 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC-16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Rachel James. And I'm Rachel Juergen. In our show this time, we'll cover the ninth annual Hawaii Clean Energy Day. It was presented by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and was called Pathways to Clean Transportation. It was a full-day program with remarks by energy and transportation experts and officials and Governor David Ige, as well as Q&A exchanges through meeting SIF technology. Transportation is critical for our community, our security, our health, and our well-being. It's also a big challenge and opportunity. Moving people, goods and services is central to our economy and quality of life. If done right, it will generate huge benefits. At the least, it will save billions. It's hard to reduce fossil fuels in transportation. The sector is so diverse and complex and there are so many options. Energy-efficient vehicles, public transportation, renewable fuels, and smart zoning. Lots of people trying to get clean energy in transportation. We need to know what's happening and not happening, and what we can do about it going forward. The Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative was rolled out in 2008. Sometimes we've forgotten where we've said we are going and wandered off course without realizing it. So that's why the forum wanted to review where we said we were going and to adjust our course if necessary. And this program was designed to lead to outputs, to refresh our vision and our goals, and identify and examine tangible actions to create pathways to attain these goals. And with an intention to report to policymakers and the public on the goals, actions and pathways discussed and proposed. Carl Friedman let off. He's the forum's go-to guy on the essential facts and figures of clean energy. Then, we heard from Ford Fujigami, director of the State Department of Transportation, Chris Yunker, the Energy Systems and Planning Program Manager at the State Energy Office, Lee Steinmetz, Kauai County's multimodal transportation planner, Mike Packard, the Complete Streets Program Administrator for Honolulu, Mike Madsen, environmental engineer with the State Department of Health, Lance Tanaka, director of government and public affairs for Par, Hawaii, and Greg Gogh, vice president of investments at Ulupono Initiative. We have some identifiable effects from energy efficiency and renewable energy that are lowering the level of fossil generation that we have. The second message there is, despite our progress, we have a long way to go. And if you look at those same two sectors with the whole barrel, you can see that they're actually a pretty small part of where we might want to go, eventually. And a big part of that, of course, is transportation use. And that brings us to the third message, which is transportation is a real challenge. So despite everything you hear about, how do we get to the next step? The Department of Transportation is moving. We're spending money wisely to get there. And again, I believe that we're using all the experts in the industry, not only in the state of Hawaii, but the consulting group that I brought on board, the Boston Consulting Group, is known for their expertise in this particular area. And that's one of the reasons why we hired them. As I just want to mention on the app and the high tech side, is looking at seamless integration across modes of transportation. So how do you get from a bike to a bus? How do you pay for these things? Can we have a seamless type of way to pay for various modes of transportation, and also cross jurisdictions? Some of our roads are DOT, some are county. How do we work together? And that's about our newly created Complete Streets program. And while it's new in the program, it's not new in what we've been doing for some time, the state legislators passed the bill in 2009 requiring the counties to consider Complete Streets and all of what we did. 2012, the city and county passed the ordinance, which required the city to look at multimodal transportation and everything that we do. And this is for 2007, and it shows that most of the statewide greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation and electric power sectors. I sometimes get the question, well, how are you guys going to even stay relevant here, maker of fossil fuels? Well, the quick answer is we plan to be a good partner with the state and local government and to a certain extent with our customers to fill the needs that they have today. And really, with the products that we make today, jet fuel, gasoline, diesel, ultra low sulfur diesel, and high sulfur diesel, these are products that are in demand. So really the question will be for the near term, we think liquid fuels will still be used in a broad way. The average car costs anywhere from six to 10 grand a year just to own and operate. So that's six to 10 grand kind of out the window for something that you use 5% of the time and 95% of the time it just sits there. That's versus a bus pass or a biggie pass, a bus pass I get $60 a month, a biggie pass you can get roughly $20 a month. And with the oncoming rail and other solutions like Uber and Lyft, you start to get an integrated system to get you out of your car and really replace your car to save that money for other needs. After some engagement on Meeting Sift, we heard from our morning keynote, Craig Dirksen, on how Portland has dealt with these issues and what we can learn from Portland's experience. There's a strong connection between land use and transportation in our regional planning, and it yields multiple benefits. I want to reiterate that you really can't think of one without the other, land use planning and transportation planning. Because your transportation planning must support the community's vision for land use. Governor David Ige then talked about the state of clean transportation in our state of clean energy and what he and his administration are doing to move us to clean transportation. The hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is truly a zero emission, zero compromise solution. The cars are fun to drive and good to look at. Most importantly, the only emissions is water. And the hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, most closely mimics the operation of the fossil fuel based vehicles today. You can fill up whenever you need to in three to five minutes. And more and more automakers are looking at hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as an alternative to the fossil fuel vehicles. And it truly is a zero emission vehicle. The governor then helped present the Forum's Transformational Achievement Awards to those who do the work to make our energy vision a reality, the real heroes. The following winners were chosen out of 16 nominations received this year. The Collaborative Problem Solving Award went to Bikki Hawaii for collaboratively creating energy saving mobility. It was accepted by Greg Gogh, Bikki's board president. Bringing together partners who made a vision of bike share become a reality. They brought zero fossil fuel personal mobility to the people of Honolulu. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Award went to the State Building Code Council for updating the State Building Energy Conservation Code. It was accepted by Howard Wigg, Chair of the Council's Investigative Committee. Thank you, Governor, for signing. In so signing, you took Hawaii from this beat up, battered old thing to this brand spanking new energy code. We went from being one of the worst in the nation to being one of the first in the nation. Plus, we amended this mainland code to suit Hawaii's climate. And as a result, we're going to achieve savings of up to 33%. The Energy Policy and Legislation Award went to the Hawaii State Legislature and Senator Kalani English for committing the state to climate change mitigation and adaptation. It was accepted by Kalani English. This is for committing the state to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Anticipating President Trump's withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving climate change, resilience, Senator English introduced Senate Bill 559, which was signed by Governor Ege into law as Act 32. For advancing energy technology, the forum recognized Hawaiian electric companies for development of its grid responsive distributed energy storage and management system. It was accepted by Brennan Morioka, General Manager of Electrification of Transportation. Some of the next steps is really continuing this demonstration projects, evaluating the communication network between these businesses and our operations, but also looking at the data collection that's being done and then also the integration of what we're able to do both on the customer side as well as on the operations side. With the ultimate goal, like they had mentioned, is reducing the cost for our customers and providing our customers with new types of technologies and services that currently aren't out there. The forum recognized Pacific biodiesel technologies for the integration between sectors in its Hawaii military biofuel crop project. The award was accepted by Joy Galatro. The forum recognizes Pacific biodiesel technologies for the integration between sectors in its Hawaii military biofuel crop project. Through this project, Pacific biodiesel successfully collaborated with the Hawaii Army Garrison, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and local agricultural interests to demonstrate a sustainable system. The Energy and Outreach Award went to none other than Think Tech Hawaii for its media outreach. And it was accepted by none other than our very own Jay Fidel. We don't do energy. We showcase energy. We provide a platform for energy. And in that way, you know, we'd like to continue to help the energy initiative going forward. Warren has led the Hawaii Renewable Energy Alliance since its founding in 1995. And he's been a stalwart member of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum as leading our Renewable Energy Working Group as chair. We present this certificate of service in advancing clean energy in Hawaii. After lunch, Maria Tomei moderated an afternoon panel to examine visions for Hawaii's transportation energy future, including Senator Kalani English, Senate Majority Leader, Representative Chris Lee, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection, Leo Esoncion, director of the State Office of Planning, Scott Tsu, senior vice president of public affairs for Hawaiian electric companies, Stan Osserman, director of the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, and the state's hydrogen coordinator, Dave Rolf, executive director of the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association, and Shem Lawler, clean transportation director of the Blue Planet Foundation Sustainable Transportation Coalition. We have asked each panelist to share a vision of Hawaii's transportation energy future. What's looming just over the horizon for us with the advent, not only of electric vehicles, but of course with automation, with different focuses on I think the strategies which the state and the counties have started to work on for some years, that is finally looking at how do you zone differently, how do you build communities differently, and how do you empower folks to actually achieve that quality of life, live, work, play, balance that limits people's time being forced to commute in the first place. We've set some very ambitious goals for the state of Hawaii, and now the question is how do we implement them? I'll give you an example. You know, we said 100% renewable standard by 2045. So I've had a number of countries around the world, Taiwan comes to mind, but a few others said great, you know, Taiwan is now taking I think a number of nuclear reactors offline in the next few years. They have a renewable policy that they have in place, but the nuclear side is about 18% of their power. So they're looking at how to replace it. So they came to us and said, you guys have a great law, how do you do that? I look for if we're going to build our neighborhoods is, you know, of course, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods, and then we have multi-modal roadways that connect the neighborhoods together, but creating then communities. And then roadways that connect the communities. You know, we're going to have rail, we'll still have highways, we'll still have some freeways that really connect the communities to the cities. You are very familiar with some of the system level types of challenges we have with different forms of energy, some of the issues in terms of reliability, in terms of cost, from the grid operator's perspective. Essentially what we're looking for are tools that will allow us to keep the proper balance between energy usage and energy generation. So that's where we really think, as we chart the course towards the transportation future, things that we have never even thought of before are going to come to play. And when I say that, I'm specifically talking about our use of electric vehicles, that can actually serve an active role for the grid operator in terms of being a balancing resource for us. We have a pretty significant goal of all renewable by 2045, and that's a huge, huge impact when we start talking about all renewable. And what does that mean to Mr. Hues' grid? You can't get, I mean, I've got NREL studies and Sandia Lab studies, and I'll show you some of the graphs here, that you can't get there with all batteries. I mean, you get to the gigawatt scale or days and weeks of energy storage, and you just can't get there. What he needs is he needs good baseline power and a renewable source he can control and renewable assets he can work with. But for example, it's a slide by Siemens, but I've also seen the same work done by our national labs. We project now by 2045 the new goal that there'll be one-quarter million electric vehicles on the roadways in Hawaii, and that includes the hydrogen vehicles. Now, of course, as the governor points out, Hawaii is this perfect illustration to the world, and we say we're the perfect Petri dish that we can show the rest of the world how this experiment is working. This is what we're building today. This driverless mass transit core will be able to collect people from different transportation modes. We have regional buses in orange that will feed into major stations instead of operating all the way into town, getting stuck in traffic. We're going to have local buses, which are going to make stops along the rail line, while circulator buses in pink that'll be providing more frequent and reliable service around the neighborhoods in each community. So Vancouver did something over the last 20 years that everybody in America says is as impossible. They totally transformed transportation in the city. They went from in 1992, 69% of all trips by automobile to 50% in 2015. With the commute trips, they went from 62% in 96 to just 41% of trips by car in 2015. How did they do that? They set aggressive goals. In the late 1990s, they set a target to, by 2020, have half of all the trips in the city be by walking, biking, and transit. The afternoon keynote was presented by Eric Sundquist. You can imagine a policy goal that is so important that we blow up government and recreate it around that policy goal. Normally, that's not what happens. Normally, we have a DOT that's been around for 100 years, and we're trying to shift it towards something else, or a utility that's been around 100 years. We're not going to go in and buy the utility and break it. I mean, there have been times in our history when we have done things like that, so it's not beyond the pale. It could happen. The majority of the time, we have an institution, governmental or a big private one like utility that we're trying to influence in the right direction. After a dialogue facilitated by Mike Hamnet and Jose Barzola, we had a summary and action forward session with keynoters Craig Dirksen and Eric Sundquist. Portland's current, the light rail line that we're currently planning, there was a lot of resistance to it. In the town that I live in and where I was the mayor previously, there was actually a small group of citizens who got a charter amendment made to the charter of the city that required a vote of the people before light rail would be allowed to come through their town from Portland to another town. And it passed, not by very much, but it did pass. People went, yeah, I'll vote on it, but through a process of informing the people and having a public outreach where we invited people to come in or we showed them what the different options were and what the different consequences were the different options to get to the point where people were able to accept what was going forward so that two years later when the actual vote was made to that, it passed. People said, yes, light rail is the best way for us to do it. It's really, really tough. I don't know what the, honestly, I don't know. I mean, I think like in Animal House and the statue, knowledge is good, but if I knew the way to turn a NIMBY into a YIMBY, I'll give one thing that seems to sometimes work. It's not a panacea, and this is what has helped in some of the contentious cases when I was on Plan Commission, is that we had a good comprehensive plan. So the COMP plan, it's more abstract and people aren't threatened by a particular project. We'll write something into the plan that says we support a diversity of housing in every neighborhood. And we have to keep up, we have to go forward, we have to go further, we have to use our existing resources to make this happen. It's a time when we're gonna transform our community and thus our lives in the next few years, so be ready. And there were great industry exhibits on display in the courtyard and a chance to see the two new Tesla cars and the newest electric bikes. This program offered an important and timely discussion of the issues on clean transportation in Hawaii. It covered a lot of ground and gave us a handle on what is an extremely important set of initiatives affecting and benefiting the people on every island in our state. Later in the week, we had other talk shows with keynoters Craig Dirksen and Eric Sunquist and award winner Howard Wigg. When we were going through the early planning process, there was a small group of citizens in Tigard who managed to actually get a measure on the ballot in Tigard to change the city's charter to oppose light rail unless it was voted on by the people of the city. They felt like the citizens of Tigard should be able to decide whether the entire corridor got light rail or not. If you go to the average planner engineer and say, we need you to reduce greenhouse gas, they got nothing. There is not, that's not what they're working on. They're working on, should we widen this road because it's congested or should we put in another traffic light because there's a danger there. That's what they're trained to do and that's what all the books in civil engineering around transportation are about. But the law is not self-executing. It does not bind, say, the county of Maui without action by the county council of Maui, right? Why do that have to happen? Why don't they just say, this will bind all counties in the state. Don't they have the power to do that in the state legislature? Yeah. So why are they holding that? We're a home ruined state. What do you think the counties would say about it? Well, but they were in on it, weren't they in on it? Good point. Yeah, yeah. I can't hold it in my head. Sounds a bit like a kabuki to me. No, it's traditional and it's not just the energy code. It's the plumbing code, the electrical code, seismic code, everything. But at the end of the day, when the county's approved this, it's the same code, isn't it? Yeah. They take liberties? They can amend, yeah. Do they? To a minor, minor extent. They want to show that they're involved in it. You mean they customize it to Hawaii? It's because the tropical considerations in Maui are different than the Big Island. Maybe the temperature or something. The wind, what? What can be different? Oh, I could tell a lot of tales like that. But it's up to them, the building code managers who attend the council to go back to their boss, the head of public works and say, hey boss, this is good, we got to adopt it. And the public works boss goes to the mayor, hey mayor, we got to adopt it. And in this case, I know that three out of the four mayors in town are very aware of this and they want it. The forum is posting the video of the proceedings on its website, hawaiiannergypolicy.hawaii.edu. But this year, it is also documenting the proceedings in a report to summarize the payload of this program. Thanks to Sharon Moriwaki and Mike Hamnet, co-chairs of the forum for their hard work on this program. And thanks to the forum's steering committee and staff and all the people who helped put it together. And now, let's take a look at our ThinkTech schedule of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. 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We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. We want to stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. Okay, Rachel. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it just like Rachel does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer or an intern and volunteer to help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Rachel James. And I'm Rachel Jurgen. Aloha, everyone.