Good news. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum will do another energy TV series this year with Hawaii News Now.

The series "Hawaii: State of Clean Energy" on Hawaii News Now series last year was successful in its treatment of the subject and the education of the public and all bets are that this year will be even better. Linda Brock will be the producer again. She learned a lot about clean energy last year and is well-prepared to do it again.

Discussions are ongoing, but based on the “issues and controversies” approach of the Legislative Briefing presented by the Forum in January one would expect that the 2012 TV series will also deal with the hard issues, and that's what we need.

Clean energy has reached the point where it’s a big project, statewide in scope, and in Hawaii projects of that nature often get stuck for decades. The way to keep things going is to engender and encourage public discussion of the hard issues, and that's exactly what the Forum is trying to do in this series.

Will this ameliorate the current public reaction to energy cost increases? Maybe not, but it's better to keep the public informed. Believe it or not, there are those that feel we should not pursue clean energy because it will cost too much and ratepayers should not be asked to pay that much for energy of any kind.

The initiative is four years old, but some people have forgotten why it was organized in the first place. They would now like to write it off and go back to the way things were. That would be truly disastrous. To appreciate the memory loss, let’s look back to the way things were in 2007, only four years ago.

At the time, we recognized that oil was going up and would be sky high very soon; that we were dependent on it for transportation and electrical generation; that we were sending $6 billion overseas every year to buy it; that we had the good fortune of world class renewable resources; that we could use these resources to make clean energy; and thus keep the $6 billion at home to bolster our economy.

Sound familiar? That's because we had this discussion four years ago and we agreed to do clean energy as a way to avoid dependency, keep our money at home and develop a new industry in renewables. Have we forgotten so quickly? What in the world could lobotomize us into forgetting the initiative and all the great reasons that supported our decision? Hawaii - the state with the short memory.

Some people went into shock to find that building new infrastructure to generate electricity with renewables costs money (as if we didn’t know that), and that we actually have to pay for that. If anyone out there is surprised about this, he’s been sleeping at the switch. There is no superhero to bail us out - if we want to transform our energy system, we have to pay for it. There’s no free lunch.

The biggest single reason for the increase in utility bills these days is the increase in the price of oil. Are we surprised about that? We knew this would happen. Anyone who's surprised about it has likewise been sleeping at the switch.

People also have a problem understanding that when thousands of homeowners put PV on their roofs and stop buying power from the utility, the other guys, the ones who can't afford to put PV on their roofs, will have to pick up the cost of maintaining the system, of burning the oil to satisfy base load, and paying for the electricity the utility is obligated to buy from the PV guys. Over time, the disparity can and will be softened, but nobody should be surprised by any of it.

Don’t look, but we’re still in a recession with lots of joblessness and homelessness and a dearth of disposable income; water bills have been increased; income taxes have been increased; and we're being nickeled and dimed and dollared in every way by government. All these things make increases in utility bills harder to take.

We'll have to pay big bucks to repatriate the homeless; fix the sewers and roads; and if we’re really unlucky pay for the rail. All together, it's $20 billion and rising. We'll never be able to afford these costs and as they press in on us, some of will buckle. These costs will undoubtedly have a bad effect on our economy.

But the cost of renewables is absolutely worth it and of the highest priority, certainly higher than rail. Once we build and pay for the infrastructure of our new energy system, utility bills will stabilize. That will have a huge and positive effect on our economy, greater in a relative sense considering that by then the cost of oil will be far higher than anything we’ve seen before.

So the next time someone tells you we need to drop the whole thing, give up the gains we’ve had in clean energy and go back to the "safety" of imported oil, tell him he’s losing it. That's why it's so important that the Forum do its 2012 series and that we all watch it. We need to stay focused and finish what we started. We already know this, but every so often it needs to be repeated.