 Welcome to Hawaii State of Clean Energy. I am Mark Lake. I'm the chair of the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. And I wanted to welcome you today for a great discussion on community energy programs provided by Juan Electric. We have a wonderful guest, Lani Shinsado, who is going to be talking about these important programs that have been developed really with the consumer, the energy user in mind have been developed over the last number of years. And we'll spend some time talking about it, but first we'll get a wonderful presentation on what some of these new programs are and pretty exciting and pretty beneficial to our energy consumers throughout Hawaii, Hawaiian Electric Service Territory. Lani, you wanted to briefly introduce yourself and go into the presentation. Thank you, Mark. And Aloha everyone. It's really nice to be here. And Mark, it's really nice to see you again. And I'm excited to talk story about our programs at Hawaiian Electric. I'm Lani Shinsado. I'm the co-director of Customer Energy Resources at Hawaiian Electric. So my team oversees our rooftop solar and battery programs that we offer to our commercial and residential customers at all three of our service territories on Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii Island. So we manage our kind of legacy programs, older programs like net energy and metering, as well as our latest and greatest programs like Battery Bonus that I will talk about in a little bit and Shared Solar, our community-based renewable energy program, which we call Shared Solar. And we're about to launch a big kind of phase two of that program. But I understand two of my teammates or colleagues from Hawaiian Electric will be coming to the show soon to talk about that program. So I'm not gonna get into details on that today. But I wanted to focus first on kind of some basics. So what is a customer energy resource? That is the name of my team, Customer Energy Resources. What does that mean? And also our plan to grow these resources over time. And then I'll switch gears and get into Battery Bonus, which is one recent way that we have tried to grow these resources in the very near term. But before we start off, and I think it's okay if we bring up the slide that now. Before I start, I wanted to add one thing that it's really, I think a good thing that we in Hawaii are leading the way, leading the nation in adoption of customer energy resources. But we do have a lot of work to do going forward. So I hope that the viewers watching this will go away feeling inspired, feeling like they wanna get better engaged with their usage, hoping they'll check out our programs, including Battery Bonus. And think of some way that they can take action as we as a state are taking action against climate change. Cause it's really gonna take all of us, whether you take a big step or a small step, it's gonna take all of us to really take action against climate change. Okay, thank you. So next slide, please. So what is a customer energy resource? I think when you ask that question, most people will jump to rooftop solar, which is true, that is definitely a customer energy resource, but our definition goes well beyond that. So you can see on the right, there's an illustration of our grid. And traditionally, we the utility have generated all of the energy we, and all of the kind of ancillary or grid services that are needed to allow us to safely and reliably transmit that energy down the grid to the edge of the grid where all of our customers are. That's traditional. Now we have about 90,000 plus generators that are our customers at the edge of the grid. And if they have a battery, they're able to not only produce energy, but also provide us grid services that we need to safely and reliably transmit that energy. And they can be compensated for. So the grid has completely changed and we're really relying on our customers to provide what we had only provided before. So on the left hand of the slide, you can see some examples of what I'm talking about for customer energy resources. There's the traditional rooftop PV who are the producers of the energy. Now we have technology that can be both a producer and a consumer. So battery storage that's cited at a customer's residence or their business and electric vehicles. And then we have technology that can be just a consumer of energy. So smart thermostats, water heaters, pool pumps, air conditioners, anything that we can manage to better kind of manage the supply and demand of energy on the grid helps us to better integrate more renewable resources onto the grid. Okay, next slide please. So we are leading the nation in adoption of customer energy resources, but we do have room to grow and work to do. And this graph depicts that. This came out of our integrated grid planning or IGP process. This is our forecast for customer energy resources from 2020 all the way to 2050. But one thing we did last year is we issued a climate action plan where we are committing to a 70% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030. So that's the blue milestone you see there for 2030. And one of the ways we said we would get to that target is to add an additional 50,000 rooftop solar systems to the 90,000 that we already have on the grid. So this is definitely a stretch goal for us just for context. We, our team has a goal every year to add so many megawatts of customer energy resources every year. Last year, our goal was 30 megawatts for 2021. We exceeded that. We're happy about that. We got 53 megawatts. But this year, and you can see this on the graph here, the jump is quite high. Our goal this year is 119 megawatts. So it's definitely a stretch. We're always looking at ways for us to get this increased amount. And I'll go to the next slide. Battery bonus is one way we're looking at doing that. And I'll talk about that in a little bit. Next slide, please. Okay, so switching gears. I mentioned that we have to grow these resources over time. And so this is one way, battery bonus is one way that we're trying to increase adoption in customer energy resources. I'm happy to say that this was a very collaborative initiative. So we worked very closely with our local solar industry here on how we can create a program that would address the need and kind of incent customers to enroll in this program. Okay, next program, next slide, please. At the highest level, this is an overview of our new program. We are paying an upfront cash incentive to our commercial and residential customers who enroll in this. This is on Oahu only for now. And the whole objective is to get customers to invest in storage. And you can be either an existing customer that already has PV or you can be a totally new customer and sign up for PV and storage tomorrow. And really the objective is to move us more quickly towards our renewable energy goals and to kind of fill this gap that is near term. So our biggest generating unit is a coal fired plant of the AES plant and it's set to retire in September of this year. This is on Oahu. And we have identified with our regulators, the PUC, and I know Mark's organization was involved with this, a reserves gap that is gonna happen sort of around this timeframe when the AES plant retires. And so we are trying to get our customers to kind of fill this gap for us in the very near term, which is why we're offering these incentives to get our customers to invest in batteries and PV to help us with the AES coal retirement situation. Okay, next slide please. So what are the incentives there on a tiered system? There's 50 megawatts total capacity for this program. It was set by the PUC. If you sign up early, you get the best incentives. So for the first 15 megawatts, customers will get $850 per KW of committed capacity that they give us. So for example, five KW of committed capacity will have that customer get a check for $4,250 as their incentive. And then they kind of step down after that. So for the next 15 megawatts, the incentives drop by $100 to $750 per KW. And then for the last 20 megawatts of the program, the incentives drop to $500 per KW. And I should note that the incentive goes to the owner of the storage. So for customers who might sign up for a leasing type of system, then the incentive will actually go to the vendor who owns that storage system. But for customers who will finance that storage and own it themselves, then they get the check sent to them. Okay, next slide please. We started this program last July and saw kind of some lukewarm adoption by customers. And so we worked again closely with the solar industry, with our stakeholders to see if we could kind of boost enrollment in the program and come up with some new perks. We were able to do that and we presented those to the PUC in March and those got approved and they're gonna be effective June 1st. So here's the new perks. Now, if you're not a net energy metering customer or NEM, you will get an additional monthly export credit. And the reason why we did this is because we noticed when the program launched, we were mainly seeing them customers signing up for the program. We wanted to make sure that customers who were not NEM and who had signed up for our other programs had kind of equal access to the program. So that's why we came up with this incentive. It's good for three years. The second additional perk is we will give customers $5 per KW monthly peak capacity payment. And this is good for the entire 10 year term of the program. And then the third thing we did was we used to have a size limit. So if customers wanted to add PV, we said you can add up to five KW per customer. But we realized that commercial customers weren't really signing up as much as we wanted. And it was kind of due to this limitation. So we wanted to again expand access to the program to commercial customers. So we got rid of this size limitation. And we told customers you can do this as long as the additional solar is no more than twice the size of the battery. Next slide, please. There are obligations to the program. We try to be clear with customers. It's not just a free battery program that you do need to kind of perform for us in order to get the money. So here are the obligations. We're trying to address an evening peak situation. So most customers will come home. This is kind of under pre-COVID days, but most customers will go to work. They come home at around five. They turn on their stove, they cook, they do laundry. So we have the most demand during the evening peak. And we wanna be able to lower that evening peak. So that is why the obligation is that the customer must either use the energy from their battery or export electricity from that battery back to us for two hours between six, sometime between six to eight 30 at night, every night, including weekends and holidays until December 31st, 2023. And the reason why we put that timeframe around it is because again, we're trying to address the resource issue from the AES retirement. It's a full 10 year program. However, the battery needs to perform in this way, set schedules every night until December 2023. And then the customer can kind of transfer into a new option. Next slide, please. And then this is kind of money, but it is a requirement. We have to make sure that the battery is operating and complying with our requirements. So once the battery is installed and operational, then the customer has 30 days to confirm that it is operating for our requirements. And they have to submit seven days worth of data to our team. And so we will check that the battery is complying and double check that the amount that it's being used during the peak. And that helps us validate the amount of the incentive check that we end up sending to the customer. Okay, next slide, please. If for some reason the customer is not happy being in the program, it's okay, they're not stuck forever. There is a way to get out. They just need to provide us with 60-day notice. But because we are really using this resource and are paying an incentive for it, then we're gonna have the customer decides to back out and withdraw from the program. Then we are asking the customer to give us back a prorated amount of the incentive they received to participate in the program. And we'll give them options. They can either do it via a lump sum or repay us through some kind of repayment arrangement on their bill. Okay, I think this is close to the last slide. Next slide, please. So if you are interested, please visit our website. There's a wealth of information there, hawainelectric.com slash battery bonus. We have a handy PDF that we've put together that has facts about the program, the requirements, how you can get enrolled. Please feel free to look at that. We also have a frequently asked questions section that we're continually updating as we get questions from our contractors who are selling this program to customers and also from our customers. So that's also a great resource for people to use and to look at. And last slide, I think that's it. Thank you so much. Oh, that's great, Lonnie. Thank you. That's fantastic, guys. There definitely are a lot of follow-up questions. And I think you've already talked about where people can go to get more information. You have wonderful brochures. If you go on your website, you have a really great section on community energy services. But first and foremost, I mean, if somebody just has a burning question on this, is there a helpline that they can actually talk to a real person? For sure. They can call our customer service representatives or they can email us at that email address to that was on the last slide, connect at hawainelectric.com. We're happy to answer their questions. Yeah, I mean, it looks like there are significant benefits, particularly, you know, on a five kilowatt system where ultimately the payment could exceed $4,000. Obviously, this could really affect the bottom line significantly. But I found it very intriguing that for those, it applies not only to new sort of battery installations, but also existing PV and battery, I guess, addition, battery additions to existing systems where it did appear to me that you could actually even increase somewhat your PV panels. Could you talk a little bit about that? That's correct. And that's exactly what we saw in the early part of the program. It made a lot of sense for our net energy metering customers who came on kind of a long time ago in terms of our PV years, right? So maybe like five to 10 years ago, not with storage. And perhaps they're wanting to increase their load now. They wanna get an EV or their kids are coming back home and their load is gonna increase and they're still paying a bill that they wanna see come down a little bit more. It really makes sense for those. And maybe they were kind of interested in battery storage just for the resiliency value that it provides. So this is kind of a perfect opportunity for them to add some additional PV and also the battery as well and get the incentive. So that's who we saw the most of our NEM customers adopting this at first. We said, hey, it's great, we want enrollment, but we want other customers to adopt it too, which is why we worked on some additional perks that were focused on not just NEM customers, but customers who had signed up for customer grid supply or smart export and the other programs that we offer. Now, that's great. There's so many people that have talked to you that have PV that have wondered about how are they ultimately gonna do that? I think many of them thought they would never be able to expand the system. So this gives them an opportunity and the battery bonus obviously is good for everyone. Like you said, we'll fill in a lot of gaps as we retire our single greatest contingency problem. For those that's in the tech world, concerned about the closure of the AES plant and with that 180 megawatt system, firm power system will do to our system when we're now having this sort of imbalance with intermittent energy being more dominant, at least for a while. You know, getting back to the purpose of this, you talked about, of course, trying to be helpful to the AES situation, but we also know that there was a long and very eventful docket, one of many that dealt with performance-based regulation and in the decision and order that was issued in June of 2021, there were a lot of these performance incentive mechanisms that were built into place. It sounds to me like this program is really what the commission had intended. And I think what the company had intended with its response is this kind of part of the PBR overall program? Yeah, thanks for the question, Mark. It's a good one that we know that from the commission's perspective and from our perspective, grid services coming from our customers is very, very important and critical, and that's what we're working so hard to do. And the commission did give us a grid services performance incentive mechanism to make sure we carry that through. I don't think that this program has been approved for the PIM yet, but we certainly would hope that that would be the outcome. And I was remiss in mentioning that, although it's for Oahu only now because we're trying to address the AES situation, actually just today we filed a request with the PUC to expand the program to Maui because we are having a similar situation there with the retirement of the Kaha Lui power plant. So for Maui customers heads up, we hope that this program can come to you soon. Well, it sounds like a really great and effective program to provide some incentives to ratepayers and I hope we'll see it throughout your service territory ultimately. You know, with customer energy services and particularly under the PVR, this push for greater consumer engagement, you have other programs and I know that you've worked really hard on your energy portal. Could you talk a little bit about that and how that's helping customers? Yeah, by our energy portal, are you talking about our customer interconnection tool? Yeah, well, and also the thing that would sort of lead to this green button connected to the other kind of programs. Yes, yes. So I'll touch really briefly on the customer interconnection tool and that's really our engine for my team because now pretty much all applications go through that tool, it's automated. We've worked really hard to put enhancements into it. So the process overall in terms of applying for any of our programs has become much more efficient and streamlined over the years just because now we've moved to automation and we have that tool. And then for the energy portal, we are also moving to that. I think that's gonna be really exciting as we continue to deploy AMI and our grid mod team is working really hard to get that done. That's supposed to be completed by Q3 of next year. So I mentioned it up front in the beginning, we really want our customers to get more engaged with their usage and by having AMI, by having access to this energy portal, they can see in great detail how they're using energy when and then can make corrections based on that kind of data. We also are looking at time of use rates and we propose that to our PUC. So the more our customers know about how they use energy and how they can kind of better adjust their usage and that'll help them save money if they were to come up on a time of use rate. So that's a very exciting opportunity for our customers. Well, that's great. And, you know, as we get to the close of the program, it is very exciting to see that you have essentially moved forward. You talk about advanced metering infrastructure for those of you that don't know what AMI stands for, but you know, the smart meters and essentially the entire equipment that will allow you to better take advantage of these automatically time of use rates and the way to shift energy around the day to move it away from the peak or at least to get the excess solar energy to peak power times and so on and to move people away from the peak power times. It seems like you're doing all the right things now to try to get all of that aligned. Any final words as we close out this show? I think I would just end with what I started saying upfront which is we're really relying on our customers which are all of you who are watching if you're watching in the state of Hawaii or at least within our service territory. So I really encourage all of you to really just get engaged and see how you can take part in this transformation that we're all trying to achieve in Hawaii and moving to a decarbonized economy and a state that is based on 100% renewable energy. Well, nothing more I can add to that, Lani. Really appreciate you taking the time to share these new programs with us. And I think a lot of people are gonna be taking advantage of them. Hopefully they'll also go back to the sources you cited for greater information. Thank you again and that closes out this episode of Hawaii State of Clean Energy. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.