 I'm here with Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC and former legislator, and a speaker at this fabulous conference, the Kawhi Marriott, the Kawhi Energy Conference, organized by the County of Kawhi and the County Economic Development Board, including Mina Morita, by the way. I know you were a part of organizing. I just sit on the planning committee. That's all. Okay, we're meeting a lot of very interesting people here today. And on the phone, as our regular arrangement, we have the other M in the M-M-M-M. That stands for Mina, Marco, me on Monday. Okay. Right. Four M's. Four M's. Marco, and you join us from Provision Solar and Hilo, welcome to the show. Of course. Live. Thanks. Of course, wherever we go. So anyway, let's talk first about the conference, because we're here for the conference. I mean, can you talk about this conference? What's going on here today? Right. So the conference is hosted by the Kawhi Economic Development Board, and we open the morning with two keynote speakers, David Bisso, the CEO of Kawhi Island Utility Cooperative, and Kate Gordon, who's with the Pulse, she's a senior fellow, I believe, at the Pulse Institute and working on making the business case to address climate change. But let me, I forgot the most important part of the morning activities. The mayor of Kawhi signed a county proclamation, basically stating that the county of Kawhi will commit to the Paris Agreement. So I love it. You think about it now. The county of Kawhi, little Kawhi, 80 miles off Honolulu, and it's signed the Paris Accord. I love it. Yeah. That's perfect for Kawhi. Well, I think, you know, again, you're going to hear from the other counties, Oahu, Maui and the Hawaii Island, and also, you know, a lot of people heard from the governor during the Hokulea ceremonies, the commitment to keep to the principles of the Paris Agreement. Yeah. He's great. He's a great mayor, a courageous mayor, really like everything he does, including the fact that he sang a song at some length this morning. Yeah. You know that song? What song is that? I don't know. He probably made it up. It was really good about turning the lights on. He covered all the, you know, the idea of this conference in that song, and he has a pretty good voice on that. Oh, yeah. He does. You want to sing a song now, Mia? I don't have that voice, but Marko does. Marko, do you want to sing a song? I remember that. But I think one of the most important points that the mayor made was, you know, the engagement of the younger generation in addressing monumental problems or monumental challenges like climate change. Yeah. And those kids at Kauai Community College, they were so vital, and they're so on it. And that was very nice. They were part of the ceremony, I understand, for the signing of the proclamation. Right. And, you know, I don't believe those were college students, those were high school students. Oh, pardon me. And they were all women. I didn't notice that. There was a lot of girl power there. A lot of girl power. They were sitting right next to us. It was really nice. Mm-hmm. Anyway, there's a lot of vitality here. And a lot of people came over from Honolulu, but there's a lot of people from Kauai too, including, you know, people who are consumers of electricity rather than in the industry. So it's a real mix, and it's a very, you know, exuberant kind of conference, I think. Nothing like being on Kauai. I guess you can say nothing like being on the Big Island, but Kauai has special merit. So anyway, let's, you know, let's talk about what we are, what we hopefully will expect to learn. You were on one of the panels this morning, Mina. What did you talk about? That was about maintaining a rather limiting cost or maintaining a reasonable cost for electricity. How to use data, how to make data to your friend. But before we get into that, this conference has three tracks. And the track that I was moderating was the energy savings track. The second track is on transportation and really looking at what the transportation system will look like on Kauai in the future. And the third track was the low carbon track and the 21st infrastructure, 21st century infrastructure, dealing with the electricity sector, the transportation sector, and we were really fortunate to have an airline perspective with the participation of Kauai Airlines. So, you know, what's interesting about this is that it's not the same old, same old. This conference has new ideas floating around. This conference has an orientation toward, for example, making peace with climate change. We can't solve it, but at least we can recognize the reality and deal with it. Well, I think the most important aspect of this conference is, you know, really viewing climate change from the business perspective, the risk, the opportunities that might be out there. It's really rethinking your business strategy to be successful in the future. Yeah, it's a lot of, and I talked to Kate Gordon, both on the record and off the record, about that connection, the business connection, the business case. And I think there's some really fresh new ideas, important ideas. It's about exactly how does the community engage with the federal government these days? It's a little different. How does the community, you know, come up with business arrangements and business incentives and how do businesses conduct themselves? And it is an analysis, this community here in Kauai, the Garden Island, about big time business. We're talking about multinationals here in Kauai and how they have not only a responsibility but a capability of actually dealing with climate change and dealing with clean energy in a way that maybe they haven't before and in a way that government may not be able to. Right, right. There was a, I told Kate, there was a professor of business finance from Harvard, came out here a year or two ago. And she made the point to me, so I will not forget, is that, you know, power is a function of money. And if you look at today's world, the amount of money that passes between governments is nothing compared to the money that passes between global multinational corporations. So if you want to evaluate the real power to get things done, it isn't in government anymore. It's in global multinational corporations. She made an important point about, you know, that the clean energy transformation is really a capital substitution strategy, you know, where we're going to put our capital, the best use for the capital, and where, especially in the electricity sector, we were dependent on, in the past, dependent on the utilities making those kinds of investments. Now the investments are being made on both sides of the meters. Yeah, that's exactly what she said when I talked to her. So Marco, you know, this is different than the rest of the state, isn't it? I mean, Kauai seems to have a special sauce. I also talked to your friend, Mina, at 10 Brogan Gate, who used to be a tech reporter for the Honolulu's, what, advertiser? Yeah, advertiser, the science writer. Yeah, science writer, and he was the chair of KIUC. He still is a chair. And vice chair. He's going to vice chair. Oh, vice chair, oh, okay. We're also going to have him on the program, and I mean, and he talked about the internal culture of the management. Yes. And I told him that, you know, good management builds good neighbors. You can probably find that on Kauai. So a question I put to you, Marco, how, from your advantage in Hilo, how is this different, you know, between, say, Hilo, in fact, how is it different between the co-op that you contemplate or the existing Hawaiian electric arrangement that, you know, exists today and life in Kauai? And what can we learn about exchange? And you mentioned before the show began that there was a very interesting collaboration between Alan Oshima and David Bissell from KIUC just yesterday in the Star Advertiser. We're still more of a wannabe co-op than a real one in terms of we don't have generating assets or infrastructure, and we're still waiting patiently for the opportunity to see if there's a willing seller on the part of Hawaiian electric companies to see about parting with Hawaii Electric Light Company so that we can go from a wannabe co-op to a real co-op and join our brothers and sister friends at the Kauai Island Utility Co-op that have been making wonderful things happen for the past about 15 or so years. So, yeah, there was a very good piece, a collaborative piece between Alan Oshima, president of Hawaiian Electric, and my friend David Bissell, president of KIUC, that was in the Star Advertiser yesterday, an op-ed piece and essentially leading with the noting that, despite what President Donald Trump may do in terms of backing away our commitment to reducing our carbon footprint in greenhouse gases, that the electric utility companies here, of which there are, of course, only two of the Hawaiian Electric companies, HIKO, HALCO, MIKO, and KIAUC, they're full speed ahead and going as fast and cost-efficiently and cost-effectively as we can, two more and more renewables than some of the numbers they cite in the piece, I think, are just really laudatory, including KIUC going up from 9% renewables a bear nine years ago to 40% now, and the Hawaiian Electric company is being at 26% of other total generation coming from renewables with the big island here, J. Ignacio and his team leading the pack with 54% renewable energy as far as generation in 2016, and it's great to see Alan and David collaborating on this piece, and that we're all hands on deck and doing this in a collaborative and cooperative fashion to try to reduce our fossil fuel consumption here in the state as quickly and as cost-effectively as we can. Okay, so going back to the earlier part of my question, how does it look from Hilo? I mean, how would you, you know, compare life in Hilo with life in Kauai if you can do that? And if you can't, Mina will. Oh, no, I think I think you are, but let me let me take a moment and say that we've had conferences in Maui, we've had conferences in Kauai, it's time for us to have conferences in the big island, and I hope you set that up. For now, however, we're gonna take a short break. We'll be back in one minute. This is Mina, Marco, and me on Monday about energy. Hi, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech, and this is our Monday show at noon. It's an energy show called Mina, Marco, and Me on Monday about energy. And we travel the world and do this. Right now we're in Kauai, we're in the Kauai Marriott Resort Hotel, near Lihui, where there is the Kauai Energy Conference going on, and it's really fabulous. And Mina is a speaker here, and Marco was interested from Hilo, where he joins us by phone from Provision Solar in Hilo. And we're talking about the conference, but all the issues that flow out of the conference, and I'd like to address the issue that Mina was talking about in one of the breakout sessions just a few minutes ago. She's a speaker in that session, and we're talking about managing costs, and you've always been very interested in that because, you know, it's important that we don't do violence to the economy. Well, like I said, you know, the whole clean energy strategy is one of capital substitution, and you know, in deploying that capital you want to make sure that it's effective, efficient, and increases your productivity. And so those are, you know, some of the topics that we're hitting on. Basically, you know, how do you take information? How do you do the analysis to make good solid business decisions that ultimately affect your bottom line, or improve your bottom line, and meet your mission? Yeah, but I mean it's very interesting because, you know, this is sort of a new emphasis, if you will. It's a new emphasis. It's making the business case. Yeah. It's taking a look at it from the lens of business. And, you know, government has trouble doing that. Yeah. But the business community and the people who focus on, you know, business analyses have less trouble doing it, and that's one of the big threads here, big thread in your panel anyway, in the energy conference in Kauai. So I think we're in a new time, don't you? Right. Well, you know, our two speakers this morning were excellent. We had Michael Chang, and you might be. Yeah. So Michael Chang is the customer service development. Oh, I forget his title, but it's, you know, he's focused on meeting the customer. Jim Alberts there. Yes. Yeah. In the customer service area. And, you know, he mostly spoke about data analytics, you know, and not only taking your meter information, but also taking different sources of data, you know, to get a complete view of your business. And then I had Scott Bly, who's the senior project manager for Aqua Engineers. Aqua Engineers is a Kauai-born company that operates statewide now, and they're 100% employee-owned. But with Scott, you know, really demonstrating the business culture to be able to embrace data analytics and making and using that to drive, help drive your productivity and profitability. That's really, I didn't see the whole panel. We got footage from some of the panel. We took footage from all the panels, and we put that on OC16, which is now known as Spectrum. Spectrum 12 and 1012 is what it is. But that'll be on in a week or two. We're going to have footage from the whole conference. So, Marco, I mean, does that resonate with you? Is that discussion happening elsewhere in the state? Much of new market should get to go, PV, still do so. That's the existential question number one, and there's no definitive answer to that. Obviously, at this point, an existential question number two is more kind of a micro question from what business perspective, in this case, my business perspective, which is to what extent is, what size of the piece of the pie of the remaining PV market can my company, can my business provision solar, hope to capture? So, there's kind of the big macro questions, which conferences like this, and then the Verge Conference on Oahu is going to be in the next week or so as well. They answer kind of the 50,000 foot question questions and issues. And then folks like me, who are with our dedicated staff to try to generate enough revenue in order to pay bills on a timely basis and be payroll and so forth in terms of a very challenging transition that we are undergoing here on the state, the first in the country going from an export based interconnect regime where you can get some type of credit for it, moving from that type of model, which we've had for 16, 17 years, to one that's self consumption, self supply, which where the grid is not accepting, the utility company's not accepting surplus power. So it's kind of the between the more global macro techno issues and then running a business and trying to stay profitable and try to try to maintain your revenue streams so you can pay your bills on time. I sense a quickening, don't you? I mean, so we were all dampened by what happened with Next Era and it cast a shadow during that long period of 19 months and thereafter. And now it's, oh gee, it's almost a year later, isn't it? It is a year later. And finally, I think that shadow is lifting. Finally, I think there's new energy, new confidence, new optimism. Do you feel that? Do you feel that, Mina? Well, I hope that what we can take away from this is, you know, what we're really striving for right now in order to make rates affordable is a more, I think the more realistic view is not a renewable energy future right now, but a low carbon future. So how do we do a variety of things to move towards lower carbon emissions, but keep it affordable? And so there are a lot of complex issues that we're going to have to be facing soon. And one is rate design. So how do we have the proper incentives? You know, again, exponential growth of rooftop solar is not sustainable. And it's very expensive. And especially given the capacity factor of solar panels. So you know, it's really drilling down into these hard issues now. And using technology, Marco alluded to the using technology to gain data to gather data about how it works, how the community comes together on this level of exchanging electricity, and, you know, and analyze that and use predictive analytics on it. So we can actually make a system that's statewide. And that fits the purpose. It's not it's not easy. And then you crank in one more thing I'd like to discuss before we close. And that is transportation. There's been a fair amount of discussion, Marco, about transportation here, and about electric vehicles. In fact, Stan Osserman is here, Mr hydrogen. And there has been some discussion about what how do we incentivize electric vehicles and how do electric vehicles play into the grid and all this. And I haven't seen so much, you know, sort of integrated discussion about that, where it's sort of part of the landscape now that you can't discuss renewable energy without discussing transportation. Well, and I think, you know, this is where kawaii plays a leading role, because they're trying to approach transportation from a planning viewpoint, and getting all the different partners in transportation to collaborate, especially in the planning, because the future for transportation isn't just electric vehicles. You know, again, with the onset of autonomous cars, vehicles, I mean, we're hearing more. I think the you know, the pace on that is sort of accelerating. If you talk to any auto manufacturer now, I mean, I'm not true. It's, it's, you know, the focus is on autonomous vehicle. And so when when you're talking about it's like, what's the infrastructure platform that will support that? You know, you know, how are we planning for the future in looking at the bigger picture of transportation, where it's multimodal? You know, you work where you live, so you don't have these commute costs. And you have vehicles when you need them. Right, not all the time. And that's been important discussion. But Marco, we're almost out of time. And I wanted to get your reaction to that. And some, if you don't mind, I'd like to get some profundities from you, sort of, especially if you the fact that the Verge conference starts tomorrow. So you go from the one day conference here in Kauai, to a tour, whether the three day conference in in Honolulu in the Verge. And a lot of the people who are here are going to be there. And that's what I get. So we are having a week long and very, you know, diverse discussion about energy. And it all seems to me to be a pretty healthy experience. But so Marco, what would you leave with us in terms of the profundity of the whole thing? Okay, and I want to make a comment before meaning gets to close. And that is, you know, here in Hawaii, there's a Kauai, there's Kauai green energy, which is a biomass facility. It's German designed and I think German owned it's in contract with KIUC. It's very successful. It's a very interesting plant. It's high industry and high technology all put together. And I think it's delivering a fair amount of renewables at a relatively cheap price. No, I think it's 7% but 7% right, 7% base base load power. Yeah, base load power. So that's pretty good. And so with that, you don't necessarily need to worry about the question of whether the renewables are more expensive, because they they don't have to be it. Kauai is sorry, paying a little bit of a premium for for that biomass. But I think who who knew is substantially more compared for other renewables. And so I don't think it should be renewables at any price. But there are renewables that are cost competitive. And we need to get back to some form of economic dispatch. But we also need to have diversity. Don't you agree? Yeah, you can't rely on only one thing. Okay, we're out of time. That's Mina Merida, Marco Mangelsdorf here on Mina Marco, me on Monday on energy. I have so enjoyed doing this with you guys. It's fabulous that we can do this from anywhere next time we're gonna do it from the South Pole. Yeah, it's nice to have you on my home turf. Thank you, Marco. Take care next time soon.