Soaring electric bills have led some of the state's biggest consumers to cut energy use, but conservation has not been enough to counter the high cost of oil and the added power demands of new buildings and high-tech equipment.

For the state, this has meant returning to the Legislature the past few years to ask for emergency appropriations to keep facilities from going dark after costs exceeded budget projections by hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that doesn't include overruns for schools and libraries.

The Department of Education expects to pay $37 million for electricity next fiscal year — a 65 percent jump from two years ago. Policymakers are weighing the benefits of turning off school lights at night to save money, though that raises the risk of vandalism.

Hospitals are trying to conserve but critical medical equipment keeps usage heavy. They must decide whether to pass the costs on to patients. St. Francis Medical Center has avoided that so far. The Queen's Medical Center has not.

For consumers, that's the bottom line: They pay more for their own residential use, and higher bills for businesses large and small get passed on to them in the form of higher prices. Higher costs for government agencies also affect taxpayers by siphoning away money that could have been spent elsewhere.

While Queen's has tried to save where it can, costs have increased about $1.5 million a year, which "like anything, is ultimately passed on to the patient," said Dennis Burns, director of facilities engineering at Queen's.

The price of a barrel of the low-sulfur fuel oil used in most O'ahu generators has almost doubled since January 2003 and is expected to climb, according to Hawaiian Electric Co.

Since the price of fuel is passed on to customers, their bills rise and fall along with oil. While the price of a barrel of oil rose about 35 percent between May 2005 and last month, the average resident paid about 20 percent more for electricity, HECO said.

CITY CUTBACKS

The City and County of Honolulu has seen electricity costs climb $3 million a year for the past two years and is cutting back — in big and small ways — to conserve energy, according to city budget and fiscal services director Mary Pat Waterhouse.

Since the city provides core services such as police, fire, water, sewer, road and emergency medical services, it can't just turn off the power to a lot of offices.

Waterhouse said the last two fiscal years show a steep increase in what the city is paying for electric power.

"It's very important. It's significant in our costs, so we have to watch that very carefully," she said. "We're just trying to work more efficient, smarter."

In September, Mayor Mufi Hannemann sent a letter to all city employees asking them to help cut energy costs.

"Skyrocketing fuel prices are adding an unexpected burden to our city budget, increasing not only the costs of operating TheBus, police patrol cars, and refuse collection trucks, but our electricity bill," he said.

The city's electric bill has jumped from $17.2 million in fiscal year 2004 to $24.8 million with a week left to go this fiscal year.

Waterhouse said the city's Department of Design and Construction has been doing major work in recent years to make entire buildings more energy efficient. She said the team went through Honolulu Hale in 2002 and estimates those changes now save the city $104,000 each year.

She said the savings came from replacing outdated air-conditioning equipment and old lights and fixtures at City Hall with energy-efficient equipment.

The team started to work on the Honolulu Municipal Building recently and then will turn to police headquarters. Waterhouse expects to save an additional $500,000 a year after updating both buildings.

Waterhouse said the city's energy-saving team keeps looking for places to save.

In August, she said, the city added "vending machine misers" that put beverage and snack machines into a standby mode that uses less power if they haven't been operating for a while. And that device alone could save between $16,000 and $20,000 a year, she said.

STATE SQUEEZED

The state has constructed its new buildings with energy-efficiency in mind and is also asking employees to conserve energy by turning off lights, computers and air conditioning in empty rooms and buildings. Nevertheless, its costs will still top $7 million this fiscal year — an increase of 23 percent over last year even though consumption has remained stable, according to state comptroller Russ Saito.

"Even as we were bringing new buildings on line, we've been able to hold consumption pretty flat," he said.

However, the state has no control over the cost of oil.

State lawmakers have asked the Public Utilities Commission to explore how the electric company can share in the burden of rising oil prices, in part to encourage the use of renewable energy sources.

State Consumer Advocate John Cole advises against getting rid of the current "fuel price adjustment clause," although he thinks it could be modified.

"In my own view, I wouldn't want to eliminate it entirely," he said. "It would probably result in them paying more for fuel and asking for more adjustments of rates."

HECO opposes any adjustment, and in addition to concerns raised by Cole, said that changes could cause the company's financial ratings to suffer, which would lead to higher interest rates for the company and, as a result, higher rates for customers.

HECO spokesman Peter Rosegg pointed out that the utility makes no profit on fuel costs and ratepayers feel the effects of any reduction in prices as quickly as any increases.

Neighbor Island counties have employed a variety of energy-saving techniques to try to keep their power bills under control.

"Even before the recent jump in oil prices we still had the highest (electricity) prices in the nation. It's an ongoing battle, but it hurts now because the price shot up so quickly," said Glenn Sato, energy coordinator for Kaua'i County, where power costs have increased nearly 40 percent over the past five years.

Sato said the county is working on different fronts to save on power.

Since lighting is the easiest way to realize immediate power savings, the county installed compact fluorescent bulbs at 30 county facilities, including office buildings, police and fire stations, and neighborhood centers.

To further conserve energy, Kaua'i is looking at using higher-efficiency aeration blowers at its wastewater plant and is implementing computerized energy management systems to monitor and control air conditioning and lighting for maximum efficiency, Sato said.

Hawai'i County has budgeted $6.5 million for electricity costs for the fiscal year beginning July 1 in anticipation of a 10 percent rate increase being sought by Hawaii Electric Light Co. That's a 29 percent increase from the current year's budgeted power expenses, and a 52 percent increase from just four years ago.

The increases would be even more if not for contracts with Honeywell to retrofit the three largest county buildings with energy-efficient fixtures and monitor energy-consuming equipment, which have led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings over the the course of several years, according to Hawai'i County energy coordinator Bob Arrigoni.

The water department, the single-largest consumer of electricity, is taking advantage of cheaper rates offered by HELCO by running its pumps during the power company's off-peak hours, he said.

Maui County, with an even larger power bill of $9.5 million for the current fiscal year, is conserving energy at its main facilities in Wailuku by raising office temperatures a degree or two, especially in the cooler winter months, said public works engineer Chico Rabara.

The county projects that its electricity costs will increase 18 percent in the coming fiscal year, to $11.2 million.

CRUNCH IN SCHOOLS

In addition to rising oil costs, public schools have increased their power demands with more computers and other high-tech equipment.

For the current fiscal year, 2005-06, the Department of Education spent $31.2 million on electricity to keep the lights on and the computers fired up in the state's 258 regular public schools.

Last fiscal year, electricity costs hit $23.87 million, while a year earlier, in fiscal 2003-04, they were $22.2 million.

But next year the costs are projected to hit $36.98 million. Part of the allocation to pay for that jump comes from a supplemental appropriation of $13.9 million the department received from the Legislature this year.

While that amount will be the starting point for the electricity budget in 2008, the power bill is expected to rise again, and the department is just now beginning to make projections for the next biennium.

"The demand for electricity is not going to go down," said Board of Education member Maggie Cox, a former principal. "And it's going to be more. We need it for the technologies we're incorporating in our school construction. We need our kids to have Internet access. ... So electric bills are not going to go down."

While some Board of Education members favor seeing schools keep lights turned off at night to trim costs, the debate rages over whether that could cause more expense in the long run because of a potential increase in vandalism.

To cut costs, schools already turn off air conditioning and lights at the end of the day and on weekends, and board member Herbert Watanabe believes that keeping schools dark at night is the better choice to save on fuel costs.

"The concern is if you turn lights off, you're going to have more problems," he says. "But on the Big Island I did not find that." Watanabe said that as a business manager for Big Island schools from 1965 to 1992 he saw costs drop more than 15 percent just by keeping lights off at night.

"And we found out that the rate of vandalism did not increase," he said.

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.