 One, bingo, four o'clock rock. This is Stink Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. Wow, what a show we have for you. This is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. No kidding in all ways. Okay, and so tonight we have our special guest, Colton Ching. He's a senior vice president of planning and technology at Hawaiian Electric Companies. Did I say that right? Yep. You got it. Welcome to the show, Colton. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And my co-host, Ray Staling, say hi, I knew you could do that. Welcome. And we have Lisa Harmon from Hawaii Energy, and she has some movies she's going to talk about and show us about energy efficiency in Hawaii. Welcome to the show, Lisa. Thank you, Jay. Thanks for having me. Okay. Introduce your movies. All right. Great. So we've got a video that we did at Architects Hawaii for their Clean Energy Ally program to support their Clean Energy Allies. We want to help the contractors that are implementing these projects out in the marketplace to be able to educate their customers. So we have a co-op event funding where we kick some money in for the contractor to host an event to educate their customers about energy efficiency. So the videos are about, the first one is about a presentation we did at Architects Hawaii to educate them on Hawaii Energy program so that they can teach their customers. And the second one is an HVAC training, HVAC training that we had on Saturday to help support the contractors in the marketplace with increasing their professional development and technical knowledge. So we have funding at Hawaii Energy to support these projects. And we're really excited to help with the workforce development and help the customers and the contractors get better premium efficient equipment that saves energy. Okay, that's the point of it. So Roland Dano, let's see what the first one looks like. Our mission is really to empower island families and businesses on making smart energy choices. Oh, we live on an island, right? Tsunami, hurricane, anything, food or oil prices go up. I mean, we are at the mercy of those things, you know, in my land. And this is really important to help make sure that you guys get involved early. I don't know if a lot of our clients are aware of the incentives that are out there for the things we already are doing. So this is just an added benefit for them. No, those are the guys on the firing line. They're doing constructions and they're doing design. So they have a lot to say about how things are designed and built. That's right. That's right. And they're interacting with the customer. So in this case, we went to the company and we presented our program to them and we brought lunch. So if there's any other clean energy allies out there that are providing services to end-use customers, we would love them if they signed up as a clean energy ally as part of the program. We can go present on their behalf and we can bring lunch, which is always nice as well. Which is always nice. So how do they find out about this? Is there a website? They can go to yenergy.com slash cea and that says sign up pages right there. And then they can find out about all the benefits of being a clean energy ally. Okay, what about the second one? So I think the next video we have is again about the HVAC training, which is supporting the technical and professional development of the contractors in the marketplace. Okay, now you say that after me. Roll them, Dano. Roll them, Dano. Finding and selling energy conservation measures in HVAC. My name is Mike Hedge. A lot of you know me. We're all coming up to the same level in this. So it's not like I'm selling a product or something. I'm you know, we're selling energy efficiency, all of us, right? So it's a it's a thing for humankind. We really want to focus on workforce development because it's more than just rebates. It's more than just incentives and we have to continue to change with the the market and the industry. We want to continue to support these sorts of educational events and we want your feedback. We want to ensure that we're picking the the right right things that work for you guys. Coming on a Saturday morning, many of you may have been working otherwise or had the day off. I feel like we're always all working. So yeah, but you know this is this is awesome. Okay, really important. HVAC is so important to so much energy involved. It is. It is and we've got a lot of great people out there like Mike Hedge that presented that training that's willing to share his technical knowledge with other contractors. So we really want to support that and we appreciate all the work that the contractors are doing. So if you're not a clean energy ally, please sign up at HawaiiEnergy.com slash CEA so that you can be part of the benefits be it the professional and technical development training or take advantage of some funding for a luncheon to educate your staff or your customers. We're here to help and and get feedback and ideas from the contractors as well. Yeah, that's great because you know we've got to get the word out. That's that's the mission and you've got to get the word out through this part of our community as you know in addition to the people you know who are residential customers and so forth. Ray, you want to do some cross-examination on Lisa? Well, I we we just introduced you quickly because you're you're here quite frequently but tell a little bit about the program, the energy efficiency program and sure why why you're here. You're called by cross-examination. That's a soft one. Well, the Hawaii Energy program is for residents and businesses, electric utility customers. We have commercial offerings and residential offerings so be it lighting or HVAC pumps and motors. We have all sorts of incentives to help people make a really smart purchase, make smarter energy choices and and reduce their energy consumption in the long run and have premium energy efficient equipment all towards paving the path of the 100% renewable that we're going to that the state's going to get to by 2045. So Colton, do you have any cross-examination? After all, this is not helping you generate and sell more power, is it? It doesn't help us generate and sell more power but energy efficiency is very important to the operation of the grid. It helps us manage our system and always keep our generation and demand always in balance and so we really count on Hawaii Energy to put into place the energy efficiency program so that we can plan for and serve a more predictable electric load over time. It's been a big help to our system, helps us keep our costs down which ultimately means our customers save money. Yeah, well that's not cross-examination either but hey Lisa, thank you so much for coming down. You are great. You're going to come down again. Will you come down again? I would love it, thanks. It's on record. All right, we'll take a short break and switch seats with you right back. Aloha. My name is Carl Campania. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I hope you join us as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii over the coming weeks and the alternative fuel supply chains necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. We are going to invite in and we will have significant interviews with various stakeholders including our producers which are our farmers and our scientists, our conversion technologies including Terra Viva, who we'll see in two weeks, as well as our consumers. Within there we're also going to have the investor groups necessary to make sure that this can advance. So I do hope you join us as we explore our deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii. Hello and Aloha. My name is Raya Salter and I am the host of Power of Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to figure out how we're going to work towards a clean and renewable energy future. We have exciting conversations with all kinds of stakeholders, everyone who needs to come together to talk about renewable energy be they engineers, advocates, lawyers, utility executives, musicians or artists to see how we can come together to make a renewable future. Tuesdays at 1 p.m. Okay, we're back. We're live. We're here with my co-host Ray Starling and our esteemed guest, Colton Ching, Senior Vice President of Planning and Technology at Hawaiian Electric Company, very important guest, very important discussion. And Ray, can you put this in context for our monthly series? Well, we're actually looking hard at the utilities and what they've been up to and of course Colton is bringing us the message from HECO today as to, in particular, the PSIP that has been ongoing for some time. And we've got it for show and tell here when you're ready for that. But for now, Colton is going to tell us a little bit about the PSIP, where you've been and where you hope to be going with it. Okay. Rich, this is Rich Propuse, our floor manager and he's going to bring it in. Bring it in. There it is. There it is. Fabulous, fabulous 2,000 page plan. Right, so couldn't do an interview without a visual aid. So, just for everyone to see the sort of enormity of this work, this is what 2,000 pages looks like and this is actually double-sided. So, it would be twice as right. It would have been twice as tall if it actually was single-sided. But all kidding aside, the power supply improvement plan, as Ray was mentioning, was something that we've been working on for quite some time. We most recently filed our most recent version, latest version, followed it with the Public Utilities Commission December just before Christmas. And in our power supply improvement plan, we lay out several things. But I think that the thing that folks have been most interested in is looking at what we're looking to do over the next five years to get us started in a sort of very no regrets way around accelerating the amount of renewables that we have on our system that gets us in a direction towards our 100% renewable energy goal. We do look at the longer term. We do build up multiple scenarios of plans that go out to 2045. Some of those scenarios take us to 100% renewables ahead of the state goal. Some of it takes us right at 2045. But one of the really interesting things that we found in the work that we did, and you can tell just sort of by the enormity of this, how intensive the analytics were behind this study, that regardless of the scenarios that we looked at, the reasonable multiple paths to getting 200% renewable energy have a lot in common in the beginning years, especially in the first five years. And so we feel really good about the work that we've done and especially of the action plans that we identified to aggressively pursue the addition of new renewables, all five islands in the next five years. And we're really ready to go. We've taken some initial steps to get primed and ready to go once we get the green light from the Public Utilities Commission to go. Wow, exciting times. How many people were involved in the preparation of this plan? Well, we had a core team of around 20 or so engineers and planners. We also had a team of consultants that helped us out as well. But this core team would not have been able to do this alone. We had the support of our accountants, lawyers, our engineers, our designers, the folks that develop all of our forecasts, the folks that are in charge of developing and executing our demand response and DER programs. It was a real team effort consisting of teammates from across the three utilities all working to do this. So can you read some phraseology from it? You know, when we have book reviews, you know, people, we interview people who just published books. This is really kind of the same thing, isn't it? We always ask them to pick a paragraph, you know, not a long paragraph, short paragraph, that they really like and so we can sort of see and feel the poetry of it. And I know there must be poetry in the plan. You're asking an engineer to talk about poetry. Well, you know, engineers are really romantic at heart, aren't they? You should talk to my wife. So, you know, actually there's one thing that comes to mind that maybe I wanted to share with folks. It's relatively short and it's called Our Planning Principles and hopefully I can find it here. Okay, let me take this off the table because it's so big. Sure. I can hardly lift it. Let the record reflect that I'm getting a hernia. So, you know, in undertaking this very complex planning and analytical exercise, we wanted to have a set of rules or principles that sort of guided our work. We had so many teams working on so many different models doing a whole bunch of different analyses. We wanted sort of this sort of north star to guide how directionally we performed the work. So, real briefly, these principles, number one, renewable energy is the first option for us, right? Number two, the energy transformation must include everyone. So, it can't be a renewable energy plan for some of our customers. It really needs to be one for all of the customers that we serve. Number three, our decisions that we're making today on the technologies we're looking to use today must not crowd out tomorrow's breakthroughs. One of the things that just being a member of society in the last five years, we've learned how technology is improving at an ever more rapid pace. And that applies to everything. It applies to our phones, of course, but it applies to PV systems, inverters, battery systems. And we're starting to see that improvement, right? And not only are things getting better, they're getting cheaper. So, we want to make sure as we make decisions today, we're not making decisions that doesn't allow to take advantage of that improving technology. That's hard. It is, but it requires having, being aggressive, but having a measured and thoughtful plan and approach to adding the right resources on a grid over the next 20 plus years. The power grid needs to be modernized. The grid itself is a glue that keeps things together. And the grid has, therefore, a very, very critical role in operating the entire system and making all of these parts, all of these components that we're looking at in the PSIP to work. So, the grid needs to keep up with the resources it's being connected to and the new roles for which the grid is being asked to do for not just connecting customers to a few large generators, but being the grid that interconnects many small generators with all of our customers on a two-way bi-directional basis. It's a whole new paradigm. It is. It really, really is and it's really driving a lot of our redesign of our transmission and distribution system that is actually part of our PSIP whanning that we're going to explore further and develop further in a good modernization strategy that we're doing later this summer. Because there's a lot of work ahead of us in that space. Well, it's kind of poetry, don't you think? This is certain. Yeah. Certain poetry in that. You're adding poetry to it. I am adding poetry to it. By the way, your emotive way of presenting it. So, just a couple of things really quickly. Can't forget that lights must stay on. So, as we go on this journey to increase our renewable energy and achieve these very, very aggressive state goals all along the way, the state's economy and the way of life for everyone in Hawaii depends upon reliable energy. So, we have to make sure it's reliable all along the way. Number six, and this is something in Hawaii I think we tend to take for granted, but we can't forget is that our plans must address climate change. It's not just about achieving our renewable energy goals as important as it is, but ultimately the reason or one critical reason for moving to renewables is to address climate change issues. And climate change is more than eliminating fossil fuel use. It's about having a grid and a system that's more resilient to the kinds of natural events, storms, hurricanes, title changes that we're going to see as a result of climate change. And so, we need to ensure that the grid is able to deal with that. And lastly, as a planner, this is sort of very hard for me to include within this set of principles, but it's the fact that there really is no perfect choice. All of these complex choices we're making in developing plans is going to require a selection of one over another. And trying to find that balance is the key, but even in the perfect or the best optimization, you're really trading off one great thing for another important thing. And so, there is no perfect choice and we just got to acknowledge that. I was going to ask you that. I was going to ask you, is this perfect? You've already answered that. I guess the other question is, though, inherent in what you've said, though, is this has to be watched in view of events in, well, in geopolitics, events in technology, national things, whatever it is, and changes in the state. So, you have to review it going forward. So, how do you see that? You have to watch it. You have those 20 people and contractors, whatever, watching it. And then you have to make changes from time to time to be sure that you're following the ball. This is not easy either. It's not. And to add to your question, I think one really critical piece that you didn't mention that's really important is what we do with the plans. Right? And so, we've spent a lot of time and a lot of effort, a lot of money, in developing these plans. And it's really not of use if we don't actually use them towards our advancement of our renewable goals. So, I think there's a very critical step to take the plans that we file, right? Come to an agreement on what are the actions that we should be taking over the near term and actually execute on that. That is the execution in the 2000 pages? Yes. So, it's all laid out there. So, once you get the green light from the PUC, and we hope that's soon, then you already know what you're going to do. Right. And we want to execute it in a very deliberate and thoughtful way. So, one of the things that we acknowledge and actually put into report, although we've done a lot of analysis and used the best models to develop plans and identify specific resources, specific resources meaning grid scale solar or grid scale wind, we want to let the market really have a say in this. And if the market can find a solution that produces a renewable energy resource at a cost lower than what we identified in here, we want to take advantage of it. We don't want to be so rigid and stuck with the plan and inadvertently put blinders on and pursue a path without taking advantage of market. So, as we execute a big part of what we want to do is to conduct RFPs to acquire and contract for renewables. If the market says, even though the PSIP says this block of wind, if they can deliver a photovoltaic system or a PV battery system that can deliver the same operating attributes, the same amount of renewable energy or more, but do it at a more cost-effective basis, that's what we must pursue. I mean, it's the best better deal for our customers and so we should be pursuing that. And when those market-based things happen that may not be perfectly aligned with our action plan, we should then step back. After we do some actions, we actually make some progress, come back to our plan to say, let's update our plans for this new information that we have, right? And so, I kind of see it as being an iterative cycle that includes and incorporates within our work actual execution steps along the way. How often do you foresee going back? I mean, how much of the changes, for example, there's graphene, right? As a potential new technology for batteries, it could change batteries. And that might have a profound effect on the products available. And thus, the way it all works with the grid. And that might give you the idea that maybe you can change this, or you should change this because of this new revolutionary technology. So would you be able to do that yourself? Is it built in, or do you have to go back for another green light? At least the way we see it, that there is value in ensuring that the plans that we have are updated for new technologies, right? Or new economic conditions, new circumstances. And so we want to always have plans that are fresh, right? And the plans that we develop should not necessarily just be plans we develop in response to a request or an order from our regulators. Really, it should be a living document that we keep alive, keep current, keep fresh to guide the actions of the utility. So we don't necessarily see it one where we only do in order to obtain approval. That's great. That's great. And Ray is shaking his head. Ray, what do you got on this? When do you expect, if things go the way you think they will go, when do you expect to be given to go ahead on this? Well, so my desire is for that to happen as soon as possible. In the regulatory proceeding that we're currently in right now, the commission has not identified a specific timeline to make a decision. The docket for which we filed this PSIP update included milestones and dates to the commission identified most recently with all parties in the docket submitting their statement of positions. But there is no schedule beyond that filing of last week for a commission decision. Let's say around April 50, you guys go ahead. I'm looking for you to sort of close your eyes and think out into the future. In one year, if this is approved, in one year, what kinds of changes might we expect to see? Sure. I'm going to ask you like at three years and five years. So I won't go any further than that. So let me sort of take a step back and talk about one element in our PSIP plan that I think gets to your question, maybe the two or three-year question that you're going to ask me. In our plan, one of the elements is for us to aggressively pursue solicitations for wind energy, grid-scale wind energy on several of our islands. The purpose of that is to see if we can take advantage of the remaining federal tax credits for wind. As you know, that is a declining, tax credits began declining at the beginning of this year. But in our analysis, if we're able to take advantage of those tax credits, grid-scale wind provides a very, very low-cost renewable resource that provides a lot of renewable energy from fairly compact systems on the grid. So to your point about in one year, what we'd really like to do is accelerate in a thoughtful way and shorten the normal standard process for procuring things like a wind resource so that we can bring them into service by 2020 and really take advantage of those federal tax credits. And you know, if they get the tax credits, that means the cost of the infrastructure is less. And if the cost of the infrastructure is less, rates are less. What a wonderful result. So this is really going to help everybody. And my personal thing is that wind also has poetry. Wind has poetry. Wind has poetry. So you heard it here. Okay. So we might see some new windmills in three years, maybe. Right. And in order to actually achieve something like that means we have to begin very soon the process to acquire those resources, begin a competitive solicitation. And we've actually started taking steps even before we filed our PSIP with the commission to get more information upfront so that procurement process can be conducted on a more accelerated basis. So one of the things we've gotten is feedback from renewable energy developers and large landowners is that they have a hard time playing dating game. They have a hard time matching up a good renewable resource developer with a good land site and a good landowner that can work together. So we actually issued a solicitation of interest for large landowners to say if you are interested in having your land made available to be a host for a renewable resource, let us know. Provide us critical information about that property. We'll take that along with information about the system like how close or how far it may be from a transmission line and we'll make that kind of information available to developers interested in bidding into an RFP. So they start the RFP process with a bucket of information rather than a clean sheet of paper. Right. That we think will help to accelerate the process. This is so interesting to have you here, to have the plan here, to be able to talk about it. I mean it makes me feel that there should be an approval pretty soon. I hope so. And that we can get on down the road and do these things. That's what it's all about. So Ray, unfortunately, we're out of time. It means two things. One, it means that Ray gets to summarize because he always does. And the second thing, it means you have to come back. Ray? Okay. The summary is basically that you've got a power supply plan that is ready to go and waiting for approval. And once it gets approved then you expect to be moving forward pretty rapidly. And the first things we might see, hopefully, is a line of new windmills on each of the islands. Right. Like I said, if the market says that they can deliver something like photovoltaics or some other alternative technology at a lower price, we'll go with that. Okay. And you're looking at having these windmills owned by a third party and just the energy sold to you. Okay. Well, that's good. I mean that means we do have to have Colton back and talk some more because we need to get out there at five-year point, maybe the 10-year point and start talking about what if real things that we might see in our lifetime. Yeah. And the other thing is if you have a declining tax credit on wind, it means you have to act before it declines. That's right. So time is of the essence.