The proposal, shared by Gov. Josh Green’s Office on Tuesday morning, details plans to overhaul Oʻahu's energy grid to run on a new fossil fuel.
It sets a target of 2030 to swap in natural gas for oil, with a price tag of $2 billion in infrastructure investments. Green’s office said the Japanese company JERA plans to start the permitting process in the coming months.
The proposal repeatedly cites the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office’s Alternative Fuels, Repowering, and Energy Transition Study, released in January 2025.
That report came under intense scrutiny in a House Committee hearing less than a week ago. Matthias Fripp, an energy policy expert and former UH engineering professor, told House lawmakers that he found multiple mistakes in the study.
Perhaps the largest error Fripp said he found relates to the cost-savings of using natural gas instead of oil. According to modeling in the study, switching to natural gas would cut nearly a billion dollars in fuel costs — saving ratepayers an average of $340 on their electricity bills each year.
Fripp said a key spreadsheet equation for that modeling didn’t factor in the costs of natural gas. If true, that means the energy office’s math is off by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The office has rejected Fripp's analysis as inaccurate and denies that there is an error in their spreadsheet. But lawmakers want a more thorough explanation.
"If the concerns [Fripp] raised bear up, then it completely changes the conclusions drawn by the report… it wipes out the savings," said Rep. Nicole Lowen, who presided over Thursday's committee hearing.
Lowen said the release of JERA’s proposal shouldn’t overshadow concerns about the energy office’s report. She gave the office until Friday, March 20, to provide clarification to the committee.
The Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has been parsing through the study’s spreadsheets since late last week.
"We have identified some inconsistencies, but we are not yet in a position to say what the impact of that is on the numbers that were presented in the HSEO report," said institute Director Rick Rocheleau.
Rocheleau expects that the institute will complete its review by the end of Wednesday.
JERA's proposal breaks with the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office’s study in at least one key regard. JERA crunched its own numbers on the cost savings of importing and using liquefied natural gas compared to oil — it estimates $500 in savings per household a year.
Rocheleau said achieving hundreds of dollars of savings a year for Hawaiʻi residents with natural gas is not impossible, but it relies on an optimistic set of assumptions about factors like the project's capital costs and how quickly new infrastructure could get up and running.
The Natural Energy Institute plans to release a public tool that tests those assumptions, essentially allowing users to game out different fuel pathways for Hawaiʻi.
"Our tool is going to allow us to… look at the range of savings or potential lack of savings, depending on what you want to assume about those variables," Rocheleau said.
That tool should be available to the public by the end of next week.
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