2014-12-18 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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LEED silver, we have on-site renewable which is photovoltaic array, a storage system of electric vehicles. So we’ll also try to do beyond on-site renewables like the photovoltaic array, we’ll try to combine electric vehicles or in the future we’re getting three hydrogen buses. So we try to do that all on site. The more stuff you do that you can wrap into one system, the more efficient you become. Our fourth thing that we’re trying to do is utility grid initiatives. The grid is 100 years old and that technology needs to change to integrate either more solar, integrate more wind, integrate more of the things that will drive our energy cost down for County of Hawai‘i where we’ve said since I started with this Administration which was five years ago, is we don’t just want renewable energy we want cost effective renewable energy. We’re at a price point at forty cents a kilowatt hour, where we can compete with this utility pricing at a lower rate. So we can drive cost down to the twenty cents per kilowatt hour rating is what we believe. The next one is energy demonstration projects. That’s just an exciting cutting edge economic engine that we feel our island is well suited for. So the Natural Energy Lab is a place you can take people within two-by-two miles and show them algae to biodiesel, photovoltaic, OTEC, storage so we believe in energy demonstration sites just like we believe in our astronomy sector that it drives economic development, people visiting, eco-tourism and things like that. So we believe we’re in the place to test things like hydrogen and we believe that will be an economic development engine for our County with a low footprint. And then finally on that chart is economics, effectiveness and education. So we always try to analyze from economic standpoint, we don’t just do things. So everything we do, we do with economic trigger. Next slide please, and that is kind of our portfolio what we’ve done since 2012 to 2014. We’ve replaced 1,000 of these lamps and maybe you’ve seen them. We’ve replaced 1,000 lamps with a 50% more efficient bulb, which provides better lighting. It also darkens the skies for our astronomical community. We’ve intervened in so many PUC dockets that it’s hard to count. We started our electric vehicle fleet and we’ve done efficiency retro fits and no cost initiatives like at the West Hawai‘i Civic Center we have a solar photovoltaic array where we paid no money for it, but the power we receive is half the utility rate. So that’s how the developer makes their money and that’s how we save. What we’ve done, what we’re doing in 2014, 15 and 16, we’re doing a master solar photovoltaic RFP for all of our facilities that can take solar that is a good play on and also adding storage in sites that are critical where we can micro grid off the system if need be, if there’s a hurricane or civil defense event or we need a critical facility to have its own power. We are making the transition to biodiesel. We are going to put that in our Mass Transit and County fleet and we’re going to do the total island street lamp. So that will be 9,000 additional street lamps so that people can see, distinguish between caution lights and street lamps; and we can darken the night skies and also save 50% on our $2 million energy expenditure for a year, which would, so we have a million dollar savings from doing that. Our long term vision is to be leader in the renewable energy; we already are and we’re going to continue that leadership. We’re looking at cost effective renewable energy in the 50%- 100% range and then storage is the big technology play for everybody who’s doing renewable energy in the United States and around the world. So we’re going to do storage data tests at places like the Natural Energy Lab. We have a Memorandum of Understanding with HELCO and the Natural Energy Lab in storage technologies that will be a big economic play in the future, who can get best storage options and then sell that around the world. We’re looking at storing our excess geothermal, hydro and PV to things like hydrogen to power our buses. There will be two buses at the Volcanoes 5