Kaua`i: The Retreat From Renewables
Kaua`i is not the energy producer it used to be. It has a few hydro-electric power plants that support agriculture on the island’s west side, but the once abundant bagasse (sugar-cane waste) that used to provide power has shrunk considerably with the exit of large sugar producers. Recent battles over the future of Kaua`i’s energy production show that the island’s energy future is still in flux. So far, however, despite winning a preliminary battle, opponents of continued reliance on fossil fuel seem to be losing the war.
At the heart of the dispute are Kaua`i Electric’s plans to build a new 26-megawatt fossil-fuel powered plant near Hanama`ulu. Last year, after the county’s Planning Commission granted a needed change in land use, opponents – calling themselves Citizens for Clean Air – challenged the commission’s approval process. While state law gives the commission authority to grant land use changes in areas of less than 15 acres (so long as Conservation District land is not at issue), the county had never adopted rules of procedure.
At that point, Citizens for Clean Air went to court, challenging lack of governing rules. Eventually, the group prevailed and got the commission to adopt rules of procedure.
But any celebration was short-lived. On November 8, 2000, the final permit hearing was held for the plant. Gabriela Taylor with Citizens for Clean Air testified that a fossil fuel plant should not be located in an area like Hanama`ulu, where emissions could be blown to nearby schools and hospitals. Instead, she argued, it should be at Port Allen where winds would carry the emissions out to sea.
Over the objections of Taylor and others, the permit was approved. Shortly afterward, the plant site, in a former cane field, was blessed for groundbreaking. An independent power producer called Kaua`i Power Partners, hired by Kaua`i Electric, will build a naptha (jet fuel) power plant. KE had sent out a request for proposals for construction of the plant and had sought proposals for plants using alternative or renewable fuels, but decided in the end that the naptha plant was the cheapest and most reliable.
Back when the parties were wrangling over Planning Commission rules, Kaua`i Electric’s parent company, Citizens Utilities Corporation, put the company on the market. A group of local residents calling themselves the Kaua`i Island Utility Cooperative moved to purchase the utility and applied for approval from the state Public Utilities Commission.
The original proposal “sounded harmless enough,” according to an article in Ka Uila News, published by Life of the Land. But the proposal did not stay harmless.
The co-op soon changed its proposal: Thirteen unelected board members would run the co-op, effectively silencing the voice of ratepayers. What’s more, the co-op “would assume ‘all environmental liabilities’ from Citizens (who would not be obligated to disclose the nature of environmental liability),” Ka Uila states. “The Cooperative agreed that, after the sale was complete, the Co-op would not discuss any environmental data with its members, including toxic contamination and potential Superfund sites, without seller’s prior written consent.”
According to Carol Bain of the Kaua`i chapter of the League of Women Voters, the co-op was a group of businessmen, “Rotary Club types,” that were “way out of their league” when it came to operating a utility. Without having sought any appraisal, the co-op proposed paying $170 million for the utility, Bain says, and tried to support the sale with a federal loan that would have “put the island into debt for 30 years.” “Clearly, the co-op was either working with the utilities to make them a huge profit or simply not practicing due diligence.”
The sale of KE was eventually killed. Now, the mayor has built a task force to study the issue, and the county has provided $100,000 to assess the utility’s worth, a project that “should have been done long ago,” Bain says.
Once the assessment is complete, it’s possible that the county will buy the utility, Bain says, and “contract out for management, similar to our water board. Nowhere else in the state does a city or county own the utility. [It would be] better idea than what was happening.”
— Teresa Dawson
O`ahu: Wa`ahila Ridge Encapsulates Issues
HECO’s plan to string a power line over one of Honolulu’s most visible ridges has sparked outrage every time it has been put forward. And this latest round is no different.
HECO desperately wants to erect a series steel poles and miles of transmission line on panoramic Wa`ahila Ridge, one of the walls around scenic Manoa Valley. This line would provide HECO’s Pukele substation with an alternative transmission line, the utility says, and is needed to prevent overloading, enhance reliability, and provide additional capacity. Thousands of O`ahu residents disagree; many have described the project as one of HECO’s most public fiascoes.
Between 1971 and 1999, HECO proposed this project four times, settled out of court with a feisty Palolo community, and has had its Environmental Impact Statement for the most recent version of the project rejected by the Office of Environmental Quality Control and the state Department of Land and Natural Resources. To date, HECO has spent $10 million trying to get this project approved.
Fiasco or not, the project is alive and kicking – and so are the protesters.
In late September HECO released its mammoth, 26-volume Revised Environmental Impact Statement (REIS) for its 138-kilovolt Kamoku-Pukele line. In October, Ka Uila News, published by the community activist group Life of the Land, laid out the path the project could take, the first hurdle being the acceptance of the REIS by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR acceptance is needed because the proposed project will cut across state land and land that lies within the state Conservation District).
In early November, LOL prepared a mass mailing to stop the project. All totaled, the DLNR received about 4,000 comment letters and postcards from LOL and others commenting on the REIS. On November 9, the DLNR issued an acceptance report, finding that the document met all state requirements. Even so, then-DLNR director Tim Johns went on to find fault with many of the assertions made by HECO and expressed concern “regarding the presentation of information, conclusions drawn by HECO, and potential areas of bias in the subject document.”
HECO’s reference to an outage in 1987 as The Super Bowl Sunday outage “tends to sensationalize the event,” Johns’ lengthy letter of acceptance states. “This possibly makes the event seem more serious to bolster an argument to justify the project. HECO also failed to disclose the duration of the outage in the body of the EIS.”
It continues, “HECO suggested that the Honolulu Power Plant may be retired early (thus accelerating overloading of the downtown system by 2005, adding further justification for the project), but failed to explain why the plant may be closed early, in the body of the EIS or in their response to public comments.”
Furthermore, the report states, HECO’s prediction of a 10 percent peak load increase for 2000 “does not seem to be probable given the economy and population decline in the Pukele Service area. Since increasing demand is being used to bolster arguments about overloading, the Department is concerned over the accuracy of HECO’s information.”
Problems with wind, corrosion, accidents, tree contact, among others, are good reasons for burying the lines, an option that HECO dismisses without providing reasons, the letter continues.
“HECO mentions problems with underground lines (New Zealand and downtown Honolulu faults), but HECO fails to illustrate the exact nature or extent of these faults. These facts should not be used merely to bolster and argument to the contrary to make the lines less desirable than they really might be,” it states. The report also criticizes HECO’s for downplaying possible visual and cultural effects.
Unless the REIS is successfully challenged in court, HECO can move forward with an application for a Conservation District Use Permit from the Board of Land and Natural Resources. In addition, it must seek the approval of the Public Utilities Commission for the project.
— Teresa Dawson
Renewable energy on Maui has been much debated over the last three years, ever since the Maui Electric Company (MECO) proposed building a new oil-fired plant at Waena, between Kahului and Pa`ia and an independent power producer proposed building a wind farm on the western side of the island.
The plant’s first phase would involve the installation of two 20-MW combustion turbines and an 18 MW steam turbine generator. Later phases would bring total capacity at full build-out to 232 MW. Plans call for burning cheaper (and more polluting) high-sulfur oil.
The Land Use Commission has approved changing the district from Agricultural to Urban, one of several zoning changes needed for the project. Maui County Council also approved the zoning change, while placing a 66-MW ceiling on the amount of energy the plant can produce using oil-fired generators. In addition, the county recommended that up to half the rezoned acreage be used to develop renewable energy. But as Henry Curtis of the energy-watching group Life of the Land points out, that recommendation is not one likely to result in any push for renewables. “After MECO completes the first two phases [58 MW] of its planned facility” – something it can do within 33 acres – “it won’t need the second half of its project for another 30 to 40 years,” Curtis told Environment Hawai`i.
Curtis notes that MECO has not yet filed for Public Utilities Commission approval of the Waena plant. At present, an integrated-resource planning docket is working its way through the PUC process. The IRP docket, in which Life of the Land and the Hawai`i Renewable Energy Alliance have filed as intervenors, will take months before concluding.
Maui’s current energy profile includes few renewable resources. Just 16 MW of non-firm power comes from the HC&S sugar mill; most of that is generated by bagasse.
The only major renewable energy installation planned for Maui is the 20-MW wind farm proposed by Zond, a subsidiary of Enron. Last spring, the Board of Land and Natural Resources approved siting of the project on state land in West Maui. However, because the company is not regulated by the PUC and therefore not eligible for a direct lease with the Land Board, the only way to get Zond on the land was to go through the process of putting out the land for lease at public auction.
“There is no nexus that allows us to directly negotiate a lease with a [renewable energy] developer,” Land Management Division Administrator Dean Uchida said at the Land Board’s meeting in December. The Land Board voted to approve the sale, giving Zond the opportunity to acquire the land and start work. While there is a danger that other parties may underbid Zond, the auction the company’s only option.
In addition, Curtis says, MECO has not yet signed an interconnection agreement with Zond.
— Patricia Tummons
The Big Island of Hawai`i has abundant opportunities for alternative energy – lots of land for solar and wind power, geothermal heat, streams for hydropower, and is the only area in the state where ocean-thermal energy conversion has been developed (albeit on a less than commercial scale).
But the island’s electric utility, the Hawai`i Electric Light Co., or HELCO, has not knit these resources into its grid on a large scale. For the most part, HELCO relies on oil-fueled generators, some dating back to World War II. Altogether, the utility says it has about 225 MW of firm capacity available, about two-thirds of which comes from plants that HELCO owns and the remainder coming from independent power producers – facilities that sell power to HELCO under contracts approved by the state Public Utilities Commission.
The single largest source of alternative energy in the grid is geothermal. But the benefits of geothermal must be weighed against such issues as cultural concerns, inappropriate siting, routine releases of noxious gases (primarily hydrogen sulfide), and the interruptibility of power in the event of seismic activity. Last year, Puna Geothermal Venture (PGV), operator of the Big Island’s sole geothermal facility, requested permission to double its generating capacity – to 60 MW from the present 30. That request is going through a formal mediation process established by the Hawai`i County Council. Opposing the expansion are many Puna residents living near the plant who claim that ongoing releases of hydrogen sulfide (including a major release last October) have injured their health and that noise from the plant detracts from their previous quality of life (the residential subdivisions were built long before the geothermal plant).
Wind power has been contributing to electricity demand on the Big Island since the early 1980s when a 7 MW wind farm was built at South Point in Ka`u. Since then, another wind farm, generating some 2.3 MW, was installed at Lalamilo in North Kona. Together, they supply about 1.6 percent of the Big Island’s electricity. Recently, HELCO signed a contract to buy power from a third wind farm that Zond Pacific plans to build at Kahua Ranch that will generate 10 MW. Because of its intermittent nature, wind power is not considered part of HELCO’s “firm” (i.e., available on demand) capacity.
Hydroelectric power capacity on the Big Island is about 15 MW, generated at three plants in East Hawai`i. Like wind power, hydro is considered non-firm.
HELCO boasts of having about 30 percent of its energy generated from renewable resources. However, just 13 percent of its firm capacity of 226.3 MW consists of renewable energy, and all of that is from geothermal.
One of the most contentious energy disputes statewide has arisen on the Big Island over HELCO’s plans to expand its generating facility near Keahole airport. The existing plant sits on Conservation District land amid small farms and residential developments. In 1992, HELCO submitted to the state Board of Land and Natural Resources a request for a Conservation District Use Permit to add 58 MW of oil-fired capacity to the existing 29-MW plant.
In May 1994, the board finally voted on the project. While the final vote was three opposed to two in favor, HELCO attorneys claimed a victory since, they said, state law requires the board to muster a four-vote majority to block a permit. HELCO then claimed to have won a “default” permit. Since then, the project has been stalled by legal action on a number of fronts, most of it the result of action initiated by two nearby residents – Peggy Ratliff and Mahi Cooper – whose initial requests for a contested case hearing on the application were repeatedly bollixed by Department of Land and Natural Resources staff. Representing Ratliff and Cooper against a raft of HELCO attorneys (including some from the most high-priced Honolulu law firms) has been Michael Matsukawa of Kona, whose work has largely been on a pro-bono basis.
Ratliff and Cooper have been joined in several of their lawsuits by the Keahole Defense Fund, a community group whose main purpose has been to push HELCO away from the decision to expand the Keahole plant.
Opponents of Keahole successfully appealed to the Environmental Protection Agency the initial Department of Health clean-air permit for the expanded plant. A new clean-air permit has yet to be issued. Matters involving land use, water use, and noise levels have also been the subject of lawsuits, several of which are still pending in state Supreme Court.
Most recently, opponents managed to win in August a victory in Third Circuit Court, when Judge Ronald Ibarra ruled that HELCO’s “default” permit, under DLNR rules, had a three-year life. If construction were not completed in that time, the permit would expire, unless specifically renewed by the Board of Land and Natural Resources.
In December, the Land Board heard HELCO’s request for a time extension – a request that, until Ibarra’s August ruling, it had declared it did not need. Although Land Board rules do not anticipate such requests being made after a permit has expired, the board agreed to entertain this one.
— Patricia Tummons
Volume 11, Number 7 January 2001
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