In Lāwa‘i, on Kaua‘i’s south side, the morning sun shimmers across two hundred acres that sixty years ago was prime sugar cane land. Today the cane is gone, replaced by 64,800 solar panels connected to 17,000 batteries housed in 9 containers the size of semi trailers.

The panels are suspended on brackets that allow them to follow the movement of the sun throughout the day; after sunset the batteries slowly mete out twenty-eight megawatts to the island’s grid. The Lāwa‘i plant is currently the largest of its kind in the world, producing as much electricity as 3.7 million gallons of diesel per year.

It’s also the newest facility of the Kaua‘i Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC), widely considered to be among the most progressive electrical utilities in the country. Two or three years ago KIUC announced an ambitious plan to generate most of its power from renewable sources by 2023. But with the Lāwa‘i plant online, that goal has already been met. The facility is only one of eight (one more is under construction), totaling 520 acres of former cane land. Only one other plant releases power after dark, but all together Kaua‘i’s solar farms generate 95.9 megawatts of power daily, meaning that each day about a third of the island’s power is generated from solar.

Call KIUC the little electric company that could. “I think we’re unique,” says CEO David Bissell. The utility was started in 2002 as a rural cooperative after the privately owned Kaua‘i Electric Co. decided to sell. “It’s a success story, really—from the improbable start of a bunch of guys trying to form a community-owned electric company—to within sixteen years going from burning thirty million gallons of oil a year to half of that,” Bissell says. “The original plan was to get us off oil using the resources on Kaua‘i, and we’re getting there. Technically, on any reasonably sunny day we can be 100 percent renewable—solar, hydro and biomass—for several hours. There’s no other island utility anywhere doing that.”

The island’s portfolio of renewable energy sources includes hydropower and a 6.7-megawatt biomass power plant near Līhu‘e. (But you won’t find wind turbines: Because the island is home to at-risk bird species and Kaua‘i’s only native land mammal—the endangered hoary bat—wind is not an option.) Some of this is old tech; in 1906 the McBryde Sugar Co. built a small hydroelectric plant in Wainiha, on Kaua‘i’s North Shore. Another hydro plant KIUC still uses first went online in 1914. Sugar companies also burned cane waste to generate electricity. McBryde and another sugar producer, Lihue Plantation Co., both had biomass facilities. The operations were later combined into what became the Kaua‘i Electric Co. But eventually sugar died on Kaua‘i, and with it the power it generated. The end of sugar was only one factor in KEC’s decline; its outdated grid was devastated by Hurricane ‘Iniki in 1992, and the company never really recovered. Eventually, Kaua‘i Electric’s parent company decided to put it on the market. Then the community cooperative group came along.

“KIUC started in 2002 with no track record, no [ownership] equity, burning 92 percent fossil fuel,” says Jan TenBruggencate, a KIUC board member who was raised on Moloka‘i and has spent decades as a journalist and public affairs executive on Kaua‘i. “This year we’ll have a solid record of achievement: 35 percent equity, more than 55 percent renewables, with more coming, and we have done it while keeping rates stable.”

Stable but still high—among the highest in the country, which remains a sore point for many. But that’s inevitable, says Bissell, in an isolated island environment. Despite the cost, KIUC claims its rate structure is the lowest in Hawai‘i, though to locals that might sometimes seem small comfort. Factored into those rates is the reality that KIUC has to be self-contained, 24/7, and it must function or there’s no power, as there is no backup grid in case of failure. In that the utility has been mostly successful. That’s not to say outages never occur, of course; last July, for example, a shorted cable plunged the entire island into darkness for two hours, followed by nearly two days of rolling blackouts as the utility struggled to conserve power for vital functions and to make repairs. The situation was complicated by the fact that the weekend in question was overcast, making it impossible for KIUC’s solar capacity to compensate for the power loss.

It’s easy to get caught up in a conversation about modern electricity generation and distribution and forget what the “cooperative” in nonprofit KIUC’s name means. It’s the only utility co-op in the state, owned by its 28,500 members. The other main Hawaiian Islands are served by the Hawaiian Electric Co., a commercial utility that’s heavily invested in fossil fuels. While KIUC has achieved national prominence within the utility industry for its aggressive push into renewables, it remains a down-home electric company that tries to give back to the community, in part by ensuring that its employees are actively engaged in the small island population of about seventy thousand.

One of them is John Ludington, a long-time lineman. On a late Sunday afternoon in April 2018, Ludington was visiting a friend in Lāwa‘i as a storm pounded the island and set a national record for the most rainfall in a twenty-four-hour period. Ludington heard firetrucks and lifeguard vehicles speed past with sirens screaming. He jumped into his truck and followed. Just down the road he came across emergency personnel facing a perplexing problem: A truck with a woman and baby inside was stuck in a flooded stream. “There was water behind it and water in front of it,” Ludington says. “It was going to go.” But firefighters couldn’t reach the truck by helicopter; live high-voltage power lines hung nearby. Ludington told firefighters who he was and then called the central power plant in Port Allen, directing a dispatcher he knew to throw circuit breaker 2134. Almost instantly the entire neighborhood went dark. The torrential rain let up briefly, and with the lines dead the helicopter was able to land a firefighter on the hood of the truck and rescue the woman and baby. After seventeen minutes Ludington had the power turned back on.

Ludington is one of 151 employees, all of whom have a stake in the co-op’s success. They are acutely aware of KIUC’s importance to Kaua‘i, particularly because KIUC’s formation was an indirect result of another disaster: After Hurricane ‘Iniki the grid was in such poor condition that parts of the island were without power for as long as six months.

In 1999 banker Jim Mayfield saw a story about the impending sale of Kaua‘i Electric in a local newspaper and said to himself, “That’s a great idea.” Mayfield soon found himself among a group of local business leaders determined to buy the company and turn the operation into a resident-owned cooperative. That group turned to the Rural Utility Service, an agency founded in 1935 as part of the New Deal’s Rural Electrification Administration; its mission is to improve infrastructure in rural areas. Mayfield was surprised by the agent’s response. “He had almost no reason to spend more than a minute or two talking to somebody like me about 100 percent financing for a community to purchase a utility.” Mayfield admits he had no idea what an electrical co-op was. A financial adviser from the Mainland tried to explain, but Mayfield needed to fit the concept into an Island context. “I said to him, ‘Oh, a co-op is an ‘ohana.’ But of course, he didn’t know what an ‘ohana is, so I went on to explain that it is family, but not necessarily by blood. Then I told him ‘ohana would work really well on Kaua‘i because that’s what a co-op is. This is a small island. That’s what people do on small islands. We take care of each other.”

KIUC has been steadily increasing its investment in renewables. Bissell says that in 2006 the utility was producing only 6 percent of its power from sources other than oil. In February of this year, just after the Lāwa‘i plant opened, that number had grown to 56 percent—among the highest in the utility industry nationwide. Allan Smith, who chairs the KIUC board, sees that figure rising rapidly in the next three to five years. KIUC is partnering with AES— the company that built and operates the Lāwa‘i solar farm—on construction of another solar installation on the grounds of the US Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) near Waimea; it too will release power at night.

Smith and Bissell say if all goes well, KIUC should be generating 80 percent from renewables within three to five years. By some projections, KIUC could end up producing 82.3 percent from renewables by 2025. As of February 2019 KIUC got 43.6 percent of its power from oil, 27.3 percent from solar, 14.6 percent from hydro and 14.4 percent from biomass. The biomass plant includes burning invasive albizia trees from across the island. Eventually, the plant will grow and burn eucalyptus.

In addition to more solar, KIUC hopes to build a pumped storage system. A reservoir near Kōke‘e, on the island’s west side, will hold water during the day; at night it will be released through a pipe down a steep incline, powering turbines that feed twenty-five megawatts daily to the grid. During the day, solar power will be used to pump the water back uphill. But this proposal has caused some controversy over access to Kaua‘i’s streams, rivers and diversion ditches, especially within the Native Hawaiian community. At the moment, KIUC is moving forward with the permitting process.

From the outset, KIUC has engaged with the Hawaiian community. “There were Native Hawaiians involved in formation of the co-op,” says Smith, himself Native Hawaiian. “Hawaiians have a loud voice, which we hear.” KIUC’s relationship with the Native Hawaiian community took a major step forward in 2014, when the co-op built what was at the time its largest solar facility, on land near Anahola leased from the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. It came about through a unique partnership with the Homestead Housing Authority and the Sovereign Councils of the Hawaiian Homelands Assembly (SCHHA). The partnership allowed for the project to be built on twenty-five acres of homelands property, and Native Hawaiian organizations will have the right to purchase the facility when the lease ends after twenty years. More than that, KIUC employed Native Hawaiians in the construction.

“Our homestead association leaders went to see KIUC in 2011 to suggest that we’d like Native Hawaiians to be involved in a commercial-grade solar project on our trust lands,” says Robin Danner, CEO of SCHHA and the housing authority. “KIUC became our mentor on renewable energy. We became theirs. On top of that, KIUC and our homestead association entered into the very first homestead benefits agreement that ensures that Native Hawaiians are mentored over the entire term of the land lease.”

Today the “staff” of the Anahola facility also includes a herd of sheep that keep the weeds down around the equipment. Indeed, sheep are integral to KIUC’s approach to renewable energy. The flock, which will eventually number as many as nine hundred animals, will clear vegetation without burning fossil fuels.

The rush to renewables has left KIUC with a diverse inventory of power sources, including conventional fossil fuel facilities. It has no plans to retire oil-powered generator units at Port Allen and Kapaia. Island residents and businesses have installed an additional total of thirty-one megawatts of rooftop solar. Large hotels, some schools and Wilcox Memorial Hospital—Kaua‘i’s principal health care facility—have joined the movement and operate substantial solar generating plants of their own. But will these ever fully replace conventional power sources? “Five or ten years down the road, I think we can get into the 90 percent range, maybe even 95 percent renewables,” says Brad Rockwell, KIUC’s chief engineer. “But as you get closer to 100 percent, it gets exponentially more difficult. If you were gonna say we would never burn another drop of oil ever, that’s pretty tough.”

Beside the technical challenges, Rockwell and Bissell acknowledge that retiring its fossil-fueled generators will not happen soon. KIUC must maintain enough standby capacity to sustain the island’s entire load—no matter what. “Part of our mentality is we’ve worked with very good companies—arguably great companies like Tesla and AES,” Bissell says. “They saw the opportunity to do projects on Kaua‘i as attractive, and it’s a little bit of developing a research lab here. We can get things done. There’s a real opportunity here.”

As the sun goes down in Lāwa‘i, the slow release of stored electricity begins. No clattering generators will be heard—just the quiet hum of batteries and the sound of sheep grazing among the panels. HH