2014-12-18 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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3. DISCUSSION, QUESTION AND ANSWER SESSION WITH WILL ROLSTON, ENERGY COORDINATOR FOR THE COUNTY OF HAWAI‘I Ms. Maddox: So Will, you’re next on our agenda. Thank you very much for joining us. Mr. Rolston: Thank you for inviting me. Ms. Maddox: So we have the handout. Do they have it there in Kona? So we have your handout. Do you want to walk us through that and then allow us the opportunity to ask questions? Mr. Rolston: Certainly. Ms. Maddox: Great, thank you. Mr. Rolston: Thank you for having me. Thank you very much Council for all the good works that you’re doing. I’m the Energy Coordinator. I am part of Research and Development under Director Laverne Omori and Deputy Director Donn Mende; and, as far as the Energy Program for the County of Hawai‘i, I am the coordinator for the entire Energy Program for the County. Every County either has one energy coordinator or commissioner and a coordinator or a sustainability manager and coordinator. We have one, so we have the energy coordinator and that is William Rolston, me. So the presentation today is about what we’re doing with energy past, current and future. So the title is Transforming Energy in the County of Hawai‘i and on the second slide, it’s just an overview of where we are and how we’re separated from the nearest land mass and our total population. The third slide is a detail of the island wide, that we are the largest island, about twice all the other islands combined. We have a population of 190,000 and growing. Our peak electricity and compared to other grids I’ve worked on the mainland, I’ve worked (inaudible), we are a very small grid; you would say 200 megawatts is a rather small grid if you will. We do have, what’s significant about us is we’re not connected to any another grid. It’s like on the mainland, we were connected to New Jersey and Pennsylvania and other places like California are connected to Oregon and Washington. So, fundamentally, we’re on our own, you know, if a Civil Defense event occurs or we want to get lower energy prices from say big hydro in Oregon we can’t do that, or Washington. We’re on our own and that’s why we have a system, we deal with an enormous amount of redundancy if something happens to go down. So we do carry a lot of capital cost in the, because we need to be a little bit more redundant and resilient. Next slide, and interrupt me please at any time for questions if you would like. The next slide goes over what our system comprises, so it’s slide four. It’s a 200 megawatt electric system; the base load power comes from geothermal at 38 megawatts. Our south wind is 20 megawatts and our north wind is 10.5 megawatts. What’s significant about the south and north wind is they’re the best wind farms you can possibly have in the United States area. They’re the highest, we say capacity factor, meaning the wind blows more than 60% of the time. So we don’t just have wind farms, we have world class wind farms, so the best in the world and the County of Hawai‘i is actually looking at another wind farm in the Lālāmilo area which is just mauka from the Puakō area and it is determined that it is the best wind farm site in the State of Hawai‘i which makes it the best wind farm site in the United States. So next slide is the, 2