The focus of the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawai’i has shifted so much over the last 20 years that its name no longer seems to fit. While the site it occupies is still regarded by many as the place where the state undertakes research in ocean thermal energy conversion – a method of energy production involving the difference in temperature between warm and cold sea water – the role of energy research at the facility has effectively faded into the background. Instead, NELHA is busy playing landlord to more than 20 aquaculture tenants on 870 acres of land at Keahole Point.
“We started out as a research laboratory to look at energy and we’ve come around 180 degrees,” says Tom Daniel, scientific and research manager for the facility who has been around longer than almost anyone else there. “We’re in a place where we’re not doing any active research and all our efforts are into developing businesses and trying to become a business facilitator.”
The most recent OTEC project to end at Keahole is the Pacific International Center for High Technology Research’s OC-OTEC (for open cycle OTEC). Over seven years, the total cost to the taxpayer was nearly $15 million; of that, the U.S. Department of Energy contributed more than $10 million, with the state paying the remainder.
Given the prevailing low cost of fossil fuels, the work at NELHA hasn’t shown that OTEC is a viable technology for Hawai’i, according to Tom Daniel, scientific and research director for NELHA.
In 1993, a closed-cycle OTEC project broke ground. This project’s budget, according to Daniel, is $1.245 million, consisting of state, PICHTR, Hawaiian Electric Company, and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency.
Further OTEC development is constrained by the need for a new pipeline. When OTEC experiments are running, Daniel says, NELHA doesn’t have as much water to sell to the other tenants, and vice versa. One problem with the closed cycle plant, he says, is that it takes 3,000 gallons a minute of warm water and 3,000 gallons a minute of cold water, which is not very much compared to other things, but over the next couple of years, Cyanotech is expanding dramatically.”
(For a more complete history of OTEC research at Keahole, readers may consult the May 1991 issue of Environment Hawai`i.)
Volume 8, Number 5 November 1997
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