I really have a fascination for the sun in many ways, and I hope to share some of that with you today. All right, so the sun is a star, as you probably all know. It's a very ordinary star. It's a very mediocre star, in fact. It's neither very bright nor very dim. It's not particularly large, not particularly small. In the context of all the stars in the universe, it's really not special at all. And if you were to ask a nighttime astronomer what they think about the sun, they'd probably tell you it's a really boring object to study. Why would you do that to yourself? But the sun, of course, is very special to us. It sits at the center of a solar system, and it provides the light and the heat that sustain life on Earth. And although there will come a day where the sun expands to engulf all the inner planets, probably including the Earth, that's not going to happen anytime soon. And it's currently enjoying a pretty, let's say, uneventful phase in its life. But the sun changes, and it changes in measurable ways, and it changes in ways that affect us. So that's how I'm going to start my talk. So just for context, this is not super interesting, but I thought I'd show you a slide with the structure of the sun and what we know about the structure of the sun. So maybe think of the sun as an onion. It's made up of layers, and in each one of these layers, different physical processes dominate so that the very inside of the sun, in the sun's core, the temperature and the pressure are so high that this nuclear reaction is taking place all of the time. And hydrogen atoms get combined to form helium atoms, and it releases vast amounts of energy in the process. Then this energy travels outwards, and it hits the next layer, the radiative zone. And in the radiative zone, the material is still very, very, very dense. It is so dense that it takes a photon, it's a particle of light, it takes a particle of light about a million years to travel through the radiative zone. And that's because it keeps colliding with the very, very dense material in that part of the sun. But eventually, photons make it through the radiative zone, and they hit the next layer. The next layer is called the convection zone. And in the convection zone, most of the heat is actually transported outwards by means of convection. Convection is what happens in a boiling pot of water. So you have hot material at the bottom of the pot, it becomes lighter, it rises, it releases heat at the top, and then it cools down, it gets dense, it plummets back in, and starts accruing heat again at the bottom of the pot. So this creates a cyclical process by which material that rises up and down kind of transports heat from the bottom to the top. So that's what happens in the convection zone of the sun. This is this area here. And the outer edge of the convection zone of the sun represents the outer edge of the sun's interior and the beginning of the sun's atmosphere. Now the sun is a gas, so the difference between the interior and the atmosphere has nothing to do with the interior being solid, like you would think in the Earth in some way. But the sun is a gas throughout. What makes the difference between the sun's interior and the sun's atmosphere is that by the time the energy reaches the first layer of the sun's atmosphere, which is called the photosphere, all of a sudden these photons, these particles of light, are free to escape into space. And they don't collide with an ethanol pretty much. So the sun's photosphere, this layer here, is a part of the sun, a part of the atmosphere of the sun from which most of the light that we see comes from. If we were to look at the sun with our naked eye, which I was reminded to tell you that you should never do, we probably know that, what you would see would be the sun's photosphere, basically. Above the photosphere sits a layer called the chromosphere. It's a very thin crust that only becomes visible to us during total solar eclipses. And it appears as a red ring glowing around the edge of the eclipse. And above that sits the solar corona. The solar corona is a very faint and very tenuous layer of the sun's atmosphere. And it expands many solar radii out into space. And it's also visible during, if you've ever seen a total solar eclipse, it's an amazing event. And you get to see the corona and its full glory. So I really recommend it if you ever have a chance. Next one in the US is in 2024. All right, so humanity realized a long time ago that the sun was not a perfect celestial body, that it was blemished with these dark spots that constantly appeared and disappeared off the surface of the sun. So we've known about sunspots for a while. The first written records of sunspots are from Chinese astronomers, several hundred years BC. But the observations, routine observations didn't start until the early 1600s with the invention of the telescope. And actually, at this point, maybe the longest, most continuous record of sunspot observations goes back to the time of Galileo, which is at that time at the early 1600s. At that point, astronomers didn't quite know what to make of these sunspots on the sun. Some thought there were shadows of planets that were undiscovered that were transiting across the sun. And some thought they were dark clouds in the sun's atmosphere itself. And they were obscuring the surface. But today, we know that sunspots are magnetic in nature. And they're just the footprints of very, very strong magnetic forces that pierce through the sun's surface and into its atmosphere. So sunspots look dark because they're cooler than their surroundings. And they're cooler than their surroundings because the strong magnetic forces that they harbor inhibit the propagation of heat to the surface. So that's what makes them dark. However, sunspots are not cold, by any means. Even the coldest of sunspots is still a couple of thousand degrees Celsius. But at the same time, it's still a couple of thousand degrees colder than its surroundings. So just a short digression to talk a little bit about magnetism. Magnetism, magnetic fields, magnetic forces, I will refer to all of these chains throughout my talk. But for all intents and purposes throughout the talk, they're the same thing. So magnetism is a force that is generated by an electrically charged particle in motion. And it's a force that is very intricately related to electric fields and electric forces. In fact, yeah, an electrically charged particle, when it moves, it creates a magnetic field. But a magnetic field that changes is capable of creating or creates an electric field and is capable of inducing an electric current. So why is this relevant to the sun? You may ask, well, the sun is, I said earlier that it's a gas, is something called a plasma, in fact. And a plasma is no more than a gas that is a mix of neutral and electrically charged particles. So because the plasma in the sun is constantly moving and churning and rotating, the electrically charged particles in this plasma are moving and churning and rotating.  So the sun is full of magnetism everywhere. The lifetime of one given sunspot is typically a few weeks, anything between a few hours and actually a few months. And if you were to look at the sun for long enough, let's say for a few months in a row, the pattern of the movement of the sunspots across its surface reveals the sun's rotation. So the sun rotates, and it rotates with a 27 day period. It rotates once every 27 days, approximately. It rotates faster at the equator than it does at the poles. Again, because it's not a solid, it can do this. And that's, maybe it's obvious to you guys. But that actually results in interesting phenomena, too. So because the sun rotates, it generates very, very strong magnetic fields in its interior, very, very strong. And because it rotates differentially, because it rotates faster at the equator than it does at the pole, it drags these magnetic fields around its interior. And they kind of wrap around the interior of the sun, creating this kind of donut-like pattern. These are very, very strong magnetic forces. And sometimes strands of these magnetic forces become loose or separated from the main strands. And they're buoyant for reasons I'm not going to get into. But they will rise up to the sun's surface in the form of loops. And they will push through the surface and into the sun's atmosphere in the form of these loops. And the place with the foot points of these loops intersects the solar surface. That's where sunspots appear. And these, remember, are very, very strong magnetic fields. So just because they're there and they cross the sun's surface, they prevent the propagation of heat to the surface. And then they create these dark patches, which are the sunspots. Sunspots, because of this particular pattern of magnetism of the sun and because of the nature of magnetism itself, sunspots always appear in pairs of opposite magnetic polarities. They can't be just the north sunspot by itself. It has to be accompanied by a south magnetic polarity in one way or another. So sunspots typically appear in pairs or in groups where you have both magnetic polarities. The number of sunspots on the sun's surface waxes and wanes with approximately every 11 years. And this is what we call the solar cycle, if you've ever heard of it. So the two pictures on the top show the face of the sun, the surface of the sun in one day in April 2014 and one day in October 2019. And you can see a stark difference. In April 2014, the sun was full of sunspots. And pretty much all of the month of October was like that. There was nothing going on. And this is because April 2014 was close to the maximum of the solar cycle. And now we're pretty close to the minimum of the solar cycle. So if you look at the graph on the bottom, this is one of the two or three graphs that I have in my entire talk. I apologize. But this graph shows the area of the sun covered by sunspots at a given time as a function of time on this axis. I can't do this on this axis. Since 1875, approximately, up to 2016. And so each vertical bar tells you for each day in this period of time how much surface of the sun was occupied by sunspots. And you can see that although there's a lot of intrinsic variation from day to day and from year to year, there's a staggering repetitive pattern that repeats itself every 11 years, whether it's maxima followed by minima pretty much consistently since we've started observing sunspots with an exception that I will mention later on. So this is the solar cycle. Not only the number of sunspots varies with an 11-year periodicity, but there's a lot of other things that actually change with this 11-year pattern. One of them is interesting is the location at which sunspots appear on the sun's surface. That changes with the solar cycle. This graph on the top shows the location on the sun. So this would be the north pole. This here at the bottom would be the south pole. And the line across the middle would be the equator. And again, it's a function of time since 1875. So if you look at the beginning of a solar cycle, you will see that sunspots tend to appear at high latitudes, both in the northern hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere, but away from the equator. And as the cycle progresses, don't mean to do that, sunspots start appearing close and closer to the equator until they get to the end of the cycle, where they tend to appear in a narrow band around the equator. And then all of a sudden, pretty much will sunspots vanish from the surface of the sun for a little while until the new cycle begins. And sunspots start appearing again at high latitudes. So this is another quantity that changes with the solar cycle, but there's a lot of other ones, such as the amount of light that the sun emits also varies with the solar cycle, be a maximum during the maximum of sunspots, a minimum during the minimum of sunspots, and so on. So space weather is kind of a hot topic nowadays. So space weather refers to the changes in the sun and on the sun and how they affect the interplanetary medium, and in particular, how they affect near-Earth space. And just like weather on Earth, space weather can come in many different phenomena, in many different shapes. And just like weather on Earth, there's storms. So solar storms are impulsive events in which the sun releases vast amounts of radiation and particles into space. And these particles can travel at really high speeds. So I'm going to show you some examples of solar storms. This one here is called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, for short. The video shows a composite of observations from three different telescopes, but these are actual observations of the sun. CME, or coronal mass ejection, is just a huge bubble of plasma threaded with magnetic fields that kind of is ejected from the sun's surface over the course of several hours. The amount of material in a large coronal mass ejection can reach the billion tons of mass. And the speeds at which this material travels in space can be anywhere from 300 kilometers per second to 3,000 kilometers per second. And realize that, as I said, per second, this is equivalent to saying multiple million miles per hour at the largest speeds. This storm here is a filament eruption. It's an amazing video. I love watching it. A filament is a large concentration of cool and dense material from the sun. This is this here, this big pointer, that one, that is suspended above the sun's surface, and it's confined and supported by magnetic forces. The magnetic forces that support it against the action of gravity are anchored below the sun's surface. And this filament, I'm just actually showing the eruption in this movie, but that filament has been sitting there for a while before it erupts. So these magnetic forces just supporting it and holding it against the action of gravity, and they anchored below the solar surface. And the motions of the plasma at the sun's surface and below the surface twist and stretch these magnetic fields, loading them up with energy. And sometimes they get to a point where they can't take it anymore, and they break. And they break, releasing all of the material and the energy that was trapped inside them, which is what is happening right there in that movie. This movie actually shows a different type of solar storm, too, just underneath the filament. When it's ejected, you see these two ribbons of light that appear. This is a solar flare. A solar flare is just a sudden and very, very intense brightening around the sun's surface. And all of these solar storm phenomena, coronal mass ejections, filament eruptions, and solar flares oftentimes come together, but they don't have to. They can also happen independently. So the sun's magnetism is not confined to its interior nor to its surface. It actually extends out into space. This is an old picture of a solar eclipse. And you see this is what you see. You see the corona over the sun in its magnificence. And it's kind of structured. So that is the magnetism of the sun extending out into space that structures that material. And it stands out into space and is carried away by the solar wind. So the sun has a wind. It's constantly and relentlessly expelling material into space. And it drags the magnetism of the sun away with it. And because the sun rotates, they both kind of get dragged out in this spiral pattern throughout the entire solar system. And this spiral pattern creates pathways along some of these solar storms can travel. The Earth has a magnetic field, too, as you know. And it creates a protective bubble around our planet called the magnetosphere. I don't know much about the magnetosphere. I'm going to tell you all I know about it. So the place where the magnetosphere and the interplanetary magnetic field from the sun, the spiral one, the place where these two meet is called the magnetopause. And at the magnetopause, the Earth's magnetic field points north. And it has done so for the last several hundred thousand years. I forget the numbers. But the Earth's magnetic field doesn't change very often. On the other hand, the sun's magnetic field changes all the time. And that interplanetary magnetic field at the magnetopause coming from the sun can be oriented in any direction and principle. When it happens to point south, it cancels out part of the Earth's magnetic field. And it peels off layers of the protective shield around the Earth. And it allows particles from the sun to penetrate into the Earth's atmosphere. This is one of the things that causes aurora, or northern lights or southern lights. These are energetic particles from the sun that penetrate through the Earth's magnetosphere, collide with the atoms and the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere, which get excited and release little bursts of light. And when seen all combined, they create these wonderful natural phenomena called the aurora. This is just one effect of space weather on Earth. But there's multiple other effects of space weather, some more disruptive than others. And in fact, different types of space weather can mess with different types of technologies on Earth. For instance, a solar flare can emit powerful x-rays that can disrupt radio communications. Solar energetic particles from the sun can cause failures in electronics on spacecraft and spacecraft themselves. And coronal mass ejections can create what are called geomagnetic storms. These are disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field. And these, in turn, can induce currents in power lines on the ground, disrupting power grid operations. These things are also responsible for disruption in the GPS navigation system, for instance. So the effects of space weather can make us really vulnerable, because we depend on a lot of these technologies. On September 1, 1989, Sir Richard Carrington was looking at the sun through his telescope. And all of a sudden, he saw this massive flare in a group of sunspots. This is his drawing. And these two white bananas are his representation of the flare. A few hours later, there's records of aurora seen at really low latitudes, really close to the equator. It's far south of Cuba, in the Caribbean. And there's anecdotal records of miners in the Rocky Mountains. I had to look this up in Wikipedia. But miners in the Rocky Mountains are getting up to make breakfast in the middle of the night, because the aurora was so bright that I thought it was morning. So this is a very rare event. This doesn't happen very often. There's records of telegraph disruption all across North America and Europe, and even anecdotal evidence of telegraph operators getting electrical shocks because of the induced currents in telegraph wires. The measurements of the Earth's magnetic field disturbance indicate that, well, two things. This storm that happened when Sir Richard Carrington saw his flare took about 17 hours to travel from the sun to the Earth. That is a long way. So it was probably propagating at speeds over 5 million miles per hour. So that's a really fast solar storm. The other thing that we know is that its magnitude hitting the Earth has not yet been surpassed in the space age. There's statistical studies out there that say that the chance of a storm like this, of this magnitude happening within the next decade, is about 12%. But the sun is a spherical object, and storms can happen anywhere on the sun, and definitely do not have to happen in the line of sight of the Earth. They can happen anywhere on the sun and not hit us. So most of the times, it will probably not hit us. But it's something to take into account. So I hope that with this introduction, I've made it clear why the magnetism of the sun is important to the sun itself and obviously to space weather. So magnetism is at the root of all space weather. And I find it funny. It makes me feel important to this topic. And of course, we need to be able to forecast space weather in order to be able to protect ourselves from its effects. But in order to do that, we need to understand the magnetism of the sun. We need to quantify it. We need to measure it. So that's what I'm here to talk about. How do we measure the sun? And in particular, how do we measure its magnetism? The first thing I need to say is that solar physics and all of astronomy, pretty much, is a science based on remote sensing. We do not have the technology to travel to the sun. We measure things there directly. So we can only infer information about the physical conditions on the sun by looking at the light that it emits. Remote sensing, as you know, you're very familiar with it because it happens in everyday life. But it's the science and the art of measuring, identifying an object without coming to direct contact with it. So we measure light. And from the light, we infer physical properties. So I will constantly talk about measuring pressures, measuring densities, measuring we don't measure. We infer these things. It's just jargon. How do we do this? Well, we need three different elements. We need telescopes first. Telescopes help us capture the light and magnify the image of astronomical objects. And we need instruments which analyze the light, analyze the different properties of the light. And then we need detectors that record the light. Astronomers nowadays do not look through the eyepieces of the telescopes. They record the light on digital media. So telescopes. Telescopes are just arrangements of mirrors and or lenses. His purpose is to magnify the image of an object that is distant. The telescope was invented in the early 1600s. And although I used to think that Galileo was the inventor of the telescope, Galileo is not the inventor of the telescope. But he was certainly one of the first people to point it to the skies. So if we were to look at the sun through our human eyes, which we don't remember. All right, the human eye can discern any object that is bigger than, I forget, one minute of arc that subtends an angle larger than one minute of arc. This means that a human eye is able to discern something that is a third of a meter big at a distance of one kilometer, or larger, of course. The sun subtends in the sky about 31 minutes of arc. So with our resolution, with the eye resolution of one minute of arc, we can actually see details on the sun if we were to look at it. There's not just a point in the sky like all the other stars. However, if we look at the sun through a telescope, we get to see a lot more detail. This image here is from the HMI instrument on the Solar Dynamics Observatory. And it's just an image of the surface of the sun, and you can see a sun spot there. And as I zoom in, you will see how much more detail HMI can see than we would see with our eye. It's about 60 times more detail. The HMI telescope is able to see the equivalent of something that is half a centimeter big at a distance of one kilometer. So that is much better than what we could do. But if we were to look at this exact same sun spot with a different telescope, that is much more powerful. This is the Swedish Solar Telescope on the Canary Islands in Spain. You can actually see even way more detail in it. The Swedish Solar Telescope is about seven times better than the HMI instrument. So what determines the spatial resolution of a telescope? What determines the amount of detail that a telescope can see on the sun's surface? Well, there's many different factors, of course, that influence this. But the absolute limiting factor is the size of the telescope. What we call the aperture, which is the physical diameter, the physical size of its main mirror or its main lens that captures the light and converges, that creates the image. So the HMI instrument on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory sees the surface of the sun like this. It's a little blurry. If we look at it with the Swedish Solar Telescope, as I forget to say, HMI is about 14 centimeters big. That's the size of the telescope. The Swedish Solar Telescope is about one meter big, and it can do this much better. So one meter, more or less. The US is currently building the largest solar telescope in the world ever. And it's going to be four meters in diameter. It's huge. From here, just the main mirror, not talking about the building. The building is a lot bigger than that. So scientists are really, really excited in the solar physics community to see what the telescope is going to reveal. Because it's undoubtedly going to answer some scientific questions that we've not been able to answer before. But it's also undoubtedly going to bring up new scientific questions. Because we're going to be able to see the sun have never seen it before in a lot more detail. So my last slide about telescopes. I'm going to try to explain why we put telescopes in space. So sometimes we put telescopes in space, on board a spacecraft. And it's really, really, really expensive to put a telescope in space compared to putting it on the ground. It's also a lot riskier. And it's hard to upgrade or hard to fix instruments if they happen to fail. So why would we do that in the first place? Well, there's several reasons that they all have to do with the Earth's atmosphere. So the Earth's atmosphere gets in the way of astronomical observations. It blurs them. If you've ever looked through the hot air above the flames of a campfire to an object behind a campfire, you see how it flickers and shimmers. That's because the hot pockets and cold pockets are there above that campfire and making a blur in your image. And that's exactly what the Earth's atmosphere does to astronomical observations. You can go outside right now, look at the nighttime sky, and you will see all those stars that kind of flicker. They don't really flicker. It's an optical illusion created by the Earth's atmosphere. So by sending a telescope into space, we bypass that. We get rid of the Earth's atmosphere. The other reason we send a telescope into space has also to do a lot with the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's atmosphere absorbs different types of light, some types of light that come from the sun. The very same ozone layer that protects us from ultraviolet radiation, have to look at you, prevents that ultraviolet radiation from reaching the ground. And that's a shame in some ways because there's a lot of diagnostic potential about the physical conditions in the sun in the ultraviolet light that emits. So if we want to measure this ultraviolet light, we have to get outside the Earth's atmosphere to be able to detect it. So that's another reason we send telescopes to space. But both ground-based and space-based observations have their advantages and disadvantages and they're very complementary. So they're both important to do. So the next element for observing the sun is instruments. And I can't speak about instruments without speaking about the properties of light. These two first properties that I'm highlighting here, we're all very used to, they're kind of intuitive because the human eye can perceive them. Talking about brightness or intensity, which is self-explanatory, I would say, and then color or frequency or wavelength, they're all equivalent. So color is a little bit more interesting because the human eye is not able to see all colors. They're certainly able to see the colors in the rainbow. This is the visible light, the colors that we're used to see in. But there's a lot of colors of light that we do not see, such as radio waves, microwaves, x-rays and gamma rays. These are all types of light, but we're not able to see them. The human eye is just not sensitive to them. There's a third property of light that we're maybe a little bit less familiar with just because the human eye cannot, it was not sensitive to it or barely sensitive to it. And it's polarization. Polarization is a little bit hard to explain, but it's a property of light as a wave because light is an electromagnetic wave.  And you're now creating a wave in this horizontal plane. That's the type of linear polarization. It's horizontal linear polarization. Now take that same skipping rope and move your arm in a circle like this. And you create this spiral pattern that kind of propagates along the rope, okay? That is called a circularly polarized wave because you move in your arm in a circular motion. Circularly polarized waves can happen in two directions, counterclockwise or clockwise. A linearly polarized wave can be horizontal, vertical, or any angle in between, of course. And then you can have a combination of all of these. You don't necessarily have to happen separately. Talk a little bit more about polarization later, but first let me talk about the light spectrum, about the colors of light. So if you were to take the light from the sun and break it down in all of its different colors, what you would get is the sun spectrum. Sun spectrum looks like this, at least the visible part of the spectrum. Now if you look carefully, you see it's littered with dark lines. These dark lines are called spectral lines and they're just the footprints of the atoms and the molecules that form the sun's atmosphere. So each type of atom and each type of molecule in the sun's atmosphere, anyway, imprints a very, very specific pattern of dark lines in the spectrum of light. So just by measuring the spectrum and by virtue of looking at where these lines are, we can begin to find out what the chemical composition of the sun is because the patterns of line tells us what elements are present in the sun. Even beyond this, it actually tells us how many of each type of atom and each type of molecule we have in the sun, even more than this. If you look at these lines, some are broad, some are narrow, some are very faint, some are very dark, they have different shapes and the shapes of these spectral lines so give us information about the physical conditions in the sun's atmosphere. And it's not worth going into how because it's a very complicated science but we can look at these spectra and extract information about the pressure, about the density, about the temperature, we can extract information about how the plasma is moving and so on and so forth. So it has an incredible diagnostic capacity. This is also the reason why if we observe the sun in different lights, in different colors, we get to probe different physical conditions. So some colors are sensitive to high temperatures, some colors are sensitive to low temperatures, some colors are sensitive to high pressures, some are sensitive to low pressures. So each color is probes a different physical regime in the sun's atmosphere and this is equivalent to saying that each color probes a different layer of that onion, of that sun's atmosphere. So different colors help us probe the physical conditions in the sun's atmosphere as a function of height. All right, polarization. I said it was a property of light as a wave, right? Most sources of light are unpolarized. This is equivalent to shaking that skipping rope in random directions and not creating an organized pattern in the movement. But there are some physical mechanisms that can polarize the light. The one that you're probably most familiar with is reflection off of flat, shiny surfaces. So if you drive in east in the morning, when the sun is low and it reflects on the road where you're driving on, it produces this crazy glare and it's really annoying. So you put on your polarized sunglasses and you eliminate the glare. So what's happening there? The reflection of the road, of that parallel surface, becomes polarized horizontally because reflections create polarization. When you put your sunglasses on, they eliminate all the horizontal polarization and they only allow the vertical polarization to pass through to your eyes. So you're eliminating only the reflection and you're keeping everything else. So that's how you eliminate the glare of shiny surfaces, reflective surfaces. In the sun, there's a different mechanism that creates polarization and that's the presence of magnetism. So magnetism creates polarization in the light that is emitted from the sun. So if you're looking at an area of the sun that contains magnetic forces, the light emitted from that area will be polarized. And the strength and the type of polarization will depend on the strength and the orientation of that magnetic force. So just by looking at the types of polarization at different locations on the sun, you can begin to infer information about the magnetic field, both in strength and what direction in space they're pointing. And this is in summary what we do with, what I do with instruments, how I measure the sun, there's a lot more instruments out there, but the instruments I typically work with are first polarimeters. Polarimeters allow us to measure the polarization of light. They allow us to select different polarizations and then measure that light. And then on the bottom, instruments that allow us to measure the spectrum in different ways. And I've highlighted two here. There's way more than these, there's a combination of these.  You shine the light from the sun through it and it spreads it out into the spectrum. And then you put a camera behind it and you take a photograph of the spectrum. So you take a photograph of all the colors. A filtograph is a type of instrument that allows us to select one specific color and then take a picture of the sun in that specific color. And both instruments are very useful and complementary in what would they do. So this is what I do. And this is what Lorena introduced me. This is a science I do, it's called spectropolarimetry. Spectropolarimetry, if you look at the etymology of the word, is the measurement metric of the intensity and the polarization of light as a function of color, function of the spectrum. And why do I do this? Well, because it's a really incredible, powerful tool for diagnosing the physical conditions in the sun's atmosphere, including its magnetism, which is where my heart lies, I guess. So what does the sun look like in polarized light? This picture here is another image taken by the HMI instrument on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory. And what it's showing, it's called a magnetogram, by the way, it's showing circular polarization measurement of the sun, of the surface of the sun in circular polarization. So gray means no polarization, and black and white means the two circular polarizations, the right-handed and the left-handed. And you may infer, from what I said earlier, where there's polarization, there's magnetism, because that is the main mechanism in the sun that generates polarization. So we know that these areas with strong black and white have magnetic fields. So are they sunspots, you may ask? If we compare the magnetogram to a picture of the sun in visible light, we can see several things. First, the concentrations, the very, very strong concentrations of black and white correspond to locations of sunspots, always. However, the circular polarization always extends beyond the location where there's sunspots, and that's because there's magnetism also outside of sunspots. It's just not strong enough to make it dark. So magnetism is around sunspots, but it's just weaker, and it doesn't create the sunspot area around it. The other thing that you can notice is that there's kind of a salt and pepper pattern everywhere away from sunspots in the magnetogram. So if we were to zoom in with a more powerful telescope and a more sensitive instrument to an area on the sun where there's apparently nothing, we would see that there's circular polarization everywhere on the sun, and it changes with time, and it changes all the time. It's constantly emerging and submerging, being created, and being destroyed. So the sun is riddled with magnetic activity at the smallest spatial scales, not only at the large spatial scales. All right, so we now know how to measure the spectrum of the sun, and we know how to measure its polarization. So how do we interpret these measurements? How do we turn them into magnetic field or pressure or temperature without going deep into this at all? And this is the only equation of my talk, I swear. But we use theory, and we use equations to interpret the measurements. The most important equation for this particular problem is called the radiative transfer equation, and it's that one. And the radiative transfer equation tells us how light is generated and how its spectrum and its polarization get changed as the light travels through the sun's atmosphere and towards us. So if we understand how the light travels, how it's generated, and how its spectrum and its polarization travel, we can begin to understand how to interpret the measurements of polarization. And we also use computer codes. Computer codes call spectral line inversion codes. These codes implement these equations that we need for interpretation, and they solve them because these equations are really hard to solve with pen and paper. And they solve them in a way that they try to make the solution of the equation match the observations that we make with telescopes and instruments. And when they are able to match these two things, what we get is our best guess or our best estimate over the physical conditions in the sun's atmosphere that led to the generation of that specific observation. So the video I'm about to show you is shows an observation of polarization from the HMI instrument in the Solar Dynamics Observatory. I did work for this project, so that's why I quoted so much. But the measurements of polarization that I'm going to show have already been interpreted in terms of magnetism. So they've already been interpreted through this equation and these computer codes. And what you will see is a couple of small sunspots on the sun's surface. These ones here. I'm going to zoom into this area. And all of a sudden, new magnetism is going to start emerging from the sun's interior onto the surface and interacting with those two sunspots. So here you are. We zoom in. These are these two sunspots. And now all this new stuff is coming up, and it started interacting with already other sunspots. So here what I'm showing, I told you it was already interpreted in terms of magnetism. So red and blue are showing the main magnetic polarities, north and south. North is magnetism that is mainly pointing towards you. And south is magnetism that is mainly pointing away from you into the screen. But then each one of these little arrows, each one of those tiny little things, actually shows the actual direction of the magnetic field for each point in the solar surface in the group of these sunspots. And what you can see is the new magnetism emerges. Kind of they separate. They pull away. They rotate. The sunspots rotate. And they drag the magnetism with them. And creating these very, so you can get the sense of how they stretch and how they twist as they move along. And that is what's happening to the magnetism in these sunspot regions. So what are these measurements for? When we do all of this, why do we do it? I'm going to show you a list of examples of use cases for these kind of measurements. Well, first of all, just to repeat the same thing over and over again, measurements of polarization on the sun allow us to identify magnetized regions in the sun. They allow us to quantify the magnetism in sunspot regions. And they allow us to quantify how they change with time. And this allows scientists to, for instance, see how the magnetism gets rearranged during a solar storm and how it changes during an impulsive event from the sun. And this, in turn, may eventually allow us to try to find clues as to what indicators there are pre-eruption that tell us that an eruption is going to happen. So this has an interesting potential from the forecast perspective. How can we predict a solar storm? Is there anything in the magnetism before the storm that is going to tell us that a storm is about to happen? Then measurements of the sun over decades and even centuries allow us to study long-term changes on the sun. They allow us to study things like the solar cycle, that 11-year variation of the sun. It also allows us to study things like epochs of grand minima. I didn't mention this earlier, but there are times, spans of several decades on the sun at a time where it doesn't show a solar cycle. And we don't know why. It doesn't have sunspots. The first one and last one recorded, in fact. This was very close to the beginning, the invention of a telescope and routine observations of sunspots. But there was this period in the late 1600s and the early 1700s where there were barely any sunspots for decades on the sun's surface. And it's called the Monde Minimum. And there's a lot we don't know about these epochs. On the other hand, very fast cadence observations of the sun will allow us to study solar storms in detail before, during, and after. And it will allow us to understand the sequence of events, the chain of events that happens before and during a solar storm. Measurements of the sun's magnetism at the sun's surface allow us to make a three-dimensional reconstruction of the magnetism of the outer layers of the sun's atmosphere and into space. We do this using theoretical equations, Maxwell's equations. And we do this because it's really hard to measure the magnetism in the sun's corona. I mean, some people do it, but there's a fair amount of uncertainty associated to those measurements. So if you want to know what the magnetism of the sun is in the outer layers in the corona and beyond, we need to aid ourselves with this kind of tool, with magnetic field extrapolations, that are based on measurements at the surface and then a certain set of assumptions and some equations to extrapolate into outer layers. Of course, because we're making assumptions, our assumptions could be right, could be wrong. So there's a limitation to these kind of tools. Observations help us constrain numerical simulations. Numerical simulations are just computer implementations of mathematical models that describe physical systems. And they allow us to study physical systems that are really too hard to understand analytically. And by this, I mean, it's really hard to solve the equations that describe these physical systems just using pen and paper. We have to use the process and power of computers to be able to solve them. These equations are typically very general, and they could be applied to a variety of physical scenarios. So by constraining them with observations, we can make them produce solutions in the physical scenario that we're interested in, or at least in the range of parameters of physical scenario we're interested in. This is a simulation that I love by one of my colleagues, Suhum Fang. It's a simulation of a coronal mass ejection. And here, gray represents the sun's surface and black and white at two magnetic polarities, like in a magnetogram. They're probably two sunspots. But remember, this is a simulation, not an observation. And these red and yellow lines represent the magnetic structure in the atmosphere of the sun. And as new stuff emerges, new magnetism emerges down here, and new material emerges from under the surface, represented in blue, kind of it slowly rises, and then all of a sudden it reaches this point where it just explodes catastrophically. This is a coronal mass ejection. Observations, lastly, also help us test the robustness of models. Models ideally mimic observations of the sun, observations of the actual behavior of the sun. If a model is able to mimic an observation, whether it's in a specific way or in a statistical way, in a general way, then we can assume that the physical assumptions in the model and the physical processes in the model are describing the physical processes in the sun. But if a model is not able to describe an observation, then we know that there's something wrong with the model. And I say this from the perspective of an observational solar physicist. There's never anything wrong with observations. It's always the models. It's always, you know. But anyway, that would tell us that we need to take a model back to the drawing board and figure out what physical ingredients are missing. What are we missing that is not describing the observations that we make? Okay, so there's a lot of usefulness for these observations, of course, because they represent or they show reality in one way or another. This particular numerical simulation, this is numerical simulation, not an observation. Sometimes it's really hard to tell because it's so good. Basically shows a solar flare in the sun's atmosphere. And this was done by my colleague, Matthias Rempel, and his collaborators. So this takes me, okay, frontiers of data interpretation, I don't know what to call this, but in the last few years, the field of solar physics and many other fields have been resorting to artificial intelligence to address some of the problems and certain types of artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning. And these have been, I guess it's yet to prove, but they're really powerful tools to help us analyze the large volumes of data that are coming from telescopes and from models these days. And it's humanly impossible to do with a human brain, or many of them actually. And then they're also really good. These techniques are also really good at detecting subtle patterns hidden in the numbers. So there's this very promising avenue for diagnostics of data in machine learning that I don't know anything about, so please do not ask questions. So this takes me, I'm really close to the end. This is what my lab does. My lab does all of these things and many other things, actually. The High Altitude Observatory of ENCA studies basically the sun and earth connections. We want to understand how the sun's variability affects the Earth's atmosphere. So the science that we do spans all the disciplines from solar and heliospheric physics all the way to the Earth's ionosphere, magnetosphere, ionosphere, and Earth's atmosphere. And we do this with the mission of trying to inform and improve space weather forecasting. And we combine theory, observations, and numerical simulations to create this big picture understanding of the sun Earth system. We do not do space weather forecasting. The Space Weather Forecasting Center over at NOAA off of Broadway in 28th do space weather forecasting. And I don't know much about that, but I was listening to this talk a few years ago at the HEO and it was this forecaster from the Space Weather Forecaster, Space Weather Prediction Center, sorry. And he was saying that space weather forecasting lies several decades behind Earth's weather forecasting, both in accuracy and in sophistication. And there is a strong need for more reliable and more timely forecasts of space weather because there's a lot of technologies in Earth that depend on this. And space weather makes us vulnerable. So with this, I wanted to finish me talk with this image which I really like. It puts into perspective our place in the universe in my opinion. This is a picture taken from the Boyer year one spacecraft when it was about to leave the solar system. And that inside that blue circle is the Earth. And it looks just like a speck of dust and it just looks really fragile and really vulnerable. And whether you want it or not, we live inside the atmosphere of this star and we are subject to its temperamental behavior. And magnetism is at the root of all of space weather, larger, small or relentless or impulsive. Magnetism is the culprit. So only by quantifying the magnetism and the evolving magnetism of the sun, we can begin to be able to predict its behavior and to protect ourselves from its effects. So thank you.


ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. And welcome to Stand the Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies here under the state of Hawaii and business economic development, particularly. And welcome to our show today. This is one of our shows where we have a repeat guest that comes in and talks about some of the more technical aspects of energy and grids and things like that. And we're going to get into that. But before we get into that, I want to make up for some lacking I had last week when CERFCO Hawaii opened up their very first hydrogen station available to the public to refuel vehicles here in Hawaii using hydrogen. And so they had a great ceremony. It was out in Mapunapuna, which for those of you that aren't familiar with the island, is right below Tripler Army Medical Center and between the airport and downtown Honolulu. They had taiko drums. The gentleman on the image right now is Mr. Tanaka. And he led the team that actually designed the Toyota Mirai. I got to spend about 20 minutes with him talking about his design work and what his design team went through and giving him a good pat on the back for a really beautifully done piece of work. Anyway, the station is up there now. It's up and running. Governor Ige was the keynote speaker. So he was and he was really excited. In fact, I talked to some of the folks from the state legislature. And when the governor gets a chance to, I would call it geek out in honor of our show title today, but he gets a chance to be an engineer and talk about technology. He gets all excited like a young kid at Christmas time talking about things like this. And he's he's really excited about hydrogen technology that's available now in Hawaii. What you see on the screen right now is actually the station itself. The two dispensers you see one is labeled H35 and the other one is labeled H70. H35 means 350 bar pressure or low pressure hydrogen. And H70 means 700 bar pressure, which is high pressure hydrogen. And that's because some of the vehicles like industrial vehicles normally use the lower pressure because they don't care how big the tanks are. And then the vehicles need higher pressure because they put smaller tanks that hold higher pressure inside. And as you can see, we had a Kahu there to do the blessing and he walked around the entire facility doing a Hawaiian blessing. And with the governor and the key folks at store and I believe Mark in the picture from CERVCO who helped put all this stuff together. And then the last images of them filling up the car symbolically for the first time. But what I found was they've actually been driving these vehicles. The folks at CERVCO that work there have been able to drive these vehicles around. And the one neat thing that I heard from them was they expected range of this vehicle supposed to be around 300 to 320 miles on a Philip. And what they've actually been experiencing is closer to 400 and around 400, 380 to 400 miles between Phillips. So even more impressive technology than they anticipated. So again, kudos to CERVCO for bringing the chicken and the egg to Hawaii. That being the vehicles and the station. To me, that's a big, huge tipping point for hydrogen in the state of Hawaii. And we really appreciate the effort to CERVCO and the Toyota folks have made to bring a clean, sustainable transportation model to Hawaii and put it on the road. So now we get into our real topic today, which is I'm telling you geeks with superpowers. That's what I got on here today. We got Ryan, women's thanks again, Ryan, for coming. That's 10 for a third Friday of every month. We got Ryan here from Burns and McDonald to talk on the more technical side of energy. And today we're going to kind of continue on that sustainability track. And we left off last time talking about energy storage and the grid and and different things like that. And we're we're kind of going to focus in a little bit today on one of the lesser known and actually not fully developed, but has a lot of potential and ways of storing energy. And that is compressed. And we're going to talk a little bit about compressed air, which normally on the mainland, that would be a salt caverns or some big void in the geography that a city or a state has that they can pump air into it and build pressure up in there. And then at night when they don't have solar or when the wind stops, the air pressure can be released back through turbines to generate electricity. And that system is being proven has been proven already is actually in at least some limited use in some big cities. But we don't have a whole lot of salt caverns in Hawaii. So a kind of a sister technology is putting balloons or at least pressure vessels underwater and using those to store a compressed gas because underwater you have automatically water pressure for anything that's under the water. So so Ryan, maybe you can give us just kind of a picture overall of how these systems might work and why they work. Sure. I'm going to go back one step and explain why we're talking energy storage. OK. A few weeks, a few shows ago, we talked about just going 100 percent renewable and there are some countries out there that are 100 percent renewable, but those countries are basing themselves either on geothermal or hydropower, which from an energy storage standpoint, they have a lot of energy behind them. Whether it's hydro, you're always getting water pushing down on the dam or geothermal, you're always creating that heat. So they've already got their energy storage built in. We don't have that ability necessarily geothermal. There is some but a big baseload here in Hawaii. So in fact, if you look at just the big island to make your point, you look at the big island by itself, it's already exceeded the renewable energy thresholds that HECO has. They're looking at HECO maybe is 18 to 25 percent renewables and they're getting saturated already. But on the big island, they have geothermal and they have hydroelectric on top of their other renewables. But those are firm baseload renewables. So they don't have to store that stuff. It gives you that power automatically on demand and you can run it or not use it as you see fit, but it's always there. And that allows them the neighbor islands in many cases to exceed that threshold of intermittent renewable because they have these other more stable renewables to use. That's right. So you get that big source of energy behind it. And when we say energy storage, it doesn't mean that it's already converted to power to electricity and then stored in some fashion lithium, lithium ion or hydrogen. We're talking a diesel tank sitting underneath the generator. That is it. That is energy storage. And the reason we need that is so that we can fluctuate how much energy we're producing at any time. When we go to 100 percent renewable and we start talking and bringing in a lot of solar, we don't have that throttle. We don't have that tank that we can fill up and empty at will. You know, diesel tanks, if if there's a big hurricane and we couldn't get new barges into offload, we'd be using up that energy storage while we're waiting for new energy to come in. So energy storage is important. We have it today in the sense of fuel tanks. When we go renewable, there's a more there's a larger need for massive scale energy storage when you start when you start putting in what I would call massive amounts of solar, because they need to balance each other out. Simple lithium ion battery is just not going to provide you days, weeks, months of energy storage like fuel tanks do right now. Which is why we start talking about hydrogen. So much more energy dense. But where are you going to store massive scale hydrogen? And then you and I were talking a little bit. I said, well, you got compressed air systems on the mainland that deal with salt caverns. But then there is a company or companies looking at underwater storage. These would just a balloon that you're going to fill up underwater. And the pressure on the water around it is what's providing the pressure acting back on the hydrogen. Whereas above ground, you're creating the bigger tanks, thicker walls so that you can compress the hydrogen or the air into those tanks at a very high pressure so you can decrease this footprint that you have. You move it underwater. It's just a just a balloon and you're using the water to act on the hydrogen instead of really thick walls. So no one is doing this hydrogen underwater storage. It's it's just something I think you and I just kind of throw out the technology on in that respect is pretty much brand new. And I've only seen a couple of companies or a couple universities that are actually testing at the summit in Canada. I think a couple in the UK, but not a whole lot has really been proven. And as we know, living here in Hawaii, you've got to respect the ocean for a lot of reasons. I mean, number one, the currents are powerful. Number two, the salt corrosion. If it's if it's got any corrosion factors at all, whether it's aluminum or steel or whatever, it's going to corrode. And and then you have creatures, boring creatures, you know, mollusks, barnacles, things that grow on anything that doesn't move in the ocean after a while starts collecting this unless you have some way of mitigating it. So we haven't even seen anything that's been put in saltwater for any length of time to decide whether or not it's going to survive. So it's got to be pretty durable, too. And so there's there's still quite a bit on the technology side. It's got to be overcome with these technologies. But they're they're there. And, you know, maybe it's time to start looking at those, especially if we're really looking at 2045 in Hawaii as a goal. Maybe this is another alternative for Hawaii Electric to use to store power, store energy. I think so. I think there's the technologies are available to apply towards this concept. It's just a concept at this point in time that we're talking about over lunch. But that that being storing hydrogen and using that compressed air storage is a is a known technology that's been used for for some time under water, compressed air storage is a little bit different. But yeah, when we apply if we have the drive to apply the engineering, it's theoretically very possible to to to store massive amounts of hydrogen in which which case we could use as energy reserves for the grid. Energy reserves to fuel cars. I don't know if planes and ships will be hydrogen fuel that someday. But when you talk that amount of of hydrogen or energy stored, you'd rather have you got to pick, I don't want to say pick your poison, but you got to choose one or the other. There's some type of compromise.  You're probably going to choose just a big ball of air under water. I mean, the problem that would that could happen there is. The air comes out. Yeah. And then it's back in the air. Yeah, if the air comes out, then you got more air. But if the diesel comes out, you got a big problem. Yeah. And, you know, along those lines, you kind of talked about energy storage and zeroed in on what our topic is today. But the problem or the issue that I have with energy storage is right now people are really comfortable with batteries. I mean, we've had them for years and years, whether it's alkaline batteries for flashlights and stuff for little lithium batteries for cell phones and all of our appliances. And now we have lead acid batteries in our car and big lithium batteries for bigger cars and for the Elon Musk's wall and things like that. People are really comfortable with batteries. And the fact is for energy and energy out, batteries are very efficient. They're very highly efficient. But everybody kind of forgets that that's not the only part of the equation. There's what does it really cost to make that battery in terms of are we exploiting another country's labor and paying them 50 cents a week for labor and putting them in hazardous mines just so we can have cheap batteries? Are we talking about a country that owns most of the lithium that now becomes our master because we depend on batteries and we have to go to them exclusively for this raw material? Does that put tension in terms of conflict or war between us and another country when they up the prices so high that we can't stand it like what happened in the oil crisis? And at the end of life, we're going to have these batteries and they aren't necessarily earth-friendly at the end of life. So what do you do to recycle the materials? There's some batteries that you can recycle almost everything. Lithium batteries go into a different category. They're a little bit more tricky on the environmental side. So it's that fully burdened cost that I keep pointing to for energy storage. But you look at these energy storage for hydrogen or for air, a lot of those costs are gone. They're just not there. The safety issues are reduced. The safety concerns are reduced. And if you have a leak, your environmental issues are pretty much not there. They definitely have their different pros and cons. We are very, very comfortable with batteries, but that's a battery is not going to give us that. It could give us that massive energy. At a cost. At a cost. And that cost is going to be a square footage cost and it's going to have a lifetime that it's just not as big. It's not as long as some other technologies that we could have available. I don't know how much energy storage is on this island when you add up all the fuel that we have and the daily shipments of crude and diesel that are being produced out of the refineries. But if you add that up, it's going to be a really large number. And just simply converting that number into a bunch of batteries. Lithium, iron, lead acid, what have you. You're talking a lot of batteries. And they're going to degrade over time. That battery needs to be maintained. They do lose some of that life over time. And that energy storage we need to realize is important for us in the case of, we can go into like a hurricane or some natural disaster that happens. The energy is absolutely critical. You can't just, we can get really far with putting in solar and batteries right now. It's really high bang for the buck right now. But that's, we're talking a lot of high trip, high round trip efficiency with the battery. Yeah, I'm going to produce the solar today. I'm going to use it tonight and I'm going to produce more solar tomorrow. I'm talking a week of clouds. Maybe it's 40 days storm or something like that where you really don't have a lot of sun but your load is still being required. Is your battery going to be sized up for that? Maybe. Is the whole island going to be sized up for that? Probably not. That's where the scale is massive and while we're comfortable with batteries it might not be the best fit for that. Okay. Well, we're going to take a quick break right now and we'll be back in 60 seconds to hammer through some of the details here and how we could make it work. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here of Think Tech Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30 Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of Contemporary Asian Affairs. There's so much to discuss and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think, we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Ana all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to Stand on Energy Man on my lunch hour, of course. And today we've got Ryan Wubbins, my super geek electrical friend. In fact, a funny story when I went to the mainland and talked to a bunch of hydrogen people, most of them are engineers and they're all CEOs of big companies. And I told them our governor was an engineer. The one guy screamed out, you can't spell geek without a double E and the whole council broke out laughing because they thought that was hilarious. But it's true. Our engineers are a precious resource and we like to tease them and call them geeks, but hey, if you don't have electrical engineers, you're not gonna get much done around the state of Hawaii or around the world because we need more energy than you can imagine. And we take it for granted. We take it for granted that HECO just has the power there. We can flip the switch on and write them a check at the end of the month, but it ain't that easy. So we're gonna talk a little bit about some of those challenges. But one of the things is, you know, when it comes to compressing gases and even the way we do it now with our hydrogen, pushing it into tanks, we generate heat and it takes energy to compress. So that's one of the things that makes hydrogen energy storage not as efficient as batteries is we have to take that hydrogen at ambient pressure and squish it into containers, which takes energy. And we can measure that energy a lot of times by how much electricity it takes to run the pumps, but also by how much heat we generate when we push it into tanks. But when we use this underwater model, even as opposed to some cavern models, if we were gonna say store hydrogen in these pressure vessels underwater or these balloons underwater, wouldn't that also cool the hydrogen and reduce that element and make it actually more efficient to store the hydrogen underwater? Yeah, it absolutely would become more efficient in handling with the heat. When we produce hydrogen, via electrolysis or really any form, we're gonna create energy in the sense that it's gonna be stored hydrogen. And then the heat that we just generated, we have to deal with that heat somehow. We can't just let it off to the atmosphere. Sometimes the equipment can't even handle the heat and that's how we deal with it right there at the equipment to cool and not break the equipment that was just producing the hydrogen. So when you get into the water, deep water cooling is already even used here. And I think Big Island may have some deep water cooling as well. You come down and use that really that thermal bank that sits there in the ocean, which is incredibly huge and it's thermal power that it has to help cool that equipment. Now when we use the ocean water, we can say, okay, that's how we're dealing with our heat. That's an especially very efficient use to deal with it. Another way to deal with it is to actually consume it. Now in Hawaii, we don't have a lot of needs to consume heat. We're always the other way around who's trying to get rid of it. But other island nations, if you're more North, I mean, and you have the need for heat, maybe there's Alaska, maybe New Zealand, it's rather cold, Japan. They use it for heating houses and things like that. Exactly. So you're gonna use that heat when you use that heat, your efficiency goes up because you're displacing another form of energy that was being used to create it. So dealing with that ocean water is theoretically, I mean, because we're still in that, we're just kind of talking about it right now. But yeah, we could do that to help deal with the heat or maybe even I would propose, I think we talked to you about putting the equipment in the water. And that's where it resides. Because I mean, you look at the ways we deal with heat right now in engines. Like in your car, you have a radiator, which pumps fluid through your radiator where air is cooling that fluid down and going back into your engine and absorbing the heat and then running it back through the radiator. On your lawn mower, your small engines, you have fins on the outside of the cylinder wall that when the metal heats up, it goes out in those fins and the air cools and that's how you keep those engines cool. But cogeneration, we call it using the heat and the hydrogen, the energy generated by hydrogen is one of the things that make hydrogen efficient when you really apply it. But we're gonna have a whole show where you're gonna talk about air conditioning and how heat can be used in air conditioning. And it's a little bit outside your place in the electric area, but I know you know this stuff, so we'll talk about it some more. Even small scale co-gen is something we can talk about even on the silent that's being used in some spaces. Small commercial can use it. Absolutely. The heat can be good. Okay. We can. Well, let's expand, theoretically take this method of storing whether it's compressed air or hydrogen or whatever. And let's say that it works and we've got it over in Kahi power plant instead of having a big diesel fire power plant offshore, maybe a quarter mile, half mile in 40 degree water, we have a bunch of this stuff and we're able to pull hydrogen ashore. Let's say that's already there. What would be the way, what would HECO's grid look like? What would it change into? If we're gonna try and employ that technology, what would have to change on HECO's grid to be able to efficiently use that technology? That's a good question. The nice part is when you're talking about, yeah, replacing the power plant, if we do actually put that equipment there and it's almost a one for one, instead of producing it via diesel engine, we're producing it via a fuel cell, at that location of the same scale, the implementation is actually rather easy because that power plant is already, the grid is already designed around, it's strategically designed around the power plants that we have on Island right now. So when you do a one for one, we're done. The power plants are made to help back feet and blackstart power each other in the form of outages, but it's not gonna be a one for one in most cases unless you're sitting there right by the water. We won't always be that lucky. In that case, the grid gets, we call it a modernized or it really just gets transformed into allowing more of the distributed generation. When we say distributed generation, it takes from that larger big, big generator model to everybody else having their smaller generation units scattered throughout the grid. It creates a lot of technical difficulties for electrical engineers to deal with that distributed generation because the way we're used to powering up with big units going out and powering large chunks of consumers at once, it's not as easy now. We have to group a bunch of smaller distributed generation units together before we go after bigger chunks of consumers. If everybody's got their own hydrogen station or maybe even hydrogen fueling stations right now that get installed, they could even be made to back feed back into the grid in times of outage. They don't need to be made just to just buy fuel for vehicles. We start to section off chunks of the grid and now we get into a little bit more of a micro grid talk where chunks are even neighborhoods, full cities are able to section themselves off and power themselves via their own distributed generation. That, you can't do that today. We don't have the equipment for the grid to just do that. There's not the switches, there's not the smarts. When we say modernization, it really is bringing in some of the latest technologies and putting them in the right spot so that we can become a micro grid, become self-sufficient, power ourselves back up and then reach out to the next neighborhoods and reform the grid as a whole. But if you could do that, wouldn't that speed up the ability to recover after like an incident or to recover, say that one ear power sources went down and all the other ones are up? If you can produce enough power, you can actually even pick up that one drop load but at the very least, the rest of your system's up and you're only dealing with one distributed area that's down. So let's say for example, instead of using a Kahi power plant as the input for the energy, let's look at, and I've seen Hiko's grid layout basically, let's take the North Shore. So maybe from Hali Eva out to Kuhuku or just past Kuhuku around that. There's relatively few customers in terms of downtown Honolulu and the potential for a lot of renewable energy to be generated, whether it's wind turbines or solar on people's roofs or commercial grade solar, industrial grade solar where they have big solar farms. So let's say we islanded that community and then have the switches available where they could either be tied into the grid or if the grid was faltering, they could disconnect from the grid and be islanded themselves and produce all their own power. Is that feasible? Is that realistic? Yeah, yeah, it is. If you were to continue come down Kuhuku, if we were to wrap down, I live in Ka'ava, so if we were to loop all the way down into there, there's one main line that comes around that side of the island. You, we just brought in Turtle Bay, BYU, and the PC, the Polynesian Cultural Center. Those would be your big loads there, they're hanging out there. The bigger loads are what cause a little bit more of the technical difficulties, but we have these, if we turn that into its own microgrid and these places and the communities have installed their renewable generation, they, when we talk about getting back online quicker, they almost become dependent upon their own resources first. So they will be, they will come online quicker because they already have that distributed generation. We're not worried, we're not using power plants up in Scofields pretty close to to get the power back over to the North Shore. So everybody becomes a little bit more independent on bringing themselves back online first and then going out and helping the rest of their communities around them. So in theory, when you do the calculations on power outage time, everybody would have, it'd be less, you'd have less, no power less often. That's a tough way to explain it, but to answer the question, yes, everybody would power up sooner. So now we have two more shows to do, one on air conditioning from heat, and the other one I'd like to do is maybe notionally, maybe you and I can sit down and graph out what HECO's grid might look like if we were, if you and I were gonna redesign it for HECO. Sure. Not that I'm an electrical engineer or anything. No, they haven't asked me yet, but maybe one day. You can help me do it, I'm sure you could. Well, that's gonna do it for us this week here at Stand Energy Man. Thanks to Ryan Wubbins again from Burns and McDonald. Thanks to Cindy and Robert here in the control room for all their geekiness, because they're actually closet geeks too. And thanks for their help putting the show together and we'll see you next Friday. Aloha.