 Yeah, the end of coal in Oahu, what an interesting topic, you know, with Jim Kelly of Hawaiian Electric and this is Hawaii, the state of clean energy. Thank you so much, Jim, for joining us. Great to be with you, Jay. It's been a while. And yeah, great topic for us to discuss today. Yeah. I was saying before the show, we were both, you know, thinking back to the old days. I met you when you were with PBN and then you went to the Honolulu Advertiser and then you went to, you went to KIUC for a while and then a big time. Yeah, that's right. With the Hawaiian Electric. With the energy business in Hawaii, it's, yeah, there's something going on, it's like the news business. Oh, it's a thrill. Yes. Well, there's a relationship. Yeah. It's a thrill to have you here. So, okay, news release, a bunch of articles in various, you know, media over the past few days about the end of coal. And, you know, we talked about this a long time ago. I remember when I was first, you know, introduced the subject, if you will, of energy in Hawaii, there was discussion about, you know, we're not going to have another coal plant. And indeed the statute that was adopted in 2020 was a synonymous with the end of the Hawaiian Electric Agreement, the 30-year agreement with AES for coal. So here we are. We have reached that. The statute date comes up September 1, three weeks, two weeks from now. That's really something. And we are looking at this inflection point in energy in Hawaii. It's an historic moment, Jim. Don't you agree? Yeah. It absolutely is a critical point for the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. I mean, it really is a, it's not just a symbolic kind of a thing. I mean, it's absolutely a real event that is going to affect everyone on Hawaii. And I think it really is kind of a moment to think about where we've come and how much has changed in the 30 years of that contract. Because when that contract, when that plant first started producing electricity in 1992, it was interesting that the state of Hawaii and Hawaiian Electric had pursued coal because oil had become so unpredictable, the price of oil. I mean, we've been through several price shocks in the 70s and the 80s. And the thought was, look, we got to get something else to use as a fuel for baseload generation, basically power plants that can be on all the time. And even though there was some early adoption of renewables, mostly wind in Hawaii, the thought was, hey, let's, we need something that we can ship. We need something we can transport without too much trouble, something that can be stored easily. Something that's cheap and available. Hey, how about coal? And at the time, there was just very little conversation about the potential environmental effects. I mean, obviously there was talk about, oh, great, we got something else here. There's smoke coming out of the smokestack and there was a lot of, I think, some concern expressed at the time, but there clearly wasn't the consciousness about climate change in the late 80s, which is when the deal actually was struck, that there obviously is today. And so in one generation, we've really changed dramatically about how we look at coal. Toward the end of that contract, there was a lot of pressure on coal. I mean, a lot of people were saying, we got to get off coal. The reality was, you were in a contract. Is there anything you could have done to get out of it before now? No. And I don't think there was ever any. I mean, we started talking about this back 10, 12 years ago, and also in terms of our planning for the future, because when you're a utility, you're not planning six months or a year ahead. You're planning 10, 20, 30 years out. And so more than a decade ago, we started planning. We're saying, OK, we assume the plant's going to go away. Because already this was after Al Gore. This was after the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. This was after there was a lot of alarm being expressed about climate change. And nobody was really advocating for the coal plant to stay open. Yeah. And so now it's a perfect stone because the coal plant closes as a matter of statute. I suppose theoretically, I don't know if this is really possible, theoretically, the legislature could say, we were only kidding. And you need a little more time. We'll give you a little more time. And the AES would say, OK, we're good with that. You know, how about five years more? Would that have been a possibility? I think it could have been a possibility maybe five years ago or three years ago. But when you're talking about the practical reality of shutting down a major facility like a coal plant that has people working there that are having to make plans for transitioning to a new job when the place closes, they're going to start disassembling the plant that my understanding is almost immediately after it shuts down. You know, there's remediation work that needs to be done out of sight. They have to figure out. I mean, one of the questions was trying to figure out how and when to order the last batch of coal because they wanted to time it so that they would use it all up so that there's not coal left there. They're going to have to pay to move away someplace. So if that had even been a thought, it would have had to have been several years ago. So it isn't like something that could happen today and say, OK, let's go, fellas. We'll leave it going another six months. If I look back at the title of our show, which is the end of coal, I would probably change it to the transition resulting from the end of coal because, you know, there are all kinds of issues and it is the perfect storm because we have the oil problems emanating out of Ukraine. We have inflation, which is probably directly related to the oil problems. But nevertheless, it's a separate factor, you know, at this point in time in the transition. And, you know, we have we have issues that came out of covid. Don't you agree? I mean, the Clean Energy Initiative was affected by covid and that affects the timeline of the utility to get these projects on. Can you talk about that? Sure. I mean, you know, again, being in the utility business on an island where you kind of you're on your own, you got to make sure that everything you're doing because you can't really get help from anybody else if things don't work out. So you always have been making plans. But I got to say, yeah, the last couple of years, just about every potential thing that could go wrong went wrong. The the thing that is really unfortunate about the coal transition is even by the last year, even in January of this year, we were forecasting it was probably going to cost about $2 more a month for customers to get off of coal, that that was going to be the price difference. I mean, it was hardly, you know, not even one a cup of coffee. That's the average customer. Yeah, for the average customer would have been very, very not not noticeable at all for most people. And by March, after Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices hit, you know, historic levels, we were already seeing bills rising because of that. We were already seeing bills rising because of inflationary pressures. And then on top of that for the customers on Oahu, we now have taking coal out of the mix, which basically costs about six cents a kilowatt hour. So it is absolutely the cheapest fuel that we use. But it's also the dirtiest. And we're having to replace it for the time being partially with 30, 32 cents a kilowatt hour oil. So, yeah. And then the projects that were supposed to be online by now that would have meant we would be using far less oil to replace AES. We've had two projects drop out. We've had a number of projects that have been delayed as a result of covid as a result of the investigation that the feds were doing about tariff violations of panels made in China. As a result of, you know, inflationary pressures, the cost of materials going through the roof and developers saying, you know what, I can't meet that price that I agreed to anymore. So I'm going to step back. So, yeah, it's like it's a lot of stuff all at once. Just wonder if you if you go back a couple of years and you could not to say that you could do this, but if you could see into the future and and figure there was going to be a spike in oil and figure there was going to be a covid and the effects of covid, what could you have done in anticipation of the September one deadline different than what you did? I mean, were there steps you could have taken? Had you been able to wrap around these possibilities? Well, if you followed all the activities of the governor's powering past coal task force, which is set up to address some of the challenges that there are with existing projects, so projects that have already been approved by the Public Utilities Commission. They're on our we have a board status board we call the scoreboard on our website. So there's nine projects on Oahu that are in various stages of completion. And the task force's job is to look at each project and say, hey, look, what's holding this project up? Is it a permit? Is it is it a utility issue? Is it, you know, a siting issue? What what's what's going on with each one of these projects? And that process has actually got everybody in the room, state, city, agencies, HECO, phone, everybody has touches a project. They're all in that room and we can problem solve in real time in that kind of a forum. I think that would have been super helpful if we had known about it a couple of years ago to say, look, what do we got to do to get these obstacles out of the way? Which in some cases are actually pretty easy to move. But, you know, as we know in Hawaii, there's a lot of steps to get anything done. Oh, sure. Talk to the home builders. Yes. Anyway, the other thing is here we are this inflection point where all these vectors are affecting, you know, the ability of the utility to get the the energy out in the same way as before. And and I wonder, too, if you if you sit right now, and of course, it's early because you haven't learned all the lessons that we will all learn going forward because, you know, this is a new a new experience. But right now, today, can you say that we have learned stuff like, for example, this collaborative team approach that might be a lesson to apply in the future? Is there is there anything else you can think of that that would be useful going forward in the possibility we have other, you know, problem influences, you know, as we have now? Absolutely. I mean, this is this is one that I would really, you know, continue to point to where we're modeling. You know, we have we have some issues on Maui that we're trying to address with one of our facilities over there that we're going to have to replace some of the generation resource that we have over on Maui sooner than we thought we would. And so we're actually in a process of standing up a group that is similar to the Powering Pass Cold Task Force with exactly the same kind of a mission. We have, I believe it's four or five projects on Maui that are on the board. They're in various stages of completion. And the group is their main mission is, all right, let's look at each one of these projects. Everybody's in the room. Let's figure out what's hanging it up right now. What can we do? And and in some of these cases, it really is a question of just being able to look across the table at someone and saying, hey, can you get back? And we can find out at the next meeting where we're at on that rather than, you know, the endless train of emails, the endless train of, you know, correspondence and missed messages and that kind of thing. It's it's been super helpful and collaborative. And, you know, it also includes voices from the community. Yeah, Henry Curtis is part of the Powering Pass Cold Task Force. We have representatives from a number of community groups, and they've been super helpful in this process as well. That's good. So it's really a lesson for all of us. I mean, and it stands total because the next time we are threatened, you know, you or anybody else in that task force and say, wait, I remember 2022, I remember what happened at the end of coal. And we need to we need to focus on the other thing is the legislature and you got the state energy office. Sometimes the governor is not on the same page as we know from LNG a few years ago and next era when it tried to come in. So query, you know, you have a lot of governmentals and the PUC, of course. You have a lot of, well, I say unforgiving structures around you. We all have these unforgiving structures around us. And I suspect it should be a lesson for them, too. This was an unforgiving bill, perhaps, that might have been more thoughtful. And there are a lot of other things you could put in that basket. And I wonder, you know, if you were to say, you know, what government should have, could have might learn from this experience up against this kind of deadline with a, you know, a difficult transition. Maybe maybe they should just stay out of your way now. Well, I think everybody, the good thing about Hawaii is which is very different from most other states. And I saw an interesting stat recently, a presentation, I think less than half of the states have a clean energy mandate, a target like we do 100 percent renewable by 2045. I think only like 23 states do. And so that's really I was really surprised when I looked at the map and you can kind of figure out which states would have these and which states don't. But it's super helpful for us to at least we all have a common goal. So we're all moving toward that goal. You don't have a whole bunch of people that are trying to hold us back or trying to divert us from that target. Everybody is is committed to that goal, where we obviously sometimes run into some friction is everybody has a different idea. You know, you you've got the map out, you know, what road you're going to take. And you come to a fork and people want to go different ways. And I so. Yeah, I think there is a process underway called integrated grid planning, which yeah, I know it makes your ears bleed. But it's been going on for several years. It's got a lot of people involved in a technical people, but also community people, you know, PUC, state energy office. Everybody's got a place at the table and it's a very. It's very comprehensive planning process. We're going forward for the next 20 years. How are we going to get there? And I think sometimes that people forget that it exists and that, you know, when people I guess it's hard for us when we hear people say, hey, you guys aren't planning for this, you know, hey, you guys didn't plan what the hell you've been doing for the last 10 years. You know, this is coming. Why didn't you do something about it? And, you know, the truth of it is that's kind of what we do at Hawaiian like we plan a lot. So that's that is kind of a point that a sore point with us when we hear people say that it's not just us. There's a lot of people are part of what's your answer when they say that? Well, I'm polite, of course. And they say, well, thank you for that insight. You know, let me explain to you about integrated grid planning. No, I try to I try to point to, you know, some of the things that we said publicly, some of the depending on who they are and, you know, some of the documentation, there's there's a lot of documentation about planning out there. And I also ask people to get everything you want to know about integrated grid planning. It's on our website. It's not like it's some dark cave by invitation only kind of an operation. But it's, you know, it's complicated. We did we did a group of we did some focus groups before the the announcement on the coal plant. We asked we wanted to ask people about how we were communicating this this change and it was striking to us who work in this every day. How many people and it was just average folks. How many had no idea we had a coal plant out of Oahu at all. So that's kind of the first we have all these assumptions that people are deeply interested in and up to speed on everything that's going on with the electric company. And that's really, really not the case at all. I think it's true. A lot of people know no idea about AES and coal. And this is such a vague thing about it. And a lot of people will learn about this through the article in the star avatizer and, you know, whatever other media you want to care, you know, and query whether over the time, you know, since say 2020 anyway, you might have socialized the idea to a greater extent so that they did know and it wasn't coming as a surprise. In retrospect, what do you think about that? Oh, I think that's you can always look at. What we should have communicated to people and whether we did it in a way that was going to stick with people. I mean, we've talked about this for a while. But, you know, is that the kind of a fact that sticks with people? Again, back when we thought that it wasn't going to have really much of an impact on bills. We weren't really communicating. I don't think as much about it because we thought, well, OK, people don't really. You know, bad people, we hope would be excited we're not using coal anymore to make electricity. But, you know, in this case and also back in March. I do want to point out, you know, we've taken a different approach to communicating with customers or really getting out front and being proactive about it, where I think in the past. We were more. We would tend to have people open the bill, go and then be prepared to answer questions about that and to be able to explain why that was here. We're getting two months out in front, as we did back in March when we knew that the bills are going to be going up in May and June to tell people, hey, it's coming, be ready. Maybe you can take some steps to reduce and manage your bill. And here's what you need to know. Here's why it's happening. And, you know, people aren't excited about the message. And as you pointed out, the timing is just, you know, terrible. It's really not it's it's not good at all for a lot of people. But I hope they at least understand a little bit about getting any push pushback. I mean, it's public now, for sure. And I wonder if anybody is, you know, giving you any rash over it. Customers are not happy about it, and especially because we've got customers that are still trying to recover from the pandemic and we're, you know, maybe on a payment plan. And so I think that's what we've been talking a lot about internally is how can we continue to help our customers who are struggling not only with the the kind of carry over from the pandemic, but then that now they've got this to deal with. And the answer has been giving people, I mean, really custom tailoring programs to every customer who calls up and says, hey, I'm having trouble. We think, OK, can we put you on a payment plan? Can we hook you up with an agency that's offering assistance? You know, you've been doing that for a couple of years. Yes. You went public on that. I guess that was an understanding of the whole energy community that you would give them a break. You would give them a payment plan. You wouldn't shut them down. That was the important thing. And I saw a number of press releases on that subject since, gee, since 2020-21. Yes, 2020. And did you ever, you know, run into a problem with that? I mean, in terms of having to shut people down, who who who really couldn't afford it? We resumed disconnections late last year. But what we've done is we've we raised the threshold for when we would take that action. And in most cases, we're finding that when we tell people, hey, look, this is it, it's going to happen. We're at that point, then we're getting them on a payment plan or we're we're being able to get some kind of an arrangement with them so that we don't have to do that. Because that's that's the last thing we want to do. Yeah, some some people it'll become irresponsible when they see there's a possibility to be irresponsible when they turn their back on you and they don't pay you period even or even seek a plan. I'm sure that has some cases like that. But you know, here, seven percent were the average household at fifteen dollars a month. And that and that my my very rough arithmetic is that you're talking about a two hundred dollar per month customer. Seven percent, seven percent and fifteen dollars a month. The high end customers at three, four, five, six hundred dollars. And some people pay a lot of money. That's going to be way more. And what I caught from your press release is that this is really want to talk to you about this. This is going to last until twenty twenty four. That that is an increase that is going to have a salient effect on a lot of people over a significant period of time. How hard is that twenty twenty four, you know, date? I mean, do you think you'll be able to resolve it by then or possibly sooner than then? Are you going to be able to, you know, get back to where people would like it to be where it was or even better? Well, at the beginning of it all depends on on world events, you know, pandemics, oil prices. I mean, at the beginning of the pandemic, the average bill on a while I think was like one hundred and thirty dollars. Because oil prices had dropped so dramatically. So I think what we're really hoping for. For a lot of reasons is a resolution to the Ukrainian conflict stability in oil markets nationally, internationally. We're already starting to see some signs of oil prices dropping. And you can see it at your corner gas station, too. We're really hoping in the next couple of months, especially on the neighbor islands, that we are going to start seeing some decreases in oil and pushing down on the bill. I want to be clear that we don't have any sense that these bills are going to be in place till twenty twenty four. I mean, that's that's not what we're assuming. Well, that's kind of a pessimistic expectation. Yeah, that is a pessimistic. But, you know, to be absolutely straight, I mean, world events can have a huge effect on oil prices. And that's still what we're we're using, you know, to run a lot of our plants at night. So every island is still using oil to some degree, some to a greater degree than others. So I think we're so there's a lot of worst case scenarios about, you know, where oil prices go. I think we're hopeful that that the the prices are going to continue to go down. The other thing is that they could actually go up. I mean, depending on geopolitical considerations and oil and Ukraine and all that, it's possible that this will get worse now. Yeah, although what we had a report the other day, kind of a forecast and, you know, things like Japan is resuming a nuclear power program and putting a lot of money and effort into that. That means they're going to be buying less oil on the market to run their power plants. People are still buying oil from Russia. If anything, they're actually selling more oil than they were a few months ago. And so there's plenty of oil available on the market. That's part of what's been pushing the prices down. That makes sense. Yeah. So despite the talk about, you know, them being isolated, in fact, they've been, I think, selling more. The issue in the long term is everybody's assuming that, you know, and I don't know if you guys have talked about this on the show. You know, there's just the infrastructure for refining oil is I think where the bottleneck is right now. Nobody's building new refineries. Nobody's assuming over the next 30 years that the demand for oil is going to be increasing enough to get your return for building new facilities on that. So the amount of oil that's available right now for purchase in the world is probably going to be pretty, pretty stable. So I don't know that it's going to be going down dramatically again, you know, short of having another pandemic or some kind of economic recession. But to talk about the renewables impact. Yeah, please. You know, in that same period, you know, from this discussion, I get the possibility that a lot of these projects, renewable projects that are stuck right now will get unstuck all over your part of the state anyway. And and that will have just exactly the opposite effect. Although it always costs money to, you know, build infrastructure like like like solar farms and the like and battery and battery facilities. Fact is that once we get into it, it's a stable, regular cost. And that's way different than geopolitical spikes. So how does that look in that same period? That looks really encouraging, you know, by the middle of next year, we'll have this battery storage project, a Kapolei energy storage project should be online. One of the largest of its kind in the world. So during the day, we're using solar, we're putting it into the battery. And then during the peak, you know, where we're burning a lot of oil right now to accommodate people when they come home and turn on the air and all that, we can be using the solar that's stored in that battery instead of that, we're going to have a total of nine new projects as a project being dedicated this week in Milani, 39 megawatts. That's online right now, it's got its own storage attached to that. Huge, tremendous help at nine cents a kilowatt hour again, as opposed to 30 cents. But you're the word used stable is the right word because. You know, the future does not in look like rates are going to be dropping, you know, 30 percent because we're on renewable energy. I mean, that's because we're using more renewables. It's it's about stabilizing rates so that we're not doing this all the time. If you look at. Go ahead. No, if you look at Kauai, for example, which has been held out as a, you know, the where we want to be. Absolutely. Their rates over the last year have been like this. It's it's it's a straight line. They haven't gone down. Their rates are still, you know, in the 30s, which which ours are. And and but while ours have gone like this because of the use of oil, theirs has been stable. And that's where we hope to be in the next couple of years is that our rates will be like that as well because you're locked into a 20 year contract for nine cents energy from a project like Mililani, as opposed to every month. You get a bill from the oil guy and you pay whatever the going rate is. So that's it goes back to the early part of our conversation. So the mission here, in order to get back to, you know, a stable, maybe even a cheaper rate is to get these projects unstuck. That would be the, you know, the most important thing to do, because if you if you have to rely on oil, gosh, you know, we're at risk with vulnerable to all kinds of things over which we have no control at all. So, you know, I hope you can put that, you know, collaborative approach, you know, together and get it unstuck and get the permitting people to move quicker and all that. It is. It's working really well. We're moving ahead on these projects and some of them are just behind on schedule because of challenges getting materials. And that we have limited, you know, ability and influence. But, you know, we're hopeful. So we, you know, we established maybe it came from the utility. I don't remember this target of 100 percent renewables by 2045. And then there was some talk about, well, we can do that by 2040 query, you know, this inflection point in the history of energy in Hawaii, which is somebody will write a book about it. Maybe you know, how much this has put us off track. Would you agree with me that we seem to have lost time by virtue of these various factors we've been you and I have been discussing? Can we get back? Can we meet those targets? What does it look like in terms of the aspirational goals that we settled on some years ago? Oh, I we've lost a little bit of time, but we our goal at Hawaiian Electric is still by the end of this decade, we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions compared to 2005 levels by 70 percent. And we're still aiming to do that. We're going to have additional procurement efforts that are actually underway right now for Oahu and Maui and Hawaii Island. So we're hoping there's going to be even more projects coming in that we're hoping for a frankly, a broader suite of proposals beyond solar and batteries. We're hoping we're going to be hearing, you know, some proposals on, you know, potentially geothermal, potentially, you know, biofuels, potentially, you know, other kinds of resources coming in. So no, we're, you know, this decade is key, though. You nailed it. I mean, if we don't make the progress that we need to make by the end of this decade, then we are going to be. It's going to be harder. It's going to be steeper. So this decade is the key decade to get things done. You know, your press release also talks about energy conservation and bringing in all of those programs that Hawaii energy, you know, has and and trying to get people to be more energy conscious and also not waste energy. But that, you know, that that opens the question, really, of whether there's going to be some kind of gap shortage, you know, while you're working on a transition that gets us to what I call stability. Maybe, you know, you don't have the resources, the facilities to keep going at the same level. If I have to conserve, maybe it's for a good reason that I could experience a brownout or any how much risk do we have of brownouts and, you know, the inability of the utility to actually meet the demand? You know, I'm really glad you asked that because some people have been talking about blackouts and that sort of thing. And and, you know, the last two years, we've been re moving around our maintenance schedules on all of the projects that we, you know, the facilities that we own. You know, these are big power plants. They have to go down for maintenance every couple of years. You basically got to rebuild them to keep them running. And so we moved all the schedules around to make sure that all of our facilities had had their tune ups, had been maintained, had been overhauled ahead of AES shutting down so that we would have this clear field after AES shuts down, where most of our equipment was going to be available and at peak performance. And so really going into next year, into later next year, we have sufficient generation. And we also have a reserve margin which we have to have on an island because we can't call up anybody else and say, hey, one of our machines broke, can you send us some electricity? So we've always got to have that reserve as well. So we're we've been planning for this. So that is a I mean, obviously, things happen. Storms happen, things break, but storms will happen for sure. Things will. The last couple of years have told us they've taught us that things are going to happen. But we we feel like we've got everything planned out the way that because, you know, AES goes offline for maintenance, too. There are parts of the year when they're not running because they're overhauling them, so it isn't like with them not being on the system that suddenly we're we're within an inch of not being able to keep the lights on. Yeah, there's something you mentioned makes me want to ask this. I mean, I always favored, you know, an integrated state on energy where we had an undersea cable and, you know, I still do if it was possible. You think that that this this is possible in order to want to call it balance and stabilize energy, at least among your islands. I know it costs money and I know there's no environmental considerations as there were last time, some of which I thought were really over the top. But query, are we ever going to get to that? Because it seems to me that if you wanted to balance the state, you would do that. You would have undersea cable. It's the easy technological solution, no? Well, I think there's there's all sorts of new solutions that are kind of arriving and I'm hoping are going to be catalyzed by we're talking about the Inflation Reduction Act and all of the money that is be loosened by the feds on a lot of different fronts, things like hydrogen research, things like, you know, offshore wind, there's a lot of interest in that. And that kind of goes to your question about the cables. You know, people are asking about that all the time. You know, is that something that's potential here? It does have potential here. Carbon capture, I think, is going to be one of the most interesting emerging technologies that we're going to all be looking at over the next 10, 20 years. And whether that means that you can generate electricity on site, capture the carbon, no emissions. And then you're not having to worry about how big a facility is or being hooked up to a different island. But I think we, you know, there's the point that you're making. Every island has got its own special signature in terms of, you know, what resources are available, what the geography is. And I think we're at the point where we shouldn't ever say, let's take everything off the table. I think we ought to look at everything. Oh, you mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act is very important. It's happening now. I wouldn't say that the ink isn't dry. I would say the ink isn't even wet yet. Yeah. Yeah, we're not quite done yet. But clearly, how is that going to affect what we've been talking about? Because there's money coming in for credits on electric vehicles, for example. And as you said, infrastructure, how does that affect the picture you and I have been talking about? Well, we're hoping it is going to really get into the hands not only of the utility for infrastructure work, and we're really gratified to see a lot of money put toward coastal communities and resilience work around addressing climate change because that's hugely expensive for us. So our communities are going to have to pay for that to have the feds come in and pick some of that up. That's that's going to be great. I'm really gratified to see that they're specifically targeting money to low and moderate income communities to put in rooftop solar to pay for heat pump water heaters, which are very excited about those. It's a great technology. Imagine that you want to talk about lowering your bill. If heat pump water heater could potentially lower your bill. Water heater is 40 percent of your bill for most people. Imagine having that just go away because you've got this heat pump water heater that hardly uses any electricity at all. And but they're very expensive and they cost money to install. And so not everybody can afford those. But I think that's the sort of thing. We love to see billions of dollars put toward that kind of technology to make that more affordable, to be able to give people grants, tax breaks, whatever to install that and get rid of the plain old water heater that most of us have. Well, it's a statement. It's energy justice in a way that makes these things available to people on both sides of the the energy divide, so to speak. So that's all positive. I hope that really happens to knock wood and cars. What three say no. And the car that to be able to get to their offering rebates, tax rebate for used EVs, OK, four thousand dollars, I believe it is for people making for a single people making under seventy five thousand dollars a year. That would be terrific. That's going to then put EVs within reach of people because we all know that's been one of the biggest obstacles to getting people to transition. That creates an aftermarket. Yeah. So then you can go about you can go out and buy a new one after you've sold your old one. And so then you're really expanding it to a tremendous possibility for a lot of people. Yeah. Well, one other thing before we close, we're about out of time. I'm sorry we are like to continue the conversation. But coming back to the point about we know that Congress, thanks to Joe Biden, is doing stuff. And infrastructure includes energy. God bless for that. And although it passed the Senate on only because Kamala Harris cast the you know, the the tie breaking vote, which is sad that we had to go through that. But we have it. It's there pretty much. The question really is the state legislature, you know, in twenty twenty one, the state legislature had a good year. They had may I say I don't like to say this, but they had extra money. They were flush, but they did not renew the E.V. credit. They did not pass the the additional credit for storage facilities on existing rooftop solar. That was disappointing. And I don't know what else they did or didn't do. But I wonder if you had any suggestions for what you would like to see coming out of the legislation. We know the Fed finally got on board. What about the state? Well, the state in addition, we spent a lot of time talking about the renewable energy law. But, you know, the state also has a law and a mission to decarbonize the economy and seeks to be in alignment with, you know, Joe Biden's pledge, which is to decarbonize the American economy at least 50 percent by 2030. That's a huge lift. We're really trying to get focus on the issue of decarbonization, not just renewable energy. We want to get, I want to say we want to get off of that, but we've gotten a big start on renewable energy. We've now got to start really going on after the hard stuff involving, you know, transportation, which is what we're talking about with with E.V.s. We have to really make sure that people understand what's ahead in terms of the lift to truly decarbonize and what that's going to take and what it looks like. I know there's there are people working on it. We saw the there's coverage of the electric airplane between the neighbor islands recently, and that's pretty cool. But there's there's a lot of work that needs to be done. So I think that policymakers can really, I think, address the decarbonization issue more more directly by trying to get everybody lined up here on that that is the goal that we're aiming toward. It's not just renewable energy. It's about reducing carbon. And that's an agriculture that's in buildings that's in, you know, concrete construction. That's in, you know, every food production food that we bring in from the mainland. It's a very broad category of activities of our economy. Well, you know, it was this election year and I truly hope that the people running our office, both in Ledge and, you know, for governor and lieutenant governor take this as a platform point, you know, and carry it carry it home because leadership is everything is especially in an area that is so technical and complex as energy for sure. So I hope that happens. And I hope that the public opinion gets focused on it that way. I have one more question for you, Jim. It goes back to PBN and the Honolulu Advertiser and KIUC and everything. I have them fun. Oh yeah, it's fun every day. I mean, I always look forward to going to work. There's always something going on. Remember, looking out the window going, oh man, I wonder when five o'clock is going to be there. There's a lot going on. And I mean, it's like I said, this decade is going to be, we're going to look back at it and feel proud of what we accomplished or we're going to be kicking ourselves saying we didn't get it done. But I feel pretty certain we're going to get it done. Great. Well, I hope you come back and talk to me from time to time to keep tabs on it and follow the action because this is one of the most important things for the state, for its future, for its development and its attractiveness for people to come here, live here, participate in a thriving economy. Thank you so much, Jim. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Jay. Aloha. Aloha. 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