The Pele Defense Fund has been in the news saying it will sue if the Large-Scale Geothermal/Cable project Settlement Agreement is violated.
Read the settlement agreement here.
The settlement agreement of 1995 says that an Environmental Impact Study must be done if a geothermal cable project is to be constructed. I think most people assume an EIS will be done, and that this isn’t a big issue.
That agreement shut down everything to do with geothermal back at a time when others, such as Iceland and the Phillipines, were busy planning for avoiding oil usage by enabling more geothermal. Therefore, today we are far behind Third World nations as we try to catch up in a world of escalating energy costs.
It was done wrong originally, but now we have a chance to do it right.
The PDF constantly sounds like it has group dyslexia. They get facts turned around backwards all the time. The undersea cable for geothermal electric from the BI is lower priority than the cables from the Molokai and Lanai wind farms, each providing a peak 200MW for Oahu. There have been multiple studies and preliminary EIS for all these cables and their routes, which even requiring a protection trench through hard coral, has been judged to have minimal impact. While these private wind farms will be getting most of the revenue, making some super wealthy individuals even more wealthy, it does decrease the dollars going to foreign oil suppliers, and keeps those dollars in the local economy.
From the settlement document
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Item 9. State of Hawaii defendants ‘agreement to the terms of paragraphs 6, 8, 10 and 12, of this agreement shall be limited to the term in office of Governor Cayetano, including any term caused by re-election
This is clear to me.
That is a real Hahaha moment! The documents that PDF keeps referring to are so out of date, it is almost like the whole group lost the past fifteen years and are still living in 1997. It is a mystery to me why the local council members are so polite with PDF when they are so whacked out of time. The big difference is that a small disturbance like a geothermal plant means a lot of local benefit. And the real problem here is how HELCO/HECO/HEI is setting the kw-hr rate to the price of producing it from oil fired generators when almost 40% now is coming from cheaper alternative energy. That needs to be investigated by the Public Utility Commission.