Realities sink in as Hawaii ditches coal

Reader interest is high on the state-mandated closure of the AES coal-fired plant being retired in September. Energy reporter Sophia Compton’s recent article noting that Hawaii just received its last shipment of coal prompted calls and emails like I haven’t seen since Covid lockdowns shuttered businesses statewide.

Readers want to know, what happens next and what will it cost?

The answer, in part, followed right away. Hawaiian Electric announced this past weekend that residential rates will go up 7%, and the varying rates paid by businesses will also increase.

The coal-fired plant is meant to be replaced by the Kapolei Energy Storage System being built for Hawaiian Electric by Mainland-based Plus Power at an estimated cost of $500 million over its 20-year lifespan.

In the short term, however, that half-billion price isn’t why rates are going up, per the utility. That’s due the one-two punch of global Covid policies messing up the supply chains behind upcoming Hawaii renewable energy projects. This is necessitating that the KES be charged with oil-derived electricity at first, and oil prices are spiking.

These are not unique problems, they’re global. For example, I’ve read this week that electricity bills in the United Kingdom will soon soar. “[T]he average household would be paying £355 a month, instead of £164 a month currently,” the BBC recently reported.

Why? The current price of oil, and the Covid-policy disruptions delaying new renewable sources.

And those sources turn out not to be as reliable as billed. According to a UK government document, renewable generation fell more than 9% in 2021, from a record high in 2020.

“The decrease is mostly the result of less favourable weather conditions (particularly wind speeds but also sun hours and rainfall).”

Global examples abound of what the green revolution means for citizens and businesses.

For more than a century, the mission of electrical utilities (as with phone and cable companies) had been to make service ubiquitous, affordable and reliable. The green mission put upon them instead makes power ubiquitously expensive and unreliable.

Without a stable renewable base, like nuclear energy, Hawaii policymakers have us relying on … the weather.

The Legislature mandated that we ditch coal. Policymakers approved replacing it with battery storage, fed by non-petroleum sources — I can’t bring myself to say “renewable” in this sentence; windmills and batteries don’t just grow like daisies, their ingredients are mined out of the Earth — like wind and solar.

A question the politicians never seem to have considered: What will recharge our giant battery back-ups if the weather doesn’t cooperate? In 2006, Hawaii was blanketed in heavy rain for 41 straight days. What do we do when that happens again, or if a severe storm or hurricane trashes solar panels and windmills?

Maybe the PUC should mandate the construction of utility-scale hamster wheels for us to run in, because Hawaii’s grids are totally isolated.

We cannot do what Texas did when the weather knocked out wind farms, which was to buy electricity from other states. Only those of us raised on Gilligan’s Island will be prepared to survive and even then, I’m not sure the Professor’s inventions were entirely sound.

Well, there will be plenty for us to report on in the months and years ahead.