Friday, February 11, 2022, 12:05 a.m
Jobs and dependability
Pierre Davet (“Enough already,” Your Views, Feb. 3) asks why unions and working people support Honua Ola. There are many reasons. First, Honua Ola created more than 500 jobs in the construction of the plant and continues to employ more than 30 local people, mostly from East Hawaii Island.
Once the plant is open, it will create more than 200 jobs in forestry, transportation, plant operations and in ancillary businesses, such as wood product manufacturing and agriculture.
Wind and solar, renewable technologies Davet lists, are not necessarily less expensive, nor are they as reliable.
Solar plus battery storage is intended to provide power for four hours a day at 8 to 9 cents per kilowatt hour, when the batteries are fully charged.
Honua Ola provides power 24 hours a day at 22 cents. If the battery capacity were increased and additional solar panels added to provide 24 hours of power, instead of four, the price of solar would be more than Honua Ola.
If you add batteries to these intermittent power projects, they store power all day to have it available for four hours during peak demand in the evening.
But if it rains all day, or for several days, batteries cannot be charged, so they cannot be counted on to keep the grid stable. Because Honua Ola’s renewable power is always on and can be increased or decreased as needed, it can maintain grid stability. This dependability enables more solar and wind to be added to the grid without jeopardizing the resilience of the system.
For Hawaii to have 100% renewable energy on the grid by 2045, we are going to need to put every renewable technology to work.
Warren Lee
President, Honua Ola Bioenergy
Hawaii Tribune-Herald, Friday, February 11, 2022: https://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2022/02/11/opinion/your-views-for-february-11-6/