 We're back. We're live. We're here at four o'clock. This is Stink Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. We do our flagship show on energy with Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and it's called Hawaii the State of Clean Energy. We are committed to clean energy here on this show. Today we're going to talk about the outcomes of the 2017 legislature with me and my co-host, Mina Morita of Energy Dynamics, and our guests, Jeff McElina of Blue Planet Foundation and Leslie Goldbrooks of Distributed Energy Resources Council. Welcome to the show, all of you guys. Thank you. Okay, we had an interesting session. I guess you could almost call it a day here. It's about done, so we should talk about outcomes. And you had some stuff you wanted to inquire about, Mina. Right. Well, first of all, a little bit about how we're going to proceed in the month of May is sort of divide the show up into the watchers, the makers, and then the implementers. And so today we're starting off with two key watchers at the legislature, Leslie Goldbrooks and Jeff McElina. Leslie is with the Distributed Energy Resources Council of Hawaii. She's the executive director, and Jeff is the executive director of Blue Planet Foundation. So I want to start off with Leslie. So what were your priority bills at the legislature this year? Well, first, thanks for having me. It's great to be able to talk about it, even though it was kind of a sad session this session. I didn't realize that I was a watcher either. The watch bird watches. Yeah. So there were three main bills we were interested in. Two of them were energy storage incentive bills. One of them would have revamped the existing renewable energy investment tax credit. Right now you can incorporate storage, but it changed the structure so that you could install storage as a standalone, say for a commercial system, or you could include it with a distributed PV system. And the other one would have, the other incentive bill would have allowed using some of the gems funds as a rebate. So those are two competing ideas with the same hope for result, but different strategies. Those were very important to us, trying to bring down the cost so we can really move forward with this technology. And then the other bill was kind of a humble little bill, but very, very important. And it would have given an appropriation to pay for trainers to come to Hawaii and help the counties with inspections for renewable energy installations. It's just changed so much. I think that the inspectors are trying to keep up with what they see in the field, and it's a tough job, and they don't have the resources they need. So this would have given some money to bring in a trainer, somebody from, you know, the national electrical code to say, this is what we've got now, and this is what we look for. So I guess given that bills have to be decked by Friday evening that all of these died in conference committee and didn't move forward. That's right. Yeah, the inspection bill didn't make it to conference, but the other two did. So we made it to Friday at 3.15 and 4.15. And that's close as we got this session. Very close. Really work with stakeholders to get on the same page, so we didn't have a lot of different ways of doing it. You get too many cooks in the kitchen, and then that can implode, you know. But still, it's not easy to get bills through. How about you, Jeff? I'm unfortunately in the same situation, and it's so frustrating. We had so many good energy bills this session, and it came down to the last hour. And, you know, even if you're an hour away or two months away, it's the same outcome, right? That's for sure. And I think the frustration is really, I mean, we're on this journey to 100% in Hawaii, and we need policies to help, you know, clear the path, to help catalyze some of the change we need. These are difficult, complex issues. I mean, it's really evolved over the last decade or two, but we need to take action if we hope to retain our leadership position on clean energy. So, I want you to give us some, we have some of the bills that were important to your organization. But the next question after that, you know, really, I think we should be thinking about is, are there alternatives to legislation? Because these are so complex issues, do we really need laws to deal with it? Yeah, it's a fair question. So we had a whole host of bills, but I'll focus on three. And they fall into this camp of journey to 100%. The first is to just clarify our renewable portfolio standard, make sure 100% means 100%, make sure we get the equation right. That was a good bill. It was a good bill supported by the state. It was a basic math, that's what we were talking about. And then alongside that, making sure our whole energy system is moving towards 100%. So we had a measure looking at our gas system and seeing if we could set targets for them to incrementally improve towards 100%. And then the big bill was looking at our transportation system, because that is our largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. And unfortunately, we're not making good progress. We increased gasoline use last year by 2%, even though we made good progress on the renewable energy side. And part of the challenge we think is we don't have that target. We don't have a planning target for eventually we're going to wean ourselves from fossil fuel. So we thought aligning that target with our 100% RPS made sense. It's easier to solve the two problems together than separate and put that target out there so we can start to think of infrastructure, think of the planning and the collaboration we need to do to achieve 100% for renewable transportation. But similar to you, we were in that last meeting and we just couldn't get it over the finish line. So I guess with this, the first question is can you still move forward with these concepts not using legislation? Is that a possibility? I know with the 100% renewable redefinition that there was a working group set up to build a consensus position onto methodology definitions. And so apparently that didn't move forward. But are there key working groups that need to be developed as we move forward getting greater acceptance of some of these concepts? I'll say yes. And I think that burden is on us to help build that tent of folks help to show folks that this is possible. This is the trend where we're heading and bring folks who might be skeptical of that into the fold. You mentioned the RPS bill. And it's one of the frustrations because that's the go-to of the legislature, right? Well, let's work on it in the interim. Let's kick it to a working group. That happened in 2016. We had the working group, had consensus, and then it was kind of a fragile consensus and it fell apart during the session. And so they're thinking as well, let's have a working group and eventually we have to make a decision and go with it. What do you think were the obstacles or the challenges into, you said it first of all, I think the keyword was fragile. So what was the obstacle in moving a bill like that forward? That's a fair question. And I mean this is probably longer than the show allows, but for that particular measure, I mean a lot of these issues we are dealing with a legacy or incumbent industries and we're looking at transitioning to a new landscape. That's a big challenge for some of the businesses to see how they remain relevant in this new future. So there's some resistance there that we have to overcome. And part of it is showing how this is evolving, this is changing. There's still an opportunity for you to have a viable business in this future, but it may not be in the current iteration. That's a big challenge. So Leslie, a lot of the bills that you're concerned about dealt with money. So are there alternatives to tax credits, rebates that could help incentivize rate design that's out of the realm of the legislature. So where do you see that going? Exactly, that's you kind of already answered your own question there. And answered that our focus now, and it's been ongoing but we're trying to do as many things as we can to really service catalysts like Jeff was talking about to move things forward and to not have these big gaps and pauses while the state decides on policy and then industry leaves the state and then we're going to have to start again. So there's a few things that I'm actually really excited about. I think that will be a big help and one of them is the demand response program that's in docket right now. We've been in our final statements of position, the application is in, there's a pilot going on and the goal is, or not the goal, it's actually the scheduled start date is the end of this year. So what that would do is for customers that have energy storage connected to PV or not, you know, commercial, residential, a wide variety of different kinds of installations can provide grid services. These are system level grid services and they'll get payment for that. So it's part of the whole new business model of how we're going to get to 100%. It's not just centralized, it's now utility scale and distributed and commercial and residential. So that will be a way to help right now cost because it's another way to speed up the payment of your installation that if you can say provide fast frequency response or be available during emergencies, things like that. So we are looking to that and then another docket which is also examining the market track issues. That can be a little slower sometimes. So what it is about the DR docket that I really like is that there's a deadline and that we're looking at it actually happening and there's a pilot going on right now where the aggregators are showing how they can take 100 people and put them all together and they create a product that is available to provide these services. So it's really pretty exciting and cool. That's one of the things that we need is more pilots. This is the quietest I've seen J. I'm just listening but I do have some thoughts and comments. I think really an important question you've posed is what are the alternatives to having the legislature do this? Because we've seen over this year anyway that the legislature doesn't treat this as a priority otherwise they would have reached conclusions about it. They would have come to some policy and we need the policy, we need to move ahead. So you ask legitimately what other methodologies what other organizations are available to give us leadership decisions and policy and then let me spoon through a few of them. One is the governor but he's sort of detached on this. He comes up with comments about next era and about LNG and they come from nowhere particularly. So that's not a proven method of determining policy in this administration. Another one is D-bed but I think D-bed is good at conferences rather than determining policy. There is no energy authority and some people have said might even say in the future that for the lack of an alternative maybe we should have one. There's the PSIP and there's the PUC. The PUC is not going to act on that right away too bad but that could help us to sort of clear the air about what our policy should be, where we're going, how we're going to reach 2045 and 100%. So I mean I make my little list, I spoon through my little list and I don't come up with anything where, how can we answer her question? What are the alternatives? Must we wait for the legislature to realize this is a very important subject? What are we going to do? Do we just, you know, self-help? Self-help. Part of our job is to help convince the legislature to have overwhelming support and give them permission to take action or neutralize maybe some of the resistance. There are other mechanisms though and we're thinking through, you know, we have the counties, the counties can act on some of these issues. We had some efficiency bills at the legislature. One simple one that I think people might laugh at but you walk down Waikiki and all the doors are open, they're air conditioning the outside. New York City dealt with this two years ago passing a fairly draconian law saying you must close your, it's called shut the front door in New York and you get a big penalty if you're air conditioning the sidewalk. So we had a bill like that this session, of course, it didn't go anywhere. Did it even get heard? It did, I did get heard. Why didn't that bill go somewhere? Why all of these bills we've been talking about didn't go anywhere? Does it really take a lot to do that? So that's what we did. So, you know, there are, we can do some peer pressure, we can do some, you know, bring some attention to it. We did, you know, canvas all of Waikiki and, you know, handout things saying please close it, close it for the climate, we call it. Maybe in like street theater when you find you have a whole gang of people and all like fall down, you know, in front of those like. I gotta tell you one year I was in the Kamehameha day parade. It was such a relief to go to Waikiki with their conditioning. I consider there was a drop in the temperature plus it was shaded too because of tall buildings. You want relief? I'm going to give you one minute of relief. We're going to take a break right now and then go watch that. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Diveheart we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Diveheart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Diveheart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Diveheart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search Diveheart.org and share our mission with others and in the process help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. You're watching ThinkTech on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts five live talk shows from noon to 5 p.m. every weekday and then streams our earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from ThinkTech. Okay, welcome back to ThinkTech Hawaii, the state of clean energy. We're talking about the outcomes of the 2017 legislature with my co-host, Mina Morita of Energy Dynamics, Chef Michelina, Blue Panda Foundation, Leslie Cole Brooks of the Distributed Energy Resources Council. So to carry on with that same notion, something you said a minute ago, Jeff, and that is, you know, it's up to the industry to approach the legislature and explain the priorities. You guys represent the industry and the public service groups around it. And so this, I think inherent in this discussion is we collectively who would like to see renewable energy come about and we're not successful in this legislature. And we can think of other ways to do it in all, but the reality is in Hawaii, you need the legislature to do a lot of things. Not everything, but a lot of things. So here we are looking at the track to next year. Okay. What do you have on your minds about next year? How would you change your approach? What would you do? How would you explain and make the legislature understand in an election year, as I remember? How would you make them understand? They got to take some risks. They got to take some affirmative steps. They got to get out there and make this happen. And that means pass those bills. What would you do to make that happen? Well, what we're doing right now, and it's interesting you bring that up about it. It's an election year because that's already, already on the plate of their legislators are going to want to do something that looks really good. I mean, I hope they always want to do that. But this year it especially matters because everyone's going to be looking at that. If you could say, look what I passed. Look what I did. It's fabulous. So how do we do that? So for us right now, it's the dust is still settling. The first thing to do is to find out at the very end what happened in that conference committee. So I plan on visiting the different conferries and sitting now at their bill and saying, could you just honestly tell me what was it about this bill that gave you heartburn? You know, I've heard different things and so that's the first thing. Is this to sit down as off-session? You have more time during the session. Are there people out there that oppose these, actively oppose these bills? Who might oppose renewable energy? Who might oppose the development? Well, I think, you know, again, with the, especially the storage bills, you know, there's a cost-attach, you know, and there's always this struggle to balance the budget. And I think another major issue was some equity issues that, you know, you're looking at the same pool of people who have taken advantage of rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and now moving to storage. The same group of people getting, consistently getting benefits. So, yeah, the cost of it would be a concern. And, you know, it gets down to the budget. You know, there's extra money and they want to pass it around, then it's a good thing. But if the budget's tight, something's got to go on the chopping block. And there's uncertainty. So I don't think anyone comes out and says, we don't like renewable energy. It's not that. It's more the uncertainty of, well, it's revenue neutral according to our analysis. And we've, you know, put in things that are more anecdotal to say, even if you don't have the exact number, this is how it's designed. But you don't know exactly. And that can make the money committees uncomfortable because they say, what if this ran away, you know, and then it's not that. So... And we did see it run away with rooftop solar and, you know, how the incentives were applied there, the tax credits were applied there. And unfortunately for these kinds of cost issues, we don't see the impact until two, sometimes three years down the road because, you know, how returns are filed and that lag... But I would go back to the problem. I don't know if you guys agree with me. Is that this is an important initiative. And we haven't made the... You say we have leadership position, Jeff, but, you know, we could have a much bigger, better leadership position. So let me put it this way. You're walking in the park and it's July, August, okay? And you run into your favorite legislator who was on that committee, for example. And you're going to have a schmooze with him. And I'm him, okay? For this... We're going to role play. What do you say to me about your reaction to this session? What do you say to me about how I should conduct myself in next year of the election year? What kind of moral swage do you apply? Jay, it's so great you got elected finally after all these years. I'm glad we could support your campaign. No, I think it can appeal to... Clean energy is really, I hate to say populist, but it's a popular issue among Hawaii residents and visitors. People, it matches the image of the state. And I think writing on that and talking about this leadership position that we have, the jobs that it creates, and then the moral imperative around climate, I think that's more and more front and center to folks. I mean, we've had some pretty odd weather here, and it's only going to get worse. We have a small window. But some of these things, we're asking this year for a planning target for 100% renewable transportation. And I think people look to the leaders for that sort of visionary, you know, direction-sending and leadership. Yeah, Hawaii ought to take a position that eventually we're going to wean ourselves from fossil fuel. Anyone who's been in an electric car or something similar knows the power that, wow, this isn't something... This isn't Jetsons. This is here today in 2017. So asking leadership to set that vision. But, you know, with 100% fuels, renewable fuels, is that vision too small and not inclusive enough? Because we're not... You're limiting it to moving towards renewable fuels and electric cars. But the chatter these days is on autonomous cars. So should we expand to look at the whole platform of transportation? You mean a plan. That's what she means. I know she means that. Fair point. I think it's the chicken-the-eggs thing. Do we set the goal first, or do we make the plan first? And that was some of the discussion in the legislature. But is that goal a little too limiting in trying to... When we're trying to develop the platform? Just to clarify, the goal was simply to eliminate fossil fuel from ground transportation. So whatever that may have to be, autonomous or hoverboards or, you know, flux capacitors, we don't know, but at least setting that we're not going to burn fossil fuel for ground transportation. So I can see it being a real... a faster move for, again, the urban areas. But when you're looking at the rural areas and their choices of trucks that may not have, you know, electric options or limited public transportation, I mean, so how do you give confidence to all stakeholders in this that the vision is big enough to be inclusive and varied enough that there is customer choice? And we all know about customer choice on the electricity side, but, you know, you're really talking about customer choice on the transportation side where it really is a market design. So it's a complex issue. So how do we get down where, you know, we can all share a bigger common vision and move forward and really design the policy? Let me offer the thought and see if these guys agree. It is an election year next year. This could be an election issue. And, you know, you could explain we haven't made the kind of progress we hope to make that the 2017 legislation didn't do anything. We need to do something. And will those who are willing to get behind this and make it a high priority step forward because we want to know that when we vote one way or the other. Will that be done? Or is this politically incorrect, impolitic? I think you're on the right path. It's our challenge to make it that type of issue where folks are paying attention and they hold legislators accountable for their decisions. Yeah. And they see, and not just that they adopt the position because they think they'll get elected. They adopt it because they know it's the right thing to do. And that's the challenge of breaking it down, especially for things that are more complicated and explaining what it is. And I think a lot of times that's the problem is these issues with energy and transportation. It's not just a simple two-minute conversation. It's about the money and analysis. And I think, you know, I don't want to throw the legislators under the bus. I think if I didn't understand something I sure wouldn't vote for it, right? Because you don't know what you're getting. So it's on us to break it down and explain it in a way where they see that this is the right thing to do. And I know I'm going to get re-elected because people want to have renewable energy. So if you camera one over this, that's the public. They're all out there listening to you. Okay. Why don't you give you a special message to them? What should they be doing thinking about? What should they be doing vis-à-vis the legislature and their favorite legislators for next year? You should. This is the camera right here. That's so weird. Call your legislator and say, I really care about the environment and I care about Hawaii and renewable energy and renewable transportation and those sorts of environmental issues are just top tier for me. So please do what you can next session to make it so. Jeff, how much of what she said do you agree with? 100 percent. We're all about 100 percent. I know. I'm going to be the counterbalance. What about the person that said me finding a place to live next month and being able to pay my rent is important to me. I care about the environment but I care about where I'm going to live, having affordable housing. So I think these kinds of conflicting. I don't think it has to conflict though. But it's always presented that way. We have to do a better job of aligning those and showing that our clean energy future can be the most affordable future and even looking at electric vehicles today. There are certain models out there that compete or beat gasoline powered vehicles but that's only going to improve over time. So I'd like to think we're aligning that preferred societal outcome with our preferred climate outcome. The point though is that you've got to approach this. We've got to approach this on all the levels. On the governmental level, on the legislative level and with the public because they ultimately are the ones most respected by the legislature. So it's time for us to go now. I can sing that. Can you summarize for us? What did you learn today? What's the takeaway here? It's difficult. It's harder than you thought. It's harder than you thought. The reason for sort of breaking up into the watchers, the makers and the implementers, it comes down to implementation. And that's how we progress but it's having the right policies in place which we're all working on and hopefully together and having a long-term vision and strategy. So we basically stay on the mark. We might have to make adjustments along the way but we can only get there if we have a common vision and we can be able to articulate it. Thanks. Energy Dynamics, my co-host and the person who's going to shape the next three shows here in Hawaii State of Clean Energy. Thanks Jeff Michelina of Blue Planet Foundation for all that you do, not just today and I hope to come back soon. We'll talk some more about the same subject. Lesley Goldbrooks of Distributed Energy Resources Council thank you so much for what you did. Thanks for coming down today. We'll do this again. Thank you.