 and welcome to Stand Energyman here in Tingtec, Hawaii, Stan Osserman. I'm into you live and direct from Honolulu Airport, South Ramp, where a few years ago we were testing some really innovative, we call them medium scale wind turbines. And my favorite one is the one over my left shoulder, this one here. Really, I love that turbine. It was so neat, it would automatically weather vane so it went in the right direction. But what you can't tell about it is when the wind would get up to 35 knots, the turbine would actually flatten out and would still be spinning like a record player, spinning this way instead of this way and still producing electricity. And then when the wind died down, it would roll back to vertical and it was all done with basic physics and air pressure, no hydraulics, no computers, no nothing. It was really amazing. So we put that one together in about four hours out of the box and it's the only one like it in existence. It's about 13 feet in diameter. And anyway, it was just an amazing piece of equipment. And so we still have it out at Hickam. And I don't know if the guy that designed it is marketing them but he probably should because they're actually pretty neat. And it's really quiet too. It's a really quiet wind turbine. And we tested it down low, not in the best wind but down low because it was designed to go around an airfield that had approach radar and it wasn't allowed to interfere with the approach radar. And it did all those things really well. That's why we haven't done a trailer. We were hauling it around to different places on the base. Anyway, wind turbines are really popular nowadays. And down in Texas, the big wind farms, they can produce so much electricity that you can actually buy wind power really cheap in Texas, like down to two cents a kilowatt hour. And on a really bad day, you can sell your wind for like, you have to pay people to take your wind. It can be that bad. But wind turbines are probably never gonna be super popular here in Hawaii because the ones that we do have on the North Shore have gotten a really bad reputation for obnoxious red flashing lights in the middle of the night and endangered species getting tangled up at the tips of those blades that are spinning around at 200 miles an hour. You look at them, they don't look like they're going very fast. And at the hub, it looks like it's barely moving. But at the tip of those long, long blades, they're doing 200 miles an hour. And the birds just, if they get in the middle there and they start playing between the turbines and then they slowly slide out and birds and bats just get schwacked really bad with those things. So I'm not sure they're gonna be real popular here in Hawaii. But one thing that we don't talk about much is different ocean power production. And here in Hawaii, we were actually in the home of OTEC which is Ocean Thermal Technology. And I had the inventor of that on my program early on, maybe five years ago, six years ago, Hans Kloss from the University of Hawaii. But it's gotta be scaled really, really, really big. And then we, in the windward side of our island, we have a lot of ocean motion where you tether a system to the ocean floor and then you float it up on top. And as the waves move around, they literally pump and make electricity by moving the arms up and down as the swells go by. And those things seem to work pretty good, but they have a lot of moving parts and anything going in the ocean with salt water has gotta really be robust because ocean, especially down here in the warm tropics, just eats the daylights out of anything metal, aluminum, steel. And if it's not stainless steel and good stainless steel, good high quality stainless steel, it just takes a major beating. And so do electronic components. But one thing that we haven't really talked about much or looked at are ocean turbines, underwater ocean turbines. And kind of like the ocean thermal, it's gotta be fairly large scale to make it economical. Even the big wind turbines, they've gotta be fairly large scale to really make it economical to use. Today we're gonna talk about some of the ocean turbines, underwater ocean turbines that are in development. And there's several different ones out there. And we got our guest today, Dan, going again to talk about ocean turbines. So Dan, welcome to the show. And I know you've got some good slides here to show. But in this past couple of weeks, I've seen at least three different ocean turbines that are being tested around the world. And they all seem to be doing pretty good. And so I'll turn it over to you to run through your slides. But I know from fishing and driving my boat around the islands here, we definitely have the undersea currents, whether it's the ocean moving between the islands or just the tidal changes or, you know, the ocean definitely moves, not just at the surface, but down deep. And we could definitely take advantage of some of these things. So why don't you give us an idea of what these monsters do? Can do, Stan. So go ahead and show slide number one, please. If I'm just doing a pitch for the company and just make sure I do that. So let's go ahead and go to slide number two. And so this is just simply a graphic model of something that we're talking about. And these are sea turbines. These are turbines that are underneath the water. Now there are two versions of these. Some that they've been experimenting out in certain areas where they try to take advantage of tidal energy like in the northern part of Scotland. But there are a lot of us in the engineering community think that there's a better opportunity where these can be used in places in deeper parts of the ocean, where we can take advantage of deep ocean, deep sea currents. And I know Stan was talking about how reactive a lot of things are, you know, especially in the tropics because the saltwater and metals being reactive and so forth. But there's actually a place where things that are made out of metal or steel could be placed at near Hawaii that that water probably have very little effect on those objects. And that's basically if we place these or anchor these things deeper down in the ocean. So if I can get you to go to slide number three, please. Yeah, like for example, you know, one of the things that causes oxidation or corrosion in aluminum since steel is air. Yeah. So when you have a lot of this electrical stuff like I talked about the ocean motions, that's sitting on the surface. Yeah, all the oxygen is dissolved in the water. Yeah. Exactly. And so you get a lot more corrosion where if you have an underwater, you actually are able to resist a lot of the corrosion because you don't have as much air down there to actually oxidize whatever your metals are. Well, we're gonna talk about, besides the oxidation, we're gonna talk about another effect too that adds to helping making sure this equipment lasts a very long time. So going back to slide number three there. So what we're showing there, that's basically the world's weather system over the Pacific. And that shows you basically the general wind and weather patterns. And that affects the surface currents and of course the surface currents affect your deep ocean, your deep sea currents. Now, when it comes to around a lot of the islands there in the Pacific, their number islands were these deep sea currents. What they do is they bring up nutrients from the deep depths and bring them up near the bio zone around these islands. And that's really what all the coral and all the animals and so forth and the fish are eating in these coral reefs is that basically these are nutrients that are brought up by these deep sea currents that are bringing nutrients up into that bio zone. But the point being is if you locate some of these devices in those areas where those deep sea currents are, we can do a lot of great things and not impact a biosphere or affect those currents in any way. And the beauty of this is water is really heavy. And when water's in motion it stays in motion. So let's go to slide number four here. So one of the places that I was looking at and that red arrow there, I'm pointing out that I've got the big island. So it's west of the big island is south of Maui. There's a place there and you can see right there that isn't anywhere near the shore of either one of those islands. And there's sort of a little pocket right there. And that's some pretty deep water. And now the reason why we're looking at that, now I'm gonna contrast this with some of the ocean wind power turbines that they've been using. And if you've ever got on seeing a documentary like what they install off the coast of like Holland or Germany or someplace like that. Those ocean wind farms have a couple of things in common. One is the water is usually between 21 meters to 35 meters in depth. So it's relatively shallow. The pylons that they drive into the seabed are usually driven in at least 30 meters into the seabed. And the reason why is because when they put in the tower and the nacelle on top of that wind turbine, they'll stand usually about 290 meters tall above the level of the ocean. The other aspect of those ocean wind farms is the equipment they use is the same kind of equipment that the oil and gas industry uses to put energy production facilities out in the North Sea. So whenever you're looking at companies and install, especially wind turbines on the ocean, when you talk to the people or you look at the ships and the equipment they use, understand that a lot of that was bleed over from the oil and gas business because that's kind of what they were doing is they were basically building platforms out in the middle of the ocean. They're anchoring things in the middle of the ocean and so forth. I'll talk about that and that will give you sort of an idea about some of the funding behind installing the wind farms in the ocean and also talk about why that's probably not a good idea. It's not gonna be very popular for Hawaii, okay, but it's probably not gonna be popular for a lot of parts of the United States for a lot of different reasons. And I'll tell you. Yeah, so example, waters around Oahu and the big island, you can go maybe two miles offshore and you're in a mile deep water already, where you were talking meters up in the North Sea. So most of the turbines, if we did put them out at sea in Hawaii, would have to actually be even farther out, maybe past the three mile limit and maybe even past the 12 mile limit. Out there, the ocean's probably two, two and a half miles deep. Well, the sea turbines will be much more appropriate for Hawaii than doing the ocean wind turbines because if I look at around your islands, if you're gonna do sea turbines, they're gonna be pretty close to land. And one of the things that always concern me about those wind turbines, those ocean wind turbines, is there a navigation hazard? That's probably the biggest, because there's always gonna be a car dictatorship, there's always gonna be a hurricane or a big storm or a swell and one of those ships get slammed up into that navigation hazard, not besides airplanes, not besides it's an eyesore. They're just a lot of issues. And then on top of that, when you put that kind of equipment in place, it's gonna make a mark on the land there in Hawaii. If you're gonna put something out there, you want something out there that later on, you may wanna clean it up, get rid of it, whatever. It's not gonna be an eyesore. It's something that's easy to clean up. It's easy to recycle. I mean, those are all things you need to think about when you put in an energy source. But this is just one of those energy sources that actually solves a lot of problems fairly simply. And it's not really that hard to do when you finally put all the pieces together to do this. We can go to slide number five first. And that there just shows that's the big island south of Maui and that I've got the arrow pointed at that zone right there. That gives you an idea how deep the waters we're talking about. We're talking 800 to 2,800 meters in depth. Obviously, this is just all guesstimation on my part. You'll probably need like the University of Hawaii to get out there with some undergrad students and ROVs and actually start mapping out some of these places in some of the ocean floors. Now for those that are concerned about the biosphere in these kind of places, usually these places that have high amounts of current, usually the ocean floors actually scour clean to bear rock. So there's nothing down there. The life forms actually avoid these places because otherwise the current just sweeps them away. It just so happens these places where your biologicals are not these are the best places that these sea turds. I agree. And taking it from a local perspective for fishermen the area you're pointing to between the big island of Maui I don't know of any fishermen that fish that far out and in that area. Because like when you talk about deep sea fishing off the Kona coast, man, they're not even a half mile offshore and they're catching 300 to 600 pound marlin. And bottom fishermen, the most popular place in the state for bottom fishing is right near shore or in a place they call Penguin Banks between Molokai and Oahu. Where again, the water's only maybe 100 meters deep or 500 meters deep at the deepest. It'll actually show up on your depth finder even if you have a really cheap one and you're 10, 15 miles south of Oahu and probably four or five miles off of Molokai. And that's, so you're not putting in these turbines anywhere near where people would be fishing. They'd be way below any deep sea fishermen and they'd be way below any of the bottom fishermen. Well, you're outside of the biosphere because most of your animals and fish and so forth they live near where the sun is and that's where they're getting their energy from. When you're talking about these kind of depths at the bottom of the ocean, it is near freezing. There's no light down there. There's just very little life forms and these high curniers, like I said, the current sweep the bottom freeze. It's not a biosphere. You're not going to impact anything in that location. There's very little life at all living in those locations. I mean, we know very little about the deep ocean. This is that by us exploring these type of power sources it's a way of exploring these deeps. But what we do know about these locations is there's very little life that could be impacted in those locations. And it's definitely out of mind out of sight and you're definitely well below the keel of any ship that would go over the top of the ocean or it's, and even if you're talking about submarines we're going to talk about something and I'll show you an aspect of these wind turbines where you wouldn't even have any, it wouldn't be a navigational issue even for submarines, for example, which might be a concern with the United States Navy. But when I show you this, you'll say, oh, this isn't a concern with the Navy. This is something that can easily navigate around. So we can get to slide number seven. Wait, hold here a second. Now, slide them six please. And this is the important one. So that arrow, again, I'm pointing at the same area. And if you can see the arrows and the arrows with the long tails that shows you where these really strong currents are at. And if you look real closely where Maui is in the big island none of those strong currents are even close to those islands, right? They're a good 15 miles offshore, where these locations are at. It just so happens that's where these really strong currents are. Now, one of the beauties of this is that these currents are run 24 by seven by 365. So from a utility aspect, that's baseload, right? That is equal to, I've seen some studies if you, especially if you design your sea turbines directly, it's equal to a nuclear fire power plant as far as reliability. It's 24 seven power. So you could build base power using something like this is what I'm getting. And in fact, for Hawaii you could probably build an entire industry around this good one. We can get to slide number seven first. If you think about it from my history standpoint when we talked in a long time ago about putting an undersea cable between the islands to transfer power from Maui and Molokai to Oahu, for example. Well, if you use these undersea turbines the cable would be about half as long as that undersea cable. And that's a big advantage too because less line loss, less engineering challenge you get the power where you want it from these turbines under the sea. So I mean, I think it becomes pretty obvious to me it's at least worth looking at and getting like you say university involved to look at occurrence and stuff and do some more analysis but I think it's really worth looking at. I can't. So if I can show a slide number seven here. So, and that's one of the anchors that's off the coast of Scotland and they're lowering it down to the bottom of the ocean. And one of the interesting, I'm more interested in it has to do with the equipment they're using for doing this. Basically, this is a small-sized cargo container ship that's got a crane built onto it. And you're just lifting about the deck and then using ROVs to locate this thing on the bottom of the ocean. So there isn't any equipment here that you just can't pick up or remove, okay? But I'm going to go into showing you how this is actually sectioned in multiple pieces. Let's see, we already talked about, yeah, okay. So we can go to slide number eight, please. Okay, and that's where they're actually putting in place one of the nacelles on top of that anchor. So these are set up so that you first you put in place an anchor and then you can put in possibly a stem and then you put the nacelle on there. Now, initially when you deploy these you probably will start off with like say a 1.4 megawatt turbine just to get you some good data to figure out is this a good location to put turbines, right? That's kind of a hint to the University of Hawaii. You might want to invest at least a small one just to pick up some data on good places to place these things. And once you've decided, hey, this is a good place for a sea turbine farm then you can start putting on those anchors. And the way this is designed is you send the ROVs down with a piece of cable, you pick up that nacelle and you just pick up the entire, just the head and put it on the deck of your ship. Then you can pick up the new one and slower back down with the ROVs and then look it right into that anchor and you're up and running. And the way these things are designed, a lot of the quick hookups and so forth are built right into the anchor itself. So it's rather, a lot of the design I'm going to show you, I'm going to explain you how simple it is. I mean, that's the key to doing a lot of this is using the kiss principle, keep it simple, stupid, reduce the complexity because you're using ROVs, you're deep under the ocean and the fewer parts, less to break, less parts to break, the more reliable it's going to be. So if we can go to slide number eight, please. Okay. And so that picture right there is a great picture that gives you an idea, there's a truck in there so it gives you an idea of scale and that there is actually just two of the three parts. That's just the anchor within the cell on top of the anchor. And then the third piece it's not shown is you can put a stem on top of this thing. So if you had to, you could put together an undersea turbine that was probably as tall as the Eiffel Tower and which is something like 500 meters tall, but the point is it'd be well, well underneath the water. Now, why you would do that, there will be a lot of different reasons. When you go to these areas where these undersea currents are at and you lower down the equipment down there, you can have multiple currents at different strata in the ocean and the water and that depends on depth where they're at. So that'll dictate how tall these things will have to be off the ocean floor. Now, as far as the engineering complexity of this thing, so that nacelle, there are, that nacelle is really only made up of, is really only made up, make comprised of two parts. Okay, one is the rotator and the other one is the stator. So the rotator, that's the part that rotates. Now, on that stator, on that rotator, there are some blades there. Now on a wind turbine, usually the blades are designed to can't or they adjust them to the angle of attack, and that's because the wind is variable, but these places where these currents are at, the current is stable. So what you do is they set the angle of attack and then they lock the blades in place so they don't move. So that reduces your mechanical complexity right there. The second thing is that on the rotator and that axle, what's inside there is a neodymium magnet, so rare earth permanent magnet in there. Now, what holds that axle in place in that nacelle when they insert that axle into that housing there. On the backside of that axle, what they did is they machined out a groove and they put a locking ring on there and that's the only thing holding that whole thing inside that housing, it's just a locking ring. You gotta have a special tool to spread that locking ring out to take it off it, but that's all it's holding in there, holding it in there. So is this basically a bearingless, frictionless bearing? It's bearingless, yeah. It uses the water for cooling and lubrication. All right. It has what's called an airless bearing where it's got some propeller blades and actually forces water through there and it uses the water for the cooling and lubrication. The stator, stationary part, all it has is three copper coils there, or I'm sorry, six copper coils and the copper is encased in high density polythene plastic, right? That way it's sealed away from the seawall. Now, this device is what we call a variable AC device, alternating current device, okay? So basically you just have a neodymium magnet spinning inside of a copper coil, that's the idea. Now, depending on the current, we'll dictate how fast it's spinning. So it could be, the speed of the spin will dictate what the frequency is, whether it's 40 Hertz or 120 Hertz, okay? Now, in the case of this device, that really isn't that a problem because that alternating current and the fact that usually these things run between 16 to 20,000 volts, that's what's coming out of them, that kind of voltage, and since it's AC, you can transmit voltage directly out of that head, directly to shore, 15 miles is really nothing for AC. Now, when you get that power on shore, how do you turn that into useful 60 Hertz AC is very simple. You take that variable frequency AC, you rent it through what's called a bridge rectifier and that turns it into DC, and then you hook that to an inverter that converts it to 60 Hertz AC. So all your electronics are really on shore where you can easily fix, replace and change it and so forth. So there's hardly anything out there on the bottom of the oceans. It's very simple to fix, repair, it's not very complex. Fewer parts, one of the things as an engineer, I always have to keep in mind is Murphy's Law. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The more complex the system is, the more chance it has going wrong. So the key to making these systems work is making them simple stupid. They're big parts, but they're simple stupid. There's another aspect of this device. All these components are all made out of steel, okay? So if you put together a CADCAM diagram in electronics and there are never shipyards here in the States, you send them a CADCAM, for example, that anchor right there, they could build that, right? You can do that, have them do it under contract, or even the housing or the blades or whatever. The other thing about it too, these blades, if you notice how straight those blades are, those blades cavitate. What that means is in the ocean, they make a lot of noise. Now, that's beneficial for a lot of reasons. Number one, this should never become a navigational hazard for a submarine. Because any submarine in the universe should be able to hear this loud turbine spinning in there. The only other life form that might come near one of these things might be a whale. And if you know whales, whales are the same idea, they live by sound, they're gonna hear this thing. So any type of a submarine or whale or something like that is gonna avoid these things because they're noise. Because those straight blades actually serve a purpose and that is while they're moving, they're producing lots and lots of noise. I would think that the whales would avoid, well, number one, they'd be really down deep and some of the whales can die pretty deep, but there's nothing down there for them to eat. There's nothing down there that they would want to do. And the currents are so tough, they avoid it anyway. We already know that from the data up in Scotland that the sea lions and the whales avoid these locations where they have these strong currents. And the reason why, I mean, especially when you're talking about a whale, that's a mammal, they have to come up to breathe. The chance of them drowning in a place like this is pretty high. So these animals avoid these areas anyway, okay? Yeah, I had a quick question. Sure. As an engineer, do you think it would be possible to put like maybe two anchors, a little oversized and span it with a long tube and put maybe five or six turbines? Oh, I agree. I think that'd be a wise idea. I think your limitation on deploying these things is really gonna be the deck of the ship. Because you're gonna wanna do as much as you can on the deck of a ship and then lower this thing down. So maybe if your deck of a ship is wide enough and you got two cranes, you could probably take two of these and hook them to the same sub-assembly and pick them up together and lay them down in the bottom of the ocean. It's probably just gonna be the limitation on the type of ship now. One of the things when I was looking at this, when I look at the wind turbines that they deploy at sea, a lot of that equipment is very specialized. It's really came out of, like I said, the oil and gas business. For example, they have these jack-up ships where they bring this ship out and this thing's got like four jacks and it anchors itself in the bottom of the ocean. It actually picks the entire ship up about 20 meters off the surface of the ocean. And the reason why is because I got this 400 ton crane and they have to keep that thing balanced and stable so they can put the several hundred ton this out. Because this wind turbine is sitting so far off the top of the ocean, it's very dangerous to do this. But this equipment here, you can use a cargo container ship in these days with the pressures on the cargo container business, which really, the economics really favor much larger cargo container ships. So a young entrepreneur could probably pick up a small or medium-sized cargo container ship for the cost of scrap metal, right? And all you need is a cargo container ship, a flat deck and a little crane and you could use that to deploy these. So I think this is a much easier business to get into just because the requirements are just less stringent, not comparable to winter. Yeah, that is the fact that if we have shipyard guys that want to do work here we could do some of the construction here. Well, we've got a lot of Navy people too. And a lot of those Navy guys are experts in that ROV technology, underwater technology. So, and using like the small, like Alvin type subs and stuff like that. So you guys have a lot of capability at your hands that other people just don't have. Okay. Okay, we got 30 seconds left. What do you got to wrap it up? Well, okay. We can do the flight 10 is a Wahoo. And that's just showing more currents around the, around a Wahoo and those islands there. And if we can go to slide number 11 and that just shows the economic zones where sea turbines could be deployed, sea turbine farms could be deployed around the islands and around the, I think it's the Johnson atoll area. So that gives you, right there where some studies have already been done for the optimal places where this could be deployed around the Hawaiian islands. Great Dan. And I tell you what, I think that that's given at least some folks that are interested, some things to think about because, I can tell you talking to Senator Rivieri from our state legislature. He's responsible for the North shore of a Wahoo where our wind turbines are. And he hasn't gotten a whole lot of great feedback from his constituents on land-based wind turbines. I think our legislature, when they really start to think about endangered species and all the other impacts, corrosion, subsidies, end of life with the wind turbines, you know, stuff, they're probably gonna look at the ocean turbines and go, you know what, this might actually be a much better option for tourism and everything else. So thanks for the explanation. I really appreciate it. Well, the other thing too, we talked about those deep waters because of the lack of oxygen and also because of the temperatures, anything you put down, that seems to last a long time. And let me give you a case in point, the Titanic. The reason why the Titanic is at such great shape today is look at the depth of the water, that's it. The low oxygen and the temperatures are so low, there's hardly any chemistry. So if you're gonna, as far as deploying equipment, especially for a public utility standpoint, that's almost a match made now. Yeah. All right, well, that's gonna wrap it up here for Stan Energy Man and Think Take Away. Dan Gowen, thanks for being with us. And he's gonna become a regular fixture here. I have a feeling on Stan Energy Man, so we'll catch him in another week or two. So until next Tuesday, Stan and Dan, signing off, Aloha. Thank you.