 the state of clean energy, I'm your host, Mitch Ewan. Our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. And I'm pleased to welcome back for a return engagement. He did such a good job last show. Adam Strubeck from, he's a graduate assistant at the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and we're going to have another talk story time about bipartisan infrastructure law. This law has allocated $550 billion, get that billion dollars, to find a variety of things that Adam is going to tell us about. Adam has done the heavy lifting of going through all this legislation and making it easier to find programs that may apply to you, our listeners out there. So after the show, you can always go to the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum web page, where you'll see many more details, but pop level stuff. We're going to let Adam tell us what it's all about. So there's gold in them on our heels. Adam, welcome back to the show. Great. Thanks for having me back on, Mitch. I had a great time a couple weeks ago. I'm excited to dive back into the federal policy. I'm glad you do. So anyway, let's talk a little bit. How about introducing the bill itself and tell us what it means. It's gone through a variety of names, but let's just go with the first slide and you can talk about it. Sure. Well, what we're talking about today is the bipartisan infrastructure law, also known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. This bill was actually passed last year in August of 2021. So since then, we've seen a number of programs get created and actually get off the ground and get running. So it's interesting that we're able to see the effects of where this money is going and what new programs are being created. That's great. Well, let's throw up the next slide. It's $550 billion. I think I said that in the intro. So let's talk a little bit about this. Right. So this is $550 billion in new federal investment. And there's three key areas that I wanted to discuss, those being infrastructure, resilience and transportation. So infrastructure, sorry, infrastructure, we are really talking about our highways, bridges, ports, airports, and then some not so common things that people think about when they hear infrastructure such as internet and water access. So there's quite a lot of money allocated to internet for underserved communities here in Hawaii. And I want to point out that down in during COVID, there are some, as long as they're not being Oahu-centric, like on the big island, there are areas that don't have very good if any internet availability. So like during COVID, I know down in the Puna area, for example, the kids couldn't get their online training because they didn't get any signal. So the community kind of ad-libbed a little bit and got like trucks to come in with hot spots so that the kids could gather around and go online and get some of their lessons. But nevertheless, this is what they need. It's not just the kids, it's also businesses, you know, they need to be able to operate and wouldn't it be great if you could operate from your home in Puna? I'm just using that as an example, but there's other black spots out there. And people are a lot more people are working from home. It's pretty hard to work from home if you don't have any internet connection. And one other thought I had was medical support, like people who have medical conditions, I mean, it's really handy here on Oahu to go online and check out your symptoms and all that. But if you don't have an internet connection, you can't do that. So that makes it harder. It means you have to go into town and go to the doctor and, you know, it's a real hassle. So there's many really good benefits from improving our internet system. And also, let's not forget cybersecurity now because everybody's trying to attack our systems. So let's talk a little bit about resilience, the resilience thing there. Sure. So resilience funding is specifically for floodplain management, FEMA, and like you mentioned, cybersecurity. But there's a lot of different ways in which we use resilience, which we'll get into later. But generally speaking, the funding for resilience is how we bounce back from emergencies. We're going to see probably more intense storms due to climate change, sea level rise. So it's really critical that we have this funding to help adapt and mitigate some of those problems that we're going to encounter. And the next little bullet you had there was the transportation. So what's in this bill for transportation? Right. So primarily in this bill is funding for electric vehicle charging networks. The administration is putting a big focus on creating an electric vehicle charging corridor along major roadways. And hopefully that'll speed our transition to being able to use more electric vehicles, not just for individuals, but for also schools, commercial trucking, and a lot of government agencies that have so many vehicles converting those over to EVs and being able to charge them all. Yeah, I recall D-bed was quite proactive on this. I give a little shout out to D-bed and Margaret Larson, who's actually just gone back to the mainland, but she was responsible for identifying these corridors in Hawaii. And that was like three or four years ago. I recall, you know, we talked about corridors on the big island and also not only just electric vehicles, but also a hydrogen, I had to get a hydrogen plug in there, also hydrogen corridors. So hats off to Margaret. So that means like we're ready to go, basically, you know what the corridors are, and it'll make it easier for us to get these, this infrastructure in place. So let's move on to the next slide, which is like, what's in the name? And what, so what is in the name here, Adam? Right. So last, last week we talked about the Inflation Reduction Act, which is sort of a very contentious name. I think this bill is a little more aptly named, but I wanted to point out that it was originally came from the American Jobs Plan, which was put out by President Biden. And there was a bipartisan committee that debated the infrastructure portions of that jobs plan. And after months of negotiating, we finally landed on what was passed as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. And this has been lumped together with some other authorizing bills to sort of form this bipartisan infrastructure package. So that's sort of what we're referring to when we're talking about the BIL. Yeah, and it's interesting to see how the name of a bill can change over time, but a lot of times the content will stay the same. Yeah, really. So let's look at slide four and tell us a little bit more about all these bills that got vacuumed up into the top-level bills. So how about opening the Kimono here on these bills for us, Adam, and tell us what they are. Sure. Well, the first two are very similar, the Surface Transportation Reauthorization Act and the Surface Transportation Investment Act. They both have to do with the Highway Trust Fund, which is run through the Department of Transportation. And those are primarily for servicing, repairing, and expanding our major motorways. Also, there's funding for, like I mentioned, commercial trucking and converting stuff like school buses over to electric and hydrogen. Oh, thanks for that plug. I like that. Next is the Drinking Water and Waste Water Infrastructure Act. This primarily has to do with sewer overflows and storm water management, which has a lot of implications for climate change as we may see more intense periods of rainfall, more flash flooding, and also more need to purify our drinking water. So this involves protecting forests that act as watersheds and filter our drinking water for us. So one other big issue we have here in Hawaii that, you know, it's kind of, we've been kicking the can down the road for many, many years, and that's cesspools. Like on the Big Island, I think they have 80,000 cesspools, which is essentially just a hole in the ground where the sewage collects, and that can get into a dozen gets into the groundwater and the aquifers. And so it's polluting, but it's going to cost a heck of a lot of money to convert those over to proper wastewater facilities. And that's why the can gets kicked down the road, because we didn't have the money to do it. So theoretically, if we have this kind of funding becoming available, we're going to start stop kicking the can down the road and start repairing our infrastructure and getting it right. I think we're under a consent agreement or decree here on Oahu, where our major sewage or wastewater treatment plants basically are throwing, you know, they treat it up to a certain point, but it goes out the ocean, but it doesn't mean it doesn't meet the EPA standards. So we've been under that sort of damocles for a long time. So now here's a chance to really get after it and do something about it. And we'll move on to my little thing. Maybe I said something wrong. I'm sure I'll hear about it if I did. But that's my understanding of the situation. And I think this is a great opportunity for us to start getting our infrastructure right. Right. And finally, among those authorizing bills is the Energy Infrastructure Act. So this is the major funding towards the Department of Energy. And that includes energy supply chains, carbon capture and storage. And interesting is some ecosystem restoration, which kind of ties into the drinking water as well. So there is some overlap among these bills, which is pretty common with federal legislation. But that's because the funding is going to different agencies and sometimes different agencies are doing similar activities. I think when we were talking about this show, we talked about critical materials, critical raw materials. I think that's in what part of that are we in, in the Energy Infrastructure Act as well? Yes. So that's a big part of establishing the security of the energy system domestically. The bill establishes programs to support supply chains for clean energy technologies. And part of clean energy technology is these rare earth minerals that are used in batteries. So if we can ensure that the US has a robust production and recycling system for these rare materials, then we'll be that much better off when we go to implement large scale electric vehicle use. Well, yeah, as we discussed previously, critical raw materials, it's not just hard to find stuff. It's like things like copper and tin and all these other metals that we use that are harder and harder to extract. So we have to mine more and more rock to get the actual material out of it. So that means a lot more work, a lot more energy expanded, a lot more waste. And of course, that drives the cost of it. So reading on the internet that you used to be able to find a big boulder that was like solid copper. Now you're down to the granular size. And I remember in my previous life, I was supporting some of the big mines out in Arizona. And I went to the quarry or to the mine, and they had these huge piles of crushed rock that had a copper in them. And then they would flow an acid through it to leach the copper out and then run an electrolyzer to separate the copper from the electrolyte or from the acid. Whereas before, they didn't have to do that. It was just the natural occurring metal. So it's a heck of an issue. And we only have a limited amount of it, and it means everything's going to go up in cost. So it's good that we go after that and look at substitution, what other things can we do, and certainly recycling to capture the raw materials or the processed raw materials so we can reuse them. Right. And the better we are at recycling, the less we'll have to do more mining for these materials. Yeah. So let's go on to slide five, which is talking about resilience itself. So let's talk about resilience. What does it mean to start with Adam? Right. So resilience has been a big theme in both the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. Resilience has sort of become this buzzword used in planning and policy. I think similar to how the word sustainability has been used over the past few years. I think what's important about discussing resilience and getting drilling down to the real meaning is thinking about both the scale and the context at which it's being used. For example, an individual, community, business, city, or even country could be considered resilient. But resilience is also often discussed in different contexts, like infrastructure resilience, energy system resilience, food security resilience, and even resilience of humans to diseases like COVID and communities fighting back against COVID. Yeah, exactly. And part of resilience is trying to identify what your vulnerabilities are. So that's the other flip side. I think we were discussing that before the show is, you have to analyze what am I vulnerable to? Like a tsunami or a hurricane or whatever. And then how's my infrastructure going to cope with all of that? For example, one of the big topics we had during the legislative briefing earlier this year was about looking at our port security. Because if the port shuts down, we don't have a lot of extra stuff, food materials, to keep our economy going. I think we have about two weeks supply of food here on the island. So if all of a sudden, some big storm wipes out our grid and our ability to offload and unload ships, we're in big trouble. And so we have to address that and have some kind of a plan and backup resilience built into the infrastructure so that we can cope with that. Right. I think when a lot of people consider infrastructure, they just think roads and bridges. But here in Hawaii, what's really important is our ports and airports because those are where connect us to the global supply chains and keep our economy going. Let's look at the next slide, number six, which talks a little bit more granular about what these elements are, certainly the energy infrastructure. So tell us about this, Adam. Right. So primarily the Energy Infrastructure Act provides funding to the Department of Energy, the DOE. And it will start 60 new Department of Energy programs. That's a lot of programs. And that's within demonstration, deployment, and R&D. So I'll give an example for the three bullet points. So for reliability and resilience of the grid, there's a grid resilience and innovation partnership program which acts to prevent outages and provides grants to states and tribes to improve the resilience of their energy grids. For the domestic clean energy supply chains, an example program would be the Advanced Clean Energy Manufacturing and Recycling Grant program. This is like what we talked about about expanding domestic battery supply chains and recycling rare earth minerals. There's even a new program for establishing a rare earth element demonstration facility. And this is an example of a program that's open for universities to apply to. So it'll be interesting to see who ends up getting a lot of this funding. So you talked about three programs. How can we get a window on all 60 of these programs? That's a lot of programs to get a handle on. What's the best way to do that? Right. So the information is available on the Department of Energy website, but we've also sorted out into different categories on the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum website. So if you're interested in a particular area, say batteries or hydrogen or even resilience, you can find the programs that fit within that context on our website. And just tell us what our website is, so everybody knows. Right. So we are the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and that is, we're nested within the University of Hawaii at Manoa website. So I believe it's manoa.edu slash HEPF. Great. And I see that ThinkTech is right on the ball. Let me put up a little flag. And so I'm sure we'll be able to advertise that a lot. But basically, for our audience out there, Adam's done the heavy lifting on sifting through all this information. And at the Policy Forum, we're trying to make it really easy for you to find this stuff so that you don't have to read these huge volumes and try to figure it all out. So we've done a lot of the work for you and thanks, Adam, for doing that. That's your Ataboy. So let's go on to the next slide. Seven. Right. So like I mentioned earlier, the funding is in the process of being distributed. There's been a good amount that's come to Hawaii since the act passed last year in August. So far we've received about $600 million here in Hawaii. But this is the expected funding just based on a formula calculation. So we're supposed to receive $1.5 billion for our roads and bridges, $100 million for internet coverage. And that is in relation to the affordable connectivity program, which I think you were mentioning earlier. And then also funding for public transport and ensuring the resiliency of our ports here in Hawaii. I don't expect some of that public transport money to go to battery electric buses and fuel cell electric buses. I've already seen that on the Big Island, but where the Mass Transit Agency just won $23 million from the Federal Transit Administration for six new fuel cell buses. And other islands have won money from that same program for battery electric buses. And I think that also means that Oahu also got several buses. I just don't know how many, but that's a real shot in the arm. And that's, this is a good thing. And so let's go to slide eight. So this is a resource that I wanted to share with viewers. This is from the General Services Administration website. And it's an interactive map where you can see what funding is going to what states. And you can also see where the individual projects are. But I just wanted to show on this slide that Hawaii has received about $600 million. And that really pales in comparison to some of the other states like California, Texas and New York, but part of its population and representation in government. So it's up to Hawaii as sort of a small state to advocate for as much funding as possible. And my understanding is this keeps on regenerating itself as new funds become available. So it's not static, correct? That's correct. As new projects are developed and awarded grants and loans from the government, this page is updated with the funding total. So let's look at the next slide, slide nine. So this is more local and gets the girls down a little bit. So let's talk about the slide. Right. So these points on the map are locations to where that $600 million is allocated. I also wanted to include the Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa. Just because at the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, we do take a specific approach. We're not just focused solely on Hawaii. But if you hover over the different projects on the website, you're able to see what they are. And there's also an Excel sheet that you can download and get a full list of the projects. I wanted to point out a couple notable ones. If you look at the Big Island, there's four dots on the Big Island, both the Hilo and Kona airports, and then also a forest restoration project at Kohala. So the Kohala project runs through the Department of Labor and Natural Resources, the DLNR. And I think it's a really good example of the coordination between state and federal funding because the state was able to allocate some money and then that was used for matching from the federal government. So without the state money, it's hard to get money from the federal government because all these grant programs usually require a matching component. Yeah, it all depends on what the program, how much of the match is. Like for the hydrogen hop project is 50%. But for like the low no program, that $23 million that the Big Island got, it's like a 5% match for infrastructure and 10% for the buses. So that's perfectly doable. Whereas 50% is a lot harder if you're going for $400 million and have to cough up $400 million, that's harder, much harder. And it has to be non-federal money. So anyway, let's go on to slide 10. We're getting down to our ultimate slide and the major takeaways. So we're kind of summarizing now what we've been talking about for the last half hour. So take it away, Adam. Sure. So I think overall the bipartisan infrastructure law is a large investment in our federal transportation and infrastructure. It does sort of raise questions about how the funds are allocated, as we saw there's sort of a disproportionate allocation among the states. So we're still trying to parse out how that money is being divvied out to states and what the best way for states to claim as much money as possible is. But in conjunction with the Recently Passed Inflation and Reduction Act, the BIL provides a framework for the clean energy transition in Hawaii. It's just really up to communities, businesses, and even individuals to advocate for that money and funding to come to the state. Okay. Well, let's throw up the last slide, which tells people how they can once again access the Policy Forum webpage so they can get a lot of this information that Adam has been working on. And we're trying to make our website as user-friendly as possible. And that's Adam yet again, he's a workhorse. He does all of this for us. So he's doing a great job. So anyway, in closing, we're going to have to leave it there because we're out of time. We breeze through like 29 and a half minutes pretty fast. So you've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy on Think Tech Hawaii and part of the Energy Policy Forum program with Adam Strubeck, who is a graduate assistant to research assistant with the University of Hawaii's Energy Policy Forum. And today we've been talking story about the bipartisan infrastructure law how it will impact Hawaii and you. So we encourage you to visit the Policy Forum website to get the more details. I'm hitting that a lot. And thank you Adam for all your good work. And thanks to our viewers for tuning in. And I'm Mitch Yuan, we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.