 We're back alive with Hawaii, the state of clean energy and we are delighted to have Jim Kelly, who is the vice president of Hawaiian Electric and the title is too long for me to read within our 30-minute show, but I'll just say one of the things he does is communications for Hawaiian Electric and we're going to talk to him about an update on news from Hawaiian Electric. Welcome to the show, Jim. Nice to see you, Jay. Thanks for having me, making fun of my important title. I appreciate that. Would you like me to read it? I'm good. Oh, I don't want you to read it. That's all right. No. Yeah, no, I've got things going on and I really appreciate the opportunity to come by and talk about some of them. If it's okay, the first thing I'm going to talk about is really one that is a tough one to crack and we've been really working on it for several years, but this is involving scam artists who take advantage of people and a lot of the people they hit up are small businesses and they tell them they call them up. Well, most recently, they actually went in person to a church and to a restaurant and told these folks, hey, we're from Hawaiian Electric, we're going to cut your power off in 30 minutes if you don't pay up. You owe us $1,200. And what we need you to do is we need you to go on to the Bitcoin machine at the gas station and that's how you need to pay your bill. This is really a emerging scam that we've seen over the last few years because of a couple of things. One is most people have gotten lies. The scammers used to have people doing gift cards. They'd go down to longs, get a gift card. While working with longs and other places that sell gift cards, we were actually able to talk to their store personnel and they'd see an elderly person or somebody coming in to buy a gift card for $1,500 and saying they're going to pay their electric bill and they'd say, no, Auntie, that's a scam. You don't want to do that. And that actually was super effective in heading that off. Now we've got Bitcoin as the latest. A couple of years ago, I checked on this. I mean, there were only a few Bitcoin machines on Oahu a few years back. Now there's over 75. They're all over the place. And what our security staff, to their credit, has started doing is posting signs when the store owners will let us next to the Bitcoin machine and basically says, Hawaiian Electric does not accept Bitcoin for payment. You got questions about your bill. Here's the number to call. And I'm hoping that's going to head off some of these people. The good news is that of the, we've really seen a drop in the number of customers who call us or call HPD and tell us about this stuff. The number of people that have actually been tricked. We get a lot of calls from people say, hey, these guys called me and I told them to go screw, hung up on them, which is great, which is what you should do. But there's still probably about less than 10%, but still a number that get fooled. And I've lost a lot of money. And the hard thing is too, if these scammers see that you're somebody that will pay, then they come back and hit you again after you paid them $1,500. Oh, it's another $1,000 now. So like we tell everybody, look, if you got any kind of anybody that calls up, and it isn't that we don't call people about billing issues, we will, but we'll, we'll say, look, you can call, go on the website, look at the main Hawaiian Electric number and call back that number. Don't call back the number that shows up on your, on your telephone. If you have any questions, just hang up. It's okay. I know people don't like to be rude, but we'd rather have people hang up and then check it out. Call us up and check in on what status your bill is. We never call people and say, we're going to cut your power up. We never do that. And that's what they do. They get you to, they get, especially a small business, running a business, running a restaurant. They got people there, where you say, you're going to cut your electricity off in 30 minutes. That's, you know, panic sets in. So those are the alarm bells. The alarm bells is, if the telephone call, you know it's funny. If they're asking for gift cards or bitcoins, you know it's funny. If there's any kind of immediate threat of, you know, cutting you off, it's funny. And they should go to the website, go to the Hawaiian Electric.com, is it? Website and check in or call, or call please for that matter. Yeah, we work really closely with them. In this most recent case, it's guys, these are guys calling from, you know, some country someplace else. They actually went to these, the church and the restaurant said, Hey, I'm from Hawaiian Electric. And, you know, you got to do this. So these guys are in the community and they're working it hard. So we got to just make sure everybody's pitch one gets the word out. So who are these actors? Do you have any idea? No, I don't have any idea. Are they local? Most of them are not. Most of them are off shore, but I think there are some guys that are working it locally. And, you know, they pray. I think there's a lot, we see a lot of the victims are maybe English as a second language, you know. And so when you come across as an authority figure at AM with the electric company, you've got to do this right now. You know, people are easily confused and they get stressed out. But HPD is working on this. And I'm hoping that we can just by getting the word out these guys, but they always adapt. See, that's the thing. They always come up with a new a new wrinkle. And that's what's tough. But we just want to tell everybody any question you got about your bill or if somebody's legit coming to your door, anything like that, just call us up at the main number of will picks you up. I don't believe on that subject would be here we are coming out of COVID. I mean, I like to think we're coming out of COVID. Sometimes I'm not so sure, but I like to think that. And, you know, you've had you've had customers who who've had economic issues for the past almost three years, almost three years now. How are we doing on getting you guys paid when you send out a bill? Are you making deals? Are you are you are you able to rescue them somehow? Yeah, I mean, the main thing with with our customers that we tell them is you have to talk to us. We want to hear from you. So if you call us up, you know, don't wait until it's an issue. Don't wait until you get that notice of disconnection. Call us up and tell us what what your situation is. And then we can work with people individually coming up with a number where they can pay something on the account. The main thing is that people can pay something on their account and we can set them up on a payment plan. And right now we're we're doing something we've never done before. We're doing payment plans as long as 24 months. So you can spread out the current balance over 24 months. And as long as you're paying something on that balance every month, you're not going to get cut off. And as long as you know, if you get jammed up on the, you know, you just have to stay in touch with us and make sure we're talking. It's people that we contact that we don't hear from. The balance grows. We try to get in touch with them. We can't talk to them. We don't hear from them. Those are the ones that it's more difficult to help. And those are the ones, frankly, that are going to be more in jeopardy of getting disconnected. If we don't, you know, if we don't talk to you and make some kind of an arrangement. Yeah, from the customer's point of view, it's really only a matter of establishing a good faith effort, talking to you, responding to you. As long as they demonstrate good faith, you're not going to be mad at them. And you're going to work with them. I mean, I think that's just good business both sides. It is. And we're also working though, you know, we talk to people and say, Hey, you know what, you might be eligible for one of these programs that either the state or the feds have set up on utility and rental assistance. There's a lot of programs out there's a lot of nonprofit agencies in our community, they're willing to help. And a lot of them they're not paying the whole bill, but they're willing to give you something they're willing to do something that will help get your build down. So we have all of those connections as well. We work really closely with a low to moderate income service providers. And so I'd like to think with most 99% of people, we can really work with them and make sure that they keep their power on and that they're not getting disconnected. Yeah, well, it's so important, you know, for the economy to come back. And I guess you're watching that as we all are to see it come back by you see an awful lot of businesses have gone out of business and we have to find ways at the legislature and other other places in government to bring things back. So a query and we're going into another session and the bills will be put in in December, the opening will be in January. My guess is it'll be a hands on opening rather than last year or two. It's been kind of a hybrid opening where everybody stayed home and worked on Zoom. But what do you think about the session? What's important about the session as far as the economy is concerned as far as why electric is concerned? Well, what we're really we're excited about. I mean, there's a lot of opportunities right now with federal funding through the inflation reduction act and the jobs act, billions of dollars potentially available for not only clean energy, but all sorts of economic development programs. And we're really hoping and we've had really good conversations with state. You know, these are things that we usually have to partner up with the state or some state agency to get this this funding or to apply for it. I think the legislators already that we've talked to and people are aware of this money out there. I think that is really something that the legislature has to figure out what's the way, how do we tell a competitive story with all these 49 other states that are competing for this money. And part of that competitive story is being willing to kick in your own funding. You know, they're not covering 100% of anything. So if you can have a really strong partnership between state agencies, private industry like us, nonprofits, lots of different kinds of organizations, we really feel like we can get moving on some really important initiatives around electric vehicles, around broadband, around clean energy projects, obviously, there's some tremendous tax incentives that are going to be available. So we think, and we're going to be putting out another request for proposals for Maui and Oahu and Hawaii Island for more renewable energy projects in the coming months. And we really think developers are going to be swarming over those tax incentives and funding opportunities provided by the feds. We're expecting a lot of action on that front. And so as we were discussing off camera, our main message is let's get going. We have a great plan for getting Hawaii off fossil fuels. Let's do a lot of work this decade. So by the time we're 2030, we can be at a renewable standard of close to 70%. And we could dramatically reduce our GHG emissions. And we can also say that we've gotten bills to moderate that people's bills are coming down. And what about some of these projects? Can you give us a handle on what you have in the pipeline here, what you're planning, hoping for or arranging for? Yeah, right now, there are about 19 projects that are on our board that's on the website on our scoreboard. And I think 18 of them have had some kind of delay. A lot of them are delayed by, but you know, it's become kind of the cliche now, but the whole supply chain, but it's real. I mean, these guys are having trouble getting the components that they need to build solar and batteries. But they've also been delayed by, you know, frankly, workforce shortages. Just just a lot of things going on. So I'm hopeful, we're pretty hopeful that over the next two years, a lot of these projects on the board were supposed to be online by now. And we're really hopeful that by the end of 2024, most of them will be online and will be now at that point, bringing in new bids for new projects that'll take us through the end of the decade. So that's really exciting. That Kapolei Energy Storage project, which is a big battery out Campbell Industrial Park, I was out there a couple of weeks ago, they're moving along. I think they've gotten all of the battery packs delivered already. And so they're in the process of putting those on the concrete platforms. And that that project is is on track to be up and running by the spring and next year. I'm really excited about that. How about micro grids and community community based installation? What would you rather do like on a Tuesday night go out to your local high school and talk about micro grids and integrated grid planning? No. Well, here's the good thing, we're trying something we've never done before. We're going to work with our friends at O'Lelow and we're going to try to do a hybrid in person and watch on TV events for these six community sessions that we're going to be having over the next couple of weeks starting Monday, October 24th at 6pm at Kahuku Elementary School. That's only a few days away. Only a few days away. So what these meetings are about is we're trying to get two things done here. One is we got a Department of Energy grant, a federal grant to map where micro grids could go. Okay, so what's a micro grid? Well, these would be micro grids can be set up in the event of an emergency. Let's say you have a storm and you want to ahead of time set up a contained islanded place that presumably is providing power to a critical piece of infrastructure, a hospital, or a fire station or a school that could be used as a shelter, someplace like that. So, you know, storm hits, power goes out, then what are you doing with the hospital and the fire station? Well, the idea is that these micro grids and these kind of what they're also called resilience hubs can be set up ahead of time so that there is a generator, some kind of power source, maybe it's solar, maybe it's a traditional generator. It's islanded so that it provides power to this, you know, defined area. Maybe it's a wastewater treatment facility, maybe it's a water pumping facility so that if there's a storm, you flip a switch and this area is protected. It's basically generating its own electricity and forest, you know, certain set amount of time that they're up and running. And so we're really interested in talking to communities about what places on Oahu would be the best locations for those kind of facilities. And we already have some ideas. We've been having a number of good meetings over the last four years with people on the windward side who are at the most vulnerable for a service disruption just because there's no generation resource on that side of the island. It all comes over the mountains. There's three lines that come over and if those went down on a hurricane or some storm, it would be a long time getting those back up. So we really want to look at, you know, small little mini grids, micro grids that we could set up ahead of time and, you know, maybe, you know, Castle Hospital or again fire station, water pumping station, something like that so that the community has a place to go in the event of a catastrophic storm. So the meetings are about we have a list of places that we're thinking about we want to hear from the communities about, hey, is this the right list? What's the priorities here? What, you know, what aren't we thinking about with that? Second, go ahead. Let me just digress for a moment. You know, if I go to a meeting and I'm the kind of guy that I'm looking for a NIMBY excuse to oppose a project, you know, exactly what is a micro grid involved for me? Now I know that, you know, if there's going to be a wind turbine, you know, a few feet away, well, I have the old wind turbine concerns. But micro grids, they're not so NIMBY, are they? There's not all that much that happens that might be subject to a NIMBY type objection. What happens to the neighborhood, for example, if a micro grid grows in? You know, there is a generation source there. Now, is that generation source a big generator, the kind you pour diesel into and it runs, you know, and it's like a trailer, a tractor trailer, right? I mean, a lot of them look like that. And maybe that's parked at the school and that's your generation source. You know, people don't like these days things that run on fuel and smoke comes out of the smokestack, but in the event of an emergency that maybe could be something that runs on biofuels, so it's something that's running cleaner. You know, you could be talking about a solar array with batteries. So, you know, solar array takes up space. If you want to have it be of sufficient size to power a small part of the community, it's probably going to take up a decent amount of space, not huge, but, you know, batteries as well. So, but yes, there's less, I think, opportunity for people to look at something and go, hey, that's, you know, it's got to be something that's resilient. I think that's why a wind turbine probably wouldn't be optimal for something that's going to make get through a hurricane. So, we're hoping people are going to see this as a positive. The rest of you might find that they're old competing and they all want it. Yeah, so I think that I think that will be the case. They're not cheap. I mean, that's the thing. It's a lot of it is you got to then wire it up so that's just this area and you can turn it on and close it off so that, you know, it's just just feeding this one particular part of the circuit. So, there's a lot that goes into that. But yeah, I think it'll be good for people to hear at least what's being thought about that. Yeah. Well, I hope they come around and understand that. And I hope they give you a wide path to do it. And that you do it, you're able to do it in rapid order. I'm thinking about a discussion before the show about this community in Florida that where one community 10 miles away was devastated, no electrical power for quite some time if they ever got it back. And another one had this microgrid. And I guess next era was the company that put it in place where they were operating immediately. It was really totally resilient. And, you know, to me resilience is really important because we have a fair chance of a bad storm because of climate change and all in the future. And so whatever we do, we have to think about that. So, so query, you know, how are we doing on that kind of resilience? How important is it to, you know, to you, to the regulator, to the legislature, the executive? I mean, is this, is this a top priority or should it be? Absolutely. It's a top priority. I think over the next few years, you're going to be hearing, I mean, we've been talking about, but I think more and more of the term resilience is becoming the word that you're hearing, you know, whether it's adaptation, climate change, adaptation, managed retreat, all of those kinds of phrases. I think you're hearing more about resilience as much as you're hearing about renewable energy. And we just a couple of months ago, we filed an application with the public utilities commission to start the first stage of a big resilience initiative over five years that would basically start kind of the foundational work that we're talking about here. It's some of it is super simple, Jay. Some of it is spending a lot more money, say on the big island, to not only trim trees that fall in transmission lines, which is what we do now, but to go in there and to remove the trees, which is a hell of a lot more expensive work. But it also you're getting rid of these what we could hazardous trees, which are the cause of frankly, most of the big, it's not anything that you need to be an engineer or a towering intellect to figure out on the big island, as we saw in this cell, most of the big widespread outages that that go on for a long time are caused by albija trees falling on transmission lines. So it's things like that. It's replacing wooden transmission structures, some of which date to the fifties and sixties, replacing those with steel structures that are the foundation is concrete. So they're much more able to withstand, you know, 120 mile an hour hurricane force winds. The lines are still going to come down in a storm, but when you don't want to come down to those big transmission lines, those are the ones that are hard to put back together. You need helicopters, you need big equipment that that stuff and that's that's where next era did really well. They really put their resource into the transmission system. The stuff in the neighborhoods, that's going to come down. Most of it's going to come down the line to your house. It's probably going to come down, but that's that's easy to fix, relatively speaking. It could be a couple of guys in a couple of trucks, they can get the neighborhood back up and running. But when you're talking about, again, lines over the coal is, you're talking about the big transmission lines that you see running from Waiao and Kaihe, that's that's what takes weeks to put back together. So we really want to focus on those resources. Yeah, if it costs money, I mean, really, with the comparison is that on the one hand, you pay the money and you'll have greater resilience. And on the other hand, you don't have any power for weeks. What's that worth? And the probabilities are getting, you know, more dangerous all the time with climate change. But I don't I don't really think it's a choice on that. I think that everybody should be fully supportive of any step toward resilience that you make. And now's the time. And I really want people to know we're not insensitive to the fact that, you know, rates are up, people are paying more for electricity, it's kind of a tough time to be asking for more to be added to the bill. The way it's set up right now is for most customers, it would be less than a dollar a month on their bill would pay for this first step. We've also spread it out over a longer period rather than all kind of front loading it, we're spreading it out. So this is the first step five years. And I think we want to get some of that I don't want to say the low hanging stuff, but get that done. And then the next step is probably going to be more intensive after after that. But yeah, for, you know, asking people in Puerto Rico, would you have paid an extra buck a month to have your lights stay on or, you know, after the fact, people would have said, Hey, what, why did you guys do something about this? And hopefully, so this is before the PUC now, we're getting a lot of supportive comments from state officials and community members. And so we're pretty confident we can get that project moving in the next year or so. So important, but people should really, you know, see it as a team play. We must all work together to be resilient. And we all need to do that going forward. Or we will, we will have consequences that we will not like. Yes, we should learn from Florida. We should learn from Puerto Rico. Those are important lessons for us all on the personal side of things. You know, what is the change in circumstance you describe, you know, the change in risk you describe and the need for, you know, for exigency and so forth, going forward. What does that mean to me? What does it mean to me as a homeowner as a condo owner? What does that mean to me about finally getting off my butt and buying an electric car and so forth? What should I be doing as a consumer? Well, I think you've got a really, you're gonna over the next several years. I mean, starting right now that I think we're still for a lot of this stuff that's still for early adopters. And but I'm really seeing a lot of opportunities over the next several years where people can make investments, not that I'm not just talking about rooftop solar, even electric cars, but there's going to be, you know, new technology for heating water, which is, you know, there is that technology right now. Water heaters use so much of your bill. It's probably 40% of most families bill is the water here. There's, there's something, there's new technology emerging all the time on that. We're going to, in the next few years, have time of use rates, which are going to enable people to really try to move how they use electricity. Take, you got to take more control over how you use. That's, I mean, that's either, I know, you're going to have to work a little bit harder. That's, that's the tough part. You got to know how your household uses electricity and you got to make smart choices. Maybe I'm not going to drive that load of laundry at 10 o'clock at night because it's going to cost me, you know, three times more than it would have cost if I do it, you know, on Saturday afternoon. So, but I think that's okay. I think if you make it worth people's while they will get engaged. So any other news that you'd like to discuss? I'm open for anything else, including, including Jim. And by the way, it's Jim Kelly, vice president, government and community relations and corporate communications for wine and electric. See how well I did that. Wow. Better than I usually do. So what else can we talk about in terms of news that people should know about? And you may, if you like, include the cookbook. Oh, thanks. We just came out. You can look on a website. You can also look on social media. There'll be something in the next bill insert. We have our annual United Way fundraising cookbook, which includes recipes from all of our employees. And this thing sells out every year. It's a huge fundraiser for United Way on all the islands. And we're really proud of it. Our folks put a lot of time into it. It's a very creative endeavor. And as a company, we're really proud of being number one, if not usually number one, pretty close to number one in terms of fundraising for United Way on all the islands. We're really, really proud of that. So yeah, check it out. You'll find some good recipes in there. Make great Christmas gifts too. You know, I don't know. This reminds me of the Boy Scouts. Every year for quite some time, you know, how popular they are in Blaisdell. There was a Boy Scout, a Boy Scout in Jamboree when everything called it. And Hawaiian Electric was there in such force. There were so many Hawaiian Electric employees. They came down as volunteers just to participate in that community event. And you guys really do interface with the community. And the cookbook is a good example too. Okay, anyway, I always like to talk to Jim. I hope we can do this again soon. Any final closing words to our listeners and viewers and what have you? I think it's great that you're on ThinkTech. And I think it's great that you're doing the Olala program and the transparency involved in your microgrid initiative. All good for the future. I always like talking with you, Jay, and really appreciate where we are as a company, I think coming out of the pandemic and really doing more community and in person more events than we were. I know our employees are excited about that. So hopefully we're on the right track. And thank you so much for inviting me out today. Thank you, Jim. Olala. Thank you so much for watching ThinkTech 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.