Enter
and Navigate our online edition by advancing the pages
on the power point player above
Hawaii's Internet News & Entertainment Portal
We
deliver local news from a number of perspectives and
news sources.
Hawaii Tries Green Tools in Remaking
Power Grids
Marco Garcia for The New York Times
On the Big Island of
Hawaii, a wind farm shares the scene with
cattle. The state hopes to be a laboratory
for the country by cutting its dependence
on fossil fuels. More
Photos >
NAALEHU, Hawaii — Two miles or so
from this tiny town in the southernmost
corner of the United States, across
ranches where cattle herds graze beneath
the distant Mauna
Loa volcano, the giant turbines of a
new wind farm cut through the air.
A power plant
extracts heat from volcanic rock to
generate electricity. More
Photos >
Sixty miles to the northeast, near a
spot where golden-red lava streams meet
the sea in clouds of steam, a small
power plant extracts heat from the
volcanic rock beneath it to generate
electricity.
These projects are just a slice of the
energy experiment unfolding across
Hawaii’s six main islands. With the most
diverse array of alternative energy
potential of any state in the nation,
Hawaii has set out to become a living
laboratory for the rest of the country,
hoping it can slash its dependence on
fossil fuels while keeping the lights on.
Every island has at least one energy
accent: waves in Maui, wind in Lanai and
Molokai, solar panels in Oahu and
eventually, if all goes well, biomass
energy from crops grown on Kauai. Here on
the Big Island of Hawaii, seawater is also
being converted to electricity.
Still, the state faces enormous
challenges in delivering the power to the
people who need it. While the urban sprawl
around Honolulu consumes the bulk of the
energy, most potential renewable sources
are far from the city, 150 miles southeast
or 100 miles to the northwest.
Each of the state’s six electric
grids belongs to its own island and is
unconnected to the others. And according
to state figures, Hawaii still relies on
imported oil to generate 77 percent of its
electricity, a level of dependency unique
in the United States. Coal-fired power
provides 14 percent, and 9 percent comes
from renewable sources like the wind or
the sun.
Hawaii’s governor, Linda
Lingle, a Republican, has resolved to
throw off the yoke of oil dependence and
harness the state’s potential.
Under an
agreement reached last year with the
federal government and the dominant local
utility, the Hawaiian
Electric Company, Hawaii plans to
generate 40 percent of its power from
renewable sources by 2030. The state’s
six grids will be connected by cables, and
planners hope that conservation steps like
reducing the air-conditioning load at
high-rise hotels will cut Hawaii’s
energy consumption by nearly a third.
“The goals are very, very
aggressive,” said Debra Lew, a senior
project leader for the federal National
Renewable Energy Laboratory. Three
decades ago, Hawaii mapped out a similar
vision, if in less detail, that came to
nothing. But this time, planners say,
failure is not an option. “We don’t
have anywhere else to go,” said Ted
Peck, the point man for the Hawaii Clean
Energy Initiative, overseen by the State Department
of Business, Economic Development and
Tourism.
Even if the state were indifferent to
the environmental costs of burning oil and
gas, including carbon-dioxide emissions
that contribute to global
warming, it would have to embrace
renewable energy sources, said Robert Alm,
a vice president of the Hawaiian Electric
Company. “Our hedge won’t be buying
oil futures, it will be buying wind,”
Mr. Alm said.
Heavy reliance on imported oil has
proved economically perilous. When oil
prices hit $147 a barrel a year ago,
electricity rates approached or briefly
exceeded 50 cents per kilowatt hour on
Maui and Kauai, about five times the
national average.
The technical and political obstacles
have since become clearer.
Hopscotching around this brightly
colored archipelago by plane, a visitor
gets a vivid sense of Hawaii’s
essentially rural nature and the scope of
the challenge.
The biggest priority is laying undersea
cables between the outer islands and Oahu.
Once those connections are made — first
with cables stretching from Molokai and
Lanai, the islands nearest Oahu — the
capital will get power through them.
Then there is the daunting challenge of
feeding fluctuating wind and solar
power into the small electric grids on
the individual islands while devising
backup systems to keep the energy output
smooth and reliable.
On Maui, for instance, General Electric
is
working on ways to modulate demand and
store energy for later use either in
electric batteries or by pump storage —
filling an elevated reservoir in
low-demand periods to produce hydropower
when needed.
“The whole trick is making the system
work in the right way, like conducting an
orchestra,” said Bob Gilligan, G.E.’s
vice president for transmission and
distribution.
On the financial side, the state must
attract developers with enough financing
to help underwrite their own wind, solar,
wave or other renewable projects, carry
out the required environmental reviews and
secure local approval. Addressing local
concerns can be especially challenging. As
in any state with a rural-urban divide,
residents of Hawaii’s less populous
outlying areas are wary about being pushed
around by planners in Honolulu.
The outer islands have higher
concentrations of Native Hawaiians who are
well versed in a local history of
exploitation, from the American overthrow
of their monarch in 1893 to environmental
costs of sugar plantations and tourism.
Some have formed groups like the Pele
Defense Fund, which sprang up here in the
1980s to protect religious gathering
rights in the rain
forest on the Big Island. The fund
seeks to prevent desecration of Pele, the
native goddess of fire and volcanoes, and
finds geothermal
energy projects sacrilegious.
One avenue for developers, utilities
and state officials is to offer outlying
communities support or financing for needs
that the local population identifies, like
fish conservation. “We’re asking the
small islands to be significantly burdened
on behalf of Oahu, so Oahu needs to do
well by them,” said Mr. Alm, the
utility’s vice president.
For all the optimism, planners
studiously remind themselves of the
detritus of past failures, like the
dismembered and rusting wind
turbines of a defunct wind farm near
the southern end of the Big Island.
“This transformation is going to take
a generation,” said Ted Liu, director of
the state economic development department.
“There are no short-term easy
solutions.”
BOSTON - (Business Wire)
Satcon (NASDAQ CM: SATC), a leading provider
of utility scale distributed power solutions
for the renewable energy market, announced
today that their industry leading PowerGate®
Plus Spectrum micro grid solution has been
selected to power La Ola Hawaii’s largest
solar photovoltaic (PV) farm and Micro-Grid on
the island of Lana’i. The 1.2 megawatt (MW)
installation sits on a 10 acre site in south
Lana’i on the Palawai Basin and is the first
solar photovoltaic power plant to be
controlled remotely by a utility, Maui
Electric Company, Ltd. (MECO).
The micro grid developed, coordinated and
operated by Lanai Sustainability Research, LLC,
through its managing member, Castle &
Cooke Solar Management, LLC, and designed and
built by California-based SunPower, is
expected to produce enough solar energy to
supply up to 30 percent of the island’s
electric demand. The advanced control
capabilities and optimized power efficiencies
of Satcon’s Spectrum micro grid solution,
combined with SunPower’s solar tracking
system, will increase the energy capture of
the farm by more than 500,000 kilowatt hours
(kWh) annually.
“Our goal of helping the state of Hawaii
achieve energy independence has taken a
significant step forward with the La Ola solar
farm in Lana’i,” said Harry Saunders,
President of Castle & Cooke Solar
Management. “Satcon was the obvious partner
choice for this project as we assembled a team
of the industry’s most innovative minds to
pioneer our micro grid solution. The
combination of their deep expertise within
solar power conversion, their experience with
successful large scale renewable to grid
interconnection, and their proven PowerGate
Plus solutions helped enable our team to solve
the challenges that faced us as we constructed
a stable and reliable island grid built on a
solar energy framework.”
The solar farm builds on the progress of
Governor Lingle's Hawaii Clean Energy
Initiative; an unprecedented state partnership
launched in January 2008 with the U.S.
Department of Energy which aims to have 70
percent of Hawaii’s energy needs come from
clean sources by 2030. Satcon’s Spectrum
channels renewable power into the Maui
Electric Company grid, resulting in an
increase of 14.4 percent of installed electric
generating capacity to the island. La Ola
offers an offset equivalent to burning 202,400
gallons of diesel fuel, thereby avoiding 4.5
million pounds of carbon dioxide emission
annually.
“We are honored to be a part of this best
in class team of solar power innovators who
are successfully supplying stable, high
quality renewable power locally, at the point
of demand,” said Leo Casey, Chief Technology
Officer of Satcon. “What we have achieved
with MECO and Castle & Cooke is a
significant advancement in solving renewable
energy challenges of intermittency and power
storage and will ensure uninterrupted
utility-grade renewable energy to deliver the
energy security, reliability, safety,
sustainability and cost effectiveness required
for the island.”
“The La Ola, Lanai’s Solar Farm, will
offer visibility to utilities around the world
about how to successfully integrate solar PV
power plants into the grid at high penetration
levels,” said Jean Wilson, Vice President
and General Manager of Utilities and Power
Plants at SunPower Corp. “Satcon’s
inverters provide low voltage ride-through as
well as the production and consumption of
reactive power, both of which are crucial to
grid operation in this application, as the
solar farm will provide up to 30 percent of
peak generation on Lana’i. We believe that
the solar power plant solution Castle &
Cooke, MECO, Satcon and SunPower jointly
developed will be the foundation for planning
rapid growth in deployment of solar PV power
plants around the world.”
About Satcon
Satcon Technology Corporation is a leading
provider of utility scale distributed power
solutions for the renewable energy market,
enabling the industry’s most advanced
reliable and proven clean energy alternatives.
For over 23 years, Satcon has designed and
delivered the next generation of efficient
energy systems for solar photovoltaic,
stationary fuel cells, wind-turbines, and
energy storage systems. To learn more about
Satcon, please visit www.Satcon.com.
About Castle & Cooke
Castle & Cooke Solar Management, LLC is
the managing member of Lanai Sustainability
Research, LLC. Castle & Cooke and its
affiliated companies have operations in more
than 24 states. The company’s diversified
businesses include the development and
ownership of real estate, leasing of
transportation equipment, manufacture of brick
and building materials, and ownership of
public warehouses. The real estate
developments of the affiliated Castle &
Cooke companies include master planned
communities such as Mililani Town on the
island of O‘ahu, Lake Sherwood in Thousand
Oaks, Calif., Seven Oaks in Bakersfield,
Calif. and Keene’s Pointe in Orlando, Fla.
Safe Harbor
Statements made in this press release that
are not historical facts or which apply
prospectively are forward-looking statements
that involve risks and uncertainties. These
forward-looking statements are identified by
the use of terms and phrases such as
"will," "intends,"
"believes," "expects,"
"plans," "anticipates" and
similar expressions. Investors should not rely
on forward looking statements because they are
subject to a variety of risks and
uncertainties and other factors that could
cause actual results to differ materially from
the company's expectation. Additional
information concerning risk factors is
contained from time to time in the company's
SEC filings, including its Annual Report on
Form 10-K and other periodic reports filed
with the SEC. Forward-looking statements
contained in this press release speak only as
of the date of this release. Subsequent events
or circumstances occurring after such date may
render these statements incomplete or out of
date. The company expressly disclaims any
obligation to update the information contained
in this release.
Ocean Network started as a
Pacific-wide idea with Joe Teipel, grew to a
national TV Network and web integration with
Ken Sanders, and with CFO Kevin Robinson
adding valuable entrepreneurial tutelage.
These media pioneers envisioned a cable
channel fully dedicated to bringing audiences
the world of water on TV. Now ON is available
in its first cable market, in Honolulu on
Oceanic Digital Channel 349.
Ocean Network programming
highlights three areas: Education, Recreation
and Information. With ON, there will always be
advocacy for the world's oceans and all water
environments.
Surfing, fishing, boating and
all water sports complement programs that
showcase hands-on experiences by hosts that
film and document life over and under the
ocean. Programs scheduled have been produced
locally, nationally and internationally with
an eye toward variety in the areas of
documentaries and vivid ocean life, with
something for the whole family to watch.
Get on board while the tide is
rising. Ride the swell of growth with
Ocean Network!
Hawaii Endorses Plan for Electric Cars
Jonas Pryner Andersen/Polfoto, via Associated Press
The entrepreneur Shai Agassi, right, met with
Anders Eldrup, center, a Danish energy executive, in Copenhagen
last March.
SAN FRANCISCO — The State of Hawaii
and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort
to build an alternative transportation system based on electric
vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent”
battery recharging network.
The plan, the brainchild of the former Silicon Valley
software executive Shai Agassi, is an effort to overcome the
major hurdles to electric cars — slow battery recharging and
limited availability.
By using existing electric car technologies, coupled with an
Internet-connected web of tens of thousands of recharging
stations, he thinks his company, Better Place L.L.C. of Palo
Alto, Calif., will make all-electric vehicles feasible.
Mr. Agassi has succeeded in assembling a growing consortium
of national governments, regional planning organizations and one
major car company. Tuesday’s announcement follows earlier
endorsements from Israel, Denmark, Australia, Renault-Nissan and
a coalition of Northern California localities supporting the
idea leading to the deployment of an electric vehicle with a
range of greater than 100 miles, beginning at the end of 2010 in
Israel. The company plans test deployments of vehicles in 2009
and broad commercial sales in 2012.
Mr. Agassi has raised $200 million in private financing for
his idea. In October, he obtained a commitment from the
Macquarie Capital Group to raise an additional $1 billion for an
Australian project.
On Tuesday, he said that he was optimistic about his project
despite the dismal investment and credit markets because his
network could provide investors with an annuity. Users of his
recharging network would subscribe to the service, paying for
access and for the miles they drive.
Given the downturn in the mortgage market, he said that
investors are looking for new classes of assets that will
provide dependable revenue streams over many years. “I believe
the new asset class is batteries,” he said. “When you have a
driver in a car using a battery, nobody is going to cut their
subscription and stop driving.”
Mr. Agassi has argued that even if oil prices continued to
decline, his electric recharging network — which ideally would
use renewable energy sources like solar and wind — could
provide competitively priced energy for a new class of vehicles.
He supposes that his network idea will be appropriate first
for “island” economies that typically have significantly
higher energy costs, and then will become more cost-competitive
as it is scaled up.
“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” he
said in a telephone interview. “The typical driving plan is
low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”
Hawaii is a relatively small market with high energy costs.
The state has about 1.2 million cars and replaces 70,000 to
120,000 vehicles annually.
Drivers on the islands also rarely make trips of more than
100 miles, meaning there will be less need for his proposed
battery recharging stations. Part of Mr. Agassi’s model
depends on quick-change service stations to swap batteries for
drivers who need to use their cars before they have completely
recharged their batteries.
Peter Rosegg, a spokesman for the Hawaiian Electric Company,
said that Better Place would become a major customer for
electricity and was also planning to invest in renewable energy
sources that would be connected to the electric grid.
“It’s going to be a nonexclusive agreement, but so far
they’re the only one that has shown up,” Mr. Rosegg said.
In late November, the mayors of San Francisco and other major
Bay Area cities endorsed the Better Place network to help create
an electric recharging network by 2012. The company estimates
that it will cost $1 billion to build a charging network in the
Bay Area that may create as many as half a million charging
stations.
Despite challenges, the Better Place model is promising, said
Daniel M. Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group
at the University of California, Berkeley. It could appeal to
owners of fleets of vehicles and to early adopter customers who
are willing to work through the difficulties that will
inevitably accompany a new transportation system. “It has a
lot of promising features,” he said.
The Zero X electric motorcycle is a full sized high
performance machine. Built from the ground up using the
ultimate electric motorcycle technology and boasting 50
ft-lbs of torque, this stealthy motorcycle will send you
racing up hills, flying over jumps, and splashing through
streams. Best part is, you can do it all without
disturbing nature or your neighbors.
After years of designing electric motorcycles we’re
always looking to ‘one up’ ourselves and it shows in
the latest modifications we’ve made to the 2009 Zero X
electric motorcycle. It’s faster, stronger, and more
durable in the most demanding terrain. We’ve upgraded
elements of the drivetrain, frame, suspension and more.
Inside and out it’s a better motorcycle. We know
that’s great… but the part that really excites us is
how much more fun you’ll have getting to the places you
couldn’t go before.
Our proprietary Z-Force™ lithium ion power pack and
handmade aircraft grade aluminum frame combine to form a
motorcycle that is the fastest,
lightest,
cleanest,
and most fun. Check out the Zero
X features for more info.
Click our Screen Shot Above To
Visit Our Website
Click our Screen Shot Above To
Visit Our Website
The Big Island Reporter Online is a service of The Big Island Reporter Newspaper.
"The Hawaiian Islands Communities Newspaper"
The Big Island Reporter, 75-6081 Alii Drive, FF-201
- Kailua-Kona, Hawaii 96740, (808) 990.1323
This site and all contents are copyright 2003, The BIR is a division of The Green Valley Reporter
Newspaper,
Mark K. Wood, Owner and Publisher
Optimized for Internet Explorer.
.png){kind=small}
Hawaii's Internet News & Entertainment Portal 
