Fortnightly Top Innovators 2018
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and President of Lines Up, Inc.
Richard Barone is Director – Demand Response, Hawaiian Electric Utilities.
PUF's Steve Mitnick: How does this demand response program work, and what makes it unique?
Richard Barone: There are a few reasons that it's unique. If you go back to the DR policy statement that the Commission ordered in April 2014, there were strong indications and directives for the company to explore demand response, offer, and provide a full array of ancillary services to the grid. That's different from a lot of utilities and jurisdictions on the mainland, where demand response has traditionally been a capacity, or peak reduction instrument.
Second, the Commission encouraged us to explore the market, and let the market speak. The Commission said, there's a lot of aggregators, intermediaries, and curtailment service providers. Why don't you see how a market might evolve?
That was challenging because to the degree that aggregators or curtailment service providers do participate in markets in the mainland, those are typically wholesale markets that are administered and run by the independent system operators.
You don't have markets that are administered by a utility. We don't have an independent system operator, and we are fully responsible for the vertically integrated grid, even though we don't own a lot of our generation.