 This is ThinkTech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good Monday. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. And this show is Mina Marco and me on Mondays, of course. And we have Mina Morita on the phone from Kauai. Hi, Mina. Say hi. Hi, Jay. I knew you'd say that. Mina Morita is a consultant in energy dynamics. And she's also a former chair of the PUC. And she's also a former legislator. The Hawaii State Legislature. We also have Marco Mangosdorf, who teaches energy. He runs Provision Solar in Hilo. And he knows tons about energy models and every other thing about solar and batteries and what we're doing in the world on energy here in Hawaii, and that's Marco Mangosdorf. Marco, say hi. Good day, Amiga, and Amiga, with a lot of love. Hello, you guys. Great to be on again. All right. So our agenda today on Mina Marco and me is to find out what's going on and the sea changes around the state on energy, especially renewable energy. And Mina, you're up first, because you have to tell us about the Tom Gorak case that's pending in the courts. Okay. Okay. So about a week and a half ago on December 7th, the Hawaii Supreme Court heard the oral arguments on the Morita versus Gorak case. And this is where Thomas Gorak, who was named the commissioner by the governor after Michael Champley's term expired on June 30th, 2015, removes Champley despite a state law saying that the incumbent commissioner stays beyond his term until his successor is appointed and confirmed by the legislature, by the state senate. And so I challenged the governor's action and lost in the circuit court and was appealing in the Intermediate Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court accepted our petition to hear the case because it is a case of first impression in Hawaii. So we were really pleased with that, that, you know, we didn't have to argue before the ICA how it appealed by either party, but it went straight to the Supreme Court. Well, who argued on December 7th, who were the lawyers who appeared on the case, Mina? Basically, what the state is trying to do is change the definition of vacancy, which really means an empty office, and it's pretty well established in jurisprudence. And they want the term vacancy to include the end of a set term. So the state appears to parse each paragraph in the interim appointment clause in the Hawaii state constitution and ignore a previous paragraph, where the words also say as provided by law. So a lot of the questioning from the justices dealt with trying to define what nomination, appointment, confirmation, and qualification means. I thought one thing that was really interesting was when the Chief Justice, Chief Justice Wreckingwald questioned the state on whether the PUC, the Public Utility Commission, was one of the nine principal departments of the state. And of course, the answer is no, because the PUC is legislatively formed. And said that the constitutional provisions seem to apply just to the nine principal departments. And he asked, pointedly, if the state was invalidating statute, which the state said no. And then he asked them, why aren't we referring to the statutory provisions? And how can you read and avoid as provided by law in the Constitution? So I think it comes down to the state defining vacancy. And if this new definition by the recent Attorney General's appointment will stand up to the court scrutiny of the state relying on the Justice Interim Provision Clause and ignoring state statute, which allows the incumbent commissioner to stay on until his successor is appointed and qualified. So do you feel that the court is sympathetic and understands your argument? You know, the questions were all over the place. But I think when you kind of delve into the key issues on, you know, was the governor correct in relying on the Interim Clause, Appointment Clause, in this case? And whether they accept the Attorney broadening the definition of vacancy? That's the key question. Who appeared, who appeared for your side and who appeared for the government side? Well, the question who argued for my side and who argued for the state side. Yes. OK, for my side, my attorney was, my original attorney was the former attorney general, Mike Dennett. And then for the appeal, I used Harold Bronsting from Kauai. And then the state had two deputy attorney generals there. And the one that was arguing, I believe her last name was Marie Eha. So what's the time? Sorry, Marco, you had something. Yeah, if I could ask a clarifying question of you, Mina. So practically speaking, if the court ruled in the direction that you'd like them to decide, you have a PUC commissioner whose term ends on a given June 30th, which is outside the normal legislative. And that particular commissioner chooses not to. And does that essentially mean that the governor, the chief executive of the state, does not have their own nominee? She, the governor, wouldn't be able to do that the next legislative session, which is not of his or her own choosing, who's starting on July 1st. That's maybe kind of a convoluted way to ask a question. Understand what I'm asking? OK, yeah, yeah, so, you know, you rely on the governor's good faith that he will make a timely appointment. You know, that a timing, I'm sorry, not an appointment, but nomination, that, and this is what is typically done, that knowing that the term ends on June 30th, not only for the commissioner's position, but a lot of boards and commissions. What the governor does is send down a nominee during the legislative session who gets reviewed and confirmed, given advice and consent by the Senate, in time for them to take their position on July 1st. Prior to that June 30th, yeah. So if a given member of the PUC doesn't want to resign after his term is up or her term is up, then he can stay in office until. It's not that he doesn't want to end when his term ends, but the law states, the 269-2 states that the incumbent commissioner remains as a commissioner until his successor is appointed and qualified. So, you know, I'm concerned about this. I mean, this might affect, if you win on this, if this turns out to be the scenario, then it would affect not only the PUC, but all interim appointments, right? And that would be a real Pandora's box kind of problem, wouldn't it? Right, right. So the thing is, you know, we rely on everybody doing their job, right? Everybody has a job. The governor has to send down timely nominations and, you know, the reverse can happen where this can be abused, where a person can sit almost a year in a position without receiving advice and consent. So under your approach, what do you think politically? I mean, the decision to remove Mike Champley, I think, can't be viewed in any other way that it was highly political. What do you think the governor's motivation was prior to that June 30th, 2016? What was the governor's motivation during that prior session from January to May of 2016 to not go ahead and nominate, propose and nominate to the Senate a replacement commissioner for Mike Champley once Champley is termended? Yeah, I mean, I don't know what his motivation is. That's something that has to be asked about the governor, but they went through great lengths to throw out two previous Attorney General opinions that have stood for more than 30 years, almost 40 years, regarding the appointment nomination confirmation process. Well, I take it, even if you win, the solution for this governor or any other governor would be just to appoint the successor before the term of the sitting commissioner is over. I guess you're saying that if he had appointed a successor during the session in 2016, and that successor had been confirmed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Exactly, exactly. And if the commissioner, as they do sometimes, decides to vacate their commission or ship, so to speak, their position there at the PUC, sometime other than the end of their given term, then there is a vacancy and at that vacancy time, if it happens outside the time when the legislature meets, then the governor is within his or her power to go ahead and put in, as soon as possible, an interim appointment, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, at least until, unless the Senate were to convene a special session or the Senate convenes during its normal session. In other words, if there's a vacancy outside of the legislative session, then the governor can go ahead and fill that vacancy as soon as possible, right? Because, you know, vacancy is created, it means that the seat is empty, the vacancy is created by either death or resignation, and he has every right constitutionally to use the interim appointment clause. Nobody, nobody really arguing that, but just for the fact that now they're including, the state is including, in the definition of vacancy, the end of a set term. When do you anticipate a decision? I have no idea, you know, it's just out of our hands and you just sit and wait. Okay, well speaking of waiting, why don't we wait on a one-minute break now? We take a short break with Mina and Marco and me. We'll be right back after these messages. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on ThinkTech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on ThinkTech Hawaii. Okay, we're back, we're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. We're talking Mina, Marco and me, and we are joined by Mina and Marco. That's Mina Morita and Marco Mangelsdorf by Skype, from Kauai and the Big Island, respectively. So let's talk now about the 10th anniversary of the HCEI, the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. It feels like all of 10 years. We've been through a lot in these 10 years. So what are your thoughts here at the end of 2017? What are your thoughts about the 10th anniversary of the initiative? Marco, you go first. I've certainly been an interesting 10 years, and as I've said a number of times before, I believe the progress that we've made as far as offsetting combustion, fossil fuel-based power generation has been laudatory and been fairly impressive. On the transportation side, it's been far from laudatory or impressive. I think things are more complicated now than they were 10 years ago in terms of our finite and isolated electric grids being able to accommodate the degree of rooftop solar and renewable energy distributed energy resources. 10 years ago, the penetration of rooftop solar and ER in general was considerably less than it is now. So the practical in terms of integrating renewables in finite grids, we're seeing a lot more of the challenges now compared to when the parties, the governor, then Linda Lingle and Connie Lau from HCEI and others signed that document. So in a more challenging space right now, I think a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and it's much more challenging. Yeah, Mina, how about you? And on the question of transportation, Mina, I note that Ford Fujikami, who was, he was talking a lot about trying to bring transportation forward and making it clean and including requirements for clean energy and transportation. Well, he's now moved to be Mike McCartney's successor as chief of staff, so he's no longer with the department of transportation. I'm interested in your thoughts about how that will affect things. I think, you know, I agree a lot with Marko. It was probably the best move at the time to, you know, really concentrate on research in getting moving the political will in one direction at that time, and that definitely now the issues are more complicated, especially when we bring in the transportation piece, because you're no longer dealing with regulated entities or dealing with, you know, the marketplace and important infrastructure issues, and I think where we have our biggest challenge is there's still a lot of coordination, research, and application of the research that needs to be done, and we no longer have a federal partner in this, you know, this is strictly a state initiative now, and can we do it on our own without, you know, the help of the national labs in the department of energy? Yeah, right. This is a difficult time and maybe difficult for years to come. But what about the Department of Transportation? Does Fort Fujikami's transfer mean anything to the energy initiative for clean transportation? You know, one of the biggest concerns I always had as a legislator with the clean energy initiative is the changing administration, that, you know, usually when there's unique continuity, when you're talking about these really big complex infrastructure issues, and, you know, election year coming up, you got the governor playing musical chairs with some of key people that, within his cabinet, and, you know, you wonder if they can, if the momentum can be sustained after election. Yeah. But it's all about trying to avoid distraction, you know, trying to stay on course. So if HCEI was a big deal for the future of the state, it's easy to be distracted, and then, as you say, we lose momentum, so we're at risk for that now. Yeah. Right. Well, let's go to our last topic today, which is the Tesla Powerwall, and we have a real live witness to how it works with Marco. He installed one. So can you talk about that, Marco? What's it like and how is it working? I'd be happy to, yes, kind of a little bit of background. So there are somewhere around 80,000 plus grid type PV systems across the state, across the island chain. And the vast majority of those PV systems have no battery storage, which means that if the grid were to go down, their PV system would produce, provide no value to them. And I think this is especially kind of timely in that there's been a fair amount of coverage recently in New York Times, Washington Post, the fact that Puerto Rico, which got clobbered not by just one, but two hurricanes within a couple of weeks, they're only 60 percent back online. In other words, 40 percent or so of the population have no access to power. Still, months later, more than three months later after these hurricanes. So it's a timely discussion that brings in the possibility of adding existing PV systems. So I've had a NEM system myself for the past two plus years and I decided to plunk down some money to add a Tesla Powerwall, which is a 13 and a half kilos with an integrated DC-DC inverter. So essentially, you can take this Powerwall and you can add it to battery less NEM systems across the state. And not that it's going to produce additional power because batteries don't produce power, they distort. But it will provide the capability of having backup power in case the grid were to go down. So an interesting question that I've been pondering philosophically these past months is we live in a society where you pay insurance for lots of things in your life. You insure your home, you insure your health, you insure your vehicles, you insure your possessions, you insure, you insure, you insure. We're probably the most insured society and culture in the history of the planet, not necessarily down to states because of the insurances, it has become a part of daily life, right? So to what extent will a homeowner who's already paying all these insurances see the value in plunking down money, either cash purchase or finance it, to essentially buy an insurance policy by having battery storage like a Tesla Powerwall or others out there as well, not just Tesla's offering this, that would provide power as an insurance policy in case the grid goes down? That is a question that I think is going to be very interesting to see as to what the adoption rate is going to be from these 80,000 or so grid type EV system owners across the state, will they be spending thousands of dollars of insurance cost to bear in order to have that peace of mind? Now as we know, as long as the grid is on as stable as it is, 99.9 something percent of the time, people don't think too much about losing power, but we all know that when they do lose power, because of high winds like we had on this island a week or two ago, I read that recently there were power outages in Honolulu that caused Alamoana to go down and some of the vendors lost sales there. So when we lose power, we can become much more acutely aware of the vulnerability and the dependence that we have on having electricity at our beck and call. So I had a chance, like I said, to order and install the power wall, so I'm just going to be playing with it, kind of putting it through its spaces and see how it performs. And let me ask you what kind of demand there will be for retrofitting existing NEM customers across the island with battery backup to provide them something that their existing PV system is not able to provide them. It's kind of a moving target though, Marco, because as we speak, the utility, I mean, KIUC has already installed a Tesla battery, big Tesla battery in Kauai, and it's working on another one in the thought that the battery function resides with the utility. And I think Hawaiian Electric is going in a similar direction looking for big battery installations. I think some are underway now. At the same time, the utilities are trying to be more resilient so that the failure, the blackout rate is smaller, hopefully going forward. So the percentage of risk for a given solar owner or homeowner in general being abandoned and not have any power in a crisis is probably, hopefully, getting smaller. So here we have an expense that might be as much as your original solar installation, effectively doubling the cost of your solar installation on your home. I think a lot of the 80,000 people are not going to be willing to do that because they believe that ultimately the utility is the place where the battery system or to reside. What's your answer to that? Well Jay, you faded out a fair amount in terms of me being able to really understand everything you said, but let me take a crack at what I think you asked. Yes, the Kauai Island utility co-op has been at the forefront in the state in terms of integrating utility-scale battery storage with their newer utility-scale PV arrays. And Hawaiian Electric as well has been dabbling with utility-scale battery storage, but it hasn't been designed and we're not there yet where utilities in this state at least are, and I don't think in the rest of country as well, are installing megawatt hours of battery storage as a backup in case one of their generators were to go down or they were to have a fault in a particular part of the grid. The utility-scale battery storage which has been installed to date is typically there to write out and smooth the variable nature of renewable energies when the winds will pick up to a certain value and then die down within seconds or when the sun plays peek-a-boo behind cloud. So there is no utility-scale storage that I'm aware of, certainly not in this state, and not in the mainland where you have megawatt hours and megawatt hours worth of storage that are sitting there waiting in a fully charged mode to be able to provide power in case there are other failures in the grid. Amina, what are your thoughts about this issue? So Jay, I mean basically in the Kauai system that the utility is relying on is to give the system operators enough time to bring on their quick start generators because it's just far cheaper for them to bring on their quick start diesel generators than to rely on batteries. So they're just looking for that window of storage to bring up their quick start generators. But Amina, you know they've got a very substantial battery facility with DeSauro and they're doing one with AES and I heard also they're doing what? Pumped Hydro. They've got a big project for Pumped Hydro in Kauai and it all suggests that even if they don't have batteries and storage systems in place now that will work overnight that seems to be a sea change that we should be watching and maybe utilities around the state will be doing that. And I agree. And I agree we should be watching. You know this is fairly new they've only come on within the last year and so this is for dispatchable power from these power purchase agreements and so yeah these are developments that we should be watching. Yeah but I agree with you that right now we don't have it. I agree with Marco that we right now we don't have it and we may not have it in substantial quantity, substantial enough to really cover the basis. So it's a legitimate question for every homeowner who doesn't have storage to see what what the economics are for him or her and maybe take a look at that in order to give you know to be more resilient in his own home. Well anyway we're out of time you guys. Thank you Amina as always. Thank you Marco as always. So enjoy having these conversations they were lucidating for everyone including me and I look forward to talking with you guys again in two weeks hence and in the meantime I wish you a happy Christmas and the prospect of a wonderful new year. Aloha you guys. Aloha to you both very much really appreciate being able to have these uh do these shows with both of you. Thank you Amina. Happy holiday. Happy holiday.