 Yeah, Energy Justice in Hawaii here at four o'clock on Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel and we're co-hosting today. Me and Ali Andrews. Hi, Ali. Hi, Jay. So I want to talk today about weather and to the extent, is Hawaii resilient to extreme weather here on Energy Justice? Because we know that if we don't have resilience, certain parts of our demographic are going to be affected more than others. And usually, as usual, it's the people who are disadvantaged who are affected worse. So there's no justice in not being resilient. It's just Aristotelian. So the question is raised by what happened in Texas a few months ago with their failure to be resilient against a cold snap. I guess it was a really bad cold snap. And what happened in New Orleans just a couple of weeks ago, which is much scarier in the sense that in New Orleans, they had the opportunity to put their power lines underground and they didn't do anything about it. The government didn't do anything about it. And then when the storm came, the towers blew over, the poles blew over, and I think most of New Orleans and on Iran are still now today without power. And that means the people who were disadvantaged without power because the other guys left town already. If you have a few bucks, you leave town. So it's really a problem if you're not resilient. The other thing is, I don't want to tell you anything you don't know, Ali, but we are in climate change and it is getting worse all the time. That's probably why you care so much about energy and energy justice. And although the media doesn't necessarily associate these extreme weather situations and wildfires with climate change, they're definitely part of climate change. They're caused by climate change. Give me a break. We should all know that and live that all day long. And Congress should know that, but unfortunately it doesn't know that. So the problem is that climate change, extreme weather can affect, and we see wildfires too, and drought and flood, all those things are all part of climate change increasingly. And the connection is so obvious. One of these days, Oahu, the most populated island, is going to get a storm. We've been so lucky. And it's going to get a storm when we have a lot of overground electrical connectivity, and towers, and telephone poles, and all this. It's coming. I wake up in the morning, I say to myself, today, what a beautiful day it is. One day closer to the next extreme storm, which will be worse than any storm you can imagine. So that's the problem. And the question before the House is, are we resilient to that storm? And if we are not, what is going to happen to our energy systems? And what is going to happen to the people who are disadvantaged, those who would be affected more than others, by the failure of our energy systems? It really counts. When there was that storm that wasn't Maria in Puerto Rico maybe four or five years ago, now there was a huge field of solar array. And one half the field, we know this because we had a show about it. One half the field had a certain kind of fastener holding down the anchors and the solar cells. And the other side of the field, about half divided, had a different kind of fastener. And when the wind came from Maria and blew through that field, the field with one kind of fastener, it just got destroyed. All the solar arrays, all the anchors all finished on. The other side, hell. So the point is, it really makes a difference if you plan ahead. If you look at those fasteners, if you make things resilient. Now, I know you're an energy buff to the max. And I want to know your thoughts about this. Okay. How resilient are we? Wow, just coming right out there with the big question right away. First of all, thank you for having me on. I'm still grateful to be here either way. And I think this topic is really interesting. I don't, I will admit that I'm not a huge expert in resiliency in general, but you are correct that I am an energy nerd and like to think about this a lot, particularly that question that you posed around what happens to our frontline communities, our most vulnerable communities, which we know from the events though I storm in Texas this winter, and the current outages that are happening in New Orleans, that are low income communities, our communities of color statistically are the ones who are left without power for longer or experience those more extreme impacts because of losing power, because of lack of access, as you said. I would say without being a resiliency expert, I think that renewables in general make us resilient to those events that would isolate us from external resources for longer. If we are dependent upon fossil fuels coming to our islands, those do not come from here. Those come from very far away. So if the ports or the way that we receive those fuels cannot enter, then we have a finite use source. I'm sure that we have a pretty large backup, but the sun comes every day, the wind comes every day. So I think in general renewables and battery storage are looked to as being more resilient. So as Hawaii does the good job of shifting towards renewable energy, I believe that makes us more resilient. And I think that there are also ways of deploying those renewables in ways that make us more resilient, in ways that distribute the energy rather than centralize it. There is a big movement around distributed energy as providing more resilience. The closer it is to where we use it, the less dependent we are upon the infrastructure that has to take to us, aka the distribution lines and the transmission lines in some parts of the island. So if we have a failure in those channels, in those distribution and transmission lines, distributed energy is better. And I think that's a huge buzz. Why we hear so much about micro grids these days is the ability for micro grids to provide that safety, that isolation, that backup in a severe case. I think for me, one of the big questions is those systems historically have cost more. And so micro grids as awesome as they are, and as much as I love to hear about their buzz and the new technologies that enable them, they still do micro grids cost more than not having that islanded backup ability. I think that should be on the final exam, Molly. The question on the final exam would be, does resilience cost more? And the answer is yes. What would you rather have? A blackout like in New Orleans that lasts for days, weeks, months, maybe more? Or would you like to have your power back? And people don't realize what happens. Wake up in the morning, nothing works in your house. You want to watch the tube, no tube. You want to do internet, no internet, no nothing. What's that worth? Anyway, there's a question. It's funny that you should raise that because there's a question I want to read it to you from a viewer, viewer question. We appreciate all viewer questions, question. What is the value of resilience? I guess that means the value economically. And what is the cost of resilience? Who pays, who should pay for the cost of resilience? And this is something you've covered tangentially. Does having solar panels on your roof make you more resilient? Okay, that's a compound multiple question, but let's see what you can do with it, Ali. I will start with the last one first. I think in general, having solar panels on your roof does not surprisingly ensure that you will have power in the case of a power outage. In fact, most rooftop installations are connected to the grid in a way that the utility has the ability to shut it off as soon as there's an outage on the line in general. And there's a safety reason for that, because if they're sending out individuals line people to service the lines and you, they think that the power is out on this circuit, but your solar system is sending power on the grid, that can be a very dangerous situation. I'd suggest that I'm better off if I'm free of the grid. Thank you, but I don't want to be connected kind of thing. Now, a lot of people wouldn't do that because they want to back up from the utility, but if you did do that and you weren't connected, this problem would not exist, right? That is likely true, unless the storm, you know, ripped off your solar panels or ruined your circuitry, you probably would be better off in a hardy off-grid system. I would say that there are ways now, particularly with more batteries, that you can have a system, at least in California anyways, and I assume that the same is true in Hawaii, that you can have a rooftop system as long as it's connected in the right way to be able to island itself and you would be able to use that. You know, one of the things that has happened in New Orleans is that people have brought in generator systems, generator sets, running fossil fuel into their homes in order to generate power for all those things I mentioned, you know, right down to your electric toothbrush, you know, and these generator sets have exhausts and the exhaust has noxious toxic fuel fumes and so they have actually died from the fumes of these generator sets being used indoors. So there's a certain danger in doing the generator sets, but it also strikes me that if you have solar panels on your roof and whether or not you're connected to the grid, and for this discussion we'll assume you're not connected to the grid, and those solar panels are feeding the rest of your house except that, you know, the wiring was damaged, the panels, the system was damaged, and you're in the house and it's feeding, you know, electricity into the house and it's broken. There's a danger there too, isn't there? I would guess you are right, yes, without being an electrician I cannot confirm the full certainty, but yeah, I guess that probably would create a dangerous situation in some cases. I have to be able to turn it off. Anyway, okay, so the rest of my question or the viewer's question is what is the value economically of resilience to you and to the community? This is a wonderful question. And what is the cost of that resilience to you or to the utility or to the community? And I suppose that all that means is who enjoys the value of the resilience and who pays the cost. I think there's an answer that the energy industry, I think there's not one answer to the value of resilience, but there's a there's a way that the energy industry tries to monetize, to account for the monetary value of resilience, but Jay, I might put this on you for a moment. How much do you think, let's say you were expecting in the future for one power outage that would last a full day every year? How much would you be willing to pay extra to Hawaiian Electric if you got to keep power during that full day that would just happen once a year? Okay, that's me now. I am not particularly disadvantaged, although my wife thinks I am. I would pay whatever the freight was. I would pay whatever it was. I believe in resilience. I believe in survival, not only for me and my family, but also for the community. So I would pay whatever whatever cost, whatever the actual cost was, I would pay that. And if utility calculated it at X dollars, I'd be happy to pay that. However, I would like to add, pursuant to the title of our show, there are some people that can't afford that. They may make a much closer analysis of it. You want $100 for me for resilience for one day? I can't afford that. I'm out of work, COVID has busted my budget. I'm in terrible shape. I'm not even paying my electric bill now, much less then. So it would be a different answer for different demographic groups, wouldn't it? Yes, yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think and also different groups and how necessary electricity is to them on a daily basis. I think when you're talking about Texas during a winter storm, a lot of the attributable deaths in Texas were hypothermia related. And so if you don't have electricity, that means something more dire than hypothermia related deaths here in Hawaii. In the Central Valley in California, which I have lived for a couple of years there, when I lost power for three hours at the hottest time of the day, I was 105. And it was time to have the AC on. I was very uncomfortable. And I think others would be in an even more uncomfortable situation if they were dependent upon that, if they were elderly, if they had medical devices. So I was reading a study earlier today about the value of lost load. The VOLL is an acronym in the energy industry. And it varies from a dollar per kilowatt hour, which a kilowatt hour is a unit of electricity. We typically use about three to 500 of those units in a month here in Hawaii in a household. So a dollar per kilowatt hour to $300 per kilowatt hour, depending on what you're using that electricity for. If you're a hospital, you're on the other end of the spectrum. If you're Allie, who's kind of uncomfortable and sweaty in her apartment in Fresno for three hours, you're probably on the $1 end of the spectrum. And having the resources to be able to adapt to loss of electricity, just like you mentioned before, that you can leave town. I think there was a senator who got criticized in the Texas ice storm for heading off on a semi-tropical vacation in the middle of the ice. Everybody knows Ted, he's a friend of the country in his own strange way. The country meeting Mexico. Let me make a distinction for you, Allie. And that is, you mentioned, I think it's really important that renewables, specifically solar, are resilient because they don't require outside help, outside fuel, and so forth. But that is not necessarily the test of resilience because you could have a fossil fuel. I think this would be clear for the analysis. You can have a fossil fuel system. One of those generator sets has been running for longer than I have, which is really a long time. You can have that running on fossil fuel, and you have to be resilient with that too. So renewables do not solve the problem completely. I guess the problem with the old-fashioned renewables with fossil fuel is if I have a generator set that's old and it breaks, I have engineering issues. I have to find an engineer who was around when it was designed. I may have to go to long distances to find replacement parts, and that's not resiliency at all. That's the opposite of resiliency. If, for example, this generator set was made in Germany or somewhere in Europe, Scandinavia would have you, we know they do manufacture, they have manufactured this equipment. It means I have to call a right and get them to ship that air freight, hopefully, and if it's a big, heavy piece of equipment, it's not going to be air freight, so I can start up that generator again. That's not resiliency, is it? Yeah, I think that's a really good point. I think the parts are a really good point, as well as the labor. I think having local individuals who are knowledgeable about operating, maintaining problem-solving our renewables is super important, and local workforce development is another reason for that. I mean, another component of that. I think the group that has come onto the show before that I worked with on Moloka-i, the whole Afu Energy Cooperative Moloka-i, that's a huge effort of theirs is we're not just going to build this with outside labor and maintain it with outside labor, both because we want local economic development and we want our community to know how to repair, maintain in moments of crisis and in moments of not crisis. I think that makes us resilient, as well, if we are all not, maybe not all of us need to be knowledgeable, but we need to have people among us who know what's going on. Well, let's talk about justice for a moment. So, suppose it cost me X dollars to be resilient. Whatever system I'm using, however I'm connecting or not, whether I'm using, for example, community solar, whether I'm using fossil fuel generators, it's going to cost some money. Now, what is the equitable allocation of that cost? It's really important, especially in a time when people are economically stressed in our community and they don't have money and how are you going to raise that sum? It could be expensive and maybe it should be expensive. It should be, you know, what is President Biden saying? Build back better. Don't just have resilience to achieve what you already have. Have resilience to achieve better than what you already have. So, my question is who pays the freight? How do you allocate that in accordance with, may I say, energy justice? I think that it's an amazing question and I think that our, I'm going to just solve it for us real quick in the next seven minutes that we have. I'm not going to do that, but I believe that the reasons that are some of our low-income communities and communities of color are more vulnerable are due to systematic oppression. And so, just giving everybody a hundred dollars across the board per household to make yourself more resilient is not going to create an equitable situation. It's going to perpetuate the inequities that have led us to some neighborhoods being more vulnerable to outages than others because of the resources that the utility has prioritized to keep the lights on for the hospital in this neighborhood versus the just purely residential over here. So, I personally believe that the system as a whole, that the ratepayers as a whole need to pay for the resilience that brings us all to the same vulnerability. And hopefully that's the same resilience, not the same vulnerability because that's taking a negative tone on it. But I believe that electricity is a human right and access to that should be equitable equal access. So, how do you raise the money? Do you include it in the rates that people pay? Some of them aren't paying any rates, they're, you know, they're not able. And do you include it in the somehow you make the utility company pay out of their funds? Do you make the state pay? Do you spread it among the taxpayers, the ratepayers of the utility? Where are you going to get the money to build back better? Wow. Okay. All right. I think I can answer that. I think that the ratepayers, the people who have chosen to be on the grid system on our shared system and share in those resources, I think that recovering those costs across all of our ratepayers makes sense. And keeping, as you mentioned, you know, some folks have assistance on their utility bills from federal subsidies. And I believe that those should stay in place because I think, again, those are addressing systematic inequities. So we shouldn't take those out so that everybody pays their fair share of resilience. But I think I support those systems staying in place as well as these extra costs that we are going to incur over the next several years will hopefully pay off. Like they're going to cost us money now. But as PG&E's CEO was arguing when they were arguing for, I think it was $15 billion worth of transmission cost upgrades to bring their transmission lines underground. They said it's a huge cost now, but we're going to save money in the long run because we're going to cut out the risk of wildfires and the loss of property and life as a result of that. So I think if we share the cost now, we will share in the benefits later. That's the takeaway. That is so important. What you just said, that is really, that is also going to be on the final exam. Okay. The other thing is the essential question, the title question, we need to answer I think in greater detail. And that is, you know, how resilient is Hawaii right now? Remember that Hawaii is, you know, 2,500 miles away from the mainland. It's not clear that anybody's going to come and save us or repair our equipment, refurbish our, you know, broken equipment. Nobody's going to come from Asia. We may or may not have the workforce or the equipment or spare parts. We probably don't in order to repair everything. And looking at the footage that came out of New Orleans, those towers fall down. The wind blows them right over. And, you know, it's not like we have a storehouse of new towers that we can replace. We have to bring them in. We have to build them and so forth. And we have towers in Hawaii that would fall over in extreme weather for sure. We also have the telephone poles in so many neighborhoods, including my neighborhood where, you know, it's for sure they would fall over and somebody's got to build them back. So the issue in New Orleans was why didn't we bury these lines a long time ago? Not the same issue exists here. Why didn't we bury these lines a long time ago? We would be so much more resilient if we had done that. Can we do it now? It's not going to be cheap in any way, including legally, to bury them. So, query, how resilient are we now, Ali? This is not an easy question. And maybe the answer is not very, either. Okay. I think that's a question that I'm not very well equipped to answer just because there are lots of uncertainties in that. What I do know is that I learned that about the 3,000 miles of Hawaiian electric-owned distribution and transmission lines across the Hawaiian electric territory, I did not look up about 40% of those lines are underground already. So underground lines tend to be more resilient, although they do have their own risks to people digging them up when they're building new things or planting a really deep garden. And they're more prone to potential water damage because they're under the ground there, which is another vulnerability that we have with sea level rise. And I know that in new development, there's a policy around underground lines. If a new development, I think it's over four units gets built, then they go underground. So there's a movement generally towards undergrounding. But I think it's something like a million dollars a mile, or maybe it's three quarters of a million dollars a mile somewhere around there for building a new underground distribution line. So multiply that by 60% of 3,000 lines. I could get out my calculator, but that's a pretty penny. Yeah, one thing strikes me from what you said with the 60%, 40% and all that is the weakest link is the one that determines resiliency. If I have one part of the system that's not underground and it feeds the part that's underground, and a storm comes, the whole thing is going to go down. So you've got to put it all underground. Ultimately, that's better resiliency. I agree with you that maybe it's subject to water, but that can be dealt with. I think wind is a more serious problem for extreme weather here in Hawaii. But let me, we don't have a lot of time left, and I want to ask you another compound question. You know, it's out of Charles Dickens and the Christmas Carol. It's looking at Christmas future with Ebenezer Scrooge, if you remember. And I don't mean to refer to his willingness to spend money, by the way. So what is your warning to all of us about the dark side of the future if we do nothing to enhance our resilience? If we do nothing for whatever reason it might be to make our systems more resilient. And the second part of that question is if we were to do something to meet that warning, that admonition, that dark side out of Charles Dickens, what would we do? What step would we put out first? What would the action point be? Okay. The first part of the question was sort of the pessimistic. What are we in for if we do nothing? And I think that's a scary thing to think about. But we've probably seen some flashes of what's to come. Flashes may be flash flooding, flash storms. I think that what is happening in New Orleans right now with over 400,000 people still being without power, I think we could see a very real scenario like that in 40 weeks after a storm. If we do not address the infrastructure issues, I'm not much of a doomsday or so. I'm going to focus on the second part of your question, which is more about what should we do to address that. I think that the most powerful way to make our communities more resilient is to tap into the knowledge of what our communities already know about what risks and vulnerabilities there are. I think I have learned so much from working with the Moloka'i community about where good places and bad places to develop are, what areas are vulnerable to flooding and not at what times of year. And I've only just scratched the surface of that discussion. I think that there's a lot to learn. And there are already communities that are taking steps towards that. I learned about an awesome resiliency hub that is spearheaded by a community group to create a resilient hub that can serve as a multi-use shelter in the case of bad weather. That's an awesome project. I think more projects like that where we use local knowledge, we build up local capacity to know and maintain and repair and construct. I think that's where we're going to be resilient both to outages and from a social and economic perspective. I think that's how we become resilient. You know, a lot of the best laid plans of mice and men and women in Hawaii get put on the shelf and we do a great job at talking it up and then we don't do action. And that's deeply ingrained in our DNA and our culture here, I'm sorry to say. And this is a time in climate change where we really can't afford to be like that. So my last question to you, Alec, to what extent do the experiences in Texas and in New Orleans, to what extent are they wake up calls or should they be wake up calls for us, the consumers, for the utility, for the legislature, for the governor? To what extent should we be concerned and treat that as a wake up call to get on it and develop action points? I think to a huge extent that's a wake up call. And I think that is something that seeing the devastation that has happened, the loss of life, the loss of property, the pandemonium, I think that that is certainly something that can and well I won't say will. But it could happen here for sure. And I do think that it's a huge wake up call. And I think it's something that our frontline communities have been aware of for a long time. And I think it's that vulnerability, that sense of we need to be resilient for ourselves. That I think we need to heed their voices and their call in this as well, take their lead. And yeah, I think you're exactly right. It should be a call to action for all of our people in power who can help make a difference, direct resources and direct policies to booster, bolster, bolster our resilience. Alie Andrews, energy nerd, energy follower, energy justice person, community person. Thank you so much for for having this discussion with me. And I'm looking forward to your next show two weeks from now. Alie Andrews, thank you very much. Aloha. Aloha. Thanks, Jane.