 Hey, welcome to Stan Energyman. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for advanced transportation technologies, state of Hawaii, under the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. And we're glad to have you here today where we've got a special guest coming to us all the way from the mainland because as we all know, people in Hawaii don't know anything about hydrogen, so we bring in experts from around the world. So this guy's not only from California, he's actually from further around the world and works for a company in the UK called ITM Power, and they do some pretty innovative things with hydrogen, which as we all know is my favorite subject. So we've got Mr. Steve Jones from ITM, Skyping in from over there in Irvine, California, is that where you're at Steve? Anaheim. Anaheim. I was close. All California. But thanks for being here. The only time I ever see is when we meet at a conference or something, so good to see you up on the screen there. Tell us a little bit about, you know, what got you interested in the line of work you're in and what got you working with ITM and the kind of things that you do over there in Anaheim? Sure, yeah. So a bit of background on myself. I'm a material scientist by trade and way back years ago when I was still studying at university in Birmingham in the UK, Birmingham University have a hydrogen program and part of my post-degree work was done in the field of actually hydrogen separation membranes, so membranes that filter out all of the impurities in a hydrogen stream and provide pure hydrogen for semiconductors or fuel cells or whatever. So that was kind of how I got involved in the hydrogen industry. And then almost by chance, by good timing, ITM power was floating on the London stock exchange a few years after I graduated. And I saw the advert and here we are almost 12 years later and I've transitioned through from being on the development team, doing some of the hands-on work in the labs and developing prototypes and things like that up through into the managerial and business development roles. And then going back about three years, I did a bunch of business development here in California from the UK, so I was doing a lot of flight times hopping across the pond and then we got to a stage where we had enough traction that it made sense for me to be here permanently. So for the last two years, I've been here with my family in Anaheim doing the work for ITM Power Inc, which is the subsidiary of ITM Power PLC that's based out here. And really what we're trying to do is develop hydrogen technology in two kind of tracks which often overlap. As you know, you have clean fuel, so we're making renewable hydrogen fueling stations for fuel cell vehicles. We're doing that in the UK and France and here in the US based around our innovative PAN electrolyzer technology. And we're also doing energy storage work, which again is using the same core PAN electrolyzer technology but using it to store excess renewable energy at times when there's more energy than demand. Storing that as hydrogen and then using that hydrogen for various things it could be used for re-electrification later on, could be used for vehicle fuel, could be used as a chemical feedstock and can even be used as a straight replacement for fossil fuel natural gas like we're doing in Germany where we're actually injecting hydrogen directly into the pipeline system in Germany and we're substituting natural gas for hydrogen. Wow, sounds like you're pretty busy and it's really kind of exciting for us because we actually have a small natural gas grid here in Honolulu with Hawaii Gas Company and they're a publicly regulated utility. So we'd really like to see them kind of mirror some of the things you're doing especially the things that you're doing to support the transportation industry. So I know in California that's a big a big push that ITMs on in California is building the stations. How many stations do you guys plan to participate in over there and are they primarily production on site or are they you know taking gas from a grid like the gas grid or between one of the big gas manufacturers you know off of one of their pipelines or what's the concept over there in California? Sure yeah so when the state California has a big incentive on hydrogen infrastructure and the state is EMR $200 million over a 10-year period to finance building hydrogen fueling stations so that the vehicle companies have confidence to roll out hydrogen fuel cell vehicles amongst the general public safe in the knowledge that the public can go and get fuel and it's reliable and and they're not going to get stranded. So they do this via an annual competition solicitation process and ITM has participated in the previous two years competitions and we received awards in each of those years for one station the first year one stage in the second year and then the third year's competition is actually just closed and people have just submitted their bids and the California Energy Commission are busy figuring out the winners and losers from that competition we should find out in the next month or so. And ITM have stepped it up a little this year and that we've put five applications in this year as opposed to the one in the previous two years. So we're looking to keep our toe in the water in California on the station front all of our stations are centered around onsite renewable hydrogen generation so all the hydrogen is made onsite so that we're not relying on hydrogen being delivered to the sites but I think longer term my vision of ITM longer term in California is as we get more and more stations and the demand for hydrogen grows and the demand for renewable hydrogen grows that ITM will become more of a fuel provider rather than a station owner and operator and we'll have larger centralized hydrogen production facilities that are you know up into the megawatt sizes producing hundreds thousands of kilograms of hydrogen a day that are then distributed to the network of stations in California. Doesn't California have a mandate of like 30% clean hydrogen versus steam-reformed hydrogen? That's right so the state law is that a 33% of hydrogen that is delivered to fuel cell vehicles needs to be renewable so that means that it either comes from steam reformation of biogas or electrolysis using renewable electricity so those are the two options really that are used and that 33% is the law at the moment and California are very keen on pushing that boundary higher than 33% all the way up to 100% and you know we're looking at using electrolysis to manage the excess renewable electricity which takes place in the middle of the day when the big solar you know the big industrial arrays you know the big yeah there's a lot of solar in California and we get this huge peak in the middle of the day and sometimes outward is the demand for energy and so I did use that excess make hydrogen and use hydrogen in the transportation industry because the state as you know has a mandate to reduce the CO2 output from its transportation sector in the future. Right so you know a lot of times they get asked about the round-trip efficiency of hydrogen when you're doing electrolysis and they say it doesn't really pencil out all that well I mean if you're getting free or really cheap curtailed power you might be able to make it work it what's on the horizon to kind of bring that business case a little bit tighter I know a big company like ITM's got to be looking at that for the long term what are some of the implications there for getting the round-trip efficiency and the cost you know to where it's feasible to use more electrolysis. Sure yeah it's a good question so the round-trip efficiency really is a question of the efficiency of the actual electrolyzer itself so turning electrons into hydrogen and that's already a relatively efficient process about 75 percent efficiency and we're constantly through our R&D center in the UK constantly pushing that boundary higher and higher we have our highest plant today out in the field which is utilizing some of the waste heat that the electrolyzer produces is operating around 86 percent efficient and that's with RWE in Germany but I think that one of the other questions is you're using or ideally you're using curtailed energy so this is energy that would otherwise be wasted or spilt and so any efficiency is better than zero which would what the efficiency would be if you were curtailing that energy and what you see around the world in places like Germany and Scandinavia and the UK is that once you get to 20 plus percent of capacities for planted up renewables you start to see this curtailment event happen more and more frequently and that's just essentially wasted energy there's nothing you can do you can't get the energy back it's gone and so what you can do is you can store that energy you can store it in a battery you can pump water up a hill flywheels all these different types of energy storage and they all have their niche markets where they play a good role and I think where a hydrogen can fit well into that mix is long term large volumes of energy storage and energy to fuel to fuel vehicles you know it's a real sweet spot where hydrogen wins out over a lot of the other potential technologies that you can use and I think the reality is that in the future you'll see a mix of these technologies being used to get the overall efficiency of the of the whole power sector as high as possible yeah one of the things I hear discussed a lot and I think it's kind of a false analysis is that you know once these big grids get to kind of saturation of renewables that suddenly we won't have any curtailed power because we're we're going to be at that point where now we've we've kind of balanced it really well but in my estimation we're always going to be looking for a larger and larger demand on energy and we'll always kind of be outstepping the the requirements and always have curtailed power from renewable sources intermittent renewable sources so is that the kind of long-term take for a mitm too that that all the curtailed power may may lessen a little bit down the road it'll always be a factor and do you have enough confidence in the overall technology that that the the electrolyzer will actually become an efficient way to make clean hydrogen uh even if the electricity's you know not always curtailed but a little bit more expensive yeah sure I really do and I think that if you look at um you know these analogies of things like to make the whole amount of energy from the world you only need a small amount of solar power but you need to store it it comes at the wrong time and I think if you look at areas of the world that have a lot of renewables certainly more than than California or even Hawaii you get to see the kind of grid imbalance effects that happen and because public awareness and um public behavior is a very difficult thing to change you will always get these huge peaks of demand in energy when everybody's going home gets home from work plugs everything in starts to do things uh it kind of it always overlaps as to when the sun's going and so you get this huge mismatch of demand and supply and you're you're not going to change that even if you have vast vast amounts of renewable energy that's planted up you're just going to get more amount more volume of energy that is curtailed um even if the percentages of curtailed energy um reduce the physical volume the terawatt hours of energy are only going to go up and so that represents a huge opportunity for companies like ITM and other energy storage companies to try and grab that energy uh store it and then use it for sensible things later down the line um to to boost the overall efficiency of the energy system and I think that thinking about energy as just electricity or just gas or just petroleum you know it is a very archaic view of of energy and I think going forward if we to meet all of these goals that you know Hawaii California other areas of the world have set themselves very aggressive renewable energy goals we're going to need to think a little bit broader if we're going to meet that I agree and uh I think we're going to get take a quick break here when we come back though I'd like to talk to you a little bit more about like the the loss or that the the energy used for compression on the transportation side and some things like that that maybe we can attack to help drive I know you mentioned that using the the reject heat from your electrolyzers and and capturing that energy source makes your systems more efficient so maybe we can chat a little bit more about that after our break here happy to you thanks I invite you to join us on our keys to success show which is live on the think tech live streaming network series weekly on Thursdays at 11 a.m. My name is Danilia D A N E L I A and I'm the other half of the duo John Newman our goal for keys to success is to provide a platform for professional and personal development tools and profound insights on how to achieve success in life career and or business we have incredible guests from all walks of life including politicians successful business owners leaders entrepreneurs and authors as this is a live show there are live mess ups as well which are fun to watch aloha and we'll see you on Thursday that can be welcome back to standard man thanks for spending your lunch hour with me I've got Steve Jones from ITM out of Anaheim California talking to us today on Skype and I'm really excited just a little background I met Steve probably three years ago in Los Angeles at a fuel cell conference and just talking to him a little bit about what ITM is doing in Europe when it first started out kind of got me excited and I shared some of the information that his company puts out publicly with some of the PUC members here and some of the folks in our state energy office and and I think it finally got some traction after a fairly short time so we're gonna we're gonna kind of move our conversation towards more efficient electrolysis first and then a little bit into the model that Europe's using to to not only produce hydrogen for the transportation sector but to also move it around the continental the mass of Europe to to make it available for the transportation public and I point out to people that one of the really important things here is that you know with gasoline right now you throw that in a tanker truck and drive it around and that costs money too and a pipeline is a much more efficient way to move energy around long distances than than in a pipe than in tube trailers or tractor driven trailers or even trains for that matter and that's what Europe's taking advantage of now so so Steve let's first talk about a little bit about maybe what where you see electrolyzers going and some of the things we can do to improve the roundtrip efficiency on producing hydrogen cleanly with an electrolyzer and then move into the european model sure yeah so um the electrolyzers as i said at the moment about 75 efficiency um and that's power into hydrogen out and some of the things that we're doing as a company moving forward is is incremental efficiencies to the individual chemistries that happen inside the electrolyzer and that's done through our r&d center in the uk and they're constantly reformulating things and making incremental steps in efficiency um i think one of the other things is looking at um ways to utilize some of the waste products from an electrolyzer namely heat and how that can boost the overall efficiency of the system as i mentioned we have a plant running in germany which is an 86 percent efficiency because it uses the heat obviously that that's quite site specific um but i think you'll see a gradual increase in efficiency from a let from electrolysis products from 75 up to you know the 85 range within the next few years so what kind of pressure comes off of your stack right off the stack um so our stacks are relatively high high pressure for the industry so we have systems that operate at 20 bar 50 bar and up to 80 bar pressure and that's straight from the electrolyzer and it enables you to save some um downstream compression energy um later on if you're if you're ultimately compressing it up to high pressure for vehicles for example and we have a project we're getting ready to take on with some folks from arizona where we're looking at getting in excess of 700 bar pressure off of a it's not actually a stack but it is an electrolyzer and um we're excited about the potential for that because that could be a huge game changer um if companies like yours could could capture that efficiency as well yeah exactly i mean you know you're looking at generally speaking if the larger the compressor the less efficiency penalty it has on the overall system but it's still definitely a slice of of the pie when you're looking at overall energy efficiency of the system um and if you can if you can eliminate that um it's always more efficient to uh compress the hydrogen internal to the electrolyzer than it is via an external mechanical device outstanding well let's transition now to what you your company's doing over in europe um that actually like like you say uh the the idea of energy is no longer just electricity or gasoline and diesel it's kind of a now one big uh market where uh all the renewables and all the electrical power and what we're using to drive uh our vehicles is starting to all merge into one huge system and we all agree that um electrification of the transportation sector is not a matter of if but when um and what kind of storage you're going to have on the vehicle for energy whether it's just batteries maybe graphing batteries will be a breakthrough in a few years but hydrogen certainly will play a role and is destined to play a role in most people's minds right now so what are the kind of things that itm is doing in europe to make hydrogen possible for the transportation sector yeah so um i think two two main areas um in uh in germany and in the uk and in scandinavia we're looking at the constant step to power to gas so using the gas grid network to move hydrogen around for various energy hungry um processes now whether that be you know heating your home or firing a boiler or using as a transportation fuel you know kind of all of the above um is the real answer once you've injected it into the pipeline but looking at more direct um projects that we're involved in in the uk for example um we have uh 17 oh 16 sorry hydrogen refueling stations um that will be going into the uk all of which utilize electrolysis technology to use the electricity grid network renewable power network to provide a transportation fuel for the growing number of fuel cell vehicles in the uk um and the uk energy market is looking at how can we best use these electrolyzers as effectively dump loads to mop up renewable electricity when there is an excess on the grid and so they're looking at ways and means to devise um specialized tariff structures to uh financially incentivize people like itm with electrolysis technology that is able to receive um large amounts of energy you know at the flick of a switch um so does itm actually have their own proprietary control systems that work in a grid that help you do that mop up as you say of you know when you have three voltage running around here and there you can pull it all in and use it yeah so our electrolyzers um are are very rapid response you know you can turn them on and off sub second and so that helps um when you're managing the grid when you're doing things like frequency response demand side management where you have to be able to react very quickly in order to balance the grid and now the the the grid operators are becoming more knowledgeable about knowledgeable about hydrogen and and the the opportunities that electrical electrolysis allows them and so we're working with those guys to um develop the control systems required so that when the grid need to spill energy you know they can do it instantly they can tell us to turn on we turn on we we absorb the load um for as long as they want us to absorb the load and they can turn us off just as quickly okay and how about on the on the continent over in uh germany and um maybe germany france netherlands you know how are your systems or other systems from companies like yours working out over there and that power to gas concept how's that working out on the continent there yeah it's going well i think germany has the most um deployments of projects um you know there are there are over a dozen projects now in germany where electrolysis are being used um for power to gas energy storage for various sizes of systems and there's been um uh a few reports done by the european union that look at how best to use power to gas within the energy mix you know with batteries and flywheels and pumped hydro and all of the rest of it um and most of those if not all of those studies that have looked at it have all concluded that for what they call deep decarbonization of of the um of the energy sector hydrogen is going to play a role and it's going to play a role at the large large amounts of energy storage and long durations of energy storage is really where hydrogen plays out um and when you're looking at an alternative energy source for a sector that's as large as the transportation sector then really you need to be absorbing terawatt hours of energy long term to be able to meet those energy demands so hydrogen has a real um benefit for the transportation sector uh and i think it's it's it's echoed by all of the different car companies that are bringing hydrogen vehicles to market you know you sit uh as you and i sit quite often in conferences and things like that where the executives of these companies are getting up and talking about the future of mobility all of them see a electrification as the way forward but b hydrogen as the long term propulsion technology that's going to drive us forward and meet the goals that everybody's setting these days well that's that's great i agree 100 percent and it's nice to hear from outside of our territorial boundaries here in the island state of Hawaii that other places are coming to that realization that um it's a great a great tool to help you control your grid and store energy from your grid especially when you have excess power off renewables intermittent renewables in particular and the benefit to the transportation sector because here in Hawaii you know we're we've got great strides um you know going towards uh getting our grid off of fossil fuels which we're almost totally dependent on between coal and oil to make our electricity we have a quite a bit of a penetration of solar uh and more in the queue waiting to be given interconnect agreements a lot of the folks are really excited about getting connected but um they've got rate structure changes happening which is something we haven't had uh here previously there's some dockets in the public utility commission that will do the things like you mentioned in europe where you structure the rates the rates for uh renewables and electricity so that it incentivizes use of it uh use of the curtail power or the time of day use to be much more functional and gets you other benefits so we're hoping that the transportation sector in Hawaii which is about 60 percent of our fossil fuel use is going to see a benefit uh from the kind of things that we're seeing in europe and the technologies we're seeing by your company that are being employed in europe to get hydrogen more out in the transportation sector and help us with our electrification of the transportation grid yeah i i think that's that's um that's really important and i think that hawaii is as a territory and i've you know i've been out there quite a few times and i've met with the with the puc there and the and the local gas company um and there's a lot of similarities that can be drawn between island communities like hawaii and areas of northern europe you know the uk is an island um in europe gas prices are a lot higher than they are in on the mainland in the us for example uh like they are in hawaii um so when you're faced with an energy system where you can't rely on essentially an infinite pipeline of really cheap natural gas you need to do something a little different and um you know the uk and hawaii um have got quite a few similarities in that regard because although the uk is interconnected with mainland europe um it's by no means connected enough to be able to solve all of our problems and a lot of our energy is still imported just like it is in hawaii so i think there are a lot of similarities that can benefit both both territories that's a great that's a really great point steve and you know believe it or not we're we're up against our uh stop time here and i'd like to thank you for your participation on think tech hawaii and stan energy man show um i definitely am going to have you back on in the not too distant future so we can dig a little bit deeper in but can you can you help us with one piece of information over in europe what does it cost for a leader of gasoline or a gallon of gasoline just so we have some sense of comparison here in hawaii yeah yeah so a leader of um unleaded fuel in the uk for example is a little over one pound sterling so that's about uh say one dollar fifty um and if you think there are four liters in a gallon so that's four that's five dollars uh per gallon and it's gone much higher than that you know it's relatively low at the moment i can remember it being one pound fifty per liter um so you know it's it's really uh it's you know it's less than a third of the cost in the u.s. all right great incentive for us to to really think about this stuff seriously because we've seen our gas prices go pretty high so steve thanks again for being on the show with us and uh we appreciate you calling in from california hope your surfing's going well and uh and you get back to wearing a dry suit in in uk if you get back to uk to do some surfing there and uh we'll get you back on the show here to talk some more about hydrogen thanks again thanks dan enjoyed it all right hello and thanks to everyone for joining me on my lunch hour stand the engine man signing off till next week and we'll see you then