Plans for Oahu-Maui Grid Connection Raise Questions About Lanai
Castle & Cooke is not giving up its fight to build a wind farm on Lanai to power Oahu despite a plan to connect Maui and Oahu instead via an undersea cable.
贬补飞补颈颈鈥檚 Public Utilities Commission held a hearing Tuesday evening at Farrington High School on Oahu to hear public comments on the Oahu-Maui connection, which would allow for the adoption of increasing amounts of renewable energy.
Only six people showed up to testify during the brief meeting that attracted about 60 residents and ended up focusing partly on whether the Oahu-Maui plan was superior to the Lanai wind farm. Representatives from Castle & Cooke testified that it made sense to pursue both.
“Any real project that would help achieve (renewable energy goals) for the state should be presumed to be in the public interest and should not be precluded from being able to advance,” said Chris Lovvorn, a representative of Castle & Cooke Hawaii, the Lanai wind farm’s developer.
State energy officials have said that it would be difficult to pursue both energy projects at the same time.
The Lanai wind farm has been in the works for about six years, when Hawaiian Electric Co. announced that it was negotiating with Castle and Cooke, which at the time owned Lanai.
But in July, state regulators announced they were reconsidering the wind farm. The PUC opened a separate investigation into whether an Oahu-Maui grid connection made technological and financial sense.
Mark Glick, head of the state energy office, and Jeff Ono, 贬补飞补颈颈鈥檚 Consumer Advocate, opened the meeting with an overview of the project.
Glick said that the Oahu-Maui plan would reduce pollution from fossil fuels, bring down electricity rates, help the state go beyond its clean energy goal of 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 and ultimately save an estimated $423 million in fuel costs over 30 years. This is after subtracting the cost of the cable, which is roughly estimated at $700 million.
Ono then espoused the benefits of connecting the Oahu and Maui grids, noting that the Lanai and Molokai projects were often criticized for merely feeding energy from wind farms into the Oahu electric grid. Plans for the Molokai wind farm have since fallen apart.
The Maui and Oahu systems would be made into a 鈥渦nified grid鈥 where power would flow back and forth, said Ono.
The 鈥済rid-tie鈥 would allow more renewable energy to be connected to the electric grids without causing power outages, state energy officials say.
But Lovvorn told state regulators that it made sense to connect Lanai to Oahu along with Maui. He said that 700 megawatts of wind energy are needed to meet the state鈥檚 energy mandate of 40 percent renewable energy by 2030 and that there aren鈥檛 enough resources on Maui and Oahu.
While the meeting on Oahu sparked little public interest, a meeting planned Thursday for Maui, where grid-tied renewable energy projects would most likely be sited, is expected to draw more engaged residents.
Residents on Lanai and Molokai have protested that they were essentially being used as an 鈥渆nergy colony鈥 for Oahu, where about 75 percent of the state’s population lives.
