Wheeling of Electricity:

1) Wheeling “is the movement of electricity, owned by a power supplier and sold to a retail consumer, over transmission and distribution lines owned by neither one.” A fee is charged by the owners of the lines for letting others use them. (www.cepc.net/rewhl.htm)

2) Wheeling is defined as ”the process of transmitting electric power from a seller’s point of generation across a third-party-owned transmission and distribution system to the seller’s retail customer.” (Hawaii PUC)

Last week I learned that HELCO’s tariff does not allow the transmission of electricity across TMKs, even if it is entirely through property a person owns.

I cannot imagine how this could be illegal. There must be some mistake.

This could mean the end of our hydro-electric project, as well as our integrated community-based agriculture plan. We had planned to put in a hydro-electric turbine on one property we owned, then run a electric line through a neighboring property we owned to our packing house, which is on a third property we own.

We have a large cooler there that we are not using. Using hydroelectricity, we wanted to help area farmers consolidate and ship products to O‘ahu, thereby sharing transportation costs while maintaining freshness and quality.

We are actively pursing a Hawaiian sustainability project, where we would use the water from a new spring we just discovered for taro growing. The vision is to use this as an educational opportunity. We planned to use the hydro-electricity to power a processing plant where we would make poi and do value added processing for ourselves and participating area farmers.

Students who were interested could lease land from us for taro growing or other types of farming. One of the bottlenecks to food security is that there are places for students to learn about farming but limited opportunities to actually get into farming. We would like to help fix that problem.

With cheap electricity, we could even cold treat plants to force flowering during the winter. The possibilities are endless. Because it is difficult to raise our workers’ pay, we had planned to set up charging stations for our workers to charge up their electric/hybrid cars.

Being able to transport electricity through adjacent, commonly owned properties is very important for Hawai‘i’s food security effort. I would even advocate for farmers to use renewable energy Kilowatt hour credits on non-contiguous sites, such as at farmers markets or at value added processing plants. For most farmers, 100KW is way large enough. At full usage it would not even approach one half of 1 percent of the total electricity used. Yet, it would make a major impact on food security. Looks like we have the tail wagging the dog here.