 Welcome to stand the energy man here on Think Tech Hawaii, Stan Osserman, coming to actually live and direct from Kailua, Hawaii, not Indianapolis, Indiana, but Kailua, Hawaii. And the picture behind me is actually from the northeast coast of the big island, Hamakua, in what we, I guess, affectionately called Pauelo Malka, beautiful flowers, those are ginger flowers that grow wild in the forest of Hawaii. So all you folks that love hiking and nature, come visit Hawaii and come and do some touring over here. You'll really love it. Anyway, today's show is a unique three part, we're in part two of a three part show that was started when I participated as a, as a viewer on a webinar by Sustainable Energy Hawaii, a group that's trying to generate awareness in Hawaii and how Hawaii could become sustainable in much the way that it was 500 years or so ago, where we had about the same population, but we didn't have to import our food and everything else from the rest of the world. And it's not that we don't want to bring in cool stuff like computers and cell phones, but we should be able to sustain our energy much better with all the technology that we've developed in the last few years. And so they've done a great, a great webinar about two weeks ago, Saturday, and they have another one coming up on the 19th of this month and we'll be flashing their website up on the screen there. So you can, you can look on their website and start to pull down how to, how to get involved in the webinar on the 19th, which will focus on geothermal energy here in Hawaii. So there's their website there. So last week we, we showed two parts of the video that they, they ran on a Saturday, which was called New Energy 101 or Modern Energy 101. And it talked about, start off with a really neat quote from Albert Einstein that said, everything is energy and energy is everything. And that's kind of the, the viewpoint that I look at the world from and, and have probably for the last 10 years, because it's become apparent to me that, you know, even as a human being, if you don't have food, you don't have energy. And if you look at the human body, it's all run on electric pulses. Even though we don't think of it that way, all your nerves are electric pulses. All your thinking is electric pulses. It's all energy and life itself is energy. Plants are energy. A rock sitting on top of a hill that could fall down and crush your house is energy. Everything is energy like Einstein said. And you know, when we talk about controlling energy and harnessing energy, we're talking about the ability to do work. So 500 years ago, the biggest thing for making energy was making fire, usually burning wood. And so that allowed us to do a little extra work, but originally it was human power, animal power, or maybe a little bit of heat power from things like a volcano or from wood that you burn. But we can't afford to be burning trees now with the population that we have or we run out of trees. And that's how we get rid of carbon dioxide right now, is that the trees take CO2 out of the air and turn it into oxygen and sequester the carbon. So we have to look at getting our work done in clean ways with clean energy. And for the last 100 years or so, we've been using oil and fossil fuels. And that hasn't worked out real well. So sustainable energy and a bunch of us are looking at how do we get back to a sustainable environment without burning trees, burning fossil fuels, burning natural gas, things like that to create heat, to create electricity, to cook with and heat our homes and things. So but we have to be careful, we have to do it right. We can't be rushing to a decarbonized solution at the expense of making the transition in an affordable and reasonable way. Literally, if you got rid of carbon-based fuels right now like oil and gas, you wouldn't be able to make solar panels. You wouldn't be able to make wind turbines. You wouldn't be able to move things between cities. You wouldn't be able to move the raw materials you need. You wouldn't be able to get the raw materials because all the mining equipment runs on diesel. So you can't just go, okay, we're done with diesel. We're done with oil. We're done and expect to get to that renewable state or that clean energy state. It would actually end up driving the price of fossil fuels and transportation and things so high that we could never get to that end state of clean energy because we cut our throats by stopping oil right away. The idea is to transition. We've done a poor job of it the last 20 or so years. We need to do a better job and we need to set the example here in Hawaii. I think Hawaii is the perfect laboratory, if you will, to show the world how we can get to a sustainable future. And that's why we made this week's show part two of a three-part series that talks about how Hawaii potentially can do a great sustainable energy solution to show the world. So I guess today, again, are Richard Ha and Peter Sternlich from Sustainable Energy Hawaii. And I'd like to bring in Peter. I kind of opened there with some comments. What are some of the things you could add to what I tried to pull in from last week's show? I think you hit the salient points, which is that really simply put right now, renewable energy cannot happen without fossil fuels. And we're really focused on electricity. And transportation is such an enormous part of the global economy and how we manufacture things and how we get things from one place to another that focusing on solar panels and windmills are good for things that don't move. But for transportation, the infrastructure, the scale of it is enormous. And the amount of time that we have before we start really feeling the contraction and the availability of petroleum, fossil fuels, and also the minerals and metals that are necessary to make the renewable systems is something that we really need to expedite. We don't have a lot of time. We don't have 50 years to do this. Climate One won't allow it. And the economics and just the supply and demand of what's needed for the population that we have on this planet isn't going to allow it either. I think one of the statistics that you put out in your video that we showed last week was that 96% of the transportation sector is still oil and fossil fuel base, whether it's diesel, whether it's jet fuel, whether it's a bunker oil for ships or gasoline for cars. And then I would propose that even in that 96% of the 4% that are electric now, probably a bunch of electricity going into those vehicles is still made with fossil fuel. So in reality, we're probably still close to 100% fossil fuel base even in transportation, which I think is sad. I worked for the state in a program called the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. And that program has been in existence for probably about 22 years. And even in the whole time I was working in it, we were just barely scratching into EVs. I mean, HCAT basically set up the first plug-in charging stations with Hawaiian Electric and did a lot of electric vehicles. Then we moved into hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. And Hawaii has quite a few electric vehicles. And they fit because of our range of driving and things like that or even a little bit better than most mainland perspectives. But still, we're dismal in the number of electric vehicles we have on the road. And we're oblivious to the fact that if we want to have charging stations all over the island, you're going to have to put in almost double the electric infrastructure that you've got. So that's a conundrum as well. And there's other solutions. So I've worked a lot with Richard in talking about hydrogen and maybe how you could make green hydrogen using things like hydroelectric. Because Richard showed us a hydroelectric plant he has on his farm that produces enough power for him to run up his equipment. And he can sell his extra power to the electric company if he wants. So Richard, can you comment a little bit on how you see Hawaii capitalizing off of things like hydroelectric and maybe geothermal and ocean thermal to get us to that renewable, even in transportation? You know, a simple way to look at it is we can try to duplicate lightning. So with lightning, a portion of it is electricity, but a large portion of it is heat. And the result of hydrogen is oxygen, hydrogen, and ammonia. And what is interesting about that is in order to get to ammonia, you've got to have the heat. Electricity will get you there economically. And so the way you can do it is use geothermal, run the electricity through water. Hydrogen comes up, you take the hydrogen, and from there, you've got the heat and you can get to ammonia. If you get to ammonia, you can get to hydrogen fertilizer. Ammonia is a good carrier of hydrogen, and it can be used as fuel. So, you know, and I'm only talking as a banana farmer. I don't know what I'm talking about, but it just makes common sense to me that we should be looking into this because if we can combine the three things, we can start to do a skill that because a skill that you need for Haverbush is not even possible here. If the cotton fertilizer is so incredible now, and I've gone through that before 2007, you know, so anyway, I just wanted to point that out, you know, it's not a difficult concept, but we've got to get everybody on board from the university, everybody to start to look into this. I agree. And let's connect some of the dots with the fertilizer piece. Right now, fertilizer is expensive, not just because it's expensive to ship because the price of gas and oil are going up, but because a lot of the fertilizer made in large quantities is made from natural gas. And the price of natural gas has gone up dramatically. I think here in the U.S., it's still less than $5 per million BTUs, but if you go to Europe, it's in the $20 to $30 per million BTUs. And so all those companies that were making fertilizer before their prices are going up to manufacturer fertilizer, on top of that, you have a bunch of people hoarding it because they want to get it before the price goes up even more. So there's a shortage and that creates a supply and demand thing. And on top of that, you say, well, okay, you can use it in transportation, but most people don't realize that we can even run jet engines and things like that off of ammonia. So on top of being fertilizer, it can also be used in engines to burn for traditional internal combustion engines and turbines like jet engines. And that we need in Hawaii because airplanes don't come to Hawaii with all the fuel to get them back to the mainland or back to Japan. They come and buy that fuel here. So Hawaii has to have a way to make the kind of fuel that we're going to see in transportation in the future. And that fuel can be made, like you say, from geothermal with hydrogen and converted into ammonia, which is NH3. It's one nitrogen atom, which is nitrogen comes from the air that we breathe, which is 75% nitrogen, and hydrogen, two hydrogen atoms or three hydrogen atoms and one nitrogen atom. So like you say, we can actually control the process to make liquid fuels and gaseous fuels and fuel cell, hydrogen for fuel cell, which is even more efficient than burning it in our transportation sector. And if we could get Hawaii online with hydrogen, we would be up and running. So what I'd like to do now, though, is let's run the video that's kind of the middle piece of the video that we learned from in your first webinar. And then we'll talk a little bit more about the issues covered in that segment of the video next. Modern Energy 101. The existential crisis that is climate change demands we rapidly replace our fossil fuel energy consumption with low carbon or no carbon alternatives. To be successful while being economically viable, our energy solutions must support the ability to move goods and people from place to place on an industrial scale. Currently, that ability is limited to liquid fossil fuels. It's the lifeblood of the global economy. One of the biggest hurdles in meeting our climate mitigation goals is that liquid fuels contain more concentrated power than solar, wind, biofuels, or any electric alternative for that matter. Liquid fuels are readily portable, meaning that they can be conveniently used to power mobile equipment of any size or weight. Refueling this equipment is rapid and is standardized around the world. By comparison, the electric power systems used for transportation today require longer refueling times than their liquid counterparts, and the physical weight of the battery systems limit the size of the vehicles and equipment they can effectively power. While we expect this situation to improve, these are the conditions we face right now. Still, effectively scaling a new system to this degree will likely be the biggest turtle of all. Today's battery systems are also dependent on many rare earth minerals, which have a known limitation to their availability. Geopolitically, these critical raw materials will increasingly play a strategic security role in the politics between nations. As we decarbonize, it's also critical that we find an affordable alternative to producing high temperature heat, something that's essential to many of the industrial processes needed to manufacture these renewable systems themselves. So from the mining of minerals to the transporting of large renewable energy systems to delivering the thousands of EVs we're counting on to reduce our carbon footprint, none of that occurs today without fossil fuels playing a prominent role all along the supply chain. All this points to a reality that is a set of very sharp double-edged swords, climate mitigation on the one hand and the global economy on the other, and crucial renewable energy in the middle. Simply put, today's biophysical reality, where there really is a limit to growth, seems to be banking on the continued availability of affordable, non-renewable resources. So what do we do? Who's going to pay for all the changes we need? How much time do we have before we reach the tipping point separating success and failure? These are questions that do not have simple answers. Just looking at the time factor, it seems the unspoken conventional wisdom surrounding the world's renewable energy transition is this. If we fall behind the schedule we've set for ourselves, we can just keep doing what we've always done, continue using fossil fuels a little bit longer. There's a big catch to this though. Fossil fuel supplies are finite too. At this point in history, we're seeing the practical limit to how much can be supplied on a daily basis. At SEH, the energy resource data we've studied, credibly indicates the tight supplies we're experiencing today is more than a short-term issue, but one that will continue well into the future. Each day there's news about energy shortages around the world. We see it impacting Europe, Asia, and the United States too. Global energy demand is increasing to historic highs with no let up in sight. As fossil fuel demand surpasses available supplies, logically it will become more expensive, driving up the price of everything else along with it. Everything. We've all seen what's happened to gas prices over the last year. We know what's happened to the price of other goods too. It's common sense that with the interdependence between fossil fuels and the production of renewable energy systems, the cost of those systems will rise too. We also know the infrastructure the world is counting on to provide the added power to fuel our growing EV demand is in desperate need of update, upgrade, and expansion. For example, we know the lifespan of today's solar wind and battery systems range from 15 to 30 years. As I mentioned earlier, each of these is built using rare earth metals, many of which may not remain available at the scale or price needed to continuously retool the entire planet's energy systems into the second half of the 21st century. During that video, in that last slide there, I'm sure people couldn't really see the data, the number of points on the bottom, but two of the commodities that were there were lithium and cobalt, which by the way happened to be the key components of lithium ion batteries that we use in everything today, cell phones and all this, and they were the two minuscule little bumps on that graph at the bottom. So I've always said that if we plan on having EVs for everything, electric vehicles that run off batteries for everything, we're going to have a point in the not too distant future where economy of scale, meaning we can make them really cheaply, runs into supply and demand where the supply gets shorter and shorter in a hurry and suddenly the cost of the materials gets so high that the price of the batteries goes through the roof. Can you kind of comment on that? You did that graph and I think it was pretty accurate. Last I checked, we only had about 13 years of cobalt from the US Geological Survey World Reserves of Cobalt. There's only about 13 years at our current use rate and now we're talking about replacing that 97% of the transportation fuel with battery power. So can you comment a little bit on that? Yeah, it's a little bit daunting because that graph actually came from a report done by a friend of mine who is a research scientist for the Geological Survey of Finland, a guy named Simon Michaud and this is from a report that he did that analyzes what it would require to replace fossil fuels entirely and that graph, there were two charts there. One shows essentially the life cycle analysis of converting light duty vehicles to electric power, battery electric power and what it shows is that the known recoverable resources to make the batteries would allow for that to happen for light duty vehicles one time and with a lifespan of being 15 if you're lucky maybe 20 years, the idea that we're pinning that type of the ability to continue light duty transportation for longer than that makes me a little nervous. The other chart showed the ability because we're talking about doing battery backup for solar and wind and when you start to include grid scale battery backup you can't achieve that even one time on a global scale. So we're looking at an ambition that has focused on wind and solar as renewable energy using the word all we need to do is just do this and we can continue on the way we have been. I don't see that being a realistic forecast. Peter thank you so much for putting that so well and concise I mean I've been trying to communicate that to an awful lot of people they have no idea of the magnitude of the challenge we have decarbonizing our energy systems and like you say if we can barely do the light duty vehicles with the existing cobalt and lithium resources we have and the grid is planning on also putting gigawatts hours of energy storage in batteries all over the world I have no idea how we can conceive of getting to that end state and that's one of the reasons why I push hydrogen so much because number one you only talk about light duty vehicles where we really need to start taking advantage is in heavy duty vehicles for transportation including ships and airplanes but mostly trucks and trains and that's where hydrogen comes in because hydrogen can be made sustainably hydrogen is the most common element in the universe and when we use it it turns back into water so we can use hydrogen so we don't need as many batteries and we can make the battery resources we have go farther until we get a better technology whether it's some kind of digital batteries or some other kind of new hasn't has yet to be invented yet batteries so Richard besides the the farming and the agriculture piece of hydrogen you know can you see how this other transportation and grid piece of energy storage fits in for a way yeah I do you take to your thermo Don Thomas in its presentation said that we're going to be over the hot spot for one to two million years kind of sustainable yeah one to two million years and and not only that the heat and the steam that comes out of the ground is free it just rises all you gotta do is put a pipe in there appropriate kind of pipe with right metal lurchy and stuff like that and you've got stable price for a long long time and and and so that's the basis of it because it's completely removed from our fossil fuel and so not where we're going to be immune from the ups and downs and the volatility of fossil fuel prices and that's going to protect our small businesses and everybody lives here so as far as timing goes you know we've been talking to folks from the University of Hawaii about geothermal we happen to have the basically the grandfather of ocean thermal at the University of Hawaii as well and these are both proven technologies but they really come into their own at scale and one of the things that peter mentioned in his in the last segment not the one we showed today but last week was the one restriction Hawaii has is we were kind of as well as a population pretty small we're like a fraction of the size of Los Angeles city in terms of population so we we can't afford to scale up really big to make our electricity on each island but if we could make the electricity on the big on there or a majority of it and then put it into a sustainable shipping form like ammonia or liquid hydrogen or even gaseous hydrogen and share that with the other islands we could work at a scale with geothermal to do exportable energy as well as liquid fuels for aircraft and ships and things that we could be selling and producing with our own resources in other words Hawaii's economy could convert from the energy purchasing energy importing economy to an energy selling and energy exporting society so could you just close us with some comments on that from you know what what it could do for Hawaii not just for our environment not just for our own taking care of ourselves in an emergency long term but what it means for our economy you know what what is the biggest thing that a sustainable energy Hawaii looks at is how do we keep our youngsters from leaving Hawaii and and and if we can do this and we can export the energy that we're talking about with geothermal now all of a sudden we'll we'll give the youngsters options so and that that is really what we're trying to because there are more Hawaiians that live on the mainland they live here something from that picture yeah it's sad that we call Las Vegas the 9th island because we have I mean my sister and her niece and my niece and nephew live there my parents live there I mean a lot of people leave Hawaii just because of the affordability and stuff and a lot of our kids go to college and don't come back to Hawaii because they can't get jobs and what they went to school in so Peter can you wrap it up for us in our last minute or so and talk about that that career opportunity piece and also the grid piece and the transportation piece and how what you folks envision can help us in the future what from from the stand I mean I live here so I look at it from the standpoint of my life my children's life my grandchildren's lives and with what I see coming in terms of the change in transportation especially about being able to get everything that we need to live here it seems critical to me that if everything is energy and energy is everything we need to have a source of energy here geothermal makes sense to me generating electricity and liquid fuels and transportation fuels from that geothermal energy makes sense to me because it's an indigenous source of energy we don't need to import from there we can grow our own food that doesn't have to be imported it I it's it's difficult to to really picture the entire planet making this transition in an elegant manner and so what I think about is I kind of put it the way you know the the flight attendant puts it when you start to get on an airplane and they say if there's an emergency and you have a baby in your lab you put your mask on first then you take care of the baby and so we need to take care of ourselves and that needs to be a focus I hope that makes sense but things are things are already getting very very expensive we're looking at gasoline that is over five dollars a gallon in certain places that's that realistically is something that is is not going to come down all that much in the near future so I agree with you Peter it's a much longer conversation we have time I agree with you and and I won't get into it now but because of my aviation background I can tell you why putting your mask on first is more important in nauseating detail because it is life threatening at high altitude if you take a full breath of air at 35 000 feet your time of use of useful consciousness is five seconds after that you're wiped out you're unconscious after that you die that's why the flight attendant tells you put on your mask first before you try and help somebody else and most people that goes right past them they don't know why that's being said but they don't realize that when you're at altitude high altitude like six miles above the earth there's not much air in that I mean not much oxygen in that air that you're breathing and it can literally take your life in a matter of minutes and it'll make you unconscious in a matter of a matter of seconds so you're right we we are at that point in the world and it may even be too late like you say Peter for the rest of the world but for Hawaii it's not too late we can be there but we need to start acting now we need to start doing what's right now what's po note now what's required now and I think we need to get some folks uh a little bit of a bee in their bonnet in the legislature to start picking up the pace and getting us where we need to be and I'd like to thank both Richard and Peter for being on the show today and they're going to be back again next week and we're going to wrap up this series on sustainable energy Hawaii so don't forget to look on their website and and uh check out the webinar that's going to happen this Saturday and uh we'll be ready for another another visit with them next week so until next week Tuesday this is uh Stan Energyman Peter and Richard Ha from the Big Island signing off la la