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[Music] [Applause] [Music] aloha y'all that's my texas coming out of me it's wednesday afternoon and time for hawaii the state of clean energy and i'm your host mitch hewin our sponsor is the hawaii energy policy forum that's a program the university of hawaii's college of social sciences with financial support from the hawaii natural energy institute i'm really pleased to welcome again my guest and good friend toby kinkade toby is an inventor author and now publisher of the green of green hydrogen today toby welcome to our show thank you so much aloha commander good to be with you so the name of the episode today is green hydrogen takes hold clean energy independence for all so toby let's talk about green hydrogen for all well the world is in crisis and in a crisis there's a great opportunity and we're really at the threshold of an industrial revolution in the 21st century now in a fossil fuel world we have lots of problems and essentially it's because it's a toxic fuel and when we dig for it and scrape for it and do all of the things that we need to do to bring up this hydrogen that's stuck to a carbon as soon as we refine it and then burn it we're releasing all of this carbon that nature had sequestered for millions and millions of years well so let's pull up the first uh the next slide okay so yeah here's kind of a sketch of just to kind of give a general ideas that you know for 300 years we've been burning carbon and it was convenient to burn it because if you could control the holes in the ground and uh and have a military to make sure that you control those holes in the ground then you can control the energy and so when we look at the top of this sketch you know on the left uh side you could see just a a a general representation of wells and refineries and super tankers and pipelines and railroads all of this infrastructure uh that takes six trillion dollars out of the world economy and that's going to a very few people companies actually compared to how many people are paying into that and so what the big problem here is toxicity not only the fact that some people have it and most people don't that's already a lot of conflict and so we've seen for 300 years this uh mad rush to dig up every bit of carbon we can and sell it to somebody and let them burn it the great thing about selling carbon fuels is of course when you burn it and use it guess what you gotta buy it again so we've been running under this commodity basis for for quite a while and now uh it's time to pay the piper and the the we cannot overload our environment you know when we look at the earth if you shrunk the earth down to a basketball the film on the basketball less than the thickness of a saran wrap is where we live so it's a very fragile situation now if you ask the u.s geological survey they'll tell you that well in the world there's about 1500 volcanoes about 50 are active at any one time in any one year well i looked it up tried to get an idea of how much pollution these volcanoes put out and they estimated around 400 million tons quite a bit well then we look up what is man-made carbon fuels what are we doing in loading the atmosphere we're putting out 37 billion tons so that's something about 90 times uh you know the amount of the natural world so the the idea that we're not influencing our world is nonsense of course we are we always have uh plato used to write poems of lament when he saw his dear attica deforested you know 2 300 years ago so whenever you get a group of humans together we tend to eat up everything around us now it was wood you know they burned everything they could and in the greek islands you didn't have very much wood anyway so of course they had to go out and through their colonies have a great import business we've talked about that of well the ancient romans had huge fleets of ships that went out to grab wood and bring it back in because that's actually fascinating really when you think about it they had to go out and keep conquering people just to get their wood absolutely and every other resource they could come up with but it was the fuel you know when you're smelting metals in the bronze age that devoured a lot of wood then when you get to the iron age in the roman times now we're talking about you know most of italy was denuded of trees by the second century bc you know we look now and we see forest because it takes a century and they grow back if you didn't chop them all out and which was often done to clear land but they had a huge energy crisis in fact every civilization meets an energy crisis and so for the last 300 years we've run this modern wonderful world with all of our innovations that by the way anybody from history would never believe our world you know you can fly through the air in tubes what are you talking about you can talk into little boxes in real time with another continent you know you get burned at the stake for that kind of talk so now here we are in the 21st century and we have to face the music that if you want to base the world on 300 years ago the same kind of thinking well that's not going to work in the 21st century because we have 7 billion plus people and they all want to live like we do in north america well we use 250 kilowatt hours per day per man woman and child and if you do the math it's so large that these numbers became they become almost meaningless they're just huge so if we're actually going to talk about converting our industrial need to a sustainable uh model then we have to get serious and we have to realize we're talking about mount everest you know and here we are 10 years later still sewing costumes in the valley saying you know we're gonna have a great party you know when we finally get up to that top there well in it it's it's a serious moment and you know here on the west coast in oregon uh washington and california we had the wildfires last summer our climate has changed june used to be very wet when i was a kid now i live in oregon and june is a drought and so it super dries july and august and then we get the east winds and you have a blowtorch so we lost 1500 square miles incinerated many towns faster than you can run so anyone on the west coast after breathing that air for 10 days will tell you we've got a problem and now in speaking of texas earlier you know they're in real trouble right now because well they for a lot of reasons they didn't invest in winterizing their equipment but even the fossil fuel and nuclear world is not a panacea of making sure everyone is energy rich in fact the reality is you're extremely vulnerable if you're based on fossil fuels and so i know that we mentioned the theme here is green hydrogen is taking hold and it really is taking hold it was a wish of ours for years to try and get the institutions and the players the stakeholders in the energy world to take this uh seriously right but but and now finally we are like we talked about in earlier shows 2020 was a sea change the world is different now and what we're realizing is if you have the right equipment it changes everything you know for 300 years energy is a commodity meaning if you need it you buy it need it again hey buy it again great business model if you're selling this kind of material but now in the 21st century if you have the right equipment the right kit the right gear then you can have a renewable green hydrogen system on all levels and and we're seeing that now as the world takes hold we're seeing basically six sectors that are going to be revolutionized the residential sector commercial industrial transportation stationary power and feedstock now all of these levels whether you're in aviation or whether you're just going to heat your home green hydrogen is an actual solution because it does the one thing that clean energy has actually not had and that is a battery so hydrogen becomes as you've advocated is the battery it's nature's battery and it's the most uh has more specific energy density than than anything else so it's certainly potent now because it's lighter than air at least this was just another sketch again kind of trying to show that you know we lop off tops of mountains in west virginia we throw all the tailings into the streams then you pack it on a train and you take it all the way down to uh to jacksonville florida where they have their big coal power plants right on the ocean so they can use the water to cool the plant which is not good for the ocean by the way and also all of that smoke goes off i almost said off island it's going offshore now anytime you put a big polluting power plant or refinery you tend to put it where people are not going to be too bothered unless they come right up up on it so they usually the idea is you put your utility as far away as possible so it's dirty and no one will complain out of sight out of mind and bring all that energy back and sell it to it to a locked-in market in your own distribution system right well all of this is going to change and it's going to change rapidly in the next few years because it has finally taken hold and everyone understands it has a name green hydrogen right so a lot a lot less talking and more doing right that's right that's right and if we don't and this is what's interesting in studying what's going on around the world is i'm acutely aware now of the language used in the european union the language used here in america and the language used in the asia pacific players they have identified green hydrogen and maybe i'll just say just very briefly you know there's three colors of hydrogen essentially there are others if you want to fine tune it but three we have to worry about gray blue and green now the world today is gray hydrogen this is from methane from from a fossil fuel so you're going to produce 10 times more pollution more co2 than the amount of hydrogen you can extract so one ton of hydrogen is 10 tons of co2 well that's not very good so that's gray now to go to blue they said okay we're still going to do that but uh hey we're going to sequester that co2 we're going to stick it somewhere maybe we could put it in cement or or dissolve it in the ground or you know no one has a real answer that's ubiquitous that's that's going to work for the industry and it's very expensive and the the big push to do the blue hydrogen is to so-called not strand assets and to keep our business so that's basically the blue now green hydrogen is special because there's no carbon involved and if there's no carbon involved there's no pollution when you burn carbon in a piston engine you know folks we've been using pistons actually for 300 years too first in external combustion engines and then in internal combustion engines but you know uh uh carl benz in 1872 you know uh patented as motovagen which is basically a modern car we're a little better at it but it had everything there an internal combustion engine rack and pinion steering brakes the windshield everything it's a car the carburetor everything so what we have now is in the 21st century is we really need to move beyond pistons so it's basically if someone went to sell you a smartphone and you said okay i'll take the smartphone they go oh no what we've got here is a is a telegraph on a plank of wood with two wires hey why don't you take buy that instead it worked for them in 1850 i mean if it worked in 1850 why not use it network okay right we know that because of technology we can do things they never dreamed well now the reality is we don't have to trash the place that everyone everywhere relatively all at once if you get the right equipment can make their own energy and without toxicity and you can use as much as you want everyone could be energy rich and it won't destroy the world which is an important point because we only have one so uh toby tell you know a lot of the naysayers you know we got there's a whole chorus of people i get up there and start talking about the round-trip efficiency and i always thought the objective was not round-trip efficiency it was to prevent carbon dioxide from polluting our environment what do you what do you say about these these people who just continually harp on the round-trip efficiency isn't it the cost of the hydrogen at the pump that make that that's the you know a good way to measure it and uh and what about this round-trip efficiency thing is that just an excuse it is and i'll explain why you know efficiency is very misleading if you talk about one component in a system you really have to look at the life cycle efficiency and if we look at fossil fuels it is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of one percent and the reason is because you have to start with sunlight you know millions of years ago that sunlight made biomass only a small amount of that was buried and then over tens of millions of years with with the heat and pressure you're able to pyrolyze that material and kind of the impurities kind of get pushed out and all you're left with is a bunch of carbon with a lot of hydrogen stuck to it and that's the fossil fuel that we that we that we go with so by the time we get through the whole process of mining it refining it transporting it and then when you burn it 75 percent of the energy out of your tailpipe is wasted as heat it's just waste and that heat doesn't go anywhere except the atmosphere so it's a really not an intelligent uh way to go if we were to design it today so it's often with efficiency some people will look at a lithium-ion battery and say hey it's 95 efficient with the round-trip going in and out of that battery well what's unfortunate about that conversation is it ignores everything else and when we use fossil fuels even though a coal power plant charging an electric battery car would be more efficient than pistons in that car you still have a massive pollution output and i would also point out when people compare batteries and fuel cells they say well a fuel cell you know 75 efficient it's a little higher in a good steady state but if you've got 75 they'll say that's a bad thing but i would point out that the energy that you're not including in your calculation is the other 25 where did that go did it just get dissipated no it's heat it's heat in the water that comes out of the fuel cell now if you look at a home or a business a hotel or or a resort uh or a restaurant do they use hot water of course they do they use a lot of hot water in fact if we actually add up how much energy in hawaii goes to heating water it's it's it's a significant amount because we need it on demand and we want it when we want it so that amount of energy that is uh normally the critics will just dismiss as waste is not waste at all what it what hot water comes out of my fuel cell i can use that hot water directly and by the way it's potable water so it's if you could consume it so this idea of efficiency is really a loaded question when people want to say oh well you know a battery is much more efficient than than a fuel cell no because if you look at the way that you're charging that battery and the fuels that you use it's incredibly inefficient from a systemic standpoint from a system standpoint so what's happening with the fuel cells is is the real virtue is is that when you plug a a hydrogen system into a grid a green hydrogen system we can take renewables off the grid to bubble the hydrogen store safely and by the way a lithium ion battery may store energy for about four hours before it starts to discharge so even if you had in texas all of these little home batteries like tesla wants to sell you it's gonna last you four hours and you're stuck just as well but back to the grid the grid is a really important player in the electrification because it's a it's what we can share to move clean energy resources around the network but what's what's a problem for fossil fuels it or for the battery cars is when you plug them in it just pulls from the grid anytime you happen to plug it in and that can be a big demand in fact transportation energy is before five times more energy than we used in the electrical grid so the idea of using that grid which was not designed for this purpose to then suddenly hey that's the panacea that's the answer we'll just all use batteries is is just maybe one step above a lie we don't have the ma erials for the batteries we don't have six earths the nickel the cobalt the uh the lithium itself they're all chemically bound it takes a lot of energy to extract it a lot of energy to refine it so they're how do you do the batteries that are finished end of life yeah then that's a problem too they're they're people are working on recycling but it's not a major uh financially viable thing yet so often that they don't get recycled very well and it's a big problem because with this life cycle analysis so you have kind of these these uh this little pretend war going on between the battle of the all batteries and the fuel cells but it all depends on what you want to do if you're talking about one car or a sports car or something like that you can do anything but if you want to talk about a fleet of cars like on oahu you have a million vehicles if you did ten percent that's a hundred thousand vehicles if they were happen to be charging at the same time at seven kilowatts that's you know 700 megawatts that's half your grid not gonna happen so uh the idea of you know with policy makers is we're finally breaking through thanks to the europeans thanks to the work you do which are demonstrating yes we can take clean energy make potent transportation fuel and other fuels you can make electricity with it when you need it you can run any kind of vehicle from aviation down to to cars and trucks and buses and construction equipment and all the things we use so you're kind of showing the world how this whole notion of being energy poor is nonsense we don't have to be energy poor there's no law of physics that says that people have to be impoverished and if you look at most homes in america there's more energy falling on it from the sun than they use through the whole year so the energy is there the missing link has been the battery and that's what your work does by adding the electrolyzers and a fuel cell whether the fuel cells in a vehicle or stationary you now have the ability to make absolutely clean fuel from water and sunlight for heaven's sakes yeah please okay so this is a shot from from the last issue and we're preparing now for the next issue and the theme of the next issue is going to be green hydrogen in hawaii and you guys are not only have you been leading this charge and and alone often for many decades now the world is kind of woken up and now we can ask some really big questions can we replace coal power plants yes can we replace peaker plants and intermediate plants oh yeah absolutely so so you know there's a little quote there i i can't see it on the screen so i don't want to misrepresent it but basically of jules verne who has been pointing this out since the 1870s so water will be the coal of the future yes yes and because that's the feed stock you just add clean energy you make hydrogen fuel from water it'll store for decades if you want it to you could even make a lot of it during the summer and save it for the winter on any scale it's entirely modular so you can scale from a house to a shopping center to a steel making facility which is coming heavy industry is coming and that's why i say the green hydrogen has taken hold because now when you listen to countries like south korea they have absolutely committed themselves i recently listened to a lecture from ambassador kim and he pointed out look we realize our children aren't going to survive this world if we continue to use carbon as a fuel the writing is on the wall now imagine a small country like south korea it's not a big country but they're focused and same with the pacific rim japan is making as long made a commitment to hydrogen and then green hydrogen now singapore is positioning themselves and i want to get back just quickly what we talked about singapore to your your statement about efficiency now i heard a little story at that the conference i attended virtually and uh one of the last speakers who was one of the sponsors was from singapore he said you know interesting story i in singapore we have a fleet of 5 000 buses and he said i went out of town out in the outskirts and there was a fuel a bus depot and they handled maybe 200 buses and they do the maintenance they do the cleaning they refuel and they and they get them out again and the manager said to him because he asked hey how's the electric buses you excited about that because they had a few and he goes no we can only charge 18 of them at the same time that's it because our grid is maxed out we don't have the electrical service and by the way if you want the electrical service it's going to cost so much money to upgrade this old section of singapore to get it to us so he goes i don't like battery buses they take a long time and i can't service my fleet to me it's a pain it's it's not viable and this is where i think there's a great argument for what happens when you have the fuel cell fleets because with the height with green hydrogen station you take all the excess clean energy make the hydrogen store it and then when you fuel the bus it's 10 minutes you know typical bus time uh 10 10 12 minutes something like that and now this manager could move his fleet and and meet the requirements of singapore so this is what's happening all over the world that public transit systems are saying hey we're going to electrify but it seems the flavor of the day are these big battery electric buses which by the way are twice as expensive as are largely more expensive than a fuel cell bus or certainly a diesel bus but the biggest problem with these fleets is when you try to charge them now i'll give you an example a tesla has their semi that they're pushing well to me it's nonsensical it doesn't make any sense because to just charge one diesel semi they have a megawatt charger i think it's rated at 1.6 megawatts well that's you know it's it's crazy because in singapore i don't think they'd even be able to hook up one in your grid on hawaii i don't think you could do it a 1.6 megawatt draw just to charge a bus and the other thing about charging batteries i you know i've been building battery chargers uh for 30 years 40 years getting to build solar chargers and i can tell you something about charging a battery yes to get a fast charge the only way you can do it is brute force you've got to push all that power into the battery and batteries don't like that so what happens is as you charge the battery the more it charges up the more its resistance to being charged increases and so what happens is you have that 1.6 megawatt when you start if the battery's you know 80 percent discharge it'll love that energy but then you have to you have to push the power down and down and down because if you overcharge the battery too fast you'll you'll wreck the battery you'll damage the battery because in batteries you have different materials and with different materials you have a different coefficient of thermal expansion which ways there's no way to get around this if you use different materials and you heat them up charging fast they're going to expand at different rates and you'll eventually wear the battery out it'll it'll uh become dangerous you could have short circuits so the the chargers are intelligent they sense what's going on in the battery they go okay we'll give you this power for a little bit but then we're going to knock it down so that your battery doesn't get hurt and so all that does is cause the grid to have this huge spike and then if it survives that then it'll it'll taper it down but you're still talking about hours of charging for these huge you know we're talking about 10 cars worth of batteries in these buses it's a huge battery bank not practical what about heat yeah heat is also a problem i guess electricity in your battery exactly yeah it's going to damage the battery so they have to carefully control it but there's other problems with the all battery style if i i may just keep going there there's the the different formats you see there's there's something called a j1772 that's the format that you'll find for the level one charger you can do out of your garage or even a level two chargers you'll see some of those formats out there well in europe they have european makers so they came up with their own standard ccs a combined charging system and then in the asian manufacturers they came up with their own their own format called chatimo and then tesla has its own format so you have four different uh protocols and plugs they physically won't work with each other you have to have this station has to be equipped with the right format where you can't use it now in europe they solved that problem because they said okay anyone who builds a station including you tesla if you build your stations you have to include a ccs port so every electric car could charge at any charging station that's not the case in america so there's a lot of challenges going beyond one pers or two percent of a fleet when you're talking about all batteries it's actually uh not a not practical at all interesting thing on the big island is they have a you know if you're going over the saddle road it's like a 21 mile grade you know uphill going uphill for 21 miles i would say that's probably a battery killer definitely so definitely so you know batteries are particular they like it slow they want to be charged slow and they want to be discharged slow they don't like anything big or spiky they're just very mellow but humans we want to go hey charge that battery and the only way to do it fast is to push it harder and harder and harder and the faster you do that the more damage you're going to create and this is becomes now a bit of an issue so what we're seeing in the asian pacific players as well as the european union they are embracing green hydrogen it is in america it's uh you hear the discussion even now in in texas with the fossil fuel advocates they're saying it was the windmills that caused the problem you know oh my goodness no no it's all the meters and all the pumps that you run your fossil fuels with you didn't winterize that's the problem as far as your immediate concern but the great opportunity is and i want to make sure we have time for this is just put quickly is that if you work in the fossil fuel industry don't be too concerned because there is a job waiting for you in green hydrogen yeah we're not going to strand human assets on that happy note uh put up slide 10 and um with your contact information again very fast well if anyone would like a copy i'd be send it to you for free of the of the volume one would be my pleasure just give me an email toby kinkade at gmail and i'll send you a copy and i'd love to have your feedback and then we're working on the apps we'll have this digital magazine converted to an actual app that we can offer on the apple store and android under google play so and all the pages are loaded with links so if you like a story if you want to click on a picture or or the byline or whoever it is click on it and it'll take you to more information and it's very exciting well toby once again it's been wonderful having you on the show thank you so much thank you so this is mitch ewan from hawaii the state of clean energy and uh we've had a great conversation yet again with toby kinkade of green hydrogen today and that's our show for the day and i'll see you next week aloha [Applause] you