 Good afternoon, and you know what time that is, it's Hawaii, the state of clean energy time. And I met you and your host, and I'm very pleased to have Cameron Black from the Hawaii State Energy Office as my guest today. Hello Cameron, welcome on board. And Cameron's going to tell us all about the renewable energy projects and the directory that he manages and how it works. And what you can use that for and its value. So welcome aboard Cameron. So first of all, tell us a little bit about the Hawaii State Energy Office. Yeah, we'll do Mitch. Thanks for having me and thanks to everybody who's listening from wherever you are. Real briefly, before I do jump to the energy office, I just wanted to touch on the directory if the slide is up, the main slide. We manage, as Mitch said, the Hawaii Renewable Energy Projects Directory, which showcases all of the existing and proposed renewable energy and innovative projects going on in Hawaii. The directory serves to demonstrate our progress towards our renewable energy and carbon free goals. And it also serves the important function of notifying communities and regulators and other stakeholders of projects that are being proposed in their areas of interest. And it's one of the few interactive online maps of all the renewable energy and energy innovation projects in Hawaii. So we pride ourselves on maintaining this directory and making it available to the public. My last slide before I get into or last point before I get into the energy office is we're in the process now of overhauling our entire website, which is a good segue to the energy office, to make it more user friendly and accessible. And one of the things we're looking at is redeveloping the directory as well. As you can see from this slide, our office was originally established in 1976. And at that time, we were a division of the Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism. Some of you out there are familiar with our office and have worked with our office for a long time. We were established by statute last year, Act 122 made the Hawaii State Energy Office an attached agency to D-Bed and it gave us new specific duties. It also created the position of the chief energy officer, which is Scott Glenn right now, our first inaugural chief energy officer. And as you can see, we have the mission that's stated on the slide. We're committed to promoting the energy efficiency, renewable energy, clean transportation and to achieve a resilient, clean energy, decarbonized economy. That kind of says it in a nutshell. We have five areas of focus. Mitch, feel free to jump in here if you have any questions or points you'd like to make. You're doing great so far. They're all circled around collaborating. And they're not broken up right now because they're all related to one another. That's the point with the globe there is that they're all interactive to each other. Starting with efficiency, efficiency first is what we like to say. So we have a staff that's dedicated for energy efficiency from policy to building codes, green businesses, all kinds of stuff. We also have analysis and planning. I do have a question while we're on efficiency. How does Hawaii energy fit into that? Do they come under you or do they come under another agency? How do you coordinate with them because they have money to do actual energy efficiency projects like light bulb changes and refrigerators and things like that. How does that work? How does that fit in? They fit in under the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission. And they're funded as you know and I don't know if all of our viewers know through our monthly energy bills. All of us pay a small charge that goes towards Hawaii energy that allows them, well, it goes towards a public benefits fee, which is administered currently by Hawaii energy under the PST. And they use that money to issue rebates for like you said, energy efficient lighting or if you buy a refrigerator that's energy efficient and you get money back from the state. That money comes from a little fee we've all paid over the years on our power bills. So we do work with Hawaii energy quite a bit, but they're administered by the Public Utilities Commission. So what do you say you work with them? Does that mean you guys have meetings and look at, you know, low hanging fruit? What kind of a program is targeting? Is that what you mean by working with them? Well, I think we cross paths on a lot of things that we do. Our goals are aligned with ours on a lot of things. So whether it's policy, possibly even building codes, energy efficient measures, initiatives. So we talk with them pretty regularly, you know, they're pretty well known in Hawaii. They're not Hawaii State Energy Office. They're not themselves, the government agency. Right. So they're a little bit unique, but they do a lot of things for the state and for all of us. And the beauty of that program is that a lot of people can take advantage of those rebates. Exactly. Yeah, it's a really great program. And they're actually doing a really good job on it. So I need to bring them on my show one week and let them have a chance to tell us all what they actually, what the projects are doing these days. So anyway, go ahead and go around the globe here. All right, keeping the tour going, we've also got energy resiliency and assurance and that's something we talked about before the show, Mitch is one of the really important functions of our office is to serve as the state lead for emergency support functions for the energy and fuel sector, which means when a fuel or energy shortage is imminent or happening, whether it's caused by economics or a hurricane or other natural disasters, our office works closely with all of the private sector, energy and fuel stakeholders and the government agencies, federal, state and county who are involved in disaster relief. And that means we coordinate a lot with the energy and fuel providers checking statuses on fuel and power outages and we serve as somewhat of a liaison between the private sector and the government agencies in charge of the emergency response. Sorry, I cut my mic off because I'm on the flight path, the Marine Corps base, and I have C-17s flying in every now and then. So I have a question about the resilience program. Do you guys do what ifs or a scenario analysis, like I'm looking for the gaps? I'll give you an example, not an energy, but you know, I just read this article about Lanai finally being hit by the COVID virus and they had no plans, no ventilators, no nothing. It's like, hello guys, I mean, we've only been doing this for eight months and how could you not think of a plan B? So is that something that you guys do in the Energy Office? Do you do these kinds of scenario analyses to come up with the plan B or the plan C if we get whacked by a hurricane? I mean, I know it's not just you, you've got civil defense and everything else like that, but is that part of your thought processes and things that you guys do? Oh, definitely. The Hawaii Emergency Management Agency is the lead state agency, the working closely with the National Guard and the rest of the state agencies that play an important role in the disaster response and every year there's a hurricane exercise course. As an example this year, there was focus on port restoration. What happens if a big storm comes through, the ports are inundated with debris? What are the scenarios and plans and how can we be prepared for that? So that's an example of preparing for scenarios. I think COVID caught a lot of us, you know, without maybe by surprise as far as response or what the impacts to COVID would be. So that's I think a little bit unique. I think infectious diseases have been part of emergency planning for a long time. Of course, these diseases are unique and this is I guess a pandemic. So that's a little different. But most definitely, we do try and plan ahead and a big part of that is identifying the information that will be needed in a response. How do we know what infrastructure is where are our critical assets, who manages them, and then how do we get a hold of those people when we need to? We also have a clean transportation focus as well. So that is something we're looking at, electrification and other technologies hydrogen, for example, that you and I have spoken about. I think is also in the mix of alternative, fossil free. And then last, but not least what I'll talk about my branch is the renewable energy sector, which we do a lot of planning analysis. Well, that's also another area, project support, policy. Next slide, please. So what I'm here to talk about today is the Hawaii renewable energy projects directory. And something that I kind of gleaned over is that our state goals are to become 100% renewable energy powered from the electricity sector and carbon free carbon negative by 2045. So we're not only looking at being 100% powered electricity wise from renewable energy, but we're also looking at eliminating carbon use altogether, which includes transportation, which is a little bit of a harder nut to crap, I would say to become carbon free. So under that office of reaching 100% renewable energy, one of the things that we noticed under a previous administration was how do we track our progress? How do we know what projects are going on that are going to get us to that goal? And how can we showcase to the outside world that Hawaii is a place that is really taking big strides to reach that goal and becoming an innovator and a test bed for some of these technologies? So we devised the Hawaii renewable energy projects directory. And as I stated in the beginning, this project, these directory lists many, but not all of the existing and proposed renewable energy projects in Hawaii. We don't have all the projects in the state of Hawaii listed on this directory. That would be hard. There's a lot of medium size rooftop PV installations that we just don't have the bandwidth or information on to put on this directory. So we've made some decisions on what projects we will list. And right now we have a certain cutoff of about 500 kilowatts for some of these larger PV, unless the project demonstrates itself as some sort of innovative or public use project. For example, PV for a wastewater treatment plan, I think as an example, the wave energy test buoy off Kanoe Bay where you're at is another example where it's not producing a lot of renewable energy, but we still like to showcase that project. So there's a lot of projects in the directory that are like that. The projects are all here based on public information only. So we're regularly mining or becoming aware of these projects through media outlets, government filings, company filings, company notifications. So we're like everybody else in that sense is we don't use inside information to put these projects on here. We want to make this based on public information only. And why is that? What's the thinking behind that? Well, I think one of the big reasons is we don't want to be put in a position of using information that we may have come across as privileged or confidential. That's not our position or our job to be providing that kind of information necessarily. And I think it also shows that if you have the time and energy and it's your job, like it's ours, you can find a lot of information on these projects. Of course not too many people in the state are getting paid to track these projects. But there is a lot of information out there if you know where to look. And what the directory tries to do is identify some of these sources. At least the PUC docket is a good source, for example. I would think that you have to be really careful about insider trading because a lot of the larger projects are done by publicly traded companies. And if you're kind of opening your kimono and talking about their stuff that isn't public, then I can see where that could be a major problem. You know, the state would get hammered for doing so. That's why I got it. Yeah, there's a lot of competition. You have one off-taker for some of these large projects that's either Hawaiian Electric or KIC Unquite. You also have limited space. You also have limited resources as far as the construction equipment or maybe even the workforce or the expertise that you need here. So there is quite a bit of competition amongst the developers. But there's also I think a lot of common goals that they share and commonalities with each other. So it's a good point. So the directory, the previous slide showed the link where you can go to the directory. And at the end of this presentation, it'll show you a link to our home page which you can access the directory at. And like I said in the beginning, part of our goal is to rebuild our website to make it more user-friendly. The directory is one of the things you can find on our homepage pretty easily because it is one of the more regularly visited websites. But once you get there, you can search for projects either by island technology. If there's, you want to look up all the wind farms or all the wind projects in Hawaii or all the solar projects in Hawaii or all the solar projects on Kauai, you can do that. And you can also search by map. So if you saw a project driving over H1, over by Mili-Lani, and you're curious to know more about it, you can look on our map. You can try to find that project. You can click on it and hopefully that will give you information on that project. Or you heard there's a project being built on that piece of land down the road and you want to learn more about it. Hopefully our directory would provide that information. So it's also good for local communities as well. I think we're talking about that before we started the show. So local communities, you know, so it's not a surprise all of a sudden, wow, what's that? Why wasn't I informed? You know? Yeah, that's our intention and that's been an issue is communities are finding out about these projects too late in the game to where they feel they can make an impact to actually change or impact the project. So as soon as we learn about the project or get a public source of information on the project, we try to put it on our directory immediately. And one of the other websites I'll show at the end of this is we've also added an area for the more recent projects about opportunities for public input or to learn more about the project. Because again, we fully appreciate that not everybody knows where our website is. Not everybody knows how to track these projects. Most people don't. Again, I get paid to do this partially. And you know, we have to look for this information ourselves too. So we want to make it as user friendly and accessible as we possibly can. Users can also download and excel of these projects, either the entire list of 115 on there now or by their searchable category. Well, that's another feature. You get a nice little Excel. On the next slide, you can see what happens when you click on one of the project icons. It pulls up the information on that individual project. With the caveat that we only have the information we have, a lot of these projects don't have a PUC docket, or we don't know the tax map key or the parcel where they're located at. Or maybe even in some cases, we don't even know the exact location for possibly some of these smaller solar farms. So that's an area that we'd like to improve upon is gathering the data and making that data available. But we publish all the information that we have. That's public. So if I have a project that I want to have up on the site because I want to, you know, provide some visibility to it. So what's the process? Just contact you and the energy office. And if I meet your criteria, you'll put a very nice article about my hygiene project, for example, on it. We will look at it. We'll look at it for sure. We'll put it, well, right now, Hydrogen, one of the things we'd like to change is that we're set in the technologies. This is an application, the directory, but we're looking to convert it to a different platform where we have the power to add technologies. Hydrogen would be a great one. So yes, the station behind you, for example, is something that we can add in the next iteration. We love the platform that it's at now. It's the application that's really easy to use. However, we don't have full control over the programming aspect. We can't add energy storage, standalone energy storage technologies right now without paying our contractor to do that. So to answer your question, yeah, I think when we make the transition, hopefully, in the next couple of months, that is something that we can do. You can send me information on a project. We'll look at it, make sure it meets the criteria, and then we can put it on there. We've also been contacted by members of the public saying, A, those windmills are not where you said they were. Can you please move them to where they actually are? Or this project is not accurately described. Maybe the developer will say, we appreciate you putting our project on here, but you're not describing it correctly. So we are very open to all corrections. There's a lot of projects on here, and we don't always have all the information on all the project. So a brilliant thought is a lot of these project developers could come on Think Tech Hawaii and be interviewed like you are. And then they get a link to a YouTube article which you guys could put a link inside their project description to get an actual video of the whole thing, correct? Yeah. Well, what we want to do is, at least in that project details page, put a hyperlink to that developer's website or to whatever website you can get more information on that project. If it's a Think Tech interview, that's good, whatever it is. I think that's in the next iteration, an improvement that we would like to do. So that's a great suggestion. And that's also a good segue to the last slide, number six, which is almost our last slide, second to the last or third to the last slide. We do want to make changes to the directory. And like I said, one of those things is moving over to a GIS based platform. And that will enable us to explain it because for the general public, what is GIS? Yeah, I need to explain it in my mind to myself first before I can explain it to everybody else. But it geographic information systems where the projects, I suppose in a way, are located by location. And when you click on them, you get a lot of information on that individual point or project in this case. So this is an example that's in the slide of a mock-up that we'd like to, that it might, may look like. It's very clean because it's like the first slide had these big blobs on them. And this one has like that nice little discrete dots and their color code. And I think this is a much, this looks like a much cleaner interface to me. Well, I appreciate that. One thing that we do want to make sure it is, is easy to use. We like a grade schooler who's doing a report on energy projects to be able to come to our website and learn about the projects. And sometimes that means they need to have bigger buttons. So, and great, grade schoolers are just as smart as we are these days. So they don't always need bigger buttons. But we want to make it as user-friendly as possible. So in our transition, that's definitely something that we are making a priority to. But the beauty of transitioning to GIS is you can have so many more data fields added. You can identify how much greenhouse gas is being reduced by a project, how many homes are being powered, how much that's moving our renewable energy goals. So there's a lot of advantages to moving to a more database tool system. That's a layer, right? Yeah, there's a lot of layers, as I understand it. Yeah, yeah. And we can add layers to it. And we can make this layer as part of our Hawaii statewide GIS program library, which is a great library of GIS maps, if you haven't already checked it out. Office of Planning does a great job with that. The second to the last slide, I know we're getting towards the end, is some of the other tools that we've put out there. And I'll make this quick. We're good. We have a renewable energy, EnerGIS, which provides information on individual parcels. You can go on there, which is GIS based, like we just talked about. You can go click on a parcel, you can click on your own parcel to tell you a lot of information on that parcel. We've also got a permitting wizard, which helps identify the federal state and county permits that could be required for your project. And finally, we have the Stage 2 Project website, which is new. These Stage 2 projects are the last round of large solar plus storage projects and standalone battery projects being pursued by Hawaiian Electric across Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii Island. And that's the website where we attempt to provide information where the public can provide input or learn more about the projects. Okay. And when do we expect to have this up and running? I mean, website development usually takes a lot of very long time, I found. So when do you think this is going to be ready to go or do you not want to commit yourself? Well, the three websites that we just showed are accessible now as is the directory as is. The next iteration of the directory where optimistic will be up and running in a couple months. But until then, we do have the existing directory that we tried to keep up to date. I was updating it as recently as this week. Again, we welcome any updates or errors, omissions that users notice. The last slide provides my email and cell phone number, as well as the email address to our main office and our homepage at the Hawaii State Energy Office. So this is a great time. If you think the directory needs something, please contact us. Okay. If you need to do something, please let us know and we'll see if we can work it in there. Does it have key map information? I mean, I know you said that the GUI that hooks into the state GIS. I always find it kind of complicated to use that. So yeah, it does have the tax map key information and some of these projects are located on multiple tax map keys or parcels. And what we want to do in the next iteration is to be able to identify all of those parcels. In the current directory, we can only list one or two direct parcels because of the character limitation. But in the next iteration, we'd love to list all the properties where projects located. So what about links to environmental assessments and EIS studies? Because that's also another, I mean, particularly for communities, you know, if I'm, you know, not that familiar with all of this stuff, but all of a sudden I'm concerned about something going in near my home or my property. Are you going to have links to environmental assessments and EIS studies so that it makes it easy for the, you know, for the community to find out what's being done. You don't have to hire a lawyer to do it. You can just figure it out yourself. I like that idea. I think if I'm optimistic, we can put in multiple links. Maybe you can access the PUC docket and the environmental assessment and the company website. I'm going to write that down and look into that. I like your idea of linking into the PUC because for many people, the PUC is like totally a mystery place. You know, I mean, there's certain people that really understand it well and they do a good job on it and using it, exploiting it in a good way. I don't mean exploiting it in a negative way. But yeah, for, I mean, once again, I mean, if you have an informed community, I would think it would make it easier to get some of these larger projects than you mean, you're not trying to hide anything. I mean, I think the big mistake lots of developers make is trying to hide stuff and then eventually it's going to come out and then it's just a big flap and then that delays it and it costs you money, time is money is the deal. Okay, so let's just throw up that final contact slide for Cam. And seeing as how you're working at home, you might want to add your cell phone number. I don't know if you'd like want to do that, but that is my work cell phone there. Okay, good. And I completely agree with your last point too, about early notice is best. Yes, exactly. Saves a lot of. So anyway, talking about early notice, we've actually run through 30 minutes, Cam. So we're good. So I'm going to wind it up now. I just, first of all, like to thank you very much. You're doing a, this is a great service to the community. And so well done to the Hawaii State Energy Office and to yourself. I really like what you're doing and the path forward of how you're moving forward. So thank you so much. And this is Mitch Yuan from Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, and I'll see you next Wednesday. Aloha.