Legislature must take care to save photovoltaic credits

Although photovoltaic provides only a small part of Hawaii’s base load, it is going center stage for the 2012 Legislature. In popularity, PV is the leader of renewables, even though it’s the least firm and most costly of the front-runners.

PV represents freedom from the issues of the grid and the risks of blackout. It symbolizes energy independence and can go pretty much anywhere. It makes electricity miraculously, silently and without moving parts for decades.

Like Saturday night, everybody loves PV. Even activists on Molokai and Lanai tell Oahu to use PV instead of asking them to provide wind. The number of PV companies, projects, workers and jobs has been increasing. PV has become a great industry, although margins are getting slimmer with fresh competition.

Beside PV, wind is the only other proven renewable contender. Wave energy, ocean thermal energy conversion and algae are all still in the research and development phase, and it’s hard to say when they’ll be ready for prime time. The state Public Utilities Commission has blocked biofuel, and further geothermal expansion is years away. Should we hold up on PV and wind while we’re waiting?

Forest City recently dedicated a utility-scale 1.2-megawatt PV farm at Kapolei, making a "bright field" out of a "brown (industrial waste) field." This reflects a creative effort among the developer, the lender, the utility and government. It’s a model that will surely be repeated across the islands. We want that.

But PV tax credits and therefore PV are at risk in this session of the state Legislature. Some say PV credits cost too much and that it’s not fair to have all taxpayers and ratepayers pay for credits and infrastructure that benefit only a few. It’s an election year — perhaps that makes tinkering tempting in a belated effort at fiscal austerity.

One of the primary questions at the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum’s briefing on Friday was whether we should amend these credits, with a civil counterpoint between Rep. Pono Chong and Jon Yoshimura of Solar City. We’ll post the video of the discussion on thinktechhawaii.com in the next few days.

We need these credits not so much for the jobs, the PV industry or the property owners they incentivize, but because they expand our solar capacity. That expansion is a beacon of our success, showing that Hawaii recognizes its destiny in solar energy and is willing to invest in the Clean Energy Initiative.

But we also need to dispel the myth that PV alone can light our cities — that can’t happen without utility-scale storage. Despite the joys of independence, we still need the grid and base load generation to light our cities overnight.

And what a discovery that storage will be. It will take PV, clean energy and the 21st century to new levels. The guy who invents an efficient, affordable storage system will make Bill Gates look like a piker. Could he be in Hawaii?

Extreme storage units have been used in Lanai and Kauai. Sopogy is working on a residential solar collector with enhanced storage. Google "Bloom Box" and you’ll see the incredible possibilities. With storage, PV would become firm. This could trump a statewide grid and redefine our integration of resources.

Until then the expansion of PV puts the utility under pressure to develop technologies and techniques to deal with the difficulties of distribution. How much PV can it take? When overnight storage is here, PV can rule the day, that is, until geothermal or something else can provide us with lower costs.

When politics and technology leapfrog their way around the issues, it’s hard to design a scientific systematic sequence of bringing renewables online. If at all possible, we need to know what renewables and projects are coming and when. We can’t just wait for surprise media releases; we need to have predictability.

That’s why we need to go easy on the PV credits now in place. Curtailing them will demoralize the industry and raise questions here and abroad about our commitment to clean energy and investment. Shades of the tragedy of Act 221, from which we have not yet recovered and from which we might never recover.

Memory loss is not an option. We need to remember what we started, stick to it and resist all distractions. We decided we would do clean energy. So let’s do that, with unwavering enthusiasm, every day in every way. If we don’t, we will surely lose the momentum, the initiative and the future.

Jay Fidell, a longtime business lawyer, founded ThinkTech Hawaii, a digital media company that reports on Hawaii’s tech and energy sectors of the economy. Reach him at fidell@lava.net.