 Hello, welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and the Asia-Pacific Business Strategies Program. My name is Michael North and with this program we try to highlight some of the leaders of Hawaii's society and industry and culture so that we can understand better Hawaii's role in the center of the Pacific, looking in one direction to the Americas and the other direction to Asia. So today we have a very interesting guest from one of the leading companies in Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric Company and its sister and connected companies are the only providers of grid power in the Hawaiian Islands. So they perform a very heavy responsibility in his stewardship for citizens and for businesses and this company invests heavily in technology innovation and in infrastructure and in public education and it's a full-time job to keep up with all of the fast-moving changes in the energy landscape in Hawaii. So explaining all of that is the job of Peter Rasek along with his group at the corporate communications shop. You're just right across the street from us here. So we're going to look at the many different forms of renewable energy that exist, assess which ones are being used in Hawaii and what their status is and we'll be looking at wind, ocean, biomass, hydro and so on and the role that HECO plays. I don't want my friends on Kauai to be angry so let me point out that Kauai Island Utility Co-op is an entirely separate company. We have friendly relations but no actual business relations so we take care of about 95% of the population of the state and they take care of the rest and do a good job. I'm sure they do. I don't want them to call me up in a flash. So we're really interested in the long-term goal of energy independence which has been proclaimed really by business leaders and civic leaders, by the state legislature, by the governor and so on in a series of actions that started really 10 years ago and are gradually getting scaled up becoming more serious, more substantial, more definitive and HECO of course will play a lead role in our accomplishment of that energy independence goal and talk to us a little bit about that. Right, well 10 years ago or so the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative was signed formally but actually Hawaii Electric's involvement goes back a lot further. We put heads of experimental wind turbines up on the North Shore in the late 90s and early 10s. We've been looking at renewable energy over the long haul for a long time but about 10 years ago as you say people got serious about it. We signed an agreement with the state and the federal government and eventually that was codified in law. Our goal is 100% clean renewable energy for electricity by 2045 and we think we can get there sooner but where are we going to be in 2030, the intermediate point? Well we are at the end of last year we were at 27% and by the end of this year we'll be a couple of percentage points higher. Our next major milestone is 2020 when we need to be at 30% and we'll probably be there or higher. Are we at 27% now? We're really at in the lead among the 50 states. Oh absolutely. Who's number two? You know California does very well and of course on a much larger scale and they've recently passed their own law and they're looking to get to 100% by the 2040s as well but they are still way behind us as where we are today. As a percentage. Who are the other leaders like the top five? Nevada is also very strong in Arizona. They have a lot of solar at their disposal. Some of the North Western states where they can use hydroelectricity which counts as a renewable although some people prefer not to count it because it doesn't. It's the oldest renewable. Well that's been around for 100 years. It has you know the dams that make it possible are not necessarily environmentally friendly but without getting into that Florida does very well and some of the surprising states you know there's a lot more solar in Minnesota than you would expect. Yeah there's a lot more solar in Sweden than you would expect. Well yeah that's true. People think well it's dark there. How can there be solar? Right they do solar and they do a lot of wind and of course they have hydro as well. So every place is different based on what the resources they have are. We have great resources as we're going to discuss. We have wind we have sun. We don't have a lot of running water but we have a little. So we're in an ideal position and the prices for a lot of these things are coming down very rapidly where the price of oil has been stable for a few years but is kind of inching up now as well. So you know we're in an ideal position but it's not just about the generation it's also about preparing the grid, preparing our energy management systems to accommodate all these various different kinds of energy. The smart grid. Smart grid exactly. In the old days when you had basically power plants that you could turn up or down it was not simple but you it was very predictable okay but when you have wind when you have solar that are variable unpredictable bad weather and all of a sudden your solar is not giving you the power it used to. Today is a perfect example. It's raining. Yeah but there's still solar energy coming. There's still solar but it doesn't reach the you know the capacity that you hope. So it's not zero. It's got it's not zero definitely not. During the day it's not zero and energy storage is also a very big function that's now coming into its own. It's always been too expensive. It's still expensive but for example we've just we're in the process of signing contracts for seven new solar facilities on all three islands that all have storage. So that energy that is produced in the middle of the day will be available at five, six, seven at night and that's huge because that's been the the stumbling block for solar is that you can only use it when the when the sun is shining. Yeah. During the daylight hours and this will make a huge difference. So we have an overview video about renewables from HECO that I think puts things in a nice visual frame. Great. Can we have a look at that video please? I'll learn something I'm sure. What does a green future for Hawaii look like? Our state has committed to achieve 100% renewable energy and we've already made a lot of progress. A smarter and more efficient grid is being developed. It'll help us safely and reliably integrate even more clean energy from many renewable sources including rooftop solar and as an option to rooftop solar you may buy an interest in the electricity produced by a renewable energy project like a solar or wind farm. With more clean energy coming into the grid driving an electric vehicle makes more sense than ever. It's a great way to save money and go green. EV owners can charge their vehicles when rates are at their lowest and EV charging stations are being added throughout the islands. The Hawaiian Electric Company support a green future for Hawaii to reduce our dependence on imported oil and your total energy bill. Find out more about clean affordable renewable energy at hawainoelectric.com slash our vision. So Peter there's the overview. Now I want to start to I want to break this down a little bit piece by piece and talk about the role that each one of these has or doesn't have in the energy spectrum for Hawaii. Can we can we look at the first graphic that shows the strategy? Okay so biofuel, biomass, geothermal, hydro, ocean energy, solar, wind you know Hawaii is rather unique in that we play in virtually all of those areas right. There's not too many places that play in all seven of these areas. The roles of different significance. Can we look at the first one there and let's do a little breakdown of biofuel. Talk to us a little bit about biofuel and where we're at in Hawaii with biofuel. Well we just this last year opened the Schofield Barracks generating station 50 megawatts station in central Oahu that is biofueled or can use regular diesel but it uses diesel, biodiesel primarily and it's very important for resilience because it's away from the ocean and that's going to protect it in storms. We have another plant Campbell Industrial Park and another small installation at the airport that all use biofuels. These are fuels that are made from bio from plants and we want a company here called the biodiesel not are related to us but we have contracts with them. They're actually producing biodiesel on the big island. They're growing the plants mostly sunflowers I think and they're pretty much all grown here right the biomass is here. We wouldn't import it. No we do import we import some because we don't produce enough here locally so but we're getting further and further down that road. I know there are digesters and catalysts and so on that do the actual work and some of that is probably imported as well. Right we import biodiesel from the Midwest where it comes from rendered animal fats but we're getting more and more from the local producer and of course the goal would be to have it all for a local producer but you know there's always the battle or the controversy do we use our land for food or do we use our land for fuel and we have to find a balance and the market will find a balance but so HECO will play a role in delivering the electrons that come from biomass. Absolutely there's a bunch of companies and other organizations that are involved in the research and the generation and so on but ultimately when the electrons move out to the user you're the common transport so you have to work closely. We deliver it all whether it comes from one of our plants own plants or whether it comes from an independent power producer that you know is another question but so you're investing in some biofuel generation now. Yes we are we have as I say these three plants all together about 160 megawatts of power plants that are biofueled. Okay let's look at the next category the next biomass. What's the difference? Well biofuel is something some biological product that is turned into a liquid fuel in effect biodiesel. Biomass is direct burning of things that are available here on Oahu we have the H power which is biomass it's waste that it can be burned directly and that's burned and turned into electricity. So that's heat that powers a generator a steam generator and turns the turbine and then we get electricity. Exactly and the neighbor islands are looking at biomass as well you can't just grow biomass you can grow eucalyptus on the big island there's a company called Huonuo which is nearing completion and their plan is to harvest eucalyptus trees burn those trees and create electricity that way. So biomass can either be raw or it can be man processed which is waste. The neighbor islands are also we're all looking at you know vanishing landfill and the amount of space they take there and so we've for some years here on Oahu most of our trash has gone into the H power they're looking at that on the neighbor island so unfortunately trash is a renewable source we're never going to run out of it we're never going to we can try to reduce it but ultimately we have to have to use it and here we use it for electricity. Both of these involve fairly large-scale infrastructure absolutely and some pretty serious science behind them absolutely right let's look at the next one because that falls into the same category geothermal we had geothermal was in the news a lot recently with the plant over at Puna that underwent some stress how how did we recover from that by the way that was a good test of some resilience there right how do we do well not as well as we'd hope but what happened was that the lava did a little bit of damage at the Puna geothermal venture but not too much but the problem is it completely surrounded the plant and so without access had you ever modeled that not no we had not we have various contingencies about problems it's an earthquake zone you know and it has the it's on a susceptible area but Puna geothermal venture the owner is being very responsible in our estimation they're keeping their staff on salary they're flying people by helicopter in periodically to upgrade to maintain their facility and they tell us they're coming back when that will be we don't know so and that is a very advantageous kind of energy however because it's firm it's very much like a regular conventional power plant or a biodiesel power plant they can turn it up and down and they can regulate it and they can tell us we can tell them we need a certain amount of energy and they can provide it so firm renewable energy is highly desirable as compared to zero cost well the fundamental energy is zero cost it's there because we're here yeah because we're on the island fuel doesn't cost anything getting it into a usable form is is rather expensive you have to drill wells you have to have some fairly advanced equipment and but the actual the fuel so to say is is free okay let's look at the next slide briefly ocean energy and as we go into the break think about ocean energy we'll come out of a brief break with peter ross egg from hawaiian electric company aloha my name is mark schlau I am the host of think tech hawai's law across the sea law across the sea is on think tech hawaii every other monday at 11 a.m. please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and hawaiiana all across the sea from hawaii and back again aloha hi i'm bill sharp host of asian review here on think tech hawaii join me every monday afternoon from five to five thirty hawaii standard time for an insightful discussion of contemporary asian affairs there's so much to discuss and the guests that we have are very very well informed just think we have the upcoming negotiation between a president trump and kim jong the possibility of cgp and the leader of china remaining in power forever we'll see you then we're back with peter ross egg from heco hawaiian electric company and we're talking about the subject that we left with was ocean right right there's a couple of different forms of ocean energy right could you talk a little bit about wave title and thermal i think that those are um the hawaii does not have a lot of of ocean energy we've had some very constructive experiments here uh with basically what you might consider to be an artificial blowhole where the waves come in and they force air through a a blowhole that then turns the turbine and then as the waves retract the the air is pulled back in and it turns the turbine as well the problem we have is that first of all it's expensive like anything else you put in the water it can be very expensive and the the other problem is that our we're the tips of volcanic volcanic islands as you know so we don't have a lot of offshore low-level land that goes out under the water for miles like they do in in europe where they have offshore wind for example there is a way that you can exploit the difference in temperature between the deep water and the surface water and there is a company called hawaii seawater energy that that is in the process and getting closer to using the cold deep seawater and the the warmer water on the surface to create electricity which would then be used for air conditioning throughout say the downtown area it could even be used at the university it's been a long time coming but we're we are optimistic that they will we'll get going so that basically is a way of taking a lot of generation off our hands for air conditioning and uh using this the the seawater differential right it's done in a number of places especially in lakes and we have some companies here that are specialists in underwater right uh piping and very interesting water around so um we're we're optimistic are we signed up our building downtown and we are looking forward to the idea that a very large amount of air conditioning load a downtown perhaps Waikiki perhaps at the university of hawaii could be removed from our system and if we don't have to generate the electricity yeah we get closer to a hundred percent renewables that's a huge one okay let's have a look at the next type of renewable um so that that's another uh kind of version of something that can be done in the ocean i i i don't know what exactly that power plant i think that might be otek or something could be okay otek is is the ocean thermal energy conversion that we talked about uh there are also we've also experimented with the platforms as i say that look like a sort of an artificial blowhole in some areas in europe there are they take advantage of the tide coming in and going out as you know hawaii doesn't have a lot of tide differential between high tide and low tide so there's a limited amount you can do there there are some companies that are looking at the offshore wind which would be wind turbines that are actually floated on platforms out in the ocean uh so that has not so far gotten beyond much beyond the talking stage but it's one of those alluring things these are all r&d opportunities they're also business opportunities if someone really smart can be you know the steve jobs of one of these areas then the potential is immense figure out how to do it for especially if you're you're using hawaii as a test tube exactly because across really the whole subtropical zone of the planet you know we have over two billion people who live within this the hawaii band right and so we're yeah if somebody can figure out how to do that at a reasonable price we'd love to talk to them okay let's look at the next one the next one is solar which is what most people think of when they think of renewable energies energy but there are actually a couple of different kinds of solar talk to us a little bit about solar and its status the simplest differentiation is there is privately owned rooftop solar about 80 000 of our customers across the islands or over 20 percent of our customers in single-family homes almost a third in fact have that kind of solar on their roof they generate the power they need for themselves if they are if they add batteries they can use that power overnight and then there is the grid scale or utility scale we've got some solar farms out in y and i there's one being built by ypo and by westlock and we've we've got several under construction companies that are we're working with have them under construction in central oahu as i mentioned earlier we've got seven projects totaling 260 megawatts that we're about to sign contracts for and you're actually allowing customers to buy shares in a wind farm in other words rather than putting the panels up on their own roof they pay you to put the panels out and they're they receive a return on their investment in terms of electricity right right community solar allows people to participate even if they don't own a roof even if they live in a high rise as i do we're just there sort of the middleman on this the companies will build these these community solar and deal with the customers then the companies will tell us so and so gets a certain amount of credit take this money off their bill because they are participating in this community solar project and that's coming along we have a dozen projects that are now going through our reviews and to make sure that we can accommodate them on the grid and within what i hope is a few months we'll be able to say okay these are ready for customers to participate that's a really complex proliferation of a lot of different technologies and economics and and and grid distribution methods and so on right all of this really has taken place within the last 15 years at the outside absolutely virtually none of what we're talking about right now existed except in concept 15 years not at scale it existed in a laboratory perhaps or existed in a we had these demonstration wind turbines up on the north shore in the 1990s and then of course the price of oil fell and the economics went out of it so yeah these things have been in the laboratory in many cases for many many years a wind turbine is not new one of the earliest let's look at the last one here the last type of energy right wind right there we go but it was one of the first right one of the first yeah up on the north shore and we had the those experimental units up there now hawaii island is particularly strong Maui island or they both have two or three big wind farms there are two wind farms here on Oahu and another one that's coming close to getting under construction wind is good because it's 24 hours it can go all night and sometimes it goes stronger at night than during the day also the Hawaiian islands are blessed not just with wind but with a very uniform kind of wind so that it's very much more dependable than in other areas we can't do very much as i mentioned with offshore wind because the the the plates the the surface of the ocean goes down too quickly but you know unlike europe so you know you go to denmark or someplace they have a they have a shelf under the sea that goes out for miles and miles they can cover those england as well we don't have that that luxury so maybe someday we'll have these floating wind turbines but for now it's mostly on land we're going to see some more on what's the balance relative between solar and wind in terms of total generation right now well in terms of total generation that's a tricky one because the wind goes 24 hours solar basically just during the day so although there's more solar capacity the amount of energy being pumped into the system by the wind is probably equal roughly equal to what we're getting from solar right now but solar will continue to grow and wind they're not too many places that you have the land and you have the public permission and the community willing to accept a wind farm so the wind is kind of will be reaching its peak we think in the next few years whereas i believe solar and storage will continue to grow and will will really be the main the main source along with the biofuels what comes to mind is a tapestry here right you know previously we had a monoculture for energy exactly which is hydrocarbons burning ancient oil and and gas and so on now we have many different pieces of the puzzle no one is enough to provide all of our generation right so we really need to the hidden element the eighth element of all of these is the brain power to tie them all together right and the creativity yeah that's why we talk about a portfolio we will never again allow ourselves to be so dependent on one source of energy as we now are dependent on oil same thing for transportation of course you know electric vehicles are coming along we're going to be seeing some electric buses electric cranes at the waterfront that are replacing diesel cranes so the train of course the rail when it comes will be electric electrically driven so both in transportation which is more dependent on fossil fuels even than electricity and of course in electricity we're going to see the power coming from a range of portfolio and you're absolutely right the the trick is always you know when you had just one kind of energy coming into the system it was fairly straightforward to manage that and turn it into the electrons which are sent out to people's homes and businesses when you've got various different kinds of energy different amounts at different times of the day some that you can control some that you can't control some that you can see some that you you know where our system operators can see it coming into the system so to speak all of these things have to be balanced and we have the computers to do that now but we have to install the systems the smart grid the energy management systems yeah to make that all happen and the the final element is really okay the final element is what we call demand response which is a kind of a funny name but you know customers can participate will be able to increasingly to our participate in helping us to stabilize the grid by having equipment that either stores energy on the premises or allows us to turn off some of their energy for a period of time or you know all those electric vehicles potentially are a big battery they're just driving around and but most all of them will be plugged into the grid at night and if just like you can take power out we can take you know we'll eventually be able to take power back so if we had an emergency in the middle of the night we take power back by three or four in the morning we we've solved the problem we put the power back and we're all part of a this integrated system so what's the main obstacle to our achieving that 2045 goal time and money you know uh we couldn't do it all right now even time can be collapsed by money so maybe it's money well primarily it is money because you know we have to have cussed have companies that will invest in wind farms and solar farms and all of these projects we can't why electric can't and won't do it ourselves we have to invite withdraw capital from other places we have to draw technology from other places yeah and um there is time can be collapsed but it can't be collapsed infinitely uh it'll take time uh year by year to uh to upgrade the grid to improve these systems to bring all these things online but that that's it's very urgent absolutely it's it's highest priority for the ultimate survivability and resilience of our state there there couldn't be anything more important absolutely i mean we just lost an island a small island a tiny island to the rising sea levels and we all pretty much all of us here in hawaii live uh less than a mile from this from the ocean front uh our primary economic driver is on the ocean uh our power plants are on the ocean so we we've got we're out of time all right you know there's so much more that we can go into and maybe we'll do a follow-up to this there's some other issues that i'd like to bring up anytime and i want to thank you peter ross egg for being here with us on think tech hawaii and for asia pacific uh business strategies we'll see you next time this is michael north