On June 29, economist Michael Roberts published a report titled “Hawaiʻi’s Electricity Future” on the University of Hawaiʻi Economic Research Organization’s website. With his report, Roberts waded into perhaps the state’s largest ongoing debate around energy: whether Oʻahu can lower its electricity costs by burning natural gas instead of oil for power.
Roberts’ paper contended that Oʻahu doesn’t need a new natural gas plant, nor does it need any other kind of new fuel-based generation for that matter. Instead, Roberts concluded that investments in utility-scale solar are Oʻahu’s most cost-effective option.
After publication, the report was met with criticism, some of which came directly from Gov. Josh Green, who has been a vocal proponent of a proposal by Japan’s largest energy company, JERA, to build a 500 MW gas plant on Oʻahu.
Green called the report “baloney” on KHON2, critiquing its assumptions about the availability of land for solar development.
Roberts told HPR that he was aware of other critiques of the report, but only one group reached out about a specific error: Hawaiian Electric flagged that Roberts had mislabeled some of the utility’s solar-plus-storage contracts.
Roberts issued a correction — but in doing so, he said that he opened the door to a bigger mistake.
“I screwed up in responding to that too quickly and said something that just wasn't right,” he said to HPR.
The revised report said that mainland solar with storage contract prices were “flat to falling” between 2018 and 2024. In fact, the opposite was true — contract prices doubled in that time. Roberts said he got that data point from an AI assistant, which had incorrectly summarized a Berkeley Lab study.
“I leaned on the AI assistant and did not check what it wrote. It looked right to me, so that was a big mistake,” he said.
After recognizing that error, Roberts conducted an internal audit of the report. That process brought a few additional mistakes to light, including one that inflated the costs of JERA’s project.
“Some of the errors we found had made the case against the LNG project look stronger than the corrected data support; we are correcting those too, in the open, because the standard is accuracy, not advocacy,” Roberts said in a written statement shared with HPR.
Roberts withdrew the report from publication on July 7th. UHERO Director Carl Bonham said this incident has prompted the organization to review how it vets reports from fellows, which do not always undergo peer review.
“There is a tendency to rely on the academic integrity and the academic care that a faculty member is going to bring to a subject automatically, but for much of what we do, that's not enough,” he told HPR.
“So we're looking at how (we can) improve those systems without making things so onerous that we never publish anything.”
In a written statement, Green’s office approved of the decision to pull back the report.
“I appreciate that UHERO recognized the flaws and bias that the compromised ‘study’ demonstrated. The cost of energy and Hawaiʻi’s energy future is a serious issue with extraordinary complexity and it deserves a sober, thoughtful and honest assessment,” the statement read.
Roberts said he intends to republish a revised edition of the report and doesn’t believe that the planned corrections will change the report’s fundamental conclusion that solar investments present the lowest cost pathway for Oʻahu.
“Solar is still the cheapest thing that we can do, and I think that's pretty clear,” he said.
In the meantime, Roberts said he and his coauthor, UH Ph.D. student Ethan Hartley, are reclassifying the report as a working paper.
“Now that it's got lots of attention, maybe we can get the best peer review ever,” Roberts said, adding that they are open to feedback during the redrafting process.
“We want to invite all these people out there who are criticizing it, come to us … If you think that there's any particular problems or you want us to do anything else, then let us know what those are, and we'll look at this much more carefully and vet it more carefully.”
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