 Okay, we're back. We're live. It's Wednesday. It's the 4 p.m. block, and I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech, and this is our flagship energy show every single week. The Energy Policy Forum helps us with this show. They organize it. And today we're starting, and I guess we're doing an interesting series on gas today. But we have our Hawaiian electric spokesman, Peter Rosick, and he's going to tell us some stuff. And we have a long-awaited return of the vagabond, Ray Starling. Yeah, he's back. Okay, my co-host, Ray Starling. So welcome, Peter. Thank you. And welcome, Ray. So let's take a few minutes and talk about the scammers that have visited our shores yet again and how they are trying to scam between the public and Hawaiian electric companies. Well, we see scams pretty much throughout the year, but they seem to come in waves where they pick up. And then usually before the holidays, and maybe the holidays have come early this year, as they seem to come earlier every year. But we've had a real uptick in the last couple of weeks of these scams, where people get a call and they're told you're delinquent on your energy bill. We're going to cut you off in an hour unless you take steps we tell you to take to pay us. And they call some residences, but they seem to concentrate on small and medium-sized businesses. They're very clever. The ID number on your telephone may say Hiko Miko Helco. It's not our number, but that's what the ID says. They have recordings that seem to be from the utility company and they call very often at times just before closing or when the business is likely to be the busiest. Like if it's a small diner, they'll call around the noon hour where everybody is busy and can't take the time to think, well, where did I leave my electric bill? Where's the check? Or they'll call very often and the manager or owner or somebody else pays their bill for them or they're paid automatically through their bank and they don't think about it. They don't have any immediate proof in hand. The person says, here's what you have to do to pay us. Here's what you owe us and if you don't, we're going to cut off your electricity in an hour. And for many people, that's frightening enough, especially if they're not fluent in English or not sure about wanting to get in trouble, they'll, they will pay it. And we don't know for sure how much, but we believe there's tens of thousands of dollars going out of, probably out of state, to these scammers. So we're undertaking a campaign as we do periodically. We're spending ourselves about $100,000 on advertising and other efforts to tell people don't get scammed. And the way not to get scammed basically is if you have the slightest suspicion about what the call is about, hang up. And don't call the number that they called you from. Don't call the number they give you. And sometimes they'll say, don't call Helco because they won't help you. They call our customer service number. It's on your bill. It's online. It's in the phone book. It's information. Call customer service. We're glad to take the call. Say, I just got a call. Do I owe any money? And I think 99 times out of 100, the answer will be no and you go about your business. But the first step is really to just be suspicious and hang up. They're not likely. I mean, Hawaiian Electric is not likely to cut anybody's power off in an hour. Not like that. Absolutely not. We do have delinquent customers. And the last thing we want to do is turn off their power. They need it. And we don't want to go through the hassle for us and for them. It costs us money to turn off somebody's power and then to go back after the bill has been rectified and turn it back on again. Our last absolute last resort is to turn off somebody's power. And we would never do it in that way with that kind of pressure. You know, there'd be a series of mailings and there'd be, you know, some discussion come in and, you know, let's work out a payment plan or how can we make this work out for you. We don't want to do that. And we certainly don't want to do it in a coercive way. I mean, everybody that works for this company lives here in these islands and we just don't operate that way. Can you catch them? Can you somehow get an angle and set them up so that you can prosecute them and put them in jail? You know, ThinkTech knows about technology and with phone technology today, they could be calling from anywhere. They change their numbers frequently. They could be next door, but we think by and large they are mainland operations. This is happening across the country. We're not unique in that respect. We're part of a consortia of utilities that are joined together in what we call the Stop the Scam campaigns. And we know it's happening everywhere, so to speak. But, you know, we have to take care of our own. And that's why we're really trying to tell people, don't be scammed, don't be fooled, hang up, call us by the numbers that are posted for us. There are many ways to pay your bill. We would never ask for that kind of, you know, go to the convenience store and buy a prepaid debit card or buy a money order and send it off to some anonymous source. We don't work that way. There are places in addition to our own offices where you can pay, walk in, you can pay by mail, of course, Western Union, but they're all legitimate and they're all, you know, will give you a receipt and they're all going to, you know, treat you with respect and they're not going to, you know, they're not going to put you under pressure. Some of the convenience stores and drug stores now, their managers are on the lookout, especially if they see a senior citizen or somebody saying, you know, I need to spend $700 or $800 on this and they'll say, wait a minute, wait a minute. But, you know, you can't, they can't get everybody. They've helped us. They're certainly aware of what's going on. But in the end, it's, you know, we've just got to reach out to people and say, why electric, why electric, why electric light doesn't work that way? We're not going to turn off your power and that kind of a threat. If you get a call that's at all suspicious, you know, if it was an email from the Nigeria, the famous Nigerian prince, by now we're pretty well all used to thinking, you know, that's not on the up and up. But this kind of a call that seems to know about you, for some cases, they seem to have your account number. They asked for some number, you know, you owe $484.12. Wow, that, they must, they must, that must be right. Even though it isn't. Even though it isn't. Even though it isn't. And if you, you know, if you're busy, if you're stressed, if you don't have your receipts right in front of you, and God knows most people don't, you know, you're, you're a lot of people's Tennessee. And we know that there are people who are getting scammed who are not calling us because they're embarrassed, as we all would be. Sure, I would be, yeah. Yeah. So the, when we do hear about it, as we do, it tends to be people who have put their foot down, or in one case, we know of, they got the call, they paid $750. Ooh. And the next day, the scammers called them again and ordered another $750. At that point, they said, wait a minute. Even scammers make mistakes. Well, I don't know how many times the second call works out. Maybe it does. Who knows? I just know that we, we want our customers to know, we want people to know for their, the sake of their relatives and their friends. We don't operate that way. And there's a fairly simple and direct way to avoid getting scammed. And that is hang up. Could you do anything at the electric company to, you know, ameliorate the risk to limit the possibilities for these scammers? Well, what we can do, what we do is we provide a lot of reliable ways to pay. We publicize them, you know, on the bills, on our website, you know, on our mobile app. You look, if you get our mobile app, it'll tell you how to pay your bill in a legitimate way. And we can warn people, but there's no way we can get between these random callers. Yeah. That's the thing. It's random. This random. So Ray, has this happened to you at all? Has not. But I have seen it happen before being in the energy business. But you mentioned the sequence of events that lead up to it. Would it be fair to say, and I'm asking you, but I believe it's so, that you would not, if you were the customer, the named customer on the account, you would not be surprised by someone calling you to tell you that you're about to have your lights cut off because you haven't paid your bill without knowing that somebody's been after you for a long time. Would that be fair to say it wouldn't be the surprise that would make you want to run down and pay it immediately? Absolutely. But I'll tell you how they deal with that. If I say to the scammer, you know, I haven't gotten any notices. This is, well, you must have gotten, well, they must have been lost in the mail. Maybe you ignored them. Maybe you threw them away. Or in there are cases, for example, where a manager of a store doesn't pay the electric bill, the central office pays, or, you know, downtown here, or the central office back in Cincinnati pays their electric bill for them, or they have an automatic deposit through their bank where they pay on a regular basis. But they don't have any proof in hand that that was done. So if somebody says to them over the phone, well, I'm sorry, but your payment didn't go through. And now we have to shut you off. Your first instinct, I think, is to prevent losing power and figure, well, maybe we'll, you know, if it were legitimate, you know, it'll work out, they'll give me a credit. You know, I don't know what exactly goes through your mind, but there are a lot of ways you can justify in your own mind. Let me get this paid and off the table and work it out later. But of course, by the time you've done that, the money is gone to who knows where. You know, the distinction here, I mean, there's the scams of all kinds. We're all exposed to fishing and whatnot. Sure. The distinction is that they have this pretty powerful threat that they're going to cut your power off. Sure. A lot of other scams, they, you know, they'll find a way to deceive you and defraud you and give you social engineering. But in this case, the threat is pretty serious. So the point is that we live in a world of increasing complexity and risk. The internet brings this kind of risk. And you have to apply, we talked about this before the show, you have to apply critical thinking. And you have to be, as you say, Peter, you have to be a little bit, a little bit suspicious of anything that doesn't ring right. Not only for the electrical bill, but for everything. Sure. That's the reality. Anyway. But you're quite right. There are a few, they're not that many bills. There's the electric bill, there's your water bill. They're, you know, they're not that many things that literally could put your, throw your life out of whack as quickly as having your power turned off. Yeah. I mean, it's like, if Macy's called me and said, you better pay right now and your wife can't buy any more clothes. I said, Hey, I would talk. Anyway, Peter, thank you so much for coming down. Good to see you again. Good to see you back. All right. We'll take a short break when we come back and talk to Joe Boyven. All right. Thank you. All right. Pass that gas. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. On Think Tech Hawaii, we show at three o'clock in the afternoon every other Monday, my guests are specialists from here and the mainland on energy efficiency, which means you do more for less electricity and generally safer and more comfortable while you're keeping dollars in your pocket. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At Dive Heart, we believe freedom is all of these and more regardless of your ability. Dive Heart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, Dive Heart has helped children, adults and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. Dive Heart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. Should we ask yourself some questions? I do that once in a while. Joe's going to ask himself some questions today. My son does that to me enough. So, if you didn't remember, this is Think Tech. I'm Jay Fidel. That's Joe Boyman, okay? Hawaii Gas, Senior Vice President. Senior Vice President. Senior Vice President and Ray Starling. You remember him? He was here one minute ago. He's co-host today. We're talking about Peter Rosig, with Peter Rosig about wine electric companies. Okay, so now we're going to talk about gas. And what are we going to talk about, Gas? And ask yourself some good questions, Joe. I will tell that to you. We'll help you answer them. Okay. What are we going to talk about gas? Well, we could talk about renewable methane. So, we'll put a definition to this gas thing. So, renewable methane. And we have an interesting project we're doing right now that we got approval for a few weeks ago from the Public Utilities Commission. And that is to capture the biogas that's produced at a local municipal wastewater treatment plant and convert it into renewable methane. That will then be a natural gas pipeline quality methane that we'll inject into the line to serve all of our customers on our utilities. This is what you ordinarily serve your customers with, methane? It is methane. It says chemically equivalent. It's the only differences. Our existing methane comes from an oil-derived process. And this methane comes from wastewater. And it's local. And it's local. So that means in a sense, in a sense, and you can go further with this, it's renewable. It is renewable. It is renewable, yeah. So, we get all those benefits for decades. And we do this on Oahu and we do it on some other islands as well. When wastewater is treated at a wastewater treatment plant, it contains what are called biosolids. And those biosolids are broken down through the use of microbes. And when that happens, it creates a biogas. And biogas is about 60% natural gas, methane, and about 40% carbon dioxide. But you can't use that gas in a natural gas pipeline because you have all that carbon dioxide and some other things in there, such as water and hydrogen sulfide. So you have to get those things out. And you have to go through what's called an upgrading or purification process. So at the Hano-Uli-Uli wastewater treatment plant, we will be installing a skid-mounted purification piece of equipment. And the... What does that mean? It moves around? Well, it means that it's brought in all prefabricated. And you simply need to create a little platform for it to rest on, which means your site preparation work is minimal. So most of the work is done off-site. But once you put it on the site, it stays in exactly the same place. Exactly. So it will stay there. And the job of that equipment is to take the raw biogas and remove first the H2O, the water, and then drop out the hydrogen sulfide and the saloxanes and the carbon dioxide. And out the other end comes a natural gas equivalent product, right? A pipeline quality natural gas. And then we'll run a pipeline extension from the wastewater treatment plant to connect to our existing 1,000 miles worth of pipeline infrastructure. So which is not going to be too far away from this equipment? It's about three quarters of a mile away. That's not bad, really. Not bad. And so now, for decades, that gas has been flared. There's a big flare stack. Is that your existing refinery? No, there's a separate flare stack at wastewater treatment plants. Because when you create this biogas, it's raw methane. And that is a harmful greenhouse gas. So the way to deal with that is to combust it. And that makes it much less so. Now you're dealing with the outputs of a combusted fossil fuel. How does that change? Well, it changes. So basically, we'll shut the flare off so we won't be combusting it there. And we'll be taking the raw gas stream, purifying and putting it to the pipeline. And now that will serve the needs of all of our customers, which, as you probably know, is cooking, is hot water heating at all of the hotels and the hospitals. And some lighting, some electricity generation, crop drying, and a number of other uses. Well, if this works at the biomass, at the wastewater treatment plant, can you also use the same technology to pull the methane out of the landfills? That I guess they're all flared now. But is that something that you could just as easily do? You can. And so this is the first project of its kind in Hawaii. And for a long time, we've been flaring these renewable sources of energy, which in aggregate across Hawaii today, there's approximately six million gallons worth of diesel fuel equivalent that is flared and put into the atmosphere. So just think about that for a six million gallons worth of energy. And I think now, certainly, the city and counties are looking at how to use that energy, which is essentially free, except for the upgrading cost and how they can use that in other applications, such as ground transportation or for gas utility. But the landfill and Wyman Oval Gulch Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, those are all potential candidates for capturing, upgrading, and then using that gaseous energy in some way to displace the fossil fuels we're using today. Each facility, you have to have one of these skid-mounted processors. What are we talking about in American money here? Well, this particular project is about a $5 million project. And we'll be processing about 800 firms of energy a year. And to put that into perspective, we sell about 28 million firms of energy on O'ahu in our utility system each year. So it'll get us somewhere about 3% renewable, in addition to the 2.5% or so percent we already are. And this is the first iteration of the project, but there will be other iterations going forward. That's the goal, right, is to pursue Hawaii's clean energy future. And you can do with certainly electricity through solar and wind and other types of devices that can produce renewable electricity. But fuel diversification or energy generation diversification is something that is tremendously important. And we're seeing that in Puerto Rico today. We've seen that in Australia with some of their big outages they had earlier this year. And even in Germany to some extent. So, you know, fuel mixed diversification is I think tremendously important for us living in the middle of the Pacific. I'm a gas customer. So I'm happy about this. Thank you. Because it means you'll be able to supply me even if you have trouble getting supply here. That's correct. Yeah, yeah. And the more we can do this, you know, this is the first project. I'm hopeful there'll be several more. And we can continue to increase the amount of renewable energy in our pipeline over time. Can you do it totally? 100 percent. Well, we all the gas that you sell, you know, through these through these high tech, you know, facilities and processors. Well, if if we were to get all of that gas on a Wahoo today and, you know, obtain rights to that gas and purify it and inject it, that may get us around 15 ish percent renewable. So then the question becomes how do you go from 15 percent to 100 percent? And so the so the municipal resources are not scalable. They they sort of are what they are. And to go beyond that, we have to look at additional sources of biogas production. And and those really get narrowed down fairly quickly because you need you need an organic matter to produce a biogas, right? And organic matter can come from a few things. But one of the innovative ways that people are producing biogas today, certainly in Europe, just starting in the United States, but New York City is a leader in that. And I think Charlottesville and North Carolina and a few other cities have developed food waste programs. Now these food waste programs will collect the food waste at the source rather than trying to separate it and compost or you could speed that up a little bit, kind of the same process, but we'll speed it up a little bit by building an anaerobic digester. We'll put the food waste in it and anaerobic meaning in the absence of oxygen, right? So introduce microbes and we can take that food waste and create a biogas. So there's there's some amount of energy that can be created that way. And the common theme for all these programs, if you if you take a step back is is really sustainability. Taking existing resources that aren't currently being used for energy and figuring out ways to do that, right? So wastewater is one of them. Landfills is is another one of those those approaches. Food waste is another. But that'll so that gets you a little bit further. Now the the next way you can you can move forward with more renewable gas production is through an energy crop. And we have we have a tremendous amount of land in Hawaii that can be used for agriculture. I believe if I remember correctly, even at the at the peak of our sugar cane and pineapple days, we used about 300,000 acres. But we have about a million acres in Hawaii. That's that's assigned to agricultural status. So if we can take land now and grow an energy crop, whether it be an energy cane, or any number of any number of crops, you know, this the the the key thing to do in in energy crops is, of course, having something that grows well in Hawaii. But the magic really happens in how many wet tons of organic material you can yield per year. And then within that wet ton, what the energy content is. So you want the high you want a crop that produces the most amount of energy per acre per year. And that is easily farmable doesn't require a lot of water and and those sorts of things. Then you come post it. Well, then you would go back to the anaerobic digestion. So you would you would you would mulch it up. You would combine it and make kind of a slurry. The slurry would go into the anaerobic digester. You would heat the the digester up to a certain desired temperature with the inclusion of these microbes and you'd produce a biogas. We're not talking really hot here. We're just talking about warm enough to to derive this reaction. Exactly. Exactly. And and and in doing that you now create this sustainable process of agricultural to agriculture to energy. And you're seeing this take place in in Europe in in hundreds if not thousands of locations. You're doing it now. Yes. So this isn't this isn't new technology. It's refined technology. And Europe's really really turned out to be the leader in this. And a lot of times they're co-digesting meaning they're taking agricultural waste products or manure and that sort of thing combining it with energy crops such as corn. And then they're producing this biogas and they're they're either driving low BT engines right at the farm producing all of their electricity. And in some cases they're then purifying it and injecting it into the local or national gas grid. So is this more or less efficient than using crops for biofuel. Well that's an interesting question. I think it it comes down to yield per acre right and and cost per acre. I can tell you that in the work we've done we think that that the the biogas production is is a much more economical approach than biofuel. Now there's a lot of folks in Hawaii that are pursuing biofuels and various other outputs. So I think you know when you do this long enough Jay you realize that you know there's never one answer for everything. And it really gets down to diversification in a mix. So it may be that you know there's certainly a need for biofuels for a liquid renewable right. And there's other processes that may be better served by a gaseous fuel right. Could you serve them both. Could you have one field of organic material that would create you know the gas for you and create the biofuel for Hawaii bio. Well there's an interesting company that I think a lot of us are talking to called Terviva which is which is looking to do that. Now in their case they'd be growing a tree with a nut on it and then the nut would be squeezed. You'd get an oil for a renewable liquid fuel. And you know in theory the waste of that could then be digested to create a biogas. So there's a lot of interesting things that I think we'll be dealing with in the coming years to see if they work out how they work out. But you know each one of these has a maturity level right. And so if you take wastewater treatment plants in landfills and purification of those things it's done in it's done in thousands of places we know how to do that. You start talking about energy crops and doing those types of things. You know we've not done that in Hawaii. Let me ask you one more question because we're almost out of time. And that is this let's assume let's assume that we can do this crop thing and all the other systems that you're talking about the deployment so to speak of the equipment in every place you can find it all of a sudden it's not 15 percent or 30 percent it's 100 percent in fact it's 110 percent. Now you have 10 percent extra okay. Now I mean beyond your needs the needs of Hawaii gas in its market with its customers what do you do with the extra 10 percent. Is there some place you could deploy the extra 10 percent of this gas. For example for example Stan the energy man comes on here at noon every Friday talks about what to do with hydrogen. Does the just does the market for hydrogen the equipment that uses hydrogen to run could it also use this gas that you'd be creating this extra 10 percent. Well it could it could we'd have to take the methane which is CH4 and strip off the H's right strip off the hydrogen. And you know we do that at our plant today with fossil fuels but we could do the same thing with this methane. Steam methane reformation is what it's called and there's a cost to do that so it would be a fairly costly source of fuel for that. So I would suggest that that perhaps a more direct pathway would be to do what LA is doing and and many other locations in California which is you know CNG heavy duty vehicles refuse trucks transit buses handy vans and things like that the tractors that are used to haul around all the containers in Hawaii. There are natural gas engines that are in all of those vehicles so for example LA's bus system is 100 percent compressed natural gas and now it's being converted to renewable natural gas by a lot of the projects that we talked about earlier landfills and wastewater treatment plants and and other other programs. So you could take that and you could use it directly in a compressed natural gas engine. So there is such an engine and if we if we got the engines then we could use the natural gas to run the vehicles. You know interesting statistic 35 percent of all transit buses today are compressed natural gas. 35 percent so all of LA right all of all of Dallas Texas and many many other cities. So that's that's been around for a long time and there's there's engines that are used today that are called near zero low knocks which means that they don't emit zero emissions but they're they're pretty close. So those I think are are extremely compelling uses and as we grow this renewable natural gas yes certainly we wanted in our our business and and one of the challenging things there is to do this in a way that makes it affordable right that affordability factor and but if we can if we can satisfy that then we can certainly move into other sectors like ground transportation and use the renewable fuel there. I have this absurd Woody Allen kind of vision in my mind about this this garbage truck okay that runs on natural gas and the natural gas is created by the very garbage that goes in the truck so it's cooking the whole time it's creating the natural gas and as you fill up the truck and the truck on the way to wherever it would go the dump okay by the time it gets to the dump this is it's been running on the natural gas the whole time there's nothing left in the truck it's used that's an absurd thought so we're at the end of our time guys so Ray can you summarize and try to make some some gaseous sense of all this well I yeah I must congratulate you guys I thought you might be out of the game a few years ago when everything went to renewable and you guys were not doing renewable but now it looks like that you're taking you're finding ways to take care of some of the waste products that we have now that we're throwing away or dumping out in the ocean and turning it into a useful product and I'm I'm I'm actually pleased to hear it and congratulations I'd like to hear more maybe over a beer sometimes yeah right sure and I joined in that thought good for you you know you found a way to be renewable despite all the aggravation about LNG over the past few years you you are still on a course of innovation and creativity good for you Joe okay appreciate aloha aloha all right aloha