 And OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things that matter to tech and to Hawaii. I'm Marianne Sasaki. And I'm Elise Anderson. In our show this time, we'll cover the May membership meeting of the Energy Policy Forum. The members of the forum came to discuss the future of energy in our state at the Lawniakea YWCA. The forum is the only collaborative organization dedicated to the greater good. It began as an experiment in collaboration 14 years ago and tries hard to rise above vested interest in politics. The general membership of the forum meets twice a year. The forum also presents Clean Energy Day each summer and a legislative briefing in January before the session opens. This year it's especially important that the forum come together. There are so many unresolved questions in energy, so many leaders without followers, so many followers without leaders. It all needs alignment. After all, moving to clean energy involves huge stakes and huge challenges. How in the world are we going to get to 100% renewables by 2045? Is that really doable or is it just pie in the sky? It's a biblical test. Energy is the biggest, most profound initiative the state has ever had. It will remake our society one way or the other. Can we afford to give it anything less than the full Monty? That's why the forum presented a slate of speakers to think big and set the stage for a discussion among its members, to rethink our progress to date and to forge navigable pathways to get to our goals. We want to come together, settle on and advocate for the things that we the state should do to meet the interim goals of 2030 and our 100% goal by 2045 in both electricity and transportation. The forum has a critical role in finding a way to make those miracles happen. For us and for our children's children, without confusion, controversy or contention, as we so often have in Hawaii, but rather with aloha and determination as soon as possible. The forum asked its members to dedicate themselves to this task. To find five-year action points and determine how the forum members can facilitate those actions over the next six months. This was a powerful array of members and speakers, no pun intended. After opening remarks by the two co-chairs of the forum, Sharon Moriwaki and Mike Hamnett, we heard from Senator Lorraine Inouye, chair of the Senate Energy Committee. We want to look at, assess where we are now in our clean energy journey and where we want to be in the future. I'd like us to kind of sit back and appreciate each other for being here and being here for the day because it is a very important day for us as we plan forward. As many of you who followed Senate Bill 2738 that would adjust the current renewable solar tax credit, to my disappointment of its failure to pass as this would have addressed some incentive for solar energy storage as well. This will be my highest priority in the upcoming session to reintroduce this bill and with your help on suggestions for revisions if needed. However, there are some good things that happened as well. Two measures, two pieces of measures that got passed and funded is SB 2652 that establishes the renewable fuels production tax credit and the $1.25 million to DBED for plans and designs of an electrolysis, hydrogen and production storage and dispensing facility. So DBED has some work cut out for them. Then, Sheldon Kimber spoke. He is an energy developer and entrepreneur. In his view, self-interest is necessary for the economy, but he also feels we need to work hard to achieve public confidence and the common good. Amen to that. Even if you give lithium ion batteries a four or five-fold increase in performance and energy density and massive having or quartering of the price per kilowatt hour, in addition to giving solar power massive increases in the area efficiency and the power efficiency of the panels, you still wind up with a situation where only a very few small pieces of the nation can be served by DG solar. And then when you add in roofs orientation, roof quality, it just goes down and down. And yet, this is really what we hear ourselves talking about in the media. Most of the time when it comes to solar, solar cities, sunruns, longevity, these are the sort of darling solar stocks. So the basic math comes down to, say, Minnesota in the middle of winter. If you want to provide five-nines reliability, 99.999% of the time, uptime, and truly get someone off the grid, you basically have to build them a new garage in their backyard and fill it to the brim with lithium ion batteries because the sun isn't going to shine for most of that worst January on record. And you're going to have to basically run that entire house on battery power for 30 days or more. Longtime forum member and energy regulatory expert, Carl Friedman, spoke about the metrics of clean energy. The forum has been collecting and analyzing the data that defines our progress. Carl is the keeper of that data, and he could put things in perspective. First, I'm going to focus a little on electricity and a little on transportation because those are our topics today. So this is a chart you may have seen in various forms, but this is our attainment of the 15% RPS standard. So this is electricity. It's a fraction of renewable generation as a fraction of central utility sales. And as you see, the state has surpassed the 15% target, and all of the individual islands have also surpassed the target on their own. Another way to look at this is in quantities. And so this is in terms of kilowatt hours. And we have the fossil fuel generation is going down. Renewable generation is an increasing wedge and energy efficiency attained through the programs of the utilities, the independent Hawaii Energy utility-funded energy efficiency programs, and some of the state programs is also an increasing wedge. Our next speaker, Les Tanayama, is an electrical engineer. He's a passionate advocate for energy and energy education. He is interested in building a workforce and maintaining the infrastructure we will need to have a clean energy future. And the first thing I want to address is the 100% RPS that we're trying to get by 2045. I know it's a utility direction and directive, but here we are. I was very happy by both of these people recognizing efficiency is very important. One of the things that I think Sharon can remember that I mentioned to her is, by the way, equipment, vehicles, they don't use energy. People do. So we got to adjust these attitudes on how we use energy. And that's why I'm here today. She wanted me to take that little angle and see where we go with this. So I always believe and I have always purported that energy efficiency shall come first before renewability. We also got to consider conservation. And here I'd like to take a little case in point that Sharon resides at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, at Saunders Hall. Saunders Hall was, if you're familiar with the building, also named the Sustainability Building or Sustainability Saunders, and they achieve remarkable energy efficiency metric. The group of speakers that followed were asked, what is the most important contribution their organizations have made to meeting our energy goals? What is the most important action we need to take in the next five years? Who should take that action? And what is the most difficult challenge we will face along the way? And indeed, some of them did answer those questions. From the electrical sector, we had Mark Glick, Administrator of the Hawaii State Energy Office. Rick Rochelot, Director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. Jeff Ono, our consumer advocate. Carolyn Carl, Deputy Manager for Hawaii Energy. Scott Hsu, Vice President for Energy Systems for Hawaiian Electric. And Jim Kelly, Member Services and Communications Manager of Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, KIUC. Hawaii has been able to meet our 24% current RPS, and that's where we are today, 24%, with relatively modest changes in the way our utilities operate. Now, I know Hiko and KIUC are here saying, oh, what do you mean? We had to do a lot. Relatively modest compared to what we're about to phase in the next phase. And we're gonna have to look at system modifications to be such as adjusting ramp rates and load shifting even to greater extent than we have thus far. I'm gonna try to answer the three questions I'm supposed to answer, and then that way my slides won't really matter. So what were they? What have we done that's important? I think the most important thing we've done is we've assembled a really good team, including the people that are working on it, not only at HNAI, but the outside players and the advisory group with GE and the PUC and D-Bed and Hiko to really try to work collaboratively to get some real quantitative answers to some of the issues going forward. And I think if we can keep that going, we can help answer some of the questions. I think we need to maybe pay a little bit less attention to the 100% and figure out what we need to do for the next 10% or 15% or 20%. I'm gonna ignore Jay's three questions. But actually, somewhere in this discussion is gonna be the response to Jay's questions. But I wanted to talk about three projects that have been in the news. These are three renewable energy contracts that were terminated by Hawaiian Electric. And I bring this up not to berate Hawaiian Electric or the developers, but to have a dialogue about how moving toward a 100% RPS is going to require everyone to do their share. Really, when it comes down to it for the Hawaii Energy Program, our most significant impact has been our validated energy savings over the last seven years, six, seven years. So in terms of the numbers, I think it's similar to what we've seen in efficiency achievements, 856 gigawatt hours attributed to the programs. You're home. You are required to generate as much renewable energy as you consume. So for some people, okay, what maybe you have to wear with all, you have the means, you have the resources to be able to install the renewables as well as storage on your house. And okay, you do it. I would argue that the majority of our customers probably would struggle with that, okay? And what they would look to is, you know, can I have some flexibility to be a part of a bigger system? Maybe my condominium, can we as a group try and achieve this goal? I think probably the most significant accomplishment at KIUC in the last few years is determining that we can actually do this renewable energy thing and integrate it into the grid without the whole thing coming crashing down. I remember just four years ago, we were at five, we were getting close to 5% solar on the grid. And there was a very, I mean, the engineering staff was very concerned about how we were gonna, you know, how this was gonna work. This thing was gonna be jumping around all day. And there was a lot of concern about, you know, whether the whole place was gonna be come crashing down. And from the transportation sector, Ford Fujigami, State Director of Transportation, Kelly King of Pacific Biodiesel and the Biofuels Alliance, and Joelle Simon-Pietri from the UH Applied Research Lab. I'm actually not gonna answer any of the questions. The reason for that is I have more questions than the questions themselves. And it's really gonna come up during our working group when we go through it today. But that being said, I just wanted to share with you a video that we produced last year at the American Association of State Transportation Officials. They asked me to do a presentation of what Hawaii was doing when it comes to HDOT and transportation. And I brought up the fact that I was working on a sustainable transportation. And so I did a presentation to the board of directors. It was pretty interesting because after the presentation, they actually sent the media team to Hawaii because they wanted to actually film something to show exactly what we're doing. One of the things that I emphasize is that even though I'm the director of transportation for the state of Hawaii, we work very closely with HART on the rail, DTS when it comes to Mike Formby and the other three counties as well. We're not basically state centric. For us to accomplish our goals, we have to work with every single industry. Basically today Pacific Biodiesel is the commercial biofuels company in Hawaii. We're hoping, we're working with the legislature to try to push legislation that will hopefully bring others into this space in the state as well. Today we're at, actually as of this month, we will have hit capacity at our plant or the nameplate capacity working towards higher, which is 5.5 million gallons a year. Hoping to get even beyond that in the next couple of years. Our sister plant, which is the same size as this, but doesn't have distillation. In Oregon is over eight million gallons a year. The world's first commercial renewable jet fuel plant, Altair's plant in Bakersfield, California, opened for operations in January and started selling fuel immediately on a 10 year contract to United Airlines and American Airlines for 100% of their jet fuel product and then their diesel product is, the majority of it's going actually to defense logistics agency for US Navy and a very small amount of it is actually going to be coming here to Hawaii for RIMPAC. On the role of hydrocarbons in our energy future, we had Lance Tanaka, director of government and public affairs of Hawaii independent energy. Al Chi, policy government and public affairs for Chevron and Joe Boyven, senior vice president of business development and corporate affairs for Hawaii gas. We understand the state's rationale for it's objectives to reduce its dependency on fossil fuels. We also believe that we have a critical role to play in the energy security of Hawaii's energy mix, not just for today's needs, but also being a bridge to whatever energy future that lies ahead for Hawaii. Now at part Hawaii, we will continue to modify our operations and make prudent investments in our facilities to adjust our product mix so that we are in sync with the changing demands of the marketplace. It's really how do we do this in a manner which is not disruptive to the everyday lives and to the business here. Our role during that interim will be to continue to be reliable, to be safe, environmentally responsible, efficient and incident free in our operations. Okay, and I wanna touch upon two of those tenants of operation that I just mentioned. So the first, environmentally responsibility. Since 1990, our facility out at Kapolei has not increased greenhouse gas emissions. We've actually decreased greenhouse gas emissions over that period of time to the tune of about 7.3%. And we're very proud of that, but I just wanna make it clear. I mean, the motivation for that result is really our drive for efficiency. Renewable natural gas. I'm hopeful that by the end of next year, we will be somewhere between 10 and 15% renewable in our utility distribution system in Hawaii. I think that's pretty incredible. It's been a lot of work over the past few years to kind of get these things going, but my goal is every waste order trend, treatment plant, every landfill that we have out there, as well as perhaps some agricultural crops to grow, will get purified and injected into our pipelines and then used either for power generation or direct thermal load or for transportation. Everybody knows we completed a global tender. We now know how much natural gas costs to bring to Hawaii. I know that it will reduce emissions by 30%, and we can do this today. It's proven it's operating in 18 places throughout the world, just like we've proposed to do here in Hawaii. And if you're going to bring natural gas to Hawaii, this is how you do it. After these speakers presented their remarks, the members of the forum broke out into work groups to discuss the questions raised, come up with five-year action points and figure out what the forum can do to facilitate our progress over the next six months. I think we had a good scan of what's happening right now and in some way an honest assessment, looking forward to the discussions. What do you expect from this table? A lot of good ideas. What do you want to add to this discussion? I mean, other than lunch, some near-term goals to take that next year what the next real step's going to be. Well, this is the forum's semi-periodic way of figuring out how to be the most effective and where to focus. And so we're going through an exercise and hopefully we'll be able to identify some actions who's going to be responsible, what resources we need and keep our focus relevant. So that's in the general terms. And where it's going to happen, I don't know, we're going to find out. Well, I hope that we really move into collaboration and find ways in which the forum can help enable all of the organizations here to do more to get us to clean energy. Well, I think it's great. You know, any time you can go ahead and hear the different views from the different organizations, it kind of puts what you're trying to do in terms of which direction you're going to head. These are always great. I try and make a point to come to every single forum. And we're actually in the midst of a shift which is having more and more of the focus beyond transportation, not just electricity. This afternoon, I hope to have a very honest and open dialogue and especially I'm interested in the transportation conversation. I expect that we'll be having some pretty fruitful and deep conversation in an effort to try to find those pathways that we can agree on. I think it's one of the important things I heard is that obviously it's a pretty lofty goal but you gotta take it in reasonable tronches and so maybe looking at what can we do today that can make a difference the next five years is probably a good place to start. So how do you think it's going today? I think it's going swimmingly. Yeah, I think it's great really. What do you expect out of the discussion now? Great things, I expect great things. No, honestly, it's really nice to be able to talk about things candidly. I think that's important in planning so I'm looking forward to having that candid discussion. Well, it's been a very good, very thought provoking discussion. I think I really appreciate how a lot of the speakers have been very candid. I think what I hear is overall since that we need to just put the issues on the table. I think it's going well. I think we're just getting going but I think we're gonna wind up with some good answers and outcomes. I think we've got utilities, we've got the solar industry associations, we've got retired developers, hopefully somewhere in there, there's some overlap. Yes, the members did come to some important conclusions about these things but we're not going to tell you what was decided. Suffice to say, the forum will be refining those points in the next few weeks and presenting them a clean energy day in August. All in all, this was a congenial meeting with constructive and respectful exchanges of concerns and ideas consisting of what usually happens at member meetings of the forum. If you want to know more about the forum or clean energy, check out hawaiiannergypolicy.hawaii.edu. And now, let's take a look at our ThinkTech calendar of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the internet from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekday afternoons and then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and some people listen to them all night long. If you missed a show or you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on ThinkTechHawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to ThinkTechHawaii.com slash radio. Visit ThinkTechHawaii.com for our weekly calendar and our live stream and YouTube links or better yet, sign on to our email list to get the daily docket of our upcoming shows. ThinkTech has a high-tech green screen video studio at Pioneer Plaza. We invite you to come down, see our studio and join our live audience. Contact Jay at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be part of our civic engagement and raise your awareness on ThinkTech. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at ThinkTechHI. We want to know what you're thinking and how you feel about current issues and events affecting Hawaii. We want you to stay in touch with us and we want to stay in touch with you. Let's think together. Do you know that ThinkTechHawaii is now broadcasting 30 live talk shows a week? Check them out. Here are some of the great shows and hosts we've added over the last few months. Join us and raise your awareness about the critical changes affecting and taking place in Hawaii. See what's going on. Be a part of the conversation. Check it out at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Want to speak out about a community issue? ThinkTech invites you to come down to our studio and make a video at our speaker's corner. Contact Jay at ThinkTechHawaii.com. Want to join the conversation? Now you can call in and be included in our live shows. While you're watching any of our live shows, just call our hotline. 415-871-2474. And you can pose a question or make a comment. We look forward to getting your call. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Jay Fidel does. For additional times, check out OC16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech on OC16, visit ThinkTechHawaii.com. Be a guest or a volunteer, a producer or an intern. And help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and globalism in Hawaii. You can watch the show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Marion Sasaki. And I'm Elise Anderson. Aloha, everyone.