Chair
Jay Griffin is the chair of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission.
PUF: What is your role here?
Chair Griffin: I'm the chair of the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission. I came on to our Staff first in October 2012. I knew the Chair at the time, Hermina Morita. I worked for her in the state legislature and had been a good friend of hers.
She was a common colleague in energy policy and asked me to come onto the Staff and help our internal efforts to build capacity for our Commission to help manage the increasing workload, and complexity as the state moved forward with its Clean Energy Initiative.
This initiative started about ten years ago. In the beginning, there was extensive negotiation and policy work in coming up with the agreement. After that, a lot of the implementation work started to filter into the regulatory arena. She could see at the time that we needed to increase our Staff's capacity, both in numbers, and in expertise.
I was working at the university. I'd been working on renewable grid integration studies and demonstration projects. I came in to be an advisor to the Commissioners, but also to increase and build the capacity of our research Staff.