We wish to thank the sponsors of our club’s newsletter! Click on our fellow Rotarians  business cards & visit their website:

We welcome all of our visitors….

Barnaby Min – applying for the GSE team to visit Sweden/Latvia.  He is employed as an attorney for the city of Miami as well as an arbitrator for the Florida Attorney General. He is a volunteer guardian as litem and it currently the President of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of South Florida (which is how I know him) He is active in many other civic and charitable organizations.

Ann Freeman (SpeakOut) – Ed

Daniel Berger – Ellen

We’re happy because….

…it’s all coming together for my Presidential year – Doreen

…My significant other had a final visit with oncologist and it’s been five years without esophageal cancer – Joan

…Our newest member saved the day with his laptop!

…I’m happy to see you today – Karen

…for Ed’s volunteer spirit and hoping for - Diana

…I’m going to the mountains for 5-6 months – Otto

…of Rebuilding Together – there were 14 houses in renovated in Naranja last Saturday –Cathy

…I visited Chiapas, Mexico & got to spend time with a Mayan village family – Charles

…of the many tomatoes from my yard to giveaway – Buck

… my healthy baby is here today – Tom Sullivan, today’s speaker

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Today's Events:

President Pansy Graham presiding

ROTARY THEME 2009-2010

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This Monday night

May 3, 2010 @ 6:00 pm

Board Meeting @

the First National Bank of South Miami

All are welcome! J

2009-10 RCSM OFFICERS:

President:  Reverend Pansy Graham
pansygraham@bellsouth.net

President Elect:  Doreen Reitnauer
dhiker217@aol.com

Vice President:  Mike Mills
millsmike@aol.com

Secretary:  Brett Trembly
b.trembly@suttonlawgroup.com

Treasurer: David Jacobs
david@jnccpas.com

Sergeant at Arms:  Fabio Fernandez
fernandezfabio@bellsouth.net

Club Board of Directors:

Rotary Foundation of South Miami, Inc. Board of Directors:

Pansy Graham, Doreen Reitnauer, Brett Trembly, Don Streaker, Fabio Fernandez, Treasurer Artfest, Linda Kaplan, Diana Phillips, Ellen Book

Rotary District 6990:

www.ri6990.org / 305-860-8060

District Governor Lee Phares & Eliju Phares District Foundation Chair

World Organization:
www.rotary.org

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Mission Statement

The mission of Rotary International, a worldwide association of Rotary clubs, is to provide service to others, to promote high ethical standards, and to advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through its fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders.

THE 4-WAY TEST OF THE THINGS WE THINK, SAY OR DO:   

Benefits of Being A Rotarian (Membership)
Rotary membership provides the opportunity to:

¨ Become connected to your community.

¨ Work with others in addressing community needs.

¨ Interact with other professionals in your community;

¨ Assist with RI's international humanitarian service efforts.

¨ Establish contacts with an international network of professionals.

¨ Develop leadership skills.  Involve family in promoting service efforts.

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Renewing or Joining
To Renew ($275) or to become a New Member ($325) contact

Asaad Massoud at www.racharters.com

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Fundraisers
Interested in putting together a fundraiser?

Contact Club Fundraising Chair Wendy Lapidus at wendylapidus@bellsouth.net

Service Projects

Interested in helping others?

Contact Club Service Chair Linda Kaplan at lk@lindakaplan.com

Programming Chair Donna Gaines introduced today’s speaker…

Tom Sullivan

                                                 1-800-HARDWOOD

"Hardwood to Hydrogen Energy”

Tom started as a contractor in Boston with a load of flooring in the back of a pickup.  He looked at it as a low cost bundle. Now there are over 200 stores which went public in 2007.

He hired a CEO so he could start new businesses.

July 2008 – article in NYT solar powered hydrogen through Proton Energy

Auctioned off on that Tuesday.  Owner by Thursday. 

The auto companies have not been building cars because no one was building the infrastructure of fueling stations.  Honda, Mercedes, GM, Toyota (building 10) are all building these cars. 

The Proton business was an already established hydrogen company but it awaited the federal government to fund expansion.  So he started expanding now by founding SunHydro, Inc.  In 2012, you’ll be able to drive from Maine to FL. Every 250 miles there’ll be a solar-producing hydrogen station in a major city. Most will be next to a Lumber Liquidator store –since he already owns the land.  The average hydrogen car goes 300-350 miles on one fill up.

With a hydrogen car there are no oil spills, no batteries. Water is the emission.  We can stop the $1billion / day export of our money due to the  importation of foreign oil.

The City of Hartford put in a grant for two hydrogen buses and a fueling station.  The federal government awarded $ for the buses but not the fueling. 

This focus will create more high tech jobs – 10-20 years for it to be mainstreamed.

Our society’s emphasis has been away from academically focused students so he established a Proton Scholarship Award – 500 applications.

The right help in the right place one student can go on to help many.

Many stations will be near established Lumber Liquidators buildings.  Uses a similar hose as a regular gasoline station.  Hydrogen fumes dissipate faster than other vapors.   Only compressed hydrogen is combustible.

Cars and technology are available now but the infrastructure is not there. So far, Germany and Los Angeles (not open to retail public) has the best infrastructure.

Hydrogen is nYhot being taxed, yet.  Hydrogen can be stored in a tank when the solar cells are working because it’s cloudy.  Cost of generating the hydrogen is offset since it will be solar and we make the hydrogen on site charging similar prices to a gallon of gas.  Water is used and hydrogen is extracted. 

from the New York Times

April 16, 2010, 7:30 am

A Private Plan for a Hydrogen Highway

Many alternative-fuel companies are cash-poor, which means they spend a lot of their time chasing government loans and private capital. SunHydro, a start-up founded by Tom Sullivan to establish a solar-powered fuel-cell car refueling network on the East Coast, doesn’t have that immediate challenge. In 1993, Mr. Sullivan founded Lumber Liquidators, a hardwood flooring retailer that now boasts more than 200 stores and, according to Reuters, had $544 million in net sales last year.

Tom Sullivan

Hydrogen and hardwood floors? What’s the connection? In an interview, Mr. Sullivan said his $15 million to $20 million backing of a network of hydrogen stations from Maine to Florida began in 2008, when he started to research the next generation of car fuels. “It seemed ridiculous we were spending $1 billion a day on imported oil when we could make our own zero-emission hydrogen,” Mr. Sullivan said. “If we can make hydrogen from wind or solar, that’s as good as it gets.”

Mr. Sullivan said he plugged “solar-powered hydrogen” into a search engine, and that led him to the Connecticut-based Proton Energy Systems — then a self-described “struggling public company” in the business of making electrolyzers to produce hydrogen from water.

“The company was getting auctioned in just a few days,” Mr. Sullivan said. He did some hurried due diligence and showed up at the bankruptcy auction. There was one other bidder, who quickly folded, he said. For $10.2 million, Mr. Sullivan owned a hydrogen refueling company. “I like buying stuff that way,” he told The Boston Herald.

Proton will provide the electrolyzers for SunHydro’s string of 12 to 15 hydrogen stations, said Mike Grey, SunHydro’s president. The first, at Proton’s Wallingford, Conn., headquarters, is scheduled to open in June. The operation will be able to produce enough hydrogen to fully refuel 10 to 15 vehicles a day, the company said. The stations, which presumably qualify for a federal tax credit (capped at $200,000), are expected to manufacture hydrogen using integrated solar panels, allowing them to make zero-emission claims.

Mr. Sullivan said he now owned the land for most of his stations, which according to Wired.com would be strategically located from Portland, Me., to Miami, Fla., to account for the 300-mile range that state-of-the-art hydrogen cars are capable of traveling. The stations will be built in Connecticut over the next two years and taken to their locations in shipping containers, Mr. Sullivan said. The bigger obstacle will be finding cars to take the challenge, since fuel-cell vehicles are rather thin on the ground in the United States.

Connecticut has one fuel-cell bus in service. Several carmakers have hydrogen car pilot programs, and Toyota has said it will commercialize fuel-cell cars in 2015, though initially in small numbers. Some current or coming fleets are based on the West Coast, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California has an embryonic hydrogen highway proposal currently constrained by budget cuts. The California Fuel-Cell Partnership says that 250 hydrogen cars have been put into service there since 2000, with two million miles logged.

As Mr. Sullivan describes it, a lack of pumping infrastructure has slowed the efforts of automakers like General Motors and Honda to bring the fuel-cell vehicles they developed to the mass market. This, he believes, is where his start-up comes in. “If it catches on,” he said, “it will really change the world.”