 This is Jay Fiedel. It's Think Tech. It's Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We have with us Brian Kealoah, and he is the leader of Hawaii Energy, which is energy efficiency organization. And we're so happy to have him. Hi, Brian. Hello, Jay. How are you? I'm good. I'm good because I've told you before the show, Brian Ozawa sent me a social media link with this footage of people celebrating. And they were so excited all over the country. Every major city, name a city, they're all there. And these people, everybody is so diverse and so beautiful to see them, to see them celebrating like that. It really touched me. I was emotionally affected by watching. And you will see it. It'll be on the news for sure. So this is a good day. Yeah, looking forward to that. Yeah. So let's talk about Hawaii energy and energy efficiency and energy renewable energy in general. I guess the first thing we should talk about is all your programs that you're doing even in the time of COVID and maybe because of COVID. Everybody, including certainly, people with community interests at heart are trying to help the community deal with COVID. So let's talk about what Hawaii energy is doing in that regard. Sure, happy to. And again, thanks for having me on. It's been a crazy ride, right? For all of us in 2020 and clean energy and energy efficiency, probably no different. I think when I was on a while back with you in the early days, we were just talking about how we saw energy usage in the commercial sector plummet. Meanwhile, energy usage in the residential sector started going up quite a bit with people being at home, with the stay at home order, working from home, all of those things. So it was a really different dynamic than what we're used to in terms of our energy usage profile. But as we are here now in nearly mid-November and the economy's opened up a little more, tourism has returned, we're starting to see business energy usage go up quite a bit and residential usage start to come down a bit. I mean, there's still a lot of people working from home, so it hasn't come down completely. But I think one of the biggest trends that we've seen in the commercial sector in particular is that when they started to reopen, even if they weren't seeing a lot of business, just the needs to have a lot of ventilation in their space, leaving doors open to have outside air intake, just burning a lot of energy, even if they weren't necessarily doing a lot in terms of business revenue. So it's been a challenge for businesses out there and we've been there trying to help them adjust to this new norm, knowing that the safety and health comes first, we have to use energy when we need to, but how can we conserve and reduce in other areas of their business? Yeah, that's very thoughtful. And it makes me think of this. As you said before the show, a lot of this is perception, how to deal with COVID is perception. Our leadership has to give us confidence and it has to give us a path. It has to tell us things will be okay and it will have to take steps to affirm that. And one of the things in our lives is that we can turn the lights on. This is really important. One of the things in our lives is clean energy and it's sustainability and it's a sort of optimistic view of the future. And if we did not do this now at a time when people are at risk of becoming depressed and unhappy, and some of them are, then I think that would enhance the depression. But we've been consistent. We have kept going. We still have the lights. They go on in the morning. We still have you doing efficiency. We still have clean energy around us. We have initiatives that keep on going and the statement of all of that is that we care about you. We care about your lives and we don't want you to get unhappy about things because we're here for you. I don't know if you feel that, but if you have any thoughts on that, it'd be interesting. Absolutely. I mean, I think we saw a lot of this in the early stages that the term we're all in this together. I'm not hearing it as much now, but I think it's something that we've all kind of taken to heart. And I think we've seen it in the work that we're doing. It's been really interesting because in normal times, energy efficiencies, usually the redheaded step child anyway, right? Nobody, they know you should do it, but it's not super exciting. But all of a sudden, given the pressure on revenue and the need to cut operating expenses, we've been amazed at the inflow of requests for assistance and help. It's coupled with the challenge too that they don't have a lot of money to perform upgrades, but they're looking for quick, easy, low cost or no cost ways to help reduce their energy bills. And it's really been nice to see the community come together and try to help each other out. We have a contractor that actually started doing free lighting retrofits for nonprofits. And they could only do a handful, they weren't a huge business or anything, but they saw the need with nonprofits. And this was their core business and wanted to help out our community. And those are the kind of stories that just make you feel good about what's happening around us. And still having a theme of clean energy, energy efficiency and bill reduction too. So there's a lot of stories like that. You have to dig a little bit, but it's nice to see the community come together. Yeah, well, you don't happen to remember the name of that contractor because he deserves or she deserves kudos. And we should remember that on into the post COVID time that this company was doing community service in a selfless community service. This is when it really counts, you know? Right, no, the contractor was AE Solutions, Ingrid over there, who's the head, just been great to see her give back to the community. Yeah, well, we all have to do some of that, you know? It's a time for rebuilding and it's a time for reevaluating relationships. There are people I'm much closer to since COVID began and there are people I'm not so close to since COVID began. And that, you know, in part that's political, of course, but in other part, you know, you get to see what's going on. And it's the same thing I think with the community. You get to see what's really there. You get to see what's happening and what holds us together the way people behave and offer themselves for help like AE contracting. One thing I wanted to ask you about was we had a show, a couple of shows with Richard Hobb, formerly of Hamakua Springs Farms, and he's promoting, and I think it's largely a community contribution, these air purifiers. And the air purifier is supposed to deal with the issue about air, which is stagnant, you know, in an enclosed space and it holds the virus particles. They're called virion, by the way, V-I-R-I-O-N. It holds the virus particles for some time and then if you go into that space later, you're exposed. And the idea of the air purifier is that that reduces the risk of being that enclosed space. Problem is they're all electric. So it's a balancing, isn't it? There are some things that help you but they have a cost to them. What are your thoughts about that, Brian? No, absolutely. And I am not a scientist, but I think we all can read what's being published and seeing that the biggest risk seems to be that the virus is in the air and it's not necessarily, yes, it's on the surfaces you touch, but it's the aerosol transmission that is probably the most thing that we need to worry about the most. So air purifiers absolutely will help in that. I don't think anything will reduce or eliminate the risk, but it will help with that. And it's the same with, you know, we've seen, again, people leaving their doors open. Another trend that we see are folks are leaving their air conditioning systems on overnight and taking a lot of outdoor air intake to help, again, with the circulation in their space. And that's something that we've been saying, at least from what we're seeing things across the nation where it isn't necessarily helpful to exchange air flow throughout the entire evening if nobody's there. So, you know, if your business shuts down at nine and maybe run it for another hour or two and then an hour or two before you open, but just leaving it on, thinking that changing the air out when nobody's there is gonna do something, it isn't. And so I think that's partly where we're all learning as we go through this. There's so much unknown about the virus, but there are absolutely energy implications to this and it's a balance of health and safety and then ultimately cost. And for a lot of these businesses, their energy costs escalate anymore. They're on the edge of going out of business as is. So it's a real balancing act. Yeah. Well, again, on the psychology of things, you know, it seems to me that when you hear about Pfizer's success in a 90% effective vaccine, that's good news, makes you feel better. It's a better day to hear that. Oh, they're sure there are wrinkles in the 60 minutes program on Sunday, you know, showed you that it's gonna take a Herculean effort to distribute that to everybody here and elsewhere. But psychologically, it's important for us to have things to hope for a lot of the end of the tunnel. And part of that I think is energy, you know, so the question is, we had for the past, what 15 years or so, you've been involved the whole time. We've had efforts to make the state renewable and efficient because the best, the best, the cheapest energy is the one that's free. The cheapest energy is the one you never even use at all, which is as true today as it was then. But, you know, when we hear about these initiatives and then we see that the PUC is actually, you know, moving on it and the utility is moving on it and you're moving on it, then we look forward and see the light at the end of the tunnel and we don't feel that, you know, it's a dark day, literally. And I wonder, you know, if you agree with that and how you feel the initiative of our clean energy and for that matter, energy efficiency has evolved over the last six or eight months. You know, in the energy efficiency, I'll start with energy efficiency space and kind of go broader. From the efficiency side, I think what we're excited about is, again, there's a lot more interest. We just released about a month and a half ago our energy relief grant. And this is to help small businesses and nonprofits, those that had been impacted from COVID-19 and had applied for one of the loans, they could apply also for our energy relief grant up to $25,000 to perform energy efficiency upgrades. And we had a budget slated for a million dollars, which you would give out to businesses in need. And Jay, I mean, we've been on the show how many times, right? I mean, I can talk about things so I'm blue in the face and we still have to really pull people in and get people to wanna sign up. Not this time. We've already to date have over $3 million worth of requests for energy efficiency projects. So the tide has definitely changed quite a bit for us. And along those lines, we're trying to take advantage of that momentum because clean energy contractors that are doing this work can benefit from the economic recovery that comes from projects going into the ground. So that's been a lot of our focus is how do we get the money, the funding that we have out the door quicker to businesses and families that can use it right away that we're creating this economic multiplier and not relying solely on tourism again to be our economic recovery. And that just broadens out as we look at the entire clean energy picture. I mean, I'm very pleased and enthusiastic of what Mayor Caldwell in the Office of Resiliency and Sustainability has done at the City and County of Honolulu they've released back a couple of months ago or awarded a couple of very big energy efficiency performance contracts for a number of their city facilities and their department of parks. And this is gonna save taxpayers a lot of money. It's gonna get our clean energy allies back to work installing energy efficient technologies and putting us towards our goal to a hundred percent. So I mean, efficiency and clean energy has always been a win-win and I think even more so now. You know, on the flip side, I think we were a little disappointed this session, the ledge, there was a bill that passed that would require state facilities to lead by example and do the same thing, but it was ultimately vetoed by the governor and in a time where we could have really used that stimulus and have government get out in front and lead. I think we were really hopeful that the governor would reconsider his veto on that. But, you know, at this point we have to just keep plugging on with the ones that are willing to move forward. And there's a lot of folks that are seeing the benefits of clean energy and energy efficiency and if they can afford it, they're realizing there's never been a better time. Business is slow. It's easier to come in and do these upgrades. It's less disruptive. I mean, we have hotels doing guests from thermostats because they don't have to kick anybody out of their rooms to do the upgrades. So there's a lot of advantages that has happened because of this and those that are really on the leading edge are figuring out how to take advantage of it. Yeah, I think that's spot on. There's a time for reevaluation. It's a time to, you know, look at your to-do list and see all the things you never did. And that's happening across the board. And, you know, I mean, nobody wants to be in COVID but that is a good effect of reevaluating. And it goes to all of our initiatives. It goes to, you know, dealing with climate change and sustainability. It goes certainly to every aspect of energy and city planning in general. You know, let's take another look. Let's see what works. Let's be more efficient about how we, you know, live together. And I think there's a lot of good fallout. So what about from your point of view, from, you know, Hawaii energy point of view? Have you changed the way you do business? Have you changed the way your organization works? Have those changes been so useful that you would consider making them permanent? There are definitely a lot of changes that we made. You know, first and foremost, we continue to primarily work from home. We do have a few folks coming into the office but it became a realization as we started to go through this that we really didn't have to be in the office. Now, you know, I think we, at some point we do need to return and be in the office a little more. But to your point, it's not gonna be every day, you know, Monday through Friday, eight to 10 hours a day anymore. I think that's changed. And especially because we've been changing a lot of our processes to be able to work remotely. And, you know, our employees are enjoying that flexibility. And, you know, from my perspective as I'm looking at what we're doing and where we're getting out the door, I'd argue we're doing more than we were pre COVID. So there's definitely a productivity function for people to have that flexibility. I also think that we're doing a lot of upgrades on our IT infrastructure to allow for, you know, the automation and maybe, you know, the less of a need to actually have, you know, physical presence. So that's a big thing. And then, you know, the other part that we were starting to work on this pre COVID and now, you know, it only accelerated is what are some of the activities that we can do even remotely with customers? You know, can we do a remote audit of a home or a business? Can we do an inspection after a project's complete remotely instead of having to send somebody out and get the documentation? Great question. Yeah, really? How do you do that? Well, it takes some work, right? I mean, so basically not every customer we can do that on the business side. You know, obviously if they're sophisticated enough to know what they installed or sometimes you work with a contractor, we were literally on the phone face timing, you know, leading them around and saying, can you show us this? Can you show us that? And then, you know, allows us to see what's happened there. And with residential customers, that's something that's evolving across the country as well is more and more online and remote auditing tools because people don't want, especially now, I mean, the virus caused people to like, nobody's coming to my home, right? Nobody wants to have other people in their home unless they have to. But even prior to that, it costs a lot to send somebody to one house and do an audit, right? So we never did residential audits as part of our program. We had some online tools, but this is something now we're exploring that could be easily customizable and something that the homeowner can understand and do it themselves. And we can be there to guide them remotely if it's needed. So those are the kinds of things that we've been forced to look at. Just give it all that's going on. I think those things are gonna stay in place. We're gonna see sort of a shift in our lifestyle here. And they're gonna stay in place because they're more efficient, because they're faster, they require less work, less aggravation, and you don't have to drive, you don't have to park. You know, when I graduated law school, my first boss said to me, never underestimate the power of parking. And he was right for most of the time from then till now. But now nobody wants to park, nobody wants to drive and nobody wants to use fossil fuel to muck up the environment. So here's an opportunity not to just do it online, do everything online. Absolutely, absolutely. And it takes, you know, it took an event like this for us to question, how are we doing things and can we be doing it in a more carbon friendly way? I mean, I would be the first one to tell you that I would never, I could never see the day that the majority of our staff would be working remotely, at least for this long and being that productive. I was pretty old school, I guess. I felt like you have to be in the office, we have to be together to talk about things and collaborate, you know, and kind of the whole teamwork piece. But I think we're all experiencing zoom fatigue, but at the same time, it's gotten me to shift and be like, if we're focused on energy efficiency and the ultimate goal beyond just reducing, you know, energy bills for customers is really the carbon impact and carbon reduction around climate change. Then why are we driving to the office every day? Why are we driving out and doing inspections every day? I mean, this is partly, it gets you to question like you're part of the problem and you can also be part of the solution. Yeah, we live in really extraordinary times and I think they're gonna get to be even more extraordinary when people realize that COVID, you know, even with a vaccine, it's not gonna really go away. And even if it, you know, submerges for a while, these things like the plague, like the bubonic plague, for example, it came out in the 14th century and it comes out every X number of years, most recently in Hawaii in the 19th century. So, you know, just like this virus, it will happen again. And if we don't know by now, we have to realize that our lives, our civilization, you know, is a function of these kinds of antigens and they're never gonna go away completely. Therefore, we have to tailor our way of life, our way of, you know, development, our way of living together and doing, you know, industrial type developments to cope with that. So I think, I hope, you know, people, especially government, you know, we'll recognize that in their future planning and we'll all be happier and we'll all have, we are developing the tools to do that right now, that's the thing, more than before, you know. And so what about the Clean Energy Initiative in general, you know, we've seen it grow, we've seen a lot of projects, some projects have been controversial. Hey, we have so many controversial projects in Hawaii. I mean, most recently, Huu Honua is still going on as a controversy and the TMT and the Superfery and you know, I'm probably, I'm missing some. And Pune Geothermal Ventures is also in controversy as it has been for 30 years. So query, how does COVID, how do these special times in which we live affect the development of clean energy, the development of these large projects, the development of things that will get us to our goals? Do they help? I think on some level, they must. And do they hurt? I think on some level, they must. And how do they change the way people look at these things? Yeah, that's a good question. And you know, from my perspective, you look at 2020 and there was a number of things that just start to shape mindset around clean energy and what we need to do as a state. I mean, obviously the virus and the economic ramifications of having tourism pretty much our only industry shut down and we see the need to diversify and find, you know, other ways and other opportunities to continue to function as a society and have that economic engine that we need, clean energy is one of them. So that's a clear sign that came out of the pandemic. But, you know, all around us in 2020 have been the signs of climate change. I think sometimes we kind of put that to the side with all of the COVID-19 challenges, right? But if you look at the wildfires, again, that happened, particularly in California but across the West Coast, it was going crazy. We had a hurricane this summer. People forgot, we had a hurricane that just about hit every single island. I mean, we were all in hurricane warning. So we've been getting by in Hawaii unscathed for a while. You know, and at some point, it's not a matter of if. I mean, you talk to any of the climate scientists, it's when. And so these are starting to converge, right? And I feel like there is some momentum in the space, but at the same time, it has to be done together, right? It goes back to we're all in this together. You could apply that really to clean energy too. We have to do better at community engagement. You know, the process is broken right now. When we ask a developer to come in and do the community engagement, they're the ones who wanna see a project move forward. So of course, they're gonna be pushing their alternative forward. And we have to relook at how do we do community engagement to bring in the interests of the community, but also, you know, speak intelligently about all the facts and what's happening with a particular project and then seeing how we can get together. And in some cases, maybe a project shouldn't be built in a certain community. You know, maybe that land is better used for agriculture as we look at sustainability in general. But I think the process in which we're going about it is broken and we're seeing some of the results that have happened from a really developer led community engagement process. And it's no fault of the developers. It's just that's the process right now. We need to address that if we really wanna start building a lot of large scale renewable projects. Yeah, I think we have to change our image to the world and to Wall Street and to developers on the mainland or elsewhere to encourage them to come in. And that means we have to get everybody on board. So we don't have these gratuitous controversies all the time, which shun investment and shun development. So one of the things I was gonna ask you about and I hope we have the time to cover this at least a little bit, is you know, from time to time we have noticed that people think Hawaii is its cutting edge. They think we know more out here. Maybe it's because we have resources and because we have, you know, solar and wind and although I don't think we develop wind enough actually and we have various, you know, diversified sources of energy. And the mainland thinks, a lot of people in the mainland think that we have a special sauce. And they look to us for leadership, for sort of an example of where to go. That may be diminishing in recent years. I have a feeling it has been diminishing but there's no reason why we have to let it diminish. I mean, we can make energy into a sector. I mean, an actually productive, profitable sector. As tourism is threatened here and is suffering and will suffer going forward, we need another stool, leg on the stool. You know, years ago it was all about technology but I used to say at the time that Clean Energy came up within the public conversation, I used to say energy is the new technology. It displaced, you know, all the enthusiasm about technology and there was enthusiasm about energy. So the technology of inverters, you know, the technology of efficiency, technology of doing a building so you use less and the result is better and the things you deal with every day. And I'm thinking that we could go ahead. We could be the Silicon Valley, if you will, of energy, all things energy. And we can show the world and we can export. We can form companies that have, you know, intellectual property. We can have people coming out here just to see what we do. We haven't realized that dream that I wonder about your thoughts about whether that is workable, I mean, attractive, whether it's possible, whether we can ever do that. I think so. I mean, to put it in perspective, I think kind of what you're insinuating a bit in your question, Jay, is that we were leaders 10 years ago or maybe 12 years ago when the Clean Energy Initiative passed, we were policy leaders, right? And in 2015, when we hit the 100% policy, we were leaders, but to your point, we're not leaders anymore on the policy side. This is becoming the norm. The goals that we've said is starting to become the norm in more and more jurisdictions and states and cities across the country. So we're starting to lose our edge in that respect. So we need to back it up with what we're doing, what we're actually doing. And I feel like we've had a lot of great momentum and we came firing out of the gates. And to your point a little bit earlier, things have slowed down. And, you know, on the utility scale side of things, there's the challenges that you spoke of, but I think one area that's completely untapped and has a lot of potential is on the distributed side. You know, there is a lot of rooftop solar, but are we really using distributed energy resources to help balance the grid? Really doing aggressive demand response and utilizing storage so that we can capture in time of use rates and everything to really make use of all that we have here. The answer is no, we're not on the leading edge of that. And yes, there's challenges and difficulties and we need to overcome that. But I think we've gotten a little complacent, honestly, that we were leaders 10 years ago and we keep patting ourselves on the back, saying we've got this 100% mandate and we've got all these renewable resources. And believe me, I think we've made good progress, but we still have a long way to go. And to your point, this is a really good time to start to figure out how to do that and how to make it an industry that we can export. Okay, you know, whether it's intellectual, capital, engineering, design, you name it, we need to make it so it's not just about the projects, but it's the expertise that we can share with the rest of the world. Then we've created a new economy. Yeah, and that could be a significant sector. It could make money. It could attract people, but it could also sell things. And it could, you know, it could change our image from being, you know, a business-resistant, controversial on every conceivable controversy. Instead, it could be a statement of our commitment to sustainability, to a better climate, to a better environment, to a better life. Wow, that's the reputation we want to have, Brian. And you work every day for that. And I must say, I really appreciate it. You've been constant and you've been vigorous and you haven't stopped pushing the whole time I know you. It takes a village, Jay. We all gotta do it. We all gotta do our part. What we need is a village of Brian K. Lojas. Thank you, Brian. Great to talk to you. I really enjoyed these discussions. We'll do it again soon. Look forward to it. Thanks, Jay. Aloha.