 Green Think Tech Kauai, 26, 2021, and my guest today is the Energy and Sustainability Coordinator for the County of Kauai, the Honorable Ben Sullivan. And Ben, I'd like to start with a riddle, mirror, mirror on the wall, which the U.S. is the greenest of them all. And my guest is the County of Kauai. And that's what I want to do is try to get into the inside story of how you guys got so gosh darned green. You have this very, very enviable track record. If every county in the U.S. of A had the track record that you had, our problems would all be over. We'd be a really, really clean and prosperous county. So welcome, Glenn. Thank you so much for welcome, Glenn. Ben, thank you so much for being my guest. And you have been the Energy Coordinator for long time. And then they added sustainability to your title. So let me begin by asking what has attracted so many renewable energy companies to Kauai. Do you guys slip them money under the table or something? Or what's going on here? How did Tesla get to you? Or how did they discover you? And what deal did you make? Great question. And before I start, I want to take advantage of the faux pas and names that you gave and just pay a little homage to those of us that have been doing this work for a lot longer than myself. So my predecessor, Glenn Sato, I know was a good friend of yours, Howard, and did this job for, I think, 20-some years himself and made a lot of great progress and did foundational work. And I was lucky to follow him up. And I'm still, you know, very happy to be doing this job. But the answer to how do we get so green, I think, is a lot of people doing a lot of hard work over a long period of time. And I will also say that I think that sometimes the grass is greener on the other side of the channel. So we are very green. Part of that is all the rainfall we get. Part of that is our luck and our hard work on renewable energy. But we still have plenty of challenges as well. So lots to do over here. To answer your question, you know, I think there's several key pieces to look at when you look, and I think primarily you're referencing the tremendous progress that PIUC has made over the years, probably above other things at the moment, right? Yeah. So as a lot of folks know, we have a utility cooperative, which is a very different structure on the island. And that allows for a lot greater and closer and local control of strategic decisions of the utility. Obviously, we were like all the utilities and why for a long time very dependent on diesel. And so it was very expensive. And you had a locally driven utility board that back in 2007 said, Hey, we're going to, we're going to make it to 50% renewable by 2023. And that was at the time they're lying in the sand. And as safe and easy as 50% renewable sounds today, that was very, very aggressive back then. So you could imagine people saying, How are we going to do that? That seems impossible. We need all these power resources and fossil generation to keep the lights on. The utility staff just took it on and took ownership of it and began to pursue. And at the same time, the price of PV and the price of batteries and the, you know, the R&D that went into all those things did what they did what it's supposed to do to the market. And AUC started getting better and better at installing renewables. And then, no, here we are 10 years, 15 years later, and we're, we're staring down 80%. So as of today, we're over 60% renewable energy. And I really feel like I'm doing a commercial for KIC right now, but that's okay. The Tesla plant and a lot of the firsts that you refer to are, I think are evidence of the success of the utility. And I think when, when you get success like that, people want to jump on board. So you had Tesla wanting to deploy a large battery set to show that it could be done. And they saw a utility that had already done a lot of large scale solar farms, you know, more so and probably quicker than a lot of other utilities. So they were at the, you know, the leading edge of deploying solar. And they said, Hey, we want to get in on the action. So that Tesla plant, I think is a product of that. And also a product of, you know, the ability for the, of the utility to deliver lower cost resources to the grid. So, you know, all these things, all these, all these solar farms, all these resources that have gone on the grid have gotten less and less expensive and delivered more and more saving to Hawaii residents over the course of 10 or 15 years. You know, to the extent that the most recent ones to go on the grid are on the, you know, in the range of about 10 cents. So AES has been a key partner. And they, you know, their most recent EMRF solar farm, I think is, I think came in right around that 10 cent mark. So very, very affordable energy. Obviously, that's just the avoided portion of it. So they're still, you know, the operational costs that get built into the final rate customer, but great things overall. I don't want to go on too much. I'm sure you've got a lot of questions, but it's great to see you. I'm great to be, great to be here and happy to share all the wonderful things that are happening on the island. Yeah, you mentioned operational costs. One of the rush darned problems with fossil fuel energy, be it coal, oil, natural gas, is the fact that you just can't turn it on and have things go. You have to continually feed some sort of fuel into the power plant. And number one, that fuel ain't cheap at all. Number two, you've got a lot of moving parts. And generally speaking, the more moving parts you have, the higher the maintenance requirements. So yeah, you know, I'm feeling like you should have asked Brad Rockwell to come on and do the show with us because really he's got the, you know, he and KAC have a much more in depth understanding of those issues, but I think you hit it pretty much on the mark. I recall a point back in 2008 when, I think all of us that have been in the energy space for a while recall, oil prices went so high that our corresponding electricity price at that time went to 47 cents. So we actually had conversations with people who were shutting down their businesses because they couldn't afford electricity. So you hear all the reasons in the world why people struggle with business and, you know, especially now in the pandemic, it's always a concern. What can we do to help businesses? But can, you know, can you imagine the primary reason being I can't afford to keep the lights on literally? Oh, and that's what happened. And so I think that was, you know, that was at the very front end of the very precipice of this transformation. We saw that acute pain. We realized we just could not expose ourselves to that kind of volatility like you said. Yeah, that's oil was 120 a barrel, something like that. Yeah, recall exactly. But I think it was over 100. Yeah. And I do remember that 47 cents should have been broadcast nationwide. So you mentioned costs coming down continually. What's behind this is cost of renewables. Now what's behind cost coming down? What's going on here? Well, I mean, I think, again, you know, great question for KAC and as an observer, what I have seen and you know, I have a little bit of background with them. I spent, I spent three years on the board of directors for KAC. So I have a general sense of how those things are going. But I want to just continue to give credit to them for that. And I think it was a combination of things, you know, it was one is they really learned how to execute projects better and better every time. One of the things that they did is if you look at the early PV projects KAC deployed, they were PPAs where they're paying someone else to do, you know, everything. And then they just continue to pay that that entity for power over the course of the project. They realized pretty early on that that PV projects are very low risk. They're really just financial transactions. And so they figured out how to capture the tax credits internal cooperative by making LLCs that were able to exhaust the for-profit tax credits and then doing most of the work other than the EPC contractor in-house. And so really, you know, driving the costs down and their approach has been, you know, unless there is some risk that requires outside expertise, such as with their biomass plant, then they would proceed on their own. So that's what they've done with PV. And then you start to see outside contractors and PPAs coming back into play when they started incorporating more storage. Because again, there was early on with storage is a little bit less certainty as to how it's going to perform. And so let's bring in someone else and buy the power from them and then let's leave it on them to decide or to worry about the life of the batteries and how the batteries are managed and all that kind of stuff. So I think, you know, KAC has just done an incredible job of executing and they've had a number of resources at their back. Certainly the county has tried to be as strong a partner as we could be. One of the early things that happened in my tenure at the county is we developed an MOU that basically pivoted the relationship between Kauai County and the utility. It was somewhat adversarial prior to that where, you know, there was a lot of prior to KUC making all the progress that they made, there was some political desire to kind of impose requirements on them and to get them to move faster. And that was not necessarily effective. It was kind of, you know, folks from the outside saying, hey, we need to move faster. So we're going to require this or that. None of that took any major effect. But when we pivoted, and at the time it was Mayor Corvallo that was leading, you know, the message was, hey, we're here to help. We want to figure out what you need, how we can help you. How do we help expedite permits? How do we help advocate for projects? How do we get out of your way so you can do what you want to do? And that, you know, Mayor Kawakami actually served on the KAC Board prior to myself. So if anybody knows the business and knows how to support a utility going forward, you know, Mayor Kawakami, who has been in office for a little over two years now, really understands those relationships and has been a huge boost, I think, to the cooperative in terms of being able to continue to just charge ahead and get the job done. So we're very excited about their progress. So based on your, oh, let's see, let's get some acronyms out of the way. K-I-U-C and M-O-U, please. Sure. Sorry. Oh, I went utility cooperative. And so that is the name of our local utility, unlike the rest of the state. Under HECO companies, we quite electric companies. We have our own member-owned utility here. And then M-O-U being Memorandum of Understanding. So just a really simple document that memorializes, you know, shared goals and vision for a lot of the projects and spaces that overlap. We, you know, we drive, as the county, a lot of benefit out of that M-O-U and really just kind of said, hey, we're going to be partners and do everything we can to help each other. Absolutely. I've met both mayors and they have struck me as very cooperation-oriented type guys. And I think this is a perfect example of you. Sound like you in the county are very much playing a support role to K-I-U-C, but aren't you upfront with the permitting? You guys do all the permitting and everything, don't you? So obviously the, you know, the building division and the planning department have, you know, zoning and building requirements. But, you know, I think on a large-scale utility system, you know, there's a lot of deference to the expertise within the utility. And I think there's also recognition that there's multiple layers of regulation to assure safety and well-being. And, you know, the stuff that we do typically as a county, and you know Doug Hig, well, so again, more credit to him for this, is life safety. And then also just kind of making sure that things are being constructed through a standard, you know, through a reasonable minimum standard with K-I-U-C and with large solar farms. That's, you know, a level of expertise that our staff is not necessarily going to have or large power systems. And so, you know, you look at the fact that they are also regulated and overseen by the Rural Utility Service and by FERC. So there's really, right, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. So there's plenty of checks in place to make sure that things are done in the right way. And certainly, you know, the county has, where appropriate, stepped back. And then obviously we're involved on the zoning side, you know. So the planning department is very careful to make sure that projects are put in the right place and they're next to appropriate uses and all those kind of things. It's also fair to point out that, you know, I think you have a lot of advantages over here that have allowed us to to accelerate on renewable energy and solar in particular. You know, certainly one of them is being a more rural environment. And so having a larger percentage of open land available for projects like this. Now, certainly on Oahu, you're very much constrained in terms of land available. And the cost of that land is probably even higher than it is over here. So that's a variable. Another thing K, you see has been very fortunate to have over the course of decades, is really access to low cost capital. So the ability to borrow money at a low interest rate as a function of being a rural utility cooperative. And that has, you know, that has certainly been a key driver in their ability to execute on, what about that? That I did not know. Access to cheap money. That's a real, real, real driver there. Just on a lighter note, you do need to maintain the solar farms to some extent. And part of that, I think, involves wheat growth all around the panels. Because it's not what used to be probably agricultural areas. Is it Kauai that grazes goats on the solar farm? It's KAC. Yeah, they have sheep in some of their solar farms. Yeah, they've done a tremendous amount of work. I think one of the most exciting things, and I'd love to pivot a little bit, because I think that a lot of us recognize that they've done such a good job that it's now necessary for us to be picking on kind of a different direction in terms of where we see our renewable needs and our clean energy needs going. Sure. Let me kind of close out of the KAC conversation with this, if I may, and just say, their most recent project proposal, which they just signed a deal with, that they EC again, to execute, is a pump storage hydro project on the west side of Kauai. And that will actually, that project will take us to over 80% renewable energy when it's done. And I think it's, I don't remember the construction timeline, but it's, you know, two years in the future, let's say 2025, and please check the press release to get that right. But that project is moving forward. They've gotten through a lot of the hurdles. What they're doing is they're basically upgrading some of the existing reservoirs and ditch systems. And they are using a large solar farm to take water that runs downhill and pump it back uphill in the day when the sun is shining and then flow the water down through a hydro turbine at night when they need it. So it's like a really big battery, but obviously that battery is stored energy in the form of water at a higher elevation. So amazing work there continues. And then, you know, I think an area that we talked early on about what's the progress in the different counties. And I think an area where we can really look to you folks on Oahu is the amazing progress that HIKO has made on the electric vehicle side. You know, from our perspective, look at you and say, hey, the same thing that you're saying about us and our leadership. You know, the I noticed three things that that eco companies have done actually for know, they have, they've made a great effort to have an EV ready program. So basically, EV ready infrastructure where they're willing to help put in everything other than the charger itself or certain facilities that to help make sure there's plenty of structure out there. They've got a backbone of their own chargers, as you know, that's just that's a pretty amazing thing. And then, you know, they've also got electric vehicle rates. So, you know, one of the things we'd love to see, and we're just engaging KIC on now is what are the rates within which that an electric vehicle driver, whether it's a small car or a bus or bicycle, you know, charges when they plug into the grid. And that's a very important part of electrifying transportation. So you're going to see it the last thing. And if you remember, I said four, they have, HIKO has done an amazing job. And it's the first time I've seen this in the utility business, bringing people in from outside of the traditional utility sector to pick on key functions. And to me, this sounds like a small detail, but it's really important if you look at like Hockey Marceau as an example, as somebody who they brought into electrification and transportation, and even your own Jun Chi, who used to be at the State Energy Office and brought Jun in to perform on some of that. Like really smart people, really great move, because you all of a sudden change your perspective, right? You get a broader perspective than you would have had if you just elevated somebody from within the utility. And I think that shows really, really tremendous leadership. And, you know, certainly I think speaks to the progress they're making in that part of the overall ecosystem. Well, let me give you a little update that those are definitely words of wisdom. Did you know Alan Yonan when he was here? Yes, yes. He's the RPL guy, and he's continually writing press releases for us. Seems like we're almost a press release a day. I was talking to Alan last week about a press release. I hope you're sitting down. Alan, as of today, Monday, is with Hawaiian Electric. Wow. They stole him away from us. Ouch. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's obviously a good thing that they're looking broader for for talent. But then if it's all looking at HSEO, that's you guys going to have to back on defense there. Yeah. And he's been eating, living, sleeping energy for, I think it was 10 or 11 years with us. So he certainly knows the energy. So I was correct that we were actually going back and forth with him last week. And your office, you know, and Chris Younger and Sage did great work in supporting Kauai along the term lines of electrification. So they got our, I'm going to get the name wrong, but our Alternative Fuel Corridor designation approved with with the federal government. So we now are able to receive funds through the STIP funding. And that's an acronym I'll stumble on. State Transportation. And, you know what, I'm going to leave it alone. Somebody else is going to have to fill that one. But basically, it's a way for us to receive federal funding and now for high-speed chargers. So some great work happening. I wonder if there is any federal funding coming? Maybe a bit. A bold joke. I did catch that as a joke. I'm not sure if everyone else that you're so, you're so subdued about it. The answer to that is we've got literally billions coming into teeny little Hawaii for various energy projects. And some of those dollars are going to be directed towards EV infrastructure. That's great news. And, you know, what an incredible thing, right? So we've we've done so much in terms of clean electricity, green electricity. And now we have this opportunity to transition and really kind of encompass some of that in terms of transportation tools and become even more independent. You know, that one of the things that's really interesting that I observe here on Hawaii, Howard, is, and you got to give a lot of credit to our planning department, our council. You know, Mayor was actually Mayor Kyle Comrie was on the council and critical to a lot of these things early on, but not just electrification of transportation, but also really shifting transportation in terms of mode choice. So we've got some really smart people over here. I don't know if you've ever interfaced with Lee Steinmet or Marie Williams or any of those guys, but from our planning department who have spent, you know, the last decade really hammering home the fact that we're going to get there in terms of cleaning up our transportation systems. There's a lot of reasons to do it. It's not just about clean energy and the biggest opportunity is to help make mode choice, right? So it's like you guys are doing with rail, but whether it's transit or rail or bicycling or or walking, like that's the built environment. We got to be focused on that. It doesn't just happen on its own. And so, you know, one of the things you're seeing behind me is in my background is a little electric bike that we demoed, but also a whole bunch of EV chargers. And then this this little piece of the Huey is actually a part of a much bigger Higer grant that was a transportation initiative that was about trying to generate economic recovery. That was as a function of the last, you know, big recession in 2008. And what it did is it, you know, built in mode choice. So more bike paths, more bike lanes, more sidewalks, or bus shelters, when you can see in the background there. So, you know, great stuff happening in that regard. And that's a long haul because it's infrastructure. It doesn't happen overnight. So I think if you thought the utility business was slow, you know, go look at the transportation system and it may be even slower, but we're going to get there. We're headed in the right direction. And the folks who are doing the work are amazing. Somehow the word sustainability seems to creep in there. Yeah. Yes. Yes. What do you think about that? Yeah. Once you describe your the sustainable part of your job, because you have two parts, two types of that. Yeah. Sure. So as you noted with KUC, and that this is true for really all of the things we do, we provide support to different agencies when they are breaking new ground. So, so in the case of KUC, we just try to figure out how we can be a good partner. We can support what they're trying to do. In the case of the planning department, you know, we add support. In the case of Kauai bus, as an example, we add support. We also add support for, you know, our public works solid waste division. And so, you know, to me, and I guess from my perspective as an energy and sustainability coordinator, what that really means is it just says, you know, we need to look at things as systems. We can't look at them in silos. And we need to recognize that that this process of change is about getting better integration between all these different systems and really trying to, you know, look at a future that doesn't complete more resources than are required and or especially then are available, right? So we got to get off the one way bandwagon we've been on that is represented by fossil fuels and by high consumerism and really try to really try to get more of a circular economy going, get more renewable economy going and all those things. And so wherever that pops up, you know, my role in my it's a small role, but it's just to ask and support other agencies. So one example, solid waste division under mayor's directive recently passed that styrofoam band, and I think you saw those across the state. So that's something Kauai County chose to do as well. And so we provided a supporting role for that. And we continue to do so. And then, you know, there's just many other instances, why bus right now is looking at piloting electric buses. So we come in and we add resources to them. They know they're the ones who know that system best. And so we really come in and we say, how can we help you? But what don't you know about doing this? And they have that, you know, in this case, they're kind of saying, Hey, we don't really understand exactly how the grid rates work. But let's talk about that. And what what would it what's it going to cost us? And what about this, these batteries and how can we charge them? What they do know is, Hey, this is where the buses need to be. This is how many people are going to be on them. This is what type of buses, you know, so they know their operations really well. And it's a matter of kind of integrating the different knowledge bases to get success. So to me, that's a big part of what sustainability is. But it's, you know, it's impossibly broad. You know, we could be talking about food systems or natural, you know, ecosystem health. And it would all fall under that vast umbrella of sustainability, which I get to work under, you know, in a small portion of it. It the talk about buses brings to mind the fact that tourism is coming back to Hawaii, you know. And if you had a good bus system, of course, tourists want to tour the island. And they could tour the island by bus if they wanted when it because you only have a few roads, wherever they want. That's that's on point, Howard. That's very on point. So one of the things that that mayor has emphasized, and we had some great conversations recently with white tourism authority. I don't know if you're familiar with their D map process, which is the destination management area plans that they recently performed for all four counties. But those those that was a really comprehensive community based process where they talked about what is HTA's relationship to all these other things. So again, going back to sustainability, how do we integrate? We're not just about getting visitors on planes, we're about recognizing that we have a huge footprint in transportation, we want to help clean transportation. We have a huge we have a huge footprint in terms of educating folks on culture in terms of natural resource preservation, all these kind of things. And so it was really great to see HTA stepping up for the plate on that and, you know, with with John DeFries as their new leader is offering some tremendous insights as to where where and how do we deal with the gorilla in the room, which is tourism, you know, it's not something we can ignore. It doesn't make sense to just ignore it and it's not there or wish that it went away because that would cause tremendous economic pain for so many people. But instead, how does it integrate with our vision? Right? I mean, that's the that's the that's what we want to get. Absolutely. And that is a very positive note to unfortunately end on. But that's again, very positive. We keep talking about overload of tourism, but you're pointing to some ways where tourists have much less of a carbon footprint. And never mind the carbon footprint, it's the car footprint that I love to emphasize Howard. I mean, if you think about the physical space and impact, and then, you know, obviously the carbon and everything else of cars, you know, that's most often if you listen to locals talk about their problems with tourism, very often it's about the cars, it's traffic, parking, it's, you know, this or that. And if we could if we could deal with that through mode choice, if we could get more people on buses, more people walking, more people biking, that would have a really big impact. And it would reduce that pressure that we have from tourism without without having to say we're going to mandate some dramatically less than a smaller number of visitors. And on that very, very cheery note, that's that's a good visionary note. Thank you so much. And Sullivan Energy and Sustainability Coordinator for County of Hawaii and Code Green Think Tech, Hawaii must bid everybody fond of you. Thank you so much for attending. See you later.