Keep eye on HECO solar plan

Hawaiian Electric Co. has taken a welcome step toward fulfilling its green-energy commitment with a proposal to develop a 15-megawatt photovoltaic (PV) solar power-generating array adjacent to its Kahe plant.

The project deserves prompt and serious consideration by the Public Utilities Commission, which should embrace the opportunity to reduce the oil needed to fire the generators. However, the panel also must press the utility for details about how this may translate into a net savings for the ratepayer.

In particular, the commission needs to decide whether to waive the requirement that projects exceeding a 5-megawatt capacity be put out to bid in a public procurement process. HECO spokesman Peter Rosegg said the utility went through its own internal bidding process to select Solar City as the contractor and believes the company has the acumen to do the work.

Other PV projects are in the HECO pipeline, but those are not on property owned by the utility, offering such a potential for savings.

Nevertheless, the PUC must ensure that there’s enough benefit in cost savings, one that would be shared with the ratepayers, to justify the waiver and approval. The utility may be feeling pressure to speed up other projects as well: Federal tax credits are scheduled to diminish from 30 percent to 10 percent by the end of 2016. The commission owes HECO’s customers some assurance that competition will be maintained to rein in contract costs.

Some of those customers may be feeling dismayed by HECO’s fast-tracking proposal emerging at about the same time their own hopes for PV installations at their homes are being delayed.

Last month, HECO announced a change in its solar policy because of the rapid pace of solar penetration on the Oahu grid. The problem utility officials have always raised about this is that solar power is intermittent, making it tough to maintain the stability of its power delivery system, which was designed for the "firm power" of its oil-fired generators.

The juggling act becomes more challenging the more solar power is on a given circuit. The increase in solar capacity, HECO claimed, raised questions of safety and reliability for customers. Exponential growth of PV installations in recent years has created a situation in which about 20 percent of neighborhoods on Oahu today have what HECO considers high penetration of solar energy generation.

So one of HECO’s policy changes was to require customers wanting to connect a solar system to the grid to contact the utility to check PV energy saturation in their neighborhood. Delays have led to backlogs in installations. Further, the new policy dictates that going forward, customers installing solar on saturated circuits would pay the cost of any new equipment needed to support new PV systems.

HECO has offered to mitigate costs by doing its own general studies to gauge how much solar can be accommodated. That’s a departure from past statements that customers would foot the bill for individual studies, and it was a needed gesture.

But it’s not enough. HECO officials have told lawmakers at a recent informational briefing that there are technologies being tested to help make the grid able to respond more nimbly to changing demand and to store excess green energy to be used when needed. That work must accelerate.

It’s high time that the electric company moves to advance its own use of renewables to offset the cost of oil. Now decision-makers at the PUC and the state Capitol have to see more concrete evidence that the utility is making such savings possible for the ratepayers, too.