 back to energy justice in Hawaii. I think we're on episode four now, joined today by three special guests to tell us a little bit about a recent development in a project in West Maui in which a community group secured enforceable community benefits associated with a solar project in Kahana. I'm gonna start with asking my three guests to introduce themselves since some of them I'm just meeting for the first time today and then we'll dive in a little bit to the content of the project. So, Ryan, can you start us out? Can you introduce yourself in a couple sentences? Sure, my name is Ryan Hurley. I'm a local attorney here in Honolulu and I practice mainly in the areas of environmental law with focus probably on utility and energy. Awesome, glad to have you, Bianca. You're up next. Yeah, much like Ryan, I'm Faisaki. I have a private local practice in Honolulu focusing on environmental and Hawaiian cultural rights. Awesome, so glad to have you. And last but not least, Lance, can you give us a little couple sentence intro? Sure, my name's Lance Collins and I'm an attorney based in Maui, private practice and I also have worked for the West Maui Preservation Association or Wampa for short for 16 years and I serve as their spokesperson and at times their representative. Awesome, it's so great to be joined by the three of you today. Lots of legal knowledge in the room, the Zoom room. So let's start with a little backup rewind for folks who maybe are not as familiar with the Kahana Solar Project and Wampa. Can one of you maybe, Lance, give us a little intro about what is Kahana Solar and how did the community, how did Wampa and maybe the broader community first become aware of the project? Sure, so Wampa has been around since 2004. Actually the people who founded it started, were involved in some community activities before 2004 but actually incorporated in 2004. And so Wampa's been involved in the number of sort of hot button community issues related to development. I think the one that folks maybe in Hawaii are most familiar with, is that Wampa is one of the plaintiffs in the injection well lawsuit that ended up going to the Hawaii Supreme Court. I mean, excuse me, the US Supreme Court two years ago and that was decided against the County of Maui last year. So but with respect to the Kahana Solar Project, you know, the Wampa heard about it because people in the community had basically some people had heard that there was a new solar project that was potentially going to be occurring on former pineapple lands of Maui land and pine. And a lot of people in the community were very unhappy with the Kuia Solar Project which is in Lahaina town and it's above the bypass. And basically if you're in Lahaina town and you look up, you see the L and now you also see the Kuia Solar Farm. And I think people were very unhappy with the lack of community input and the way it was cited and basically total disregard for things like runoff and visual stuff. So when word started spreading about this, Wampa started looking into it and then eventually the consultants, the marketing consultants for Interjects contacted Wampa and we set up a meeting with them. So that's how it started. And as people found out that we were interested in trying to help address community concerns, various people from different parts of the community started communicating with Wampa about their concerns because many people are afraid to speak out on a project that may possibly just go through regardless of what you say. So people were careful but there were a lot of concerns and Wampa tried to address as many as could be addressed. Awesome, that's a great background. I just wanted to flag for those who might be hearing about it the first time, Interjects I believe is the name of the solar developer that is proposing this project. And the project is around, I think I read eight megawatts of solar and like 20 megawatt hours or maybe it was 40 megawatt hours. I forgot that number for the battery. I think that's about reverse a little bit. So I think 20 megawatts of solar, a little bit larger than I think. I forget what the exact numbers on the battery are. Okay. That's something like eight megawatt hours. There's something like that. Maybe eight megawatt, I'll have to look later. Yeah, it was 80 megawatt hours. Great, thanks for confirming that. Sorry for not looking at a pre-show. So folks, we're hearing about it kind of drawing a parallel between a project, a past project that had already been installed that didn't match community values and some of the same issues were being raised to Interjects' kind of community outreach consultants around I'm hearing like a visual and maybe also some environmental benefits or environmental impacts. Were there any other community concerns that you guys recall Wampa or the broader community bringing up in those sort of early days? Well, I think one of the main things actually was, well, I mean, overarching all of this, right? It's a large foreign corporation that's going to be profiting. So there was concern about who is this new neighbor that's going to be in our community that's going to be making money in our community and be physically there for at least 20 years. So that was a concern, but it's sorry. As far as like other concerns or as environmental around, especially runoff, I mean, the project is going to be placed on gulches across several gulches. They call them table tops because it's right across them. And those gulches go straight to the ocean. So that's going to have to be carefully monitored. And I think that's one of the things that was scrutinized also fire because this area is fire prone. Specifically this area that's, I think even in the last year or two years ago there was a fire there. There was concern about land rights because a lot of these parcels that were taken up by the previous, well, by the plantations going up through Mollie Lennon Pine which is the landowner for them. Like there was concerns about whether or not the land rights were there. I'm sure there's others missing. Those are some of them in English. And I'm curious at that stage, well, actually I'm not curious cause I listened to the snippets of the PUC hearing that Ryan sent to me. So I have a sneak preview but what was the response that Wampa and the community was receiving from interjects with these concerns being raised at that time? Well, I think the, I'm sorry. I think for interjects, the, their focus was on getting this thing approved by the PUC. And so there wasn't, what Wampa has even in the injection well case what Wampa is used to is basically engaging in some sometimes difficult negotiations but negotiating with the developer or in the instance of the injection well as the county to come up with solutions that everybody can live with as best as possible. And it just seemed that that was not part of interjects strategy at the time. And unfortunately, those things can happen. And so we ended up in having to do a contested case because there was no negotiation. And having to do a contested case, what does that mean from Wampa's perspective? Like what does that look like for a community to have a contested case? I guess maybe I'm talking specifically about like procedure. How does a community contest a case? Is that in front of the PUC? Is there somewhere where you log a complaint with the PUC? Oh, sure. So a contested case is actually, it's a legal term of art that refers to an agency engaging a trial-like process where it hears evidence and it basically weighs the evidence and makes legal determinations based on whatever the legal standards are. And so when Wampa intervened in the docket, it became like a party and the PUC identified what the legal issues were and basically signed posted. If you get to the hearing part of the contested case, this is what you have to prove. And so the process that we had basically went through that. And so the contested case hearing was at the very end of it and you have to prepare and of course Wampa had two attorneys representing them, Bianca and Ryan. So communities don't need to have an attorney to do a contested case but it definitely makes things a lot easier. Great. Yeah, Ryan, go ahead. I was just kind of at the time in about that. I just wanted to add a point, I think that that highlights kind of one of the challenges with getting the community involved is if the developer is not really open and welcoming of the community, then the community has to take a much more drastic step. Wes Maui is very lucky that it has organizations like Wampa to represent it and hire people like us to do this. But there is an expense to it and I'm not sure it's totally necessary if there's other ways we could handle this but I think right now given the current process I believe it was important for us to do that and it does just show one of the challenges is actually doing the contested case is takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of resources and months and months of work. And as we've seen in this case now if we could have hopefully done this prior to a contested case and save resources for everybody else. So that's one of the challenges I think we kind of hope to show in this and encourage the utility and the commission to look at ways to better incorporate the community so that they don't have to result with contested case all the time. That's a really, really good point and I wanna touch on that in a moment also but I would love for our audience to kind of get a sense what was the result of the contested case and the PUC hearing once that was formalized? What was the output of that? Well, it was kind of interesting I haven't seen this before at the end of the contested case and perhaps because of the testimony both of I think of all the parties and especially the consumer advocate which is a government agency for the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs. Everybody noted that there are concerns and we've said this even before we got to the contested case that could be remediated through mediation through settling it because nobody was specifically opposed to the entire project it was just there was details about it and so when the commission heard that message they ordered us into mediation. So that was a novel statement. That is interesting. So tell us a little bit about mediation. Well, I don't know if that's that a secret thing that you can't tell us about or are we allowed to know what mediation was like? Negotiation between the parties that's structured by a we've chosen mediator agreed upon by all the parties. The mediator talked to all the parties and kept trying to find compromises and points of weakness and strengths that then just talked everybody through and that's essentially we did it on Zoom as everybody is doing now. And there was a result that the mediator I believe I read that it was a retired judge who helped mediate between the two parties. What were some of the outputs the community benefits that were decided upon and how does Wampa feel about that output? Perhaps someone else wants to talk about how Wampa feels about it. Good? You all feel good? Okay, go ahead. Yeah, well, you know, the PUC proceeding is relatively limited in terms of what the PUC can and can't do. And so I think what Wampa was able to get through the mediated settlement was by far probably the best that it could have gotten in the process. And so, you know, for folks that aren't familiar with what Wampa got, the developer will be funding $55,000 a year of community benefits. And then they will pay at least 80% of their non-supervisory workforce. The equivalent of prevailing wage, which is basically a living wage, they'll commit to hiring locally first from West Maui, then County of Maui, then State of Hawaii, and then only if they can't get their labor needs met locally, then they will look elsewhere. And then also they'll commit to a decommissioning plan, which is very, very important for the community. So, you know, I think those issues, which are things that the PUC can deal with, are things that it should deal with in a more systematic way for those projects that meet the minimum requirements for a community to be okay with having these kinds of projects occur. And so, you know, in the same way that the PUC has decided as a matter of policy, that these independent power purchases will occur through a competitive bidding framework, they can just as easily require that the independent power producers commit to 100% of its workforce being paid the equivalent of the prevailing wage. They can also require a standardization of community benefits and so forth. And so I think Wampa's big hope is with this settlement that this can guide both the Public Utilities Commission and also the utility in standardizing some of these types of benefits and policy preferences so that it doesn't require community groups to have to hire attorneys and engage through a contested case process. I mean, that's Wampa's big hope, I think. That makes a ton of sense. And that feels like some amazing points and suggestions from the community that I think are wise business-wide. So that's amazing. Oh, I also wanted to make a plug as a good think tech Hawaii host. I get to ask most of the questions but if anybody's listening now and wants to ask our guest questions, they can email them to questions at thinktechhawaii.com. And if we get them in time, then I will ask them to our guests. But in the meantime, I get to keep asking the questions. I'm curious about process. Like this was such a burdensome process, many hoops to go through for Wampa to get this end result. And I totally agree that those community benefits that Wampa asked for should be a great starting point for all future projects like prevailing wage. What a wise idea. And I'm wondering for specific projects that might have like a site-specific community benefit or maybe a slight tweak on those things, have you guys, through this experience, like this is probably not on you guys, but do you see a better process forward for folks like Wampa who are gonna be the neighbors of future projects to get this outcome without being an intervener in a docket and going to a PUC hearing and having a mediation? Or do you think this is kind of what we're signed up for for the next couple of decades of energy development? Ryan, I know you have thoughts. Sorry. I don't wanna cut you off, Bianca, but yeah. No, we've talked about this a lot lately. So, and I will say, first of all, I think, and I know that the three of us have discussed this, is we do think this was the best deal we could got for Wampa at the time. That doesn't mean that this is a ceiling. We believe this is the floor going forward. I personally believe that 100% prevailing wages should be required for any project going forward. As Mr. Collins discussed in our hearing, one of the big selling points about large utility scale, industrial scale, solar was the jobs and the good paying jobs for that. So, I think that's absolutely critical. And the fact that we had to fight for something like that, I think it's telling of the times. I do think there's a lot of things that can be done differently and that should be done differently. Just in terms of getting, and I won't go into the details about all the different ways it could be done. I know that Ali, you're working on different community ownership models. I think there's a lot said to that. I think focusing on the distributed ownership, distributed resources first. Personally, I'm a big fan of we really need to start to understand our load and our future loads. As we were 10 million tourists in 2019 and are looking to exceed that in the coming years, I think we need to understand that that's gonna be our driving load and that those tourists equal solar panels on agricultural lands, right? And so that in certain areas, we're gonna have to understand that. I don't have a short-term solution. I do think there's gonna be a need for more intervention at the PUC. I hope it's not for the next couple of decades. I hope that with some good intervention, I think that we're making a lot of headway now in terms of, I'm seeing, and I know you're aware of this, Ali, how the commission and Hawaiian Electric is responding to some of the community benefit, to the community renewable energy projects, I'm trying to get some more input there. I will say too, I think the speed, right? As we're seeing it from everywhere, both the utility and the commission, is this time is of the essence that we need to get this done yesterday. And I think that does pose a challenge for us, for community groups and the community in a whole. And that might not lead to the best reality for us on the ground and how these projects have developed. So I think that always slowing down and taking your time, especially in the early procurement phase, if we can get more community benefits prior to the procurement, I think that not community benefits, but more community input prior to the procurement, that will go a long way. I know Bianca has some stocks in this too, so please Bianca jump in. Oh no, I just wanted you to go more into it. But I do like the language of this is a floor and like Ali said, these are starting points. Because I mean, you think about projects like Napua Makani and like no amount of community benefits was going to like remediate that. And so yeah, I mean, community inputs. And I mean, but like taking a step back, like why is the onus always on the community to like show up on a tent on 10 a.m. on a Wednesday when they have to work, which explain why a project's bad, when it's pretty obvious that it's, well, you know, that very, very often it's just a way of like extracting resources from an area by another corporation as opposed to keeping the benefits there. And you know, that's like you guys have been saying that's where the crux of the issue is. So we're just like finding band-aids at this point. All the way, you know, settlement was good. I'm going to add my other two cents in this. I really feel like at this phase we're at the putting the fires out stage. There's a lot of forward thinking, planning and discussing that we need to have. But the truth is that HECO has 15, 16, 17 extremely large renewable energy projects, 600 megawatts, 3,000 plus acres of utility solar going in the ground in the next two years. And there's been a very, very, very little community input. Add on top of that a layer of COVID-19. A lot of these public meetings have been held via Zoom. I think one of the interesting things we talked about in the Kahana Solar Docket was the differences in how developers are holding community meetings online versus how the commission holds their community meetings online. Are they doing it in a way that's encouraging community members to talk amongst themselves and be open and forthright? Or are they doing it in a way that limits kind of community input? That was one of the things I think we noticed. And this is not solely on Kahana Solar. This is in a lot of the developers I think and the projects going forward. But I kind of consider what we're doing right now is putting a fire out. We're trying to make sure that the community gets some decent benefits. They get the best that we can do for them. But I do think that in terms of, you know as we look to 2045, 100% renewable energy this is gonna be a massive, massive undertaking in terms of a number of projects and the size and the scope and the costs. And I think that the community really needs to lead in this. I think all of that makes a lot of sense. And I also, I loved your comment about like the speed and we need to move quickly. And so we're just, we're moving quickly and you guys, we'll deal with you guys you guys being community later. Like we're just focused on this. You're our second choice. And I think one of my realizations about seeing projects that had that perspective was that they are not gonna go any faster than projects that might slow down earlier. Although I wouldn't say that we've seen a lot of evidence of the slow down earlier yet. But hopefully they are seeing projects like this seeing the output, the community benefits that were allocated through this project. And hopefully they take that and incorporate that early in their project design going forward bumping that up to 100% prevailing wage. Lance, do you have anything else that you wanted to add from the perspective of like iterating this process to be maybe less cumbersome upon community groups like Wampa in the future? Yeah, well, I think one thing that I just wanted to follow up on what Ryan was saying is that, you know, as I understand it, a number of independent power producers are making donations to nonprofit organizations and calling that community benefit or the response to their community outreach. And, you know, the problem with it is that if it's corporate marketing department deciding where to donate money, it's a very cynical way of looking at community benefit. So there really is no reason why the PUC can't say, look, projects that the community support has to have a community benefit component. It's gonna be this percentage of gross revenue or something and that it has to be, you know, who gets that funding has to be determined by an independent third party, whether it's something like the Hawaii Community Foundation or a separate nonprofit is set up. That, you know, maybe that would have to be decided after further study by the PUC. But yeah, I just, there's a concern about, you know, that the fact that it has the effect of benefiting the community doesn't make it a community benefit with respect to the project if it's really just an extension of a developer's marketing. And so that, you know, and so as you see in the Nupua Makani instance, well, that one's a little bit different because I don't think any community benefit that could be given would have ameliorated the problem there. But I think in instances, you know, you can see from the Nupua Makani where that kind of problem can occur because you don't have a community. I mean, even what they're saying is community benefit actually isn't going to the Kahuku community. It's going to another nearby community that basically is pitting neighboring communities against each other. So that's actually like the worst case scenario what could happen. But by degree, there's all sorts of less worst case scenarios that could occur and in some ways undermine the purpose of having community benefit. So I think that that's one issue. The other being, you know, community outreach, the purpose of community outreach is to affect the proposed development. And if community outreach is really just trying to convince the community how great the project is without there being some change the other way, it's not really community outreach. And that's an issue that Intergex has faced in some of their other projects in Maui as well. So. I can add on to that. Oh, sorry. Can I add on to that just a little bit? Yeah. Yeah, we've got 30 seconds. Go for it. Okay, no, I just, well, for this settlement, I think it made sense. Community benefits package made a lot of sense because Lager's was going to go into the grid to Maui, but whereas like, I mean, there's also the consideration of like making sure that you get the lowest rates. But I think in this case, because it wasn't necessarily going to benefit the local community, that's one of the important reasons that you would want to have all of these clauses in there. Yeah, yeah. Really good point. Thank you for adding that. And I'm sorry to rush you guys. This was an awesome conversation. I'm so glad that you guys were able to join. And I hope that maybe we can have you back in another couple of shows to talk about what the future of community benefits packages are in a new process. And maybe we could even talk about community ownership because that's a topic near and dear to my heart. Thank you for joining us, audience, on our fourth episode of Energy Justice in Hawaii. I'm Ali Andrews, your host. If you think of anything that you want to come on the show and talk about energy justice lies, please let me know. We're always looking for guests. Thank you beyond Ryan and Lance, and we'll see you next time.