no wood-fired grid power for you!

[leilanidude]

Do we actually have plants that burn diesel? I thought we burn the waste oil left over from the creation of fuels at the refinery on Oahu. Am I wrong?
----------
They stopped using bunker fuel a couple years ago, switching to diesel, at a higher cost of course, to the consumer.

[Jeremy Lutes]

tangentially - I suspect that anyone hoping that their electric rates will someday go down is going to be waiting a very very long time indeed.

[MarkP]

The turbines burn something akin to diesel. The plants in Hilo and Puna burn this thick black stuff.

[geochem]

quote:

---

Originally posted by glinda

Why Life of the Land should be given standing..
.... If concerned citizens, groups, are not given standing, able to become party to matters of their concern, we might as well let Putin run the show. Methinks it brings shame on anyone that would suggest otherwise.

Interestingly, the courts, at least here in Hawaii, have always granted concerned citizens standing. Otherwise there are all sorts of boondoggles we would have been saddled with.

.....

I see this project as an echo, a reflection, of days gone by. A last ditch effort to capitalize on something envisioned many moons ago that never really panned out, and now is an outdated modality.
....

I still would like to see geothermal gain ground, not in Puna, the area is already given over to other land uses, but the back side of Hualalai is a wide open, and not impacting anyone, space. With a more stable (assumed) heat resource than all that active volcanic stuff along Kilauea's East Rift, we could power the whole state with that.. but no, that too has been ruled out, or so it seems.

---

So many ideals... and so little logic...

Sure, we do let every tom, dick, and harry activist go to court and increase the cost of any project - regardless of their real standing or the grounds of their complaints - which is why we are well on our way to a single industry economy that is in no way sustainable.

And your idea of doing some geothermal on Hulalai is absolutely brilliant - except that Puna Pono Alliance - a ragtag activist group if there ever was one - might heartily disagree - since they filed a lawsuit against the University of Hawaii over a proposal to actually conduct some non-invasive geophysics there to determine whether there was any evidence for a geothermal resource...

Equally brilliant is your idea of turning all the eucalyptus land into diversified agriculture - except oops!... another ragtag activist group believes - and is happy to go to court to prove - that we should do all that diversified agriculture without benefit of pesticides or plants with an engineered resistance to pathogenic viruses and other pests...

So we continue to burn oil to sustain our unsustainable economy and continue to have potentially productive lands sit idle because all these evil investors have the quaint - now clearly obsolete - notion that there might be some hope of generating a return on their investments. I would hope that, by now, any investor with half a brain will have realized the error of such thinking.

[kalakoa]

let every tom, dick, and harry activist go to court and increase the cost of any project - regardless of their real standing or the grounds of their complaints - which is why we are well on our way to a single industry economy that is in no way sustainable.

No, we're already there -- dragging everything through "the process" (planning, EIS, and court if necessary) is most of our economy, and those costs must be paid first, even if the project fails.