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About the Program

Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative

90% of Hawaii's total energy is supplied by oil—and 99% of that oil comes from outside the United States. To confront this issue, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) launched the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI) on January 28, 2008. HCEI's goal is to put Hawaii on a path to supply 70% of its energy needs with clean energy by 2030, reducing their overall consumption of crude oil by up to 72%.

See the EERE press release, the DOE press release, and the full text of the MOU (PDF 108 KB). Download Adobe Reader.

DOE's Role in the Initiative

The approach to HCEI is based on three areas of effort:

  1. Working groups: Small, collaborative teams focus on long-term, intelligent solutions that integrate DOE's technical and policy expertise with Hawaii-based knowledge and project resources around energy generation, energy delivery, transportation and end-use efficiency.

  2. Partnership projects: Projects focus on a number of strategic technology opportunities that test the working groups' concepts and combine DOE's and Hawaii's resources.

  3. Transformation economics: The economics focus on taking concepts and completed projects and introducing them to the market. This creates investment incentives for energy suppliers and consumers, accelerates new investments for rapid asset turnover, and improves energy service delivery and security.

Within the Hawaii-DOE partnership, the DOE has integrated the program for funding priorities in FY08 and beyond. DOE provides intelligent manpower and R&D expertise in energy efficiency, renewable energy, electricity delivery and system-level integration, and third-party objectivity to facilitate collaboration between the public and private sector.

For a more detailed overview of these efforts, see the HCEI Executive Summary and Plan Forward presentation (PDF 1.1 MB) or the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative project page at the EERE Project Management Center, which lists supporting documents and reports for HCEI.

Videos

A news conference that was held to announce the launch of the HCEI in January, 2008. Watch the full video on the State of Hawaii: Governor Linda Lingle Web site.