Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a: Energy Ranch

By Jan Wizinowich

Approaching Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a Ranch, a sylvan scene of sheep and horses grazing in pastures unfolds. Standing above this pastoral landscape is the Blue Planet Energy Lab, a powerhouse that produces 400 to 450 kilowatt hours of renewable energy a day that is used to power the ranch, stored in batteries or to make hydrogen fuel.

When owner Henk Rogers bought Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a Ranch ten years ago, he wasn’t thinking about hydrogen. “All I was thinking about was living sustainably. I wanted to grow my own food. I wanted to make my own energy. I wanted to take care of my garbage and I wanted to figure out all those things by living them,” says Henk.

The first thing Henk and his architect Vincent Paul Ponthieux (Paul) did was to build what is now the Energy Lab. “I asked Paul to design me a workshop because I like to tinker. I like to build things. We really didn’t have a clear picture of what we wanted to experiment with afterwards,” says Henk.

The Energy Lab, with its simple clean lines, is a monument to cutting edge, environmentally functional design. It highlights what can be done by understanding and using ambient natural processes. A giant wedge, the south facing roof slants at an optimum 20-degree angle and is covered with 360 Sharp solar panels that power the ranch and hydrogen production.

The north side of the building has tall cathedral-like windows that receive indirect north facing light. “All of the windows are on the north face so we get all of the light and none of the heat. If there’s any heat gain in the building at all, it floats up and vents out near the top. There’s no air conditioning needed,” says Henk.

We board Henk’s Tesla and glide silently up to the main house and sit out on the deck, where the pastoral landscape stretches across to Pu‘uanahulu, an ancient guardian of these parts. Before purchasing the ranch from Jerry King, the original 1906 house and surrounding structures were renovated and set up for executive retreats.

“My very first gathering in the room downstairs was a meeting about hydrogen. I invited Mitch Ewan, the expert on hydrogen from the Hawai‘i Natural Energy Institute (HNEI) at the University of Hawai‘i. That was the beginning. Hydrogen. It makes sense. It’s something you can store long term and it’s portable and cheap to store. Why aren’t trucks, buses, cars and even cooking being done with hydrogen?” asks Henk.

This question led to the formation of Blue Planet Research with Paul as director. The workshop was dubbed the Energy Lab, beginning an experimental odyssey into energy independence.

Energy Roundup

The first obstacle to tackle was making use of excess energy produced by renewables such as solar. “If you have an off-grid situation like us, it’s built for a cloudy day. In other words, the batteries have to be able to charge to 100% on a cloudy day. But what happens on a sunny day? The batteries are charged by 9 or 10 o’clock in the morning and you’ve got the rest of the day and all this energy being wasted because there’s nothing you can do with it,” says Henk.

Unless you use the excess energy to split water and create hydrogen fuel. The basic process of creating hydrogen is simple. Plants do something similar every day when they convert light into chemical energy, which is then stored for later use. It’s called photosynthesis.

To produce hydrogen you need to split water (H2O) into its two elements: hydrogen and oxygen. One method of doing this is through electrolysis, where running a current through water causes the oxygen to go to the positive pole and the hydrogen to accumulate on the negative pole. However, you need energy to power the electrolysis, so the only economically viable way to produce hydrogen is to use free or very cheap renewable energy, such as excess wind, solar or hydro power.

The lab’s 360 solar panels were producing an abundance of extra energy and Paul and Henk got to work to harness it, developing a battery storage system for the solar energy and using the excess to make hydrogen.

Just outside the lab is a small outbuilding that contains an industrial sized electrolysis system or the electrolyzer that produces the hydrogen fuel that powers the back-up power fuel cells. Two five foot tanks lay on their sides with a series of chambers at their feet, each “stack” with dividing membranes. Oxygen bubbles up on the side with the positive pole and the hydrogen bubbles up on the negative. They are then captured in the two separate tanks. The hydrogen is stored and the potentially volatile oxygen is released.

Outside there are large propane tanks where hydrogen fuel is stored at 250 psi. A fueling station stands adjacent to the electrolysis chamber. When the fuel is fed into the pump’s tanks it’s compressed to 6000 psi. To fuel a vehicle, the hose locks onto the intake and the hydrogen flows into the tank. “The majority of hydrogen vehicles are full at 5000 psi but as you use the fuel the pressure goes down. From the tank it either goes into a fuel cell or an internal combustion engine,” says Henk.

This is the end product; however, the conduits for all this abundance are inside the lab. There are seven bays, with the first four being workshop spaces and the second three living quarters for visiting engineers and scientists. We go into the fourth workshop bay and into a small side room. Henk points to a wall of black rectangular boxes, measuring about six by eighteen inches, called charge controllers.

“This is where the electricity comes in from the panels. Each charge controller handles 18 panels. We have 360 panels on the roof so we have 20 controllers. They regulate the electricity that comes off the panels,” says Henk.

From there, the electricity travels through “a big DC (Direct Current) bus”, a four inch diameter pipe that contains the wiring that carries the electricity to a couple of 1200 amp DC breakers on the facing wall. “This is control central for all the DC electricity. The solar panels and battery storage are always DC. It goes from here to the batteries or to the electrolyzer,” says Henk. “And if we need AC (Alternating Current) it goes through here (pointing out another set of panels). These are the inverters. We have five inverters and each does eight kilowatts,” he adds.

We move on to the number one bay that houses the batteries and the fuel cells. There are five stacks of Sony Lithium Ferrous Phosphate batteries, which replaced the failed vanadium redox flow batteries, which are cobalt based. “That was a terrible idea. They just never worked and cobalt is something you don’t want to have around,” says Henk. “So we were looking for our next battery. Sony showed me these batteries. They fit in server racks and so I’m thinking they were originally going to be uninterruptible power supply for server farms. I wondered what if I used them to take the ranch off grid?” he adds.

Because they are lithium iron phosphate based, the batteries don’t overheat and charge quickly. Henk opens up one of the racks, which contains 18 battery packs and two Battery Management Units (BMU). “One rack holds about 20 kilowatt hours. So this whole thing is about 100 kilowatt hours of battery storage. What’s inside each pack are batteries that look like slightly larger AA batteries. There’s a computer inside each BMU, which monitors the battery packs and makes sure they’re all charging evenly,” says Henk. The software communicating with the BMUs, called EMCc, was developed by an Energy Lab in-house team.

Another necessary component of the system is fuel cells, which convert hydrogen back into electricity. These are housed in cabinets just inside the big bay door and are being fed hydrogen through 3/8” diameter tubing. The fuel cell then converts hydrogen into electricity. “If the batteries go down to 12%, the fuel cells kick in to charge the batteries. They do this until the sun comes up.

A New Kind of Grid

Although the Hawai‘i Legislature has made a commitment to be 100% renewable energy powered by 2045, Henk thinks it could happen sooner. “I think we can go 100% for electricity by 2030, easily.” One of the difficulties faced by Hawai‘i Island and the producers of renewable energy such as solar and wind farms, is they are unable to put the excess power to work.

“They have to throw it away. In the contract they have with the electric company it says they can’t use it for anything else. We have to change that. The electric company can’t handle the excess electricity and they don’t want the solar farms selling their electricity directly to somebody else. That means that renewable energy providers have to charge inflated prices to break even. If we have to pay for the excess energy, then it’s too expensive. If we can get over the hump of, let’s not throw it away, then the price of electricity goes down,” says Henk.

The Hawai‘i Island Energy Cooperative (HIEC), a non-profit association of community leaders, was formed in January 2015. The hope is that a cooperative would be capable of addressing this and other energy issues facing Hawai‘i Island with a cooperatively owned electric utility.

Recently, eight organizations, including Henk’s non-profit Blue Planet Foundation, announced Drive Electric Hawaii, a mission to provide more electric ground transportation. That would mean more charging stations powered by renewables and an increase in the number of electric vehicles, including public transportation vehicles.

For their part, Blue Planet Research is exploring possibilities for transportation fueled by hydrogen fed fuel cells. “First we went after electricity, next we go after transportation. So if you’re a city or county and you own buses, when it’s time to replace the buses, replace them with hydrogen buses. And then there’s a demand for hydrogen. We have to create some legislation that allows solar and wind farms to use their excess power to make hydrogen. Then we make our own transportation fuel. So those are the steps that we’re working on right now,” says Henk.

Henk believes that Hawai‘i can eventually be off the grid and he likes to walk the talk of sustainable living. “My theory is that when you live it, then you can talk to other people and say, ‘You know what? It’s not that hard’,” says Henk.

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Energy Lab photo courtesy of Blue Planet Energy Lab
Contact Blue Planet Energy Lab: info@blueplanetenergy.net
Contact writer/photographer Jan Wizinowich: janwiz@gmail.com