What Does Your Energy Future Look Like? And How Do You Get There From Here?

The 10th Anniversary of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative in January marked Hawaii's remarkable progress toward its goal of 100% renewable electricity by 2045. Yet for energy planners in Hawaii and elsewhere, navigating the uncharted waters of energy transformation remains a challenging endeavor fraught with risk. For many, obtaining the hard data needed to understand and communicate the impacts of various policies and actions can be a long and circuitous journey. Often the energy planner's only option is to rely on studies conducted by stakeholders with greater resources-and different priorities. With support from the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has developed a new energy scenario modeling tool to address the need to make energy scenario planning more accessible. This postcard provides an overview of how the no-cost capacity planning and economic dispatch modeling tool is can assist energy planners in answering the questions most relevant to them, validating complex decisions, and gaining the buy-in they need to move forward. It also describes how built-in compatibility with visualization tools like the Hawaii Advanced Visualization Environment (HAVEN) makes the tool a valuable asset in generating visualizations of land use and other impacts of various courses of action for achieving strategic energy goals.