**Title**: Energy in the North - Rick Rocheleau
**Date**: January, 7 2025
**Participants**: Amanda Byrd, Rick Rocheleau

00;00;00;16 - 00;00;12;12 [Rick Rocheleau] Really, the storage became economically viable some time, 2019, 2020, and it has been a game changer to everything to do with variable renewables.

00;00;12;12 - 00;00;15;09 [Amanda Byrd] This week on energy in the North. I speak to Rick Rocheleau, director of Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa campus. HNEI conducts research, they have a test lab where they test new energy products and new processes, and they have an official role in helping the state of Hawaii with their planning activities and moving the state forward with energy. They also do a lot of projects across the Asia Pacific, and Alaska has leaned on Hawaii quite a bit to learn about things like net metering and renewable energy integration into remote power grids. I began the conversation by asking Rick about the similarities that Hawaii and Alaska share.

00;00;51;07 - 00;01;02;01 [Rick Rocheleau] Actually, I think the similarities apply across all the grids, actually, because when we first started to do this, we thought what we learned in Hawaii, we take to other island organizations. But then it turns out it's just as applicable to larger countries like Thailand or Vietnam or even smaller grids, which a lot of the things that Alaska has or that you do have the Railbelt. But the tools and the processes are really similar. So it's more kind of the culture and how you approach the problem that makes it makes it work across all sorts of different sizes of grids.

00;01;26;05 - 00;01;31;06 [Amanda Byrd] And Hawaii has done some really innovative things. There's some islands that are like almost 100% renewable.

00;01;33;05 - 00;01;42;05 [Rick Rocheleau] I think the highest when we have the 60% now, which is really good, particularly when you consider that 60% is almost all solar. They were really early adopters with solar plus storage relative to the other islands, which is probably why they were ahead of the other islands by some amount. Really, the storage became economically viable some time, 2019, 2020, and it has been a game changer to everything to do with variable renewables. Kauai is the island that is at the 60%. They do have some spinning thermal generation you do have they do have a small biomass plant. They got a little bit of hydro. They're either putting in a synchronous condenser or have it. So they're not operating as a 100% inverter based grid, but they do at times operate 100% renewable, with the vast majority of it being solar and solar combined with storage.

00;02;27;17 - 00;02;31;24 [Amanda Byrd] And one of the similarities, I guess, with, Alaska and Hawaii the thermal load in Hawaii, you're using air conditioning. In Alaska, we're using heating as our main, energy.

00;02;42;12 - 00;02;46;21 [Rick Rocheleau] Actually your your heating is probably a much bigger part of your energy load than our air conditioning is. So if you look at Hawaii's mix, we are about one third electricity and two thirds transportation, with the transportation being ground transportation, marine transportation and jet transportation. So the air conditioning is a fraction of that one third goes back to the mix is very different. But if you apply the tools and do the analysis, it applies no matter what that makes mix, you can account for it behavior. So yeah, we do have an air conditioning load. But our peak load in Hawaii is actually in the evening when everybody comes home from work, gets back in their houses, starts to cook, might turn the air conditioner, but they open the refrigerator. And so our peak is typically between 5:00 in the evening and 9:00 in the evening.

00;03;34;14 - 00;03;38;11 [Amanda Byrd] And so you said the utility is a one utility for the whole of Hawaii.

00;03;38;11 - 00;03;46;00 [Rick Rocheleau] There are essentially two. Actually at one point the it would have been described as separate companies for each utility. But all the islands except Kauai were subsidiary company. So for one so Hawaiian Electric Company is the utility for most of the islands. Kauai is actually operated as a rural co-op. And so again, that's part of also the reason why they were able to move more quickly into the solar plus storage is they were able to describe that benefit to their ratepayers, and they weren't as constrained by the Public Utilities Commission as to how they approached it. The net metering was much more rigidly enforced on the other islands, and that was essentially went for a number of years. So it doesn't mean it was bad, it just means it was a little slower before we started to look at the some of the other options that were more at the utility scale, or you might call it community level.

00;04;36;10 - 00;04;42;09 [Amanda Byrd] Rick Rocheleau is the director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and I'm Amanda Byrd, chief storyteller for the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Find this story and more at uaf.edu/acep.