Fears about the price of oil are growing and politicians near and far have recognized the need to kick their fossil fuel addiction.
But the Hawaii Legislature has rejected as many ambitious clean energy proposals as it’s kept alive.
Thursday was the deadline for any non-budget bills to clear their first chamber, and clean energy advocate Jeff Mikulina of The Blue Planet Foundation says it’s been tough sledding so far.
“It’s been disappointing. There are a lot of pro-consumer, pro-clean energy measures out there that didn’t see the light of day at this crossover,” he told Civil Beat Thursday. “We’re going to do our best to resurrect some ideas in the second half and re-insert them into bills (that are still alive).”
Dozens of bills related to energy were introduced in January. Civil Beat has identified key proposals, some of which still have juice and some of which were switched off:
What’s Alive
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Encouraging the private sector by exempting customer-site renewable energy systems from regulation as public utilities —
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Allowing the electric companies to count customer-sited renewables toward their portfolio standards — (, a companion bill, stalled, which could be a bad sign for proponents.)
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Creating a regulatory scheme for an inter-island electric transmission cable between the neighbor islands and Oahu — ,
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Creating a sunset on the renewable energy tax credit and delaying payouts of those credits —
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Requiring that new single-family homes be designed and constructed to facilitate the future installation of a photovoltaic system —
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Ensuring that net energy metering contracts are maintained even with new distributed generation programs —
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Redistributing the revenues from the $1.05 barrel tax from the general fund to energy and food sustainability purposes — , (, and stalled)
What’s Dead
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Creating a Vehicle Miles Traveled user fee pilot program as alternative to state and county fuel taxes — ,
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Conducting an analysis of on-bill financing program that would pay for the upfront costs of efficient appliances and clean energy technology —
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Giving the individual counties the power to grant variances to the solar water heating mandate and collect fees —
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Restricting new construction or expansion of fossil fuel-burning electricity generation facilities unless the utility is already in compliance with renewable energy portfolio standards —
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Establishing performance standards and mandating the use of cool roofs on new residential and commercial construction —
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Requiring the consumer advocate to advocate for increased use of renewable energy —
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Requiring the Public Utilities Commission to consider technology, carbon emissions and cost to consumers when requiring clean energy generation —
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Requiring new televisions sold in Hawaii to meet ENERGY STAR efficiency specifications —
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Enabling renewable energy producers to sell electricity directly to end-use customers (“wheeling”) — ,
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Developing and implementing grid reliability and interconnection standards rather than allowing the utilities to decide themselves — ,
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