Next Monday’s Energy Futures program on Hawaii Public Radio will focus on sustainable agriculture and its relationship to energy efficiency. Guests will be Richard Ha, president of Hamakua Springs Country Farms located on the slopes of Mauna Kea on the Big Island, and Jerome Renick of the Integrated Agriculture Network, also on the Big Island’s Hamakua Coast.
Energy Futures is broadcast live on Mondays 5-6 pm HST on KIPO-FM (89.3 in Hawaii) and is streamed on the Internet. An archive file of each week’s show is usually posted sometime on Tuesday at the Hawaii Public Radio website.
To listen to this program over the Internet via live streaming audio, click on your player (Windows Media, Real Media or iTunes).
We will be talking on the radio about ag and energy, both subjects that are dear to my heart. Here are some of the things I want to discuss.
Agriculture
For two years now, I have been the only person from Hawai‘i, where we are heavily dependent upon oil for our transportation and for the generation of our electricity, to attend the Peak Oil conference (in Houston 10/07 and Denver 10/09).
The world is not running out of oil – it’s running out of cheap oil. I believe that, in close consultation with the Hawaiian community, we should consider using geothermal for most of the Big Island’s electrical base power needs.
Geothermal breaks even at the equivalent of $57 per barrel oil and will stay steady for centuries. Fossil fuel oil prices will keep on rising, and bio fuels are even more expensive than fossil fuel oil.
We need to choose the alternative that is cheapest and that will not rise in cost, and that is geothermal.
We are busy reorganizing our farm so it will be relevant as oil and gas prices keep on rising. Last summer, when gas prices spiked, some of my workers asked to borrow money to pay for gas to come to work. Clearly, this is not sustainable.
We don’t think that importing foreign labor is sustainable, either. So we are reorganizing into units of small family farms. We call it the “family of farms.” The idea is to utilize our large-scale economy to the benefit of smaller, family-sized units.
For example, we have a local farmer growing all the Japanese cucumbers we used to grow. We provide free water and cooling and they do the farming. We hope to replicate this many times. The result is that all the family farmers will come from the immediate neighborhood, and this way we are not pressured to find workers, nor to provide labor housing.
Energy
I’m big on using Energy Return on Investment (EROI) as another tool to evaluate energy resources. In the 1930s, to generate 100 barrels of oil took the energy equivalent of 1 barrel. In the 1970s that had declined to approximately 30 to 1, and now it is around 10 to 1. Clearly this trend is not good.
Folks who study these things, Professor Charles Hall in the forefront, estimate that an EROI of 3 to 1 is the minimum for a society to be sustainable. Biofuels, which are often discussed as the solution to the oil problem, have an EROI of <2 to 1.
On the other hand, geothermal has an EROI of 10 to 1 and it will be that way for centuries.
Plus, geothermal is the cheapest form of base power. And because the State owns the mineral rights to geothermal, it is a resource for the Hawaiian people: 20 percent of proceeds from geothermal goes to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.
In addition, from the “off-peak” stranded power that geothermal provides, we can make ammonia, which can be used as a transportation fuel as well as a fertilizer source.
There’s a lot to like about geothermal.