On Friday November 2, Frank Wolak, the Holbrook Working Professor of Economics at Stanford and Director of Stanford’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, gave a special seminar “How Should the Public Utilities Commission Regulate Hawaiian Electric Company for Better Integration of Renewable Energy?” His talk summarized the many ways conventional regulation and rate design creates inefficiency in our electricity system. To lower costs of high-renewable system, he argues that Hawai’i should embrace a “cost based” market in which long-term competitive contracts for power would be used in conjunction with regulated optimization model that would set real-time prices for buying and selling of electricity and grid services.
Below is video of his talk and a link to his slides. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX7HuyeUOOA This special seminar, organized by Governing Green Power (https://uhero.hawaii.edu/governing-green-power/), was co-sponsored by UHERO and Sea Grant.