Big Wind at the (Hawaii) Legislature

[mahina]

http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/01/big-wind-at-legislature.html

An excerpt below of another outstanding article by Henry Curtis. Read it all at the link above.

"A Senate Hearing held on January 11, 2011 fired up the public. Anela Evans (Friends of Lana`i) gave a chant that was chicken skin.
The Big Wind hearing filled the Senate Conference Room, and the overflow room overflowed. Some people milled around in the hall, others left.

Big Wind refers to the concept of building an interisland undersea high voltage electric transmission line between Moloka`i, Lana`i and/or Mau`i to O`ahu so that ever energy hungry O`ahu can be fed by the Neighbor Islands. Giant wind farms would be built in Mau`i County. Each tower would be as tall as the First Hawaiian Bank in downtown Honolulu. Perhaps 200 of them would industrialize the rural areas of Moloka`i and Lana`i.

There are currently no interisland electric lines in Hawai`i.

Except for the failed attempt to bring geothermal energy to O`ahu in the 1980s, no one in the State has ever proposed building 400MW of electrical generators in one shot. The cost of the interisland cable would be $600M to $1B. According to HECO the cost to upgrade the O`ahu grid to handle Big Wind would be at least $300M. The wind farms would cost up to $1B."

The whole article is at http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/01/big-wind-at-legislature.html

[DCKit]

1. Why should the other islands pay the environmental and monetary costs...

for O'ahu to have cheap electricity? The price tag is just too damn high, and it's not fair to ask the other islanders to subsidize such an outrageous investment.

The other islands could become self-sufficient at a far lower cost and O'ahu should pay for the cost of the lines as well as the privilege of buying any surplus electricity.

I don't mean to sound like a complete asshole, but I'm thinking a lot of the people on the other islands are middle to lower-income, with many just barely holding onto the land and homes they've got now.

[mahina]

3. Couldn't agree with you more

plus, it keeps the problem in place. Decentralized generation would solve that problem.

With this 1. expensive and 2. centralized system, we would still be at risk for major outages, and the revenue generated would still be held by a few.

You don't sound like any kind of hole. Lanai people agree with you and if history is any indicator, I am sure Molokai people will too.

[virgogal]

2. OMG,they want to industrialize parts of Moloka'i and Lana'i? Awful.

[molokainews]

4. David (Molokai) is fighting back against Goliath (Oahu) in the wind farm battle

Here's another interesting story about the attempt to put wind
farms on Molokai and Lanai:

If the community members attending last night’s public scoping
meeting have anything to say about it, undersea transmission
cables will never carry wind-generated electricity from
Molokai to Oahu.
To see the full story go to this link:
http://themolokainews.com/2011/02/04/against-the-wind-community-expresses-distrust-of-process-that-would-bring-wind-farms-to-molokai/

Molokai has fought against development in the past, quite
successfully, and they will do it again.