2014-12-18 Cost of Government Commission Minutes

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sector that spins off a $100 million in economic development benefit for this island. Research and Development is kind of the economic development department of the County so also try to wear my economic development hat when I’m doing projects like how to darken the night skies. Again, we’re at the West Hawai‘i Civic Center today, it’s a LEED silver with a 250 photovoltaic array, it’s also got a storage battery which powers us at night and we are 100% renewable right now, the PV is cranking so we’re over 100% sending electricity to the grid and getting paid on it. So right now we’re 100% renewable with HELCO paying us in a monthly check. It’s about $2,000-$3,000 that we get from HELCO for photovoltaic array. We have five electric vehicles. We’re testing them to see if they’re efficient, we already paid back the cost of them with our PV array and our battery and driving those back and forth to Hilo. I was in one car yesterday that had 45,000 miles on it; we had it for two years and people are using them. We got them in full usage and it saves about, in all electric mode, it’s equivalent of $2.00 a gallon of gas and now the gas prices are down, it’s not as much savings as we had when gas was near $5, but still we’re saving on every drive in electric mode. So we intend to do more with things like that in the future. The next shot is a 250 photovoltaic array from a higher view plain and the next shot, which is slide 19, shows you how the energy is produced in green and the photovoltaic array in beige color or orange color is what the building is using, the building usage has a photovoltaic production (inaudible), so we’re basically producing from 9 am to 4 pm and we’re putting more electricity on the facility than it needs so that, that area above the beige is what we’re getting paid on by HELCO. The next project we’re working on currently is a wind farm at the site I discussed earlier, Lālāmilo, the best wind site in America. The winds over there blow 70 mph or 20 mph constant. We’re going to put up a 3 MW wind farm, we’ve already awarded it to the same people who did the North Wind project. It will be the same turbines that are at the North Wind project, so we’re happy it’s going to be a redundancy in parts that can be changed out; and the projection in savings is up to $2 million to the water rate payer because the water rate payer gets an energy surcharge that we’re passing on in their energy bill. So if we’re using HELCO energy to power water pumps, we have to pass on that charge; if we’re able to power our own sites like with the wind farm, we can pass on savings. Ms. Kelly: I got a question for you. Mr. Rolston: Sure. Ms. Kelly: There was a previous wind farm right above Mauna Kea hotel, Wai’ula’ula project subdivision part of Mauna Kea. Why was it torn down? Mr. Rolston: I think, are you talking about Lālāmilo or may be Monty Richards or, was it very old like 20 years old? Ms. Kelly: I don’t think it was that old. It could be, but there was some wind turbines there and they were taken down. Mr. Rolston: Yeah. This island has done the first wind projects in the United States, so those probably were very old Jacobs wind turbines, which were made of plywood and basically that technology was so old and maybe had, wind farms do have problems mechanical failures. There engines burn out; and the Jacobs wind turbines, 8