 Come to Stan, The Energy Man, the first show of 2017. I'm Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. And my job is to make you as smart as humanly possible with regards to energy. So relax, sit back, and pop a cold one. After all, it's got to be 5 p.m. someplace around the world. And I look much smarter and sound much smarter after you had a few. So go ahead and pop a cold one, even though it's lunch time here. We'll find out what the great city of California is doing today to clean up its transportation sector, because that's something that we're likewise trying to do here in Hawaii. My guest today is Mr. Tyson Eckley, who is actually sitting in Governor Jerry Brown's desk right now. Well, maybe he's not. But he's over there in Sacramento in the seat of government, the executive branch. And we're going to be talking to Tyson and finding out what's new in California. But just for the side note here, the image behind me, what you see behind me is actually from a trip I made to France, a really cool castle over there. So we're kind of doing the show from Hawaii and France all at the same time. But Tyson, thanks for coming on the show with us today. And I really appreciate you being on. We haven't seen each other for a while, but, you know, you're my hero over in California. And I'll tell you right now, we're trying to actually start a bill in Hawaii that will bring up a position like yours in our executive branch. And it may end up being me, but we're trying to get somebody who can say, hi, I'm from the governor's office and I'm here to help you with our hydrogen infrastructure. So what do you think? Is that going to work out okay? You like doing that? I think that'd be great, Stan. I think it'd be great to have Stan the energy man in there for sure. And it's been a really big help here in our, in the state of California. We've worked a lot with local agencies. And there's a big difference coming in as a company versus coming in as the governor's office to, you know, pitch and support a project. And so really what's, what's helped is we've, you know, worked directly with local agencies and our fire marshals here to set up the systems and make sure that, you know, when a project does come in, that is, you know, developing the infrastructure we're trying to develop, you know, the hydrogen fueling stations. It gets top priority and top billing within the cities. And it's been really effective so far. It's also been a whole lot of agencies together. So within this, we have a vast array of agencies with a bunch of overlapping jurisdiction and really helping to streamline kind of, you know, where the focus is. So we are, you know, affected with our set of resources and making sure we're doing everything we can to help launch this market. So I think it's an excellent idea and I hope it happens. Well, we're going to try it. I think the white energy policy forum is going to put that initiative in. And we're going to look at it this week and see what they do. But tell us a little bit about yourself. And, you know, I knew you grew up in California. So what got you wired into doing what you do now with hydrogen? And, I mean, how the heck did you end up all the way at the governor's level and being smart enough to answer all the questions and helping the fire marshals which through all the permitting issues and things to do stations? Well, I think if anything, there's a lot of smart people around and I ask a lot of questions. That's kind of really how it started. But, I mean, if I, you know, going how I fell into hydrogen is really almost luck. I was down at graduate school at UC Santa Barbara and had met a couple of gentlemen down there who had started a nonprofit called Energy Independence now that was based in Santa Barbara out of luck and ended up interning there. And that organization actually started with, so it was Daniel Emmett, Rick Markle, and Terry Taminant. And Terry Taminant turned out to be, they put together a pitch for the hydrogen highway in California. They pitched to Governor Schwarzenegger when he was running for office. Governor Schwarzenegger really liked the idea. And so he took that up as one of his main platforms. He brought in Terry Taminant as the EPA secretary. And so from there, Energy Independence now became one of those repositories of knowledge and helped push this hydrogen highway blueprint plan. This is before my time. They also pushed through some renewable energy stuff. And so when I met them, I didn't know anything about hydrogen, but I did know I loved, you know, wanted to work on climate change and air quality. And there's really no better way to do that than to work at the transportation sector. You know, it's about 40% of our emissions profile in the state of California. So it's a big, big chunk, the largest, in fact. And so any strategy to help reduce emissions from the transportation sectors, you know, what I was interested in. And then the pathway and, you know, I guess the longer story, but when I took over Energy Independence now, I think back in 2011 or so, we're looking kind of for how to make an impact. And we developed a hydrogen network investment plan, working with a bunch of different stakeholders to figure out, what will we do to incentivize the development of hydrogen infrastructure? How would we structure it? And so we came up with a bunch of concepts that were pretty influential and helped support the passage of legislation here in California, that Assembly Bill 8. And there were a lot of stakeholders who worked on that. But Assembly Bill 8 put together four hydrogen, $20 million a year. And I lost it. That's a lot of money. And it's nice to have a big state like California to do that, but $20 million a year to build out a network of at least 100 stations. And this was part of the program that does all the different alternative fuels. So it's about a $100 million annual program. And so our recommendations got fed into there. One of the things that came out of it was the need for a central complex coordination out of the governor's office to help make sure that the hydrogen network is developed in a good manner. And I put my hat into the ring and I was selected by the governor to do that. And that's really kind of a nutshell story of how I got here. Is this luck and opportunity and being the right place at the right time? Well, that's awesome. And, you know, we've actually had Terry Townman in here on our show and did a great interview with him. And I had no idea who I had on the line there until, I mean, he was here in person for the World Conservation Congress. So we had him on the show. And as I, because I was just introduced to him as Terry, you know, and then I find out he's head of the DeCaprio Foundation. And he wrote a book that I really, I read and was really inspired by Lives Per Gallon. And, you know, I just went crazy talking to him and he's a great guy. I hope to have him back on. He, again, California guy grew up in California and did the, like scuba diving and that's what got him into the clean energy stuff. Wanted to see clean transportation and clean water. But, you know, we here in Hawaii have a total population of just over any 1.2 million. So we're smaller than most of your cities in California in terms of population. So we don't have quite the budget that California does. But thanks to you and the folks that you work with, we certainly tap into all the standards and all of the work that you've done in California to help us develop our standards out here and stay consistent. Because you guys go international. I mean, when you start negotiating standards and the norms for stations and things, you're looking at Japan, you're looking at Europe and trying to standardize a 2601 kind of stuff and make sure that we're all in line and that cars don't all have different fittings on them to take the hydrogen. So we appreciate the leadership that California has provided consistently. I mean, while the rest of the federal government and a lot of the states, including Hawaii, kind of dropped off the hydrogen radar for a while in the last eight years. California has been pretty consistent. We appreciate that leadership and your role in it. So thanks a lot for doing that. But what's kind of the latest in the stations that you've got going? How many stations are up? Are you doing on-site electrolysis? Are you a tube trailer? What are some of the things going on in California with the hydrogen stations? Yeah, so it's really exciting. We ended the year with 26 open retail stations. So the last one that we opened was in San Diego and Del Mar. So that's really exciting. So essentially now we have, for those who are familiar with our geography, you could drive. You know, between San Diego, we have a cluster of stations in Orange County and Los Angeles. Then there's a connector station. Actually in Santa Barbara, there's a station as well. So it's very easy to go up there for the weekend from LA or Orange County. Then we have an interstate five, which connects our northern and southern California population clusters. The Colinga, the Harris program station there as well. And so from there you can drive into the Bay Area. We have a good cluster in the Silicon Valley. We're going to build out the San Francisco region soon. We have the North Bay covered as well. There's a station in West Sacramento and then one up in Truckee in Lake Tahoe. So we've actually driven some fuel cell vehicles in Nevada. So we got some by-state fuel cell vehicles. I was going to ask about Nevada. If you've got something on the way to Vegas, because I know that's a real popular route. And getting interstates is going to be the perfect start. It's a very popular route. We've been talking about it a lot. We actually have an incompetent route. That's right. That's right. And I think we just finished applying for FASTAC corridor designations, you know, working within California. But we're also talking about connecting up with Nevada and Utah and Colorado. And to connect our, you know, hydrogen and plug-in charging corridors. And I think one of the important ones is getting to Las Vegas. We can already, we can do Reno now, but Las Vegas is a really important one. And so these stations, are they production stations or are they mostly tube trailer? Is there a good mix? And is there a tendency to like one way of doing it over another based on the cost? Or, you know, what are some of the factors in building these stations? So right now we're seeing a lot on the delivered gas. So, you know, a tube trailer would come up. Some of them do a drop and swap. So once a tube trailer gets low, they'll come up and switch out for a new tube trailer. But a lot of the stations that are developed are actually kind of, they have a receptacle. So the trailer can do a milk run, so to speak. And then go out and top off the stations with the deliveries. And so we're seeing that for the most part. We do have some electrolysis stations coming online. We'll have one up and running very soon in Riverside, actually on the city yard. That would be electrolysis. Ontario is very soon to be completed as well. And also in Woodside, which is for those of you who like Classic Rock and stuff. It's by Alice's restaurant right across the street. Okay. Is there a preference? I mean, is there something driving the tube trailer thing? Is it just more convenient or for scale right now? Because the few vehicles that are out there, it scales better that way? What are some of the decision points in there? So far, it's just the lowest cost option. We can skim off of centralized production. A lot of it's steam methane reformation of natural gas. We can take water and natural gas based on centralized production. So that's kind of the cheapest molecule. But we're working closely with the utilities. It's up to figure out systems that will work to make electrolysis pathway more cost effective. And it's manageable now, but we can do a lot better with attractive rate structures. And we're very excited about as our renewables grow. And I think we're getting close to 27% if I'm not mistaken on our renewable portfolio standard. But as we get more and more online, more of that excess energy is, you know, there's certain times of the day or certain seasons where it needs to be curtailed. And so hydrogen is a great place to store that extra energy. That's an important point. And it's a point that I tend to really push hard over here is that as we electrify our transportation sector, that's going to drive our electrical requirements higher overall in the state. And we don't have all the hydroelectric like you do in the west there. That you can pull your renewable hydro power. So we have to look at a lot of that intermittent solar and wind power. And for that, you got to have the storage and hydrogen compliments the transportation sector and also helps us electrify the transportation sector as well as take care of high production time when we don't have the demand for electricity. We can use that intermittent solar and intermittent wind to start making hydrogen and then use the hydrogen and stationary fuel cells later on in the evening. In fact, Zuri, why don't we bring up the first two pictures? We'll just talk about them and just do them really quick. The first one, this one here is actually one of the stationary fuel cells at the Toyota headquarters in California at Torrance. And it's a one megawatt fuel cell that they use for what we call peak shaving. When electricity is really expensive in the summertime in California, they'll fire this thing up and run it off of the hydrogen line that runs right down the street between the Lindy Gas Company and one of the refineries. And they make all their electricity required in their headquarters off that stationary fuel cell. So just to show you the scalability, that's a one megawatt fuel cell. And the next photo is one that we actually use in our vehicles. That's just a small 30 kilowatt hydrogenic fuel cell, which is typical in a vehicle. So that's how you make the electricity with these fuel cells and it's really kind of neat. And like you say, the hydrogen, the more intermittent renewables you've got, the more important it is to really look at that hydrogen as a storage option. So we're going to focus on that and try to make a big push for our electric company to understand that they have a new potential business model if they start looking at the transportation sector as well. So we're going to take a quick break here, Tyson, and we'll be back in about 60 seconds and learn more about what's going on in California. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Kondo Insider. And we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at 3 o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners. And I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. I'm Jay Fiedel. And with Ray Starling, I host Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, 4 o'clock every Wednesday. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, making discovery of what's going on in energy in this community. Ray, what do you think? We've got a great group of shows coming up, finishing out this year and starting next year. Dean Nishita has been with us today. He's the new consumer advocate, and he has told us a lot, but he's got a lot more to tell. So we're going to have him back and others like him in future shows. And Dean, how much of that do you agree with? There's a lot to be said, and I'm interested in seeing some of your other shows. Okay, we'll be back. 4 o'clock every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii. Hey, welcome back to Stand on the Energy Man on my lunch hour, as usual, here on Friday afternoon. So thanks for being here with us at Think Tech Hawaii. We've got Tyson Ackley from California, works in the executive branch over there in a really unique position, which we're hoping to maybe duplicate here in Hawaii, where he just kind of helps, I'd say, smooth the way, especially on the permitting side and maybe when people have technical questions about standing up hydrogen stations in their vicinity to help move those projects along and make sure that things just don't get stuck in the bureaucracy. So again, welcome, Tyson. Thanks for being with us today via Skype. And we're going to throw up a couple more pictures here, and they're mostly the stations and stuff that's in California. So, sir, why don't we throw up some more of these pictures? There's a hydrogen bus that I didn't get to ride on, but I talked to some folks, this is up at Berkeley, that would actually wait for the hydrogen bus to come by. It was so much quieter and more comfortable to ride in than the diesel buses. So that's one of the things that California is doing is some of their metropolitan areas are looking at zero-mission and hydrogen buses and other hybrid technologies to clean up the transportation sector. And we can just flash through the other ones. There's a bunch of stations. This one is in Torrance. And then the next picture is actually the dispensing area. Is it Irvine? I mean, University of California Irvine that has a hydrogen station. Tyson? Yeah, so Irvine has a hydrogen station. They're using that kind of in a unique way. They do have the ant teacher bus, which is one of them is running as a hydrogen fuel cell electric bus. They fill it during the night. It's a light duty station not designed for heavy duty use, but we want to get the bus down there. And so in the evening time, they do the feelings of that bus and also the one that Orange County Transit already has. And then during the daytime, it fills light duty vehicles. Okay. Do they actually sell the hydrogen? They do. It's an open retail station. And that's one of the most unique things about California's network is all the stations that we're opening now, the 26 I mentioned before, they all sell fuel via credit card to retail consumers. And that's unique anywhere in the world. I mean, Germany is a non-retailing notes. It's a similar feel, look and feel. They're not actually customers directly paying for the fuel. Okay. Is the government subsidizing it in Europe or is it, I mean, they're just not charging. They're giving the fuel away for free? I think in some cases, in some cases there's a cross subsidy. It's a partnership between the automakers and the station providers. So they're kind of, they're considering like a pre-commercial type of a thing. And this, you know, in California it's an open retail but it can buy the fuel if they have it received receptacle, which is a car. In California, what is the cost for a kilogram of hydrogen just out of curiosity? So right now, let's, you know, on average it's probably 12 to $14 per kilogram. So it's on the higher side. We definitely want to get that lower. But then the saving grace has been the automakers have been picking up the tab on fuel. And so that, you know, the 12 to $15 a kilogram is, you can divide that by two or three to get, you know, kind of the equivalent for a gasoline price. You know, you're looking at, you know, around six to seven or, you know, five to six dollars depending on equivalent gasoline price. But as I said, the automakers have picked it up. I think with Toyota, with the lease, you get $15,000 for the first three years of fuel. And we'll see what happens as they extend that in. So we're definitely very mindful of the price. Yeah, in Hawaii, that $12 a kilogram, actually we did some Sandia National Labs math with those engineers. And at one point in time, gasoline was, you know, right under five bucks a gallon here. And when we threw in the, through the formula together, it came out to around 12 or so dollars a kilogram, which pretty much was right in the ballpark with what we were paying for gasoline out here. It was almost equivalent. And so if you throw in the mini-mart concept of, you know, running a business that makes its money off of the retail sales in a store, and now you're right in the ballpark where a company can actually make money dispensing hydrogen and selling it at like $12 to $15 a kilogram because they're right there almost with the retail on gasoline. But also the technology, I mean, I know you see it too, the technology's getting better and better and the more volume you do, the price drops. So I'm looking at hydrogen getting substantially cheaper over the next five or 10 years as more and more cars come on the road. You're looking at the same thing? Absolutely. And that's the nice part. The cost reduction isn't up. It's down. So it's just a supply and demand. And so as we get more throughput, the price will come down. I think every study I've seen has shown that. And so we're looking at, you know, potentially very attractive price of fuel once we get over that kind of this valley of death. Right now it's hard because there's a relatively few number of stations. We don't have economies of scale and relatively low volume throughput. Now we have about just over a thousand fuel cell vehicles on the road in California, which is a big deal. But we still need a lot more than that to drive the price down. Are they primarily the Toyota Mariah and the Hyundai? That's right. So we have Toyota Mariah is the lion's share of that. And we have the Hyundai Tucson. And then also just, I think a few weeks ago, they got the first brand new Honda Clarity's on the road. I think there's about 10 of them out right now, but they're ramping up very quickly. Great. I don't know if you know this, but we actually have six Mariah in Hawaii. I saw that. That's great. Yeah. And that leads us to the point of, I named the title of this segment to Zev or not to Zev, because you guys are a zero mission vehicle state. And Hawaii made the decision not to do the Zev mandate. And it's kind of interesting because you guys are really pushing ahead. But, you know, we're not Zev, but we're trying really hard to stay up with you in terms of making things happen quick. We're a much smaller scale. So I see that as a big advantage on our side. But I want to let people know that's where the title came from, Zev or not Zev. California is a Zev state and gets priority on vehicles in a lot of cases because the car companies get credits for emission free vehicles or lower emission vehicles. And that allows them to sell higher emission vehicles. You know, more of those in the state too. So it's an interesting concept, but Hawaii is kind of on the other end where we're just looking for people doing the right thing and hopefully getting some business involvement in that says, hey, we just want to do this because it's the right thing for our environment in Hawaii. But are there a lot of advantages to being a Zev state that maybe Hawaii ought to relook at that model? I think it'd be great if Hawaii looked at that model. We're trying to get this as far and wide as possible. And the more pressure we have on automakers to deliver zero emission vehicles the more they'll bring to market. So as they're making for fuel cells, for example, as they're making investment decisions on how many Marais to produce, how many Clarities to produce, they're looking at our network and they have to make those a lot of decisions three years in advance. There's a network that's developed in Hawaii and in California and Northeast, it's all the North American market. It's a much more safe investment decision for the automakers to make. And so I think we find that to be very important. But we see Hawaii in particular, it's a tremendous opportunity there. All the exposure and the travelers who come there and imagine renting a car that's a fuel cell vehicle when you get there or a plug-in or any zero emission drive train that exposes the public to that. And the ability to think about your island in Oahu, three or four or five stations can really cover the island. That's true, especially as we first get started. Opportunity there. Yeah, until we get a lot of vehicles on the road just a handful of stations can cover it. And that's what we're trying to do. And speaking of the tourist side of it, one of the other projects I did mention to you earlier when we were talking off-air was the Department of Transportation is initiating a rental car bus shuttle program where instead of each rental car company bringing their own buses in the state is going to contract it out. And they've already committed to make nine of their 40-foot buses, fuel cell buses, I'm supposed to help them build a station. And so one of the first things that anybody that comes into Hawaii to rent a car is going to get to do is ride on a hydrogen fuel cell bus. And I think right after that we're going to try and get some of the car companies to bring in Clarities and Marais and Hyundai vehicles in their fuel cell. And I've even talked to Honda about actually doing kind of the whole package deal where you do like an eco-package thing where you come out here and rent a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and even do a little test track thing where they have a test track where you can kind of max perform the thing for a couple hours and then rent the vehicle and drive around in it. Because we do a lot of good package deals for vacations out here and we thought it would be good. But you're right, this is a great place for the world to see hydrogen and we're going to try and maximize that potential as well. No, that's great. I love that idea. That sounds really fine. Like the eco-tourism in a zero-mission vehicle. Exactly, we do a lot of great eco-tourism out here because the other advantage Hawaii has is its natural beauty and the propensity that our local population has for keeping things clean and natural and unpolluted and as culturally sound as possible to meet with the Hawaiian values that we've always had here in the islands to kind of cherish the land and the water and all the resources that we have. So it actually is a lot easier for us to sell that here in Hawaii because it's kind of naturally built into the culture. It's great. So what are some of the things that you see happening to get the other ZEV states between the Northeast and they're in California connected? I mean, there's a whole lot of non-ZEV states between you and Connecticut. I mean, what's a big plan to bring the rest of the folks in there so you could actually drive your Clarity or your Mariah to New York City sometime from California? It's a great question. I mean, really the ZEV regulation is meant to be a floor, not a ceiling, so it's meant to start the market. So you're noticing companies that are bringing zero-management vehicles and that there are 50-state vehicles. They're not just selling them in ZEV states and that's part of the exciting part. So like the Chevy Bolt, the Bolt EV coming out, for example, that's a 50-state vehicle and will be available across the country saying with the Bolt, with the V. And that's, you know, there's a few years ahead of where hydrogen is and hydrogen's different because you can't just plug it in at home, so to speak. We need to have a fleet-fueling network. And so we're working with the Northeast States. Toyota has partnered with Air the Geed in the Northeast or maybe the other way around there, the Geed has partnered with Toyota to build 12 stations out there and so we're supporting that effort, you know, with information and everything. But I think really we have to kind of create these beach heads of activity. Like Hawaii, I see as one. California for sure. The Northeast States. And then it's really, you know, once we prove that and I think California has proven that you can do this and it is scalable and now it's just developing those next markets and then you can imagine as the Northeast expands it's very easy to get into Quebec with Canada. Canada has a new ZEV program that they're implementing. Same thing on this West Coast, you know, with the Oregon as a ZEV stage and the Washington and British Columbia is making a push on the fuel cell vehicles. And I think it's just, you know, with each step we just kind of reach a little bit further. You know, we get lots of big heads from California and Reno and then it's not that far of a stretch to get into the neighboring, you know, Utah to make that happen. And so ideally we get this to where... I hope we can keep that momentum going, Tyson because obviously the stuff that you guys are doing in California is really leading the way and we thank you again for your leadership over there. Believe it or not, we're up against our stop time here and we've got to sign off, but I want to thank you for being on Think Tech with us and giving us an update in California and I hope that you can come back on another six months or so and give us another update and tell us how much farther you're reaching into Nevada with your hydrogen clause and get those guys over there to start telling some of your vehicles from California. I know that will be a big step, too. Thanks again for being on the show with us and for everyone else out there in Think Tech Land, we'll see you next Friday.