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When a shipment of 568-foot tall wind turbines headed to Kahuku in 2019, it was met by hundreds of protesters opposed to the turbines’ placement close to homes and a school.

Police eventually arrested over a hundred of the protesters who were blocking the roadway, and the turbines went in — a small victory for the state’s goal of weaning its energy grid entirely off fossil fuels by 2045. 

But the opposition didn’t go away. For years, residents have complained of headaches, disrupted sleep and seizures, which they suspected are caused by the turbines’ proximity. They consistently advocated for bigger buffer zones that would force the turbines to be moved farther away from the community.

Now, the Honolulu City Council has complied with their demands with new land use rules that mean many of the turbines might come down at the end of their current power contracts. Correction: An earlier version of this story says the turbines must come down.

In that decision, the council has picked up an awkward conversation about where and how to construct renewable energy projects that are crucial to the state’s sustainability goals, but that residents say unfairly burden their neighborhoods.

The Future Of Wind In �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��

The Honolulu City Council last week changed land use regulations governing setbacks for the winds turbines, from a 1-to-1 ratio that would allow a 568-foot turbine to operate 568 feet away from homes to a new distance of 1.25 miles or 10 times their height — whichever is greater — from many property lines.

Experts said last week’s City Council decision doesn’t kill the wind industry in �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��, but it could make developers more cautious about investing in renewable energy here.

Under a state clean-energy law , �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� utility companies are required to switch to 100% renewable energy by the year 2045, and 20% of that is envisioned to come from wind, .

“It’s an important part of the overall mix,” deputy director of the State Energy Office Stephen Walls said. 

Currently, the state only has onshore wind generation, making up of the state’s total energy supply, or about a quarter of the state’s renewable energy portfolio. Kahuku’s wind farms can produce up to 55 megawatts for Oʻahu’s grid, enough to power more than 30,000 homes. Another wind farm, in Pupukea on Oʻahu’s North Shore, can produce up to 69 megawatts. 

Many Kahuku residents have opposed the wind turbines for years, saying they are too big and too close. They maintain that their well-being suffers from the turbines’ proximity, and that they feel pestered by shadow flicker caused by the setting sun shining through spinning blades. Research on human proximity to wind farms generally says that annoyance levels due to noise and light flicker .

The Kahuku residents, some of whom testified at the City Council last week, also worry that mechanical failures of the turbines could threaten nearby homes and an elementary school that sits about 1,900 feet away. AES Corp., which operates the eight 568-foot turbines called Nā Pua Makani, said in a presentation to the Koʻolauloa neighborhood board that they have measures in place like an automatic high wind shut-down and monitoring of hundreds of turbine signals to minimize safety risk.

Council members ultimately decided against allowing wind turbines to make repairs affecting their height after the end of their current 20-year contracts with Hawaiian Electric Co. That means turbines from the first batch might have to close in 2031 and turbines from the last batch might have to close in 2040, because changes in the wind power industry mean the only available replacement blades might be bigger than the current blades.

For residents opposed to the turbines, last week’s decision was both a long-awaited victory and a compromise. Developers are allowed to replace blades with slightly longer versions during the current power purchase agreement, but after that the turbines’ staying power is less certain. Correction: An earlier version of this story said the turbines must go after their current power purchase agreements.

“That’s really what the community was fighting for,” attorney Ryan Hurley, who opposed Nā Pua Makani, said.

For power companies hoping to get more use out of the facilities, the decision was less welcome. 

In testimony, they said they hoped the turbines could be used for future contracts with HECO, also known as power purchase agreements, and warn that it could cost millions of dollars to replace the electricity the current turbines generate with new renewable energy projects.

Projects already in place sometimes pursue second power purchase agreements, Walls said, pointing to an example of a wind farm on Maui. 

“Even after the first PPA ends, it doesn’t mean the project owners think the project is finished,” he said. 

It’s hard to predict what will happen if the projects cease operations in the coming years.

New technologies like more efficient solar batteries could quickly fill the gap left by Kahuku’s wind turbines — though Walls said it’s hard to make the math work for �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��’s eventual compliance with the 2045 deadline without wind being a portion of it.

A Better Model?

Community engagement has killed renewable energy projects before. 

A proposal to build about 70 wind turbines on Molokaʻi and Lānaʻi for transmission to Oʻahu, called Big Wind, fell apart more than a decade ago after many residents opposed the project. Like the Kahuku residents, they took issue with their region hosting big infrastructure that mostly benefits urban Honolulu.

“I mean, it sounds exploitative and it sounds extractive,” Walls said about Big Wind. “That’s not part of the transition that we want to see. And we want to be respectful and hear from the people that actually have to live with this stuff.”

Poor community engagement during wind farm siting decisions can lead to strong backlash, threatening the viability of future renewable energy projects, said Michael Roberts, an economics professor at the University of �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� Mānoa and researcher with the University of �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ�� Economic Research Organization. 

Walls, from the State Energy Office, agrees. He and Hurley, the attorney opposed to Nā Pua Makani, said one example of where community engagement has worked is on Molokaʻi with its , or CERAP.

But Walls cautioned that what works for Molokaʻi might not work for everywhere else, especially if not enough community members have the bandwidth to get involved with siting renewable energy projects. 

“That process has been long and involved and it’s really inspiring in a lot of ways,” Walls said. “But if we’re looking at statewide goals and how much time we have left to build the things that we need to meet those goals, then we have to figure out how to do CERAP much more quickly.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.