2020-08-26 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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5. NEW BUSINESS Chair Pequeño extended his appreciation to Steve Holmes and Riley Saito for attending and sharing their knowledge and experience with the commission. a. Presentation by Steve Holmes on energy savings performance contracts. 1 Mr. Holmes: I am a former U.S. Department of Energy national energy champion. I’ve traveled around the country helping local governments address their infrastructure problems using innovative financing. And one of the tools in the toolbox for that are what are called ESPCs, or energy savings performance contracts. Hawaiʻi actually leads the na?on in investments from energy savings performance contracts. Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into the state of Hawaiʻi for projects that are funded using this mechanism. Honolulu Airport is a good example. They’re going in and retrofitting, putting in energy efficient lighting and HVAC systems, and they’re putting in solar. So it’s a very powerful tool. It’s been around since 1996, and I think it’s an opportunity to look at some of the wastewater problems and some of the solid waste problems that the commission has to address, at a time where there are limited county funds available for these types of projects. It’s third-party financing. It means it’s somebody else’s money. These companies are able to leverage rebates from Hawaiʻi Energy, for instance—so if you do a lighting retrofit, you can get cash rebates for that, so that becomes part of the financing. They also leverage tax credit financing. So if they put solar on your buildings, say the wastewater treatment plant at Kealakehe, they can write off 60% of the cost of that project to tax credit financing. They also have varied access to 5-year depreciation schedules on many forms of equipment, like pumps and motors and things like that. None of that is accessible by the county directly. So if the county just wanted to put solar panels on its own, it would lose those types of opportunities to bring that kind of extra money in to make the project work. So we’ll have Riley take the portion of the presentation this morning, Mr. Chairman, dealing with solid waste and with the transportation connection that I think is very innovative, and I give Riley a lot of credit. So we’re doing a tag team today, and I will focus in on wastewater stuff. One of the issues that Bill has presented to you—Bill Kucharski, our director—has been the issue of infiltration in the wastewater lines. So there’s an energy connection. Every gallon that comes in through cracks and breaks in the sewer line is a gallon that has to be pumped for miles out to the treatment plant. So that’s where the energy connection for using an ESPC, energy savings performance contract, comes in. You also have an energy cost associated with treating that water that’s coming into the system unnecessarily. So it eats capacity in your lines, it eats capacity at the treatment plant, and it has huge energy costs. So if you can prevent that, then that’s a big savings, and it provides an opportunity for financing mechanisms using this type of an approach. The Department of Water Supply is actually moving ahead on a similar concept, where they are putting in Doppler flow meters that register water that’s leaking out of their pipes. So the analogy here is the opposite, where you’re trying to prevent water 1 Minutes in italics are verbatim. 3