By Leslie Lang
The August/September 2012 issue of Hana Hou! (the Hawaiian Airlines in-flight magazine) has a good article about Puna and its geothermal energy.
It's really an interesting article. Informative and easy to understand. I learned some things about how geothermal works:
To generate electricity, all you need to do is spin a coil of metallic threads inside a magnetic field (or, conversely, spin magnets inside a nest of metallic threads). The real question is: What force is going to do that spinning? The movement of water (cascades and tides) can turn a hydroelectric device. Wind will spin propellers. But most electricity is generated by steam, and to make steam you have to boil water. Oil, gas, coal and nuclear fuel are today’s favored methods for boiling water in power plants, and each comes with risks. But if you find natural steam in the ground, you don’t have to burn a thing because the earth has done it for you....
The article includes this quote by Wally Ishibashi (co-chair of the Geothermal Working Group with Richard), which I find thought-provoking:
What PGV doesn’t have is a huge smokestack—and that absence is historic because Hawai‘i, though it contains zero natural deposits of fossil fuel, currently depends on oil for a whopping 90 percent of its energy. Last year the Big Island alone spent a billion dollars on oil. Wallace Ishibashi, head of the ILWU Hawai‘i chapter and a longtime proponent of geothermal, asks: “What do you think is our biggest export from Hawai‘i? Bananas? No way. Our biggest export is our own money. That billion dollars we spend on oil, we can keep that here.” Can we?...
And as a reward for reading to the end of the article, you will get to read about Richard:
In a democracy, every thorny problem needs at least one levelheaded farmer to think things through. Richard Ha served on the same Geothermal Working Group as Pat, and he too is a believer in geothermal. His thinking on it is Island-based and practical, and in fact Pat and many others regard Ha as the voice and conscience of geothermal, a citizen who has punched through the boundary between today’s energy crisis and tomorrow’s potential....
Click here to read the whole article
Awesome! Congrats Richard, although you shouldn't have to be so singled out as a geothermal supporter. Geothermal should be so obvious for Hawaii, especially the BI. The public perception problem needs to be reversed and this author does a good job pointing out this is steam technology, even though a very sophisticated and expensive steam technology. The problem is if the individual is a geothermal supporter, that incorrectly implies corporate sympathizer with the association that corporations are environmental destroyers. Those perceptions are going to be a challenge to turn around.
Posted by: punated | August 22, 2012 at 07:48 AM
Yes. We need to look for the greater good. We need to get past individual agendas. We need to look past today and toward the future,
We can have a better future for our children and their children. I feel like we are beginning to look up toward the horizon. I am hopeful that we will all go forward together.
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Posted by: richard ha | August 22, 2012 at 08:55 PM