 Like on OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Elise Anderson. And I'm Kauai Lucas. In our show this time, we'll visit the 2017 annual briefing to the legislature by the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum at the state capitol. The briefing looked at some of the earlier energy initiatives that have not been completed and asked what we can learn from them. It was the forum's 13th annual briefing to the legislature and was entitled Finding Continuity, inquiring into what happened to various earlier energy initiatives and what should be done next. The forum works hard to organize community events and programs that advance clean energy. Its members include government, academia, utilities, oil and gas companies, labor, trade associations and environmental organizations. The briefings intended to update the legislature and the public on how things are going and what we need to focus on in the coming session. That task was more difficult this year because of the many uncertainties we've had at home and in Washington. As everyone knows, we had a tumultuous 2016, consumed by the next era merger and of course the national elections. Last year's briefing was about what we called staying the course, but the 100% renewable energy generation and community solar laws of 2015 were not followed by further legislation in 2016. We learned that the energy community cannot take its hands off the stick even for a moment. And looking back, we have passed a number of bills in the last decade for a number of energy programs. Many of these seemed promising when they were passed, but have since been forgotten. For better or worse, they have lost their luster. We should ask which ones succeeded and which ones didn't, and why, and what that teaches us. Indeed, what programs will be relevant these days? Sometimes it's hard to find focus on that. This year's briefing began with remarks from Sharon Moriwaki, co-chair of the forum. She welcomed the legislators, forum members and the public. We represent individuals and organizations committed not only to clean energy, but is importantly to a collaborative approach in seeking smart solutions for our clean energy future. We bring together our diverse perspectives to address controversial and emerging issues in energy and always, always with the public interest as our core interest. While our individual agendas may sometimes conflict, we have stayed together all these many years. We celebrate this year, our 15th year together, our 15th anniversary. The forum seeks to inform and educate through briefings such as this, our 13th annual, our Clean Energy Day in August to inform and engage the broader public and our dialogues and working groups on initiatives and legislation that matter. Chris Lee, chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection, then spoke about the future of clean energy in Hawaii from the legislature's point of view. Aloha. A year ago, we stood here, some of us sitting together in the midst of great uncertainty and I think everyone was on the edge of their seats waiting to figure out how we're going to move forward with our energy future, who would own the utility, what would that look like. And I just want to take a moment because that nearly 20 month process obviously came to a close. I just want to recognize the PUC and their staff who poured their heart and souls into doing the due diligence into that docket. Where are you guys? Can you please stand? The facilitator for the forum presented the forum's Clean Energy Performance Report and discussed the forum's initiatives on leadership in energy generation and targets for transportation. I've been managing a Clean Energy and Metrics status reports project for the forum over several years. We've been trying to identify what it makes sense to measure, develop meaningful metrics to measure progress with clean energy or maintaining and publishing that data and developing status reports. And the current status of that project is we are taking all of the data sets that we have, we're getting those electronically, automatically updated and they will be available in the first quarter of this year electronically to any organization or person who wants to get on there for access to what's a very large amount of energy sector related data. Two other initiatives that are new this year or as the end of last year, one is an electric power sector working group and a transportation sector working group. These are both facilitated stakeholder driven processes, the forums providing the venues and the facilitation. The electric power sector working group is working on reviewing the roles of the various stakeholders, how planning gets done and by who and what types of incentives exist for clean energy so people are working together with the right incentives moving forward. The transportation sector working group is working on performance metrics, goals, targets, strategies and trying to tackle this difficult problem in the transportation sector is there's no unified agency or entity who's in charge of all the different moving pieces. We have agencies in charge of building roads, we have the counties, we have the state, we have planning for land use, we have planning for transportation, we have agencies that run transportation systems but there's not any unified entity really who's in charge of it all to move forward in a coordinated way. PUC Commissioner Tom Gorak then gave us a report on what is pending and contemplated by the Public Utilities Commission. Given the theme of this conference I can't believe that no one has yet quoted the great Stevie Wonder whatever happened to the world we know. Well that world as all of you in the audience know is gone and we won't be returning to it any time soon that world was you walk in a room you flip on the lights which at the end of the month you pay the bill that's done. The next era is done that's good there are many many issues on the PUC's plate and while you may not have followed them while we were doing the next era proceeding we did not forget them and we continue to work on them during that period. It's the great acronym list of things to do the PSIP, DER, DR, decoupling CBRE, grid modernization I'll try to fill you in a little bit on where we are in each of those dockets right now. The powers to apply improvement plan or PSIP Carl just alluded to a little bit. This is the blueprint for future action. It really is an in-depth look at the entire system of the electric utility from generation to just to transmission to distribution but also we look at what resources we have on the customer side of the meter. We have had two and now three as of December 23rd iterations of the PSIP. The commission has issued critiques on two of them and the commission in its last order in August stated that it wanted to bring the docket to a close and that it was looking for finalizing the PSIP's and what could be done in the short run defined as a five-year term. So there were some significant changes I think Carl alluded to them and what has just been filed in the short term much more storage on the utility side no LNG or cable in the short run and there was also a proposal to meet the 100% goal by 2040. The schedule in that proceeding is that parties are due to file information request on that by January 17th. The responses are due by January 30th and statements to position are due by February 13th. Our keynote was Gavin Bade, editor of the utility dive energy app and newsletter. He spoke about national changes in energy and what those changes mean for Hawaii. So if there's one thing that journalists like myself really, really like to do it's find an analogy, right? Find a little trope, a metaphor, something that can make a really complicated subject easier to understand. And I think the best one that I could come is the best of times, worst of times going back to Charles Dickens. And I say that because we're really entering 2017 in a gigantic energy paradox, right? On one hand we've got the flaming haired climate denier who is going to be the next inhabitant of the White House next week. And for a world that's already behind the pace to limit global warming to two degrees this century, I mean losing the diplomatic and policy will of the largest economy in the world would seem to be catastrophic, right? That's how I thought of it the day after the election. And I think a lot of other people did as well. But Trump's vocal skepticism renewables and promise of a coal resurgence, they really belie conditions on the ground. In fact, renewables in 2017 enter the year into their best market position ever. They're competitive with natural gas and cheaper than coal across large swaths of the country. And no matter what Donald Trump and his administration do with the Clean Power Plan and renewable energy tax credits, the price is going to continue to fall for these resources and they're going to continue to grow throughout the next administration. So as you may have seen, a lot of those economic realities have spawned some very optimistic takes about energy in the Trump administration. Things like Donald Trump can't stop the Clean Energy Revolution. Well, those headlines, they're correct, right? But the problem is the pace of the revolution is far too slow today, as you all know, to allow the US to hit its decarbonization goals onto the Paris Accord. And the absence of federal action means that we're liable to fall further behind over the next administration. But fortunately, that's not the end of the story, right? A number of proactive states and jurisdictions, you guys probably first and foremost, are setting ambitious clean energy and decarbonization targets and devising market mechanisms to preserve and expand clean energy on the grid today. From my standpoint, from the standpoint of many people I talk to in Washington and across the nation, the success or failure of these initiatives on the state and local level is going to provide a path for the decarbonization policy when the pendulum inevitably swings back the other direction. Going back to Dickens and putting it simply, it's jurisdictions like yours that are going to determine if we alter an age of wisdom on climate or an age of foolishness. Our panel, led by Mike Hamnit, co-chair of the forum, was called Finding Continuity, Whatever Happened To and What's Next For. It included Jeff McElina of Blue Planet Foundation on the Community-Based Renewable Energy Program and the Green Energy Market Securitization Program, that is GEMS, Jay Griffin of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at UH on on-bill financing, Stan Osserman of the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies, that is H-CAT on the Hydrogen Economy Plan and Scott Tern of HNEI on the Bioenergy Master Plan. Carl mentioned that a number of things that were put into law, including the Noble Portfolio Standards and the Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards and other things, have come to fruition and they started to bear fruit. We haven't made the kind of progress we would like to in transportation, but certainly in the electricity sector. We're going to be going back and looking at a series of laws that the legislature passed and were signed into law. And the title of this panel is Whatever Happened To. And when these things were passed, they were kind of hot topics. And most of them look like the three motivations for this on the part of the legislature. I could be wrong, but I think that's what they were. Everyone is to ensure that we have affordable, accessible, and equitable access to clean energy. So everyone's familiar with this concept and Commissioner Gorek kind of shared a little bit of the background, but essentially the idea is on our path to 100%, can we all go together? And can we make sure everyone has access to the benefits of renewable energy? Ohana means family, means no one gets left behind. And I think it's instructive to look at the history of this policy to see how we can move other policies more quickly. This was such a great idea, and yet it's been five years in, and we still don't have a program in place. So the problem that we're seeking to solve was this. This wasn't the problem. This was a revolution that some 80,000 families took advantage of. One in three single family homes have a power plant on their roof supplying power to the grid. They're part of the solution, but all of this left folks who are renters or folks who live in high rises otherwise out of the equation. So how can we rectify this? And that was the idea. And not just in Hawaii, NREL looked across the country, and some half of the residents can't participate in clean energy. They just can't host solar. They're a renter. They don't have adequate rooftop space. They're in a high rise or what have you. It's probably a higher number here in Hawaii because of the number of folks in multi-family dwellings. So that's the challenge we're trying to solve. Very simple concept that customers can put on the bill as they install renewable or energy efficiency improvements to their home, the opportunity to attach that obligation to their utility bill as opposed to paying a private company. So basically the ability to pay off finance some sort of improvement to your home or business using your bill. There's lots of opportunity benefit, but primarily the key driver here is that customers tend to have a better bill repayment history with electric utility bills than other forms of consumer credit or similar obligations. Hawaii Revised Statute 19610, which is the Hawaii Renewable Hydrogen Program. The capital fund, the special fund, was very controversial when it started to be executed. And I'm not going to go into the details of that because quite frankly, they're pretty ugly. I mean seriously ugly. I would say in hindsight that I think that because of that ugliness that the Hawaii Renewable Hydrogen Program really never got off the ground. I was going to read the renewable energy hydrogen energy program entirety in the logs. It only takes two minutes. It was a stakeholder driven event or project and it was funded by the State of Hawaii and the US Department of Energy. As I said, it was a stakeholder driven document and it produced a series of recommendations intended to provide direction for policy support as well as research. The overarching question there was, does Hawaii have the capacity to provide a substantial portion of its electricity and transportation fuels from biomass resources? To wrap things up, we heard from Colin Moore of the UH Public Policy Center. His talk was called Beyond the Soundbite, Legislation That Matters. The subtitle of my lecture should be is why we need to think about politics when we make energy policy for Hawaii. The title of this form is really to, I think to help us think about what happens after the signing ceremony ends and the pens are put away. Why do some policy reforms endure while others are quietly reversed or eroded away? And as you all know, in acting far reaching energy policy, solutions is a tough task. Politicians like to deliver measurable benefits to constituents but climate change is an intergenerational and global problem. But difficult as it is, passing bold measures is just half the battle. These victories must be sustained. Even when new laws are in place, the sustainability of efforts to limit damage from climate change cannot be taken for granted. So we need sustainable policies and by that I mean we need politically sustainable policies. So policy sustainability for me refers to the capacity of a reform to maintain its integrity and deploy core principles to guide implementation and stave off pressures for debilitating changes. And research from a number of social scientists suggests that the most durable reform stick not because they're frozen in place. In other words, the battle isn't over when the law is passed but because they reconfigure politics in ways that preserve our core principles and spur a continuing momentum. Now I have a few examples I was gonna give you but I'm not gonna do those. I'm just gonna leave you with the question of how do we do this? How do we achieve this policy political sustainability? And I have three thoughts. The first is that sustainable policies should undercut support for opponents of reform. For example, by weakening industries or interest groups that don't want the new policy direction. This is the part about thinking politically when we design policies. The second is that sustainable policies reconfigure institutional authority and change the venues in which decisions are made. For example, by stipulating that an independent agency and not the legislature will be in charge of future policy modifications. And then finally and most importantly, sustainable policies create what I call positive feedback by encouraging citizens, businesses and interest groups to adjust to new ways of doing things. Once that happened, these groups become reluctant to have reforms repealed or fundamentally changed because they wanna protect their investments in new technology and in new ways of doing things. So that essentially is the two minute version of my 10 minute talk and that all to say that as you think about creating and crafting a sustainable environmental policies we also need to think about creating politically sustainable policies. Thanks everyone. It seemed clear from the discussion that political will cannot end at passing a given bill. It must continue after the bills passed to make things happen. Without that, many well-intentioned initiatives can come to not. It also seemed clear that some initiatives do become irrelevant and once they do to avoid confusion, we need to terminate them. The transformation to clean energy requires us to find new ideas. It also requires us to leave old ones behind. It's the nature of change itself. A couple of days later, we had keynote speaker Gavin Bade on our think tech state of clean energy talk show where he summed up his thoughts and takeaways from the briefing. Basically, I kind of thinking about how to frame this question of climate and clean energy in the Trump era. I've done a very journalistic thing and resorted to a shorthand trope and that is that it's kind of for climate and clean energy and it's the best of times, worst of times, right? Yes. When it comes to the beginning of 2017, we have this big energy paradox, right? We have a climate denier going in the White House who said he's going to cancel the clean power plant, potentially pull us out of Paris, although Rex Tillerson is saying some other things about that now. But for a planet that's already kind of behind the pace in limiting carbon emissions to kind of limit our temperature increase to two degrees this century, the loss of that diplomatic will from the federal government seem to be catastrophic for the planet, right? For the planet, yes. Well, I think that's the way a lot of people looked at it the day after the election and certainly from an environmental standpoint that was my initial reaction, right? You've changed your mind? Well, not exactly, but I think that it's not all gloom and doom. There is reason for hope and I think that's because there are states like Hawaii that are doing really ambitious things, setting ambitious targets and figuring out how to make a clean energy economy and a clean energy power generation system that can power the rest of the clean energy economy. So basically my thesis for everyone here in Hawaii is that you're gonna show us how to do it. I don't think climate denial will be the policy of the US federal government forever. So if and when the pendulum does swing back the other way. I sure hope it's soon. Sorry. Well, I will leave those value judgments up for anyone but I think from the standpoint of climate action, if and when it does swing back the other way and we do want to do something federally on climate, states like Hawaii are gonna show us how to do it and they're going to dictate whether we can do it cost effectively for consumers. Yes, clean energy is critical to Hawaii's future but setting our 100% goals is one thing and achieving them is another. Meeting those goals is not something we can wait until 2045 to do. It's something we need to work on right now. The forum is hoping the 2017 legislature will focus on what's relevant for the long-term, programs that will remain relevant beyond the election cycle that will be affordable, accessible and reliable and help us avoid the distractions of oil, weather, politics and geopolitics. The forum presents these briefings in the hope that our policy makers will be better prepared to preserve our economy and our state. Now more than ever, short-term thinking on energy is unacceptable and dangerous for Hawaii. ThinkTech tries to raise public awareness on these issues and has five energy programs in its lineup. Marco, Mina and me power up Hawaii, Energy in America, Stan the Hydrogen Man and our flagship program, Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Check them out on ThinkTechHawaii.com and don't forget to check out the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum itself at HawaiiEnergyPolicy.Hawaii.edu. And now let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. There's so much happening in Hawaii. Sometimes things happen under the radar and we don't hear much about them but ThinkTech will take you there. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC 16 several times every week to stay current on what's happening in government, industry, academia and communities around the islands and the world. ThinkTech broadcasts its daily talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you wanna replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. The audio is on ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. And good news, we are now posting podcasts of all our shows on iTunes. See our website for links. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links or sign up on our email list and get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high tech, green screen First Amendment Studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you wanna join our live audience or participate in our shows, write to Think at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHaii. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives together in these islands. We wanna stay in touch with you and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. Send to our talk shows live. While you're watching any of our shows, you can call in to 415-871-2474 and pose a question or participate in the discussion. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we wanna thank our underwriters. Okay, Kaui. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Kaui 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 help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much 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 Elise Anderson. And I'm Kaui Lucas. Aloha, everyone.