 goodness it's Monday I'm Jay Fiedel this is Think Tech and today we have an FBI show that means from the Big Island we're talking about hydrogen from the Big Island and we have our co-host Marco Mangelskor, the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo and our other guest who is Paul Pantio and he is the director and CCO of Blue Planet Research which is up there above Kona I guess and the most beautiful part of the Big Island with a hydrogen facility we want to know about it my gentlemen how are you? Great to be back with you my friend Jay and calling we're talking I'm talking from the San Francisco South Bay Area and I am so appreciative of my friend Paul agreeing to share his wisdom and insight with us today so thank you so much Paul for being on with Jay and I today. Well, it falls on you Marco to be as a co-host to introduce Paul and just give us some some some parameters on him. It's one of those people I think of as a brother from a distant mother in terms of being on the side of goodness and light and renewable energy and trying to do the right thing not only for the Big Island and the state of Hawaii but for the planet at large he's a brother of another different mother that is excuse me his longtime friend Hank Rogers of Blue Planet so Paul has been doing such cool things over the years at the ranch there on the west side of the Big Island that Hank has in terms of renewable energy making his own hydrogen and just being one of those visionaries who has been working for years putting out an image and a reality hopefully reality of what the island can become in terms of clean renewable energy which hopefully over time will use hydrogen gas and greater and greater quantities so I just have a lot of respect and a lot of Aloha for Paul and I'm just so pleased that he has some time to talk with us today. Paul am I right to say that the Blue Planet research is focused largely on hydrogen at least in your facility and am I right to say that hydrogen is probably lives most in terms of use and research on the Big Island am I right to say that? Well that's close what we do here at Blue Planet research or would we just say BPR is Renewable Energy Storage Research so from flywheels to batteries to hydrogen we're interested in it and this is what we came together to do to find out how to make renewable energy work closer to base load that's always been the Achilles heel of renewables and when Hank and I started this project years and years ago the goal was to find out what was the best solution to make this a reality and then learn from that and show other people. So hydrogen is just one of the storage farms that we use for energy it's an energy carrier however it is my personal favorite that I spend a little bit more time on compared to batteries. How do you compare yourself or coordinate yourself with our hydrogen coordinator Stan Osserman who does our show on mostly on hydrogen on Fridays and Mitch Ewen who does hydrogen for HNEI what's the connection how do you work together? Stan and Mitch are both really close friends of mine we've been working on this for well since 2005 with Mitch and a little bit later with Stan. Stan is actually moving to the Big Island we were going to be neighbors soon I have a tremendous amount of respect for both Mitch and Stan. Mitch has paved the way with getting all the permitting and all the red tape out of the way to get hydrogen infrastructure in place. A real quick interesting story when Hank first bought this ranch in 2005 the very first meeting we had up here was with Mitch Ewen. Mitch came over to talk to us about hydrogen and that's where Mitch and I first met. Can you talk about the ranch a little bit Paul? I understand the ranch is off the grid so what's happening at the ranch? Yeah the ranch is our microgrid it's our cast bed that we deploy all of the different technologies on. We actually live this it's not just a laboratory setting it's a living microgrid it's 32 acres in size. The power loads and requirements are fairly low because it was started in 1884 there's a lot of legacy old equipment and buildings here. We have no air conditioning loads because we're almost 3,000 feet in elevation so it's relatively cool here. The ranch is our test bed and we use it to show other people an example of what can be done. So you have electrolyzers there and you talk about what that is and how it feeds into the system the renewable system you developed at the ranch? Absolutely. First of all as you said we're off grid and that means 100% disconnected from the utility. A couple things happen when you go off grid for one thing you have to have an oversize generation source and in this case it's PV and the reason for that is because every day counts you can go one day by powering the utility if they're not there you have to make your own power every single day. So the other thing that means is when the weather is really good you tend to end up with too much energy. So if you size your system for worst-case scenario for example we can run the ranch loads when it's overcast which happens every day around noon or a little before noon. We can also operate in light rain but in the mornings the skies are typically crystal clear blue and we would end up throwing a tremendous amount of energy away. So while the batteries are charging and the ranch is being run we take the excess power and we turn that into hydrogen and we also charge electric vehicles. So any any way that we can minimize the waste is what we're looking for. Yeah and I recall you were into Sony batteries is that still so? Yeah we started we have the first Canadian Redox flow battery in the state of Hawaii and that's just a fancy type of battery. Unfortunately the technology wasn't efficient enough for the type of weather that we have. We live in a microclimate up here as I said in mornings of crystal clear and by 11 or 12 it's overcast. We don't have enough hours to focus on something like a low battery. So that didn't work out too well. We worked with Tesla for a while looking at their battery technology. We ended up not going with Tesla because of the chemistry that they use. There's a huge difference between lithium chemistries. They use cobalt and I think the article in the paper tests upon some of the reasons we don't like cobalt. Yeah I saw that I saw that cobalt comes from environments that it's not fair to take the cobalt. Yeah it's mostly from the Congo and they use lots of child labor to mine it without any health protection. So it's not a very good on a moral issue alone it's not a very good technology. Now what cobalt has in its favor is that it's lightweight. It's very energy dense so it's actually good for cell phones and small stuff. But anything large that's carrying a lot of energy the potential danger and risks involved with cobalt are just not enough to justify its use. So Sony is what we ended up with. They use an olivine type ferrous phosphate lithium ferrous phosphate and olivine is as you know Green Sand Beach same mineral. It's a very benign. It cannot overheat and catch on fire so it's incredibly safe and in particular it has about a 40% longer cycle life so it lasts 40% longer. That's great. So Marco can you talk about the recent developments in the county over hydrogen buses and maybe you can frame some questions to Paul about that. Yeah I think I'll let Paul get into that because he's kind of more knowledgeable about kind of the late breaking news about one or more county buses running on hydrogen. I think I'll kind of take more of a macro view and then we'll get more more down to the micro of the big islands. I just quickly did some research yesterday to see what the hydrogen fueling station situation is in our state and also across the US mainland and just some interesting factoids. In California for example there are 40 fueling stations north and south of California with another 24 so in the pipeline so in the most account there will be somewhere under 70 and the total sales of fuel cell vehicles across the US as of about three months ago was somewhere below 7000 total with Toyota, Honda and Hyundai being the top three by far with Toyota being the number one out of those three. So clearly in terms of hydrogen used for transportation which is at the beginning of hopefully a rapid steep j-curve in terms of adoption and you know I'm particularly interested as well of course in hydrogen gas as a fuel source for generation power generation on the big island and we can talk a little bit about that in perhaps a few minutes but you zoom down to the state of Hawaii and by my account there's only one hydrogen fueling station in the entire state that's run by CERF Copacific and Mapuna Puna on Oahu. So with that kind of background what's kind of bedeviled me for years Paul and I would like to get your head on this is you know the chicken and egg question regarding hydrogen in terms of supply and demand do we provide a supply first and then hope that demand is going to come and if so how do we do that and I know you've been working in the trenches on that question for years so I'd really been interested in hearing kind of your take on on what comes first so they both come at the same time how do you calibrate because obviously it doesn't make sense to make a whole bunch of hydrogen if there's isn't going to be a consumer for the hydrogen and then the consumer for the hydrogen isn't going to buy the vehicle or vehicles unless there's a reliable source of hydrogen so what's your what's your approach on that yeah that's you hit the nail on the head with that it's always in the chicken and the egg and you explained it very very clearly the solution in my opinion is to not do it California is where they invested a huge amount of capital into developing the infrastructure even while they were waiting for the vehicles to come that doesn't make a lot of sense to me what we would prefer to do is put in small hydrogen systems that are scaleable and scale the production as the demand grows right now we have a lot of easy in particular Toyota's a lot of these are being turned in at the end of leases and they're being recertified as pre-owned used vehicles that you can pick up for actually quite cheap the numbers I'm hearing or something like $15,000 versus the original $60,000 price tag so that makes buying the use component of it very affordable but obviously we need to focus on public transportation at the same time if not first so doing a bus system and providing just the amount of hydrogen needed to maintain that application makes the most sense to me because as we add more buses we can easily scale up hydrogen equipment now it does require using specific type of equipment there are a few companies around that make small hydrogen dispensing systems as well as generation in particular the company that makes our equipment is Millennium Rain out of Dayton Ohio the US company they make a range of different size or output models of hydrogen so the point of making is if you have a bus that uses 20 kilograms per day of hydrogen for its route you can supply that bus with 20 kilograms you don't need to store much more than that and as you add buses you can scale that now with the new bills that have just been passed allowing the county to purchase or do transportation procurement that's what I was asking about I I think that's really important can you can you say what that bill provides yeah so that's going to open up the door for a third party to come in and build the generation system and the infrastructure and also purchase the vehicles and then just lease that or sell that service to the county the county now has the ability to procure those services so that means the county doesn't have to come up with the funds they can be paying or less than what they're paying now on a daily basis to maintain the aging crippled diesel fleet that they have and I think on the big arm we're now in nine buses now out of a week of 60 marker you can I know the number but with 60 or 66 buses we're down to nine and the update on those buses is getting more and more expensive every day so if a third party came in and says here we've got these brand new buses they're non-polluting they run on a renewable resource and and we'll leave these to you facts and that makes a lot of sense okay so this is this is in many ways ground shaker groundbreaking isn't it we're going to have a system on the big island that will be quite remarkable if we can put it together what what are the steps necessary to put it together and and what is the role of Blue Planet research in all of that Blue Planet research's role is just kind of helping with the coordination we're working with several different groups including some private entities who may want to invest in the technology in the infrastructure there's no mistake that this is hydrogen's a year if you just look at the amount of movement that's taking place worldwide and especially in the US and Hawaii it's hard to deny that this isn't building enough momentum to sustain it I think that we finally got into the point you know the meeting I mentioned earlier with Mitch 15 years ago yeah we thought two years we would be on our way and we'd be running on hydrogen well it's a little longer than we thought but it's definitely here now as evidenced by the car companies rather the the availability of the buses the availability hypothetically of the hydrogen and the buy-in by the county government here signals a whole new time in hydrogen for Hawaii because it suggests to me anyway that other islands will follow don't you think they will the natural progression and you know it's a typical whole thing where no one wants to be the first but as soon as someone breaks that ground and plays with that trail it's easy to get people to join them yeah this could be a big time for hydrogen and it is that's why I was asking you know is is hydrogen focused these days I know there are facilities here and surf go you know gives you hydrogen if you lease a Mariah and all that and it's a Puna Puna facility and of course there's hydrogen facilities on the military but sounds like hydrogen at least as far as public transportation is concerned is beginning to focus on the big island now and it may be where hydrogen and of course you guys are doing research with it so it may be that hydrogen is going to start to you know come alive in the big island more than any other place you do you agree with that or am I overstating the case no I think you're you're right and one of the main reasons is because we need it more than any of the other islands the big island being 4,000 square miles in size we've got range issues we've got elevation challenges that the other islands may not have so it makes sense to do it here and the silly part of this this whole story is the two camps between the electric pure electric vehicles and the hydrogen electric they're both electric and we have to quit thinking that one is better than the other enough it's just different applications if you can run on a pure electric vehicle for short distances that's more efficient than the hydrogen side problem is those electric vehicles can't make the run to Hilo and back to Kona or to South Point they just don't have the range and we have a Tesla Model X here at the ranch and it's pushing it to try to go to volcano and back and you know it's got a 230 mile range the Mariah has a 320 mile range and only takes five minutes to refuel yeah that's that's compelling but the issue as Marco brought up before is exactly how much hydrogen do you make for that for the consumer market for the individual passenger car market how much do you make and you have to time your you know production one thing it's that strikes me though is that with hydrogen in steel tanks you can make it in advance you can stockpile hydrogen and let it sit and wait for the market to catch up I mean I don't know how long it can wait but it seems to me there's a you know there's an opportunity there to stockpile it somewhere and keep it at the ready waiting for the cars no yes I mean hydrogen never loses this energy unless it just leaks out it's literally there for eternity so you can stockpile as much as you want and then that would definitely be the way we would do it and have a certain amount of surplus for them now one of the things that when we talk about other than transportation for example the military across the board has a mandate now for 14 days of economy they need 14 days of backup generation well you could do it with batteries technically but it would be crazy to try and do that the cost of warehousing electrons for using them every couple of months in an emergency with the astronomically expensive now if you combine batteries with hydrogen and you use your batteries for your power for your daily turnover of electrons and store your backup in the form of hydrogen now you have something economical that makes sense and you can do the hydrogen side for about a third of the cost of batteries and once your storage is full you still make hydrogen for other uses you can use that for transportation or ground support equipment you know the airport has in Kona has had this and their master plan for 15 years now you put in hydrogen and all the ground support equipment the baggage tugs the airlines could all be running on hydrogen instead of propane yeah what's what's more is that you can you can move hydrogen around the state in those tanks that you can move it outside the state in those tanks and and you can take your time about it and you can take advantage of the cheapest method of transportation don't have to lay cables or anything like that so there's really an advantage statewide but my question I don't know you really haven't gotten into this yet but how do you make it how do you make it efficiently how do you make it cheaply my recollection is to buy even a moderate size of electrolyzers it's going to cost a hundred thousand dollars how how can you do that at a commercial a commercial quantity you know so that it can fit into this whole new system of hydrogen and and query also where does where does geothermal fit in all that there was so much discussion about geothermal producing hydrogen right there in Kona so can can you tell us where it's going to come from and how expensive it's going to be yeah you just gave me the perfect segue about the touch on geothermal now right now we know we can make hydrogen on par or cheaper than gasoline and we can't do that with the utilities cost of power obviously however if we use renewable energy and in particular this is another reason why the big island is the place to start first we have over seven and a half gigawatts of potential renewable energy available on this island alone if we would have been to all the resources from solar to wind to hydro to geothermal we could not only make all of the transportation fuel for the entire state we would be exporting it as a product to California and possibly to man so it's an industry that's going to generate new jobs new high-tech well paying jobs so that we can quit exporting our case geothermal is is one of the keys now this is a hot button topic obviously but everyone bases geothermal on the experience of the Kona there are new technologies available that can make it much safer you can do it on very small scales but the cost of your electricity to electrolyze water is one of the things that can determine the cost of the hydrogen the equipment cost is pretty fixed it's your energy cost that's the variable now electrolysis is only one way to make hydrogen right now the county flares methane from the landfill and the quantities enough to provide each bus 700 miles a day of transportation right obviously the buses don't do 700 hours but that's how much we're flaring right now just in the form of burning gas methane is CH4 there's four hydrogen atoms for every carbon you can extract that hydrogen from the methane now you have a source of hydrogen that was typically thrown away in the form of heat and CO2 before we have we have the process available do we have that technology working now how far away offer are we from having that technology working this is all technology that exists today this is nothing that's you know science fiction and in the future this is what's available now we just need to deploy Marco you must have a million questions for Paul why don't you run into some of them and what you're referring to Paul is in terms of breaking up the hydrocarbon molecule of methane or propane or butane is steam reformation right right that's the most common technology of today there are better technologies which aren't commercialized yet that's what we could start with and listen a little bit of CO2 from steam reformation is certainly better than methane going into the atmosphere and if you burn it you're producing CO2 anyway I'm going to ask a question but I'm going to sketch something out first before I get to my question and I'm going to sketch out the following so in order to get to anywhere close to 100% renewable energy and power generation in the decades to come on the big island is my conclusion that renewable energy which is variable solar or wind and batteries is not going to get us across the finish line why because we're going to continue to need some type of combustion generation as a backup as a security policy in the event that we have difficulties with renewable energy and or storage so if you look at the power generation backbone of the big island the two largest power plants are at Cahole which is about 80 megawatts and that's owned by Helco and then there's a 60 megawatt plant in Honoka which is Hamaku energy owned by Pacific Current which is a unregulated subsidiary of one electric industries each of those plants has two count them to General Electric LM 2500 combustion turbines and those turbines as far as I know and in the brief research I've done can be converted to different fuels other than hydro carbon based fuels so obviously if you're running large combustion turbines on a scale like that and you convert them to hydrogen you're going to have want to have obviously a very high confidence that you can get hydrogen in adequate quantities to be able to power the turbines and not only adequate quantities but at a cost effective price so my question to you Paul is have you done any crunching or has Mitch done any crunching or stand any crunching in terms of the type or not the type but the quantity of hydrogen that would be needed to power the largest power plants on the island and those four 2500 combustion turbines the answer is no we've been focused mostly on transportation however if you look at what's happening in Australia right now Australia is decommissioning coal-fired power plants and they are converting them to run on hydrogen they can get a coal-fired plant to run efficiently and cost effectively on hydrogen we can certainly do a an already existing gas-fired sermon more cost effectively and it again depends on the amount of hydrogen you can produce as you stated and that is really just dictated by the cost of your energy the equipment side the hardware that's all available now and it's scalable but we need to have a low cost solution of energy but if you compare it you know maybe we could get on some boxes here and talk about just purely economic issues or moral issues but bottom line is we really don't have a choice we have to start doing something we can't wait for everything to run out or for sea rise to start eating all the specific islands well is there you is there anybody addressing this because it sounds to me like once you achieve a hydrogen based transportation system on the big island the very next step is to go where Marco was talking about you know figure out how to get a reasonable supply at a reasonable price and then convert the power plants to use hydrogen and that would be remarkable that would be that would be headline news that would be a game changer on the big island and maybe elsewhere but it all depends on finding you know the way to produce a sufficient hydrogen at a reasonable price so who's working on that Paul you you think you'll be working on that who's going to work on that well it's a good chance that you know there are a lot of smart people in Hawaii and that is the logical next step and in the progression of things but we can learn what's being done by other countries and by other companies they are working on that right now in Australia so this is kind of goes back to the silver bullet statement and we have to use everything that we have available the silver buckshot type approach now believe it or not you'd be surprised at what the real obstacle to the deployment of hydrogen is we all think the first thing that comes up is the cost economics it's the safety of hydrogen it's the storage of it it's actually the public perception of hydrogen that is the real obstacle at this point and we've experienced this firsthand over and over again people think hydrogen is incredibly dangerous when the truth is it's actually the opposite it's the safest flammable gas that we have it's a flammable gas so you have to handle it with respect just like any other flammable gas but there are properties of hydrogen that make it far safer than propane or detain or any other hydrocarbon fuel well we have to get into it more we have to you know we have to see that and educate the public about it in the course of this transition to the buses but one thing seems sorry and the best way to do that is to start with public transportation yes i agree and one thing seems clear though i it's i think in the future for for all three of us there's a trip to australia we have to go down there and see what they did we have to talk to them and you know and drink beer what can i say that that's the future to find out how they did that marco you interested let's go as long as i can get into business class so i don't get crunched back in the proletariat section my friend okay and paul have you been there shouldn't we go there now well actually hank is in there and hank has been talking to some of these people uh australia here i mentioned what we could be doing by exporting hydrogen from the big island well australia is doing just that they have just signed contracts with japan to ship them hydrogen instead of paul kawasaki misubishi these large industrial companies are building ships specifically designed to carry hydrogen so it's coming it's coming and we don't want to be the last ones on the planet no the clue in and that's interesting it's it's uh it's related in a funny way this is related to the lng ships that are being built and one of the trump administration initiatives is to try to sell lng through through uh japan uh to china and a good part of uh of points west of that and southeast asia and so forth so we have an initiative involving development of these transportation systems that will carry gas and if you can carry one kind of gas then arguably you convert it uh to another kind of gas maybe hydrogen so maybe it's not in small tanks maybe it's in big tanks as long as we can create it or draw it off methane in the first place uh gentlemen we're out of time i'm so sorry about that thank you so much marco for setting this up marco can you say goodbye goodbye thanks so much guys thank you paul thank you marco aloha we'll do this again thank you thank you jack i think you should do your next show from the ranch over here here i second that motion okay first the ranch and then melbourne hello everyone hello everyone