Dive Brief:
- Hearings into NextEra Energy's proposed acquisition of Hawaiian Electric Industries have concluded, and regulators have indicated they will have an answer before the end of the year on the $4.3 billion deal, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports.
- The deal was announced in December 2014, and has had stakeholders guessing as to what direction NextEra would move should the deal go through, and whether the company would embrace a new utility direction.
- Hawaii has been working to modernize its grid, and critics of the deal point to NextEra-owned Florida Power & Light and the challenges it faces in regards to distributed solar as signs the deal may not be a good fit.
Dive Insight:
Out of 25 intervenors in the HEI-NextEra case, only one is in support of the deal, according to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Despite that, the news outlet reports no one wants to speculate what the commission might decide.
"I don't have any insight which way (the commission will rule)," Henry Curtis , executive director of Life of the Land, told the news outlet. But he said if the deal is approved, what should be obvious is the outcome for the utility. In Florida, he said NextEra has "systematically laid off workers."
In order to win approval, NextEra has filed over 85 commitments it would fulfill to Hawaii if the takeover is approved, including customer savings and economic benefits of over $1 billion for the first five years after the deal is finalized.
But the deal may have an uphill battle. Kristin Mayes, former Arizona utility regulator and expert witness for Hawaii County, testified during the hearings that she did not believe the deal was a good match for the evolution of Hawaii's grid.
“It scares me [and] it’s unrelenting [to see the] repeated, open hostility to customer-sited energy and technologies on the grid edge [that FPL has shown],” Mayes said at the hearings.
