 Hi energy Hawaii, I'm Jerry Feidell, this is ThinkTekka, and that's Peter Russick next to me. He's from Hawaiian Electric. And we're going to talk about something dear to our hearts, well, involved in our hearts. Hi Peter. Hiya. So we have the title of this show is Heat Waves, Require More Energy to Cool, and it provokes that as a fact that we've had a lot of heat waves lately. Not necessarily in Hawaii. Hawaii's been hot, but other places have been much hotter. And if you believe in climate change, you believe we're going to see more of that, right? Well, in fact, it's been a record this last four or five months, actually, started in May earlier than our, quote, summer usually starts. It's extended into September, and it'll probably be into October as well, of some record heat. And unless you've been living in a very cool cave somewhere, you know that. You know what people don't automatically think of or perhaps don't think of until they get their electric bill is that the air conditioning we're using more and more, it increases your electric bill. That's the subtitle of the show. Air conditioning doesn't come free. Yeah. Well, it doesn't. And it's kind of a two-edged sword. First of all, it doesn't come free. And second of all, all those air conditioners are emitting heat out into the atmosphere or some stuff that makes our situation a little worse. But there's no question that over the last 20 or so years or 40 or so years, really, the amount of air conditioning has increased as we built new buildings that have blocked the traditional trade winds, got more and more concrete, unfortunately, instead of soil and so forth. I don't want to get the numbers right. But we had homes in 1970, which was about the time I got here, we had 14 percent of homes on Oahu had air conditioning. And it was really unusual to see one of those boxes sticking out of a window somewhere. Today, 68 percent of homes have air conditioning, either built in as part of the apartment or whatever, or they've been added, two, three. Sometimes you go by houses and you see three or four, five of the boxes sticking out there. Just on its own, that's a huge increase. And then you put on top of that the fact that this has been a historically hot month, hot, hot few months. And as you say, it's probably going to be the new normal. Everything we know about climate change suggests it's going to continue. And that's going to mean more of air conditions being used more. Walking down memory lane with you here, back in the statehood time in the 60s, there was very, very few air conditions. Matter of fact, it wasn't considered natural. The natural is the trade winds, right? Open the house up. There was a whole school of architecture about that. Open the house up, let the wind blow through, you'll be happy. And I suppose that was popular. Problem is that if you're building a brand new house with a lot of lot to it, you can do that. And if you're in a place where the trades do blow, you can do that. But if you're in a condo and we have, I don't know, 1800 condo, you know, Hawaii property regimes these days, 1800 of them. And you can't let the wind blow through your house. It doesn't work. So you've got to have air conditioning if you want it to be cool. There were fans around statehood, but air conditioning is so much more efficient. So when the market, you know, that is people, wanted to have it cooler, they said to the developers and the managers and the sellers of units, they said, we've got to have air conditioning. So the result is those 1800 Hawaii property regimes, horizontal property regimes all have air conditioning, or most of them do these days. How could you sell one for like two, three million dollars, which is what they're going for for the offshore market without air conditioning? That's unthinkable. Right. And 1970, 30, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, we were building homes in Ewa and Kapolei. I mean, there was a very small Ewa Beach community on the ocean pretty much where they could take advantage of the prevailing winds. We didn't cover the old sugarcane and pineapple fields with homes because you couldn't air condition them and you couldn't live there if you weren't air conditioned. Now, of course, the second city, you know, we've got a lot of homes that not necessarily two and three million, well, they may be unfortunately two or three million dollar homes, but they're really starter homes, very small townhouses that are going to be basically unlivable unless there is air conditioning. So it's nobody's fault. Nobody's blaming, you know, people that want to just have a good night's sleep and be, but you're right, the increase in high rises. And, you know, the other thing we don't think about as much as, you know, when we started having one or two or three or four or five computers in our home, it was generate heat. So back in the day when we were all living kind of out in the open, we would have a stove, we would have a refrigerator, which pushed a little heat out the back. We'd have a television, but that was about it. And that was our electricity use. And then you started bringing in the computers and the bigger TVs and things like that. And although we've come a long way in reducing the heat output, they still generate heat. And in addition, your computers want to be in a fairly sealed environment. They, you know, you don't want the, the ever planes, the dust from the ever planes blowing through your, your, your home office onto your computer. So you tend to, you know, lock it up. So you close the windows, the heat's being generated, and you really have no choice but to air condition. Same thing with a lot of high rise buildings. And I live in an apartment building without air conditioning. But we have one of those rollout portable things for, we've rolled it out this year and used it this year more than ever just to keep the bedroom tolerable. One factor is also in this same period we're talking about historically, the cost of air conditioner equipment has gone down. Sure. We can talk about, you know, how they're more efficient later. But the cost has dramatically come down. And in our house, we had an air conditioner installed in 1973. And it's been working all these years. Okay? Well, here's, here's something interesting. We had to replace it. Why did we have to replace it? Because it worked on a remote. And the remote got fried. There was no way to replace the remote from 20, maybe six years ago. So we had to buy the whole thing in order to get, anyway, the point is that you last a long time. Right. But I trust when you got a new one, you got an energy star one. Yes, we did. Okay. That's a big, that's a big thing. If you are, if you had told me that, that you were still using that 20-year-old air conditioner, I would have severely castigated you. I would have ridden you, ridden you the riot act because they are much more efficient now. And maybe the, the non-energy star units are a little cheaper. But it's a big mistake not to have an energy star because it's going to use electricity overall. It's going to reduce the need to generate that electricity. And you know, it's just the current, you don't have to be at a Thunberg to know that you got to reduce your carbon footprint and you got to help us reduce the use of oil. And that's one of the ways you do it. So, you know, energy star has made a lot of advances and they get better all the time. I've many times heard people say, you know, I replaced my old one and got an energy star one or an energy star refrigerator. My electric bill instantly dropped $30, $40. And, you know, that's all the different. But if you're going to use it all the time and not use it carefully, then you're going to see that electric bill go up. So, what is the thing, I know in office buildings, we've had a number of shows about this. You have these energy efficiency contractor people. They work either by a consulting business model or I'm saving you so much and I keep part of it as savings. That has an effect too, isn't it? It's like the star appliances except it's more high tech I suppose, more mechanized. Well, you know, if you have a building and you've got to keep your budget under control, you want to control the use of electricity and that means controlling the use of air conditioning. Also, there's a comfort factor for the people that are working in the building. It's very typical or it has been, you know, on a floor the people that are nearest the air conditioning or nearest the vents are freezing. The people that are out at the far edges, especially if they have a window that may be heating up the room, they're burning. And in order to keep those people at the far end under the, you know, who are next to the windows and far from the air conditioning ducts, cool enough, you keep the people that are near to the ducts in heavy closings or they actually will put in, you know, I've been in buildings where there've been little heat units under the desk of people doubling the electricity use. The heat makes the air conditioning think I've got to produce more air conditioning because I'm detecting this heat. But when you have one of these contractors that'll come in, they can start looking at what they can do and using technology to control your air conditioning. Used to be that if you wanted, over the weekend or after hours if you wanted air conditioning the entire floor would have to be air conditioned because that's the way it was set up. Now in many cases air conditioning can be restricted to a certain part of that floor. And, you know, especially if you're gonna pay for an extra you wanna not be, you know, be using too much. So we have a lot of stuff, you know, the whole smart home concept is really going first in offices and in buildings. And so- Air conditioning is central in all that. Absolutely. And, you know, when you have an energy management system, when you have a building operator, whether it's a hotel or an office building or an apartment building even, a modern one, they have people who are trained and they have equipment that allows them to control that energy use because, you know, they have, they can't, in a hotel, you can't raise the hotel rates in summer and say it's to make up for the air conditioning. You gotta control the use. Yeah. And, you know, pretty much all of this has stayed in hotels where, you know, if you go out of the room everything turns off or you pull your key out of a little, your key card out of a little lock. And so there are ways to do all these things but you have to invest a certain amount to get going and then whether it's hiring one of these energy service managers or bringing in the equipment and teaching your own building maintenance people to do it themselves. But in the long run it pays off in so many ways. I've often thought that, you know, the hotel thing is not only here, it's everywhere. You know, you take your room key and leave and everything turns off. So you're saving a lot of energy that way including air conditioning I think. So why don't we do that in residential units? Why don't we do that in condo units? Especially when you have central air in that building. It would save so much money. In fact, you know, it could be required by code or something, couldn't it? It could, it could. You know, you do run into when you're talking about homes, whether it's a single family home or a townhouse, whatever. You know, when you tell the developer we're gonna require you to do this and such. The developer is gonna say, you know, these homes are already too expensive. And if you're gonna require me to do this, you're gonna require me to wire the place for solar power or hot water. It's gonna drive up the price and people already can't pay these prices. So there is, you know, there is a rub there. With a hotel or an office building, you have a company that's interested in saving money, they don't have no spend. They know how to do the calculation. Of course they do. And they can see that if they invest a certain amount in the energy management system, they will get that money back. But if you're a single homeowner and you're gonna buy a townhouse in Kapolei and, you know, all of a sudden there are all these things that you don't know you want yet. Maybe you will in two years or five years or, you know, maybe you'll wanna put solar on the roof or you'll want all these things. But you wanna get that home at the lowest price. So, you know, I don't, I think there are a lot of things that could be required and there are a lot of pushbacks. There's a lot of pushback when you try to go, you know, go too far. We saw that in the water heater issue a few years ago. Yeah, there you go. It's the same kind of thing. Yeah, and people say, oh, I'll do it later. Don't charge me for it now, I'll do it later. Right, right. And maybe they will and when they do that, like anything else, if you have to retrofit your home for some kind of wiring, it's gonna cost you more than if it were built in. But, you know, it's a cash flow system. It's what I have to pay today versus what I imagine I'm gonna pay tomorrow. And on the office building situation, the office manager, office building manager or owner, he's making a decision essentially for you because, you know, it's his building and he wants it to be efficient. Right. And he knows that his investment, this kind of efficiency technology is going to reduce operating expenses in that building. So he can say to his tenants or prospective tenants, it's gonna be cheaper for you because I'm efficient on my electrical usage, my air conditioning, and so forth. And that's pretty appealing. That's a competitive feature, you know, that he can sell to prospective tenants. Are you valuable to have that? You know, these days, I don't think you can not have that. I don't think you can say to prospective tenants, you know, we're not gonna manage that, we're just gonna let the prices do whatever they do and we'll all send you a bill. And you'll say, wait a minute, that's crazy. You know, as a renter in an office building or, you know, you don't say this in a hotel, but you're, the fact that you're saying to the hotel operator, I'm expecting you to take care of this. You're not, you know, and I don't wanna pay, you know, I've already got the restored fee, which I don't know what that's for, but you know, I don't wanna pay the air conditioning fee on top of that. So yeah, there are certain, really, you know, certain benefits to, people are always saying, oh, the hotel's a lot of like, but they use it much more efficiently than most of us. These big new buildings, you know, the new, they're very expensive, unfortunately, but, and people will say, oh, they must be using a lot of power. But on a custom, you know, on a residence by residence basis, they're probably using less than my home, my single family home, because I don't have an engineer or my single family home who can say, you know, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna turn down the, certain time of day, we're gonna turn down the two degrees down on the refrigerator, and we'll save X amount of money. I've got it in our news release, but every degree of war, you know, you raise the temperature that the air conditioning is putting out, you save I think 3% on your electric bill. So, although Hawaiian Electric would sell less electricity if there were more efficiency out there, you're still pitching efficiency, because at the end of the day, you don't want people to get concerned about their electric bills. Right. And, you know, and do stranger things yet. Yeah, we are committed to 100% renewables by 2045, as you know, we're committed to efficiency because if efficiency lowers the demand, then what getting to that 100% is easier. And, but as you say, we are, we have customers and we have 450,000 of them here in the state. And when they get higher electric bills, they call up, we're getting calls right now. One of the reasons we've, you know, publicized this a bit right now, we're getting calls from solar customers. We're saying, how come my electric bills going up? We have to explain to them that first of all, it's hotter and you're using more air conditioning and these warm, muggy days, overcast. Today as we tape this, as we do this, it's completely gray outside. It's been raining, it's completely gray. There's no more solar being generated. So you're going to have less coming from your roof. You're going to take more from the grid. And, you know, one of the other things that tends to happen, unfortunately, when somebody has solar is they think, wow, the electricity is so cheap. So I'll add another refrigerator. I'll put in another television. So in the end, their load is higher than it would be if they didn't have solar. So ironic. It is ironic. It's a human kind of thing. You know, oh, I can do this. You know, I can finally get that fourth television. And so, you know, they're calling and saying, why is my electric bill going up? And the reason is very simple. You're generating less from your roof and you're using more to cool your home and you're not being careful because in your mind now, oh, my electricity is so cheap, I don't have to be careful. But you do have to be careful if you want to avoid the higher bills. So there's so many factors working on the chart with this. I mean, one is it getting warmer and you want to use your air conditioning and be reasonably comfortable. Two is when you went out and had that spreadsheet done by your friendly solar installer, he was operating on certain assumptions of what you'd need. Now you have more appliances in the house, it's hotter, you need more air conditioning and the calculations that were on that spreadsheet are no longer appropriate. Right. What we've always told people before they go out in a contract for solar is see how much they can reduce their load so that they don't have to get more solar than they absolutely need. Which people do, many people do, then they get the solar and they see the electricity is that cheap and they think, well, why not? I'll add another this or another that. And then when they need the power from the grid to support that overnight or on days like today and sometimes we've had 40 days of rain and storm and again, that's going to become. That could happen at any time. Well, I think more overcast and more storms is going to be the new normal as well. Then all of a sudden it's harder to, what happened to my savings? In the old days when you had so few appliances you never thought twice about electricity. Today it's a factor you have to think about in terms of running your home. So let's talk about the future for a minute. I do want to say one of the things before, if I may. And we're making a big to-do about this and we've seen articles in the paper and so forth. We have enough generation. We have enough capacity. All, knock on wood, all things operating as they should and they generally do, meet the demand. So we're not trying to do this primarily because we're worried about meeting the demand. We're worried about our customers who pay, as we know, high rates compared to the mainland. The total energy bill is low compared to the mainland but no question we're paying high rates here. And these are our customers and we want to help them take care of their home energy bills. We don't want them to plan a family budget that says here's about what my electric bill is gonna be every month and then all of a sudden go boom. So this is primarily about helping customers. Important that people are in a kind of harmony about this sort of thing and they don't get excited about electric bills that don't fit in their budget. But I wanted to go forward, look into the future with you Peter. So we have factors working. Put on my future cap. Future cap. We have factors working. It's gonna get hotter, sorry to say. Even Gretta Thunberg can't stop that. Although she's trying really hard. She's doing a job more. She's the Joan of Arc. I saw Art Juneel depicted her as a Joan of Arc of that. And you know, with a couple of polar bears on her side of the, yeah, she's awesome. I don't care what's his name says, she's awesome. What's his name, nevermind. So it's gonna get hotter. And there'll be storms and maybe there'll be overcast and the solar won't work as well as the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet may not have been designed for any of this. And so the solar panels may not deliver as much. They're gonna make greater call on you, greater demand. And I suppose another factor is the solar cells that are out there getting old. They've been in place for a long time. And I don't know what the useful life is but there is a useful life somewhere. So I just wonder, looking into the future, what do we have? Oh, and if you say that right now, the utility for all islands knows reasonably well what to expect in terms of demand and hot weather. Does that mean if it gets hotter yet and the demand is greater, you're prepared for that? Is there a plan? Could there be, should there be a plan to sort of meet that temperature rise at the pass and always stay ahead of it? Well, we try. We try to look into the future. We try to go, we have basically three Rs. We've talked about reliability, that's job one. And so part of that is thinking about what our needs will be. Resilience, that's the second, not the second in order of importance, but it's a second arc to mine, mine, mine. And that is, as things do get worse, as the storms get worse and so forth, can we either survive our system, either survive them or quickly recover for them? And then underlying all that is the need to go to renewables. And when we look at what we need, we look at, we say, we're not gonna put it all in solar. We can't do it all solar because, as we just said, 40 days and 40 nights a few years ago of basically rain and overcast. And we can't do it all with wind because wind is 24 seven, which is good, in a very strong storm. The wind, the turbines are locked down, feathered, the blades turn so they're not turning. So at the very moment when you may need the electrical system most, it has to be locked down because of the violent forces of the hurricane. Parts of it. And so you have to do all the various renewables that are available to you. You have to do biomass, so you could have some firm, reliable power. You have to do the solar, you have to do the wind, you have to do hydro where you can, mostly on the Big Island now and maybe a few other places. You have to have this broad spectrum of things because everything is not gonna work all the time at the times you absolutely need it. And that's why the planning guys make the big bucks or they should make the big bucks I guess because they've gotta figure out what this is gonna mean as things get warmer, as we get more days of overcast, more days of storm. I can't guarantee you that we have the answers but I can guarantee you that we're looking at them. We're looking at these things very, very seriously because they impact our overall ability again to serve our customers. And we're all here in Hawaii, the good news is we're all the customers, all of us who work at the electric company are also customers. And so we and our family and our friends are all gonna be impacted by the decisions we're making right now to move ahead on this project or that project. Why can't you go faster? Well, we're going pretty fast first of all but second of all, we don't wanna close off the option for some new technology that's gonna come and be part of that portfolio that's gonna add to the variety of choices that we have. So we're trying to move at a reasonable pace but not get so far that we can get to 100% but then we turn around and say, oh, it's too bad we couldn't get that new technology because we're already at 100%. Right, right, an ongoing syncopation. Exactly. So something you touched on a minute ago is, okay, suppose we got great demand, huge demand, more than perhaps we expected. And indeed, the heat and the climate change is moving faster than we expected. And suppose it's just not enough out there to satisfy that demand. What can I do as a utility customer, as a homeowner, what can I do to help? Or should I curtail my own use some way? Will you curtail? Will you need to curtail? Is there curtailment in our future either voluntary or involuntary? Gonna keep the system running at the same time as these greater demands are being made. I would, you know, we're committed to not having to ask our customers to sacrifice their convenience, their safety, their comfort for, because there's not enough electricity. I mean, that is part of the reliability or overall picture. That's our ticket of admission. And we can't go forward on the assumption that we're going to say our customers, you know, you can't have it. What we can say to our customers, please be as efficient as possible. Please, you know, curtail yourself in the sense that you don't have to have the air conditioning on all day when nobody's at home. You can, you know, nowadays, they're timers. You could have it turn on half an hour before or you could do a smart home on your phone. Turn it on half. It doesn't cost much at all. No, turn it on, you know, 10 minutes before you get home on it. You can get in your car and drive home or you get on the heart to go home and, you know, tap, tap, tap, get the air conditioning going. But there's no reason to leave it on all day. There's no reason to run it in every room of the house when basically you're going to have dinner, you're going to go into the den and watch television and you're going to go to bed. I hope you're writing this down because this is going to be on a final exam. Well, it will be. And so, you know, we want you to use every bit you need but don't use any bit that you don't need. And, you know, there are a lot of ways to do it. Some of the best kind, of course, would be the kind where you don't have to do anything. The best kind, eventually they'll be, you'll tell your home energy system, I don't want to spend more than $180 this month. So I want you home energy system to control my refrigerator, my air conditioner and so forth so that I don't get a bill of more than this. That's great stuff, stay within the budget. Yeah, and then you won't think about it again till the next month when you get your bill. Okay, I was a little bit upset this month. You know, I didn't have quite enough air conditioning or I didn't have, I'm willing to go to $185 on my bill, but I want you electric system, computer system to, you know, and the other thing many people now have and more and more people will have time of use rates. So time of use rates lets you save money by doing things when it's cheap. Throw it down when it's cheap. And charges you more when, you know, like in the peak during the day when we have the greatest demand and you'll be able to tell your home system, you know, it won't hurt if you turn my refrigerator down two degrees overnight, nothing's gonna unfreeze, nothing's gonna go bad. So you do that and in order by doing that, you keep my electric bill under this, you keep my, you may be more about your total use. I think we're gonna see more of that Peter. I think that's really visionary. And I want to add we're almost at the end of our time, I'll say my thought, my wraparound thought here is that this is not unimportant, this is very important. If you look at the heat waves in Europe, people are dying because it was especially elderly people who can't handle the heat. And this is happening in the mainland also. So we really have to pay attention to the availability of air conditioning to our population that is serious. And therefore we have to make systems to, you know, make sure that everybody gets what they need. Absolutely. And you know, as I said, we're committed to giving everybody the power they need, maintain their comfort, maintain their security, maintain their, you know, basic convenience of life. We just don't want to have to give more than that. We want to meet every justifiable need. We don't want to meet the one, you know, we don't want to be in a position where, you know, people are keeping their air conditioning on and empty houses all day. And as a result, as you say, as a result, there's not enough, you know, services or not, you know, there's not enough juice to keep the fan in an elderly person's apartment going. That's not right. We wouldn't live, we don't want to live with that. And you're hurting somebody else. You're hurting your neighbor when you do that. Exactly. Thank you, Peter. It's a pleasure. Peter Rasek, spokesman for Hawaiian Electric Company. And as I always say, Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric Company is Hawaii's electric company. There you go. I'm going to take that up with the branding department. They should, we may change all the signs. Thank you, Peter. Thanks. Aloha.