 Okay we're back we're live with that flagship energy show it's Hawaii the state of clean energy and you can tune in every single Wednesday at 4pm and see amazing things about energy. You need to study energy you need to know about energy and do not watch Michael Moore's film planet of the humans because that is disinformation. Miss you and you want to say hello. Hey hello hi everybody from beautiful and lovely Kaniwi Bay overlooking coconut island. formerly formerly known as Gilligan's Island. Perfect. If I had to guess Peter I guess you're the same place. That's Peter Russick spokesman for Hawaiian Electric. Hi there. I'm in downtown Hollywood overlooking coconut island. Miracles of television. That's a perception thing. So we want to talk about energy because we have to stay educated about energy even in, especially in the time of COVID, because you know, relentlessly climate change proceeds relentlessly we need to keep up with our initiatives. We need to move ahead. And I must say Peter that you know from all the little segments and clips we've had with you and other people from Hawaiian Electric, you are you continue to move ahead. We're still focused on that you, you haven't lost your direction or your, you know, commitment to the initiative. And that's one of the reasons, aside from your smiling face that we wanted to see you here today. There was a piece in I think was civil beat or was it in the star advertiser today, and it was about some new projects 16 new projects as a kind of a big number. Can you talk about it. Sure. I remember this is actually the second phase of what of this effort to increase the amount of renewable energy on our system. We're at about 28% and we are all we're confident of being at 30% by the end of this year, but we still have a long way to go to get to 100% by 2045. And in particular, we've got some, some power plants, some fossil fuel generation that will be closing up in the next couple of years. The AES plant here, the Kahului power plant on Maui, Big Island has needs that, you know, are very vulnerable because of their, their volatile geographic situation. So we've gone ahead with the second phase of this request for proposals. We put it out some eight or nine months ago now, I guess, and we got about 75 responses, which was pretty good. We're looking for a large, the largest ever tranche of new, of new projects and of megawatt hours of generation and also storage, which is becoming increasingly important. So in the first phase, as you remember, we had about eight projects across the islands, 260 megawatts. And those are proceeding now and, and, you know, some are under construction, some are still in the planning stages, but those are in the bag. And although we fear there may be some slowdowns to the virus, we think they're basically on schedule. We put out a request for a second phase, very aggressive. We wanted to really see what the market would bear. And we got back to 75 proposals. We've got them down to about 16, which are the best. Some of them are really just, you know, kind of waste of time, but some of them are very good, except they're very expensive. And we are still, you know, one of our priorities is still price. We are not going to pay any amount of money for renewable energy at this stage. We're going to wait, hope those prices come down as they have for solar and for rent. So the result of this effort was we've got 16 projects across the three islands. They are all story, all solar and storage, and a few of them are what we call standalone storage. In other words, there are people who want to build basically a big battery that really looks like a bunch of masts and containers, but it is working together. It's a big battery. And during the day, we can use the excess renewable energy from these many solar plants, or we can use regular generation if we have it in excess, and we can charge up those batteries. And then starting at about four or five in the afternoon, we can unload those batteries. They have about four hours of use in solar. And that way we take this renewable energy from the middle of the day to the afternoon and evening. Well, you know, that's impressive. And I know from the newspaper articles on your press release, you're not in a position yet to tell us exactly who or where. Exactly right. And I know that's causing some heartburn. And it's understandable. We're kind of in between a rock and a hard place here. We want to tell people about this, but we don't necessarily want people to wake up in the morning and pick up their star advertiser and say, oh, you know, there's going to be a big solar project outside your window and nobody ever told you about it. That's a bad way to start that process. So we've given each of these developers who we have put onto the shortlist 30 days to go out to their respective communities. Some are already making announcements. Some are still trying to get organized. And you know, this is particularly difficult right now in normal times. Some of these developers would be here in the islands talking to people, you know, scoping out the communities around where they want to build and so forth. That's not happening. They're not able to travel. They're not willing to travel because they want to be at home with their families and so forth. So it's a double bind in that respect. And it's very difficult. But we have, we've said, you know, 30 days from now, we'll release a list of the names of the projects where they are, how big they are and so forth. And in the meanwhile, we are really hoping that these developers will get out there and some of them already have made some announcements and made some contacts. Others are a little slower, but you know, it'll be 30 days from now and then we'll have the complete list out there. Meanwhile, we're beginning the negotiation process. We have to negotiate the final what we call the purchase power agreement and those will go to the public utilities commission and the comments of the neighbors will also be included in those when they get to the public utilities commission. So, you know, people will be heard and we've got a, you know, everybody in Hawaii knows there's increasing sensitivity about big projects, whether it's because they're near residential areas or because they're on agricultural land or because some small group of people say these are sacred sites. And, you know, we've got to, we recognize that we're, we've got to respond to that and trying to get the word out, explain to the communities what's going on. And I just feel that we have forgotten, we as a community have forgotten our original intention in the matter was to deal with climate change to deal with carbon to go renewable and to do everything we can possibly do to get where we want to go. It's, it's critical for our role in the world and our reputation, and I, well, reputation and, well, I'll say reputation I mean our reputation as a renewable energy state. Right. You know, I think we've always been willing to have renewable projects in our somebody else's backyard and you know, if it, we're always willing to, you know, do it if it's not in our line of sight and so forth. But we're getting to the point frankly where they're, you know, these projects in size and scope and location are no longer invisible and I don't blame anybody for saying, you know, I'm concerned about what happens in my neighborhood. I'm concerned about what's going to be here. I moved in here when that was an empty field, but you're right. Ultimately, if we're going to get to 100% renewable energy or even close, we're going to all have to be looking at things that we never saw before. And look, you don't have to comment on this but but I would like to express a view on it. My view on it is it's not constructive Thomas Jefferson said, make yourself useful. That means make yourself useful to the community. And anybody who wants to stop a project that's obviously for a good purpose. That's, you know, important to our community and, and to everyone in our community and beyond our community is really standing in the way. And he should reconsider or she should reconsider that view. I think it's time already where we began thinking that way, especially in light of COVID, where it's a pull together or we hang together. One or the other. So I'd like to ask you Mitch how do you feel about this. You know the NIMBY thing is old already. People have got to stop doing that. I don't agree. I don't agree. I'm sorry. Can I, can I go ahead, Mitch? I'll jump in. You finish your, you finish your thought. You know, it's, I don't think it's old. I think it, it doesn't really come into play until it's something that really begins to impact you personally and I don't personally think somebody being concerned about what's happening in their neighborhood is a bad thing. I think, and I do think that sometimes community people can come in and say, well, what about if you did it this way? Or what if we, you know, are there changes that could be made? Or, you know, what if it's a little small? I think people of good faith now people of good intent ought to be informed what's going on. They ought to be listened to. And if we can do, if the developer or Hawaiian Electric can deal with the concerns and still not abandon the project, I think that's a good thing. I think the people who come in and say, no way, not in my neighborhood, definitely not here doing somewhere else, send it to Waianae or, you know, out on some other island and so forth, that's not productive and that's not constructed. I don't think it's fair to the well intentioned people among us. And I still think there are a lot of those people who are, who want to know what's going to happen in their neighborhood, how it's going to affect their homes, their property values and so forth. And to say, well, you know, what are the impacts going to be? And are there some ways that we can, you know, make those impacts less or make them a little more tolerable? I don't have a problem with that. I think the problem that we have encountered in some of these projects is a kind of a no negotiation, absolutely not. You know, you're violating some sacred trust or something. That's when I begin to have a personal problem with it. So Hawaiian Electric is committed to this community outreach. We are insisting that our developers do that. You know, I'll tell you one other thing, we have some projects of our own. For the first time in this process, we can do what we at Hawaiian Electric call self-build. In other words, we propose projects and it was separated, there was a wall between our people doing the proposing and the people doing the evaluating. And there was an independent observer who was watching to make sure we didn't get any preferential treatment. We put in about four projects, two of them got accepted, two of them did not. But we have begun and we will continue to go out to the communities where those are going to be. And they were going to say to them, here's the plan, here's what we're going to do. You know, can we get your cooperation or can we at least get your toleration of this? So we're holding ourselves to that standard and we're holding these other developers to that same standard. You've got to go out to the community. You can't just show up one day with bulldozers. And I don't think that's a bad system. Okay, well, you know what you say sounds very reasonable and good for Hawaiian Electric, you know, for taking that position and dealing with it that way. But I still want to hear from Mitch and see what. All right. Mitch, go. I was on mute because I have a bunch of helicopter activity here so I didn't want to drown you guys out. So, yeah, I totally agree with what Peter was saying. I had a little bit of experience. I had to my geothermal project. I had to go and present to the community in Pune. They have a very vocal anti geothermal crowd there. But, you know, we're at the, we're at the community center. And there were a lot of the silent majority showed up and, you know, so we have a kind of a balance. And the anti geothermal, there was a component in the anti geothermal problem. It doesn't matter what you say, like you're saying, Peter, it's just like, no way, the highway, you just don't want to do it. Whereas the community itself, they asked good questions, they were interested in the project. I think they all supported, in this case, it was a hydrogen project, they all supported it. And I think there was a lot of value in doing it. I wonder if 30 days is enough time. I mean, it seems like a pretty short timeframe to be able to A, get the people up there, then give them a chance to think about it. But nevertheless, giving them the chance. Now, we saw, for example, in Waimanello, I guess there's competing opinions of what happened there, but they just, like you said, Peter, they just arrived with the bulldozers one day knocking down all these, you know, old growth trees and boy, people just, you know, were really anti about that. Now, you could say that the lead up to that was not well done, because, you know, the city's claiming, well, we had all these meetings for the last five years. Well, you may have had all those meetings for the last five years, but the word didn't get out. And people were surprised. And so it's like no surprises. And you look up at the North Shore. I think a lot of people who are pro wind were even surprised at how big those wind turbines were and how close they were to buildings. It was like, Oh, we had no clue they're going to be that big. But it's kind of hard. If you're just using drawings and things like that to give a feeling of the size of these things until you're like standing right next to one, and they're big. And so they do have an impact. I know, for example, some of the given given take is like up in the northern end of Big Island, they have a wind farm up there. And one of the big complaints community was, well, they have these strobe lights. And when I bought this property, there were there were no, there were no wind turbines there and I bought it so I could look at the stars and all this kind of stuff. Now I've got all these strobe lights blaring off. And so they worked on a solution to that where the strobe lights were only on when they when there was an aircraft was going to land at their little airport up there and you could trigger a switch and switch on the strobe lights when he was close enough and then they switch them off. And that worked. So there's a, there's an example of the community working together with the developer to smooth it out and come up with a solution that everybody can live with. But like you said, Peter, there does have to be some kind of a willingness to get you some given take. Otherwise, what are we doing? I mean, like you said, you know, there's only so much land that's out of sight out of mind. And at some point, it's going to start encroaching on the view planes and that of people. So you've got to make allowances for that. Peter, I would first of all, I want to point out that the developers have 30 days to start their community outreach, not to finish. You're absolutely right. You can't do anything in 30 days, especially in this current environment where a lot of people are going to be thinking more about how they're feeding their families and how they're keeping them safe. Not normal times, but we're saying to these developers, you have 30 days to start and we'd like you to start even sooner. If you haven't started in 30 days, we're going to make the announcement. And then you're going to catch some flak from the people who are going to say, well, how come, you know, the developer themselves didn't come to me or didn't come to our community. So it's 30 days to get started before we announce these plans ourselves. And it's going to be months before these these community outreach programs are completed. So that's absolutely right. And I agree with you there. There's room for improvement from well meaning and from well intentioned people who want to talk it over and say, how can we solve this is a problem for us. How can we solve this problem. And there's no doubt that, you know, we all hear about how this is happening. That's happening. They've been talking about repaving the street outside my house for years. And they finally did it. I was shocked. Two reasons because I didn't think they'd ever do it. And secondly, all of a sudden they were, and you know, I'm all in favor of that repaving, but it happened to be somewhat inconvenient. And that's the nature of human beings, I think so. Yeah, it's also Hawaii. We take our time sometimes and it really puts the crunch on projects. I remember, Castle and Cook once gave a talk in the venture capital association when permitting and they said their original project which was quite large out there and really lying somewhere. It took 40 years, 40 years to get the project approved. I can't afford that climate change is coming a lot sooner. And so, you know, I want to talk about, you know, if you were or we were a developer one of these developers. What would you do to socialize the project. I mean, especially in these times of coven seems to me one of the things I would do is I would write them a note I get contact to the community leaders. I would write them a note I'd network, you know, and then I try to do I try to do a zoom meeting, let everybody have at it. Take notes even record the meeting. And I'd make this as as good or better than a flesh and blood meeting, because we have the technology, and we can do that fairly quickly. And I think it's useful in many ways. One of my concerns is not only that people do that thing about never no way, my way or the highway kind of thing with a never to sort of terroristic negotiation with the never ever going to agree with you. But the other part. I'm sure you've experienced this is, I agree. I took a project. I'm with you. I support it. Okay, six months later, I changed my mind. And I really don't think that's fair. Anyway, your comment. Yeah, well, I agree with you and you've you've kind of laid out exactly what the things that these developers need to do and what Hawaiian Electric has done already with the projects that we were proposing we had zoom meetings, in which we presented the information we publicize those meetings, we have contacts and made contacts with more contacts with the people in those communities, not just elected leaders but community associations neighborhood boards. You know, there's even ways to find out who the real leaders of a community are they're not necessarily the elected leaders of the community as you know, they might be religious leaders they might be, you know, they might be Hawaiian activists leaders. There are leaders and people who are influencers in the community. And we do have social media now that allows us to, you know, get out to a lot of people and get that we didn't before. But at the same time, I think, especially in Hawaii that I think the absence of face to face meetings is going to be make make the things a lot more difficult. You and I mentioned we're not we're content to do this but you know we can't touch our noses if you know what I mean if and and in Hawaii being able to touch the nose of the other person that give him a handshake that you know, a Hawaiian style handshake and stuff. Those things go a long way and then not just with Hawaiian native Hawaiian people but with all of us. I think it makes things a lot more difficult and so as I said it's going to be hard for some of these developers who have very little experience and very little, you know, very small contacts here to do what needs to be done. But it does need to be done. And we need to be, you know, we can't stop the naysayers we can't stop. We can't, you know, do very much about the people are going to say no way. All we can do is make sure that on our side, we have done all the outreach we possibly can that we have communicated directly and you know whether it's email or letter or whatever with the people and that we've offered the meetings and that we've held meetings. All we can do is make sure that our side of this equation is is as perfect as it can be. And then when the, you know, when the intransigent ones come along, you know, people will say, Well, where did that guy was six months ago that guy said it was okay now he's changing his mind what's his problem. So all we can do is all we can do all we can do is be the best possible communicators for this community reach and there's going to be more of it you know because we're going to be soon we're going to be looking for solar community solar projects and those are in many ways just like these other projects and we're probably going to have wine electric self build projects and we're going to have other developers so I think this we're just trying very hard to make this the new normal you cannot do a project in Hawaii without going through the effort very sincere effort and reach out to the community listening to their comments and figuring out if there's anything you can do. But you know one of the problems in Hawaii are things take a long time here like like the castle and cook project I mentioned right and and we simply have to avoid unnecessary delay for this initiative. Otherwise we'll never make the target and things you know the Red Sea will will fall in on us after a while. So I guess my question is how do you see the timing on these 16 projects. Of course, you know developers have the opportunity to try to socialize, but when do you when do you draw the line. Also you mentioned and I'm talking about timing. Also you mentioned that you know one electric wants to expedite its process. One of the three commissioners has said that she said that at the January why entry policy forum legislative briefing. She said that on our show two weeks ago, and I'm sure that Jay Griffin, who is coming on our show week after next is going to say the same thing. But so is this going to work is this going to happen. I'll be really going to be faster now, even with all the challenges of COVID. So far, I think to some extent some of the some of the process gets can get faster with this kind of technology. You don't have to drive across town to have a meeting you don't have to, you know, put a put an application in the mail you can press a button and it's there. We had meetings with the public utilities commission and the solar contractors, and we looked very carefully at our processes and we came up with three steps, which we believe will make things move faster if you want to put a solar array on your home right right now and it's under 25 kilowatts, and it has the right protective equipment. You don't have to wait for an approval and you can go ahead and energize it as soon as it's constructed, as long as you have your city building permit, which can be a delay no question. But from our part we got out of gotten out of the way that it used to be that we would, if somebody was going to put in a certain kind of system, we waited till there was a final approval and then we began the process of changing the meter. Well now we're going to move that up and as soon as there's a conditional approval. We're going to start our process to get that meter change so the meter is out there much earlier in the process and the person cannot energize their system. And finally, this is all pretty technical stuff but we're you know, we're allowing contractors to put in a temporary meter that so the customer can energize their system. When we get our chance and opportunity with our other workload, we'll get there we'll put in what we call permanent revenue meter and so we're trying to get out of the way of that part and we think it'll reduce the time, which has been about six months, five to six months down, take about two months off of it. And part of this is to be able because we can do a lot of stuff electronically but physically we still have to get out there and change the meter. So Mitch, what do you think of all those ways to do this going to work? I'm mute. Yeah, I was on mute again because we had an offspring boy those things are noisy. So yeah I think that'll work I mean that's all good stuff to try and look at your systems and make sure that you're being as efficient as you can and moving forward and I think that was always one of the complaints that I hear a lot was that it takes, you know, both the permitting guys and the utility so long to do it. So this is this is really being responsive and I think on the other side too is, you know, we have more incentive to get the even more incentive to get these things done because we need to generate employment for people. So it's not like you have the luxury now of just sitting back and loafing around and oh man yeah it'll happen. People need to work and our solar industry needs to get out there and they employ a lot of people. And so that'll help everybody and of course they spend their money in the community so it's all going to flow down. So that's what you call shovel ready, like let's make sure we can really go and it would be interesting to have a similar kind of a meeting with the permitting guys. So I'm just throwing this out as an idea is that Hawaiian Electric are going to talk to the city and say look guys you know you're taking way too long to do this, if that's the case, and work with them and show them how you might be able to shorten their process now. One thing we looked at I've said before is having a third party engineering firm do all the grunt work of, you know, looking at the drawings validating the drawing so that then they can just tell the, the permitting guy in the city that hey we've checked all the drawings everything is the code you can go ahead and approve this. And so you have several guys working in parallel and not seriously and get it done. So that would be a good conversation because you know you, I mean Hawaiian Electric has a lot of, a lot of expertise in this kind of stuff. And, you know, you're, you're a big company and so you have a lot of influence on how this works. So maybe even talk to the mayor and then have a meeting of minds you guys have a brainstorming meeting and you're sitting there and have the solar industry there as well. And say come on guys, let's solve this permitting thing I mean everybody complains about permitting in this in this state. And it's time to get off the pot and do something about it and the first step is to talk about it with the people involved and find out what their problems are like. Good point, good suggestion. And we hadn't talked about it before but the idea is these projects these 16 projects are going to yield a number of jobs. And this is an essential activity. There'll be all kinds of capital flowing in all kinds of jobs flowing out, very valuable to the community and should be persuasive to people who care about restarting the economy. Well, this in the context Peter of, you know, getting on with it, doing it despite COVID, you know, making our new normal work for for energy. So we were out of time but I wonder if you could give some parting thoughts what you would like people to take away from the program. What I'd like people to take away is that you may be hearing about a project in your neighborhood or in your on your island. Maybe a for just a bunch of what looks like a bunch of massive containers and that's the standalone storage or maybe a solar, which, you know, is not wind so it doesn't stick up in the air in the same way. And, you know, we invite you to find out all you can about it. Don't assume anything about it. Find out the facts. Look at it. Think about what it will mean to you. And if you have some constructive criticism, we want to hear about it. We don't believe for a second that all of these developers ideas are just automatically perfect. But at the end of the day, recognize as you've said Jay and so many people have said, if we're going to solve global climate change, we're all going to have to have some different experiences. But what we what we look at in our neighborhood, whether it's a solar array or or an energy storage facility or, you know, we're not looking at any new wind facilities at the moment, but probably will not in the future. But, you know, there's a possibility we could have offshore wind before too long and most of it will be way out where you can't see it. But, you know, you go out in your boat and all of a sudden you can't see it. And if that's going to, you know, we can't allow that to throw a wrench in the works, be open minded, be fair, be constructive, find out all you can, and then, you know, come and talk to us where we are all we all. We all want the same, you know, good things for Hawaii and so I don't think this needs to be a terrifically adversarial process. That's one of the problems. And the mindset should be, of course, you have to take care of your own interests but at the same time, you should have another hand on for the community. You should care about the community. We have to focus on that. Yeah, not how can we stop this but how can we get this done in a fair, honest and useful way. That's got to be the attitude on a lot of things, not just energy but food, you know, housing. We used to have more of that here in Hawaii and now we don't have so much just like the rest of the country. We got to get back to that. Well, you know, let's see how we can make it work, not how. Yeah. Okay, Mitch, this is, we're way over but then that's not unusual. So maybe you could make a little summary about what we learned here today. I love when I ask you this. Well, it's a dirty trick. No problem. We heard a lot of good news from Hawaiian Electric and what they're doing to, you know, meet their goals. There's keeping the focus despite the, you know, the COVID pandemic that's affecting us all. I might add to just by way, you know, the lights are still on my computer still works like it's still working home so thank you very much for doing that. We're going to have, you know, we have to change our processes. And especially when 16 big projects hit all at once we're going to have to get our streamline our processes. And I think this is a great incentive the fact that we need jobs we need to get people back to work. Let's put all the agro aside and let's work for the common good so that everybody wins out of the same because you know that money comes in, and it flows down. It flows down to everybody. It's not just sitting in one big pot. So everybody wins here it's going to be a win win win situation. So thank you, Peter. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. We're all sitting around watching our late night movies. We have to remember who makes that possible. Thank you, Hawaiian Electric. Thank you, I appreciate it. Got a lot of people out there working to make that happen for you. Nice. Talk soon.