Green Hawai'i

Living on a rock in the middle of the ocean, 5000 miles away from the nearest civilization, comes with expensive perks like clean air, beaches within walking distance, and nice weather most of the time.  I say expensive because everything is imported into Hawai'i, including fuel.  Our top import in Hawai'i is oil, which accounts for 77% of the state energy use.  This is a big contrast to the mainland, where they get only 1% of their energy from oil.  Not to mention the fact that they have a lot more alternatives and space.

The only choice that we have in Hawai'i is to use less energy.  Even if we were to attempt to replace energy production with renewable resources, it wouldn't stop the fact that there would be an increase in energy use over time just from population growth.  That's assuming if we continued to use the same amount of energy now. 

On the mainland, energy companies can buy and sell power as needed.  This only works because they are all connected to form a giant electricity grid.  It's different in Hawai'i because each island have their own grids, but they aren't connected.  Electricity is 0.30 per kWh on Oahu.  It's much worse on other islands. It doesn't help that each island is separated by a big stretch of water so it's probably impossible for Hawai'i to consolidate energy production or even share electricity.  The power plants themselves aren't efficient at all because they're just so tiny.

One of my pet peeves of trying to use energy is trying to read the meter.  Unfortunately, my house was built during a time when it was a good idea to keep information away from the general populace.  The only way to find out how much energy I use is at the end of every month, which I'm very impatient about.  It would help me a lot to see how much energy I use exactly per day so that I could adjust my behavior accordingly, or at least where my energy is going to.

Living in paradise comes with a lot of strings attached.  Paying more for electricity shouldn't be one of those strings.  Hawai'i needs to be more aggressive with researching alternative energy production, than building a monorail or making laws against the homeless.  Just the savings alone would free up so much money for other projects, like making the homeless not homeless anymore or better schools so there are more people looking for alternative energy.