 And welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on my new time on Tuesday at 3 in the afternoon, Hawaii Standard Time. Coming to you from beautiful downtown Honolulu. I'm Stan Osterman, retired from military, retired from state federal civil service and state civil service. And I think I probably pissed off the federal and the state government by doing an edit op-ed today in the Star Advertiser that tries to talk about what some of the private sector is doing in the hydrogen that the government sector is not bothering to even do anything. So they may kill me by next Tuesday, so hopefully I'll still be here Tuesday for my show. Anyway, today we got a great show. Previous guest has been on a couple of times. In fact, he holds a record for a number of views on YouTube for a show that I did called Hydrogen Safety. I just checked the other day, it's over 37,000 views, which is pretty cool. I was basically walking through his equipment about all the safety features in his equipment and how it all worked. We got Chris McWinnie from Millennium Rain coming to us live and direct from Dayton, Ohio, where he started his company and has it grown by leaps and bounds. So Chris, welcome to the show. I'm really glad you could join me this week and you're really kind of overdue. I've been wanting to have you on the show, but getting so much stuff done, retiring and everything, it's been kind of hectic. But thanks for coming on today and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Stan, for having me. We really appreciate the opportunity to share with folks what's happened in the hydrogen industry from our perspective. Great. Chris, could you start off by telling the viewers a little bit about yourself and how you got into Millennium Rain and what you're doing in the hydrogen world? Yeah, well, it started in my garage back in 2003. And then prior to that, it goes back clear back to 1993 when I first came up with the idea of when solar and hydrogen working together to create a put a person in a position where they could be completely energy independent and off the grid. And so I didn't pursue that right away. After several, with a partner of mine, Dave Herbal, and how it would work, we kind of parted companies for 13 and a half years. And then after 9-11, and I saw what was going on with the energy and how tied we were to foreign oil and that kind of thing, it encouraged me to try to take a closer look at what we had thought up 13 years before that. And so I wrote a patent and I sent it in on something called a residential hydrogen power plant. And basically bought myself a year to start working on that concept. And then I ran into Dave again after 13 years of not seeing him right when I sent the same day I mailed the patent in, as a matter of fact, he showed up. And so we started working on it in my garage and building several different types of electrolyzers and then realized the direction the market was heading was also going to be fueling vehicles of many types and that we were going to need to learn how to build hydrogen fueling stations and basically be able to provide a packaged product that would do everything in one package, make the hydrogen purify it, compress it, store it, and build it. So that's what we ended up doing. And in 2013, we moved into a 40,000 square foot building and later purchased that building. And so then in 2016, we actually stopped sales for a while so that we could pursue getting our products certified. And we ended up with two certificates of that testation on six electrolyzers and 10 different size and types of fueling stations. And we started up our sales again in February of this year. And we're already over 1.2 million so far this year. So this will be our first profitable year. And we're really excited about the future and how many people are really getting excited about hydrogen and the products that we have. That's great. I know that I talked to Andy Marsh that had a plug power about two years ago when they first turned a profit and they'd been running in the red for years and had the first year he turned a profit. He was so excited. And so I know you're probably feeling that same boost and that same adrenaline. It feels good to get out of the red and into the black. And I know that's taken a lot of hard work on your part, a lot of traveling, a lot of meetings, a lot of working with regulators and standards folks. So can you tell us a little bit about that part of what you've been into lately, working with codes and standards folks to make sure that your concept, which is kind of working on the small scale, fits into the bigger picture of the full spectrum hydrogen fueling station. Yeah, well, you know, this is a pioneering industry and the codes and standards are in constant development. And I realized a long time ago that I was afraid that, you know, it's just straight engineers that don't really think about money or economics much and and and regulators might create regulatory roadblocks that would make hydrogen the cost of doing hydrogen commercially too expensive. And so for the last four or four and a half years, I've been on multiple codes and standards committees within the CSA group and also SAE, which is Society of Automotive Engineers. And then I've also visited a couple of times to the NFPA and I've even traveled to Europe and set in some international standards organization meetings, ISO meetings. And it's interesting to see the different companies, perspectives and angles of approach. You have the big auto manufacturers, the OEMs, and they have one perspective on how things should be done. And then you have the big gas companies and they've got their perspective on how things should be done. And then you've got, you know, smaller players like Millennium Marine Energy, which has a completely different perspective on things. And our perspective is, is that the current way that hydrogen infrastructure is being built is too expensive to stand on its own. And the only reason that it's working right now, frankly, is that the state of California is putting up so much money, generously so, and thank goodness so. But they're paying for as much as 80% of the station. And then so what that does is it masks the fact that the station costs at three to four million dollars total, depending on how many kilograms a day it produces and can fuel in cars. It's just not financially feasible for it to pay for itself unless it gets to where it can do 500 kilograms a day. And then the station costs four million dollars. And so you have an issue where if you're going to put out a brand new fueling station and let's say it costs three million and the state puts up 80% and, you know, and then that station goes out there and you want to put it in a place where, you know, there's not any other stations yet. And what that does is it says, okay, there's only 20 or 30 cars in the area. And if you're going to ever going to get to the point where you're going to dispense 500 kilograms a day, you need 143 cars filling every day to consume that, which means you need 1,000 cars in a five mile radius. And so when there's only 6,500 or 6,700 cars in the whole state of California, it's kind of difficult to have those type of dynamics help your financial pro forma develop an organic growth for putting out hydrogen stations. So our take on it is, is that you should start small with stations and that you should build the amount of hydrogen to meet the demand. And as the demand outstrips the supply, then you take that hydrogen generator and fueling station combination package that was too small now and you relocate it to a new location in a day to open up new territory and you put in the next biggest size. We have four premade products with certificates of attestation and meet all the codes and standards that you can do that four different times all the way up to 64 kilograms a day. And then you're in better position to make the jump to the bigger stations. So that's a conflict in the way everyone else wants to do it. So we're kind of seen as a renegade a little bit and that's okay with me because I believe the concept is correct and it will end up really being one of the key factors to making hydrogen infrastructure proliferate around the world. Well let's take a look at some of your equipment and see what the viewers look at the kind of stuff that you've got that goes like is your smallest one still 2 kilograms a day? Yeah we have a two kilogram day unit and a four kilogram a day unit. I don't have any of those on this slides but we have this unit here is our latest who we started actually Paul Panthio over at Blue Planet Research on the Big Island and I scratched the first one of these out on a napkin and over in Kona one day because he was looking for he needed 12 kilogram a day unit because he was driving it off a sun and when you do that you're only going to get about a quarter of its production. So that way he would get at least three kilograms a day produced. And so that's why we designed that system to begin with and the old system used to have six stacks and was called a 330 triple twin. Well this is our first 342 triple twin it only has three stacks and we took the plumbing fixtures that plums it all together from 24 ends and outs down to nine. So that saves a lot of money saves a lot of leak points and then we also are moving water through this and has a circulatory system on it so it kind of sweeps the bubbles off the plates and allows you to get more production out of the same space and then we also added another 12 cells to the package and this thing is running sweet. I mean this is the best I've ever seen in this class that we've ever produced I'm so proud of it and if you look back at the picture again you can see that it has it has the hydrogen generator on the bottom side and then it has over to the to the left it has the purification and on top it has twin compressors. So you're looking at a system there that'll do 12 kilograms a day and has three separate electrolyzers that are running together. So that's why we call it a 342 triple twin because it's got triple electrolyzers and twin compressors so and it puts out 6000 psi into your storage and then we have a station that goes along with that then that has 24 kilograms and a fueling station and it comes as a package for about three hundred twenty five thousand dollars. Wow that's great and what's up next we got another slide coming up here that shows us a little more of an animation this is the next step up. So we actually are building this this is this is the old 3D version before we started building it and this is going to be our 64 kilogram a day electrolyzer this is in a 10 foot shipping container so it can go anywhere in the world and sit on you know with one of those containers ships and it's really exciting to see this come together because those stacks that were that you're seeing in there eat there's four of them in that the stacks that were on the other one they're four times bigger than that stack they produce 16 kilograms a day each stack so it's a sweet spot to have 64 kilograms a day and as I mentioned earlier we have a station that will do 64 kilograms a day and that's the electrolyzer portion of it so just this week we confirmed that we can get the pressure where we need it to be the purity where we need it to be and the stack holds its dimensional stability so it's a huge breakthrough we've actually been working on that stack and that system for almost three years now to get it to do what it did and that's after we already kind of understood what we were doing from developing all the smaller systems that we did so that's going to be the building block and you'll see one of the last slides that we show how we can do megawatt scale systems now to capture large wind and large solar okay we're going to take a quick break here and back in 60 seconds with chris mcguiney look at some more of his projects and the bigger plans that he has for the whole us aloha my name is mark schlaufe i am the host of think tech hawaii's law across the sea program my program airs every other monday at one o'clock on think tech hawaii most of my programs deal with my own life and law experience recently i interviewed alex gempell who i have known for over 30 years about his voyage across the sea as a lawyer from tokyo to hawaii those are the type of stories that i like to bring and like to talk about human stories about law and life aloha aloha y'all my name is mitch ewan i'm from the hawaii natural energy institute and i'm the host of hawaii the state of clean energy we're on every wednesday at four o'clock and we hope that we have interesting uh guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in hawaii all the way from pv to windmills to hydrogen most of my heart electric buses and electric vehicles so please dial in every wednesday at four o'clock on hawaii the state of clean energy aloha hey welcome back to stand the energy man stan oserman here with chris mcguiney from millenium rain coming to you live and direct from Dayton ohio so chris but i just had a quick thought while we're on break there what are the chances of you just taking one of the larger um electrolyzer stack and making uh back to the smaller scale but with the larger electrolyzer stack so you could do maybe you know four to six kilograms a day with the smaller unit is that feasible i'm not sure i understand the question stan i we we do have a two kilogram and a four kilogram a day system already perfected can you clarify a little bit more what you're talking about yeah how big is the stack you said that the stack on that um the new uh 10 foot containerized one the the larger 64 kilogram a day is of basically four times bigger than than the um the one that the triple twin um could you yeah could you possibly take one of those stacks and make a single stack unit that would produce you know more hydrogen but in the smaller footprint um kind of kind of yeah i see what you're saying yeah and we have plans for that actually we have a 32 kilogram a day one that'll be smaller and then you could take that single stack it'd be 16 kilograms a day and it would fit on the same platform as the 330 triple twin or the 342 so yes that's possible and it is something that we will do in the future okay great well let's keep going with the images and let you talk to those and we'll keep on pressing through okay um well this is an interesting one because this cut this is a report that was done by mckinsey it'll give a person a really good opera a look at the future of hydrogen um they're expecting um that um there will soon be uh 400 million um cars on the road um there will be uh 15 million to 20 million trucks and five million buses and 30 million jobs will be created by the hydrogen industry um and this is by 2050 i think um and then um millennium rain energies plan for hydrogen infrastructure has the potential to negate 17 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions um and to give you idea how much a metric ton is the next slide kind of puts that into perspective um because i was wondering you know that sounds like a lot but just how much is that this this bush aircraft carrier right here is weighs 100 000 metric tons and there's actually a misprint on this page says 17 000 bush aircraft carriers if you add it up it's actually 170 000 bush aircraft carriers stacked up on top of each other that's like a giant mountain range of co2 that are planned for uh building hydrogen infrastructure and just the mainland united states alone um and um we'll take out of the air uh by uh replacing carbon-based vehicles with hydrogen-based vehicles and just so it's a big deal just for the viewers really quickly could you explain why that is and just talk just for a second or two about fuel cells and fuel cell vehicles and how you can negate the carbon impact yeah so um a fuel cell is an electrochemical device that takes in hydrogen and air from the environment which contains oxygen it takes the oxygen out of that air to recombines it with the hydrogen to make water and it strips off the electrons and then the electrons are able to power an electric motor or charge batteries and that kind of thing so that's the way a fuel cell car works and when it does that your only emissions are water and then if you've gotten the hydrogen from like we do with an electrolysis which takes in electricity from renewable energy and then it takes in um water and you run that at renewable electricity through water through an electrolyzer you get out the hydrogen and the oxygen so when the car then is running it's taking in the same oxygen you released and it's putting out water again and it's a beautiful round trip of uh sustainability when zero carbon it was zero carbon that's right and so every time you put a hydrogen fuel cell car on the road and it's running on renewable hydrogen you're removing all of the CO2 that that car that they would have been driving was was emitting and so that's how it adds up to 17 billion metric tons and that was that was actually a report that we commissioned it was done by a professor of environmental studies at um Johns Hopkins University and then his work was reviewed by another professor at Yale University and they're the ones that presented us with that information okay what's the next image that we have so you know we've got quite of an extensive IP portfolio that we've developed now that protects our products in um in the United States uh the European Union in Canada we have nine patents we have three trademarks and we have the two certificates of attestation that's a picture of what the certificate of attestation looks like there for the fueling stations and one of the key things is that they're called a scalable hydrogen fueling appliance and because it's called an appliance that makes a really big difference in coding in in the codes of standards in that it doesn't in most jurisdictions you would not have to get a permit you don't need a building that's it's it's like a it's like a piece of equipment it's not a building right it's it'd be i was in a codes and standard meeting in Canada at the csa group and there was a guy there that was with natural gas companies and they'd use the same technique for quite so many years and they said it is like you go to the store and you buy yourself a brand new propane grill and you put it on your wooden deck and that's permittable and you without a permit and you don't so you've you bought an appliance that is flammable and explosive and um you're going to actually light it on fire on a wooden deck and because of the way the safety is engineered it was given an appliance code so therefore you don't have to get a permit to go buy a grill and it's the same type of approach with the hydrogen fueling station that's really great because we ran the same thing in the military there was a nowadays with epa standards and stuff it's almost impossible to do outdoor shooting ranges for the military and they need them they need to shoot live weapons to qualify before they deploy so a company came up with a concept of building a modular indoor shooting range and it was considered equipment because it was completely modular and movable you could pick it up and just put it on pads or put it on and that made a huge difference in terms of how you could locate it and how fast you could build it and it really saved the the military in a many ways by using that same approach you're using to get the equipment out in the field quickly yeah and and our stuff is equally modular um when we put the one at the navy research lab in Washington DC over a year ago um it was I pulled in and had it in the back of a rider uh truck and um 45 minutes later it was sitting on the ground running and uh it could be moved and from its place and put indoors or move some to some other location just as quickly all you need is a water hook up in the electric outlet at 240 volts and 60 amp breaker so uh pretty much standard electricity at most people's places right let's bring up that next image and um look at your your big plan for the whole us so um this is uh our plan for the transcontinental hydrogen highway and the fueling infrastructure we plan on putting 27 stations coast to coast from Los Angeles to New York with our um with our pre pre manufactured stations and uh we our goal is to have this done um in the the end of 2021 first part of 2022 we're all we've already placed our first one in place since we announced this in April and it is at a Honda Toyota dealership um and um they're actually buying five used Toyota Marais and they're going to be um providing um those cars to customers um that bring in their car for service and it has to stay for a couple of days so they'll let them have a loaner car and be test driving a hydrogen car in the meantime which is uh really exciting to see them take that effort and and take that step so it's it's really really cool um and then um but we're not going to just fixate on the mainland united states because Hawaii is also a great opportunity on the big island especially uh where we could just put five stations there and uh you could travel every place on the big island and always find fuel and so uh we're really pushing to try to make that happen and looking for people um that want to maybe own the stations and that kind of thing the ones on the mainland millennium rain energy is going to pay for um we're currently looking to raise 20 million dollars and um for a 10 stake in our company and we're going to take 3 million of that 20 million and put those stations out so they'll be company owned um i'm hoping that we can find some some people um with the aloha spirit to to go out there and help us put these stations together then and build uh you know the first highway in in hawaii there on the big island how are you getting that word out how are you looking for investors um so um actually we've talked to um three billionaires in the last three three uh uh weeks um and we've got lots of other people we went out and we put a professional slide deck together so we can go do a road show if i can ever get shook loose from time to go do it um and um so we're just going to get aggressive and go out and seek the seek the people and it's not about the money as much as it is the people who can bring the experience to the table and we've got we've already talked to some pretty serious players that have some great past experiences that can be beneficial to us going forward yeah i'm looking forward and i i you know i'm going to be helping you on the big island with paul there's a lot of opportunities on the big island of hawaii and uh and i i've talked to uh actually some folks in australia yesterday that are looking for a way to invest in hawaii hydrogen and um i'll be talking to paul and mitch about that some more um and we'll we'll see what we can get going on the big island so i think well you know stan things i wanted to say stan is is that the world doesn't realize how fortunate hawaii is to have people like you and paul and mitch and and the other and the other leaders on the on the on the big island and on honan and honolulu there you have um surf co has taken a leader a leadership position and put out a station and get in cars in and you know you guys are really you guys really have some great leadership there and there's no doubt in my mind you have everything it takes to make this thing big and and may and be and be the banner uh you know the the the star that everybody can follow in the example so i'm really happy to be have some kind of part in that but we're gonna keep on trying because if you can't make him work in here in hawaii it's not going to work anywhere and we've got more renewable energy that you can shake a stick at and we buy a lot of fossil fuels from from everybody else so we've got more incentive more financial incentive to get off fossil fuels in any other state in the union and uh we need to be doing it that's right that's right well i think we have at least one more image up there for to throw up and uh i'm going to talk to you yeah so um this is just a i'm just going to go through this real quick because we've already touched on it but the idea is you've got to get the cost of hydrogen below the cost of gasoline because it's you know we all want to help the environment we all know we need to be green but for most people if they can't afford it they're not going to do it and so if you look at that at that gge it stands for a gallon of gas equivalent and with our mega four ta 70 in the top right hand corner there we can get gasoline equivalent down to three dollars and seventy one cents per uh and and and that's cheaper than gasoline is in hawaii is cheaper than it is in california and is cheaper than it is in europe and and but it doesn't happen that way overnight you've got to start small down there with the shfa 200 you see it's a 571 and then it goes to five hours and then it gets to 371 but you know that's that's what we think the magic that we've created is by packaging our systems running our business the way we are we're debt free as a company low liabilities in in in our our geographical position where we have a lower standard of living here um so we can we can actually make these products and uh in mass quantities and and get this to happen so the last thing is a the last thing is a slide about the the mat the large scale systems and so once you build that network of stations you need to have larger scale uh hydrogen systems that are working on large wind utility scale wind and solar fields that can then store that energy and and then transport it in and backfill those stations networks that you've built and so here in the bottom left hand corner you can see that's an electrolyzer that would do 160 kilograms a day and eat 336 kilowatts of power to do so and if you put three of those together you're at a megawatt and you're at 480 kilograms a day in production and you could scale it from there and then the last thing I want to say about that is hydrogen is the greatest way to store large scale wind and solar some preliminary numbers I've done is compare batteries at three three hundred and eighty dollars a kilowatt hour in storage to as low as three thirty dollars for hydrogen uh per kilowatt ten times less you know and that that factor has not caught on with it with the grid folks I mean I talk to all the time and they keep going batteries batteries batteries and I go I know you're going to need some batteries in the mix but when you start to get to you know hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts it ain't going to be batteries it's going to be hydrogen and it's going to be because of the cost and they just don't get it yet even Hawaiian Electric doesn't get it Hawaiian Electric late company on the big island which is part of Hawaiian Electric those folks over there are starting to get serious because they're they're starting to see what Paul's system at Kuva Va can do in Kona and it's got their attention so I'm I'm looking forward I'm looking forward to seeing your systems you know all over the place Chris and I'm glad they're with the Navy now in the Army and you know we have our two out there with the Air Force and and uh really really appreciated but believe it or not we blasted through a half hour I just want to thank you again for for being on the show and coming to us past your dinner time and almost at your bedtime over there in Ohio and uh looking forward to seeing you in Hawaii sometime when you get out here yeah hopefully very soon Mahalo okay aloha and thanks everyone for watching today and this is Stan Osterman for Stan the energy man signing off till next week Tuesday aloha