 Welcome to Stand on the Energy Man today on Think Tech, Hawaii. Stand Osserman here, coming to you live and direct from the mighty megalopolis of Kailua, Hawaii. And I've got a really, really, not just a good show today. When we started putting this thing together, I decided we need to make at least three shows out of it. So this is gonna be part one of a three-part series. And it's based on a webinar that was done by Sustainable Energy Hawaii last Saturday. And we'll have the link to that webinar up on their website, probably by tomorrow. And I really highly encourage everybody to check the whole webinar out because what we're gonna show on this show and the next show is just some of the segments of a PowerPoint done by one of our guests today, Peter Sternlick, who is a media guy by trade and did an outstanding job of encapsulating what I think is the macro to the Hawaii-specific energy situation and all the moving parts that go with it. So what we're gonna do today is we're gonna start off by showing the first couple of minutes of his, it's a PowerPoint that he's narrating and it'll start you off with the kind of the big world picture. And we'll do a second segment after we have a chance to discuss the first segment a little bit and then we'll finish up in the next two shows for the next two weeks, next two Tuesdays and get this thing going. So our guests today are gonna be Richard Ha. He's a local businessman from the Big Island, farmer by trade and lifelong born and raised Big Island guy and Peter Sternlick who is also from the Big Island and been there for a long time and both of them are super energy people and super local Kama'aina attitude gotta be good for everybody including the rubber slip of guys or we don't do it at all. So sustainable energy Hawaii is the organization that they're representing and if we can, well, let's get started with the first video then Richard and Peter and I will get into a discussion. Modern energy 101. Albert Einstein famously said, everything is energy and that's all there is to it. This isn't philosophy, it's physics. The science of physics defines energy as the capacity to do work. Regardless of the form that's used, energy literally is what powers everything we do in life curtail any of what's in use today and the entire system begins to weaken. At sustainable energy Hawaii, we believe it's essential our community have a greater overall understanding about energy. Due to the climate emergency, major decisions are currently being made about our energy future. The question of whether they're sustainable over the long term, isn't really a discussion we've had in depth yet. To that end we're convinced geothermal has a prominent role to play in our energy future. Today there's a race to decarbonize the global economy. The lion's share of this effort is focused on solar and wind in combination with battery storage. All of these are valuable, essential and achievable near term solutions. At SEH we wholeheartedly support these efforts. However, we know that solutions with longer life cycles are critical as well. Hawaii has very different energy challenges compared to those being confronted on the large continental land masses. Each Hawaiian island is small, isolated and the physical space that can be devoted to renewable energy production is limited or in conflict with other public, private or cultural interests. None of our islands have interconnected grid systems and the relatively small size for each power plant keeps them from enjoying the economies of scale seen elsewhere in the world. These conditions and more contribute to the high price we all pay for power. So, as we finish up that piece of video, welcome Richard, welcome Peter. And Peter that's an awesome job you did on that segment. You also had some great speakers and great guests and a nice segment by Richard Ha on the whole webinar. So I hope folks get a chance to look at that webinar when it's up on your website and get a good look at it. I think we're also gonna include the link for just your presentation in whole, not chopped up like we're doing for the show here. So people can look at it a couple of times because I've been trying to focus my shows on the macro level, the global level of energy, how much oil there is, how much natural gas there is and how critical the resources are to our daily lifestyle and what we've quote unquote become accustomed to with travel and cars and price of gasoline and things like that. And I'd really, really believe that most of the people on this planet, especially in our country don't realize how spoiled they are by the availability of cheap energy. And it's not always gonna be that way. And Hawaii needs to start planning now to get a clean, sustainable energy future going. And we're already behind the power curve. We need to be moving on this. Whether you believe in climate change or not, the supply of oil is limited and we fight a race to get our infrastructure, our clean infrastructure built before we start getting really expensive oil making our infrastructure even more expensive. So welcome, Peter and welcome, Richard and... Richard, I'd like you to kind of introduce us a little bit to Peter, you've been on my show before and you grew up in Hawaii and have family roots that go way back generations. How important is this topic of sustainability to you? Well, it's extremely important. I met Peter through Robert Rape here that he's a mutual friend of ours. And so we've been engaging this subject for more than 10 years at Peter before that. Yeah, so when we talk to each other, we're talking the same exact language here. So now we're bringing it down to how it applies to us here in Hawaii. You know, we're keeping an eye on what's the worst situation, but we're bringing it down to Hawaii. And so is Nate Hagens also one of your musketeers in your sustainability discussions? Does Peter know Nate very well? Yeah, we all know Nate, you know, and what I like about Nate's point of view, he realized how serious this is. But his take on it is, how do we bend but not break? You know, so it's a reasonable... And we've been looking at this for a while, it's a reasonable way to go and... You know, even if we're wrong that, you know, there's no harm no fault in what we're doing. Exactly, exactly. So Peter, you know, I really... I can't overstate how much I appreciate your production. And even the trailer that you sent that... We're not gonna show on the show here for obvious copyright reasons, but that piece of work is exceptional. And I think it's something that everybody in the world should be seeing. So I hope we can somehow drum up enough resources to let you do the full length feature of that and see if we can get it going, because it's really important. But, you know, give us your view on sustainability on a global scale and on the Hawaii scale. Well, that's a very, very good question. I mean, in terms of just the definition of sustainability, sustainability is something that in my mind, and I think is inherent in its own definition, is something that's long-term. Our global economy is one that is based, that expects continuous growth. This is a finite planet, continuous growth is not possible. So sustainability means that the way that we have gone about essentially financing the way we live has to change. And this goes to, you know, what Richard was talking about in terms of the research and work that Nate Hagins has been doing, because the work that Nate is doing now is really focused on mindset, on how people look at their surroundings and what their expectations are. I think the reality is, is that everybody is going to be living with less stuff. And we can get into this in terms of energy, but the amount of available energy to create and do the work that is being done in the world today is going to start contracting. There's, the people who research this stuff know that to be true. It's just not public, it's not conventional wisdom yet. You know, so I've had Nate on my show and he uses the term energy blindness. He says that people just don't realize how much energy they use. And he has an example where he's standing in front of some of the things he has on his farm. He's standing next to his horse and he says, you know, I can do about one seventh of the work of this horse in terms of energy. And the horse can do about a third or quarter of what my quad can do. And then my truck is 150 horsepower. It can do 150 times what my horse can do. And when you put it in those terms, people start to visualize that energy is all about getting work done. And we are so used to having fuels that are energy dense like oil, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel to move airplanes at hundreds of miles an hour across oceans and continents. And we take that for granted. In my show last week, I asked my guest how much he really valued oil at. And he said $10,000 a barrel in terms of actual work that can be done by that oil and products that can be made. But we just suck the oil out of the ground and burn it like it was free. And it's not free, it is a finite resource. But I know further on in your video and you'll see it and you'll talk about it. What is your view of the value of oil? How much energy is in oil? Well, if you look at the energy that's contained in a barrel of oil, I think it's a fairly common metric that a barrel of oil is the equivalent of four and a half years of human labor. So I think if you properly value human labor over four and a half years, you're gonna come up with a figure that's way higher than $10,000 a barrel. It is the densest, it is the most concentrated form of energy that we have. There's, we did some calculations and there's 12,500 kilowatt hours in a cubic meter of petroleum, which is about half the barrel. So for my house, I use 21 kilowatt hours of electricity every day. So start to compare those numbers and realize where we would be if we didn't have an energy dense fuel. And it is a finite resource. We're gonna be running out. So Richard, if you didn't have a tractor on your farm, how many more people would you have to hire to dig trenches, clear land? If you couldn't use tractors and pumps and equipment like that, what kind of impact would that have on your productivity on your farm? You know, we ran a hydroponic tomato operation and we produced a million palms annually. Now, if we didn't have the help of machinery, I cannot imagine, you know, there's no way we could produce that much and we produce that much on 20 acres. So it's a threat to our ability to grow enough food that that is the problem. And I think that's the whistle that Nate's blowing is that people have to understand, like Peter says, that as oil gets more and more expensive, we may have to go back to more unmanual human labor or do without certain things because we won't be able to afford the energy to do what we do now. And unless we can find something more sustainable and that kind of leads us towards the direction of maybe a clean thing, like some people say nuclear, that's not a real popular choice, but it is clean. It's non-carbon. That's, it's very, very long lived. We have the resources, but it's not safe as we produce it now. So it would have to change. The systems would have to change. But then we have hydroelectric and Richard, I know you have hydroelectric on your farm. That produces electricity. And one thing that we have, that we use on the big island, unlike the other islands in Hawaii is geothermal. Puna geothermal produces, I think they're up to like 38 kilowatts of production or megawatts of production out of their geothermal wells. And the technology is getting cleaner and better with horizontal drilling and stuff so that people are starting to take geothermal on the big island and even on Maui and Oahu a little more seriously. And I'm sure we're going to have more discussion on that later on in the show. But let's, can we roll the second segment of the video now and talk a little bit about that? Modern energy 101. To put the potential of geothermal power into context, we should take a broad look at the basics of energy and then evaluate our expectations as humanity goes through its first major energy transition in more than a century. At the outset, it's important we understand that not all energy is created at equal. By this I mean we use distinctly different types of energy to satisfy different needs, each requiring different concentrations of raw power. Broadly there are three well-defined forms of energy used to support civilization as we know it. For example, we have one form that's specifically used for transportation. Another that powers static infrastructure such as our homes, commercial buildings, and public spaces. And then a third often left out of the energy category altogether, food. Transportation is primarily powered by petroleum and tends to come in various types of liquid fuel. Gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and marine gas oil are good examples. Even with the advent of EVs, 96% of all transportation used to move people and goods around the world is still powered by liquid petroleum-based fossil fuels. Today there is no alternative at scale. Solar cannot power container ships. Windmills cannot power the mining equipment needed to secure the raw materials used to build renewable systems in the first place. This should begin to illustrate the scale needed to transform global energy supplies to renewables, especially if continuous growth on a finite planet remains the default business model. Our second energy type is electric power. At its most basic, generating electricity has been very simple. We've just needed some kind of continuous flowing force to spin a turbine generator. In recent history, that's come from burning fossil fuels like coal, natural gas, or petroleum to produce the heat needed to boil water. That in turn produces pressurized steam that spins power-generating turbines. Current data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that 61% of US power production still comes from fossil fuels. The remaining 39% are renewables and comes from a mix of hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, and biofuels. Even though renewable energy growth is quite strong, it's only projected to satisfy a little more than half of the growth in overall energy demand during 2021 and 2022. The rest will come from increased fossil fuel use. The third type of energy I wanna discuss today is the energy that powers you and me and all of our domesticated animals, food. Today it's estimated that 90% of the food consumed across the Hawaiian islands arrives by petroleum-powered cargo ships. Virtually all that food is grown using some combination of equipment and fertilizers that is derived from fossil fuels. So as we finish up that segment, the things that really stand out for me are your definition of your three major types of energy, that being for transportation, liquid fuels, the grid, electricity, and food for us. And the first law of thermodynamics pops into my head and says energy is not created or destroyed, it just changes form. So the sunlight and the water and stuff is transformed in plants to the food we eat or the grass that the cows eat and we eat the cows. But we harvest oil from the ground that took millions of years to make and we can't replace it. But we have 96% of our transportation is still oil-based on fuel. And guess what? I think that some of the electric transportation that makes up that last 3% of electric transportation is probably powered by an oil grid. So even there, we have a long ways to go. How do you recommend that we try and do this transition? And what is the challenge of getting to that grid parity where electric transportation is not gonna drive us broke, trying to put charging stations and things at every house or all over the world and upgrade our grid. I think people don't realize that we'll have to probably double the production and the scale of our grid to meet the transportation needs if we go electric. No matter whether we use hydrogen or whatever, at least hydrogen, you can produce it near the renewable resource and then use it like gasoline, like a liquid fuel. But what's your picture of that, Peter? How do we cover that gap? How do we start growing where we need to grow? That's a really, really good question because honestly, I think about the scale involved. And it's hard for me to see how that actually succeeds on a global level. Well, could you do it with just solar and wind? Well, no, I don't think so. I don't think so either. I really don't think that's possible. I mean, the issue is that we have a global economy. It's a centralized production and stuff has to move. I mean, you saw the picture of there were two, there were two graphics. One showed the tanker transportation that delivers 100 million barrels of oil every single day. And the other graphic showed the marine traffic, that was a real-time capture, like you can do the same thing with airplanes. That was a real-time capture of the global marine freighter traffic moving stuff around. And what's kind of shocking to me is that we're talking about just-in-time logistics for almost all of it. And the scale is incredible. And the way that we've grown that scale, and I don't want to kind of filibuster here, but it's like my father was born in 1921. It took 300,000 years for the human population to reach 1.8 billion people. In 100 years, we've added 6 billion more to that number. And everybody wants stuff. And I just, my feeling is, is that we need to focus on Hawaii. That Hawaii, I mean, we got to, just like on an airplane, they tell you if the oxygen mask comes down and you've got a small child sitting in your lap, you put your mask on first, then you take care of the baby. And that's how I feel about, you know, getting our energy house in order, which is we need to focus on Hawaii. And we have a blessing, an incredibly lucky resource here that can boil water for a long time and we don't have to buy it. It's sitting right here. And that's geothermal energy. I agree with you. There is no way we can put enough wind turbines and solar power. Even ocean, OTEC, ocean thermal, which we have available, we need it all. We need solar, we need wind, we need ocean turbines, we need OTEC. But geothermal is the one thing that Hawaii is literally blessed with. I mean, you can thank Madam Pelle for one of the most awesome resources on our planet to get Hawaii sustainable in the future. So Richard, along that line, you know, Hawaii is blessed with geothermal power. It's probably the only thing that can bridge that gap to renewable energy unless we bring nuclear in, which I don't think most of the people here would want to do right away. What do you think that the Hawaiian community would say if we wanted to introduce geothermal as a viable place to get us into the clean energy future? I think the native Hawaiian people, you know, once we sit on it and discuss the situation and talk about it in terms of what are we trying to do for future generations, I think we'll all be able to come together and start to move toward the future because the simple part about geothermal is, number one, 21% of the world has it and we're so lucky. But imagine we're going to be sitting over the hotspot for one to two million years. That's a little bit like forever. It's going to be long after I'm gone, that's for sure. Yeah, and the other thing too is that the heat and steam is free. All you got to do is stick a pipe down there and the pressure of the steam coming up spins the turbine. So in other words, we're talking about electricity that's stable price for that length of time. So it's such a blessing, it's incredible. So we just need to talk about it and that's what we're doing with our geothermal webinars. Yeah. And we're basically taking the heat, converting it into electricity. The energy is just changing form. Like I said with the first law of thermodynamics and because there is so much heat left in the earth that'll go many, many hundreds of years past us. I'm sure that by then we'll be mining Mars or some other planet for minerals and for energy and things like that. Or we'll have another technology that can take its place long before we ever look at expending all the energy from the Earth's core, the Earth's heat, Madame Pele's hotspot. You know, it's like Hawaii has everything it needs to be sustainable just as the Hawaiians had 500 years ago. And they even use geothermal for cooking, as I understand it, back in the early days up on the mountain they would cook food on the steam vents on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. So I just see it as a natural. I see it as something I hope we can continue to talk with everyone and work out the details. Make people comfortable with the safety aspects. I mean, you and I have all looked at some horizontal drilling from modern geothermal systems. And I think we're there where we can do it safely, cleanly, environmentally safely, take up a much smaller footprint than we would if we were doing solar and wind. And nobody wants to see wind turbines on every hillside in Hawaii. So I think geothermal is a really strong candidate. So we've got a couple of two minutes left. I'll leave it up to you, Peter, to kind of close us out. And we're going to have you back next week and we'll look through some of the rest of that PowerPoint. Yeah. So it's essentially, you know, the, the energy that, I mean, one of the blessings and one of the benefits that we have, and this is sort of how I describe the nature of Hawaii to my friends in Los Angeles is the state of Hawaii only has one area code. We're fairly low population. And so we, the resources that we have, which are water and sun and geothermal, we have the ability to produce the energy we need to hear, but it's going to take, it's going to take making it a priority because we don't have a lot of time. There are projections about, about the rate at which fossil fuel energy is going to start contracting. And it's not that far into the future. I mean, we have, you know, we're already seeing it now. So, you know, when oil is, oil is pushing $100 a barrel, that's recessionary in terms of its price because the cost of energy bakes into every single thing we consume. So, yeah, it's, it's really a matter of the entire state pulling together and realizing we got to get serious about and transportation fuel is the big deal because everything we need to do is, you know, we're going to have to do that. We're going to have to do that by boat. And at some point they're going to come less often. Right. Richard. In a couple of seconds. Do you think hydrogen plays a role in this big equation with geothermal and transportation energy? Absolutely. And hydrogen. It generates heat. And it, you know, it allows us to do stuff that we can't do with just electricity. We can't make ammonia. We can't just make ammonia from electricity. But if we go to hydrogen, we can get to ammonia. If we get to ammonia, we can, that fertilizer, and not only fertilizer, it's a fuel you can use in legacy type of plants, you know. So, the fact that we're sitting on this resource that can make green electricity at a stable rate, sooner or later, it's going to be more competitive to the rest of the world. Right. Well, I thank you gentlemen for being on today, and we're going to do part two next week, and I'm looking forward to that. So for everyone here on the, on Think Tech Hawaii, thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week, Tuesday. Aloha. Aloha.