Hawaii Decarbonization Settlement 2045

[MyManao]

it seems more like you are saying that Pele is cool with us grabbing some power from geothermal but folks still whine about it.

Regardless, thanks for sharing the haiku.

Thank you. And yes, it's my summation of this thread.. as I said earlier, regardless all the other stuff Pele put paid to the matter in 2018. Before that it was (kinda maybe) easy to say it was a mistake to let geothermal take hold in what otherwise became a bedroom community.. but that, even without 2018, was a hard sell when the state designated the area a geothermal sub-zone decades ago.. Seriously, the writing’s been on the wall for a long time.

https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/se...be/content

And, now, add 2018 and the story is over. What might have been opposing ideas equally balanced so as to never let either become dominate shifted in favor of geothermal, And still, there's always going to be those that would rather spend their days resisting something. 

As to the injection wells and their possible consequences.. I have a hard time imagining that returning the fluids that come up in the geothermal process to where they came from could make all that much of a difference. In fact it's the quintessential renewable resource, isn't it? We extract some steam, use it to turn a turbine and return it to where we got it so as to be able to use it again.. and again..

Keep in mind the area in the rock from which the steam comes is a part of a much larger system where the ground water, that lens you mention, is pushed aside by the presence of heat, from magma. The magma is too hot and because water can’t exist in an environment that hot the ground around it is dry. So there is a super hot dry zone, a transition zone that is hot but not hot enough to repel water entirely, and further from the magma there is the relatively cold water lens. 

The fresh water lens that permeates the island is explained here..

https://dlnr.hawaii.gov/mk/files/2016/11...Hawaii.pdf

I am sure most have felt both while swimming in the ocean over the years. Pohoiki had great warm fresh water currents running through the surf, and the beaches along the Keaukaha side have cold currents. Both are obvious when you come in contact with them. Geothermal is focused on the transition zone. Where there’s enough heart to make steam, but not so much as to drive away the water the steam is made from. It naturally exists and without man doing anything it is filled with all sorts of nasty chemicals from the magma's heat and gases and water interaction.. and without something that needs to be monitored and all that it just is, it’s there and Ormat’s discharge is but a grain of sand in the overall scheme of things.. literally a pin prick.

So, geothermal, we use it, we return it to where we got it, and all is done in a closed system that leaves nothing on the surface. And when you look around at how much land is used and how toxic it is or isn’t we get a whole lot for very little. Like so little that with the land use requirements and the supply chain nonsense that comes with solar and wind I think geothermal is a far better, safer, less toxic, and more stable choice.. by far.

And.. since I am going on.. my energy source of choice would be the ocean currents at the bottom of the ʻAlenuihāhā Channel. Just place the turbines down there and we’d never run out of energy.. nor need have its production effect us, at all. It’d be clean, no extraction and reinjection, no weird minerals mined in some god forsaken place that need to be recycled, no trash.. just turbines turning seven miles below the ocean’s surface and some wires. Maybe someone should write a novel.. a sci-fi thriller..