 Good afternoon and welcome to Code Green. I'm your guest host, Ethan Allen, filling in for Howard Wigg. Howard's traveling today and asked me to step in and we have two wonderful guests here today. Good to see you, Kailani Shinshato. Shinshato. Shinshato, sorry. And yo, Kaonami. Okay, both from Hiko, right? All right, excellent. And they're here to talk about how Hawaii is really going leading the nation in renewable energy. So, I gather there's been some sort of reorganizations and some sort of refocusing of programs at Hiko to really get the public more engaged in sort of taking us to that goal, right? That's right, Ethan. So we wanted to share a little bit about that. The fact that yo's team and my team have merged together and so now we are customer energy resources and we'll get into what that really means a little bit later on but that's basically all of the stuff that's on our customers roofs or in their homes that we as the utility can use as a grid resource. Right, because more and more the grid is now shifting from being a sort of one-way process to being brought to two-way, right? Instead of just power being generated and distributed out, it's now coming back in from people's solar systems as well as coming out from your generators, right? That's absolutely right. That's a major change for us. Oh, it's got to be huge. I mean, it's just something ten years ago you weren't dealing with this at all really, right? And now suddenly this has become a big thing. It's a really big thing. All right, because Hawaii is doing a whole lot of solar which makes sense, right? A whole lot of sunshine here. We are leading the nation but even though we're leading the nation we know that we have to grow customer energy resources even more. Right, so this is a whole program then to really help get Hawaii's energy consumers to be more active partners in this whole business and be sure more and more of us do put solar panels on our roofs, land of cooperative solar systems or whatever they may be and work with HECOTA to build a more resilient power grid so that we can use all the diesel fuel, right? That's absolutely right. That's our plan for the future. Right, because we have this state of gold by 2045. We're going to be essentially 100% renewable, right? That's right. We're close to on track because I understand it. Close to 100? Well, we still have a ways to go. But we're close on track for it. We are on track. That's right. So we do have some live presentation materials that we brought with us. Sure, why don't you call off the first slide and let's start in here. Sounds good. So I thank you for that good introduction. I think we talked about why we're here today but I guess I'll call out one thing that customer energy resources are actually a really big part of our plan to get to 100%. So we as a company put together a strategy for how we're going to get from where we are today to where we need to be in 2045. So that's what we're going to share with you and your audience. Sure, because you couldn't just keep building generators and building generators and building generators without massively increasing import of fossil fuels and increasing emissions and other undesirable That's right. It's no simple task. Instead, we're going to borrow people's roofs as it were and set up solar farms and wind farms and various other things, right? We need a lot of different resources to get there, including customer resources, right? So we'll go to the next slide, if we could. So I mentioned we're leading the nation, but that definitely doesn't come without challenges. So this might be stating the obvious, but we don't have a large transmission cord that takes us to the mainland. We can't just plug into California and suck energy out. We wish we could, but it's not that easy. And even between our islands, we don't have any intertized. So all of our islands are isolated grids, which makes running our islanded grids pretty challenging, right? So if you're on the mainland and if you're one of our sister utilities, well, in our industry, starting from the basics, we have to have high equal demand in real time, at all times, right? So if we have excess generation, we can't ship that off to a neighboring state. And contrary, if we don't have enough, we can't just bring it in from somewhere else. Whereas on the mainland, they can do some of that, right? They can do some of that, exactly. So that makes integration of renewable variable resources, right? We do have some firm, but many of our resources like the Sun, the Wind, sometimes they're here, sometimes they're not. So it makes integration sort of extra challenging for us in a whole lot of ways. Small islands, again, small of the island is sort of closer to the edge all the time. That's right. So the lower you're sort of inherent resiliency in space. That's absolutely right. So how are we doing this? So we can hop to the next slide. Just a few more data points as context. So we mentioned that we are leading the nation. So our city of Honolulu is the first in the nation for per capita solar integration. And what's made this a very exciting ride for all of us in customer energy resources is that we experience this sort of all at once. So just in the past five years, we've experienced a 91% increase in solar adoption. And that's obviously a lot, right? As a state, 18% of our residential homes have solar and that translates to one in every three single family homes on Oahu. And you can probably see this just as you drive around our communities, it's very obvious that we have a lot of solar. But and we'll get into this later on. But going forward, it can't just be about passive PV systems anymore. It's got to be a lot more sophisticated. And we're going to look more closely at what our homes can do in managing our loads or our demand for electricity and how we can make those more flexible. That helps our system operators add more renewables to the grid. Right, right. It is clear. Every time I get on certain sections of H1, down and more so more homes now used to be sort of a smattering. Now it's a fair number. And in a few years, it's going to be everybody, right? Everybody. And in fact, I'm glad you mentioned that that's actually what we're planning for. By 2045, in our plans, we want to have solar on every roof, which is a very bold, almost crazy idea, right? But that's a part of our plan. Should be, we show all that way. Everyone's dusting in the system, right? Everyone's sort of part of the part of the solution. So we can move to the next visual. So the big wave of solar that we experienced came on in our net energy metering program or NEM program, which was highly popular. But that was close in 2015. Because I think our Public Utilities Commission recognized that that couldn't be a very sustainable program for us to get us to the high levels we need to be at. So our programs since then have very much evolved. And so this is a summary of what our newer programs are. And I'll just give you a few examples of how they got more sophisticated over time. So customer grid supply plus is a program where first program of its kind in Hawaii where we can actually manage that system if we need to. So if there's some grid emergency, and we need to sort of save the grid, we can manage that system. And then another one you see there are smart export. And so this is a program that incentivizes our customers to actually charge their batteries during the day. So this is when we already have a ton of TV coming back to us in the grid, right? So we've got excess. We don't compensate for that export during the daytime. But if they export out of their batteries at night, they do get compensated for that exported energy. NEM plus is where if you're a current NEM customer, you can add to your system, and you can still stay a NEM customer. But that added part just can't export back to the grid. Again, we're trying to always manage real time supply and demand. So making sure we don't have too much during the day. And then the last one there is really promising to us. So that's community based renewable energy. It's essentially community solar. I think you alluded to that earlier, Ethan. It's a new program where if you live in a condo and many of our customers live in condos, right? Or if you have a roof, you don't want to put panels on your roof or it's shaded. Even our low to moderate income customers, we want to, when we say we want to grow customer energy resources, we have to look at that huge segment that still hasn't participated in it yet. So all of those I mentioned, we want to really be able to target with community solar. So we're in the first phase of it now and we're installing projects. We don't have customers enrolled yet, but that should be coming This will be as a condo owner. I could essentially opt in to some might might be a solar farm, a limanola or something. Part of that. That's right. And enjoy the benefits. Yeah, that's exactly right. You'd still get a credit on your bill. Just like our other customers do who have solar under roofs. I'm sure at the same time, you're looking at a lot of good ways to put solar panels on things like condos and make solar as pervasive as possible, right? That's absolutely right. We're looking at that too. It's an option for our commercial customers as well. Right. Excellent. We'll move to the next visual. So this is this is the need for customer energy resources. So we put together a plan for how we're going to get to 100%. And this is straight from that plan. We call it our power supply improvement plan. And it's kind of small, but the you can see at the bottom, the legend that shows the different colors and how they align to different resources. And you see that huge chunk of yellow at the top. That's the customer energy resources. And so that's what keeps you and I up at night. How are we going to get that huge amount between now and 2045. It's quite a big amount. By 2030, even we have a milestone. And we need over 1000 megawatts more by then and by 2045, we need like 3000 megawatts. So that's up from 850 roughly that we have today. So we have a lot more work to do. But I think that's what makes our state very unique. No other state or utility we think is going to be as dependent on our customers resources as we will be. Should give you that sort of diffuse network than a great deal of resiliency in some sense, right? That's right. That's right. Within that grid, then hopefully, if some place needs more, you can shuttling power throughout that grid in an organized way, right? Right. And so in order to do that, we have to modernize our grid. And that's what we started to do, but we'll need to continue to do, right? Because the grid was not initially set up to do anything like that. It was just sort of simple, you know, lots of power out on some main trunk lines and gradually decreasing on some power out on smaller and smaller lines. That's absolutely right. Now we're going to have little power plants at the very edge of the grid. And how do we get their energy coming back? Right. Super challenging. Super challenging. Yeah. But really, when exciting time like the opportunity for us to be involved in this kind of transformation. Yeah, I mean, the technologies are now there that really enable this. This isn't we're not talking about some futuristic thing, right? You're talking technologies that really do currently exist that build these systems, allow you to feed power back in and regulate that power. So you never get too much back in at once. Right. Right. So we do have a lot of solutions in place, but we know that there will be more technology coming in the future. We don't know what that looks like yet. So we'll constantly have to be adapting. Yeah, and this is I mean, it's really great to hear this because it's so important to recognize that we live in a very dynamic world, right? It's changing, you know, climate is changing, the weather patterns are changing, all this stuff is is going to not going to be the same as it was. And therefore, great to see the HECO is sort of getting out ahead of the whole thing and saying, yeah, let's let's build a system that will adapt to this change and really handle this kind of change technologies as costs per kilowatt hour for solar dropping, more and more attractive for people to put it on. And we'll figure out this way is to make old farm farms of solar panels and do something with the ground underneath will grow shade shade tolerant crops of some sort, doubtless. And you know, the whole thing was, no, we are going to explore this much further in the in the near future. But right now, I'm being told we need to take a quick break. We'll be from HECO there with us when we return in one minute. Hawaii Council of associations of apartment owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, integrated security technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group Limited, the Schindler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Polo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Welcome back to Code Green here. I'm your host, Ethan Allen filling in for Howard Vig is traveling right now with me there, Kailani and yo from Hawaiian consumer, customer energy resources. Sorry, the new new consolidated department there. And we've been talking in the first part of the show about some of the ways that we're all going to be working together to build that goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045. And a big part of that is going to be reliant on the customer base and getting energy back in from the customers instead of simply feeding it out, largely solar energy, but probably some other things. So what's what's the next step? Well, we'll sort of what we talked in the last segment about background and where we've come from. And going forward, we have a strategy and I'll hand off to you on a second, but maybe if we go to the next visual that we had, that kind of starts us off on this conversation. The strategy, I think is really captured well in this circle here. So we have a customer first strategy and that's represented by the customers in the middle. You really need to understand each of their needs, their wants in order to offer them valuable products and services forward. And then the next circle there represents our anchors of our strategy. And that's the 123 on the side. And we went over this already, we know that customer energy resources are going to be essential for us to get 100%. And so because of that, we need to expand opportunities for customer resources. But we have to make sure that we don't leave anybody behind in the pursuit of renewable energies, because not all of our customers are going to want to adopt it. So we have to do it in a way that's fair to them. So that's a part of our strategy. And then the outer most circle represents the fact that we as the utility can't do this kind of change on our own. We have to work with stakeholders and get everybody's perspectives and feedback in order for us to kind of have common alignment, we hope and a path forward for everybody. Yeah, it's very much a systemic change you're talking about here. And we're all part of that. He goes apart of it, the stakeholders, the electrical consumers are part of it, the corporations are part of it. Individual households are part of it, you know, every sector is everybody. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So thank you, Lonnie. So how are we going to do this? If we can show the next visual. As Lonnie said, customer centric, we cannot force the situation to happen and tell people to add on a solar without the proper message and the value as that we provide. So the three customer approaches that we're taking is the customer choice where customer designs. I want to include and participate into this. That's sort of the easier ones. And then the two other ones are collaboration and co creation to get with the customers figuring out a methodology of how can we create a balanced grid and inviting another consultant contractors to provide that model. We call those aggregators someone that can help us provide that environment to be able to connect to the grid. So those are the three C's that we're looking into. And the next slide, we can talk about what you think you mentioned, what are the customer energy resources? Solar certainly is the easier of the options. But as you can see from the pictures, the entire house now comes into an energy resources and individual with an electric vehicle has a battery that's perhaps usable. Lonnie earlier mentioned two areas merged. The customer energy resource operations was formerly known as demand response. That is an area where we typically worked like you said Ethan 10 years ago, we were not talking about solar and storage. So we were working with water heaters and air conditioners being able to control those customer energy resource and be able to balance the grid. Now, can we make sure to align that with what Lonnie's program has so that we are balancing the grid together, not siloed and being separated out. Those are some of the key attributes that we're looking that these houses can combine the water heat programs are not going away, but we want to work together with solar storage systems. There's now a small part of a much bigger system, right? Yeah. Even within each household will now become sort of more complex unit. You have to look at as a whole, whether that's whether they have an electric car that can be absorb energy access energy when you got it basically working possibly feed it back in when you need it right. That's exactly right. You mentioned earlier about, you know, we cannot be just generation centric. I hit it in the nail where we need some resources to actually absorb some of the energies that are certain times and whether that's a pricing program or simply asking the customer, hey, can you charge your vehicle more often during this time? Those are type of the opportunities that we want to be aligned and offering to the customer in a simplistic message. We don't want to have 2040 different type of programs, but rather a more simple approach of these are the options and they are aligned with each other where people can bundle the different type of resources into one program, perhaps. Yeah, very sensible. And that's that's what you take advantage of abundant energy when it's when it is abundant. You'd have the storage capacity and obviously utility can't can't keep just a huge bank of batteries and cells, right? These batteries essentially have to be spread out among all the customers. That's exactly right. And then in the next slide is just a simple data point where we have all these resources available. We cannot just rely just on the research. We have to know what the researchers are doing. So the technology you mentioned is already there your sleep right the advanced inverter systems inverter that are connected to the battery and the solar system, as well as advanced metering. Those are all available. So the question is how do we accept all those data that is available and be able to design a program that we have to get to 3000 megawatts? Right, you must sit in the center that you must have some basic machine learning algorithms that are watching all the inputs all the outflows, all the time hooked up to weather forecasting models so that you're guessing an hour or two hours out what the input is going to be on a given area what the demand is going to be another area trying to keep everything. It's it's it's like the guy, you know, with all the spinning on all the poles, right? Exactly. A lot of plates, a lot of poles. Right. And I think you hit all the ones that we're looking at and predicting any of those is actually quite difficult. No two customers are exactly the same. And weather has been unpredictable as ever. So we have to be able to help with whatever we can at the distribution level at the customer level to help out with the total system of balancing. Right. And the fact that we're entering an era of ever more frequent weather extremes isn't isn't making this any simpler, right? I mean, there are longer droughts, bigger storms, longer, probably longer periods of very cloudy weather, all kinds of different things that are happening today. Again, you guys have to be thinking about what if or when this happens, what are we going to do? Then the combination of that is on the next visual where we try to show that, you know, we have that I think money mentioned earlier, each home is becoming a power plant. And but it's bi-directional, not only is it generating, but might it's going to be smartly using energy the way we would like to keep the distribution area clean. So we look forward to that opportunity and excited for that. Right. And certainly, energy conservation is a big part of this you want people to use energy in a smart way. I was shocked when I moved here to Hawaii and saw all the stores that run air conditioning with their doors wide open struck me as this is not high efficiency energy use. I don't know what the commercial how he was going to work with commercial folks to pass that or what they're going to do. But as the mission that we together have customer education is actually a big component of this, we will continue to work on how to convey the message. Not everyone knows what the matter sponsors. The first goal is to remove that name. And we talk about the customer energy resource to be the focal point of how we want to deliver. But to your point, education will be a key aspect. You know, people are gradually coming to appreciate the fact that it brings water is a limited resource. And you may have to pay more for water at different times, different places. And people come to understand that now. And the same thing with energy is you get a better understanding energy isn't just something that comes magically out of some power plant somewhere. They're, they're personally involved with right. They're collecting it. They're generating it. They're using it. Yeah. That's wonderful that that kind of engagement really ought to ought to bring your customer base much more into again. I think we had one more slide. And so we we did is initiated this project footprint. And we as a company as a whole, we're looking at customer as a focal point. We are doing everything for this for the customer. But we cannot do this without the customer's help. And so we're looking forward to that initiative where we will create new opportunities and be able to say one last week needs your help to make this 100% true goal. Yeah, absolutely. And you're going to involve a wide variety of different systems doubtless. I suspect you folks are looking at wave energy and things like that. Maybe 20 years out still. Figure out how to make that one practical. But it's what we've all got to face, particularly as we really do want to cut down on amount of carbon, we're dumping into the atmosphere. We have to be looking at this stuff, as well as I'm sure you're looking at just how to burn stuff more efficiently in your existing power plants. So you help less carbon, how to scrub it better, and take that carbon back out back into the ground or whatever you more efficient way. I think you related to that project footprint initiative that we started is trying to incent our customers to take actions to mitigate climate change. Because like you said, it's really going to take everybody and everybody can do something. And I know like, right before this change happened with our organization, you and I talked, we have very similar missions, like why we come to work is to really help fight that that good fight. So it's it's rewarding, I think, to see all of this happen. Yeah, no, this is actually, this is a beautiful example of that the climate change is a big problem. It's not it's not something that we can't take on each individual channel and make real contributions here. You're going to you're setting up a system where the individuals efforts individuals contributions will become much clearer to them. They'll be able to sort of see off of meters in their own home. Oh, look, you know, here, we're using this much energy. Oh, but if we know our AC up a few a few degrees, let ourselves get a little warmer. Hey, look, save all those energy and feed more back in the grid and bring everyone's costs down. You don't have to do a lot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But if everyone begins to jump in. So I guess in we got about a minute left here. So what do you have like a message for the consumers? You want to you want to tell them what would you say? We look forward to working with the customers. We hope to simplify some of the messaging and be able to reach out to the heart to reach and make sure that everyone that only that one is just benefiting, but everyone in the customer race is I would say get engaged. Learn about look look at your bill. Learn about what you can do to make some changes. Cool. This is this is absolutely exciting stuff. And it's wonderful to see you guys doing this. It's wonderful that HECO is leading out in the nation to really show other people the path to energy self-sufficiency. Colony, yo, I thank you both so much for being here. You've been been vastly informative and actually inspiring, which is great. So I hope everyone will work with HECO to achieve these noble goals. And I hope you'll come back and see Code Green next week. Howard will be back. Until then, I'm your host Ethan Allen.