Hawaii utilities pushing for more solar installations

Hawaii utilities pushing for more solar installationsHawaii, particularly Oahu, has seen a flurry of activity in the solar industry over the last year.

There are two 5-megawatt projects going through the approval process with the Public Utilities Commission right now, and a homeowner in Manoa just got a 1-megawatt system online.

The homeowner will reap big rewards from Oahu’s feed-in-tariff, which pays 21.8 cents per kilowatt hour for systems under 20 kilowatts and 19.7 cents for larger systems.

The feed-in-tariff is one of the driving factors in Hawaii’s flourishing solar industry, said Hawaii Electric spokesman Peter Rossegg.

“The utility is being prodded along by the state mandate that we get 40 percent of our power from renewable sources within 20 years,” Rossegg said.

That’s the heftiest energy portfolio standard of any state. And it makes sense that Hawaii would adopt such an aggressive stance on renewable. It’s rich in natural resources like sun and suffers the economic consequences of its remoteness with unusually high costs for power.

The island state has historically had some of the highest energy prices in the country. But they blew sky high after the Tsunami in Japan pushed the closure of many of that country’s nuclear plants, Rossegg said. Japan has switched a lot of its power generation over to low-sulfur fuel oil, which is what Hawaii relies on for power.

While oil prices have been dropping, it hasn’t helped fuel oil prices in Hawaii.

“Since other countries like Japan have switched away from nuclear, that’s kept prices high in this region,” Rossegg said. “The utility is doing all we can to promote solar.”

And it’s working. He expects there to be 100 megawatts of newly installed solar within the next five years.

“We have a lot of work to do,” he said.

But the utility is courting solar and other renewable-energy generators. Most of the utility-scale projects will be 5 megawatts or larger, he said.

“On the distributed generation side with homeowners, there’s been a lot of activity,” Rossegg said.

Many homeowners, motivated both by their high energy bills and the utility’s net metering and feed-in-tariff programs, have made the switch.

“We’re pushing as much as we can,” Rossegg said.

He said 2011 was a record year with two to three times the solar installation seen in 2010, and he expects 2012 to be an even bigger year.