July 6, 2022
Kavya Balaraman
ICYMI: Hawaii poised to close the door on coal despite delays to clean energy projects
As Hawaii prepares to shutter its last operating coal-fired power plant — the 180 MW AES plant on the island of Oahu — state regulators and its utility have assembled a multi-pronged approach to ensuring grid reliability despite delays to several planned solar and storage projects.
The Oahu coal plant is the single largest generator on Oahu, serving roughly 16% of the island’s peak electricity demand. The plant is set to be retired by September, and, originally, was supposed to be replaced by a series of utility-scale renewable energy projects. However, after many of those projects began experiencing delays — leading to concerns among Hawaii regulators about grid reliability — Hawaiian Electric and state officials have turned to a combination of demand response, distributed energy resources, and other measures to keep the lights on after the coal plant goes offline.
Hawaii was the first state in the country to set a deadline for achieving 100% renewable electricity sales, required by 2045, and crossed the 30% renewable electricity sales threshold in 2020. At the same time, it’s also the country’s most petroleum-dependent state – more than four-fifths of its energy consumption is petroleum-based, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, with the electric power sector using about a fifth of all the petroleum consumed by the state.
Hawaii has a more challenging task than many other states when it comes to the clean energy transition, according to Scott Glenn, Hawaii’s chief energy officer, who leads the Hawaii State Energy Office.
“We’ve got a harder race to run because we’re taking six standalone grids, in the middle of the ocean, to a 100% renewable energy for electricity — and we’re starting from a high fossil fuel starting point,” Glenn said.
Hawaii’s Stage 1 and Stage 2 projects
The AES coal plant isn’t the only fossil fuel-fired facility that Hawaiian Electric is looking to retire in the coming years. The utility also plans to retire the 38 MW oil-fired Kahului plant on Maui, which constitutes roughly 15% of the island’s firm power generation capacity, by the end of 2024. To replace the power that would be lost from the planned retirements, in early 2018, the utility launched the first stage of a competitive solicitation for new renewable projects on Oahu, Maui and Hawaii Island, which resulted in eight “Stage 1” utility-scale solar and storage projects.
The following year, Hawaiian Electric issued another solicitation, which resulted in 12 “Stage 2” projects: nine utility-scale solar-plus-storage facilities, and three standalone storage systems. Half of the 20 projects are sited on Oahu and 18 of them are being built by private developers.
However, over the last couple of years, regulators have grown increasingly concerned about delays to the projects. In February 2021, the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission opened a docket to oversee Hawaiian Electric’s plans to retire the fossil fuel plants, as well as the utility’s interconnection processes for renewable energy projects. Among other things, that rulemaking has focused on tracking the progress of the solar and storage projects.
The following month, Hawaii Gov. David Ige, D, also created a task force, called the Hawaii Powering Past Coal Task Force, which was in charge of tracking the progress of the renewables projects meant to replace the coal plant. The task force includes representatives from the government, utility, developers and environmental groups, and has been very helpful in terms of getting everybody into a room together, said Jim Kelly, a spokesperson for Hawaiian Electric.
The task force also maintains a master schedule of the renewables projects intended to replace the coal plant. As of June, only one utility-scale project was expected to come online before the plant is retired — the 39 MW Mililani I solar project. The others are anticipated to come into operation between September 2022 and March 2024.
Hawaiian Electric has around 1,800 MW of generating capacity on Oahu, and peak demand on the island can be anywhere between 900 MW and 1,200 MW on a given day, said Bob Isler, the utility’s vice president of power supply.
“With AES being 180 MW, that’s a fairly large portion… but we still have other units that are available, and we always try to operate the system here such that we’re able to not only serve the load, but are in a position where if the largest unit were to trip unexpectedly, that we still have enough capability to continue to supply the load,” Isler said.
UnityDive, July 6, 2022: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/hawaii-coal-delays-clean-energy-projects/625828/