 Welcome to Stan Energy Man on a fun filled day here in the studio getting a little bit of a late start. Anyway, I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and you're watching Think Tech Hawaii and Stan Energy Man show. We've got a great guest today from the big island of Hawaii, and we're going to be talking to him, but I'd like to talk a little bit about a great event coming up on the 8th of May here in Honolulu at the Foreign Trade Zone. We've got a renew rebuild Hawaii, where we'll be talking to some folks from D-Beds Economic side and get an economic picture of energy in the state of Hawaii and what the future looks like. Go ahead and let Yamamoto Lao from the GEMS program and talk about financing energy projects. I'll be making a presentation on hydrogen. We'll have a couple other folks talking about projects on Kauai and some folks from Hawaii Gas talking about their Honolulu, their natural or the renewable gas project they have with the county of Honolulu. It's a great event. If you've got time on the 8th, come out from 8.30 in the morning until 11.30 in the morning and enjoy some time talking about energy. Today on our show we have Richard Ha from the big island. I've known him for about six years, and he was one of the first people I met from the big island that works energy projects, and he's our guest today, and it's really good to talk to him. So Richard, welcome to the show, and why don't you tell the audience a little bit about what you've been up to your whole life on the big island and what's been keeping you busy and getting you involved in energy. Yeah, so the last 40 years I've been involved in farming. I started off with bananas and started off with a $300 credit card when it was difficult to get a $300 credit card, and then we built ourselves up, and then eventually moved from where we were in Capogo to get out, and moved again to VKL, and diversified into tomatoes, and then about 10 years ago we noticed the cost of our supplies were going up, and it was surprising because it was to do with all the plastics, the fertilizers, stuff like that, and it took me a little while to figure out that energy was needed because they were my products of petroleum, and once I found that out, I figured I'd better go study what that was about, and so I went to the first of the five equal conferences I met, so in a short description that I've been thinking of over the last few years, yeah. So you've actually self-schooled yourself on the amount of energy it takes to actually run a farm when you actually go back into the products that go into farming, like fertilizer, energy for your vehicles, your tractors, your refrigeration, because you have food safety issues as well, right? Yeah, we have to follow all these regulations, but you know what happened to me when I was a kid? My mom used to tell stories about impossible situations, and he would always, you know, it would be around the table, and he'd turn the table, and he'd say, not no can, can, and I was 10 years old at that time, and it affected me really, really strongly, but maybe I'll tell another story, and our family is Kamahele from Puna, and so we, you know, the family of land along the ocean, and I was telling a story about his family, his friends fishing, so they had a bamboo pole with a peri-sea lantern and they were fishing, the three of them, and he said, wait, why aren't coming? What you going to do? He was asking me what I would do if, you know, they were out at this point, and the wait was going to clean out everybody, and I didn't know what to do, so I said, no, I don't know, what would you do? He said, you know what I did was, I climbed my bamboo pole, and overhand, lifted up my legs, or whatever I'm going to need, and I jumped back down, and I fished my friends out of the water, you know, and I'm like, wow, and then he looked at me, he said, you know what, I knew what I was going to do before it happened, so then, you know, I was so confused, planning it at the end, back on the storm, I was influenced along by these kinds of stories. Yeah, that's really important, we forget that if we look back to our kupuna, the folks that came before us, and in Hawaii, if you look back four or five hundred years, the population of Hawaii wasn't much different than it is right now, but we didn't have to import food, or safe way and Costco, and things like that, we didn't have to import oil, we didn't have to import a lot of stuff that we import now, it was all sustainable, and I think a lot of folks don't have that picture right now, we're so used to using cheap oil and cheap transportation to bring stuff in that we probably should be growing ourselves, and that we could relearn from folks like your dad, and the folks that grew up from an earlier time, and look back in our history, and how we could be sustainable, and I know one of the things that you did on your farm was you had your own hydroelectric at your banana and tomato plantation, so I have a picture of your hydroelectric generator, maybe you could talk a little bit about that project. Oh yeah, how that came about was, you know, ten years ago when the oil price spiked, we realized that I realized I needed to go right about it, so I went to the first of five big oil conferences, and the first thing I found out was that the world had been using places like oil as it had been finding, and had been doing that for twenty years or so, so when I came back from that first conference, I said, you know what, we better go figure out what we can do, and we just happened to have the fuel running through our property, so two things happened, one was, I went to work with legislators to get a long pass so that farmers could use renewable energy and keep more from the deployment of eggs, so that was the first thing, and the second thing was we started to figure out how we were going to use the river to generate all the electricity, so I applied for the loan, and then we developed a hydroelectric plant which is now generating 100 kW just from the run of the river. And so basically that was an old sugarcane flu? Yes it was, it might have been around for a hundred years and it was, you know, yeah. We know that sugarcane was on Oahu and on Maui and probably on the big island, maybe even on Lanai, I think they were mostly pineapple, but there's a lot of those flumes and tunnels that have been used for a long time in the sugar and pineapple industry, so we could actually be doing a little bit more hydroelectric, maybe even on Oahu than we think of using right now, and that's pretty much a firm base load power, right, that 100 megawatts just kind of keeps going all the time, it doesn't change like the solar panels and wind, when the wind dies down or the sun goes down you can't count on it for energy, but those flumes, as long as the water is flowing and you're putting the same water in that you took out so you're not polluting it or anything, what were some of the permitting issues that you had with using the water? We just have to go through the water resource permission and get approved, so we did that, but what is really good about hydro is that when it's raining and cloudy, you're not normally giving a lot of solar, so it works when there's a lot of solar it's not really critical but when there's no solar, the rain is falling and so it works to complement each other with solar and hydro Does it fluctuate much over the seasons like rainy season to not rainy season or you get a pretty constant generation? It goes up a notch, if there's a drought it can try out, but in general it's pretty steady Let's talk a little bit about some of the other renewable sources that are available on the big island for example geothermal, give us some background on how Pune geothermal was accepted by the community and some of the issues they ran into and maybe some of the issues we can avoid in the future if we want to use that huge natural energy source The characteristic of geothermal is that the big island is going to be over the hot spot for the anticipate 100,000 to a million years, so you know it's kind of sustainable pretty sustainable and it's 247, real solid stable power, so it's just a matter of where you're located and there's some right now Pune geothermal is located close to the east reef zone but there's also geothermal energy on the slopes of Wanakea and there's quite a bit of geothermal power beneath Wanakea What are some of the concerns though about the folks I mean we always have folks that don't want things in their back yard or whatever for whatever reason, what were some of the issues that the local community brought up when Pune geothermal started out Well you know there were issues about gases but the Department of Health actually controls the amount of gas that can be emitted at a loose level, in other words what you can smell is what they control yeah that's the threshold but the danger is quite a ways higher than that so there's not really much danger to compare to maybe New Zealand or places like that so there's a lot of concerns from the community but if you look at the amount of emissions, the kind of emissions, the frequency there's very little danger as compared to what just happened with this eruption I mean the amount of adjacent sulphide that came out is just incredible incredible as compared to the level that the Department of Health controls that's a good point, when the volcano recently erupted in that area and they had to shut down Pune geothermal my understanding is that the big island lost about 30% of their power generation from that plant shutting down during the eruption, is that about right? Yeah it is right and so they had to use the plants that they had and that was quite a bit Do you think that actually helped the case for geothermal on the big island to realize how reliable it was and how much they could count on geothermal if they really took up newer technology and maybe improved the location got the geothermal moved a little bit farther away from a residential and community farming area? So there's a lot of discussion and people especially if you talk to the employees at Pune geothermal what you find is that the employees are very comfortable that they're doing the best thing they can do for the community so that's what I normally do when I'm trying to find out what's going on with the particular company I just ask the workers and I can't say geothermal are very convinced that they're doing the right thing for the community That's important. I know that we try and do a lot of things here in the islands and each island has its own personality and its own culture and a lot of times we get pushed back from the community. A lot of times it's just because the people don't understand or they're fearful of the technology itself they're worried about traffic or they're worried about safety issues they're worried about what would happen if a tsunami hit and impacted that technology, what would happen there they're kind of afraid of the unknown but when you have people working at that plant and they're up to speed on the safety and they're familiar with all the procedures and they're comfortable, it's better for them to talk to their own neighbors and make their own community comfortable than to have some stranger come in and everything's fine. So I think that's a good way to approach it Yeah, absolutely Yeah, and you know the concerns immediately and for the last 20 years has been local around the area but you know there's some larger issues today and the larger issue has to do with you know going to these people conferences and the larger issue is we're depending on fossil fuels so much and we're relatively energy blind as to how important fossil fuel is in our economy and in our way of life so when you start to realize that these concerns are so important to worldwide concern and you take a look back down to your immediate neighborhood and have to compare what is most important to everybody, it's time to see that the concerns that's facing us in the future is something that all of us should be concerned about on Hawaii Island as well as the whole state fossil fuel is the finite resource, basically it's what it is, it won't last forever Yeah, I know and you send me those videos from Professor Hagen and I've talked about it several times on the show we're going to take a quick break here and get back with Richard and talk a little bit more about the future of the big island and how things are looking 10, 20 years from now and I think some of that's going to revolve around hydrogen so we'll be back in 60 seconds Aloha and Mabuhay, my name is Amy Ortega Anderson inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with Think Tech Hawaii, we come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday, we invite you to listen, watch for our mission of empowerment, we aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain and we hope to empower, again Maraming, salamat po, Mabuhay and Aloha Hey Aloha, my name is Andrew Lanning, I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii, live from the studios I'll bring you guests, I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe family safe, keep our community safe, we want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because Security Matters, Aloha Hey welcome back to Stand There in Juman, on my lunch hour as usual here on a beautiful Friday in Honolulu, we're talking to Richard Ha on the big island and Richard left off talking a little bit about some recent conversations he's had with Professor Huggins from Minnesota I believe, University of Minnesota. Anyway, he makes a great point, the professor does about how all of us are really energy blind and we really don't appreciate everything that we do today requires energy and one analogy he makes is that two, three hundred years ago people used about two hundred watts of energy or had about that much energy requirement every day but today with all of our technology, all the things we use, our vehicles, our transportation, our jets, our shipping food and things across the globe, we're actually using about a hundred times as much or close to a hundred times as much energy as the earliest man was using to go out and hunt and gather their own food but we don't appreciate how much actual work goes into giving us the lifestyle that we have right now and that entire energy capability, that hundred fold increase is all because of cheap oil and that cheap oil is a finite commodity and eventually it's going to get more expensive than it is now and it's going to round. In fact, just an article from the Internet today and from the news last night, Russia has a contaminated pipeline and that pipeline carries about one percent of all the oil that the world needs to operate so imagine if a bigger system, maybe there's a bigger war in the Middle East and 15 or 20 or 30 percent of the world's oil gets tied up and is unavailable and now all of a sudden there's pressure on the U.S. to provide its oil to the world and the price starts creeping up on everybody's oil because there's a supply shortage. That's when all of a sudden you start to realize that the price of all your food goes up as we start off with his show with Richard saying he's got to buy fertilizer, he's got to move his equipment he's got to have tractors going. That all focuses back on hydrocarbon fuels, fossil fuels and that price starts to drive the whole world economy crazy when that price of energy goes up. We need to start looking and being more responsible about being efficient with energy and also what we're sourcing our energy with. We talked about hydroelectric and geothermal and the bigot and being two great sources of what we call baseload power or firm power that doesn't fluctuate with the sun and the wind that are also available besides all the sun and the wind that we have to provide not only the bigot but our whole state with energy. But when it comes to moving energy around you've got only a couple of choices. You've got batteries, you've got hydrogen, you've got I guess moving in heat if you wanted to but there's really only limited ways you can move an energy as either a liquid fuel or a stored in batteries or as a gas. And one of the ways we're looking at storing energy in the state here is hydrogen. That's one of my favorite subject. Richard, talk a little bit about, you know, you've been up to Blue Planet Research and been with Paul at his shop. Tell us a little bit about what you think about hydrogen. Well, you know, I like the idea about hydrogen because like I said, you know, it can be moved around in containers. You don't like cocaine but you know, adjust it to make it work. And you can use it for transportation, hydrogen fuel cell versus electricity where you would have to use a heavy battery. You could use a smaller tank and still get longer range and you won't take as long to fill up compared to batteries. Yeah, so and plus when you use hydrogen your emissions is just heat and water vapor. So there's no pollutants that go up in the air from transportation. So there's a whole bunch of advantages to using hydrogen in the future, in the future of declining oil supply. And certainly going to the future, the more important hydrogen becomes. So the question really is now how soon are we going to see the effect of rising oil prices? You know, right now we see it happening a little bit here. But in about two years or so it's my guess that we'll start to really appreciate how difficult it is how expensive it is to go get the oil. And then the prices will start to rise. So it's prudent for us to start to move towards hydrogen as soon as we can. I agree. I had a guest on last week and we were talking a little bit about this and he pointed out something that I haven't thought of and I don't think the professor even included in his talk. But if we wait until the crisis point and decide now we need to move into hydrogen for an alternative energy source, well you don't have the equipment built to make the hydrogen or the vehicles and the other stuff to use the hydrogen. So now you have to make all that equipment or make all that infrastructure and when you make it you have to use the expensive fossil fuel that's in crisis. So you're building the infrastructure at the most expensive time and the time to really start building the infrastructure is now even though it's not maybe as competitive price wise but you can't afford to wait until the crisis to start building the infrastructure to replace such a huge and important piece of our economy as what the fossil fuel energy sources so we're talking about not waiting for the crisis and don't wait for the crisis to start transitioning to this hydrogen energy because the infrastructure build will be too expensive at that point. So how are we going to start moving on Richard to get things going early rather than waiting until the price of oil jumps so high? Yeah you know and so we have to determine at the time how many refueling stations do we need and how much will it cost and how do we start moving in that direction because what is happening just recently is that hydrogen refueling stations don't have to be as large as we thought at least what I thought three years ago when I was last involved in this hydrogen so it can start that's not as expected so that's kind of where things are today so it's a possibility to get it started earlier rather than having to wait. Yeah it's better to start moving now And so that's a great point because one of the great things about hydrogen is it's really scalable. They make hydrogen fuel cells small enough to run a cell phone on and then they make them big enough to go to grid generate power for an electric grid and everything in between and same with the generation to make the hydrogen and dispensing in vehicles you can get units that cost less than 100,000 dollars that will make the hydrogen compress it clean it store it and dispense it into your vehicle and if it's for like a household use or a small business use that's less than 100,000 dollars for that entire production equipment So it can be scaled really easily Well Richard I tell you what we're getting close to the end of our time here and I'm going to leave the last 30 seconds or 45 seconds to you to start coming up energy wise Yeah so we're looking at a future of declining oil supplies and rising costs and it's kind of scary actually but you know in Hawaii we are extremely lucky to have geothermal because this is a totally saturated source of energy from oil and the heat that's coming out of the volcano the cost of that heat will not change from today it's free yeah so it's just the infrastructure the infrastructure is nothing compared to having to drill it in a foreign country and then bring it all the way to Hawaii and then a set of equipment to convert it to usage we actually have it here on the big island and it's we're going to be over the hospital for 500,000 years so the future is bright what is really important to us here in Hawaii is to leverage our heart is something we know Well Richard I think that's words of wisdom that really need to take to heart because I agree with you and I think in the future the world's going to be looking at Hawaii on how we did it because we're going to do it first we're going to be there before pretty much anybody else and I'm looking forward to working with you on the big island to make it happen so thanks for being our guest today and I look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks on the big island ok Richard and thanks to all the viewers out there for watching Think Tech and Stanley Energy Man this Friday and next Friday I probably won't be here I'm going to be in DC maybe you can Skype me in or something but we're still working on that until next time, Allah