good afternoon welcome to the economic development energy agriculture and recreation committee i'm john ku's minn the chair of the committee before we begin i please ask everyone to turn down your cell phones or silence them i'm going to go ahead and introduce our lot yes good afternoon and chair of the council my quite alone chair good afternoon we also have for our administrative side we have our deputy corporation counsel gerry shepherd good afternoon and we have our for maui county energy commissioner from the economic development office frederick rebel law and for our staff we have legislative attorney sharon brooks and committee secretary pauline martins before we  begin i'm going to go ahead and check in where they are with their district offices in han office are you there likely to testify please come to the podium identify yourself and or the organization organization in which you represent you'll have three minutes to testify once you see the red light blinking light you will have one minute so actually two minutes and one minute to a sugar milk near the dump there and that area is an area that possibly could be used for expansion i was also previously working with animals of ours when he was mayor he pointed to a chair of a committee that it took a look back committees i'm very pleased that you're taking this up today in the council and i thank you very much for doing it and i see it there are really two separate topics they could be almost divide into two different forms one is what kind of  production capabilities do we have on the island and how should they just be used for the long term should we go solar should be go when should we continue burning of fossil fuel those kind of question should we have a cable among the islands  and i'm looking at it this is really a maui county issue and there are a number of technical things that we could talk about should plan lands be used to produce a biofuel of some kind what can we do to incentiv clean fuels on the island such as solar wind should we look at geo geo altec off the coast of culpo where the waters are quite deep out there as a potential source should geothermal be explored all of those the technical production type things that need to be done the second topic and it's somewhat different obviously will be related and that is who should be in charge of all that to what degree should mico continue as it has over the years  we now know that next year is not coming in here potentially another company may come in and want to take over and make another effort to take over the takeover hawaiian electric should mico separate from he i has done and will hear from that today if you don't say so we have those kind of issues out there and finally we could also take a look at separate and here in mali a company that would take a look to control for example the distribution system the billing as cetera it could be eco they could do that and they would buy power from various alternative sources solar farm wind projects etc and try to get the best rates there are some other major technical issues what happens if we do convert to these cleaner fuels fish up cleaner fuels what happens to all the existing infrastructure the sun costs already for power plants lines etc that may not be needed if we go for these new technologies and good afternoon to the committee and thank you for the panel being here my name is lee c n d nay i'm testifying on behalf of maui to moral foundation just a little historic background back in the late one nine s tomorrow foundation did an educational campaign at both the state land use commission and at the county consul about alternatives to building a more fossil fuel based plants on maui seeing that is kind of a step backwards rather than a step forward as time has proven we are looking at ways to go forward across the spectrum now since that time tomorrow has supported several of the wind farms that have been established here and also weighed in on some of the other renewable energy projects we very much feel like clean energy future is a is a good part of our economy is certainly we see this in our maui island plan that part of our economic potential is to both use efficiency investing in efficiency for everything that uses electricity and investing in renewable resources as a expanded job sector for the future with the large scale plantation agriculture not being  in the mix the same way it was we don't know exactly where we'll end up energy really is as an emerging sector is more important than ever we very much appreciate how much growth has happened in the renewable sector here the solar companies have done a great job of getting solar both hot water and solar electric generation on many rooftops we have a large scale so proposed we have successful wind farms but we really need is a way to firm up our power that can be renewable as well in other words a way to firm up our power without just going backwards t more dirty carbon based fossil fuel so i think that's the challenge of this committee and this and this panel that what is the backs pathway to take to that  reality because you can we confirm up the power the power we can use we can use all the solar that people want to give us we can use all the win that people want to give us and that isn't the case right now thank you for your time and interest now closed moving on to the only item that we have on today's agenda members this is our one six this is a presentation by the various experts in the field of energy you know basically the changing energy landscape of hawaii opens up many possibilities for the people of maui to transform the current system and work towards the state's one hundred percent renewable electricity goal by twenty forty five signed into law by governor david last year the energy requirements makes hoey a global leader in renewable energy policies the law also an  oversight to ensure that the targets always remain achievable and economical we are all interested in in achieving the most reliable energy production together with the most reasonable rates the proposed merger between the hawaii electric company and the florida based company next era inc garnered national headlines this year as an unprecedented number of parties and participants debated the future of hawaii's energy system before the p the p u c determine that the merger should not go forward opening the doors again for citizens and government alike to consider what utility decisions will best serve this county to help us examine the issues and possible solutions we have invited six experts in the field to provide us with their perspectives on possibilities for now as energy future starting off with the panel we have we have sharon says zuki who is the president of maui electric company which serves about seventy thousand customers on maui molokai we also have met me nath who is the manager and the power supply of the power supply department at the maui electric company we also have david  bussau he's the president c e o at koichi island utility cooperated and he will be discussing the electric cooperated business model and how it structures has helped coase significantly increase it renewables source energies and generations and we also discussed he will also discuss resources and available availability within the operative net network which will help k i see operate effectively we have jeannie sco who is the president of the c e o of the economic development board muskoka will be speaking on subjects of m power maui a community engagement process on maui energy future than abled participants to learn more about energy to think about their own actions related to energy and to prioritize issues to consider what actions they would take we have dug macleod who is the energy committee of maui tomorrow foundation and the strategy committee for the maui county comprehensive economic development strategy doug also operates a consulting business which was mentioned he will be discussing what cost to make power on maui with oil wind and solar and how we define that cost he will also include an analysis of how different ownership types might affect costs and discuss how these might fit into broader notions of sustainability we have  frederick rebel who was recently appointed by not recently but he's been appointed by the mayor as the energy commissioner earlier this year he previously served as a managing director at  this might have butchered that solar l l c and he's also a graduate from the university of illinois and he has a degree in mechanical engineering as well as holding various professional engineering alliances and in california we also have commissioner lorraine a kiba who was appointed by the why public utilities commission in january two thousand and twelve for the term to expire department of labor industrial asians and also chair of the state of the hawaii environmental council she's also a member of the advisory council for the board of directors of the economic power research institute and she is also a member of the u s d o e  berkeley national laboratory future electric utility regularly regulations advisory group and she's also i believe a member of the local energy efficiency  financial solutions working group in the audience in the chambers we have no nyoman land graph who is the maui district representative of the public utilities commission and she previously worked  twenty years with the state department of agriculture on maui and research as well so why don't we begin with mrs zuki for your presentation ok good afternoon jericho's men and members of the economic development energy agriculture recreation committee i'm sharon suzuki president of mali electric company and joining me today to make our presentation is matt mcnabb our power since farming in the one nine hundred twenty one we have been transforming to address the needs of the community and we continue to change in fact before next era came into the picture we were already looking at our internal processes to change to better serve our customers and our communities and getting two hundred percent renewable energy now that the decision is behind us molly electric continues to move forward on that path looking internally and focusing on efficiencies and innovation to better serve our customers to give them more choices and to help the communities get two hundred percent renewable energy and we've made a lot of progress back in two thousand and eight our portfolio standard percentage was fourteen percent of our sales from renewable resources like solar wind and biomass and last year we achieved thirty five percent renewable energy with similar resources ahead of the milestones required by the law so in our business we're constantly balancing achieving goals like hundred percent renewable energy maintaining reliable and safe power to all of our customers and most importantly finding ways to stabilize and make your electric bills affordable you know we said all along with or without the merger that we can do this and we can do it we are strong local company this is our home and this is the only place where we do business we can beat hawaii and mali county to a clean energy future we have very hardworking employees dedicated to providing service reliably and safely to all of you and we're not for sale we can do it alone as part of the hawaiian electric family of companies we have access and we have the financial strength to make the necessary investments in new technologies like energy storage and new resources or additional resources such as wind solar potentially geothermal  renewable technologies to help us get to the hundred percent renewable goal as an investor own utility we are allowed to earn our rate of return and that rate of return is regulated by the public utilities commission it's not a guaranteed return we do have to earn it and a portion of the returns are reinvested into the business to help us operate and maintain our infrastructure across the three island and the remainder is used to compensate shareholders for the amounts that they invest in our assets to help us provide service to the different communities that we operate in moving forward we know that we can't do it alone we want to continue to collaborate we know that the voice of the customers and our communities are important because that's how we succeeded we didn't achieve the thirty five percent renewable energy last year alone so we're committed to meeting with our customers and the community reaching out as we did last year and last year we reached about ten thousand of our customers to different  events community association meetings to share with them what we do in an emergency response situation which ironically we're working towards today and this week and to hear their concerns any concerns that were that they had so we have heard from them we know that we need to continue to work with government policy makers businesses developers community and environmental groups and our customers to help us to achieve these very ambitious goal of achieving hundred percent renewable energy by twenty forty five in the next few slides i'd like to just share where we as  sixty employees and their families and many of them are probably our friends and neighbors in terms of supporting the economy we purchased goods locally and as you can see over ten million dollars last year and in addition to that we collect franchise taxes last year we collected ten point seven million that went to the economy to support their programs and services as an investor on utility our shareholders also provide funds to us to provide corporate giving are giving back to the community because being a good corporate citizen is important to our company and last year we supported social service organizations and schools and especially science technology engineering and math programs on the order of one hundred thousand dollars that amounts to multiple years of nearly a million dollars going back to maui county now i'd like to turn the program over to matt who will share with you more specifics about what we are doing in the area of affordable reliable clean energy know cost matters to our customers and it matters to us too that's why we have been and continue to take measures that will address the issue such as reducing our use of fossil fuel fuel is the largest part of a customer's bill and we've been working on lowering our usage since two thousand and eleven we've reduced our fossil fuel use by close to fourteen million gallons a year and since replacing it with renewable generation not only will that lower costs but also work to stabilize builds in the long run where fuel is still required we've been evaluating alternatives that are renewable less volatile and or cheaper as an example it was almost a decade ago that maui electric tested all over generating units and mulayam power plant to run on bio diesel as an alternative to diesel another source of savings for customers is that we are able to leverage the purchasing power of our five violins to purchase goods cheaper than if we had tried to purchase them separately we've also been designing more customer options such as time of use rates and demand response to help customers manage their bills similar to the savings from purchasing power of our companies we also share services amongst ourselves that allows customers to save money as an example my electric relies on hawaiian electric for all of our legal services my electric is on the leading edge of renewable energy integration in the nation and that attracts partners to our different projects that in exchange for the shared learning learning they get out of the project bring funding resources so projects that benefit my electric customers can be done cheaper than they would be if we had tried to do them alone one such example is the battery energy storage project that was recently installed them  commitment to our customers very seriously many of them who rely on our services not only to make a living but for their health and wellbeing as well accordingly we put a lot of effort and resources towards keeping the lights on for example we spend nearly two million dollars annually on vegetation management trees falling into lines and causing power outages is one of the major reasons customers lose power and we spend this money and effort to proactively trim trees and problem areas so that this type of audience is reduced in the future and when problems do arise such as storms and hurricanes we work as hard as we can to get power back to the people we spent over one point two million dollars just responding to hurricane isabel alone and another advantage of having a five island utility is that we can all pitch in to help those areas hardest hit my electric send crews to the big island to help people get back to power quicker we've also been investing in our existing generating resources making sure that they are equipped and that staff have the tools to manage all the renewable energy we even be ben incorporating and the variability that comes with it  as we maintain reliability so that when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow everyone can be confident the ma electric will be there to supply a power we've invested in upgrades that allows us to detect outages quicker which in turn allow us to restore customers quicker i mentioned a little earlier in the presentation the molokai battery project hawaii national energy institute shared in the cost of this project with us to help us explore how best to use a battery on a system with a very high penetration of rooftop solar and we've proposed spending about three hundred forty million to modernize our grids in ways that allow even quicker outage detection and give customers more control over their electric usage through our smart grid efforts as you heard sharon say maui electric is changing from a utility that primarily relies on fossil fuel to one that more and more relies on clean energy we have a viable plan to get to one hundred percent renewable energy by two thousand and forty five and we are currently four years ahead of the state goal of thirty percent renewable by two thousand and twenty last year we exceeded thirty five percent we have made modifications to our existing fleet and control systems that have allowed more than ninety percent of the end you know wind production to be accepted into our grid in fact last year we accepted more wind energy than we ever had before and we're working with the commission and stakeholders on the community based renewable energy program that will give greater renewable access to customers that have historically been unable to participate in some of our programs for example those that live in condos we have almost ninety megawatts of solar installed in maui county and just to give you an idea of the scale of ninety megawatts that's larger than the combined total of all the wind farms at seventy two megawatts it's also significantly larger than any own but we're not stopping there we recently signed to purchase power agreements for two large solar farms on maui now one of the main goals whenever we negotiate purchase power agreements is to help drive down customer costs and we believe these two projects will with a price that's right around eleven cents per kilowatt hour fossil fuel used to generate electricity makes up only about one third of the state's few fossil fuel usage so we have a formalized plan to further the use of electric vehicles which can replace fossil fuels used for transportation with renewable energy in fact we recently were recognized by receiving the clean energy transformational achievement award for our electric vehicle and fast charging efforts thanks to programs such as jump smart maui my county has more electric vehicles per capita than even a while as sharon said we have come a long way but we've not stopped looking at new ways to integrate more renewable energy in fact we have plans to get to one hundred percent renewable energy  participated either with of a top solar system or if you're a developer and helped us to get to where we are where we want to be so as an investor owned utility we have the capability to leverage the strength of our hawaiian electric family of companies and to use our expertise and our ninety five years of commitment to take my county to a clean energy future thank you thank you very much  members various questions for each of the entities and persons as a guideline if you'd like to use those questions or you can come up with your own questions but i was able to put to put together these questions on behalf of the committee so feel free to use those if you don't have any questions of your own next we will have david bessel he is with the quiet island utilities cooperative mr president thank you good afternoon chair and committee members it's a pleasure to be here today i want to run a real quick through a little bit about k u c for those who don't know about us for the koala utility cooperative where the only co op operating electric operating the state a whole why we're relatively small about thirty three thousand members and we're not for profit so all our profits above what we need operate go back to our membership and stay on the island of  we started in two thousand and twelve two thousand and two i'm sorry and we started with zero equity we were financed one hundred percent by debt since then we've grown to having almost one hundred million dollars of equity so we've strengthened ourself financially and became a nice viable solid utility and in a quiet we've got nine elected board members everybody that buys electricity from us has a chance to be a member and they get to vote for the united states operating in a forty seven different states number on the board forty two million that's how many of the co op network serves how many customers our reach throughout the united states and that's an important number because while we're small this network of co ops allows us to reach into a lot of the scale that was talked about by the electric folks because they're right scale is important and we're a small small co op where without this network we would be at a disadvantage this network provides a lot of the advantages and the bigger investor own and sometimes i think we've got more advantages than the bigger investor owns we've got two or three co operative banks co operative finance corporations a twenty five billion dollars bank called banks one hundred billion dollars plus and of the it's a co op as well both of those are they very low rates we've also able to borrow from the real utility service that's a division of the united states department of agriculture real advantage of a co op as we can borrow money at treasury rates plus an eighth administrative fee so it's really the cheapest capital there is anywhere to to get to so that helps us out in comparison to having to go to market rates we've got co operative information service providers the national information solution co operative where we buy all our teeth products from at a great price because there's the whole nine hundred ops or most of the nine hundred co ops pay into that organization members and organizations all the development costs are pooled and we can get i t very cheaply we've got our own cooperative research network formed within all the member every co ops a member of that similar to an investor own so we get the cutting edge research and we've even got a marketing and member outreach co op but touched on energy quite energy cooperative to help us with their communication and elected directors and staff are done through that's a lot of resources within the co operative network just to name a few what's the difference of a co op while in my mind every member of a co op has a stake in the success of the co op their members their actual owners of it and every action that a co op does is oriented towards those members we have no outside shareholders we have nobody else to take care of or to please but the people that use our power and we were directly accountable for them as i talked about through the election this chart shows inquire we've gone from about eight percent renewable in two thousand and six to over forty percent today we're about forty two percent right now so we've already met the twenty thirty state targets and w initiative by boards meeting today right now where i suspect they're going to authorize going out in the community talking about our seventy percent target that we want to hit by two thousand and thirty so we want to stay ten years ahead of the state mandates and co i am we have projects in the works to get us there how do we get to forty percent in five years well thirty one megawatts of utility scale solar k u cs actually developed and brought on our own projects we've also done we've got to twenty four two project we've got a biomass plant that provides about twelve percent of the island's energy and we've also invested fairly heavily in batteries we've got ten and a half megawatts of battery storage which has helped us be able to bring out all the solar we're also we broke ground  partners a solar city and tassel have broke ground in the last couple weeks the industry is first and largest dispatchable p v project which will have it'll be about ten percent of our island's needs five to ten percent of our island's energy needs and it will be taking out a g from the daytime running into a battery and bringing it out at night in a cost effective way so all told that's about three hundred fifty million dollars invested and in our grid on kwai and it's a combination of k you see developers and our actual members doing that to move us to that point what other before i move on we're also working to dispatchable p v or an active development of two new projects both of which will be larger than the solar city tesla project so we are really bullish on battery storage on co i we believe that that can be the answer to help move us towards the hundred percent targets for the state and we've got the land we've got the sun similar to over here on maui and we believe that that technology can help us get there where we've taken a position that there's a lot of risk on batteries still it's a developing technology we don't want to own them we're doing them through purchase power agreements where the developers actually own them so our members aren't at risk but we're excited we're doing a lot of good stuff on quiet and i look forward to questions thank you thank you very much have we have this code and she's with the maui economic development board and she'll be speaking about power molly thank you chair and thank you for this opportunity when i mean to be was formed hundred two we were formed with the mission of creating new industry from our economy and energy was a natural place for us to go partly because we have a natural strength there we can do so many forms of it and it's manifesting itself certainly in in recent years but to the extent that we can manage our electricity costs it has a bearing on anything we do in economic development as well thirdly the career opportunities in energy o in terms i'm i'm focusing on community engagement and really highlighting the three forms of it for us it is not to it's not the only way we do it but these three forms are probably most relevant for today so we are probably best known for the conferences that we've done focused on energy over the past three years we've done so in conjunction with the office of economic development and in a great partnership in fact many of those here at the table have been a part of the conferences and it was initially triggered by the exponential growth in solar and wind and so forth basically we normals and the impact that was having  utilities not just in my icon but actually across the u s so it seemed like a natural place to start for us and hence the name of the first conference was electric utilities the future is no longer what it used to be it is definitely changing the whole paradigm in in terms of the utility in the second year with the advent of the next era polls all we decided that it was time to focus on the customer and focus on the impact that this merger could have on the customer and finally in the third year in twenty fifteen with the legislature having passed that new mandate of hitting hundred percent renewable but twenty forty five that seem to be the most pertinent topic of the day and we focus on that going forward the next conference is being held in may may twenty second to the twenty fourth so put that on your calendars i'm sorry march thank you march twenty second to twenty four so throughout our history it's become very important for us to convene the community and historically we've done a lot of that through conferences but with the folks small into a visiting process that we did in two thousand and three it took us to a broader and deeper dimension of community engagement and from that experience we learned that these kinds of processes really glean the richest feedback from our residents and really help to bring them along in terms of the important dialogues that have to take place in our community so the empire process that we did really emulated the approach of focused knowing that the twenty fifteen conference that i mentioned earlier was going to focus on the customer our goal in the empower process was to lead up to that but i assure you that a cross section of voices in our community were heard at the conference particularly from those who normally don't have the opportunity to attend these kinds of meetings and basically to gather the perceptions and even misperceptions of what people know and what they don't know about energy the challenges there's many challenges to doing this this approach to community engagement in this case energy is a huge topic and there's a lot of opinions a lot of innocent misinformation learned a lot about this through the one on one interviews we  did eighty interviews we did prior to setting up this process it's very labor intensive you really need to develop good quantitative and qualitative metrics within this process and then there's always the task of were there are some major of these decisions that we made that are listed here and the focus was on small groups because we really want people to feel comfortable about talking and sharing their opinions and perceptions and we went to the participants we didn't set up a time and say ok you need to show up here we went to employers we went to homeowners etc and did a lot of the sessions in that way this was not a scientifically random process but it was a very rich one that still yielded a lot of great information part one of the process actually began at the county fair where we gleaned surveys from fourteen hundred residents that  there but the meat of this presentation is really about the structured process that took place after  that this is a kind of an outline of the process and it was a ninety minute session and it's centered on four different activities the session was done i definitely in each of the forty three sessions that we held and  really covered a range of ways to to get our participants to share where they were at with us including looking at tradeoffs which is really a critical thing because very often you know residents are asked well what do you want to see what do you want and you come up with really a lot laundry list a laundry list of wish lists of wish lists that really are not tested with well how much do you want this how much do you want this over something else etc and this process really tried to get at that so in terms of the demographics we reached four hundred thirty five participants in five weeks through these ninety minute sessions  in addition we had fourteen hundred seventy seven surveys from the county fair and ninety eight percent of the participants were full time residents the rest were part time and the vast majority of them really rated themselves as average or on knowledgeable when it came to energy so again it's important to say that this is was not a scientifically random sample but regardless product provided some pretty r information so from the participant evaluations overall they really really enjoy it's a very very interactive process there is definitely education involved but the rest of it is all about being interactive and sharing and hearing from them  eighty two percent of those who participated participated felt that they had done something significant in participating in the sessions at all so what we learned in an in a capsule is it confirms something we suspected that cost was the major factor in decisions and concerns that are driving our residents and including our businesses but costs were not the only concern and this was kind of a surprise they were very vocal about the environment about health cultural issues and so forth and also about insuring equity so in other words there was a lot of interest in going after solar or being able to secure solar installations in their home but they were equally concerned about well what about the other person that can't afford it and we suspect that they were thinking about their parents or their children etc because it is an investment up front to get involved in renewable energy if you are let's say a small business or resident going forward there was a lot of suspicion about ellen g and in fact some people even said well what is ellen g anyway so that was enlightening in and of itself and in the end what big takeaway was people really want to know more they want to be better informed and don't always feel that they have adequate resources to be informed and make the choices that they need to make and then most recently and other dimension to our community engagement process has been in what is called the said the comprehensive economic development strategy this is a process that is mandated by the economic development administration and it is to come up with an economic roadmap for our any community that wants to be eligible for e t a funding it is locally based which is really really important it's very grassroots and the emphasis year was on looking at strategies that will help build economic specific requirements outlined by e t a in this process the strategy committee itself must be a really broad mix of government agencies private sector interests educational interests labor non profits and so forth so it's a very prescribe process and this year it was focused on clusters in the past it was really just focused on business and how do you grow business and what's the road map for that but this year the focus was more on the cluster which is not just a particular business but all of the ancillary the end celeriac to view that has to be healthy in order for us to succeed in economic development  emphasize this is the draft recommendations that came out of there so far we are about to put it to bed but these are the draft recommendations that came out under the energy cluster there's eight clusters all together and energy came out as one of the major clusters for opportunities in economic development so certainly renewable energy continued to be very very high the cost of energy for business was also very significant again this was focus on economic development and then looking at ways to really increase energy efficiency because that is for sure the low hanging fruit how we're meant managing the use of the energy that we have we are already k k energy services thank you for your guzmn and council members i'm going to take the opportunity to talk with you for a few moments now about costs but to be honest what i'm really hoping is that you walk away thinking about value more then than just cost the topic here indigenous and affordable all three words matter if we if we can find a way to do things that are indigenous that are based on natural patterns of energy and affordable that's really what we're looking for what will it cost to get to one hundred percent renewable put for a little standard well there are a lot of factors obviously but is it you know the first one is economic cost and we'll talk a little bit about what it cost me co to make power today and they've given you a presentation about all the power that's coming on to their grid but in terms of what their units are doing today they are burning fossil fuel and with the exception of a little bit for start up and shut down and we're going to talk about that cost the same thing we're going to talk about is the cost to our community and this is a term from economics extra analyses then the final thing we're going to talk about in the cost area really has to do with social cost and we haven't really talked about what's going on with the solar industry right now on maui and i did want to make a few comments about that because we really are at a moment here where where things what i've done here is i've created a chart i started in two thousand and thirteen because that's the year in which all three when a pharmacy were online and there's there are people here from the commission in micco so i'm going to give some of the footnotes that were involved in actually creating this data and what we tried to do these are contracts and the third the blue line on the bottom is the eleven cent project that nico referenced and we have some folks here in the audience for that project at eleven point zero nine cents the yellow line is showing you what mika was reporting as it's cost to operate it's possible units and what the point i'm trying to make here is that when you had people talking in two thousand and thirteen or two thousand and fourteen they could have discussions and tell you how they're going to reduce your bills and in fact that that was possible and it did happen but what's happened here is that me costs because oil prices have fallen so far meet those costs now are below the lowest recorded renewable energy price for maui county so it really gets very complicated and you heard me say that they've entered into this eleven percent contract with the idea that it's going to drive down prices now that's that's an interesting thing i mean you start making assumptions about the future and we'll work through a couple other slides here what we're showing here on the bottom of the references k w p one a while he and cato p p two are the names of wind farms and what we're showing here is the rate that mico is paying these wind farms for power and sixteen and to create this i've had to blend some data in fact all of these wind farms are operating under contracts where there are different blocks of power that are slightly different prices and sometimes more than slightly different so we've made some assumptions here about curtailments and everything else but what you can see here is that the mainland price this price on the far right that's about two and a half cents a kilowatt hour and even though there are a number of factors that make this is not really an apples to apples comparison so so just to be clear some of the differences those two wind farms are walking k to p p to have batteries and those batteries are built into the cost of  power but k w p one is a really pretty close to apples to apples and you can see that we're over thirteen cents compared to you know a mainland cost of two and a half cents now mainland wind farm is a huge thing and it operates on a scale that we just don't have and will never get that low but i'm putting this up here because people in the energy industry have long felt that we just have not done a good job of buying low cost renewable energy and if you think about construction or you think about other things you know whatever the hawaii premium is you know dozen two or three hundred percent coverage and so again you just have this this feeling that we just have not been good at buying power at a low cost exter now i've gone ahead and just grabbed a definition from google here and i'll read it i don't know if you can read it from the audience but it basically says a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without being reflected in the cost of the goods or services and it gives an example of the first one it gives is the pollination of surrounding crops by b so when you get that that's a positive extra anality benefits all of us but doesn't show up in the price the other kind of an extra now has a negative externality and we experience quite a few of them so i wanted to put this up because when people talk to us about cost  want to go to the real world here and this council knows for example that the fire department budget has been a big issue and this fire which is a recent event burned six thousand acres it affected travel between west maui and central mao it affected the operations of the fire department for over a week and it was caused by a transmission line to the wind farm and i just throw this out to you that you again when we talk about costs i'm saying the cost to our community are not the same as what mika will tell you the costs are in other words i don't mean that they're lying i mean that for their company these bay calculate the economic cost but that is not the same as saying you know how how do  operations affect us and what is the cost on the community so i throw this out there again because someone is paying for all that fire response and all the last time in all of the lost business opportunities and it doesn't show up in any of our accounting we're not alone on maui pro put this up here this is an article from the honolulu paper but it's talking about something that happened on a big island and i guess sorry this is actually very difficult to read i'm just going to describe it it's the manager of the geothermal plant explaining that when the transmission line to their plant goes down that they've got a pressure build up and they had to release hydrogen sulfide in the end the state department of health find m i think twenty five thousand dollars and they had to deal with a number of claims from the neighbors but again when we talk about the costs of what we're doing there are a lot of extra nowadays and the message i hope isn't that we should avoid doing these things so much as we can't just based on some simple analysis of cost it's got to really be part of some broader guiding principles and the co op really has an advantage there i mean there are some ideas that they've had very consistently for a number of years and they've been able to communicate in the two to there folks  i wanted to switch a little bit here and i'm putting up a famous quote i saw this first in law school many years ago near teaching about a water law in the western united states so it's from mark twain or at least attributed to him whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting over and the reason i'm i'm raising this again when we talk about the cost of going where we want to go in this community we all know that we are short on water we have issues of the country we have issues are central now the water is a resource that we simply are always in some level of search for always in some level of shortage and right now and we compare alternatives for how we make power we give no consideration to water use we talk about cost we talk about what's going on in our community i wanted to give you this backdrop showing our population so what you're seeing there is the first red dot on the left there is the current population so about one hundred sixty five thousand and then the dotted line is deep beds projection of where we're going to be in twenty forty and you know two hundred twenty two thousand it looks like from reading that right when you look at that growth and you understand our backdrop on water it just becomes clear that as a community we we ought to have a preference for making electricity in ways that minimize the use of water but in our in our ways of doing cost so far we've never been able to get that subtlety and what we're doing so sustainable ecologically sound development there are actually a couple different places those those terms are coming from but i've  been lucky enough to work with both m e d p and maui tomorrow and it's amazing how consistent people are cross the political spectrum on some of these things so the first is just what we talked about here isn't there a preference for factoring water he's into the cost then the second point it's really not being factored in and then finally moving one hundred percent is  game we have been able to say in hawaii for a long time that we want to broad range of resources but where we are today on maui we've got over one hundred megawatts of solar approved we've got seventy to make a watch of when they're already on the ground and the reality is anything that would be a large scale project at this point a twenty or thirty megawatt project is taking away from the ability of some other technology to do that and so we can't just keep saying there's room for everything in fact we should make some preferences based on the broader community interests social costs here i wanted to talk for a few minutes about what's been going on to the solar industry on maui and you know at the maui companies on solar we're early leaders and that's also meant that they've been some of the first to be affected by the changes this is a headline from utility dive which is a trade digest for regulated utility is and it's just that the cap been head so this was actually in essence the second cap if you will first being the net energy metering systems the nam systems and then these or if you will the son of now the grid supply systems and both big island in maui now we're done with those as we got ready for this i went ahead and talked to the people that own a couple of the solar companies i'm out and i want to say that these were folks that are focused on the residential market  and these comments are about the residential market so i asked people what the market was like annihilated destroyed every one of the owners that i talked to said that their business is down at least fifty percent basically what i was hearing for several of them were statements to the effect that we will all be laying off people after the first of the year you know i will say that sometimes the solar industry folks ha a reputation for the boy you cries wolf and they've they've said our business is destroyed in the past but this was pretty specific to residential and it does seem like there's this fundamental problem where they're all building out systems that were approved under the old rules but they simply aren't signing up new customers at a rate that there's going to be you know able to keep these these folks on now to check on this a little bit and i want to say mahalo to the public works department because i did check with the public works d s a and they said that there is less activity now and they do anticipate that things are going to slow down quite a bit but in terms of the actual permits that have been issued you know it's been a slow drop  right now on maui the electric permit is the very final step in a process you get your mico approval first so this is showing you basically the tail end of a pattern and it seems to be if we take the statements that are being made by the owners plus the statistics it looks like we're about to get hit with a downturn in the residential solar market here so that's really what i've got i think i've used my my ten minutes here and when this is over happy to take any questions that the folks have with i think we have focused in this discussion yet really a little bit more where we started which was the objectives just to frame again or where were and you get closer to the might be just a frame again where we're at at this moment so we all have the objective or we could share a common objective of getting to one hundred percent renewable energy by the target twenty forty five the next of course that we would like to stabilize and possibly reduce electricity rates over time i think the second is an extremely tall order and i think a lot of people tell me the same thing the next one that we want to be able to do is improve energy security and resiliency and sometimes this gets i think confused with the idea of whether not the lights are on at this moment or an availability concept versus a resilient system that's able to withstand issues changes whatever they might be from a fuel supply problem to a tactical issue last the other being availability is any moment that your lights may go out this is exactly the same problem that i'm trying to think or suggesting we should address so first i want to talk a little bit about what the county has been doing to get to this point and a lot of this actually has been driven by others before me and i just want to recognize those people of course being calico biagi for twenty five years working for the county trying to drive things forward of course doug mccloud my predecessor both of them who got the county to two point five megawatts of installed capacity photovoltaic projects and this was a very good effort and we hope to be able to leverage or build upon that other other things that happened over time including some small wintergreen projects and then a lot of smaller projects like p v in lighting so at this moment the county is looking at what can we do next and what we do now to continue moving in the right direction right now we have under  review of renewable sludge drying project which would also produce electricity renewable actressy for the cali wastewater treatment plant next at this moment we're in an early stage of scoping a few other concepts which would be baseload solar power with batteries a little bit beyond just shifting power into the night but to be able to supply and or g for pumping i would say water use is one of our largest or one of the large energy uses on the island another one that we're looking at is when we're installing new projects there how can we make these both renewable and flexible so that they're they integrate to the system they're efficient and so what we're looking at is a combination of new water wells that would include photovoltaics batteries and in line hydro which would essentially reduce the electricity demand or make it a more efficient project and then of course we're looking at at the moment to demand response as a portion of the market that probably in my opinion would be next to be able to free up some flexibility on the grid that flexibility when i was touring on molokai recently you can see that in that the county has a lot of assets that might be useful as a demand response type of asset what i saw there was that the utility doing exactly what they're supposed to do gets ready for demand coming on by spinning another generator or being ready to accept  that demand coming on that demand would be in that case a county well pump and instead of looking at that as a a resource or something that you can use to then accept more renewable energy the utility will be running a generator to respond to that and we need to work faster to try to find those opportunities where we don't have to spend more money to get these sort of results of flexibility and so these will be some of the early things that hopefully we can do when the opportunity is there and then so there goes a little bit below the radar not a lot of people know as there's a lot of work that's always done by the collar me to be more efficient to try to find ways to spend less money or or to consume less fossil fuel by consuming less electricity and there's a lot of projects like variable frequency drive these are ways to run motors or pumps in a more efficient way in both o pools and also in a wastewater treatment plants and such in a way that we're going to use less electricity by making a comparable or a smaller investment hopefully and then we're now looking at other opportunities which are out there on this a little bit like my mother would say turn off light there so what else does the county do of course the counties involved with the public utility commission cases and we do this in an effort to represent the county and the citizens of the county most notably we participate in the power supply improvement plan this is the process of the planning process at the utility is using under the direction of the p u c to arrive at twenty forty five build out that is one hundred percent renewable but along the way of course you still have to be average renewable power or reliable power keep the lights on and it's about what are we going to do next right now in the next five years and so we participate in that were actual interveners in that and then the other actions that we're not interveners we provide public comments where appropriate and this would include things like the demand response or our distributed energy resources or other dockets so a lot of people  saw in the last year a report that came out made for the county which was known as the guernsey report and this was a review of ownership models and what i wanted to start with in talking about this is it does focus on the idea of what if you were to look at the utility under a different ownership that might not be the only way that we should look at it but its results came down to that there was a preference and stead of direct ownership to have an independent system operator concept this is something that you see on the mainland in a bulk electricity system if flows down from further regulations down to the point where another entity would actually manage the systems that the utilities w and then everybody would bid into and sell power into or services into that model and then power is then delivered to the customers by the results of that was that that was its mame preference and then perhaps a co op would be the right way to go and then perhaps a municipal organisation so what we really need to do though is look into deeper and see because those are trying to fit a concept for the future into an exact box that already exists and what we're trying to do is see you know that box we don't know what it's going to look like we don't know which technology is going to come up we don't know how it's going to exactly work in the future well we would like to do is take the bits and pieces that are beneficial and then of course from our county look at this in the way that it's not the same from a look ireland i or from ali and those are different distinctly different systems that may have the same solution or may be different in time or ones ahead of another or one's going to advance ahead of another will see so where where we would like to go in the near future is to focus on a few ideas one is continuing to review the regulatory structure to understand if it's possible or what is the benefits of an integrated independent power system integrator and system operator a little bit like the ice and then look at what is there out there are in law or that already exist or there's already funded like the hawaii electricity reliability authority or other concepts hawai'i energy that can fit into this model and can try to make a system  that is more open and more available for others to participate to see how the market can drive these things and how you know new technologies and come in and of course here framing this with a particular interest in distributed energy resources in demand response being included in the p s ip the power supply improvement plan as it how far should it be included should we be looking at a future where it's one hundred percent of that and then another entity is acting as an integrator and then looking at  business model structures instead of just looking at ownership trying to separate this concept out a little bit because maybe we get a little too stuck on the idea of who has to own it once you have the right thing the right business model the owner becomes more apparent and more obvious so in that in that idea we would look at things that bring the utility more towards a service oriented organization something that is focusing less on the idea of planning for investment more on how to provide certain services to customers or leveraging the services that they could provide and again with that same framing for a distributed energy  for d d r and d r and then the last one is more of a near term concept understand that there will be investments still to come and investments have to be made to keep the system working looking for structures where  others could make that investment and there are ways in that currently exist but further exploring that if there are ways to use perhaps revenue bonds through the county or other ways that could make it possible that investment could be cheaper and potentially could decouple it from what some people feel is a conflict of interest between planning utility planning for the future and investing in that and profiting from that and so if we can somehow find a way to improve upon that process we think we can we should be trying to do that of course some of these things cost money we're looking at ways that we could participate with you and me go participate with a high state energy office because this isn't only about the county it's about hawaii and trying to find ways to improve all around and so does it couple other quick things because i don't want to leave it off the table there are other ways that we could continue to make progress there are vehicles out there we should be looking at community solar how can that be leveraged what does what does it actually mean who invests in it who participates in it there are models being thought of right now that potentially could be like an employee benefit plan where a business that could have a a project could invest in that be the long term investor but their employees while their employees could get the benefit of that three employee benefit program so that may be one way to look at it demand response a very talked about this of course we need to find out how we can do this make sure the counties available to take advantage of this because there's a large asset available that can participate faster than large other things that may require additional investment or an aggregation of many many components and then further review of co ops by other parties there are people there are still looking at this as an idea and and we don't want to that was given by the mayor was to look at a long term plan of what it would take to electrify the the utility or the fleet the vehicle fleet for the county and so that is underway now there's a lot of resources at the hawaii state energy office but what we're going to look at here are what are all the impacts some of the impacts that do come up as we get there are of course road taxes and such come out of the fuel that's purchased and we kind of want to make sure the roads are fine for the electric vehicles because prius is aren't as durable as other cars for off road use that's all i have thank you very much mr ago finally we have great the great pleasure of having a commissioner from the public utilities commission here today miss cuba that will share with us as a perspective far from the commissioner on  the and hawaii's energy future and present status thank you thank you thank you chair guzmn and council members again and also to my fellow palace for the opportunity to participate today on this public education opportunity and this panel to provide some dialogue on some of the concerns and issues of addressing this community maori community i believe is really a leader i mean i always go out around the mainland and across the world to to brag about hawaii that we're leaders were sending postcards from the future but i really do believe that here on maui you have been implementing many things and and you are living laboratory the  much of what we talk about you know and other pilots and you've been approving it in achieving the clean energy goals i wanted to give you a little bit of background because for those that are probably listening on a kaku you know this all started a while ago i mean there and there were stakeholders and people that came before those in the room who are interested today you know the first away clean energy initiative and even when i first came on board to the commission back in two thousand and fourteen you know the states like new york and california were wrestling with the same issues and it's amazing how state commissions and local communities were really at the forefront of change in the energy area realizing from you know from the bottom up basically from the community level that energy was identified changing space with a lot of challenges and the need to respond was there and while new york and california got a lot of national press in the same month in twenty fourteen of april the whole state public utilities commission issued some very seminal orders electric personality it involved all the to ladies all the stakeholders everybody and from a state wide perspective and much of the work product of all of that we listen to and we issued at the time what became known as the white paper in the commission's inclinations on the future of hawaii's electric utilities and it was a seminal white paper because it laid forward a strategic road map for all the utilities car you see mico hawaiian electric electric lighting company for for what the commission saw based on input from stakeholders based on input from from experts what needed to be done to align the utility business model with customers interests and public policy goals so i want to reiterate folks can have a dialogue about ownership structures and you know that is the coolie on of all of this community to do so but really what the public utility commission was focused on is really what is the business of the utilities and a more broader look at what is the business of the utilities of the future who should they serve what should their priorities be and that's the same for whether it's it's an investor owned utility or co operative and that is really putting the customers first and that's a key stakeholder we need to remember here to day and the people out there watching the public that we serve we all serve as public servants it's the customer that comes first and giving the customer choices and empowering the customers with the tools that we have at our disposal and that's it and we in our white p encouraged the utilities to develop a diversified portfolio so that could include essential plant resources utility scale resources balanced with distributed energy sources we've heard some updates on what's happening with distributed generation  in this community but we also went and made a very small a very important policy pronouncement in and in the white paper which basically defined what distributed energy resources are it's not just distributed generation it also includes things such as energy storage and that's all kinds of energy storage not just batteries but it could be electric vehicles great interactive water heating thermal storage many hydro storage many types of stores that can be tools in the generation tool kit and we said energy efficiency and demand response is some of the folks on the panel have mentioned the low hanging fruit the than the no regrets low cost strategies that are in the generation tool kit we clearly defined these  generation resources because we wanted utilities to be able to have cost recovery for these very cost effective means by which we could use these tools to help integrate more renewable energy onto our grids to help modernize develop a diverse portfolio of different renewable energy resources whether that biomass biofuels geothermal other types of energy resources besides solar and wind and so we  we encourage this and it's not one size fits all and different communities will respond differently i know in coal why because of the endangered birds there they don't have windows an option has more options with wind with potential geothermal with other biomass if you know biofuel opportunities here you know waste to energy opportunities as well as as on a wahoo that's that's that's an option so i think the important thing to remember is that as a regulatory body we wanted to try to give regulatory certainty to the utilities so they could go forward and plan and also implement and it's very important to keep that in mind and that really the utility the future is really you know since i've articulated this is as a as a personal opinion but it's also reflected in some of our you know of our orders that really it's not so much about the sales of kilowatt hours it's really about providing energy services of value to customers in the future and that's really what the utility of the successful utility the future will be is providing energy management services whether that's in partnership with third parties who are distributed energy resource providers whether that you know demand response aggregators folks that are working in the solar community or on the distributed technology side there's a lot of software technology is those folks m m b know and terms of silicon valley coming into the energy space and providing a new technology tools so that utilities can better manage big data analytics on a harness the capability to modernize a new transmission and distribution systems really develop that twenty first century generation system that we gave guidance on in the white paper and that requires also some regulatory reforms as well so we pointed out for for ourselves as as a regulatory body and you know i think fred touched upon this that we need to be looking at new ways to value services and to look at what ancillary services customers can provide what value they bring to the grid and what separate grid services they take and properly value that so people know exactly what they're paying for and and they can make choices to enable better efficient usage of their electricity to they can make inform decisions to reduce expenses on their bills so we are now facing i think when we first issue that the white paper is twenty fourteen we didn't have a hundred percent renewable portfolio mandate which the state legislature has now as a as a state we are now moving toward this very aggressive goal in two thousand and forty five and as our utility representatives on the panel pointed out i'm proud to say that most of our utilities are all over your chillies are are trying to meet that goal there's not and there's no resistance like you see on the mainland it's basically how do we get there and you know devil's in the details as well and they're and they're setting very aggressive goals for themselves even exceed some of the the basic minimum standards but it's not easy and we knew a bull's renewable energy resources do put certain constraints on the system and because of the way electricity systems must work and i'm not an electrical engineer there are others on the panel that can more better explain that to you but there are are certain realistic concerns that that come about because in order to integrate more renewable energy which is intermittent you must have other tools in the tool kit to get two hundred percent and that's where energy efficiency and demand response are important as our energy storage is important and that's why customers are so important to use the customer sited resources customer sided demand response customers cited distributed energy resources in partnership with  i'd say it's a renewable energy on a reliable grid and that's what the utilities get have to be held accountable for because they're the ones that keep the lights on they're the ones that as fred mentioned are are accountable for resiliency for reliability energy security but within a reasonable timeframe because as customers we and as citizens of why we want to get to get to our goals within a reasonable timeframe and then as everyone has pointed out it's at reasonable rates it's not at all costs because this is the reality of living in you know in an island state with island grid so we have other expenses in and therefore the price of energy whether it's with the energy water nexus or energy or transportation is really important so these are some of the the policy issues that council members here have to deal with as community leaders with all of you as energy stakeholders in your respective industry areas and with our utility representatives here that are on the panel and ourselves as regulators and for the legislators at the state level who make decisions but i want to say is the cup half empty afghan period half full i'd say it's half full from you know not because i'm a pollyanna and i want to be positive but i do want to point out that you have so many opportunities here so many things that are in your advantage maoi as a leader in stem science technology and engineering math is a leadership model for that your schools and your community colleges you lead in stem workforce development skill you know education you're leading in terms of this area and this is the future the distribution technology people from silicon valley who are doing pilots and the folks that are doing you know energy management system pilots to to blend solar with energy storage they come from that those backgrounds their their software engineers the information technology experts who develop those stem  sets and are now bringing them home to hawaii to to implement them for real time solutions for our grid so it's very important from the very basic ingredients for making a utility to the future as i said truly i go out and i really i can't reiterate more how jumpstart mali is an example of the integrated good of the future central planet resources combined with distributed generation combined with customer sited resources electric vehicles avail to to grid great interactive water heating you know intelligent systems and energy storage systems at the central transmission level as well as a distribution level voltage control types of technologies that help to again integrate more renewables onto to a smart grid the smart grid of the future you know so to enable smart solar from two way inverters on the on the more modern technology that's been installed by some of the more recent solar contractors and some of the solar folks that have now the capability like they do in germany to use two way inverters for reactive power to provide ancillary services back to the grid so customers are actually helping to support the grid helping with voltage control  know it's not just on the utility side of the meter but on the customer side you know we have we have companies like stem that are are doing pilots here companies like solar city that are also working with with our utilities and i think davison mentioned that in terms of whether it's dispatch or working in terms of distributed energy resources to energy management systems and to be demand response aggregators or all those separate rooftop p v systems can now be a virtual power plant can provide support to the grid as well as to provide energy and capacity so these are all new things that didn't exist maybe five ten years ago you know i mean it's an exciting dynamic time and i think molly is well positioned to have a lot of opportunity out of this community renewables as fred mention is another area where the state legislature has initiated a program framework and we have that the you see here it's an open docket i can't speak more about it than to encourage people to go to the white everyone and we talked about addressing those that live in multi family dwellings and it has nothing to do with income level but folks that will never be able to have a top p v but maybe can have access to community renewables through this tariff program to subscribe in to whether it's community solar community wind as appropriate in their communities so i think there is a lot of opportunity here and i'm going to end with a quote because i you know i always want people to be encouraged to think and i think it's a quote that's appropriate and most of the people in the room i think are of the age there are a few millennial is out there but i think most of our the age that remember what robert f kennedy said there are people who see things as they are and ask why i seeing things as they could be and asked why not and so i leave you with that challenge to to see things as they could be to vision it to work together collaboratively as jeannie pointed out you have great opportunity here you already are good collaborators you've worked in partnership you have that basis for community dialogue you have the foundation blocks to build upon that so you know you are going forward i encourage you and i'm encouraged by what's happening on this island so thank you for letting me speak today  about you know we can talk but talk about all this other stuff but when it comes down to these natural disasters that's when we really know how well they're prepared and what they do and that's one of the questions i have is and i really don't know what i asked the question to but because of that imminent threat and you mentioned i think which is looking mentioned the cooperation between or maybe it was you math more electric sent people to the big island and because of the network of their company their ability not only in the purchase part but when to meet up with disasters or meet up with challenges they able to put their end there assets together and get out there and do it and that's one of my concerns and this is where i'm not sure who would answer that question as we look at trying to move into cooperatives will all other means of management how would that interaction continue not to say that we wouldn't go running up to co wife why had another iniki because you know this is how but we stand alone we're a state that stands alone colonies the stand alone and we're twenty five hundred miles from the main and for any help well it's not you have a somewhat put out here but do we have or would like to answer how would the cooperations continue if we start segmenting or making smaller or more independent utilities or cooperatives or whatever they may be and not have that ability to come together with that continue to exist and i guess that's my question for that year i don't dismiss anyone on the panel want to field this question ok mr bissell yeah i think i can speak for them mico in that he go people on this and any utility person that's not going to change no matter what the organizational structure is utilities are going to help each other out  you see was also part of it so we definitely you know help each other out here and i think we did explore as a try companies to hawaii electric a lecture a family of companies getting resources from the mainland because there are mutual assistance programs between the utilities in hawaii and the mainland to have get help right if it were worse so hopefully it's not even going forward but it was going to be more expensive so i think what happened locally became a quicker cheaper option so that is a benefit of us being able to help each other if it had been a larger scale event though we certainly would have had to have tapped addition resources which is understandable i mean you know if it's a major event like what happened on a while you were the entire island was wiped out yes you got to bring you know like help but i just wanted to know you know and i'm glad to hear those answers because that makes me reassur restoration level but really more from the planning level again that's why i think you know all the utilities been looking at resiliency plans in terms also what we call the integrated energy district which we talked about in our white paper in inclinations so that we learn from the lessons of the east coast from hurricane sandy and you know how the grid was taken down and in fact better usage of some of the distributed energy resources location of power plants in areas that you know where they would not running and island and off in the event there's a natural disaster or heaven forbid a geo political event that you know affects one of the islands that you could you could island op fortunes of the grid so parts of the grid could stay operational and provide necessary water you know food and and emergency hospital services and that's part of what was addressed in that white paper is that that we were encouraged to think about using storage using you know a combination of customer sited generation resources to create these integrated energy just takes on a lot of the large customers on the grid have backup generation but trying to make that again more renewable you know in in nature not just the diesel genset that kicks on you know and  emergency but more planned so that would storage with solar with some of these new technologies and whether even if it's you know e v a s that could put function to to provide you know some backup power vehicle to grid doing that stuff  that that i think the great project that's in the next phase of iteration can speak to that is looking at some of these of these strategies that you have smaller when i was smaller areas it's actually island off areas within a grid so that thank you chair for mr bissell when you look at and my always set up my always size compared to calais my recollection is that your rates are a little bit higher on koa than the rates here on maui what what we do estimate your rates or if we have the same set up on maui that you have on co op what do you think our rates would look like in comparison to what they are today or in comparison to what your rates are i think by definition i think your mike might be off the canary now yeah that's but i think by definition for any type of an ownership change for the p c to approve it you would have to establish to the p c and for your citizens here you're going to have to establish that it's going to be cheaper than it would be with an investor owned utility so you'd have to capitalize on interest rate differential zz keeping profits here and be able to prove a case that it's going to be more beneficial so you and i think arguably it is that there's no i'll go off a little bit on the organization structure you know it's all about how you execute how things are done there's no silver bullet organizational structure that's going to radically lower the rates every utility operates pretty well it's all relative the thing in a co op can bring it's more direct control direct influence by the by the citizens but it doesn't mean by definition form a call out form of the only form any other type of organization that the rates are going to go down because of that thank you and  building off of that and looking at other projects with the utility that bills bills on the volunteers that have come about as a result of really seeing all of those volunteers it's about four hundred as a kind of asset for moving us ahead in renewable energy in this virtual power plant ideas and so forth so we're kind of following their lead and their expertise in where it can go but we are excited about  wind farms where do you where do you see that and i'm sure we can change any of the p p a as this point but it seems like there's some like a better term windfall profits you know i think there are a lot of aspects obviously if we want to have an environment where more people are going to keep coming to hawaii and be willing to invest in renewable energy sometimes you know we probably can't revisit all the deals in retrospect but you know what honestly has happened here is that most of the renewable energy per curiam and strictly by the chile have not gone all the way through for a number of very different reasons they simply have not occurred in so here on maui it's all been developers bringing the projects to the utility and that's probably not the lowest cost model so wrap up with that it makes sense i guess you'd like to share that forward we're looking to do more are for peace requests for proposals to solicit for a new generation whether it is firm in your resources or variable resources and with the hopes of getting a much better price  e table this morning and share their ideas this afternoon should say so i thank you for putting this on and thank you all for being here recent installation of battery is is that the is the installation complete it and is just too is that for storage can you kind of elaborate more the purpose of this and but as far as the physical installation that has been completed just to reiterate that was a partnership with the y natural energy institute and it was to experiment with regards to how best to use a battery so you know it's kind of like to test out the different battery use cases on a grid with a high penetration of rooftop solar so so they rooftop solar is is there a weakness that you're going to address so that you know because it's limited as far as what we  can participate in your grid sharp so that project was more designed you know a journey i came to us they had a battery and you know the partnership was an exchange for the free battery you guys paid to install it will kind of experiment with it and see how best to use that use it you know that project dates back a couple years it didn't really come with any it will allow x amount more of kilowatts of solar or anything like that it's it's more just to figure out how best to use it and i was really addressing you know can we stop p v from tripping off line a disturbance that may or may not be able to do that you know can we do so thank you oh well first of all quiet was different because investor owned utility was for sale there so it was a bid process on a sale too to make it happen and it took a of a couple years and a couple adorations one of one of the attempts was rejected by the p c but best case if there was a co op form one of the smaller islands and they go and make always willing to participate in selling it it's probably similar to that a year and a half to your process to go through the whole all the approval chain and the financing and all that it's not a sort of decade long process of if if it was on the market  they're willing to entertain an offer for it's a couple of years probably well thank you that's i think an important point that those that show an interest to form a corporative is that there has to be a willing seller and i think matt we know that transmitting off our water and especially on our island for molokai which i become become aware of it because of think i'd have to pull it apart a little bit to look at the different parts to see what we mean by cheaper and cheaper to do a certain aspect if we were trying to procure  project to do something of scale and deliver a straight to that well i think that we could probably be cheaper than the cost that the military is charging for electricity at that point what that would you know clearly at least twenty percent to thirty percent cheaper than rooftop photovoltaics because you get the advantage of less inverters more installation more economies of scale so how it's actually purchased and then how would actually be delivered for the use of a well we have to look at to understand exactly a structure to compare but i think in general larger and larger is cheaper thank you did you have something to add to that no just in general i think the concept behind the program is primarily to try to get or allow those people that historically haven't been able to participate because you know whether they don't own their own roof or what not to participate in their new would you know won to add that in the said process that i mentioned that is about to conclude community based solar was seen as a very important strategy but it also addresses what came out in the  and that is one of equity and people being able to play this allows people who can afford their own to play in the renewable energy space in a more affordable way so it's important solution that way as well  i don't know can answer this but when i think of renewable energy i think way back where there was bio diesel of products here and then for some reason it left the island mentioned in my presentation we are the county is reviewing a project for to create bio gas to drive sludge in korea or produce electricity so it is being looked at that would be produced from an energy so there are efforts to look at that the economics of it of course alternately should be considered and how the risk is apportioned to the parties should be considered bissell you talked about you durant you're doing battery power battery storage over there have you kind of figured out what caused the big fires over in kuku and have you been able to mitigate that kind of attentional thank you a couple things we're doing and choli and i think the industry is moving instead of having one big facility and one big you know box full of batteries the almost all the batteries going in now are containerized so there's less potential for a big fire you get one container they're separated from each other we have also on quiet i think everybody's doing this as well we put fire suppression in th container to help mitigate that as well ok but it's good because i was some of the biggest concerns and i guess you know we talk about a lot of solar and the two big projects you got it at eleven  cents is is it does that include storage because you know for obviously half the day we we need the electricity is specially part of the peak hours at the evening in the evening so we're not getting any solar input so are you looking at having potential storage for that eleven sensors that just the transmission i mean not the transmission but something mr mcnabb that's ok yeah that's that's the big thing is we need firm power more than we do the variable because of the lack of for you know the lack of consistency of the power you know we talked about the eleven cents is that eleven cents you know when i look at my bill it's thirty eight was it's gone down a little bit but  thirty eight cents a kilowatt hour and when i want to compare that with some you know my sister's bill on the mainland to see if we were close there bill is completely different there bill says this much in production in this much in transmission costs so when i was thinking on eleven cents a kilowatt hour that's below the mainland's because of their because of their combination it turns out it may be that they love incense is still high because you have not included the transmission cost always at eleven cents the total cost for the fuel and the for the power to get it to my house or my condo actually allocation and costs for us to provide the infrastructure to you and to pay for the billing so when i see my bill that says thirty eight cents an hour that includes the transmission costs in the billing  yes ok and you don't have that separated out or do you we have the fuel surcharge we yeah i don't believe we separate out ok some french as mason says so i'm just trying to work with numbers that are apples and apples that's why i'm trying to figure that out i really don't have anything to add i think you guys are getting the right information there you know as far as the cost levels ok so i just want to like i said make sure we're talking the same types of numbers if i don't know if you guys have the any of the testimony that has come in but one testifier had a very interesting comment on how a for profit company would work versus a potential  either cooperate ivar whatnot for instance his thought was you know you invest one hundred million for a power plant that uses fuel whether it's diesel gas or biofuels you invest one hundred million dollars and then over the course of thirty years it costs about one point five billion for the fuel as far as you are concerned as a for profit company and your investment is one hundred million dollars the one point five billion dollars is all borne by the customer everything is borne by the customer but that fuel is purchased by the customer where he said he talks about if you invest three hundred million dollars in a solar power system and another three hundred million in storage that's your total cost and to invest in companies that's a six hundred million dollar investment versus one hundred million dollar so you're going to go with the cheaper investment typically his that's his assertion i kind of believe that because if i'm going to somebody's investing i'm going to say well i'll go with one hundred million dollar investment versus the six hundred million dollar investment do you guys look at things like that because you are a for profit company or are you willing to look at yeah it's going to cost more upfront but a whole lot less in the thirty year life for the so when we look at different technologies we look at the lifecycle cost side involves both the upfront investment as well as the ongoing operating cost so you could have diverse technologies where maybe then vestment is very expensive up front but lower operating costs so our planners look at the whole lifecycle  rebel thanks i would like to add something that if i could mean what you're hearing from utilities that there are thirty five percent renewable so let's do the math i mean sixty five percent is oil almost two thirds and you know one of the points that a numbers of made is that they're not doing anything to control this risk on the oil price because it's just a pass through right and that really is one of the concerns so when they put this slide up and they said they're working to stabilize prices their idea is to stabilize it by you know what percent is renewable as all the renewable is stable but you know there are numbers that say that you should also be looking at the financial risk here while we're in transition as long as the majority of the dollars are being spent on oil we should actively be in the past it didn't prove to be cost effective but we i mean there is a cost to had so but we are looking at it again so i want you to know that we don't always stop because we said no it didn't work in the past i think as times does what is the actual total cost to the consumer not just the investment cost so it is taking into account projections on fuel so that that part does take into account so the user should see that in the end and then of course on the hedging point which i think that was the other important when i was about to bring up but i think hedging has a cost depends on how you had i think when we saw some of the proposals for ellen g and it was just simply said that would be the fix it wasn't explained on how it was going to be hedged and i think everybody was so perfect that hedging we would all be on ya is so yeah this is all pointing out to you again you're trying to figure out how to stabilize the cost of fossil fuel or ill and g or even it less so and any kind of  you know bio diverse crops is there probably not with you guys but in industry wide and maybe mr macleod mr rideau what kind of really big effort is put towards you know getting storage for you know it doesn't necessarily have to be electric i believe we had a discussion about not melted salt as a storage facility i mean there's all kind of different to pump storage to is there a lot of effort by you guys or the commissioners or energy services companies to really work on storage because you've got the storage if it it if pencils out then you know have to deal with any kind of fuel that keeps coming has to keep coming it's absolutely the the good the is a lot of effort in this area and it's not just l salt energy storage the energy storage component of that is much cheaper at about sixty six dollars per kilowatt hour when compared to the maya batteries in the range of four hundred or five hundred or six hundred however the deal we does have  many initiatives to bring down the cost of energy storage and that big there i don't recall the targets i believe about two hundred fifty dollars per kilowatt hour if you recall as a sort of a target price and what that does is it puts that cost of energy storage somewhere close to on par with if you were to operate a gas a gas turbine at a certain capacity factor and so what you're trying to do is see how that gets into the market at the right at the right price and many technologies are getting there it's not just as i mentioned it's not just the mine but slow batteries probably will be what i think are some of the next technologies they don't burn many of the medium are not hazardous and and potentially they have a long term lifecycle where you're not replacing a big portion of the unit every six or seven years when we get a comment from a commissioner a key then followed by mr macleod regarding story at the p c level and what you've and i think as i mentioned earlier very early on in our inclinations on white paper and in our orders we've made very clear that energy storage should be a component of the power supply improvement plans should be a component  e meter to provide ancillary services to their storage systems whether that's battery or something else like their most storage or you know pump hydro whatever that form of storage technology we clearly define energy storage as a distributed energy resource thereby by clearly defining it in our orders as a distributed energy resource the utility will be entitled to cost recovery has been you know indicated by some of the  dispatchable storage some of the other energy storage applications that have come before that but you see so from the regulatory perspective we try to clarify and make certain where energy storage stands and that's very different from some of the mainland jurisdictions where energy storage even california obviously leading in terms of energy storage mandate which is wonderful because actually they're creating the volume there to drive prices and technology innovation and now with that volume there that we could never have because we're too small but what we have is the opportunities to implement here will time in many different ways you know like i said utility scale storage community storage as well as customer sited storage but there were the differences  we clearly defined it as a distributor and your resources a generation resource part of the generation took it to be used in lieu of conventional generation along with energy efficiency and demand respo add i guess you know there's this vision of how this all gets used but if i put a battery in today i can't get paid for it that's the problem that as much as we see the future and how the utilities are going to be able to use my better if i put it in today there is no mechanism no way for me to be paid and that's the problem for the smaller guys they're trying to sell these systems but they can't explain to their customers what the revenue stream is going to be all they can say is well at some point in the future we believe the utility will pay you for the use your battery and  it's tough to be selling a product that way well i think that even though right now the terrorists don't exist i think the structure exists we have also said and our orders and they're open dockets are for i can't speak as to the status of these but in the d r docket we are looking at time of restraints which are lo shifting which are to actually implement the self supply in the self supply plus storage options that have been created on the docket as well as there is still that open docket from back in two thousand and fourteen the demand response docket which in which energy storage and demand response and with that would be demand response tariffs that would go along with that so although the rates aren't there there again these are these are being formed these rates are being formed with input from stakeholders it's maybe not the fastest way but it is a collaborative way so our technical working groups are now meeting to discuss these issues with input from the solar industry from  did you know technology stakeholders as well to try to see what's the best rates to facilitate the kinds of integrated tools to provide ancillary services to the grid eager customers cited energy storage of pilot i'm ok or similar to care you see when we have had big energy storage projects one way to mitigate the risk is to have the developer you know that on the developer side so as mentioned start to work harder on is finding the value of the energy storage looking at it more like that swiss army knife that everybody shows it says it can do this it could be voltage support it could defer transmission it could do many other things it can do him all the same time and we shouldn't be delusional but you can do several things and we have if we can find those opportunities that we can be perhaps finding ways to be economical right now ok thank you jan one one last yes question comment maybe is battery storage at this point is it sounds like what everybody is using mike my biggest concern is what happens when the batteries run out you know what do we do that's a lot of toxic chemicals that we've got to do something with and that's one of my biggest concerns with battery storage is a good question anyone on the panel on the field this one i could start with i think we're down and car batteries that could be out there with full rollout so they at least are looking very seriously at the it's the responsibility to recycle the batteries and i think that'll be more the industry standard by definition because otherwise we got a bigger problem solar and so yes i have battery backup that's what happened that's how i park my t v and my husband massage chair when the sun's not out at night after upon a time so i've been  some some interesting points and i guess this is sort of for me to go in regards to your power point the i the point that fires have been created from your power lines and what have you have you folks looked into doing some type of changes and improvements within your transmission infrastructure in order to avoid these sparks and things because this last fire  i didn't realize was well from my i guess you said from there power lines i know there is a there is previously some big fires in west maui that fire chief did mention it was the cause of some power lines up above the mountains so and what role or cooley on a does your company play when these incidents occur if say that we are always looking at you know operating and maintaining our system as best we can and it's not the intention but it does happen and we do work very closely with the fire department in terms of the response and we do diggin after an event so sparks cannot trigger burns or i mean it just seems like that's what's been occurring in heavy winds i mean this hurricane is going to create some heavy mph and i guess that friction or whatever creates the sparks which would then you know light up the dead brush that's that's on mountainsides or what have you so i mean i appreciate your comments but i'd it really give me confidence i know things happen but you know these utilities on these type of accidents and things like well i know the utilities are required if incident reports whether it's accidents or telephone pole goes down or some incident you know that's occurring by virtue of you know a transmission spark line so we do keep track of that i think you know the utilities are held accountable based on their metrics for safe operations and  in terms of those types of fires not only cause damage but outages as well as take out polls that that fires a part of that might be i mean i'm you know part of it might be vegetation management in cooperation with  with the with whatever whoever the landowner is on which the easement of the transmission lines that lie in wait you know it's really hard with that with a brush fire but maybe some of those problems could be mitigated to an extent by by more active vegetation management either taking out the dry brush so that you know or creating situations where if there is a fire i know they do send it is california with with the drought conditions where they've tried to manage the dry brush a bit either chopping back or putting fire wall with a big to keep the brush in a way so that it burns into itself and it doesn't spread like a wildfire they've they've they've got ways that they've make the brush kind of burn into itself so that when the firefighters come it's a little bit more easier to control so perhaps some of those mitigation strategies but the utilities are required to report to us and incident reports and and to to explain their vegetation management if that's what's contributing to some of this if it's on  and i guess quickly to the true large solar farms that you folks are mention means whereabouts are they and what stages are they in at this time know i guess if it's a light on luna had no idea that there is some idea of this even occurring there the developer is responsible for you know getting all appropriate permits and whatnot so i'm not exactly sure which ones are required but so how do you think that there's a opportunity for us as a county or i don't know in the state i guess it's a state law in other areas we don't utilize it here in hawaii yet but some way that that can be incorporated into our system do you know what that is and if there's a way that we could i don't know utilize that concept and you want to hear i don't want to feel that mr ago and then followed by anyone on the panel i think it's it's another mechanism but it's been tried in many areas and sometimes a successful and sometimes not it depends on how how that and three would form how they would but i think i would look more towards the community solar i think that there may be ways to take advantage of their better you know and be able to supply the power to be utility through the utility lines in the back to the savings to those residents ok and so for people who community trees aggregation is a program that allows cities and counties to buy and or generate electricity for residents and businesses within their areas and as in marin the transmission the meter reading would have is all done by p g and e and then the code the community it's like you're kind of like  innocence where the people who purchased the monies goes back it's a nonprofit the monies go back into it to improve and expand and they have different choices of one how much renewable energy they want to buy and it's prices can be high but the people are looking at it as the sustainable renewable type of we of getting energy to their to their homes and businesses so i mean as an equal you're not in the farming business you know with the release of a lot of these somehow you know make it into an energy for you to purchase from a us or i don't know some type of community cooperation collaboration of sorts in a way just to or have you been looking into all these open up fields that are  currying and somehow you know looking into producing a type of cooperate anything to help you know offset your oil needs i mentioned earlier that we're working with an s because they're interested in keeping their land in agriculture so to the extent that bio crops crop to energy type of arrangement or crop to feel works i think we'll certainly be looking at that and to adjust your model that you're talking about i think we certainly are interested in looking at that as another customer option because as commissioner commissioner keep us said you know we are in the inclinations that that stayed up but we have been looking at different ways to provide customers choices in terms of using energy and maybe even pricing and all that so it's really odd the adverse mix of resource customer programs distributed resource centralized systems that i think will be part of our future ok we're very good looking forward to further discussion on that i think for our energy commissioner on the county electricity generated from hydro power it's just simply that you can imagine if you're pulling water uphill out of the ground and then were to decide to bring it down to a lower elevation you could just simply throttle that with  valve or you could reduce its energy or reduce its head by running it through a turban that's in line with the pipe and give you the opportunity to then extract that energy back out that energy it has because of the elevation it's coming down and so it's really in this sort of configuration would be to since the well would be pumping in the hydro portion would be producing at the same time really just to give you a better efficiency of the overall system so who who's going to be paying the bill and they're going to continue the demonstration but it was a demonstration project and it was always slated to end at the end of february twenty seventeen they are looking at sort of a next step from that outside of the demonstration project where it might become more of a business but they are not they really trying to keep the assets here they recognize that it is become very foundational to going into e v in maui and contributing to the whole community so they are trying to work out right now how to make it possible for the assets to remain here and we're trying to help with that secretary of the department of energy for the united states and in his discussions that we've had with him regarding moving forward would alter and i think it was in renewables he would express it he's not   to make america more independent but his approach was going to the manufacturers the tech companies and have them drive the innovation and efficiencies in providing better pricing to the american public in my discussions with him in as i understand it part of it was competition whole why we have basically a different type of competition because by structure of monopoly and welcome competition since it is flushable customer choices allowed or are we going to continue to go with them on top of this structure that we've had the the competitive bidding framework which one of our recent orders we said also needs to be revisited and refreshed and we talked about that in terms that are of people which even the care you see uses in terms of getting we press for proposals from private third parties that develop projects or can then sell you know electricity or storage combined types of resources to the utility for for for grid purposes so the r p process which  the clean energy initiative before i even got to the commission still exists there's a competitive bidding framework independent power producers are able to come and provide you know development projects third party projects to  to to provide generation with respect to some of the distributed energy resources i know that recently there's been other third parties that are providing demand response which is the the integrated grid of the future the things that dr moore nice talks about the technology companies like stem jelly some of the third party folks like and phase they're trying to reach out to customers on the customer side of it to provide a different alternative for  ancillary services to the grid so that already does exist i think we are your fundamental question is really one for the community to to answer for itself but currently under under law the utility as was pointed out earlier in the  has of the the franchise electric franchise it was granted by a king kong cala over one hundred years ago and for me coal ninety five years ago and that franchise exists it's part of a regulatory compact while they are an investor own utility an investor owned monopoly part of that is a regulatory compact that they must serve all customers and do so in the public interest that just and fair reasonable rates and that's what the public utility commission oversees and reviews and make sure that they're held accountable for if there is a franchise it is under legislative creation it was created by the kingdom of boy it exists and it is the reality we deal with there is still room for competition within that structure through the competitive bidding framework and i think the third party partnering is something that hopefully the innovators and i know that secretary monies is a very strong supporter as are many of the large customers here in a way of the energy accelerator which electric itself is a is a key stakeholder and and that's where the innovation comes from is is these companies that come with new ideas to provide new resources new types of technology you know and in fact stem was one of those companies that were funded by the energy accelerator to come up with this software technology the system that allows customers on their side to have storage renewable energy whether it's in in the case of stamps projects or p v and to provide that to the grid as an ancillary service and that before i mean five years ago they didn't exist so technology innovation comes from outside the utility from outside the franchise but it's still within the current structure able to be incorporated into demand response programs and through our p s and the competitive bidding framework but that is the existing structure on less the legislature or someone else makes a change to that and that is what we oversee in the public interest my concern you know with innovation and the rethinking i was commissioner and we deal still prehistoric and unable to capture the innovation what good is that you know since it can be implemented in such i mean possible our kick or old system that cannot handle the new demands of twenty first century so part of that is where we would our existing infrastructure because we keep hearing that we're at the cap we cannot have any more solar projects or additional independent p p ages because we've reached capacity whatever that may be is that because of the current type of infrastructure that's in place and we're not willing to invest in twenty first century infrastructure i don't know but as being the biggest would like i'm interested because we haven't heard or i didn't hear and i apologize if you didn't mention it but nobody has talked about the challenges to reaching the renewable goals and for me one of the things that i find interesting and by d o d initiative is what our military is doing to help why they're doing their own energy projects my new standing from deal would be is that they're going to be independent and separate from the civilian grid what does this mean to our renewable goals and if any does it impact my wee county since the majority of infrastructure is oahu but pearl harbor has become school field wheelers i don't know but overall does it impact us mr macleod going to take an attack on the military side you know their idea has been micro grid and we had a couple people use that terminology so what they're really planning to do is that they can power military operations and they're not planning on being generally an exporter maybe an emergency for a little bit but you know their their model and why it effects competition though is is just in terms of cost so once enough people are putting in these systems and people start getting a comparison between what it costs to make the power and storage you know then then you will see competition going forward technology advanced metering infrastructure or a smart grid our smart grid technologies are going to give us greater capability to be able to provide customers more information about how they're electricity and to have two way communication right now we send power to you know the different locations and we don't necessarily know if one if you have p v if it's sending power into the grid discussion but one of your conditions that the council put on was that half of the acres more or less of the sixty five point seven eight because it was to be useful to a new day of energy projects can you give us a comment on we just mentioned that we have plans to retire early power plant and that's looking like in the twenty twenty to twenty twenty three timeframe and so we are waiting for the commission to open up proceeding to amendment to the ordinance regarding the total amount of electrical output or if you want to change some of the uses of the property that we agreed to successes in and i think freely is not bad because we learn from it so if you've been trying to do things to improve our situation in on this county i don't have a problem with some feeling to it because i no we're not earning a return on our rate base we are multiple of our interest expense is what our lenders want to see so we don't get rewarded necessarily through an investor owned a more rate they should have the more return on equity you can earn and they're right you have to earn it but it's a that the regulation is unsanitized putting more more rate base into service where as a co op we have to earn our an interest and earn we have a minimal amount to keep our lenders happy but we don't really have any incentive to put more into service we have we focus and they do as well but it's a slightly different when we focus on a bottom line on rates  is what we're or pushing for and you know we hear it every day from our members out in the street that get the rates down that's we just did a customer survey which it's proving quite a bit on co i this year over the last year but of course rates are staying down so elected board very very sensitive to rates were or looking at rates every day and going back i've been anxious to go back to your prior comment about competition and we look as we have competition and collide and they can sta working is a utility of twenty years ago is going to keep in business whatever the form is you're wrong there's a lot of alternatives out there now in the utilities that have the franchises have to make sure that they have the best value or long term we're not going to be in business and there's a lot of advantages to a utility with the franchise we have the grid we have the scale and p v is much cheaper utility scale batteries are much cheaper utility scale there's an awful lot of advantages we have but we've got to continue to focus on cost control focus on working with these smart high tech companies to bring the best technologies in the best way that we can for the people in the state or we won't be in business there is that level of competition i appreciate your comments thank you very much chairman i know it's been a long day so thank you for my opportunity thank you members seeing that there's no more questions i have the final say in terms of the question so i this go down the line and you can either respond to one of the two questions or at least subject matters one is the power supply improvement plan and integrated independent power so maybe a two minute or one and a half minute or let's just keep it short one minute conclusion and your response to those two subject matters just pick one of the two ok we'll start from we'll start with our energy commissioner down on the record as i think your left thank you i think it is goes back to what was mentioned about competition when you're looking even at both of those you're trying to find out how can you bring more competition to not only just drive the price down but to have something that's different or something that is unique and i and speaking with others the point is that we don't know what's going to be in thirty years so planning today as if we're delivering an energy in a certain way is hard to arrive at that result if somebody said thirty years ago that they want to sell you a you know a camera on your phone it's also going to be a recorder could be your word processor it could be you know everything maybe soon it will also tell you when your refrigerator and your dishwasher should run you wouldn't you'd say i was just weird out know what that is on a what you're selling me  plan for that today is nearly impossible you could imagine in thirty years that yes the wires don't even matter it's so cheap that everybody could somehow with some magic device if you will you know generate their own power  storage and so i think when we get to this power supply improvement plan and looking at whatever structure might oversee this we have to take into account that future that it's that we need to take steps now that don't link us to the idea in a planet or that we're locked for twenty years or thirty years paying for something when twenty or thirty years it can definitely be different thank you  if you had to conclude ok thanks to the power supply improvement plan you know we're definitely going into it trying to earn our customers you know business we're going in there believing that there's lots of competition where we're trying to get as much stakeholder input as we can so we can move this state forward in a way that everyone feels is best and is best for everyone and  well yeah that does mean mainly that you know we're trying to make the least regret decisions early on sort of give us the most options later on when new technologies come along we're not locked into decisions  you know that we made ten years ago so definitely try to keep an open mind and do the best we can for customers very good thank you that's all it regards the power supply improvement planning process i just want to say i think we're lucky to not be on a wahoo in terms of pricing in renewable energy potential choli of the big island and while we have great resources to help stabilize our pricing long term it's a much bigger challenge in my opinion and i wahoo and i'll be fascinated to see what they do over there to try to control costs and set them self self up to meet the renewable standards it's magnitudes higher over there than it is for us we have so we're lucky we can be happy to be and the smaller and smaller populated islands thank you scott what what i would say certainly for the community engagement side of it is it be nice if it came up with the lavers and of the power supply improvement plan we have got to bring our residents along with these major decisions and directions that we are trying to implement and they want to know they want to know what's going on i mean here we are we are certainly much more informed than they are but we are still all struggling with that as well so you can imagine what they are they're struggling with trying to understand so my concern is that if they are not informed that it could lead to them either advocating or making poor choices and that would not be good for any of us so i hope that as this possibly improvement plan goes for that there is a way that  public reaches is taken into consideration to make it you know something more understandable to the lay person thank you thank you very tired mr mccollum i guess i'm not a huge fan of the power supply improvement plan and i guess two main reasons i'm number one i think that a lot of the choices are driven by something called stranded cost and one of the early testifiers mentioned that that you know the choices about when to retire the unit seem to always coincide when when the depreciation and so it doesn't look like the planning was what's best for the community it was you know what's going to solve that problem and you know the other piece of it is the p s a p still presumes that we are selecting all these technologies going out to the future rather than going out to the market and saying we want to buy thirty megawatts of renewables what's the best price we can get we were still at that stage of trying to say what is going to supply the power rather than you know what's public utilities commission so just wanted to inform the public of that something they could they know from there are at least an order that was issued but other than that i'm not able to comment and i thank the chair thank you so members i think very much the  panel it was a wonderful discussion is something that it's there we can you know move forward on and on some of these subject matters so i'd like to think commissioner akiba doug macleod