Hawaii is going where Houston should be
I found this article on energy issues in Hawaii very interesting.
NAALEHU, Hawaii — Two miles or so from this tiny town in the southernmost corner of the United States, across ranches where cattle herds graze beneath the distant Mauna Loa volcano, the giant turbines of a new wind farm cut through the air.
Sixty miles to the northeast, near a spot where golden-red lava streams meet the sea in clouds of steam, a small power plant extracts heat from the volcanic rock beneath it to generate electricity.
These projects are just a slice of the energy experiment unfolding across Hawaii’s six main islands. With the most diverse array of alternative energy potential of any state in the nation, Hawaii has set out to become a living laboratory for the rest of the country, hoping it can slash its dependence on fossil fuels while keeping the lights on.
The article continues to describe some of the history of renewable energy on the island, and makes special note of Hawaii’s unique dependence on oil imports – 77% of the state’s electricity is produced using imported oil. They’re uniquely vulnerable to high energy prices as a result, prices reached 50 cents per kilowatt hour last year at the peak of oil prices. By comparison, most people in Houston are paying 12-15 cents a kilowatt hour. They’ve also got some unique issues with the local culture, including a group that worships volcanoes and opposes geothermal power on religious grounds…
For what it’s worth, I applaud Hawaii’s effort to reduce its dependance on imported oil – and I hope their efforts do in fact serve as a proving ground for technologies and techniques to be adopted elsewhere. However, I can’t read an article like this without thinking that we should be reading this kind of news about Houston. We are the energy city after all.
Why isn’t Houston working to become the capital of renewable energy? I’ve seen some great ideas for ways to attract that segment of the industry. Why isn’t there more local support for such efforts? Is it there and I’m just not seeing it? Or do Houstonians not care about the next generation of energy technology?
Houston is an exciting city, a place that could emerge as one of the great cities of the world. And yet, I often sense this complacency among people here, this idea that Houston is already just the way we want it, and that it can’t get any better so we shouldn’t try anything new or different. I imagine similar attitudes prevailed in say, Detroit, fifty years ago.
Where’s the interest in being an innovating, leading city?
I’d love to hear other thoughts and comments on this one, and I hope you all enjoy the article.
5 Comments
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Truth be told, I’ve heard a lot of rhetoric on keeping Houston the energy capital (renewable and not), but who knows what that looks like? Oil, while not infinite may not be leaving anytime soon, and no renewable technologies have proven themselves as good bets yet. Plenty of research is conducted through Houston (be it at UH, Rice, or Shell), but it isn’t economical to founding companies off of it quite yet.
No one is looking at the Medical Center and scratching their heads as to why companies are sprouting up to take advantage of health care reform for the same reason. The outlook is fuzzy. The companies here have the most to gain by grabbing up renewables business (or lose if they don’t), and I trust a lot of them will try very hard to stay on top.
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I think the expertise for alternative and renewable energy is simply not the same as the expertise for oil and gas (of which Houston is the world leader). So even though we are an energy city and headquarters for the energy industry, we can’t necessarily turn on a dime and become an alternative energy city. I mean, you have loads of geologists and geophysicists and drilling engineers etc here. None of them are particularly useful if you want to build a wind farm.
I don’t think there is a magic bullet for incubating this kind of industry. Silicon Valley was the result of a lot of things, policies that existed in California for decades without anyone knowing that Silicon Valley would be the result. These policies included a major state commitment to education (I just don’t see that in Texas, frankly) and a huge government investment in technology in California (defense spending). No one knew that these would help incubate a bunch of high-tech entrepreneurial enterprises whose customers would primarily be businesses and individual consumers. But they did. So I tend to be a bit skeptical of big plans for [name a city or region] to be the [name a sexy new industry] capital of the U.S. Basically because I think it is next to impossible to plan this kind of thing.
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I don’t know about becoming the renewable energy capitol of the world, but we could go a long way by having programs and policies that make it cheaper and easier to install solar panels at residences. If most or all houses had solar panels, much of our aggregate residential power usage could be supplied. An additional benefit would be that the grid itself would serve as a power plant with those who don’t use all their solar generated power putting it back into the grid. In the long run it would save us money, make the grid more reliable and help the environment by reducing the need for coal generating plants.
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August:
That’s exactly the kind of thing that I’m talking about.
I think Paul and RWBoyd have good points (you can’t just buy a role as an economic center for an industry), however, public support for experimentation and development of new, cutting-edge systems can’t hurt.
I completely agree with you about the value of a distributed solar power system, especially on the hottest days of summer (highest peak demand).
It seems to me the chicken / egg issue is the cost of solar technology. Anything that stimulates demand will increase production, and increased production will lead to greater efficiency of production and lower costs. However, at the current prices, demand just isn’t high enough for the market to be pushing the technology mainstream very rapidly.
I think that like any technology, solar will get there on its own in time. But if we could speed it up by making some early investments in the public sector, then maybe we should.
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Reducing the cost of the technology and inducing consumers to invest in the upgrade is one half of the coin. The other side is getting them installed. Homeowner associations can be a big roadblock to this. There were proposals in the Texas Legislature this last session to prevent HOAs from blocking solar panel installations. Did that ever pass?
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[...] neoHouston offers some praise for Hawaii as well … and wonders why we don’t see more like this in [...]