 My name is Scott Glenn, Chief Energy Officer with the Hawaii State Energy Office. I would like to thank everyone for joining us today, especially our legislative energy chairs, Senator Glenn Wakai and Representative Nicole Lowen and our great speakers for this annual energy briefing as we prepare for the start of the legislative session. The Hawaii State Energy Office is excited to be joining the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum for the first time and putting on this event, which the forum has done such a good job of organizing over the years. I'd like to thank the Policy Forum for inviting the Energy Office to be its partner, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute for its support and Think Tech Hawaii for hosting this event on their platform and making the recording available to all of you and the public on their website and YouTube. During normal times, we would hold an all day or a half day deep dive into the world of energy. It was just a year ago that we gathered in the Capitol Auditorium for this event. These days, with COVID-19 and its partner emerging menace Zoom fatigue, we tried to keep today's briefing to virtual in just over two hours. The fact that it now seems relatively normal to be doing an event like this on Zoom is a testament to our resilience. Please note that this meeting will be recorded. The recording will be made available by Think Tech on its website and on the Energy Office homepage. As soon as the recording is available, we will post the links on our social media for it. There's a lot to say and many leaders in the energy world have made time to be here to share their experience and offer insights into their thinking on our current situation and how we move forward. 2020 was an eventful year, both in terms of the pandemic and energy. We learned early on that COVID-19 was more than just a healthcare crisis. It is an accelerator and underscored the Energy Office's role as a facilitator catalyst for Hawaii's transition to a carbon-free economy. COVID-19 forced the Energy Office to reprioritize and adjust our focus on nearly a daily basis through the issue stemming from the pandemic and its effects on energy economics. The Energy Office tackled this challenge head-on while fulfilling its COVID-19 responsibilities with a reduced office budget and workforce. Fortunately, there were no major disruptions to our energy supply thanks to the many energy stakeholders that rose to the occasion. These challenges in turn help the Energy Office to identify and prioritize our most impactful work to help spur economic development and job creation while continuing to reach for the state's clean energy goals. Among the Energy Office's key achievements in 2020, we're working with energy companies to give them timely information as our knowledge grew about the coronavirus. We developed a national best practice for keeping energy workers safe during the early days of the pandemic and worked hard to ensure that mission and business-critical energy workers have access to the vaccine. We also met with educators, community members, renewable energy developers, and many others to monitor the progress of projects and to understand their workforce and permitting needs so we can do better to have projects that create good jobs for our residents that our residents have the education and skills they need to get these jobs and can feel proud about how the projects contribute to Hawaii's well-being because these projects are done in a way that enhances our communities economically, environmentally, socially, and culturally. Looking ahead, the Energy Office is working on a number of projects with many of the folks whom you will hear from today. We had no shortage of material when it came to planning this year's briefing. There are some important subjects though that we simply can't get to today, like offshore wind, which the Energy Office is working with federal agencies to update resource maps and create pathways for community and stakeholder dialogue. Still though, we have a robust agenda with five sessions focused on the state's immediate energy priorities to help support and indeed advance economic recovery. We will be briefed by leading Hawaii legislators, public and private sector energy industry stakeholders, labor unions, and community on today's critical topics. COVID-19 has revealed connections and dependencies in our energy ecosystem that undoubtedly have impacted how all of these entities carry out their mission. The topics on the agenda will allow speakers to share their current situations, challenges, and 2021 solutions to help Hawaii achieve a resilient, prosperous, carbon-free economy. And now, I would like to introduce Senator Glenn Wakai, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy, Economic Development, Tourism, and Technology to say a few words. Welcome, Senator Wakai, and over to you. Thank you, Scott, and Kirsten for putting this forum together. Aloha and happy new year to all of you. I want to just preface my comments that I'm sitting here at the Capitol and outside my window is our protesters. So if you hear all kinds of heckling in the background, hope that's not a testament to what I'm saying, but there are supporters out there on Barry Tanya Street. You know, I jumped into this energy space just over two years ago and I quickly saw the really immense opportunities to leverage renewable energy and diversification of our economy. I also take care of tourism and we all know that tourism spawns low-wage service-oriented jobs and we know that technology creates the good quality jobs of the future, but is heavily dependent upon energy so we certainly can't diversify Hawaii's economy without reasonable and reliable electricity. And the more I understand about the energy sector, the more I see there are some obstacles in front of us in hampering our progress. For example, I think HECO needs to be much faster in its interconnections. The AES coal plant is going to shut down next year and a recent HNEI study shows that unless unicorns save the day, there's a chance we're going to see blackouts in 2022. There are other advocates out there fighting for limited lands. People want to grow more food, we need more housing, we need more space for economic development. All of these interests take away valuable lands from renewable energy. And let's not forget the NIMBYs. Remember them? They killed the Nanakuli wind project and almost halted the Kahuku wind expansion last year. And some of these issues can be solved through policy, but all of them can be solved with stakeholders support. In my first year as the energy chair in the Senate, I was able to reconstitute the state energy office that it all pointed out was poorly run. The division had many disjointed parts and outdated mission and dysfunctional leadership. So in 2019, I established it with clear goals and a new chief energy officer. Thank you, Scott, for stepping up. That's something that should have been done years ago. And speaking of years ago, back in 2015 lawmakers passed the RPS with a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2045. That was in fact a bold statement, but not based on verified research. I recall during the RPS debate, some wanted 100% data to be 2050, others wanted it to be benchmarked at 2040. So the compromise was 2045. To me, that's not the way to create sound policy. It was policy by press release. Hoy was in a rush to be the first out of the gate. Data could have shown that maybe we could have hit that 100% renewable goal by 2030, maybe 2060, but that 2045 data was not based on any kind of factual information. So here we are, 2021, just over 30% renewables on the HECO grid. In the past five years, we've picked all the low hanging fruit and the most difficult years are ahead. I see so many stakeholders with conflicting interests that only support their favorite renewables. Many don't like geothermal, others deplore wind. Some don't support biofuels. Isn't the common enemy also fuels? Instead, we are fighting amongst ourselves. Hydrogen, and as Scott Glenn pointed out, offshore wind are going to be a necessary part of our energy portfolio. Who's going to stand with them against the headwinds that are sure to come? As players and energies all in, or we are going to continue to be all over the place, because if we're not going to share the same commitment to push back Hawaii's reliance on fossil fuels, then we should be truthful to the public and tell them we can only get to, say, 75% renewables and reduce the RPS accordingly. We're not going to get there with the current atmosphere of hoarding tax credits, fabricating delays, filing lawsuits and paying no attention to the cost to repairs. We're going to make progress when we set aside our self-interest, put our paddles in the water and start heading in the same direction. I'm looking forward to this afternoon's discussion as we can fully understand the state of our energy aspirations, debate differences, take responsibility and show the world that Hawaii can be energy leaders. Thank you, Scott, for allowing me to speak. Thank you, Senator Wakai, for your very powerful message. Next, I'd like to introduce our next speaker, Representative Nicole Lohan, Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection. Welcome, Representative Lohan. Aloha and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this. Chair of the House Committee on Energy and Environmental Protection. For those who don't know, this is my third year going into it. So, you know, work together with Glenn when we reestablished the Hawaii State Energy Office. And, you know, it's great to see you guys working on this forum and all the work that you've done since that time. As we start the 2021 legislative session, we're facing a public health crisis and economic crisis and a climate crisis. And every year we hear new and more urgent warnings from scientists about the pace at which the climate is changing always faster than anticipated. And as a global community, we have a shrinking window of time to take action in order to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. And at the same time, we know that we must ensure our solutions don't place a disproportionate burden on those already at the bottom of the economic ladder. Our transition to a clean energy economy and a clean transportation economy will be good for public health for the economy and will mitigate Hawaii's contribution to the climate crisis. So last year we were working on all these issues and we had to suspend our session, you know, right in the middle and lost a lot of, had to drop our work on a lot of bills that didn't wind up passing. And, you know, now we're gonna be coming back and picking those up again and getting back to work. My committee this year is working on a package of bills to support all these goals. We're hoping to establish a statewide goal to decarbonize the transportation sector starting with the state, transitioning its own fleets, a step which will not only reduce our use of imported oil and keep more dollars in the local economy, but will also translate into savings for state agencies and taxpayers. We are also continuing to support making the adoption of EVs a feasible and attractive option for all of Hawaii's residents by supporting incentives to build out EV charging infrastructure, EV ready new construction, especially for workplaces and multi-init dwellings. We are continuing to increase energy efficiency in the state, again, starting with the state leading by example, by undertaking improvements in state facilities. So we actually passed a bill last session that was vetoed, so we're working to come back and adjust some of the small concerns that were raised to get that moving forward. And we believe there are tremendous opportunities here both for saving money and for creating new jobs and growing the clean energy sector of our economy. Finally, this session, I think we'll take up at least consideration of the implementation of a price on carbon, which will align the market with the state's policy goals of 100% renewable energy and a carbon neutral economy and transitioning to clean transportation. So if structured in the right way, a carbon price policy has the potential to put money in the pockets of Hawaii's working families, making them better off than they were before while supporting our transition to clean energy and a carbon neutral economy. So I look forward to working together with everyone on these panels and on this call in the coming session. And of course, working with Senator Wakai, even though we may not see eye to eye on everything, I think we share a lot of common ground. So thank you. Thank you, Representative Lohan. We greatly appreciate your leadership and your message. Senator Wakai and Representative Lohan, both are subject matter chairs. We very much appreciate you all being here. Please, we hope you do stick around and get to listen to the other speakers. And I think for the audience's information, Representative Lohan will be speaking again also in a few minutes here and a little bit later in the agenda. Well, with that, I think we'll move on to our first session. And this is about energy assurance and resilience. Our first session today focuses on this. As I mentioned earlier, one of the energy office's responsibilities is to support Hawaii's people, our economy, and our security with the energy system we have today. This is something that the energy office is actively working on to build a common operating picture for energy assurance. The pandemic exposed Hawaii's vulnerability to potential disruptions in the supply and demand of fuel. We learned how demand destruction for jet fuel as a result of COVID-19 closing tourism upset the delicate balance in the product mix among Hawaii's fuel refiners and importers. It's not clear when the demand for jet fuel will return to pre-COVID levels, but our energy system has shown resilience to these changes. We have leaders from Hawaii's utilities and energy companies with us today to explore this topic. Our first speaker is Eric Wright, Senior Vice President and Lead Executive at Par-Hawaii. Eric, could you please start us off? Great, thanks so much, Scott. Aloha, my name is Eric Wright. I'm Senior Vice President with Par-Hawaii. We're the largest supplier of fuels in Hawaii. We serve most of the commercial airlines, the military, as well as the driving public. We also supply fuels to the other panelists here. We operate Hawaii's only petroleum refinery. It's located in Campbell Industrial Park, but most of you probably know us through our Hela and 76 branded gas stations as well as the nom nom convenience stores. We employ about 680 people statewide and 300 of these jobs are high-paying manufacturing jobs. So very proud of that. We really appreciate the opportunity to be here today to talk to you about our business and our commitment to Hawaii. You know, COVID absolutely rocked the fuels business, not only here in Hawaii, but globally. And I want to talk about how we weathered that storm. I also want to comment on the road ahead and how we intend to participate in Hawaii's renewable energy future. As COVID descended upon Hawaii, our first concern was keeping our employees healthy and safe. Most of you have probably seen the large ships moored off of Barber's Point. What you may not know is that each of these vessels requires that two of our employees go out to bring the ship in and those guys live on board the ship for several days. At our plant in Kapolei, we have a highly trained team of experts who ensure that we can safely produce fuels in an environment that calls for high temperatures and high pressures. Finally, we have a team of people that move store and truck fuels to customers on Oahu as well as the neighbor islands. Each of these people play a critical role in keeping the lights on, keeping the planes flying and moving vehicles throughout the state. I'm really proud of the way our team rose to the challenge. We implemented protocols to ensure we could work safely in these close quarters. We also started COVID testing in advance of the state requirements. Last August, we faced a particularly unique challenge. Every four years, we have to shut down our plant for about a month to conduct safety inspections and essentially do a tune up in all our processing equipment. This is a $30 million effort that involves bringing in 700 contract workers from the mainland and another 150 local contractors. I'm pleased to report that during this period, we didn't have a single positive COVID case, great accomplishment. We were in constant contact with state and local officials about this effort and bringing folks from the mainland. And I wanna particularly think the state energy office as well as the Department of Health for all their support and ensuring we could carry out this mission critical job. I mentioned that this was a $30 million project. It was pretty uncomfortable to be making such a large investment in the midst of a pandemic, but this was a major statement by our company that we're committed to Hawaii. We also couldn't have done it without the support of our key customers like Hawaii Gas and Hawaiian Electric and I wanna give them a big mahalo for their support. COVID hit our business really hard. If I could point you to the chart in the slide, on the orange line, you'll see commercial jet demand in Hawaii and essentially 80% of that demand evaporated in a two week period in March, very dramatic. Further, the market price of that fuel fell below the cost of the raw materials to make that fuel. So we had negative margins on the oil we were bringing in. We had to dramatically shift our business in a short period of time in order to survive. We idled our par West units, that's the old Chevron refinery and effectively redirected what we would make as jet fuel into fuel for the utilities. Unfortunately, we had to lay off some folks, but we were able to keep this to a pretty small portion of our workforce. This is painful, but these are some of the tough calls that you have to make in periods like this. If you look back at the chart on the right hand side, you'll start to see the recovery take hold and we think the worst is behind us. Really optimistic about the next 12 months. You know, we were nimble when COVID hit and we will be nimble in adapting to our business to Hawaii's future. Climate change is one of the great challenges of our time and we wanna be part of the energy mix here in Hawaii for decades to come. We recently joined the sustainability business forum of Hawaii Green Growth and we're looking forward to being a leader in their initiatives. You know, we think of ourselves as an energy company, not as an oil company. For several years now, we have imported a biofuel, corn-based ethanol from the mainland and we've been honored to be associated with Pacific biodiesel in the past. We are actively looking at opportunities to supply additional biofuels to the market in Hawaii. We're here today to be part of the dialogue and the solution, mahalo. Thank you, Eric, and perfect timing. We greatly appreciate your remarks and being here. Our next speaker is Alicia Moy, CEO of the Hawaii Gas. Welcome, Alicia. Thank you. Aloha, everyone. It's really great to be part of this panel today, especially on such an important topic for our state. Energy assurance and resilience for me really came to light when the pandemic hit and tourism shut down. We're always thinking through and planning out contingencies at Hawaii Gas to ensure reliable supply to our customers and all of that has been tested during this pandemic. Another area that has really come into focus is the community's reliance on us. One example of what happened right before Christmas, we received an urgent call from a condo building. Their gas supply was empty and their supplier was not responding to them. Elderly residents and families faced a holiday without hot water or the ability to cook. We responded quickly. Our teams were able to get an emergency supply to them, to the building. And I just want to share this social media post of a resident which really ran at home for all of us who said the quick actions from your company turned our miserable holiday into a best of one. So for us, this was a real win for all of us and for the people in the condo building. And that's just one example of many. With or without a pandemic, that's our job. We know that to put our community and our employees first, ensuring that those who rely on gas are not left behind. When the pandemic first hit as a company, our primary concern was to immediately put the necessary safety protocols in place to keep our customers and our employees safe, suspending disconnects and setting up payment plans for customers before it was required. And of course, working with our restaurant customers as they pivot their business to highlight what they're doing and also encourage takeout. As an energy sector, as you just heard from Eric, we all had to adjust quickly when COVID hit. Given we purchased the bulk of our supply from Power Refinery, we had to coordinate closely with them on a real-time basis as with the Hawaii State Energy Office. Conversations were happening throughout the chain of command as we all adjusted our supplies to manage the significant falloff on demand. Our teams worked well together to manage the ever-shifting supply and demand needs as we kept our pipeline balanced despite the frequent business shutdowns. We stood at the ready to pivot to our backup contingency plans, which we had established pre-COVID to account for dramatic swings and sharing that supply was always adequate to demand and that no adverse action was necessary. And why is this important? Well, if there is excess supply without demand, this could require flaring or output, which we knew was not an option and we were able to avoid. So with the exception of the Pearl Harbor bombing, Hawaii Gas has never suffered an outage in over 100 years and I am very happy to report that that record still holds despite the challenges of the pandemic. And I just also want to comment on the amazing resiliency of our employees. Our team is already used to operating in emergency situations like hurricanes and such, but as we all know, this has been an unprecedented situation and our employees really met this moment and I'm proud of all of them. And like all businesses in Hawaii, our business has been significantly impacted by COVID. We saw an immediate and dramatic hit to our business losing 40% of our usual commercial customer demand due to the shutdown of tourism and restaurants. We did see a modest increase in business from our residential customers, largely because of the work from home environment. And many of our customers are almost completely reliant on gas for hot water and cooking. And it was our priority that they had the service they need. Regarding our workforce, we have 350 employees across the state. Many of them are primary income providers for their families. Our focus was to maintain our workforce without any furloughs or layoffs and instead offsetting those costs by cutting other expenses to the bone. We're proud that we're not further deepened. We have not further deepened the state's unemployment and economic issues, which we know are vast. Regarding carbon neutrality, the pandemic has reminded us that we have to think big, think to the future and plan accordingly. And while managing the economic and health challenges, we are continuing to move forward with our work to establish affordable and sustainable pathways for carbon neutrality. And while we are a very small producer of greenhouse gas emissions, we remain committed to do our part to decarbonize. Our clean energy transition must and is continuing. And so to wrap up, we know 2020 hit hard and recovery will be slow. Hawaii gas experience turmoil unlike anything in our history. We've had a few sleepless nights, just keeping supply and check with our demand. I'm really proud of our employees' resilience and our company's ability to keep all of our people employed and our continued focus to find new and innovative solutions to these extraordinary challenges of our time. Thank you. Thank you, Alicia. We appreciate you making time for the presentation today. Next, we now have David Bissell, CEO of the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. Thank you for joining us today, David. Thank you, Scott and Aloha to everyone. Well, from the start of this crisis, KAC worked very closely with our Kauai State representatives and Senate President Kochi, State Energy Department, PUC, Department of Health and Kauai County. And I really wanna give a big mahalo to all of those because that coordination really helped us whether the COVID storm so far and we're optimistic, we will through the duration of it. From the start in March of 2020, KAC focused on three main areas regarding COVID, safety of our employees and customers, reliability and financial stability. A few highlights on what we've done. Immediately after the quarantine started, we shut down all member service, walk-in customers, which for us as a non-profit co-op was a pretty big deal. As many as 20% of our customers were coming into the office every day and just like that flick of a switch that was done. So a lot of technology was put into play instantly and under pressure. And I think we can all say our IT people really unsung our heroes of the COVID situation. Without those, our businesses simply wouldn't have survived and it's really amazing how quick we all were able to go to a remote environment and keep functioning well. Our members use new technology. They shifted to our smart hub program, 30% increase in use of that right away to help pay their bills. Our linemen and power plant employees all changed the way they operate and work together to increase safety. And I think all of us were really worried about the guys in the control room. Initially that we could have huge impacts from an outbreak and we have had no impact in our control room. So really another shout out to our employees. The employees following directions and often changing situations really helped out. Sales decreased for KIC year to date about 10% started off 15 to 20% down. And we worked really hard on the financial side right from the start. We were fortunate having our smart meter technology that allowed us to know from day one how much they were down. So we worked on debt restructuring. We worked with the commission on some deferring of revenue lost and we were able to weather the storm financially. Reliability 2020 was our best year ever. A lot of that's because of new technology. The battery storage technology we have out there. Batteries are now our single biggest generator if you combine them and they really help keep reliability up. Looking forward to the new year, our West Kauai energy project was just announced. That's an innovative battery, hydro pump storage and PV all linked together on the west side. A lot of the viability of that project is based on tax credits both federal and for this audience state. Senate bill 2820 passed last year, kept the state tax credits for pump storage technology and it really helped make that project financially viable. So we wanna thank everybody for that. Also we brought our PMRF battery and PV project online at the base which is a micro grid technology and it's just about fully functional right now. So the basis security will improve. So thank you very much for the time and I appreciate the opportunity. Great Mahalo, David. Thank you for your insights. Up next is Scott Sue, CEO of the Hawaiian Electric Company. Aloha Scott. Aloha Scott. Aloha everyone. Thank you for allowing me the chance to join all of you and talk a little bit about a little bit of a recap of 2020 but also most of my remarks, I'm gonna focus a little bit more on resilience and energy security. So like David just covered, from an operating utilities perspective, 2020 as we had to really adjust to COVID and the pandemic, first and foremost, it was about keeping people safe. As you may imagine, if you have an employee who is sitting in a control room and you only have a certain handful of those critical employees, those are the types of employees that are most, well, I will say this, those employees are way more valuable than the president and CEO to keep the lights on. And so in our mindsets, we had to make sure that we were doing what we could to keep our operations employees safe. For the most part, those are the types of employees that have to keep coming into the office and do their work at the power plants. Of course, we have our transmission and distribution crews and it was really about coming up very quickly with measures to keep those critical employees safe as we worked through the year. About half of our employees were able to very quickly switch to remote working. And again, our IT group, I would say they were the unsung heroes of the pandemic. Very quickly, all of us shifted to getting used to Zoom and Webex and yes, we all have a little bit of fatigue, but by and large, I think we're all getting better at managing through that. So let me shift a little bit more towards some of the ongoing resilience and energy security issues that we face today. And we probably will continue to face going into the future. So as you see on my slide, really, one of the most important things to always think about is that we in the energy world, we are all part of one big supply chain. When you think about the end kilowatt hour getting to the customer. So in this case, I mean, just look at the representation on our panel here starting from Eric's par, we do have still have fossil fuel in our system, right? And to the extent like Scott mentioned earlier, that there may be a disruption to that supply. That is something that we all had to immediately jump on top, working it with Eric and the folks at par with state energy office with our Hawaii Public Utilities Commission. Difficult decisions had to be made, but ultimately people had to come together and we did come together. The other parts of the supply chain now are also on our renewable energy side. So as we work with independent power producers, more and more, we are also working with our customers who are supplying a significant and growing portion of the renewable energy that we use in the Hawaiian electric system. So all up and down this chain, it's critical that we think about energy assurance, energy security as we are rolling those resources out as we are implementing new programs. Because ultimately, it gone are the days where we had a very centralized everything under the utilities control or perhaps just a handful of large businesses controlling the entire supply chain. We have essentially gone to a situation where we have thousands, frankly, thousands of different supply resources all playing a role in our energy system. And that's actually gonna just increase as we go into the future. There are not gonna be any silver bullets when it comes to addressing these challenges. And it's just because we have such a diversity of resources and a diversity of needs and a diversity of threats, by the way. We have the natural disasters, of course, that we're all very familiar with and we've responded to over the course of the years. Last year, we knock on wood, dodge the bullet with Hurricane Douglas narrowly missing us. But then also we have growing threats coming from the human side. Cyber security is growing. In May of last year, the federal government issued an executive order through the Department of Energy that really shines a spotlight on transactions dealing with Chinese made equipment. And we are actually under, we fall under that executive order because we provide power to some very, very critical federal facilities here on this island. All that to say, this is a variety of threat vectors as they say in the business, when I say vector, I always think of either math or a rat. But in any case, these are the variety of things that are challenging our energy system as we go forward and transform it. One last thing, community engagement is absolutely critical. And ultimately we can't force fit what the operations guys think are the best solutions into the communities. And I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you, Scott. You raised some very important points. I just wanna make a quick reminder for the audience that the slides that you've seen here will be available on our website and with the recording later when it becomes available. So I think at this point we've heard from four really great speakers on our energy security side. Mitch, I'd like to turn it over to you for any questions that we might have. Okay, thanks very much, Scott. And hello everybody on the panel. I have a couple of questions that I think apply to all four of our panelists. So I'd like to start off by saying, if you look in the near term, like right now, what's your most challenging challenge? And the other part of that question is how can the legislature help you address that challenge? So after all, we are speaking to legislators today and I think we need to ask them how they can help us. So I'm gonna start off with you, Eric. Can you kind of identify one of your biggest challenges and how the legislature might be able to help you address your challenge? Yeah, thanks, Mitch. Our business is obviously very sensitive to economic conditions in Hawaii. We sell fuel. So when people fly here and rent a car or fly home, they're using our fuel. And so it's really all about positioning our business to make it through this difficult period and enjoy the good times that are sure to return at some point. In terms of specific asks for the legislature, I wouldn't say that we have any particular ask. Our interest is really in policies that help our customers. And so policies that help restart the tourism economy, create jobs, address the cost of living, the things that are good for our customers in Hawaii generally is good for us. Okay, thanks very much. So Alicia, how about Hawaii gas? You have one of the biggest challenges in my opinion. I'm not gonna talk for you, but trying to convert the gas company to decarbonize I think is like a huge challenge. But getting back to my original question. So what are your immediate challenges and how do you think the legislature could help? Yeah, it's a great question right off the bat. The immediate challenge is really working through what COVID is going to have, what effect it's gonna have for this 2021 year. We've been looking at various forecasts for the recovery and what that looks like. Obviously for any business that recovery impacts how you allocate resources, allocate capital, allocate capital for projects like renewable gas and hydrogen studies and all sorts of things like that. So we wanna continue to move forward with that. We are committed to do that. It's just working through those pieces and that challenge of 2021. When is it gonna come back and managing through the financials of that? In terms of specific ask, I think one of the things that I think we benefit a lot from from legislators is just an open door. Now it's a little bit difficult because you can't go to the office but at least having a virtual open door and the opportunity to discuss what we're doing and educate, I think that's part of the whole process. We're all interconnected here as an energy system and really trying to understand how we're all interconnected and how one policy may impact the whole entire system. What are the unintended consequences of that? And of course, as Eric mentioned, I mean customers and working through how do we help our residents through this? I mean, that is front and center for everybody. Yeah, thanks very much, Alicia. So David, you've had a really good record of progressing our renewable portfolio standards. I mean, you've got these really good numbers. But same question to you, like what are your immediate challenges and how can the legislature help you? Thank you. You know, we've got most of the low hanging fruit. We've reached about 60% renewable here and now we're pushing new technology. Again, the pump storage hydro linked with a large scale PV and the key part for us from a legislative side is this is a long-term difficult project operationally and financially to bring about but it can be 20, 25% or more of our RPS and that one project alone and it brings much needed bulk storage technology to our grid. But it is tax credit reliant and keeping certainty on tax credits and state policy around credits is really essential. We brought in, we're partnering with AES on this project. So we're bringing in, you know, large mainland investments through the project but we need to keep the certainty on it or projects like that won't be successful and it'll be difficult to attract capital for future projects that are gonna be needed throughout the island chains as the RPS moves higher and getting improvements becomes more difficult. Okay, thanks, David. So Scott, same kind of question for you. You know, how are you doing and how can we help? You know, I think that we've got a lot of exciting things happening here. I know I think Chair Griffin will talk a little bit more about on the regulatory front, recent performance-based regulation order that came out. We have a lot of effort going on, of course, as we're pushing forward with the renewable energy. I recognize and acknowledge Senator Wakai's comment about needing to get those interconnections done so that we can get these resources hooked up to the grids, which also ties back to this topic of energy assurance and resilience. But you know, if anything, I would suggest that we could really use more direct dialogue to try and harmonize across a lot of the state policies here. Right, we have our state energy policy, land use challenges are becoming more and more significant. You know, just within the last week, there was a front-page article about the difficulties of a project developer trying to develop one of our community-based renewable energy solar farms, which would be targeted towards helping low-to-modern income customers. But there were concerns raised from some in the agriculture sector about whether the use of that parcel of land was truly better for energy versus food production. So those are just the types of things that we're gonna start to see more and more of as we go into the future. And I, you know, it does get back to that comment about everybody being able to come together and really putting things on the table and really making those tough decisions because otherwise, getting to the 100% optimally is gonna be very difficult. Right, well, we're all in that new behind me together. That's for sure. So I actually have a question about LNG. And the question is, is LNG being considered by the state as a cleaner option to replace coal next year on an interim basis and perhaps also to meet other energy shortfalls until the state can achieve 100% sustainable energy. So that was kind of level at the state. But could you guys comment? Maybe Scott, you could comment on it because you have a lot of generation requirements. I assume you mean Scott Sue here, right? Oh, yeah, so I do. Yeah, no, we don't actually have any plans right now to go back to LNG. A number of years ago, we actually did when Nick Stara was one of the folks around town. We were being quite aggressive at the time trying to map out a strategy that would be based on switching over to LNG while we did continue to have any amount of fossil fuel in the system. But I can tell you that right now our plans, we don't have LNG as part of our current plans. I don't know, Scott Glenn, if you want to jump in here too. Sure, and this might be our last question just because we need to be moving on too. I think at this point, Governor David E. Gay has been quite clear that his preference is not to use LNG and for the state to move on to renewable energy resources as quickly as we can. And certainly the Hawaii State Energy Office is acting in that way and regarding proposals that way. So I see I still have a minute left in our time. So Alicia, this is also a question for you because you guys have already been importing at some point at least on a trial basis LNG. What's your comment about this question? Well, we have no plans to increase any sort of amount of LNG into the system. We have a limited scale project that we use for resiliency reliability purposes that was approved by the HPUC. That equipment can also be used for renewable natural gas gas and renewable sources as well. So it is important infrastructure to have in place for just pointing out the whole topic of this panel is energy assurance and resilience. And David Bissell, do you have a comment on that? Yeah, we don't have any movement towards LNG here. We looked at it a few years ago, but we don't have the scale and we've moved so far on renewables that there's no, the scale's even less so it's not viable for us. Okay, and Eric, you're the importer, the refiner. What's your comment on that? This is the last question. It's not something we're working on. Well, that completes my time allocation for this Q&A period. Over to you, Scott Glenn. Thank you, Mitch, and thank you, everyone. Participants, thank you very much for speaking this afternoon. Our second session is to address critical solar pathways to 100% clean energy. And as I mentioned at the beginning, unfortunately, we don't have time in the short, two or so hours that we have to address all technologies. But we decided that we would focus on solar rooftop and grid scale because that's the critical path to the coal plant. Solar PV is the anchor of Hawaii's renewable portfolio. Together, rooftop and utility scale solar account for nearly 60% of renewable generation statewide and ensuring that the deployment of Hawaiian Electric Stage 1 and Stage 2 projects goes smoothly is critical to make sure that those projects are there and available on time for the scheduled retirement of Hawaii's only coal plant in 2022, pursuant to Act 23, which the legislature passed earlier last session in 2020. Did you catch all that? So the Act 23 of 2020 is for the coal plant retirement in next year, 2022. So the Energy Office is also doing community outreach and making workforce development a priority for these projects as they make their way through the development pipeline. For this session, we're pleased to have five speakers representing a wide range of perspectives on this topic. Our first speaker is Rick Roscholo, Executive Director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. HNEI, a research and development arm of the University of Hawaii, plays a critical role in supporting the transition to reliable and affordable clean energy in Hawaii. HNEI provides independent and impartial research, analysis and demonstration to inform decisions made by regulators, legislators, utilities and other energy stakeholders. Take it away, Rick. One more time, I'll make up the time. I wanna thank the organizers, State Energy Office and Policy Forum for inviting me today and especially for providing me an extra two minutes since my goal is to kind of set the stage for the following speakers, but I'll try to return at least one of those minutes. HNEI and one of its contractors, Telos Energy, have been spending considerable time looking at the high solar scenarios for the islands and a lot of the focus has been on Oahu and I'm gonna really focus on Oahu today as an example. Part of our effort has been developed new tools that provide accurate, transparent ways to analyze what these future grids will look like, ones with much more solar than we have today. As has been stated a couple of times now, these tools are being used to support PUC decision-making especially in regard to potential reliability issues associated with the retirement of the AES plant. I'm not gonna discuss that, but a presentation of that work is available on the PUC website or you can contact me. In a way of a very short description, these tools analyze every hour of operation on the grid over the course of a year. And what's different about them is they have the capability to consider in a probabilistic manner, multiple years of solar data, random unit outages, and simultaneously look at grid stability. This flexibility along with the ability to look at different operating strategies for the batteries gives us, I think, very important information about how to optimize the management of the solar battery systems for the benefit of the entire grid. We believe it's gonna provide a number of useful insights. And one that's easy to understand is it provides insights into what I call extended weather events and the classic one everybody always remembers the 2006, 40 days of rain. And it's used in the example, although it doesn't necessarily look particularly bad when you put it into the model. So anybody who's interested in that, I'll be happy to talk about, but I wanted to get to a more general discussion. Based on what I've been asked to do, we kind of ran this model a few times, making some very optimistic sets of assumptions. So we eliminated a lot of the grid constraints, ability to cycle units to really just look at the ability of batteries to arbitrage your energy and put it onto the grid out of a solar system. And again, the focus is on Oahu. So the figure that's shown on the left kind of summarizes those results. And I'm just gonna point out a few things from it. First and foremost, and I think part of the topic here was solar to get to 100%. As the systems are currently configured and it can be four-hour storage or six-hour storage, even without any siting constraints, whether that's rooftop or land for utility scale, solar plus storage will not get us to 100%. Other non-solar generating technologies or maybe some radically different means of storing energy and shifting that energy are going to be needed. That said, if you follow that curve up and you look at the numbers, the PV plus storage as it's currently being implemented as we see it going forward in the future, can take us well beyond where we'll be even when the stage one and stage two projects are completed. So there is still a lot of room to be able to move forward with solar, but somewhere around 70 to 80% of our total energy on the island, curtailment really starts to increase significantly. Additional storage does not easily get you out of that. And so there's gonna need to be other solutions. You know, coming from that and looking at the numbers on that graph, there's a few conclusions we reach. One is that we think we're gonna need both utility scale and rooftop to be fully developed. It's not a contest between the two. We're gonna need both. They each come with their own sets of benefits and issues. Clearly potential transmission in land availability is the problem for utility scale, rooftop and controls at the edge of the grid are likely to be a limiting factor for the utility scale. So there's requirements to develop both. There's issues that need to be addressed for both. I had a little bit more, but I know my clock is already starting to run down. So I wanted to make just a couple of high level comment. The community via the investment, the rates are making a big investment in batteries. It's very important. We continue to look at how to use these batteries to do more than just shipped energy to provide grid services. I think we're well on the way to doing that, but it's important that we minimize the expenditure unnecessary or potentially unnecessary infrastructure. We've talked a lot about different goals, carbon decarbonization resiliency. I think there's an opportunity to build those better into our decision-making on which projects go forward. And in particular, I'm thinking in the resilience part of it. It's gonna be very difficult to retrofit for resilience. We really need to get that upfront as part of what we do. And finally, as a final comment, if we're gonna get the broad community acceptance that is required to move forward on all these fronts, we're gonna need to make sure that the rates that people are paying is a benefit to all the ratepayers. And that I think can do a lot and explaining that to them and making sure that's in place is gonna be important. So that's quick. I'm glad I had the extra two minutes and thank you for the opportunity to speak. Rick, thank you so much. We greatly appreciate you sharing your manaho with us. Our next speaker is Brian Gold, president of the Hawaii Solar Energy Association. Over to you, Brian. Thank you, Scott. For those of you that don't know, the Hawaii Solar Energy Association is a nonprofit trade organization that represents the majority of the solar companies operating in the state. And those companies or our membership is majority locally owned. I thought I'd start by talking a little bit about the industry's response to the pandemic. Scott mentioned earlier the information that the state energy office did a really great job spreading out to the community. And I just wanted to echo that. And that in part allowed us as an industry group to provide a comprehensive guidebook to our members regarding safe workplace guidelines and providing them with essential resources and how to keep their businesses operating. And this really kept our essential workforce operating safely amongst themselves and in the community. And that was a huge part of the rooftop solar industry remaining a main driver of the construction sector throughout 2020. So in contrast to a lot of other industries, we were very fortunate to have a strong 2020 consumer favorability towards renewable energy has remained incredibly strong in Hawaii. And we've been very proud to deliver those solutions to the community regarding our workforce. So the solar foundation did a study in 2019 that identified that just the photovoltaic sector compromised well over 3,500 local jobs. And I think it's notable to point out what that doesn't include. So that doesn't pick up some of the accessory business in the solar trade. That would be solar hot water, wholesale distribution, financing, engineering, et cetera. When you add all of that in, we make up about 6,000 jobs in the local economy. And those are diverse. Senator Wakai made a comment during his remarks about diversification of our clean energy economy. And that's certainly something that we support in all of the above strategy. And I would just like to point out that the most successful companies in the quote unquote solar space are quite diversified, not just PV and solar hot water. They're installing electric vehicle chargers, split air conditioning systems, LED lighting systems, skylights, solar attic fans. Really the emphasis there is not just on renewable energy production, but it's also on energy efficiency. That's a huge part of the industry. And this local workforce that's quite massive has really become a homegrown success story. So Rick and his comments before me mentioned battery technology. Hawaii really stands out nationally now as having the highest attach rate of batteries to residential solar energy systems. Over 75% of the solar systems going in now have a battery attached to them at the residential level. And that's dramatically higher than anywhere else in the country and really is a unique resource and something to be very proud of as a state. And so this local success story has propelled the rooftop industry to be that anchor of the RPS that was mentioned earlier and we're very proud of that. So the biggest challenge we have moving forward is how we go faster. HECO's power supply improvement plan identified an estimate for between 1,226 megawatts and 2,537 megawatts of additional rooftop solar required to meet the RPS. Now to put that in perspective, give it some scale for everyone. The rooftop industry has done about 820 megawatts of solar to date today. So roughly in the last 20 years. So we need to go two to three times as fast to meet our goals as an industry and for the state. Yeah, I know I'm over time, Scott, just to wrap up, TECO, one other comment regarding market consistency that really is huge for our industry. Without market consistency, investment will leave the state and we really want to continue to promote a growing sector of our clean energy economy. Thank you. Much appreciate it. Thank you. Next up, we have Ren Westcote, Development Director for Long Road Energy. Thanks, Scott. Aloha, everyone. Thanks for sharing time with us this afternoon. I work for Long Road Energy. We used to be called First Wind and we developed since 2005, seven of the state's largest utility scale wind and solar projects. I'm here today to talk about utility scale solar, which is unlike Brian's rooftop projects. These are the projects that are larger projects that are installed on the ground. Together, utility scale solar is the lowest cost, clean energy and probably the cheapest of anything besides coal. We're replacing coal-fired and oil-fired generation and utility scale projects over the next three or four years are gonna help the state get past 50% renewables. Big chunks really move the needle. Probably over the next few years, you're probably looking at two billion in construction activity in the state and at least another 1,000 construction jobs. In terms of challenges, one of the big challenges that several people have mentioned is our state has two priorities. Well, two priorities locally produce clean energy and locally produce food. I mean, they're both really important priorities for our state and solar and farming like the same kind of land. So they like flat land with lots of sun and dirt. And so more and more, I think we're seeing solar and agriculture, looking to use the same kinds of lands. And that is what's important for us in our industry and for friends in the farming industry is finding ways that we can use that land, co-use the land for both purposes. We need to research compatible crops and livestock. I worked with a couple of projects that now on Oahu, they're solar projects that are now Oahu's largest sheep ranch. But there have to be more things that we can do with agriculture. So we're looking at shade tolerant crops. We're looking at pollinator species to improve honey production. We're looking at potentially hydroponics under the solar panels and growing and other ways that we can use the land for both solar and agriculture. So we don't have to sort of create laws that cut a lot, set a line down the middle and say solar only over here, agriculture only over here. So that's one of the challenges that we're hoping to work with folks to look for a new solution so that we can share the land and achieve all our goals. That's it. Thank you, Ren. We really appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us. Now I'd like to introduce Eric Inos, Executive Director of Ka'ala Farm and YNI. Eric is a longtime community leader and we're very fortunate for him to be here with us today. Over to you, Eric. I want to thank you for inviting me. I'm going to represent a community voice. I'm coming from the back of YNI Valley and the speaker before me and those were very right on mark because we're looking at land and the challenge between farms and solar. But let me just give you a little bit of background. I'm in the back of YNI Valley right now. We're a model cities project that started many years ago and we're dealing with social economic issues and working with a community that has many concerns. Getting to our community learning center, we have to go through stolen cars and illegal dumping and a lot of illegal activities and then you come to our area and we've brought back water into the community. We're farming using traditional agriculture and working to teach the children, native Hawaiian issues and natural resources and environmental and really concerned about economic resources, living wages, small business and cottage industries and really a holistic approach to how do you create strong communities? How do you create healthy communities using all the tools that we have and energy drives everything that we do? Yeah, and I'm looking right here at the Wahiawa Solar Farm that talked about solar versus food versus fuel. So, and that's a perfect example because right now we're working with putting in sheep for fire control and working on small scale energy projects that could power small farms throughout our state and throughout our communities. So that's pretty much where we're at. So I'm very much in favor of working with the developer right from the start in the community so that we can address these concerns and also the work that your department is doing and getting out into the community before we get committed to a project so that we can start facilitating the discussion and so that we can really working on both sides of it so it's not a one versus the other but to create some win-win solutions for the work that we're doing. So that's pretty much it and that's my role to be part of this process. So Mahalo and thank you. Mahalo Eric, thank you so much. Our next speaker is Damien Kim, Manager of IBEW Local 1186. Over to you Damien. Thank you Scott. I appreciate it. You know, going last is a little tough because in everything I wrote down, a lot of people spoke about it, which is very good. IBEW trains its members through a five-year apprenticeship program which we currently have around 500 apprentices statewide. They graduate with getting a required State of Hawaii Journey Persons license. Our graduation rate is about 90%. We also have continued education for over 2,400 journey persons in safety, electrical code book review, all renewables and ever-changing technology that keeps coming up and changing every day. I also see other programs training for renewables, especially rooftop solar and these graduates end up receiving a certificate of completion. The challenges and the potential opportunities that we see is that the challenge that that I see with these certificates that are being handed out, however, is that while it teaches you to install the rooftop solar, it does not allow them to actually go out and start installing panels. You still need to obtain a State of Hawaii Electrician's license to do that, which requires five years, 10,000 hours of electrical training. The other challenges that I see that pertains to getting work for everyone is the approvals of homeowners, contractors and developers in getting their, whether it be utility approvals for the grid itself, being able to get, contractors have a hard time sometimes getting permits and inspection to the city. Developers are getting a hard time going to neighborhood boards and obtaining land use permits. And I can understand why the community is hesitating to approve some of these farms and windmill projects. And the reason for that is because, you know, they're looking at, well, if you're going to build it in my neighborhood, what do I get out of it? What is their financial gain? What is their utility bill going to be? Is it going to go down or not? So to me, some of these questions need to be answered in order to, you know, move on with a lot of these projects. You know, one of the solutions to helping the industry itself is making sure that it's being installed safely and correctly, ensuring current laws are being followed regarding license, which would involve the state's DCCA as well as the city and county inspectors. We also need to educate the public on how these grid solar projects will better their lives. Rooftop solar is paid by homeowners so they can benefit, they can see the benefits right away by seeing the lower electricity costs. The same theory needs to go and be echoed out into community with all of these solar farms and other renewable projects. The other big thing that I think that will help out in the future as well is that we still need to keep up the state and federal tax credits and rebates that they hand out. I believe we can get to this goal of 20, 45, 100% renewable energy, we need to move now, we need to educate the public on the big picture. Thank you, Scott. Mahalo Damian, thank you very much and thank you to everyone for your great presentations. It's great to hear from a diversity of stakeholders coming into this from your own points of view about how it comes together in one topic like this. It's clear that we're going to need everyone's support to successfully carry out Hawaii's clean energy transformation. I think several questions came in for the Q&A, so Mitch would like to turn it over to you. Thanks very much, Scott. Yeah, I have one question that hasn't been addressed in this presentation. The question is, what is the plan for waste disposal 10 to 20 years from now? The solar panels and batteries have reached the end of their useful life. Well, maybe I could ask you, Brian, to start off and follow it up by maybe Ren. I mean, you guys are dealing with these, you know, both of these, both the panels and the batteries. So the reuse issues we face in the rooftop space are probably of a slightly smaller quantity than Ren's, but I'll go ahead and take it. This has been an interesting space and there's been a lot of new companies that have formed specifically to address these challenges and to date, the most effective means of repurposing them have been through groups like Reuse Hawaii locally, and also there are groups that will collect a certain quantity and they have different minimums and repurpose them to low-income countries. We've worked with a company that repurposes to the Dominican Republic, to Haiti, et cetera, and so that's one of the areas. I would say in the rooftop space, given the relative youth of the trade compared to some of the other trades, it hasn't been a huge issue, but it's definitely a growing challenge and we're seeing a lot of innovation pop up to address it. Okay, Ren, do you have a comment? Sure, yeah, I think it's similar. We are, you know, these solar panels are going to have a useful life of 35 to 40 years or more. So we haven't really hit the outside of that envelope for some of the projects that have been built recently, but more and more companies are available on the mainland that look at recycling. I think our goal is to first, you know, to re-ship the projects out to be reused, if possible, as Brian was mentioning. If not to be recycled, then a lot of the components can be recycled, and then if not to figure out some sort of for whatever cannot be recycled, some sort of disposal site on the mainland, but those are all that right now, that's all speculative because, you know, we haven't really gotten there for so much of the volume of the PV panels that are out there now. We don't have very much time left, so we're running over, so I'm going to ask Eric one quick question. Eric, practically, how can we bring, you know, the farming community and the PV community together to vent or talk about these issues and then come up with solutions and how can the legislature help doing that? Help us do that. Yeah, you need a very good facilitator and spend some time talking to people in the community. There's a lot of one-on-one work that has to be done and creating a sense of trust and you got to find the right people to have those conversations because people know who you can trust and so a lot of times people are very suspicious. So start there, put a little bit of investment and understanding what the field looks like in the community, who are the right people you want to talk to and then have those conversations and spend a little bit of time. So that's important. Credibility is really important. Who you bring in the room. Thank you. Last question to you, Damien. Can you talk a little bit more about workforce development and the state's workforce development program? Are there areas that that could be tuned up and can the community colleges, can UH and the community colleges become more involved so that we can really get after this? What's your comment on that? Well, actually, we're starting before the community colleges. We're actually working with the high schools right now. The state is gonna have a workforce development in looking at revamping some of the way they teach, they have teaching in high schools. Before you asked, you used to have the automotive shop, the wood shop, metal shop. And I think they're looking at bringing some of these things back. And one of it is talking about PV solar, robotics, automation, those are the things that the wave of the future right that we're doing. So we've been starting this in the high school level. I've talked to the universities a while back already about these PV programs. And like I said, I have nothing against them teaching it in there. It's just a matter of, I didn't want them to give a falsehood just because they came out with a certificate. They can run out there and stop putting PV panels all on everybody's homes. Again, we wanna make sure that it's done properly and it's done safely. So we've started that. And the work, we have a lot of people that are getting into this renewable energy, as you can see, because it's gonna be exploding. They know this is the next job that's coming up because not only installing, but eventually maintaining and running it too. So there's a lot of job opportunities for it. Hey, thank you all so much. We're now pow and off to the next panel. Over to you, Scott Glenn. Thank you, Mitch. Thank you everyone for participating in that panel. Our third session focuses on energy efficiency and affordability. Buildings account for about 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions in the US. Hawaii's adoption of the 2018 International Building and Energy Codes will make buildings more efficient and lower the cost of living and working in our buildings for families and businesses. Our first speaker is a recognized leader in energy, especially energy efficiency. Representative Nicol Owen, chairperson of the Hawaii House Energy and Environmental Protection Committee and member of the US Department of Energy National Electricity Advisory Committee. Welcome, Representative Owen. Thank you. So I actually am looking at the title of the panel, Energy Efficiency and Affordability, and knowing that we have so many other experts in energy efficiency, I thought I'd speak a little more on the affordability question more broadly, because what I see is that there's often a lot of misconceptions about that there are trade-offs between our goals or that climate action comes at a cost to affordability, or that things like rooftop solar and electric vehicles only benefit those who can afford them and that they're enjoyed at the expense of those who can't, or that renewable energy might be good for the environment, but it's bad for our electric bills. And I just wanted to take this opportunity to say these things are simply not true. What is true is that this transition is necessary and inevitable and it will benefit everyone and Hawaii's economy overall. So transitions are challenging and there are real challenges, of course, associated with reaching our 100% renewable energy goals, but they are not insurmountable. And doing things differently, learning new things, investing in new infrastructure to support renewables and distributed resources and electric vehicles. This is a big change that's challenging for a big utility company. And that's why I really strongly believe that the role of the legislature and the policy goals that we set and the role of the energy policy form is really important to get over this transitional speed bump, because I've often heard it said that it's not as simple as just setting a goal, which is obviously we understand that that's true, but what I also think is true is without the goals that the legislature has set in the past couple of decades, we would not be where we are today. And at the end of the day for legislators, it's not just about environment and climate change. It's about resilience and independence and affordability in particular, all of which are good for Hawaii's economy. So I wanted, I guess, to just get off my soapbox now and focus a little more on energy efficiency, which I feel like I've worked on a lot in my few years as chair of the committee in the House. In 2019, we passed a bill to create Hawaii's first state level appliance efficiency standards. And in recent years, we passed a bill last year that then got vetoed. So we'll back to working on it again this year that we think is a really important measure to encourage that the state undertake energy efficiency measures in its own facilities. And in addition to that, this bill would mandate that new construction of state facilities has efficient design to start out with. And it would also require data transparency for how much money is spent on a state facility energy bills right now. We are also looking at a bill that would help facilitate the adoption of our up-to-date building codes and some other energy efficiency measures during this session. And I guess I'll just end by saying in the wake of COVID-19 and all of the economic impacts that it's had, we feel like there's tremendous opportunity in the energy efficiency sector to create new jobs and save people money at the same time. And I know that there's a lot of people on this panel who can speak to that even better. So we'll stop there. Thank you. Representative Alon for your powerful message. Next up, we have Gwen Yamamoto-Lau, Executive Director of the Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority. Thank you, Scott. The Hawaii Green Infrastructure Authority, or HGIA, was the result of Act 211, which created the framework for establishing a state-administered clean energy financing authority. HGIA's objective is to make clean energy investments accessible and affordable to Hawaii's underserved ratepayers, defined as low and moderate income homeowners, renters, non-profits, small businesses and multifamily rental projects. Hawaii's high cost of energy coupled with our high cost of living made it a priority for our policymakers to make green energy inclusive and available to our most vulnerable ratepayers while stimulating private investments and leveraging tools to mitigate risks and reach new markets. Forgive me, I've been deviating from the energy efficiency in my remaining remarks per se. So, you know, while the COVID-19 pandemic has been a major disruption to everyone, economically, it has disproportionately significantly impacted lower-income households, small businesses, and state and local governments. With an estimated 1.8 billion budget deficit, like many households and businesses, the state is capital strapped. As such, it is imperative to proactively seek opportunities to access federal and other funding sources. A bill has been introduced this session to create a clean energy and energy efficiency revolving loan fund, which will allow HGIA to continue to help ratepayers lower their energy costs and seek federal and other sources of funds for loan capital. If passed, the bill will also enable HGIA to finance power purchase agreement purchase options for state agencies, which will create a new cash flow stream that can be utilized to finance the installation of the electric vehicle charging stations and or purchase or lease electric vehicles to transition the state's fleet of internal combustion vehicles to EVs. Personally, I think having the state lease EVs rather than purchase EVs is important. As short-term leases, which is typically less expensive than financing, will create a supply of relatively new used EVs, which can help eliminate the new EV cost obstacle for low and moderate income households. Additionally, the state has a policy that any state-owned asset, including vehicles, needs to be offered to other departments before it can be disposed, which means that by purchasing EVs, existing policy will preclude us from helping our vulnerable communities during a clean transportation transition. What COVID has taught us is it is not business as usual and collectively, we must all stretch out of our comfort zone to find solution for a resilient, prosperous and carbon-free economy. Thank you. Thank you very much, Quinn. Next, we'll hear from Brian Kailoha, Executive Director for Hawaii Energy. Over to you, Brian. Hello, Scott and Mahalo to the State Energy Office and the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum for the opportunity to discuss energy efficiency with my focus, I'm gonna be focused on affordability a lot in my commentary this afternoon. I think it's been mentioned several times and I'll mention it again with Hawaii having the highest energy costs in the nation coupled with our high percentage of Alice's families, energy affordability was a serious concern and this was even before the pandemic which has, as Glenn just pointed out, disproportionately impacted low-income families. We've seen the lines for food distribution and the challenges that COVID-19 has brought upon our most vulnerable population. Nationally, one-fourth of all U.S. households and two-thirds of low-income ones have very high energy burdens which means they spend more than 6% on their energy bills. Two out of every five low-income households have severe energy burdens meaning that 10% of their income goes towards energy costs. So energy affordability is critical. Reducing energy ways and improving efficiency can go a long way to help. One of the most successful programs we run at Hawaii Energy the Energy Smart for Homes program has served over 22,000 households and it's growing. But we wouldn't have had the success we have had without the partnerships of property owners who have multiple sites like Catholic Charities, the city and county of Honolulu, EHHL. However, it's becoming increasingly more challenging to identify those customers that need help due to a number of data privacy concerns. We're actively looking for partnerships with community groups and organizations to help better identify those in need and provide resources and training to improve energy literacy. One of the easiest ways to increase energy affordability is strong energy codes. Some developers will have you believe that installing energy efficient equipment adds so much to the cost of the home that they aren't able to do it without a significant increase in costs. However, that is simply not true. Recently, Kea Humoa Place was built in reaching lead platinum standards which means that all the housing can be both affordable and sustainable. This housing development had 320 affordable rentals and included thermal hot water systems, water efficient fixtures, drought tolerant landscapes, ceiling fans, large windows that would enhance the flow through ventilation as well as LED lighting. All of this will help reduce the cost of utility bills for residents so they can stay in their homes. Along those lines, as Representative Lowen mentioned in her comments, it's imperative for the state to lead by example to demonstrate the benefits of energy efficiency while reducing costs to taxpayers. Many are who are also the families that we're trying to help. A little bit later, I think Mike is gonna be speaking around what's been done at the community colleges and I do wanna recognize the community colleges for really being a leader in energy and sustainability among state facilities. I am excited to see a number of organizations making energy affordability a priority. It will be important that we align our messaging so we don't confuse people as energy is already a very confusing topic. Working together will be critical in our joint work in communities. Eric just spoke about building trust in communities in the previous panel and it's hard work and it becomes even harder if our messaging and our goals are not aligned. So in closing, as we looked at 2021, it'll be critical to keep the focus and funding on efforts that will drive affordability in our communities so that our residents can make smart energy choices that will save money, save energy and keep us on the path to 100% clean energy future. Mahalo. Mahalo, Brian. Thank you very much. Now let's welcome Brandon Hayashi, Regional Business Development Manager for NG Services, Hawaii Region. Brandon. Mahalo Scott and Aloha everyone. I'd like to start with a brief analogy about mindset born from the subject matter of the next session actually. You know, in the US, we measure the efficiency of a vehicle by its miles per gallon, but in nearly every other country, a slightly different metric of measurement is used. Leaders per 100 kilometers. We focus on the distance and most of the world focuses on the fuel resource. While this may sound like semantics, it is not. It speaks to our outlook, our perspective and importantly, what we choose to prioritize. And so in a similar vein, you know, energy efficiency needs to be seen not as be less bad or do more with less type of mentality, but rather by viewing it as a true resource that is critical to our island's climate and resilience goals. I'm certainly not the first one to say that efficiency needs to be seen as a valuable resource, but I firmly believe that this change mindset will empower us to make more, even more progressive policies, create innovative business models and really run public sector RFPs that reflect its true value. Many folks are ready with regards to the situation have spoken about the impact and the challenges coming from COVID-19. And I just want to underscore, really from a community as well as a developer perspective, that in spite of this, there are indeed real opportunities to create positive change, both within the public and the private sectors relating to efficiency and of course, clean energy as a whole. Now, with regard to challenges, yes, things take a long time to get developed here and yes, attracting more capital investment here to our islands would be fantastic. These are but two of the many challenges that we all have, but I would argue that the solutions reside in the challenges themselves. So when we talk about policies, processes, projects, perspectives, and importantly, underscoring all of this, of course, are people. If we can have greater alignment, as was talked about at the beginning and opening of the session, we can have greater alignment around our why. And I'm not saying it's going to be an easy ride. Changing the hearts of the mind of people is very difficult, but we can properly address many of the challenges that we have in front of us that are tied to technical, financial, environmental and social issues with this change mindset. So I want to spend a little bit of time on the solutions and I certainly don't have enough time to go through even the seven that I've listed there and that is by no means an exhaustive list, but didn't want to talk about two real briefly, the new financing models and actionable process roundtables for lack of a better term. With regards to the former, Governor Egan has signaled that his administration may end up seeking $800 million less from the last two years for compared to the last two years for construction going forward for general obligation bonds. And this is where energy related construction projects with new business models that have the ability to attract capital to help bolster jobs as well as tax revenue for some of those potential delayed or halted infrastructure projects could significantly help our state. And like the discussion that we just had between agriculture and utility scale energy projects, trust and relationships matter. We need to understand each other and figure out ways to be more time efficient. We are in the decade of action. There's a real impetus for us to sit down with one another. And for example, could government agencies and energy service companies sit down to share and listen to one another as to how we might be able to create expedited processes, shared risks, stakeholder engagement and so forth so that we have real pathways for it to build more projects. I believe we can. And with that, I just want to say thank you and I'll carry on to the next speaker. Thank you, Brandon. Our next speaker is Mike Unebasame, Vice President for Community Colleges and Associate Vice President for Administrative Affairs at the University of Hawaii. Thank you, Mike. Scott, aloha everybody. We began looking at sustainability opportunities for the community colleges over 10 years ago. Our strategy was to first address energy conservation and efficiency measures, which we did using the performance contract statute, HRS 3641, understanding that renewable energy does not reduce energy consumption. So phase one performance contract targeted energy conservation and energy efficiency measures. Using FY 2008 as our baseline, our conservation and efficiency measures resulted in a KWH reduction by 2018 of over 22%. These projects also reduced our deferred maintenance by more than $15 million. We then focused phase two on additional energy efficiency measures with emphasis on renewable energy coupled with battery storage. Our efforts have resulted in Leeward Community College becoming the first net zero UH campus. And we think the first in the nation to become net zero, producing all of our energy on campus. And we energized everything in July of 2020. UH Maui College just became the second net zero UH campus. The other five community college campuses are in different phases, increasing its dependency on renewable energy. Once we complete our current efforts in renewable energy, the seven community college campuses will be generating over 60% of its electricity requirements, all on our campuses. This amounts to 16 million KWH generated and 42 MWH of battery storage capacity. We have had tremendous working relationships with JCI and initially with brand care law with Chevron energy solutions when we first ventured into all of the things that we're doing now. And currently we're working with Pacific Current with all of our PPAs. And you need good partners in trying to achieve what we're doing. And all of these people and companies that we've worked with have come through for us and we're thankful for the working relationships and the results of the efforts that we all have. So very happy with what we've been able to accomplish over the years. Thank you, Mike, and we are as well. So next we'd like to turn it over to our state consumer advocate, Dean Nishina. Dean, if you'd like to share a few words. Mahalo Scott and good afternoon to everyone and Aloha to everyone in Hawaii and in other time zones. I think as Deemian had mentioned, sometimes going last there are potential pitfalls and I am gonna be focusing on affordability which kind of was raised a little bit by representative Luan as well as Brian Kealoha. But I guess I'll start off by if you look at the slide that I have on the left-hand side, there are two graphs and the intent of these graphs is to provide people with sort of a better understanding of some of the numbers behind the affordability issue especially as it relates to Hawaii. So these graphs are based on a report that's published every year by a group called Fisher, Sheehan and Colton and they do an analysis based on a model that they have county by county basis across the United States. And so the graphs that I have here are for Hawaii where for those of you who may have a little trouble seeing the graph, I'll just kind of explain them briefly where the top left-hand graph shows the home energy burden as a percentage of income for people of a certain ranking as it relates to the federal poverty level. So if I can, in 2019 for people below 50% of the federal poverty level, the home energy burden is approximately 44%. What that means is that of their income, about 44% of their income needs to be spent on a home energy bill, which obviously is too high. As Brian mentioned, the general benchmark for affordability is 6%. The top left-hand graph shows that for different rankings from below 50% up to 200% of the federal poverty level. So again, everybody knows Hoy's electricity rates are high, everybody knows the bills is high, but this really highlights the point that we really do need to work on making Hoy's energy bills more affordable. The lower left-hand graph shows a number of households and basically it does show that there's a significant amount of households that are of a level where the, as it relates to the federal poverty level, approximately 25% of the households in Hawaii are facing unaffordable energy bills. If I can, part of our duty and responsibility in terms of representing consumer interest before the Public Utilities Commission is to try to make things more affordable. And generally, I'll just offer three strategies that we're trying to pursue is make overall costs affordable. Because the concern is that if we try to come up with separate programs to aid low-income, moderate-income customers, it can be actually incur additional administrative costs, as well as people falling through the cracks. So one of the strategies trying to make overall system costs lower so that everybody would be facing lower bills. Another one is, as mentioned by Rick earlier speaker, is we really do need to work on educating customers about energy consumption and options for them, as well as looking at redesigning rates. That's been something we've been pushing for a number of years. And it's something that we're working on right now in a docket with the Commission as it relates to advanced rate design issues and strategies. And I guess another strategy that we are trying to ensure is that program designs really do consider the impact on all customers, not just the participants, but all customers. Because we want to make sure that, again, we keep the overall costs reasonable. And we'll recognize that energy efficiency is often recognized as one of the lowest-cost options as it relates to a resource for energy grid. And so that's where we've been working with Hawaii Energy in terms of trying to make sure that we're stepping away from rebates and tax credits because those tend to benefit those people who have money to engage in those programs. Otherwise, I appreciate the opportunity to offer these comments. Mahalo to everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dean. And thank you, everyone, for sharing your thoughts, especially Rep Loan, for being able to stay with us today. Now we have some time for questions. So Mitch, would you like to turn it over to you? Yeah, I think we have time for one question. And this is for Rep Loan to think a little bit in the room. So this is the question. And it seems certain that there will be efforts in the upcoming legislative session to ramp down and reduce the state's renewable energy tax credit. What's your position, and Senator Bukai's position? I know you can't speak for Senator Bukai, on ramping down or reducing the tax credit. This is on everybody's top of mind. Yeah, obviously, I can't speak for Senator Bukai. I'm not planning on introducing any bills relating to this, so we'll have to see what comes our way. We did amend the tax credit last year to give more certainty to utility scale developers in that arena. And so I mean, I still support in keeping the tax credit. I mean, I think that we need to continue. We're not at capacity yet for installation of rooftop solar. And we want to ensure that now that the early adopters have utilized the tax credit to take it away now when it's becoming more affordable for lower and middle income families, there's more financing options, et cetera. It seems like they should also have the option to benefit from this tax credit. And we've also, I think, seen we're going to see the claims on the tax credit reduced just with the economy as well. And so if there's concerns, of course, there's massive concerns about the budget, and that's going to be part of the conversation too. So I mean, my stance generally has been that I support maintaining the tax credit. It's kind of odd an unusual policy to have a tax credit that has no sunset date whatsoever. So I mean, at some point, we'll have to look at when it makes sense to let market forces take control in that sector. But in advance, I guess that's the extent of my comments having not seen a bill or seen any testimony. I can't really give a definitive answer on how I would vote on something if I haven't even seen it yet. OK. Well, thank you very much. That's my time. And over to you, Scott Glenn. All right. Well, thank you, Mitch. And thank you, everyone, and realize we're getting up on time. And we also recognize it's Friday afternoon. And so we are going to move ahead to the next session. That session is focusing on clean transportation. And if you aren't already aware, for Hawaii's greenhouse gas emissions, that transportation as an overall sector has now exceeds power production for the source of greenhouse gas emissions in the state. Within that, round transportation is the highest source of our transportation emissions. And we have six distinguished speakers from the public and private sector who will delve into the details of clean transportation today. Our first speaker at SNF, and unfortunately, is currently occupied with a different legislative matter. I think he's testifying at the moment. So we will bypass him for the moment. And perhaps Ben Sullivan, if we could go to you, Ben is the Energy and Sustainability Manager for Kauai County. So Ben, over to you, please. Absolutely, Scott. Thank you. Let me just pull my notes up here. Caught me off guard. All right. First off, I want to give a big mahalo to HSEO for helping us pull this together and for organizing with Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And I want to say that Hawaii State Energy Office has done a great job in the last year, really increasing the amount of collaboration between the county and the state. And that has been of tremendous value to us. So thank you for that, to Scott and your whole team. The next thing I want to do, I'm going to cheat a little bit and touch just briefly on electricity, because I was on that panel previously and you guys moved me. So I'll get into transportation in a second. But the remarks I have on electricity and really all these remarks are about how do we think about climate action and clean energy aligning with economic recovery? More importantly, how do all of these things help Kauai's low and moderate income households and small businesses? That's what this is all about right now is helping small business, helping families that are struggling, as previous speakers have said. And so that's the objective. Thank you, Rep. Lowen, for pointing out that these issues are not intentioned. We can succeed on the long term by investing in our future and we can also have a clean energy future and reduce our emissions. And there is an imperative to do so. I think it's abundantly clear that we can help our households and small businesses here on Kauai and around the state while accelerating our shift, both on the electricity grid and with ground transportation. So as everyone knows really well, KAC is leading and has done a tremendous job with renewable energy. And we are tremendously lucky for their leadership on the utility side of the grid. With regards to energy efficiency on the customer side of the grid, we feel that there's still a tremendous opportunity here on Kauai and around the state. Two major customer needs to increase energy efficiency that we see. One is financing mechanisms. So Glen Yamamoto did a great job talking about this. HB1844 was a bill that really made a lot of sense previously. Nobody has mentioned the national climate bank, but I'm certain Senator Schatz is going to keep pushing that idea, especially giving what happened in Georgia recently. And then we also have access to funding through the rural utility service that Gwen's bill and other opportunities would help open up. The second thing in energy efficiency that is really important is more streamlined access to data. And this is customer utility data and having the ability to authorize third parties to use it. So I'm looking right now at Jay Griffith and I'm hoping that the PUC can help accelerate those requirements within the utilities statewide, because it has a, you know, I mean, let's think of a financial tech app like Mint and imagine it applied to the utility sector where you can basically just bring your utility bill in and immediately know what the opportunities are to save money in your household or your small business. Full stop, switching over to transportation. The approach that Kauai County is taking on transportation is really about mode shift and accessibility. So I know other folks are gonna talk about electrification today and we think that is an important secondary strategy, but ultimately we think it's about getting people out of single occupancy vehicles and into more diverse solutions for a lot of reasons because it's a healthier community that's created because we can't afford the roads that are gonna be necessary to keep expanding car ownership because it's cheaper in the long run for everybody and also because the emissions are lower and that is needed. A couple of outcomes that are results of the pandemic right now that are interesting related to this point. One is that half of our rental cars have been shipped off the island. So obviously there's no demand and the response has been a reset in the visitor industry. We really see the visitor industry as an area in which we can use strategically to really make this mode shift begin to happen across our whole community. We recently had a meeting with Mira Cavallo I'm sorry, Mira Cavallo, that's a big football. We've been working here too long in the county. Mira Cavallo let off a meeting with HDOT, Hawaii Tourism Authority and local businesses as well as our planning department and really talked about how this vision is critical to the island. One thing that we need the support of from state agencies across the board is coming online with that vision and really helping us to see it happen. So if that talks about a choice between adding capacity on roadways versus looking at mode shift opportunities, that's where we wanna be thinking about those things. If that means looking at our rental car capacity versus other options like shuttles, those are the kind of things we wanna do. I will stop there. Hope we get a chance for security and thanks God again. Thank you, Ben. I know you always have a lot to contribute to the conversation. We went ahead without Ed, but he is here with us now. So Aki, if you don't mind, we'll go back to Ed Sniffen. We're very fortunate to have him, Deputy Director, Highways Division of the Hawaii Department of Transportation. And Ed, would you like to say a few words and thank you for making time to join us. Thank you, Scott. Now apologize for being late, everyone. Ed Sniffen with DLT, thank you very much for having me. For us, we know that transportation is the dirtiest industry in the world and we know it because Scott keeps telling me that every day. So we're trying to do our best to make sure that we are a part of the solution rather than the problem. So we've been greening our operations throughout. We pushed forward on our $60 million escrow contract that helped us reduce our energy draw by 50% or so. And we're pushing forward on green construction methodologies to ensure that we use better materials so we can minimize the maintenance that's required throughout the system. We pushed forward on CO2 entrained concrete that allowed us to entrained CO2 into our concrete, increased the strength of the concrete and allowed us to decrease the amount of cement we put into it. So all of that thanks to Aki for bringing it to us, our attention and allowing us to pilot that on our system. Now we're pushing into our AC materials to make sure that we start looking at plastics going in there. Try to dump all of our waste into our pavement to ensure that nobody has to deal with it anymore. That's the least we can do because of the CO2 footprint that we have in transportation. We wanna make sure that we push forward on all of these things and especially on electrification. Ben said it well, most shift is the best thing but we know people don't wanna give up their cars right now. We wanna make sure that when they do choose their cars they can start reducing their own footprint as well. We also know that we would love for everybody to convert but we can't do it unless government leads. So we push forward on a contract that allows us to lease the services of an EV without having to purchase it upfront. That contract is open for all state agencies and all county administrations throughout. So we're hoping that we can make a big push for everybody to start converting throughout. For the state itself, we have 2,000 ice vehicles that we could convert to immediately. The technology is there. For highways, we have 300. We're gonna replace our 300 in the next two years with 250 electric vehicles. That other 50 will be gone. We're not gonna use them anymore because we know we don't need them. So we're gonna use this opportunity not only to convert but also to get more efficient in our operations. All of this leads to the new norm that we're looking for at this time, especially during this pandemic. We know that our mission to connect people to their goods and services and opportunities is not just a physical one. It's not just a drive, a bike, or a walk away. Now virtual is a big thing for us. So we're pushing forward on a broadband initiative that allows us to connect all of our systems, state and county systems to a broadband or wireless mesh to ensure that we can put cameras or data collection devices anywhere on the system that we're ready for connected autonomous vehicles when it comes through in the future. But more importantly at this time, to be able to help out and connect those communities that are underserved at this time that run parallel into our facilities. So we'll use the backbone of the highway system and the county system and the federal funding that comes with it to ensure that we build out to connect everybody sooner rather than later. And that all goes back to transportation again because we can't push a vibrant teleworking industry or teleworking community without that connectivity. So we're gonna help bridge that digital gap, that digital divide, make sure that everybody can live and or work and learn from home and make sure that our connectivity is not just physical. My hope is if we can push for 10,000 public workers and 5,000 private to start working from home or from alternate locations regularly, in general it helps us tremendously because now the peak traffic is gone. The CO2 burn from that methodology is gone. And everything gets cleaner. So that's the hope that we have. That's the push that we're making and we really appreciate the work that we get to do with Scott and his office. He's been helping us out tremendously because I really don't know what I'm doing. So we push in a certain direction. He kind of re-corrects us and we go for it. It works out really well. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ed. And we greatly appreciate your leadership and vision on helping to bring about the digital carbon free economy which is how we work together on this, right? Next up, we have Aki Marceau, Director of Electrification and Transportation at Hawaiian Electric Company. And just for the audience's awareness, Aki's previous life, she was with Elemental Accelerator where she helped introduce this carbon sequestration company to the Highways Division. So over to you, Aki. Yes, Hawaiian Electric is not in the concrete industry all of a sudden. So thanks for that clarification. And I know it's the afternoon. It's Sunday after, not Sunday afternoon, Friday afternoon right now. And I can say that there's no place I'd rather be than on a transportation panel. But for the 221 of you that are still with us right now, thank you so much for making it this far. As Representative Lowen pointed out in her opening remarks, we are in a triple crisis right now, health, economy, and climate. And I'm excited to reaffirm that electric transportation improves people's lives on day one. So it can reduce pollution, create shovel-ready jobs in a growing industry, and put downward pressure on electricity rates for everyone. And that includes businesses and families. So of no, transportation accounts for over 50% of CO2 emissions in Hawaii as Scott mentioned, and ground transportation is about half of that. Electric transportation not only reduces CO2 in this sector, it also improves renewable energy integration, creates energy security, and generates resilience by serving as what we would call rolling storage. So this all leads to things like cost control and reduced variability for our community, which are things that we're all concerned about. I'm not sure how much you all follow EV news these days, but there's been a lot of big announcements lately. And in recent news, one of the big auto giants, General Motors, they announced an electric comer, but that's not their big announcement. They just completed a new rebrand to reflect an all electric future. And so this also is tied to $27 billion, and that's billion with a B, and 30 new electric vehicles over the next five years. And part of their rebrand is using the term everybody in. And that's the name of the campaign. It's really to show that these old ideas about electric vehicles are no longer applicable. And so in the same way, one of the biggest barriers that we encounter is myths. And my ask is really similar to the General Motors campaign, everybody in. One of the biggest myths that I've heard that Representative Lowen mentioned in her earlier remarks is that electric vehicles are only for the wealthy. And when I hear that, I think about early electric vehicles that were maybe primarily only dominated by luxury market. Now there are over 40 models and they're growing. And I'd also like to add that there's a very robust used EV market as well. I personally got a used EV. So I can attest to that. I think it's important to recognize that electric vehicles aren't just for families and individuals, but also for businesses. And so we've heard from the counties in the state, but all four counties committed to electrifying their fleets. And we've committed to electrifying our fleet at Hoyn Electric. And there's a lot of other businesses that are doing the same thing. The city and county of Honolulu, they actually just delivered their first electric bus. And that's the first of 17 electric buses. So soon everybody will be able to ride electric by hopping on a public bus. So this will be accessible to everyone. So this leads me to the point that we collectively, the collective we have the ability to be part of this transition, or we can choose to have it happen to us. From hearing the panelists, I think we wanna be part of this transition. And if we are part of it, we can design it to be accessible to everyone. But in order to do this, we need to really have that alignment and we need everybody in. So thinking about the future at Hoyn Electric, we have a number of exciting projects in the queue where we are working on infrastructure development, new rates, expanded public charging. And many are involving a lot of collaboration with our state partners. And so I'm happy to discuss that more during the Q&A. And lastly, am I at time? Yes. Okay, I'll just close my comments with that. Thanks. All right, thank you, Aki, very much. Up until now for this, it's mainly been focused on electrification of transportation, mode shift and affordability. We also have some other aspects of the transportation shift away from fossil fuels. And our next speaker is Bob King, Founder and President of Pacific Biodiesel. Thank you very much for having me today, Scott, and the whole team appreciate it. Three minutes, I'm gonna rush through where a few points here. We Pacific Biodiesel made 5.8 million gallons last year of the lowest greenhouse gas transportation fuel in Hawaii, Biodiesel. Lowest lifecycle greenhouse gas fuel that you can put on the road. We made it predominantly from local feedstocks, restaurant oils, grease trap oil, some crop oils that we grew and about, but about half of our feedstock did have to come in from the mainland, waste oils and Guam, Alaska, where we can find them. That's the placeholder for agricultural oils in Hawaii. And our goal is to displace those important waste oils with agricultural oil. So our predominant use was in fact, Hawaiian Electric at Schofield Barracks, San Oahu and Homical Energy on the Big Island for power generation. Rough equivalent of our production is about 250 megawatt hours per day of electricity if we put it all into power gen. The challenges that we have is that this year our source of oil, the feedstock oils, are down quite a bit. Obviously the restaurants are not running. So it did cause us to have to bring in a little bit more oil from the mainland. And we're still trying to find that model where to get the crop oils up to scale so we can grow more of our fuel here. Part of that is to get the rest of the rotational crops going, which is the culinary oils and cosmetics. There's a lot of value added cropping that will happen when we grow energy crops. So it's an exciting future. I think it's going to be a big play in the coming forward, but we've got a lot to do. So 2021 needs, we've got the biodiesel plant, we've got firm offtake from utilities and on-road fleets. Now we need the feedstock. So let's get the oil going, getting up to from the 100 acre farm, up to a 1500 acre farm is the next step. Significant amount of capital involved to do that. But also as we bring these rotational crops and the food crops that go along with it, there's a lot of processing that we just don't have in Hawaii. We don't have the way to get from the farm to the grocery store with a lot of these new and exciting local products. So all of that's jobs, jobs, jobs, a predominant amount of the money that you spend for bioenergy is going to be labor and jobs. And that's another exciting piece for Hawaii in the future. Thank you very much, Bob. And just to clarify earlier, you mentioned oil in your remarks and you meant bio oil. I only talk about bio, there are vegetable oils and yeah, we don't do any petroleum refining. Now I'd like to welcome Chuck Collins, Executive Director of the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance. Over to you, Chuck. Thank you, Scott. I want to say a quick hi to Mitch and Rick. Thanks for your pursuit over the years. Appreciate what your folks are doing. Aloha Kakaua and Aloha Friday. On behalf of the Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance, we wish to extend a big mahalo to everyone involved with this broadcast today. The Hawaii State Energy Office, Think Tech Hawaii, the panelists and Senator Glenn Wakai for allowing us to be a part of this conversation today. The Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance is a Hawaii-based nonprofit advancing hydrogen production from local renewable energy resources. Our members assist with education, policy and projects that help move green hydrogen forward in Hawaii and throughout the Pacific region. Our group includes key hydrogen and fuel cell stakeholders from around the globe, representing large manufacturers, startups, government and universities and our sister organizations as well. Hydrogen and fuel cell projects for transportation, base load power and microgrid projects are rapidly coming into focus, creating a range of opportunities for workforce development, technology deployment and further research. Deployment of hydrogen and fuel cell technologies in the key areas of our state becomes part of a central strategy over the widespread implementation of zero emissions, clean energy and transportation plan for the state. Proactive state and local policies around hydrogen fueling, storage and use are needed now more than ever to help shape the business climate, align government and guide future project investments here in the state. The Hawaii Hydrogen Alliance members are excited for the new year. We believe the timing is right for hydrogen and fuel cell projects to grow across Hawaii. Again, we thank you for the opportunity to present today. I'll be available for any questions. Thank you Chuck, we appreciate you being here today. Next, we'd like to welcome Thor Thoma, Vice President for Projects and New Initiatives at SURFCO. Over you Thor. I'll start and Mitch, great seeing you all today. And Aloha to everyone, Aloha Friday. As many of you know, SURFCO is a local company with over 100 years of experience in the automotive industry here in Hawaii. SURFCO's worked on many automotive technologies including hybrids, PHVs and of course hydrogen fuel cells. And what's quite clear in our experience is that it's gonna take a portfolio of technologies to help reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There's really no one technology that does it all. That said, hydrogen is part of that solution. SURFCO has taken a leadership role in Hawaii to help the general public understand the benefits of hydrogen. We've committed quite a bit of resources and time for education and outreach. But interestingly, our best outreach has been our Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell customers who drive with hydrogen every single day. Now, these are not prototypes, these are not demonstration cars. These are full production vehicles out on the roads every day using hydrogen. SURFCO is also 100% funded, built and managed a hydrogen fueling station in Mapuna Puna. That effort we believe has benefits for others, other companies to really build out infrastructure because one of the challenges that we face, the biggest hurdles was getting building department and far department approvals to build the station. Our experiences, our conversations, discussions with many of these key people, I think really helps bridge the way for other companies to build infrastructure. So what can you all do to help support hydrogen? Really, it's creating and supporting legislation, policies, incentives to help companies, entities build hydrogen infrastructure. This in turn helps really encourage hydrogen product vendors, whether it's stationary power, heavy duty trucks, buses, trams, forklifts, and of course cars bring their technologies to the island. One example of hydrogen legislation is a bill that Senator Wakai introduced last year regarding hydrogen measurement standards. Certainly encourage all of you to take a look at that this year when it's reintroduced. In closing, if you haven't had the opportunity to drive a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, the all new second generation Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell vehicle will be launching this month. Thank you very much for your time and Mahalo. Thank you very much Thor. And thank you all speakers for helping us to better understand Hawaii's efforts and clean transportation from electrification to biodiesel to hydrogen. I know we're after four o'clock, but I still would like to make sure there's a time for Q&A, so Mitch over to you for any questions for the speakers. Thanks very much Scott. Yes, I have one question and I'm gonna read it. With reducing carbon in the transportation sector, the assumption is that transportation will move to electric drive. I think we can all pretty well agree with that. This will not only increase power generation by nearly a hundred percent, but drive a significant increase in grid delivery infrastructure. Are HECO in the state looking at that dramatic demand for electricity and their strategic planning? So that may not be inside your wheelhouse there, Aki, and but maybe more on Scott's side, but do you wanna give it a shot first? We're all worried about having to rebuild the grid to supply all the electricity required. Sure, I mean, the answer is yes, we are, we have an entire planning department and that is something that we are looking into and considering, but I'd also like to add that our goal is not for everyone to charge their vehicles necessarily at 6 p.m. When in a new normal situation, they come home from work, I guess, but rather to use market tools like rate design to incentivize charging in the middle of the day when renewable energy is abundant too. And so that really allows for the fuel of your car to be powered by solar and wind and other renewable sources. And so we've introduced a number of rates, all of our EV rates currently use time of use design and there's a few for commercial entities that are currently being reviewed by the commission that also have that time of use structure. And so we're really hoping that using market pull and of course outreach education and other forms of design that we can really incentivize folks to charge in the middle of the day and that'll really reduce any infrastructure pressure on the grid as well. Thank you very much for that answer. And of course we in the hydrogen community are looking for a spectral hydrogen rate that we can make hydrogen that's competitive with other fuel solutions. I had to get that in. So that's my question, just that's my one question. We're out of time. I want to maintain our timeframe here. So Scott, Glenn over to you. Thank you, Mitch. And thank you everyone for being here this afternoon for our panelists for the clean transportation discussion. We greatly appreciate you making time again on a Friday afternoon. To round out our presentations today, saved commissioner Jay Griffin, chairperson of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission present last to round out the discussions. He's here today to share his thoughts and what's been going on with the Public Utilities Commission. So Commissioner Griffin, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much. Hey Scott and Aloha everyone. I wasn't sure if the idea here was to wear me down or to wear down the audience. But thanks everyone for sticking around. Given the time and some of our constraints here I'm foregoing any slides. So I'm gonna try and speak off of some of the material that I prepared. I'll send what I have over to the energy office so we can post it. But really I was asked to talk about two big areas. One is to summarize the decision we issued in late December on the performance-based regulation framework. So I'll talk to that for a little while. I did wanna touch on some of the other major decisions that we issued at the end of the year as well as what I see in the year ahead in 2021. Some of our highlights here. So first I'll talk about performance-based regulation framework. And I'm gonna challenge myself to work to discuss this with as few acronyms and regulatory jargon as possible. We have a summary of one page and a five page summary of the decision on our website. I actually just did see today a very good white paper that Ulupono Initiative has put out about 20 pages about the decision. It was over 200 pages itself. A lot of significant detail about new regulatory mechanism. So we're trying to distill all of this, make it accessible to people and still capture some of the significant components. So first I just wanna highlight that this was really a 10 plus year evolution of regulatory change in the state consistent as the state has looked to increase its renewable energy goals. We've also looked at adjusting the regulatory framework to make to align the utilities incentives along with those goals. And as our state has moved to 100% renewables, really the benchmark was set as high as possible. And so as the commission endeavored on this, we looked at really a transformational framework that was consistent with the new renewable goals that the state has set out. And to help align, and we're talking about our investor on utility here at Wine Electric, align their financial performance with the state's goals, energy goals that we've set out. And with a strong emphasis on cost management, understand that we're in an environment with the highest electricity costs in the nation. That was really the challenge to ourselves and the stakeholders that we started on this. But well over 10 years ago, we started on regulatory reform with decoupling. We've done reviews on that during the course of it, but really what kickstarted our work on performance-based regulation was the legislation that passed in 2018 Act 5, the Ratepayer Protection Act. I just wanna read one section of that that really shapes and challenged the commission and others to do something that had not been done yet as far as I understand in the nation. And so that law said, the Public Utilities Commission shall establish performance incentives and penalty mechanisms that directly tie in electric utilities revenues to that utilities achievement on performance metrics. I'm gonna emphasize this and break the direct link between allowed revenues and investment levels. As far as we knew that that's never been asked of any commission in any electric utility in the country, there was a lot of uncertainty in the beginning how we would create a new regulatory framework and meet the goals of this Act. And so we engaged in an extensive two and a half year two phase stakeholder process. On the first year plus, we spent time with stakeholders held multiple workshops, just getting people clear on what the existing regulatory framework consists of because it actually already consists of a lot of elements of what are known as performance-based regulation, but really also talking about where we wanted to go, what are the state's goals and ambitions and what changes that are necessary to accomplish that. We think that was fundamental to being able to accomplish what we've arrived at late in December. The commission invested a ton of time and all the stakeholders to their credit put immense time into the meetings that we've held, the filings they put before the commission. So we thank them for that. We tried to host as much of that and record it online. A lot of that can be found on our website. That culminated in the decision that was issued on December 23rd, 2020. We do have some post decision or actually we have a lot of work post decision and that working group started this morning. And really the major elements of the framework will go into effect in full June 1st, 2021. But what I talked about in December, that was the end of the beginning and really now we're fully underway with the implementation of this new framework. And so I do want to touch on the phase one of this process we really asked ourselves, is reform necessary to meet our state's energy goals and if so what reforms are required? And what was one of the things, and I have a slide on this that came from one of our stakeholder presentations, but one of the most surprising and eye-opening statements made to all of us, or at least for myself personally, was a presentation we asked representatives of the financial community, both those that represent stock shareholders and the credit community. We had a presentation, very interesting presentation from the analysts who covers Hawaiian Electric for Moody's. So their credit rating agency traditionally had been very conservative, concerned about major changes to regulatory frameworks. The title of the second slide is Cost of Service Regulation, which is the traditional framework, leads utilities down the wrong path. And his major points were in doing so, utility spend money to make money, they're incentivized against non-capital projects and the different types of cost trackers and pre-approvals create incentives for the utilities to really inflate their costs. I mean, this was very eye-opening for all of us. This is not when we invited folks like this, not what we're expecting, but it was very consistent with other reforms that have been underway in other countries along this area, UK and Canada have been pioneers in this area. But really they were ahead of the curve with the other members of the financial community. And ultimately in our phase one decision, we largely agreed that we did need to make these significant changes, but we wanted to do so in a way that balances both the customer benefits of the new change in the framework maintains utilities financially stability and creates a more efficient system for everyone. And as I said earlier, the decision was 200 plus pages, has a lot of elements in it. And I'm gonna talk about four different areas and it's not a complete rundown of the decision, you can find some of our materials online about that. So the first area I wanna talk about is a strong emphasis in this decision about cost management, establishing a future system that instills strong cost controls and actually a strong financial incentive for electric utility to manage their cost efficiently. And what we have moved to is what's called a revenue cap system versus a traditional rate case, process service rate-based investment system. And really basically the difference is under the traditional system, why electric with every three years, each company would file what's known as a rate case with us. These are extensive filings, thousands and thousands of pages. They asked the commission to raise revenues to cover their costs and any new capital they've invested. And really there's lots of pressure always over these cases to increase rates, not a lot of strong cost control incentives. You heard what I just said, what Moody said. Under revenue cap, we've established a formula indexed by inflation for the next five years. And so why electric and all of us know what their revenue trajectory is for about 50% of their costs, what we call target revenues. So these are all the costs that are largely in their control. It's a known index-based cap for the next five years. And so what we can look at is what is that future path of revenues under the formula that was established through the past two years versus the system that would have been in place. I have some projections of that, but if we look at what more electrics last rate case filing was along with some projections, we're talking about several hundred million dollars of potential savings from what would have happened under the prior status quo versus the new revenue cap that is in place today. I think what is interesting about this and what potentially makes it or provides an opportunity for it to be win-win is now the utility can look at ways to manage their costs below this revenue cap. And for the next five years, they get to retain those savings as profit. That's not a strong incentive to do that today. And so we'll see whether one electric can find those efficiencies they get to keep them. And then at the end of this period, we'll re-review and most likely revise that cap to capture the savings. So it does provide a greater opportunity for profit, but one, again, we're aligning utility's ability to profit with something that we've found necessary to manage costs. That's a key element of the framework overall. Where do we find, how can we find win-win situations? This is a very powerful one. The experience in the other utilities and places, there's a lot of detail goes into setting that formula right, but it's generally been effective at this outcome. We'll move on to a couple other areas. The second major area, which is the target of what are known as performance incentive mechanisms. And really these are carrots, incentive payments for the utility to achieve certain outcomes. And we've established five new performance incentive mechanisms. The centerpiece of this is what's known as the RPSA, an incentive to accelerate achievement of renewable portfolio goals. So if the utility can exceed the current corrected formula for renewables in each year where they exceed that formula, the first two years they're gonna earn, it's called a $20 a megawatt hour adder on top of, for any generation above that. So a very, very strong incentive for bringing on all the current projects in the timelines in the queue that have been delayed. We've put a greater incentive for projects coming online in the first two years. So we're trying to bring on as much these new projects as we can during our recovery period and support that recovery period with new clean energy jobs. So we've put a greater emphasis on the near term achievement of this incentive, but overall, really for the first time it will align quite electric the ability to earn a profit on non-utility-owned projects, which are by and large the ones that we see for both utility scale and customer-owned projects. And we believe this will, again, provide a strong incentive to align interconnection and bringing these projects online. This is a quick rundown. The other incentive mechanisms will allow for faster acquisition of grid services contracts, faster interconnection, a innovative one that I wanna thank our staff and commissioner Potter for leading. And this is one to provide greater incentive for collaboration between Hawaii Energy and Hawaii Electric for achieving energy efficiency savings or low to moderate income customers. We've also included a incentive mechanism to increase the pace of grid modernization. So the details of that are in the decision in some of the summary documents. Last two areas I wanna touch on are, we've also included safeguards in this for both customers and the utility. And so if we find that the outcomes are kind of getting to the extreme range, commission can reopen and look at different provisions of the framework. There's automatic sharing provisions if we find utilities returns are too high or too low. This provides safeguards for everyone. And one area that hasn't been emphasized as much in the public discussion, we've also included a new innovation framework, a more flexible framework for Hawaii Electric to bring pilot project proposals to the commission. This was modeled largely after the framework that exists in Vermont for Green Mountain Power, which has been an industry leading framework and series of projects that they've had there from as far as we could tell. We've adopted that for Hawaii. So some of Aki's projects would fall into this midst right before we started here, talked about a pilot rate for hydrogen, Arizona power just pulls something like that to their commission. We're trying to make a more flexible, faster pathway for those ideas to come before our commission and go into implementation. I wanna emphasize that. So that's the summary of our PBR decision. I do wanna highlight the end of last year was an extremely intense time in our commission. A few days before we issued the PBR decision, we extended the disconnection moratorium for utility customers. A few days after that, we approved three of the phase two projects, two of the grid services contracts, then to the year we approved on the interim basis, a new agreement with Hawaii Gas and Par, as well as dealt with a number of outstanding COVID related requests. So the last two years was a pretty intense time. Our staff worked incredibly hard. So I wanna thank you again. Looking ahead, if you're curious, I wanna touch on. One thing that we've worked actually very hard on internally in the past year is a new strategic plan. Our action steps for implementing that are online. We're working on that in this year. We're also working and we've asked a number of you to give feedback on this, but we're updating our docket management system, our DMS. So that bid is out right now. And so that'll be a couple of year project, but we're looking to update and overhaul that system. That's gonna significantly improve our interactions with all of you. Looking ahead, all of our phase two projects, and including KIUC's projects, a phase two projects for Hawaiian Electric, for CBRE, utility scale projects, these are higher on a priority list to continue. A number of times today, we've heard references to the DER docket. This is our next major investigative docket that we'll look to push forward on this year. We've worked on a new strategic plan and initiatives with Hawaii Energy and their COVID response plan. So we'll look forward to the next year. The implementation of this new framework will be front and center in the next six months. And since it was a topic already, and not far down the list, but we'll continue to monitor and deal with emergencies overall. And as well as the overall COVID response across all the utilities. We've had a lot that made the news, but we have some others, some smaller companies that don't quite make the news, but they're things that the commission needs to act on immediately and demand our attention. So that's a quick rundown. Thanks, Scott. Hopefully, let's see. The attendees are still up, so I didn't wear everyone down too much. And I'll see if I can handle any questions. Well, thank you, Chair Griffin. Unfortunately, I think we're at the end of time. Perfect. And so you're not only where everyone went down, you ran out the clock. So thank you though very much for providing us with so much detail about the work that you've been up to and the hard work that the Public Utilities Commission has done to help Hawaii respond to the coronavirus and position Hawaii for economic recovery. I also, just as a closing comments, would like to thank our speakers and audience members for spending your afternoon with us. We can't stress enough the value that folks like yourselves bring to this process, to Hawaii achieving its energy goals. It was quite an ambitious agenda we had today with some excellent presentations. And I know it will provide a good foundation for the upcoming legislative session. I'd also like to just say a few thank yous, especially to Maria Tomei and Kirsten Turner here at the Energy Office. We're doing so much of the heavy lifting to bring this together. I'd like to reiterate how honored we are to work with Senator Wakai and Representative Loan with the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum and especially Mitch Ewan for helping us out with the Q&A, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute for helping to sponsor this. And think Tech Hawaii for bringing all your technical expertise and personal presentation training to everyone and our many partners who also helped put on this important event. We look forward to working with you all throughout this and we have our fingers crossed that we will be able to see each other in person this time next year. Mahalo Nui everyone and have a great weekend.