 Welcome to Stand the Energy Man on another beautiful day in Honolulu. In fact, today is so beautiful, it's a holiday. I went surfing this morning for the first time in a long time and it feels really, really good. So anyway, welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. We're going to start off today with an email that I got from a friend on the Big Island. Introducing me to some videos from the University of Minnesota professor, Dr. Nate Huggins. I'm going to try and get him on my show sometime soon. I don't know when, but it can't be soon enough. I watched these videos several times and I'll try to take his beautiful analysis of the connection between energy and economics and present them to you today. But you really should look at his videos and they're going to be posted on the site there. You can actually pull them down from the ThinkTech site when you go and look at the show here. He says that we are all energy blind and he's very, very correct. He makes the point that economic economists don't have the energy in any of their models, but he notes that there is a very close correlation between things like GDP and other critical economic data points and energy. He tells you why and I'm going to try and, with some help today, tell you why also. For example, in Congress, there's much talk about the Green New Deal and some call it brilliant and some call it kind of BS. I hate to sound wishy-washy, but it's actually both. There's some changes on the horizon that we can plan for and we can plan for or ignore them. That's the decline of cheap fossil fuel. AOC has reacted in the frame of climate change, but at least she's got the part about burning fossil fuels right. It's not a matter of CO2 causing the world to heat up. It's not even a question of if we'll run out of fossil fuels, which is a scary thing for many industries today. But more a matter of when will it become too expensive to buy fossil fuels? Think of all the products made from oil. It's simply supply and demand. Right now we're just burning it because it's like burning monopoly money. It's cheap, it's easy. Right now we have no other choices of energy other than fossil fuels. They're cheap and they're plentiful. We take the energy for granted. But when oil starts to hit $150 a barrel or more, and gas and diesel are up in excess of $20 a gallon, every single product and service on the global economy will feel the impact. And if we don't have alternatives, we're simply screwed. But are we going to give up travel? As my favorite Hawaiian senator said recently to our colleague, so how will I get from my home state to Washington D.C.? Apparently Congresswoman Cortez missed the geographic point that the 50th state in the U.S. has a 2500 mile moat built around it, and if ships and airplanes aren't on the table, Hawaii has some huge issues to address, like who's going to stay in Waikiki? And how will I get my toilet paper? So the good side of the Green New Deal is that we need to face the reality that fossil fuels are too valuable to be burning for energy for very much longer. But the bad part is that if you don't understand the economic connection between energy and economics and what it takes to get by today, you can really dork things up. We need a strategic plan, a transition to the future. An energy future that has fossil fuels off the table and trying to transition them is unrealistic. An unrealistic timeline is just not going to work. This means not letting the price points drive decisions for short-term gain. So here's some of the links to the shows, and we'll put them on the website, but bottom line is when I go to conferences and I talk about hydrogen and what it means to use hydrogen to store energy, a lot of people go, oh, it's too expensive and we can't do it right now because it doesn't compete with fossil fuels. Well, the question is, are we going to wait for the price point so fossil fuels are more expensive than hydrogen before we start trying to replace over 100 years of electrical infrastructure and fossil fuel infrastructure to make that change? The answer is I hope not, because I don't think our world economy can handle a shock. Anyway, on today's show we'll talk about this with Mr. Ryan Wibbins, my favorite electrical engineer from Burns and McDonald, and Ryan, welcome to the show again. What do you think about that? Yeah, it's very important to look ahead if you're going to have a deep-eating resource in the future on how you're going to replace that. When we talk about it from an energy standpoint, we understand that to replace a generation source we have to make something else. That's easy, but it costs energy to replace it. So just saying that we're going to replace our current generation because maybe the price at this point is getting too high, we are losing the amount of resource we have, so demand is staying high, but supply is going down, that price gap will start to drive up the cost of energy. Well, now we have expensive energy. We need to start replacing it. Well, to make the new stuff it's going to cost more energy to make the new resource, a solar panel costs energy to make. The cost of energy, when you think about it from an economical standpoint, there is this return on investment, there's this return on energy that you get when you make something. When we're using oil in the early days, put your finger in the ground, it was like oil is just squirting out. As we know, that will get harder over time. When that exact point is going to happen is obviously debated by many different people. I don't really, I think everyone is saying, yeah, that eventually you could use it all by night amount. When we think about energy from a return on energy that you get, think about it like there's a dollar on the ground picking up that dollar is very easy. You'll do that. There's even sometimes there's these calculations with multi-billionaire people like Jeff Bezos or something. If you saw a $20 bill on the ground, it's not worth this time. I've got other stuff I can do to make more than $20. So for us, because I don't make billions or that kind of money, what if it's a quarter, a penny, you'll have a penny. You've got to bend down and try 100 times to pick up that penny. Are you going to do it? At some point, you're going to say, no, that's not worth my time. Energy is the same way. Right now you go into the ground and you pull something out. The return on energy investment is something like 100 fold for oil, natural gas. That can decrease. If you go into different environments, something like Canada, it's a much lower threshold. You don't have the energy to get the energy out of the ground. It's still worth your time right now. That metric will change. Different technologies can help you out and help get you back to making it easier to go down and get that quarter or to get that dollar. I don't have to go 100 times to get that penny, but eventually in theory, yeah, it'll become very difficult. Right now the US is kind of focusing on our own internal sources of natural gas and oil. We're actually kind of putting the kibosh on coal a little bit. We have these resources available right now and everybody thinks we'll not run out of them. But when you look at how the future is shaping, the future is going to be electric transportation. Cars are going to start becoming electrified instead of fossil fuel. And you have this dynamic, and this is where this title of show comes from, equals not equivalent. You know, energy is, your first law of thermodynamics is like, you can have energy in all different forms. It never goes away, it just changes form. But you can't eat money. And you can't put dollar bills in a fuel tank in a gas engine and make it run. And you can't, you know, the different ways you have economic inputs and energy into a system matter. But right now we're pretty much so focused on fossil fuels that we don't have that replacement. And as you mentioned, not only does the infrastructure get expensive as the price of your fossil fuel gets higher and higher and you're trying to bring in the new technology, but think of all the other associated industries. You know, we used to have thousands of people working a few acres of land to grow a crop. Now you have six people working a thousand acres of land and they have big combines and big equipment and they can do it. A family can run a thousand acre farm in the Midwest and make money on it and get it going. That's five people. Well, big cities would starve to death if a bunch of those farmers couldn't farm for a couple weeks because they didn't have oil or couldn't run their equipment. And those kind of relationships, I mean, you order an Amazon Prime and expect the thing there the next day. Well, if airline prices go up higher and higher and air freight prices go up pretty soon, the cost of freight to ship your stuff is going to be, like here in Hawaii it already is, more expensive than what you're buying. I've ordered some $30 worth of stuff and it cost me $30 to ship it. In fact, just last week I sent two envelopes to the mainland and Express and it cost me $33 for one and $29 for the other one. And it was two envelopes, I mean, two legal size envelopes. It's like, there is so much economically tied to the cost of fuel today and that insidious price rise is kind of blinding us to a potential disaster because the U.S. is doing well right now. We have a lot of our own resources in Alaska, on the Conus, in from Canada, but we take them for granted. What if something happens where they're not available? Then what? And even just the incremental increase, are we going to wait until hydrogen is so much cheaper than fossil fuel that we start infrastructure? Then your formula kicks in where the infrastructure gets more and more expensive to replace it. You may never catch up and the economic impact can be huge. Yeah, it can be huge. And then an imbalance is a place that you don't want to be in, which is some of the driving reasons for us going back and relying on our own resources. We've experienced in our own history that when we lose these lack of energy resources being imported, the amount of impact that it can have on our own economy. Looking back internal, that's one way to buffer yourself from that, but then just because there's not a political reason or a physical reason that it can still come out of the ground, there are different ways natural disasters being one that we can be cut off from our own supply very quickly. And that imbalance is what would start to cause the problem. Yeah, and a true crisis will make you react. I mean, it definitely will. Nowadays, the big crisis is climate change. So I pulled this off the internet two days ago. American energy surges despite climate change concerns. What was that one more time? Energy. American energy use surges despite climate change concerns. Yeah. Right off the internet. I mean, with everybody talking climate change, with all the angst that President Trump got for pulling out of the Paris Accords, with all of the politicians jumping on and saying, we're going to tackle this ourselves, we're still using more energy. And like I said with transportation, with 5G coming on board, electricity is going to be more required in our grid, in our system to charge vehicles to take care of a new technology that comes on board. So we're adding to the energy requirement. We're trying to transition to also free solar wind and things like that. And we're going to try to absorb the entire transportation sector and agriculture sector and everything else that uses fossil fuels. We can't be waiting, you know. We don't need a crisis to hit us between the eyes. The economy should be picking up on this trend and letting stock market and investors realize that we need to make this investment now to make it so that we have a stable market, things keep going about the way they do. We're not reacting to a real crisis like boom, all of a sudden Middle East gets in such a big turmoil that none of that oil is leaving anywhere because all the infrastructure is gone and the whole world is fighting for American oil or natural gas and the price starts driving up. Sure. So I had a very quick point I was going to make. We love consuming energy. Everything new that comes to us is a great way for us to consume more energy. Cell phones we just draw the line of one much energy a cell phone draws. It's very little power. Plugging it into the wall for 30 minutes and it's charged up all day if you got a phone a lot better than mine. I'm more of a half day kind of guy. That's a little bit of energy. But now what are you doing with that? You're on the internet more. You're taking pictures and now all of our pictures are stored. All of the emails being passed all of this computing power is happening at large data centers or these cloud based computing places. These are energy monsters. Now the people putting these in are becoming very aware and wanting to build a renewable infrastructure around them. But that cell phone those pictures you're taking the emails you're sending that's where the energy is being consumed by the computing power somewhere else. Not just the little wall socket. And not just the computing power but to keep our equipment cool because you can't let it get hot or it shuts down. We're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back in 60 seconds to talk a little bit more with Ryan Wibman. Hello, hi, and Mabuhay. My name is Emmy Ortega Anderson inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with Think Tech Hawaii. We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen for our mission of empowerment. We aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, Maraming, Salamat Po, Mabuhay, and Aloha. Aloha, I'm Lauren Pair a host here at Think Tech Hawaii a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii non-profit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you'd go to ThinkTechHawaii.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Hey, welcome back to Stand on the Energy Man on a beautiful Friday here in Hawaii. Not on my lunch hour today, and let's pick up kind of where we left off. I used to do this actually two weeks ago. I talked a little bit about this because I was still watching those videos from my professor Hagen's. He had a slide in there. By the way, he's kind of a farmer. He grows his own food and has his own property and stuff. He's pretty self-sufficient. He had a picture of himself with a Dutch boy haircut and shorts and white legs and shoes and socks kind of comical. He had a little one-tenth over his head and behind him is his draft horse that he uses, he says, when he can get him to move to do some of the work around the farm. So that horse represents one horsepower and he represents one-tenth of one horsepower. And behind the horse is a quad, you know, the side-by-side off-road vehicle that you can load stuff in the back and then two people can drive around. That's 45 horsepower and then he had his truck which I thought had more horsepower but it's a diesel truck and has 150 horsepower. And he points out that, you know, back 200, 300 years ago all we had was pretty much manual labor and animal labor. So we're talking one horsepower or less until you multiplied out the number of animals or people that you had working. And that's the maximum amount of energy you could get applied towards any kind of work moving, putting in fence posts, moving rocks, moving trailers or carts or things. Just moving, moving yourself from point to point. But as the industrial age kicked in, now we had gasoline-powered or coal-powered steam engines for like locomotives and trains and vehicles that all have this enormous amount of extra power, the ability to do a lot more work in a shorter period of time, which is, if you take the definition of horsepower, it's a factor of amount of energy you have and amount of time that you applied to doing work. You can get a lot more work done in a shorter time with a lot more horsepower. Well, what I didn't notice on that same slide, later on he actually adds an airplane and that's 100,000 horsepower. He says, next time you're flying across the US down at all the nice scenery, just realize that the energy it's taking to get you from point to point is massive and you should be appreciating it and not just bitching about the price of the ticket because it's actually a lot of energy going into making that pretty much marvelous thing that the Wright brothers started off with 100 years ago into what it is today with four or 500 mile an hour transportation. So, when it comes to other modes of transportation we talked a little bit offline about boats and I sent you an article that I got about some folks trying to look at electric ships and you had some comments on that. Yeah, when we talk energy and amount of energy it takes to move to tie into our first half we're saying that we love consuming energy but right now we have this deep and high return on investment type of energy so we are able to do things just amazing. When we want to look at what it would take to convert off of that we started talking about a ship and an electric boat we get to a very large vessel a containerized vessel so I had an article that I love because I like talking numbers and we were talking about a little bit back and forth about the amount of energy actually consumed on a boat in a diesel tank and then comparing that to what it would be in our current battery format and seeing how those two compare so do you have some of the numbers you can share a little bit? Yeah, actually this article it has and it's pretty concise here so they're describing the current container ship that they call the OOCL, Hong Kong holds a record 21,413 40 foot containers and it cruises at the super slow gaming rate of 16 knots that's a fuel savings rate these ships can make their journey from Hong Kong to Hamburg, Germany in 31 days so now they look at a brand new ship called the Yara Birkland it can carry 120 of those containers at a speed of 6 knots and as far as it can go is 30 nautical miles and it will carry let me see batteries it carries are 7 to 9 megawatt hours worth of energy stored and the other ship just by comparison can carry 150 times the number of cargo containers a distance of 400 times farther at a speed of over twice as fast but the weight penalty weight you can't possibly put that many batteries on a ship to move those distances and those speeds without taking all the other containers off but at a certain point all you're doing is driving a ship full of batteries and not a whole lot of cargo so that gives you a good visual feel for how much density there is in the fossil fuels we use today that we take for granted it's incredibly energy rich and that's what's done so well for us 100 years is the easy return I'm going to grab something and use it and we're still in that time right now so we're looking at a ship that would take 150 times less cargo and an absolute magnitude higher on the energy consumption so we get into this problem we want to switch but how are we going to do that with the diesel and batteries that we've been using your double A's, triple A's even in some of the cars being used now if you really want to get to what I would say the larger use batteries they have their use even on the grid we have some use for batteries but it's not it's not our magic bullet I mean this is some quick math and even if you put in a learning curve on how much better can we get the theoretical limit on how much better we're going to get and we're not too far off of what that will be that's chemistry and science in the way there so it's not that for that application we need energy dense in this case energy dense transportable fuel that's what's made the ship move right now the other part that it is is the cost aspect we know that that's going to shift in the future this is a look the battery is not going to be the energy medium for high energy dense transportable fuel the math is not there we said hydrogen hydrogen is close if not more energy dense than diesel it so it's you have a model that can be proven just by energy now it's a matter of being prepared for the economics to shift and that's where they're not there right now we're picking up orders $20 bills off the ground right now not penny what is going to make that shift hopefully it's not a crisis hopefully it's something a little bit more planned that will allow that change to take place but I think for hydrogen's goal you can take incremental steps to get there right now I think reformation with natural gas making hydrogen is a very logical first step keep the price down for now and use a resource we're used to and it's still cleaner than burning fossil fuel even though it's a fossil fuel they're starting with it's easier to sequester the carbon from that process and things like that maybe use that carbon for carbon fiber and other things nano structures there's some things happening right now I just talked to a friend of mine who makes electrolyzers and he says they've gotten the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water and DC power down to about $10 a kilogram $10 a kilogram that's around $5 a gallon between $4 and $5 a gallon well we're not real far from that right now and the price of gas creeping up over the summer could easily hit those kind of mark so even if you talk about price point we're right there already that's probably a good signal that we could start doing this another thing is we could look at hybrid vehicles and focus on them we could also look at hydrogen in internal combustion engines now there's some tricks to doing that and I've actually worked with some folks on doing that and it's not easy, most of the folks that try and use hydrogen in internal combustion engines run into hydrogen is energy dense by weight but not by volume so when you try and push enough hydrogen into a cylinder to give you the bang for the buck it's really hard to do but there are ways to do it you have to change the dynamic in the engine, in other words change the timing you have to inject the hydrogen under pressure or under stroke, detonate it in a stratified mixture and make the engine work and there's people doing that with diesel engines that actually get better performance out of the diesel engine with hydrogen and with diesel so with all the internal combustion engines in the world today there's a couple ways we could start transitioning to hydrogen internal combustion engines converting them to hybrid and you go straight to fuel cells but they all involve hydrogen so we ought to start looking at that yeah, that's very realistic that's pretty neat combustion engines drive just about everything right now so the opportunities are everywhere well that's good to do it for this week in Stanley Energy Man thanks again to Ryan for being here on the show and we'll see you next week, Allah