Brittany Lyle writes: Hawaii’s electricity prices are higher than anywhere else in the nation. The burdensome cost of power, paired with the island state’s plentiful sunshine, has led to an unparalleled adoption of residential rooftop solar energy. On the island of Oahu, where 80 percent of the state’s population lives, more than 12 percent of Hawaiian Electric Co. (HECO) customers have rooftop solar systems — about 20 times the solar penetration rate of any mainland utility. As homes increasingly morph into mini power plants, some residents are winding down their HECO bills to net zero.
The problem is this: When solar customers provide their own power, they don’t pay for the fixed costs the utility has outside of electricity generation. As more and more people switch to solar, an ever-shrinking pool of utility customers still connected to the grid are left to cover these operating and maintenance expenses. This causes bills to spike for traditional customers, which incentivizes even more people to switch to solar, raising bills for nonsolar customers even more. Every new rooftop solar installation added to the grid contributes to this cost shift.
“It could be that all of the people living in apartments are going to be subsidizing the millionaires with their huge estates covered in rooftop solar,” said Michael Roberts, an economics professor who studies electricity pricing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “I don’t think we’re quite at that point yet, but we need to change or that’s where we’re headed.”
In 2014, HECO’s nonsolar customers picked up the tab for an extra $53 million in operating and maintenance costs because so many people switched to solar. It is estimated that they will pay an additional $80 million in 2015.
As the island grapples with the task of making a biased energy pricing system more equitable, mainland utilities with large and growing solar energy bases in states like California, Arizona, New Jersey and Colorado are looking at Oahu and watching their future unfold.
In the basement of the faded 1934 cottage where he was raised, Kong thumbed through a filing cabinet in search of his utility bill records. Vintage Hawaiian slack key guitar music buzzed on an old radio. A small electric fan circulated warm air in the room.
A retired Pearl Harbor security guard, Kong inherited his childhood home. But he lives next door in a newer, five-bedroom house that he shares with his wife, two daughters, son-in-law, grandson and the occasional foreign exchange student. The house stands on a corner lot in Honolulu’s Kaimuki section, once an ostrich farm owned by the Kingdom of Hawaii’s royal doctor. Bordering the iconic Diamond Head volcano, it is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods.
He pulled from his files his HECO bill from February. In time with the music, he tapped a finger next to the figure for the total due: $336. That’s a 53 percent increase from his bill for the same month two years earlier.
“I think about shutting the power down, putting the two refrigerators on a generator and using flashlight and candles,” Kong said. “If it wasn’t for the refrigerators, I’d shut the power off now when we go to sleep.”
