 12 noon. It's Sigtek, Hawaii. It's energy 808, the cutting edge. It's Peter Rossig, the spokesman for Hawaiian Electric. Hi, Peter. Thank you for joining us today. Pleasure to see you, Jay. Good to be here. Lots of stuff going on. Let's talk about the Loa United Way first. Hawaiian Electric gave a substantial donation to a Loa United Way. What was that about? Well, we know that there are a lot of our customers who are hurting. We know that because they're unable to pay their utility bills, either their electric bill or their water bill or their gas bill. These are our long-term customers. These are our friends and neighbors. We've been looking for a variety of things to do, but one of the best things we thought was to give some direct money to people who could use it to get started repaying whatever they owe. We made a donation of $2 million. I should say it was the shareholders. This money came out of money that would have been paid to shareholders as dividends. We gave $2 million. We asked the Loa United Way to manage things because we didn't want to be in a situation of saying, you get it, you don't get it, and so forth. They managed that. They took applications and I think we were surprised, pleasantly and unpleasantly surprised, that the whole $2 million was spoken for within about two days. People heard about it. People signed up for it. Clearly, there's a need for this. The fund continues and people are contributing. People contribute individually. We're talking to some other customers about getting them to other companies, I should say. We're talking to them about making a donation and I think we'll see some more money going into that fund. Clearly, there is a real hurt out there as I think we all know from some of the food lines and the unemployment and so forth. Everybody's got to do what they can do and this was what we could do and we'll hope to look for other ways to do that. We know right now there are no disconnections and that continues at least through the end of March. We're not quite sure whether the commission will extend it or not, but we're not interested in disconnected people. We're not going to, when that disconnection ends, we're not the disconnection moratorium. We're not going to rush out and start doing disconnections. We want people to work with us, get online and you'll find a variety of different payment schedules. Are they doing that? Because I can imagine just in the human condition some people would say, I don't have to pay my electric bill so I won't, even though I could. Well, I don't. I think in Hawaii generally, we believe when we talk to other utilities, we have a very high rate of payment. We obviously do get people who bunk out on their bills, especially if they're going to move away or something the last few months, whatever. But in general, we have people in Hawaii have a high sense of paying what they owe. We now have a lot of people who can't do that. I'm sure there are some people who are just figuring, well, if I'm not going to be disconnected, why should I bother paying? And there are many other people who are making a decision every day, food on the table, rent, medicine, and if they have to put off their utility bills, so be it. We are hoping that they will contact us. No shame. No shame to ask. We've made very, tried a big campaign about no shame to ask. And we'll work out a payment plan, even if it's a little bit, even if it stretches out over a year or longer. Who knows? We don't really know the state of the economy. I think we get information about the nature of the COVID. Although it's very interesting, civil beats said they weren't going to carry the reports anymore because it wasn't reliable. That's very interesting. You get these press conferences and you get statements on the national level, but as for the economy itself, metrics, reliable metrics that you can use as planning points, it's hard to find them. And my own theory is that we have yet to reach a tipping point. We don't know what's going to happen with the economy, either in the country or the state. There's been so much damage and permanent closing. And I don't think you know either. So here you are in a situation where you're not able to collect your regular payments, or some of them, maybe many of them. And you still have to do business and generate the electricity and pay your bills. And you don't know when it's coming back or when it comes back, whether it's going to be robust or not. And so it's just looking at it from the outside. You must be taking a loss. And the duration of the loss is indeterminate, pretty much. We can say the fall, but I wouldn't have all that much confidence. Even the White House doesn't have that much confidence in the fall. So the question is, how do you make up for this? You're taking a loss every day, Peter. How do you make up for it? Well, as you know, Jay, a loss is something on the books. We have people that are 30 days behind, 60 days behind, 90 days behind on their payments. And those go to the bottom line as a theoretical asset that eventually we expect some or all of which will be paid. I got to say, considering we are a quasi-public, well, we're a public utility with, in some ways, heavily regulated, but I don't think people need at this stage to worry about Hawaiian Electric going out of business. In fact, we're surprisingly, we're surprising ourselves, I think, that we are not doing worse. We're not, as a company, we will get through. And I don't think you have to worry about us closing up someday like the little mom and pop restaurant on the corner or that kind of thing. That's not the kind of company we are. For sure, there's a huge amount of uncertainty. And I agree with you. I mean, you talk about data, but let's face it, even in normal times, the data collection has a lag factor. And sometimes the federal government will come out six months later and say, well, we have to correct the figures from six months ago, because we have new data. And I'm sure, as you are, I think that the actual death toll is probably higher. We've seen that just the number of deaths, not counting the COVID deaths, is higher than it would have been in the normal year. And we know there are probably more people getting sick, some of whom are not coming forward. We're used to this kind of, I think, I call it kind of fake science, but I mean, we're used to this impression that we know what's happening all around us all the time. We don't. We just have a pretty good idea. And that's what we're planning for, a pretty good idea of what we think is going to happen. Things change. We, as I said, the commission may or may not decide to extend that moratorium on disconnections. So we don't know, we don't know either what is actually happening or what's going to happen. All we can do is plan for what we can plan for the best way we can. And our major concern now, as I said, is not putting anybody in the situation where they need to be disconnected. It seems to me that when you have a crisis like this, an ongoing crisis, I'm talking about a mom and pop, and I'm talking about a big utility, all the same. It wakes you up. It alerts you. And all of a sudden, you know, your sensors about what's going on in the world are activated more than they were before because you know you have to make plans. You know it's dynamic. It's changing. What you know today may not be what, you know, what happens tomorrow and so forth. And it seems to me that the inquiry into the circumstances of our community is sharper. Am I right? It's sharper than it would normally be simply because you don't know. You know there's going to be big changes, but you don't know what. Absolutely. I think, you know, we are so kind of used to the day and day after we forget kind of how vulnerable this whole structure we have, you know, that we've built on can be. And, you know, we're certainly learning every day. One of the things that's come out of this crisis of our customers, excuse me, is that we have formed what we call an LMI advisory council. We have an advisory council, one on each island, of people who are in the business of dealing with low and middle income people. And because we know though, I mean they're the ones that are primarily not being able to make their bills. A lot of people are doing pretty well and they're handling their bills just fine. I think the inequality split in our community has become even more extreme and even more invisible than ever before. So we didn't know, you know, we didn't have a lot of experience. We knew what it was. You know, typically X number of people are 30 days late, X number of people are 60. We don't really know, have a very good vision of that. So Vice President Shelley Kimora and people working with her formed these LMI councils, advisory councils. And they're telling us what's going on, helping to tell us. They're helping to tell us what works and what doesn't work, what's needed and what isn't needed. And a year ago, a year and a half ago, you know, we were kind of blissfully ignorant of a lot of that because we had no real reason. Now we've got to really pay attention because we don't want anybody in a situation where they default because we didn't do all we could to help them. So yeah, we're in a whole new world. There's no question of that. Disconnected in any way with the article in the paper about the, I don't recall, reorganization, but the restatement of roles where Scott's view is taking over in some way. What happened there and is it connected? It's not really connected because it's something, this is kind of the culmination of something that's been going on since Alan Oshima was president maybe even a little earlier. We've been trying to make our company more efficient. And you'll remember back when the PUC did the audit and came out and said, you've got to make this organization more efficient. You've got to kind of tighten your belt. And this was before COVID. If anything, COVID has made it more important. But we've been coming this way for a long time. We call it the one company process. And so we used to have three presidents. We had a president of Hawaii Electric. We had a president of Mallory Electric. And we had a president of Hawaii Island of Hawaii Electric Light Company. And when Jake Nassio retired a few years ago, a very good guy who we all still miss, the two neighbor islands were combined under one president. And that was Sharon Suzuki who was originally the Mallory president. And now that she's retiring, we're kind of completing the process. Everybody is going to be part of one Hawaiian Electric. We don't, you know, obviously, we don't, we recognize Mallory and Hawaii Island are different places. But we're talking about one company, all called Hawaiian Electric. And we're, we are trying in everywhere we can. For example, just, just as, you know, in my department, we have the public relations and communications and community department, all of those which had been separate in each island are coming together under one director. And we'll have people on Mallory and we'll have people on Hawaii Island, but we'll be working as a team. And the same thing goes even for things like running the plants, even though some plants are on Hawaii Island, some plants are on Mallory, one person will be responsible, not necessarily on a walkway, I might add. For example, the guy that runs our entire fleet for all three islands is located in Hilo. And he runs the fleet for everybody, which is something you can do with, with electronics now and with media. Sure, it sounds very sensible to me. Well, it's not only sensible, it's inevitable. The PUC told us we had to do it. We knew we had to do it. And, you know, we can argue about whether this, we should save a buck here or a buck there, but we can't continue to operate the way we operated before. We're still growing the company because we still have demands on us and we still have, you know, work we have to do, but we've got to just be very much smarter. Now, you know, before people were hired kind of, you know, I don't want to say willy-nilly, but I would say, you know, a lot of different people have the ability to authorize a hiring. Now everything, all three companies, all three islands, all five islands actually, County Molokai and La Natia, you know, if there's going to be a hiring, if somebody retires or resigns, it goes up to the committee and one central committee says, you know, need this person, find somebody else to do it, or we will hire somebody. And it's all being very carefully monitored. We're not going to, we're not going to leave, you know, vital positions empty, but we're not going to just kind of automatically say, well, we had somebody doing that before, we'll have somebody doing it again. We'll say, what were they doing? Who can do it? Can we get somebody, you know, and there again, there's somebody, one of the people on Maui Island is really the kind of financial director for, you know, for across the islands. No reason has to be on Oahu. I think that's important. I know neighbor island people can get a little sensitive, but I think rightfully sensitive. Oh yeah, Oahu is going to make all the decisions, but that's not the case. We have people on Maui and we have people on Hawaii Island who are making decisions and exercising leadership for the whole company. Obviously, you know, the big dog is here on Oahu, no question about that, but there are plenty of good people and plenty of people who can make decisions across all companies across all islands. I think that's great Peter. It's the future. It's inevitable, I think, but we're, and again, COVID has certainly accelerated that or put us in a position where, you know, we do have to watch every penny very carefully because we don't want to be in a situation where, you know, we can't get what we need to have custom, we need to have people willing to buy our stock so that we can get the money to do the repairs and do the additions. We have to have a good stock showing. We have to pay a good dividend and fortunately we have people at HCI who manage that, but we can't let the company somehow slide because we're, oh well, it's COVID. Are you doing more Zoom management across the islands? Are you spending more time on Zoom? Absolutely, but again, it was something that started before COVID because we were doing this one company thing. We already had a good deal of telecommunications going on, meetings that were happening on your Webex or whatever we would use it. The difference is now for, since about last March, just about half of our employees are at home. So whereas before, you might go into a big conference room and, you know, 20 people would sit in a conference room in Oahu and five people would sit in a conference room on Maori and five people would sit in the conference room on the big island. Now we're all coming together from our various homes and almost no one goes into the office except, you know, to pick up the mail and sign some, sign some paychecks, I hope. So, you know, the, what we started, and fortunately we didn't have to start from scratch, but what started as telemeetings of groups of people in the offices on each island have now become telemeetings and Zoom and Webex and so forth. I mean, I just, I've had two, before I had the pleasure of talking to you, I was on two other Zoom meetings, Webex meetings this morning, Monday morning, everybody's trying to figure out what we got to do this week and we've got to make plans for the next month and so forth. So these things are likely to continue after we get out of the woods on COVID. Absolutely. Because they're more efficient. They're efficient that, you know, they're not 100% pleasant. It's not like being in a room with somebody because, you know, I can't look to my right and snicker with somebody when, you know, I can't pass a note to the guy sitting to my left and saying, who is this idiot that's talking to us? But on the other hand, we're, you know, we look at each other and we see each other and there are more and more ways to interact. I don't think whatever happens, I don't think everybody's going to go back to work in an office one day. I don't want to, frankly, I don't want to go back to that cubicle. I'm very happy working from home. I think I'm efficient. I get it done. And, you know, just between the two of us, while I'm waiting for somebody to give me what I need, if I'm in the office, I've got to be busy and, you know, if I'm at home and I give somebody a document and say, well, you edit this for me, and they'll say, yeah, I'll get back to you in an hour. Well, I can do something else. And, you know, very frankly, people are taking care of family, people are taking care of kids. And I don't think we're going to all go back to work one day. And it's a better life. And it's also, you know, more efficient, obviously, for business. Let me go to a big news event I want to ask you about. And that is, you know, we had this storm, which was somewhat predictable, maybe somewhat not predictable, in Texas. And we've had, you know, crises, well, an electrical generation crisis, grid crises in Texas and also in California. And do you understand, from the utility point of view, what has happened in Texas, that they should have this crisis? Well, I think I understand part of it. And that is, like Hawaii, Texas has their entire grid system contained within their state. And we have no choice. We're a bunch of islands out in the middle of the Pacific. So we're not connected to any other utility. We're all within the state. But they made a choice. And they made a choice to keep virtually all of, I think, about 90% of all the circuits, all the grids in Texas are contained within the state. So there is no interstate commerce. They don't have to deal with the federal government. And, you know, that was a big claim of bragging. And, you know, we're, we'll mess with Texas, you know, you're familiar with the attitude. And unfortunately, they also completely deregulated to the point that there is no virtually no control over companies, what they charge and so forth. Meanwhile, they have Texas is where the Wheeler doctrine was, was organized. Remember that one? Yeah, so there, there are companies that can sell directly to customers and ignore the grid or use the grid and pay something for it. Meanwhile, they have a energy, you know, they have an energy economy, but a lot of that is exported out of the state. So they send natural gas out of the state with no controls, no way of saying, you got to take care of our whole our of our Texas customers first. So the result is, and they had 10 years ago, they had a not quite so severe, but they had a severe cold snap and they had a lot of outages and a lot of problems. And the, the federal government and people within Texas said, you know, we've got to put some heaters on these natural gas pipelines, because they freeze up. And Texas ignored it. They didn't do that. And now today, they're suffering the consequences of that here in Hawaii. You know, if we have a we have our share of natural disasters here, as you know, we have hurricanes, we have earthquakes, we have tsunami. But when we have an experience, we get right in there and say, what happened? And how can we fix it? So the next time, it's not so severe. So, you know, a couple of years ago, well, 2014, actually, Hurricane Izel came along, wiped out about half the the electricity service on Hawaii Island. And first of all, we got it back much more quickly than anybody could imagine, because we've been preparing for it, we've been training for it. And secondly, we learned a lot. And now one of the things we talk about all the time, we talk about renewable energy, of course, we talk about reliability, but we also talk about resilience. And resilience means that you've got a tougher, stronger grid. And it's able to withstand these increasingly wet storms, increasingly windy weather, these hurricanes we're getting. And when it's, and if the power does go down, and it will go down, we're able to recover it more quickly. So we've made resilience a watchword. Texas doesn't seem to have been concerned about that. And now, you know, dozens are dead. The economy's totally disrupted. People are living in homes where they, you know, that are in shambles. It's a tragedy. It's a human tragedy, first and foremost. I talk about, you know, the benefits of having an interconnected grid. I can't help but remember the day, and it was what, 10 or 15 years ago, when we were all talking about interconnecting the island. And one of the, I mean, there were various elements pro and con about that, as we know. But one of the elements to me is that an interconnection among the islands of Hawaii would make the state in general more resilient. Am I right? Well, it could offer some opportunities for sure. You know, there's a lot of renewable energy on the neighbor islands, but there's not a lot of demand for it. Hawaii Island probably has more geothermal resources. But and Maui may even have some geothermal resources. It's obviously easier to locate a wind farm on Hawaii Island than Maui Island that it is here on Oahu. So yeah, there is definitely a potential. The problem was and is that it's very expensive to interconnect islands across very, very windy and stormy and violent straits as we have between the islands here. And, you know, nothing is perfect. And the Northeast, you'll remember a few years ago, a small problem that caused an outage. The outage turned into a domino and the entire Northeast 50 million people, I think I forget the numbers, were out without power. So that's the downside of interconnection. No question. It's not purely one thing or the other. But in general, across the continental United States, people have seen the value of interconnection because if you have enough, if you don't have enough power one day, by interconnections, you can bring power from other states. And if you have too much power for whatever reason, you can sell to other states and you can support, you know, people can plan their, for example, they can plan their maintenance knowing that even though a major power plant on their on their grid is going to be down, they have a resource that can replace that. So that overall there are certainly more advantages to an interconnection. But Texas was, you know, Texas first of all thought they were big enough that they were, and you know, there are a lot of, that's a fairly large grid, but they may, mainly they didn't want to have the federal government telling them what they had to do. And the problem is that, you know, this teaches us Texas, I hope teaches us something. And the magic word is infrastructure that you, you know, Spencer Abram at the time of that northeast power failure a few years ago, was the secretary of energy. And I remember him saying, it grills into my head, I remember him saying, hey, you know, we put this grid together 20, 30 years ago, and we have really not updated it in the Northeast. And you have to update your infrastructure with the latest technology, and make sure that it works against the latest threats. And if you don't do that, you get Texas. So I think it's a lesson to everyone about infrastructure is inherent in sustainability and resilience. Right, absolutely. And I think, you know, there's another one other aspect I should mention in Texas, they chiefly have problems with generation. Their small number of their wind turbines were not we're out of service, not a big, you know, wind turbines in the winter don't generate that much anyway. So, but mostly natural gas was frozen in the pipelines and they couldn't generate the electricity. And, you know, the storm certainly affected the grid to a certain extent, but the wires were not their main problem here in Hawaii, our generation is pretty solid. We built our power plants in such a way that they're, by and large, they do a good job. But we have winds, we have storms, and we have, you know, as fast as we can upgrade the wires, we still are, you know, have a way to go. And there's no way you can completely upgrade to prevent any kind of a storm that's going to come along. So here in Hawaii, when we have problems, it tends to be problems of distribution, getting the electricity from the generation out to the customer. In Texas, they primarily had a generation problem, because they'd be regulated and they, you know, you're hearing about these people getting, you know, I mean, the $200,000 electric bill supposedly a mistake, but there are people who are getting bills of $10,000, $17,000, because they don't have a regulated system. We couldn't, you know, we don't do that, we couldn't do that, because our system is pretty tightly regulated. And we don't, we can't just make a profit, you know, willy-nilly, we have to take into account the customer. But they, you know, they took that away in, this goes back, I think, in Texas to the Enron days, you know, they opened up the system and they didn't regulate it. And the result now is, amazingly, if you didn't lose power in Texas, you're going to get a $17,000 bill. Yeah, I saw that in the newspaper, yeah. You know, I hope they fix that, but can you imagine, you know, your house is in an uninhabitable, you don't have any water, you don't have any heat, you don't have it, and all of a sudden you open the mail and you get a $17,000 bill, you know, I mean, nobody should have to go through that. That's not, that's humane. It reminds me of this guy who had COVID and he really had a bad case of COVID and he was in the hospital for X number of weeks and he gets a bill from the hospital for $4 million. That can make you sick well over again. Well, we certainly tap your will to live, I'll tell you that. Yeah, I mean, that's just, that's just crazy. So anyway, Texas, let's hope for the people who live in Texas, you know, for the everyday people, not the hotshot politicians and not the energy kingpins, but the everyday people who go to work and try to make a life. Let's hope that things get fixed for them so that the next time this happens, which it will, guaranteed that they don't, they're better prepared and they don't suffer so much. They've got to learn and the country has to learn. You know, there are, I'm sure there are other, you know, such incidents waiting to happen, but we have a few minutes left Peter, and I want to talk about RPS. Okay. You got some numbers on RPS, which is what is it? The renewable energy used by customers as a percentage of total utility sales. Right. You're pretty good right now and you made a report about it. I guess it was a press release. Can you talk about that, about how well we're doing on RPS? Sure. You know, the state has an RPS renewable energy mandate and requirement that we, by the end of 2020, the end of last year, we needed to reach 30%. And when we finally added up the numbers we found we reached 35%, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. I mean, that's really, we were a little surprised ourselves, even without COVID, had there been no, had there been no COVID, which resulted in some decline of energy use, we would have been a 32%. So we beat the mandate, we beat the requirement and we're very, very proud of that. We, you know, here on Oahu we're at about 31%, which is quite amazing because Oahu is energy challenged in terms of renewable energy. On Maui they hit 51%, which is the first time anybody, Maui County has gone over 50%. So of all the electricity used by all the customers on Maui Island, over half of that came from renewable sources from wind, from biofuels, and so forth. And then on Hawaii Island, they were at 43%. And that was without Pune Geothermal, no Pune Geothermal till about last November, I think that October, November, they started generating from there again. So even without having their primary renewable resource, their wind and their solar, you know, their biofuels and got them to, to an incredible 43%. So, you know, I think, you know, we're justifiably proud about it and we're bragging about it. But I gotta say, this is an accomplishment of a lot of people who put solar on their roof. This is an accomplishment of a lot of people who said, I'm going to make a commitment to Hawaii Island, I'm going to build a wind farm, I'm going to build a solar farm, I'm going to come to Hawaii, even though they say it's a bad place to do that. I'm going to come there, I'm going to make an investment and I'm going to contribute to this. So as much as it's Hawaiian Electric, which gets to kind of claim, you know, the good news and we're glad to be out there shouting about it, this is really a triumph of a lot, a lot of people. We have something like 80,000 plus people, customers across our five islands, put solar on their roof. That's just incredible. Is this a good time to do that Peter? Yeah, it's a great time. As a matter of fact, you know, we thought, again, going back a year, we were all kind of worried, especially the solar industry. They were worried that, you know, all of a sudden their business would dry up and it would be awful. So, we've gone quite the other way. We had a, in 2020, we had a 55% increase in solar systems accepted on our grids, something like 6,000 plus, because people kind of looked around and the people are going to afford it and who have a single family home and they're spending a lot more time there. And they looked around and they said, this would be a good time to put solar on our roof. And we're doing everything we can to make that go forward. We just launched what we call Quick Connect, which means it's going back to the old days, really, in the old days, 10, 12 years ago, you put a solar system on your roof and then you got around and set an application to Hawaiian Electric. So, you got approval and we knew we needed to know that it's out there and so forth. We had to stop that because it was getting out of hand and, you know, we had a very, very rapid and very dramatic increase. But now we're going back to that. If you meet certain qualifications, and you can put a solar system on your roof, if you're on the kind of a circuit that has capacity, you can go up to 25kW solar system and file your application later. If you're not on a circuit that has a lot of capacity, you can still put on solar up to 100 kilowatts, but you have to turn it on so it doesn't export, doesn't send any power into our system. But you can take care of your own power and you can start, as soon as that system is ready, you can start saving money because your electric bill is going to go down. And, you know, we're in the only business I know where we encourage people, you know, not to buy the product from us, but, you know, make your own. I don't think, I never hear Zippy saying, you know, eat less chili. But, you know, we say to you, if you can generate power on your roof, and we're going to have other programs if you can't, they can still participate in, if you can generate power on your roof, go for it. You know, it is a unique, you know, it's we're a regulated utility, as I said before, we're not going out of business. So it's not crazy, just sounds crazy. But we're the only company I know of who will encourage you. First of all, we'll just tell you, you know, get a better refrigerator so you're not using so much of our electricity. Get a better stove, get a better air conditioner. Don't leave your lights on overnight. We're the only company I know that says use less of our products. And, you know, so, I mean, maybe healthcare, they say, you know, don't get sick. But so, you know, it's really a great sign of things when we hit 35% renewable energy. And we have to take stock, you know, as you go forward, there are targets to be made. There are, you know, there are events and dynamics that will happen in COVID or beyond COVID. And I hope that you and I can get together again, Peter, and keep tracking on these same issues. Always glad to talk to you, Jay, you know, you're doing a, as I've said to you before, you know, a long time ago, I sent you a white hat, because I think you're, you're the guy that's doing a lot of good for this community and you and, you know, you're not alone, but you and Civil Beat and the newspaper and the television stations, the only way, especially now that we're kind of locked down and in our homes, you know, we got to still keep track of the general welfare and what's going on in our community. And we all have decisions to make, you know, we don't want to leave these decisions to, you know, whoever to the state or city government, we have to make our own decision. We have to all be part of it. And the only way we can do that is that we know what, what's going on. You are a very big part of that, especially in the energy realm, but in others as well. And, you know, just the fact that we're, we have to do it over Zoom instead of sitting around in the coffee shop is unfortunate, but it's a reality and we'll get through it. Thank you, Peter. Peter Ross, a spokesman for Hawaiian Electric. Thank you so much. Pleasure. Good to see you, Jay. Take care.