Hawaiʻi’s energy planners have had to hit “recalculate.” The Hawaiʻi State Energy Office has issued a May 2026 update to its Alternative Fuels, Repowering and Energy Transition Study after discovering spreadsheet mistakes that materially changed the economics of several liquefied natural gas scenarios. The corrections push a number of net-present-value estimates into healthier territory and remove one scenario the agency says could not be evaluated on an equal footing. The timing is touchy, coming as regulators, lawmakers and a proposed 2 billion dollar LNG plan from JERA all square off over Oʻahu’s long-term power path.
What the state fixed
In the May update, the agency reports three key fixes. First, it corrected a misplaced parenthesis in the low-sulfur fuel oil (LSFO) price formula. Second, it removed a double-counted sensitivity factor that had overstated capital-cost impacts. Third, it dropped an Alternative 3 scenario that the office says could not be fairly compared with the rest of the options. Officials characterized these as technical corrections rather than any overhaul of the study’s broader assumptions. For the fine print, see the May update from the Hawai‘i State Energy Office.
Reviewers had already flagged big mistakes
Independent analysts had been waving warning flags earlier in the spring. At a March 12 legislative briefing, analyst Mattias Fripp told lawmakers he found spreadsheet errors that wiped out the headline savings once corrected, and he said the published sensitivity charts did not match the underlying calculations. Civil Beat’s transcript of the hearing records Fripp’s review and his conclusion that the uncorrected spreadsheet overstated LNG benefits. Local research groups reached similar conclusions in reports to the Legislature, according to contemporaneous news coverage.
How the numbers moved
Once the fuel-price formula and the double-counted sensitivity were fixed, the revised technical appendices show net-present-value gains across the two primary pathways the office continues to analyze. Alternative 1A shifts from about 150 million dollars to 651 million dollars, a roughly 501 million dollar increase. Alternative 2A moves from about negative 364 million dollars to 137 million dollars. The revised report spells out these changes in detail. The corrected figures and appendices appear in the May 2026 revision from HSEO.
What is at stake locally
The math is not academic, since large projects and rate cases are already on the table. An affiliate of JERA has floated roughly a 2 billion dollar LNG-fired plant and import terminal for Oʻahu, and supporters say the project could cut costs by about 20 percent. The public details of that proposal appear in industry coverage from Power Magazine. At the same time, the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission recently weighed Hawaiian Electric’s Waiau repower and limited how much the utility can recover from ratepayers, a ruling that has already reshaped the cost calculus for a “no gas” path, according to a news release from the PUC.
Critics say the result is still sensitive
Even with the spreadsheets tidied up, experts warn that the outcome still hinges on a stack of volatile assumptions. Future oil and LNG prices, contract indexing, capital costs and the question of whether LNG infrastructure can realistically convert to low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen by 2045 all loom large. A fuel-price analysis from UHERO underscores how contract terms and the LSFO to LNG price spread can flip long-run savings into losses, or vice versa. Local reviewers who dug into the state spreadsheet also pointed to offsetting mistakes and pasted values that made independent verification difficult, a critique summarized in reporting from the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Next steps for regulators and lawmakers
The revised study does not settle the political or regulatory fights. Any LNG proposal, contract or repower project must still run the gauntlet of engineering reviews, environmental permitting and scrutiny from the Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission before ratepayers feel the effects. In its Waiau decision, the commission capped recoverable costs and set renewable-fuel milestones, a signal that regulators intend to test cost controls closely, according to the PUC. In the meantime, the Hawaiʻi State Energy Office says it will continue stakeholder engagement while interested companies and the utility refine their filings and proposals.
