Hilo Taco Bell and Keaau sugar mill

[terracore]

One post. Two questions:

1) What happened to the Hilo taco bell? Its closed and being gutted.

2) While driving by the old Keaau sugar mill, I saw steam or smoking coming out of the stack... what's up with that?

Anybody know?

[Hawaii Bound]

1) It's being renovated

2) Have no clue on this one

[wax]

2) it is a HELCO power plant

[james weatherford]

2) That is HELCO's "Puna (oil burning) Power Plant", 36.5MW.

[ericlp]

yeah helco's DIRTY power plant. One should never see smoke coming from the stack... I see it all the time. It just means it's not working properly. Or it's just really old. Not sure what the problem is but it can't be too good for the environment.

[Rob Tucker]

It is WWII vintage. HELCO decided to refurbish it rather than invest in new equipment.

[pahoated]

I apologized to Pele the other day. When I first came to Hilo, the first impression was why was it so run down looking? Then I started noticing the sides of buildings like Office Max with big black streaks going down, the corroded look of Liliuokalani park, and like many people, having only associated it with the effects of the active volcano, putting a lot more SO2 in the atmosphere, mixing with H2O to make acid rain. The black streaks must have been volcanic ash.

Now, with the recent EPA violations issued to the Hilo and Puna Diesel-Electric Power Plants for excessive SO2 emission violations, looking at the smoke stacks, vintage 1940's design before the word smog was in the vernacular, made me realize all the excessive corrosion around here doesn't come from Pele and the salt air, it comes from Big Oil. That isn't volcanic ash, it's dirty black soot accumulating from the smokestacks.

There are thousands of tons of SO2 being pumped into the virtual bubbles over Hilo and Puna. HELCO is in a bind (not as big as Oahu HECO) because the EPA is making new standards the law, not just something nice to do, and not grandfathered, to meet emission requirements. Hawaiian Electric have to get their smokestacks upgraded or replaced. The diesel-electric plants were mechanical marvels for their time. They are running and nobody notices because there's almost nothing visible coming out of the stack and the diesels are super quiet. But they are from a time where nobody had even heard of pollution. Modern stacks now have scrubbers to reclaim emissions so very little gets out into the air, only they are very expensive, in the tens of millions. That is why the refineries are shutting down, it will be too costly to meet the new EPA requirements. A lot of people have to be scrambling in the background.

So, the people of Puna have spoken and declared they prefer living under a huge blanket of massively verifiable SO2 rather than try to survive barely measurable levels of H2S, which are now being associated with longevity. The point isn't coal, oil, natural gas. It is: STOP. BURNING. NOW. PERIOD. How difficult is that to understand?

"It was a majority decision to descend into the Dark Ages. Don't worry, be happy, bang on da drum all day!"

[ericlp]

Ted, this ain't the mainland. You'd never see anything coming from the stacks on a power plant. Lived next to a few of them. Even on Oahu they are poorly run. I see stuff coming out of the stacks there as well.

While yes the volcano does send out way more pollution than helco every could but does that mean we have to add MORE too what happens in nature?

Just so happens I think adding scrubbers to the stacks is a good thing. Makes one aware of our environment and actually TRY to work the machines properly so to not keep replacing million dollar scrubbers. I worked in many power plants and it's inexcusable to maintain equipment like that. Esp, when we are paying the most $ for kWh's...we should have the best/cleanest equipment around.

[Jay Bondesen]

I think that the point here is that the hazards posed by burning oil or diesel seem to be acceptable when the possible but less understood hazard exposure to those close to the Geothermal plant has been, and still is, quite newsworthy.

Jay