Go outside and look up. All that bright Hawaiian sunshine is nothing but a nightmare.

Not for you, but for power companies like Hawaiian Electric Co. and Florida Power and Light, the company owned by NextEra Energy, which wants to buy HECO.

Hawaii may still burn hydrocarbon to power the turbines to make electricity, but solar is big time competition.

About 12 percent of Oahu HECO customers are powered by rooftop photovoltaic panels. In good months, that means those customers have monthly electric bills of $20 or less.

If you are making your own power, then there may come a time when you will close the circuit and stop buying it from HECO.

Today customers sell solar-generated electricity back to HECO, and the power company runs the power lines to keep the lights on at night and for those without solar.

It is not a happy marriage. The Legislature had to force HECO to buy the rooftop solar power and the power company has repeatedly found ways to drag its heels on the deal.

Then last month HECO went from reluctant partner to something of a bully.

The Big Island HECO subsidiary started telling customers that their rooftop solar systems would not be approved until the Public Utilities Commission ruled on HECO’s request to cut the amount it pays for excess solar power sent to the grid.

As Honolulu Star-Advertiser energy reporter Kathryn Mykleseth wrote:

"HECO asked the PUC for permission to cut the rate the utility pays solar customers on Oahu who feed excess power into the grid to about 15 cents per kilowatt-hour from 29 cents. It asked for similar reductions on neighbor islands. That means if a customer was able to zero out his or her electrical bill with a solar system with, say, 25 panels at the old rate, the customer would need 50 panels under the new, lower rate to achieve the same results."

The result, as Mykleseth said, was HECO holding customers hostage to force the PUC to sweeten its power-generation deal.

Big mistake. First, it gave Randy Iwase, new PUC chairman, a chance to flex some leadership muscle, and second, it allowed consumers to see behind the veil of corporate public relations.

Hawaiian Electric’s recipes may be much loved, but HECO is all about making sure that if there is any electricity to be sold in town, it does the selling and you do the buying, not the generating.

Iwase and the PUC told HECO that it "has a duty" to approve rooftop solar.

"Stated simply, the policy is that the HECO Companies have an affirmative duty to interconnect a potential customer," the PUC said.

The process of getting power from solar is not the issue; both HECO and Next- Era are piling on the solar-generating plants.

In fact, NextEra’s Florida Power and Light is one of the major producers of solar-generated power in the country. At the same time, the Florida Power company has a poor reputation with the rooftop solar crowd because it has consistently fought rooftop solar incentives.

The power companies are, not surprisingly, in the business of selling you power.

The issue is not so much that you are going green, but that their balance sheets stay in the black.

———

Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.