Action manager will help isles achieve energy goals

Our energy goals are commendable (the state hopes to get 40 percent of our energy from renewable sources by 2030), but the real deadline will be determined by the cost of imported oil, now at $103 per barrel. Given world oil trajectories against the strength of the dollar, we need to get real serious about this.

We’ve had some big dedications and groundbreakings this year, including Sempra’s Wind Farm at Ulupalakua on Maui next week, but our renewables, now 12 percent of our needs, can’t keep up with our oil costs. Imagine two lines on a graph, one going up for oil and the other going down for our disposable income.

At a certain point, say when oil hits $500, we will be paying so much for oil and will have so little money left that we will no longer be able to build renewables. We’ll be locked into paying crisis prices for oil, and we will have lost the chance to build the renewables that could have saved us.

That’s why we need to build faster, while we can.

It was easy to agree on the principle of the clean energy initiative four years ago. Today it’s much more difficult to agree on exactly who should do what, and how and when. We are finding the devil is in the details, and we are perseverating over environmental, cultural, NIMBY and other activist arguments. In the way of comic relief, some wags are now advocating, "back to reliability, back to oil."

Great threats call for great leadership. Our governor and lieutenant governor are passionate and visionary leaders in energy. But for the short strokes we might also need an "action manager" who can craft a critical path plan with costs, legalities, predictions and contingencies for a resilient deployment of technologies, people and resources and then boldly implement that plan.

As our initiative continues, two things happen. First, there are more players on the field vying for influence; energy is everybody’s baby. Second, things become all the more fragmented. Some want their own kuleana and don’t think the others can play as well, invoking the alamihi crab tradition where some pull anyone trying to escape back into the pot. Organizing the field thus becomes essential.

So many players: the state Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism director and energy administrator and Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, its attached agency; the Public Utilities Commission and consumer advocate; the energy chairmen in the House and Senate; the utilities; the contractors, unions and trade associations; the academic and research organizations; the community organizations; the federal agencies; the reliability administrator now to be created by Senate Bill 2787.

The de facto hierarchy is far from settled, so who’s the one? Or perhaps this action manager should be a selected combination of the players, or a new entity or office, a czar, authority, commission or Cabinet-level director and department. Whatever the arrangement, it can’t include all of them, and it can’t be founded either on self-interest or unattainable consensus.

Whoever it is, we’ll want to empower this action manager with abundant discretion, money and, you guessed it, loyal followership. We’ll need to trust him, allow him a wide berth and give him a long honeymoon. We’ll want him to feel the support, take the reins and get us skillfully where we need to go.

We’ll want to give him the strength to resist the slings and arrows and ignore the calls of the sirens who seek to distract him. If we needle him and never give his decisions a rest, we can be sure that soon he’ll fold up into the conventional clam, leaving bureaucratic calcification the order of the day.

Good followers are not sheep. They stay informed, adopt thoughtful opinions and reject misinformation. They judge leaders as important human capital most often trying to do the right thing. And they avoid the impulses that lead to destructive attacks for the sake of animosity, irrationality, politics or sport.

They would give our action manager the room to test alternatives and correct mistakes and otherwise engage in scientific trial and error in searching for the optimal path. Not everyone can find that path on the first try, especially in dealing with the complexities of a societal transformation, but try we must.

Energy is Hawaii’s most promising opportunity and most challenging test. There are deadly footfalls in every direction, and the most worrisome risk is lack of focus. We can’t all be in the driver’s seat, but we can be supportive followers and friends, empowering our leaders to take us to greatness.

Skirting disaster is not enough. Impatience is a virtue. We do want Hawaii to have the best energy economy in the world, don’t we?

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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.