金丝雀媒体：夏威夷有一个为期一年的拆除煤炭的截止日期。它可以保持灯打开吗？

HONOLULU, Hawaii — The telephone rang. First electrons were imminent. Twenty-five-year-old Julie Blunden grabbed her binoculars and stepped onto the lanai, a covered porch tucked into the emerald hillside rising above Honolulu.

Looking past the turquoise coastline of Waikiki, across some 20 miles of bay to the west side of Oahu, she saw the evidence: a plume of smoke rising from Barbers Point.

On that day in September 1991, Blunden’s first reaction was relief: AES, the upstart independent power company she and her new husband had moved to Hawaii to work for, had fulfilled its promise. It had constructed a state-of-the-art coal plant, which would lessen Oahu’s overwhelming dependence on imported oil for electricity and deliver cheaper power for the island.

Rooftop solar on residences in an Oahu neighborhood (Jeremy Bezanger/Unsplash)

AES had packed the plant with equipment to cut air pollution to levels well below the industry norm, while spending $2 million to protect 143,000 acres of rainforest in Mbaracayu, Paraguay as an early form of carbon offset. This made Blunden hopeful.

“If we could figure out how to take old technologies, like coal boilers, and make them way, way better, certainly we’d eventually figure out how to start building wind plants and, maybe, someday, what I really wanted to be building: solar plants,” she recalled recently.

三十年后，AES燃煤电厂仍然是由夏威夷电气公司管理的最大电力来源，夏威夷电气公司是该州大部分地区的投资者拥有的公用事业。但不长久。

The AES coal plant near Kalealoa, Oahu (Tony Webster/Creative Commons)

In August 2021, Blunden returned to the site of her old project — to bury it, not to praise it.

杰夫·米库利纳（Jeff Mikulina）说，随着对气候变化的关注，公众情绪转移了“天堂中的煤炭堆”，他最近从领先的蓝色星球基金会（Blue Blue Planet Foundation）退休。经过多年的蓝色星球和其他人的敦促，州立法机关去年通过了一项法律，专门阻止新的公用事业合同。该法律意味着AES工厂的合同于2022年9月1日到期时必须停止运营。

立法者对他们的意图并不清楚：“该法案的目的是消除夏威夷煤炭用于电力生产的目的。”

在八月的访问中，布伦登（Blunden）骑着覆盖的传送带沿着AES工厂的转弯骑行，该传送带将煤从附近的港口穿梭到同一工业公园的空地尘土飞扬。她看着她现在建议的电网存储开发人员是Plus Power，打破了Kapolei储能（KES）设施的地面，在那里它将安装158个Tesla Megapack电池，以帮助在煤炭关闭后保持网格的运行。

That shutdown will carry Oahu and its 1 million inhabitants past a point of no return. The AES plant is Oahu’s biggest generator, meeting roughly 16 percent of the island’s peak demand. It’s also the first, and last, large coal plant in the entire state. Hawaii is now only building clean energy projects to take its place; a 2015 law mandates 100 percent renewable power in the state by 2045.

Hawaii’s willingness to dive headfirst into clean energy has earned it the moniker “postcard from the future,” a place the rest of the U.S. can look to for a glimpse of a cleaner world. Hawaiian Electric has already surpassed 30 percent renewable power, and rooftop solar adoption is well ahead of the mainland. But no one can say for certain if next year’s transition will be smooth.

由夏威夷电气挑选的大型太阳能项目替换AES工厂的机队已经陷入了延误。这促使国家公用事业监管机构丢弃了许多州常见的忧郁，准司法方法，并在保持效用方面发挥了更加肌肉的作用。这种动态在三月份的一次异常激烈的听证会上发挥了作用。州长戴维·伊格（David Ige）（D）动员了他的办公室，以跟踪太阳能项目的进度并加快许可。

“There’s no shortage of challenges in execution,” said Jay Griffin, chair of Hawaii’s Public Utilities Commission, in an August interview. “At the same time, the plant is coming offline, date certain, so we’ve got to keep the focus on getting as much of the pieces in place as we can.”

Now the state must execute more clean-power plant construction than ever before, and continue that streak for the foreseeable future. And it must orchestrate smaller energy devices in homes and businesses to work alongside the major power plants. And it must prepare the island grid for catastrophic events as extreme weather becomes more common.

为了避免动荡的过渡，夏威夷正在绿灯，即能量和气候活动家长期以来梦dream以求的政策。锂离子电池正在接管化石燃料发生器的关键网格职责。该州正在向居民寻求帮助，居民将获得薪水以安装电池并向电网发送更多屋顶太阳能生产。监管机构也是快速跟踪的社区规模太阳能。大规模发电厂的挑战可能会使较小的，敏捷的发电厂有机会发光。

In a year’s time, Oahu will offer either a cautionary tale about decarbonizing too rapidly — or a blueprint for moving faster than people elsewhere think possible.

提高檀香山能量狂热者集体血压的问题是，当燃煤电厂消失时，新的太阳能电厂的延误可能会离开该岛。

格里芬（Griffin）说：“有几个月来没有告诉[公共事业委员会]委员会，”格里芬（Griffin）掌握了政策分析博士学位，现在在研究清洁和分布式能源的职业生涯后领导该委员会。“到我们发现事情有时会延迟到18个月，您知道，我们处于一个非常严重的漏洞。”

The most extreme scenario would involve a shortage of electricity supply that triggers power outages in fall 2022 or summer 2023. Hawaiian Electric is rearranging maintenance schedules for other power plants to ensure they’re lined up and ready when the AES plant is turned off.

But those other plants run on diesel or oil, which Hawaii imports at considerable expense. The plan was for new solar plants to work in concert with the KES battery, filling it up cheaply by day for use at night. If KES comes online without sufficient new clean resources to charge it, it will have to fill up on oil-fired electrons.

这个前景似乎并没有引起夏威夷电气的震惊，夏威夷电气可以将额外的燃料成本传递给消费者。但这完全对消费者和环境拥护者产生了不同的影响。

“What the PUC saw was an avalanche of relying on more oil, rates going up for customers and possibly subjecting the grid to energy shortages during the hottest time of the year, so they had to do something,” said Kylie Wager Cruz, senior attorney with nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice.

格里芬（Griffin）在三月份的一次异常观看的监管听证会上向公用事业代表施压。

格里芬宣称，燃烧更多石油的后备计划代替了“从香烟到裂缝”。此后，这条线已经变得像您从公用事业监管听证会中发现的那样接近病毒 - 似乎在我访问期间，瓦胡岛的每一个清洁能源都向我引用了它。（单击此处观看病毒时刻。）

建筑延迟的原因既适合夏威夷，又指示将早晚面对大陆的挑战。

Hawaiian Electric, sometimes known as HECO, is solely responsible for running the grid on Oahu. But to build the myriad clean energy projects needed to replace the coal plant, the utility awarded contracts to independent developers (as well as awarding a couple to itself). It’s the job of a developer to secure land rights, get permits, acquire the necessary components, and build the power plant as promised.

Bidding out contracts for solar energy ensures more competitive pricing. But it also complicates the task of figuring out who is responsible for delays, due to overlapping spheres of influence and responsibility.

Everyone can agree on one culprit: Hawaii’s scarcity of land. Large-scale solar, the principal form of new generation being planned, eats up a lot of acreage. That sends developers away from the coastal hubs in search of wide-open terrain. Open spaces tend to be zoned as agricultural land, a legacy of decades of colonial exploitation by sugar and fruit plantations.

“It all comes down to Hawaii’s history, the land-use decisions, who benefits, who doesn’t benefit, and how we share in the collective vision of what is a thriving Hawaii,” said longtime renewables developer Noelani Kalipi, who now develops offshore wind as chief strategy officer at Progression Energy.

科尔顿·钦（Colton Ching）说，夏威夷当今的许多社区都位于种植园工人居住的地方，他负责过渡到可再生网格的过渡，因为夏威夷电气电气公司的规划和技术高级副总裁。将以前的种植园土地转换为太阳能站点可能需要额外的许可 - 它可以触发社区的推动力。如果开发商从大陆驶入，那么动态的增长就会变得更加复杂，就像瓦胡岛计划的许多太阳能开发一样。

带电池的屋顶太阳能是为瓦胡岛增加清洁能力能力的快速方法。（朱利安·斯佩克（Julian Spector））

“There is such unanimous support for renewable energy in Hawaii, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into support for building a renewable energy project in my neighborhood,” said Ching. “So I think there might be a little bit of surprise there for some folks, especially folks who are not used to doing business in Hawaii.”

Communities that have been burned by developers before look warily at new developers, even if they are from an entirely different industry, he added.

Successful development takes more than hiring local partners, Kalipi noted. It requires connecting with communities and actually grappling with the issues that they raise. Building trust as a responsible partner for the community takes time and money.

卡利皮说：“夏威夷拥有悠久的开发商历史，并承诺了世界。”“金钱会说话，但钱并不总是赢。”

The same issues and constraints crop up in the mainland U.S., even though other states have far more land to work with. As prime development spots fill up and renewables encroach farther into populated or sensitive areas, siting concerns will grow more potent.

“I think this definitely will be a broader industry issue five or 10 years from now, for a number of reasons,” Ching said.

Hawaiian Electric can’t do developers’ jobs for them. But the utility is responsible for a number of potential bottlenecks, such as studying what impacts a project poses for the grid system and building out transmission lines as needed to connect it.

Renewables developers complain about utilities taking too long on their grid studies just about anywhere utilities study the impacts of new renewables. There’s a fundamental mismatch in incentives. Speed of construction matters hugely for a cash-strapped developer trying to finish a project and get paid, whereas the utility generally will do fine whether or not a developer hits a deadline.

Frustration with Hawaiian Electric’s pace has, on occasion, led to court battles.

电动finaliz夏威夷毛伊岛电气子公司ed a deal in 2018 with developer Molokai New Energy Partners for a solar-plus-battery plant on the island of Molokai. The utility then canceled the contract in 2020 because the developer missed its deadline. But the developer sued, arguing that it missed the deadline because Maui Electric hadn’t finished the interconnection study. A federal judge in Hawaii allowed the suit to move forward this summer.

That particular project is on a different island and doesn’t impact readiness for Oahu’s coal retirement. For the most part, the interconnection studies on Oahu’s forthcoming solar and storage projects are done now, Ching noted. The exceptions are projects that changed a major technical component, thereby prompting a redo of the study process (the same factor that initially delayed the Molokai study).

Canary Media的Julian Spector与夏威夷电气技术高级副总裁Colton Ching进行了交谈。（Lucas Assenmacher）

Grid wonks and entrepreneurs have spent the last decade evangelizing the transformative power of small-scale or “distributed” energy sources, like rooftop solar, to serve the grid and households at the same time. Swaths of studies and pilot programs have proven this can work, but hardly any jurisdiction practices it at appreciable scale.

夏威夷还一直在修补以促进分布式能源的政策。但是，迫在眉睫的网格短缺促使从计划委员会迅速发展，因为格里芬和他的同伴监管机构竞争批准任何可以补充延迟项目的东西。

Earthjustice律师Wager Cruz说：“ Heco有很长的时间开始计划过渡的外观。”“ [公用事业委员会]必须通过寻找其他方法来填充[KES]电池的其他方法来吸引人们。”

这些新方法之一the PUC fast-tracked is the Battery Bonus program. Hawaiian Electric will now pay customers for the use of their home battery systems during two hours of the evening demand peak. Participants will earn an upfront bonus of $4,250 if they enroll a typical battery for the duration of the 10-year program. That could pay for a large fraction of the battery system’s cost.

瓦胡岛的居民可以赚取数千美元，以便在需求旺盛的时候将电池安装在他们的房屋中，以向电网发送清洁电源。（朱利安·斯佩克（Julian Spector））

格里芬说：“三月份的会议之后，我们在委员会方面都退后一步，看着我们需要投入的其他铁杆。”“那一个立即升至顶部。”

The PUC hopes to bring 50 megawatts of battery capacity online through this program. The concept of harnessing thousands of home batteries to act as a decentralized power plant, often referred to as a virtual power plant, has inspired panels at industry conferences for years, but it only recently started to become a reality.

Vermont’s largest utility, Green Mountain Power, now taps more than 16 megawatts of customer-hosted batteries to reduce its total demand during the most expensive hours of the year, and then shares the savings with all customers. This example proves it can be done, but other utilities still choose to prove that point for themselves in demonstrations that can drag on for years.

Virtual power plants rarely play a mission-critical role on par with traditional power plants as Oahu’s battery network will. And one would be hard-pressed to find an example that reaches a market share comparable to 50 megawatts out of Oahu’s peak demand of around 1,100 megawatts.

“These are the grid-edge solutions that Hawaii can really be an innovator on,” said Mikulina, the Hawaii clean energy advocate. “Hawaii is that perfect laboratory where we can de-risk some of these policies and programs so they can scale elsewhere.”

Any laboratory experiment carries the possibility of failure. But the Hawaii PUC’s willingness to iterate quickly in the face of a grid challenge distinguishes it from slower-moving regulators elsewhere.

加利福尼亚州在2020年夏天用完了电力。该州的住宅太阳能和电池容量比其他任何州都要多。但是，为了解决供应短缺，加利福尼亚PUC在很大程度上忽略了分布式能量，而是要求在不可能短的时间内建造大型发电厂。这些努力并没有像希望的那样表现，而加利福尼亚州进入2021夏季，电源短缺的缺点比代理机构预期的要大。

夏威夷过去曾推动房主的产生尽可能多的太阳能消耗，并避免向电网出口任何额外的太阳能。太多的不协调的太阳能生产被认为是网格操作的滋扰。夏威夷电气还认为，支付盈余屋顶太阳能（通过较早的净计量政策），等同于所有公用事业客户为那些负担得起的家庭提供太阳能补贴。

因此，近年来，安装屋顶太阳能的房主几乎全部添加了电池，因为他们不愿分享其盈余生产。

PV system on a home in Oahu (Julie Thurston Photography/Getty Images)

现在，PUC批准的电池奖金计划将奖励家庭产生更多的太阳能并与电网共享的家庭。该政策甚至使旧的网级客户在屋顶上增加了5千瓦的新太阳能。巨型KES电池将存储屋顶和社区尺度太阳能场的多余产量，瓦胡岛需要他们可以制造的所有电力。

“我们必须在这里想到一个范式的转变，我们在整个一天中的所有时间都非常需要权力，对清洁能源的巨大需求。”格里芬说。“因为再次，它将取代石油，这几乎可以保证，直到我们重新替换了该植物的其余部分。”

瓦胡（Oahu）等待大型太阳能项目从其允许和网格研究的灌木丛中出现，但新的住宅太阳能和电池可以在一两天内启动并运行。这种灵活性和对客户欲望的反应性是分布式能源倡导的吹捧，这与公用事业驱动的方法形成了鲜明的对比，该方法基于更少，更大的项目越过终点线。

For Hawaii’s rooftop solar industry, this feels like vindication after years of policies limiting the payback they could offer their customers.

“This is also largely about a utility overreaching on their response to a healthy solar industry, and now recognizing that they went too far,” said Blake Briddell, who runs Hawaii sales for Sunrun, the biggest rooftop solar installer in the U.S. “That’s a big part of the story here.”

If you ask people who are steeped in Oahu’s energy transition what they think will happen when coal goes away, nobody has the same answer. But they all tend to be fascinating, in the slightly macabre manner of California grid wonks speculating on the odds of another power shortage during this year’s fire season.

一些夏威夷电网的预测者保持着笨拙的看法：所有新的大型太阳能电厂都将陷入延误，电池奖金未能在希望的50兆瓦时在任何地方集会，随之而来的是混乱。

格里芬被问及他对过渡会顺利进行有多自信时说：“这不是一个恐慌的时刻。”

“We’re in a better position than we were back in March — we’ve got more irons in the fire,” Griffin said in August. But, he added, “There’s not a single one of these [large-scale solar and battery] projects that are online yet. […] At this point, we’ve got to stay vigilant and disciplined, and there’s stuff out there that can still set us back.”

On a more positive note, in early October the PUC approved a plan to speed up completion of two solar-plus-storage projects developed by Clearway Energy, Griffin noted in a recent email. Those plants should be operational around the time the AES plant shuts down, and analysis indicates that their capacity, plus forthcoming distributed energy installations, should be sufficient to maintain grid reliability.

But, Griffin noted, there’s still uncertainty around just how much distributed energy will be built by then. And unexpected circumstances can still delay the bigger projects — for instance, one called Kupehau Solar is facing a major redesign after the discovery of cultural resources at its planned location.

Mikulina的非营利组织有助于支持100％可再生法的法律，他认为即将过渡的过渡可以通过一些忙碌。

“Thanks to the bold leadership at the PUC, I think we’ll be OK,” he said, adding, “It will require deploying resources at a speed and scale beyond what we’re accustomed to.”

A “looming” concern is constrained battery supply, Griffin noted. The Covid-19 pandemic has unsettled global supply chains. Meanwhile, the grid battery sector has suffered from its own success: Surging demand for high-quality batteries outstripped manufacturing capacity this year, and that imbalance seems unlikely to resolve itself anytime soon. Meanwhile, the solar industry is struggling with its own supply-chain issues, from polysilicon price spikes to shortages of essential materials.

幸存下来的煤炭关闭只是最迫在眉睫的测试，例如，开启的独木舟在驶向海上的第一个断路器。越过一波只是意味着另一波即将到来。对于瓦胡岛来说，下一波将是数十年历史的燃烧植物Waiau 3和4，定于2024年。

“Longer term, I think one of our big challenges is how do we keep our grid reliable and resilient for all of our customers,” Ching said.

Maintaining reliability with onshore renewables entails competing for land with other uses, like locally produced food or affordable housing, he added.

“Do we want to make the policy decision to double or triple the land needed for energy to provide you that reliability and resilience, and trade off even more land for ag and housing?” he asked.

Onshore wind is now “a real third-rail conversation” on Oahu, Mikulina noted, after a wind farm in the North Shore community of Kahuku failed to heed the input of local residents. More than 160 people were arrested in 2019 for attempting to block delivery of wind farm equipment.

逃避这些限制并确保更强大的阵风的一种方法是在海上建立。Ching说，几名开发商正在为夏威夷的海上风能范围内的生存能力，但考虑到火山岛链的深海，涡轮机需要漂浮而不是固定在海底。北海已经出现了浮动风项目，但尚未出现在美国

Floating wind installations off Hawaii would need clearance from the Defense Department certifying that turbines wouldn’t interfere with military operations, Progression Energy’s Kalipi noted. Then the Interior Department would have to open up those areas for wind development. And developers would need to see technology costs fall into competitive territory.

卡利皮说，她在过去的八年中一直在夏威夷海上开发项目，但她预计该项目的最早在线日期将是2030年代初期 - “那就是一切顺利。”

Offshore wind and onshore plants will also need to survive the kinds of extreme weather events that are becoming more frequent and destructive due to climate change.

Ching说：“在您的电网接触到今天的气候和环境的时代将与从现在起20年后的20岁接触的时代不同，我们需要考虑这些事情。”

迄今为止，夏威夷的经验表明，从煤炭到清洁电力进行批发转变将完全按计划进行是不明智的。过渡无法开始运动，然后无人看管。它需要进行持续的审查和及时的课程校正，直到旧植物消失，而新植物则泵出稳定的无污染动力。