During his State of the County address, Hawaiʻi County Mayor Mitch Roth urged the governor to declare an energy emergency amid soaring gas prices. The call also came out of concern that green energy projects should be fast-tracked to reduce Hawaiʻi's reliance on oil. The governor is reluctant to have the Public Utilities Commission speed up its review of renewable energy projects.
Roth spoke to The Conversation about why he believes every effort needs to be made to approve renewable energy projects faster.
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CATHERINE CRUZ: Have you heard back from the governor?
MITCH ROTH: We did. They made some recommendations. Their thoughts were that even if they set up the PUC that it's still going to take years. I can see that, but we don't know how long it's going to be before our oil prices come down. And we're dealing with a crisis on climate. So there's a whole bunch of reasons why we should be looking at this emergency. You know, one of the things that I mentioned in my letter to him is that we have over 50% of our people living ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. It's very concerning when you hear people who were used to paying maybe $40 to fill up their car, now looking somewhere in the neighborhood of $60, $70 to fill up their car. Their electricity bills for their housing are going up by 20%. They have to think about feeding their kids, they have to think about paying their bills, they have to think about a lot of different things. And you're now making decisions that we really shouldn't be making. So the governor made some good points that we need to work on our backlog. We've been working on our backlog for PV systems, we've been trying to speed up our entire permitting system. And you know, we're getting there. We're also making recommendations to people to conserve energy and to be thoughtful about what they're using because a lot of our electricity is being made with fossil fuels. And that's the reason why the prices are going up. And so we have the ability to get to 100% of renewable energy that we make here, which has several benefits for us. One, we're keeping the environment clean. Two, instead of sending dollars outside to get fossil fuel, those dollars rotate through our system. And so there's a lot of reasons why we should be doing this sooner rather than later.
I know I had pain at the pump when I gassed up my little car, but I don't drive very far. And for the folks on the Big Island who have to commute from Kona to Hilo, those gas bills just must be staggering.
They are. They're staggering. And you know, the county pays some of those gas bills as well, and diesel bills. One of the things that we've done is we've made our bus free on the Big Island, so you used to pay $2 a fare. Now you can ride from one side to the other. And so we're encouraging people, whatever ways possible, whether it's carpooling, whether it's conserving energy, to think about, you know, what they're doing and think about the environment.
We're looking to see what Kauaʻi has done, it's in a better place than the Big Island, just simply because of its size and what it's been able to do — the utility cooperative over there.
We have a couple of things planned out, as well, for our island. We had a meeting today. We're looking at, you know, our wastewater, we have to rebuild our wastewater. We may be able to get some kind of fuels out of our wastewater system. We're looking at our solid waste, where we may be able to get fuels that are running our buses. And right now the Big Island has, according to HECO, 60% of their electricity being made by renewable energy. And so I think very easily if you look at what we have online, I think we need 185 megawatts to make it to 100%. I think we're at about 100 right now. We have a solar farm coming on with about 40 megawatts. We have wind power, which is another 30. We have PGV geothermal, which is another 20. And then there's other projects out there, that gets us over and then we have biomass, which is another one that possibly gets us over the top as well. We're thinking about energy as a portfolio. And we did say to the governor, look, if it's cheaper to make it with renewable fuel, and it's carbon-neutral or even better carbon-negative then we should fast track. I was talking to somebody working on the Oʻahu wind farm, actually one out in the ocean. They've been working on it for nine years. They're going through all of the federal hoops that they have to jump through. A lot of people don't realize there's a lot of hoops that these energy sources, they have to jump through before they even get to the PUC. And so we're thinking that if we can speed up our end anywhere possible and the county is doing it where we can, we think the PUC is the next place that we can really move projects. There's a lot of different options and so on when people say renewable energy, we're open to looking at all of them, as long as they're going to be cheaper to make than fossil fuel, and they're going to be carbon-neutral or carbon-negative.
In the State of the County address, you also talked about the need for affordable housing. We saw what you folks did with the tiny houses there to help with the homeless problem. Anything more you can share with us on that?
We're looking at different ways to increase our pipeline for affordable housing. Really, what we want is workforce housing. We want to make sure that the houses that we're building are built for people that live here, are local families, we know that we need about 15,000 affordable housing units before 2025. When we came in, there was a little over 1,000 in the pipeline, we now have over 5,000 in the pipeline, that makes some people a little bit nervous that we're developing. But if we want to keep our local kids here and allow them to raise their kids here, they're going to need housing and quality kind of jobs.
We're just coming off this next phase of the pandemic. Where are you looking at going at this point, as far as the tourism and boosting other aspects of our economies to get us going again?
I think right now, that is the key. Looking at COVID, I think today we have anywhere between 11 and 15 people I think in the hospitals — which is way down from where we were. So we're not too worried about COVID, we need to be thinking about our local families, thinking about our economies, making sure that people are able to work, make sure that our different employers are able to do their things and get our economy going. There's a lot of people that really are struggling still because of COVID. Again, we look at those ALICE numbers, we need to make sure that those numbers are coming down and giving local families the option of doing what they want to. And that's done by taking care of the economy and focusing on the economy.
We just got through a hearing this past week on the future of Maunakea. And there's a lot of hand wringing over what that management model looks like. Any thoughts on that bill?
I'm not sure exactly what has come out. But one of the things I saw, it was very disconcerting. I don't think anybody wants to get rid of astronomy, whatever side you're on. But I think when you look at the bill that was in front of the Senate, it was a flawed bill. There's certain things that need to happen in the next couple of years, negotiations on the leases and things like that, that if you don't have that you could be endangering the future of astronomy. And so I think you need to have a couple of people, an agency that's looking at it. And so right now UH is probably the best agency to do the negotiations because there's nothing set up in that bill to say who is going to negotiate those leases, who's going to take in the decisions that need to be made in the next couple of years. And if those decisions aren't made, you jeopardize all of the astronomy and that's, again, we talk about our economy, that's $100 million to the Big Island. That's food on people's tables. And that's a lot of those families are local families.
This interview aired on The Conversation on March 29, 2022. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
