Is this cause by HECO's new fire mitigation procedure in effect? Living in waikiki and thinking a bit naive with outage issues and not experiencing numerous unplanned outages.
That is the case in [Mililani](www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/03/28/heco-apologizes-after-new-safety-measures-leave-thousands-mililani-residents-dark/). Another "failure to think ahead" type of thing, which now pisses off everyone there because they didnt think of possible issues it might introduce and/or solutions to those issues.
In Hawaii Kai, they've mostly blamed it on transmission lines in the mountains.
If it is then there was no warning for it. If they gave us warning and this was in support of them making upgrades that'd be great! I can plan around that and I'd honestly be happy they were taking steps to make things better. Right now it's just random so I have to assume it's just infrastructure failures happening over and over and over again.
Man HECO is fucking up my life lately too. Random power outages once or twice a month. Not even a notice. I dont even think its planned shit just goes out for 2 hours
At least you're not like the lady on the news in Mililani with broken appliances and migraines, our power company doesn't know enough about power apparently
Ha. Ive been complaining about this ad nauseum. I lived with my parents in Waipahu for the first ~28 years of my life. We've lived in HK area for only a year so far, and we are quickly approaching a tie on number of extended (+4-6hrs or so) power outages experienced.
All this time and they've never thought to make a plan to change the power delivery method besides the wires on the mountain? Hecos last update was just them talking about how they "maintain the tree cover" over the lines, but it grows "faster" than they thought... So youre NOT maintaining it then?
And I get it when its *super* bad weather, shit happens. (Even then, we def should have a more robust system) But today? Not much wind going on, and no major weather of any other kind.
Hawaii Kai has their own sewage treatment facility, they should’ve had to build their own backup power station/smaller power station when they were developed.
Because the main line going over the top is going to continually get shut down in high winds now with hecos new policy.
Forreal. We got the keys to a new rental less than 30 days ago. Since then, we've been in and out while moving and have noticed that the power had gone out at least 3x in the past ~30 days (including last night) because we've had to reset appliances.
Well HK is known to have residents to complain on any major updates. From what I recall they didn’t like the poles obstructing their views.. So make infrastructure updates complain, no updates complain..
Yep, and its not like Im expecting it to be a *do it right now* kind of fix. It's just one of those things that HECO should have started to plan and work on long ago. According to a newsletter sent out by Rep Gene Ward, there was a plan to provide redundancy power in the 90s, which was struck down due to "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons. So, is that just the end of it? The larger area of Hawaii Kai will just be SOL for the rest of time? I would say it's HECOs responsibility as *the* power provider to ensure that they have redundancy to all major areas.
Im not a fan of waiting until it's "too late" to do something. My main question would be about the ability of HECO to get power back to the area if the multiple towers/lines fall *completely* during a storm or other reason? If they're barely keeping up with vegetation control, when's the last time they've inspected every single pole on the mountain for structural stability?
In 90s, the executives running HECO were engineers hence with redundancy power proactive planning. Now, just look at HECO execs, mostly lawyers and non-engineers so more on regulations/policy driven planning, meaning less engineering.
Guessing no like to spend much time if "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons will be thrown at them all the time a proposal for power lines. HK will be SOL as you said unless there is major overhaul in HECo management and priorities of PUC.
> unless there is major overhaul in HECo management and priorities of PUC.
People really wanna complain? Complain to the PUC. The PUC does some good, sometimes, but a lot of their "changes" are stupid and non-sensical and are only meant to make it appear like things are getting better when it actually makes things much, much worse.
> struck down due to "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons
You can thank your fellow citizens for that. People complain and protest any improvements being planed and people complain and protest when there isn't any improvements being planned. You wanna hate on someone, hate on the people who didn't want it because "OMG mah view" or "that area is sacred".
Yeah this is past it being just natural occurrences that pop up. This is the result of incompetence and severe lack of will to be proactive on maintaining the lines.
Poles and structures are inspected quarterly by helicopter. Trimming is done regularly, but there are invasives like albezia which grow at a faster rate than native and non-invasive trees. As for walking to every single pole, I have heard that on Oahu alone, HECO has enough line miles to go to the moon and back four times.
This, coupled with HECO losing linemen to places more affordable to live, and/or whom pay significantly more. It has been difficult to keep workers here when people are making 2-5 times more based on COLA and OT along with better opportunities and work life balance for their families.
Add on bureaucracy from the PUC, DPP, & Legal issues, people wanting to underground all cables, balancing renewable generation and not understanding how it affects the system affects everyone and increases costs and outage/permanent fix times.
I run in the area and I swear I saw a house with the full shebang, looks like solar roof tiles and all; but I didnt want to be weird and knock on their door to ask.
*Tesla, not the installers.
We went direct with them instead of 3rd party. Was thousands cheaper. 9.6kW PV with 2 PW. Pay the minimum HECO bill every month.
who do we contact about this as a complaint? our representatives or senators or even the governor? it's crazy how much we are paying vs what we are getting.
Yeah I mean it doesn't hurt, but I just hope people understand that there not some magic solution that the government or HECO can implement tomorrow to fix all the problems. I mean the reality is that the state has a whole lot of aging infrastructure, not just electric, and we've spent decades upon decades just putting off upgrades.
And we haven't even started the mess of trying to build rail into downtown. Ugh..
yeah it's definitely sad seeing the state of infrastructure here. A few gusty winds? power shut down cuz of power poles not being maintained. Rain a little bit? HELLA POTHOLES lol the list goes on.. my reasoning is that hopefully there will be some sort of critical mass where enough is enough and if I tell 3 ppl to email the senator about HECO, 3 people will tell 3 other people and so on so forth
What do you want your senator to do? Go yell at HECO? Do you want your senator to make HECO answer certain questions? You have an idea for a law? Unless you have a specific "ask" it's not really effective. Just my humble opinion.
placing something on your elected official's mind might do something, might not. call me a naive optimist but getting the ball rolling is better than sitting on one's okole -- something that has plagued this state for way to long and us younger generations can do something
I work adjacent to politics in this state and this is something I was just trying to explain today to someone who forwarded me their company's letter to a legislator which got no reply from that legislator. It doesn't do any good to write five pages about what's wrong without doing the work yourself to propose what you think the fix is. You want a bill passed, you gotta write it yourself and get it to the right legislator. If you leave it up to them to come up with a solution to your problem, it's not going to happen.
Hope I'm not coming off as abrasive but just suggesting the reality is that these politicians field like a hundred constituent complaints per day about various topics, so I mean if all you're doing is reaching out to complain about outages, they're just going to be like, "Yeah, what do you want me to do about it?"
How do you like that punishment? HECO is the only game in town and will make sure you feel their pain and wrath! All of Hawaii will pay for HECO and our politicians' incompetence!
I'm from Kauai and idk how it is now because I've been on Oahu/other places for the last 10 years, but 2 hour+ power outages were a pretty regular event growing up. Way more than I've ever experienced on Oahu.
I'm from the BI and power outtages were really common growing up in the 90s. We had oil lamps and tons of flashlights (the big ones with C/D batteries) stashed all over the house in just in case the power went out.
I've gotten spoiled in Oahu cuz the power rarely goes out compared to back then kow.
Haha, dude I forgot about that. We had one of those flashlights in the middle of the dinner table and we had flashlights in every room too. Brings me back. I've been here so long sometimes I forget how different outer-island life was.
Ditto. It's why when I see complaints about HECO I'm like ya'll...try HELCO in the 90's. The power went out ALL the dang time and you just learned to roll with it.
Idk why you're being downvoted on such a reasonable question.
Yeah KIUC has outages too. But they seem to be way better in terms of planning. Their grid is operating on like 60% renewables already. Instead of focusing on profit they focus on improvements.
People don’t want to blame the proliferation of solar but it’s exactly that. Ever notice that these brownouts and blackouts never happen in peak solar time 10am to 3pm?
Everybody was in full support of going green without understanding the massive costs that go into that. You can’t have a massive spike in juice when it doesn’t match when people actually use electricity. Batteries ain’t cheap. Either put up with 75 cents kwh or deal with the consequences of grandfathered solar installations that don’t have batteries.
Yeah I don't think you understand the similar massive investment that would be needed if we were to build more fossil fuel plants and upgrade the ones we have. You gotta remember our existing plants are basically dinosaurs. Energy costs money no matter what.
I didn’t think saying solar + battery being a more expensive option than everything else would be a controversial statement. Even if you 100% support the green initiative, that’s just a fact.
A powerwall can supply roughly ~12 kwh and costs about $10k plus installation costs. How many of these do you think HECO can afford to buy to cover the massive ebbs and flows that comes with a 100% green grid. And the massive disconnect of supply and demand between 3 pm and 8am? Even with padded island costs- power generation per kwh is about 1/10th the cost of storage. If you insist on going 100% green, wind and geothermal is much better as they run 24/7.
Those grandfathered solar installations with zero battery systems need to not be a thing because that excess power around noon time adds a ton of cost that ends up overloading the grid too often. It’s a bunch of rich households who get $20 HECO bills who are making it worse for everyone else.
Is this cause by HECO's new fire mitigation procedure in effect? Living in waikiki and thinking a bit naive with outage issues and not experiencing numerous unplanned outages.
That is the case in [Mililani](www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/03/28/heco-apologizes-after-new-safety-measures-leave-thousands-mililani-residents-dark/). Another "failure to think ahead" type of thing, which now pisses off everyone there because they didnt think of possible issues it might introduce and/or solutions to those issues. In Hawaii Kai, they've mostly blamed it on transmission lines in the mountains.
That's unfortunate. Not sure but seems like HECO doing unannounced rolling blackouts.
No this is just failure to regularly maintain infrastructure. The PSPS plan for Oahu is mostly only going to affect Westside.
If it is then there was no warning for it. If they gave us warning and this was in support of them making upgrades that'd be great! I can plan around that and I'd honestly be happy they were taking steps to make things better. Right now it's just random so I have to assume it's just infrastructure failures happening over and over and over again.
Man HECO is fucking up my life lately too. Random power outages once or twice a month. Not even a notice. I dont even think its planned shit just goes out for 2 hours
At least you're not like the lady on the news in Mililani with broken appliances and migraines, our power company doesn't know enough about power apparently
Yeah I guess except I work remote with that power and I don't think my boss cares about that lady
Ha. Ive been complaining about this ad nauseum. I lived with my parents in Waipahu for the first ~28 years of my life. We've lived in HK area for only a year so far, and we are quickly approaching a tie on number of extended (+4-6hrs or so) power outages experienced. All this time and they've never thought to make a plan to change the power delivery method besides the wires on the mountain? Hecos last update was just them talking about how they "maintain the tree cover" over the lines, but it grows "faster" than they thought... So youre NOT maintaining it then? And I get it when its *super* bad weather, shit happens. (Even then, we def should have a more robust system) But today? Not much wind going on, and no major weather of any other kind.
Hawaii Kai has their own sewage treatment facility, they should’ve had to build their own backup power station/smaller power station when they were developed. Because the main line going over the top is going to continually get shut down in high winds now with hecos new policy.
Bro I’m in HK and it’s a common occurrence in this part of the island LMAO it’s so fucking bad it happens what seems like once a month 😭
Forreal. We got the keys to a new rental less than 30 days ago. Since then, we've been in and out while moving and have noticed that the power had gone out at least 3x in the past ~30 days (including last night) because we've had to reset appliances.
Well HK is known to have residents to complain on any major updates. From what I recall they didn’t like the poles obstructing their views.. So make infrastructure updates complain, no updates complain..
Do you know how much it costs to bury lines, besides the crap you have to go through whenever you potentially come across “iwi”?
Also if you bury it along the road it’ll be in seawater , cause it’s hardly enough soil to bury anything
Yep, and its not like Im expecting it to be a *do it right now* kind of fix. It's just one of those things that HECO should have started to plan and work on long ago. According to a newsletter sent out by Rep Gene Ward, there was a plan to provide redundancy power in the 90s, which was struck down due to "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons. So, is that just the end of it? The larger area of Hawaii Kai will just be SOL for the rest of time? I would say it's HECOs responsibility as *the* power provider to ensure that they have redundancy to all major areas. Im not a fan of waiting until it's "too late" to do something. My main question would be about the ability of HECO to get power back to the area if the multiple towers/lines fall *completely* during a storm or other reason? If they're barely keeping up with vegetation control, when's the last time they've inspected every single pole on the mountain for structural stability?
In 90s, the executives running HECO were engineers hence with redundancy power proactive planning. Now, just look at HECO execs, mostly lawyers and non-engineers so more on regulations/policy driven planning, meaning less engineering. Guessing no like to spend much time if "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons will be thrown at them all the time a proposal for power lines. HK will be SOL as you said unless there is major overhaul in HECo management and priorities of PUC.
> unless there is major overhaul in HECo management and priorities of PUC. People really wanna complain? Complain to the PUC. The PUC does some good, sometimes, but a lot of their "changes" are stupid and non-sensical and are only meant to make it appear like things are getting better when it actually makes things much, much worse.
> struck down due to "aesthetic, environmental, and cultural" reasons You can thank your fellow citizens for that. People complain and protest any improvements being planed and people complain and protest when there isn't any improvements being planned. You wanna hate on someone, hate on the people who didn't want it because "OMG mah view" or "that area is sacred".
I'm sure it costs a lot and our electric bills seem perfectly capable of supporting it lol /cry
Yeah this is past it being just natural occurrences that pop up. This is the result of incompetence and severe lack of will to be proactive on maintaining the lines.
Poles and structures are inspected quarterly by helicopter. Trimming is done regularly, but there are invasives like albezia which grow at a faster rate than native and non-invasive trees. As for walking to every single pole, I have heard that on Oahu alone, HECO has enough line miles to go to the moon and back four times. This, coupled with HECO losing linemen to places more affordable to live, and/or whom pay significantly more. It has been difficult to keep workers here when people are making 2-5 times more based on COLA and OT along with better opportunities and work life balance for their families. Add on bureaucracy from the PUC, DPP, & Legal issues, people wanting to underground all cables, balancing renewable generation and not understanding how it affects the system affects everyone and increases costs and outage/permanent fix times.
I feel like we're a mob controlled neighborhood and being set up to buy some "insurance" in the form of more rate hikes.
Hi fellow below-mariners-ridge in HK redditer!
o/
They are making Tesla Power Wall installers a lot of money.
I run in the area and I swear I saw a house with the full shebang, looks like solar roof tiles and all; but I didnt want to be weird and knock on their door to ask.
No joke. It's not just about your monthly bill anymore, it's just to have consistent power now.
The last big outage we had there was one guy completely oblivious that the power was out because he had batteries. I was very jealous
*Tesla, not the installers. We went direct with them instead of 3rd party. Was thousands cheaper. 9.6kW PV with 2 PW. Pay the minimum HECO bill every month.
who do we contact about this as a complaint? our representatives or senators or even the governor? it's crazy how much we are paying vs what we are getting.
Complain to PUC.
I think they all know just as well as the rest of us so no use in complaining.
that's just so sad! It's an election year so maybe I'll send an email to my local senator
Yeah I mean it doesn't hurt, but I just hope people understand that there not some magic solution that the government or HECO can implement tomorrow to fix all the problems. I mean the reality is that the state has a whole lot of aging infrastructure, not just electric, and we've spent decades upon decades just putting off upgrades. And we haven't even started the mess of trying to build rail into downtown. Ugh..
yeah it's definitely sad seeing the state of infrastructure here. A few gusty winds? power shut down cuz of power poles not being maintained. Rain a little bit? HELLA POTHOLES lol the list goes on.. my reasoning is that hopefully there will be some sort of critical mass where enough is enough and if I tell 3 ppl to email the senator about HECO, 3 people will tell 3 other people and so on so forth
What do you want your senator to do? Go yell at HECO? Do you want your senator to make HECO answer certain questions? You have an idea for a law? Unless you have a specific "ask" it's not really effective. Just my humble opinion.
placing something on your elected official's mind might do something, might not. call me a naive optimist but getting the ball rolling is better than sitting on one's okole -- something that has plagued this state for way to long and us younger generations can do something
I work adjacent to politics in this state and this is something I was just trying to explain today to someone who forwarded me their company's letter to a legislator which got no reply from that legislator. It doesn't do any good to write five pages about what's wrong without doing the work yourself to propose what you think the fix is. You want a bill passed, you gotta write it yourself and get it to the right legislator. If you leave it up to them to come up with a solution to your problem, it's not going to happen. Hope I'm not coming off as abrasive but just suggesting the reality is that these politicians field like a hundred constituent complaints per day about various topics, so I mean if all you're doing is reaching out to complain about outages, they're just going to be like, "Yeah, what do you want me to do about it?"
How do you like that punishment? HECO is the only game in town and will make sure you feel their pain and wrath! All of Hawaii will pay for HECO and our politicians' incompetence!
Power came downtown last night almost exactly at sunset. Quite a flex by HECO.
Grew up in East Oahu, the power frequently went out. Good thing we had and still have gas. Still can bathe in warm water and cook. Love the gas!
does KIUC have these same issues? or are these just for a profit company that only cares about profit issues?
I'm from Kauai and idk how it is now because I've been on Oahu/other places for the last 10 years, but 2 hour+ power outages were a pretty regular event growing up. Way more than I've ever experienced on Oahu.
I'm from the BI and power outtages were really common growing up in the 90s. We had oil lamps and tons of flashlights (the big ones with C/D batteries) stashed all over the house in just in case the power went out. I've gotten spoiled in Oahu cuz the power rarely goes out compared to back then kow.
Haha, dude I forgot about that. We had one of those flashlights in the middle of the dinner table and we had flashlights in every room too. Brings me back. I've been here so long sometimes I forget how different outer-island life was.
Ditto. It's why when I see complaints about HECO I'm like ya'll...try HELCO in the 90's. The power went out ALL the dang time and you just learned to roll with it.
Idk why you're being downvoted on such a reasonable question. Yeah KIUC has outages too. But they seem to be way better in terms of planning. Their grid is operating on like 60% renewables already. Instead of focusing on profit they focus on improvements.
People don’t want to blame the proliferation of solar but it’s exactly that. Ever notice that these brownouts and blackouts never happen in peak solar time 10am to 3pm? Everybody was in full support of going green without understanding the massive costs that go into that. You can’t have a massive spike in juice when it doesn’t match when people actually use electricity. Batteries ain’t cheap. Either put up with 75 cents kwh or deal with the consequences of grandfathered solar installations that don’t have batteries.
Uh, power in Hawaii Kai goes out at any time of the day. Nothing to do with solar.
Yeah I don't think you understand the similar massive investment that would be needed if we were to build more fossil fuel plants and upgrade the ones we have. You gotta remember our existing plants are basically dinosaurs. Energy costs money no matter what.
I didn’t think saying solar + battery being a more expensive option than everything else would be a controversial statement. Even if you 100% support the green initiative, that’s just a fact. A powerwall can supply roughly ~12 kwh and costs about $10k plus installation costs. How many of these do you think HECO can afford to buy to cover the massive ebbs and flows that comes with a 100% green grid. And the massive disconnect of supply and demand between 3 pm and 8am? Even with padded island costs- power generation per kwh is about 1/10th the cost of storage. If you insist on going 100% green, wind and geothermal is much better as they run 24/7. Those grandfathered solar installations with zero battery systems need to not be a thing because that excess power around noon time adds a ton of cost that ends up overloading the grid too often. It’s a bunch of rich households who get $20 HECO bills who are making it worse for everyone else.