2025 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 22, 2025 to Friday, August 29, 2025.

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 electricity, water, sewer, gas, interisland shipping, and telecommunication utility services are delivered to consumers in a safe, reliable, economical, and environmentally sound manner.  Utility regulation limits economic, social, and environmental harm that could occur if naturally monopolistic industries were not regulated.  Potential harms include, but aren’t limited to inadequate investment, reduced innovation, higher prices, social inequity, poor service, and pollution. The HPUC must also provide utilities with a reasonable opportunity to recover the costs incurred providing service, including a fair return to investors.

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 2025 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 new distributed energy resources programs. Aligned with these topics, we offer four potential projects for a Shultz fellow below.

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. Informing an In-State Lifecycle Carbon Intensity Threshold for Electricity Generation that Involves Combustion:  Hawaii law requires the HPUC to consider the greenhouse gas (“GHG”) emissions impacts of fuel contracts and generation projects that involve combustion. For this project, the Stanford fellow will work closely with Commission staff and climate experts from other organizations to develop recommendations for how the GREET lifecycle analysis model may be used and modified appropriately for Hawaii’s local context to establish carbon intensity (“CI”) thresholds for energy projects involving combustion (GREET stands for the “Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies” suite of models developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE's) Argonne National Laboratory). The fellow will assess different biofuel options using GREET and different powerplant efficiencies/heat rates. The Stanford fellow will also research how other jurisdictions have developed and applied carbon intensity thresholds and report their findings to the Commission. 
3. Understanding the Economics of Biofuel Markets in the Hawaii Context: Hawaii’s electricity utilities are considering the use of biofuels for future firm generation. The Stanford fellow will research and report their findings on biofuel markets, including pricing indices, availability of supply, local and national demands, transport and storage considerations for Hawaii, local sourcing potential, and how these factors vary by common feedstocks. The fellow will also consider factors such as regulatory requirements, environmental policies, tax incentives, and growth trends in different sectors that may increase their utilization of biofuels in the future to meet RPS and decarbonization goals. 
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.
   1. 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.
   2. 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 mentors

• Anand Samtani, Supervising Economist
• Clarice Schafer, Supervising Utility Analyst

Work environment

We anticipate HPUC staff will have a flexible hybrid work policy for Summer 2025. If this is the case, the fellow will have the option to work fully in-person, partially remote, or fully remote, with partial or full in-person work highly encouraged.

2024 Fellow

• Stephanie Unur, Environmental Systems Engineering ‘24, Sustainability Science & Practice ‘25
• Learn more about Stephanie's experience at the HPUC:
  • Student blog
  • Final projects