Relating To Renewable Energy.
HB790 would direct the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission to establish a statewide goal of 50,000 new customer-sited distributed energy resource installations by December 31, 2030. The bill focuses on technologies such as rooftop solar, battery storage, electric vehicle-related technologies, and other distributed energy resources that can be used in grid service programs and community-based renewable energy arrangements.
The measure also requires the commission to allow tariffs and tariff amendments that support these programs, including a rider for new and existing energy storage devices, provisions for aggregators to enroll customers and receive utility dispatch signals, and device-level measurement and verification without requiring an additional meter for storage systems. In addition, it requires fair compensation for exported solar-plus-storage energy and for the resiliency, capacity, and ancillary services provided by these systems. The bill is written to amend Chapter 269, Hawaii Revised Statutes, and would take effect on July 1, 3000.
HB790 would add new statutory sections to Hawaii’s energy law governing distributed energy resources and utility compensation structures. It would give the Public Utilities Commission explicit authority and direction to set an installation target, approve related tariffs, and establish compensation values for grid services and exported energy from solar-plus-storage systems. The bill would affect electric utilities, customer-generators, aggregators, and owners of rooftop solar, batteries, and related distributed energy technologies by shaping how they are enrolled, measured, and paid under grid service programs.
The bill appears broadly supportive of renewable energy expansion and distributed energy adoption, with a strong pro-solar, pro-storage, and pro-grid-resilience framing. The text emphasizes Hawaii’s renewable portfolio standard goals, grid reliability challenges, and the need for customer-sited resources to reduce fossil fuel dependence and improve resilience. No committee transcripts or recorded votes were provided, so there is no direct evidence of opposition or amendment debate in the available context.
The main policy issues embedded in the bill are compensation levels and utility program design. The bill requires exported energy from solar-plus-storage systems to be credited at a rate sufficient to encourage deployment, and it directs the commission to set values for resiliency, capacity, and ancillary services—areas that can be contentious because they affect utility costs, ratepayer impacts, and the economics of distributed generation. Another likely point of tension is the role of aggregators and the use of tariffs to manage customer participation, since these provisions can raise questions about utility control, measurement standards, and how broadly the benefits and costs of grid services should be shared.