 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. Today we're going to do Hawaii State of Clean Energy. This is a very long running show. I think that we're talking about energy issues for 2024. What's happening? And what decisions can we expect on Hawaii from GWS, from the executive branch, from the legislative branch, from the PUC, from the utility and so forth. And without a special guest, Henry Curtis of Life of the Land. Welcome to the show, Henry. Thank you. And Aloha, Jay. Aloha to you. So just to follow up on our last discussion, what is going on with Huro Nua? Last time I heard they were going to appeal again. How's that doing? What they've done is they're suing Hawaiian Electric for a billion dollars in federal court. I think it's kind of funny because even if they received approval from the Public Utilities Commission, which they did not, but even if they did, they don't have a valid water permit to discharge their industrial waste into the ocean. And therefore, HIKO is not standing in their way. A lot of different things are blocking a very bad project. Is that suit going to go anywhere, you think? Are you involved? We're not involved in the suit. And I hope Huro Nua falls on their face because they have a really bad project. Yeah. Okay, so I guess the question is, how's Hawaiian Electric doing? I mean, nobody likes to have a billion dollar suit filed against them, even if it has no merit. It's still a problem. Especially if you're a public corporation, you have to report that to directors and stockholders and what have you. And how are they doing these days in view of the fire and who on Lua's suit? You know, give us a praise and see how this has all affected them. Right now, the Hawaiian Electric appears to have enough funds in the immediate short term to survive, but they must be hiring lots of lawyers and international experts to handle the more than six dozen lawsuits that have been filed. The lawsuits are now either in federal court or Maui court, but there are a lot of suits coming. And so the legislature is trying to grapple with the idea of how the utility should be funded in the short term, whether it's securitization, whether it's special purpose revenue bonds, or what mechanism can get money to the utility that's low cost. Because if the utility tried to borrow money right now, it would have junk bond status. And that would be a major problem. It would be a much higher interest rate. Yeah, they must be sweating it out. I mean, how at risk are they financially? It's not clear because they've, I think, really closed in among themselves in figuring out how much vulnerability they face and what the risks are. Life Land continues to believe that there's really a set, there's really free separate Maui liabilities if you want to look at it that way is what happened upcountry where there were two fires that were really serious. But in Lahaina, you could probably separate the property damage from the deaths of people because the property damage was caused by the fire. But the deaths might be attributed to how the county and state reacted to the fact that there was a fire there. Josh, I wish we could, you know, move on. And I'm sure they feel that way. So that there's a bill, isn't there? There's an attempt in the legislature to somehow curtail their liability to all these suits. Have you followed that at all? Yeah, the legislature is not going to give them a blanket shield for liability, but they are trying to figure out first how they can be funded during this interim period. And second, that the utility really needs to develop a fire management plan. And at the hearing this week, Hawaiian Electric, the consumer advocate, Life of the Land, all favored a very public process before the Public Utilities Commission. We need to get all the stakeholders at the table, and we need collectively to figure out which areas should be protected, who goes first. I know Maui County is looking at egress routes about communities that have like one way in and one way out. One option instead of having cars be able to shoot through communities is you have an escape route, but it's an escape route that's open for bicycles and pedestrians rather than cars. And that way you still have a dead end community, but you have an alternative way out. Well, yeah, that's a great idea. You know, having alternative routes on so many places in Hawaii don't have alternative routes. And so we're learning, we're learning about that and certainly learning about energy too. So I guess the larger question I would put to you, given the Maui experience, is how is all of this going to affect energy and our attempt to reach our goals and clean energy, and you know, the status of Hawaiian Electric legally and operationally. There's all kinds of issues, but I have a feeling that, you know, this fire and the energy aspect, the energy consequences of this fire are going to affect our energy system, going to affect our ability to get energy, the price of energy, the legal organization of the entities that provided to us, the structure, you know, of all the instruments and make that instrumentalities, the status of mentalities that deal with it. Because ultimately, we have to deal, you have to deal with it. Your thoughts about how it will affect the fire, the fires will affect energy in Hawaii. I think I'm going to step back for a moment because it affects water delivery. It affects what water you use for fires. Obviously, if you can reuse wastewater for agricultural and firefighting, that's important. It affects telecom, because the telecommunication system went down. It affects housing, because right now there's discussions about how you not only meet the needs of the renters there, but the fact that we have a lot, not enough affordable housing statewide. So it's going to affect a lot of things beyond just fire and just the electricity. But in terms of moving towards 100% renewables, I think we're on path to that. There are a lot of things in the pipeline, but we're right now not meeting our 2030 greenhouse gas requirement. So it seems to me that there are all kinds of things that are going to have to be looked at, and the legislature for the first time really is going to have to look at them holistically, because we have a limited budget, but there are many, many different parts of it that need to be fixed. Yeah, well, you know, as one aspect of the fire, it makes us look at ourselves. It makes us look at issues maybe we were not looking at before. And you know, I mean, I firmly believe it, I'm sure you've addressed the same thing, is that a lot of our problems are systemic problems, but we don't want to face them. We don't have faced the problems, there's too much work. And so we just do cosmetic things. This fire is so traumatic, so tragic, that it forces us to look at the systems, the underlying problems. Don't you agree? Absolutely. And it forces us to recognize, while Lahaina was the original capital of Hawaii, it also had a major Filipino population. And so it's affecting many different types of communities. And so yeah, it forces a real re-examination, and the legislature in their three to four month session is going to be grappling with this. Well, they should focus. You know, I think it's one of the problems. We have all these bills, you know, thousands of bills in there, and it makes it very difficult for them to focus on the priorities. So if you've been dealing with this for years and years, what are the priorities you think they should be focusing on this year? I think one of the important issues is equity. And that is a can of worms in itself, how you define equity and how you involve marginalized communities. A second one is identifying which areas of the state are at risk from burning and figuring out how through replantings, through mowing, through fire breaks, how you protect those areas, because Maui had a fire a few years ago that jumped the five lane highway due to high winds. So you can't just say that the fire break is five feet wide and everything is fine. So we really have to begin rethinking things holistically. And I don't know if the legislature can do it that quickly, but it might be a multi-year effort. Well, all these things affect quality of life and quality of life affects the next generation coming up. And if those kids look around and say, gee, this isn't working for me, and my home in Maui was destroyed, I don't have any job, I don't see any prospects, I'm out of here. And I would add that to your priority list. It's a very hard problem, but we have to find a way to keep them here. We have to find a way to build an environment, and that means a total environment that will attract them, maintain their connection with the state. Do you agree? Yes, it is. And one thing we asked Hawaiian Electric is how much would it cost to bury the distribution system on Maui? Because distribution lines are the most likely to fail in windstorms. They're most likely to spark. There's a lot of them. Heiko gave us an estimate of $7 billion to bury the distribution lines, and $2 billion to bury those are distribution, $2 billion to bury transmission lines in certain parts of Maui. So that would be $9 billion. And that is a heck of a lot of money for the counting people to pay. And when you look at all the other islands that also have to be addressed, there are ways of insulating lines to make them less likely to spark. But insulating lines removes part of the risk, but not all of the risk. So microgrids might help, but if we had had a microgrid in Lahaina, Lahaina still would have burned. And the EPA said this was the first major urban fire they dealt with where they had to worry about battery systems blowing up while they were cleaning out the area. So yeah, it forces us to really reevaluate everything and to try to really think long term, but it's a mess. There are two levels. One is figuring it out, doing the engineering and the critical thinking to deal with what's coming around the corner. And the other is the secondary, but it's equally critical, is to find the money to pay for the projects, like burying the lines. That's expensive. And when you think about it, you mentioned other islands. Take Oahu. There's an awful lot of overhead lines in Oahu. I'm sure that the estimate for Maui is only a fraction of what it would be here in Oahu. And when is that going to happen? Yes. And then you have to take into a fact that like the windward side, the coastal area, the highway is eroding into the ocean. And if we move the highway inland, of course, it will split communities. But you also have to move the water lines, the wastewater lines, the telecom lines and everything else. And yeah, it's going to be very expensive. Well, I asked you before the program to examine with me how life of the land has changed or will change because of what we know to be dramatic changes because of these things and because the passage of time is always changed. There's nothing so constant as change. So how is life of the land, how is the mission doing, the activities, the operations, the scope of your work? Since the fire, we have put in an enormous amount of time trying to understand how utility lines can or cannot start fires, how fires start, how you can prevent fires and wildfires and how you can save lives. And that involves not only the technology of the lines, involves the financing, involves the regulation. And we've been reviewing the fire management plans from PG&E, from Southern California Edison and other large utilities to see how they've handled it. One of the ideas is that you can de-energize lines when high winds and dry humidity exists. But there have been seven red flag days since the Maui fire. And I'm sure since people reacted to the rolling blackouts that they did not like, if we had turned all power to large sections of the state for seven days, there would have been a huge outcry. So de-energizing is sort of what the California Public Utilities Commission calls a last resort. And you must figure out a lot of different things to do first. Well, you're saying that life of the land is looking at issues that perhaps we didn't think about before. Issues that have been raised by the fire and of course by the passage of time. So it changes your mission, your focus, you know, the scope of your activities, no? Yes. In fact, we served on HECO's resilience working group that was active a few years ago. And while fire was mentioned, we and many other groups focused more on hurricanes. It's what HECO focused on. And in hindsight, life of land should have been focusing more on fires. But like many groups, we didn't think that this was going to be the catastrophic event that it is. And so that's one way we changed realizing that the unknown disasters coming, you really have to begin preparing for. And climate change will bring them more and more to Hawaii until we stop putting so much greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Yeah, but you know what? Of course, it's certainly an important issue given what happened. But the possibility of extreme weather is still there. I mean, you're into environment up to your eyeballs and you know that climate change is getting worse all over, not just here. And I wake up in the morning, Henry, I walk outside and say, what a beautiful day, one day closer to the next extreme storm. That's what I say, because I know it's coming. We all know it's coming. What can we do? What is the government doing? What is life of the land doing to deal with these other existential threats to our society? We're trying right now to wrap our mind around what can happen and what ways there are to minimize what happens. I like to refer to resilience as you have two boxers in a ring and one boxer knocks the other one out. And resilience is, one, how fast the person on the mat gets back up, and two, what can you do to his equipment so the next time he gets the same punch, he doesn't fall. So it's a two-part resilience. And resilience has to be applied to all of the infrastructure. So it's not just the electrical infrastructure, it's the gas infrastructure, it's the telecom. How do you actually safeguard what we have so if a disaster happens, we're not all left in the dark or dead? Somehow this falls between fire and the energy problems and the fire and the risk of some kind of catastrophe over extreme weather, and it is nuclear. Henry, you know there are two bills in the ledge this year too, and we hope to examine them, at least by the people who introduced them, for nuclear energy in Hawaii. There's a constitutional provision that makes it hard to do that, but it's not impossible, and some people think that it is a solution going forward. Your thoughts? It's a funny constitutional provision because it was put in at a time that there were certain types of nuclear plants and it covered all of them. But the newer type is you have a self-contained container made somewhere that has its own fuel inside. You ship it in, you plug it into the grid, and when it's done you ship it out. So you're not constructing anything here and you're not disposing of the waste here, and those two criteria means that the constitutional provision does not kick in. The provision says we can't construct a plant and we can't dispose of waste, but if it's self-contained in and out, it gets around it. Now, I'm not sure that people would support nuclear, and I'm not sure what the regulations would be, just that the constitutional provisions might not kick in for that kind of a system. That's a very interesting prospect. We did a show with Fred Hemings maybe five years ago, and he had actually been in touch with Dan Inouye about the possibility of this device that was being designed by Toshiba in Japan, which is kind of ironic. And it was the size of a VW bus, and it was buried underground, and as you say, it was self-contained and for a small city, not on a little of course, but for a small community, it would last decades and you didn't have to do anything. It would just generate power, and when you were done, you would dig it up or maybe just cover it over, I don't know, and get another one in there. It was like a battery in a sense, and it never went anywhere. I'm intrigued yet to see that there are people who would introduce bills, but with you, I doubt that it has any legs because anti-nuclear is built into our state DNA. Just not going to happen. What about all these other possible technologies that we considered? You and I were witness to all of these possibilities. It was just, it was a glorious time back 20 years ago, the geothermal and wind and offshore wind and hydrogen and algae and biodiesel and ocean energy. Otec, remember Otec? Yes. What happened? What's going on? Otec was one of those ocean thermal energy conversion that I was actually thinking might solve our problems. I've come to realize it wouldn't, but at that time I thought it would, but we're actually coming up with a proposal for something that isn't in Hawaii yet. We're not suggesting it, but we want to put an idea out on the table for discussion. It should be out in a month or two about another type of technology, and who knows. But we need to put more ideas on the table because the more you can actually put on the table and the more different views you can bring to the table, the more options we will have for going forward. Well, wait now. We had these options and we kind of declined on a lot or forgot them, I think, or decided that solar was king and queen. Yeah. Now solar is everything. We've been building with hotcakes with solar. Are you saying that we need a more diversified portfolio than we have? I think solar is good, but I do think we need diversity. I do think we need some firm renewables, not 50%, but like when Kauai has reached 100% renewables on some days, there are about a third firm and two thirds intermittent. So we do need some type of firm renewables. I don't think lithium batteries are yet there. So we need some diversity. Obviously with the Kohoku wind farm going the way it did, wind would be a really tough sell, especially on Oahu. There are hydroelectric possibilities, but we do need to have more ideas floating out there. Yeah, okay. I'll buy that. But it's like deja vu. No, what about cars, electric vehicles? This is also what deja vu kind of thing. You know, back when everybody was pretty high on electric cars and in fact the technology has really come through. However, the number of electric cars or even hybrid cars in the state of Hawaii is not really what we expected to have. And the number of hybrid cars is really pitiful. And so, you know, where is that going here? Does that really matter to us? Should we be focusing on that? You know, we dropped the state tax credit. Maybe that would change things if we, you know, re-initiated the state tax credit. Your thoughts about electric and hydrogen vehicles? I think we need to impose a limit, a date certain, where we will sell new fossil fuel powered vehicles. So we might say in the year 2035, you can sell your fossil fuel vehicle to somebody else in the state, but you can't buy a new one after that date. We have to have a date certain that we're saying the transition is occurring. We did that in electricity. We said 2045 is the magic date. We did that in greenhouse gases. We claim we're going to be net zero at some point. We need a deadline in ground transportation. You know, I have heard the argument, maybe not so much lately, but in view of climate change, Hawaii is a speck in the firmament, a tiny, tiny, tiny speck. And if we all follow all the rules on climate change, on production of greenhouse gases, on using clean energy in every aspect of our civil society everywhere, it still doesn't mean anything to the world in general. Your thoughts on that? If you look at the percent of greenhouse gases emitted by Hawaii compared to the US, you find it's a little bit higher than the percentage of voters in Hawaii versus the voters in the US. So if you think that it's important to vote for president, then you should also think it's important to deal with greenhouse gases because the greenhouse gases is a higher percent of the total US market. Well, yeah. And we used to be seen as a, you know, a model. Hawaii is a model of clean energy. Is it still being seen that way? I think it is, but I think how we address the fire may change public perception greatly across the country and the world. Yeah. We're being tested for sure. There's many, many, many, many ways. So let me ask you, and this seems like a de minimis question after the larger conversation we've been having, but what are the projects these days? What projects are you following? What projects are you supporting or opposing? What projects are likely to change the energy landscape that are in the pipeline right now? I should not use the dirt pipeline that are in the timeline now. We're looking at all the energy bills at the legislature and all of the proceedings at the public utilities commission. But our primary emphasis is on reducing greenhouse gases in an equitable manner and addressing the Maui fires so that we minimize the chance of a future fire like that from occurring. How about big solar projects? How about, you know, projects that involve earth moving or the construction of infrastructure that will add to our clean energy model? We are involved in an energy equity proceeding at the public utilities commission. I'm not sure if that's going to go anywhere. I know that PUC has great hopes on it. I'm just not sure yet whether it's going to lead to anything. How you involve communities and how you allow them to decide what is appropriate for their communities is a major equity and justice issue that we're wrestling with as a state. And I'm not sure how it's going to work itself out. You know, years ago when you and I first met the early part of the century, there was a tension about whether the state should, as a matter of policy, care about clean energy. And there were people out there who didn't think we should care about clean energy and certainly, you know, you were advocating for it and for better environment. We read how has that changed? And I guess what I mean to say is who these days would oppose clean energy, if anyone, and who these days are the strongest advocates for moving as quickly as possible with clean energy? Can you give us the, you know, the people landscape, if you will? Well, eight law firms are defending the fossil fuel industry from the Maui, from the Harululu and Board of Water Supply lawsuits dealing with climate change. And the governor has $2 million in his budget to fight the youth who are challenging the Department of Transportation in court. So there are a whole bunch of people in the state who certainly profit from business as usual. I'm sorry to hear that. I thought we all agreed clean energy was the way to go and that it was in everybody's interest. And I guess what I hear is from you now is that, you know, it's not quite resolved yet. Yeah, there are a lot of forces out there that would be happy to have a very fossil fuel intensive and high greenhouse gas emission future, because as you say, we have such a small amount of the total glow emissions. So why don't we just run with fossil fuels? Now that's really depressing. So who are the champions now? You are, unequivocally I say that you are a champion of this whole movement for clean energy and environment. But who else? So who else in government? Who else in industry? Who else in the non-profit sector? Sorry, it's a political question, isn't it? Yeah, it's a political question that I'm going to shy away from answering. Okay, well, we'll have to find them one by one and get them on the show here what they have to say. Okay. So where are we, Henry? Where is it all going? Because we certainly had a bend in the road here over Maui and we have to look at these things again. And it's not just a straight question of how this affects energy in the state. It's how it affects everything. Where is the state now? Should we be optimistic? Because what do they say about so as General Motors goes, so goes the country? Well, I say so as energy goes, so goes the state. That's what I say. And the question is where are we on the continuum? Are we where we want to be? Do we have challenges that will give us more crimps as we go forward? How should we feel optimistic, pessimistic, somewhere in the middle? If we felt really good about it, say 10, 15 years ago, how should we feel now? As lifeline is always optimistic because it's a lot easier to work on these issues being an optimist than being a pessimist. But we are missing, we're currently slated to miss our 2030 greenhouse gas emission goal in this state. And we are certainly not installing renewables quickly enough and we're certainly not addressing transportation. We haven't really addressed it in any large system for 20 years. So we have an enormous amount still on the plate and hopefully we'll have a bunch of young people come along and say, as we did when we were young, you messed up the world, we need to fix it. Your work is not yet done and in fact in many ways it's only beginning. And I am so glad that you are part of the community, the ferument of advocates for energy. Thank you so much, Henry. Thank you, Jay. Aloha.