 It's Friday afternoon and you know what that means. It means Hawaii, the state of clean energy. And here we are. I have a cast of thousands today. So we have Peter Rossig from the Hawaiian Electric Company. He's got some great news. I've got Scott Higgins who works with me at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. He's got some excellent news. And of course we have Jay Fidel who's my overseer for today. And he's doing some QA on me and he's he's going to help me handle our guests today. Okay, I have regards for you Mitch from Sharon Moriwaki. I spoke to her a little while ago and she sends regards. Remember that she is the progenitor of this program. She is overarching on all of us. Right. So first of all we're going to talk to Peter. And Peter's got some great news about some new, you know, the latest state of play for the renewable portfolio standards for Hawaiian Electric. And Peter, why don't you tell us your good news? Well, the good news is that we have sent to the Public Utilities Commission for review eight new contracts for new renewable energy and storage facilities. The result of our, the second phase of our RFP. In total if all of these projects come to fruition we will, it will be the largest single procurement of renewable energy in the Hawaiian Islands, about 300 megawatts of solar capacity, about 2,000 megawatt hours of storage capacity, six of these projects are on Oahu, two of them are on Maui. We have some other projects that are still under negotiation. So the total of this tranche may increase, but we're still pretty, pretty proud of this. And we're optimistic that the commission will approve it. If all of them, as I say, come to fruition, it'll increase our RPS, our renewable portfolio standard by about nine percentage points. So we think we'll be at 30% by the end of this year. And within about two and a half, three years, when these other projects come online, we will be at 39 or so percent. Assuming all goes well. And so this is a substantial increase. This is nine percent increase in renewables, isn't that right? Nine percentage points, 30 to 39. Right. And you know, we were just talking earlier, when you think about the fact that a little over 10 years ago, we were at eight percent, nine percent. We have come in about 10 years to about 30%, roughly tripling. We'll go up for another third within about a year and a half, two years, when these projects come online. So, you know, this is really pretty dramatic and it's pretty exciting for us. So there's a couple of good things about it. I mean, one is AES is coming off its coal arrangement. And you're going to replace all that coal out there at Campbell with renewables. That's a good step, isn't it? It is. It is. Obviously, the coal is a big cause of emissions and climate change. We're glad the contract is coming to an end and we're glad not to renew that contract. Over on Maui, the Kahului power plant's been around a long time, 38 megawatts or so of oil fire generation. It's done its service and now it's time to retire it. So these projects will allow that to happen without any deterioration of service because we'll have generation, but we'll also have storage. So we'll have kind of two sorts of storage. One is what we call load shifting, which means you accumulate power during the day when the sun is shining and you're able to use it from five to nine at night when most people are using electricity. And we also have what we call fast frequency or contingencies. That means that if there's a problem on the system, you have about a half an hour of battery storage that can be instantly put into the system. And that gives our system up. Here's half an hour to figure out the problem and figure out how to solve it without deteriorating service. So that sounds like a replacement of the technology in the peaking plant at Kapolei, sort of a battery solution to peaking. Exactly, exactly right. So it allows us to maintain the system and have the assurance that we can, instead of just starting up a peaking unit, which is usually diesel and very expensive and very much a generator of emissions, we can do it using the storage that we have available on the system. There'll be some of that on Maori and some of that here. So Peter, what's the mix on these various new contracts? Is it all solar? Is it a combination of renewables? What is it? It's all solar. One of the systems that we have allowed for is a standalone storage system here on Oahu. And then there are two others that are not part of this aid I've been talking about that Hawaiian Electric is going to build. And those are both standalone storage as well. But eight of the nine projects that we are are some sort of seven of the eight projects we're sending to the commission. We have sent to the commission this week are solar, various sizes, but pretty large and pretty good prices too. Not quite what they were at the first level, but they're going to enable us to reduce the bills on Maori on Oahu, not a huge amount, but by about a dollar a month. So what's the range of cost per megawatt hour? You know, it goes from about 10 to 12. That's a great improvement. That's a terrific improvement. Before the pandemic, we were paying about 15 cents a kilowatt hour for oil fire generation. It's come down now because the demand for oil worldwide has come down and so prices have come down a small silver line to this this ugly pandemic. But still the prices are very good compared to what we would typically be paying for a kilowatt hour of oil fire generation. Are these all going to be contracted out to contractors, developers, or are some of them going to be handled by in-house, so to speak, by Hawaiian Electric? All of the generation, all of the solar facilities are going to be independent power producers and the big standalone storage here in Oahu will be a standalone, will be an independent power producer. The two projects that Hawaiian Electric is building, one is on Maori, one is on Hawaii Island and those are our company's bill. They were chosen through competitive bidding, but our company was able to bid into the process and we're very careful to make sure that the bidding team is not part of any other information flow. So they were, they're fully competitive with everybody else that was trying to do that. You know, Peter, you mentioned in the course that this is going to take two or three years before it all gets online and that is actually a perfect time frame because I don't want to tell you anything you don't know, but we're in the middle of COVID right now and COVID has a way of gumming everything up. So, you know, you go through the approval process, you organize these projects, developers organize these projects. The building doesn't take that long once you get them organized and then two or three years from now, presumably, I assume this is in the analysis, presumably we're beyond COVID. That's beyond COVID, BC, beyond COVID. Yeah, I think that's obviously that does throw a potential monkey wrench into the end of the works, but, you know, there's there are many things that can can cause delays, including, you know, insufficient panels and this and that and so forth. Any big construction project has inherent risks. You know, so we're that's kind of built into the system that we hope that the COVID pandemic will disappear as a risk factor sooner rather than later. You and seven billion others. Exactly. Good company to be in, I think. Those are all the questions I have, Peter. Thank you very much. All right. Well, thank you for that. Yeah, Mitch, what's up? I just wanted to know what kind of job creation or maintenance, you know, keeping existing jobs? What's the kind of employment fixture on this? I don't have hard numbers on that, but obviously, it's a big construction. 300 megawatts of solar is a big construction project, you know, parceled out among the seven or eight companies. The building, the batteries, the battery energy systems are is also a big thing. After they're built, they tend not to take a lot of maintenance, you know, so that it's not a long term thing. But in terms of the next year or two, again, one of the things that's important to us is to try to help restore the economy here and get us going again. And these projects will definitely contribute to that. That's great. So I just want to get one final plug in. So thank you so much for keeping the lights on, keeping my computer still going after all these months working at home. So it's really great that you guys are... You do it all for you, Mitch. You're the only customer we've got, so we do it all for you. You know, amen to that, Peter. I get up in the morning. I mean, I swear to you, this is true. I get up in the morning every day. I turn the switch on and the lights go on and I say, okay, all right, I want an electric, okay. Thank you guys. Have a nice rest of your conversation here. I'll be listening in to hear about it, but I'll disappear now and leave it to you guys to talk about the fuel cell electric bus, which I'm interested into. Take care. Thank you, Peter. Thanks, Peter. So I'm ready now. Yeah, okay. So I'll reintroduce my good friend and colleague, Scott Higgins, who was the driving force behind this fantastic project that we've been doing for the last how many years? Like six years or so. It's taken us a long time, both from the point of view of developing the technology, going through all the testing. And then ultimately, we decided to try to patent this thing. And I think it took us about at least two years, maybe three years, to go through the patenting process, which is not a simple thing. And this is like a pretty sophisticated piece of technology. But we eventually, we just got the patent, what, about two months ago now, maybe three months ago. And of course, we, we as through the University of Hawaii. And so we want to be able to license this out to people who need this. So I've, you know, we've called this, the title for this project is a fuel cell electric bus face mask. And so you may be wondering, why did we call this technology a face mask? Well, I'll steal a little bit of thunder from you, Scott. I mean, the fuel cell is an air breather. So that's where it gets its oxygen from. So it's breathing in all this air, just like we do. And there's lots of contamination in the air, not necessarily COVID, but all sorts of bad stuff. So I'm going to turn that over to Scott, who is the brains behind all of this, all the technology you see was all Scott's doing. He did a great job. So Scott, tell us about, first of all, just tell us what sort of horrible things there are in the atmosphere for fuel cells. That's a good question, Mitch. Essentially, like you said, a fuel cell is an air breather. It takes air to run at most fuel cells. And we get that air from the atmosphere. And the only thing that we want in that air is air. And anything extra will impede the practicality and use of the fuel cell. So if we have contaminants in the air, those contaminants will make their way into the fuel cell. And if they do, they'll reduce this performance. And so what we've essentially got is the potential for poisoning of the fuel cell. What's a contaminant, Scott? What is it? It's essentially anything other than oxygen. And so obviously there's nitrogen in air as well, but that's inert. So that just passes right through and it doesn't react or have any negative impacts on the fuel cell. But once we start getting other air particles in there, like SO2 or NO2 or nitric oxide or essentially anything in the atmosphere that's not oxygen or nitrogen, those are potential contaminants. And some of them are worse than others like SO2 will make its way into the fuel cell and it will chemically adhere to the catalysts on the surface of the fuel cell. And when it does that, it will physically block that active reaction site from reacting. And so each molecule that gets absorbed onto the surface of the catalyst is reducing the effectiveness of that fuel cell by some small percentage. And what's that permanent damage to the fuel cell? That's a good question. So there's ongoing research in that area. And some contaminants will adsorb and they will desorb quickly, depending on what's going on. Some of them will covalently bond to the surface. And when that happens, it is there forever. And there are some techniques that people are looking at in order to clean up those surfaces, but it's essentially blocked forever. So we've had sensors around for a long time to sense sulfur and other contaminants like that. And the university has worked with that in other contexts, I know. But what took you so long? My boss was taking so long, Mitch. Well, we're really serving a need. So as engineers, we fix problems. And the problem that came to us was the problem of running a fuel cell bus in Havo, the national park on the big island. And the goal was to run this fuel cell bus on this island that was erupting SO2 into the atmosphere. And if we just took a fuel cell vehicle and put it in the park and we ran it around there, what would happen is it would suck the SO2 in with the air in order to function. And that SO2 would covalently bond to the catalyst surface. And it would essentially be dead in the water in no time. And so what we came up with was a device that essentially turns a fuel cell vehicle into a smart vehicle that understands its environment and can react to it. And so it was really just solving a problem that popped up is why we came up with it now. How do I screen SO2 out? How do I have a filter of some kind? Or do I change the way the fuel cell operates in general? Both. The answer is both. So when you have high concentrations of SO2, we do have air filters that can filter out the SO2. But it's very difficult to balance how much air makes its way through the filter and the concentration of SO2 that gets absorbed. So if you push air with SO2 through a filter very quickly, well, the SO2 will not get bound up by the filter and it will just make its way through. And a fuel cell like the ones that we operate in the parks require 2,200 liters per minute of air. So it's a huge amount of air that needs to go through there. And if we try and just clean up the SO2, some of the SO2 will blow right through the filter, getting into the fuel cell. And then also that filter will be getting accumulation of the contaminants. And once it's completely full of contaminants, the SO2 will just go right through. So part of the technology is understanding the capacity of the filter and having a real-time alarm that will show you how full that filter is so that you can change it out at exactly the right time. So one last question before I stop interrupting Mitch. You have a patent and the university helped you get the patent. It's to their credit, the Office of Technology Transfer and all that. But I guess the question I have is what is the art here? What are you protecting? What is the patent that makes it different from other patents? Well, it's a good question. So the art here is in the details of protecting the fuel cell. So what we're doing is creating this sensor system that, like I said, understands the capacity of the filter. It also understands the external environment that the fuel is getting pulled from. And it's taking both of those inputs of data and it's running them to the control system on the bus so that in a scenario that the filter can handle, the filter is used in a scenario that the filter can't handle, the battery is used, the backup battery on the bus. And so it's really the integration and the control systems that is the IP. Got it. So the software and the control system driven by the software and fed by the sensors. Yes, exactly. And it's a smart system. In other words, as you said, the driver has a constant display showing how well this filter is working like Scott said. And then when it reaches a certain level, it's like the yellow light comes on or he's like, uh-oh, you know, it's starting to clog up. And then there are a lot of things he can do. The system, if it gets too bad, will automatically stop the fuel cell, like Scott said. And then you ride through this cloud of pollution on your battery or be able to get back to base so you're not like dead in the water. But if you still have some time, you can ride through it and then continue on your mission. And the other thing is we've also allowed to be able to have two air filters. One is you're using it and then the other one's a hot spare and the system will automatically switch over to the fresh filter that's available. And so that allows you to complete your mission, i.e. transport people through the park in this case. Or if you're running a bus company, you know, your buses aren't falling out of the sky because the fuel cells clogging up. For example, in a place like Beijing or in some places in India, or you can hardly see your hand in front of your face if the pollution is so bad. Or Seattle. Or Seattle. Or now with all the, you know, with all the forest fires in California, this is like a new app for us. So, you know, like your fire trucks, for example, your fire truck goes into one of these areas, it's sucking all this bad stuff into the, in this case, into their engines. But it could be a fuel cell fire truck at some point in the future. So this requires some kind of special installation. I mean, do I have to get down there and, you know, with a crew for three days or a week and install it special? Or is it just a little box that I connect to a few things and bingo, it works? So, fuel cell vehicles right now are running blind, which means that they're sucking air out of the environment and they have no idea what's in the air. And they have no idea if their filter is actually effectively pulling contaminants out of the atmosphere. So our, our concept here is to protect fuel cells. And like Mitch can tell you, fuel cells are very expensive. So once you invest in one, you want to make sure the longevity of that fuel cell isn't short. And so in the areas that you're talking about, this is where our application will work best. And so in order to install it, we're going to have to work with the companies and the fuel cell vehicles to bring the technology in. But it's possible to integrate into both vehicles that are run by fuel cells and stationary fuel cells. Any idea of the cost for a given vehicle? It's a good question. I'm going to give it to the CEO here. Well, this was a prototype development. So the bottom line is no, we don't have a cost for that yet. I mean, going forward, there's things we want to do with it. For example, we want to miniaturize it more and make it like a product, like you said. And so we've been working with one major company on a parallel projects, but, but that experience got us together with them. We have this relationship with this huge company that makes these sensors. So yeah, we don't have it yet. But these are fitted on two of the volcano buses that were gifted to the county of Hawaii Mass Transit Agency. So we're actually going to be having them out deployed. And they're totally fitted out with data acquisition. So we'll be able to track, you know, how well they work, and what breaks, what doesn't break, and look for areas where we can reduce costs. So it's still very much in that kind of a phase. So it's not a product, it's not an off-the-shelf product yet. It strikes me that, you know, of course, the initial purpose here in the volcano, you have serious contaminants, but there'll always be some contaminants, and there'll always be some benefits. So if I were a hydrogen bus manufacturer, or if I, you know, created the, what do you call it, the fuel cell part of a hydrogen bus, I would say, well, I can, I can sell more. I can have a longer life, you know, more sustainable, more efficient. If I, if I build this kind of device right into my bus with every hydrogen bus, with every fuel cell hydrogen bus, I would put this, this box in there, and I would connect it up, and nobody would have to come after it, you know, and connect it for me. It would be there. It would be standard operating equipment. What do you think about that? Fuel cell companies warranty their fuel cells. So when a fuel cell goes down and goes bad, it costs manufacturers a lot of money. And so I think you're hitting the nail on the head with that, in that a fuel cell manufacturer wants to protect their own product for as long as possible, at least through the warranty period. And this is one way to do it. Yeah, it's like, it's like when you, you buy certain equipment here, your home, your home. So you put the fire detection systems in your, in your home, all of a sudden your premium goes down. Okay, so that warranty would go down. We're putting it another way. It's more profitable for the person selling the warranty. Now, so if I were selling warranties about this, I would insist on having this because that would make the risk under the warranty less and potentially very much less. Well, exactly. So for example, right now, fuel cells have been documented being able to operate for, they have over 30,000 hours on a fuel cell. Now, how much longer could that fuel cell last if we had our device in there? I mean, could it double its lifetime, say 60 or 70,000 hours. And then that's a significant cost savings, but both from, like you said, from the, from the point of view of operations and maintenance. And you got to look at the guy that's running the bus fleet, the guys that operate, you know, the maintainers. I mean, it gives that guy confidence to buy this system because he knows he can manage his risk. And I mean, this, this system could be monitored externally too. Like, okay, the bus driver has his like little heads up display, but the bus operator itself, each bus in his fleet could feed in a signal telling them what's the status of my air filters right now. And so they can help manage it. So if you get some operators a little bit now half asleep at the switch is not paying attention back home and home base, they can, they know exactly what the status of the health of their air filtration systems are. And air is a big deal. You know, one thing strikes me is that, you know, we live in a, as discussed with Peter Rosse, we live in the time of COVID. And regrettably, manufacturing becomes an issue, especially when you had hopes of manufacturing in China, for example. If I took the device that you have patented and you know, designed and everything. And I went to China or some other country, maybe in Asia. And I had it manufactured there. Career comes to mind. The cost of manufacturing, it would be substantially less. So I know you haven't started manufacturing yet. But when you do start manufacturing, wouldn't it be, wouldn't it be better to go outside the United States for manufacturing? No, I don't think so. You know, we're very capable of doing volume manufacturing, you know, the use of robotics, you know, for manufacturing things. And really, you know, the blushes off the rose now for manufacturing in these kinds of countries because they try to rip you off. So we don't want to give them the technology. We want to keep it here in the good old US of A and jobs for Americans. And yeah, we're happy to export it to them. And we'll even export them the whole bus, you know, but yeah, no, I think at least from my point of view, we want to keep the manufacturing. Well, that raises the question of, you know, where are these buses manufactured now? I guess there are a lot of them are custom, but where would they be manufactured in volume later? Would that be also in the US? Well, yes, in many ways, they would be because we have a Buy American Act, particularly for the buses who are, you know, all these transit agencies get federal funding. And if they don't have a very high content of American made goods or or percentages in their vehicle, they can't, they're not eligible for that funding. So there's there's a lot of leverage, levers available to, you know, force the manufacturing to remain here in the US. So what are the what are the steps? Ultimately, hang on, but ultimately, we're licensing this technology. So there's a limit to what we can control where it's going to be manufactured. To whom? Well, that's that's where we're at. We're at that phase now, that now that we have the actual patent and that we've got the systems on actual buses, now's the time to go out and quote market slash sell, you know, licenses to this technology. And of course, the university is very, very interested in this. They invested quite a lot of money in in just getting the patent and we want to honor their investment. Also, but it raises the whole timeframe thing. I mean, again, COVID gets in the way to some extent, but what's what's the plan on the timeframe? What are the steps along the way? And let's assume, and I would like to assume this, that hydrogen buses will be really popular in various contexts, various uses, purposes, and, you know, situations, configurations in the life. When would this be ready for market? When would it be an item on the shelf, so to speak? Two years, three years, five years. How do you see that evolving? I think we could evolve fairly quickly. I would say say one to two years. We could have it as a product. We've already worked with one company who's very familiar with this technology. So we're going to start with them. And then we'll see where it goes from there. Yeah, but what exactly will Scott do? Well, his work is finished, isn't it? Scott, this is when you retire. Is that what happens? The work is never finished. So we have the first generation prototype built and working. And so that's a proof of concept. And now we have ideas to add functionality to it, reduce its size, reduce its costs. There's a lot of little engineering that's going to go into this thing and continue improving it. Do you think you'll get more patents on it? We haven't talked about that, but it's a possibility. Yeah, well, it's very nice that the officer of technology transfer helped you, but query, can they keep on helping you? You know, maybe you have to make some money first. Well, when they see that this is a viable product, then once people see viability in it, then all of a sudden they want to invest. They'll call it investing in it. It's also good to keep in mind the size of the industry. It's a $10 billion industry in fuel cells per year, and it's projected to grow exponentially due to clean air accents and the movement towards there. So I think protecting those fuel cells is important to ensure the longevity of all the fuel cells that they sell. And so getting involved in protecting them, I think is a good position for UH and HNEI to be in. Sure. Well, you know, one thing that strikes me, I meant to ask you about it earlier, is so right now it's a bus and it's hydrogen bus, and it's got a lot of space for devices like this, and you're going to try to make it smaller and all that. What about the Miura? Is that the right pronunciation? You know, the hydrogen car? What about that? What about other hydrogen devices that are, you know, being planned and developed and will come into the marketplace? Is this something that would apply to every single fuel cell device? Arguably it could, no? Yeah. Exactly. That's the idea. Most of the manufacturers have a fuel cell prototype and they're moving it into the line, and all of those fuel cell vehicles, this could be applied to in terms of protection. Also, the stationary market is a huge one. There's a lot of places that use fuel cells as primary energy devices or backup energy devices, and each one of those cases, especially in the case of backup supply of energy for hospitals, I think is important to protect that. Oh, yeah. In fact, that's something we looked at from the, you know, coronavirus kind of things, as Scott said, is applying this kind of concept to other uses such as that. Well, beyond, you know, beyond the generation of electricity using fuel cells, I mean, in a car, in a vehicle. It seems to me, you know, you raised this whole thing about backup systems for hospitals, for example. Are we going somewhere in that direction too? Are fuel cells going to go beyond vehicles here? Are they efficient and useful, flexible enough to be used for backup systems in my house or in, you know, other contexts? Is that where we're going with hydrogen and fuel cells, and for that matter, your device? Yeah. In fact, people are looking at your, you know, fuel cell powered cars as your backup system for your house. Just like you said, you have this basically power production plant, which produces electricity and you can plug your house into it and power your house. Like I have my buses on the big island to have power export units so that each of the buses becomes a mobile emergency power plant during a time of emergency. If your grid goes down, for example, you know, that means all your, you know, all your communications, everything else is at risk. And so all of a sudden your fleet of buses becomes this mobile fleet of power sources. And so when people start saying, well, gee, you know, fuel cell bus is so much more expensive than a diesel bus. Actually, the parity is coming down quickly. But you know, what's the value proposition? What's the value of being able to use your bus to power critical loads when we get slammed by a hurricane and the whole grid goes down like it has, or we have a big earthquake, whatever the disaster is. So civil defense loves this idea. And it's all about this resiliency we've been talking about for years and years. Well, that's how you justify putting in these fleets of buses. People say, and then, you know, this thing will go for 30 hours at providing backup power. People say, well, what happens when you run out of hydrogen? Well, I go back to my hydrogen station I refill. Well, where are you going to get the power for that to run the hydrogen station? Well, I'm going to get it off my bus because I just plugged the fueling station into my bus. I power it up. I refuel in six minutes. And I'm back on back on the road going out there to provide emergency power. Well, it strikes me that if I was, you know, a survivalist, and I may need to be a survivalist with the storms that are coming. And God knows what else with climate change. I would like to have a tank of hydrogen in the back. And I'd like to have one of these, you know, fuel cell units generating power from my house. And when the tank runs out, I want to have a second tank and so forth. And I'd like to use this as a backup system. It sounds like this has benefits that other backup systems may not have. How would you compare it with putting a lot of solar on the roof? Well, I mean, sorry, go ahead. You go, Scott. I've been hogging the conversation. That's okay, Mitch. All good stuff. But I was just going to say, you know, you being a survivor, survivalists, it kind of like if you take a step back, the country needs to be a survivor, survivalist, because we are burning fossil fuels at a very rapid rate. And if someday those fossil fuels are going to run out, and when it does, we're either going to be left holding the bag, or we're going to have these other technologies developed, one of which is fuel cell technology. And so I think from your own personal perspective, it makes sense to have a fuel cell backup in your home, but also from a strategic perspective on the national and world scale, it makes it makes sense to have these technologies developed, especially fuel cells. What was your question again? Well, what compare that with solar on my roof? What's a better solution for me? Well, the solution is solar on my roof is only good during the day. I've got to have a battery system of some kind. So it may be better to have these tanks of hydrogen in the back. Well, the solution could be both. So you could potentially use the solar energy that you produced during the day to electrolyze water and produce hydrogen and store it as a fuel for when you need it at night or in an emergency situation. It strikes me that you shouldn't retire just yet, Scott. You've got miles to go and all kinds of other science to develop and devices to create before you're done. As a matter of fact, I would say, actually, you're only beginning. Thanks a lot, Jail. I'll keep that in mind. The last slide of our seventh slide deck we haven't seen. So I just want to throw this one up to show this is how we can, you know, for our audience, anybody who's interested in this technology wants to know more. There's a splash of our actual patents. So, you know, we're not, we're not speaking with forked tongues and also Anne Park is the lady in the Office of Technology transfer. She's been great supporting us for all these years. So hats off to them. I'd also like to acknowledge the investment made by the Office of Naval Research, H&EI, and the State of Hawaii and the Battle Tax Fund. So I think I haven't covered everybody, but some of the main players, you know, we've covered off here. So with that, following my mentors advice on how to close a program, I want to say aloha. Thank you so much, Scott, for coming on board and telling us about this invention. And my pleasure. Thanks for having me on. And thank you, my mentor, Jay, for helping out on this show. So with that, it's aloha from Hawaii, the state of clean energy.