Frequent power outages need costly combo of fixes - KHON2

Frequent power outages need costly combo of fixes | KHON2

HONOLULU (KHON2) — Widespread power outages strike again, this time on the Big Island. It’s just the latest in a series of power reliability problems. Always Investigating looks into the reasons and solutions.

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A combination of equipment failure, winter weather, variations in renewable energy, and even planned maintenance are to blame. HECO says they’re investing in upgrades, but customers and some lawmakers are fed up.

Just after 7 p.m. Tuesday, a HECO generator unexpectedly went down in Hilo.

“That initiated an automatic process that disconnected service to about 9,700 customers around the island for about 30 minutes,” explained HECO spokesperson Darren Pai.

That outage caused a shortfall in supply, and outages spread.

“We did have to initiate a manual process of disconnecting more customers from 7:30 to 8 p.m. and that impacted about 79,00 customers from Keaau to Mountain View, portions of Waikoloa and in the Volcano area,” Pai said.

HECO tells KHON2 there was almost zero wind power, and Puna Geothermal has not been back to full capacity for years since the last big volcanic eruption. Several generators were out for planned maintenance or running below capacity. A combination of unfortunate factors makes this outage similar to Oahu’s widespread January blackouts where weather, low renewable production, and offline generators left thousands at a time without power. Maui has had its own spate of issues, too.

“It’s a wake-up call,” said Rep. Gene Ward, a member of the House Energy Committee. “We’ve got to be attentive. We cannot become a third-world country. That is the bottom line of all of this.”

“Part of what has plagued all the islands is they have all these old diesel generators that are ending or at the end of life and are hard to maintain,” said Sen. Glenn Wakai, vice chair of the Senate Energy Committee.

It’s not for lack of money. HECO is profitable. Their latest stock report shows they made more money last year than 2022 despite the Lahaina fires for which they’re facing huge repair costs and lawsuits.

“They did better when they did worse,” Ward said. “Now, that is a contradiction. That should be an oxymoron. When you do worse, you should not be compensated for that.”

HECO got a $95 million federal grant to help pay for grid resilience, and consumers pay handsomely.

“We pay the three times the national average for utility costs than the rest of the nation,” Wakai said. “When we closed the coal plant on Oahu two years ago, people on Oahu paid 20 percent more for their electricity.”

But lawmakers say HECO needs even more help, and a measure moving forward just today ( SB3096) would let them get state government bonds.

“It’s a bill to allow them to borrow money at a lower cost,” Wakai said, “so they can go and fix their power plants and maybe by upgraded equipment.”

Always Investigating wanted to know, to what extent has the move toward renewables and away from firm power generators — like the shuttered coal plant — impacted reliability? The Public Utilities Commission monitors reliability statistics that but has no post-coal data. We asked HECO for their 2023 service reliability report, they say it’s not ready yet. We asked HECO: how can renewable equal reliable, as the state marches toward 100% renewable by 2030?

“That’s going to mean more energy storage systems, more solar energy, more firm renewable systems — generators that can run when you need them whenever you need them to provide that consistent power,” Pai said, “and the fuel that they that they run on is from a renewable source such as a biofuel.”

“We want to get rid of fossil fuels, well, let’s do it. But do it wisely,” Ward said, “not this lickity- split stuff that I think HECO has been really kind of fazed by and not able to cope with.”

A spokesperson for HECO’s main regulator, the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, told KHON2 in a statement that the PUC “continues to work with the electric utilities in our state to address reliability, and ongoing resiliency issues, that are impacting the electricity grid on each of the islands. The commission is committed to ensuring that the improvements made to the electricity grid to address reliability and resiliency are in the public interest, have minimal cost impacts to ratepayers, while consistent with meeting our state energy goals.”

A spokesperson for the Hawaii State Energy Office said: “Our office is analyzing hourly data from the PUC on the power outages that allows us to identify which power plant units were down and for how long, along with the function of the battery energy storage systems… Despite the cloud cover and rain, the data we have seen shows solar and battery power helped avoid a more severe shortage.”