 My Engelstorff here, Energy 808 Decutting Edge, really pleased with that much gratitude to have Ivan Penn from the New York Times, one of the best energy beat riders, I dare say, in the country and has been covering the energy beat for the times over these past years. So welcome to Energy 808 Think Tech. It's great to have you, Ivan. It's a pleasure to join you, Marko. Let's take the dive by starting. I'm always really interested and curious when I talk to a guest kind of how they got to the chair they're sitting in now as far as, well, in your case, the reporting path that I believe I read that you've been a reporter for decades. So let's start wherever you'd like to start and kind of tell me more about how the Ivan Penn of today came to be the Ivan Penn of today. Well, there's a lot of interesting components to that but what brought me in particular to the energy space, I've been covering utilities and energy for about 15 years or so. I've been a reporter for, I guess it's 31 years with a career that's gone from the Miami Herald to the Baltimore Sun, the St. Pete now Tampa Bay Times, the Los Angeles Times, and now the New York Times and based in Los Angeles. It was at the Tampa Bay Times that I began to cover energy after largely a career that focused on government politics, criminal justice. And I was asked to cover utilities at the Tampa Bay Times. And there was a broken nuclear plant that was 70 miles north of Tampa. And reporting on how that plant broke really, that's what led me into almost really making this a career of covering utilities and energy. The utility company there had done a project replacing steam generators that led to damaging the plant. And so since then, the LA Times hired me to be their energy reporter. And then the New York Times hired me as the title is Alternative Energy Correspondent. I get it harangued on Twitter over that title because people like to say, well, solar is not alternative anymore. And I'm not the solar reporter. I'm the title's Alternative Energy. But I cover basically the electricity sector in the power grid, along with my colleague Cliff Kraus in Houston, who covers oil, natural gas and coal. We're the energy correspondents for the New York Times on the business staff and another colleague in Europe, Stanley Reed, who covers energy there. But that's sort of the essence of how I got to the space. Great, I so appreciate kind of hearing how you get your path. And just out of curiosity, do you have an idea of kind of what the cohort size is of national reporters whose principal beat is the energy slash utility sector? I'm just kind of trying to get a sense, because I, of course, read up on this, quite a bit heaven for years, kind of get a sense of how big you feel your cohort is that covers this particular beat. Do you have a sense of that? Well, so it's interesting, before President Biden pushed the energy transition, there wasn't the level of interest, even as folks would talk about climate change, people didn't necessarily, especially in mainstream news organizations, wanna cover utilities and energy. Maybe oil and gas, but electricity wasn't exactly, there weren't a whole lot of folks and some of the bit of the obvious. So when you start talking about particularly African-American journalists who are business reporters and cover energy, that world is really small. The mainstream media reporters who cover utilities and energy has grown, but it's still a relatively small group. I mean, you'll have more climate and environmental reporters, but those who particularly cover utilities and energy, not a lot. Several of us, we do know each other in competing news organizations. Cause it's poles and wires aren't as sexy as politics and Hollywood and things that generally dominate the front pages and the top of the news hour. But because of the energy transition, a lot of that has changed. And my Marko addendum to that is that, yeah, people don't pay a whole lot of attention to poles and wires and electrons until something rather dramatic happens to threatens the availability of that. It's kind of the joining Mitchell that you don't know what you've got, Jill is gone in this case, power to do what you need to do. So let's just take the dive into your recent reporting on the line of fire tragically. Worst thing that the state has experienced us in statehood and you along with other times reporters and many others on national and local have been covering this story from multiple angles. And I've read all your stuff and kind of what stands out to you in your reporting over the past couple of weeks about the fire, the possible causes, wind, electric, all of the above. Yeah, the thing that struck me from the very beginning is here we have again questions of utility preparedness for extreme events that are becoming more common. When we really look at the picture, we have an electric grid that's well over a hundred years old. And in many cases that grid all across the country hasn't been upgraded to meet not only the clean energy challenges of rooftop solar, batteries and garages and electric vehicles, but the climate events that are driving the energy transition. And so what we began to see in our reporting were some similarities to the things that we've reported on the mainland. Questions about the, were the electric poles, the power lines, were they up to date? And were they the sources of these deadly fires? Because once again, we saw in particularly here in California, it was electrical equipment that failed, particularly the biggest one was a transmission tower that failed and caused the campfire and that killed 85 people. So we started seeing some evidence from particularly one company called Whisker Labs. They have home sensors that detected what they call faults and arcing on the power lines. So in those cases, you see drops in voltage and ultimately potential sparking. And if you've got a lot of dry brush, that can trigger a fire. So a lot of attention of course has turned to that area. And that has been a consistent focal point of the wildfires in California and increasingly in other places around the States. So that's what, those were the most striking things from the beginning. Now there's been, you mentioned the campfire which is getting a lot of play, so to speak, as far as people referring back to that last terrible fire in 2018 in California. And many pieces I've seen have brought PG&E into the course of the discussion. And from your perspective, I'm wondering, what do you feel are the parallels or lack thereof between let's say what happened with PG&E and what you're witnessing so far with the fires on Maui and how on electric. Well, of course the first thing that people started thinking because when you start looking at the potential cost of recovery in the billions of dollars and then that's weighed against the value of Hawaiian electric, the first thing people start thinking about is the utility gonna have to go into bankruptcy as we saw with PG&E. And when you start thinking about it in that context, these are, so you have multiple things that people are looking at in the comparison. One obviously is potentially utility equipment causing a fire resulting in scores of debts and a utility so overburdened with liability that it may have to seek bankruptcy protection in order to handle it all. Just to give a little context for the comparison with PG&E, part of the issue was not only the campfire but it was multiple fires, including some that sort of preceded the string of what some related to the kind of climate change explosion of the wildfires beginning in 2017. PG&E was already trying to resolve previous wildfires and then suddenly they have this string that began in 2017, the most deadly, devastating one in the campfire in 2018. And as a way to manage all of this, they took the bankruptcy route because they had all of these court cases they were beginning to deal with. So akin to that, Hawaiian Electric now is looking at having to manage a series of lawsuits that have been filed on the behalf of victims and you have the uniqueness of Hawaii where you have different islands and unlike the mainland where you have connections to the grid throughout a state and even across state borders, Hawaii has separate grids on the different islands. So they're all acting independently which creates another set of issues for Hawaiian Electric to manage in addition to the multiple suits that keep getting filed. So a lot of parallels and then a significant difference in that Hawaiian Electric has separate grids that it has to deal with. That's a unique situation. I have them in fact, which don't have underwater cables as we all know and probably not gonna happen in my lifetime nor probably yours. And I'm wondering from your take, just it's a little bit background. So I've heard it from a number of sources and I read it in Katie Blunt's book on PG&E that they're one of the issues with PG&E and it's also been put out there with Hawaiian Electric is that maybe their focus over the years was so heavy and so pronounced on renewable energy development that that kind of took up so much oxygen in the room so to speak that it left other priorities lower on the list. Do you find any merit in that that somehow in this case of Hawaiian Electric that maybe they too or so somehow preoccupied with renewables that other important priorities were were not ignored but just that were given the same level of urgency to do something? Well, that may be the case but there's a bottom line when it comes to the regulated utilities and that is they have a very clear mission. It is to produce safe, reliable and affordable electricity. That is their core mission. And so everything else is supposed to be subordinate to that even as you're developing a clean energy profile those things are supposed to stand out in the forefront. Again, doing the PG&E comparison. I mean, one of the things that we found in our reporting was that there was an enormous amount of spending on executive pay, on a shareholder pay, you know, rewarding the shareholders and not maintaining their equipment. Because again, that campfire, so the tower that broke was 100 years old and by PG&E's own standards, it was 25 years past its useful life. So why was that tower there given in particular that safety is a core and a universal element that utilities can get funding for from regulators because it is part of their core responsibility. I've seen a number of utility experts just raised eyebrows, take their heads, wondering why would you not make sure that your grid was stable, make sure that all of those things were taken care of because the regulators are gonna approve things that are safety issues. You can still deal with clean energy. You can still deal with solar and wind and batteries, but safety is a bedrock element of the core of what utilities are supposed to be doing. Yeah, I think you put it very well. You've been an observer of utilities on both the East Coast there in Florida. I believe you were talking about Florida power and light in terms of that trouble nuclear plant, certainly PG&E. It was progress energy now and Duke energy. Okay, okay. Thank you for that correction. So progress energy and PG&E. And I'm wondering if you have, what your observations are in terms of how wind electric to date over the past couple of weeks has kind of done in terms of what I'll call crisis management. I mean, there's a whole kind of subcategory PR that deals with nothing, but dealing with crises, but it befalls a company. So what's your kind of impression about as to how wind electric has done to handle the very, very difficult, obviously tragic situation on now? Well, as you noted, it is a difficult situation. You know, I guess it will forever be comparisons between the Hawaiian electric and PG&E, but in perhaps in all fairness to Hawaiian electric, they don't have the numbers of people, especially communications staff and all as a PG&E. And PG&E is not only California's largest investor own utility, but it is the largest utility within the borders of any state in the country. And so that's a massive operation. And even for them, responding to the the barrage of questions from both the local media, the national media, and then ultimately international media, I mean, it's a lot, right? I mean, that's, you know, I think being real, at the same time, you know, I mean, it also becomes your responsibility. And, you know, we have to ask tough questions and the public has a right to know what happened. Sometimes, you know, they're balancing, okay, we're also being sued. So how do we respond to the questions that you Ivan Penn are asking and your colleagues against the backdrop of a series of lawsuits and potential penalties from regulators. And then, you know, you're also dealing with state government, the legislature, the governor, you're dealing with all of those elements at the same time that you're, you know, being asked to be responsive. And that's difficult. But, you know, that's also your job. Speaking of a barrage of questions, kind of a similar question I'll ask you regarding how what I'll call the Hawaii political class has dealt with this. I mean, Governor Josh Green is relatively new in the chair, so to speak. Same with Richard Bissen, mayor, county of Maui and they've been holding multiple meetings before the press. Do you have any sense of kind of how you would grade them and as far as how they're handling this? I mean, in my position, I wouldn't particularly great offer a grade to maintain our, you know, particularly as a reporter and not necessarily a columnist, the objectivity, you know, but from the reporting that we and others have done, I mean, obviously people are deeply concerned about the response because they need help. And that's always gonna be a challenge, especially, I mean, this is, there's a lot of really complicated issues here. I mean, we still, we have hundreds of people who still aren't accounted for. That's a, and that affects response. At the same time, again, people need and want answers as to how do we get here as much as, you know, do something about my situation because I've got to survive right now. So you're juggling all of these pieces, but first and foremost, I mean, people want to know what about my missing loved one? I want to know what has happened to them. What about our needs right now? And we need help, you know, and you hear those cries. And so, you know, I think that all of that ends up speaking for itself. And as of a little bit earlier today, the tally of missing was somewhere over 800. So I mean, it's just kind of astonishing that me that know, you know, two weeks into it, there's still 800 people missing and that they've apparently the search teams have gone through about 80% of La Jaina. So yeah, the grizzly work goes on. Do you have a last to put on your prognostic heater hat? Do you have this, would you hazard the guess as to how long is going to take the alcohol, tobacco, firearms, explosives, the ATF people from Washington to come up with because they're on the ground. They're now investigating the cause or possible causes of the fire. Do you have any sense of how long it's gonna take them to be able to produce something for the public? I don't know how long it'll take the ATF, but a lot of times, and especially given the kinds of data that we have, a lot of times from the wildfires, you know, it takes a lot of work because a lot of your evidence obviously has been damaged by the fire itself. So you've got to sift through all of that. And again, at the same time, you're dealing with, you're still dealing with search and recovery elements as opposed to, you know, we haven't really moved beyond that phase yet. So you've got all of that going on. But at the same time, we have seen, you know, at points in some of the California wildfires, some pretty rapid response times within, sometimes it's been months, but, you know, it's a little unclear when you have the kind of unusual data that we have seen in this case, you know, quite a bit of evidence related to what was going on on the grid. So that may hasten a determination. Thanks. Anything more you want to say on this subject before we shift topics? Well, you know, I mean, this is going to be an ongoing question. I've been raising the questions about our distribution as well as transmission system. We talk a lot about the transmission system, especially in the energy transition. But a lot of these poles and wires that are connecting the grid to our homes, there's a lot of work that needs to be done all throughout the country. Yes, we want to move solar and wind from one area to another, but that equipment that connects our homes and businesses to the grid, that also needs attention. And when you start plugging a whole lot of stuff up to it, the solar panels, the batteries, the electric vehicles, you got to consider what kind of impact that that's going to have on equipment that's 100, 125 years old. Well, you know, I've been at this for a very long time and I couldn't agree more. I mean, the distributed generation shift going from the Edisonian, you know, great big power plants with power lines going hundreds or thousands of miles either in yawn is certainly shifting to a very, very different model. And yet the infrastructure, the architecture is still kind of stuck in the 100 year ago mold and it's going to take a time and it's going to take a tremendous amount of money to be able to move us where we want to go. So let me, let's go to tell your piece from last year. So you wrote what I thought was a really great piece in May of last year, long piece on Hawaii, energy renewable energy. Can you reach back in time and kind of share the top things that come to mind about what you learned during your reporter visit here in the first half of last year and what you wrote? Whenever I think about Hawaii, I think about, you know, obviously the number one thing outside of, you know, a disaster situation like this is the electricity rates. Hawaii has the highest rates in the country and as we looked at, you know, some of the dynamics could part of the question, especially at that time, we had the beginnings of Russia's war in Ukraine and that caused natural gas prices to spike and Hawaii, you know, imports all of its fuel for the fossil fuel generators. So there was a direct impact and learning that the renewable prices were tied to the fossil fuel prices. You saw just an overall increase in the rates even as you were trying to, you know, clean up the grid. Those were some really fascinating dynamics. You know, we need to rethink how we have packaged everything because there was not just Hawaii, but all over the country, some short-sightedness and how we have developed the grid. And this is a perfect opportunity to cite a couple of stats that just continue to kind of boggle my mind in terms of showing just how dangerously I would say and how vulnerably dependent we are and we have been for decades and decades on the long, long supply line of imported fossil fuels. And for example, in 1960, 1960, 99% of the state's economy was powered by imported oil. Well, that's not too surprising. Last year, that figure, despite decades of people working really hard to try to bring about greater energy independence, greater energy security here in Hawaii, we were still, as of last year, dependent to the tune of 80%. I've been 80% on imported fossil fuel, principally oil by far with some net gas. And we've made strides, certainly, in the power generation sector, but transportation is pretty much abysmal. I mean, there are more and more EVs, of course. But I mean, we're still, just below my mind, we're still, after all these years of effort, we're still 80% dependent upon imported fossil fuels. And I think we should be having more of those of us who have hair on fire moments that this really necessitates something much more dramatic than the efforts that we've been up to so far, but it'll meander on as it does. So in the past year, so it has been something over a year since that piece in May of last year. What, if anything, has changed or what kind of progress you think we've made or anything that kind of comes to mind in the intervening time since you wrote that piece, as far as being an observer? One of the things that I thought then, and even in recent conversations I've had with people, I thought was very interesting, very much on the positive side of Hawaiian Electric, was being in their control center and seeing that they were able, they were tracking the distributed resources that were coming into the grid. That's actually very unique in the country. Many of the utilities, especially California, has the most rooftop solar of any state by far. The grid does not know how much rooftop solar is coming on to the grid at any particular time. They don't have a system in place right now to track that. So that's a really, and it's an important thing. And that was a really striking thing and remains a striking thing about what Hawaiian Electric is doing. There are efforts to begin to track that in California, PG&E is being one of those. But another PG&E, Portland General Electric, they have a distributed energy center that is doing the kind of things that Hawaiian Electric is doing, but these are rare. It's kind of, you begin to wonder why do we not track those resources which can help us manage the grid better? So that actually is a good thing. Well, let's move to NIMBY, not in my backyard, darn it. And I don't know if you were aware of this, but in the not too long ago, Hawaiian Electric submitted a very long plan as far as how they were going to develop their grid with more renewables. And that included in their assumptions that there would be 400 megawatts of wind, offshore wind on Oahu, which really kind of struck me as being a rather large number because we don't have any whatsoever offshore wind in Hawaii for a number of reasons, at least to date. And you wrote a great piece on, not focused on Hawaii, but what's going on as far as pushback against large wind farms, whether onshore or offshore and solar. So what do you want to share? What can you share from that particular piece? I mean, there's just this conflicting priorities here. And I get why someone doesn't want to have a wind turbine in their view plane or have this low frequency hum to disrupt their quality of life. But I guess, what is your reporter, your reporting lead you to kind of surmise or conclude kind of where we are regarding those competing priorities. So we want to have more renewables than at the same time, there's commensurate pushback in some quarters. Well, you use the perfect word competing. Solving a lot of the clean energy questions is actually not as complicated as it seems, but the problem is the competing interest. And because there are some who are arguing, well, we don't need to do all of these big solar farms and wind farms when we have all these rooftops of homes and businesses, that where we could put panels on, put batteries at those locations, put the generation where the load is, as part of, is one quarter. Another quarter argues that, well, if we're going to electrify everything, including transportation, heating and cooling, especially in areas that aren't using electric for HVAC, when you start adding all that up, we need a whole bunch of power and more than waiting for home owners to adopt rooftop solar or businesses. And so there's one point of tension, but then you also have others that people may or may not be thinking about, like the unions, they're thinking about jobs. Well, a nuclear plant, you know, is 600 jobs, high paying kinds of jobs, a solar farm after it's built, you know, well, it was a guy with a squeegee and increasingly it's a drone. So you worry about jobs from a union standpoint. So the unions pull in a different direction. The utilities are thinking about, well, our profit is we get a return off of, you know, their kind of construction companies, stuff that they build. So if they aren't building things, then, you know, where is the profit gonna come from? So there are all of those tensions that have nothing to do with types of generation themselves and whether the stuff works and all of those things. And that's a real challenge. But then you start talking about offshore wind, you know, the whole country, we're way behind, especially Europe. We have seven turbines in the water. You know, obviously there are some others that are, we're getting there on some on the East Coast, but we only have seven where Europe has thousands. And so, you know, that's a whole another set of challenges, both economically, the NIMBY piece, people are concerned about, you know, the visual aspect of the turbines in the water. They're the fisheries and the fishing industry. And what's the impact? The environmentalists worrying about the whales and, you know, what are the impacts of having lines under the water for these turbines? So, I mean, there's a whole lot of policy, political, NIMBY job interests that are all competing against each other that don't necessarily have anything to do with the energy itself, but they are the drivers. Now, these are great points you're making and just kind of bring it back to what you name. I mean, Oahu is the island is really kind of in the more difficult straights because there's, you know, one million out of the states, 1.4 million who live there approximately. And whereas the Kauai, where you see the co-op there has been exemplary as far as bumping up their renewables, cost-effective renewables. The big island is number two on the list. Maui is not doing too bad, at least wasn't until what happened a couple of weeks ago. But it's really Oahu, which, you know, the big bulk of the power demand is and there's less room, there's less space. So, hence, you know, looking to the horizon in the ocean for her megawatts, perhaps a large wind turbine. Well, we could go on and on. I feel like we both, we've only kind of scratched the surface here, but all good things do come to an end at some point. So, Ivan Penn, I can't tell you how much I really appreciate you joining me and joining us today. And I hope I can have you back before too long to share all the interesting juicy stuff that you will be reporting on from now until then next time. So, Mahalo Nui Loa for joining us and ThinkTech. Thank you.