On Molokai, A Community Cooperative for Energy Sovereignty — Episode 230 of Local Energy Rules

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
For anybody that is looking, we are open to sharing everything that we’ve learned, giving you everything that we’ve learned just because we want to encourage other communities like ourselves and people in general to just take care of Mother Earth.

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John Farrell:
Dissatisfied with utility scale renewable energy proposals that failed to align with Islanders priorities. Residents on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai organized through extensive dialogue, they developed the Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative with proposals for two community-based renewable energy projects that would supply one fifth of the island’s, electricity with clean power, as well as 15 nanogrids, solar and battery systems to supply electricity to previously unserved households. In parallel, allies with Sustainable Molokai developed an island-wide plan to get the entire island to a hundred percent renewable electricity. But unlike the utility’s proposals, it did so in a way that respects the cultural and environmental priorities of the community. Joining me in December, 2024, Ali Andrews, chief Executive Officer of Shake Energy Collaborative and Aunty Lori Buchanan, president of the Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokai explained why the community needed to chart its own course and why a cooperative was the logical way. I’m John Ferrell, director of the Energy Democracy Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and this is Local Energy Rules, a podcast about monopoly power, energy democracy, and how communities can take charge to transform the energy system. Ali and Lori, welcome to Local Energy Rules.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Thank you. Mahalo. Thanks.

John Farrell:
I would like to start just by asking each of you to share a little bit of your story. So I’ll start with you, Ali. Could you just tell me a little bit about how you got into community-based renewable energy development?

Ali Andrews:
Sure, thanks. In 2018 and 2019, I was in grad school for design. I was studying design, particularly as it intersects with energy development and had the great honor slash luck of getting connected with a group of individuals on the island of Molokai who had already been thinking about energy sovereignty and community decision making in the energy development space for a long time. And so I got to kind of shadow a few meetings when I was in grad school and learned a lot from them about what was missing, I think in the energy industry about the key between the community knows what it is that they want and what resources exist in their area and how to best use those resources. But the people who are building the things don’t have a great connection to implementing that knowledge. And so that’s after grad school was lucky enough to continue to work with that group and really form what is now Shake around what was needed in that context.

John Farrell:
That’s great. Thank you so much. And Aunt Lori, could you just tell me, how did you get interested in Molokai’s electricity supply as a native resident? What brought you into working on energy issues?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Thank you for that question because the last thing I thought I would be doing is energy. Actually on the island of Molokai, I’ve been a lifelong advocate, community advocate, everything that affects my island I’m involved with. And it just made sense that energy was such a big issue on the island of Molokai, and I don’t think most people are aware. Molokai is one of the smaller of the main Hawaiian islands, yet we pay the highest utility costs in the nation. So we are by some standards economically challenged, but we also have one of the highest populations of indigenous Hawaiians in the state of Hawaii. And so take all that and we are a community that is focused on sustainability because an island in the middle of the Pacific, so highly dependent on shipping in goods from afar including oil and gas. And so it just made sense for us in pursuit of our sustainability to transition to saving the planet, saving our island, and making that energy equity more of a reality for the people of Molokai. So then that’s how I ended up in energy. I am a conservationist, so it’s kind of a natural thing

John Farrell:
For sure. I don’t know which one of you wanted to tackle this question, but I’ll let you decide. There’s a particular community-based renewable energy project being planned that I would love you to talk about, and then we can back up and talk about the bigger context of the planning that has gone on the island around the energy future and the other pieces of that. But as I understand that this particular project has three parts. There’s two community-scale solar and battery installations, and then there’s also 15 individual solar and battery installations for particular households. Did I get that right?

Ali Andrews:
So they’re kind of two different projects. We think about the grid-connected ones as they’re technically two projects, but we kind of think of them together because we design them together and they’re going to be built on the same schedule, et cetera. And those ones are basically community solar, but in Hawaii, community solar is called Community Based Renewable Energy or CBRE. And so those ones were the first ones that we started developing together back in with meetings from 2020 from planning a project that would be bid to the utilities request for proposals. And it ended up being submitted in 2022 and then the 15 off-grid systems is a project that Hoʻāhu conceived of. After that, after we submitted our proposal to the utility, they got some technical assistance from the Energy Storage for Social Equity program through the National Labs – Pacific Northwest National Labs specifically. And through that program they designed the 15 off-grid systems, which are now also going to be deployed potentially sooner because it’s easier to build small off-grid things. Aunty Lori. Does that seem right?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Yeah, it does. I just wanted to quickly touch on the why for the projects. It’s really why Hoʻāhu was formed – was specifically to be able to bid on these contracts on this CBRE community based renewable energy projects because it was supposed to give the community an opportunity to lead these renewable energy projects. It was very difficult, highly technical and had so many moving parts and all, and Ali and Shake Energy was one of the main drivers that really showed our community that we were able to do this as a community grassroots and then Sustainable Molokai, another organization on the island of Molokai, which also focuses on sustainability, also played a crucial part in helping with community outreach. And so it really was a grassroots effort to bring a large project out of the control of outside commercial entities and then for us to form a cooperative where all the benefit would go directly to the people. I look at us as not a commercial for-profit type of, I guess, corporation, but more of an energy equity cooperative for our community. But that is really what drove us to do it and to work hand in hand with community members from Sustainable Molokai and the whole island of Molokai is really heartwarming and it feels that we’re doing a really good thing for our people.

John Farrell:
As I understand it, these projects are at least related to this kind of extensive community planning process. There was sort of a counterpoint to some of the proposals from Hawaiian Electric Company to do large-scale renewable energy projects in ways that didn’t really align with the Islanders interests. I think it was called the Community Energy Resilience Action Plan. Are you able to talk a little bit about that plan and maybe why it was created? What was the utility proposing to do that didn’t feel like it was a good fit? And how this planning process then took place to lead to looking at alternatives

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
As a native Hawaiian and the indigenous person born and raised on the island of Molokai. Again, I said we organized because the request for proposals went out and entities outside of Hawaii bid for it, and we didn’t really feel in control of our future at all. And so we have this big, big, big thanks for Ali, but I’m going to let Ali jump in now because she’ll say it nicer than me.

Ali Andrews:
There’s no way I’d say it nicer than you, but I will try and explain. So I think what Aunty Lori said about the things feeling out of community control, I think that is really what the Community Energy Resiliency Action Plan was about. And it happened in 2022 or maybe 2021, somewhere around there. The utility in addition to the RFP that we were focusing on, the community-based renewable energy RFP Hawaiian Electric issued a second RFP for a utility scale project on the island located right by the power plant. And the community had been for a long time vocal about we want it more distributed. The power plant is towards the center of the island and there’s a lot of desire to have the generation decentralized to support a better quality of electricity for the grid since people who live way out at East End or West End have a lower power quality, more outages, et cetera.
And so a group of community members, Hoʻāhu included in that, co-hosted a status conference with the Public Utilities Commission and said a few different things. Some things that we don’t like the community-based renewable energy RFP, we want you to change it in these ways. And also we don’t want you to run the centralized generation RFP that would just put solar right outside of the diesel power plant and kind of recreate the same system, but just with solar instead of diesel. And the utility said, okay, we’ll pause the RFP process and you guys can do your planning process and come up with what you want and hopefully that will integrate well with what the utility can accommodate. And so for the first couple of years, we were focusing on community-based renewable energy and this other group called the Molokai Clean Energy Hui, facilitated by the nonprofit Sustainable Molokai was running CERAP 1.0, which was a high level two year long energy education and planning process that we, Aunty Lori and I actually weren’t quite as involved in, because we were focusing on our CBRE project and now we are more looped in.
There’s the second phase now CERAP 2.0 that started last year where we were awarded some technical assistance from national labs and some funding to host a more implementation focused phase of this planning. So instead of, here are a few conceptual ideas of what we like here is the power systems modeling that says these ideas are feasible and they will cost this much, and that is better than your centralized plan. And so therefore that’s what the community wants to pursue. So it’s been a series of really robust public workshops that were hosted by that Hui, so we are hoping by the end of September, 2026, we will have the implementation plan complete for which projects specifically want to get built. And we’re exploring things like floating solar on an ag reservoir, pumped storage hydro, smaller scale solar and battery storage projects. And those are the kinds of things that the community is investigating.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
And I wanted to jump on because what you talk about this CERAP for me, it was really about educating my community. You cannot make informed decisions on stuff you just don’t know. And renewable energy is not the priority and number one issue in my community, being able to pay your utility bill tomorrow is an issue for my community. Having a home is a big priority for my community. Many of my community are beneficiaries of the Department of Hawaiian homelands and don’t have any home. They are not connected to the grid. And so buying gasoline and running generators and buying ice to keep things cold is a reality here. And so I wanted to make that point where the CERAP was really to educate our community about the different types of renewable energy that was available. And where would the likelihood of these types of renewable energy projects go?
The 15 nanogrids you mentioned earlier mostly are going to these types of beneficiaries on Hawaiian homelands that are not connected to the grid who are struggling every day in their lives to come up with enough funds to buy ice and run generators. And we’ve seen stuff like generator fires gone and destroy small homes, and we have many of them on Molokai. And so from the beginning it’s been a very David and Goliath type of scenario. So educating our community, bringing them up to speed about what is renewable energy, what does it look like, how will it affect our resources? Because Molokai is an island, because of our economic challenges, we rely on our resources for food from the ocean and from the mountains. And so keeping our resources intact is extremely important to us. So any projects that might hinder our resources or have an impact to our resources is really what the balance is all about for us. And so to me that was so important and we’re really indebted to Sustainable Molokai for helping to do outreach to reach the people of Molokai and then people like Ali who actually bring the technical expertise to implement stuff on the ground. So we just are very thankful.

John Farrell:
Yeah. Let me just ask a follow up to that. Why are there so many folks who don’t have electricity connections? I know that that’s also common in some Native American communities in the mainland United States that they still remain off grid. And is it just that as it happened in other places, the for-profit utility was like, well, we don’t make money if we connect these folks so we’re not going to bother? Is that the story there too?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Yes, and Ali can also jump in, but I know this personally because my husband and myself are beneficiaries of homestead lands, and sometimes those homestead lands come without infrastructure because of political geopolitical type of issues with funding to go to beneficiaries, the lack of funding to provide infrastructure so people live in whatever they can construct, not on the grid. And so that is the big problem. Affordability is the issue. If you need to bring in one pole closer to your home from the main highway, you’re looking at anywhere between 20 and $30,000 per pole. There’s actually nobody that can afford that here. I currently don’t have rooftop solar because I just can’t afford it, John. I don’t have that kind of money. And so programs like this that bring the 15 nanogrids to homes like the beneficiaries who are off grid and then also for the CBRE project is very critical to the people of Molokai. Thank you for that question.

John Farrell:
Well, let me ask you a little bit about Hoʻāhu Energy as a community-owned and managed energy cooperative. There are so few great examples of cooperatives in the United States other than the traditional rural electric cooperatives. So it was kind of like people understand them as, oh, a hundred years ago the New Deal passed some federal policy that helped bring electricity to farms for the first time, and that was a big deal. And the nature of how those operate is no longer really in keeping with the way that cooperatives are intended to in many cases, where the people aren’t really well represented on cooperative boards, the cooperative may have kind of given away some of its local authority to buy power from a wholesale provider. So when we hear stories like this, I think one of the things that was so exciting to me to hear about what you’re doing is that people have a real meaningful role in the decision making process. They have a real financial relationship with the cooperative. So could you talk a little bit about that? How do people become members of the cooperative? What does it mean to be a member? How do they help in the decision making? How does that structure help with sharing the benefits, the financial benefits, the economic benefits of the solar projects?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Just the word cooperative is awesome. Again, we are island people, we’re indigenous people. We managed to survive in the middle of a vast ocean on a tiny little island. And so that love and heart is at the core of needing to cooperate with your neighbors and everyone on your island because you drive around in a circle and that’s it. I mean, you can’t go nowhere and you really are dependent on your community. So heart is at the core of this cooperative, and that’s the reason why we formed as a cooperative because we want our community to benefit. It was formed by people who are all heart and have a heart for our community, understand our mission, love our people, and really want to just benefit everyone collectively. And Ali, you could take it after that.

Ali Andrews:
The only thing that I would add is that the way that Hoʻāhu has been practicing that cooperative decision making even ahead of, they don’t have members yet other than the board members because none of their projects are operational. So nobody is a co-owner in anything because there’s nothing to co-own. But as soon as the community solar projects come online, there will be about 1,500 households that will immediately become members, and the 15 nanogrid recipients would also become members, and that would create the official pool of who gets invited to the meetings to vote on certain things, but ahead of that, because that infrastructure doesn’t exist already, we have been creating kind of the grassroots collaborative decision making. And Aunty Lori was speaking to this a little bit before, but in the intense period when we were making decisions about does the project go here or there, do we hire this person or that person? Do we buy which kind of solar panel batteries are scary? What are the different types of battery chemistries that exist out there and what are we comfortable with?
We were hosting a virtual public workshop every two weeks for almost a year to go through all of those details and had maybe 20ish people at every meeting hashing that out. And I think that that gave the board a lot of confidence in the decisions that were ultimately made about who to hire and what batteries to order, et cetera. Because we had done that deep dive and people had the opportunity to participate for so long, and I think it surprised everybody how interested people were in battery chemistry because to what Aunty Lori spoke to, these decisions are really important to the people who live on Molokai because putting something really flammable near the center of the island is not something they support. And so they were willing to do the deep dive to pick that out. And I think that has really been a joy and a surprise and has helped to make sure that everything about the process can be as transparent as it can.

John Farrell:
That’s great. Ali I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about Shake Energy Collaborative. So you are involved in helping develop these solar projects. I was curious if it’s both of the community-scale ones and the nanogrid projects or if it was one or the other. And I guess I was just kind of curious, did you develop other projects as well other than the ones that are on Molokai, and how do you approach that maybe in a way that’s different than sort of a traditional solar developer?

Ali Andrews:
Great question. So Shake was built as a co-development partner, and the other co-partner in that partnership would be a community group, community cooperative, nonprofit, some sort of community led entity that would own the project. And so we bring whatever co-design or development skills are needed for developing a certain community desired project, but the idea was to bring whatever was missing in the community, realizing their own vision for energy infrastructure in their area. And so that has looked a little bit different in some different communities. We started with Hoʻāhu and Hoʻāhu has really formed what it is that we think about offering to other communities based on what was needed in that context. But we do work in a few different areas in Hawaii now. There’s a cooperative that formed a couple years after Hoʻāhu formed in Waianae following the same model. It was several community members in Waianae, which is on the west side of this island. I think it’s actually where Aunty Lori is calling in from right now. She has family in Waianae. But they saw what Hoʻāhu was doing and said, we want a piece of that. And so we have been helping support them in a smaller community solar project, co-design and development for a couple of years. And now we work on a community-led small hydro project on the windward side of Oahu and a couple of other groups mostly in Hawaii who are following in Hoʻāhu’s footsteps. And we kind of bring whatever it is that we can, whether it’s bringing in an engineering firm to help draw up a design or trying to help raise some funds for something. So we help on the development side. And I think what we really find fun is the co-design process. The okay, we understand community values and community resources, but how does that translate into which solar panel we’re going to buy? And we help create activities and workshops that translate that into the development decision that is reflective of the community value.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
I wanted to jump in and say something about Shake Energy. Shake Energy is an awesome, awesome company. Ali and her staff – I’ve not seen anyone with as much patience as Shake Energy coming into a community such as ours. And this is why I would advocate for anyone out there in small communities like ours to call Shake Energy for help because they’ll take the time, they have the patience to really dive deep, understand your needs, understand your culture and your community. And for indigenous peoples on a small island in the state of Hawaii, that was actually the priority for us because of the way we live and what is important to us. And Ali and her staff really took the time to find out what was important to us. They didn’t talk at us. They listened forever and ever. And then they really knew how to help us design our projects because they knew what was important to us.
They knew what the line in the sand was and they really took it to heart. And their company is also all heart. They’re not like any other company that I’ve ever met in my entire life. They’re really altruistic in the way they want to support the communities in energy equity. I think they couldn’t believe what our utilities bills were when we first came. I paid like $500 a month for just electric, and that’s not counting everything else that we pay for. So our cost of living, I’m sure your listeners know in Hawaii is off the hook. And so being native Hawaiian, that’s why we have the second economy of subsistence. And I wanted to go back to Shake Energy. Really, if it wasn’t for Shake Energy, Hoʻāhu cooperative probably would not be here. We probably would not have submitted a thousand page plus request for proposal on a highly technical document that a community came up with and not some for-profit company. And all of the stars aligned and we’re here today. It’s a miracle that’s what it is.

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John Farrell:
We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, I ask my guests about the Community Energy Resilience Action Plan to achieve 100% renewable electricity. We discuss the relationship with the incumbent investor-owned utility and whether the Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative has inspired cooperative projects elsewhere in Hawaii. You’re listening to a local Energy Rules podcast with Ali Andrews, chief Executive Officer of Shake Energy Collaborative, and Aunty Lori Buchanan, president of Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokai.

Hey, thanks for listening to Local Energy Rules. We’re so glad you’re here. If you like what you’ve heard, please help other folks find us by giving the show a rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, five stars. If you think we’ve earned it. As a bonus, I’ll gladly read your review aloud on the show if it includes an energy related joke or pun now back to the program.

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John Farrell:
So that’s awesome. And I think really clear kind of the difference for Shake between what you might find in a traditional development relationship. I want to understand a little bit more about the big picture for the island. So the CERAP, or Community Energy Resilience Action Plan, as I understand it, lays out a path for the island to get a hundred percent of its electricity from renewable resources, this sort of long development process, talking to the community about how to do it, where to put things. Could you talk about what share of that a hundred percent will come from the Hoʻāhu energy projects and kind of what else is in the pipeline? Will other projects as part of that plan also have cooperative ownership, whether through Hoʻāhu or another cooperative? Is that also part of the plan, thinking about the ownership of those other components?

Ali Andrews:
The community-based renewable energy projects that are under development by Hoʻāhu will account for about 20% of the island’s current load. And so the other 80%, because the goal is 100% transition, haven’t been determined yet, but the set of projects that are being considered by the community right now include a floating solar project that could be maybe as big as nine megawatts. There’s this big reservoir towards the center of the island at Kualapuu that the community is interested in putting panels on because it means that you don’t have to take up ag land or other land that might be important for another use. So they’re looking at that with the feasibility study, looking at pumped storage hydro, which would potentially leverage existing agricultural infrastructure reservoirs to store energy and decrease the need for chemical batteries, which in general are not well loved by the community or I would say mostly recyclability, but the idea that all of that stuff would need to come from somewhere far, far away and then go somewhere far, far away to be recycled is why they want to look at pump storage hydro as an alternative.
There’s a smaller solar and battery storage project that’s looked at that’s sized well for a town on the west side of the island called Mauna Loa. And then looking also at what can we do to increase the ability for individual homes to have rooftop solar. Right now, there has been a huge decrease in the number of rooftop solar and battery storage systems installed on Molokai, partially because of the way that the grid is set up in the capacity for the grid to accept more energy from a bunch of different spots. So looking at what can be done to allow for more of that. Those are the projects that I would say are kind of on the top of the communities’ list, but the process for technical assistance for the national labs to model the grid and tell us what is the best set of projects, that part is really challenging. The what’s the best set of projects to align what the community wants and what electrical engineers can tell you is that translation project has turned out to be very challenging. So we’re still in the middle of that.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
In the middle of that is the need for millions of dollars. Obviously this community has to partner with everyone to make renewable energy on the island realized and going to that is what is important to me is trust. Trust is very important to the people of Molokai and the people of Molokai are very, very smart people. We’ve managed to basically survive without any money, without electric, without lines coming into a house. So again, back to why it’s so important to collaborate and work with our partners at Sustainable Molokai and our community is to gain trust for them to have a say on what these projects, whether they have negative or positive impacts. We talk about pumped hydro. You talk about water on the island of Molokai and everybody’s antennas go up because the entire island of Molokai is a water management area. And so every water use on Molokai has to be approved outside of Molokai by a commission.
And so we really, really the need to work together as a community to make anything realized, to have millions of dollars to upgrade and switch to renewable energy, even to upgrade the current grid from Hawaiian Electric in order to distribute that or are we doing microgrids. So all of that is an ongoing discussion with all of these projects because everything is fast and furious and new information and it’s really not on the top of your list for today. Like I said, energy was never at the top of my list trying to figure out how I was going to save the trees and the fishes was at the top of my list, but all of this can be done. We’re doing it and we are doing it together and it might be slower than some funders would like, but too bad – it’s what this community wants and this community is going to drive all of these decisions and that’s what we love, that we have control and we have a seat at the table instead of not having being what they said for dinner. You’re either at the table, or you’re for dinner and we’ve had a lifelong of being what was for dinner. And so we like to see that change.

John Farrell:
Ali, you mentioned this issue of that there are limits to what the grid can handle with the solar projects on homes. We’ve been looking at that in other places too, and at this sometimes the term of art is called a hosting capacity analysis. How much energy can the grid take? And I mentioned that just because we have another podcast about that, if people want to learn more and have been involved in regulatory proceedings. So I guess one of the things I’m curious about is you have this Hawaiian Electric company. It sounds like some of the ideas that they’ve had have not always been well-aligned with the community’s interests. I’m kind of curious how have they reacted to the Hoʻāhu energy projects and the broader community energy resilience action plan? It sounded like they ran the RFP process for the CBRE, the community-based projects. They’re kind of waiting to see the plan it sounds like. I guess I’m kind of curious what the conversations with the utility have been like and if they’ve been helpful or not in the efforts of the island to have more control over what’s going to happen.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
I use a term sometimes – I have a lot of people I work with and they’re all my frenemies. I love you and I hate you, I love you and I hate you. And that’s kind of the relationship we’ve had in the past. But all of the people that work for Hawaiian Electric Company are really our neighbors and friends. We love them too. They work for a for-profit company and then it’s back to David and Goliath and a for-profit company and a company that really wants to give back all of the benefit to the community. So we have to work hand in hand with Hawaiian Electric Company. They have to understand what we’re trying to do and we have to understand their responsibilities to their shareholders. And so we know that that responsibility is for them to be successful and bring in a lot of money. At the same time, we’re hoping that they work with us like they have through the CBRE project to bring all of our projects alongside.
And we know that at some point we’re going to have to do grid upgrades. There’s been talk on the side about since the Lāhainā fires, the devastating fires in Lāhainā, bought a lot of discussions to the surface about grid ownership. Would communities be able to own the grid, like on the island of Kauai where they have the Kauai Island Utilities Commission? And so all of that money is very high level, very expensive and political types of discussions and we’re open to having those discussions. And Hoʻāhu is also open to doing whatever renewable projects, if that’s what the community wants. We’re very open to all of that because again, we are an energy equity company for the people. And so that’s where we come from. I especially know the importance of working collaboratively, whether it’s something that you don’t agree on or you agree on, you still have to, Molokai is too small, Hawaii is too small to really not work collaboratively with everybody for-profit, nonprofit, whatever it be. So we’re open and we remain open and our heart is open.

Ali Andrews:
The only thing that I would add to that is that there have been some moments of tension for sure over the last several years about the community wants this and it’s a hard line and it does not align well with what the utility is asking for or the utility needs this and that’s not something we can give or want to give. The RFP process has been really illuminating for that because it’s just two totally different ways of operating that clash in the middle that have literally resulted in negotiations of them explaining why the RFP has to be this way because they are formed like this and it has to be secret secret because they’re a corporation and because of this and our process is very different. Like we were explaining before, we talk about every single detail in a public zoom workshop that anybody could listen to afterwards. And I think those just two totally different ways of operating have resulted in us not always understanding each other super well. But I think we have learned a lot from them and they have learned a lot from us. I think over the course of this, and we have come to some pretty good agreements I think that are somewhere in the middle.

John Farrell:
Hawaii is one of the only states that has changed the way that utilities like Hawaiian Electric Company make money in the past few years from most states like mine in Minnesota or others. The utility makes money when they invest money in infrastructure and then they earn a return on whatever they spend their money on. But the Hawaiian utility regulatory system has been changed so that HECO can make money by meeting certain goals like more renewable energy, et cetera. I guess I’m kind of curious, given that you’re doing your work kind of in this timeline, when that transition is taking place, have you felt it at all in the work that you’re doing with the utility, this idea that they’re going to make money in a different way?

Ali Andrews:
I would say overall, no, not yet. And the only, I think in part it’s super complicated and we don’t understand the different ways in which they make money. And so we tried to understand it as a part of the community energy resiliency action plan. We tried to do a bill study, like this set of portfolio projects would result in this bill for a resident. We tried to incorporate rate, how does performance ratemaking, how does this new way of the utility charging for things getting compensated for things affect the portfolio? And it was just like, would have taken us years to pick apart this 200 page document. So mostly no. And I would also say it feels like a big train. I understand that their performance based rate making gives a small incentive like a couple hundred thousand dollars penalty if you don’t meet this reliability metric or outages on Molokai. And the portfolio of projects that the community is proposing would significantly increase the quality of power and decrease the number of outages on the island. But the interest in shifting to a portfolio that would result in that, it’s a lot of effort for them to shift to that and a pretty small incentive. When I calculated it, it was only like a couple hundred thousand dollars, which for a $2 billion, whatever, however many dollars that they are valued as a company, I personally haven’t seen them act in much of a different way.

John Farrell:
That’s helpful. Has the Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative inspired other cooperatives on the islands, other communities that have said, Hey, this looks like a model and we might want to try?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
The answer is yes. And I think because we’re so open to sharing the countless of hours, it took us to write up bylaws and come up with structure and protocol and of course actually doing an RFP in smaller communities, like take for instance Waianae on Oahu, it inspired them because they saw a local grassroots community like themselves. Same challenges being able to do ownership of their own communities like Kahuku that were affected by windmills without their consent or support being constructed alongside of their children’s schools, people being arrested, that type of advocacy in neighborhoods throughout the state. I think we set an example that it can be done and Molokai has a reputation. If it can be done at Moloka, it probably can be done anywhere. And so again, our openness to share everything that we’ve learned that some other company would probably want to sell you we’re just giving it away and we’re giving it away to empower our people. And so that is really inspiring I think to others. And we have been in contact with others, helping them along, encouraging them to do power to the people. Let’s do this. Let’s all take control of our communities and move forward.

John Farrell:
One of the big concerns among climate and clean energy advocates is the rising resistance to citing clean energy projects. And Aunty Lori, you just kind of got into this about the sighting of windmills without a community’s consent. I guess I’m kind of curious if there are lessons in development of the action plan from Molokai or the Hoʻāhu projects that could maybe help folks on the mainland US address this issue of community resistance, what should we learn from that?

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
What you should learn is to be transparent and talk to your community. A lot of people, I mean I can spend another hour telling you about failed projects on the island of Molokai from wind to wave to you name it. People come to Molokai all the time with great ideas about what they want to do, but they don’t bother to understand my community, learn what we’re about, what’s important to us. And that’s why I said that Shake Energy dove in deep and they decided that they were going to help us and learn. But for all for-profit or any type of entities coming outside of the state of Hawaii, they really are going to have a culture shock because we care about stuff that some of people might not care about, especially on siting. We have so many sacred sites and burial sites and sites that will affect our water recharge our oceans.
And so I would say that that is a huge priority for us is siting. So it really doesn’t come on the radar. Even companies like HECO, they look at their checklists and we have a whole separate checklist that they have to meet and they get so far into a project and then meet so much community resistance to the point where people are laying on the ground getting arrested. And that is so sad and that really breaks our heart. And so we really don’t want to see that happen. And so companies really have to be working with the communities and people to bring energy to fruition because renewable energy is important, especially now.

Ali Andrews:
I would just want to double down on what Aunty Lori said about the community has their own checklist and they also have this huge amount of knowledge about place that no outside energy developer could ever possibly have, even if they had access to all of the publications and tax records. That has been, I said before, that the community was really interested in battery chemistry and 10 times more, the community is really interested and knowledgeable about place and land and who owned this parcel before, the person who owned that and what it was used for and when it was graded and what the tax assess value is and what kind of rock is underneath that has been also a lovely surprise. I don’t know why it was a surprise. I guess I should have intuited it, but double down on transparency because you’ll learn a lot more from the people who live in that place than you could ever find anywhere else.

John Farrell:
Is there anything else that I didn’t ask about that you were really hoping that I would ask about or anything else that you think people should try to learn from the Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative?

Ali Andrews:
I just am continually grateful and impressed with the level of commitment. I mean, it’s been four years since we started working on more than that, beginning of 2020, since we started working on the concept of a community-owned solar project on the island of Molokai. And in the same vein, as the community knows the most knowledge of place, the community members also have the most steadfastness. And we’re in it because we’re in it for generations, not just the term of the PPA, where I think many projects would have failed had they taken as long as we have to do what we have done. But above and beyond the best partners to be working with lots of joy and surprise and love there.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
I’ll just add that Hawaiians have a saying that the land is the chief and the people are the servants. And so we also use land. Ina is land, that is inclusive of the people and whatever is the best for Ina is best for everyone, especially for renewable energy. So for anybody that is looking, we are open to sharing everything that we’ve learned, giving you everything that we’ve learned just because we want to encourage other communities like ourselves and people in general to just take care of Mother Earth and take care of our land in the water. And we can do that. And it’s not by burning fossil fuel every day or by drilling, fracking and whatever. All of the bad stuff that we do now, we don’t have to do that because we’re smart enough and we can make the change as long as we don’t let politics and money stand in the way. And that’s it. And love to everybody. Thank you, John. It’s been great.

John Farrell:
That was a great sign off by the way. Beautiful. Thank you so much both of you for taking the time to talk with me today about the Hoʻāhu energy projects and the cooperative formation in the community. It’s just lovely to be able to share this story and I think such an inspiration to other communities who are trying to figure out how do we do this, to know that there are others out there that they can learn from is just wonderful. So thank you again both for taking the time.

Ali Andrews:
Thanks, John.

Aunty Lori Buchanan:
Mahalo.

*****
John Farrell:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Local Energy Rules with Aunty Lori Buchanan, president of Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative Molokai, and Ali Andrews, Chief Executive Officer of Shake Energy Collaborative on the show page. Look for links to the Hoʻāhu website with descriptions of its community-based projects as well as a news story and the full community energy resilience action plan for bringing the island 100% renewable electricity. We’ll also link to related Local Energy Rules podcasts, episode 130 with Isaac Moriwake, explores the performance-based system for the state’s investor owned utility that we briefly discussed. Episode 92 is an interview with Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, CEO, David Bissell, about that island’s substantial progress toward renewable energy with nearly 70% of its electricity coming from renewable resources. Local Energy Rules is produced by myself and Ingrid Behrsin, with editing provided by audio engineer Drew Birschbach. Tune back into Local Energy Rules every two weeks to hear how we can take on concentrated power to transform the energy system. Until next time, keep your energy local, and thanks for listening.