Governing Green Power
Liquefied Natural Gas: A cleaner fossil fuel that’s cheaper than oil and pairs well with renewable energy
By Sherilyn Wee and Michael Roberts Spurred by low natural gas prices and a maturing market for liquefied natural gas (LNG), Hawai‘i Gas received their first shipment of LNG in containers in early April. In phase one of the gas utility’s plan, LNG serves as a backup fuel for locally produced synthetic natural gas (SNG). […]
Read MoreManaging a Grid with Green Energy
By Michael Roberts The calculator in the last post shows that installing solar is an incredibly valuable investment for households and businesses with the physical and financial ability to do it. The gains are so large that some wonder why the state is nearly breaking its budget to subsidize what would still, even without the […]
Read MoreCost Implications of GHG Regulation in Hawai‘i
The State of Hawai‘i and the U.S. are developing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction regulations in parallel. The State requires that economy-wide GHG emissions be reduced to 1990 levels by the year 2020 and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is developing new source performance standards (NSPS) for new electricity generation units. The State Department of […]
Read MoreThe Costs and Benefits of Installing Solar PV
By Michael Roberts Renewable energy presents many new challenges at the system level. Before we get to that, it helps to first look at things from a homeowner’s perspective. The Homeowner’s Solar PV Decision If you’re a homeowner, and you haven’t already installed PV solar, you may want to look into doing it very soon. […]
Read MoreIs Monopoly a Barrier to Hawai’i’s Ascent?
By Michael Roberts In 2012 Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist and Columbia University Business School Professor visited Hawaii to give the Stephen and Marylyn Pauley Seminar in Sustainability. Stiglitz discussed sustainability within the context of our depressed national economy and ongoing struggles with debt and unemployment. For our economy to fully recover, we […]
Read MoreWhy are Hawai’i’s Electricity Prices So High?
By Michael Roberts Excluding rooftop solar, Hawai’i residential consumers pay an average of about 37 cents for a kilowatt-hour of electricity. Taking refrigerators, water heaters, stoves, air conditioning and other uses into account, the average Hawai’i household uses about 18.5 kWh each day, for a monthly bill of about $205. That’s a lot, between three […]
Read MoreA Policy Analysis of Hawaii’s Solar Tax Credit Incentive
This study uses Hawaii as an illustrative case study in state level tax credits for PV. We examine the role of Hawaii’s tax credit policy in PV deployment, including distributional and tax payer impacts. Hawaii is interesting because its electricity rates are nearly four times the national average as well as has a 35% tax […]
Read MoreMarket, Welfare and Land-Use Implications of Lignocellulosic Bioethanol In Hawaii
This article examines land-use, market and welfare implications of lignocellulosic bioethanol production in Hawaiʻi to satisfy 10% and 20% of the State’s gasoline demand in line with the State’s ethanol blending mandate and Alternative Fuels Standard (AFS). A static computable general equilibrium (CGE) model is used to evaluate four alternative support mechanisms for bioethanol. Namely: […]
Read MoreAn Assessment Of Greenhouse Gas Emissions-Weighted Clean Energy Standards
Published in the journal Energy Policy, this paper quantifies the relative cost-savings of utilizing a greenhouse gas emissions-weighted Clean Energy Standard (CES) in comparison to a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Using a bottom-up electricity sector model for Hawaii, this paper demonstrates that a policy that gives “clean energy” credit to electricity technologies based on their […]
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