2024 Shultz Energy Fellowships: Hawaii Public Utilities Commission, Office of Policy and Research

Regional-, state-, and city-level efforts are essential in our fight against climate change, especially in the field of energy. Stanford University is committed to helping by integrating its students into energy and climate ecosystems in the West through the Shultz Energy Fellowships program, an energy-related summer fellowship program for undergraduate and graduate students.

Named in honor of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, one of the most widely admired American public servants of the past half-century, the program offers a suite of paid, energy-related public service fellowships for Stanford students in California, Colorado, Utah, and Hawaii during the summer. 

The fellowships run from Monday, June 24, 2024 to Friday, August 30, 2024.

Organization/Agency mission or role in state government

The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission’s (HPUC) primary duty is to protect the public interest by overseeing and regulating public utilities to ensure that they provide reliable service at just and reasonable rates. HPUC regulates all chartered, franchised, certificated, and registered public utility companies operating in the State; reviews and approves rates, tariffs, charges and fees; determines the allowable rate of earnings in establishing rates; issues guidelines concerning the general management of franchised or certificated utility businesses; and acts on requests for the acquisition, sale, disposition or other exchange of utility properties, including mergers and consolidations.

Initial Project Descriptions

The HPUC is excited to again partner with Stanford University and to offer a Shultz Energy Fellowship position for the summer of 2024 within its Office of Policy and Research (OPR). We anticipate that a fellow will have opportunities to contribute to key Commission priorities, as aligned with their interests. In the last year, Hawaiian Electric and the Commission have pursued tangible actions on topics of increasing interest and importance across the country, including considering equity and justice across Commission and utility functions, prioritizing greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, implementing advanced rates, and developing an industry-leading microgrid program. Aligned with these topics, we offer four potential projects for a Shultz fellow below, which are subject to change depending on the needs of the HPUC and the interests of the fellow.

1. Assessment of Hawaiian Electric’s Performance towards an Equitable Energy System: The HPUC has ramped up efforts to prioritize equity and justice across its work. In addition, stakeholders, including the State Legislature, have asked the HPUC to better consider the impacts of its decision-making on vulnerable communities, including low-income communities, those who have experienced past harms associated with energy infrastructure, Native Hawaiians, and others. In response, the HPUC has opened a proceeding to holistically consider equity across our work. As part of this effort and in furtherance of the HPUC’s work to align Hawaiian Electric’s business incentives with policy objectives, the HPUC would like to do a rigorous quantitative assessment of how the utility is preforming towards serving customers equitably. This project would include identifying, collecting, and assessing data sets on key metrics such as electric reliability, outage restoration times, and renewable energy penetration across different demographics such as by income, geography, racial make-up, and other equity indicators. This project would include participating in equity-related groups and proceedings, researching best practices to determine what metrics and demographics to study, collecting and analyzing large data sets, and would culminate in a report or presentation of key findings and recommendations for the HPUC’s consideration.
2. Developing technology- and fuel-specific standardized frameworks for GHG analysis: Hawaii law requires the HPUC to consider the greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions impacts of proposed electricity-related projects and programs. Currently, there is no standardized framework established for the scope and methods to be used in GHG analyses performed by utilities to support their proposals. Furthermore, the HPUC has no standardized framework for evaluating the reasonableness of GHG analyses for different technologies and fuels. For this project, the Stanford fellow will work closely with Commission staff and climate experts from other organizations to identify frameworks and methods currently available to determine lifecycle GHG emissions associated with different technologies and fuels such as, solar photovoltaics and battery energy storage, pumped hydroelectric storage, geothermal energy, biofuels, biomass, and other fuels and resources. To focus this research, the Stanford fellow would be encouraged to select a focus on either 1) renewable technologies or 2) renewable fuels. The Stanford fellow will build on projects such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Life Cycle Assessment Harmonization and expand and tailor findings to Hawaii to establish recommended frameworks for quantifying lifecycle emission impacts of different technologies or fuels.
3. Identifying data needs to determine marginal electricity system costs: In 2024, the HPUC will be working with Hawaiian Electric and stakeholders in the electricity industry to identify data needs to update electricity rate design to reflect “time-based marginal cost pricing.” In theory, establishing time of use (“TOU”) rates that reflect long-run marginal costs will encourage customers to modify energy use patterns to the efficient economic advantage of the utility system, and by extension, all customers. Over the course of the fellowship, the student will work closely with the Commission, Hawaiian Electric, and stakeholders to determine the scope of information to be gathered and the need for future studies to be used in future rate design proceedings. The student will consider the following questions to identify data needs:
   • What methods are appropriate for determining forward-looking long run marginal generation costs differentiated by hour or time period?
   • What time-differentiated Transmission and Distribution (T&D) costs should be included in the determination of TOU block energy charges and block price ratios?
   • How should the cost of ancillary services be determined and applied to rate design?
   • Are there other forecasting models and tools used in other jurisdictions that may be useful for identifying marginal generation, T&D, and ancillary service costs in the context of Hawaii’s unique island energy systems that are growing increasingly dependent on battery storage?
   • This project will require doing research on best practices across other jurisdictions, consulting experts in the field, and will result in recommendations for use in the Commission’s decision-making on Hawaiian Electric’s marginal cost of service study.
4. Development of a Microgrid Services Tariff and/or Program: As directed by the State Legislature, the HPUC established a microgrid services tariff for Hawaiian Electric. Microgrids can provide valuable services, including energy storage, demand response, load shifting, frequency response, and voltage control, to improve resilience for remote communities that are vulnerable to natural disasters and climate change. Furthermore, microgrids can facilitate the state’s achievement of its clean energy goals by allowing the integration of higher levels of renewable energy and distributed energy resources while improving customer electric reliability and resilience.

In May 2021, the Commission approved Hawaiian Electric’s microgrid services tariff and concluded Phase 1 of the proceeding. Now, in Phase 2, the HPUC continues its work with Hawaiian Electric and stakeholders to promote self-sufficiency and resilience among microgrid project operators and further streamline and enhance the microgrid services tariff. The topics for Phase 2 include: (a) valuing the grid services microgrids can provide; (b) how to compensate microgrids for their services; (c) customer protection; and (d) interconnection of microgrids to the electrical system.

While working on this project, the Shultz fellow will identify one or two of the above microgrid topics to review industry literature, analyze current efforts in other jurisdictions, respond to questions and requests from staff and Commissioners, and ultimately develop and propose a detailed plan on how to best address the selected topic(s). In addition, the fellow will attend scheduled internal and stakeholder working group meetings, prepare internal memorandums, and present on selected topics to commissioners and/or staff.

Potential Mentor

• Grace Relf, Chief of Policy and Research

2023 Fellow

• Sierra Withers, MS '24, Civil & Environmental Engineering
• Learn more about Sierra's experience at the HPUC:
  • Blog post
  • Final project