[Intro Music] We live on a planet which has greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

We are grateful to those greenhouse gases because they keep the temperature of the planet at a level which supports life as we know it.

Extracting, processing, and combusting fossil fuels is increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And what this does is simply increase the capacity of our atmosphere to retain heat.

Yes.

So when we look at sustainability in terms of energy, we can see finite resources such as coal, such as oil that we're using up, and these resources are depleting.

But it's not just about the fact that they're not gonna be there forever.

It's also that these resources tend to have health and well-being impacts, causing climate change as well as local pollution.

It's gonna have to be a transition to renewable energy, solar power, wind power.

We have tremendous potential in the state in our producing solar, we're producing wind.

About half of our electricity is actually hydro.

We're looking at renewable hydrogen, our geothermal options, and we're looking at offshore shore wind.

It's far more sustainable and a better choice for all.

The planet will go on without us, so it's up to us to decide what role we want to have on this planet.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by The Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by The Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.

In discussions about renewable energy, solar and wind get a lot of attention.

These technologies are proven, actively producing large quantities of electricity.

A percentage of the energy you're using to watch this program likely comes from solar and wind.

However, here in Oregon, we're blessed with incredible geographic diversity, which makes this a great place for the deployment of other somewhat more novel forms of renewable energy.

From the churning oceans off the Oregon coast, we can capture the energy of waves.

From under our feet, especially in Southeastern Oregon, we can capture the energy of Earth itself.

And in universities and companies throughout the state, there's active effort to bring hydrogen technology into commercial viability.

Our team is traveling around Oregon in search of experts, researchers, and industry professionals to better understand next generation technologies representing the frontiers of renewable energy.

There are all these different technologies in play, and we're gonna need many of them.

We are best served if we can keep investing and looking at what seems like it's gonna make commercial viability.

Wave energy projects really started before I was even in the legislature.

I put it in the category of the many other additional new technologies that we're looking at.

Pacific Marine Energy Center is a collaboration between Oregon State University, University of Washington, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Our goal is to try and connect people to the power of the ocean.

We really wanna focus on how do we advance our understanding of the potential of marine energy.

So tell me about this space that we're in right now.

Where are we?

What is this facility for?

So the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory is the biggest nonmilitary site for generating waves in a predictable fashion on demand.

While it's great to go and do testing or data collection in the ocean, we can't control it.

So our ability to rapidly generate knowledge and understanding is always limited.

However, in an environment like this where we can control the size of the waves, the water depth, the slope of the beach, the scale of all these sort of interactions, we can really generate a lot of knowledge very fast.

Clients from across the country and around the world will come here to Hinsdale to use the directional wave basin or the large wave flume to really start to capture and develop new understanding and knowledge.

Wave energy is when we're looking to harness the change in the water elevation as a wave comes by.

So anyone who's ever been to the beach and walked along the beach, you know, you're always gonna look and you're gonna be like, wow.

There's this constant waves breaking, waves moving.

There's sort of so much energy in the ocean.

So part of what we do is we look to capture that motion in the ocean to make a useful energy product.

That may be electricity.

It also might be hydrogen.

It may be some sort of other energy carrier, but our goal is to try to figure out how to harness that in a sustainable way without creating significant impact to make a fuel that we can use or a product we can use to reduce our emissions.

My primary interest and research are to develop small scaled examples of wave energy devices so that we can start to understand and improve those technologies before we try and deploy them in the ocean.

So when we find out something that doesn't work exactly how we might hope, we can quickly change it.

We can iterate fast.

We can fail fast.

And that's a big thing is when you fail, you learn things.

As a wave passes, you can think about this surface of the water changing.

So some technologies will use that change in the surface elevations.

So there might be that sort of a bobber that follows that surface.

Some technologies might look at, well, when a wave goes by, it also creates a surge motion.

So you can think of like an opening and closing of a door that's laid over.

So as that door rotates back and forth, you can extract power from that.

Other technologies look at well, when a wave passes, it also creates a pressure signal.

So maybe there's an ability for us to harness that differential pressure motion.

So there's a lot of work in all these different spaces, and that's why the wave energy space is so diverse, is because there's at least three or four different energy components that one can look to harness.

The state of Oregon has always been a great advocate for wave energy or looking at our ocean in new ways to make renewable energy.

You know, the state has a long history of looking at renewables, whether it's solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric.

And as we went to the ocean, the states really always looked at it and be like, where do we have an opportunity to both create a niche for us, create economic development opportunities, create workforce development opportunities?

And Wave Energy was one of those.

So over the last 2 decades in the state of Oregon, there's been a pretty significant effort towards doing that.

And that's led to some of the only deployment of full scale technologies in the country.

The leading US manufacturers and inventors in the wave energy space are located here because of the investment in Oregon State University, because of the investment in the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.

While they might have a great idea or a great concept, we can provide all the expertise to help them get to that next step.

I think there's a huge need to generate open source knowledge, open source technologies.

We need to bring the whole community up.

A rising tide lifts all boats.

We need to generate more open knowledge that isn't behind paywalls or protected by IP that everyone can build from.

So one of the concepts we have here at Hinsdale is a point absorber.

So LUPA stands for the laboratory upgrade point absorber.

LUPA is a completely open source wave energy device.

So and by open source, I mean, we have no plans to commercialize LUPA.

LUPA is here as a platform, a data set, a technology for the entire global community to use to benchmark performance of wave energy devices.

So point absorber, it's a two body device.

There's one body that sits on the surface and follows the water elevation.

And then there's another body that's deeper in the water column that sort of acts like an artificial sea floor.

So you can think of these two bodies moving relative to each other and generating power from that.

It can replicate a lot of other different wave energy converters in the world.

So it gives us this incredible flexibility to replicate a lot of commercial technologies, give an idea of how they may work, what their performance characteristics are, and also allows everyone to keep measuring against a single baseline.

So we've built a number of versions of this.

Our current one is about 12 feet tall.

It weighs about 900 pounds, so it's a fairly significant sized device.

Absolutely every detail of this technology is publicly available.

You can download your SOLIDWORKS files for it, your CAD files.

You can download where the weights are, where we purchased everything, what worked, what broke, what we did wrong.

So if technology developer A says, I've got concept A, and it's amazing, we can be like, okay.

Well, how much better is it than the baseline?

Is it 5 times better?

That's great.

Let's start to invest there.

Let's work on that.

Is it 1 percent better?

Maybe we need to wait for something that's a little more disruptive or has potential to be significantly better.

Can I come up with an innovation that's gonna make that technology way better?

Fantastic.

Please do.

Let us work with you and help you, and then go patent it and sell it.

That's not our game.

Our game is to help the whole sector move forward.

So Courtney is a PhD candidate with us here at Oregon State University, and Jason's a faculty research associate who leading this test campaign with a LUPA.

While I would love to think I am the knowledge holder in this case, it's really great PhD students and incredible faculty researchers who really do most of the work on the day to day.

So the waves cause the buoy to move up and down, and that up and down motion turns these generators, turns these gears, and turns this generator to make electricity.

So we have this physical turning, this physical motion, kinetic energy turned into electrical energy through a generator.

And right now, we are running about 2.5 second wave periods coming by.

And we're seeing actually on our outputs right now, some 40 watt peaks, 20 watt averages.

The distance between individual waves, we're changing that time.

So we might do 2 seconds, 3 second, 4 second waves to replicate what happens in the real ocean when we scale up.

We're also testing different ways of controlling all the power electronics.

So are there ways for us to maximize performance?

Basically, allows you to simulate all kinds of different conditions and see what performance you get under those various conditions.

Yeah.

It allows us to simulate the performance and also look at the sort of trickle on effects like that.

So while we may maximize performance or maximize electrical power in one setup, we find that we've also really created a lot of tension on our mooring lines, which is less desirable.

So then you can be like, okay.

Well, I wanna reduce the mooring line tension, but still increase the power.

So where is the trade off?

How can I do these 2 things?

How do I co design my system to maximize power and minimize loads?

And loads is kind of a a nice proxy for cost.

When When I was here 3 years ago, it started as an idea, I say, on a napkin.

And then we have taken it to its full design, about a thousand parts in here, all the nuts and bolts built together, taken apart, and built back together again.

And we're already having outside companies, outside researchers from different schools come and use it.

The surface of the globe is 70 odd percent covered by water, and every piece of energy infrastructure we've built has always been terrestrial.

We've built it on land.

We've built solar, we've built wind, we've built coal, we've built natural gas We've built all of our energy infrastructure on land.

But as we go into this new world of renewables and we move into the ocean, there's a couple things we need to keep in mind.

One, we need to think about how do we develop a new energy system.

But then also try and understand the scale, like, really, what what are we working with?

How big is it?

You know, on land, you've got the surface of land and you can work up.

Wind turbines go up, solar panels go flat.

But when we get into the ocean, we've got sort of another dimension.

We can also go down.

So what resources do we have below the surface?

What resources do we have above surface?

And what resources do we have on the surface?

So it's a whole new domain for trying to figure out how do we make renewable energy in the ocean.

The Pacific Marine Energy Center has made a name for itself due to the resources and knowledge they bring to the ocean energy space.

Their presence is about to become even more significant with the impending completion of the PacWave test site on the Oregon coast near Newport.

Historically, most of the effort and most of the emphasis has been in Europe.

We've sort of relied on our European colleagues to lead the way.

I would say over the last decade, 15 years, the US has started to say, hey.

We need more energy resources.

What can we innovate and develop here?

Technology developers in the US have been able to build technology, build concepts, build innovations, and get them to certain scales.

But whenever they wanted to test them in the ocean, there's never been a place in the US to do that.

They've always left the US, and they've gone to Europe to test their technologies, which isn't ideal from a sort of homegrown domestic innovation perspective.

The PacWave project is incredibly important because it provides an opportunity for domestic US innovators to test their concepts in the ocean.

It also is gonna be one of the best test sites in the entire world, so we really hope our European colleagues, our Asian colleagues, our African colleagues will come here to Oregon to test the next generation of renewable energy technologies.

PacWave is a full scale, so it's open ocean conditions.

It's prepermitted, so we've done a lot of the work with all the agencies to make sure that they have confidence in what we're gonna do.

It's Grid connected.

So we do run four 5 megawatt cables from land about 7 nautical miles offshore to a location where there's sort of let's think of it as a an extension called plug in the ocean.

A technology developer can bring a device, deploy it, plug it in.

We will do all the environmental monitoring around that.

The electrons will travel back to our utility connections and monitoring facility where it will connect into the local grid.

It allows them a sort of ecosystem to continue to grow and innovate.

So PacWave is prepermitted, fully energetic, open ocean, and the best test site to test in the country.

Wave energy is experimental technology, but the concept has merit and could one day become a valuable generating source to have as part of our energy mix.

Each of these renewable energy technologies has its own signature.

It generates power at different times of the day, different times of the year.

And it's really important that there's a matchup between when a technology makes power and when we need it.

So in Oregon, we're a winter peaking region.

So we want more power in the winter.

While there's a huge amount of value in deploying technologies that still make power in the summer, there's much greater value in the technologies that will make power in the winter.

So that's one of the great value propositions for wave energy.

As folks know, it's stormy in the wintertime in the northwest, and in those storms, there's a huge amount of energy.

There's this great correlation combination between when we need power in the northwest and when wave energy would make it.

And it's a great complement to things like solar, which will make a lot of power in the summer.

So if you think about it from that perspective, you can rely on solar in the summer.

You could rely on wave in the winter.

The fantastic thing about wave is it's very, very forecastable.

So we can give you a very accurate estimate out a week on how big the waves are gonna be, what the wave period's gonna be, which allows the grid operator to plan with a lot of certainty.

We all know how hard it is to predict if it's gonna be windy next week, and is it gonna be windy at two o'clock on Thursday?

It's a tough game.

It's wrong a lot of the time.

The difference with wave energy is that's not the case.

We can predict that very, very well.

Kinda like when you get your surfing forecast.

Hey.

It's gonna be a great wave day today.

Let's get out there.

Exactly.

One of the other benefits I think in the global context is we've also gotta look at the distribution of population around the world.

60, 70 percent of the world's population lives within a 100, 200 kilometers of the coastline.

All the demand is on the coast.

The greater ability for us to generate power close to where people need it limits the need for transmission lines or tracking power back and forth across the country, which is a difficult ask.

It's difficult because there are losses involved.

It's difficult because it's expensive.

It's difficult because it does have some ecological impact.

So if you can generate power close to where you need it, you're just making the whole system more efficient.

What level of deployment would we actually need in order to make a difference?

During the discussions about offshore wind, we were talking constantly in, like, the megawatt and even gigawatt, you know, threshold.

What is that with wave?

How many of, like, that device do you think we would need out there?

Or is it a bigger device?

Tell me about that.

At this stage of maturity of the wave energy, it's not gonna be as big as offshore wind.

It has the potential to get there, but that pathway is a lot longer than it is for the offshore wind sector.

The way I like to think about wave energy is if we reference back to where the solar industry came.

When they developed solar technologies for the first time, they didn't say, we're gonna deploy 10 gigawatts of solar in the Arizona desert.

They said, I'm gonna power your calculator.

I'm gonna power your watch.

I'm gonna put a little solar panel in there, and I'm gonna supplement what your batteries do.

So they started small.

They learned some lessons.

They innovated, they got bigger.

They learned some lessons.

They Innovated.

They got big.

We're trying to make small scale devices to power oceanographic measurement buoys, to power underwater vehicles, to explore ocean where we just need watts or maybe a kilowatt of power, just small amounts of power.

But then in concurrence, we're also developing large scale devices, which are 500 hundred kilowatts or a megawatt in scale.

As we learn lessons on both sides, we can sort of cross match.

We can compare our notes and hopefully get technology working commercially faster.

Because ultimately, that's the goal.

We're trying to make as much renewable energy as we can to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change that I don't think we have time to go through a very slow process.

So we need to be innovating at all scales at all times and comparing lessons learned constantly, as such, that we can develop technology fast.

Wave Energy, it's still got a lot of work.

But we got a good test site, and there's no reason to be pessimistic.

But if you ever go to the beaches, you know that constant movement.

There's got to be a way to harness that.

We're probably not there yet, but I'm all for continuing that work.

Chances are very good.

We will prevail with some fun, productive kind of energy that will contribute to society here.

Has anybody ever surfed in this, in this contraption?

Nobody has surfed in here in recent years.

In days gone by, there are some pictures of people surfing.

The environment you find in the highlands, east of the Cascades, is a world apart from the cold shores of the Pacific Ocean.

But here in Klamath County, there are still exciting possibilities for renewable energy.

Right now, Klamath is exploding with the deployment of large utility scale solar arrays, part of the solar revolution, which is dominating renewable energy today.

But Klamath County, along with several other volcanically active parts of Oregon, is an exciting region for geothermal energy, with a history going back long before the modern interest in renewables.

The Oregon Institute of Technology is a major player in the history and future of geothermal energy, and home to world class expertise in this promising industry.

My daughter's wedding happened last Saturday.

I have no voice left.

Oh, congratulations on that.

And no money left.

That is different.

I'm Nagi Naganathan.

I have the honor of serving as the president of Oregon Institute of Technology or Oregon Tech.

Oregon Tech has a unique accomplishment in terms of having created the first baccalaureate degree in renewable energy engineering in the United States.

First of all, we are blessed with a local asset.

Now we have great hydrothermal underground.

This very campus, this was relocated here because of the geothermal assets here.

The first president saw the snow melting much more quickly on this side of town.

And, of course, they had the technology at the time to look at geothermal, and they discovered this is a great place to have that.

And in some ways, the ethos of the place is driven by renewable energy.

Yeah.

I was a retired professor from Oregon Institute of Technology, spent 53 years here as professor, dean, and department chair.

And you're an expert in what?

I guess geothermal energy.

Well, I'm a civil engineer by training.

So originally, I built roads with volcanic materials, pumice, cinders, that sort of thing up in the Winema National Forest.

And then I became interested in geothermal, so I became, I guess, a worldwide expert because I've lectured in 45 countries on geothermal energy, given training, have friends all over the world.

Geothermal energy is heat within the earth caused by the molten core of the earth radiating heat outward and into the mantle, and then we drill into the surface to get some of that heat.

Unfortunately, it's not evenly distributed at shallow depths around the world.

So only in certain places is it economical to tap into it and use it for power, for space heating, or even cooling.

You know, it is renewable, providing you don't overtax the resource.

It doesn't create any pollution or very little, if any.

In Klamath Falls, there are about 600 geothermal wells, and they all pointed up in this direction.

Winston Pervine, the first president, decided there must be geothermal up here.

So he took a chance and drilled several wells and actually hit a 192 degree water.

So we're going to go up to the top of the campus where the heat exchange building is, and that's where our geothermal heating wells are.

And the heat exchange building is where, basically, the geothermal system starts that heats the entire campus.

So the campus is made up of 17 buildings that are a hundred percent heated by geothermal.

The campus saves a million dollars a year in heating costs.

The construction started in the mid '60s, so the geothermal system is close to 60 years old.

Okay.

So we're at the top of the campus on the east side, and this is where the geothermal system starts for the campus.

So we have 2 primary heating wells.

Those 2 wells feed the heat exchange building, which is right here, that has a storage tank in it.

The heat exchange building sends the water to the campus that heats approximately 700,000 square feet of buildings.

The water comes up from the wells at between a 196 and 198 degrees.

By the time it gets through the last building, the water still is about 70 degrees when it leaves that building and goes to the injection well.

So all our water that we pull out of the ground goes through the campus and then back into the same aquifer in the injection well.

So it's a continuous loop.

It's not sent down the storm drain or anything like that.

So in other words, you recycle all of the water that's used in the system?

Yep.

And it goes back into the aquifer, gets reheated, and works its way back up to the production wells.

And originally, here in campus, we disposed it into a creek that ran down into the lake.

Well, the homeowners down below didn't like all that heat coming down there, so we drilled an injection well.

So therefore, if you produce, you have to use an injection well.

Oregon Tech recently received 18 million dollars in funding from legislation to renovate our geothermal heating system.

And so this system has been heating the campus for 60 plus years.

And so this funding will help us renovate that system and get another 50 to 60 years.

So this design that we're about to see in here is pretty much what was put in 60 years ago.

Yep.

This is original.

So we're kind of seeing like the last legs of this current design.

And it'll be noticeably different.

Wow.

Okay.

The layout of the building, the geothermal heating is on this side.

This is the current storage tank.

This will be replaced with a new tank that'll be located outside of the building, 4 times larger.

If our well goes down, we'll have more storage that'll allow us to get the well back up and running before we run out of hot water.

This is 6,000 gallons.

Our new tank will be 24,000 gallons.

This side is a geothermal power plant.

So the hottest water goes to the power plant, and then once it circulates through the power plant, then it goes to the storage tank and then to the campus.

We are currently looking at upgrading this to a new and more modern system, more of a modern teaching tool for our students.

This is not just a utility interest.

To us, it is an educational and innovation platform.

So our hope is as we develop these technologies, our students will have an immersive learning experience working with the actual geothermal power plant.

They are not just reading the theory of it.

They are getting to practice it and see how it is working.

Yeah.

I have a geothermal well in my front yard.

That heats our house and the neighbor's house.

It's a 190 degrees.

And it's only 410 feet deep.

And we don't pump the water out of the well.

We use what's called a downhole heat exchanger.

Just a loop of pipe in the well that we circulate city water through, and that then goes in the east of the house and our domestic hot water and my hot tub in the backyard.

Geothermal, for example, in town here, they have drilled wells in one part of town and piped it to another part of town.

They were actually able to pipe it up to Klamath Union High School.

So it can be piped.

In Iceland, it's been piped probably 50 or 60 miles from where their geothermal field is to the town of Akureyri.

But the reason they could do it, because they came out at a 100 degrees Celsius, and all they needed was 80 degrees Celsius in town.

So they lost 20 degrees, because they had the pipeline above ground buried under under Earth bank.

Okay.

So they lost 20 degrees, but 80 degrees was still enough to heat the town of Akureyri.

So it was beneficial there.

More geothermal development in Klamath County is very exciting.

We have a lot of it already.

I don't know if you're aware, but if you were to walk down Main Street during the winter, the sidewalks don't have snow on them because they're all geothermally heated.

Many of the homes and buildings, including this one, are geothermally heated.

We save a lot of money on different types of energy in that way.

Oregon Tech has a huge geothermal program.

And as I understand it, they're doing a lot of research on how to con you know, make that more large scale.

How do you develop power on a large scale with geothermal energy?

So those are the things that get me excited right now.

Energy will always be a mixed portfolio.

Klamath Falls is blessed with great geothermal assets underground.

It is also blessed with a lot of sunshine.

You know, we are the sunniest city in the state of Oregon with 300 hundred days of sunshine.

That probably provides one third of the campus' power needs.

And when we begin to develop our geothermal power plant, which needs an incremental investment, we expect to really go towards being completely off the grid in the near future.

So this is the newest building on campus, the CEET building or Center of Excellence in Engineering Technology.

And then part of the design we're gonna look at right now is the main mechanical room for the building.

Typically, mechanical rooms are hidden in a dark corner of a basement or someplace that nobody ever sees except facilities.

Because of our geothermal resources, we wanted to highlight this as a teaching tool.

You can see the heat exchangers.

This is where heat is taken out of the geothermal water, provides heat to the domestic water.

It's what caught our eye as soon as we came in here because we came in right through those doors and just were kind of wandering around.

We're here a bit early.

This immediately caught our eye, and we're like, well, there you go.

It's right here.

Pretty cool.

Once you developed it, the annual operating costs are low.

The trouble is the upfront cost of actually developing the system is the problem.

And if you have to drill deep wells, if you have, certain contaminants in the water, then that can create problems.

But once you solve those, then you're home free, essentially.

Geothermal is a little different than solar where, basically the sun shines everywhere.

But geothermal hot water is only available in very specific areas.

Geothermal energy can be tapped naturally in some places, but not all places, primarily in the state of Oregon, Klamath County, and Lake County, which which have done that, which are tapping it.

Again, it's not gonna be every place, but where you have that capacity could be a terrific thing for us to to tap and use.

Personally, I'm very optimistic about geothermal.

I think geothermal is gonna be a natural.

We're spending a lot of time on it.

Have you ever gone out to the Oregon Tech geothermal, plant?

Yeah.

What do you think about their operation?

I think it's great.

I mean, they were they understood that geothermal was cool before practically anybody else.

You can always say I've been in hot water all my life, so that's that's one of the comments.

But, no, the trouble is is educating people in what geothermal can do.

Solar and wind gets all the publicity, and you see it because it's above ground.

Geothermal, very few people understand it.

In fact, we've only had one faculty member that even, like myself included, that had an understanding of how to use geothermal.

So that's the problem is understanding it, how to use it, and as opposed to the other renewables.

Geothermal energy is based on well established technology, and the principles behind it are relatively straightforward.

However, hydrogen technology, which is more cutting edge and may seem more complex, is gaining attention.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe and has been used by humans for everything from fertilizers to rocket fuel.

In recent decades, hydrogen has emerged as a promising clean energy source with great potential to overhaul transportation and industry.

My name is Shannon Boettcher.

I'm a professor here in the University of Oregon in the Department of Chemistry, and I'm the founding director of the Oregon Center for Electrochemistry.

These are some students in our electrochemical technology master's program that's, training students in the foundations and applications of electrochemistry for energy.

Hydrogen, of course, is a very simple molecule.

It's 2 protons bonded together, H2.

So why is that energy?

Okay.

It's only energy because we can take hydrogen and react it with oxygen.

We have abundant oxygen in our atmosphere to make water.

Hydrogen's explosive.

Right?

You light a match, hydrogen oxygen explodes.

It's making water.

That's a downhill chemical reaction.

So we harness that explosion much like you harness the explosion in an internal combustion engine, which is the explosion of gasoline, a hydrocarbon, reacting with oxygen via combustion to make water and carbon dioxide.

The nice thing about hydrogen is when when you react it with oxygen, there's no carbons, no carbon dioxide is emitted.

There's two important technological concepts.

So first is is making hydrogen in the first place.

Where do you get the hydrogen from?

And then how do you use it?

How do you get energy, useful energy for to run our civilization from it in principle?

So making it historically, most hydrogen we use, we use quite a bit of it in our economy today, but it's made from what's called reforming of fossil fuels.

So you can get hydrogen out of a carbon and hydrogen molecule by releasing the carbon as CO2, and that leaves you with hydrogen.

That's how most of our hydrogen is made today.

There's, of course, now new processes that are efficient and can be run with electrical energy, electrolysis to get the hydrogen from water, pulling the oxygen out and just releasing O2 in our atmosphere.

Then we have the hydrogen.

Then what do we do with it?

That's your that's your question.

How do we get energy back out from hydrogen?

The simplest way is you burn it.

It has a different combustion temperature.

It carries different amount of energy per cubic foot.

There's some engineering differences, but from a chemical principle basis, it's very similar to any gas based fuel source like you have in your barbecue, for example.

Another way is that's more efficient and would be used for situations such as running a heavy duty truck, for example, is something called a fuel cell.

So hydrogen fuel cells are electricity generating devices that consume hydrogen, consume oxygen out of the air, make electricity for a number of applications.

So Ballard is a 40 plus year old company.

We've almost always been into, fuel cell technology.

Ballard has developed stationary fuel cell systems powering hospitals, data centers, telecom cell tower sites.

More recently, we're into the heavy duty motive application space.

In fact, that's what we're building behind us is a fuel cell module for heavy duty buses and trucks.

Hydrogen doesn't make a lot of sense for light transportation where you can use a battery.

The batteries are good enough to run a small car or a pickup around a city or even rural areas these days, and they're just getting better.

So probably hydrogen will have very little role in those applications.

But applications where the amount of energy storage you need is so large, you couldn't possibly build a battery that big because it weighs too much, then you have a huge need for synthetic fuels.

And hydrogen is by far the simplest synthetic fuels.

There are alternatives but hydrogen is the simplest and probably most cost effective and what I think we'll probably see to the largest extent.

What is the FC Move HD plus fuel cell?

We refer to it as a module because, it's not just a fuel cell, it's a fuel cell plus.

Things like coolant pumps, air compressors, valves, controllers, safety systems, it's ready to be integrated into a vehicle.

It supplies the electricity to the electric drive train of a zero emission vehicle.

The fuel cell is actually a stack of a bunch of cells.

We introduce hydrogen to one side of a cell and oxygen from air on the other, And there's a chemical reaction that goes on, and the hydrogen actually permeates through a membrane, combines with the oxygen on the other side to create water.

And in doing so, there's an electron and electrical current that's generated.

And if you stack a bunch of those cells together, you end up with, you know, a substantial source of power.

The fuel cells used in the product behind me have 220 cells, per stack.

So this is a 220 cell fuel cell stack, and you can kinda see from that angle how thin these plates are.

On this side of the module over here, we have, these two compression fittings.

So that's gonna be our our fuel in and then, pressure relief.

Air going into these butterfly valves, and then coolant as well.

And then at the very end of the side over there, there's a couple high voltage connections, and that's where the, voltage output is gonna be.

If you start with the idea that you have an electric vehicle with batteries and you go to an application where you have to drive for an extended period of time or you're carrying a heavy payload, you end up needing a lot of batteries, you know, more than you'd like.

Right?

And you're displacing your ability to carry a payload.

So that's where fuel cells come in.

You reduce the size of your battery bank.

You're supplementing the power to the drivetrain with hydrogen source power.

The batteries are simply there for peak power demand, like you're going up a hill or you're accelerating, and the fuel cells giving you that that long term steady power to make that long haul or carry that heavy payload.

Primary customer here for our product is New Flyer.

They're the largest transit bus manufacturer in North America.

That's our customer base is the heavy duty, you know, long duration or a customer who can't really tolerate recharging times for batteries.

Before we actually introduce hydrogen, we wanna make sure that everything is operating as it should.

So, yeah, kick it on.

[Machine Whirring] What's going on here is an end aligned factory test.

So every fuel cell module is actually operated through its full operating range.

It has to achieve full power.

The performance has to be, you know, above a prescribed level.

So this basically simulates, like, the kind of power load that the fuel cell will have to deal with while it's driving a truck.

That's right.

Instead of just burning the power and, you know, running a heater outside, we actually are pumping that power back out onto the grid.

So we're actually running our meter in reverse when we're running our tests.

Reduces your power bill a little bit.

That's right.

That's right.

This one right here is a fully complete module.

It's fully tested.

So it's gone through our factory acceptance test and yielded the high performance that we're expecting out of it.

So right now, it's complete, and it's basically being ready to put in a crate and ship to the customer.

And what actually, what does that name mean?

FC Move HD plus?

I'm guessing FC is fuel cell.

Move is a brand, but what's the HD plus?

So HD just means heavy duty.

The original heavy duty module was a 70 kilowatt module, and then we said, okay.

We need a hundred kilowatts, so we just we just added the plus.

Nothing nothing too secret going on there.

Each time we we have a generational improvement, we're we're working on performance, durability, and cost reduction, cost being key to having that kind of scale up of volume.

You know, if we go back a decade or so, we were using industrial components that maybe weren't tailored very well to our application.

Today, with the interest in hydrogen technology and and fuel cells kinda taking off, we have those tools and those components that we need that are very tailored to our application and more cost effective.

We really appreciate the early adopters, the customers we have now that are buying these in low but increasing volumes each year.

They're helping us achieve that scale each year, you know, as we go from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000, get the economies of scale.

At a certain point, we're on that curve, and it's just a matter of volume to get to the target price.

Over time, as that infrastructure comes together, it enables the technology to be deployed.

Right now, hydrogen mostly comes from natural gas.

It's not super green yet.

So our team broadly is working in the area of electrochemistry, and, you know, electrochemistry is anything where you have electrical current, electrons in a wire interface to a chemical reaction.

Many electrochemical phenomena, batteries in your laptop, that's electrochemistry.

We're converting between electrical energy and chemical energy in the form of a battery reaction.

But there's other forms of electrochemistry.

One of the most important ones that we're working on is, electrolysis reactions.

This is where you drive uphill chemical reactions by inputting electrical energy and it's a way to store energy for a long duration.

It's a way to make chemicals that are useful.

It's a way to make hydrogen fuels, for example.

Okay.

So these here, these devices are are very small scale versions of what industry is building enormous we call them stacks, electrolyzer stacks.

And they have, again, 2 electrodes, 1 making oxygen, 1 making hydrogen, and a membrane for the ions to pass through, much like we talked about.

So we're testing really some new materials that are, in principle, much more efficient and much cheaper to manufacture in these devices here.

You wanna be able to build these devices, these electrolyzers, at a very large scale with minimal baseline costs of ingredients.

Hydrogen can be produced and used with carbon free methods.

But in practice, it can be a tricky resource to work with, legendary for its explosive flammability.

It bursts in the flames.

Get this, Charley.

Get this, Charley.

It's lighting and it's frightening.

It's frightening; terrible.

Get out of the way, please.

Oh the humanity and all the passengers screaming around it.

Hydrogen's tendency to ignite is well understood, and consequently, strong safety measures are employed when working with it.

But for wider world applications, such as renewable energy, there are other risks and challenges to consider.

So here's a couple problems.

Right?

So one of them is hydrogen leaks.

There are some worry that if there's too much hydrogen leaks, it could cause some reactive in the atmosphere that has some deleterious effects.

I think this is something that needs to be studied more, and we need to improve our materials and monitoring systems.

You may have heard a lot in the news about perfluorinated polymers.

So perfluorinated polymers are plastics that have a lot of fluorine atoms in them and these have great properties for the devices that make and use hydrogen, but they can contaminate ground water.

They're not easily decomposed, so they can accumulate.

They can cause cancer and other things in humans, so we need to manage that.

I believe that with sufficient oversight just like any of our energy technologies, any of our human technologies, many of them have substantial downsides.

This all has to be managed.

Right?

But when you compare it to something where we are essentially digging out a complex mixture of a lot of different elements in hydrocarbons and burning them and releasing all that into the atmosphere not just the CO2 all the stuff there, lead, other things, you know, it's in my view far superior.

Anything we do as a human civilization that's not a closed loop is eventually gonna become saturated.

Supply cannot meet the demand, we're gonna run out so or we're gonna put huge stress on our natural system.

So what I mean by a closed loop is the inputs equal the output.

So if we have water, we have a lot of water on the planet, we use the water, we electrolyze it to make hydrogen and oxygen, all we're putting in is energy.

We're rearranging the atoms.

Oxygen will actually be vented to the atmosphere increasing the oxygen in the atmosphere.

Somewhere else, different oxygen can be taken in from the atmosphere, can be combined with hydrogen to remake water.

That water goes back in the atmosphere.

Both water, oxygen, those are very natural substances.

Those are the only things that in principle a properly operating system emits.

So it's a closed loop.

We're not burying anything.

We're not depleting anything.

We're just taking renewable energy.

There's plenty of sun.

There's plenty of wind to do all of this.

So these are the tanks where you actually store the hydrogen you use here in this facility?

That's right.

So we're really fortunate.

We were able to line up a supplier here in the northwest air gas.

This hydrogen's coming to us from Kalama, Washington.

And actually it's pretty green.

They're generating this hydrogen from an electrolyzer.

There's lots of different ways to use and store hydrogen and they're gonna vary substantially based on the application.

So hydrogen can be actually piped around at very low cost much like natural gas.

The challenge is you need different types of pipes because it's a very small molecule and it can damage steels and things like that that are not meant to carry hydrogen.

So it needs some infrastructure to pipe it around.

That would be using it as low pressure and that's what you do if you just wanted to use it for a on-site application, for example, in a steel mill or to any sort of high temperature process you want to run with hydrogen instead of with a fossil fuel.

However, if you want transportation, you can't store enough energy in low pressure hydrogen.

So what you would do is you compress it, so that requires a reinforced tank, there's high pressure tanks up to 700 bar.

It's not too much energy to compress hydrogen.

The final solution which is in principle ideal but it's very expensive right now is to liquefy the hydrogen.

It carries the most possible energy per unit volume and that's very important in an application for like an airplane.

So if we're gonna have jets, which we probably will, jumbo jets flying off hydrogen, they're gonna need liquefied hydrogen.

You're gonna get like 4 times as much hydrogen in liquid form than you could in in gas even at, you know, 7,000 psi.

We'd love to have liquid hydrogen here but there's certain setbacks related to a liquid hydrogen storage facility.

There's just not enough space between these buildings.

Otherwise, yeah, liquid would have been the way to go.

We will need huge amounts of infrastructure.

This is probably trillions of dollars, many trillions of dollars for world infrastructure.

It's gonna be probably 20 or 30 percent of our global energy market.

That's a big job.

It's not gonna happen fast.

It's gonna happen slow, and it's gonna happen over the next few decades.

And we're gonna start with the things where it makes financial sense.

Investors can put money in and get a return on their investment, and that's where hydrogen's gonna be seen to have a big impact in the next decade.

Ultimately, the use of hydrogen depends on the economics.

The cost of making the hydrogen, the cost of storing it.

A lot of that depends on the scale.

Almost all technologies, as you scale them, they become dramatically cheaper.

Batteries, solar cells, cell phones, everything scales like this.

So where are the immediate places hydrogen is gonna have an impact?

I'll tell you a couple really big ones.

So one of them is fertilizer.

We make fertilizer by taking N2 nitrogen from the air, and we react it with hydrogen.

This is a chemistry that won several Nobel prizes.

This is how huge fraction of the world is fed synthetic fertilizer.

Right now that hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, it emits a lot of CO2.

It's a plug and play replacement into that process to use green electrolysis based hydrogen from water and renewable electricity.

That's an obvious place to do and that's a good 1, 1/2 percent of the world's energy use right there.

Other places where it makes a lot of sense is any very high temperature process.

So a good example is steel.

To heat up the iron and to mix it with carbon to make the products we need.

Right?

So right now that emits a lot of carbon dioxide.

Other areas that are very hard to get the carbon dioxide emissions out of with things like batteries is aviation.

The physics don't really work for a battery powered airplane.

We'll see small local transport, small commuter planes certainly, but it's gonna be very difficult and it's gonna be impossible to fly a jet from Los Angeles to New York on batteries, it's not possible.

So that's gonna probably be liquid hydrogen.

Freighters is another good example, if you have a freight ship, probably liquid hydrogen makes the most sense ultimately.

The companies that make the devices that produce hydrogen from electricity and water, they're growing very rapidly.

Every year, the costs are getting lower and their orders are getting larger.

Innovation in manufacturing is coming big time in this area and that's gonna lower the cost a lot.

Renewable electricity is getting cheaper and electrolysis hardware is getting cheaper, fuel cell hardware is getting cheaper, hydrogen management structures are getting cheaper, but we have a long ways to go.

A gallon of gasoline has about the same energy density as a kilogram of hydrogen.

Kilogram's 2.2 pounds of hydrogen.

Right now, it might cost you 10 dollars for a kilogram of hydrogen, but it's a pretty clear strategy to get to a dollar to 2 dollars per kilogram, And there, you're out competing gasoline costs.

Right?

So that would be great.

And I think we'll see that in the next 10 years or so.

Part of this is driven by policy and by government programs like the hydrogen hubs program from the Biden administration, which is sort of accelerating the deployment and de-risking technologies and local ecosystems that drive the deployment of production and use of hydrogen for the initial smart applications.

They put aside 8 billion dollars for hydrogen hubs.

There's one here in the Pacific Northwest.

There's one in California.

They're putting money on the table to help industry get started.

Saying, look, if you put in 50 million, we'll put in 50 million, and we're gonna build a plant that takes hydrogen made from electrolysis, and we're gonna use that to make fertilizer, and the farmers in that region are gonna use that fertilizer.

That makes a ton of sense.

You have a lot of wind.

You have a lot of hydro power.

It's another source of green electricity.

We have a lot of hydro power in the Pacific Northwest right now.

We have solar.

We have all the things we need.

You know, if you're in the port of Seattle, you know, and you wanna de-risk hydrogen as a maritime fuel, It it should it will be a great fuel, but we need the hydrogen.

We need the ships, and it's gonna be subsidized at the beginning, but most of the costs are actually still being born by industry.

Because they know ultimately, there's a lot of money to be made in the new energy economy.

It's just getting over that barrier.

How do you how do you displace bunker fuel, right, with the cost structure that it has?

You you need some help getting started.

So it's subsidizing the cost just like we actually subsidize gasoline costs.

It's all subsidized by the federal government.

So it's no different.

It's just a different way of subsidizing things.

It's very much how we built the interstates.

Right?

The government comes in, builds the interstate system, it accelerates the economy.

The foresight there, I think, is really good.

I think as those pieces come together, that that's the secret to deploying fuel cells in large scale.

Probably 5 to 10 year timelines, but that doesn't it's not really a problem.

That's kind of our timeline too for major major fuel cell adoption.

One of the great things about the, you know, American capitalist model is if there's money to be made, there'll be a lot of capital coming in to make that new economy happen.

But you have to demonstrate that money can be made, and we'll see.

It's still a tenuous case.

The economies of scale aren't yet there.

We're building towards that.

It's gonna take, actually, really international cooperation and competition to drive the prices down.

We're not gonna run the world on hydrogen.

Right?

But we're gonna run a piece of it on hydrogen.

If you go out and you look at a New Flyer bus, you you might see, you know, Ballard technology inside something like that.

And, you know, there was a time when I maybe was not convinced that we could ever make fuel cells an economically viable product, But I'm more convinced now than ever.

I mean, we are doing it.

It's not a question anymore.

What's your optimism level?

As somebody who works in this field of technology, works on renewable energy, how do you feel about our prospects with climate change?

Is that a challenge that humanity will ultimately address?

Will we reach net zero?

What are your thoughts?

I wouldn't be in this game if I didn't believe we could get there.

Well, it's inevitable.

In my mind with what I know now, there's really not something else viable on the table as far as I can see For sure, net zero is achievable through those kinds of sources of energy.

So do you feel good about the future, in a very general sense working in this industry?

I do.

And I, you know, I mentioned earlier, I think I've been in this industry for over 20 years, and I wouldn't stay if I didn't think it was worth working on.

Those that do recognize climate change will do something about it and will look heavily at renewables, and those are the people that I'm counting on.

This is the cycle of innovation.

Once people start selling these things, there's more money to do research and development.

The cycle of learning will continue.

The factories will get bigger, create more jobs in this field, and eventually, it'll eat into that energy economy, become a real substantial piece of it.

But I think at this stage, we need to investigate every technology, every option of societal change, of policy, of technology development to get there.

I think we can do it.

The public is starting to understand this.

Unfortunately, I think it's taken some wildfires, some floods, a lot of very significant natural disasters for people to start to understand changes happening right now.

But I think we're in the right place, And I think we're on a good path.

We just need to be steady.

We need to provide confidence that in 5 years, in 10 years, in 20 years, governments will still be supporting this work so that companies don't go to something where there's a cheap buck.

But they're like, if I stay the course, there is a huge opportunity here.

Renewable energy is not simply an aspirational area.

It is going to be very relevant to the world.

Energy Horizons is made possible in part by the Elizabeth Maughan Charitable Foundation, The Four Way Community Foundation, and by the Members of Southern Oregon PBS.

Thank you.