Future power plans panned

Kailua-Kona resident Ulrich Bonne noticed something missing from Hawaii Electric Light Co.’s draft integrated resources plan.

“None of your four slides on how to lower customers’ bills lowers customer bills and that’s what is really the issue,” Bonne said during a public meeting on the plan Thursday evening at King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel. HELCO needs to “commit to one or more numeric (cost) milestones. Without the data, I find the IRP unacceptable. (It has) no measurable goals.”

A plan without those measurable goals is “for the birds,” Bonne added.

The state’s Public Utilities Commission, under a new procedure, requires utilities to update their integrated resource plans every three years. The latest cycle began in March 2012, with a 68-member community advisory group formed in June 2012.

The plan looks 20 years into the future, but will culminate with a five-year action plan. HELCO’s strategic goals in the plan are lowering customer bills — as Bonne referenced, securing a clean energy future, improving grid operations and fairness to all customers.

Engineering Manager Kevin Waltjen outlined a number of strategies that could lower costs, including decommissioning some of the company’s more expensive power generators, including several Hilo sites; increasing the use of less expensive facilities, such as geothermal; increasing the efficiency of the Waiau hydroelectric units; evaluating waste-to-energy; and renegotiating existing independent power producer contracts, focusing on older contracts in which the cost paid to the power producer is tied to the price of oil. HELCO is also looking at how to replace oil with a biomass or liquefied natural gas, Waltjen said.

“(Liquefied natural gas) is the lowest cost fossil fuel at this time,” Waltjen said. “Seems very good. You can get it very cheap. But if you have to spend more money to create the same amount of electricity, it’s not worth it. It has to be evaluated.”

Waltjen described the multiple options as possible paths, which seem to run parallel to each other now.

“If we were to do everything (on the list), we could not get everything done,” he said.

Community members raised, among other points, concerns about the difficulties people and businesses have connecting a small-scale renewable energy generation system into HELCO’s grid.

Waltjen said sometimes the company has to reject certain tie-in projects for safety concerns, particularly if the project will create more energy than the circuit can handle. Doing so could cause overvoltage problems for other customers on the same circuit, Waltjen said.

“There’s studies that show it creates several different conditions that can effect customers on that circuit,” he said. “The protections you have to put into place are way more expensive than it’s worth.”

HELCO has partnered with several groups to test different technology, including new kinds of battery storage, Waltjen said. But even as those projects begin to produce data, newer technologies emerge, he said. One example of that is at the West Hawaii Civic Center, where a battery is providing information to HELCO. That battery has been in place less than a year, and a newer version is already available, Waltjen said.

Kohala resident Ron Becker raised several questions about HELCO’s intentions to offer Advanced Metering Infrastructure, more commonly referred to as smart meters. Other utilities on the mainland, including in California, and around the world are installing the meters, Becker said.

“It’s not a benign little thing that reads the electricity,” Becker said. “It also has the power to turn off your electricity or ration your electricity. There’s also health issues with it.”

The health issues, he said, have to do with the meters’ radiation emissions.