2020-08-26 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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into legal issues? Well, an energy saving performance contract could be the umbrella to do water recycling. So you would bring in a company like Hawaiʻi Water—I just throw that out there, I have no financial connections—that has that kind of experience, has access to cheap capital right now, because money is cheap, and could bring the water from the treatment plant up to R-1 and put in the distribution system as a design-build-operate contract under the umbrella of the energy saving performance contract. So because this is a specific state law that enables energy saving performance contracts, it gets around all the legal issues that Bill has raised previously. So that’s one thing. The other thing—and I sent Riley an email just before your meeting, Mr. Chairman—was to how to rethink what is happening with the methane at the landfill at West Hawaiʻi. Rather than looking at just the resource from the exis?ng landﬁll, you have to really rethink it and look at a bioreactor technology. I’ve toured a couple of these in Virginia, for instance, where you create a cell within the landfill that acts as a bioreactor. So that increases the breakdown of organic material. And so that a long term benefit is that it helps save your landfill space. But it also increases gas production, so then it increases the resource value of the landfill. So one way you do that is you add water to the system, because the microbes produce methane better when there’s more water in the system. So you can add that by adding wet sludge from Kealakehe. You can take wet sludge from the Mauna Lani wastewater treatment plant, which is two miles down the road. You can take it from the Waikoloa wastewater treatment plant which is nearby. And you put that wet sludge in there to act as the inoculant for methane production. So methane is produced by organic breakdown of material, and methane is released. So you want to recapture that, and you want to create a cell within the landfill specific to do ______. I’m talking to you from Bremerton, Washington. We have a landfill. All of the trash trucks in Bremerton, which is comparable in population to the Big Island, comes from landfill gas. So you could just—instead of, as Riley’s proposing, go with a fuel cell technology, converting methane over to hydrogen, you could do compressed natural gas. So that’s another opportunity. And I suggested that you use the Landfill Methane Outreach Program through EPA to fund the types of studies that Bill’s talking about that would look at the opportunity that would be created if you shifted over to a bioreactor technology. It turns out that Waste Management, the folks that run the West Hawaiʻi landﬁll, are the very ones who ran the landfill in Virginia that I toured. So they have the expertise in bioreactor technology, so you want them to partner with the ESCO company to make that happen. They have the expertise, they have the contract for the landfill, everything is set in place. All you need to do is direct them to start looking at a bioreactor where you’re going to increase your gas output. And once you do that, then the economics get much better. Otherwise it’s just a demonstration project for ________. What’s the point in that? Why not go big? There’s an opportunity to go big. Take all of the greenwaste that you’re generating in West Hawaiʻi and put that into the cell. Make that part of the fuel. So add the sludge, add the greenwaste, put it in the cell where you’re maximizing gas production, and that’s how you do it. Don’t just recapture landfill that’s mixed in with other types of waste products. You’re just not going to get the type of output that you need. And that’s my two cents. Commissioner Adams said she agrees with thinking bigger and with tying in Waste Management, since they have extraordinary experience with recycling and managing landfill materials. However, she is concerned with the wastewater side and questioned whether the 8