This is a shout-out to Henry Curtis and his blog post summarized below:
When the Storm Ends, the Record Goes Dark — Kona Lows, Outages, and How the PUC Handles Them by Henry Curtis ililani.media@gmail.com

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Three governor appointees run this dog and pony show.

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Summary

Hawaiʻi’s electric grid is increasingly exposed to Kona lows — cool-season subtropical cyclones that load transmission corridors from a direction the system was not hardened against — yet the regulatory record generated by these events is thinner than it was three decades ago.

Drawing on Hawaiʻi Public Utilities Commission filings, reliability reports, and contemporaneous press coverage, this essay documents the March 2026 Kona low sequence and the August 2026 Hurricane Lala, along with the months of persistent flickering and abnormal circuit configurations reported in Windward Oʻahu and East Honolulu.

It identifies three mechanisms by which storm performance is removed from public scrutiny:

• normalization of reliability indices under an adjusted IEEE 1366 methodology that excludes Major Event Days,
• partial suspension of the associated performance incentive mechanisms,
• inquiry conducted through information requests lodged inside a docket opened for unrelated purposes, and
• substantive discussion conducted at a private technical conference under protective order.

The essay contrasts this with earlier Commission practice — the formal investigations following the 1991, 2006, and 2008 island-wide outages, and the independent engineering study those proceedings produced — and sets out what a properly scoped storm-resilience docket would establish on the record.

http://www.ililani.media/2026/08/when-storm-ends-record-goes-dark-kona.html

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