5/31/2023 William Gillespie
Written by William Gillespie
In 1985, scientists from British Antarctic Survey discovered that there was a widening hole in the ozone layer, a layer of the atmosphere that prevents harmful wavelengths of ultraviolet light from reaching the surface of the earth. UV can be damaging to plants and animals and cause skin cancer, sunburn, permanent blindness, cataracts, and worse in humans. According to Susan Solomon, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, by 2050 the earth would have become "uninhabitable."
In 1974, Mario J. Molina & F. S. Rowland had published a breakthrough paper about how chloroflourocarbons from manufactured chemicals such as refrigerants destroy the ozone in the atmosphere. What the British team unexpectedly discovered was the proof.
The scientific community was able to work with industry and government to identify the problem and its source and enact legislation to protect the planet.
These efforts culminated in the rapid adoption of the Montreal Protocol in 1987, which bans the production of many ozone-depleting chemicals. By the mid-1990s, ozone levels began to stabilize. In 2019, NASA reported that the hole was at the smallest it had ever been measured. It is predicted that by 2075, the ozone hole will once again reach pre-1980 levels.
This is the story of how humans discovered that certain byproducts of industry were damaging the planet, and corrected course to solve the problem. It's a success story. Because the success is so gradual, there was never a moment to have a victory party, but it is good to remember how an overwhelming environmental threat was acknowledged and eliminated by a pan-partisan, international team effort. As safer chemicals were found to replace the old ones, few noticed the inconvenience. Nobody had to go without refrigeration or AC.
As a General Engineering (now Systems Engineering and Design) student on campus in the 1990s, Jeffrey Mikulina was involved with environmental advocacy, working with the student chapter of the Sierra Club to raise awareness. Mikulina and his colleagues in the student group also led campus Earth Day celebrations, and put forth a vision of the Boneyard Creek restored to a little ecosystem. The message seems to have been heard, as what was once a culvert that some wanted to pave over and be done with is now a creek with a walking trail and a beautifully landscaped Bardeen quad.
In summer of 1995, partway through his undergraduate degree in General Engineering , Mikulina interned with an environmental engineering firm in Honolulu, and in the following spring, he took a leave of absence from being an undergrad to return to the company. It was not, however, the work cleaning up sugar cane fields he was in love with, he admits, but a young woman. Thus, after returning to Hawaii, the smitten Mikulina left the company and proceeded to support himself with odd jobs (to his parents' dismay!), such as teaching waterskiing, playing in bands, and serving coffee at Hawaii's first Internet cafe (which featured the UIUC-built browser Mosaic).
The strength of his engineering background landed Mikulina a gig writing reviews of nonfiction books for the Honolulu weekly (at ten cents a word).
Mikulina was then asked to write an article about Hawaiian solar power pioneer Cully Judd. Sounds interesting, he thought. Unbeknownst to him, this low-paying opportunity may have launched his career.
In the fall, Mikulina returned to UIUC and finished his degree in spring, 1997. His senior engineering program advisor was Deborah Thurston, an early innovator in environmentally conscious design, and she persuaded him to stay for a master's.
But after a year and a half of that work, an opportunity came up to lead the Sierra Club in Hawaii. Mikulina explains, "At the time I was the volunteer Chair of the Prairie Group of the Club in Champaign and excited about the possibility of working full-time on advocacy. Thanks in part to my writing on Hawaii environmental issues a couple of years earlier, I was fortunate to get the job. I left with enough credits for a master's degree but short a thesis. I promised Professor Thurston I'd get it done. Well, years passed and I didn't. I really wanted to finish, and Professor Pete DeLisle was kind enough to introduce me to Ray Price in the department. Ray was skeptical of this ‘student’ 4000 miles away, but gave me a shot. I bit off far more than I could chew at the time, but eventually produced a thesis on the residential adoption of solar energy in 2007—nine years after I left 'shampoo-banana.' I am forever indebted to Deborah, Pete, and Ray for helping me on this journey."
With Professor Ray Price, Mikulina worked on a thesis about the diffusion of innovation, using renewable energy in Hawaii as their test case. It proved uncanny. Mikulina says, "We used a diffusion of innovations approach to develop a path model describing how individuals make the solar PV [photovoltaic] adoption decision, and then used survey data that we gathered on willingness to pay to predict actual adoption rates. This was all very theoretical, as only about 75 Oahu homes had PV when I finished my research in 2007.... In my thesis, I wrote that "the 'tipping point'—where investing in a PV system would appeal to the majority of near adopters according to this sample — would be reached in approximately 5 to 7 years, or between 2012 and 2014..... And then on page 105: 'By 2014, this estimate predicts that approximately 41,000 systems would be installed.'"
Amazingly, and despite some wayward estimates on the part of the investigators, the explosive growth in adoption occurred very much as Price and Mikulina predicted between 2012 and 2013 (by far the fastest per-capita adoption ever in the history of the country). In 2014, Oahu hit 41,795 PV systems!
In 2008, Mikulina became Executive Director of the Blue Planet Foundation, whose mission is to "make Hawai‘i a model for climate solutions that inspire and catalyze action globally."
Mikulina describes Hawaii as "a test bed where we de-risk new climate solutions so they can scale globally." According to Mikulina, it makes sense for the tiny island state of Hawaii to lead the continental US in clean energy for a few reasons. First, First, Hawaii is blessed with an abundance of nearly every type of renewable energy: solar, wind, geothermal, and more. Second, in the continental United States, the adoption of renewable energy is helped tremendously by load sharing between grids — if a windy day in Illinois produces more electricity than is needed in Illinois, the excess can be shared with the neighboring grids in Indiana. This is not possible in Hawaii, a single state with six isolated grids spread out over multiple islands, so the pressure to find energy storage solutions is more pronounced in Hawaii than it is on the continent. Consider, also, that fossil fuels must be shipped across the Pacific before they can be burned for power, and it becomes clear that Hawaii is positioned to lead the other 49 states on the path to renewable energy.
Mikulina says, "We need to innovate rapidly to make use of variable sources of power (sun, wind) and balance it with our energy loads. This requires energy storage and intelligent, flexible energy grids. We'll need to solve these technical challenges before mainland states will, and that drives innovation."
In 2015, with Mikulina's advocacy, Hawaii became the first state to pass a law saying all electricity would come from renewable sources by 2045. 12 other states have since followed Hawaii's lead. In 2013, the state got less than 1% of its electricity from solar. By 2021 that number grew to 17.5%. While 5.1% of that comes from solar farms, 12.4% comes from things like rooftop solar, on private homes. The island of Kauai is often powered by nearly 100% solar energy for hours during the middle of the day.
The state's last remaining coal plant was closed in 2022.
And Mikulina is currently continuing his journey as Director of the Climate Coalition, an initiative of the Hawai‘i Executive Collaborative — a group of Hawaii business leaders interested in using their collective influence to help Hawaii on its way to a better future.
On behalf of the planet, Alaska, and the lower 48, ISE salutes Jeff Mikulina and the great state of Hawai'i.