 Happy Aloha Friday, everyone. You are tuned in to Stan the Energy Man. Stan is actually out for today and so I'm filling in. My name is Rachel, the energy woman, and I'm here today to talk a little bit about clean energy and a lot about energy action month, which will kick off tomorrow. Today we have Veronica Rocha from the State Energy Office. She's the Renewable Energy Program Manager. Welcome, Veronica. Thank you for joining us. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Rachel. It's so good to be here. Thank you. So, Renewable Energy Program Manager, what does that even mean? It basically means I helped the state meet the 100% renewable energy goal by the year 2045. And so that's a combination of working on legislation, of course with our legislators and the governor's office, also getting involved in a lot of regulatory proceedings with the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission as an intervener and other stakeholders. And then we work on a lot of programs and projects to make sure that we really push the industry as a whole and the market as a whole to be able to achieve the 100% renewable portfolio standard. And that's all under... That's quite a bit. I mean, that's a team of people I'm sure then. Yeah, we actually have a very small team of people, but we're part of a very large integrated community. So, talking about the team, three guys in my group, so there's Cameron, he's been in the team the longest and his background's all about environmental analysis, permitting sighting, that sort of thing. And then we have Ryan Morita, his background is in finance and project management. And then the third gentleman is Sheldon Honda and his background, he actually came from HIKO. His background is electrical engineering. So, we have a really small group, but we have a very robust, well-rounded group. Awesome. And, you know, we have a lot of fun in doing what we do and really believe in our work. Outstanding. Yeah. So, perhaps we could take a step back a little and talk about what the State Energy Office is. You mentioned some of the different ways that they engage with the community and regulatory agencies, but can you speak about what the State Energy Office history has been and kind of what that progression has been to where they are today? Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm going to take a really big step back. So, the Governor's Office has various cabinet level positions, which are all departments. Okay. And the department that the Hawaii State Energy Office is an agency of is the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism, often simply called DBET. Okay. So, now, going down to the Hawaii State Energy Office as an agency, we have four branches, my branch, Renewable Energy Branch, Energy Efficiency, not trying, working really hard to get the State to achieve 30% energy efficiency by the year 2030. And then we have the Energy Systems and Planning Group. And that effort, the effort there is to look at the overall energy ecosystem and see how best we can get and plan towards 100% renewable energy meeting our energy efficiency goals and even in transportation. How do we clean up transportation? And then lastly, the Clean Energy Systems Group works holistically with all of us on new innovations, new ways of catalyzing clean energy throughout the state. Okay. So, that's a pretty broad swath of both expertise, I'm sure. Yeah. Wow, what a depth of background and experience. Yeah. Okay. So, in the Renewable Energy Branch, you mentioned intervening with the PUC. You mentioned some other regulatory efforts. Can you talk a little bit about what that entails? Let's say a snapshot, maybe what your day looks like. What type of engagements do you have? Maybe even a week. Let's do a week. Oh my gosh. Okay. A day could vary really depending on what's going on. The Public Utilities Commission issues dockets, which are essentially investigations into specific topics. So, I'll just ramble a few names of dockets that are ongoing right now. Sure. There's a power supply improvement plan looking at overall the electric utilities and how to match the resources, clean energy resources, and other fossil, for example, to match up with the demand towards cleaning the overall sector for more renewable energy. So, that's one ginormous proceeding right now. The other one is distributed energy resources docket, and that's looking at distributed PV and distributed water heaters. And how do we incorporate that into overall planning, the resource planning, right? There's many, many others, but I won't bore you. But let's just say that so the PUC issues these dockets, you can apply to be an intervener, which means you can submit your comments. And those comments would of course be considered by the Public Utilities Commission as they ultimately issue an order. And when they say they issue an order, what that means is this is our decision on how we want to proceed. And based on those orders, that is how ultimately the electric utilities need to proceed and follow what the Public Utilities is telling them to do. Okay, so that sounds like an intervener has a pretty integral part in shaping what policy looks like moving forward for the state, it sounds. Yes, absolutely. Excellent. Yeah. So, a few things you threw out there. I thought a lot. Distributed energy resources. Okay. So I'll preface a little bit by saying, I mean, we've worked together before, which has been excellent. And on a broad swath of projects, we've worked on hydrogen, particularly most recently, but I also was pleased to see you as a panelist in a recent discussion with Hawaii women lawyers. Thank you. And so it's really fascinating to see both the work you do kind of behind the scenes and regulatory space and planning and analysis, but then to also see you carry that work forward and sharing that information with the community and practitioners as well as people who are just interested in learning more about energy work. And so can you talk a little bit about what the state energy office as a whole does? I know I've seen Mark Lick a number of places in panel discussions, but if you could talk about how community members can get some of this information without necessarily engaging one-on-one. Sure. We spend quite a bit of time and resources, both our personal time as well as just like marketing, communications, resources on directed through like our website. Right. We have a lot of information with regards to the state energy goals, but then we do a deeper dive into actual clean energy facts that the industry maybe or sorry, the general public may be interested in such as like how much PV do we have and how much of that is distributed versus utility and how much wind do we have. And then we also provide quite a bit of like latest news as well as to what is happening in the industry. For example, you mentioned Mark, myself, if we have speaking engagements that there's follow-up communications through the press and the media, we tend to publish those on our website. So it's a really good resource, publications. We get involved in a lot of, you know, research whether it's on policy matters or other things and whatever research we get involved in, we also publish in our website. So it really is a wealth of information for anybody that wants to learn a bit more. And then in terms of getting involved, you know, I really have to say that some wonderful ways of getting involved is one through legislation and really telling your legislators what you want in terms of Hawaii and towards its goal of renewable energy or anything else that you want them to know about whether or not you support a position that they have or not. So I think that's a fantastic way of getting involved. The other one, I mentioned dockets. Even if you are not an intervener, you can still submit your comments on the public utilities website. They have a docket portal and you can submit your comments on particular dockets. And those things do get considered by the Public Utilities Commission. We also have on our website a portal by which if you're a developer and you want an assistance, complete our questionnaire and we'll reach out to you with more specific assistance. Or simply drop us a line and we're happy to chat with you. Okay. So you mentioned a developer having kind of immediate access. Is that also open to just interested individuals that give you a call and get more information? It really is open to anybody. The questionnaire is more targeted to developers. So sometimes they have questions about incentives or they have questions about permitting or what not. But when we have more information as to what they're looking for, how the type of assistance that they need, we can better get the information ahead of time in communicating with them. But certainly the general public can use it. We also have a public email address where they can contact us or just pick up the phone. We get a lot of those inquiries pretty much on a daily basis. Would you mind providing the email address? I don't have it on the top of my head. But the website. Yeah. If you go to energy.hawaii.gov, you're going to be able to find everything that I just spoke about. Excellent. And the website actually is pretty robust. I signed up for the newsletter. Yay. I appreciate that. Thank you. So I get the regular updates and the information is certainly timely and very useful just to see kind of broad scale what's happening across the state. Well, for a state that's separated by water with its different counties, it's really, really, it's a nice place to go to get singular information on a particular topic. So thank you for your work to provide that information. Oh, sure. Happy to. Yeah. So as you mentioned, opportunities to engage the community as well as informational speaking events. I wanted to mention an upcoming event that you all are partnering on. So for with HECO, I think the 13th year now, they're hosting a clean energy fair. Actually, I'm probably not going to get the name right. We're going to say an energy fair. Sure. So tomorrow at Kahala Mall is October 1st and it's a kickoff for Energy Action Month. And so HECO, along with you, the State Energy Office, as well as Kanu Hawaii, will have activities for the family and information available for what's happened in the state. Can you tell us a bit about engagements like that where you partner? I know the Verge Conference has a partnership as well. So can you talk about some of the partnerships that the State Energy Office has? Actually, again, I don't remember the name. I think we're both trying to play totally okay. That's happening tomorrow. That is a really fabulous opportunity for the KK to get involved and start learning about clean energy. And I think the earlier on that we can introduce them to these concepts, the earlier on that they really value what clean energy has to offer in their everyday lives. So this is fabulous. It's really a learning opportunity. But it's also going to be a fun opportunity. There's going to be games. There's going to be entertainment. I believe in prior events, like this one, I think it attracted something like 3,000 people. Like a hollow mall. I know that I'm going to be swinging by. So hopefully I'll get to see you when I'm there. So it'll be really, really fun. A lot of the engagement that we do does happen through invitations that we get. So, you know, for the general public, if somebody is hosting, I don't know, a community event, but the Hawaii women lawyers. Right. Yeah. So somebody from your organization extended an invitation. I was very happy to participate. So we do a lot of these speaking engagements to nonprofits, or industry organizations, conferences, et cetera. We do host, this is going to be our second one that we're going to be hosting in 2017, Verge Conference. Yes. And that was amazing. I just came back from the one in Santa Clara. And I tell you what I most want to say about Verge and the way that they conduct the conference. It's really focused around expanding one's understanding of the overall clean energy ecosystem. So for example, did you know that in order to have clean water, you need to have electricity? And in order to have electricity, you need water, right? And in order to produce either one of them, there is consumption of electricity and consumption of water. So which begs the question, okay, as we're getting more people in this earth, right? And we have fewer resources. What are we going to do? So it was just a fascinating way to explore that topic at the last Verge meeting, Verge Conference, which happened in Santa Clara. And really excited to see what we have in store for next year, Verge 17. I should say Verge Hawaii in 2017, which is going to be in June. So I appreciate you making that distinction. I was going to mention, for those who aren't aware of Verge, it's an ongoing, I don't know if it's throughout the entire year, but I know there's a series of conferences at different locations, but there's almost a consortium or a cohort of Verge conferences. Can you talk a bit about that, the Verge? What is the Verge? I'm not a Verge expert. I mean, certainly they are our contractor. Okay. Green Tech Media. Yes. They were one of the pioneers, I would say, in really publishing about clean energy and mainstream media. They've been around for a couple of decades now. But besides their publications and how they have blogs and a lot of online content versus like publishing on paper, which is how they started. It's amazing, right? They also do these conferences focused on various topics. Okay. So far I've participated in three. So the first one was Grid Edge, and that was in 2015 in San Diego. And it was all about the Grid Edge. Are you familiar with this concept? No, this is new to me. Yeah, it's super fascinating, super fascinating. It's the idea that essentially, right now, the utility has visibility into one's energy, but also control over one's energy consumption, energy generation, up to basically like your house, your meter, that sort of thing. So that's the Grid Edge. So the idea is going beyond it, right? And now you start getting into like really interesting relationships and dynamic. For example, okay, if you have a PV system and it has storage, and so now you're generating renewable energy and you're maybe storing some renewable energy and you're connected to the grid and now you give visibility to the utility to your system, right? So the utility needs to tap into your system in order to keep the grid up and running, right? So should they be compensating you? How much should they be compensating you? Or is it basically in order for you to be connected, do you give that to them for free, right? So I'm not advocating for either one. I'm simply pointing out there's all these complexities of this concept of the Grid Edge and being able to pierce to the Grid Edge provides, right? So that's one conference. I don't know if they've kept doing it. The other one is Verge Hawaii, which took place 2016, we're starting the planning for 2017 and that's here in Honolulu, it's in June and in this last Verge, we really explored everything about energy, not only in the electricity sector but also in transportation. Too early for me to talk about what we're going to be exploring in the next Verge. They call Verge 16 or Verge 17 and it's really the confluence, I would say of like all all the topics in one location typically takes place in California. There's also like Verge, more focused around New York so they have like a New York Rev. So I'm not an expert on Verge but they're all great learning opportunities, great way to expand your understanding of the complexities related to renewable energy and energy efficiency in smart grid etc but also the vast opportunities and you've come back feeling just very excited. That's super exciting. I hadn't realized the depth and I certainly didn't realize the term grid edge but that's an exciting concept and one we were exploring particularly here in Hawaii but definitely across the nation. So I appreciate you taking this time we're going to give our listeners a little bit of a break and we'll be back in a moment to talk more about Veronica Rich's efforts with the State Energy Office. Thanks for tuning in. This is John and Danelia from Thank Tech Hawaii Keys to Success. We'd like to thank all of our viewers for tuning in and enjoying the show as we enjoy giving it to you. We're very grateful for all the wonderful feedback we receive from our viewers. My name is Danelia D-A-N-E-L-I-A and I'm the other half of the duo John Newman. We thank you all. Aloha. Thanks for hanging on and we're back with Veronica from the State Energy Office a renewable energy program manager and we've been chatting a bit about what's happening in the state of Hawaii but also across the nation in clean energy as we kick off Clean Energy or Energy Action Month in October we've just been discovering the many things that are taking place and the projects that are happening here in the state. So Veronica thank you again for joining us today and we chatted a little bit just about broad scale the different engagements that the State Energy Office has the different speaking engagements and regulatory inputs and informational opportunities for entities across the state so I wondered if you could talk in a bit more specific terms about some of the projects that you personally oversee. Oh sure. One of the collaborations that I was involved in helping to craft not necessarily at leading the effort was at Verge 2016 Governor Ige an assistant secretary of the Navy McGinn signed a memorandum of understanding or MOU for the Navy in the state of Hawaii to work more collaboratively on energy efforts right both the Navy and the state of Hawaii we have very aggressive clean energy goals and so therefore a lot of overlap in both our challenges and opportunities and solutions so there were three working groups that were established one of them is on alternative fuels and transportation the second one is on resiliency and then the third one is on renewable energy and I'm leading the effort in the renewable energy space so it's a really interesting super fun to connect with the folks from the Department of the Navy to NAFAC Hawaii NAFAC PAC REBO it's been really good so we're really now starting to explore in depth in a bit more depth I should say some of the initiatives that I think both entities have interest on most immediately though we started to take a look at and I can't go into too much specifics but you know micro grids I think that's an area of mutual interest both Department of the Defense as well as for the state of Hawaii so we were able to leverage some non-DOD but still federal funds to help us in evaluating an area and infrastructure towards the development of micro grids in a way that would pull in more renewable energy but then also provide for greater energy security and resiliency so working on that really to disclose more details but excited for the collaboration that we have going on I really appreciate you talking about the collaboration because I think that's a part that sometime is missed because so much of the work happens behind the scenes people don't always have an opportunity to see the levels at which the state energy office engages but also the projects that you all are working on so I've been fortunate to work with you on some hydrogen efforts and just really that have an international scope so we could talk about some of the engagements that the state energy office as a whole has perhaps some of its international partners and some of the things that are being looked at currently I could go on for a long time on that I can tell you that from a personal perspective I've really been inspired by this MOU between the State of Hawaii Department of the Navy and it got me thinking well how can we do more of this whether or not we have an MOU so I keep bringing it up because it's so fresh on my mind it just happened last week but again I'm not sure to what extent you're familiar with this Microsoft, Google, Facebook they have very aggressive renewable energy targets many of those guys 100% renewable energy which leads me to believe that when Hawaii when we passed our 100% renewable energy bill that that really had a ripple effect and inspired others so I participated in a summit with Microsoft and all these people and several utilities from around the U.S. and it was all like how do we move forward and one of the challenges that was brought up and this was in the context of electric vehicles and increasing the electrification of transportation one of the California electric utilities said well one of the challenges that we have is when we have a cool idea for like a new electric vehicle charging station demonstration project it is so hard for us to get it done because of all of the protocols that need to be had because they have limited funds because X, Y, C and so one of the big companies, I'm not going to say which one so I don't want to put anybody in a bad position and they said well if you tell me what challenges you're having then I can test them out in my facility and if you think about it some of these data centers for like Microsoft, Google, etc they're so huge that they're consuming as much energy as a city as a state as even like an island so they actually could be a beautiful place to test some of these things so that got me thinking there's a wonderful opportunity here to work across borders even more so in a very meaningful way so that's something where I'm starting to explore that concept that I just relayed and started to reach out to potential partners in California and also Alaska so hopefully there'll be a little bit more to come on that wow that's really exciting it's exciting to think not only one that people are thinking about broadly but there's a lot more in that type of way I mean for businesses as large as the ones you named it's certainly it's impactful if they're able to make the change but it also speaks a lot to the merit of the work that we're doing for someone to be able to assume that risk and say that this is meaningful and we'll test and make sure that it gets better and we'll undertake that responsibility so I think it's fantastic that you're exploring that yeah I'm excited about it so we'll see it's still very very early on but you know you have to plan a seed and it really makes you right indeed I agree and so we talked a bit about I think when we first met it might have been in relationship to opportunities to engage with Japan particularly but just seeing how we can branch outside of the US and what other nations are doing and what some of the challenges people have experienced both in planning and implementation and it's really been exciting for me to see how different governments move forward with renewable energy efforts from those engagements it takes time and it's all it's very much a relationship based approach I remember actually me you and Stan we were talking and I was expressing some frustration and I'm not going to say which country or why things just take so long and I just don't know what to do what email to send, what phone call to make and Stan actually said well have you thought about just calling and checking in and see how they're doing after you know some event I was like no but I think that really alerted me to it's based on relationships and I think since then we've had a bit more meaningful dialogue and there appears to be more interest in a proposal that we're working together with a potential international partner that's really promising to hear and it's something that's encouraging Hawaii has so many sister-state and sister-sandy relationships it's been nice to work across departments so working with Hawaii National Energy Institute as well as D-Bed and just really kind of spanning the spectrum of engagement across the state in their agencies has been an exciting thing for me I must admit when we think about energy and we talk about electricity and kind of what it means I think we can speak about it in a very broad way and people understand that it's important but when you start realizing the dependency that each of us have as an agency but as individuals as well it hits home a little bit more and so the work that we do I find is pretty meaningful and so when you mention being inspired and just really wanting to think more about how we can explore different types of partnerships it's really inspiring to hear and I'm grateful that we have a lot of people within our state agencies so people like that who are impacting upcoming policies so I wanted to thank you for your time this afternoon and thank you for your ongoing efforts for renewable energy for the state thank you it's my pleasure always great to connect with you and be on your show so thank you Rachel, appreciate it and thank you studio audience for tuning in to Stand the Energyman thank you for allowing me to fill in for my boss and spending a little bit of time as we kick off Energy Action Month this weekend and have an awesome Energy Month Allah Hafiz