Hawaii’s Moon Shot

NY Times

December 2, 2008
Editorial

Jeffrey Mikulina, a longtime environmental activist in Hawaii, jokes that his home state, which is almost completely dependent on imported oil, is one supertanker away from being Amish. It also is one superheated ocean away from being underwater.

There, in a nutshell, is the motivation behind a new campaign to wean Hawaii from fossil fuels in 10 years. The project is Hawaii’s own moon mission, led by the Blue Planet Foundation and not by the state’s political establishment, which tends to prefer the slow and tortured way to change (a long battle over a new commuter rail system was bogged down by a ferocious debate over whether it should have steel or rubber wheels).

Blue Planet, a private foundation, is the creation of Henk Rogers, a software entrepreneur who made a fortune in Tetris. Reassessing his life after a heart attack two years ago, he decided to pursue a goal that for decades has been as elusive as it is drop-dead obvious.

Hawaii is as energy-hungry as any state, but it has no oil, natural gas, hydroelectric dams or nuclear plants. It needs imported crude to keep the lights on, but it also has an abundance of clean-energy sources: sunshine, wind, powerful tides and waves and cold ocean depths.

A green consciousness is beginning to take root in Hawaii. In January, the state approved a plan to cut its reliance on foreign oil by 70 percent by 2030. Mr. Rogers doesn’t want to wait that long, so his foundation is trying to turbocharge the effort. Mr. Mikulina, the foundation’s executive director, says this will mean more than just throwing up lots more solar panels and windmills and making lavish investments on exotic technologies.

Wind-farm relics from the 1980s are now languishing on Hawaiian hillsides or as forgotten proposals in desk drawers. The foundation plans to seek structural changes, like pushing the state government and Hawaii’s main utility, the Hawaiian Electric Company, to revamp an obsolete electrical system to increase efficiency and to allow customers with solar panels to easily sell power back to the grid. An agreement to do just that was signed last month but has not been enacted into law.

Advances like these, plus a concerted push for conservation, may be just the steps needed to complete the state’s transformation from blue to green. Hawaiians have a long tradition of self-sufficiency, community action and a deep attachment to the land that sustains them — leadership in a clean-energy movement could powerfully reaffirm those values and perhaps spread them to the rest of the nation.