 Hello, and welcome to Stand Energy Man, Stan Osterman here from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies. Emphasis on the advanced stuff, because this is a moonshot for us today, trying to Skype in from our warehouse space and talk about our convergence space. And what we're going to do here is I'm going to introduce some young folks to you that are coming to us from the Center for Tomorrow's Leaders, and they're actually helping us convert a Jim Polaris Jim electric low-speed vehicle to run on a hydrogen fuel cell. So it's an electric vehicle with a battery pack, 40-volt battery system, but we also have photovoltaics on the roof to charge the batteries, and we have a hydrogen fuel cell, one kilowatt, to also power charge up the batteries. So essentially this vehicle can go about 40 miles just on a battery charge. We should be able to get it to do another maybe 200 with hydrogen power, and as long as we keep it parked in the sun, we'll just keep it in the battery charge by the solar panel. So this thing can go pretty far with almost no outside interference or influence, and just a squirt of hydrogen from time to time. But anyway, let me get started by letting my team introduce themselves. These are the folks from Hawaii Center for Tomorrow's Leaders. There's part of a special program of high school students that Rachel James and I have been working with to kind of get them ready for college and things beyond. So we're just trying to do our bit to get them into the real world and away from just academics. So let's start by introducing ourselves. Hi, my name is Julia. I'm going to be a senior at Kata High School. Hi, my name is Julia. I just graduated from the Jimmy High School. I'm also going to be attending the University of Hawaii at one point. What's your major going to be doing? Chemistry. Chemistry major. Oh, my name is Julia. So this is a great team. Rachel and I have been working with them for, wow, almost a year now, at least nine months or so. And we've been working on this project. They actually helped us pick the vehicle and interviewed the folks at Montgomery Power Sports where we picked the vehicle up from and talked to them about marketing and what it's like to market these kind of vehicles and what the customer's input is into the system and how they can influence way manufacturers build things. So we've had a lot of time and a lot of good quality time and they've put in a lot of work after hours to make things happen. They're also documenting. So we're doing a little bit of our own video now so they can put a production together and they'll keep taking this production on the road to introduce people to hydrogen technology. So what we're going to do now is just talk about what we're going to be going through and I'm going to turn a little bit here and show you. We have this rack back here. We're going to be mounting the hydrogen fuel cell in this rack and we'll bring the parts out. We also have a, right now it's a propane tank but it's going to be low pressure hydrogen so we won't put anything high pressure in here. It'll be pure hydrogen that goes in from our Millennium Rain Unit and why is it we want pure hydrogen? You don't want it to... It's not taking too long. Yeah, if you get to an oxidizer and you get an oxidizer in there it's flammable or it can be explosive. So this will pure hydrogen so it won't be flammable inside the tank. It's only flammable outside when it mixes with air. So we'll have this strap out on the top and it'll have those coming out of here going to our fuel cell. Over in this part of the rack we're going to have the controller unit and the bottom part is going to be our hydrogen fuel cell. So actually why don't Georgio and Leo go grab the two components and we'll slide them in. And then we'll show you where we're going to put them on the vehicle and we'll also talk a little bit about while they're getting that. We'll talk about the photovoltaics. This vehicle came with three panels. They're 100 watt flexible photovoltaic panels. And they're on the roof. They're mounted on the roof and we're going to wire them up. Yeah, let's put the top one in first. So these are rack mounted. They're just like a computer or a... They slide right in there. And it slides right in there. So when it's all set up it looks just like this. And you notice that we've got labels on everything and where things are going to plug in. We're just going to have to match up the colors and the labels. It's all numbered. And it's just a few quick connections and we'll have it all plugged in and ready to go. So this is what the unit will look like. Our big challenge is right now is to figure out how we're going to mount this and how we're going to get it in the back because we will have some wires coming out of the back and we've kind of looked at a couple options here. So why don't you guys explain what our final decision was? How are we going to do with this here? Show them where it's going to go. Okay, so we're basically buying this one sideways. And we're going to put... I don't know if you guys can see it, but all the way in the back. Yeah, okay. All the way in the back. Okay, so then the tank is going to be facing the outside so you can feel it better. And there's also the control panel on the outside. And on the back, there's going to be the wiring. So for this vehicle, the batteries are actually underneath the driver's seat and the passenger's seat in the compartment. And we have...the driver's seat is out right now so we can connect to the battery terminal there that goes right to the battery... the connecting point for the battery with the charger. So essentially what we're doing is right now this vehicle is a plug-in electric. You plug it into a regular wall outlet and it charges the batteries up. But what we're going to be adding are two more chargers. We're going to have the photovoltaic charger and we're going to have the fuel cell charger. So basically what I need to do is connect to the same place that the other charge unit connects right now. And that's a simple positive to positive, negative to negative. And it's right underneath the driver's seat. So turning the rack like this and having it sit up, it's a quick run, only probably three feet from the back of this unit here under the driver's seat to where we hook up to the batteries so it's a pretty quick connect. And let's talk a little bit about the photovoltaics. I don't know, it's kind of hard to see. You can see the back of them. They're right up here. But we have three panels. They're 100 watt panels and they're running sideways. There's one in the front, one in the middle, one in the back and it's curved a little bit. I need the rack for it with a little curve to it because the curve will give it some stability. I've seen these mounted on top of small vehicles like this with a flat panel and they bounce around a lot and they flap a lot. This will give, the curve gives it like an arch to a building, gives it a little bit more stability and it'll only flex in one direction and it'll stay nice and stable. Hopefully make those panels last a little bit longer and give us a little bit of protection from the rain as well. So I'll tell you what, when you grab those ratchet straps and we'll show people how the tank's going to hold on. We'll show you how we're going to mount the tank and then we'll show you some of the connections that we've got to make and we'll show you how fast this conversion can actually be. It's a little shorter so it's not too long. It'll have two straps on there, old and down nice and tight. And one of the connectors, heavy duty ones on the left with a red light and a red light. There's two sets of cables here. This set connects the controller to the fuel cell and this set connects the fuel cell charger to the batteries. This is a regular communications like a regular computer connector. It comes to the batteries. A little screw driver, tiny screwdriver tightens it down but you can see that's only a couple connections that go from the controller to the fuel cell to the control cable and then what we'll do is we'll also be looking at some hydrogen lines probably after the break we'll look up hydrogen fuel cell. It's really straightforward. There's an in and a drain line so we'll just have to connect up to the input and we're pretty much ready to go. We need some hydrogen in the tank and we can rock and roll with that but it's a pretty quick conversion. What we're going to do is after we sign off on the show today we're going to actually bolt all this stuff on to the frame and get everything ready and by this afternoon these guys will be able to take a spin around coca-cocoa in this thing and at least charge with the solar panels. So we'll be doing that after the show's over. So let's think a little bit of a break here and talk about what Cine for Tomorrow's leaders what you guys got out of the program a little bit because that was a little bit of time to invest in and was it worthwhile to you? What kind of experiences do you have? George you've got to go and make a couple presentations and actually step right and give a tour of the vehicle to a bunch of folks at the Honolulu Club. Yeah, yeah. Talk a little bit about your experience. It's about where George came from. My experience. Okay. My experience with the Set Up for Tomorrow's leaders basically it made me like a lot more open minded but especially with like energy in general because this is a topic that people already like to talk about because you know they want to get things that are always cheap and affordable but this one is a little bit more like towards the high end but then like if we're looking at the long run then it's worth it to invest in it like right now so then like as the technological advancements keep on improving then eventually it can become like affordable so it really towards like energy accessibility in general and it was a pretty fun experience. And the technology will start to get cheaper and cheaper and other car companies they're in production right now and they wouldn't be in production if the technology hadn't gotten cheap enough. Two weeks ago I heard a commentary that the amount of platinum used in the fuel cells for the cars now is about equal to the amount of platinum in a catalytic converter that's already in your cars now to clean up your exhaust in your current car. So that was a 95% reduction in platinum and platinum is the expensive part of a lot of this technology. It's already gotten quite a bit cheaper but like George says it's gonna get a lot cheaper as time goes by and new technologies start to replace their current technologies and we can start doing some really cosmic things. So, okay Leo, what about you? I really like about CTL is that I got to really connect with the outside for years so for example I got to work with CHICAD to build this vehicle looking about my peers' style D9 project and of course a public speaking which really helped me a lot. CTL for me I really enjoyed it because it exposed me to like an array of different projects and especially such intricate projects like this I had no idea that I had the capability of doing but to be able to come here from CTL to work with the outside leaders like Leo said it's been a great opportunity that I would have never gotten anywhere else I just like add it on to like apparently what George said they gave me the confidence of spreading myself and trying to learn different things that I'm not used to and stuff like that I'm not good at but we're gonna take a quick break now and we'll be back in 60 seconds to talk some more with the Center for Tomorrow's Leaders on my lunch hour. Hello everyone, I'm DeSoto Brown the co-host of Human Humane Architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. and with the show's host Martin Desbang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Welcome back to Stand Energy Men on my lunch hour as usual with Center for Tomorrow's Leaders and our vehicle conversion we've actually, Rachel and I have been anticipating this for a long time it took us several months to get the vehicle and then several, several, several more months to get all the equipment in but it finally came in from New Jersey it's actually commercial off the shelf stuff with the standard propane tank of course we probably should paint it red and put a big H on it and have all the safety stuff on there we'll get around to that but for the amount of hydrogen we're storing which is really a fraction of a kilogram there's really not going to be a whole lot in here and it'll be very low pressure but this is a horizon one kilowatt fuel cell and you can buy them yourself and they come in several different sizes you get one, it's one, two three and five kilowatt size two kilowatts is probably decent for the average house if you wanted to make your own uninterruptible power supply with some batteries at your house you could put portable optics on your roof just like they have on the roof of this vehicle with any of the extra electricity if you have a little electrolyzer you can make your own hydrogen at home and store it in your tank and then you'd have free fuel for your vehicle all the time you just put a little bit of hydrogen and you're set to go at home and charge your vehicle so you propose to live off the grid and this vehicle is it's just like a regular quad you can get an electric quad nowadays I think that way Buckeys make some and Polaris and some of the other companies are making electric quads they're full-on off-road vehicles they're all electric and you can do the same conversion on those vehicles I think most of them are 48 volt as a standard and that's what we're trying to do is stay with 48 volts so this system here produces voltage up to around 50 I want to say 52 or 57 volts so it can charge the batteries up and then it has a control that cuts it out when the batteries are full up and like I say it should get us well over 200 miles on the tank of hydrogen plus whatever the solar gives us and if we get real desperate we'll connect them away and electric and throw some apps in there via the public utility but we're going to try not to do that I think Rachel's going to make me park this thing outside so we use a solar all the time and we do run around a lot we do a lot of work at the state capitol and around the state office buildings and we use this thing here in downtown the low speed vehicles are good up to 35 miles on our zones it's actually got a license plate electric vehicle license plate so we can actually park in for free at the meters and of course you can't go in the HOV lane it's about 35 miles an hour we don't want to do that but it's actually it's just like a regular electric vehicle and I think a lot of people could do this it'd be a great project for high school science classes if they want to try and do something like this maybe do a fundraiser, raise some money and maybe get a used electric vehicle and do something like this it'd be real easy to do and I think the kids have fun at least learning about hydrogen biotrains and today we'll finish up putting this thing together and I think we'll have a good time for the rest of today so again this is the fuel cell part of it it's really simple, it's got three modes it's got a manual mode it's got an automatic mode and it's got an intermediate mode that you can program the way you want it but basically you can turn on and off manually but we'll leave it in the auto mode and in the auto mode what it does the voltage off the batteries and it reads it and if the batteries get too low of a voltage as they're drained down it'll automatically kick the fuel cell in and start making electricity to recharge the batteries and that's the mode we'll probably leave it in or off and if we're in the sun a lot we'll just leave the fuel cell off we'll make a little cover for it to keep the weather off of it but these things are actually fairly weather proof they've got to be in a shelter they've got to have cell phone communications like cell phone towers and other things where they can put a photo array or a tank of hydrogen out in the field and between the batteries the photo array and the hydrogen they can keep a cell phone tower going for months and months and never have to send anybody out to service it so that's what most of this equipment is used for but it adapts really well to either a house as an unnervable power spot or to a vehicle like this so, you know that's kind of the unique thing about this technology over the batteries so, what's the one thing that you learned about hydrogen that really surprised you or that you really were impressed by? I was impressed that you could use hydrogen in multiple ways you could find it everywhere I didn't know you could use it after fuel source to charge your car or you could use it in your house you could even hook with it like blue planet and the big one has a propane tank and they hook it up to their water burner and they can actually put lunch on it and have lunch over there and also when you make the hydrogen if you use an electrolyzer you're making pure oxygen that's medical grade so they can even use the oxygen for a welding or medical so even when you make the hydrogen like we say it's the most common element in the university but it's also almost always attached to something else something is water so what else are you doing about hydrogen and these kind of technologies? something interesting for example there's like a scuba diving company and they make they get oxygen via electrolysis then you can maybe request from them the hydrogen and then you can use the hydrogen for yourself or something along those lines I don't know if they do it now I don't think the scuba divers use pure oxygen they use air compressed air most people don't really like it most professionals are more afraid of pure oxygen than pure hydrogen because as an oxidizer it can spontaneously conduct around airplanes because we use high supply there's a ment port for the liquid oxygen that comes out of the airplane from time to time and there's a red circle around it and you know why? because if you have oil in your gloves when you're doing your pre-flight inspection and you have oil and it gets the pure oxygen and it'll catch on fire no lighter required it'll just spontaneously combust so you want to make sure with oxygen it's more dangerous than hydrogen for me, I didn't know that you take water and it's the if the process is subredient it's actually a question of whether or not it feels hard but I think this could be a part of our environment and try to support the new process to making our world I think how many did they steal all of your acronyms well actually that's kind of what they put up do you think that was really expensive for anyone? some of the chef schools on the mainland are crazy to cook with and they like it because it's very directional the heat goes right where you want it and another good thing about hydrogen there's no carbon in it so you don't heat up a whole kitchen except where you want the heat it's very directional and of course, whenever you burn hydrogen or you use it in a fuel cell what comes out of the exhaust? water? it's just water so if you start off with electrolysis and you electrolyze the water it's put behind you in an oxygen you end up with no carbon in that process because it's the electricity from the sun and then when you put it back in the fuel cell to make electricity there's no carbon in that process so from beginning to end you're just taking water and pure sunlight and making a fuel that you can cook with and no carbon pollution no greenhouse gases no nothing it's also good because if hydrogen happens to escape out of this tank it's just up in the air it's just going to be clouds it doesn't make any outside of it it's really basic it's non-toxic it's only flammable and mixed with air and it's easy to use easy to work with as long as you follow the safety procedure very safe I really want to thank all of you for being on the show today we'll get hot finishing up this project we'll have you back and you can talk about some of your exploits tell me your story about hydrogen conversion and vehicles and folks out there in the real world so people aren't afraid of hydrogen anymore you can make it run free so I'm going to wrap it up today for Staten Energy Man thank you for being with us and our Center for Tomorrow's Leaders folks thanks for the folks in the studio that helped pull us together and Christine over here I'm an analog brain in a digital world and she's the one that makes it happen with Tyler our intern so thanks for being with us and we'll see you next week on Staten Energy Man