Love and a passion for nuclear engineering brought Dr. Karl Stahlkopf to Hawaii, around the world and back again.

As an undergraduate in college, Stahlkopf followed in the footsteps of his brother, studying electrical engineering not because it was his passion, but because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. After school, however, he went to work for the Navy on nuclear submarines and found that this was his true calling.

During his time in the Navy, Stahlkopf was stationed at Pearl Harbor on the USS Kamehameha. One week before a three-month deployment, he met the woman who would later become his wife. He asked her to marry him just two weeks after he returned home from sea. They’ve now been married more than 40 years.

Stahlkopf pursued his love of nuclear engineering, returning to school to earn a doctorate in the field from the University of California, Berkley. He proceeded to work for a number of years with utilities around the world to make safer, cleaner, more durable nuclear power plants, later returning to his electrical engineering roots working for the Electric Power Research Institute in California.

It was while he was working in California that he met Hawaiian Electric Company, Inc. (HECO) president and CEO Mike May, who enticed Stahlkopf back to Hawaii where he joined HECO as the company’s chief technology officer and head of the organization’s renewable energy program.

Pacific News Bytes asked Stahlkopf to share his thoughts on HECO and his role in Hawaii’s high-tech energy industry …

Q: What is the greatest lesson you have learned during your time in this industry?

A: I think the greatest lesson that I have learned is that you can never stand still. You always have to innovate. You always have to move forward. Particularly in an industry like ours that is dominated by technology, what you knew yesterday will not serve you well for tomorrow. You are constantly on a learning curve trying to understand what the new technologies are, how they can be brought to bear, and how you can do things more inexpensively with greater reliability and greater customer satisfaction.

As the Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige once said, “Don’t look behind you, something might be coming.” Really, this should be a hallmark for our industry. We can’t look behind us at where we have been. We have to look at where we are going in the future and very clearly, the future for HECO and the future for the energy industry revolve around getting ourselves away from CO2 emissions, getting ourselves away from the use of fossil fuel and moving toward a cleaner, more renewable future.

Q: How has the market in Hawaii changed when it comes to the use of energy solutions?