 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Hey Aloha and welcome to Aloha Friday and Stan the Energy Man here on Think Tech Hawaii where community matters. We got a great show today, we're skyping in a special guest from on the mainland, on the East Coast in fact. So she's up kind of late today to talk to us but I met our guest today when I was in California at the fuel cell conference and she made a great presentation. And we're going to talk about her organization and the things that her organization does to promote hydrogen worldwide. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Mary Rose V. Valderos. And thanks for joining us today, Mary Rose. Good to have you on board. It's my pleasure. My pleasure. Glad to be here. Glad to be here. I'm always happy to talk about hydrogen and the International Energy Agency Hydrogen Technology Collaboration Program. Great. Once you start off by talking a little bit about yourself and how you kind of got into the energy business and then tell us a little bit about the international energy. Right. Well, I was originally trained as an urban planner and a linguist and I actually did quite a bit of work in community development both in Washington and out west on the mainland and started a business actually with my late husband where we built houses and we gradually started to build more renewable solar houses and passive solar houses and then we also then we began to do distributed energy systems because of the great need for irrigation and the acceptance of the utilities of this kind of technology application. So that's how I got into it. And then I wound up working for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the Washington office and reset up my own business, MRS Enterprises, worked for the World Bank around the world. And now I am the general manager for hydrogen for some time. So that's the short story. Great. I can appreciate the value there. We're in Hawaii. We're in a kind of unique situation where we have a high degree of intermittent renewable on our grid and it's becoming problematic for our grid to absorb at all. So a lot of people are actually looking at putting batteries with their solar on their houses and becoming more and more independent. They're still grid tied as an insurance thing, but a lot of people are getting really comfortable putting some energy storage at home and just going with renewable energy and energy storage. Right. Well, the world has changed a lot since renewable energy, portable takes and wind first came along. And the penetration has grown, as you say, to such a great extent now that it's really, they're really considered mature technologies. So we recognize, the IEA hydrogen recognizes very well that storage and viewing hydrogen as part of an integrated energy system is really critical. And since it's not just our wonderful potential fuel cell vehicles, it's actually the whole energy system itself. Electricity and hydrogen are complementary energy carriers and they work together. And so hydrogen reserves can help to buffer the electricity system. And certainly use of hydrogen for energy storage, whether short term, seasonal or long term, is something that has great potential. And the scale of it can vary vastly. I mean, it can be at the utility scale or it can be, as you just said, at the domestic scale or the co-op scale. So this is definitely an idea whose time has come. And so we appreciate absolutely the need for storage. So what is the International Energy Agency actually doing on the world stage in terms of promoting hydrogen and hydrogen energy storage and addressing those hopeful ecology, energy ecology applications for hydrogen, not just the grid, but transportation and industry and stabilization of the grid, storing curtail power. What's the International Energy Agency doing on that front? Okay. So let me take you back to how we got started. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development was created after World War II to promote economic prosperity among its members. And then this was finalized by 1960. But by the early 70s, there was, as we know, a gas crisis, also called an oil crisis. But in any event, it got the attention of the OECD because in fact they recognized that absent focus on energy prosperity would be compromised. So the IEA was created, and it was created by treaty like the OECD was. And it was really sort of a brilliant concept because the IEA itself does policy work and analysis. And it also safeguards oil supply. But the same treaty that created the IEA also created technology collaboration programs so any two members can get together and decide to do research and development in a particular area. So we were created to do our D&D in the hydrogen area. And we've been around since 1978 pursuing our mission, which is to promote the application of hydrogen in every sector all around the world. So that's our background. We operate in five-year cycles. So we have a strategic plan for all five years, for every five-year cycle. And we have three major themes. The most important one is R&D, because that's our basic mission. That's our core business. But we realized some 10, 12 years ago that despite all the good analysis work going on around the world in hydrogen and related topics and renewables, etc. that there were still important questions that weren't being answered. And so we decided to also focus on analysis that positions hydrogen through technical analysis, market analysis, etc. As well, we have a third theme, hydrogen awareness understanding and acceptance because it's really important to spread the news. I mean, this is a fairly complex subject. And going back to your initial question about where does storage tie in and how do we fit into the grid, well, part of our mission is to make sure that people understand more about hydrogen. So we're trying to make them aware of our various research endeavors by publishing reports, final reports interim reports on all of our portfolio. We publish an annual report, we publish newsletters, and very recently we have kicked off a new report called Trends and Outlook for Hydrogen. This report, unlike some of our other reports, which are very technical in nature, this report seeks to reach decision makers and policy makers across the board. So it describes all the basics of hydrogen and what's going on now, what's trending now in all the various applications around the world and among all the potential users and the members of our group. Because I failed to tell you who our group actually consists of, we have 21 member countries, as well as the European Commission, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, UNIDO, that's a UN organization that deals with the developing world, and we also have, those are our country members and our international organization. We also have sponsor members, not sponsors in the traditional use of the business use of the term sponsors, but sponsors that are other kinds of organizations interested in participating with us in research on our mission. For example, Dell, the national organization of this is the German organization now, HighSafe, a group dealing with hydrogen safety, and also Southern Company, that's America's very own Southern Company, a combined gas and electric utility, which has a very progressive vision of the future and wanting to be ready for it. So those are our members, and together we create our portfolio of tasks. We operate in tasks and respond to each of the themes that I just talked about. This sounds like you published a lot of work and have it out in a broad range of venues. Do you do anything that is a little bit more active in terms of things like this show, you know, outreach on media, social media or national geographic channel or, you know, places where Discovery Channel or BBC where you get highlighted with a broader audience, where you're really kind of addressing folks that are less technical, but need to understand the technology. What a great question, and we'd love to do that work. Right now, what we're doing the following. We're on Facebook. We're on social media, Twitter. Please follow us on Twitter. But we have yet to get a spot on National Geographic, so we'd love to do that work, absolutely. And in fact, in previous work that I've done for the United States Department of Energy, I have made videos and industrials, so we have the capability. We just don't have, we haven't had the opportunity yet, but we would certainly welcome it because you're absolutely right that that's the way to spread the message. Lots of people listen to TV that don't look at other things. True. Well, we're going to take a quick break here, Mary Rose, and we'll be back in 60 seconds and we'll pick up where we left off. Right. Aloha. I'm Winston Welch, and every other Monday at 3 p.m., you can join me at Out and About, a show where we explore a variety of topics, organizations, events, and the people who fuel them in our city, state, country, and world. So please join us every other Monday at 3, and we'll see you then. Aloha. Hey, baby, that's you. I want to know, will you watch my show? I hope you do. It's on Tuesdays at 1 o'clock, and it's out of the comfort zone, and I'll be your host, R.B. Kelly. See you there. Hey, welcome back to my lunch hours. I'm Stan Energyman here with Mary Rose Iveladeris from the International Energy Agency, and she runs the hydrogen part of that organization, getting the word on hydrogen out, which you know is my favorite topic. So welcome back, Mary Rose. Thank you. Did we talk about the Hydrogen Council and what your organization does with the Hydrogen Council? That's a fairly new organization, but also international and more based on industry partners. Yes. Well, the creation of the Hydrogen Council is really a benchmark for a hydrogen world, because this entity comprises all of the major, many of most of the major players in hydrogen, and whoever's not there now, I'm sure will join in the future. And it really is critical that these entities, some of which are, some of these entities, they're large corporate organizations, and they are dominant players in their various fields, including incumbent energy companies. It's really critical that they step up to the plate, and we hope that they will join us very shortly as a member, and we do plan to work with them. There are lots of things that we can work on, and if you stay tuned, we'll have more information on that, hopefully in the coming months. That'd be great. So you mentioned a five-year plan that your organization works off of. What's the current five-year plan covering for your research? Okay. Well, the current five-year plan, it covers the period 2015 to 2020, and we are operating actually under each of the three thematic areas that I talked about. So under RD&D, we work on production, hydrogen production. A great deal of our work has been in this area, because it's, well, it's critical, and I'm happy to report that there's all kinds of sources and feedstocks for hydrogen, and these can be found all over the world, and what you might not have in one place, you could trade for in another place. Then there's hydrogen storage, and as you already mentioned, this is a really critical topic, and it covers many aspects. There is, of course, the whole realm of more basic fundamental research in storage, because this is going to be an area that we're going to have to deal with in the future for lots of our applications. But storage also includes things like massive quantities of hydrogen underground, storage in salt caverns and geological formations, and so this goes hand in hand actually with some of the production work because of the high degree of renewable penetration that we now have, and I guess I can comment on that again later because that really is important because the two tie together. We also deal with infrastructure issues, and these infrastructure issues are both at the system level, so for example, a car, a heating system, and also in the broader infrastructure context. So those are the areas that we work on in RD&D. In analysis, we work on, well, our most important analysis project right now is power to hydrogen and hydrogen to applications. So this, in fact, is the area where we talk about the conversion of electricity to the conversion of hydrogen. This is the area where we talk about power to hydrogen, and then it's storage, and then it's subsequent use for all kinds of applications. And this area really cross-cuts all sectors and all applications as enormous potential for the future. And around the world, of course, people have been talking about power to gas for some time now, this is a very, very hot topic in Europe, but the topic, but we are focusing on power to hydrogen. And I know, because I've talked to some folks from Denmark, that the North Sea wind projects are generating Boku electricity, and they need to store it and put it in those pipelines and move it around Europe. And I know that's one of the big projects that you guys are watching. I think it's called a Leeds project. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Right, exactly. This is really a very, very exciting project, and it's exciting at many levels, because of course, one of the big objections to adoption of a new technology or a major new energy force is cost. And this project, which was undertaken by the Northern Gas Networks in the town of Leeds in the UK, its purpose is to actually first introduce hydrogen into the infrastructure, the gas grid there, as they call it, and hopefully ultimately to go entirely hydrogen. And one of the really exciting results of this study is that this is actually going to be possible at a reasonable price. So this is really a very exciting development, because of course, all over the world, there are gas works. And in the recent past, as we know, the price of gas has become very attractive. And so gas has been for a long time viewed as a transition to hydrogen, and this project sort of encompasses many of the practical aspects of how that process could work. And there's different levels that will be worked on from the utility scale itself, the utility scale infrastructure in the UK, all the way down to the end user, down the supply chain, and how this is going to work for once toasters and electronic devices. But this project has enormous potential and cachet. And we are looking to launch some new work soon, and part of it will probably deal with some of the practical implications of this LEADS project. And we will probably also cooperate with our sister technologies, our sister TCP's in the fossil area, because they too are interested in the potential for gas conversion. So that little corner of the world is really going to be very active. So keep a close eye on it. I know that you will. Yeah, we're out here in Hawaii. We're working closely, my organization works closely with the US military. And we actually have, if you know how the military works, they're very prudent on how they put things into their logistics pipeline. For example, they don't want 20 different kinds of fuel. They want two different kinds of fuel because they need to minimize the complexity of their logistics challenges. So one of the things that our US military does is they either use regular gasoline, diesel fuel, or jet fuel. And those things have to work in a broad range of vehicles. So for example, diesel fuel and jet fuel are almost interchangeable across Army and Air Force and Navy applications. So we have the Army out here this week from an organization called TARDEC demonstrating a hydrogen fuel cell tactical vehicle. And they actually have a 20-foot container that inside has a steam reformer that takes JP-8, which is jet fuel, and turns it into hydrogen for that vehicle. And it all fits inside a 20-foot container and they can just bring it in the field, throw any kind of JP-8 or diesel in there and it makes hydrogen for this vehicle, then the vehicle can take off and get out hundreds of miles away from the base and generate power. It actually is a power takeoff unit, as we say, or a portable generator. And the military is looking at that very carefully right now. Yeah, we owe a lot to the military for the research that they've done. So that'll be an exciting project to watch. But this also reminds me that there's another area that we didn't talk about that's actually very exciting. IEA hydrogen has started to work in the maritime. And, you know, this offers just tremendous potential because whether we're talking about the maritime and shipping and trade or we're talking about the nexus between the land and the sea, there's a huge amount to be done there. So we have launched our first task in the maritime and there is enormous global interest. I mean, the shipping industry is huge. So we look forward to working in that area and it just offers all kinds of opportunity. And that is another area, of course, in which the military is also affected. In fact, of course, submarines were among the first to adopt fuel cells, to use fuel cells. So there's just a lot going on in every major sector of the economy and in the energy world. And at all levels. You and I talked earlier about innovation. And innovation isn't always brand spanking new technology. Sometimes it's old technology that you use in a new way. And one of the ways that we did that here was we had some Navy SEALs that were training and they told us that they had limitations on their lithium batteries on their equipment in terms of where they could go on certain ships and things like that. And I reminded them that fuel cells were actually, or excuse me, electrolyzers were actually on nuclear submarines and other submarines to make oxygen for the crew and that their byproduct that they throw away was hydrogen and they could take that hydrogen and put it in metal hydride storage containers which are like little batteries. It's like two C cell batteries on top of each other and they work just like batteries in a SATCOM radio or a regular radio or a GPS and it may solve their problem of getting a safe energy storage for that equipment where they can't normally get it on a ship because the Navy and the military in general, when they test equipment, they run it through a pretty rigorous cycle to make sure it doesn't impact negatively some other system. So they were surprised to learn that that technology was already on a lot of Navy ships and already certified to work on the Navy ships. So that was an exciting revelation for them. I bet it was. I bet it was. So I guess we'll see more activity in that area very soon. I hope so. Hey, we're getting close to the end of time here. I wanted to turn it over to you for the end, but can you just kind of, I'm going to throw two questions at you. You can probably address both of them simultaneously. Is it just me or are we at a tipping point for hydrogen on the world stage? Are we at that point where hydrogen goes from being the fuel of the future and always will be to it's really happening right now and it's starting to get to scale and we're really seeing it? And to that matter, you know, how do we address the consortiums and the lobbying organizations that are arrayed against hydrogen, like the oil and gas industry or even the battery industry in some cases, to get hydrogen going in this 2018 to 2020 timeframe? Well, I think the answer to that is that you use all your tools. I think there's probably going to be multiple inflection points. But if you look at the example of California over the last 30 years, where they just dug in the dirt and just continued to inch forward bit by bit and there were plateaus that they reached where they were able to really make great progress. And right now, certainly in California with the hydrogen refueling stations, they have made great progress there. So that's really an important step. But the other part of this is that we is to build the understanding, you know, linking with all these other groups that it's not just the mass market of cars, which are critically important, but it's also all kinds of other applications that can flourish through the use of hydrogen. And I also want to say that sometimes, you know, this is our government, sometimes government can disappoint you. But I do want to say that back in our last omnibus energy bill in 2005 in this country, there were provisions made in this bill for energy infrastructure and the process of laying the groundwork, the basic land use plans for the infrastructure that will carry not just electricity transmission lines, but pipelines for hydrogen, hydrogen is specifically included. That's all underway. So we're like, you know, 10 plus years, 10, 12 years out from that. But it's critical that all of the groups, I think, work together at some level. And certainly I can attest to the fact that there is growing interest in the IEA. And there'll be probably even more interest very soon. And we can talk about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles maybe another time and the competitive landscape. OK. Well, I agree with you. I think it's a multi-pronged approach to getting the word out and making sure people understand that the safety aspects of hydrogen are really strong and that the negatives like Hindenburg type of analogies and H-bomb type of corollaries are just way out of line and that we train firefighters in vehicle, responding to vehicles here, like vehicle incidents that have hydrogen vehicles. And by the time the firefighters finish the training, they're like, this is better than gasoline or diesel. I mean, you don't even have anything to hose down afterwards. We just let it go and it's in the air and it makes clouds and we pack up our stuff and go home. And they're really actually pretty excited to learn about it. But we need to get that word out more. And that's kind of why I asked what your agency was doing to really overtly get the message out and maybe try and be a little more aggressive. I said the same thing to the Hydrogen Council, that they really should look at a marketing program that gets the word out because I think that is critical and it will take policy. It'll take government. It'll take industry. It'll take individuals. People underestimate the power of writing to your congressman or your congressional delegation. It's huge and supporting the industry. Even as a customer just telling the gas company, hey, are you looking at hydrogen down the road for your fossil free fuel of the future? Those kind of things. People don't realize they have a lot of power if they just get a pen to paper or send a message out. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. Civic participation is important. Participation in the marketplace is important. And so we're going to continue to work with all of our members and hopefully our new members. And we're going to be working on analysis and outreach vigorously. All right, Mayor Ruz, believe it or not, we've come smack up against the end of our 30 minutes airtime here. And I want to thank you again for visiting with us today and sharing your thoughts. And I know we've got more to talk about. We still have to talk about vehicles and all kinds of things. But I hope you'll join me back here on Stan Energy Man in the future and we'll continue this discussion. But thank you again. It was my pleasure to thank you. And we appreciate everything that you do to make the hydrogen transition possible. Great. Well, Aloha and Aloha to our viewers. Thanks to Robert in the control room and Cindy out here outside for helping keeping me in track. And we'll see you next week on Stan Energy Man. I have a guest host in there. I hope it's Rachel, maybe Dave. I'm going to be off on vacation and taking a little bit of a break. But we'll Stan Energy Man and we'll be back on next week. And until then, Aloha.