 It's Wednesday and you all know what that day is, it's think tech Hawaii's Hawaii the state of clean energy. Today I'm very happy to once again have a rematch with my good friend Toby Kincaid all the way from Portland and this is going to be round two of hydrogen the decarbonizer and in fact Hawaii's decarbonizer. So Toby's put together some more of his artwork in his slide deck and he's going to explain to us energy systems and hydrogen and how it all fits and we've all done it way back in the olden days, right? Right. So let's let's shoot over to slide the next slide. Okay, well here's our here's our cover sheet. And you see there the general scheme we're going to take clean energy, we're going to use an electrolyzer and we're going to make clean fuel from water and that hydrogen is ideal for public transportation or running any large engines and what's really interesting about this I love it that you called it Hawaii's decarbonizer because do you see any oil wells in that picture? Do you see any fracking or strip mining or oil super tankers anything like that? None of that. We just have super tankers that are parked off anchored offshore X Navy I should call it anchored rather than parked. Right. They're sitting threat that could you know if they for some reason their tanks were punctured we'd have thick black oil rolling up on our beaches so that's just all we need now in the days of COVID is to add you know tar on all our beaches. Absolutely and that goes to the main point is do we need the tar? And if we go to the next slide we'll go into why decarbonization is so important and so here I hope they can come through on the screen you can see at the top I've got the sun beaming energy to the earth and you know we only receive about two billionths of the sun's output but over 10,000 times the energy in one day that we use all year. So is there a growth potential? Could it fuel our civilization for some time? Absolutely. To your point though is what's the problem? And if we look at the lower image we see that actually human beings in our civilization we're really acting like a super volcano. We're spewing out millions of tons of carbon dioxide per day thousands of tons of knocks and socks and particulates and probably hundreds of tons of mercury from all the coal that we burn. It's just a disaster for the earth. Now we've seen five major extinction events that the geologists tell us about famously when the dinosaurs were killed by the meteor but the other extinction events throughout deep time on earth have really been from volcanism. So if you spew these gases that mother nature has already sequestered that has a nice balance between the carbon in the atmosphere and the carbon in the oceans but we dug up this carbon and we're burning it and we are in effect a super volcano and I'm afraid we're marching towards a sixth extinction event if we continue this way. So I love that analogy and of course what we're doing is we're just using the atmosphere as a garbage dump and we're just dumping all this quote garbage in the atmosphere which you know we breathe and you know the plants absorb it and the ground absorbs it. How can that possibly be good? It can't and in fact it's deadly because we're talking about air pollution, water pollution, soil pollution, biological pollution. The problem is when we burn carbon we don't burn it very completely and so you get all of these chemical animals, these volatile organic compounds which are endocrine disruptors. I mean this is a really bad scene. So the next slide shows that. Oh let's just jump forward then. Right, okay so here I kind of drew a human being and it's inundated with all of this stuff the the knots, the socks, the particulates, the radiation even when you you know there's natural radiation in the ground but when you collect it as coal and burn it it concentrates in the ash and then you have even radiation from a coal power plant. That's absolutely how long and how far can we trash the earth before we're going to lose it. And this is you know we're alive and probably the most important coming decade in human history because the stakes are so high. If we continue a bad behavior I mean basically we're smokers and and no smoker wants to be told that they have a problem. No smoker wants to say hey you got to throw your cigarettes away. You don't want to do that because we're used to smoking. We're used to digging coal out of the ground oil out of the ground natural gas out of the ground we're used to it and the people who buy it us the market are supporting this huge infrastructure all in the name of energy and we all need energy but what is the price that we can actually pay as a civilization. So let's let's jump on to the next slide. And okay here's where we get kind of kind of a fun look is I tried to put the history of the world or as far as humans are concerned in terms of technology on one page. So I thought oh yeah how are you going to do that. Okay so at the upper left I'm going to take you back two million years and early man early hominids discovered fire and learned how to work with fire. That was a great milestone probably because it instilled cooking and cooking did more for our brains than probably anything else in that early development and and among having lots of seafood available for those early hominids near the ocean you had all those omega-3s may not have our brains grow. So let's jump if you go a little bit to the right you'll see the Paleolithic about 200,000 years ago human beings are genetically modern we're homo sapiens sapien at that point. So they had all of the feelings and intellect and expressions and passions that we enjoy. So back then they started building tools and then we progressed and progressed and now we'll jump a little bit to the right about 10,000 years ago in the in the in the Mesolithic. Now some bright person figured out how to smelt copper and the Egyptians were really big on this. Once they got into copper tooling 8,000 years ago they they really accelerated and expanded their empire but as we go then jump ahead to the Neolithic about 5,000 years ago some innovative person or people put a little tin in the copper and wow they they turned up the first alloy and that became bronze. Well bronze is so strong compared to copper that if you made a weapon out of bronze you're going to win. So that brings us now to the ancient Greeks. So here we have the the the birth of civilization as we know it even the birth of democracy was beginning at this time and they needed bronze. Well bronze takes a lot of energy you know this is really the every civilization throughout history actually comes up with an energy crisis and Greece ancient Greece had an energy crisis. You know the Greek islands are rocky they didn't have many trees so they cut them down pretty quick and in fact by the first third century BC in fact it was a death sentence if you cut down an olive tree it was so vital. So the ancient Greeks had to go out into all of the surrounding areas and try and import as much wood as possible it was an energy crisis. So now we'll jump a thousand years forward and we go to the ancient Romans. Well by the second century BC they had denuded all of Italy every forest was cut down because you can imagine how much wood it takes not only to smelt bronze but now they're smelting iron you have to get to 3000 degrees to do that so it takes a lot of wood and it was a big business. Italy had no more wood they could get that very easily some in the mountains but it's hard to bring into the cities so they created a fleet of ships a Navigarium Lumbarium where they would send out these fleets and they would go around the Mediterranean see a forest land the boat make a perimeter pacify anyone who objected cut down the trees and usually cut them in the smaller pieces as much as they could out on the site then they pack them in the ships and bring them back to Italy and in fact the Italians were importing wood as far away as the Caucasus a thousand miles away by that by the peak unbelievable so they ran into an energy crisis you can see they're expanding and you imagine all the resources you need to smelt all that iron and to cook and to do all the other things that people need so energy crisis and a developing civilization always go together and it turns out to be critical uh you could even jump forward to world war two uh you know Hitler was an idiot he thought himself as a brilliant strategist he was not uh he he took the idea of a general to instead of attacking France through the Maginot line he went to the Ardennes nobody expected that and the general said hey then we go north and we we divide the British in the French army and Hitler said okay we'll do that and everyone thought that was a brilliant idea so Hitler said oh I came up with it and then from that moment he thought he was brilliant and then made every mistake possible thank goodness otherwise we'd all be speaking German but the point is after the attacked France his generals said look we got 20 Panzer divisions take four of them go down to Egypt and get the Suez Canal if you capture the Suez Canal you won't be able to bring oil into the British army and it would have been in a completely different war had he done that but of course he was a fool and an idiot and an evil person fortunately he was uh made very poor decisions like attacking the Soviet Union for example things like this which his general said no what are you talking about so the choices that we make in energy can have huge impacts in our modern world so uh let's let's maybe take the next slide so we can look at history again now kind of back 300 years so 300 years ago the whole world changed because in England they had lots of coal near the surface and they started digging this coal up and going oh my goodness we can now run a newcomer had a steam engine the first one in 1699 they used to pump out the mines so they could get more cold and make more steam engines and powered them all over the country and the UK Britain took over the world in first in the first industrial revolution so if we look at this graph I have here the energy density the specific energy density that's the mass the energy per mass on the on the vertical axis and then some of the fuels we can compare on the horizontal axis so what's the big picture well the big picture is we have an economy we have the environment and we have an energy system and all of those need to work together if they work together there's no limit to what humanity can achieve however they don't work together right now if you need more energy you're going to burn more fossil fuels you're going to pollute the environment and compromise it that is going to have liability to the economy as well as health costs and all these unintended consequences not to mention the stress of some people have holes in the ground surrounded by men with guns and others don't so the this this kind of tension in the world economy is always going to be a very competitive environment and it justifies a military reaction to protect our interests so just like back in the Roman Greek days yes capture their wood yes and so now at 300 years ago we finally have coal but coal's in only a few places and the energy density this is so fascinating to me is the inner density is so low and that's because it's mostly carbon and just a little bit of hydrogen you know we talk about fossil fuels talk about hydrocarbons hydro is for hydrogen it's hydrogen and carbon but the energy is in the hydrogen not a carbon that the hydrogen is stuck to so we see the lowest energy density in coal and then when you go to oil it has a little bit more it's a liquid fuel you've got a little more energy density but the reason is is the carbon went down and the hydrogen the proportion went up but so now we continue we go to the next natural gas those three are in the graph are the fossil fuels natural gas has higher energy why because it has more hydrogen pre-init mass than in proportion than carbon so what we see on this graph is we look 300 years ago we have high carbon high toxicity and we're moving through time to a zero carbon no toxicity right and that's what's kind of amazing to me so the other amazing thing is essentially we've been a hydrogen economy since the beginning of time because it's the hydrogen that produced the energy everything else was a support mechanism for it absolutely and like we talked about in the last show now you can get hydrogen from methane which is what the that which the petroleum industry does and that provides about 95 percent of the hydrogen we use we want to evolve and change that where you get the hydrogen from water a water-based fuel is ideal because one there's water really all over the planet it's mostly covered with water our bodies are mostly made of water how amazing that water is the result of the most exothermic chemistry we know of so when we use hydrogen as a fuel we're we're actually consistent with that historic trend where 300 years ago we had coal 200 years ago 150 years ago we have oil and then we developed natural gas but we went from the 18th century the 19th century and the 20th century every century our energy is going up in terms of density so if we continue that trend the logical indicator is in the 21st century we should be burning hydrogen and of course the product of using hydrogen is water water that's the waste product yeah we combine it with oxygen it turns into water again so absolutely and see that is so straightforward that you kind of wonder what is everyone talking about and you realize that well the fossil fuel industry is protecting their business they invested a lot they want to do their business they're not going to say hey well they're going to say pay no attention to the man behind the curtain there's nothing to see here keep buying oil keep buying coal keep buying natural gas yes it's going to hurt people but you know hey you're going to live in a cave if you don't buy fossil fuels you know that they scare you with that well you're not going to live in a cave if you go to a higher energy density fuel there's no limit to what you can do and it's amazing the history that goes behind this the first use of renewables making hydrogen was actually in 1872 there was a mass show augustine mass show this great french mathematician who built these incredible solar concentrators well c-beck a few decades earlier put together a thermal pile where you put different metals next to each other in a stack just like volta did and then when you heat it up they found it produced electricity electricity would migrate that's the science of thermionics so this is in 1872 so what's the mass show do he takes his big solar concentrator sticks a stack of of the c-beck thermal couple thermal pile and he's producing electricity which he then uses the electrolyzers that just came out of out of michael faraday's work in the a couple of decades earlier so he had it all and here he is making rocket fuel in the 1870s from sunlight and water now unfortunately the french prussian war happened when napoleon the third declared war on prussia for some reason they were invaded and his laboratory was completely defrocked they they took everything away because the the prussians didn't want the french having this kind of technology and at that time he was getting some funding from the french academy of sciences then the uh because france was trying to compete with the with great britain great britain had a lot of coal france had coal but it was in the pyrenees and they didn't have the railroads yet to get the coal to the industrial centers well the the academy of sciences and the the railroad industry saw what was happening and they stopped mesho they were fuck him tooth and nail does that sound familiar someone else the right idea and they they just get to attack because they those interests didn't want that they developed the railroads brought the coal in and squashed the solar industry so imagine how the world could have been if mesho was embraced instead of destroyed right throughout history we've had these moments another one was uh the the evil genius of of john d rockefeller you know we were when we started the oil industry there weren't any cars internal combustion didn't exist but they were selling and making kerosene because you know lighting was a problem candles and suet and chopping wood we flip a switch lights go on to us it's nothing anyone from that century would have fallen on the floor because lighting was such a challenge so in 1892 something happened the real nicola tesla and westinghouse they electrified with ac power the chicago exposition in 1892 and i would give anything to be in rockefeller's boardroom when that happened because their their faces just fell off no one's gonna buy kerosene if you can flip a switch exactly and perhaps the most brilliant pivot in in industrial history rockefeller realized okay i got to find a new market but we're not going to sell kerosene but we've been making gasoline as a waste product let's just change our refining process to make the gasoline on purpose and instead of throwing it in the river we'll sell it to these new fangled cars right now this is a this is a very nefarious idea because at that time most of the cars were electric the next was the stanley steamers where you could burn any fuel to make a little steam engine but the internal combustion was actually far behind because nobody had gas stations but rockefeller realized in this moment hey i'm going to take it all over we're going to switch products and because rockefeller made his first fortune selling groceries to the union army he understood selling to the government is a big order and so he convinced the army hey get rid of the horses let's go with armored equipment and buy your oil and gas from us from me right and it worked the world war one was a huge mechanized uh uh well we were all new forms of warfare were being developed submarines as you know you're you're retired submarine captain imagine that's really gutsy uh but the tanks and and now the airplane so everything is is really coming to a head but what the world saw was if you control oil you control military dominance and that has been the case ever since and uh so now what's amazing about what you do and decarbonizing hawaii is that clean hydrogen making hydrogen specifically from clean energy solar and wind which is variable you make hydrogen which is the battery and then you use the battery whenever you want and you get the energy out you get a little bit of heat which is often useful for heating water or other things and you get the water back so this changes the entire socioeconomic political uh nature of the world of how humans interact from not a commodity basis for energy but rather you get the right gear and you're independent and then you can improve you can your children don't die in front of you that's a nice thing and actually the whole concept of human poverty is nonsense it doesn't have to be if you have the right technology everyone everywhere can make enough energy where you don't see your kids die because they drink bad water you know that's got to be a tremendous uh uh stress on a parent i don't have any kids but if you see your kids dying for you imagine that's the worst so if we get the world this technology it's a whole new ball game completely it takes the stress down and it allows everyone to be above the poverty level and guess what we found in history is richer people have fewer kids than poor people yeah so if you want a free market way to lower world population you have to bring everyone above poverty and the only way that's going to happen is if you have a robust and resilient power supply and that is solar making hydrogen from water because now you have the battery fossil fuels are the battery today but we're going to replace that chemical battery with a better chemical battery which is hydrogen made from water it's beautiful yep it's the perfect solution it's a real solution and what we have to do is get the the professionals to acknowledge it and to start focusing on it and i'm so envious of hawaii because you have a hydrogen program for years you've been pushing hydrogen and pushing hydrogen against all winds coming at you you stand tall and push for the truth i love that in oregon i love oregon but we don't have a hydrogen program we're claiming we're going to do a clean fuels program but then that's fallen back to charging all battery electric cars that's not clean fuel guys if you have solar charging the car okay that might be clean fuels but clean fuels is making hydrogen from renewables out from water and then when you use it you get the water back so so that is a i think historically we're at the turning point of a sustainable humanity that's it's going to take off now too just this year i mean the number of hydrogen projects people like converting their gas turbines over to hydrogen now i mean you read it in the news every day there's a new big announcement it's amazing it's actually it's actually taking off and the problem is is uh how do i make enough electrolyzers fast enough to be able to meet this now this demand that's exactly right people want it like right now well excuse me it takes a while to ramp up a factory and you know start producing these things i mean we can do it that's absolutely true and what all they want is an order give them an order and the volume will push the price down just like we saw in fuel cells i mean when we were talking about it 30 years ago a fuel cell was like $10,000 a kilowatt if you could find someone to build one could probably more maybe a hundred now it's $75 per kilowatt amazing solar went from when i was starting out it was $12, $14 a watt so that's you know $12,000 a kilowatt now i can buy a kilowatt for 300 bucks for less than 30 cents a watt we would have never even believed that possible years ago but the volume pushed the price down and it will happen with anything you want to make so the key to it is as just as you said the electrolyzer is the last piece that's a little bit more expensive than it needs to be and can be much less if we just order them and start using them actually the electrolyzers are not that expensive the problem is making enough of them fast enough as i said yeah yeah i would accept that absolutely yeah we've got to bring those two together and then the price points will be because in fact later in the slide i've got a slide of a fuel cell i wanted to talk about a little bit so let's jump to the next one we got about six or seven minutes left oh okay we this this slide we've seen also very quickly this is what we just talked about what is the rationale that leads you to clean hydrogen well in the center we just list everything we want clean fuel no no toxicity for soils air water and the rest resilient has to be available to all people all of these conditions and so when we throw every possible answer at that filter there's only one thing that gets through and that's renewable hydrogen right so it's not only the answer it is the only answer that actually can bring us away from the toxicity and the militarism of carbon right every you know the worst you can do with an electrolyzers maybe hit someone over the head with it but you're not going to hurt anybody you're not going to invade a country to get their electrolyzers that that's not going to happen so this is a really stabilizing force so let's see the next slide let's see what we're okay this is uh this is kind of a breakdown of a building on the work in the field and a patent application where i'm kind of combining the electrolyzer and the fuel cell guys they're usually in different industries even though they're in the same industry they're in different camps i want to bring them together into a system and so really what we have here is a love story imagine uh hydrogen and oxygen are our love our young lovers they're the ingenue and they're married and happy and stable and water and they're they could hold water for a billion years it'll stay as water completely safe well then an evil prince comes as an electrolyzer and says i'm gonna add energy and separate you young lovers the hydrogen i'm gonna keep in a tower and the oxygen over there and you're separate and they're pining for each other they're longing for each other that's the oxidation potential they really want to get back but the electrolyzers separated them so then a good prince comes along he's the fuel cell uh oh my young lovers i've dug a trench and i'm going to bring you together in my fuel cell so whenever someone flips a switch it needs energy then the the corridors open and you can run together and they come together and join together again in in marital bliss and they release the energy that the evil electrolyzer separated them with because they're the perfect battery and they return as water so that's a strange love story but that's kind of how i see it and so in that picture you just have three basic elements you have the electrolyzer you have that makes hydrogen from water when you add energy you could use energy from the grid if you have off-peak or renewables that you want to curtail don't curtail don't turn them off just send them to the electrolyzer in the second part you have hydrogen storage after it goes through a desiccant it dries it in a filter so it's only pure hydrogen going in the tank and once it goes into that compression tank it's inert and stable it's not you know lithium ion after four hours you start losing energy out of a lithium ion bag but hydrogen is so stable you could hold it for decades decades it's just going to sit there and then when you need the energy the third part is you bring the hydrogen and oxygen through the from the air back together in the fuel cell releases the energy that you use you get a little bit of heat which is often useful and returns the water back to the electrolyzer so most of the water we can recycle so that was kind of the what i think is the ultimate power plant there you go what's the next slide okay here's the fuel cell now look at this thing this is about the size of a big suitcase and it produces 150 kilowatts of power that's about the equivalent of 30 homes amazing out of something the size of a suitcase incredible so what we have there it's really just a bunch of hydrogen excuse me of carbon plates and then they etch the plates so that it provides a path for the hydrogen to go on one plate along it and then on the other plate they make a groove for the oxygen and then they put a separator between it and they make a stack of this and what happens is that remember our young lovers they they see each other through they're coming towards the fuel cell and they're ready to join but then there's a separator we play a little trick on the hydrogen there's this barrier it's called a proton exchange membrane and the hydrogen can't get through it sees the oxygen goes my love i'm coming i can't get through this barrier but then the electron says to the proton hey look there's a wire i'll take the wire do a little work for our master overlords and then i'll meet you on this other side and that's small enough for your proton to get through the barrier and i'll meet you with the oxygen on the inside and so they say yes and so someone flips the switch the electricity leaves the hydrogen says i'll see you on the other side goes and does the work for us then they all meet in bliss and create water again after releasing this energy that we we took through the wire so uh it's just amazing to me that this is such a beautiful little piece of equipment this electrolyzer stack and uh it's it's gorgeous beautiful i don't i you compare that to a piston engine you know this has no moving parts i mean there's some ancillary valves that open up and things like that but there's nothing jumping up and down like a piston which is kind of nonsense yeah that is very uh high efficiency it could be up to 60 percent efficient and if indeed and if you get it actually at the sweet spot the they tell me they can get over 90 but it has to be at the sweet spot where you're running at just the right level so for large loads we can run in a steady state condition so we can get up to 90 percent wonderful and remember the percentages are are are important only in terms of a life cycle this is what we're really looking at some people on the battery side will say well you know batteries are more efficient but they're only looking at one part of it if you charge your battery car with a coal power plant now that's better than burning gasoline but it's still a lot of emissions so as a source of the electricity is important how it's stored in this case hydrogen is nature's perfect battery right and then when we use it through our fuel cells we get the water back we get the energy out and do it again right so how we're winding down to about actually we're almost out of time so let's uh let's look at your last two or three slides very quickly okay so here's here's an example now tesla motors is saying hey we're going to build these semis that are all battery so let's just do a little math let's look at one megawatt hour of energy and let's look at an all battery versus say the nicola fuel cell truck that there's going they're coming out with all right you need 3.6 tons of lithium ion to do one megawatt hour that's a lot of weight that you're going to put in a truck that already has a 20 000 pound load and then when you use half the battery you're just hauling batteries around uh now let's look at the fuel cell if we use hydrogen i can store a megawatt hour with about 70 pounds of hydrogen now for a big semi truck that's not a big load to carry around in these beautiful composite tanks that are they're incredibly safe so when i look at the the all battery kind of which popular people are saying hey we're all going to electrify with all batteries no you're not uh you know there's a lot of nickel a lot of lithium and a lot of cobalt you're going to need for those batteries and i know people are talking about in some distant future graphene batteries may be there but hey they've been working on a long time and there are some physical problems when you fast charge batteries batteries like it's slow they like to be charged slow and they like to discharge slow but humans we're like come on let's go let's go so we want to fast charge them and that degrades the materials we don't have that problem with hydrogen electrolyzers and fuel cells can last decades if you've got pure hydrogen going in and oxygen from the air they go for decades so instead of a battery pack which you're going to have to replace at some point and is absolutely useless in a utility application unless you if you have to go over the four hours if you're less than four hours it's i guess you could do but you don't know let's look at your last slide here which is oh yeah this was just i thought kind of a nice view of of a fuel cell truck and a hydrogen dispensary and you can fuel it in 10 minutes yeah absolutely and it doesn't hurt the fuel cell you're not worried about it being degraded doesn't overheat doesn't do anything thanks the guy can go in and get his cup of coffee and the driver can go in and get a cup of coffee comes back out his truck's ready to go again so absolutely and i'll tell you that is not a small point if you're a fleet manager if you want to talk about one bus or one truck that's one thing but you talk about a fleet that 10 minute that quick fueling time becomes really important otherwise how are you going to charge these semi trucks and buses with these huge battery banks if you didn't have fast charges expensive you have to take a long time no no fleet manager will run away right that it is logistically impractical on that happy note yeah all right once again thank you so much uh tobi for coming down it was magnificent i really appreciate it we're gonna have you back my pleasure hello this has been hawaii the state of clean energy signing off