 ThinkTek Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to Stand the Energy Man here on ThinkTek Hawaii, Stan Osserman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies over here in Honolulu. And we're trying to get ready for the next legislative session, which surprisingly happens right after the midterm elections. So we're never a dull moment in Hawaii getting ready for legislation. So got a special guest today, Representative Chris Lee from the State Legislature, House of Representatives on my side of the island, no less. So I get to rub shoulders with him and honk my horn at him when I drive by him in the morning, waving his signs and stuff. And he gives us some great support, especially on the energy side here in Hawaii. He's very active. He's on top of all the legislation. So I asked him if he could come in today and participate on the show and give us some insight coming up our next session. So Rob Lee, good to have you here. Thanks for having me back. No, I know you're always on ThinkTek, so I'm just happy to be one of the shows that you can fair some time. You're the only show. Okay. You're my priority show. Okay. Let me put it that way. Okay. So what's going on with the legislature this year? What do you think is going to be coming up? Yeah, so we'll just step back for a second and put it in context. You know, we're, what, two weeks out from the election now? Yeah. And so that'll determine a handful of the races that are outstanding right now. But I think what we expect, no matter what, is that there's going to be a huge number of new elected legislators this year, at least maybe 10 or 11 in the House, a few in the Senate. And that means two things. One, the dynamics in the legislature have an opportunity to shift a little bit and have a bit new discussion and see things from new perspectives. And secondly, it means that there's a lot of education which needs to happen between now and then, particularly when it comes to energy and a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. So that's your homework from now till January to get started. But what it also means is that, you know, we're going in for another year of continuing on our progress toward our transformation of our energy future and electrification of transportation and all the things that we've been working on collectively. So this past year, you know, we had really, I think, taken some big steps. We passed our bill which made Hawaii the first state in the country to commit to a zero emissions clean economy down the road. And that really reinforces our commitment to transforming transportation, especially and all four counties now are on board with zeroing out emissions by 2045 to do our part here, as well as especially with some of the new models coming on the market, EVs and hydrogen vehicles, being able to help proliferate that new technology, which can ultimately save consumers a whole lot of money in the long run. So building off of that, I think, is what we're going to try and do this year. And not knowing yet exactly what the composition of the legislature is going to look like come January, I think it's safe to say, though, that the direction is still going to be, we're still going to be moving ahead in that direction. And it's just a question of, like, what are the specific next steps based on who's elected and all the rest. But what's really exciting, and I don't want to get too far off the tangent here, but I was just in California. Yeah, I was going to ask you about your trip. Yeah, it was great. You know, I've been up there a few times to the Bay Area working with our counterparts, our legislators in Sacramento, as well as the California Public Utilities Commission and the California Energy Commission and a lot of the stakeholders in the Bay Area that also are here in Hawaii, folks like Tesla and Protera and companies like that. And so for us, we've really been trying to figure out how in Hawaii our policies and the success that we're seeing on our energy transformation can apply elsewhere. Because ultimately, you know, if Hawaii does everything it can and we're 100% renewable and clean tomorrow, it means nothing for our climate goals if nobody else comes along with us worldwide. And it means very little to serve as sort of a test bed for a lot of this really cool, transformative, innovative energy technology if it means it's not going to actually be implemented and scalable elsewhere. So we're in California working with our colleagues over the past few years to help them out. And they've got a lot of great initiatives going on their own as well. But we were there two weeks ago in the Bay Area with Governor Jerry Brown and with Kevin De Leon is one of my legislative colleagues we've been working with as the governor signed into law. They're 100% RPS for California, directing California to be 100% renewable by 2045. It's nice to finally beat California at something. Oh, I know. And you know what? They were so eager to really take credit for being the first state and it's a friendly competition. But we had to remind them, you know, we were there three years ago. Yeah. We were way at home. Yeah. But what's really exciting about that though is that, you know, California is the fifth largest economy on the planet. And so Hawaii being out front on this, putting our RPS in place and taking the next steps to actually implement and create this viable clean energy electric grid and hopefully transportation grid down the road means that Hawaii is proving that that transformation is possible anywhere. If we can do it in Hawaii on our limited volatile electric grids, it can be done anywhere. California now proves as the fifth largest economy that that transformation is inevitable everywhere. And so it's really exciting to see our two states really work hand in hand to try and transform the entire energy paradigm, not only in the United States, but around the world. And so we've got about a half a dozen other states right now. We're working with Washington, Massachusetts and a number of others and other countries we're partnering with too on the policy front to really figure out how we can collectively move forward as a society, as a global economy, and make this transformation work for everyone. Well, you know, California puts a lot of money into what they're doing over there, especially relative to the amount that we seem to be doing in Hawaii. How can we improve that scenario? How can we basically take the resources that we do have and with all the competing things in the legislature that are vying for those resources, start spending a little bit more to get new things started in Hawaii that probably would take us even further faster. But the industry needs a little bit of incentive, not a whole lot and not a feet off the trough forever kind of thing, but get them kick started into the clean energy realm. No, I think you're absolutely right. You know, I think we've done a lot of work aligning everybody in the same direction and got our goals in place and a lot of the mechanisms to continue that progress. But funding is key to be able to implement a lot of these things. So I think that's what's coming this year is the question of how do we do that? You know, just stepping back for a second, partnering with big states like California that have billions of dollars invested in these kinds of efforts, excuse me, I almost got a sneeze. It's authorized. I know. But they've got tremendous amounts of resources that we don't have. So being able to leverage that in partnership, because we're honestly asking a lot of the same questions when it comes to trying to figure out our direction, about 80% maybe, right? Not entirely overlap, but we can share. And that also means resource share. So while they're investing in electric vehicle infrastructure and hydrogen infrastructure and all the things that make the proliferation of these new technologies viable, we can do the same thing here in concert. And so that's one of the avenues that we want to take. But more locally to bring that back home, we also need to make investments on behalf of the state and the counties into stuff right here in our own backyard. And so I think there's a couple revenue streams that have been talked about in the last few years. You know, looking at the barrel tax, for example, which is the revenue stream we get about $50 million off of all the imported fossil fuels. And using a slice of that to really invest in the innovative technology that has a nexus so that we can use the revenues from what we want to get away from to fund the investments that are going to allow people to move away from it to cheaper alternative innovative technologies like hydrogen and electric vehicles, for example. Yeah, we've been talking, Rachel and I have been talking to Gwen over at the, she's having the GEM program and she's looking at some initiatives to expand some of the funding streams available besides GEM, but things that she could possibly manage from D-Bed to help manage that funding for startups and new technologies that can help us get there. So I think you'll probably be talking to her this session too. She's got some good ideas. Well, what are some of the things that you've seen from the last legislature that you think might get carried forward into this legislature and we ought to be working on or looking at or helping with? Well, the thing that comes to mind most is we've got a finite timeline to it. There are incentives for electric vehicles, which apply both to fuel cell vehicles and straight battery electric vehicles. That allows anybody to be able to drive in the HOV lane or park in certain areas for reduced prices or for free. Those incentives, which is our state's version of trying to help the industry and help consumers, whereas other states are giving just direct cash supplements and subsidies to people, those are about to expire in 2020. They're going to sunset. So that means the legislature has to take action to decide what sort of incentive it wants to put forward. It may come in the form of a direct extension of those existing benefits or it could come in the form of additional subsidy or some mix of the two. So that's something that has to be decided relatively quickly. So that's coming back for sure. I've been watching the plug-in electric vehicle charging station issue for several years now with the energy office downtown. And the one thing that I've kind of noticed is as we try and build a plug-in charging infrastructure, we're running into situations where, especially in condominiums or large buildings, the service to the building isn't sufficient to add a bunch of chargers to the building without adding infrastructure. Adding infrastructure means HECO gets to charge the people in that building more money to put in more transformers and things like that. And the more people I talk to, the more that seems to be stifling all the efforts to try and do more charging stations. Is there anybody working on that? That is sort of the crux of the issue because for half the folks who live in condos and apartments and want to put in even just PV panels and battery storage, this is a huge problem. We pay for the common area electrical upgrades that enable all the individuals to take advantage. And so we've been working with other states to figure out how they've approached this because in Hawaii we haven't figured out an answer yet. We've had a working group that came together last year and the year before that and they didn't really find a good way to pay for it that was viable. And so one of the things that California and other states have done is basically figured out how to create additional new revenue streams specifically dedicated to that question. And so in Hawaii, one of the tools we have that's being considered is how do you, for example, leverage, whether it's through the barrel tax or some other carbon based offset revenue stream that can help pay for these improvements because it's a benefit not only for consumers but for all the folks who are going to be occupying those units in the future. And it's just fascinating. You look at, there's a great example in Kaka'ako right now, a lot of the new apartment buildings, the towers that have come up on average, I'm fudging the numbers just a little bit because I don't remember the exact but I'm rounding them off but it's something in the magnitude of roughly about a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars to put in the electrical capacity to put in an EV charging port in your typical stall, vehicle stall. When you're building the building brand new, when you're building it in after the fact an existing unit, it could be as much as 14 to 15 thousand dollars to do the same thing. So it really makes sense to really tackle this stuff up front. California has, I keep in reference in California because there are closest neighbor, but they most recently enacted a policy which says that a certain percentage of all new electric or all new parking stalls and new buildings have to be pre-wired for EVs or fuel cell vehicles, whatever it is that is going to take power to charge and so that's something that we started to look at and we had a conversation about just at the tail end of the legislature last year. I think that'll come up again because ultimately it just saves everyone money in the long run. Yeah, that seems like a more palatable solution when you have to, rather than going back to an existing community in a building and saying, okay, we're going to assess you all to put in two more charging stations that are like, wait a minute, I don't have an electric car if I was getting something out of it, why should I have to pay for something that I don't use, but if you're building a building and you build it into the building, it becomes part of the cost of the apartment divided by 100 or however many people who are buying apartments and then it's kind of invisible to them. They are contributing and it's probably the fairest way to do it and the right way to do it, but yeah, it's not as painful, especially trying to convince people after the fact on top of the fact that it's like 10 times more expensive. And the avoided alternative unfortunately, especially for folks who live in buildings now like that, that were built in the 70s, 80s, 90s long before EVs were a thing, have very few options. They're going to pay a lot of money to put this in, which means in just three or four years time when EVs and other things are actually cheaper to produce than gas cars, they're going to be stuck because they won't have that opportunity to charge at home, which means they're going to have their transportation costs artificially kept high. That cost of living is going to be there for them, where other people are going to be able to lower it and that's something that we have to be cognizant of, which is why we're making or trying to make these upfront investments. Yeah, okay, we're going to take a quick break here and we'll be back with Chris Lee to talk about some of the other things going on in the legislature and energy in the state of Hawaii in about 60 seconds. Aloha, my name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Think Tech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea. Law Across the Sea is on Think Tech Hawaii every other Monday at 11 a.m. Please join me where my guests talk about law topics and ideas and music and Hawaii Anna all across the sea from Hawaii and back again. Aloha. Hello, my name is Stephanie Mock and I'm one of three hosts Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Food and Farmer series. Our other hosts are Matt Johnson and Pamai Weigert, and we talk to those who are in the fields and behind the scenes of our local food system. We talk to farmers, chefs, restaurant tours and more to learn more about what goes into sustainable agriculture here in Hawaii. We are on at Thursdays at 4 p.m. and we hope we'll see you next time. Hey, welcome back to Stand Energy Man again on my lunch hour. I need to say that especially with the house representatives in the house so that they know I'm not mooching on state time while I'm here doing this show and getting my exorbitant fee for speaking here. We're all volunteer hosts, so don't worry about it. It doesn't cost a state anything. Thanks, Rob, for being here. And we were talking on the break a little bit about kind of one of the good deals that made it through last session, which is the folks that live in condominiums and apartments. If they could put two solar panels on their alumni, they sure wouldn't get much of a tax credit. So the legislature handled that kind of an eniquity. Can you talk about that? Yeah, great to be here. I'm also here as a volunteer unless there's a check coming that I don't know about. Yeah, this is an issue that's been discussed for about the better part of a decade now. It's to enable apartment dwellers, condo owners, renters, folks who don't have access to rooftops to put solar on their own home to be able to take advantage in the same way and ultimately save money the same way. And so we've had bills introduced in the legislature, I think as early as 2012-2013, to enable this to happen. And the utilities had opposed it for the longest time. And so just in the last, I think, two years, three years maybe, we passed a bill that required the PUC to open up a dock and figure this out. And so the PUC has gone through that process. It's been a very long technical drawn-out process. But finally, we're at a point where these programs are deploying and people are, for the first time, very shortly going to be able to buy into off-site PV and get credit as though it's on their own roof, even though they may live in an apartment building. So it's really exciting because it opens up the market to a whole new group of people who previously couldn't participate. So that would be like an independent power producer buying a tract of land and putting solar on it and offering shares? Basically, yeah. So you could buy into a set number of panels in a project that might be often Waianae or Wahiwa or wherever, even though you live in Waikiki, for example. Well, that's great. Yeah, it's exciting. And this is something that is not new. We're almost the only state at this point that doesn't do it. States like Minnesota and others figured it out in almost a decade ago. And it's just really simple and easy way to empower people and give them new alternative options for electricity. That's something that I think we're way past time catching up on, but finally glad to see that we're almost here. I know it's not a state project, but the rail project is always fun to talk about. Oh yeah, let's dive in. Especially when you want to see it. This is a four-hour program, right? You know, yesterday I was out in Wahiwa or Waipahu actually talking to some Toyota folks about forklifts, hydrogen forklifts. And sure enough, there was a train up on the rail doing a little bit of practice moving around and doing stuff by that station. And so it's coming. It's like on its way. But that thing has notoriously gone pretty well over budget and it creates its own economic impact for the state overall. How do you think we're going to get ahead on that, working with the county to make sure that thing comes to fruition? I'm convinced that once it's up and you give it a chance that people are going to really like it, no ridership will eventually get up and everything. But it's awful painful right now, especially as we look at how do we pay for it. What are some of the things that the state's looking at? You know, from the states, so first of all, it's important to point out this is a county-led project, right? And so heart is a creature of the city and county of Panolulu. From the state side, all we did was authorize the financing to be able to help pay for this. We were promised that it was going to be on time and on budget and it's... Over double budget. It hasn't been delivered in the way we expected, let's suffice it to say. But, you know, I mean, along the way, one of the things that we also had discussed, because we get updates every couple of years from the city on what's going on with the project, you know, we had, I remember maybe this was like four or six years ago now, in one of those updates, all our legislators were assembled and Hart was there presenting the latest on what's going on. And we asked them, you know, when it comes to energy use, the operational cost of running a rail system that is 100% electric is enormous. If you look at almost every other city around the country or you have around the world, frankly, where you have similar sorts of trains and mass transit, those operational costs have to be subsidized because ultimately, fairs from people riding just can't cover that enormous cost. But yet, we're building us at a point where technology has changed. All these systems that were built 10, 20, 30 years ago didn't have the opportunity that we have today to take advantage of renewables that could power our own rail system here. And so Hart at the time had come forward and its representatives had said, you know, it's something we're absolutely looking into, we're diving in, and today, there's almost nothing going on, at least that I'm aware of, on that, unfortunately. And so that's really frustrating because I feel like it is one of the projects that could absolutely benefit from the kinds of off-the-shelf technology that everyone else is using to save on costs. Yeah, maybe hanging solar panels on the south side of the rail itself and just collect solar. I mean, the thing's already there, so it's not going to wreck anybody's view or anything, it's hanging there. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And that could be a lot of solar panels. I mean, that being said, I think we're at a point where we have to build this out and hopefully create a network and a system like most other cities have that can get you from point A to B, not just in a straight line, but you can get to C, D, E, wherever you need to go. But it needs to be done right, and I think there's a lot of frustration that the project's not being executed as well as it should be, and the planning and so forth is, it's gone off the rails a little bit. No pun intended. No pun intended. But hopefully, if it comes up again this year, because it looks like the city is going to be short on funding again, hopefully we can hold our feet to the fire and figure out how we can do all these things that are just so common sense that... Well, you do a lot of traveling and so do I, and I've ridden on the DC Metro a lot in San Francisco, BART, and everything, and it's a really great system, and most people don't understand up front that they don't make money. Those systems never make money. I mean, they're made so that people don't drive their cars. They're made to save the population money by not having to operate vehicles and especially take care of folks who don't have high-wage jobs that need to get from Waioa or Waipao into town to do their work and not have to get them in traffic. But also hopefully, we'll be pulling a lot of cars off the road, especially from West Oahu. That means we don't have the pollution. We'll have actually more efficient vehicles because they'll operate at their efficient range instead of stop and go at 10 miles an hour on the freeway for an hour. They can actually just move where they're designed to drive at 50 or 60 miles an hour and burn fuel more efficiently until we get them off the fuel and into electricity. Yeah, that's an important point. I think it's often overlooked in a lot of the analysis, but I mean, a well-planned design and executed mass transit system, in this case rail, does have the opportunity to overall save consumers, taxpayers, a significant amount of money because you're just reducing the volume of investment that people have to make individually into cars, insurance, all the other things. That's money that stays in their pocket and goes out into the economy in other ways, creating new businesses and jobs, et cetera, et cetera. Especially, I think, our next generation growing up in Hawaii. I'm 37 now, and I graduated from high school in 1999, and our age group at that time, well, yeah, there's a lot of jokes I can make, but before I do that, our age group, in 1999 of 18 to 29-year-olds, 99% of us had driver's licenses at that time. Today, that same age group, less than 65%. I was gonna say almost half, probably. Yeah, it's changing so dramatically, and that's, I think, a good thing because it means people are living more sustainably, they're living closer to work, they're finding alternatives to paying the high cost of actual car ownership and everything that comes with it. And ultimately, that's one of the only ways that, especially for our generation, we're gonna be able to live here because having an entire mortgage plus car payment, plus insurance, plus all the rest of it, and wasting two hours a day and commuting from town to EVA or wherever it is, is just, that is a 20th-century lifestyle that needs to go away. Yeah, it's not sustainable. Nobody wants that. So, it's about making the right investments and the kinds of projects that can provide those alternatives and a cheaper cost of living overall. Yeah, but the whole reduced vehicle miles travel piece is often forgotten about. That's right. We're gonna talk about it. So, one of the things we did talk on the break a little bit about was Beakie. And how do you view that is in terms of an in-town solution that maybe could be deployed to other neighborhoods and neighbor islands and things? Yeah, you know, most of the folks I know in downtown that work downtown have memberships, and instead of getting in a car and driving six or eight blocks or further to a meeting. To find a parking place. Yeah, the whole thing, it's faster and way more convenient to just go downstairs, hop on a bike, head down the bike lane, you know, a few blocks and you're at your meeting, you park it and you're done. You don't have to worry about any of that other traffic and all the crap that comes with it. So, it's something that I think has been enormously empowering in a way for sort of the folks living in the urban core and working in the urban core. I hope that other communities are able to take advantage of either Beakie or something similar. And now there's a lot of things going on. I was just in Santa Monica for a work trip and there you not only have bike share but you've also got scooters, electric scooters. We've seen a few of those here in town and people just use them everywhere and they're so convenient and so easy. They've replaced a lot of the vehicular transit which has opened up enormous opportunities for new businesses to open up along the sides of streets and for taking what used to be vehicle lanes and turning them into park spaces and places where folks can open up little kiosks and do all kinds of neat, innovative stuff in a way that was never possible before. We're coming up on the end of our time here and I spent 29 minutes not talking about hydrogen which is really out of character. So I'm going to ask you where you see hydrogen taking its place in Hawaii, especially in Honolulu. Yeah, I think hydrogen will play a role here for sure in the coming future. We've already got our first hydrogen fueling station down at Servco which is exciting and they've got vehicles driving around now. But more than that as a fuel storage battery where you can take a PV project and instead of plumbing into batteries which are pretty expensive to put in you can generate hydrogen, store it, use it for other things, transport it around. And there's a lot of opportunities there to do a whole new kind of energy load shifting and storage and all the rest of it. And that's something that's exciting. Great. HECO seems to be focused on battery though. Are they actually looking at hydrogen from your perspective? I know there are people who are. I don't know in HECO's latest filings what is in there. Yeah, they just announced about 250 megawatts worth of storage projects on three different islands. But none of them included hydrogen. So I'm just wondering if you're interfaced with them they're even looking that direction right now. There are people who are looking at it. I think even HNI and some of the other institutes are looking at it because there's a there's a price point in which it becomes viable to do. And there are certain circumstances where you have curtailed energy that can be used to generate hydrogen and stored. I mean otherwise it's going to be lost. So relative, especially for large scale storage hydrogen is exceptionally efficient because you don't need like banks and banks and banks and batteries. You just need a bigger tank. So that's something that I think is encouraging for the future. Well, great. Well, I ran this right up to the last second of our show here and I want to thank you again for being on the show. Thanks for having me. And sharing some of your thoughts with us. And that's it for today. We'll see you next week on Friday. Thanks to Robert and Cindy here in the studios for helping all the magic happen. And we'll see you next week. Aloha.