 They're exceedingly exciting STEM energy man on a Tuesday afternoon coming to you live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii, the most beautiful place on the planet. Anyway, Stan Osterman here, formerly of the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, currently trying to retire and not doing a very successful job at it. But my guest likewise worked at the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies probably for almost five years, at least four years and some change and was a very effective and important part of our team. So, Rachel James is my guest today and Rachel, welcome to the show. Yeah, good to have you on board again. It's been a while since we talked and I knew you had a lot going on in your life and you can't talk about much of it because it's classified and stuff. I know you're still heavy into doing clean energy things and the way we promoted the show today was that you were the queen of clean energy and you'd keep it clean and legal. So, for the folks out in the audience that don't know, she's also a lawyer and just passed the bar a year ago. So, she is legal and she's trying to keep things legal in the clean energy world. So, anyway, Rachel, welcome to the show. I hope you've been doing well. I know you're under quarantine right now because you just got back from a trip. You got to kind of lock down in your apartment, but welcome to the show. It's good to be here, even though here is in my apartment. I'm sure you could think of worse places to be. So, anyway, Rachel, I know you've been keeping up on energy stuff. You said you were hosting a panel on a forum last week. Could you tell us a little bit about what that was all about? Yeah, I was able to do a panel with two folks. The topic of our panel was developing the device, not for us. And so, one of the people on the panel is a developer who does community collaboration style or focus development. And then the other person is an environmental equity director at a place called Green Lining Institute. And so, we talked about how to engage deeply with communities and really plan with their interests in mind and to allow them to be a part of the planning process. And just kind of spoke about ways of imagining energy development where you can have complementary benefits in the community that might start with energy, but could end up in other places in the community. Did you find that the corporate people or the developer, that they really had a good handle on issues with clean energy or renewable, like intermittent renewables, solar, wind, storage, things like that? Were they pretty conversant in it or did it seem like they could only see batteries and things like that? I think they have a creative approach. They're a relatively new company called Shake Energy Collaborative. And we didn't talk a lot of details about the technology, but I think their approach, kind of generally speaking, is to kind of see what a community's concerns are and then see what the appropriate renewable energy answer is if there is one. And so, much of their work has been in solar and that's been because they work in California and working members in the programs in California specific to solar technology. But I think as a company, I would suspect that they're open to using a variety of technologies, but just trying to work within the construct of current programs that have funding available to support the work that they're doing and keeping the community. Is this the symposium put on by the State Energy Office? It was put on by Maui Economic Development. Oh, that's right. Yeah, Maui Economic Development was, okay. Yeah, Maui gets kind of, yeah Maui kind of gets greedy, you know, they want to take everything frouble, everything away from frouble. It's a beautiful place. Anything needed a great job. They do, they're really good. I've been to a couple of their conferences and they do a really good job. They haven't let me do a hydrogen presentation two years, so I was really happy with that. Have you had much of a chance to work with Scott and Len or talk to him much about his views on what the state's looking forward to on energy? I've been able to hear his perspective. We haven't had much time to speak in real time. He was also a panelist. And then just working with the State Energy Office kind of, I mean, well, this legislative session was, was unlike any other. So many of the things that have happened in the past six months have been unlike anything that's happened before. But as he was first coming in to the office, certainly he was able to share just his ambitions for the office. And I think his experience from OETC really went itself well. So understanding some of the state's ambitions for environmental considerations and both that means the energy development and how things are developed and where. I think he has a good handle on that. And then just really getting a handle on what his team's capabilities are, the places where they have to grow and really trying to plan with partner agencies. And so in my experience with him, he's really been information gathering, still in ideas, finding new places where they can just spoil it, where they might need more support. So I certainly can't speak to any of his firm plan, but I think he has developed some plans based on a lot of good information because he's spending time playing information. So he's still kind of in the info collecting mode and he's not ready for primetime on a strategic plan or anything. I think in some areas he has been. So for instance in the Hoya Energy Conference, one of the things he was mentioning is that like just highlighting the places where there were like alignment both across the governmental departments, but also across industry and utilities. So there's broad and kind of high level alignment in wanting to ensure if community is engaging, consulting before things are developed. And then that environment considerations are at the forefront. But the how that's done, where there's a bigger question mark. And I think he's doing his due diligence and really trying to understand how best to. Okay. Yeah, the only thing that I ever, well I've talked to him several times, including on the Big Island once when he was at a symposium there on sustainability. And I got into the discussion of hydrogen. He seems to be pretty positive on hydrogen. He didn't have any negatives. And he was, you know, really open. And Nicole Lohan, the rep from the House Energy Committee was at the same thing. And she was really pro hydrogen. And we spent some time talking. The one thing that he kind of, that he kind of went negative on me. And it kind of surprised me was natural gas as a bridge. And he basically said, oh, the governor said, no natural gas, that's all there is to it, not doing it. And I said, well, but do you realize that there's GE and some of the big like Mitsubishi, they make gas turbines for generating electricity. And all of them, all the companies that make big gas jet turbines are trying to get pure hydrogen to work in their turbines. And they're claiming that they're either already there and they're doing it, or they're really close. In fact, most of them are claiming that they're close, but they are already doing it. And they tell us offline that they are running pure hydrogen in these turbines, which means you can make electricity from solar stored in hydrogen. And then you could do either electrolysis, or you could put hydrogen straight into a turbine and run it. But and these are turbines that were designed to run a natural gas and can take increasing amounts of hydrogen mixed with the natural gas. And he right now, the practical limit for the industry is like 15% hydrogen in mixed with natural gas. GE actually is published that they've gone to 85% hydrogen and are working to 100. And their goal is to make the turbines run on pure hydrogen. And this is a real game changer. So it kind of didn't upset me. But when he when he kind of went negative on me about the, you know, no natural gas, no natural gas, it's like, but you understand that's actually really nowadays a real viable bridge fuel. Whereas I think back when Hawaiian Electric was talking about it, it was still pie in the sky. And and it meant they would have stranded assets with turbines that only ran on natural gas. And you'd have to change all that stuff out to hydrogen turbines. And I think I think that the governor may still be kind of stuck on that too. So that surprised me. But maybe it's just some more education that we have to do with the new energy of the sky. But yeah, I found I mean, both governor as well as Scott just being open to receiving commission and my new and cutting edge, edge information and really leaning forward on Hawaii being a test case in many ways for things in energy. But I mean, you know, that's his boss. So I think Scott has to respond in time. So I think you sharing information and providing like that up to date and not just kind of pie in the sky, it would be nice if but like real no kidding, it's happening on the ground information. I think those are the critical information points that the decision makers need so that they are choosing things that aren't again, just pie in the sky ideals that are real, tangible, actionable items that can be on the field in real time. Here goes to you for sharing the info. It's a pretty late breaking news, actually. And we have some I have some projects working with some other folks and we're exploring that the gas turbine piece there on the mainland where they have a lot of renewable wind and a lot of curtail wind power that they're they're turning it into hydrogen and electrolyzers. I mean, a fuel cells may be too expensive right now, but a gas turbine that they're running mostly off steam reform hydrogen could actually be run off of this renewable made green hydrogen from wind turbines because it's cheap enough that it would it would compete with the steam reform natural gas hydrogen. So anyway, it is kind of late breaking. But did you see Hawaiian Electric on the Maui EVB symposium? Yeah, Scott C. actually opened a conference and he was sharing some work that they've been doing. He spoke specifically about their efforts to again that like deep community impact are not necessarily deep community impact, but deep community engagement. And so he spoke of some of the efforts that they've undertaken to gather community interest and sentiment to be able to better inform their RFP process, as opposed to trying to establish RFP and then kind of push it down, you know, to developers and then have the developers then figure out how best it seats a community. Hawaiian Electric has taken on the initiative of going to communities and trying to get a sense of what they need and using that information to inform their process. So he spoke specifically about what they've been doing in Molokai, which is just it was an encouraging story to start the conference office to see that there'd be one some backwards here in Molokai. Yeah, the friendly island can be very unfriendly if you're not if you're not playing fair with them. So that's a good test case to be on Molokai and really get the community involved. That's a that's a good way to start your process. We're at the midway point here. We're going to take a 60 second break and we'll be back with Rachel James in 60 seconds. Aloha, I'm Lillian Cumick, host of Lillian's Vegan World, the show where we talk about veganism and the plant-based diet located in Honolulu, Hawaii. I'm a vegan chef and cooking instructor and I have lots of information to share with you about how awesome this plant-based diet is. So do tune in every second Thursday from 1 p.m. Aloha. Back to Stand Energy Man here with Rachel James. Concerned citizen and clean energy maven or specialist or wizard or whatever you want to call her. Wizard is sorcerous, I don't know. Anyway, but she knows more about clean energy than most people ever learn. So welcome back Rachel. I'm not an expert yet. I'm in the learning field. Yeah, you're just being humble and modest, which is good. That's one of your good characteristics. Anyway, we're talking about the Maui Economic Development Board Conference and what went on and having it on a more or less an IT platform, not live and direct. Do you feel this is effective in person or the sidebars and things like that really make a difference? I mean, truthfully, it was the first time I've used a platform called Big Marker and I thought, I don't know if it's newly developed. I don't know a lot about the company, but I thought for online conference, I was impressed with the platforms like the tech behind the conference. But I think they were smart in making it three hours. I also think it was great that they made it three. And so my family actually was able to tune in literally all over the world. So my sister in Qatar was watching my parents in California and Arizona, like to friends around the country. And I'm sure other people around the globe, I believe some people tune in from Japan. I mean, just seeing the list of attendees, I think people's ability to access the conference from the comfort of their home or offices or wherever they were. I think that really lends itself well, again, and limiting the time to three hours. So I think in the grand scheme of things, the networking component that people often come to conferences for probably goes a little bit hard to do on that platform. But informationally and content-wise, and if the chat functions in terms of having questions come up, and people can use it to vote for questions and having polls. So they have a lot of interactive components in the platform, which I thought was great for them. I don't know how they found it, but Big Marker was a big hit for me. I thought it was worth tuning in. Good. Did you find that maybe shrinking the time frame down to three hours made people focus better and be more concise and more focused on their message and maybe organize better presentations? Do you think that was a factor in it? Certainly I think that was their aim. The panels were 30-minute panels, as opposed to the 45-minute or hour discussions that came from the customer for interesting panels. So I think we certainly aim to have more concise and direct messages. But it's a topic with a lot of technical components. People have lots of ideas. So there are times when some of the content ran over, but I think overall it kept the message pretty well. And again, allowing for that audience participation. It did the subject of geothermal come up at all during the conference, or the symposium. I didn't watch each of the panels, so I don't want to say that it didn't come up. The ones that I did see, I didn't hear it mentioned. So I don't know. How about, you know, there's been some talk, including some internal talk in the state, when I worked at the state, of wind turbines, sea-based wind turbines like North Sea Wind. But the underwater topography is so vastly different, and the currents and the winds and stuff are so different here than in the North Sea. I'm kind of hard pressed to find a good reason to support wind turbines here, but did they talk much about that? I can say that the focus of the conference was a little bit different than, I mean, I think it was part the current moment and part because of the time constraints. So the conference theme originally this year was equity. Now it's part like equity, kind of the community, societal, equity component, and then equity in terms of the resources needed to actually get these projects done. And then the online conference theme was planning for a just recovery and probably not getting that done exactly right. But so there were technical components discussed. I think a lot of the discussion centered around like policy consideration and kind of what was capable from the technology perspective to better inform policy and then also kind of what are the things that policy makers need to be considering and who needs to be at the table and kind of the structure of organizations and how they operate. There's a little less technical heavy that new and cutting edge communities right now, please, as a framework. But not to say that some of those cutting edge things won't discuss. I just don't remember much. I don't remember the conversations being heavy on some of those specific things. On the policy side, did they talk much about A, public-private partnerships and B, permitting and regulatory things that seem to hold back a lot of the renewable energy progress? I mean, you remember from us talking to private contractors, that was one of their big complaints is that the regulatory and permitting side from the county all the way to the Department of Energy or the federal agencies that get involved sometimes just get to be mind boggling where they stifle any kind of new innovative thinking or just construction. I mean, just putting a station hydrogen station in or putting in wind turbines or whatever. Did the policy discussions talk about those kind of things a lot? I know on my panel, we touched on just how some of the processes that are in place aren't necessarily conducive to getting the work done that we're kind of asking for done, but societally. And part of that is indeed permitting, part of that is like how our keys are put together. And I don't remember a panel being focused specifically on that, but that's certainly something that was recognized and brought up that there are components of the processes that we have in place that really don't lend themselves well to doing the like fast work that we're saying needs to be done to reach this clean energy ecosystem that we're aiming toward and to do it in a way that is inclusive and that isn't burdening the people, communities, unfairly. And I think it's hard to have the discussions sometimes about like permitting because it, there's so many nuances like when timeline shift and how that impacts the resources that are required for a project. And I think that's like a new thing, like I feel like people understand that like as timelines slip further and further to the right, the likelihood of projects being like on time and under budget is on budget, like increases exponentially. And then especially with tax credits expiring the next two years, like we had that conversation about like resources to contribute to these projects aren't infinite. So with that understanding like permitting is certainly becoming like that. Yeah, so I feel like that was highlighted and recognized that like pieces in this process that don't make it easy to do this work that we're saying is fully necessary. You can't just stick with this permitting and the amount of time that it adds. Yeah, sorry to bring it up, but I'm kind of sensitive to it as I'm trying to build a house now. And it's been six months and I finally got through after $2,500 worth of paperwork, my Department of Health permit to put in my waste, my aerobic wastewater system to handle my sewage at my building site. And you know, it's a little bit troubling and also working with the State Office of Historic Preservation. They were very responsive, given me log number for my my issue. And then after two weeks, I still haven't heard from anybody in the office, even though I keep emailing them and calling them and leaving messages and things. But I thought Mayor Caldwell came up with an interesting concept. They put it out and you haven't seen it yet, but it was in Pacific Business News Day. They're going to start turning the permits around in the county planning and permitting department. They claim in like 10 days to two weeks because they're going to allow the contractor to take care of all the other fire marshal, Department of Health, State Historic Preservation Office. Anybody, the engineers, if you've got a civil engineer issue like you're in a flood zone or something, they're going to, the Planning Office is going to turn it, at least in Oahu, turn it over to the contractor and say, good, you can hand carry this through. That way, they don't have to deal with the other state agencies or county agencies that are also part of the process and don't seem to be responsive to them. So I thought that was really creative, but I don't know that it's actually going to speed up the process any. I think it's just going to upset more contractors that they get frustrated at more offices than they do. It'll create more jobs, more runners. They already have permit expeditors. It's going to probably raise their prices because they're going to have to do a lot more running around to get stuff done now. I'll tell you what, Rachel, we've got about two minutes left and I'd like to just give that last two minutes to you to talk about your vision of where we should be going in your personal opinion. It looks like wind and solar and just renewable energy in general, Hawaii. What's your vision? I mean, you know, having worked at HCAP for a number of years, I feel like hydrogen has to be part of the vision. It's everywhere and it's the thing that we can between me and I feel like motion usually. I'd really love to see Hawaii understand a job and just move full-bore on my case and figure out how to do hydrogen in Hawaii and work for like the resource itself but also the job creation opportunities, flexibility of hydrogen and just the practicality of hydrogen in a clean energy economy. I would love to see that integrated in Hawaii's clean energy teaching and then just involving communities, encouraging them to be more informed about how the energy is developed and giving them opportunity to be creative about what that looks like in your backyard because it will be people's backyards and frontyards and sideyards that are going to have the energy projects and to have that built in a way that, you know, respects the land, respects the people that are living around there and provides a benefit to the islands as a whole. It seems like a wonderful industry. But I'd love to see Hawaii. Great. Well, I appreciate that, especially from somebody who would take care of not only operating but maintaining the hydrogen fuel cell light carts and generators that we used to demonstrate at HCAP. You know, that says a lot about your personal involvement in the technology and the process, not just being the salesperson and pitching it but getting your hands dirty and turning it a wrench and doing some maintenance on the equipment and moving it around and demonstrating it at public forums. So thanks for doing that. I know it makes you believe in and understand the technology that much better when you get your hands dirty working on it. So glad you got to do that. I'd like to thank you for being on the show today and we'll try and catch you again sometime soon. I know we can't talk a lot about what you do for work, but maybe someday they'll take the gag order off of you and we can do that too. But thanks for being on the show today, Rachel. And we look forward to having you on again probably in about six months and catch up on things when we're not all quarantined or locked down or whatever. And so thanks for being with us. And thanks to everybody for watching today and we'll see you next week. Hoping to have the CEO of a company, a little company that some of you may know about called Plug Power. I'm trying to get him on and it looks like they're trying to free him up and I might have to change my time slot earlier in the day to get him on board. But I'm hoping to get him on the next couple of weeks. And I know even Rachel will tune in for that one because he's a pretty heavy hitter and a big deal in the hydrogen world. So until next Tuesday, bad energy man signing off.