 This is Stink Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. But I have good— Talk about provocation. Have we got provocation? We've got Toby Kimcage. He's the founder, CEO, president, and all-around guy at Solar Dine. Ah, welcome to the show, Toby. Jay, thank you, Aloha. And thank you so much for coming. Aloha. I knew we'd lower, man. Yeah. And I speak for everyone when I say thank you for all your years of advocacy. It's really a pleasure. You've got such a group of talent here. And you kind of bring them together like the conductor of a symphony, a little more viola, a little more trombone. Yeah. You're wonderful in bringing everyone together. Yeah. For everyone, I say thank you. Okay. You done? Yes. All right. The show's over. That's it. Toby, what about about Solar, Toby? Yes. We're talking about, you know, the new wave in Solar, okay? Yes. And we always like to start with top-down. So I asked you before the show, you know, what's news? Give me news. You know, and first you said, well, Solar has been constricting, I think, with the word you use. But now that something else happening is a sea change. We like sea changes. We want to know about them. Toby, what's the sea change in Solar? Economics. Before, everything was expensive, you know, and you buy something, they have a lot of money up front and everyone's, well, you know, and then there's permitting issues, regulatory affairs, makes it all difficult. So what's new is now we can package the technology and we can package the money. If you pack those two together, you have an underwriter come up with the money and if you just agree to use it at a certain rate, we can pay the underwriter, everyone gets paid and gets their money and this is a sea change because now the consumer doesn't have the burden of this huge economic weight of, oh, let's buy a Solar system. Okay. I like it. In fact, I've had similar ideas. But, you know, one thing is if you have an investor who invests money, he wants to return. Somebody has to pay him for the return and they have to return his capital. Isn't that going to be me? No. Well, it will be, but bit by bit, bite by bite. When you buy a new car, you don't walk in with a suitcase full of money. You pay $2.99 a month. So it's an underwriter that will come in and put that up front money on. We just need to know that you're going to use it. And if we have an idea of how often you use it, that cash flow will support this entire package without the burden being on you, the owner, you have to buy the car, the insurance, the gas, everything is on you. And now it's going to be on us. Us, the investors. Us, the investors, and in continuity and with the users themselves. So the investor is part of it, he has to come up with the cash, he or she. But to answer the real question, what's my rate of return? So it comes up to 50% of your money on top of the principal in five years. So it's a 10% levelized return. That's pretty good. It's not bad. It's good for the investor, but can I tolerate that as a consumer? Yes. I know you can because you already have a gas bill, for example, with your car. And if you look at how much money you spend per month, as I'm sure most Hawaiians pay quite a bit. So that's the money we're just going to redirect. So if we could charge your car with solar energy, we don't have a fuel cost. We can package the technology, makes it very easy. And on top of that, you as the consumer don't have to deal with regulatory affairs and the permitting and permissions. We're going to take care of all of that and drop these stations down. Are you starting to get it now? I mean, what he's talking about is a new model for investment in solar, solar being the operative word, where the consumer kind of gets a break. But so does the investor, so does everybody. And it bypasses regulatory slowdown, regulatory constraints, so to speak. And he's talking about, ooh, I didn't realize this at first. He's talking about transportation. That's what Toby is all about. He's about transportation. So how is this going to affect my life? I get up in the morning. OK, how does my life change? Well, on this island, you have, what, 900,000 cars? So I'm sure you're noticing with all the congestion in the highways and everywhere you go. I do notice that. Yes. And I thank the mayor every day. Well, one solution is we could support a ride share program. Now, just what you're doing with the bikey program that's available everywhere, we can actually put these stations where you actually go in all the parking lots. So you charge up in the morning from home, come out to wherever you're going, employment, or out to eat, or shopping, whatever it is, having a meal. And that's where you're going to plug in. So you charge where you park. And that makes it a really wonderful idea for people who own those businesses to say, hey, come over to our place and we'll charge you a car while you're having a meal. Wait a minute. I park. I park in various places. I park where I have to go, whatever I have to do. I park. Are you going to provide me a solar charging station? That's a lot of solar charging stations, Toby. Well, there's a lot of parking spots. OK. And that's the wonderful thing. They're all over the island. And we can, with this new technology, just drop them right into the space. We don't have to have a foundation. We don't have to penetrate or change. We don't change or bend a blade of grass. OK. And we drop them right into the space. As long as there's solar access, you're in business. OK. I feel like there's a slide coming on. Do you feel that? There's a few of them. There's a slide. Let's see. A slide would be helpful. That's not a solar station. Well, this is a quick little slide. I'll just go real quickly. OK. What's the problem? We live in a world of toxicity. Soil pollution, water pollution, air pollution, mercury pollution, all of this comes to the fuels that we burn. So in the bottom there, I thought, what's the challenge? If you put it in terms of light bulbs, every man, woman, and child in North America burns 250 light bulbs continuously. And when we add all this energy up, that's a big challenge. So we can go to the next slide. So to overcome that, we need some solutions. Now here is just a quick little calculation. We don't have to go full thing. But could you power Oahu with solar energy? So I did a calculation based on your resources and how much that you need, the 6,700 gigawatt hours. And at the end of the day, it comes out to about 8.8 square miles. That's about 1.5% of your land. Now let's derate that, double it, 3%. But my point is, do you have the land already used? Here? Parking lots right now. Here on Oahu, parking lots, space on military bases, even the roadways could be covered. Do you have the land? Talking about shade. Shade is a good thing. I don't need to burn my head all the time. Exactly. I have that problem, too. We have something in common. OK, so you've got to slide about how you do this with the shade and the solar. Right. And not chicken scratch. Now we're real slide. Maybe we'll jump to the pictures if you have it there in the studio. That's the last JPEGs. Well, we're going to go in through. This was very quickly kind of five different stations. One goes in the parking lot, one goes in your driveway, and then there's three solar hydrogen stations that are each 10 times larger. That's all you need to do is, as many of these distributed around the island is. Oh, it's beginning to emerge now. I see something. OK, you go to the next slide. There's a roof on it. OK, here we go. All right. Now, this is a complete power plant that we just literally assemble on a trailer, drive it to the spot, and on site we lower it down hydraulically. So it takes about 10 minutes to install this station. And now you can drive in, plug in, and we're going from photons to fast charge. You're putting the sunlight directly into your car. And the array is a four kilowatt array. That's about the size that you put on your house. And this is going to provide that change. That's a lot of power, then. That's a lot of power. So it's a level two charger that you're looking at now. And that is what's stipulated by the government they'd like to see. So what's wonderful about the station is we can put it down, we can take it up, we can move it, we can put it anywhere there's a flat surface. And that is the real economic sea change. OK, let me, the jury has some questions, Tobi. You bet. All right? That's Tobi Kinkade. I can ask him questions. He's quick. Absolutely. Let's go back to that. OK, so this is a solar panel roof. You can't tell whether it's transparent or what, but I guess it's going to give me shape. It's opaque, so it's going to give you shape. OK, and it'll prevent rain, for example. Absolutely. And it keeps your car from getting so hot. Have you ever walked into your car and you can't touch the steering wheel? Right, all the time. Now, this has a little tracker that gives us 25% more energy. It's just a small one-axis tracker, so it follows the sun. Right, like a sunroof. The roof moves, yeah. Exactly. So, OK, and it operates independently, so it's operating on the energy that it is creating out of the solar panels on the top. Absolutely, 100%. OK, and I guess the motor that moves it is over where it turns, where the shaft turns. That's exactly right, all on the tower there. OK, now the steel plate or plate, whatever it is the car is located on, that's part of this unit. That's right, and that's, we call it ballast mount. So we don't have to penetrate anything. We can just set it down. This is heavy. It's very heavy, and you can't push it over, you can't blow it over. It's a hurricane rate. Nobody's going to be able to take it away. No, you can't put it in your pocket. OK, I guess I could say that big thing in front of the car. Is that part of the unit? Yes, now that's the battery bank. And in the batteries, of course, that many batteries is large, and it's pretty much equal to what a car battery holds in the electric cars. And so, with the sun is not shining or it's late at night and you still want to charge your car, no problem. The battery's there 24-7, and you can charge directly. Now, imagine this in your driveway. You have a blackout. What are you going to do? Well, you could actually use your station to run your house for a short time. Depends on the load, but it's an industrial system and you could use it for an emergency. What was it, four megawatts? A four kilowatts, yeah, four kilowatts. OK, anyway, all right, so this is good. So there's another few pictures. I can have this in my house. Absolutely, we'd put it right in your driver. But I can't have it in every single parking spot and have it here and there, but not every parking spot. Not every single parking spot. But I did an aerial survey and you have lots of parking spots. You have hundreds of thousands of parking spots. Use drones for that? Well, I use actually Google Maps. OK. But with Google Maps, we can actually look down and count, I counted up all the spaces to find out how many were over 100 stalls. Crafty fellow. Well, you have a statue, 089, that says everything over 100 stalls has to happen. Oh, sure, we know about that. And the problem is how do you trench in these remote parking lots, how do you trench the power? That gets expensive. So this technology's perfect because you just drop it in place and save a lot of money that way. Oh, exactly. And investors love that the underwriters are now listening to that. Yeah, we don't like upfront costs. OK, right. So let's call this a charging station LLC, OK? Right. So I go down to the Department of Commerce and I form one. An LLC dedicated to one charging station, right? One. It's like the taxicabs in New York. Every taxicab is. Because they're medallion. One medallion and one corporation. Every corporation, one. And so it's one to one. Same thing here. Same here. Everyone will have its own bank account, in fact. So we can track what's coming in. We can put advertise. Electronically, I hope. Yes, absolutely. Imagine Hawaiian Air has all of that CO2 they pump out. They would love, I hope you're listening, they would love to sponsor this because they could have their name on it. And say, hey, for frequent flyers, how about frequent charging? Something like that. It could bring everyone together because we all want the same thing, clean, powerful. It's got the standard connector, right? What is that called? SJ67? What is it called? That's right. Well, it's a J1772. But the J1772 one, I bet. That's OK. But there's an SME. And the fix all the cars. Yes. That's right. So in the fast charge world, there's Chathamo for the Asian makes. And then there's CCS for the European makes. And then there's Tesla, which we can do with an adapter. So we can move into fast charge. These stations you've been looking at are kind of level two charging, which is kind of the middle range speed of charging. But we can get 16. That's a 220. That's right. And it takes how many hours to charge with average car? We can push in from the sun about 16 miles an hour of range. But each station will produce in one day 150 miles of clean transportation from a parking space. That's over 4,000 miles a month from a parking stall. Now that puts it in perspective. So you have these scattered all over the island. No one has range anxiety and charge chasers, a word I just learned, where people are looking for a place to check. The burden is on the driver to not only go with a clean electric, but then to try and find a place to charge. No, no, we want to put a whole fleet of these everywhere. Very easy. And then we can combine our revenues. And maybe for everyone who lives here, it's $2 an hour. And for everyone as a tourist, you have to pay market rate. OK, let's talk about that. I do want to get back to my LLC thing. Yes, yes. So $2 an hour. For example. And he has an account. Right. And does he have to put a credit card in? Or is it automated, Toby? It's automated. And we'll have a little sun card or sun club or driving on Sunshine Club. And the more you use it, the more maybe you'll get those frequent fire miles or you can shop at Lowe's or Home Depot and say, hey, charge. And we'll give you some discounts or have a meal with us. We know you're doing your best. Let's reward the EV driver instead of making it so hard to do the right thing. Yeah, this sounds good. Let's make it easy to do the right thing. Make it easy. And you can put it on gas stations. A gas station would take it. Absolutely. And these are sun stations. It's a natural fit. It's a perfect fit. So if you have a fossil car, then you can get fossil fuel if you want. But better yet, if you have an electric car, you can just pull up in the gas station. And OK, but how fast does it 220? What do you call it? Level 2 is about 16 miles per hour of pushing vehicle range into your batter. Is that fast enough if I'm stuck? Well, it's level 2. In fact, we can quickly have a little truck rescue, but you'll have so many charging stations available, you'll never get stuck. You can go 16 miles on the next one and so forth. Yeah, well, that's just per hour if you park there half a day for work or whatever. And we're thinking about level 3? Oh yeah, fast charge is what we really want. Yeah, yeah. Photons and fast charge. But this is a way to get into the market. That's right. This is what we have now. It's proven in the field. We know how to do it. We know how to work with it. And then in the future, we'll upgrade to the fast charge. Yeah, the future is what it's all about. And that's why we're going to take one minute break. And when we get back, we're going to talk about the future, Toby. Toby Kincaid, Solar Dine, right here on Think Tech. We'll be right back. Raising public awareness. I'm Kaui Lucas, host of Hawaii Is My Main Land, here on Think Tech Hawaii Fridays at 3 p.m. Boy in Standard Time. We explore environmental issues, political issues, keeping it local any way we can. Aloha. I am Dyson. What's happening, guys? We're back. I'm Jay Fidel. That's Toby Kincaid, Solar Dine. We're talking about a very creative guide, a very creative project. So let's bring out the picture of the red car. It's like the women in red, right? You bet. OK, the picture of the red car. Bang, watch. What is that? That is the future. In the future, we're going to combine, oops, women. That's another one. You must have a resident artist in Solar Dine. I'm afraid those are my scratches. But the next model, the next level, the real future, is the future of transportation where we combine the station and the car. And I monetize the car, which means you could rent this car for a low amount of money per hour or per minute. Now, we have a couple of companies in Portland that do this model with gasoline cars. And they're busy all the time. I see them in front, and then they're gone. Someone grabbed another one. They just take their smartphone, walk. Car share. Car share, yes. This is the infrastructure for Uber and Lyft. If you're listening, contact them. They've got to be going there. They've got to be your competitors, though, aren't they? Well, they can work with me or not. It's up to them. I recommend they work with me. Because we can move fast. And by combining these, you just walk up to your smartphone, go to the dash. There's a little optical reader. It gives you a little boop. The green light comes on. Can you do that one more time? Then you can walk into the car, and you're good to go. Drop the car off anywhere. Someone else will pick it up. It's actually just for what you need. It's all GPS, so everybody knows where it is at all points. This is the 21st century, Jay. We live in a world where I'm from the old days where we didn't have these things. We had abacuses. It's just been the transition to that. Abacuses, this is over. Well, this is certainly fast. OK, so this is the same kind of top down with the solar roof. And what we did is we braced it up. Yeah, this is a newer one. We've braced it up, and we've added an LED display. Now that requires permitting the display, because there's rules about it. What are you showing? You're showing instructions. Well, instructions are advertising. Ah, advertising. And see, you go and take your car, you look up, and you say, oh, hey, please come have a burger at whatever. So the idea of communication, transportation, and energy, all three separate things now combined into one integrated system. And that's how the economics are really going to go fast. Putting it together, then. Yes. It's what you showed in the first picture. But it's faster. It's maybe a fast charger at number three. Exactly. And you get a package deal. You get a bundle with a car and the charger. The whole thing. And that would be the future. And I'm sorry, car company dealerships, but what do we need you for? Why would you buy a new car when I can give you a Tesla or an i3 or anything you want, simply with your smartphone by the hour? And not very much money, either. We could do these for $20 an hour and do it by the minute. So it's only a few dimes. Well, in Hawaii, that might not be a problem. But if you have more distances on the mainland, that would be a problem. $20 an hour, one of the prettiest kinds of things. Well, it would be. But if you look at the costs of Uber drivers and Lyft drivers, because they pay everything. They pay for their car. They pay for depreciation. They pay for insurance. They pay for gas. They pay for cleaning. They pay for everything. You add that all up. This is less than that. So by providing the infrastructure for the drivers themselves, this would be the car of choice. Oh, talking about drivers. That's where I'm really at Lyft. That's really where I'm trying to go. Oh, boy. And so it's more than that. It's an integration. It's a bundle of the car, the solar, and the driver, too. Precisely. That's the future, Jay. And it's very easy for the driver. They get a brand new car. It's clean. It's nice. Remember, in an internal combustion engine, there's 2,000 moving parts. An electric car has 20. Well, let me do the math. They say that it takes $10,000 to maintain a car these days. Yes. A per annum. Yes. So if I spend, say, just say two hours a day. Just say that. And that's, let's say, the 300 days. So that's negative $7,000 per annum at $20 an hour. No, I did the math bet. $20 an hour. Say, two hours a day and say 300 days a year. What does that come to, quick? $1,800. All right. It's not that much. No, it's not. Maybe less than $20,000. Well, here's what we'll, yeah. The federal government says the cost for you to maintain a vehicle today is $0.20 a mile. That's the cost of your oil changes and your tires and all of that stuff. But an electric car, it's $0.02. So why throw the $0.20 or $0.18 away? Why do that? Why not just be able to access the car? And it's a whole new world. All of the problems, the oil change companies, sorry, got to go. The dealerships, sorry, got to go. The insurance companies that have people paid for their insurance? Insurance is included in your bundle, isn't it? You betcha. The whole thing. Probably get good rates on insurance that way. Absolutely. There's a group policy of that. They're kind of excited about it. I see three problems. Please. First problem is resistance, because people like their fossil cars. They really, really, really do. It goes back to Archie Andrews. They like their fossil cars. Yeah, we like cars. You got to get through that somehow. But that's another conversation some other time. Second problem is that you've got to pay to have the bundle. Somebody's got to pay. And that costs money. So you've got consumer resistance to pay that much money, the $20 an hour, whatever, comes out to be. I'm sure you can make it cheaper over time when you refine your systems. The third problem I see, we can address these all together, the third problem is raising the capital. And we were going to get back to that. Right, that's an important question. Charging station LLC idea. So let's talk about forgetting the resistance about fossil cars is another conversation. But let's talk about how you get people to buy into the notion that this is actually cheaper than owning a car. And with the bundle involved, it's more efficient than any other way to get around town. Well, let's take that. What does it cost to own a car? You have a car payment. You have an insurance payment. You have the repairs and the maintenance payments. You have gasoline payment. I just say to anyone who wants to use these cars, add that up. What are you paying now? Because if you go the miles using these cars, it will be less. It will be. So I don't have to convince anyone their own pocketbook. And as far as the point you made about, we love our muscle cars. We love cars. Absolutely, have you driven an electric car lately? They're gorgeous. They have instant torque. They can put anyone to shame. These are not small, little pedal cars. These are monster cars. Clarification cars. They are fun. If you want to accelerate, there's more torque at 0 RPM. You'll never get a better combustion. But you know, one thing we haven't talked about is an expense you haven't identified yet. And that's the cost of the space. Ah, that's a quick question. I go on that, say, the garage, the gas station. Garage, boy, that's out of there. That goes way back. If you go to the gas station, you say, I want to put this here. And he says, hey, that's a lot of square footage. Well, yeah. He doesn't have much room. I'm going to charge you red for that. Well, that's fine because the gas station, you're making a good point, is a kind of a small thing. But the parking lots are wide open. And I've been studying your parking lots. It's what I do. And what I see is you have enormous amounts of land, square miles of parking lots. And this providing shade that we can drop it in, where the idea is to make it convenient, make it easy for people. And they'll love it because they have no upfront cost. We're going to get the underwriter to pay that. We just need to know how many people will use it. And then we'll aggregate that to pay the underwriter. The underwriter's happy because they have a reliable piece of equipment that has value. It's collateralizing the note. So not only are we going to pay them and promise to pay them, but they own titles in my hardware until I pay them off. And I get it back. You come to the gas station, man, and say, look, I need, I don't know, what's the footprint of this? Well, there's not much in a gas station. He might not like it or she might not like that. But the parking lot owner would, because you hit the key point, cut them in, give them a piece. You give them a piece of the action. Yes. Give them a piece of the action. You're not going to want to pay them. Give them a percentage of the action. So you'll give them an accounting, so to speak, of how much you earn on this machine. Exactly. And you'll get a check or electronic payment every month, whatever it is. That's right. Of course, of course. But that's the key is you've got to cut everyone in. And if it's the law that says you have to have a charging station, let's buy it for them, give it to them, and give them a little piece. Then they might even promote, hey, at our steakhouse, you could come and charge. Sure, it could be any parking lot, too. Absolutely. And there are many. And maybe that satisfies that statute you mentioned with the required number of parking stalls. The white state law, what are you doing? Yes. Exactly. So he's motivated, because a lot of people actually haven't complied with that law. The low-hanging fruit was taken, and now the people that are out of compliance have just are facing a huge cost. And so that's a trench and all in and all the grids, just hundreds of thousands of dollars. How about zero cost? And you get a check. You get a piece. That's pretty good. So on that level. And furthermore, I'd like to say that if the gas station guy doesn't want to do it, that's fine. You go down the block, because there's always somebody who's going to want to do it. Some people do like to make money. And those parking lot owners are particularly interested, because it's just the most valuable real estate in the city. I tell you, it's the most undervalued asset in America. There are parking lots. And in fact, one third or 40% of Houston in the city limits is all dedicated to parking and cars. Well, it used to be. Yeah, now it's going down. Now it's going wet. Now they're just, yeah, well, that's a good point. But shouldn't that even inspire us more not to keep putting carbon into the atmosphere? It's going to express. And it's going to express violently. And we don't want that. Yeah, by the way, just a footnote point is you could put an air, a tire filler air device in this machine and just run it out of that big pod. So if it's tires are low, we can do that by himself real quick. Really? No, no, absolutely. That's the idea is to keep that. We're adding little USB ports. You can charge your wheelchair, your phone. If you have a disaster, if your grid goes down for whatever reason, how are people going to communicate? You need these power supplies distributed everywhere. Yeah. So there's a nice example. Oh, you might even say if the utility wanted it back, if they wanted to wire it, you could even sell some of the power back to them. Absolutely. There's a big advantage, in fact, in working with HECO with any utility so that when they need energy, we can. Yeah, just got to wire it up. That's all. That's it? We only have a minute left. I'm sorry about this. But I wanted to ask you about the LLC. And we talked offline back when I got the idea that this was not cheap. If I wanted to go down and buy one of these things, it would cost me $40,000 plus. And if I had to do that, then I certainly want to arrange an investment vehicle of some kind, hence the LLC. So if you do that, and if we, me and my friends, put in the money in the LLC, we don't really have to get PUC approval. All we just buy LLC interests in sufficient amounts to acquire this piece of equipment, one LLC, one piece of equipment, and off we go. And so are you going to create a kind of investment machine, a vehicle? I shouldn't use the word vehicle in this context, but a vehicle so that me and my friends can buy in and then get a return. And can you tell me that I'll make, you know, what, 10% a year on that? Yes, because those are all set in the contract. So the rate of return is a particular payment that gets applied. And it turns out that 50% on top of the principal over five years amortizes out to a 10% internal return, rate of return for the capital. So you get, and plus you have title to the capital to collateralizing it until you're paid. So it's a five year note. And then once we pay that down, we've eliminated the burden to someone having to buy these stations. We just want to know that you'll use it occasionally. And my share of that would be a proportionate part of the $40,000, whatever it is. Whatever the amount is, and we'll include a contract for five years. Since it's a limited partnership or a corporation, I don't really have any personal exposure beyond what my share of the acquisition cost is. Exactly, exactly. All she was. And at the end of the day, we can even transfer the title to that LLC if we had a large purchase agreement or a sale of the equipment to the, and of course, it has to be a maintenance agreement too. That has to be included. And you would maintain it for the LLC. You betcha. Very interesting. Where's my checkbook? Can you bring my, never mind. Thank you, Toby. It's been wonderful to talk to you. You are so energetic, and I do need to know the name of your vitamin pill. Thank you very much. Aloha, Toby Kincaid.