For Molokaʻi, the answer to who should chart the island’s energy future was simple.
“Who knows best? It’s the people who live there,” declared Tehani Kaalekahi, the executive director of Sustʻāinable Molokai, a nonprofit dedicated to empowering residents to shape collective decisions about the future of the island.
Like many communities across the pae ʻāina, Molokaʻi struggled for decades with energy challenges, paying some of the priciest electricity costs in Hawaiʻi – which already has the highest electric bills of any U.S. state.
And although the Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) forecasted years ago that Molokaʻi could reach 100% renewable energy by 2020, the island didn’t have a clear path forward to create any utility-scale renewable energy projects. Many that were proposed by off-island firms, meanwhile, were met with resistance when they failed to involve the community or understand their needs.
Which is why the people of Molokaʻi are working to change that — and upend the status quo of top-down developer decisions to, instead, embrace placed-based wisdom and collaborative community planning to create a future of energy independence and justice.
“Why would someone from the continent come in and say, ʻthis is going to work for you.’ How would they know? They don’t live here,” Kaalekahi said in an interview. “Who better to make those decisions than the people who live and work here?”
In 2021, the Molokai Clean Energy Hui — a group of community members organized by Sustʻāinable Molokai that include representatives from key partners like Hoʻāhu Energy Cooperative — decided that instead of waiting for state regulators and developers to pick projects for Molokaʻi, Molokaʻi would decide its own energy future.
The hui took an unprecedented step to convince the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission, which regulates energy across the islands, to temporarily pause planning for all utility-scale energy development on the island, giving time for residents to chart their own path to a 100% renewable future.
What came out of that was a community-led planning process, the first of its kind in Hawaiʻi. It spanned two years and empowered voices across the entire island, involving almost 50 events and focus groups, 700 surveys and 2,800 conversations with residents (about 7,400 people live on island).
Known officially as Molokai’s Community Energy Resilience Action Plan (CERAP), the groundbreaking initiative carefully listened and collected community manaʻo to identify 10 priority renewable energy projects that could deliver 90% of Molokaʻi’s electricity needs.
While the hui ensured that all voices — from keiki to kūpuna to Hawaiian homesteaders to ʻohana living off grid — had a say in shaping the 53-page plan, they also forged partnerships with energy experts and government regulators on county, state and federal levels.
“It’s like one of those things where it’ll take everybody,” Kaalekahi said. There’s no way one entity can do it all.”
Since Molokai’s energy roadmap was published in the summer of 2023, the hui and other stakeholders are now shifting gears to map out project specifics, including the costs, tradeoffs and possible designs that fit best within Molokaʻi’s diverse communities and ecosystems.
Centering place-based knowledge in the energy planning process means that so much more is considered before a project is ever brought forward in any official manner — like factoring in the frequency of sunshine, wind or rain in a particular microclimate, which may have been missed by offshore energy developers. As Kaalekahi notes, there is no “one size fits all,” even though that might have been acceptable in years past.
Molokaʻi’s journey toward energy sovereignty has positioned the community as a model for other rural communities across Hawaiʻi and thousands of miles beyond its shores, documented in national headlines for championing a new way to create reliable, affordable and secure renewable power.
Although the process itself — navigating state and federal energy regulators, understanding the specifics of Molokaʻi’s energy demands and current grid — has been complicated, one thing is clear: Molokaʻi’s energy future is intimately tied to its own self-determination.
Without a secure source of power on island, Molokaʻi will continue to be vulnerable to supply chain disruptions, price hikes and climate disasters that threaten the barges that deliver its current power source.
And that’s a reality that all communities across the pae ʻāina face.
The County of Maui’s Climate Action and Resiliency Plan, for example, charts a path toward achieving zero emissions and a carbon-neutral economy by 2045; the State of Hawaiʻi, meanwhile, is mandated by state law to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.
But while governments have tried to shift the most isolated archipelago in the world away from relying on imported fossil fuels for power, an increasing number of communities are following Molokaʻi’s lead and taking matters into their own hands.
In the aftermath of the 2023 wildfires, for example, Lahaina Strong, Hā Sustainability and Shake Energy Collaborative came together to document the community’s energy priorities and vision for the future; Maui’s Upcountry community is also currently undergoing a process to bring residents together to better understand challenges to resilience and energy security.
“This is an awesome opportunity for community to do what community does,” Kaalekahi said.
