 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Hey, hello, and welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on ThinkTek Hawaii, where civil engagement does matter. In fact, what I'm trying to do with this program is just put ideas out there that I think will help Hawaii, or at least try and gather ideas from really smart people that I think will help Hawaii move forward in clean energy and clean transportation, because I think that's the right thing to do. So anyway, I'm going to start off by talking a little bit about my checkered past in a previous life when I was in uniform, and an experience I had at U.S. Pacific Command. It just so happened that I was around during the time that Japan experienced their earthquake and tsunami, and believe it was 2011, March, about this time. In fact, I remember it was on my birthday, and that tsunami caused damage, and the earthquake caused damage to a major nuclear power plant, where they're Daiichi Fukushima. My job at Paycom at the time was to work with the J3 and the nuclear engineers to figure out when we would evacuate American citizens from Japan based on a degradation of that power plant. So I learned a lot more about nuclear power plants than I ever wanted to or ever intended to, but it stuck with me, and it obviously made an impact on a lot of people's opinions of nuclear power, especially the folks in Japan, because now they're looking at shutting down all their nuclear power plants and going with more renewable and clean energy. They're not quite there yet, but they're getting there, and that's what we'd like to start off our talk with today. This is the third Friday of the month, so I've got my favorite guest here, my favorite electrical engineer, Ryan Wolbins. Hey, Sam. Ryan, thanks for being here. Yeah. So I'd like to stop by talking a little bit about what Japan's doing to improve their clean power and get away from the nuclear power plants. So from your experience and your reading, how are they doing, where are they headed? Sure. So a lot of different news has actually come up recently on this same topic, because we just got past the Olympics, and Japan is due up on the Olympics now in 2020. And so they're initiatives where we saw some of the robotic initiatives coming from Pyeongchang. Japan's starting to say, hey, we're kind of the hydrogen guys. We've got this new initiative. So one of the things Japan's come out to say, along with their great car manufacturing that goes on there, was we're going to switch from petrol-fueled cars, and we're going to make a big fuel cell push and go hydrogen. When they made that decision, that's going to cut down on one of their largest emitters on Island. So they make that decision. It just completely shifts the whole market for fuel cell cars, especially for Japan. They have to come up with that hydrogen somehow. They're likely using Reformation and LNG to make it, which still produces carbon from that standpoint. But from their standpoint, it's a lot less. It's cutting it. I don't know the exact figure, but let's say it's half. They're saying, hey, if we take this and just switch to hydrogen made this way, boom, we just took out a huge chunk of our emissions. Now that's on the energy side for transportation, but it's a great step, and it allows them to go on other steps because they have hydrogen, as we've talked about a lot of times, and the different ways to make it, and it can be a completely renewable resource. So they have done that on the transportation side. They still are a large importer of energy, just like Hawaii is today, with where they're geographically located, a less sun than we're getting here, makes it tough for them. Nuclear was something like 30% of their generation. And they come out and say, we need to change this, change a third. That's a huge number to just come out and say, we're going to change. And then right behind that, say they're going to change the fuel source of the vehicles. I mean, massive changes being made, what I would say very quickly and efficiently at the same time, are pretty big. So they're going to be more of an LNG hub of the Pacific. They can pull that off very well being where they're located, and that's where I think they're headed with it, but there's plenty of smart people over there running that. Do you think they have enough geothermal there to possibly use geothermal for their initial generation to make the hydrogen with electrolysis rather than steam reforming? Yeah. There are a lot of investigations to where they can use geothermal right now. I was just reading this week about how many sites there were. I wanted to say it was in the dozens, like not quite a hundred or maybe it was a couple hundred. But it was a lot of sites that they're investigating for that. Not sure where they're at with point it, but if you have that many that you're interested in, yeah, I think there's a great potential for them to pull on that. Okay. And just like Japan, and I mentioned the Daiichi Fukushima and that earthquake in Sadami, we've had some of the recent disasters in the Atlantic side in Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, that have kind of laid out some opportunities as well. So what's your impression of the situation after two major hurricanes hit that region, the survivability and the recovery? Just your general impressions on how we can improve upon that or maybe how we should be looking at different systems to make that a stronger, a stronger technical recovery on the electric grid side. Sure. The Gulf Coast and Puerto Rico are also great examples of where we sit with our energy resources and then how they react to natural disasters, just like what happened in Japan, just in a different mindset. So when we look at a place like Puerto Rico, unfortunately there are things we could have looked at it a couple years ago and said, yeah, that could happen, absolutely. And we're in that spot today in Hawaii. We can say some of these, what would sound like lofty, you know, it doesn't make sense claims, but we could have done this with Puerto Rico and say, yeah, Hurricane, could wipe you guys out for a long time. I think Puerto Rico today is at 80, 85% back online. They're hoping to get back on 100% by May, which is a really long time to be without power. It's months. It's been months and months. Crazy long time. So what we learned from them, you know, they're not a renewable grid before this happened. And there's a lot of push to try and redesign that and be resilient tomorrow as it's being rebuilt. Now there's a thing with being speedy with getting back up. That's the cause of going not 100% renewable in the next thing. But what we learned from Puerto Rico is where they got their power and the time that they needed it was immediately solar because it couldn't bring the ships in to bring the diesel and to bring up the instant generation. Some of that was turning on, but where people started building their own little micro grids, it was based off of solar with the caveat of if the solar even survived the storm, because a lot of the solar just got ripped apart into shreds. So you had to be survivable on the solar piece as well. So some of these people had solar and car batteries and the time up making little micro grids. So what we can learn from that is just solar with just even that battery as some people are going to put in big solar battery systems there, when the natural disaster happens, that battery is giving you probably the next day's power, not the next months and months of power. When that disaster happens and that battery runs out, the support comes in to help you out, the external support. That's a battery and a bunch of shredded apart solar panels, that's not going to, we can't plug into any of those. We had to bring our generators there to power it back up. What we can learn from that is that, well, that's not working. Go to the Gulf Coast and find out what did work there. That was the underground pipelines. Where power was restored first or even was on the whole time was the natural gas pipelines that were being sourced somewhere else pushing energy as a fuel underground that was untouched by the natural disaster to the micro grids, which a lot of different ways to turn natural gas into power. Learn from those disasters, your fuel, transportable fuel was the key to keeping those up, as well as a resilient design against natural disasters. You know, we don't need just to cover the brown out, we're talking days and weeks, and Hawaii still has the chance of hurricane sitting in certain directions. I mean, not to advertise your company or anything, but hasn't Berns and McDonald done some micro grid work with hospitals using natural gas to network and keep the emergency rooms and hospitals up? Yeah, absolutely. And in the Houston area, we have a hospital that has a very large micro grid in that that stayed up the whole time. So it's not like, you know, theoretically you're talking, it's actually you've seen it happen with one of the systems that you folks have built. So it's more than just theory, it actually works. So I don't know if Puerto Rico has much of a natural gas pipeline system. We have a fairly large one here in Honolulu. That's why Hawaii gas is a regulated utility is because they have pipelines, high pressure and low pressure running all away from Campbell Nostro Park to downtown and then networking out into the communities with gas lines for like restaurants and things like that. So we actually have some of that infrastructure in as survivable. And then the other vulnerable piece seems to be just the overhead wiring. And I know it's expensive to put wires underground, especially after the fact rather than when you're designing a community or building a community. So what are the relative costs of underground wiring and utility versus above ground? It is, it's hard to just say that there's a one for one or a ratio, a higher is the easiest and safest place to say. But it's significant and it's coming down constantly. So I don't want to put a different multiplier on there right now. It's true, but I mean compared to what it costs to replace it after a disaster. It's probably actually you're well ahead of the game. It's just the upfront cost that seems a little bit more. And so, and that's where I've tried on some of my shows to say we need to do a little bit more critical thinking and not just go the first thing in your sights is meet this goal, but forget that there's second, third, fourth order effects that could cost you a lot more if you don't take them into account first. So maybe you can make that 20% or 30% more investment up front and survive the next big disaster. It's definitely an investment to consider for the long term and an investment against really natural disasters. There's other problems that a lot of people just want to put them underground because it's visually not attractive. And I would agree. I mean, I like electrical engineering and power cables and all that, but I'd rather them be underground and maintaining. Some island nations keep them above ground so that they can put them back up really quickly. This is all different thinking that's happened over the last called even 80 years of how we go about creating distribution. We do have the ability to put our underground at a higher cost and still be at a high rate of reliability depending on how we build it. It's just people don't like the cost, but yeah, it is absolutely possible. And from my standpoint, I recommend it where we can as much as possible. I know that in Europe, they're doing a lot of power to gas and using the gas pipelines to move hydrogen and rich natural gas around the continent over there for transportation and for grid movement because they have a lot of curtailed power basically from the North Sea where they're producing a lot of electricity all the time and they can't use it all where they're at. So they're shipping it. But they're shipping it in hydrogen in a gas pipeline. What are your thoughts on that kind of concept? That's really neat. I'm not that familiar with what's happening there, but if you were to apply that concept here, there's a neat lesson to be learned that a transportable fuel is very vital for the stabilization of that to work out while we also look at transportable fuel to be more resilient. So transportable fuel seems to be the key takeaway in both of those talking points. So comparing batteries to hydrogen in a couple sentences or less, is that one of the big advantages of hydrogen over batteries is the transportability? Yeah, the big advantage will be the transportability and the flexibility with how it's created and then how it's used. A battery is very highly efficient, but it's very limited in its long-term capability. That's why when I look at these different technologies, I like to look at them from not just the power into power out, but a quick reaction, safety, raw materials to build, raw materials at end of life, recycling, hazmat, put in as many factors as you can and say, well, the fully burdened cost of this technology doesn't pencil out. It may look more efficient up front. But again, second, third order effects are looking at the fully burdened life cycle cost could drive a whole different decision for folks that are looking for a long-term solution. OK, well, we're coming up on a break here. We'll be back in 60 seconds with more with Ryan Wopens. Hi, I'm Pete McGinnis-Mark. And every Monday at 1 o'clock, I'm the host of Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart. And at that program, we bring to you a whole range of new scientific results from the university, ranging from everything from exploring the solar system to looking at the Earth from space, going underwater, talking about earthquakes and volcanoes, and other things which have a direct relevance, not only to Hawaii, but also to our economy. So please try and join me 1 o'clock on a Monday afternoon to Think Tech Hawaii's research in Monart. And see you then. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea comes on every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join us. I like to bring in guests that talk about all types of things that come across the sea to Hawaii, not just law, love, people, ideas, history. Please join us for Law Across the Sea. Aloha. I'm all about law across the sea. I'm about law, period. Thanks. Coming back to my lunch hour stand, Energyman here with Ryan Wubbins from Burns and McDonald, talking about the international aspects of energy and what different places they're doing to use my favorite source hydrogen to maybe meet some of their challenges. So we've talked about Japan, steam reforming, and doing a lot of hydrogen in their transportation. We've talked about Europe using curtailed power to make hydrogen to push it through their gas pipelines. We've talked about the survivability of underground utilities, including gas utilities, being superior when it comes to resiliency and recovering after disaster. So we're going to try and pull that all together and maybe explore what Hawaii has and how we can capitalize off of those pluses and see if we can make some of that happen here. So Ryan, we're talking about all these concepts and we're talking about the full life, life cycle costs of things. What are some of the things Hawaii needs to look at when we start to decide what we're going to do to make our grid really clean by 2045 and can we possibly put enough renewables here on Oahu, solar and wind, without paving over everything or putting windmills on everything to really generate the kind of base load power that HIKO needs to generate clean power for everybody. Sure, we can walk through this kind of step-by-step. So let's focus on Oahu as being a major consumer for the islands with a relatively small amount of land available, which would be required for both land-based solar and land-based wind. We can talk about water-based another time. There's not enough land here to just start throwing up a bunch of wind turbines and a bunch of solar on every square inch. Now it's still going to help. And it would be great if we could pull that off to the maximum extent possible. But let's keep in mind that that's not our only goal, is to just be 100% renewable because we can look at what happened in Puerto Rico and the Gulf Coast and say, well, what happens if we just get whacked with this giant storm? All of our wind and solar was all over the island and we just got nailed to the storm and it just ripped it all apart, which is very likely. We could try and protect it, but the cost would just be astronomical at this point to make a bulletproof solar or something like that. So there's not enough land to just make that happen. And even if there was, we wouldn't want to be doing that anyways. At least I don't think we would. Not before you keep our tourism market up. Exactly. So the fuel's got to come from somewhere else. Oahu needs to be importing its renewable fuel. That's a pretty easy logical step to take, would you agree? It's very much right there. If Hawaii wants to be independent, which would be a good goal to have as well, we need to look to the other islands to support each other. And that is to support each other by energy and economically. Trade between the islands would benefit from this. Would be producing our renewables on the other islands and then having a way, at that point, to transport between each other. We have briefed on this in some of our third Fridays before, which is hydrogen as a fuel medium can be transported in high densities. And maybe that's a way that we can be producing on the other islands small or big at this point. And having a bit of a market of energy and buying and selling and transporting hydrogen as a big source of energy. And so when we look at the quiver of renewable sources of power generation in Hawaii, we have wind. We have solar. Those are pretty much understood. We have ocean thermal, which is actually born in Hawaii with Dr. Kroc from the University of Hawaii and his engineers that have built them. My understanding of that technology is it has to be built at a large scale to get the economies of scale to make it worthwhile. And we're talking probably acres of floating platforms out on the water to really produce the kind of power that we need anchored off of the Waianae coast. So is it viable? Yeah. Is it probably better looking than a bunch of wind turbines all over the mountains? Yeah. But it's also going to be kind of expensive. Then we have geothermal. We have, other than burning waste or getting rid of waste and gas fires and taking that opportunity, using whatever methane we have that's produced locally in landfills and in wastewater treatment plants, and then producing from agricultural waste, maybe doing anaerobic digesters and making methane. And again, using that to make other fuels so that you're not releasing CO2 in the air with methane or methane in the air, which is even worse than CO2. So out of that quiver, and if you know of any more that you can think of, what are some of the things that you think would work best? I think you're going to reach in and grab a piece of every one of those. I think your list is pretty much got the gambit, or at least all the ones that are worth bringing up immediately. The trick is you don't really have one that's just going to hit the bulls eye and solve all your problems. Solar does a lot of that for the reason that the energy is coming external of the earth. We are harnessing this energy from somewhere else, and we're really only taking that energy from right below it. That energy was going before to the grass that was sitting underneath it, and now it's going into our panel. So we are taking it a little bit from somewhere else. But generally, that energy is coming external. When we reach into every other one of those pieces, whether it be geothermal, ocean thermal, even wind, we are taking energy from another system and making it our own. We've already started to experience, when we talk about the changing environment, of what happens when we start taking large amounts of energy from one and then converting it into our own use. That's somewhat it's getting us into the problem. With the fossil fuels and OK? Absolutely. What we can be really good at, though, is taking out a little bit of everything and still keeping everything within its stable environment. At least that's what I think. I don't have much of a proof of that other than Third Fridays on our show. So pulling out a little bit of everywhere would seem reasonable, or at least a lot more reasonable, than just taking as much as we can out of one piece and then hoping that we didn't mess up a system that's far too complex for us to understand immediately. So I would say you go after every bit of renewable that you can to try and have a minimal impact on the overall system. That's not the cheapest solution. It's definitely not the cheapest. It's more resilient in the sense that our resources are not tied to each other, but. How does that dovetail into the survivability mode of getting through a natural disaster? Are we looking at, and we also don't want to burden a community like Molokai, Molokai with a whole bunch of PB or wind that we don't want to hear in Oahu. Why are we telling them, hey, you guys do it, because we need the power and you guys have more space? I wouldn't particularly like somebody ramming that stuff down my throat. I absolutely wouldn't want to either. It is an agreement at that time, because that would make sense from a technical perspective, to just make that one big solar field, even transmission line it over our produce hydrogen. Who knows, there would be a lot of things we could do with that and just make them a power plant. But the islands are in this together. Even though the population resides mostly here, this is a group effort. There's even a lot to learn on Kauai's efforts and how they are getting to their goals at a very great pace. So it's an agreement. I don't have the one stop answer for that, other than we've got to all help each other out to make it happen. That doesn't mean we're going to pay that as a whole power plant, but it's all good. Well, let's go back to the transportability issue. I know that we've mentioned this before in an earlier show that when you first moved to Hawaii, you assumed that there was power coming from the other islands to Oahu. I did. Underwater cable or something. But obviously, that's not there. And there's a pretty significant cost to that. If you're going to move power, not using cables, from Big Island or Maui to Oahu, and look at batteries, look at hydrogen, look at whatever, what makes sense? So today, so we can do a theory on incrementalism, which is we can only advance a little bit at any time, which is, unfortunately, generally true. We're doing it with big oil rigs. That's how we're moving fuel between countries and into this island. We're definitely wanting to get away from that. Batteries, if you want to say, that's one step we could take. There is a giant barge, I think, running out in Europe that is fueled by batteries. Now, I think it's a little more of a sales stunt, because it's doing a short little stint, and it's got to stay docked for a crazy long time. That's because it doesn't make sense. Now, maybe it made sense for that little thing. You need a very energy-dense fuel to start to make sense, and changing from your oil-based shipping barge, I should say, tanker, excuse me, it's not crazy to think that would be a hydrogen fuel. It's simply exchanging one fuel to the next, one set of risks associated with that fuel for another set of risks, everything within the realm of engineering feasibility today. Absolutely. So we're getting close to the end of our time here. And a week ago, I proposed on a show that we look at making liquid hydrogen on the big island, not only to transport it to Oahu to supply base load for HIKO, but as you mentioned earlier, before we came on the air, maybe use our gas pipelines to move it around Oahu to the places we want to make generation happen, maybe some bit more inland than on the coastal sections where there's tsunami vulnerable. And then also, you'd have that hydrogen-available transportation sector, and it has the density to move on a barge or move on a purpose-built ship that regularly translated back and forth and moved it. Feasible? Yeah, it's well within the realm of possibility that envision your natural gas and your oil-based products today and how you use them today being hydrogen. That flip is technically possible. I'm not saying we're going to get there tomorrow, but that's how it can work. If you think you're going to do it with batteries alone, that discussion is really hard. Yeah. Well, sharpen your pencil, buddy, because I'm going to try and do the math on that one and see if we can make it work. But we've come to the end of our 30 minutes already, and I appreciate Ryan coming in as he does every third Friday and spend some time with us with his expertise. He's got a lot, a lot to share, and look to him for his expertise. Thanks for joining us on Snap to the Internet, and we'll see you next Friday, same time, noon time, my lunch hour.