Oahu’s largest and cheapest, but also dirtiest, power plant is nearing a long-planned Sept. 1 shutdown, and the facility’s operator hosted a celebratory event today to thank employees and bid many of them an advance farewell.
AES Corp., which has run the coal-fired plant at Campbell Industrial Park since building it 30 years ago, also held a construction groundbreaking ceremony Friday for a solar farm on Maui.
The back-to-back events reflect the company’s shift globally to completely replace coal power production with renewable energy by 2025.
“When I look at the future … there is more opportunity to actually generate more projects of solar, wind and battery energy storage solutions,” said Bernerd Da Santos, chief operating officer of Virginia-based AES. “We’re fully committing to the objective to being in renewables.”
Da Santos made the trip from Virginia, his first to Hawaii, to lead the two events. On Friday morning, before the celebration for employees planned at Paradise Cove, he said he met with plant workers who shared memorable moments helping run the facility that delivers about 10% of Oahu’s power supply for utility company Hawaiian Electric.
“This is a well-run plant,” he said, characterizing its performance in the top quartile of operations for AES while also acknowledging troubling past issues that have included regulatory violations.
Wayne Tanaka, director of the Sierra Club of Hawaii, said the retirement of the coal plant will be good for the environment by reducing Hawaii’s carbon footprint and benefiting the climate.
“It’s been a long time coming,” he said. “We’re excited about making this transition away from fossil fuels.”
The coal plant, according to Hawaiian Electric, is one of the state’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, putting the equivalent of 1.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.
Because the facility is the cheapest source of power sold to or generated by Hawaiian Electric, the shutdown will result in higher electrical bills for customers.
The utility previously expected the impact on a typical customer bill to be about $2 a month, but that was before this year’s surge in oil prices largely driven by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hawaiian Electric plans to notify customers in early August about an updated higher expense, which for most customers should start to show up on bills received in October.
Hawaiian Electric, which maintains surplus generation capacity, will replace power from the AES coal plant with its mix of power fueled by oil and growing renewable sources.
“The lights are going to stay on,” Jim Kelly, a company spokesperson, said in a statement. “That’s our job. We’ve been planning for this for a long time, and we adjusted the maintenance schedules of our own plants this year to ensure there were plenty of generation resources available after Sept. 1.”
Hawaiian Electric decided in 2016 not to extend its 30-year power purchase agreement with the coal plant beyond its Sept. 1 expiration. The state Legislature cemented the termination in law two years ago by prohibiting the facility from running beyond the end of this year as part of advancing a state goal to have 100% renewable energy generation by 2045.
Da Santos said these actions dovetail with a 2016 decision by AES, which was born as a coal power producer, to reduce coal power to under 10% of its business by 2030. This goal has since been adjusted to completely phase out coal power by 2025, according to Santos, who said coal power today represents a little under 20% of AES business, compared with around 66% in 2016.
In Hawaii the shift includes four operating AES solar farms on Kauai, Maui and Oahu totaling about 35 megawatts as well as a 24-megawatt wind farm in Kahuku. The company also has six solar farm projects in design or construction on Kauai, Maui, Oahu and Hawaii island to produce about 110 megawatts of electricity plus battery storage. The six solar farms are projected to start running in 2023 and 2024.
The largest of the planned projects is the 60-megawatt Kuihelani Solar farm on Maui. A groundbreaking and blessing was held Friday for the project, which is big enough to supply 15% of Maui’s energy needs.
By comparison, the coal plant has a 180-megawatt capacity and can run 24 hours daily.
The last load of coal, about 15,000 tons, arrived in Kalaeloa a few days ago aboard the ship Flying Tiger. Da Santos said there should be a little extra coal after midnight Sept. 1 and that this could be used up with a couple or so extra days of operating the plant, if that’s acceptable to Hawaiian Electric, or shipped elsewhere for AES use.
Da Santos said the plant will be decommissioned in a process that involves preparation work through the end of this year, followed by dismantling expected to be done over three years.
About a dozen employees will stay on for dismantling, while another five or six will carry out preparation work. The plant employs 41 people, of whom eight have secured jobs at other AES facilities in Hawaii or on the mainland. Another six have found employment outside the company, and six are retiring, Da Santos said. Futures of the other three or four employees have not yet been determined.
Correction: AES Corp.’s groundbreaking ceremony was Friday and its employee event was today. An earlier version of this story mixed up the days of the events.
