 Noon Tide from Sunny Honolulu. This is Howard Wigg, Think Tech, Hawaii, cold green. We have met climate change head on or it has met us head on with a horrible punch to the island of Maui. And I think Jeff McElina and I are both thankful that the phrase climate change keeps recurring over and over as this event is covered worldwide. And we mourn our friends and neighbors on Maui. So yesterday, the honorable, famous Jeff McElina, many of you know him from Sierra Club and many, many other environmental affiliations. He is now executive director of the Climate Coalition of the Hawaii Executive Collaborative. Welcome again, Jeff. It's been a long time since we've seen one another. So again, by telling us, what is the Hawaii Executive Collaborative? Thanks, Howard. Thanks for having me on. I just wanna give a quick shout out to you. You are one of those unsung heroes. You've been working at the energy office for I don't know how many decades now. A lot of just important work that people don't often see and that's with doing a building code and efficiency work and it's so critical. So thank you for all your service. So you asked about the Hawaii Executive Collaborative's Climate Coalition. This is a fairly new organization. The Executive Collaborative has been around for decades. But what we're doing with the Climate Coalition and we've been at it for about a year is trying to have a new conversation around climate, particularly for Hawaii's business leaders and organization. In my experience, there's been maybe an unfortunate pattern of advocates wanting to push something at the legislature or otherwise. And sometimes we hit friction with some folks who aren't coming along necessarily with some of the changes necessary. So what we're hoping to do is to change that conversation and engage the business community and other organizations in what does it look like to operate in this new climate era that we're in? How do you be good corporate and organizational citizens in Hawaii given what we know now about climate? And so we're tackling this challenge in two ways. One, working with organizations to reduce their carbon footprint and set goals. So very tangible, near-term and long-term goals to eliminate their carbon footprint. And then importantly, the second part is working collectively on our systemic challenge of just changing how we do business in Hawaii that's working at the policy side, trying to bring as much federal funds into Hawaii, but really just create a different conversation around climate change and how we are in Hawaii. And do you do that primarily through a series of meetings? Zoom meetings, in-person meetings, or what is your mechanism there? It's been a bit of both. So for example, during the last legislative session, we had bi-weekly meetings. We get about 25 to 30 organizations participate. We quickly go over kind of priority, climate and energy legislation, but we decided to kind of converge on a couple of bills. One of them was an appropriation for Hawaii's Green Bank, or what's known as the GEMS program, to provide low interest loans for largely low-income families. And that was a success. So we're happy to see that pass and a 50 million went to the Green Bank, which will hopefully leverage some federal funds to do even more good to get solar on folks who otherwise couldn't participate in clean energy. So we see that as sort of a sweet spot. Can we identify policies that we can actually influence and that are high impact? What was particularly exciting to me is when we worked on this in subpoena testimony, we had support from groups like some familiar names, Zippies, Young Brothers, Alexander and Baldwin, companies you might associate with clean energy or climate, but they expressed support for this legislation. And we really hope to channel that and get more of the support in, because again, this is how we need to behave in 2023, knowing what we know about climate. And economic benefits, quite an outside from the climate is number one, more clean energy. We have the more dollars stay in Hawaii and we are promoting good paying jobs. Exactly. And critically helping again, who otherwise wouldn't be participating. And that's such a, I think such an important Hawaii value that we all go together on our journey to 100% clean energy. So yeah, those are some of the things that we're looking at. And then I think going into the next session, particularly with the horrific just disaster in Maui, looking at resilience and adaptation and how can we support policies and programs to really increase our resilience in Hawaii? So we can, we know what's coming. I mean, we need to do our part on reducing emissions and then let's strengthen Hawaii so we can work through these changes that are coming. Yeah, part of the job I do is serve as chair of the state building code council, which governs all the building codes. And we are certainly looking at strengthening both homes and businesses in new construction and in renovation. For one thing now making them not totally fireproof but much more fire resistant. I understand that on the coast of Lahina, there's a home there that's virtually intact. What was going on with that one? We don't know yet. But that's what we need to move for toward and doing this in a cost effective way. Also, you don't have to add $20,000, $30,000 to a cost of a home in order to make it resilient. Yeah, and then along the same lines is looking at the economics because something that I know you've struggled with, we've struggled with is sometimes these things cost a little bit more up front but they save so much month after month in utility bills, maybe in reduced insurance needs and of course in kind of disaster. So how do we account for the value upfront? And so it doesn't just look like a loser to a new homeowner or renter. So I think that's where policy plays a role but also all the funding available from the federal government now to help maybe buy down some of those higher cost items. Absolutely and I'm glad you use the word insurance because you may be aware that State Farm has pulled up in Florida and pulled out of California. And all of us, even if we're not in flood prone flood prone or fire prone areas, we're gonna get hit with insurance increases. Good friend of mine is an insurance executive and he just shakes his head when he thinks about this. It's scary, yeah. But on the other hand, when we come up for legislature or before the city council, we can bring the insurance people with us now. Not another coalition. Yeah, that's a great idea. Because again, we're all in this together and we just have to behave differently now that we know what we know. Yeah, I was kind of lamenting the beautiful winter we had and the beautiful weather we've had before that and then we had a very nice spring and the summer is actually mild, very mild. We've just barely, barely touched beyond 90 degrees and then we compare that to a place like Texas, my goodness. Yeah. So I was saying, we haven't been hit in the face with climate change, but wow, folks on Maui, they sure think differently now. So much stuff going on there. So hard to see, because I think you're right. We would, you know, we saw the smoke that was happening on the East Coast and we saw the storms and the floods and, you know, I think a lot of us felt like, well, that's unfortunate. That's over there. Good thing we're in Hawaii, but you're right. Yeah, a terrible pick-up call. And the economic impact on this island, we haven't even really thought hard about that yet. It's gonna be tremendous. Yeah. Yeah. So sad. So you mentioned that there were two pieces of legislation that you got through past session. You remember what the second one was that? Unfortunately, only one advanced and that was the important bank. The other one was in regards to permitting for solar. So it's been a frustration to many, obviously permitting is always a challenge, but particularly for something like putting, you know, solar on top of a rooftop, we do have a pretty rigorous process and there are tools now to streamline that process. And that's what this regular measure was gonna do is employ those tools that would make it easier for both, you know, the inspector side and the permitting side and also for homeowners and businesses, also raising the threshold to trigger that permitting. Because again, we have over 100,000 rooftops that have solar. We know how to do this. These are licensed contractors doing this work and we need to do more of it. So let's break down any barriers that prevent folks from doing that, attacking it on the financing side with things like the green bank, leveraging as much federal funding to help with this. And then just the nuts and bolts permitting, let's make that as easy as possible. So we can just, you know, add renewables at the speed and scale that we need to in Hawaii. And we need that speed and scale. And I know that DPP is working really, really hard on this issue. And we secured a federal grant which we used to hire a consultant to work directly with DPP on these issues. Great. Yeah. And I hear from industry that in many, many cases solar applications are going through just like that. Oh, good. Okay. And then the next step after that is called the grid interactive. I don't know if you've thought about that at all because we're, you know, the power plant used to be those central things out on the Waianae coast. And now the power plant is a form of 100,000 different units and the solar farms and the wind farms. And we have to connect all of those. And that is going to be a great growth industry involving some really, really bright people. This is electrical engineering on steroids. Yeah. Such an exciting future. And, you know, we're talking about resilience. As you, as we have 100,000 power plants on top of rooftop statewide can really strengthen our ability to withstand disasters and bounce back better. But you're right. What a cool opportunity with, you know, now that so many folks have batteries, we have distributed solar and now electric vehicles too. I mean, they should be playing a large role in helping to store, smooth out the fluctuations on the power grid. And I don't think folks necessarily realize just how big of a change this is, you know, moving from that centralized model to a distributed model, but to think about vehicles that are currently on Hawaii's roads that can power your home for days if not weeks. It's just, yeah. And Hawaii Electric is moving toward entering into agreement with the EV owners saying, can we temporarily or just for 15 minutes or 30 minutes use your battery as a mini power plant when we need some extra juice? Yeah. And if the EV owner signs off on that, that's what voluntary, boom, he gets a discounted rate for his electricity. That's great. That's exactly how we should be looking. I think some folks think, oh, electric vehicles, they're gonna increase load, they're gonna require them to use. And that's obviously true, but it's a different kind of electricity use. And it's one that can be managed and ultimately be an asset. So that's how we should view this. We have a bunch of assets on wheels. Gas cars were kind of a one-way sort of thing. You put gas in them and you made carbon dioxide, but now we have a vehicle that essentially gets cleaner by the day too as our energy grid adds more renewable energy to it. So just such an exciting future. And it's good to see that we're making decent progress on electric vehicles, but it's still just shy of 3% of overall vehicles. So we have a long, long way to go. Long way to go. And hastening that change is the fact that Hawaiian Electric is moving towards a time of day pricing where we get on a nice sunny day like today, we have much, much, much too much renewable energy being produced. So now we are storing the heck out of it at the home level, at the wrench level and using it only when we need it. We have something called the evening peak where everybody comes home from school and all the tourists come in from the beaches and so forth and turn on everything in the hotels and we have this great big surge of need for electricity, boom, all that stored up electricity in the middle of the day can feed that. Yeah, so this is gonna be a great experiment that Hawaiian Electric is rolling out with these differentiated rates depending on the time of day. And to your point, it sort of breaks the myth that every electron is valued equally when it's not. I mean, it depends. It's produced where it's produced, how it's produced. And my personal feeling is we should value it not as that bulk commodity, but as a special, each electron is valued differently and should be priced appropriately. It's difficult though. This is one of those difficult changes. Some things are fairly easy as we make this transition. This is one that's gonna be challenging to navigate because there's some folks who are gonna have a hard time making shifts to their energy use. So any, you can provide them to make sure it's seamless and then tools to help them move their load to the lowest cost time. But that is important to help people. Yeah, well, just recognize the value and recognize the times when our electricity is lowest carbon. It's gonna take a great big educational effort too. Just for instance, with this time of day pricing, people can set their dishwasher, their clothes washer and their dryers all to come on in the middle of the day, not simultaneously, but one, two, three, save space an hour apart and suck up that cheap electrical energy right there and I've seen one figure, certainly don't wanna be quoted on it at 19 cents a kilowatt hour in the middle of the day, boom, you shifted that evening peak. Let's try 69 cents a kilowatt hour. Now that needs to be accompanied by a huge educational effort, but there's something called timers. You time all these devices to go on in the middle of the day and therefore you don't contribute to the evening peak. Ultimately is gonna make our electricity a lot cheaper too. Yeah, and you're right, it's gonna take a lot of education and then make sure folks have those tools too. So they can't not suffer from the super high rates. And then that is gonna be technology. I mean, we've seen so much storage added to the grid, both in terms of residential business batteries as well as large scale batteries. And then we might see some other storage technologies come to market that will help really just even out when we have renewable energy, when we need to store it for times when we don't have the sun and the wind. So yeah, a lot of exciting changes ahead. Have you talked with the coalition about the power of energy efficiency? Yeah, so that's coming up in terms of as these organizations take their initial sort of carbon inventory and they look at opportunities to reduce their carbon footprint. Efficiency is always top of the list. So we have a partnership with Hawaii Energy and then with the organization called the EIC which Ryan Kealoha is working with now of energy efficiency third party. So helping organizations look at all the opportunities that they can reduce their energy use or shift it. And then looking at opportunities on top of that to add renewable energy like solar and then even going into their fleets and how they can reduce their transportation footprint. So I think that the important part of this process is you can only manage what you measure. So having the organizations do that carbon footprint actually quantify it and then set targets. And these will be public. So there's a little bit of pure pressure going on and hopefully establishing some social norms about what are the appropriate targets for local organizations? And maybe a little competition too. So we have banks looking at their competitors and how are they doing in terms of their carbon footprint folks in the visitor industry as well. But we think Hawaii is the perfect place for this sort of initiative because it's small enough where we have those relationships and that trust among each other and can kind of establish new norms about how we behave within our climate era here. I'll just give the best example of energy efficiency. Some of us are old enough to remember the incandescent lamp. That's that hair shape thing that got hotter than blazes. I once measured a 100 watt incandescent at 365 degrees Fahrenheit, literally hot enough to set a fire. And then we shifted to the screw in LEDs, not LEDs, the CFL compact fluorescent lamps. And now we're at the LED source. The incandescent's got 15 lumens per watt. The CFL's about 45 lumens per watt. Now, this is something I track. We're up at average 90 lumens per watt, equivalent to miles per gallon for your typical LED that you buy off the shelf. And that produces virtually no heat. I mean, you can put your hand on it and there's some heat at the base, but that's it. I know you used to do a great demonstration. You'd put a sock on the earth or something and it would, you just keep talking, but then you saw it start smoking. Yeah, and people would panic. Yeah. Yeah, those were kind of space heaters first and lights second. Precisely, yeah. But hey, we just passed the, I think it was a few weeks back, the final incandescent phase out, right? And so the last shelves and yeah, again, a great example of sort of technology moving so quickly. And they are, I mean, almost indistinguishable from the light that people kind of grew up with. So, you know, we have every other, as you know, from air conditioning, that has to be a revolution and how we produce to transportation and each part of our energy system from top to bottom really has to be reformed. Yeah, Honolulu just passed, as you mentioned, the bill for its new energy efficiency building code. And we got into that, the definition of efficient lights, which are required 70 lumens per watt. A CFL cannot reach 70 lumens per watt. So we have effectively phased out CFLs from Honolulu and refrigerators with all the bells and whistles that new refrigerators have. Tremendously more efficient than older refrigerators. Yeah. So you're getting comfort, value, higher lifestyle at a vastly reduced energy use. Yeah, yeah. What about transportation? Therefore, you guys looking at transportation if you can see it all there? We will be and we have to be because that is our single biggest contributor to climate change in Hawaii. And it's the trickiest one. You know, I was giving a presentation a couple of weeks ago and someone asked, you know, it seems like photovoltaic PV adoption has gone fairly quickly, but EV adoption isn't quite as quick. And I think there's a number of reasons for that. One of them being some of the barriers such as charging infrastructure that exists for electric vehicles. But there's also a different relationship. You know, if you have a home and you put photovoltaic on your roof, everything kind of stays the same. Like electricity is electricity. Your refrigerator works the same. You know, it's not a big change except your bill goes down. With an electric vehicle, I mean, there's a lot of, there's attachment to vehicles. You know, people name their vehicles. It's a sort of self identity. So it's a different sort of conversation about switching to electric. And sometimes a lifestyle change as well. So we have so much work to do on that front because we are honestly, we're among the worst in the world when it comes to our carbon footprint. And we like to think that, you know, why so beautiful and we're making progress and we are, but we still are among the worst. Probably, you know, last calculation was 94% is where we are per capita for greenhouse gas emissions compared to the rest of the world per capita. So a lot of that's due to our location and we have to fly here. So exciting to see some of the progress on sustainable aviation fuels and some local companies that are looking at either using waste or actual carbon capture to make jet fuel that's sustainable. And then some commitments from local companies, Hawaiian, Alaska and others to use less carbon intensive fuels. Yeah. And we're getting biofuel powered buses and we just launched hydrogen buses. Yes. And then the electrics means great to see the electric buses, tourism and city buses on our streets. And somebody proposed to me in our final couple of minutes that all we have to do is raise the price of gasoline and buy $2 a gallon and commensurately upscale the other fossil fuels and turn a lot of that money into free bus rides for everybody and subsidizing electric vehicles up one side and down the other. That's all we need to do, it's simple. That's what life's like. I'm with you. 100%. And for years we pushed a policy to legislature that was called the fee bait which essentially would have a higher fee on gasoline powered luxury vehicles and then use the funds collected to subsidize more affordable electric vehicles. It used to be called Hummer's pay for hybrids but now it's, you know, Porsches pay for, you pick electric vehicles. But something like that, I mean, we do need these incentives because thinking about vehicles that are purchased today and the number one selling vehicle in Hawaii is the Toyota Tacoma, they're gonna be on our streets for 10, 20 years. We just can't do that. I mean, we can't do that with what we know now about climate. Yep, slightly daunting task. We've got about one minute, Jeff. Do you want to send some parting words our way? Oh, you have a program, don't you? Sure. Yeah, what is that all about? Quickly, it's on K-1 too, it's called Empowered Hawaii and we share some of these positive stories of our progress toward a more sustainable future. It airs at 9.30 on the fourth Tuesday of the month. K-1 too, it's also online. But if we do have a second, I'll just share that, you know, it's daunting what we face but the good news is if we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, the atmosphere will recover, our temperatures will come down, the oceans will recover. This isn't a lost cause. We can still do this in Hawaii in the lead. Yep, Hawaii in the lead and Mother Nature is very, very resilient. So that brings us to a close, Jeff. Make kalina. So good to see you again and all the best in your new ventures. And this is Think Tech Hawaii code green, Howard Wigg. See you next time. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.