| As is usually the case, it's complicated. The government has actually taken steps to push us down that road by mandating that all generation is renewable by 2045. Of course that's easy to say and harder to do, but I'm not sure it should be up to the government on how we get there. The entity with the most responsibility to get there is HECO, which has a bit of a mixed record. On one hand they have been pretty good about encouraging customer generation with net metering, and later grid supply options. Unfortunately there is a bit of an engineering problem there as we have pretty much reached the saturation of customer solar such that in the middle of cold sunny days, there is more electricity being produced than consumed (see duck/nessie curve). This would sound like a good thing, but with an extremely old grid and no utility level storage, it's kind of not. A more reactive utility perhaps would have done a better job upgrading the grid to allow for distributed generation, but HECO spent the better part of the last 5 years trying to get themselves sold to a mainland utility to drive returns to shareholders instead of placing institutional focus on solving current or future problems for ratepayers. Serving two masters, etc. Kauai has a much more interesting situation as their utility went through that whole sale to the mainland thing in the 90's, which failed and provided the opportunity for the ratepayers to buy the owners out and created a cooperative utility. I don't live there but from the outside looking in it looks like they are being much more proactive about renewables and more importantly, storage. Absent some kind of massive game changer in wave or wind generation, the whole game is really storage. I know a lot of people who would love to install solar, but HECO is already at max capacity absent a way to store electricity at scale. Finally the part that gets talked about the least is economic inequality. Hawaii's real estate is expensive, but it is driven by investment from outside the state, making it almost impossible for people who live here to afford homes. That interacts with the energy piece because you have to be a homeowner to benefit from solar, so solar contributes to wealth inequality as people who are fortunate enough to own homes also reap the benefits of government subsidies and cheap electricity, while people too poor to own homes are left paying the retail rates. And this is before we even get into the distortions of behavior that net metering encourages when you treat a kwh of solar in the day as equal to a kwh of petroleum at night. |