize a couple of things. One, we can energize electric vehicle fast charge dispensers. And that's useful because you don't have to draw the energy from the grid. In Hawaii, that's a big problem. Your grid was one of the earliest in the world, but it's a little bit hodgepodge. Some parts are more developed than others. And this is difficult. I take my hat off to Hiko in the case of actually running that grid, because as you know, in a saltwater environment, in high heat and humidity, very difficult to get electrical equipment to work. But you guys know how to do that. But in this little system, now we have the input device as the electrolyzer. The storage is the hydrogen itself. It's nature's perfect battery. We don't need to invent a new battery. We have one. It's hydrogen. And then on the right hand side, the output device is the fuel cell. So now as one unit, you can use this little power center to either distribute hydrogen fuel. Bring that out to a dispenser, or you just keep it in the system and use it when you're at peak time to run your fast charge stations for the electric vehicles. Or if your grid was in trouble and it had a big peak demand, we could even dispatch energy back through the fuel cell and electricity back to the grid. So here we have kind of a universal power system. And this is what we're working on here in Portland. So we're behind. We don't have a hydrogen fueling station in Oregon yet. I don't even think in Washington there's one. Now we have them in California. There's, there's some in lower California in LA and then you go up to Sacramento. There's a few there, but there it stops. So we're working on a proposal to take this power center and put one near the Southern border next to California, put a station there and then put one up here in Portland. And this would allow people to go from LA all the way up to Portland. And then up by five, we could go up to Seattle as well with a few more stations. And so that's what we're trying to rally around. And I found a brilliant EPC, an engineering procurement construction firm called EV4 founded by Hans Fandomier. He builds dozens of electric vehicle charging stations. He knows everything about charging stations. And he looked at this technology and said, well, that would be useful. So he's going to be doing the engineering with EV4 and we'll have this proposal and the engineering done in a month or two with the virus, probably two months, maybe three. But our goal is to put the station in before the end of the year somewhere in Oregon, hopefully in several locations. So that would use this kind of approach so that we could distribute hydrogen fuel to the fuel cell cars and buses and as well as electric fast charge as well. And all of the energy we take from the grid, we're going to run the electrolyzers from a nine o'clock at night, all during off peak, all the way to three in the afternoon. And then you have any overage of solar or wind that gets thrown off the system. No, no, no, we're going to take it all. We'll take it will absorb every bit of it and make clean hydrogen fuel and put it in the tanks and hold it and tell there's a demand for it and then we'll use it. Yeah, people don't realize that the electric company when you have so much renewable solar and wind. They get overwhelmed. They can't use all of that. In fact, it's very much like the oil issue we're having currently where for the first time in history, they'll pay you to take their oil because they have a glut of oil right now as opposed to 1972 where OPEC was cutting production. And we were we were basically rationing gasoline in 1972. And the price was going through the roof. So you can you can take that curtailed electricity that normally would just be basically thrown away and you can turn it into stored energy and put it into your system. Absolutely. And that's a key point. In fact, that is that approach is what's going to balance the grid, because what you described just happened in California. The biggest event was last year around April. You know, in California, it's sunny weather, but it wasn't very hot in April. So nobody really turned on air conditioning. And they had 160,000 megawatt hours of overage of overproduction. And the price went down and down and down in the market. And they finally convinced Arizona to take it for three cents. So they paid Arizona to take all of this power. It's exactly what you're talking about. So we want to turn the table and say, no, no, no, don't don't turn it off. Don't curtail it. Don't waste it. We'll absorb it and turn it into hydrogen and and hold it. And hydrogen, as you know, is stable. It's so safe. You can keep hydrogen in a tank. I think decades without appreciable degradation. That's how stable it is. And it's as you pointed out in some of your shows, I love it when you talk about safety, because hydrogen being lighter than air. It's a very big deal. And, you know, if you stood next to a propane tank and somebody lit a cigarette, I'd say put that out. Because if there's any breach in propane, because it's heavier than air, it'll just pool around the tank. And if you get any spark, kaboom. But a hydrogen tank, you could light a cigarette right next to it. And I wouldn't worry a bit because if you had a breach, that hydrogen's going straight up so fast, it'll never get to your cigarette. So there really is an intrinsic safety factor by going to hydrogen. And the world has been doing industrial hydrogen for 100 years. Their track record is impeccable. Amazing safety. They engineered it very carefully and properly. And it's very impressive. And I know you have a lot of experience working with with hydrogen. And it's, I'm sure you can attest that you haven't had any problems. You're working just fine with it. Yeah, in fact, I'm going to down the road. I was talking to Paul Ponio from Blue Planet Research and we've got a demonstration we want to do where we're going to put hydrogen in a balloon and put a igniter inside. And, and you'll be able to see the igniter flashing, but it won't set it on fire. Then we're going to introduce a little bit of air into the hydrogen and a little oxygen in the mix and do the same thing. And then we're going to have the boom of the century when that balloon goes off. So we're going to, we're going to do that to show people that pure hydrogen is extremely safe. I'm not a math wizard, but you're only not even halfway through your slides and it's already 30 minutes. Oh, I'm sorry. No, it's don't be sorry. What I want to ask you is right here on the air. Well, can you come back next week and we'll do the rest of the slide? Love to. Absolutely. Yeah, the deal. Excellent. So for everybody out there watching, be ready next week, Tuesday, Toby will come back on and and we'll wrap up his slides and it's been a fascinating discussion. Really appreciate your insight and your clarity. You just, you know, take that that number two slide you had with the list of, you know, hierarchy list of what we really need and and what makes the top of the list all the time. I think we could show that to everybody on the planet and and get their head out of their keyster because we really need to get this stuff moving. But thanks Toby, we'll bring you back on next week Tuesday, same time, same station and and we'll talk about the water battery and, you know, how we can really get the whole world sustainable and no more wars because everybody has hydrogen. It's all over the place. And we can, we can probably do world peace and world energy at the same time. If you have sunlight and water, you have everything you need. There you go. Okay, well thanks everyone for joining Stan energy man this week and until next week we'll have to be concave on again, and we'll finish up talking about how we can save the world and do what every Miss America promises with starting world peace. If you just go with hydrogen. So until next week Tuesday, a little hot from Stan energy man.