Hawaii is on track to pass legislation this year requiring
the state to go 100 percent renewable by 2040.
Earlier this month, committees in the Hawaii House and
Senate both unanimously recommended bills that would raise the state’s
Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) from the current target of 70 percent by
2030 to the ultimate goal of 100 percent by 2040. Hawaii has had an RPS since
2001, and right now the state gets just over 21 percent of its power from
renewable sources — a 12 percent increase in just six years.
This is huge for our state’s future.
“Even our utility is saying we can hit 65 percent by 2030,
so 100 percent is definitely doable,” Sen. Mike Gabbard (D), sponsor of the
Senate bill, SB 2181, and chair of Hawaii’s Energy and Environment Committee,
told ThinkProgress. “This is huge for our state’s future. Each year, we spend
$3 to $5 billion importing fossil fuels to power our economy. Our electricity
bills are roughly three times the national average.”
The Aloha state is 2,500 miles from Los Angeles — about the
same distance as New York City to L.A. — and its energy situation bears little
resemblance to the mainland’s. Along with Alaska and Texas, it is one of only
three states to have its own electricity grid — in fact, it has three of them
for three different islands. In 2013, the state had the highest electricity prices in
the nation due to its heavy reliance on imports. More than two-thirds of electricity
generation on the island archipelago comes from imported oil; in the
rest of the U.S., oil accounts for less than one percent of electricity
generation.
As recently six years ago, more than 90 percent of Hawaii’s
yearly electricity generation came from coal and oil. With renewable
technologies rapidly advancing, Hawaii’s abundant solar, wind, hydro, and
geothermal sources are moving in quickly as replacements for costly fossil
fuels.
“We are on the leading edge of the 21st century renewable
energy transformation,” Chris Lee (D), Sponsor of the House version of the
bill, HB 623, and chair of the House Energy and Environment Committee, told
ThinkProgress. Lee said he’s been pushing for a 100 percent RPS bill for three
years, but that this is the first year there’s been overwhelming support to
move forward.
In the Hawaiian Senate the Democratic Party holds the
largest majority of any state legislative chamber, with 24 out of 25 seats. The
Hawaii House is nearby as one-sided, with Democrats holding 44 out of 51 seats.
The state’s new Democratic Governor David Ige, who spent 20 years in the state
senate, appears to be generally
supportiveof the ambitious clean energy goals, though he is yet to endorse
the recent legislation.
If the new bills become law technical and economic challenges
will remain in meeting the target. Lee said that the state’s isolation is a
major obstacle and that battery storage will play a key role in “unlocking the
potential of all renewables like solar and wind.” In 2013, Hawaii has just over 600
megawatts of installed renewable energy capacity, with wind, biomass
and geothermal making up the bulk of the capacity. Wind power accounted for 42
percent of the state’s total utility-scale renewable generation in 2013.
Hawaii’s solar industry has taken off in the last five
years, doubling in size every year. According to Lee, utilities have started to
push back against this “cheaper alternative” causing numbers to fall dramatically
as utilities “began refusing to connect people’s solar panels to the grid,
claiming that there were ‘technical problems’ that, as it now turns out, simply
did not exist.”
“It’s the same kind of obstructive tactic to prevent
competition that ALEC has advocated for years,” said Lee. ALEC, or the American
Legislative Exchange Council, is a secretive
organization that brings together conservative politicians and major
corporate interests. In recent years the group has led a coordinated,
state-level, anti-clean energy and anti-EPA crusade waged through model
legislation.
At the same time Hawaiian legislators are advancing their
home-grown clean energy bills, the state is undergoing a major transition at
the utility level. In December, NextEra Energy, a utility company based in
Florida, agreed to buy all three of Hawaii’s electric utilities, owned by
Hawaiian Electric Industries, for about $6 billion. Until now Hawaii has had
three separate power grids on the Big Island, Maui and Oahu. In Hawaii, NextEra
is planning to invest heavily in transmission and distribution infrastructure,
including a $600 million undersea cable connecting the Oahu and Maui power
grids. The utility also plans on replacing some amount of imported oil with
imported Liquefied National Gas (LNG).
The verdict is still out on the impact NextEra’s move into
Hawaii will have on the state’s clean energy development.
If anywhere can solve these challenges, Hawaii can.
“While some are excited a bout the potential of NextEra’s
capacity to invest in grid modernization and other infrastructure necessary to
support renewable energy, others are worried about their use of LNG and lack of
support for customer-sited distributed generation,” Jeff Mikulina, Executive
Director of the Blue Planet Foundation, a Hawaiian NGO that supports clean
energy, told ThinkProgress. Mikulina said this uncertainty underscores the need
for a “clear policy framework” in which the utility can operate. He considers
the 100 percent renewable legislation part of the “societal and political will”
needed to achieve these goals in the near future.
“We shouldn’t forget that Hawaii has some of the world’s steadiest
wind resources, sun that shines almost every day, waves that pound our shores,
and a volcano in our back yard,” he said. “So if anywhere can solve these
challenges, Hawaii can.”
Lee is more uncertain than Mikulina regarding NextEra’s move
into Hawaii, saying the utility has already opposed all intervention by local
groups to ensure the deal is in the public interest.
“There is growing fear that in order to make that money back
they will have to eliminate competition from rooftop solar and other renewables
and keep our prices artificially high,” said Lee, who sees an unpromising
precedent from the company’s action in Florida, where “they have thrown
millions into political contributions, repealed the state’s renewable energy
goals, and eliminated competition leaving consumers captive to the utilities’
monopoly.”
Lee has proposed a number of other bills this session that
would bolster the clear policy framework that Mikulina mentioned. These include HB 1286,
which recently passed the House and would amend the state’s Planning Act to
ensure the elimination of dependence on imported fuels completely in an effort
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He has also proposed a bill that sets a
goal of net-zero energy consumption for the state’s university system by 2035.
While Hawaiians can make pretty straightforward economic and
energy security arguments for renewable power, cutting back on greenhouse gases
and confronting climate change is also a priority for this island state as sea
level rise and temperature increases threaten the fragile and unique ecosystem.
In an op-ed in
the Honolulu Star-Advertiser in early March, former Hawaiian Governor George
Ariyoshi advocated for the 100 percent renewable target, saying that “climate
reality is everywhere: eroding coastlines, dying coral reefs, droughts, floods,
extreme weather.”
According to the
2014 National Climate Assessment, Hawaii is at great risk from the impacts of
climate change. Sea level rise will cause saltwater to intrude on the island’s
limited freshwater supply. Increased temperatures and changing rainfall
patterns will stress native plants and animals. Tourism, an industry that
accounts for a quarter of the state’s economy, will suffer — the loss of
Waikīkī Beach alone could lead to an annual loss of $2 billion in visitor
expenditures according to the report.
“Knowing that the single most important thing we can do
about all this is to stop burning fossil fuels, will we commit today to
securing hope for a stable climate tomorrow?” Ariyoshi asks in the op-ed.
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