The U.S. Department of Energy approved $95 million in federal funds to harden energy grids on the five islands served by Hawaiian Electric.
President Joe Biden recently announced that his administration would make the federal funding available under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). This funding would pay for half of Hawaiian Electric’s proposed $190 million Climate Adaptation Transmission and Distribution Resilience Program, which was submitted to the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) for approval in June 2022 (Docket 2022- 0135). The federal matching funds would reduce the cost of the program to customers by 50%.
Hawaiian Electric applied for the IIJA grid resilience funding in April 2023. Their proposed five-year resilience plan includes a slate of initial, foundational grid resilience investments as the first phase of long-term climate adaptation effort. Investing in a more resilient power system will reduce the severity of damage when major events happen and enable service to be restored more quickly even when there aren’t storms.
The high-level elements of the program include:
• Critical Transmission Hardening – Replacing poles and conductors on high-priority transmission lines, including two on Maui
• Critical Circuit Hardening – circuits serving critical customers such as hospitals, public infrastructure and critical defense facilities
• Critical Pole Hardening and Replacement – e.g., poles that support multiple circuits; replacing poles with fire-resistant materials
• Wildfire Mitigation – System hardening and increased situational awareness and control (e.g., cameras, sensors and reclosers) targeted to areas prone to wildfire
• Undergrounding of portions of certain distribution circuits
• Hazard Tree Removal – The complete removal of off-right-of-way trees that are weak, dead, diseased, or structurally comprised a pose a risk to power lines (as opposed to trimming)
• Control Center Resilience – hardening of existing system control centers, relocating and elevating the Maui control center to avoid flooding and developing a backup control center on O‘ahu.