Richard Ha writes:

When we made the decision nearly 12 years ago to diversify geographically from our main farm in Kea‘au, the most important factor for us was sustainability. We could have chosen to locate on O‘ahu, which was close to the market. Most of Hawai‘i’s customers live there, and many people advised us to move there.

We chose Pepe‘ekeo, instead, for reasons of sustainability. One of the most important factors was the abundance of available water. Annual rainfall here is in the neighborhood of 140 inches. There are four streams and three springs that run through our property, which are all potential sources of irrigation water.

Today we are working on transforming this enormous quantity of water into electricity. At the highest-elevation corner of our property there is a flume intake, which used to channel water down to the Hilo Coast Processing Plant (the sugar mill that serviced the Pepe‘ekeo area). The flume runs from our property’s highest elevation to its lowest point. We want to generate electricity and then route the water back into the flume channel when we are done with it.

An inspector from the Commission on Water Resource Management (CWRM) came to inspect the flume site last week. We want to make sure that we develop this project in the right way, so we did not start any work before finding out exactly what is allowed. As it turns out, this flume intake is an approved use that is recorded with the CWRM. We were told that as long as we do nothing to the stream itself we can use its water to generate electricity. We are elated.

A preliminary estimate is that we can run all our reefers and all our other electrical motors and still have a lot of leftover electricity to sell back to HELCO.

Because we based the decision to locate our new farm around sustainability issues, we are now in a position to generate our own, free, electricity. Sustainability is one of our core values and it has guided our actions for a number of years.