 Okay, we're back. We're live. We're here on a Saturday. Huh, Saturday. No, Wednesday. Well, every day you want. This is Sharon Moriwaki. She's the co-chair of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And guess what? She's the co-host of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, which does broadcast at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays. We're making a special show today because we have a special guest. A special guest is Gavin Bade, and he is the editor. That means the senior editor, the most important editor, the guy at Utility Dive, which is an app and a newsletter about utilities and energy and environmental mixed up together out of what? Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. Wow. Now I've told the essence about Gavin, but Sharon is going to actually introduce him. Well, I'm so pleased to have Gavin here. I'm pleased to be. We, you know, at Hawaii Energy Policy Forum are just coming out of our annual legislative briefing, and we needed to know for Hawaii what is happening in Washington. It's so unpredictable, and we're so pleased that we have Gavin. Gavin is, as Jay said, the editor of Utility Dive. It's now an app that keeps the thumb of the nation, all the states, and we thought that it was really important for us to hear that as we go forward with this legislative session. And that's why the name of this episode is the same as the name of Gavin's speech, his presentation as keynote on Thursday, and it is what? Climate action in the age of Trump. Nothing political about that, okay? And Hawaii's role in the clean energy revolution. There's a lot of assumptions and publications in there. How is that? Yeah, well, what does it do for our 100 percent renewables goal in this age of Trump? We need to stay in touch, especially now. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. So Gavin, you came, you saw, you conquered. I don't know about that. Can you give us a praise, see what you said on Thursday we need to know about? And yes, you can refer to your PowerPoint. Oh, yes, fantastic. Well, thank you. You know how I love the slides. Well, I just want to thank you, Jay, and you, Sharon, for having me out here on Think Tech. You know, I do watch it from D.C. from time to time, and really love the production coming out of here. You guys do great work. I'm so happy to be here on the show. Basically, I, you know, kind of thinking about how to frame this question of climate and clean energy in the Trump era. I've done a very journalistic thing and resorted to a shorthand trope. And that is that it's kind of for climate and clean energy, it's the best of times, worst of times, right? Yes. When it comes to, you know, the beginning of 2017, we have this big energy paradox, right? It's, we have a climate denier going in the White House who said he's going to cancel the clean power plant, potentially pull us out of Paris, although Rex Tillerson is saying some other things about that now. But for a planet that's already kind of behind the pace in limiting carbon emissions to kind of limit our temperature increase to two degrees this century, the loss of that diplomatic will from the federal government would seem to be catastrophic for the planet, right? For the planet, yes. Well, I think that's the way a lot of people looked at it the day after the election, and certainly from an environmental standpoint, that was my initial reaction, right? You've changed your mind? Well, not exactly. But I think that there's, it's not all gloom and doom. There is reason for hope. And I think that's because there are states like Hawaii that are doing really ambitious things, setting ambitious targets and figuring out how to make a clean energy economy and a clean energy power generation system that can power the rest of the clean energy economy. So basically my thesis for everyone here in Hawaii is that you're going to show us how to do it. You know, I don't think climate denial will be the policy of the U.S. federal government forever. So if and when the pendulum does swing back the other way... I sure hope it's soon. Sorry. Well, I will, you know, leave those value judgments up for anyone, but for, I think for, from the standpoint of climate action, if and when it does swing back the other way, we do want to do something federally on climate, states like Hawaii are going to show us how to do it, and they're going to dictate whether we can do it cost-effectively for consumers. So I know it's a slog here going through and trying to get through, get to the 100 percent renewable energy mandate, but it's critically important that, you know, you guys do well at it, succeed and teach us all else, all throughout the nation how to do it. That's a great message for Hawaii. And that's the Port Parole message of our whole program here, and it's Gavin's message too. I love it. Yeah, I guess so. So I've got a couple slides to just kind of illustrate just kind of the market, the market situation from clean energy and decarbonization in, at the beginning of 2017. Go for it. So the first slide here, if we can bring that up. It's coming soon. There it is. Okay. So going back to the Dickens things, Pastor Times, Worst of Times, do we have a tale of two nations when it comes to energy and climate policy? And at first blush, you would think, yes, right? So this is the percent change in CO2 emissions from 2014. There is Hawaii over on the right side of the screen. Yeah, I had to split it up because it was a long interest for me. This is from a Brookings Institution study that came out last month. And basically what I wanted to do with this is just show that, you know, there are a lot of states, especially in the Northeast, the West Coast, and down south, that have had some good success in decoupling their economic growth from their carbon emissions. You know, states like Georgia and Tennessee, which you wouldn't think are big clean energy states, because they've switched from cold to natural gas, and because they've sourced a lot of power from nuclear, they've been able to support, you know, strong economic growth period without raising emissions. A similar story for the states in the Northeast and out West. So, but when I looked at this at first, I thought, oh, well, now that we're entering the kind of the Trump era, we're going to maybe lose some of that impetus, that momentum, maybe we will see this nation's keep pulling apart a little bit more. But the Brookings people that I talked to and other analysts, you know, they said, well, maybe yes, but maybe not, because renewable energy has been making inroads in many of these, you know, orange, some of the more conservative states in the land that we see. And everyone expects that to continue. So, if we can go to the next side, I think we can demonstrate why. So, this is the, this is a slide from the investment firm, Lazard, and it's just comparing the market, the market price for renewable energy and all of the conventional generation. So, if you see at the bottom there, I have highlighted, that says gas combined cycle. And that's your kind of run-of-the-mill modern gas generator on the electric system ranges from $48 to $78 a megawatt hour in the average levelized cost in the survey. And the interesting thing about this was that it showed for the first time, if you look at the wind energy, which is at the bottom of the alternative energy block up there, the range is actually quite competitive with natural gas and the range is actually lower. It's from $32 to $62 a megawatt hour. This is on an unsubsidized basis. It's without federal tax incentives for wind and solar. And if you look at the solar PV, it's on a utility scale, a thin-film utility scale. Very, very competitive with natural gas in many parts of the nation and cheaper than coal. So this is the market situation without subsidies today. What is this telling us this chart? Well, it's telling us that renewables today are at grid parity with fossil fuels. Now, they have problems. They're not dispatchable, right? You can't have wind and solar all around the clock without energy storage. And we can talk about that a little later. So this is without the problem of storage. But if you add the cost of storage and these numbers will change. These numbers will surely change. But we see really a lot of really encouraging developments coming out of Hawaii, actually, with bringing the cost of storage and solar plus storage facilities down. We're determined to do that. You know that. Absolutely, absolutely. And it's going to be critically important for a state like Hawaii that wants to take fossil fuels off the system. I think if we can go to the next slide, we can get a little... Is storage, going back to that storage question, is storage commercialized enough that you would get some kind of rate like that to say how much more you would add on the storage to the utility... That's a tough question. I think it's... Utilities and developers are still really figuring out... Like some of these... A lot of the projects are one-offs right now. Storage is just maturing into a grid-scale resource. And I think that that's one of the big stories of 2016 was that energy storage did kind of prove that it could be a viable replacement for natural gas or other things on the system. But we're on Sharon's point. That chart, you just showed us. Yes. Right now it doesn't include storage, but there will come a time, maybe the next year or two, when you could rebuild that chart and include the cost of storage and see if it still works as against fossil fuels. Sure. And I think it's difficult. There just simply aren't enough solar plus storage facilities on the system today to really model that out, right? You can't do an average thing. But the ones that we do see, the contracts that are being signed are really quite encouraging. You know, KIUC, the Kawhi utility cooperative over on the island of Kawhi, in 2015 signed a power purchase agreement with Solar City and Tesla. 100% dispatchable solar. It's a big 52-megawatt battery. Solar and storage together. Solar and storage. Same deal. So they charge these big batteries during the day. And then when the sun goes down and everyone goes home starts to use electricity. This is what's going to happen. This is what's going to happen. That's the idea, right? It's that combination package thing that KIUC did. We're going to see that on the chart that you just described. Well, that's the hope at least. And we're going to see that hopefully continue to come down. The KIUC actually just signed another PPA last week with an energy storage company, AES. And it's actually 30% cheaper than the storage contract that they just signed not even two years ago. So that's, you know, obviously Hawaii is a special test case. I haven't looked at the contract itself. A lot of these things are proprietary. No, but you are very familiar with Hawaii things. Yeah. It's not fooling around. That is not fooling around. Well, you know, if we try to be as, you know... And we should see it, don't we? Yeah. But it's, you know, that was really encouraging and exciting for a lot of people in the system today. That storage was, that solar plus storage was signed for 11 cents a kilowatt hour. And the exciting thing about that is the prevailing electricity rate on the mainland. If you take all the residential rates and average them, it's 12 and a half cents a kilowatt hour. So if I don't know if AES can make that big, that big facility into something that goes, you know, into your garage and on your roof yet, probably not because the economies of scale probably help them keep the cost down. But... But you know, you can do it again. Just 28 megabytes here and 28 megabytes there. Well, we will see. That's the hope. Look at how much Hawaii has accomplished because their rates are, like, 40... Yeah, this is remarkable. Exactly. And they will save a lot of money doing that. Yeah, they're showing us all of you things or two. Yeah, yeah. Let's go to the next slide. Let's go to the next slide because it's a little bit more detailed look at... Oh, this is... Is there the one with the map? Well, this is... Well, we've established, you know, renewables have their grid parity throughout the nation. And, you know, there's especially very competitive for wind in the heartland, you know, places like Nebraska, Kansas, you know, where there are windy, windy plane states, and then solar you can actually see in many parts of the Southwest is actually the cheapest resource on the system. So that would make you feel very good about the U.S. climate situation, right? You would think, well, if the... if we've been switching from natural gas to renewables that's driven decarbonization for the past 10 years, then we continue doing that. Everyone expects that to continue despite Trump. Well, then what's the problem, right? And this chart kind of shows us what the problem is. It's that those trends alone aren't enough. We're simply not moving fast enough on decarbonization to hit the federal targets. So this is a... So all of these bars show what's called the carbon... the annual decrease in carbon intensity. So it's basically your economic growth, the difference between your economic growth and your carbon emissions growth. So as we can see, the highlighted bar in the middle there is the United States as an average. And annually we've been, you know, taking down the carbon intensity economy by about 2.1 percent a year from 2014. The problem is we need to be all the way up where that orange line is up there if we're going to meet the goals for the United States under the Paris Protocol. That's the progress line. That's the target line, right? And you can see places like North Dakota or D.C. that have had really explosive economic growth. It's not that North Dakota has actually cut their emissions. They've just... So what is that line at? What is the metric of that line? If I could read the thing, but I think it's... Can you move that graph a little bit? I think we need to be a little bit... I think it's the way I cropped it, but I think we need to be up a little... We need to be in abstraction, but we need to be doing two to three times better, faster than we are now, than we are today, on a nationwide basis, right? Okay, well, why don't we go... You want to see a next slide then? Yes, please. Okay, next slide. So here's why I'm saying... You look at that and you think, oh, well, it is all gloom and doom. We're not going to see much more action on the federal level, but there's reasons to be optimistic about the energy why. This slide is from the most recent Department of Energy Quadrennial Energy Review. What it shows us is the expected life for all of the generation capacity on the system today. So the different bars you can see on the bottom relate to different resources. Coal is the gray on the bottom there. Natural gas is the green. And the point of this chart is showing, you know, taken today, and this report came out last month, you know, how long can we expect every plant to stay on the system? The point of this is that you can see the gigantic glut of natural gas capacity that was put on the system about 15 years ago, all those tall green bars there. A lot of analysts I talked to don't expect them to get to that expected life of their natural gas. Natural gas plants are cheaper than coal plants, the nuclear plants, so they depreciate faster. Utilities basically get their bang for their buck much faster out of these plants. Cobals and other, you know, dispatchable, clean generation or even, you know, more efficient natural gas plants come out of the system. A lot of people are telling me they expect those big, you know, big green bars of natural gas that 150 gigawatts of combined cycle, 70 gigawatts or more of combustion turbines that they might go offline and be replaced by new capacity in the mid to late 2020s or early 2030s. That is, it opens up a gigantic opportunity for dispatchable renewable resources, not just to tinker around the edge of the system, but to really make inroads and replace carbon emitting resources with clean technology. So what does this tell us about what we should be focusing on? Yeah, what it tells us is that we have a big opportunity around the corner if we can get the price of dispatchable renewables and other clean energy down to where when all of those natural gas plants come off the system, the energy in instead of putting other natural gas in. The whole natural gas has been a positive for the climate over the past decade and a half. A lot of utilities have switched from burning coal in their plants to burning their natural gas plants more just because the gas price has been so cheap. And fully that kind of accounts for about two-thirds of the decarbonization we've seen, but going forward it presents a problem. If a utility makes an investment in a natural gas plant or a pipeline today it's a system for decades in the future. 20 years or more in the case of a natural gas plant typically speaking. So we need to be, you know, when that natural gas that glut of natural gas gets ready to retire, if we replace it with clean energy we'll have a much better chance of hitting our targets under the Paris Accord. If we don't replace it with clean energy well we're just going to put more carbon we're going to just lock ourselves in to more carbon emitting resources on the system for decades to come. Well that teaches me two things. Transformation is change. Change is a matter of looking forward having new ideas and it's also retiring old ones. We have to move from old to new. We always have to move from old to new and that's the only way you can handle a transformation in energy or anything else in the mainland or Hawaii. That's one thing it teaches me. The other thing it teaches me is that Gavin has an incredible ability to give us an enormous bit of information without taking a breath. Yeah, I know that was a... I'm only going to let him take a breath now. We're going to take a break so Gavin can breathe. Ready? Go! Hi, I'm Donna Blanchard. I'm the host of Center Stage which is on Wednesdays at 2 o'clock here on ThinkTech. On Center Stage I talk with artists about not only what they do and how they do it but the meat of the conversation for me is why they do it, why we go through this. A lot of us are not making our livings doing this and a lot of us would do this if we didn't take a breath if we had that choice. And that's what I love to talk to people about. I hope you enjoy watching it and I hope you get inspired because there's an artist inside G2. Join us on Center Stage at 2 o'clock on Wednesdays. Bye. Aloha, my name is Josh Green. I serve as Senator from the Big Island on the Kona side and I'm also an emergency room physician. My program here on ThinkTech is called Health Care in Hawaii. I'll have guests that should be interesting to you twice a month. We'll talk about issues that range from health care to drug addiction to our health care system and any challenges that we face here in Hawaii. We hope you'll join us. Again, thanks for supporting ThinkTech. Okay, we're back. We're live with Kevin Bade. He's the editor, the editor of Utility Dive. Wonderful. Sorry, one of the editors. We'll talk more about that. We'll talk about climate action in the age of Trump and Hawaii's role in that action. This is in the Clean Energy Revolution into exactly the Energy Revolution in Hawaii's role. I want to ask you some more about Utility Dive. What is it? How big is it? Who's involved? Why? So Utility Dive is an electric utility trade publication. We're based in Washington, D.C. and we focus on the entire U.S. nation in the power sector here. Some other international coverage but mostly the U.S. power sector. And I guess our mission is just to provide policymakers and industry officials with actionable information so that they can deliver a cleaner power system at lower cost. Did they listen to you? I hope so. It seems like we've been... Over the past two years since I've been here it seems like we've caught on a little bit. We've been growing. We appeal to people, renewable energy executives, so people who are putting wind and solar on the system. Our target audience includes them, utility executives, so people who work at HECO or KIUC on the mainland. Absolutely. People who work at the PUC, in the governor's energy office. Any policymaker or industry official, anyone who basically has a vested interest and a say in the energy transformation, we want them to read Utility Dive. Where do you get your data from? Who makes the analysis at Utility Dive? The five of us who work there, it's me and my co-editor, Christie, are the two editors in the office overseen by senior editor, Davide, and then we have two full-time writers who are fantastic, Robert Walton and Herman Trebish and our time writer who's equally as fantastic, Peter Maloney. Shout out to all of them. Basically, it all comes from us. We do some semi-aggregation stuff, so we'll take headlines from throughout the nation, kind of distill them and then add our insight. But just kind of trying to talk to all of the industry experts out in the field. I try to talk to consultants and lobbyists and analysts and people who work in policy offices. You're on this phone a lot. I'm trying to kind of piece through the energy transformation. How can I get the benefit of Utility Dive? Well, we have a free daily newsletter that goes out to more than 30,000 utility executives and policy makers throughout the nation. You can sign up at UtilityDive.com. All of our content is 100% free. You won't pay for anything on Utility Dive. Our reports, our newsletters or anything. So there's a daily newsletter and then there's three weeklies, one on energy storage, one on efficiency and demand-side management and one on solar. So we're always looking to expand, but those are our options today. Can you just say the app? What is the app? Yes, we have the app as well. Get it on your phone. It's free and you can just have basically all of the utility headlines right in your hand every day. We've got the app, we've got the mobile web and we'll shoot the email to your inbox every day. So I think... I want that. If you want to be inundated, we can do that. Happy to be inundated. So one more question before we go back to the substance here and that is, Dive? What is Dive? Diving in Utility Dive. I didn't mean to know that. So Utility Dive is one of 12 publications that's a part of a fantastic parent company called Industry Dive. And these three guys who founded it just kind of saw that there was a demand for really succinct to the point analysis across a bunch of different industries. So they kind of started off a few years ago. It's actually we're just moving out of the startup phase. Started working in a Korean grocery store and they put these newsletters together and we've since... Well, it all makes total sense. So it's Utility... so it's Industry Dive, so we are Utility Dive. But then there's... Diving in. But then we have Retail Dive, Healthcare Dive, Biopharm, Food, everything you can imagine. What a great brand. I think so, yeah. The name, I mean, Ival was a little... It threw me for a loop when I first... But it's memorable. I'm saying, it's a drive. It's a drive. After you get past that... So let's dive into what's going on in Hawaii. Connect it up for us, Kevin. Yes, so I guess before the break we just got done saying that just around the corner there's going to be... depending on what happens in generation markets there are all these caveats, but a lot of analysts think that there's going to be a big opportunity to replace a big amount of coal and natural gas on the system in the near future. It's replaced with, you know, renewables and storage, with advanced nuclear, with advanced biomass, with something, you know, with maybe natural gas with carbon capture, that's all going to depend on, you know, house states like Hawaii and other ambitious jurisdictions, you know, drive technological change, drive the adoption of renewables and other clean energy, and create market mechanisms that allow them to really get a foothold. Well, in part, that depends on what you say about us, doesn't it? I don't know about that. We're going to get to publish what we're doing everywhere, yeah? I would say that you guys are pushing the narrative and that we're just reporting on it. Okay, okay, okay. True journalism, yeah. In any case, I think that there are a lot of really encouraging things happening in Hawaii. We touched on the 2KIUC projects that, you know, are going slated to be dispatchable solar plus storage, so, you know, storing up all of the solar energy that you generate during the day in big batteries. So you're looking for leadership points. You're looking for things at the frontier that we may have. Absolutely. And then you're going to sort of publish that. You are publishing that out so everybody can see. And that creates the leadership process you're talking about. Absolutely, and that's a big, I think that's a big, you know, motivation behind what we do every day is taking, you know, local or state level stories of clean energy success, you know, or difficulties to be perfectly trained. And, you know, trying to just broadcast them across the nation. So, you know, people who work in Ohio at AEP or, you know, up in the Northeast at National Grid, they can learn from what you guys are doing here in Hawaii. So make a prediction for me, Gavin. How is Hawaii going to do? How is Hawaii going to do? From all that you know. And in meeting the 100% renewable energy mandate? Whatever. Whatever we do, what do you think we're going to do? Okay, I'm waving into, you know, quite hard. This is deep water. Deep water. I think out of turn here, but I think, you know, based on what we've seen is that, you know, being the leader in the clean energy, being one of the leaders in the clean energy revolution is never easy. And it's always going to be fits and starts. So, you know, going through a couple iterations of the Hawaii Electric Power Supply Plan is probably how, you know, things have to go at first so that regulators and the utility can come up with a good plan to get going. It's going to be fits and starts, but I think you're going to do it because you're going to do it hook or by crook. There's political will behind it. You know, I don't think I, you know, unless things go terribly, terribly wrong, I don't see the Hawaii State Legislature bringing back the 100% renewable energy mandate. At least not any time soon. I mean, you never know what happens in today's politics. PSIP talking about, you know, 2040, not 2045. So there's a certain amount of interest in moving that deadline closer. Yeah, indeed. I think the point is there's political will behind it and people are really pushing the utilities and I think that we will. The question is just kind of, you know, I like that Hawaii, you know, California, other states have kind of defined the what, but now we have to work on the how, right? So I think the first thing that it seems that we need to do is, you know, we're talking to utility people is that the modernized grid is a necessity, right? Getting the grid ready for two-way power flows so more people can hook up rooftop solar, can hook up batteries, and so that the utility can solve problems in the system with distributed resources instead of building a new power line or, you know, upgrading a power plant or something like that. So upgrading the grid is going to be really critical. I think that's the first thing that, you know, what the utility people tell me is that's the first thing that probably has to happen. After you do that, then it's just an issue of, okay, well, which technologies do we choose? You know, do we go back to, do you guys go back to the LNG route to help integrate the renewables? You know, do you focus on biomass? Do you focus on institutional issues there? Maybe not going to happen. There are political considerations on that that will pose impossible obstacles. Yeah. In any case, I think it's, you know, it's going to be really tough for, you know, there's going to be a lot of work ahead between the utilities and the regulators to kind of plot out what's going to be the most cost-effective transition process. What I get from you is that things are basically in place. It's a maturation process. We've been doing this actively, politically, since 2008, right? If not before the Clean Energy Initiative here. And, you know, we, you know, we have had our fits and starts and we may have fits and starts going forward. So the question is, are we past fits and starts? Probably not. But we are at a point where we can see the outlines of the available options right now. We can build a pathway, recognizing there will be changes in technology and all that, and to be political issues they always are. But at least we can see the outlines and we can make a plan. Maybe, my question to you, maybe we are at a level of maturity that allows us to go forward with a minimum of disruption, a minimum of back and fill, if you will, so that the world can watch us, really watch us, and really learn. Are we there, do you think? I've certainly been encouraged, you know, to see people from the utility, the solar industry, policymakers, you know, in our discussions this week, the minds of communications seem open. And in the conversations that we have, they seem honest and frank. And that's the first thing you need if you're going to make any progress on these contentious issues of rooftop solar compensation. Which resources do you source? Where do you source them? How do you cite them? And it was a big issue. So kind of having a constructive dialogue between the commission and all of the stakeholders, the first step, and I've been encouraged to see that, I think it's always difficult when you, there's been a lot of stuff going on at the Public Utilities Commission, basically, right? There's the next era merger, there's the PSIP, you know. How about impatience? Is there room for impatience in this? I think everyone's impatient. I think Sharon's impatient, too. Because the planetary situation should make us impatient. We have to go there now. Exactly, but she wants it done right. And there are some real technical and market issues that need to be solved before we actually can get there. Will you come back and talk to us again about this? Absolutely. She wants to ask you some cross-examination now before she summarizes what you've said. Go for it, Sharon. No, I think Gavin has brought a good discussion to us about what's happening in other states, but also that we can be a model. And part of what we're talking about is the trends going forward and the market being such that we can actually keep moving forward. I think we're a little in disarray thinking, we're going to bump us all and we're going to go back to what we were before. And I know long ago, the Bush administration started this. We had this push toward renewables and then the oil prices went down and we left it. And so I think the late Senator Inouye said, look, we can't afford to blink. And that's what this is all about, is how do we keep going forward. And I think Gavin, looking at what's going forward and moving around us, kind of keeping our eye on the prize and then really moving in that direction. So my question to Gavin is, how can we do that? I mean, you mentioned some of the areas where we should really be focusing on, but what can states do? And we talked about this a little bit in terms of the public and how we can get the public engaged and what we should do. Good news. You got the question? Public engagement, no pressure. Well, I think the public, so the first thing is that public engagement and energy is higher in Hawaii than anywhere else because there's a big packet book issue here. But I think it's, you know, it shows like this. It's the utility and the stakeholders coming together to present a united option and just being kind of frank with the stakeholders and with the press about what's going on. I think open lines of communication and transparency is the biggest thing because people are watching what's happening in Hawaii. I think that elected officials, especially, you know, the federal elected officials who go to Washington but also people on the state level, I think a big thing that's going to be important during state and federal level during the Trump administration is building political power for clean energy, getting the solar people and the wind people together with the nuclear people, with the people who support biomass and even the natural gas industry. And that can and must and will and should happen in the states and in Hawaii. You've got it from Gavin Bade, one of the many editors at Utility Dive in Washington, D.C. talking with us today about climate action in the age of Trump and Hawaii's role in the clean energy revolution. And he will continue to keep taking that. Thank you Gavin. Aloha. See you soon. Thank you Sharon.